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)
Sunday, November 05, 2017
Labels:
authority,
communism,
democracy,
fascism,
Freud,
government,
illusion,
politics,
psychology,
religion
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
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
Michel de Montaigne
Labels:
ambivalence,
blogging,
contemplation,
eccentricity,
getting older,
insight,
memory,
Montaigne,
reflection
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
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
Michel de Montaigne
Sunday, October 22, 2017
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)
Marilynne Robinson, New York Review (November , 2017)
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