I wrote about Jordan Peterson in Psychological Avatar, in particular his understanding of God. Or “God,” as he might say. The question is whether there is a “God Who is There,” in Francis Schaeffer’s phrasing, or whether “God” is only a representation of ultimate human aspiration, an avatar for the ground-up Darwinian psychological development to […]
Read more...Author: Albert
Empress of Blandings
I just finished reading P.G. Wodehouse’s Summer Lightning, one of the Blandings Castle books. As usual for Wodehouse it’s a romantic comedy with the emphasis on comedy, especially of the eye-rolling ironic kind. How can you go wrong with a story in which the plot tension rests on a pig-napping of the porcine pride of […]
Read more...Psychological Avatar
I’m going to say something about Jordan Peterson, who has risen to fame in a way that is quite gratifying to see: through the power of his words and reasoning, without stooping to least-common-denominator, ear-tickling moral exhibitionism. His popularity has grown organically. His willingness to take a stand against postmodernist absurdity has endeared him to a […]
Read more...Thoughtland
A review of Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott I’m an amateur painter, and one of the things I learned early on is that it’s a real challenge trying to render in only two dimensions what we see in three. If it’s this difficult for me to create something worthwhile in two frozen space dimensions, how […]
Read more...Looking Down
A Review of The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck This was a great read so as I went along I tried to make mental notes about what the author was trying to do and why I found the book so engaging. The story is the lifetime from early adulthood to old age of a Chinese […]
Read more...Christian Violence
I am so weary of this worn-out old canard that Christian religion is responsible for violence and wars, and therefore the sooner we abandon it, the better. This is put forward relentlessly and Joseph-Goebbels-like: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” All the wars and violence of history that are attributed to religion […]
Read more...Religion’s Persistence
An unusually lucid discussion of public accommodation of religion is made by Micahel Ignatieff, in Making Room for God, an article in The New York Review of Books (June 28, 2018). Ignatieff is actually reviewing three books together, in his article, but in the course of doing so he provides a smart way of thinking […]
Read more...Conscience
I wrote on postmodernism in Epidemic Irrationality and since then wrote (in Illiberalism) on one feature of the rise of postmodernism, a descent into battles that do not preserve or protect individual freedom, but instead squabble over just how much individual power to disgorge in favor of the collective. Foundationalism and Coherency Theory A key […]
Read more...Illiberalism
Two weeks ago, in Epidemic Irrationality, I reviewed Stephen Hicks’ book Explaining Postmodernism. I’d like to build on one feature of his analysis because it goes a long way to explaining some of the political upheaval in recent years. The three-way battle I highlighted in that earlier post used phrases like “classical liberalism,” “leftist illiberalism,” […]
Read more...Epidemic Irrationality
A review of Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, by Stephen R.C. Hicks “Explaining” What is postmodernism? We hear the word all the time, but unless we really make a study of it, it’s just a word to describe a way of thinking that somehow follows modernism. Of course, “modernism” is itself […]
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