Polarization & Repair
Empirical models reveal polarization’s asymmetry: moral initiative has outpaced reflection. When progress accelerates faster than persuasion, civic harmony frays. Phronesis—practical wisdom—remains the ballast that keeps freedom steady amid democracy’s shifting tempo.
Polarization & Repair
Polarization cannot be cured by facts alone. Polanyi and Aquinas remind us that politics rests on tacit worlds of trust, practice, and love. To rebuild common ground, we must recover the unspoken arts of citizenship and cultivate shared affections for the common good.
Freedom
Patriotism need not be grievance or bloodline. At its best, it is love and affection for liberty, equality, and justice—an inheritance wide enough to hold a fractured people, and demanding enough to call us beyond tribe toward a shared republic of ideals.
Polarization & Repair
Abstract anger thrives on distance. As MacIntyre warned, virtues wither when detached from practice. Localism heals by compelling neighbors to face real problems together—transforming politics from tribal war into shared civic craft.
Polarization & Repair
Tolerance may keep conflict at bay, but by itself it leaves us strangers. Free societies endure only when they move beyond the tranquility of indifference to the practice of encounter—where wary coexistence gives way to fraternity, solidarity, and a shared civic life.
Economics and Development
Banfield’s village and Acemoglu’s empires converge on one truth: institutions rest on ethos. Without trust, reciprocity, and civic friendship, even fountains go unrepaired—and nations, too, begin to fail.
Technology
Socrates taught wisdom begins in doubt. Popper said science lives by refutation. AI speaks in polished certainties. What we need is a refutation button—a built-in reminder that every answer can be challenged.
Freedom
Solzhenitsyn warned that tyranny thrives on small lies we tell ourselves. Today’s pressures—ideological fashion, digital outrage—differ from the gulag, yet tempt us to the same betrayal of conscience. Freedom endures only where truth is quietly kept.
Music
In October 1956, Hungary’s revolt found its soundtrack in Beethoven’s Egmont Overture. From its tragic chords to its triumphant blaze, the music mirrored their struggle: freedom martyred in blood, yet unconquered in spirit.
Freedom
Forgiveness is no easy grace—it is the hardest freedom, wrested from pain itself. It asks the unimaginable: that hurt might yield to mercy. Yet time and again, from the crucifixion to South Africa’s rebirth, it has made the impossible possible.
Freedom
Cosmopolitanism is no partisan creed. From Stoic circles to today’s hybrid identities, it calls us to widen our loyalties without erasing our roots—a bipartisan horizon where patriotism and shared humanity can stand together.
Freedom
America is splitting not over ideas, but over identities. The cure is older than we think: contact that dissolves caricature, imagination that widens the circle, humility that tempers certainty.