It is part of the absurdity of American life that we decide questions of truth under the guise of settling contests of rights. Which means that we decide questions of truth without thinking deeply or even very honestly about them. Thus, while it is obvious to many that we are living through a . . . . Continue Reading »
The ancient monks’ most glorious libraries contained less information than the average smartphone. But their habits of receptivity and assimilation can empower us to lift our gaze from our screens ennobled rather than enslaved. Continue Reading »
A millennial recently bragged to my friend that he no longer has much reason to leave the comfort of his basement office. There, he enjoys a tri-screen computer setup and can simultaneously manage his business, view porn, and compete in online gaming tournaments from a single cushioned reclining chair. Continue Reading »
Don DeLillo's novels suggest that the fundamental yearning that underlies all action, the creation and the destruction of civilizations, is the yearning to escape personal mortality. But the feats of modern science have tempted some to believe that science can defy human mortality altogether. Continue Reading »
The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousnessby david gelernterliveright, 320 pages, $26.95 What in the end makes The Tides of Mind a brave and exemplary book is not so much Gelernter’s conclusions as his method. It has become fashionable among computationalists and others to argue . . . . Continue Reading »
Updating Henry Adams's famous meditation on technology and tradition. Continue Reading »
We appeal to other animals to help us arrive at self-understanding in these perplexing times. But we struggle to understand non-humans in a productive way. Therefore we cannot ultimately understand ourselves. Continue Reading »
Even if the Church could keep screens out of her sanctuaries, people strongly attached to them would still be people poorly positioned to take advantage of what the Church has to . . . . Continue Reading »
For the Frenchmen who lived through World War II, the defining event of their lives was quintessentially political. It was the great refusal, embodied by General Charles de Gaulle, to accept the defeat of June 1940. With that refusal came a determined commitment to reestablish national sovereignty. . . . . Continue Reading »
A venerable rule of predication is that certain words—or, at least, certain homonymous terms—admit of univocal, equivocal, and analogical acceptations. That is to say, there are times when a term has precisely the same meaning in two or more discrete instances of its use: say, “blue” as . . . . Continue Reading »
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