thoughts in and out of season
Back in the ’60s people used to go off to look for America. The idea was that you’d drive your car across the country or hitch a ride on a freight train with your guitar or something and then you’d meet the people and find out how wonderful and democratic America is or whatever. Off … More ...
I’ve been reading some intellectual and cultural history lately, James H. Billington’s The Icon and the Axe and part of Vernon Louis Parrington’s The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America 1860-1920.
I’m an American who knows very little about Russia. That might be one reason I thought the Billington book on Russia was really … More ...
I’ve always thought that surveys showing that more formal education means more liberal social views and less religion are chiefly a sign that formal education is a system for inculcating the outlook of formal public institutions, and thus for disrupting informal traditions and ordinary conclusions from daily experience. That view is now supported by a … More ...
A reader writes:
… More ...I just graduated from Haverford College, a liberal Quaker school outside of Philadelphia. A few years ago, two students dressed as black pop-stars went to a Halloween party wearing brown face paint. They were punished, pretty much for hate speech, on the grounds that even though they didn’t intend to offend people,
Which will win: the American tendency to make free speech absolute, or the globalization of human rights and the tendency to make tolerance and inclusiveness greater absolutes? I’ve thought the latter will win, and we’ll end up with the anti-“hate” censorship you find in Canada and Europe. A recent case seems to point that way. … More ...
It’s hard not to be pleased by reports that weekday newspaper circulation is falling around 5% a year, and music CD sales plunged more than 20% in the last year alone. Broadband net access is killing the established media, with no end in sight. Who needs the newspaper or music industries when better and … More ...
A recent development in Britain suggests one side of “human rights” in today’s world: Home Secretary threatens to suspend human rights laws after terror suspects go missing.
“Control orders” in Britain restrict movements and contact with other people for terror suspects who cannot be brought to court. They replaced detention without trial, which was … More ...
A reader sends in a link to a collection of recollections of the ’50s by ordinary British people, put together (of all things) by the BBC. The recollections are mostly extremely favorable. The reader speculates
… More ...Letting these comments be posted could just be a sign of pluralist confidence. Pluralists may see themselves in a strong
Frequent commenter MD has posted an interesting account of the views of Jacques Lyotard, a prominent postmodernist, on knowledge in postindustrial society. It’s an interesting situation Lyotard describes, one that seems to me more hyper- than post- modern and industrial. The basic idea, I suppose, is that man is rational and social. It follows that … More ...
Why is so much of pop culture so stable? Young people have listened to Bob Dylan and the Beatles since around 1963 and still find them up-to-date. “Hip” and “cool” are still hip and cool, and they’ve been mass-market for 50 years. On slightly more substantive matters, we’re still stuck at bottom with ’60s political … More ...