Ideas
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Liberal/Conservative; Revolutionary/Reactionary
There have always been two kinds of reactionaries, though, with different attitudes toward historical change. One type dreams of a return to some real or imaginary state of perfection that existed before a revolution. This can be any sort of revolution—political, religious, economic, or even aesthetic. French aristocrats who hoped to restore the Bourbon dynasty,
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Some Thoughts on ‘Breaking Bad’
I came to this show late. I've only watched the first season, and a couple of episodes in the second. I realize that the show's finale is only two episodes off, but I wanted to say a few things about it as it relates to the 'missing middle" post I put up a few days
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Does it Matter What People Think or Believe? (Updated)
Or only what they do? I think that ultimately what most matters is what they do, the choices they make, but the scope of what they can do–the scope for their freedom–is expanded or limited by what one thinks or believes. And how one thinks is shaped by the underlying story he tells himself about
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Brooks on ‘A Secular Age’
Brooks's column this morning tries to summarize Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. There's nothing particularly striking in it to quote, but if you're not familiar with the book, the column will give you an overview of its concerns, which are the concerns of this blog. The basic question for the book, Taylor says, is "Why
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It Is Futile to Reason with Them
From "Misreading Eichmann in Jerusalem" by Roger Berkowitz in yesterday's NYT: That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything
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Zizek and Christianity’s Perverse Core
Salon has an atheist write a critique of Hitchens' critique of religion. He accuses Hitchens of intellectual dishonesty, but I guess in Salon's view, you have to be an atheist to have any credibility in pointing that out. Nevertheless, it's worth a read. Sample graf: As critics have observed since its publication, one enormous problem with
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Commonplace Freedoms
What Gramsci calls 'common sense' . . . typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of long-standing practices of cultural socialization often rooted deep in regional or national traditions. It is not the same as 'good sense' that can be constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day. Common sense can,
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Quote of the Day: Robert Cialdini
From Influence: Science & Practice, p. 7: You and I exist in an extraordinarily complicated environment, easily the most rapidly moving and complex that has ever existed on the planet. To deal with it, we need shortcuts. We can't be expected to recognize and analyze all the aspects in each person, event, and situation we
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Gov. Jerry Brown’s State of the State
Is Jerry Brown the model for Liberalism 5.0? Every once in a while a major politician shocks by actually speaking in a way that politicians rarely speak, i.e., in a way that suggests that he really "gets it". What are the chances considering all the filters that prevent such people from seeing things other than