The Human Condition

Quote of the Day: Ian McGilchrist

Moral values are not somethig that we work out rationally on the principle of utility, or any other principle, for that matter, but are irreducible aspects fo the phenomenal world, like colour. I agree with Max Scheler, and for that matter with Wittgenstein, that moral value is a form of experience irreducible to any other
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Movement Conservatives and Reality

The notion of a pervasive constructed world of falsehood and illusion built on the fabrications of the press and the liberal establishment has long been central to the American far right.1 And since Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater before him, the knowledge that its supporters have their own truth, that they are forced to battle continually
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Civilization and Its Discontents

It's always been interesting to me that Freud's dour assessment of civilization was written at that moment in Europe when Enlightenment rationalism came crashing down and lay all about him in shards. That book and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, likewise written in the 1920s, stand as cultural benchmarks that mark the end of the civilizing impulse
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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
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Premodern/Modern/Postmodern

American politics used to be primarily about people choosing candidates based on their positions on issues—taxes, deregulation, the environment, jobs, health care, energy policy, welfare, social security, national security, and so on. But elections have become more about making a statement about your identity; and national elections are about whoe we say we are to
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Quote of the Day: Christopher Lasch

A culture organized around mass consumption encourages narcissism–which we can define, for the moment, as a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one's own fears and desires–not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it makes them weak and dependent. It undermines their confidence in
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Naive and Mature Idealism

I think of myself as an idealist but not a fool. That's not to say that I'm incapable of foolishness. There have been times when I've been foolish about one thing or another, but the trick is to learn from the mistake and to adjust your thinking without becoming a cynic. A cynic is a
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Scoundrels and Prigs

Nobody with any common sense believes the Warren Commission explanations for the Kennedy assassination. Nobody with any common sense believes that the reason we went into Iraq was to liberate Iraqis from Saddam's despotism. Nobody with any common sense believes that corporate education reform is about what's best for kids and not about a privatizing
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Civilization and Culture

Civilization is the head and culture is the heart or the soul of a society, and the soul of a society is framed by how its culture prioritizes what is worth caring about. And so if the culture defines what's most important to care about, the society's head develops a civilization to provide for the
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Beast + Angel = Mensch

I hope you'll forgive my mania for diagrams lately. I'm just practicing for stuff I have to do for work. But a couple of years ago I put up a reflection piece on Steinbeck's East of Eden entitled "Shrewd as Serpents, Guileless as Doves." About a year before I reread The Brothers Karamazov.
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