At one extreme, there is the person who treats his life as a journey of discovery, expecting pleasure and happiness from it—homo viator. At the other, there is the person who anticipates loss and harm, and so builds dikes against the tides and flees if the waters crest over the top—homo fugiens. Two human types, two ways of living for us to choose

One of the ironies of modern living is that the ideal of a better future can induce an ache for the past in anyone. The creative destruction that brings us ever flatter liquid-crystal television screens flattens and liquifies everything else in its path. The Maoist dream of permanent revolution is finally being realized—in politics, economics,

In 1933 the race-obsessed German philosopher Alfred Bäumler gave a lecture in Berlin, “Against the Un-German Spirit,” in which he contrasted the manly political education of the Spartans, aimed at forming citizen-soldiers, with the effeminate, Jew-infected democratic education of the Weimar Republic. He then called on his student audience, many in

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet—when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round. —Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Good disciples drop their nets and follow without asking questions. What their wives and children eat that night we are not told.

Boys and girls usually undergo rituals at puberty to mark that moment, after which new things will be expected of them in society, new things will be due them, and certain behaviors will no longer be acceptable. They begin to acquire knowledge of the adult world they will need to navigate. In societies that structure their members’ lives temporally

But innocence-talk is adult talk; it has little to do with what living and breathing children actually are. Children have no concept of childhood, any more than they have a notion of what they want to be when they grow up. (They make things up so we stop pestering them.) They are physically weaker, psychologically less developed, and unaware of the

The Hebrew Bible forbade the public sacrifice of children and constrained the power of parents over their sons and daughters. It proclaimed in no uncertain terms that our children are not extensions of ourselves; they are dependent creatures who must be protected until they can live autonomously. Without this moral advance it is hard to imagine

Some of those taboos have been restored, thankfully, though in the language of individual consent rather than divine decree. It is no longer permissible, at least in the United States, to show sexually suggestive naked children in films or even in art photography. Pedophilia has become a national concern, and the lives of those convicted of it have