The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the b...
Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - t...
However, Hardy's relationship with nature is a dialectical one. While he indicates that he recognizes how human perception shapes nature, he nevertheless accepts nature as possessed of its own agency, as working through its cycle regardless of human ...
Here I want to stress that perception of losing one’s mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation, and sensing that one is...
Courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor - the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant "To speak one's mind by telling all one's heart." Over time, this definition has changed, and today, we typi...
Liberals and conservatives tend to view the economy in purely materialistic terms. They make growth, security, and prosperity ends in themselves. They exalt enlightened self-interest. They tell us that productive work is the fundamental source of hum...
The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and mak...
Many are the scholars who make it their professional occupation to occupy themselves in this towering edifice of culture, exploring its nook and crannies, developing their responses, making their contributions here and there, and helping to hand it o...
To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for sim...
The desire to “do more in less time” is not a neutral force in our culture; it is the handmaiden of miserable experts, specialists, and leaders. Not everyone has rushed to become efficient. Something else exists on the periphery: an inefficient u...
Everyone has some kind of philosophy, some general worldview, which to men of other views will seem mythological.
Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino.
Power is to be used in the service of others and only secondarily, if at all, for the benefit of oneself.
Do not, under any circumstances, put this book down and turn on the teevee. The teevee debilitates our culture.
[E]very major religion today is a winner in the Darwinian struggle waged among cultures, and none ever flourished by tolerating its rivals.
Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.
Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.
One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.
Telling someone something he does not understand is pointless, even if you add that he will not be able to understand it.
Culture is like water in the sea; it can either keep the business ship afloat or drag it down and sink it.
If we speak of direct means for the culture of the imagination, the whole is comprised in two words--food and exercise.
