A Theory of Psychohistorical Process and Note on the Language of “Givens” and “Releases” This book is heavily indebted to Philip Rieff, the genius behind The Triumph of the Therapeutic. I first read Rieff in December 2016, thanks to my dear friend Vincent Zimmern sending me a copy, and I…

Looking Over the “Present” Terrain The title of this paper alludes to The Legitimation Crisis by Jürgen Habermas, a prophetic book nearly forty-years ahead of its time. It warned that we were losing confidence in political institutions, rendering those institutions ineffective and profoundly damaging democratic processes. Today, the term “legitimation…

On the Mechanisms of Fiction and Society Describing James Wood’s skepticism about “hysterical realism,” Lee Konstantinou writes that ‘ ‘hysterical realism’ fails for Wood because its too rapid accretion of interesting detail breaks the trance of believability.’¹ “The trance of believability” is a beautiful and eloquent phrase that I think…

How we never feel we fully live a life we must think about living. We don’t fully know a language until we don’t have to translate it. A native English speaker, I don’t have to “translate” English when I hear it: I just “know” what it means. Perhaps in a…

A Sociological “Death of Skepticism” Process has been conflated with skepticism, and with skepticism having been conflated with disbelief, process has died alongside skepticism. Furthermore, using process to determine truth has been conflated with taking a position, and so process has been replaced by force. To want an investigation to…

How people can be respected for thoughtlessness, contributing to thoughtlessness, and the need for Hume’s “philosophical journey.” “Thoughtless” is not a simile for “dumb,” as we learn from Hannah Arendt: to be “thoughtless” about x is to “not think about it,” to instead assume it, christen it an axiom, and…

I Think You Think I Think You Think Descartes famously said, ‘I think; therefore, I am’; today, it would be more appropriate to say, “I think you think I think you think…therefore, I am.” Today, our minds are not simply centers through which we consider ourselves and our world, but…

On Unstoppable, Unrestricted, and Self-Consuming “Autonomous Rationality” The Conflict of Mind by O.G. Rose ended with a paper titled “Deconstructing Common Life,” which focused on the work of David Hume and Donald Livingston, work that may prove useful for outlining the problems articulated in “Belonging Again.” “Philosophy” here will…

Where’s home? Perhaps it was because in the chaos of those days I had lost the sense of what’s right and what’s wrong, perhaps I was just tired.¹ Baudolino by Umberto Eco . “I must tell you,” he confided, “I just came back from two years in Germany. It was…

Feeling peaceful could be a sign of the banality of evil. Without community, humans feel alienated and aimless: there is a link between “homelessness” and “existential anxiety.” Additionally, we cannot possess “meaningful character,” as argued by James Davison Hunter in The Death of Character. …

Character requires community and might be too dangerous. Both Arendt’s “banality of evil” and Hunter’s “character” require community, and community is what makes possible both Hitler and Bonhoeffer. Perhaps then we should rid ourselves of community and efface the problem and its solution together? Perhaps if there’s no “banality of…

A house requires walls — like a prison. Does a home? Describing modern America, David Brooks writes: ‘We live in a society plagued by formlessness and radical flux, in which bonds, social structures and commitments are strained and frayed. Millions of kids live in stressed and fluid living arrangements. Many…

Do Cosmopolitans avoid the Hitler/Bonhoeffer Problem? Is Bonhoeffer worth Hitler? Even with all its existential anxiety and fragmentation, isn’t modern life preferable to Nazi Germany and “the banality of evil”? Isn’t erasing Bonhoeffer to erase Hitler rational? This returns us to another question: is it possible for humans not to…

On the Twin Development of the State and Isolationism ‘What part does toleration play in these twin developments of large centralized states and the isolation of the individual?’ A.J. Conyers wondered.¹ ‘Is it merely coincidental that wherever highly organized industrial powers with a central bureaucratic government is found anywhere in…

Identity Requires Allowances and Restrictions, but Restrictions Risk Injustice For good and for bad, the doctrine of tolerance can be a threat to communal authority, for as the State demands tolerance of LGBT marriage (for example), Christian communities fragment and inflate, the validity of the Bible is questioned and undermined…

Does a Growing State Decrease the Probability of Violence By Raising the Stakes? The doctrine of tolerance has lessened the authority of communities, contributing to a questioning of their very existence, which in turn has contributed to a feeling that the State possesses ultimate control. Today, the “borders” communities are…

Local Communities Weaken in Proportion to How Much Power the State Accumulates for Good. Considering our rootless, Cosmopolitism under an ever-growing State, and how toleration empowers the State and the “individual to individualize,” Conyers wrote: ‘But it seems to me a fitting coincidence: for the condition of the modern psyche…

Does Tolerance or Humility Better Favor Mechanisms of Knowledge Acquisition? In regard to modernity, Conyers wrote that ‘[t]he question [now is] how [do] we achieve authentic toleration without merely shifting to another political perspective from which a new kind of intolerance becomes acceptable.’¹ If one didn’t know better, one would…

Can internal conflicts only be stopped by controlling “the reality industry?” How do we stop internal conflicts? There’s no single answer, but even though liberal science inevitably leads to tension with the doctrine of tolerance (even if tolerance purports to be a major proponent of liberal science), Jonathan Rauch wrote…

Can law replace moral orders and still be a moral order? In the name goodness, justice, and truth, as opposed to humility, the doctrine of tolerance can reduce the categories of good, evil, justice, etc. to subjective preferences, hollowing out their authority. The society still uses these categories, usually and…