On the Square Today

Wesley J. Smith on environmentalism’s deep misanthropy :

In recent years, deep misanthropy has seeped into the popular culture. For example, the 2008 remake of  The Day the Earth Stood Still  starred Keanu Reeves as Klaatu, an alien come to earth to commit total genocide to “save the earth.” At the end, he shows “mercy” by stripping us of our technology—an event which, were it to actually occur, would result in billions of human deaths. Illustrating how times have changed, the 1951 original version had Klaatu on earth to save humans, not wipe us out.

Also today, Peter Augustine Lawler responds to Patrick Deneen :

Patrick Deneen is right to have raised questions over several years about whether American liberal democracy is sustainable . He’s not, of course, the first to do so. Conservatives, maybe beginning with Edmund Burke, have often understood liberalism as a kind of self-obsessive individualism that has the potential to consume the social and relational institutions that make human life worth living. Liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction.