Much of this book has been a repudiation, mostly implicit but not always, of the relevance, to those of us who are not naturally lean and healthy, of Pollan’s otherwise seemingly sensible mantra—“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” For us, “not too much” is meaningless. “Mostly plants” is not ideal and may be to our detriment (ideal as it may be for the animals and maybe even the environment, although that, too, is not as simple as it is often portrayed).
[K]ings have made [arguments] for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent..... I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it… where will it stop?
A. Lincoln (courtesy of Heather Cox Richardson)
You’re either believing your thoughts or questioning them. There’s no other choice.
Will depends on freedom; and freedom is a matter of degree (21. 8). This complicates our simplest possible analysis of the body politic without, however, falsifying it.
History concerns not the past, but the past encased in the present in the form of evidence.
Progress gives an answer to the troublesome question, And what shall we do now? The answer, on the lowest level, says: Let us develop what we have into something better, greater, et cetera. (The, at first glance, irrational faith of liberals in growth, so characteristic of all our present political and economic theories, depends on this notion.)
We do not inhabit the body like some alien Cartesian piece of machine wizardry, but live it – a distinction between the left and right [brain] hemisphere understandings of the body.
Knowledge and information throughout our economy and society are being degraded on an immense scale. That’s because, as with legal procedure, the standards according to which competition takes place are public goods. But they reflect the private interests of those with products to sell, axes to grind and stories to spin, not the public interest we all have in being informed.
--Nicholas Gruen
Goddess worship, feminine values, and women's power depend on the ubiquity of the image. God worship, masculine values, and men's domination of women are bound to the written word. Word and image, like masculine and feminine, are complementary opposites. Whenever a culture elevates the written word at the expense of the image, patriarchy dominates. When the importance of the image supersedes the written word, feminine values and egalitarianism flourish.
Though Christianity did reach an accommodation with Aristotle, the obstacles to doing so were prima facie more serious than for the other religions of the book. The Jewish and Islamic God, “the Desired, the Existent, the Sole, the Supreme,” was already a somewhat remote and almost philosophic figure and tended to create philosophical problems for his followers only in such marginal areas as the creation of the world. The Christian God did much more extraordinary things, such as walking around a Roman province at a not too distant time in history.
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