Men who lose traditions abandon themselves to conventions.
Essay: The Romance of a Rascal
Modern men are not familiar with the rational arguments for tradition; but they are familiar, and almost wearily familiar, with the rational arguments for change.
Essay: The New Groove
For what is the matter with most of what calls itself the modern mind is simply grooves; and our habit of being content in the grooves, because we are told that they are grooves of change… Its only form of progress is going quicker and quicker along one line in one direction. It has not the curiosity to stop, nor the adventurous courage to go backwards… Now, in spite of the wildest claims to independence, the intellectual life of today still strikes me as being mainly symbolized by the train or the track or the groove. There is any amount of fuss and vivacity about certain fixed fashions or directions of thought; just as there is any amount of rapidity along the fixed rails of the railway-track. But if we begin to think about really getting off the track, we shall find that what is true of the train is equally true of the truth. We shall find it is actually harder to get out of the groove, when the train is going fast, than when the train is going slowly. We shall find that rapidity is rigidity; that the very fact of some social or political or artistic movement going quicker and quicker means that fewer peopole have the courage to move against it. And at last perhaps nobody will make a leap for real intellectual liberty, just as nobody will jump out of a railway-train at eighty miles an hour. This seems to me the primary mark of what we call progressive thought in the modern world.
Essay: The New Groove
Political correctness employs the means of traditional morality, especially shame, less to silence certain opinions than to make them unthinkable.
Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about “liberty;” that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about “progress:’ that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about “education;” that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, “Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty.” That is, logically rendered, “Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.” He says, “Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress.” This, logically stated, means, “Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it.” He says, “Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education.” This, clearly expressed means, “We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children.”
Book: Heretics
A culture is perennially in need of renewal. A culture does not survive and prosper merely by being taken for granted; active defense is always required, and imaginative growth, too.
Conservatism always has been and always will be a force to reckon with because it most closely approximates the reality of the human condition, based, as it is, on the cumulative judgment and experience of a people. It is the heir, not the apostate, to the accumulated wisdom, morality and faith of the people.
Essay: To Conservatives Who Are Thinking About Tomorrow
The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.
Being a truly advanced white person means being able to speak with authority about pretty much any field of conversation—especially politics. In order for white people to streamline the process of knowing everything, all human beings can be neatly filed into one of two categories: People I Agree With, and People Who are Just Like Adolf Hitler.
“China doesn’t have a party culture. Five thousand years of history, and we’ve never partied before.” (Regarding the 2008 Olympic opening ceremonies)
People use the word “natural”…what is natural to me are these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is four years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, and the Sunday School teachings.
Fame is the sum total of all the misunderstandings that can gather around a new name.
France, and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing though is that people there know how to live! In America they’ve forgotten all about it. I’m afraid that the American culture is a disaster.
Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes, and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity.
I think that a sense of humour is a healing quality in every culture. When there is a total absence of humour, we have Nazism. Hitler was unable to laugh. It’s not only a European problem. I think that there is in humour, in a serious practice of humour, a religious effect. We are small creatures, we need not take ourselves too seriously.
Book: States of Mind - Dialogues with contemporary thinkers
There’s an easy way to describe today’s online culture of participation without invoking Web 2.0 at all. Just call it the Internet. That way, everyone will know what you mean.
A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.
I turned off the phone, dumbfounded. How had this happened? How had we managed to speed through all the stages of an actual relationship almost solely via text message? I’d gone from butterflies to doubt to anger at his name on the screen, before we even knew each other.
Article: “R We D8ting?”. New York Times. July 24, 2005.
Once we started relying on computers and networks to interact, we lost contact with the concept of physical decay and the process of aging. Instead an analog time span where things just sorta fade away, we have the almighty delete button. With the press of a button, content can be erased leaving virtually no evidence behind.
There is no zero sum in culture.
“The Download Debate Strikes Back” a Cornell University debate
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
One of the more distracting things about capitalist culture is that there is no stupor, no time to vegetate. What I would suggest is more time wasting, less stimulation. We need time to lie fallow like we did in childhood, so we can recuperate. Rather than be constantly told what you want and be pressurised to go after it, I think we would benefit greatly from vaguely restless boredom in which desire can crystallise.
Article: “That Way Sanity Lies” by Sean O’Hagan in The Observer Magazine, 13/02/2005, pg.15