John Horgan’s The End of Science (1996) was subtitled Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. In Grammars of Creation (2001), George Steiner, one of the last European cultural mandarins, laments that “We have no more beginnings” and concludes that there is “in the climate of spirit at the end of the twentieth century, a core tiredness.” “We are, or feel ourselves to be, latecomers.” And in From Dawn to Decadence (2001), an account of the last five hundred years, the historian Jacques Barzun—who died in 2012 at the age of 104—presents a picture of early twenty-first-century man undergoing what he calls the “Great Undoing,” the West’s self-immolation at the hands of chat shows, gangsta rap, and fashionable deconstructionism.
Authoritarianism, by contrast [to fascism], allows independent economic and social bodies, forms of limited representation, and a degree of freedom for religion. Its enemy is democratic participation. It also stifles opposition by violence and fear but stabilizes itself by relying on passive acquiescence in a trade-off of social quiet for loss of political role. The fascist is a nonconservative who takes anti-liberalism to extremes. The right-wing authoritarian is a conservative who takes fear of democracy to extremes.
In general, a researcher always has a choice of which studies to select and which to reject in working toward a hypothesis. In this process, it’s hard to overcome the essentially human instinct to select only those observations that conveniently support one’s own hypothesis while rejecting those that do not.
In our modern world, ritual is often thought to encourage a slavish conformity, but the Brahmin ritualists [at the beginning of the Axial Age of India] had used their science to liberate themselves from the external rites and the gods, and had created a wholly novel sense of the independent, autonomous self.
The coherence of Nixon’s own views has not generally been recognized, and for an important reason: this would involve the admission that American liberalism and the emulative ethic cohere—inhere, rather, in each other. All our liberal values track back to a mystique of the earner.
Detecting trustworthiness is a basic life skill in small groups which depend on sharing and reciprocity, and so people have developed good bullshit detectors. The best way around other people’s bullshit detectors is to believe what you say. If your social reputation and group identity depend upon believing something, then you will find a way to believe it. In fact, your brain will help you by readily accepting and recalling congenial information while working to bury and ignore uncongenial information.
“What was most important wasn't knowing the future—it was knowing how to react appropriately to the information available at each point in time.”
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