In this episode I look at Larry Arnhart's Darwinian Conservatism, a great book that explores many of the same themes I've been spotlighting elsewhere, but all in one spot and finally putting the tail on the donkey and labeling the evolutionary premise behind Burke's and Hayek's ideas: Darwinian Conservatism. Arnhart talks about spontaneous order and the natural order, customary order, and rational order. I also point out Arnhart's take on the differences between men and women.

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In this episode, I explore James Burnham description of liberalism as an ideology founded on an unsound notion of the pliability of human nature. I also look at his notion of guilt as the driving emotion of liberal activity.

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In this episode I look at What is Conservatism, Frank Meyer's collection of essays by mid-20th century conservative thinkers. The essays I focus on give a deeper analysis of the ways in which the state is dependent upon the particular traditions of a people, and the traditions of the people are dependent on a transcendent shared appraisal of reality. The authors I focus on include Russell Kirk, Garry Wills, and Stanley Parry.

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In this episode I explore Viktor Frankl's moving exploration into the meaning of life, Man's Search for Meaning. I focus on virtuous behavior in the face of suffering, the importance of having tasks to fulfill, obligations, and the need for love.

In this episode I explore the 'master' and 'slave' morality proposed by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, with a particular focus of how the master morality may relate to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks, and how it relates to modern conservatism and progressivism.

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In this episode I explore Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. I look at eudaimonia and the mean between defect and excess in virtuous behavior. I also examine Aristotle's work on courage and pride, two natural virtues he describes.

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In this episode I continue the exploration of the evolutionary roots of morality with Jonathan Haidt's fantastic book, The Righteous Mind. In this book, Haidt delivers the killing blow to the rationalist delusion that I've been discussing since the early episodes. In addition, I examine the broad array of virtues encompassed by Haidt's moral foundations theory. This theory, and its political ramifications, continue to draw together evolutionary psychology, conservatism, and the golden mean proposed by Aristotle.

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In this episode, we explore Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, in which he explains his research in the two modes of thought: System 1, the fast, intuitive, unconscious thought of associations and heuristics, and System 2, the slow, deliberate, calculative, resource-depleting conscious thought.

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In this episode I look at Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue. In particular I look at the prisoner's dilemna and potential strategies to achieve cooperation and reciprocity among evolving selfish genes. I also examine the sexual division of labor in early humans, with males doing most of the hunting and women doing most of the gathering.

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Richard Dawkins' best-selling book, The Selfish Gene, examines the fundamental nature of the replicating gene in a competitive environment, and all of the consequences thereof. I look specifically at the origins of life and DNA, and the evolutionarily stable strategy of behavior development in a game theory context.

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