For me, this book will rank among those rare oracles that clarify what we can sense but not see. We know America and the West are ailing, perhaps termFor me, this book will rank among those rare oracles that clarify what we can sense but not see. We know America and the West are ailing, perhaps terminally ill, but with such rapid, recurring, and many-sided social whiplash, who can say why? Like Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, Brooks Adams, or Edward Gibbon, author Deneen is one of the decoders. As the New York Times wrote of this book, “Tocqueville’s fear that [classical] liberalism would eventually dissolve all its inheritances may now be fully upon us.” For Deneen, it is the unchallenged structure of the liberal State and conservative Market, perverted through excess, and unhinged by the natural evolution of individualism under such an order. An order where neither side in our tribal Culture Wars were given a “Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.” While belonging can be binding, it can also be blinding. In the interest of perfecting the individual, we disconnected ourselves from any obfuscating attachments for the clarity of self-actualization, self-realization, and listlessness, desperate to recover what we lost. Deneen shows our backfill has been consumerism, technology, entertainment, and affirmations of membership in clans that exists mostly in cyberspace and the airways. All of it detached from humane existence we evolved with over the preceding 40,000 years.
Deneen clarifies for me that while our Founders tried to give us stable governance of, by, and for unstable humans, such a form cannot be sustained in perpetuity because humans cannot be stabilized in perpetuity. Humans are innovators, seeking advances, workarounds, and change that strains every limit. We can’t know what a system can handle until we break it. But Humpty Dumpty social systems can’t be put back together like machines. The “micro-implosions” scattered about our social terrain quake throughout all of society. Every social system and consequent form of governance fails in ways particular to their baseline in the time it takes for humans to find out how to do that. Deneen shows us our way. This looks like our time. ...more
This Pulitzer Prize winning history of America’s founding generation is the best book on that era, its people, and their project that I’ve read to datThis Pulitzer Prize winning history of America’s founding generation is the best book on that era, its people, and their project that I’ve read to date—but not without disappointment outside the text. Ellis’s approach is with an “eye on the precarious contingencies felt at the time,” with the other eye on more expansive consequences they could barely discern. It’s those contingencies so well expressed that gave this book its gravity. Until Trump, Americans long assumed their institutions would—however slow, inefficient, and clumsy—prevail. But Ellis makes it clear from the Founders themselves just how much they doubted the success of their project. Ellis considers the period from roughly 1787-1808 as a “second founding,” and that last decade of the 18th century as “the most crucial and consequential in American history,” when the founding generation figured out governance on the fly.
Ellis shows that one problem to building a nation was the Declaration itself. A document of revolution that “stigmatized all concentrated political power [depicting] any energetic expression of government authority as an alien force that all responsible citizens ought to repudiate and, if possible, overthrow.” This response to the king imprinted an absolutist perspective alive still today (especially for those who never read The Federalist) and became one reference of the ideological dualities of state vs. nation, freedom vs. equality, and individualist vs. community that was present at the founding. How to actually run a spin-off from Britain was not the Declaration’s purview. And as every revolutionary knows, to sustain the revolutionary posture is an invitation to perpetual anarchy. So the Articles of Confederation were the first attempt at taming that spirit, faithful to the Declaration’s independence message, and an utterly useless piece of parchment for running a nation. Straddling absolutist attitudes and the need for something operationally practical resulted in the Constitutional Convention to bang out a method in secret so as to mute the scandalmongers present in every age. The result was both brilliant and incomplete, built of what Ellis calls “artfully contrived ambiguity,” as though the only way to level naturally unstable humans for the long haul was through the allowance of their oscillation. “The revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies in the form of an ongoing argument,” writes Ellis, “eventually institutionalized and rendered safe by creation of political parties.” (Finally, a positive spin on parties.) Which started immediately between the Federalists of Washington and Adams vs. the Democratic-Republicans of Jefferson and Madison. One view of proper governance would rise to dominance until Americans had their fill of it, only to raise the other, back and forth through generations, never quite tumbling, until perhaps some 250 years later.
Without intending to, Ellis challenges originalism; the idea that the Constitution should be understood as it was intended to be understood when it was written—which should seem obvious. But this ignores that morality can evolve forward (e.g. slavery) or not (e.g. Trump’s jihadist “patriots”), and just what was the Founders position on a host of governmental issues? Of course, no one but a postmodern relativist could imagine that months of intense debate, compromise, and a final writing of law could mean anything, everything, or nothing at all. The Founders obviously intended a certain structure of governance, communicated in writing, but the supporting perspectives and countless details of implementation are not so apparent, at least not as a unified whole because there was no such thing. Debates were “not so much resolved as built into the fabric of our national identity,” says Ellis. “If that means the United States is founded on a contradiction, then so be it.” This clears all sorts of room for postmodernists to promote their arguments that there is no truth, no knowledge, etc. but it also—ironically—creates space for recurrent bombast from both sides of the political crevasse to claim concrete certainty about founding intent by cherry-picking the source: Adams or Jefferson for example. As hard as it is to admit it, this compromise-that-resulted-in-ambiguity probably makes complete sense when dealing with human beings. The system allows for evolution and mess-making with clean up procedures in place (e.g. independent branches), knowing all along that messes will be made because humans are a mess.
