An Adventure for Serious Readers

Takuan Seiyo continues putting together a serious and engaging opus in From Meccania to Atlantis, complete with some interesting metaphors and a wide range of useful references. It is an ambitious and thoughtful polemic affirming the Western tradition in times of trouble.

Using the Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a metaphorical foundation to explain the hold that postmodern philosophy has gained on contemporary Western thought, he enumerates the historical causes and the self-destructive effects on modern society.

Meccania demands more than a casual reading, and the work has grown to some length, now in its tenth installment. Mr. Seiyo's writing contains some of the overreach to be expected in polemic, but his assertions are well documented, provocative and thoroughly entertaining. I find myself looking forward to his next installment in the way that an earlier generation did to serialized Dikens novels.

While Mr. Seiyo, like many other writers in the conservative tradition, identifies and condemns the long and growing list of collectivist follies, he does it with considerably more insight and skill than other writers I know of. Not content, he says, with merely describing the mindless retreat from the Western canon, he promises to offer practical and lawful remedial strategies. Whether he can deliver remains to be seen.