Conservatives are upset that Middlebury College has cancelled a conservative speaker, allegedly out of concern for safety. The safety angle shows how utterly degradingly stupid college officials have become. Of course, any rational person despises Middlebury for this and a thousand other crimes. But, let us take a breath and reflect.
If family ties and local patriotism mean little, then the Stoic should regard all men as his fellow-citizens. He should be a cosmopolites—a citizen of the world. Like most of the harsher teachings of the Stoics, cosmopolitanism is easier to mouth than to practice. So austere a Stoic as Cato the younger was able to hand off his wife to a friend, but he could not cease to be a Roman patriot who preferred death to living under a dictator who, among other sins, cultivated the friendship of foreigners.
This isn’t about national security. It’s about politics – dirty politics of the dirtiest kind.
I see Prof. Sir Roger Scruton has been sacked by the Conservative government for saying George Soros is bad, Islamophobia is an imaginary problem, the sky is blue, water freezes at O centigrade, and a host of other offense notions. I never met Scruton, though I used to have some dealings with the Salisbury Review. I read some of his essays and his book on Sexual Desire, which had some good things in it but comes out of a philosophical tradition that has done far more harm than good. In this sense he is a real conservative, clinging to rationalism...
Last week, geneticists from the University of Wisconsin announced the results of their research, ongoing since 1957, into the perceptions of “facial beauty.” The conclusion, as is the usual case with most studies of this kind, will surprise nobody, as what these scientists have determined is that “there is not a master gene that determines a person’s attractiveness, and instead it is most likely associated with a large number of genetic components with weak effects.” The news, vapid as it was, caught my attention on Sunday afternoon, after I’d been to church, the day being the Feast of the Annunciation...
Globalism is one of many nightmares spawned by the French Revolution, which also generated equally pernicious counter-movements. If some Jacobins opposed war, others embraced it; if considerations of race and ethnicity were condemned by some as retrograde, they were also celebrated by others as as the ultimate reality, and, if the ultimate Jacobin dream is of a universal paradise without distinctions, the lesser alternative has been embraced by a long line of hard-headed pragmatists like Napoleon and Lincoln, Stalin and Hitler.
Thomas Fleming explains the purpose of “From Under the Rubble” and applies it to the twin errors of political correctness and the so-called right to self-expression in school.
I’ve spent the whole of last week at the circus. No, I don’t mean Westminster or Capitol Hill, I mean literally, with a bunch of clowns. Generally speaking, they don’t make clowns these days like they used to. A few of them have actually gone into politics. In Italy, what is now the largest political party was founded by one, and I note that another one, in Ukraine, is slated to be the next president. They call themselves comics to lend themselves respectability, but what they really are is tragic clowns. They play on the popular perception, famously a dramatic...
Foreword. Back in the 1980s, having had the fascinating experience of sitting on a financial-aid committee, I learned—to my surprise—that colleges no longer awarded endowed scholarships to exceptionally clever applicants; that instead they were offering something called “financial aid packages” to everyone, thus making it obvious to an inquiring mind that intellectual ability had little to do with college admissions. I also discovered that colleges operated in packs or cartels to fix their prices and restrict competition. The piece that follows was the result of my appalled fascination, and since I seem to have anticipated both the dereliction of academic standards...
Unless you are a seasoned choral singer, lover of choral music or frequent concert goer, you may not know about what H.C. Robbins Landon (a major biographer of the composer) says is “arguably Haydn’s single greatest composition.”