Lastly, while I’ve often encountered the inter-Founder bickering, Ellis provides a picture too painfully real for me. The Founders themselves became too modern, septic with emotional pettiness, backstabbing, and political machinations. In short, they seemed too much like us. With several immunities: 1) aside from their glaring blindness to Natives and excepting southerners on the issue of slavery, they possessed the capacity for an honest pursuit of truth and reason for purposes of consolidation; 2) they could compromise on that common cause; 3) they could reconcile longstanding hostility, as Adams and Jefferson are evidence, and 4) except for Washington, they were so well read on historical and moral matters of civilization that their perspective can probably never be equaled by any group larger than one lone sage to materialize here-and-there through the ages. As Ellis writes, they comprised “the greatest generation of political talent in American history.” In that regard, there’s nowhere to go but down after that. Imagine they had talk-radio and asocial media. We’d never had a country....more
Who knew capitalism and Christianity were moral opposites?
For reasons having to do with ignorance and upbringing, I have long assumed capitalism and CWho knew capitalism and Christianity were moral opposites?
For reasons having to do with ignorance and upbringing, I have long assumed capitalism and Christianity were in agreement. Agreement about what? Well, morality, I guess. Such are the assumptions of unquestioned habit. Once again anthropologist Louis Dumont changed forever the way I think. In this text Dumont traces the evolution of economics, its separation from politics, from morality, and finally its claim to be a kind of independent science. The second half of Dumont’s text is focused on development of Karl Marx’s thought. We find Marx brilliant, and so biased by his revolutionary zeal responding to his outrage at the new morality of economics that he spins everything his way. Once Dumont digs deep into Communism, it’s so riddled with holes one wonders how any 1917 revolutionary could take it for more than a means to enslave people they claimed to free from the oppressive world of production. There remain those scattered Communist holdouts that could use a good read, and here it is.
More surprising than Marx’s failure was that great self-contradiction in the West between capitalism and religion. As Dumont and others note, prevailing moral standards at the time of America’s Founding came from Christianity. According to Dumont (1911-1998), Jesus emphasized empathy as central to humanity. Recognizing the potential for error, we should then strive to be selfless. Jesus placed emphasis on what I’ll term here as spiritual morality, degrading the material world of the here-and-now in favor of a world beyond. “For what has a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mathew 16:26) But seventeen hundred years after Jesus, Adam Smith (1723-1790) wrote Wealth of Nations and changed all this. Smith claimed that selfishness is central to humanity - a paramount interest in self-preservation, why not give into it? So long as we create a set of rules to play by, each can pursue their own self-interest by a new type of morality, of “private vice serving public good.” Smith reversed the Christian teaching by elevating the material world of here-and-now, seeking physical comfort for the greatest number of people. And it worked. Smith’s capitalist economy thrived in an atmosphere of “moral neutrality” and expanding individualism.
It’s clear that traditional morality and economic morality are in opposition: selflessness vs. selfishness; empathy vs. “greed is good,” as Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) clarifies in his Fable of the Bees that so influenced Smith. Hence, the most profound self-contradiction in Western civilization, which is generally Christian and simultaneously capitalistic.
From Smith eventually arrives the notion that material well-being is a realization of social justice, not that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This change in the human definition changed our ideology (according to Dumont) and thus our actions from an ideology once based on “man’s relation to men,” to “man’s relation to things.” It might be predictable that at this transition the individual accelerates their separation from others via control of the natural world, achievement, displays of materially defined success, etc. As such, true communities disappear. After Smith, the plodding pace of individualism becomes a sprint, eventually to trample traditional communal life with its many duties and responsibilities that we moderns view as positively stifling. While Dumont is occasionally dense, it’s worth the effort as his ideas are excellent and well supported. ...more
Incredible, spellbinding, and how the heck did she do that?
This is one of those very few books in my library that may produce more note pages than thIncredible, spellbinding, and how the heck did she do that?
