[A]nti-elitism is a reflection of the feeling of powerlessness that many people experience when navigating the modern world—one in which experts and intellectuals seem to hold the keys to knowledge and power. Reflecting on this reality decades ago, the great American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote, “Once the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is fiercely resented because he is needed too much.”
“Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” the Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole wrote in April 2020. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”
(Location 2209)The political climate in Washington always pushes policymakers toward being “tough” rather than “soft”—which is a dangerous way to frame international affairs. The real question is, can they be smart rather than stupid?
Tensions between the United States and China are inevitable. Conflict is not. We have a picture in our minds of what international politics looks like that is drawn largely from modern European history. It is of great powers jockeying for influence in a great game of realpolitik and frequently descending into war. This international system is often called “multipolar”—characterized by many great powers—and it is inherently unstable. With many countries of roughly equal strength competing, each eyeing the other suspiciously, miscalculation, aggression, and war become highly likely, which is why Europe became an arena of constant conflict for centuries. (Location 2421)
Eisenhower spoke in language that few left-wing peaceniks would dare to employ today. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said. “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
[Hans] Jonas enumerates all the advantages of sight as the guiding metaphor and model for the thinking mind. There is first of all the indisputable fact that no other sense establishes such a safe distance between subject and object; distance is the most basic condition for the functioning of vision.
“THE TRANSITORY, THE FLEETING, THE CONTINGENT,” which Baudelaire had identified as the central properties of the modern age, also fully characterized philosophy. Not all protagonists found it equally easy to welcome this new feeling of existence.
