Rightly Understood

The question of my last post:  Why do we deny that it’s our nature to die?  The answer from many of my threaders:  We aren’t merely or even essentially natural beings!  Human beings are free to overcome their natures and achieve immortality through biotechnology.  The truth of evolution is not that ... Read More

Dr. Craig Bowron has done as much as anyone to explain why we're all about exaggerating what medical science and the coming biotechnology can possibly do to extend particular lives.  We're living longer than ever on average, but that's not because much of anyone is getting into three digits.  And ... Read More

Our BIG THINKING friend Robert de Neufville is right to notice public opinion trending in favor of same-sex marriage.  And so it seems reasonable for him to predict that it will become legal everywhere in our country eventually. Particularly telling is the absence of opposition to same-sex ... Read More

The GRAMMYS turned out to be one of the classiest and most entertaining award shows ever.  Certainly the show blew away the Super Bowl on both fronts.  Even the commercials paid their audience the compliment of being clever, genuinely witty, and even musically sophisticated. Compared to, say ... Read More

So I’ve gotten too many enthusiastic and too many critical emails about my recent “Liberal Education” post for the wrong reasons. It was critical, of course, with the general approach to education these days.  But it wasn’t about “general education” in the sense of the courses any particular ... Read More

So my title is misleading. The basic content of and case for liberal education didn’t change when we moved from one century to another. I’m not big on century analysis and even less on decade analysis (the Sixties!).    Liberal education is under attack these days in pretty predictable ways. It ... Read More

I'm distorting, of course, the lengendary admonition of the evil Dean Wormer to the (seemingly) fat loser Delta pledge Flounder in the classic film Animal House. I had to add  "smoking" and delete "drunk" from the original quote, because they weren't particularly judgmental about smoking in 1962 ... Read More

Our BIG THINKING friend, Robert de Neufville, wonders why more Republicans aren't voting in the primaries.  His wondering, of course, is hopeful.  It must mean either that the ferocity of the Republican passion to oust the president has ebbed OR that all the Republican candidates are so lame that ... Read More

David Brooks has weighed in Charles Murray’s controversial (but undeniably engaging) Coming Apart.  That’s appropriate, of course, because Murray’s description of our meritocratic elite depends so much on Brooks’ earlier description of our bourgeois bohemians. Brooks’ judgment on Murray: “I’ll ... Read More

This author explains convincingly that we haven’t been concerned enough with our children’s moral virtue—or acquiring the habits required to flourish as  free and rational animals in a society such as ours. Aristotle, of course, distinguished between moral virtue and intellectual virtue ... Read More

BIG THINKER Robert de Neufville has said, quite correctly, that Romney is the favorite for the Republican nomination two weeks in a row.  But it's a little misleading to say he remains the favorite.  He's the favorite once more. At the time of Robert's first post, it seemed Romney was poised to ... Read More

There are a lot of cool posts on BIG THINK today. Austin Allen's on stuff the great literary critic Harold Bloom declared dead is a kind of an ironic appreciation.  The "subtext" is that one of the critic's charms is that news of something's death from Bloom is typically greatly exaggerated. I'm ... Read More

So, as I predicted, Romney is now 1-2.  And he's gone from overwhelming favorite to a probable underdog.  Mitt is collapsing across the nation.  It's easy to predict that Gingrich will now win Florida.  What happens after that nobody can predict with any degree of confidence. All the studies show ... Read More

Each of the below deserves all kinds of links.  But I only have a moment, and I dislike links for the same reason I dislike footnotes. 1.  It turns out Santorum actually won in Iowa!  But news of the victory probably came too late to do him any good.  He's languishing in fourth in South Carolina ... Read More

The controversial social analyst Charles Murray has written an important book on the unprecedented class divide in America today.  The link is to an article summarizing the book's key arguments. Before getting to what’s going on right now, I’d thought I’d say something about Murray’s general ... Read More