Posts in Ideology
Wish I'd said that - Jan. 23, 2020

“when people do not have a satisfactory narrative to generate a sense of purpose and continuity, a kind of psychic disorientation takes hood, followed by a frantic search for something to believe in or, probably worse, a resigned conclusion that there is nothing to find…. There is even one group… who, looking ahead, see a field of wonders encapsulated in the phrase ‘the information superhighway.’ They are information junkies, have no interest in narratives of the past, give little thought to the question of purpose…. Such people have no hesitation in speaking of building a bridge to the new century. But to the question ‘What will we carry across the bridge?’ they answer, ‘What else but high-definition TV, virtual reality, e-mail, the Internet, cellular phones, and all the rest that digital technology has produced?’ These, then, are the hollow men Eliot spoke of.”

Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

Wish I'd said that - Jan. 15, 2020

“I refer to those who have fallen under the devilish spell of what is vaguely called ‘postmodernism,’ and in particular a subdivision of it sometimes called ‘deconstructionism.’… in this way of understanding things, language is under deep suspicion and is even thought to be delusional. Jean Baudrillard, a Frenchman, of all things, tells us that not only does language falsely represent reality, but there is no reality to represent. (Perhaps this explains, at long last, the indifferent French resistance to the German invasion of their country in World War II: They didn’t believe it was real.) In an earlier time, the idea that language is incapable of mapping reality would have been considered nonsense, if not a form of mental illness. In fact, it is a form of mental illness. Nonetheless, in our own time the ideas has become an organizing principle of prestigious academic departments. You can get a Ph.D. in this sort of thing.”

Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

Where liberty came from... and where it went

In my other speech to the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June, and again I apologize for the delay in getting it edited and posted, I talked about what classical Greece and Rome got right about political freedom and what they did not, how medieval England completed the picture with Magna Carta to limit government in theory and parliament to limit it in practice, and how and why things went wrong in the modern world.

In defence of those terrible Middle Ages

Here’s a video from the past. It’s a talk I gave at the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June 2019 so I’m tardy making it available. And it’s about the Middle Ages which were, far too many people think, necessarily awful because they were long ago and old is bad and new is good. In fact there are a great many modern horrors that would have appalled people in the Middle Ages and one of them is widespread ignorance about the period.

Sorry to take so long to get around to editing and posting it. Life got in the way.