This is one of those very few books in my library that may produce more note pages than there are pages in the book itself. Delsol is a rare individual with the capacity to see through the societal veil with near perfect clarity, then explain it to the rest of us in a manner so revealing in its simplicity, we wonder why we never saw the truth to begin with. Most remarkably, she reveals underlying psychology – a field generally considered witchcraft to those of us in the hard sciences - with the same kind of precision. I can’t say every paragraph was a revelation, but I can safely say nearly every page was. Delsol does for her subject what the periodic table did for those confusing elements. The world makes sense now. Delsol ranks with Allan Bloom and Michael J. Sandal as one of the giants in modern political philosophy.
In a very approximate nutshell, Icarus Fallen is about the evolution of Enlightenment ideals into what they are now, and the impacts those changes have on Western civilization. If this book doesn’t terrify the Western world for what it has become, nothing will.
For me there are, however, three distractions. First is the Forward by Virgil P. Nemoianu, which sounds like a partisan stab from the American political Right. If anyone needs to read this book, which is quite balanced, it is the American Left. Few copies will be read by liberals after Nemoianu’s second sentence. The next distraction is the publisher, ISI Books. ISI has published wonderful titles like this, and absurdities like Darwin Day In America with all the usual Creationist talking points that resonate with a scientifically illiterate public. This gives the impression ISI has a dogma to satisfy because with the small volumes they sell it’s not about the money. Lastly, Delsol herself bruises her image with her position on the natural world and popular responses to its demise. Instead of a measurable fact, it seems to be denied as, “Clearly a contemporary variant of pantheism.” Here she reads like the Church resistant to Copernicus. Could it be that the natural world is viewed less as a playground for Hippies, and more of a moral matter, perhaps for some, of God’s creation superior to market demands? All in all, this is a remarkable book, I hope everyone makes time to read....more
“We have become aware that modern individualism – when seen against the backdrop of other great civilizations – isI’ll never think the same way again
“We have become aware that modern individualism – when seen against the backdrop of other great civilizations – is an exceptional phenomena.” So writes Dumont to begin his book. As we track his arguments, exceptional it is – both the idea of individualism we take for granted, and Dumont’s text. Though he inserts a chapter on Marcel Mauss that reads like Ivory Tower jargon, this volume was first in a series that forced me to doubt fundamentals of my beloved Enlightenment philosophy.
Dumont separates civilizations into “individualistic,” like the modern West, and “holistic,” like the ancients (or modern day Amish, Mennonites, Orthodox Jews). In the former, the individual is paramount, their rights, equality, freedom, liberty. For the later what matters is the community and its member’s duty, responsibility, and virtue that maintains the community. Individualism, says Dumont, springs from its opposite in holism. This mutation of individualism is seen to begin with the Greek Cynics, absorbed and modified by Roman Stoics, absorbed and modified by Christianity. (This whole process may have begun with Buddha, communicated to the Cynics by the Indian Gymnosophists.) Christianity then deposits a form of individualism into the Enlightenment where it takes off with abandon. The old way elevates that side of us that wants belonging (with restraints). The new way elevates that side of us that wants autonomy (with no restraints).
Dumont shows how these early groups devalued the material world (though accommodated it) for the higher plain of a superior spiritual universe. Jesus makes this point repeatedly concerning wealth, the rich, and things (making this one of the great cultural contradictions in the US – an overwhelmingly Christian, yet materialist nation). Dumont terms such figures as “renouncers” who are indifferent or opposed to earthly concerns. To seek ultimate truth they largely forgo social life and its practical distractions. What they value is beyond the reach of events – “an emancipation of the individual through personal transcendence,” writes Dumont. This all gets turned around by Popes meddling in secular affairs and competing with kings. Then comes the Reformation, followed by stern Calvinism’s retreat from mystical and emotional aspects of the old way for down-to-earth correction of the profane world we live in through a Puritan “calling.” What we create, writes Dumont, is “Not a value derived from our belonging in this world, such as our harmony with it, but a value rooted in our difference from it, and the identification of our will with the will of God.” This turns the focus of concern from the spiritual plain to the inferior affairs of everyday life on the ground. It eventuates in making man’s relation to things (whispers of capitalism) more important than man’s relations with other men. One can readily see Enlightenment’s capitalism just around the corner. A really good report on the evolution of individualism from Rome to the Enlightenment. (Dumont goes beyond Enlightenment with his volume, “From Mandville to Marx.”) ...more
To be vitally human there are a few authors one must read - Shakespeare, Plato, Rousseau, Alan Bloom, and Eugene Hecht. With only Keep at it, Eugene!
To be vitally human there are a few authors one must read - Shakespeare, Plato, Rousseau, Alan Bloom, and Eugene Hecht. With only limited exaggeration - notable among man's achievements is Hecht's new 4th edition of Optics. The first edition was the central (and only) text assigned in junior year optics for physics majors at many universities. As a near adolescent I was pleased by expert writing and well delivered humor in those far off years of college life.
