June 2014

Losing the War

2016-12-28T21:37:55+00:00June 7th, 2014|Gold|

Excerpted from “Losing the War,” by Lee Sandlin

Whenever people talk about the meaning of history somebody brings up that old bromide from Santayana, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But that’s nonsense. The circumstances that created an event like World War II couldn’t be duplicated no matter how many millennia of amnesia intervened.

To the extent that the war had an intelligible cause, it was in the rancors left over from World War I, exacerbated by the Great Depression — and those rancors existed only because of decades of hatred and infighting among the colonial empires of the 19th century. But the brief dominion of the Japanese “coprosperity sphere” lasted just long enough to wreck the colonial system in Asia, and the final convulsion of war bankrupted all the great powers of Europe, leaving the former rulers of the world in abject poverty — food rationing in both Germany and England lasted well into the 1950s. The first new historical trend of the postwar era was the systematic shedding of colonial possessions, and the just-created nations were immediately absorbed into new alignments of power demanded by the triumphant global empires of the atom. The old architecture of the world devised by Europe was as harmless a memory as a dissipating storm front. Like most big events in history, World War II obliterated its own causes.

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April 2014

De Amicitia

2016-12-28T21:37:56+00:00April 6th, 2014|Gold|

From roberto, via The Listserve, April 1, 2014

Over the course of my life, I have had a handful of deep friendships that came suddenly and surprisingly and without any warning.  They have been with people of different nationalities, ages, and backgrounds.  Three are with men, and two with women.  In each case, I was meeting with someone for the first time, usually for accidental or inconsequential reasons, sometimes standing in for a colleague.  Each meeting I expected to be short and businesslike but each morphed quickly instead into a deep conversation between the two of us.  Bertrand Russell described a similar experience in his first meeting with Joseph Conrad:

“At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. It was an experience unlike any other that I have known. We looked into each other’s eyes half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves together in such a region. The emotion was as intense as passionate love, and at the same time all-embracing. I came away bewildered, and hardly able to find my way among ordinary affairs.” (“Autobiography.” Routledge, 2009.)

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March 2014

The Philosopher vs. The Priest

2016-12-28T21:37:56+00:00March 6th, 2014|Gold|

From Prof. Daniel N. Robinson’s “Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition” (The Great Courses Series)

Something momentous takes places when a culture takes the position that the problem of knowledge is essentially a religious problem and invests its credulity in a denominated group of official interpreters whose judgments on matters of this kind are taken to be incorrigible.

…

Once one confers on a select and denominated group ultimate epistemological authority on core questions arising from the problem of knowledge, the near inevitable result is philosophical paralysis.

What is more likely to happen is that positions will become quite hardened and the only thing left for scholarship is to interpret the words of the wise. So the entire debate now is not about the nature of truth, but about how a text or holy maxim is to be understood.

What the leaders of thought in the ancient Greek world might be inclined to say is, “This may be the best way to get to heaven – but surely not to the moon.”

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January 2014

Regarding Science, Conflict, and Regret

2015-01-23T03:57:32+00:00January 30th, 2014|Gold|

From C.P. Snow’s Science and Government, 1961:

[Discussing disagreements over the equations used to determine percentage of German city destruction in the British strategic bombing campaigns of World War II]

Let me break off for a minute. It is possible, I suppose, that some time in the future people living in a more benevolent age than ours may turn over the official records and notice that men like us, men well-educated by the standards of the day, men fairly kindly by the standards of the day, and often possessed of strong human feelings, made the kind of calculation I have just been describing.

Such calculations, on a much larger scale, are going on at this moment in the most advanced societies we know.

What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of some of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity?

They will have the right.

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Going West

2015-01-23T00:49:14+00:00January 5th, 2014|Gold|

From Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string  and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool that seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west.

For West is where we all plan to go someday. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: ‘Flee, all is discovered.’ It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.

Image courtesy of therese desjardin studio

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September 2013

M. Aurelius 5.1

2015-01-23T00:32:06+00:00September 3rd, 2013|Gold|

Originally published September 3, 2013. From Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.

Whenever in the morning you rise unwillingly, let this thought be with you: “I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if am about to do the things for which I was brought into the world? Or was I made to lie under the bedclothes and keep myself warm?”

“But that is more pleasant,” you say.

Do you live then to take your pleasure, and not at all for action and exertion? Do you not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees, working together to set in order their several parts of the universe? And are you unwilling to do the work of a human being, not eager to do what belongs to your nature?

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