There is much to be learned from the past—but it is better learned from the pragmatists than from the ideologues. Washington would have been the least surprised or disoriented to see what the nation looked like after the Jeffersonians had made it.
Any attempt to capture the folkways of our local centers has told a story not of participatory democracy but of closed social corporations, the rules of climbing in them quite rigid, the pinnacle of power monopolized by various social and business combines. That situation has gradually been changing; and—is it accidental?—now we hear a lament for the decline of community, a decline which the new politicians would remedy by further atomizing society, “politicizing” each man, urging him to “do his own thing.” They seem to believe that community is merely the sum of individual “own things.”
Compare this observation with Collingwood's distinction between "community" & "society."
Liberal education, he said, is the effort to establish “an aristocracy within democratic mass society.” Western civilization, as Strauss understood it, was the property of an educated minority. But that didn’t make it unworthy of defense against the nihilistic Nazis. Quite the contrary.
Are liberal educations today acting to protect us from authoritarianism & illiberalism?
I had always thought that we used language to describe the world—now I was seeing that this is not the case. To the contrary, it is through language that we create the world, because it’s nothing until we describe it.
“There is no animal in nature, excepting Man, that sleeps with the mouth open; and with mankind I believe the habit, which is not natural, is generally confined to civilized communities, where he is nurtured and raised amidst enervating luxuries and unnatural warmth where the habit is easily contracted, but carried and practiced with great danger to life in different latitudes and different climates; and in sudden changes of temperature, even in his own house.”
Remember the Spanish proverb: "En un boca cerrado no entran moscas." ["In a closed mouth enter no flies.']
The question is, was anything lost nutritionally in the process of juicing? The answer is an emphatic yes—all of the insoluble fiber is now gone. The soluble fiber alone still has some benefit; orange juice moves the food through the intestine faster (to generate the satiety signal sooner), and the soluble fiber can be converted to short-chain fatty acids. But those benefits pale in comparison to the suppression of the insulin response associated with the combination of the two. Remember, it doesn’t matter where the fructose comes from—fruit, sugar cane, beets—without the fiber, it all has the same metabolic effect on your body.
