The persistence of the Mahabharata
One year ago I was about to fly to Bali, as it turned out in the last window of easy international travel before wide COVID travel restrictions. It was a…
Tag: cultural decay
Sound and fury told by the American cultural “elite”
There are few funny stories to emerge from American politics over the last two months, especially during the constitutional embarrassment of the latest faux and cursed impeachment. There is, however,…
America’s fate: civil war, fragmentation or collapse?
Today after the distressing events and death in the Capitol building of Washington DC that interrupted the process of confirming electoral college votes, I am reposting this piece from five…
Anomie Today and Cultural Decay
“The former gods are growing old or dying, and others have not been born…. A day will come when our societies once again will know hours of creative effervescence during…
America’s fate: civil war, fragmentation or collapse?
There is increasing talk of a looming civil war in America. There has even been a website – anewcivilwar.com – established to track the increasing speculation on civil war by…
The failure of institutions in the pandemic crisis
Yuval Levin argues that the institutions of contemporary society, primarily America in his account, have become degraded. There is a good discussion with Yuval Levin on this topic over at…
The great seclusion
Michel Foucault’s history of madness describes the decrees of 1656 that confined the insane, the unemployed, and the socially aberrant to the Hôpital général de Paris, the former home of…
Degeneration
“A generation after the commissars left the scene, positive freedom is more difficult to attain, and the West is populated by people who are less and less capable of an…
The persistence of the Mahabharata
My trip to Bali – now over, since I am returned from the tropical paradise to the dry urban refuge of my home in Melbourne – reminded me not only…
Notes on a Balinese cockfight
I am in Bali, staying for a short stay luxury escape at Padma Resort, Ubud, which is actually at a small village, Payangan, about 45 minutes drive north of Ubud.…
Where is virtue in dark times?
“It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between…
What I am reading… Weber’s iron cage and prophecy of cultural demise
Two passages from Max Weber’s The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism…
