A Mission Statement

I have thought for a while of starting a newsletter, but frankly, I wasn’t sure the world needed another or, even if it did, it needed a newsletter from me.

But as the past few weeks have unfolded, I increasingly find myself having what seem to me like new insights in my research areas of moral, social, and political philosophy. Many of my friends and close associates have taken me aside to let me know how much they appreciate these insights when I share them. So this has given me the idea that perhaps there are more people out there, beyond the community of moral and rational inquirers already existing around me, who would find value in what I have to say.U.S. liberalism in the Twenty-First Century seems to have abandoned its own purported conception of the good—and to have abandoned the world’s people right along with that.

What now? Now that official liberalism has largely tucked itself away somewhere safe and deep behind the layers of far-right, fascist reaction, do we the “unofficial” simply seek to realize, totally unreconstructed, its notion of the good—one that its most powerful proponents seem already to have left for dead?

Or do we take this opportunity to see things freshly, as they are today? Do we develop our political analysis in relation to a rapidly changing reality, one swept by winds uncovering features that had already lain hidden below the surface of a previous time? These are characteristics, tendencies, and hard truths of our society which we could not see before but that we must now, if we are to be scientific, incorporate into our understandings of both past and present so that we may have some chance of survival in the future.

I’ll probably post about recipes and film sometimes, too.