Friday, July 31, 2009

Forbidden by Science

"From compassion? But Mr. Lebeziatnikov who keeps up with modern ideas explained the other day that compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself, and that that's what is done now in England, where there is political economy."

Thursday, July 30, 2009

What Men Are Most Afraid Of

"Hm . . . yes, all is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most . . ."

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Then and Now

THEN: "God explains everything, even evolution."

NOW:"Evolution explains everything, even God."

Monday, July 20, 2009

Our Descendants Will Complain

"Life has gotten dramatically better for almost everyone in the Western world during the past half-century, yet people are no happier. Centuries to come may see life better still, and happiness not increased."

***

"It is ours to decide what the future will hold. And if we decide well, the future may hold an ever-better life, about which our descendants will complain."

Art and Religion

"Like art, religion has been a way of containing feelings that might otherwise tear individuals and societies apart. Armstrong leans heavily on the distinction first made by the ancient Greeks between the realms of mythos and logos. Logos is "a pragmatic mode of thought that enables people to function effectively in the world"; it is what we rely on when organising society or planning a journey. However, logos has its limitations: "It cannot assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggles." For this, there is the realm of mythos or myth, to which religion and art belong. Religion offers us moments of what Armstrong calls, using another Greek term, ekstasis, a stepping outside of the norm for the sake of release and consolation."

Review of The Case for God

Sunday, July 19, 2009

The Case for God

"He is not good, divine, powerful or intelligent in any way that we can understand. We could not even say that God 'exists', because our concept of existence is too limited."

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Not of Flesh, But of Bronze


"No, those men are not made so. The real Master to whom all is permitted storms Toulon, makes a massacre in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, wastes half a million men in the Moscow expedition and gets off with a jest at Vilna. And altars are set up to him after his death, and so all is permitted. No, such people, it seems, are not of flesh but of bronze!"

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

A Historical Living Process

“Listen, Rodion, and tell us your opinion. I want to hear it. I was fighting tooth and nail with them and wanted you to help me. I told them you were coming…It began with the socialist doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social organization and nothing more, and nothing more; no other causes admitted!…”

“You are wrong there,” cried Porfiry Petrovitch; he was noticeably animated and kept laughing as he looked at Razumihin, which made him more excited than ever.

“Nothing is admitted,” Razumihin interrupted with heat.

“I am not wrong. I'll show you their pamphlets. Everything with them is ‘the influence of environment,’ and nothing else. Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organized, all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it is excluded, it's not supposed to exist! They don't recognize that humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organize all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an instant, quicker than any living process! That's why they instinctively dislike history, ‘nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,’ and they explain it all as stupidity! That's why they so dislike the living process of life; they don't want a living soul! The living soul demands life, the soul won't obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is reactionary! But what they want though it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is servile and won't revolt! And it comes in the end to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready, indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery—it wants life, it hasn't completed its vital process, it's too soon for the graveyard! You can't skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That's the easiest solution of the problem! It's seductively clear and you musn't think about it. That's the great thing, you mustn't think! The whole secret of life in two pages of print!”

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Talk Your Own Nonsense

"And what made me get so tight? Because they got me into an argument, damn them! I've sworn never to argue! They talk such trash! I almost came to blows! I've left my uncle to preside. Would you believe, they insist on complete absence of individualism and that's just what they relish! Not to be themselves, to be as unlike themselves as they can. That's what they regard as the highest point of progress. If only their nonsense were their own, but as it is…”

“Listen!” Pulcheria Alexandrovna interrupted timidly, but it only added fuel to the flames.

“What do you think?” shouted Razumihin, louder than ever, “you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can't even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I'll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's. In the first case you are a man, in the second you're no better than a bird. Truth won't escape you, but life can be cramped. There have been examples. And what are we doing now? In science, development, thought, invention, ideals, aims, liberalism, judgment, experience and everything, everything, everything, we are still in the preparatory class at school. We prefer to live on other people's ideas, it's what we are used to! Am I right, am I right?” cried Razumihin, pressing and shaking the two ladies’ hands.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Culture and Philosophy

Culture is a productivity tool. It can record and convey successful ideas to new generations. But culture can just as easily prevent and destroy successful ideas, too. For evolution, culture can be either an express lane or a dead end.

Art, science, and commerce adorn philosophy. A poor philosophy goes about in rags; a better one dresses well.

