Sunday, May 11, 2008

Welcome to the blog of The Emerson Institute for Freedom and Culture. Here you will find occasional postings, random thoughts, and updates. I am Troy Camplin, Ph.D., director of EIFC, Inc. The EIFC is a free market think tank whose primary mission will be to promote cultural and societal change through the arts and humanities. While other think tanks seek to change the minds of elected officials, EIFC will seek to influence the culture at large through the promotion of pro-liberty, pro-values, meaningful works in the arts and humanities. If liberty is to survive, it must have support from the people and the culture. If we have a culture which promotes freedom, truth, beauty, meaning, value, and virtue, we will have people who will support freedom, truth, beauty, meaning, value, and virtue in their lives as a whole, including in their politics. We believe the best way to rejuvenate the culture is through a form of natural classicism, which recognizes that the world is complex, self-organizing, creative, and free. Further, we will seek to educate the public about the importance of the arts and humanities to their lives and to the culture at large. Any real and lasting societal change must start in the culture -- in the arts and humanities. If the people are to believe in freedom, truth, beauty, meaning, value, and virtue, then our arts and humanities must create or reconstruct freedom, truth, beauty, meaning, value, and virtue.  in works which address themselves to the average person and not just the specialist. In other words, we must support works that provide a counterpoint to those postmodern works which promote an overly simple, irrational, unbeautiful, anti-value, anti-meaning, immoral worldview that undermines rather than reinforces the creative freedom inherent in the world. Through journals and newsletters, articles and books, scholarly panels, media appearances, special projects, and this blog, EIFC will strive to reflect the reality of the world as a complex, creative, beautiful, value-laden, meaningful and, thus, conducive to freedom.

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