December 2009
9 posts
“Suppressing religion—even when done in the name of freedom and equality—strikes...”
– Luke Goodrich: Europe’s Religion Delusion - WSJ.com (via ayjay)
Power to the People
The thinking of professional reformers and revolutionaries usually fails to escape the machine analogy operative in military and other coercive thinking. They want to organize the people into a human machine. And a machine is by definition subservient to the will of only one man. In the formula “Power to the People” I hear “Power to me, who am eager to run the show in the name...
Bad Writing
Of course, folly is something of a relative judgement. It is often the case, especially in the world of publishing, that the most lucrative course is to do things very, very badly. The richest novelists tend to be those who cannot write; and the more poorly they write, the richer they are likely to become. The most successful purveyors of popular history, popular political polemic, popular...
The Sinister Magic
The sinister magic is technology too slavishly deployed, and here he rightly indicates that we avoid noticing the fact that modernity threatens to be the triumph of this sort of magic—since no-one, including scientists, really quite comprehends why the radio, the light switch, the automobile, the mobile phone and the internet can by regular formulae command the powers they do. To surrender...
Religion and Secularism
It’s as varieties of literary narrative that religion and secularism look most alike. Religion deserves to be protected absolutely, the political doctrine of secularism goes, as long as it remains private. But it cannot be respected when it claims public authority. So too literature is to be valued as something other than an account of how things really are—as the product of an “as...
Be Absolute For Death
Claudio. The miserable have no other medicine But only hope: I’ve hope to live, and am prepared to die.
Vincentio. Be absolute for death; either death or life Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art, Servile to all the skyey influences, That dost this habitation, where thou...