The great danger of equality is atomization. If we’re all side by side on the same level and constantly in motion, there’s no fixed relation between us. “Aristocracy links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain,” Tocqueville wrote. “Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link.” Equal and independent people will satisfy their own desires with no obligation to others outside their narrow circle. The chance to be anything or anyone gives them the idea that they don’t owe anything to anyone. They grow indifferent to the common good and withdraw from others into the pursuit of personal happiness, especially wealth. Tocqueville called this “individualism.” It explains how the American passion for equality can lead to extreme inequality, even a new aristocracy, but one without links between people.
This quote and the following one from William Ophuls direct our attention to the shadow side of democracy, it's inherent defects that must receive our continuing attention and course corrections. Also, consider this quote in light of our failure to take actions for the common good in response to the pandemic.
As in a Greek tragedy, democracy’s virtue is also a fatal flaw. For it is in the nature of democratic polity to foster increased freedom, and as freedoms compound they eventually produce an unstable, ungovernable society in which anything goes.
Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.
Consider in light of the preceding quotes from Packer & Ophuls. Since Postman published this book in the early 1980s, the American people (never a majority) voted in sufficient numbers to elect an utterly unqualified, undignified rich kid (old at the time, but still . . .) made most famous by "reality" (staged) TV. How prescient--sadly.
The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
This truth—a-lētheia, that which is disclosed (Heidegger)—can be conceived only as another “appearance,” another phenomenon originally hidden but of a supposedly higher order, thus signifying the lasting predominance of appearance. Our mental apparatus, though it can withdraw from present appearances, remains geared to Appearance. The mind, no less than the senses, in its search—Hegel’s Anstrengung des Begriffs—expects that something will appear to it.
Heidegger’s philosophical vision may have been cogent and powerful, but it was time-bound and partial, and so too was his notion of humanity itself—which [Leo] Strauss called “narrow.” There was neither tenderness to his thought, nor a consideration of love or charity, or any of the other finer impulses in humanity. Heidegger appealed to anyone who embraced a “tragic sense of life” as the only, or at least the most sophisticated, outlook, but he had nothing to say, Strauss observed, about “laughter and the things which deserved to be laughed at.”
One doesn't read Heidegger (if at all) for laughs, for humor, for kindness, or a sense of human warmth. A sound critique from Leo Strauss.
Calculations done by scientists from Fred Hoyle to F. B. Salisbury consistently show that twelve billion years isn’t even enough to produce a single enzyme by chance.
A simple first-pass way to define intuitions is to say that they are judgments (or decisions, which can also be quite intuitive) that we make and take to be justified without knowledge of the reasons that justifies them. Intuition is often characterized as “knowing without knowing how one knows.” Our conscious train of thought is, to a large extent, a “train of intuitions.” Intuitions play a central role in our personal experience and also in the way we think and talk about the mind in general, our “folk psychology.”
“Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation”
Cioran was a mid-20th century Romanian writer.
The student of historical method will hardly find it worth his while, therefore, to go closely into the rules of evidence, as these are recognized in courts of law. For the historian is under no obligation to make up his mind within any stated time. Nothing matters to him except that his decision, when he reaches it, shall be right: which means, for him, that it shall follow inevitably from the evidence.
So long as this is borne in mind, however, the analogy between legal methods and historical methods is of some value for the understanding of history; of sufficient value, I think, to justify my having put before the reader in outline the above sample of a literary genre which in the absence of any such motive it would, of course, be beneath his dignity to notice.
An intriguing point if one is, like me, a lawyer and a student of history. I find a lot of overlap. Both deal with the past when the lawyer is involved in resolving--as opposed to trying to avoid--disputes.
