I came to Cairo to get a better sense of the prospects for such a global conversation. If the battle over values is likely to play out globally in this century, how open are we to our natural allies?
Adam K. Webb
Plenty of space, I concluded with a glance at the approaching headlights in my left mirror. I let the clutch out smoothly and started what felt like a routine merge out of the service area. Scarcely had the car started…
“I don’t care if you bring the president of Peru and a thousand police—we’ll be carried out dead before you dig here!” Thus was the position of the twenty or so irate villagers gathered around us. The intense Andean sun…
What ironies of fate converged that morning, such that a mob was about to come out on a march against us?
What the political mainstream ignores, unsurprisingly, is that any change in how we raise revenue cannot be only about balancing the numbers. It also involves judgements about the texture of society and the virtues that habits of livelihood can inculcate or destroy.
A revised foreign policy true to the principles of the Porch should turn the present one upside down.
Some ruling classes in history, more than others, deserve pitchforks.
Many a time, I have seen my friend doting on his little seven-year-old half brother, picking him up from school, cooking for him, and keeping his classmates’ junk food at bay. Staying abroad and settling into some sort of upwardly mobile immigrant comfort would go against the grain of years of habit.
Tradition supposedly bears the thumbprints of Roman patricians with browbeaten wives or frustrated monks who shivered in mediæval abbeys.
The prevailing model of local voting has deep defects, which often work against strong communities. The modern standard is one person, one vote, one place. While this standard is simple, it leads to outcomes that run against common sense.
Even for the average homeowner, ownership all too often is imagined as a way of gaming income flow and consumption over a lifetime, accumulating enough to spend down before one has to become a ward of the welfare state. It is part of consumer society, not a buffer against it.
But how can such plural sovereignty be realised under the circumstances of this century? Who will guard the guardians, so to speak? How will the stones of the arch fit together?
When economic growth finally levels off, what kind of world comes after? Shall we be unchained from the mad rush for money of the last century? Or will other but equally chafing chains weigh us down instead?
A homogeneous global consumer culture flattens its victims. And, perhaps in the same vein, our meanderings around the dying furniture capital of Yecla turned up nothing: virtually everything on display fitted what has become the decorative style of contemporary Spain: the sort of stuff one might find in a Copenhagen dentist’s office.
Often the politics of the local turns on the “who” as much as the “where.”
Switzerland showed as much very recently. The country enjoys some goodwill among the sort of people who read FPR. It is one of the world’s…
As the old saying suggests, be careful what you ask for, because you may get it. The hubristic here in China are well on their way to discovering some uncomfortable truths of arrival as a great power.
For the last…
