Woke

The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys

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Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel in order to be tough. The vigorous expression of our American community spirit is truly important. The ancient injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself is still the force that animates our  faith—a faith that we are determined shall live and conquer in a world poisoned by hatred and ravaged by war.”
 

Franklin D. Roosevelt, October 13, 1940

Labor is one of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

Ambrose Bierce

 

Man is cruelly wasteful of life when his own safety is endangered and he is sheltered by impunity, and little mercy is to be expected from him when he feels the sting of the reptile and is conscious of the power to destroy.

Washington Irving,  The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

Washington Irving on American public mind

Governed, as we are, entirely by public opinion, the utmost care should be taken to preserve the purity of the public mind. Knowledge is power, and truth is knowledge; whoever, therefore, knowingly propagates a prejudice, willfully saps the foundation of his country’s strength.

 

Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon

I resist what I cannot change
Own it in your own way
I wanna find what can't be found

Pain, The War on Drugs

How stands it between God and your soul now?

John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress

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

The Singularity

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

Yes, Minus the Man (from The Quest)

Patience under duress is rarely appreciated by the politically immature.

Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings

Politics is the systematic organization of hatreds.... Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

Henry Adams

THE MASS of men serve the State thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, gaolers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.

Others—as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders—serve the State chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.

A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the State with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

Henry David Thoreau, The Duty of Civil Disobedience

Life in the COVID-19 Age

The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability....The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. 

Marilynne Robinson, What Kind of Country Do We Want? (NYRB)

He who goes into a crowd must now go one way and then another, keep his elbows close, retire or advance, and quit the straight way, according to what he encounters; and must live not so much according to his own method as to that of others; not according to what he proposes to himself, but according to what is proposed to him, according to the time, according to the men, according to the occasions. Plato says, that whoever escapes from the world's handling with clean breeches, escapes by miracle.

Montaigne

“Debt, the private money that has fueled capitalism since its inception, is coded in law and ultimately relies on the state to back it up,” by way of the courts under normal circumstances and through bailouts if a debtor is too big to fail:  The history of debt finance can therefore be retold as a story about how claims to future pay have been coded in law to ensure their convertibility into state money on demand, without suffering serious loss…. By dressing private debt in the modules of the legal code of capital, it is possible to mask the liquidity risk for a while, but not forever. Whenever investors realize that, contrary to their expectations, they may not be able to convert their debt assets into cash, they head for the exit; and if many do so simultaneously, this will precipitate a financial crisis.

Adam Tooze (quoting Katharina Pistor), "How ‘Big Law’ Makes Big Money," NYRB Feb. 13, 2020

Authority is not given in favor of the magistrate, but of the people.

Montaigne

The populist wave coursing through the western world is only the visible part of a soft power emanating from the working classes that will force the elites to rejoin the real movement of society or else to disappear.


Christophe Guilluy, quoted by James McAuley in the New York Review (March 21, 2019)

So many mutations of states and kingdoms, and so many turns and revolutions of public fortune, will make us wise enough to make no great wonder of our own.

Michel de Montaigne

   

The disdain that so many people feel [millennials] reflects an unease about the forces of deregulation, globalization, and technological acceleration that are transforming everyone’s lives. (It does not seem coincidental that young people would be criticized for being entitled at a time when people are being stripped of their entitlements.) Millennials, in other words, have adjusted too well to the world they grew up in; their perfect synchronization with economic and cultural disruption has been mistaken for the source of the disruption itself.

Jia Tolentino, "Where Millennials Come From" (The New Yorker, December 4, 2017)

Today, not carrying a smartphone indicates eccentricity, social marginalization, or old age.


Jacob Weisberg, The New York Review (February 55, 2016)