We need not idealize the past, talk about the "good old days," fondly remember the way things used to be, to realize that things HAVE changed, and changed in bad ways. There is no way back, and we are completely uncertain about now and the future.

 

The distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. Something has changed. Attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. Where is clarity now? We feel out of control. There is too much going on in the world now, or least we are more aware of more stuff now, most of it entirely superfluous. Let's get our focus back on what is important.

 

Yes, It’s Fascism

Until recently, I thought it a term best avoided. But now, the resemblances are too many and too strong to deny.

By Jonathan Rauch

 Mark Twain, who famously said a lot of famous things, said that he never let his schooling get in the way of his education. His words take a new, contemporary meaning. Example: Texas A&M

On Banning Socrates at TAMU

 It’s highly unlikely that the Texas A&M regents read Plato before drafting their policy. If they had, they would have discovered that, far from “advocating gender ideology,” he challenges all of our 21st-century ways of thinking about sex and gender. He is neither “left” nor “right,” because he lived thousands of years before those labels were invented. That is one of the reasons studying Greek philosophy has never become obsolete: In every generation, it allows people to escape the binaries of their own time and think things through from the beginning.

The belief that every student is capable of this kind of thinking, and deserves to experience it, was one of the noblest ideals of democratic education. Now that both democracy and education are under threat in the United States, philosophers may have to relearn the “prudence” that once seemed like a relic of history. Peterson is already employing a classic technique of esoteric writing: calling attention to what he is forced to omit. In his revised syllabus, when the students were originally supposed to read Plato, they will now be assigned a New York Times article about why they can’t.
-Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic

 My friend Javier just stopped by at Starbucks on his way to work at Margarita Grill next door. My kind of person: at work early, full of pep and energy, spreading good words and good cheer. There aren't many of us type of people left.

Locke or Hobbs

 If you want to know a political leader’s governing philosophy, you could cut through a lot of bluster by just asking them who their guy is: John Locke or Thomas Hobbes? Anyone who’s taken Poli Sci 101 will understand what this means. The 17th-century philosophers each offered a picture of human nature in its rawest form, and they came to different conclusions. Locke, whose ideas were central to the birth of modern democracy, thought that people were capable of reason and moral judgment. Hobbes, on the other hand, believed that we were vicious creatures who needed to be protected from ourselves by a powerful king. Whether a leader is Lockean or Hobbesian really does set the table for the kind of government they want.

One way to understand the head-spinning nature of being an American over the past couple of decades is that this debate—one that history seemed to have settled in Locke’s favor—is alive again. Barack Obama was a Lockean through and through—insisting, repeatedly, that if citizens were just given accurate information and a fair hearing, they would converge on something like the common good. Then came Donald Trump, Hobbesian extraordinaire, who has often portrayed life under anyone’s leadership but his own much as Hobbes describes the state of nature: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (Nasty is even one of Trump’s favorite words).

-Gal Beckerman in The Atlanti