thoughts in and out of season
In my recent entry on being American I quoted John McCain and Thornton Wilder as authorities. McCain evidently views America as a sort of overriding moral cause that we should all buy into, Thornton Wilder as an inescapable reality and predicament we must accept and deal with on its own terms. That is to say, … More ...
A couple of texts I found horrifying:
It’s a bad question, I think, because it overemphasizes the attribute in a way that makes no sense, certainly not in 2007 and maybe ever. You can reasonably be an American stamp collector, lawyer or Catholic, meaning one whose attitudes, understanding and pursuits are colored by a background and web of connections accumulated growing up … More ...
It seems strange that the reason given by the Federation of American Scientists for their condemnation of James Watson’s views on race and intelligence, and their public characterization of them as “personal prejudices that are racist, vicious and unsupported by science,” is that they’re worried that the credibility of the disinterested truth-seeking scientific enterprise might … More ...
Alexander is important because architecture is important. It gives the social, intellectual and spiritual order a physical form that helps mold our lives. Also, it’s large, solid, visible and very expensive, so it’s difficult to ignore issues created by the kind of order or disorder it embodies. Discussing architecture is therefore an indirect way of … More ...
Alexander’s outlook has definite implications when applied to society. It rejects the idea of imposing concept and image on reality, and so is anti-constructivist. It favors particularity of position and so is anti-egalitarian and anti-inclusivist. It accepts that patterns that reappear in a variety of traditions very likely have something to them that rationalism should … More ...
If Alexander is right in The Nature of Order, what do we do about it? His examples of good design (except for some wonderful images from Matisse) are almost all from the vernacular, often from times and places like the European middle ages when artists were anonymous because even high art was vernacular. He’s … More ...
Some time ago J. Bottum, now editor of First Things, published a sort of hit piece on T. S. Eliot, What T.S. Eliot Almost Believed, that I just ran into going through some old correspondence.
It’s not clear just what claim Bottum is making in the piece, for example when he says “I … More ...
This sounds like a techie’s fantasy: hundred dollar laptops for Hottentots. Someone wants every poor kid in the world to get his own laptop. Computers haven’t done much for education in America, though, and it’s not clear they’d do more in Waziristan. It’s not as if every third world schoolkid is a computer nerd who … More ...
The point of present-day political thought is to integrate everything into a single system of technological hedonism that managers and functionaries can dominate with the aid of their ideological champions. A better and more human way of thinking would recognize that we live in a larger and less controllable world, one in which things … More ...
