Category: Human Predicament
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The Write-Off
I wrote him off at an early age but then never wrote him back on again. Unjust! But then it is hard to be just even to oneself. And sometimes justice to self requires injustice towards others. Such is our predicament in this dimly-lit slot canyon with unscalable walls and a flash flood coming, but…
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Polarization and Flotation in Politics
Can we avoid both polarization and a noncommittal floating above the fray that does not commit to one side or the other? I fear not. Politics is war. You must take a side. You can't play the philosopher on the battlefield. A warrior at war cannot be "a spectator of all time and existence," as…
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How Strange!
How strange it would be if death were to leave us all in the dark as to the ultimate why and wherefore! How strange if no one knows, no one ever knew, and no one will ever know what it's all about. And not because the Answer is hidden, but because there is none. If…
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An Advantage of Childlessness
Our parents and relatives cared about us enough to judge us, sometimes justly, sometimes unjustly. They understood us and they didn't. Their intentions were mainly good, but their misunderstanding was a burden. They were wrapped up in their own lives and troubles; ours were relatively unreal to them. "What do you have to worry about?"…
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Enemies Have Their Uses
You may do your level best to hide your faults and defects, but others will expose them. Even if they do so maliciously they perform a service to those who are open to correction. An enemy is sometimes to be preferred to a friend in tacit collusion with one's moral complacency.
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Practical Types
Practical types look down on speculation, but we are not just animals with stomachs. We have eyes and not just in the head. Mundane grubbing and hassling for property and pelf are necessary but if not kept within limits will dim spiritual sight. We are not here to pile up loot and land.
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Good Relations and Deep Relations
Given the limitations of our postlapsarian predicament, good relations with others must needs be limited relations. Familiarity breeds contempt. Propinquity militates against politeness. Conservatives understand that a certain formality in our relations with others, both within and without the family, helps maintain respect. Formality helps keep in check the incivility bred of familiarity. Reserve has…
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Ingredients of Happiness
What makes for happiness? Acceptance is a good part of it: acceptance of self, of one's ineluctable limitations, of others and their limitations, of one's lot in life, of one's place in the natural hierarchy of prowess and intellect and spiritual capacity, acceptance of the inevitable in the world at large. Gratitude is another ingredient…
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Every Generation Faces a Barbarian Threat in its Own Children
David Horowitz, Radical Son: Irving Kristol, who had second thoughts before me, has observed that every generation faces a barbarian threat in its own children, who need to be civilized. This is the challenge perennially before us: to re-teach the young the conditions of being human, of managing life's tasks in a world that is…
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Know Thyself!
He who knows himself know someone who inevitably in many a particular is not worth knowing. And he who knows this knows something worth knowing and someone who in at least one particular is worth knowing.
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Inadequacy and Self Knowledge
I bemoan my faults and limitations, both intellectual and moral, but my bemoaning them shows that I am aware of them, which in turn shows that I possess self-knowledge, which is nothing to bemoan!
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No Resolution Here Below
It is a mistake to think that we can resolve in this life the questions pertaining to it and the question of what, if anything, is beyond it. It is a passing scene, a moving image, a chiaroscuro of light and dark, a land of shadows and seemings, a twilit scene of confusion in which…
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Nothing too Small for so Small a Creature
I am petty; nothing petty is foreign to me. Or to my journal. Richard Weaver, "Life Without Prejudice" in Life Without Prejudice and Other Essays, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965, p. 11: Upon one occasion when Boswell confessed to Johnson that he feared some things he was entering in his journal were too small, the latter…
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Recognition, Attention, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Alexander
As social animals we have a legitimate need for recognition by others. This need is not a mere desire for attention. Parents and teachers harm a child when they dismiss the legitimate need for recognition and respect as a bid for attention. A child so maligned may father a man who is more monster than…