The wonders of electromagnetics - which leads to everything in our modern age of electronics, radar, telescopes and computers - is beautifully clarified with clear pictures, concise description and completing examples in this new edition.
I hope Hecht lives to be a thousand such that the hundredth edition of Optics can enlighten people in the 31st century with as much joy and fascination as his 4th edition does today. After so many years away, I find Hecht there again to help me, not this time to peak inside the mind of nature, or to make a living, but to relive the joy of this miraculous topic and do so with added pleasure, knowing Hecht continues to improve the nearly perfect. ...more
This abridged version is an excellent summary of “Democracy in America.” Tocqueville knocked me off my feet whAmerica defined, and over 165 years ago…
This abridged version is an excellent summary of “Democracy in America.” Tocqueville knocked me off my feet when I read this book in 1997 and look forward to the full version in 2015. It’s the best and worst in America, laid bare by a Frenchman who came to The States in 1835 to find for himself whether individuality, freedom and liberty could survive the dangers of equality and democracy. “[The nation] depends on [its people to determine] whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or knowledge, to freedom or barbarism…” writes de Tocqueville. Only an outsider could so accurately assess a people. But de Tocqueville is eminently balanced, overall in favor (in my opinion) of what he saw, and thus dismissed in France upon his return.
He notes an American addiction to the practical rather than theoretical. A pragmatic concern, not for the lofty and perfect, but quick and useful, with relentless ambition, feverish activity, and unending quests for devices and shortcuts. Resulting from a requirement for survival on the frontier, these observations remain the good, bad and ugly of our modern selves. Resourceful technocrats expanding comfort, health, safety or wealth by anyone with ingenuity and persistence; our exchange of youth for old age in the workplace, improving our standard of living at the expense of our quality of life; and America’s shallow nature of thought, sealed up in sound-bites.
Tocqueville finds in the sacred name of majority, a tyranny over the mind of Americans as oppressive and formidable as any other tyranny – arguably more so by virtue of its acceptance. Where monarchs failed to control thought, democracy succeeds. Opinion polls our politicians subscribe to have a power of conformity. “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America,” he writes. “It is as if the natural bond which unites the opinions of man to his tastes, and his actions to his principles is now broken…”
Of literature and art we see why so much pulp crowds the bookshelf and bamboozles fill our galleries; “Style will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, overburdened and loose,” he writes. “Almost always vehement and bold. Authors will aim at rapidity of execution more than at perfection of detail… The object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, to stir the passions more than charm the taste.”
A fascinating evolution of perception - of self and state - unfolds as the democratization of education, property ownership and the vote expands. Wiping away the trappings of privilege transforms the serfdom mindset. We see the perception of opinion as both scoffed when originating in individuals other than ourselves, and, conversely, the worship of opinion as a manifestation of majority rule. Americans, once lionizing the intrepid individual, instead took a turn to having the most pride in their sameness. Armed with this understanding, today we see each group define itself by its signals – body language, speech cadence and inflection, vocabulary and dress. Every group has its code words, actions and look. A time consuming process of investigating character is exchanged for quicker, simpler signs.
The climax is reached with de Tocqueville’s troubling “either or”; “We must understand what is wanted of society and its government,” he writes. “Do you wish to give a certain elevation of the human mind and teach it to regard the things of this world with generous feelings, to inspire men with a scorn of mere temporal advantages, to form and nourish strong convictions and keep alive a spirit of honorable devotedness? Is it your object to refine the habits, embellish the manners and cultivate the arts, to promote the love of poetry, beauty and glory? If you believe such to be the principle object of society, avoid the government of democracy, for it would not lead you with certainty to the goal.
“But if you hold it expedient to divert the moral and intellectual activity of man to the production of comfort and promotion of general well being; if a clear understanding be more profitable to a man than genius; if your object be not to stimulate the virtues of heroism, but the habits of peace; if you had rather witness vices and crimes and are content to meet with fewer noble deeds, provided offences be diminished in the same proportion; if, instead of living in the midst of a brilliant society you are contented to have prosperity around you…to ensure the greatest enjoyment and to avoid the most misery…then establish democratic institutions.” Tocqueville, one of those rare and timeless human treasures. ...more
From the outset, what UCLA’s Wm. Clark reports is staggering: Death is “not an obligatory attribute of life,” he writesWhy we die and how to beat it.
From the outset, what UCLA’s Wm. Clark reports is staggering: Death is “not an obligatory attribute of life,” he writes, and did not appear with the advent of it. Cellular aging resulting in death may not have occurred for more than a billion years after life’s first entry on earth. Programmed cell death (PCD) which we suffer (displayed through wrinkles and forgetfulness) seems to have arisen about the time cells were experimenting with sex.
