The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
A good example of how the media are misreading President Trump’s foreign policy comes from the Los Angeles Times. Headlined in the Dec. 26 print edition of the paper, “Trump claims he’s boosting U.S. influence, but many foreign leaders see America in retreat” was pecked out by no less than three top-flight Timesies: Tracy Wilkinson, Alexandra Zavis and Shashank Bengali. This really isn’t “news,” but an opinion piece masquerading as reporting. It gets wrong just about every policy, beginning, “China has now assumed the mantle of fighting climate change, a global crusade that the United States once led. Russia has...
Adam Smith Adam Smith, perhaps the most influential political thinker produced by Britain in modern times, was born in 1722, a posthumous child of a customs collector from Aberdeenshire. Smith’s interests in his early years were largely literary and classical, and his family had destined him for the Anglican clergy, though at some point he gave up both the career and religion of a Christian minister. He studied moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson at Glasgow University and came strongly under the spell of Hutcheson’s anti-rationalist common sense philosophy that emphasized benevolence. He proceeded from Glasgow to Balliol College, Oxford, where...
This series, in its unrevised form, was posted in Summer 2005. I thought it was lost forever, but Allen Wilson has been kind enough to send me dozens of old pieces that have disappeared from the old website. Part One: Capitalism 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, was marked also by the publication of Adam Smith’s path-breaking book on economics, The Wealth of Nations. This is no accident, according to a familiar myth put out by American classical liberals who call themselves conservatives, because America is a land of individualists who came to a New World seeking freedom...
This episode of Christianity and Classical Culture, our final for this season, completes the discussion began by Dr. Fleming in the previous episode about marriage within Classical times and after Christianity’s influence by looking at divorce and remarriage. Part 1: Marriage: Christianity and Classical Culture, Episode 19 Original Air Date: December 28, 2017 Show Run Time: 1 hour Show Guest(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming Show Host(s): Stephen Heiner Christianity and Classical Culture℗ is a Production of the Fleming Foundation. Copyright 2017. All rights are reserved and any duplication without explicit written permission is forbidden.
In this episode of Christianity and Classical Culture, Dr. Fleming discusses Classical and Jewish views on marriage and how Christianity built upon superstructures of monogamy towards a self-sacrificing sacrament. Original Air Date: December 27, 2017 Show Run Time: 59 minutes Show Guest(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming Show Host(s): Stephen Heiner Christianity and Classical Culture℗ is a Production of the Fleming Foundation. Copyright 2017. All rights are reserved and any duplication without explicit written permission is forbidden.
I fear the gentle reader may have concluded from my last post, where I confessed to having watched fifty hours of old Russian television in a single week, that my idleness has finally got the better of me. Yet Zone, as I sought to explain, is no ordinary television, but a pivotal historic event, and one, moreover, that presages the latest political developments in Moscow. On the day my post appeared, December 20, a remarkable anniversary was being celebrated by the millions of Russians in the covert or overt employ of the police state. It was the centenary of the...
For decades I have opposed the special relationship by which the Israeli tail wags the American dog, but, as I wrote recently on this site, I no longer care very much. The Muslims of the world hate our guts and are slaughtering innocent people in Europe and the United States. By any reasonable political standard, they have forfeited the right to be taken seriously. Spear-head by the Palestinians, their friends in the Muslim world, and the terrified Europeans who refuse to resist the ongoing invasion of Muslim enemies, the anti-Christian vermin who control the United Nations have rebuked the the...
Dr. Fleming and Rex Scott discuss the development of technology From Under the Rubble. Original Air Date: December 21, 2017 Show Run Time: 31 minutes Show Guest(s): Dr. Thomas Fleming Show Host(s): Rex Scott The Fleming Foundation · From Under the Rubble, Episode 19: You Robot, Me Man From Under the Rubble℗ is a Production of the Fleming Foundation. Copyright 2017. All Rights are Reserved.
I just finished watching the last episode of a fifty-episode Russian television series entitled Zone. This epic series was made ten years ago, and represents a kind of symbolic watershed in Russia’s political progress from the authoritarian horizontal of the 1990’s to the totalitarian vertical of today. To make such a production in the country’s present climate would be just about unthinkable, as witness the scandal around Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film Leviathan, acclaimed in Cannes yet politically a much weaker statement than Zone. It occurs to me that, having sunk 50 hours of my time into this situation tragedy, I may...
The debacle of Alabama’s Senate election shows why the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, electing U.S. senators by a vote of the people, ought to be repealed. Like other “reforms” of the Progressive Era – the Federal Reserve, Prohibition and the dreaded income tax – it made worse what it was supposed to improve. And World War I, the passion of progressive President Woodrow Wilson and ex-President Teddy Roosevelt, instead of “making the world safe for democracy,” paved the way for Lenin and Hitler. The original Constitution established a delicate balance between the more democratic House of Representatives, apportioned by...
