The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
While we were at Camp Saint Christopher, I found myself gassing on, as I so often do, on a favorite theme, namely, how various disabling mental conditions, e.g., intoxication or insanity, may confer benefits in making the sufferer more open to spiritual truths a more controlled rationality will attempt to exclude. My prime example was Saint Catherine of Siena. When someone raised the question of old age–whether someone as decrepit as myself gained anything in spiritual wisdom to compensate for the decline in physical well-being and mental powers. I thought of one of my favorite poems, Edmund Waller’s lines on...
The third book of the Politics is of fundamental importance for understanding the nature of all forms of political association, particularly citizenship, which is to say, legitimate membership in a commonwealth. It is also an essential corrective to the liberal tradition, not so much because it offers an alternative theory as because it begins by looking at the facts. Citizens are not random individuals who happen to have been dumped on our soil by illegal aliens; a nation is not simply a jurisdiction that allows us to make money from each other. In the beginning of the book [III.1], Aristotle...
From Kith to Kin to Commonwealth If there is one commonplace that is shared by political theorists who view human societies not as a set of abstractions but as an organism or ecosystem it is that the commonwealth is an outgrowth of the household or family. Wherever we turn—to Aristotle or Cicero, St. Thomas or Althusius, Sir Robert Filmer or French counter-revolutionaries—we find the family at the foundation of the evolving social order. The steps of this theoretical social evolution usually echo Aristotle’s account that traces the coalescence of households into a village and villages into a city or commonwealth. ...
I’ve been out of Paris for a week now, and apart from a brief stop there on my way to London to watch the Brexit vote unfold, I will be out of my adopted home for another week still. I continue to be bemused that such a generally kind and often generous populace is acting out in the most vicious and selfish of ways – and the current strikes are perhaps a visible sign of a silent sickness that has plagued France for some time. Now, I want to make it clear – I understand and respect that strikes are a way...
Since the NeverTrump forces have so far failed to attract a credible (in the eyes of the conservative movement) independent challenger to run against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the general election, their focus seems to have shifted toward an effort to nominate someone other than Trump at the Republican National Convention in July. This has been the steady drumbeat coming from such NeverTrump sources as RedState and Erick Erickson’s The Resurgent among many others. This effort is transparently absurd. Some are making the case that all Republican delegates are technically unbound and/or that through sleight of hand with...
By popular demand (at least three requests uttered in a diffident tone of voice), I am reintroducing some discussions of lighter works–in addition to the ongoing Aristotle–and a poem of the week. For the next few weeks, I propose to discuss three works by R.L. Stevenson: The Wrong Box, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Dynamiter. I have been mostly absent from this site for over two weeks. For more than a week, while I was in South Carolina attending the Abbeville Institute’s Summer School, my MacBook Air refused to turn on, and when, every few...
Man taunts history much the way he abuses nature, like a young delinquent at the zoo who is completely certain that the wild animal he’s teasing is secure in its cage. Like nature, history is patient, shrugging off his foolish provocations, and only once in a while does it emit a deafening roar and rattle the bars of the cage. Even more rarely, it breaks out, and then woe betide the arrogant trespasser. Then Nero fiddles as Dresden burns, Castro smiles and strokes his beard as Lisbon is leveled by the earthquake, and Genghis Khan’s motorized divisions march on the...
PARIS I boarded the plane in Pisa and joined the flight full of North Africans going home to Paris. It is hard to get a waitress–I mean, professional flight attendant on board for the passengers’ safety–because one Moroccan mother seems completely unable to deal with the logistics of traveling with a baby. It is a nice enough baby, and the mother is sweet, though her French is even less comprehensible than my own. Not so long ago, a man’s level civilization could be measured, almost literally, by the size of his French vocabulary (never by his accent, since a good...
I was sitting in a New College quad, chatting with two habitués of HiLo, the Jamaican speakeasy that, in response to my post last week, a reader has playfully – and, on reflection, not wholly inaccurately – likened to this site. The boys were both blond, affable, eloquent, and almost preternaturally polite, though obviously I was only too aware of their capacity for nocturnal Jekyll-and-Hyde mutation into what in England is called Hooray Henrys, drunken young men in black tie who vomit into public fountains and never tire of mocking their more scholarly peers. I asked the boys to...
MILAN It is small wonder if European conservatives hate the United States. My room at the Hotel Granduca di York is cramped, too small to fit in a practical writing desk but big enough to hold an American window on the world–a TV set. Next door is the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, which holds a priceless collection of manuscripts, rare books, and paintings, but here in my room I have everything an American could need: CNN, 24 hours a day, as well as a variety of channels–Italian, French, German–all replaying episodes of Hunter, Friends, or Mad About You (that’s Dingue de Toi...
