Tag: darwin
-
So I've been thinking a lot about modern progress over the last couple of days. One reason, of course, is that the president explained to us that his view on same-sex marriage has "evolved," by which he seems to means progressed or gotten better. Meanwhile, Demoocrats have claimed that Romney's ... Read More
-
So I'm in Seattle at the meeting of the American Political Science Association. The APSA meeting has to be one of the diverse and tolerant academic associations in the world. There's no dominant methodology, ideology, or whatever. Instead, there are dozens and dozens of small groups, each of ... Read More
-
The intelligent design community has responded to my confession of ignorance. They say that "intelligent design" is the God of the physicists and the philosophers, what, in fact, we can know by nature. We can say that the intelligble order of nature points in the direction of an intelligent power ... Read More
-
Here you can read the reaction of "the intelligent design community" to a recent article of mine. This post, of course, is double-down shameless self-promotion, because it includes both praise of ME and a generous quote from a recent article of mine (and a link to the rest). I am not, in fact ... Read More
-
David Brooks has a very thoughtful column on the fact that a lot of soaring health care costs have to do using all means available to keep very sick people alive just a little bit longer. Maybe the main reason health care has become unaffordable and our debt problem intractable is that we're too ... Read More
-
Read about it here. The movement for a generation or so has been toward a lifestyle of increasing freedom on our college campuses. That's meant "no rules" (beyond those connected with health-and-safety, and so no smoking and free condoms) and single-sex dorms. It's also meant dorms full of ... Read More
-
A renegade teacher tells the students at the school straight out, much earlier than they were supposed to know, what their purpose in life is, claiming that knowing what one's life is for is the only way to live decently. Unlike the free persons of Britain, she tells the cloned kids, they won't be ... Read More
-
Here's a pithy, gracious, thoughtful, and fairly accurate review of my most recent book by another conservative. In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, I'll give you a generous taste: In this stimulating collection of essays written while he served on the President's Council on Bioethics ... Read More
-
The always fascinating English philosophic intellectual John Gray has written a book about the various ways most of the leading philosophers and scientists of the late 19th and early 20th century were in rebellion against what Gray regards as the fact (and, on balance, the beneficial fact) of our ... Read More
-
The author of our Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, carefully distinguished in private letters between the modern life devoted to the pursuit of happiness and happiness itself. He says that Epicurean philosophers found happiness through their serene recognition of the truth of atheistic materialism ... Read More
Sign up for our newsletter
About Rightly Understood
Rightly Understood is a conservative blog written by Peter Lawler, a professor of government at Berry College, and a former member of President Bush's Council on Bioethics. The name implies that being a true conservative is all about being realistic, seeing things as they are. We have to be right about who we are as both free and natural beings before we can have genuinely realistic moral and political opinions. Rightly understood, the common sense of ordinary people living morally responsible lives is closer to the truth than the pretensions of intellectuals who vainly exaggerate their liberated detachment from the real world we share in common.
Lawler's most recent book, "Modern and American Dignity," is available from ISI Books.
Recent Posts
-
5/22
Let's Live Like Lobsters! (A Sensible Approach to Life Extension?)
-
5/18
-
5/17
-
5/16
American Cartesianism and the Emerging Right to Same-Sex Marriage
-
5/14
-
5/11
-
5/07
-
5/01
-
4/29
-
4/26