Rosenstock-Huessy offers an intriguing analysis of the triumph of the “French” myth of the Renaissance (Out of Revolution, 699-705). For starters, he gives a bleak summary of Europe between 1450 and 1517, “one of the ugliest and darkest hours of the past”: “The growth of the cities ceased all over Europe, and the men of the guilds and crafts, for lack of employment, streamed into the gangster life of the Armagnacs and Landsknechte. Petty tyrants destroyed the foundations of local... Read more

Historians do not make the periods of history, argues Rosenstock-Huessy (Out of Revolution, 689ff). The seams of history are made by people who experience upheaval, and commemorate those experiences in monuments, memory, and calendar. Yet the historian has his place, one marked out first by Thucydides: “He corrects Athenian tradition by giving the intentions and purposes of the other side. He writes the history of the war between Greeks in a way acceptable to both sides. . . . History,... Read more

Leviticus is full of numerical designs, often using repeated leitworten to highlight themes in a particular section. Chapter 3, for instance, uses the word “fat” (chalev) twelve times, and the divine speech that lays out the torot for the various offerings (6:1-7:38) uses the word blood (dam) seven times. One of the most intricate numerical patterns occurs in chapters 19-20. In each, a key-word is used seven times, and in each case the seventh use occurs in a statement about... Read more

We don’t have to reach back to antiquity to find apologists for bestiality. Midas Dekkers begins his Dearest Pet with some musings that blur the difference between human sex and bestiality:  “Back at the boys’ school girls seemed like beings from another planet, so different were they in our eyes. They were strange creatures, aliens, the girls’ school a few streets away was very like a zoo. The thought of making love one day to such a being had the alarming... Read more

Isaiah pronounces a woe against those who “add house to house and join field to field, until there is no room” (5:8). He warns that the houses of the land-greedy elites will be left desolate (v. 6).  We can imagine that wealthy landowners took a page from Ahab, who manipulated public opinion to seize Naboth’s ancestral property. Whatever techniques were used, the result was that the poorest were being squeezed from the land. It wasn’t until Nebuchadnezzar broke through the... Read more

Rosenstock-Huessy offers a test for distinguishing between humanism and faith (Die Sprache des Menschengeschlects): Whenever “man” is used in the singular without reference to God, the speaker or writer is giving voice to humanism. The easy liberalism that says “Man creates God is false” not only because man is a creature but because Man in the singular does not exist except as a gift of unity from God: “The tragedy of man is that they can never hope to become... Read more

Rosenstock-Huessy devotes one of the essays in Die Sprache Des Menschengeschlects to an evaluation of modern urban culture, which includes a brilliant (albeit one-sided) screed about suburban life: “In the new suburbs provision will be made for all the denominations. . . . . No one faith is absolute in claims or expectations. Faiths, in the plural, are a Sunday affair. The suburb is redundant with private activities all of which are perfectly harmless and without consequence. the best book for... Read more

Natural law theories often claim that there is a universal moral code acknowledged by all peoples in all times and places, derivable from nature. Bestiality would seem to be a good test case: Natural law arguments against bestiality are pretty straightforward, and then there’s the “natural” recoil that we all have when we hear of human-animal sex. It turns out, not all of us recoil. In Understanding Bestiality and Zoophilia and in the introductory essay to Bestiality and Zoophilia, Hani Miletski assembles... Read more

In The Construction of Social Reality and now again in Making the Social World, John Searle has explored the ontology of social facts. How can things that are themselves basically atomic particles and forces become objects like dollar bills and Presidents?  Social facts are attributed subjectively by people, by a collective of people, and yet they are not merely subjective. The dollar bill is a dollar bill, not merely “counted as” one; but it is one because of that “counting as.” Subjectively... Read more

News from Africa is often bad, but, as Alessandro Bruno says, there’s a fair bit of good news these days: “Africa is discovering a new spirit of optimism, reminiscent of the first decade of its post-colonial era. Despite inadequate infrastructure and at times even poorer governance, the continent has been attracting more and more interest from American and European investors, as well as Chinese, targeting such countries as Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Angola, Tanzania, and Rwanda to name a few. Today,... Read more