Metahistory
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Shlain on Our Disembedding
. . . and re-embedding? I first posted this McLuhanesque lecture by Leonard Shlain in 2010. I think it's worth another look because of the way it treats themes discussed this week. Lecture starts around 2:30 minute mark. He doesn't use the term 'disembedded', but that's what he's talking about. Great images. I've posted
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The Hypertrophied Eye (encore)
Protestantism is the expression of faith that resulted from changes in consciousness effected by the spread of literacy after Gutenberg. Catholicism is the expression of a faith shaped by a consciousness formed in traditions and customs that have its roots in oral culture. A literate consciousness is one that hears the Word while reading alone.
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Irony and Decadence
From a piece worth reading in its entirety in Salon article today: Percy Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” For Shelley, great art had the potential to make a new world through the depth of its vision and the properties of its creation. Today, Shelley would be laughed out of
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The Spirit of Classical Liberalism
In brief, for classical liberalism, the human world consisted of self-contained individual atoms with certain built-in passions and drives, each seeking above all to maximize his satisfactions and minimze his dissatisfactions, equal in this to all others, and 'naturally' recognizing no limits or rights of interference with his urges. In other words, each man was
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Milbank on Politics
This is a short clip, and it reinforces themes that I've been exploring as a anti-liberal progressive. The solution doesn't lie with the market or with the state, as Milbank points out, but with society–i.e, in the cultural realm as it develops out of modernity and its desiccated imagination of reality. Milbank's position is that modern
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What do Men Want?
I was interested to reread recently an old column I’d saved by Maureen Dowd in which she writes about how she was shocked to hear from a male friend that before his recent marriage he had thought about dating her but chose not to because she was too “intimidating”. She also referenced a recent study
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The Judaeo-Christian Cosmogonic Myth
[This is a repost from 2010–with a few changes. I thought I'd throw it out there again since it links to a bunch of themes that have come up in comments recently–second naiveté, Mary, the flat, univocity of the post-Scotus cosmos, and the references to the Meditations, on which this piece leans heavily. This is theological
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The End of History and the Bourgeois Type
Because we live in an age that is dominated by bourgeois values and the bourgeois worldview, we assume that this is the way it will always be. Francis Fukuyama, echoing Hegel, asks whether becoming bourgeois isn't the whole goal (end) of history–the bourgeois as the pinnacle of human development. Well, I hope not. Neither really does
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Second Naiveté.
The most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. In the former the great majority of people live in a 'given' world and in the latter a chosen world. We all live in a given world, of course, one bounded by history, but those
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Better and Worse
Over the years, the GOP has effected a propaganda coup in its branding the Democrats as the party of out-of-touch, effete, quiche-eating elites who have nothing but disdain for red America's rednecks. This worked particularly well during the Bush years, but not as well for the Romney campaign because of his plutocratic image. For that