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| A ground-breaking book |
Language, a principally left-hemisphere function, tends, as Nietzsche said, to ‘make the uncommon common’: the general currency of vocabulary returns the vibrant multiplicity of experience to the same few, worn coins.
“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers,” as a famously clever screenwriter/director/journalist named Ben Hecht once wrote, “is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.”
With the possible exception of the Scandinavians, no European citizenry has the political maturity of Americans, for whom a certain amount of responsibility, i.e., of moderation in the pursuit of self-interest, is almost a matter of course.
N.B. This was written sometime between the end of the Second World War and 1954, and what may have been true then seems not at all true now. (And I'd be delighted to be proved wrong about this.)
Until the invention of antibiotics in 1928, Western medicine couldn’t deliver much better results than indigenous medicine anywhere else in the world. In many cases, going to a shaman or witch doctor offered just about the same likelihood of recovery as seeing a Western doctor.
But in truth the U.S. government simply had no interest in creating an international order that would diminish American power. The Roosevelt administration was clear-eyed about raw-power realpolitik considerations, but FDR and many of his top diplomats were also influenced by misunderstandings about the causes of the Great Depression and infused with a righteous Wilsonian sense of national destiny.
In a world of appearances, filled with error and semblance, reality is guaranteed by this three-fold commonness: the five senses, utterly different from each other, have the same object in common; members of the same species have the context in common that endows every single object with its particular meaning; and all other sense-endowed beings, though perceiving this object from utterly different perspectives, agree on its identity. Out of this threefold commonness arises the sensation of reality.
The author Parag Khanna notes that economically, America has really turned into a collection of interlinked metro regions that he dubs, “The United City-States of America.” Big, developed cities are beginning to think of themselves as independent actors on the world stage.
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