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August 1 - August 11, 2018
liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it’s better to solve those problems than to start a conflagration and hope that something better arises from the ashes and bones.
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.
The claim “Everything is subjective” must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in that case it would be false if true.
Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently rational.
we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing.
certain beliefs become symbols of cultural allegiance. People affirm or deny these beliefs to express not what they know but who they are.
positions on climate change convey values—communal concern versus individual self-reliance; prudent self-abnegation versus the heroic pursuit of reward; humility versus ingenuity; harmony with nature versus mastery over it—that divide them along cultural lines.
express the wrong opinion on a politicized issue can make one an oddball at best—someone who “doesn’t get it”—and a traitor at worst.
people are sharing blue lies. A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer; a blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group
people seek and consume news to enhance the fan experience, not to make their opinions more accurate.
free market can coexist with regulations on safety, labor, and the environment, just as a free country can coexist with criminal laws.
A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from.
The tipping point depends on the balance between how badly the opinion holder’s reputation would be damaged by relinquishing the opinion and whether the counterevidence is so blatant and public as to be common knowledge: a naked emperor, an elephant in the room.
naturalism, the position that “reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural,’ and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the ‘human spirit.’”
The first is that the world is intelligible. The phenomena we experience may be explained by principles that are deeper than the phenomena themselves.
The second ideal is that we must allow the world to tell us whether our ideas about it are correct. The traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, hermeneutic parsing of texts, the glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.
The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness. Many of its luminaries—Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, the Critical Theorists—are morose cultural pessimists who declare that modernity is odious, all statements are paradoxical, works of art are tools of oppression, liberal democracy is the same as fascism, and Western civilization is circling the drain.
Though humanism is the moral code that people will converge upon when they are rational, culturally diverse, and need to get along, it is by no means a vapid or saccharine lowest common denominator.
The first is theistic morality: the idea that morality consists in obeying the dictates of a deity, which are enforced by supernatural reward and punishment in this world or in an afterlife. The second is romantic heroism: the idea that morality consists in the purity, authenticity, and greatness of an individual or a nation. Though romantic heroism was first articulated in the 19th century, it may be found in a family of newly influential movements, including authoritarian populism, neo-fascism, neo-reaction, and the
The first is that there is no good reason to believe that God exists.
different religions, drawing on these sources, decree mutually incompatible beliefs about how many gods there are, which miracles they have wrought, and what they demand of their devotees.
Many theistic beliefs originated as hypotheses to explain natural phenomena such as the weather, disease, and the origin of species. As these hypotheses have been superseded by scientific ones, the scope of theism has steadily shrunk.
Our universe can be specified by a few numbers, including the strengths of the forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces), the number of macroscopic dimensions of space-time (four), and the density of dark energy (the source of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe).
The best-established theories of physics today don’t explain why these constants should be so meticulously tuned to values that allowed us to come into being (particularly the density of dark energy), and so, the theistic argument goes, there must have been a fine-tuner, namely God.
The other explanation is that our universe is just one region in a vast, possibly infinite landscape of universes—a multiverse—each with different values of the fundamental constants.36 We find ourselves in a universe compatible with life not because it was tuned to allow us to exist but because the very fact that we exist implies that it is that kind of universe, and not one of the vastly more numerous inhospitable ones, that we find ourselves in.
the mind has nothing but itself to know itself with, and it may never feel satisfied that it understands the deepest aspect of its own existence, its intrinsic subjectivity.
thirty religious conflicts among the worst things that people have ever done to one another, resulting in around 55 million killings.
If there are justifiable reasons behind particular activities, those activities should be encouraged, but the movements should not be given a pass just because they are religious.
the alternative to “religion” as a source of meaning is not “science.” No one ever suggested that we look to ichthyology or nephrology for enlightenment on how to live, but rather to the entire fabric of human knowledge, reason, and humanistic values, of which science is a part.
In 2012 religiously unaffiliated Americans made up 20 percent of the populace but 12 percent of the voters.
if you combine the fact that much of Islamic doctrine is antihumanistic with the fact that many Muslims believe that Islamic doctrine is inerrant—and throw in the fact that the Muslims who carry out illiberal policies and violent acts say they are doing it because they are following those doctrines—then it becomes a stretch to say that the inhumane practices have nothing to do with religious devotion and that the real cause is oil, colonialism, Islamophobia, Orientalism, or Zionism.
If one wanted to single out a thinker who represented the opposite of humanism (indeed, of pretty much every argument in this book), one couldn’t do better than the German philologist Friedrich Nietzsche
The connections between Nietzsche’s ideas and the megadeath movements of the 20th century are obvious enough: a glorification of violence and power, an eagerness to raze the institutions of liberal democracy, a contempt for most of humanity, and a stone-hearted indifference to human life.
he was a key influence on Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, and a godfather to all the intellectual movements of the 20th century that were hostile to science and objectivity, including Existentialism, Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstructionism, and Postmodernism.
Fascism, from the Italian word for “group” or “bundle,” grew out of the Romantic notion that the individual is a myth and that people are inextricable from their culture, bloodline, and homeland.
Theocons hold that the erosion of the church’s authority during the Enlightenment left Western civilization without a solid moral foundation, and a further undermining during the 1960s left it teetering on the brink.
Between 1803 and 1945, the world tried an international order based on nation-states heroically struggling for greatness. It didn’t turn out so well.
After 1945 the world’s leaders said, “Well, let’s not do that again,” and began to downplay nationalism in favor of universal human rights, international laws, and transnational organizations. The result, as we saw in chapter 11, has been seventy years of peace and prosperity in Europe and, increasingly, the rest of the world.
Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades know it too. Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don’t confuse
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Good summary
