As early as The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes had been battling economic problems that were not principally matters of physical resource constraints. The greatest threats to harvest yields were not a lack of labor, fertilizer, or rainfall but insufficient investment and the mismanagement of money and credit.
[John Kenneth] Galbraith knew he was exactly the kind of man the McCarthyists hated most—not an outright Soviet collaborator but an idealist with a grand vision of progress who hoped to use economic reforms to break down social distinctions of rank and privilege.
“Just a reminder, Theaetetus,” I tell my student friend. “When we support the Constitution of Knowledge with our heads and our hearts—with reverence and reason, as Lincoln prescribed—and when others do the same, its enemies are not ten feet tall. We are.”
Just as sense-perception seems to give knowledge of what lies beyond individuality, so action seems to issue in an instinct for self-transcendence.
On the first page of The Human Condition Arendt speaks of launching a man-made object into space as an “event, second in importance to no other, not even to the splitting of the atom.” The reaction, “curiously enough,” was not “awe” at man’s achievement but “relief” that “the first ‘step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth’” had been taken. [From the Introduction by Jerome Kohn.]
The field of modern dietetics was borne out of two concepts, both of which turned out to be false. The first is the idea that a “calorie is a calorie,” which was espoused by the Atwater system, developed by agriculturist Wilbur Olin Atwater in 1916. His claim to fame was that he standardized how much heat energy (i.e., how many kilocalories, or kcal) three specific macronutrients would liberate when burned in a bomb calorimeter (a device that measures heat release of organic substances), and he calculated the ratios, which computes the number of kcal in a given food by its protein (4 kcal/gm), carbohydrate (4 kcal/gm), and fat (9 kcal/gm) content. As fat was the most calorie-dense, Atwater thought it was the most egregious in terms of weight gain.
36. 89. Civilization is the process in a community by which the various members assert themselves as will: severally as individual will, corporately as social will (the two being inseparable, 21. 1 seqq.).
Erwin Schrödinger spelled out the profound implication: “Mind has erected the objective world of the natural philosopher out of its own stuff.”
Epicurus saw religion not merely as false but as a fraud perpetrated by the priestly class for their own benefit.
But exclusive emphasis on the One had gone beyond the point of attributing underlying order to the Many and had ended by subordinating the Many to the One, preparing for Parmenides’ annihilation of it. Heraclitus sought to rectify this situation by restoring balance between the One and the Many...
The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead.
Critics, Hans Morgenthau among them, were quick to point out the flaw in Kissinger’s reasoning [about the use of tactical nuclear weapons]: there was a bright line between nonnuclear war and nuclear war but no such line between tactical nuclear war and strategic nuclear war. Once the bombs started falling, there was no clear stopping point. Any use of a nuclear weapon, however limited, risked inexorable escalation and universal annihilation.
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