Ideas are not dangerous unless they find seeding place in some earth more profound than the mind…. dangerous only when planted in unease and disquietude. But being so planted, growing in such earth, it ceases to be idea and becomes emotion and then religion.
Sunday, November 27, 2022
Monday, August 22, 2022
How stands it between God and your soul now?
Tuesday, December 28, 2021
Umberto Eco on religion
People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.
Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery
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.
Sunday, September 19, 2021
To the Etruscan all was alive; the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world. The cosmos was alive, like a vast creature. The whole thing breathed and stirred…. The whole thing was alive, and had a great soul, or anima: and in spite of one great soul, there were myriad roving, lesser souls: every man, every creature and tree and lake and mountain and stream, was animate, had its own peculiar consciousness. And has it today…. The cosmos was one, and its anima was one; but it was made up of creatures….
The old idea of the vitality of the universe was evolved long before history begins, and elaborated into a vast religion before we get a glimpse of it. When history does begin, in China or India, Egypt, Babylonia, even in the Pacific and in aboriginal America, we see evidence of one underlying religious idea: the conception of the vitality of the cosmos, the myriad vitalities in wild confusion, which still is held in some sort of array: and man, amid all the glowing welter, adventuring, struggling, striving for one thing, life, vitality, more vitality: to get into himself more and more of the gleaming vitality of the cosmos…. This was the idea at the back of all the great old civilizations. It was even, half-transmuted, at the back of [King] David's mind, and voiced in the Psalms. But with David the living cosmos became merely a personal god. With the Egyptians and Babylonians and Etruscans, strictly there were no personal gods. There were only idols or symbols. It was the living cosmos itself, dazzlingly and gaspingly complex, which was divine, and which could be contemplated only by the strongest soul, and only at moments.
D. H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places
Saturday, May 15, 2021
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
The Gospel of Thomas, as noted by Elaine Pagels
Thursday, August 22, 2019
Euripides, The Trojan Women (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics
Friday, February 01, 2019
Christopher Beha, The Myth of Progress, in the February 21, 2019 New York Review of Books.
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
The cumulative increase of knowledge in science has no parallel in ethics or politics.
Sunday, November 05, 2017
Benjamin Nathans on Yuri Slezkine'd The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution in the New York Review of November 23, 2017
See also Freud and Plato - The Politics of the Soul (Pt 1)
Monday, October 19, 2015
David Bromwich, "Are We ‘Exceptionally Rapacious Primates’?", The New York Review of Books (November 5, 2015)
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The promised Land of Error
Friday, January 18, 2013
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie - in Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error - talking of the life of a 14th Century sheep herder of Occitania.
Friday, July 27, 2012
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man