Sex is an energy costly activity, engaged in because it rolls the genetic dice, inviting variations with each new offspring. An advantage because with environmental change what was well suited in the old world is often not suited for the new. Gene variations result, and through natural selection, a few offspring amongst the dying progenitors may survive to save the species. For example, bacteria reproduce though cloning themselves, and can do so at a rate of 16 million per hour from one parent (take your antibiotics). But when the environment becomes harsh, bacterial parents spontaneously engage in sex, swapping genes with others as a gamble on survival.
In a description of catastrophic cell death, Clark displays a talent to meet or exceed even Sagan’s best – clear, rich, compelling. Here heart attack, and the wonder of cell machinery resist the inevitable as systems and their backups struggle to counter power failures and starvation in a chain reaction of fading miracles. Like a community, some components are wholly unaware of disaster while others sacrifice themselves, transferring energy to last lines of defense - pumps stationed in cell walls countering a siege of water pressing in about to wash them away.
Such stunning, intentioned actions of this tiny, helpless, complex organism, the cell (of which we possess about 100 trillion – as many cells as there are stars in the nearest 400 spiral galaxies including the Milky Way!) is starkly contrasted against our cell’s decision to commit suicide. This happens when life is late, or as early as the womb when ancient relics of evolution are flushed out of us - like reminders of an ocean origin when interdigital webbing of our onetime fins are removed through PCD, leaving what’s left between our fingers. Once the nucleus decides to pull the trigger, one last set of instructions emerge as its DNA begins disassembling. All the while a stack of unread commands are being executed by unwary elements of the cell. The cell detaches from its neighbors, undulates, breaking into globules while still ignorant workers in these blobs work away, floating into a void, devoured by immune systems. Awful…
But there are rays of hope for immortality. “Growth factors” are given to cells like lymphocytes to put a safety on their trigger. And there are executioners in this tragedy, T-Cells. Having spotted an invader they do not murder the foreigner, they command the interloper to kill itself, orders dutifully followed. T-Cells know the security code.
Clarks notes an important difference between us and other “primitive” life forms. For example, paramecium dodge death by letting their macro-nuclei run the show while a micro-version lays dormant. After enough cell splitting, it has sex with another paramecium. Its macro-nuclei suffers PCD and the micro takes over as a newly minted micro-nucleus goes to sleep. Once eukaryotic cells (what we’re made of) became multicellular, reproductive DNA would be not only kept in separate nuclei (as the paramecium) but in separate cells – our germ cells (sperm, egg). The rest of us, our bodies, are their guardians, not only redundant and irrelevant but we turn dangerous with too many divisions. When our germ cells meet others, clocks are reset just as they are for paramecium. Sex can save our germ cells but it cannot save us.
These growth factors, security codes, telemeres or some other mechanism may finally be commandeered to salvage us from oblivion. For now, as Clark writes, we must die and there are many mechanisms built into us to make sure we do. Death does not just happen, it is worked toward, with safeguards to assure cells don’t backslide into immortality – as cancer cells do, a recipe for disaster. The winner is our species because germ cells are immortal through sex as we contribute molecular chains of ourselves to the future and whoever is made of us. Clark reveals this and so much more. A pure joy to read. ...more
French thought, killed by Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and the Postmodern gang, appears resurrected by the likes oNew and captivating ideas about our past
French thought, killed by Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and the Postmodern gang, appears resurrected by the likes of Gauchet. In physics the most deeply piercing ideas are the simplest, and in the form of seemingly unrelated phenomena – gravity seen as geometry for example. Gauchet’s ideas are like this. “Disenchantment” is emphatically not a political history of religion alone, but much more – a perspective on the development of ideas, civilization and human thought.
Gauchet practices the tradition of substantive history Postmoderns failed to extinguish. The State is the first religious revolution in history, claims Gauchet. Per Gauchet the original religion - before advent of the city - meant “to preserve their inviolable legacy, repeating their sacred teaching.” But structurally the State comes with a hierarchy between people and their gods, some closer than others. “The gods withdraw and simultaneously the nonquestionable becomes questionable, affirmed by the hold humans have on the organization of their own world.” “The imperial ambition to dominate the world comes with the [advent of] the State,” bringing upheaval to man’s unchanging position in the world. “The power of a few individuals to act in the name of the gods is the barely perceptible, yet irreversible step toward everyone having an influence on the god’s decrees...The State ushers in an age of opposition between social structure and the essence of [religion]. Political domination, which decisively entangles the gods in history, will prove to be the invisible hoist lifting us out of the religious.” Opportunities to depart from previous religious ways presented themselves. Unavoidable questions arose concerning our fate, the search was on, each for themselves, fractured compared to what began as unquestioned practice of one’s place in the cosmos.
