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| 2021 publication |
America’s political dysfunction is ultimately a cultural problem whose solution lies at the level of values. So as we come to discover new methods for promoting the growth of values, the collective goal of cultivating cultural evolution on every front of its development will begin to seem increasingly desirable and achievable.
True but not at all easy or guaranteed to take-off.
The past two centuries have been a period of astonishing material and social progress for much of humanity—why should the future be different from the past? As the late Julian Simon, one of the optimists’ standard-bearers, wrote in 1995, “Almost every absolute change, and the absolute component of almost every economic and social change or trend, points in a positive direction, as long as we view the matter over a reasonably long period of time. That is, all aspects of material human welfare are improving in the aggregate.”
But has the neo-Malthusian Paul Ehrlich really been defeated (in his bet with Simon)? Homer-Dixon argues that we may very well face ingenuity gaps that we will not quickly or certainly close. Carbon capture, anyone?
Because American progressivism is, alongside French conservatism, the most schismatic of all faiths, with lifelong resentments governing everyone in turn and new schisms springing up every minute, Rustin had to exert a full court press to bring everyone together.
See the current Democratic Congress as a reference.
A body politic is a non-social community which, by a dialectical process also present in the family, changes into a society.
RGC sees a "society" as a voluntary group composed of consenting individuals, as a social contract theory and business law.
What had taken its place was logic, and logic was the weapon of the totalitarians, who began with a fundamental premise from which everything else followed. (“If you believe A, then it necessarily follows that you must believe B . . . ,” and so on, down to the deaths of millions.)
Channeling Hannah Arendt in the quote.
Karl Popper, described, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.”
Aretê implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency—or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.
