Tag: Politics

• January 14, 2026

  The Tribal Future Of The West: On The Need To Grow Up More

  I’m currently two-thirds of the way through Mike Maxwell’s book Tribal Future of the West. While I know very little about Maxwell, it’s enough to say that he is clearly a critic of liberalism (i.e., of the liberal political order) as well as a proponent of tribalism. In what follows, I’ll briefly summarize his main…
• November 16, 2015

  Excitement and Anti-intellectualism in Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen

  I cannot imagine a more bracing, dramatic, stern, and triumphant account of Zen practice than Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen. The very atmosphere of Zen is “lit up,” the mood is intense and alive and awesome, the figures very human while being supremely committed. I can see why the book, published in 1963, has had a…
• October 5, 2015

  Where the Left and the Right Went Wrong

  The point of being on this planet is to figure out why we’re on this planet. The point needs to be made because human beings seem to do most everything they can to avoid this existential question, the only one that ultimately warrants asking.
• November 13, 2012

  Love of love

  What’s love got to do with it? Yesterday morning, one conversation partner spoke of wanting to “love life without limit.” We spoke about how to draw out the meditative aspects from the ordinary run of life. In the afternoon, Cheyenna Weber, Interim Director at the New Economy Network and Founder of SolidarityNYC, told me that,…
• November 5, 2011

  Roberto Unger on ‘the future of the left’

  A breathtaking interview with Roberto Unger, “The Future of the Left,” The European (October 24, 2011) about the need to think differently. My curating below. (If you grant Unger’s conclusions, then you’ll have to also grant how truly “paradigm-shifting” his ideas are.) — Rethinking Modern Institutions “My view is that all the fundamental problems of the European…