Everyone Lost at the Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings By Andrew Sullivan

Everyone Lost at the Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings By Andrew Sullivan

And it is the distinguishing mark of specifically totalitarian societies that this safety is eradicated altogether by design. There, the private is always emphatically public, everything is political, and ideology trumps love, family, friendship or any refuge from the glare of the party and its public. Spies are everywhere, monitoring the slightest of offenses. Friends betray you, as do lovers. Family members denounce their own mothers and fathers and siblings and sons and daughters. The cause, which is usually a permanently revolutionary one, always matters more than any individual’s possible innocence. You are, in fact, always guilty before being proven innocent. You always have to prove a negative. And no offense at any point in your life is ever forgotten or off the table.

I don't agree with Andrew Sullivan on a lot of things, but he is an interesting and original thinker.

Why Reason Turned Into A Dead End For Enlightenment Philosophy by Nathanael Blake

Why Reason Turned Into A Dead End For Enlightenment Philosophy by Nathanael Blake

It is pointless to proclaim the supremacy of Enlightenment reason, because there is no such thing. There is only a bevy of competing philosophical systems, each claiming to be the one true “Reason.” Without a universal standard of public rationality, every criticism that Tracinski directs at “faith” applies just as readily to “reason.” Which philosopher got it right? Plato? Aquinas? Spinoza? Kant? Hegel? As MacIntyre asks: Which rationality?

I love this debate. The Enlightenment brought rationality so we no longer needed Revelation. But rationality itself needs a type of "first mover" to inform us as to what is actually rational. That back-and-forth IS the Enlightenment.

Making The ‘Miracle’: Jonathan Mayhew And The Enlightenment In America by Robert Tracinski

Making The ‘Miracle’: Jonathan Mayhew And The Enlightenment In America by Robert Tracinski

Enlightenment ideas about reason, religious freedom, individual rights, and the right of revolution were not just notions Jefferson mused about alone in his library in Monticello. They were preached from the pulpit by popular figures like Mayhew for decades before 1776 and published in widely read pamphlets addressing the political controversies of the day. Mayhew gives us an idea of how Enlightenment ideas made it out into the minds of the American common man.

 I love this kind of look at the philosophical underpinnings of the American Experiment.

How 9/11 Made a European Upper-Middle-Class Radical a Conservative by Annika Hernroth-Rothstein

How 9/11 Made a European Upper-Middle-Class Radical a Conservative by Annika Hernroth-Rothstein

I was raised in a country where that neutrality — that indifference before right and wrong — is a badge of honor. I was taught that morality is weakness, faith is ignorance, and the concept of good and evil is cause for ridicule.

On September 11, 2001, I saw, for the first time, the difference between fear and freedom, and I vowed not to be neutral between them, ever again.

So much insight and self-awareness.