So are you the side of classical truth and beauty or are you for keeping up appearances? Where do you stand?

In this sense, it is a precursor or adjunct of that “hermeneutics of suspicion” that the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur invoked when discussing the intellectual and moral demolition carried out by thinkers like Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche.

Don’t throw Darwin into that mix. I’ll have none of this blood libel against Western Civilization. Darwin’s great contribution to our culture is now part and parcel of western tradition, Roger. You’re the criticismist if you want to argue against it.

And I note your potshot against the bogeyman of nominalism, a bogeyman that goes back to medieval church debates. If you, like Richard Weaver, want to go that far back to document the decline of civilization, then good luck in reversing things. But once again, nominalism is pretty much the tradition. You Platonists are the hip dissidents with the French cigarettes as far as that is concerned.