Category: Feature

Pastor David Ramirez posted this bit of an interview done a long time ago with Thomas Fleming  for the series “Making Sense of the Sixties.”  I am not sure who this black-haired young man is, but his point of view seems familiar.  

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.

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...