The City of Man

Pretty dense philosophical reading, but if you have the endurance to get through it, Manent is very insightful. He really does great job challenging the tenants of modernity, but leaves us questioning what can take their place.

Manent has produced a work of genius. And America is the place he describes: where man can be "free" without any conception of what he really is or what he is for, and thus without any conception what freedom really is.

Most world religions have not recognized what we call "progress" as a major category. Long before Christian monks unleashed science through their formulation of the scientific method, high cultures were being annihilated by a seemingly willful ignoring of the military importance of innovation. The "good Fascists" Evola and Guenon,while showing the inevitable decline of all civilizations with the underclass demolishing everything man-conceived in the final phase, they seem to "heroically" rise above mentioning the importance of delaying "kali yuga" by cranking up the power of military innovation. Guenon makes no mention of it, and Evola briefly mentions it with no conclusions. But it does appear to me human "progress is an illusion, and material progress is utterly superficial, if it weren't so dangerous, without human progress. CITY OF MAN shows a particularly precipitous discontinuity in the slope of human regress when Montesquieu irresponsibly, even mischievously blurs the connotations of classical and Christian "virtue" and recasts the word in egalitarian terms. He meretriciously appeals to Nietzsche's ressentiment in this last phase, not of Christian/Judeo/Islam Civilization, but this last phase of civilizational Christianity/Judaism/Islam. This will-to-nihilism, the morbid end of will-to-power, was taken up by Rousseau, as Manent points out, and we know the trail of mischief-makers since. We laugh at all forms of the Sacred, but strangely no one laughs when the word "rights" is spoken, neither the speaker nor the listener. Yet the enterprise of Hobbes, his right to life and the more important right to