This illustrated the central point of this book—that all disasters are at some level man-made political disasters, even if they originate with new pathogens. Politics explained why World War II killed twenty-five times as many Germans as Americans. Politics explains why COVID-19 has thus far killed eighteen times as many Americans as Germans.
N.B. I suggest that if you prefer, you can substitute human "choices," "actions," or "thought" for politics as they are, per Collingwood & Arendt (and others), more or less the same. I don't believe that NF would disagree much.
The top 10% of America owns almost 70% of the total wealth of the country—from houses and cars to stocks and bonds—while the bottom 50% own just 1.5% of assets. Back in the 1980s, Reagan’s heady vision seemed to promise that America could grow its way out of addressing poverty and inequity. In 2020, growth—at least in developed countries like the US—looks likely to stay sluggish, as it has for two decades.
The hard right’s vote comes from many sources: first-time voters, disgruntled left-wing voters, and, for the most part, disgruntled conservatives. They are socially mixed and some are economically distressed, but one marker of the typical hard-right voter is the lack of a higher degree.
Chronicle, then, is the past as merely believed upon testimony but not historically known. And this belief is a mere act of will: the will to preserve certain statements which we do not understand. If we did understand them, they would be history. Every history becomes chronicle when related by a person who cannot relive the experiences of its characters: the history of philosophy, for example, as written or read by people who do not understand the thoughts of the philosophers in question.
Humanity had not suffered some mass collapse of creative energy or business acumen any more than it had been engulfed by a sudden international unwillingness to work for a reasonable wage. Economic underperformance, whatever its original cause, had created an investment market that now assumed chronic underperformance to be the norm—and was perfectly capable of fulfilling its own prophecy.
[A] principal “obstacle to writing improvement is our tendency to dwell on either the final results or the mental origins of writing to the exclusion of the activity of writing, as if an empty gap separated writing from thinking.”
No comments:
Post a Comment