True understanding is distinguished from public opinion in both its popular and scientific forms only by its refusal to relinquish the original intuition. To put it in a schematic and therefore necessarily inadequate way, it is as though, whenever we are confronted with something frighteningly new, our first impulse is to recognize it in a blind and uncontrolled reaction strong enough to coin a new word; our second impulse seems to be to regain control by denying that we saw anything new at all, by pretending that something similar is already known to us; only a third impulse can lead us back to what we saw and knew in the beginning. It is here that the effort of true understanding begins.
The cosmopolitan outlook of Smart America overlaps in some areas with the libertarian views of Free America. Each embraces capitalism and the principle of meritocracy: the belief that your talent and effort should determine your reward.
And even as he urged nationalization of the railroads, Keynes faulted FDR for taking too hard a rhetorical line with business interests, courting unnecessary conflict. They were not “wolves and tigers” but “domestic animals” who “have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.”
sng: What would Keynes say today about "business interests" such as Big Tech, Big Oil, Big Pharma, and Big Money in general? Are they poorly trained pets or are they beasts that need to be caged and tamed?
This cyclical view of history, whether in Joyce, Rattray Taylor, Vico (Joyce’s source), Hegel-and-Marx, etc. is only part of the truth, but it needs to be stressed because it is the part that most people fearfully refuse to recognize. Whether we speak in terms of Taylor’s Matrist-Patrist dialectic, Vico’s cycle of Divine, Heroic and Urbanized ages, the Marx-Hegel trinity of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, or any variation thereon, we are speaking of a pattern that is real and that does repeat.
sng: Patterns: yes. Eternal (or unchanging) patterns: no.
‘What is the status of mathematical entities, such as numbers for example, in the realm of things?’ The number ‘two,’ for example, is in some sense exempt from the flux of time and the necessity of position in space. Yet it is involved in the real world. The same considerations apply to geometrical notions—to circular shape, for example. Pythagoras is said to have taught that the mathematical entities, such as numbers and shapes, were the ultimate stuff out of which the real entities of our perceptual experience are constructed. As thus baldly stated, the idea seems crude, and indeed silly.
Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean “ecological” in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change.
Political freedom, Arendt insisted in the book’s [On Revolution] final pages, “means the right ‘to be a participator in government,’ or it means nothing.” The colonial townships and assemblies, building pyramidally to the constitutional conventions, were paradigms of citizen participation, but the popular elections that Americans today consider the hallmark of their democratic republic are hardly the same thing.
sng: An important point. Elections are a necessary but not (at all) sufficient condition for democracy. We in the U.S. would do well to try to reinvigorate local and state governments as decision-making bodies that use more citizen participation, such as sortition.
Responding to Fukuyama’s thesis [about the end of history arriving] in 1989, Allan Bloom was full of foreboding about the gathering revolts against a world that ‘has been made safe for reason as understood by the market’, and ‘a global common market the only goal of which is to minister to men’s bodily needs and whims’. ‘If an alternative is sought,’ Bloom wrote, ‘there is nowhere else to seek it. I would suggest that fascism has a future, if not the future.’ The English political philosopher John Gray warned of the return of ‘more primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian’ that the Cold War had tranquillized; he pointed to the intellectual incapacity of liberalism as well as Marxism in this new world order.
sng: I've never quite gotten a handle on Bloom and don't know Gray's book, but I contend that Fukuyama is often sold short. He didn't write The End of History, he wrote The End of History and The Last Man. The Last Man refers to Nietzche's dire prophecy. It takes the shine off of the end of history euphoria, more a popular attitude than Fukuyama's thesis.
The novelist’s task, as Joseph Conrad famously said, is simply “to make you see.”
