Civilization
Story Stream
Equality Is Good, Actually August 14, 2024
Once upon a time in a distant land of kings and priests, a collection of materialist philosophers decided to destroy Western civilization. These philosophers ripped apart the customs of the past and replaced them with sad irreligious notions of right...
Our Civilizational Moment August 14, 2024
Vexed by the apocalyptic vibes of the last few months, I recently went back and re-read the controversial book Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Harvard political science professor Samuel Huntington. The book was controversial...
The Well-Trained Boy August 13, 2024
In BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, British author Ruth Whippman offers readers a window into her mothering journey. This is a beautifully written, often thought-provoking, and disarmingly vulnerable book that begins ...
Africa and the History of Civilization July 18, 2024
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), Georg Hegel declared that Africa is “no historical part of the World” and that “what we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of m...
The Law-Respecting Lawlessness of 'Bikeriders' July 10, 2024
Jeff Nichols is a strange director. He makes movies about the forgotten Americans, the white working and lower classes of the Midwest, but it’s only European festivals that really take an interest. His protagonists are invariably men, yet it’s the fe...
The Serious Artist July 08, 2024
It is curious to the point of bafflement that one should need to rewrite Pound’s “The Serious Artist” in the year of grace 2024. Across the preceding centuries, other centers of civilization had decided that good art was a blessing and that bad art w...
The Politics of the Heart on Stage July 05, 2024
“The chief glory of a woman is not to be talked about,” notes Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase in Our American Queen, the new play by Thomas Klingenstein (at the Flea Theatre through June 29). Chase is directing his comment, or warning, at his daug...
The War for Western Civilization July 04, 2024
America’s elite universities are at war with Western civilization. And the public is finally starting to notice.Claudine Gay, the archetype of the modern university professor and administrator, was forced to resign as president of Harvard after she f...
Kevin Costner’s “Horizon” Goes West but Gets Nowhere July 01, 2024
Westerns are an inherently political genre, for the obvious reason that they depict (or distort or interrogate) American history. But they are also political in that they show the birth of the polis itself—the institutions of modern urban society, wi...