The State’s development is responsible for the so called Axial Age when all the world’s religions from Near East to Far East sprang forth by concepts emergent from circumstances of the State. “Higher religions” of the Axial Age sought to unify their nature via supreme transcendent principles – a superior God, Order, Idea. Ideas beyond mere order in life and no longer as self-evident as simply taking one’s place, repeating old rituals. One eventually must seek this higher reality via devotion / revelation (Near East) or understanding / enlightenment (Far East) - the conception moment of individuation.
Gauchet notes monotheism first invented by Akhenaton was on track with what had been taking place in Mesopotamia via Assyria and Babylon as Assur and Marduk were ethical superiors to their pantheon, tending to simplify it. However, the critical difference of Israelite’s god was not based on the old ancestral order but on a commitment to his saving intervention – as Israel did after all lay between the most powerful forces on Earth, thus creating something new out of an extreme social need to dominate what dominated them. Once established by the prophets who sound a good deal like lobbyists, there developed clarity of Judaism’s internal contradiction – a universal God exclusively for but one of his creations. At the height of human evisceration and unsettling of the Roman Empire - like Brooks Adams’ 1896 illuminating “Law Of Civilization And Decay” - Christianity responds with its own conceptual twist. Jesus is of God, maintaining that link, but God is now for all of God’s creation, directly accessible to all. “We are not dealing with a challenge to reason, but to the logic of a cultural system,” writes Gauchet, and only contradiction could supply the required response, leading people not to a terrestrial promised land as Moses had, but removing them spiritually from it while remaining bodily engaged in the suffering of life. A creative solution to another contradiction in empire between its inherited religious order of the old ways still present and the actual system of domination.
According to Gauchet, this separation and eviction of God from nature transforms everything that humans had held against themselves to maintain permanent identity with the past into a reversal of unrestrained action against everything around them. The old way submerged human order in nature’s order, feeling at one with nature, a co-belonging so strong any damage done required ritual compensation restoring the balance. Nature becomes opposed and possessed in a renunciation of this world in the name of the other. God, having been made external to the world, the world then became external to humans. As God was withdrawn, our perception of “the world changed from something unalterable to something to be constituted.” A full turn about occurs, from domination of people to the domination of nature. Hence our current worldwide environmental decline, the Far East only mimicking Western process without the belief system. This and development of the Church’s own undoing; the city to a Republic; independence of thought and the importance of mass opinion – so many penetrating ideas and connections. Though it could use more reference to historical evidence, a remarkable book.
Hamilton said, it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question - whether societies of men are capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. But according the Gauchet the latter is more like it. Our freedom to interact, without confinement to old controls creates a situation where no one can control the collective outcome much less predict it.
Murray Rothland wrote, “Every once in a while the human race pauses in the job of botching its affairs and redeems itA noble work of the intellect
Murray Rothland wrote, “Every once in a while the human race pauses in the job of botching its affairs and redeems itself by a noble work of the intellect”. Atkins book is just such a noble work. Rare is it to find a technical text that reads more like a novel, but Atkins does. Not only is the topic fascinating on its own (mostly the physics of molecules), but Atkins raises it to the level of riveting. In those far off years of the university experience for this reader, it was said only a genius could grasp physical chemistry – not true, at least not with Atkins leading the way. Atkins uses varied tools with so many well-chosen angles on description that the reader sees things in nature never realized before. Most often through analogies to what we know well, e.g. the familiar constructive & destructive interference (wave mechanics) applied to wave functions (Schrödinger's sometimes confounding quantum probability description) yielding electron orbitals with shapes that suddenly make sense. That “aha” experience is so frequently felt while reading this book it’s hard to put it down, for anything. There are apparently several versions of this 2006 8th edition. The two in paperback come in color or black-&-white. There’s also 4 years of access to the book’s website, including the text, all its figures, spread sheets and MathCad models. A salute to Oxford University Press and Atkins for this remarkable resource.
Having read this book years ago, I was anxious to see how this 25th Anniversary edition held up with time. (Given Goodreads has no separate bucket forHaving read this book years ago, I was anxious to see how this 25th Anniversary edition held up with time. (Given Goodreads has no separate bucket for the reprint, I’ve maintained the original review below.) While Bloom’s vast mental store of the classics can occasionally make their reference mysterious to we specialized Americans, and he sometimes writes a line (or several) with density approaching that of concrete with rebar, the answer to the question was a thrilling, timeless.
