Metahistory
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Getting to the Big Story
[If readers here are too busy or shy to ask questions, I’ll ask them for you. If you have better ones, ask them in comments.] Q: Here's what I don't get so far. You say metaphysics is best understood as story or a narrative. That makes no sense to me. Stories are things we make
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After Bacon, Recovering Aristotle
I realize that a post like the last one, and this one too, are pretty heavy sledding for readers without some background in philosophy, but it's where I think the fight for the future has to take place. Whoever tells the best story wins, but the story–or mythos– has to make sense, and it has
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Mythos and Utopia
Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness? I think not. For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of
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Thoughts on the Yesterday’s Indictment
From Charlie Syke's Morning Shots— Jack Smith and other prosecutors have flooded the zone with Trump’s criminality. The rapidly filling legal calendar means that 2024 will be dominated by: Trump the fraudster Trump the rapist Trump’s hush money payments to a porn star Trump’s violation of the Espionage Act and Trump, the conspiracist, who tried
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Archetypes and the Zeitgeist: The Tension between Order and Chaos
Our fears make us stupid, and it's our stupidity that makes our fears become unintentionally, i.e., stupidly, self-fulfilling prophecies. Is there a fearless way to think about or imagine the future at this time? It's more difficult because we seem to be in a fear-energized death spiral where common-sense solutions seem impossible to come by.
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End of History?
Let’s begin with a more specific account of the discontents expressed by the political right. These center on something very fundamental to liberalism and have been raised repeatedly over the centuries during which liberalism has existed. Classical liberalism deliberately lowered the sights of politics, to aim not at a good life as defined by a
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Return of the Repressed
In "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I", I argue on a more practical political level that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on Liberal Democrats succeeding and Republicans in their current form failing and then being pushed to the margins. I argued that's not likely to happen if Main Street Americans
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The Coming Discontinuity
At the heart of our difficulty predicting the future is our assumption of stability. It is like this today and so it will probably be like this tomorrow, too. What makes this way of thinking seductive is that it is, usually, true. And then, all at once, it’s not. —Ezra Klein What makes discontinuity discontinuous
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Progressives v. Jacobins
For so long, San Francisco has been too self-satisfied to address the slow rot in every one of its institutions. But nothing’s given me more hope than the rage and the recalls. “San Franciscans feel ashamed,” Michelle Tandler told me. “I think for the first time people are like, ‘Wait, what is a progressive? …
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The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
In fact, if you ask me what really went wrong after 1991, it’s … that there was no recognition among the Soviet elites that they had lost the Cold War and that they had deserved to lose it. Instead, people like Putin and others nursed resentments about betrayal and humiliation—as if the Soviet Union had