The reality-based community would not have endured and expanded for four centuries unless it possessed formidable strengths: its institutional depth, its vast networks, its reserves of integrity. It can use those strengths to build resilience and resistance, and, after initially reeling from the shocks of the Trump era, it set about doing so.
In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton warned of the dangers posed by men with “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity”—men who commence as demagogues and end as tyrants. Later, in a letter to President Washington, Hamilton warned that the “only path to a subversion of the republican system of the country” is by way of the ruthless demagogue who uses fear and flattery to “throw things into confusion [so] that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’ (Location 2930)
Have you ever read such an apt description of . . . .? [Fill in the blank.] (I didn't have to think twice about my answer, although he has many imitators now waiting in the wings.)
I have not yet made clear what I mean with our two terms: civilization and culture. For the sake of not imposing a major philosophical position, let us simply say civilization gets the job done as best it can. Culture is song, the song that breaks out in the midst of the job. Civilization needs tools and passes them forward. Civilization looks back to learn. Culture pops up, sprouts in a petri dish. It can be helped or hindered by civilization, but culture can also be utterly autonomous. Culture is surprising, inexplicable, unpredictable, and largely unlearned. Culture breaks into civilization and is often assimilated by it — even the counterculture, avant-garde art, street fashion, pop music and dance, slang — become appropriated by civilization.
Western scholars have complained that when Socrates says that knowledge is virtue he asserts “the conjunction of two logically distinct things, an intellectual state (knowing …something), and an emotional one (one in which there is affective backing for doing the thing one knows one ought to do).”
The origin of the word ‘humble’ traces back to ‘humus’—it means of the earth, feminine, unsophisticated. This reminds us of the biblical injunction, “Except ye become as a little child, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
The philosophical origin of [Wittgenstein's] Tractatus lies in an unsharable experience, given as a gift, rather than an argument that could somehow be reconstructed with transparent clarity.
Propositions cannot contradict one another unless they are answers to the same question.
