Freespace

New interview about Jacob Bronowski

In the latest episode of Libertarianism.org's Free Thoughts podcast, I talk with Aaron Ross Powell and Trevor Burrus about my new book, The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski.

Celebrate and exercise your right to read

This week at The Objective Standard, I commemorate Banned Books Week with a look at some of the more outlandish recent incidents of censorship and near-censorship.

Frederick Douglass and leadership

I spoke last week at the Tommy Thompson Center at the University of Wisconsin, about “leadership and the founding fathers.” It was a very illustrious list of speakers, including Gordon Wood, R.B. Bernstein, and Lynne Cheney. I was speaking about Douglass, who wasn’t a founding father but a re-founding father.... You can watch here.

My review of the new volume of Harry Jaffa’s essays

...is online at The Objective Standard. Excerpt:

Jaffa called himself a “gadfly” because he criticized his fellow conservatives, especially traditionalists such as Russell Kirk and Robert Bork, who, as Jaffa proved, actually surrendered the principles they purported to defend. His attacks on those he called “false prophets of American conservatism” often were harsh, because he wisely approached philosophical disputes with grave seriousness and because he believed they had embraced the same fatal thesis that modern liberals had: “there is no objective knowledge of, or rational ground for distinguishing good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust” (101). This obliterated the only ground—reason—from which justice or liberty could be defended.

Read the rest...

The anti-slavery constitution

My article on the pro-Constitution abolitionists appears in the newest issue of National Review. I explore the thought of such statesmen as John Quincy Adams, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln, who argued that the Constitution either already prohibited slavery, or that it was in essence an anti-slavery document and gave Congress power to restrict or even eliminate slavery, decades before the Civil War. It's a perspective known as anti-slavery constitutionalism that is completely ignored in the New York Times's recent 1619 Project articles and is often treated as disingenous or silly by historians of the period. As I argue, it is quite the opposite. Excerpt:

Many see these arguments as strained—William Wiecek, a leading scholar of anti-slavery constitutionalism, calls them “flawed and disingenuous”—but this reflects a misunderstanding of how legal arguments work.... Whatever one might conclude about anti-slavery constitutional theory, it was hardly disingenuous or implausible. And as another leading scholar of the subject, law professor Randy Barnett, concludes, it is “superior to the rival theory presented, for example, by Justice Taney in Dred Scott.” That pro-slavery ruling simply ignored the rules of legal interpretation and relied on non-textual assumptions about the Framers’ personal beliefs... Taney’s argument rested on inferences, just as the abolitionists’ arguments did. And between two theories based on inference, there was no compelling reason to choose one that doomed millions to permanent bondage over one that was consistent with the Constitution’s text, with the nation’s founding principles, and with the longstanding rule that the law must “catch at anything in favor of liberty.”

Read the rest...

Three masters of watercolor

This week in The Objective Standard, I take a look at three artists who have revolutionized the medium of watercolor. The work of Carolyn Brady, Paul Jackson, and Steve Hanks actually are watercolors, because they're so astoundingly detailed and perfectly realized. Of the three, my favorite is Steve Hanks, whose To Search Within is on the living room wall.

Humor and being human

A few years ago, I read the fascinating Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind by Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams, and was partly delighted and partly crushed. The crushed part was because I'd long wanted to write something about the philosophy of humor, and I found that Hurley, Dennett, and Adams had anticipated everything that I had in mind to say. I was delighted because they had delved far deeper than I had contemplated, and presented a fascinating theory as to why we laugh at jokes. In The Objective Standard, I give a brief overview of their thoughts, and offer a few of my own.