This year marks the 150<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the publication of Count Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, arguably the greatest of all novels. Among the book’s central motifs is the fragility and contingency of human knowledge, and the subsequent futility of trying to create a social science. In an eternal warning to central planners everywhere, Tolstoy portrayed human beings as existing in a world of contingency and immediacy, continually forced to answer to events entirely unheralded and unexpected. Ultimately, humans need to be guided by something deeper than what can be found through an examination of the empirical world. Gary Saul Morson, writing in The New Criterion, shows how Tolstoy used his literary gifts to show the absurdity of what would become known as scientism, or any other reductionist account of the human.
France is in the Crosshairs, but the Target is Western Civilization
Theodore Dalrymple in Law & Liberty crystallizes the recent riots in France to a simple equation: “Whole generations have been taught and come to accept that Western civilization consists of slavery, exploitation, and massacre.” Tearing it all down – not merely reforming it – is therefore not just understandable but desirable. Dalrymple disposes of the delusional trope that these are “student” protests, noting the preponderance of Muslim migrants committing the mayhem.
For a luminous glimpse into the singular civilizational achievements the rioters would tear down, read this C2C article by Patrick Keeney.
