The ESP and HH projects stand at nearly 100,000 words. This is my effort to condense and combine the projects into 2,000 words — Synopsis: Modernity is the left hemisphere gone wild. Gnosticism, with its dualistic approach and emphasis on knowledge that gives salvation and control, is a left-hemispheric political religion that thrived during the twentieth century and has today settled in as the dominant cultural disposition that drives public debate. Today’s powerful elites…

My daughter runs. She runs in the morning, she runs at night. Runs, runs, runs. People around town see her and go, “Look at that girl! She’s a runner.” But I know she’s more than that. My daughter breathes. She breathes in the morning, she breathes at night. Breathes, breathes…

A new battlefront has opened on the political right: localists v. monoliths. It’s the latest version of the libertarian-conservative debate that George Nash described in his major work. The localists in the current debate are the libertarians and the monoliths are the conservatives. I say “monoliths” because they welcome the…

Then again, H.L. Mencken made a killing by writing for “the morons” — There used to be writing that was “middlebrow.” You’d find it in urbane and smart publications that were lower than academia and fine writing (highbrow) and higher than sports columnists and dimestore novels (lowbrow). It was always a limited market. When Henry Fowler self-published his own set of essays, it…

Satire is everywhere these days. The Onion, The Babylon Bee. It’s popular. Satire also became wildly popular in the early eighteenth century. It was the era of Jonathan Swift and his witty friends. Two of the biggest literary names of the twentieth century, Orwell and Huxley, wrote political satire. Orwell…

Artists and creators may not find success until they’re old — Are you an aging artist with no success? Everyone says they love your work but no one is listening/reading/watching? Take encouragement from this big twentieth-century sharecropper from the Mississippi Delta, an era/area more crammed with talented blues musicians than the Internet is crammed with hack writers. He farmed, drove truck…

Until that obvious and flagrant and massive fraud is remedied, I’m afraid any argument for more government action is laughably absurd — It’s hard to say whether Sohrab Ahmari is a distributist or whether he ignores the problem of Hudge and Gudge, but based on this laudatory essay, he seems ignorant that the biggest problem with big government is that big business will use it to enrich both. If government is big…

Preliminary note: This isn’t the second part of a 2-part series, but readers might want to read or skim this previous piece before reading this one. Dogen, the father of the Soto School of Japanese Zen, is arguably the most significant intellectual in the Zen tradition. As a young man…

“The eye takes; the ear receives” — Listening has gotten deafening. Everyone extols the virtue of being a good listener. Listen, listen, listen: the advice has become clichéd. Everyone these days seems to acknowledge the importance of listening, but I’m not sure they understand, at root, why it’s important. Enter the right hemisphere. It’s the “tactile” hemisphere…