William Morris in an 1896 address to the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising: Next, we have to remember that the enormous majority of the people of the country do not care one…
Browsing Category Society/Culture
Inoculating Against Progress
I suspect that there is no such thing as a commons. Well, historically, there are “commons” all over the place. But it appears to have been erased by the Enlightenment discovery of “progress” and “improvement”…
Light Thrown by Tinder-Boxes
It might be hard to do better than George Eliot does in this bit of psychological dissection of some ways of thinking in the face of “mysteries” and motivations (1861). The next morning the whole…
Bear Grylls, a 5th Grader, and Friday? What is Robinson Crusue
I sent the following to my local paper today–bear in mind there is a 200-word-limit. To the Editor: We like to believe that people who want to be elected for particular offices of government have…
On Hitchens-ism: When Good is Bad; The Humanitarian Screen for War.
I cannot improve on Greenwald’s discussion of the way the death of Christopher Hitchens has exposed a cadre of influential writers who provided “material support” for the invasion, destruction and occupation of Iraq as not…
Clinical Trials and the Cultural Mania for Torture
I am against clinical trials. Rather, I am against clinical trials as they are now conceived and implemented. I am against the mass “treatment” of the desperately ill via the marketing of hope (and often…
Trickery and Violence: That of which there is no end.
I’ll be honest, today has me flooded with indignation and it has become hard to think amidst the noise made by the onslaught of corporate legislation removing the education of children from the public charge…
The Uses of Revolution
“A revolution, then, is a way of putting power in different hands.” Guy Davenport Jamie Warren, Associate Professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (and former Bloomington resident and graduate student in the Indiana…
By Day One Cannot See Any Stars
Guy Davenport: Collage is retrospective in content, modern in its design. Kept up, it will recapitulate and summarize the history of its own being. Herakleitos: The untrained mind shivers with excitement at everything it hears….
Better Angels on Black Ships: Is There Evidence of Moral Progress?
Update Below: Pinker in 2000 Steven Pinker, language guru, descendant and somewhat apostate of Chomsky, has written a book about the “progress” of human morality measured via a reduction of wars and war casualties called…