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A conservative take on the world
So I've said before evolution is getting more personal. I'm now going to say a few things about the personal point of view of our time. I'm just trying to lay out the facts as I see them among sophisticated Americans. Like about most social trends, the reasonable conclusion might be that things ...
So the BIG THINKers have reminded us that one of the most personal and technologically promising ideas of our time is DESIGNING BABIES--or making the result of our reproduction better than natural. I've had a lot to say on this prospect over the years. For now, I'll raise some considerations ...
Before talking more about happiness, I need to say something about the middle-class way of life we almost all live. To be middle class is to be a free being who works. An unfriendly way of describing "being in the middle" might come from some Marxist: We're free like aristocrats to work like ...
1. According to our really cool BIG THINK physicist, Michio Kaku, evolution has stopped for our species. 2. But that doesn't mean we can't change ourselves. 3. So, in the case of our species, impersonal natural evolution has been displaced by conscious and volitional evolution. 4. Natural ...
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 ...
So for the slow weekend, I thought I'd stick in some more thoughts of movies I saw a year or so ago, before I became a BIG THINKer. I saw A Single Man and A Serious Man on New Year’s Eve, 2009 and didn’t take any notes or anything. And I’m pretty old and my memory’s shot. But here's what I wrote ...
After saying something really controversial like Tea Partiers aren't Fascists, I thought it safer to return to a relatively trans-partisan commentary on a good movie. This is part of my emerging series of movies about Stoic Americans. It's also part of my series on movies about Stoic Americans ...
My fellow BIG THINK blogger, Mark Seddon, has written that Glenn Beck is "Goebbels" or a Fascist or Nazi rousing the masses up in a dangerous, murderous way. Palin and the Tea Party and so forth are all Fascists! If we don't wake up, freedom and decency may not have much of future. America today ...
Bob Duggan, BIG THINK's artistic blogger, worries that nobody is thinking about the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. I agree that there's not enough political reflection about that war. Political reflection means, among other things, looking to statesmanship--or political leadership--as a ...
I hesitate to undermine the good will I might have built up with BIG THINK readers by writing about uniter-not-divider topics like movies and happiness. But Reagan's birthday is this weekend, and I did write a contribution to a symposium put together by the encyclopedia people that might outrage ...
BIG THINK's great little interview with Danny Rubin got me thinking about the relationship between happiness and mortality. His very philosophic film is all about our "rightly understood" theme of the connections between virtue, happiness, and personal love. Groundhog Day, of course, is all ...
The author of the Declaration of Independence and surely our most "intellectual" president, Thomas Jefferson, wrote that we have life and liberty for the pursuit of happiness. In his private letters, Jefferson carefully distinguished between the modern, individualistic life devoted to the pursuit ...
Blue Valentine is a psychologically ambitious and impressively subversive effort by a new filmmaker. It is, in a subtle but clear way, a pro-life movie. It's quite jarring and claustrophobic; the psychological intensity and instability surely are meant to keep viewers from relaxing and just ...
BIG THINK has displayed a taste of the astute social commentary of Robert Putnam--the man who was so worried that so many Americans were bowling alone. The success of the megachurch, Putnam explains, should be integrated into business models, combining, as it does, impressive overall size with ...
So the headline is a bit extreme to get your attention. But let me share with you my favorite conservative response to our president's challenging and unevenly interesting speech last night--Yuval Levin's. Here's a big taste: This is certainly not a time when the economy is strong or steady ...