Ever since a Supreme Court ruling in 1976, Buckley v. Valeo, the United States has adhered to the view that spending money is an act of free speech and thus cannot be regulated in any serious way. This view of speech, later affirmed and expanded in the notorious Citizens United decision of 2010, is held in no other advanced democracy on the planet, most of which routinely regulate how politicians raise and spend money—with no adverse effects on the quality of their free speech or democracy. As a result, at the heart of American government, there is a ceaseless series of quid pro quos—money raised for favors bestowed. The American tax code is one of the world’s longest for a reason. The thousands of amendments to it are what politicians sell when they raise campaign money.
Precisely.
And with the reductionist outlook goes determinism, the belief that if we knew enough about the position and momentum of every particle in the universe we could predict everything that happens from here on in, including your every thought, desire and belief. . . . Even if contemporary physics did not demonstrate that this is an impossibility, there is a problem with this kind of argument. Reductionists and determinists unerringly fail to take account of the fact that their own arguments apply to themselves. If my beliefs are ‘nothing but’ the mechanical products of a blind system, so are all views, including those of the reductionist. If everything is already determined, the determinist’s tendency to embrace determinism is also merely determined, and we have no reason to take it seriously (since we are all determined either to believe it or not already).
Creativity is the God problem. We have to come to terms, Bloom tells me, with these “material miracles” that are present at every stage of the evolution of the universe. For Bloom, science is best served when our sense of awe, wonder, and astonishment at the workings of nature is heightened.
Historical research refers to the historian’s analysis of the evidence the past has left us. It deals with the selection, interpretation, and analysis of historical sources and with how this analysis may help us explain causally (or otherwise) what the evidence has taught us about the past.
Historians & lawyers (trial lawyers, anyway) have a lot in common.
We should not delude ourselves into thinking that our historical narratives, as commonly constructed, are anything more than retro-fits. To contemporaries, as we shall see, the outcome of Western dominance did not seem the most probable of the futures they could imagine; the scenario of disastrous defeat often loomed larger in the mind of the historical actor than the happy ending vouchsafed to the modern reader.
An outcome can look deceptively certain in hindsight.
How is it—for example—that most American “conservatives” who proclaim their opposition to Big Government favor all kinds of military spending, and support the sending of more and more American troops into the midst of peoples and countries of which they know nothing?
Great questions.
Look at the dates of their—still revered and considered “seminal”—works: Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition, 1948; Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 1950; Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics, 1953; Potter, People of Plenty, 1954; Hartz, The American Liberal Tradition, 1955. Consider but the titles of their books. There is one thesis in all of them: that, unlike in Europe or elsewhere, in the United States there is only one intellectual tradition, a perennially liberal one. Now these books, with their general ideas and theses sweeping across the history of the American mental and political and intellectual and ideological landscape, appeared at the very time, 1948–55, when in the United States a popular antiliberal movement arose that began to name itself as “conservative.”
But in America, too, it is still conceivable that the universities will be destroyed, for the whole disturbance coincides with a crisis in the sciences, in belief in science, and in belief in progress, that is, with an internal, not simply a political, crisis of the universities.
Written c. 1970.
Of the 5,400 different species of mammals on the planet, humans are now the only ones to routinely have misaligned jaws, overbites, underbites, and snaggled teeth, a condition formally called malocclusion.
People think processed food is food, because it’s calories and macronutrients, but in fact processed food gets in and poisons those pathways instead.
“What was most important wasn't knowing the future—it was knowing how to react appropriately to the information available at each point in time.”
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