The Morality of Buying Local

26 Dec 2025 16:29

On this blog, I don't often speak directly to specific moral issues (unless it instantiates a larger point about religion proper), but I can't help but think of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity could be of service in this instance:

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Folk Culture v. Pop Culture (and the Role of Consumer Capitalism)

3 Oct 2025 10:03

What Mr. Holdsworth points out here is that the individual taste profiling of consumer capitalism has, in effect, metabolized pre-existing folk traditions and perverting them for its own ends.  This has ended up contributing to an "anti-culture" that is not held in common [Commonality here with Deneen's thesis in "Why Liberalism Failed"]. 

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Data vs. Knowledge vs. Wisdom

16 Sept 2025 16:19

According to a contemporary accounting information systems textbook, straightforwardly titled Accounting Information Systems, a glaring statistic haunts us: "With an incredible 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created every day, 90 percent of the world's data has been created in the last two years alone."*

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News headline: List of stores and restaurants participating in the January 23 protests

 

OBSERVATION: It is a modern political principle that the underlying motive and the messaging of one's exact attitudes don't ever have to align.    One could be terrified of going against the mob (even secretly despising them), while paying lip service to their cause.  In fact, there may be considerable marketing upside in doing so!  /s

 

RELEVANCE: As modern consequentialists, modern man cares about the effects of his allegiances only.  And so, could those not change day-by-day depending on where the winds of fortune take us (meaning where power and influence are presently located)?  Besides, between social survival or human dignity, most will choose survival.  This is "common sense", don't you know?  Who can afford the high premium on human dignity?  Self-abasement is therefore the more morally sound option and counts as almost sacrificial in nature. /s

 

MAXIM 1 of a "Postmodern La Rochefoucauld":  It has been said that the right hand should not know what the left is doing (Matthew 6:3); even so, this was the advice given to saints, not to us political men!  Indeed, for those of us Machiavels in the know, the only rule is that there are exceptions to every rule: In this instance, the right hand should only know the left is doing only when it comes to the washing of both (Matthew 27:24).  /s

 

Stay hygienic, friendo!

 

Hegel once wrote in one of his diaries that “Newspaper reading of the early morning is a kind of realistic morning prayer,” and he went on to speculate that it would supplant Christian morning prayer as a kind of routine piety. 

 

Modern men would become more focused on the affairs of this world, less on the hereafter. 

 

No surprise there.

 

In a way, there was a time when Hegel's prediction did seem to capture the trajectory of society's utilitarian sense of agenda-mongering and staying "in the know"---- every household had its Sunday newspaper and read it dutifully--- but this conversation of Unherd attests to a far different reality for digital modernity:

 

The dawn of post-literate society - with Jared Henderson and James Marriott

 

This sub-blog investigates the correlation between declines in literacy and religion, how both trends are in fact related and sourced in the same causes in a dwindling attention span.

 

More to come!