Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

[I]n a large house, formerly a house of state ... in those shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in nuts

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Thursday, November 04, 2021

Origins of our American culture

American culture in this early period [the 17th and early 18th Centuries] becomes most fully comprehensible when seen as the exotic far western periphery, a marchland, of the metropolitan European culture system.

This whole world ... was a borderland, a part of the expanding periphery of Britain's core culture; and its inner quality derived from that fact. Like the Welsh borderland two hundred years earlier, like the Scottish middle marches a century earlier, like Ireland and the Caribbean islands in the colonists' own time, and like Australia later, the mainland North American colonies formed a typically disordered border country in which ... "violence [was] a way of life." Concentrating, as American historians have done, on the origins of a later American civilization, and hence viewing the colonial world as a frontier -- that is, as an advance, as a forward and outward-looking, future-anticipating progress toward what we know eventuated, instead of as a periphery, a ragged outer margin of a central world, a regressive, backward-looking diminishment of metropolitan accomplishment --looking at the colonies in this anachronistic way, one tends to minimize the primitiveness and violence, the bizarre, quite literally outlandish quality of life in this far-distant outback of late seventeenth-century Britain.

Partly this wildness, extravagance, and disorder were simply the products of the inescapable difficulties of maintaining a high European civilization in an undeveloped environment. Partly, too, they were products of the hostility that developed between the Europeans and the native peoples. But in large part, too, they were products of the common European, and indeed British, conception of America as an uncivil place on the distant margins of civilization -- a place where the ordinary restraints of civility could be abandoned in pell-mell exploitation, a remote place where recognized enemies and pariahs of society -- heretics, criminals, paupers--could safely be deposited, their contamination sealed off by three thousand miles of ocean, and where putatively inferior specimens of humanity, blacks and Indians, could be reduced to subhuman statuses, worked like animals, and denied the most elemental benefits of law and religion, those fragile integuments which even in England could barely contain the savagery of life.... This mingling of primitivism and civilization, however transitory stage by stage, was an essential part of early American culture, and we must struggle to comprehend it.

What did it mean to Jefferson, slave owner and philosophe, that he grew up in this far western borderland world of Britain, looking out from Queen Anne rooms of spare elegance onto a wild, uncultivated land? We can only grope to understand.

Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America

Saturday, October 30, 2021

The Singularity

The Grand Singularity and A.I. autonomy
Building the superman
Minus the man

Yes, Minus the Man (from The Quest)

Thursday, March 25, 2021

A life is not such a tremendous time to learn to express your ideas.

Henry Adams

Monday, March 09, 2020

Friendships that are purely of our own acquiring ordinarily carry it above those to which the communication of climate or of blood oblige us. Nature has placed us in the world free and unbound; we imprison ourselves in certain straits.

Montaigne

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Reality

"Reality" [is] a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot "wish them away).... [an] order [that] is relative to a particular socio-historical situation [but] appears to the individual as the natural way of looking at the world.

Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

The urgent project at the moment isn’t adding more information to the cultural file; it is understanding how meaning is produced.
 


Saturday, October 08, 2016

Modern media ... have always been based on the reselling of human attention to advertisers. 
 
Jacob Weisberg, The New York Review (October 27, 2016)

Saturday, March 14, 2015

[R]elying on the Internet for facts and figures is making us mindless sloths.... a study in Science ...  demonstrates that the wealth of information readily available on the Internet disinclines users from remembering what they’ve found out.


Sue Halpern, "How Robots & Algorithms Are Taking Over," New York Review (April 2, 2015)

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.

Evelyn Waugh, When The Going Was Good

Friday, March 29, 2013

The longer I live the more convinced I am that one of the greatest honors we can confer on other people is to see them as they are, to recognize not only that they exist, but that they exist in specific ways and have specific realities.

Shiva Naipaul, quoted by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Feb 2002 Atlantic magazine.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

Montailou culture was directed towards mere reproduction, self-preservation and the perpetuation of the domus in the world below.  The only element of "growth" which happened to manifest itself early in the 14th century had little to do with economics.  It was concerned with the after-life and with a kind of spiritual transcendence, locally centered on the Albigensian idea of Heaven.  … Montaillou is the physical warmth of the ostal, together with the ever-recurring promise of a peasant heaven.

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The promised Land of Error