Happy New Year
A Glimpse into 2025
Previews of what’s to come in 2025…
A few days shy of one year ago I wrote this brief reflection on ‘the newest year’:
In this piece I set out my own personal goals for the year. I won’t share a similar list for this year and will limit myself to saying that I achieved each of those goals (to some extent) and that about half are still resolutions for 2025. If you’re doing it right, life seems to be a continuous cycle of error, learning, resolve, improvement, ad infinitum.
Regarding my Substack, I have close to 300 drafts which I began and haven’t finished. Most of them will probably never be finished-they’ll be printed and cut up and recycled into a different and more contemporaneous piece, or they’ll disappear into the fog of cultural obsolescence (which we call ‘the news cycle’) that seems to come faster and lie thicker than ever before.
Here are some outstanding pieces which should be appearing soon:
Stories:
The Gift
Transfer Student
Essays:
The Meddler’s Impulse
An exploration of how the reflex of educated people to reorder the world (traffic, diets, housing, behaviors, prayer, education) according to their own prejudices and learned biases can wreak havoc without a commensurate level of humility and flexibility and openness and experience. From eugenics to slum clearance to rent controls to frontal lobotomies to public housing to defunding the police to climate change to gender ideology-progressives follow a familiar cycle: (1) swallow some theoretical framework in college (2) ignore opposing data and objections (3) use power structures to impose their vision upon the world (4) walk away with no personal consequences (often decades later) after their vision falls into disrepute (causing chaos and suffering for millions). Begin again.
I’d like to believe that experience has taught us something about these patterns but progressives (the people that Thomas Sowell calls, ironically, ‘the elect’) are rarely students of history and are usually inflamed with a kind of moral certainty which is highly maladaptive for policy-makers. There is some preliminary indication that social media and online information flows might be interrupting this cycle. We shall see…
The Schism of the Elites - The Left’s Division
We all know people and commentators who used to be ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ or Democrat and no longer associate with that part of the political spectrum. Most political revolutions don’t involve empowerment of an underclass-they involve a splitting or reconstitution of the powerful, along with new ideas and clients. We’re seeing such a transformation right now.
Admitting Error
Many people have strong opinions these days, even in the absence of reliable information. How do they deal with growing indications that their stances on defunding the police or bail reform or youth gender modifications were probably more harmful than helpful? How should they?
The Noble Savage
There’s a strange tendency to attribute especial wisdom or care or benevolence to indigenous tribes. This requires a wholesale ignorance of history and says more about current hostility to capitalism and nations and laws (structures from which we all benefit) than it does about an honest appraisal of these groups. This tendency is surprisingly widespread and zealous these days-especially among the young-and correlates with pessimism and alienation and mental health issues.
Europa Europa
A piece about the moon of Jupiter and other Jovian and Saturnine moons and their potential for supporting life and upcoming NASA missions.
Queer Theory - A Primer
This was a thoroughly difficult (due to dense and inane writing) and uncomfortable (due to the ideas and personalities) piece to research. Michael Foucault allegedly raped boys in Tunisia (more than a couple) and Queer Theory can be understood as a systematization of ideas which even he found to be too radical and nihilistic. This LONG piece explores the roots of Queer Theory and its implications and its worming into modern culture and politics. Do you like the idea of a world with no concepts (including childhood) or standards or institutions, where everything is pure impulse and appetite, and the only rule is constant and eternal revolution? Then you’ll love Queer Theory.
A New Synthesis - Society After Trans Activism
The rubber band appears to have begun its return journey when it comes to biological males in women’s prisons and mass gender surgery and medication of the young and even sexual confusion in athletics… but as a wise woman once said’ “once they’re transitioned their children these parents will NEVER be able to countenance the possibility that they were mistaken.” Our society may have similar troubles, in a number of areas. Trans activism was (in Hegelian terms) the antithesis to the solid and universally human notion of a sex/gender binary. The antithesis may be weakening before our eyes-but what will be the synthesis?
Unwell Healers
Why are so many psychologists and psychiatrists and therapists mentally ill? It was a number of anecdotal encounters which led me down this rabbit hole… one down which I’m still travelling.
The Long March - How Deep Goes the Rot?
How influential IS Critical Theory, really? How pervasive are its doctrines in our institutions? There are clues that it is dominant and others that it’s marginal. Most liberals would like you to believe that it’s a non-issue but this is not a sustainable or intellectually honest position at this point. It’s a serious issue. How serious?
A Theory of Pain
My personal reflections on metaphysics and spirituality and cosmology and science/religion and the problems of theodicy (the problem of pain in a world with a benevolent God) OR atheistic randomness and strict materialism.
Science is blurring at its edges. Tears are starting to appear, and light may be shining through. Some things which we have understood to be supernatural (gods, aliens, afterlives, souls) may come, in time, to be seen as natural. What things are likely to make that move?
Safety First
This explores the radical change in how parents parent and children learn which has overtaken our society in the past 40 years. It’s sometimes called ‘safetyism’ or helicopter parenting but it’s a basic psychological tendency and it’s stronger than ever, even as the negative effects of its grip become apparent.
Children of Men - The Cultural & Economic Implications of Falling Birthrates
Concern about climate change is encouraged. In some circles it’s nearly universal. Concern about cumulative depopulation is not, yet only the latter threatens to certainly erode and then cripple our civilization within decades if it’s not reversed. Go ahead: try talking to people about this issue and see the discomfort and confusion on their faces. This is a reality which directly impinges upon our individualistic and consumption-centered modes of living and so it is one about which we’ve decided to say little. Let’s do the math and speculate about the world to come. A greyer, sicker, more passive, more pessimistic civilization waits at our door.
Hostility
There are several identity groups which are culturally available as targets of acceptable hatred and scorn and negative stereotyping: men, heterosexuals, white people, and anyone belonging to or identifying with the dominant culture in most developed countries. Why is this gleeful display of hostility sanctioned and even encouraged? Where does it come from? What are its implications?
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