Demowp

Tag: Culture

  • Youth and Elders Together: Strategically Key?

    In my first couple of years of progressive activism in the late 60’s, many of those I worked with who were also young took a pretty dismissive view of elder activists. And it wasn’t just elders. “Don’t trust anyone over 30”– that was a widespread point of view. As I experienced it, I think a […]

  • Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part II

    Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part II

    Summary of Part I  After briefly reviewing the theories of the relationship between religion and nationalism, I find the theories of Anthony Smith, George Mosse and Adrian Hutchinson the most compelling. They all agree that religion provides the propagandistic foundation for nationalism. But I also claim that it is a particular kind of religion, monotheism, that is […]

  • Unbecoming American: At Election Time

    2024 is a year full of elections. For what they are worth they also present a display of the wealth and poverty of language with which active and passive electorates are confined, at least to the extent there is any serious effort to relate the utterances incidental to the process with the lived reality such […]

  • Rethinking Liberalism and Fascism

    Rethinking Liberalism and Fascism

    Liberalism thinks of fascism as the domination of extremist precision, the suppression of some creative vitality. The deliberative character of parliamentary democracy – the inconclusiveness of dialogue – is contrasted with the absolutist closure of fascism. What if we reversed the liberal value judgement regarding fascism? What if fascism consisted not of dogmatic fixity and […]

  • The Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part I 

    The Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part I 

    Do religion and nationalism compete with each other? Do they replace each other? Do they amplify each other and drive each other forward? Do they exist in symbiosis? Theorists of nationalism have struggled with this question. At one extreme of the spectrum is the early work of Elie Kedourie (1960), who argued that nationalism is a modern, […]

  • The Rise of the New Culture Commissars

    The annual rites of Oscar are nigh (Sunday, March 10), in case you hadn’t noticed—and given the sharply declining trend of the show’s ratings over the past decade, you probably hadn’t. Once a momentous occasion of national mind-melding of near-Super Bowl proportions, this increasingly tedious exercise in tacky self-aggrandizement and PC hectoring from gazillionaire celebrities […]

  • The 2024 Oscars: The Rise of the New Culture Commissars

    The annual rites of Oscar are nigh (Sunday, March 10), in case you hadn’t noticed—and given the sharply declining trend of the show’s ratings over the past decade, you probably hadn’t. Once a momentous occasion of national mind-melding of near-Super Bowl proportions, this increasingly tedious exercise in tacky self-aggrandizement and PC hectoring from gazillionaire celebrities […]

  • Truth, Love and Hope

    Broadly speaking three kinds of reactions to the recent Tucker Carlson-Vladimir Putin interviews can be detected. Aside from the official condemnations that find their echo wherever dementia and other intellectual impediments prevail, there is ecstasy, skepticism, and loyalty. The ecstatic present this interview as something akin to the visions of Fatima. The skeptics point out […]

  • Here Come the Steroid Games

    To attribute weighty moral codes to athletes has always been a silly pastime of the judging classes and flesh admiring voyeurs.  But sporting bodies, in a manner similar to the clergy, demand something called the level playing field.  Fairness and fair play imply that sports people will follow various principles and rules in competition.  They […]

  • Islam and Jesus as Jewish Messiah

    Islam and Jesus as Jewish Messiah

    If anything proves the validity of Occam’s Razor,i it’s contemplating the astounding attempts over two millennia to square Christianity’s circle, or rather triangle. Trinitarianism: one God existing in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons (hypostases) sharing one essence/ substance/ […]

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