Those 1960s, 70s, and 80s students Bloom wrote about are now parents and grandparents facing what Bloom saw in university as they now search for college education for their offspring. What they see are booming science and engineering departments immune to modern relativism (Bloom sees these as trade schools), even as state legislatures cut university-wide support thanks to the Right-wing’s focus on social studies and humanities departments rife with French “philosophy” of the sixties that makes all views no matter how high mere “perspectives” particular to cultural identities that Bloom takes particular aim at. (Though the Right still supports the football team.) Those parents also find the relativist / post-Marxist tandem of our university’s Left has only become more ridiculous, elevating micro-aggressions, safe spaces, and the cultish silencing of free speech from the wrong tribe, inane as that tribe now so often is. Bloom relishes the intellectual grappling of humanity’s most profound thought and the great questions they posed, from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, to Locke, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Kant, and Weber. It’s the baptism of these ideas, positive and negative, that Bloom feels should wash the bodies of students to give them a soul. The book’s original title, Souls Without Longing, was deemed a non-seller by his publisher, though more to the point.
But Bloom’s book is about much more than the decline of American higher Ed. as noted in the subtitle; it’s the main title, the American mind that concerns him most. Bloom charts how and why we Americans became a thin and shallow people. In what is really an analysis of the Enlightenment, Bloom makes clear this process was underway from the outset; we were destined to turn out this way (details so extensive and nuanced as to require a pending blog). In that regard, Bloom precedes Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed by 31 years. Bloom sees this descent accelerated by the failure of universities to educate the higher aims, beyond simply making our youth employable or politically dogmatic.
All that said, I didn’t always agree with Bloom’s positions or their implications. The authentic, heartfelt traditions of religion, confounded by both high ethics and mass slaughter of innocents by the deity Himself, doesn’t seem a great deal better than a listless people with no traditions. Still, all these years after its 1987 publication, fantastically provocative of deliberation with delightful insights into who we are.
April 2014 Review: Perhaps the most important non-fiction ever written in English.
A revealing, penetrating, inspiring text on the state of education and the modern American mind. It was Bloom’s life work—his profession at the University Of Chicago—to compare human eras and their standards. Through his research, no one has so completely uncovered the ills of our time or affirmed what is positive. His courage to face modern dogma made Bloom hated by those adhering to new orthodoxies and open to their character assassinations, but Bloom wrote anyway.
Contrary to relativism of the new movements and their extinguishing of deep education—which in the end is a search for the right answers—Bloom claims there are indeed answers to questions concerning the human condition (thus the inspiration), and that “not obvious” does not mean “unavailable.” “The liberally educated person,” he writes, “is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.”
Today’s social relativism is considered “not a theoretical insight” but a “moral postulate of a free society,” and hence the current totalitarianism we experience from fundamentalism, Left or Right, as one dare not oppose such rule.
How did America reach its current state of intolerance to ideas without agreement on first principles? Bloom takes us on a lively tour toward an answer, engagingly written. For example, early on in America, religion was demoted from the level of “knowledge” to that of “opinion” in order to defuse dangerous elements of its passion we still see today in the Levant, but, importantly, the right to religious belief was not lost. This demotion was possible if society were to shrink its claims to moral certainty, subordinating old ways (but not abandoning them) to Enlightenment’s natural rights. Today this process of “value shrinkage” is taken to such extremes that the original ideas providing its basis are attacked, claiming each period has its “preferences.” None are superior, as that would be, by modern perspectives, discrimination. Today, “subordination” is equivalent to suppression. This radical democracy claims limits on anything to be arbitrary (since truth is now relative). “The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right,” writes Bloom, “rather it is not to think you are right at all.”
Bloom clarifies that “passion” and “commitment” have become the new political validations replacing reason and critical thinking. What the Founders worked so hard to balance (faction) due to its inherent opposition to the common good, is now promoted as a central role of government with its fondness for “groups.” With “common good” abandoned, factions are no longer problematic. What the Founders never imagined has set in—not a tyranny of the majority they strived to counterbalance, but a tyranny of passionate, committed minority interest groups.
Concerning multiculturalism in education, Bloom notes that Greeks searched out other cultures too (as we still should), but for wholly different reasons—to learn what they had to teach about the human condition, not to nullify their own society as we now do. Moderns maintain America’s Constitution was the white man’s corrupt document designed to suppress, and that Western ways are a bias to be cleansed by exposure to other cultures through multicultural studies. But this is not to learn what they have to teach so much as it is a political maneuver to dismantle the West, its values, standards, and science. Intellectual openness used to invite a quest for knowledge and certitude, while the opposite is now true. Open-mindedness means closing one’s mind to our very roots. As though to deny them will settle a score with our history for having done so much evil, while conveniently dismissing the good.
