Rightly Understood

Today, our most resolute Cartesians are libertarians.  They’re for gay rights, property rights, and against any ideology that treats the individual as part of a whole.  They are typically “nonfoundationalists.”  That means MY irreducible existence is the bottom line, and there’s no reason why I ... Read More

Believe it or not, this post continues with my theme of Cartesian America. As I explained, the Cartesian/Lockean American understands science basically to be technology.  Its point is to make free persons more secure, comfortable, and "autonomous" in their natural environment.  That means, of ... Read More

So I'm sorry for yet another relatively pointy-headed post.  I'm still thinking about the twin pillars of our modern, scientific self-understanding—Descartes and Darwin.  For today, I'm thinking about how the right to same-sex marriage might emerge from a Constitution understood in a consistently ... Read More

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 of all the sundry commentaries on young Obama as literary man, the one that’s impressed me the most (except, of course,  for my own) is the one by the liberal literary critic Adam Kirsch.  Mr. Kirsch connects the musings of young Obama to the great themes of political philosophy: But the ... Read More

Vanity Fair has published some revealing letters from the young student Barack Obama to his girlfriend Alex McNear.  Some conservatives have been mocking the heck out of them as evidence that our president is hardwired to be a pretentious snob who’s always saying a lot less than he thinks he is ... Read More

Students at a small, liberal-arts college complained to Mitt Romney about borrowing money to pursue a college major that doesn't lead to a job.  He replied, sensibly, that some majors have a lot more job opportunities connected with them than others.  He might have mentioned, it seems to me, stuff ... Read More

So the excellent expert on public opinion Frank Luntz gives us five myths about conservatives.  It goes without saying there are many kinds of conservatives, and all Luntz can really talk about is general tendencies.  In each case, I think, Frank debunks a real myth, and in his social scientific ... Read More

The most active, often eloquent, and judgmental of our ex-presidents—Jimmy Carter—explains why he would be comfortable with President Mitt Romney: “I’d rather have a Democrat but I would be comfortable,” the former president told MSNBC in a segment aired Wednesday. “I think Romney has shown ... Read More

Sherry Turkle is at it again in the NYT.  When we expect more from technology, her story goes, we inevitably expect less from ourselves.  In a high-tech world, we flee from the emptiness of ourselves into a world of virtual or emotionally impoverished connections.  But such disembodied connections ... Read More

David Brooks has written a trendy column about the crisis in confidence in higher education.  Expensive colleges, shaken by the study Academically Adrift that shows that too many students don’t improve much in thinking and writing in college, have become obsessed with coming up with measures of ... Read More

So the final issue in my class in PUBLIC POLICY this semester is HIGHER EDUCATION.  Here are some controversial propositions generated from papers I've just read from the class.  I'm not saying they're all true, but they all are worth thinking about: 1. Too many people "survive college" and are ... Read More

Thomas K. Lindsay, quite an erudite and distinguished expert, applauds the decision of post-secondary public technical schools in Texas to evaluate institutions and faculty according to how many students have gotten jobs and how much they’re going to get paid. I’m a little skeptical about how ... Read More

Well, he was, according to Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic: What’s more important, for the rest of us, is that Obama corrected and clarified the misstatement one day later. Striking down this sort of economic legislation, Obama said, would be unprecedented in the modern era—and reminiscent ... Read More

Adam Wolfson calls our attention to an important new book by political theorist John Tomasi.  Against partisans on both sides, Tomasi claims that Free Market Fairness is hardly an oxymoron. Against liberals or followers of John Rawls, Tomasi defends the intrinsic goodness of eonomic liberty ... Read More