Category: Foundations
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Can Democrats Criticize the Enlightenment?
Reading Time: 3 minutesCan democrats criticize the Enlightenment? In Harold Kaplan’s analysis of modern literature, he doesn’t criticize the Enlightenment (late 17th to early 19th century), but he mentions it as a timeframe for a modern state of mind which has been detrimental to western thought.1 He doesn’t criticize the Enlightenment in Democratic Humanism and…
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Religion Must Guide the Political Moment
Reading Time: 7 minutesThe religions that are most liable for the current political crisis are Judaism and Christianity. Some may find fault with this statement. They will say religions are irrelevant; today politics are part of a secular world. This is in spite of the fact that the religions of Judaism and Christianity prop up…
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Modern Israel is Anti-West
Reading Time: 5 minutesIn this article, I hope to correct the way progressives think about modern Israel. I think much of our secular sympathy for Jewish people comes from the fact that the Nazi regime hated them and persecuted them. In retrospect, we had that in common with the Jews: the Nazis hated the West…
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Divisions in the Postwar Fascist International
Reading Time: 19 minutesOswald Spengler was inside the Munich Beer Hall on November 8, 1923, when Hitler launched his putsch. Such encounters convinced him that the Nazis were the worst sort of proletarized street rabble. But although he cultivated an aura of political detachment, he was highly political. He wrote Prussianism and Socialism in 1919,…
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Debating the Enlightenment and its Alternatives
Reading Time: 22 minutesThis is a summary and critique of a debate hosted by the Institute of Art and Ideas. In the videos cited below, Steven Pinker and John Mearsheimer debate the Enlightenment and its alternatives. The subtitle is, Which ideals are the best guide to human betterment?
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No Christmas for Bethlehem
Reading Time: 4 minutesWe no longer feel we are talking to fellow beings when we address our elected officials. And anyway, there is nothing left of the world we hoped to save. This is true of both physical infrastructure and human life.
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Political Zionism is an Anachronism
Reading Time: 7 minutesMorris Jastrow wrote in 1919 that Israel is a ‘glorified ghetto’. When you think about it, the conditions of Jewish life before the Enlightenment have been perfectly reproduced in Palestine.
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Defeating Zionism
Reading Time: 4 minutesIn the last century, events have transpired with no relation to the understanding Morris Jastrow Jr. tried to convey. The result is that in spite of his efforts, Zionism has prospered.
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Was the Enlightenment Democratic?
Reading Time: 3 minutesThere is no question that the Enlightenment and Reformation made the United States possible. But there have always been concerns about the Enlightenment.