Does Islam Need a Luther or a Pope?
Posted by SJackson
On 12/04/2003 8:27:57 AM EST with 66 comments
TCS ^ | 12-5-03 | EDWARD FESER
It has become the conventional wisdom in the two years since 9/11 that the trouble with Islam is that, unlike Christianity, it never had a Protestant Reformation. The idea seems to be this: Christianity was (so it is held) rigid and authoritarian before Luther and company came along and paved the way for liberal democracy, science, and all things modern and good; Islam's problem is that it remains stuck in its "Medieval phase," still awaiting Reformers of its own. This analysis dovetails nicely with the conceptions most people have these days of the Reformation, of traditional Catholicism, and of...Posted by rob777
On 12/22/2001 11:53:08 AM EST with 262 comments
Lew Rockwell.com ^ | December 22nd 2001 | Edward Feser
The notion that the political alliance between libertarians and conservatives is contingent and inherently unstable has become a cliché, and a tiresome one at that, usually made by persons who have little understanding of either libertarianism or conservatism. And despite appearances, the recent testy exchanges between the conservative National Review’s Jonah Goldberg and the libertarian Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie and Virginia Postrel do nothing to confirm the cliché.It is not that the idea of a fusion of libertarianism and conservatism does not raise important and difficult philosophical issues; it does. The emphasis within traditional conservative thinking on authority, including the ...Edward Feser: The Mustache on the Left [about delusion that right-wingers are closet totalitarians]
Posted by Tolik
On 01/08/2004 8:19:28 AM EST with 27 comments
TechCentralStation ^ | 01/08/2004 | Edward Feser
As a Bush re-election later this year looks increasingly likely, some left-wingers worry that Howard Dean is too risky a candidate to put up against a popular President. There is, of course, the obvious comparison to McGovern and the fear that a true believer may inevitably be a sure loser. There is also the worry that Dean may not in fact be so true a believer in the first place: he did support Newt Gingrich's Medicare reforms, after all, and has been a little too cozy with gun rights advocates; might he not betray the Left in order to appeal...
Great post...thanks, Tolik.
I took a History of Economic Thought class last summer. We covered Marx.
I actually enjoyed reading about Marxism as espoused by Marx. It comes through very clearly that Marx was an irrational raving lunatic. But he was also an entertaining irrational raving lunatic.
Marx can teach us a lot. He can teach us what happens to a country when they base their entire political and economic system on a self-contradictory and patently insane system of thought.
People with ambition, people who are motivated by a desire to make money and achieve material success -- in other words, conservatives -- by and large exhibit a pronounced desire to get out of college so they can start making some serious bucks. Naturally, then, what remains in your pool of potential teachers is the dregs.
Simplest answer: Because, as is the case with government and journalism, leftists are neither qualified for nor inclined to have real jobs where there is genuine competition and performance is judged by an objective standard of success. All that these professions require are glibness and conformity to a specific code of thought. In return they provide a sense of prestige and "superiority" for people who, if they were forced to actually work, would otherwise be complete failures.
Basically, they are losers who make a profession of faking their way into a spotlight and there are just enough dummies out there who buy the act to make it all work.
I think the countervailing force is young men in large numbers rejecting university education as irrelevant to their futures. The Left may eventually achieve total control over academia, only to find out that no one who matters in American society is listening.