Somewhat surprisingly to Americans today, [Johan Stuart] Mill held that the most dire threat to freedom comes not from state repression but from social conformity, which leads to a shortage of diversity—diversity of inclination and interest and talent, but especially, he implied, diversity of opinion. “Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.” His stark conclusion: “That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”
[Jonathan] Haidt likens trolling to terrorism, inasmuch as they both exploit the emotional dynamics of outrage, baiting us to overreact. Rationally, we may understand that rising to the bait makes the trolls (or terrorists) more visible and influential. But emotion rules.
Instead of being pluralist, [some on the political left] are purist. Instead of seeking to pit biases against other biases and prejudices against other prejudices, they seek to eliminate bias and prejudice from the get-go—an Augean task which first polices culpable words, then culpable ideas when different words are recruited, and finally culpable minds when bad ideas keep popping back up.
But Keynesianism was also developed to prevent war, and it remains one of the great tragic ironies of intellectual history that the very catastrophe Keynes had attempted to avert for nearly two decades would be the event that finally demonstrated the viability of his economic ideas on the world stage. Both The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and The Economic Consequences of the Peace achieved their political apotheosis in the same calamity.
What did Strauss mean by philosophy? Not what it was commonly understood to be. Philosophers were not to be found teaching in colleges and universities around the country because instructors in philosophy departments were no more likely to be true philosophers than instructors in art departments were to be true artists. Philosophy wasn’t an academic discipline or the stepping-stone to a career defined by the structures and customs of higher education. It was a personal commitment, a way of life, inspired by a sense of wonder, much like a religion though without the dogma. Philosophers were devoted to wisdom but didn’t propound doctrines or claim to have discovered the Truth. Their wisdom, like that of the prototype Socrates, consisted of an awareness that they knew nothing. Insofar as they could be said to possess knowledge, it was of the questions, not the answers, and philosophers ceased to be philosophers, Strauss said, when certainty replaced Socratic doubt.
[Q]uantum leaps, in outlook ala Teilhard de Chardin, occur with a fantastic jump to a new horizon or level of perception. This insight usually comes from a revolutionary overview which realigns or transforms former thinking into a new and more enlightening frame of reference.
The calling is a crucial link between the individual and the public world. Work in the sense of the calling can never be merely private.
(We do tend to forget, as the poet Randall Jarrell quipped, that the people who lived in a golden age probably went around complaining how yellow everything was.)
Ultra-nationalism and imperialism were a corollary of this hatred of ineffective democracy, liberal individualism and materialism.
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