Friday, July 10, 2009

No Army Since Caesar

"Confederate defenders expected the swamps in tidewater South Carolina to stop Sherman before he got fairly started. Indeed, so far under water were the roads in this region that Union scouts had to reconnoiter some of them in canoes. But Sherman organized 'pioneer battalions' of soldiers and freedmen (some of the latter recruited from the thousands of contrabands who had trailed the army to Savannah) to cut saplings and trees to corduroy the roads, build bridges, and construct causeways. Meeting resistance from Wheeler's cavalry at some rain-swollen streams and rivers, the bluecoats sent out flanking columns that waded through water up to their armpits, brushing aside alligators and snakes, and drove the rebels away. Northward lapped the blue wave at a rate of nearly ten miles a day for forty-five days including skirmishing and fighting. Rain fell during twenty-eight of those days, but this seemed to benefit South Carolina only by slightly damping the style of Sherman's arsonists. 'When I learned that Sherman's army was marching through the Salk swamps, making its own corduroy roads at the rate of a dozen miles a day,' said Joseph Johnston, 'I made up my mind that there had been no army in existence since the days of Julius Caesar.'"

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Ten Times More Difficult

"Even more important, perhaps, than the destructive vengeance of Sherman's army in spreading this demoralization was its stunning logistical achievements. Sherman himself later rated the march through the Carolinas as ten times more important in winning the war than the march from Atlanta to the sea. It was also ten times more difficult. Terrain and weather posed much greater problems in South Carolina than in Georgia. The march from Atlanta to Savannah proceeded 285 miles parallel to major rivers in dry autumn weather against token opposition. The march northward from Savannah was aimed at Goldsboro, North Carolina, 425 miles away, where Sherman expected to be resupplied by Union forces moving inland from Wilmington. Sherman's soldiers would have to cross nine substantial rivers and scores of their tributaries during what turned out to be the wettest winter in twenty years."

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

I Am a Contradiction

At first glance, I am a contradiction: a libertarian who who was raised on social security survivor's benefits; a graduate of public schools; and a graduate of a public university. Surely, if any one life can demonstrate the virtues of a progressive social system, my life does. Surely, only an ingrate would criticize a system that gave him so much.

But we don't get to choose our beginnings, only our destinations.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Not Pretty, and Hardly Glorious

"The war of plunder and arson in South Carolina was not pretty, and hardly glorious, but Sherman considered it effective. The terror his bummers inspired 'was a power, and I intended to utilize it....My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses and make them fear and dread us.' It seemed to work: 'All is gloom, despondency, and inactivity,' wrote a South Carolinian on February 28. 'Our army is demoralized and the people panic stricken....the power to do has left us...to fight longer seems to be madness.'"

Monday, July 6, 2009

Few Escaped


"Destroyed it [South Carolina] was, through a corridor from south to north narrower than in Georgia but more intensely pillaged and burned. Not many buildings remained standing in some villages after the army marched through. The same was true of the countryside. 'In Georgia few houses were burned,' wrote an officer; 'here few escaped.' A soldier felt confident that South Carolina 'will never want to seceed again....I think she has her 'rights' now.'

Sunday, July 5, 2009

South Carolina Must Be Destroyed

"At the beginning of 1865 the only sizable portions of the Confederate heartland still untouched by invading Yankees were the interior of the Carolinas and most of Alabama. Grant and Thomas planned a two-pronged campaign to deal with the latter...

Destructive as these enterprises were, they became a sideshow to Sherman's march through South Carolina. As his army had approached Savannah in December 1864, Georgians said to Sherman: 'Why don't you go over to South Carolina and serve them this way? They started it.' Sherman had intended to do so all along. He converted Grant to the idea, and on February 1, Sherman's 60,000 blue avengers left Savannah for their second march through the heart of enemy territory. This one had two strategic purposes: to destroy all war resources in Sherman's path; and to come up on Lee's rear to crush the Army of Northern Virginia in a vise between two larger Union armies and 'wipe out Lee,' in Grant's succinct phrase.

Sherman's soldiers had a third purpose in mind as well: to punish the state that had hatched this unholy rebellion. The soldiers' temper was not improved by the taunts of southern newspapers against this 'grand army of Mudsills.' one of the mudsills, an Ohio private, vowed to make South Carolina 'suffer worse than she did at the time of the Revolutionary War. We will let her know that it isn't so sweet to secede as she thought it would be.' A South Carolina woman whose house was plundered recalled that the soldiers 'would sometimes stop to tell me they were sorry for the women and children, but South Carolina must be destroyed."