While fundamentalists assumed that removing reason from the mind would remove bias and prejudice, all they have done is vanquished our best tool for correction. Such is the state of the American mind. Though American education is in crisis, Bloom has given us the gift of knowing there is hope on our own....more
At age 90 - and still with us - we hope Peter Gay remains another sixty to seventy years so we might garner another halfGreat ZOT, this man can write!
At age 90 - and still with us - we hope Peter Gay remains another sixty to seventy years so we might garner another half dozen books from him. While "The Enlightenment" was written in 1966, the ancients of 2300 years ago haven't changed much, nor have those Enlightenment philosophers of 300 years past that brought them back to life. In other words, the subjects of Gay's analysis and his stunning synthesis in this book remain relevant in any time, and what a book it is. So impressed is this reader I intend to read all of Gay's twenty-some odd productions, including those half-dozen on Freud (despite my dismissal of Freud). This interest in psychology - as slippery as it is - is apparent in Gay's "Enlightenment" revealing nuance after nuance with a sagacity and precision those in the field must wish they could approximate. Gay's treatment of the philosophes virtually rebuilds them whole with their biases, friendships, venom, insights, vulnerabilities, courage and persistence that freed the rest of us in the here-and-now. Note taking from this book may exceed its length due to the rareness of blank space left on a page after marginalia and highlights, and not infrequently for the joy of Gay's writing skills (noted simply so I can combine words the way he did). Metaphors and similes make this read like a novel. "The dozen-odd captains of the movement," writes Gay, "whose names must bulk large in any history of the European mind, were abetted by a host of lieutenants." When referring to Augustine's "Confessions", Gay adds it is "the exclamation of a tormented soul weary of mere thought, weary of autonomy, yearning for the sheltering security found in dependence on higher powers." And on Voltaire's lessons from ancient philosophy, Gay writes, "Men are thrown into the world to suffer and to dominate their suffering. Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats; life is a desert, but we can transform our corner into a garden." How a human could encompass so much knowledge (and at the time he was 43) then spit it out like Bach would compose a symphony is the rarest of things and Gay does that. ...more
Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk (and in real life he was the king of Uruk), is the first tragic hero recorded bThe first book ever written remains a treat
Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk (and in real life he was the king of Uruk), is the first tragic hero recorded by the human race. Though many of the epic’s tablets were discovered in Assurbanipal’s Assyrian library (7th century B.C), parts of this book appear to originate from around 3000 B.C. Long before the Assyrians, 1800 years before the Hebrews, and, in fact, before anybody as this story originated with the hard-bitten people of Sumer, the first civilization, who happened to have been utterly lost from history until the 19th century A.D. The very civilization to invent the wheel, the city, the sexigesimal system governing the sweep of hands on your watch and, most importantly, writing. Say “alcohol,” and you speak Sumerian – as they apparently invented that too. “Hard-bitten” because while the Egyptians would celebrate Nile floods, Sumerians cursed themselves for having deserved such punishment as a flooded Tigris or Euphrates. To Egyptians the sun was life. To Sumerians the sun was relentless. Suffering is an excellent source of creativity (though the Egyptians did well with less) and Gilgamesh reflects this in both its creativity and diagnosis.
Although very old, his story is forever new. Gilgamesh is - as stated in the introduction - emblematic of our concern with mortality, the struggle for knowledge and escape from the common lot of man. As a mortal, Gilgamesh is condemned to death, but he doesn’t take his fate lying down. So, like all good mythologies, he sets out on a great adventure to rectify his problem, encountering gods, monsters and his best friend, Enkidu, the “savage man,” who is at home with the animals, until enticed by the civilized Gilgamesh with a woman – something Enkidu never saw before (in myths, a symbol of man’s complications when leaving his natural state).
Most interestingly, Gilgamesh reaches “where the sun rises” to meet Upnapishtim. Upnapishtim is by now famous for saving “the seed of all living creatures” on a boat, whose dimensions are given by a rogue god friendly to man. All before a great worldwide flood sent by other capricious gods, because humans were making too much noise, keeping the gods from sleep. (That Noah mimics the Upnapishtim myth should be no surprise as Sumer influenced the Levant for thousands of years after its passing.)
When Enkidu dies Gilgamesh morns, “How can I rest when Enkidu, whom I love is dust and I too shall die and be laid in the earth forever.” In the end Gilgamesh is “mocked by fate, lost opportunities, wasted hopes and swallowed by death.” Apparently, no matter how many gods you have - and the Sumerians had hundreds, one even for the pick-axe – death remains a mystery, and confidence of reward a hunch.
A wonderful journey into the mind of humanities first civilization, greater understanding of scriptures to follow, and a clear signal that the deepest concerns of our human condition remain unaltered no matter where or when. ...more
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