Weber was wrong: the modern world is not disenchanted (even if secularists pretend otherwise) but a continuation of Christianity by other means. Whether liberal, communist, fascist, or authoritarian, every polity relies to one degree or another on the persistence of charismatic authority and the (usually disguised) theological legitimation of political power.


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)

About Filling A Commonplace Book?

I go here and there, culling out of several books the sentences that best please me, not to keep them (for I have no memory to retain them in), but to transplant them into this; where, to say the truth, they are no more mine than in their first places. 

Michel de Montaigne

Even in our counsels and deliberations there must, certainly, be something of chance and good-luck mixed with human prudence; for all that our wisdom can do alone is no great matter; the more piercing, quick, and apprehensive it is, the weaker it finds itself, and is by so much more apt to mistrust itself.... [Given] the shortsightedness of human wisdom...the surest way, in my opinion, did no other consideration invite us to it, is to pitch upon that wherein is the greatest appearance of honesty and justice; and not, being certain of the shortest, to keep the straightest and most direct way.

Michel de Montaigne

We are, as we have always been, dangerous creatures, the enemies of our own happiness. But the only help we have ever found for this, the only melioration, is in mutual reverence. God’s grace comes to us unmerited, the theologians say. But the grace we could extend to one another we consider it best to withhold in very many cases, presumptively, or in the absence of what we consider true or sufficient merit (we being more particular than God), or because few gracious acts, if they really deserve the name, would stand up to a cost-benefit analysis. This is not the consequence of a new atheism, or a systemic materialism that afflicts our age more than others. It is good old human meanness, which finds its terms and pretexts in every age. The best argument against human grandeur is the meagerness of our response to it, paradoxically enough.

Marilynne Robinson, New York Review (November , 2017)

The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.


Ancient proverb coming down through Sextus Empiricus

These are the times we live in, in which men hide their truths, perhaps even from themselves, and live in lies, until the lies reveal those truths in ways impossible to foretell.

Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

The nation’s labor market continues to bifurcate, separating the workers lucky enough to get the high-skill jobs our economy has newly created (and get paid accordingly) from those stuck with jobs for which automation has taken away the need for skills and that therefore pay very little.

Benjamin M. Friedman, New York Review (October 12, 2017)

Dedicated to My Brother Gyorgy

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?

Robert Browning

The principal effect of [the] power [of tradition] is, so to seize and ensnare us, that it is hardly in us to disengage ourselves from its gripe, or so to come to ourselves, as to consider of and to weigh the things it enjoins.... we suck it in with our milk.

Michel de Montaigne

No one departs out of life otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it.... We should always, as near as we can, be booted and spurred, and ready to go.

Michel de Montaigne

All of our memories are subjective.... The loss of pleasure and pain is a loss of subjectivity, of an ability to relate to objects, to persons, and to oneself.... All of our memories are subjective—they are created from the point of view of the individual who is remembering.

Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff,  The New York Review, August 17.2017

The same sun shines on everyone and everything, each place is as real as the next.


From an afternoon in Swaziland

The real benefit of complex inferences like weighing uncertainty may not be apparent unless the uncertainty has complex structure.

Quoted in Science News, "There’s a long way to go in understanding the brain," 7/25/2017)

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

 

Nathan Heller, The New Yorker (July 24, 2017)

That stone just keeps on rolling,
Bringing me some real bad news.
Takers get the honey,
Givers sing the blues.

Robin Trower

A strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgement.

Michel de Montaigne

Man (in good earnest) is a marvelous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment. 

Michel de Montaigne

Virtue and ambition, unfortunately, seldom lodge together.

Michel de Montaigne

The only remedy, the only rule, and the sole doctrine for avoiding the evils by which mankind is surrounded, whatever they are, is to resolve to bear them so far as our nature permits, or to put an end to them courageously and promptly.

 Michel de Montaigne

Many times I've wondered how much there is to know.


Jimmy Page/Robert Plant, Over the Hills and Far Away