It was a quirk of [Hans] Morgenthau’s analytic style always to break down a subject into components—for example, three aspects, four features, five elements—and in the case of Kissinger’s doctrine he saw four parts. First, and most important, was the goal of minimizing the risk of nuclear war; no objective was more important than this one. The second was creating and maintaining a balance of power that would serve the first goal and also reduce the possibility of conventional war. The third component, related to the second, was acknowledging that, like the United States, other nations had their own vital interests, which a rational foreign policy was bound to respect. Finally, Kissinger’s fourth goal was to seek to intertwine the vital interests of the various nations into a peaceful status quo so that “the institutionalization of common interests must gradually take the sting out of surviving hostile confrontations.”
While there's much to criticize in HK's actions, the principles seem reasonably sound to me.
There are reasons for hope on this score: things are already happening that may slow our skyrocketing need for ingenuity. Birth rates are falling around the world, which in time will bring our population growth to an end; people are coming up with ingenious technologies for lowering our consumption of natural resources, which will lessen the burden we are imposing on the planet’s environment; and there are some well-developed, albeit controversial, ideas for dampening the volatility of international capital flows.
This is Homer-Dixon's last "20th-century book," & it's optimism expressed here (more tempered elsewhere in the book) seems a bit naive. His observations are not so much wrong as inaccurately waited (at least as a stand-alone quote).
We can offset this kind of falling resource quality by using more resource quantity— by digging up and processing more iron ore . . . . But this response damages more of the planet’s surface, which further harms biodiversity; and if it requires us to use more carbon-based energy in the process of seeking energy (a terrible irony), it also worsens global warming.
In some ways, it's this simple.
Change was afoot in the land of his [Sri Aurobindo's] birth [India], and it wasn’t long before this bright young Indian inserted himself right into the middle of the independence movement. A natural orator with a sharp tongue and sharper intellect, Aurobindo rose rapidly in the movement, eventually becoming its political leader, decades before Gandhi would assume that role. Once referred to as “the most dangerous man in India” by his British overlords, Aurobindo was focused on political revolution rather than spiritual evolution. His religious career didn’t even begin until a fateful encounter, at the age of thirty-four, with a yogi.
“This isolation has left Americans quite unaware of the world beyond their borders. Americans speak few languages, know little about foreign cultures, and remain unconvinced that they need to rectify this. Americans rarely benchmark to global standards because they are sure that their way must be the best and most advanced. There is a growing gap between America's worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class, on the one hand and the majority of the American people on the other. Without real efforts to bridge it, this divide could destroy America's competitive edge and its political future.”
I don't know whom FZ is quoting here, but I think FZ agrees. I know I do. We Americans are often terribly small-minded.
For the archaeologist, these things are not stone and clay and metal, they are building-stone and potsherds and coins; debris of a building, fragments of domestic utensils, and means of exchange, all belonging to a bygone age whose purposes they reveal to him. He can use them as historical evidence only so far as he understands what each one of them was for.
Different groups, liberals are said to have long insisted, should be forged together by practical politics into a single umbrella unit and asked to look past their specificities. By contrast, intersectional politics say that we should look at our specificities and unashamedly recognize and assert them in our politics.
Without some shared beliefs, values, and interests, no polity can survive. We must start with the common ahead of our differences.
The absence of thought I was confronted with [at Adolf Eichmann's trial] sprang neither from forgetfulness of former, presumably good manners and habits nor from stupidity in the sense of inability to comprehend—not even in the sense of “moral insanity,” for it was just as noticeable in instances that had nothing to do with so-called ethical decisions or matters of conscience.
Arendt often seems to conflate two types of thought: one, what I'd label "ordinary thought" as evidenced by its absence in Eichmann, and what I'll label "meaningful thought," as evidenced by Socrates. But here point viz. Eichmann is the more crucial insight.
The world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as reality by the ordinary members of society in the subjectively meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world that originates in their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these.
Thought, in this sense, creates our world.
What I do maintain is that success can only be one ingredient in happiness, and is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.
