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First Things

Patheos

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/what-is-wrong-with-pope-francis/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/26/the-basic-reason-why-there-just-isnt-enough-decent-housing-for-the-poor/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/26/why-everyone-is-miserable-on-tinder/

http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/07/feminist-hook-up-culture/

NYTimes thanks Bill Harris. 🙂

Interview with Bill Murray

Slate Star Codex

First Things then  Dreher on Thiel and then Scott Alexander How the West was Won (universal culture) then back to Dreher

So: the ‘cult’ of universal culture is the sovereign individual. It is the worship of the Self. Alexander, who is a physician (Alexander is not his real name) identifies as a liberal. I assume he is an atheist, though I could be wrong about that. If you are an atheist, you are a materialist; you believe there is no such thing as transcendent meaning, that things only “mean” what we decide they mean. To someone like that, so-called “universal culture” seems rational. But to someone who believes in God — the God of the Jews, or the God of the Christians, or the God of the Muslims, and on and on — “universal culture” is … untrue. Why should anybody believe that “universal culture” is true? Alexander answers: because it works. Well, what is “works”? Alexander calls universal culture an engine of “progress.” To assert that, you have to have an idea of what constitutes progress. Alexander is smuggling teleology into his argument. What he considers to be progress sometimes looks to people like me as regress. By what standard does he call it progress?

What he probably considers to be progress is the liberation of the choosing individual from constraints on his choice. OK, fine. In this conception, there is no good and no evil, only choices that “work” and choices that don’t. But you can only decide which choices (and the values that inform them) “work” if you have an idea of what it means to “work.” You see what I’m getting at here? What looks like cosmopolitan universalism to the Alexanders and Thiels of the world is really a form of advanced parochialism, one that conceals its own cultic preferences from itself.

Alexander admits in his essay that he has more in common with readers of his blog in Finland than he does with his neighbor, who he has never met. That kind of ethic “works” as long as we remain a rich, stable, technologically advanced society. But if the power goes out for any length of time (literally and metaphorically), the real differences between Alexander’s house and Finland will assert themselves fiercely.

Back to Thiel’s assertion that the culture wars are not real. They are certainly real, in that they define what it means to be human, what it means to be a member of society, how we are to live together, and so on. I doubt a gay man in 1980s rural Alabama would say the culture wars aren’t real. Similarly, a traditionalist Catholic living in San Francisco in 2016 wouldn’t say the culture wars aren’t real. “Universal culture” only seems so to people who live in its artificial bubble.

NYTimes Was Munich shooter a “terrorist” or “disturbed loner”?