From the Center: Adler on moral skepticism and on communism versus capitalism

This past week's communications to members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• Mortimer Adler on moral skepticism, in the latest weekly issue of The Great Ideas Online; and
• Adler on the end of the conflict between communism and capitalism, in the latest quarterly issue of Philosophy Is Everybody's Business.

eLogic Gallery, Aristotle to the 21st Century

Created by David Marans, and available for download at HumBox.

A Message to the 21st Century

"Twenty years ago—on November 25, 1994—Isaiah Berlin accepted the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto. He prepared the following 'short credo' (as he called it in a letter to a friend) for the ceremony, at which it was read on his behalf."

at The New York Review of Books

Culture’s Champion

Gertrude Himmelfarb on rereading Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy’, at The Weekly Standard (via Arts & Letters Daily)

From the Center: Reardon on Honor, Adler on Idea, E. O. Wilson on Man.

This past week's communications to members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included: Center Member James Reardon's exploration of the Great Idea of Honor in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus; Mortimer Adler on the Idea as on of the Great Ideas; and an invitation to comment on a review of E. O. Wilson's most recent book.

Campaign costs and faith in democracy

The Economist's 'Lexington' columnist posted at Democracy in America.

"Campaign spending is tightly regulated in Britain, along with other forms of free speech (broadcasters are still required to demonstrate political balance, for instance, and paid TV and radio political ads are outlawed)."

As a result,

"the seventh costliest [2014 U.S.] Senate race cost more than the entire 2010 general election in Britain."

And he notes,

"Many Americans worry that public faith in democracy is being undermined by vast sums of corrupting money. There is a prevailing suspicion that elected representatives are essentially bought and paid for by wealthy special interests.

Cause and effect?

"But here is the thing. I have covered elections in Britain and British voters voice exactly the same complaints, word for word."

Bertolt Brecht’s Marie-Antoinettism

Anthony Daniels reviews Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life, by Stephen Parker, at The New Criterion.

"Brecht was consumed by two desires: the achievement of fame at all costs, including to other people, and for freedom to behave exactly as he wished without any limits not imposed or accepted by himself. In these two desires he was a very modern figure."

'The Meaning of Human Existence'

Scott Russell Sanders reviewed this book by Edward O. Wilson at The Washington Post.

Kuiper Belt Missions Could Reveal the Solar System’s Origins

Michael D. Lemonick at Scientific American

"Just a bit more than 20 years ago, in fact, nobody even knew that the Kuiper belt existed. Since then, planetary scientists have discovered a handful of frozen worlds that approach and even rival Pluto in size. They have seen evidence that points to a long-ago violent reshuffling of the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—and maybe even to the existence of a lost fifth giant planet. They have analyzed the sizes and orbits of the 1,500 or so known Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) to get a handle on how the belt itself took shape—wondering whether crashing icefalls from the nascent Kuiper belt once bestowed oceans on a young, dry Earth."

From the Center: Adler on automation

This past week's communications to members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included: Mortimer Adler on the problem and promise of computers and robots;

2014 Supreme Court Roundup

Michael Stokes Paulsen provides An explanation of the Court’s affirmations of our right not to go along, at First Things.

The Creepy New Wave of the Internet

Sue Halpern with a review essay on the Internet of Things at The New York Review of Books

What makes Islam unique?

Jonathan Benthall reviews Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic case in comparative perspective, by Michael Cook, and Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment, by Akeel Bilgrami, at the Times Literary Supplement.

"Cook identifies partial non-Muslim parallels: as regards the increase in religiosity, in the rise of Pentecostalism and Charismatic Catholicism; as regards identity politics, in the Hindutva nationalist movement; as regards the imposition of social values, in the mainstream Christian Right in the United States; as regards the campaign to restore the Caliphate, in a Christian Reconstructionist fringe (also in the United States); as regards the rise of jihadism, in the intermittent militancy of Sikhs. Hence not one of the features of the Islamic revival is unique. But the combination of features that makes it up is unique. Moreover, two of these movements – Hindu nationalism and militant Sikhism – first emerged in contentious emulation of Muslim stances."

Time and Permanence in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

Pedro Blas Gonzalez at The University Bookman

"Four Quartets reminds us that inspired philosophical reflection, dating back to its inception by ancient Greek philosophers, is akin to poetic expression."

Science, Technology, and the First World War

M. Anthony Mills and Mark P. Mills at The New Atlantis

"the greatest invention of World War I was not so much any particular machine but the war machine itself. In the United States especially, the war helped assemble the loosely connected elements of technology, industry, academic science, and government into the first glimmerings of what President Eisenhower would later dub the 'military-industrial complex.'"

The Four Degrees

Paul Kingsnorth reviews Don’t Even Think about It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, by George Marshall, and This Changes Everything: Capitalism v. The Climate, by Naomi Klein, at the London Review of Books.

"The real problem comes when we start trying to cram climate change into our pre-existing ideological boxes. In the US in particular, climate change has become a central weapon in a culture war between left and right. ‘Attitudes on climate change … have become a social cue like gun control: a shorthand for figuring out who is in our group and cares about us,’ Marshall writes."
[...]
"What will destroy this web of denial, displacement and paralysis? Enter Naomi Klein, whose latest book, This Changes Everything, aspires to ‘upend the debate’ about climate change by linking it squarely to the latest crisis of capitalism. It’s a long work, filled with original research, but it doesn’t fulfil this promise. Rather the opposite: it threatens to entrench the cultural polarisation which Marshall identifies as a main obstacle to action. ... Klein had figured out how to fit climate change into her ideological box. The framing message of her book is that preventing climate change is a ‘progressive’ cause, firmly aligned with the left. More than this, it is an opportunity for the left to succeed where it has previously failed. ‘It could be the best argument progressives have ever had,’ she says, providing an opportunity to complete the ‘unfinished business of liberation’ on a global scale."

Technocracy Versus The Great Books

Peter Lawler noted Tim Lacy's remarks (quoted in our earlier post) as a starting point for this essay in The Federalist

"For a good while, liberals have thought of 'great books' initiatives as basically promoting a conservative agenda. But it turns out a lot depends on what you mean by conservative. ...

"... Peter Thiel, the Republican/libertarian public intellectual of Silicon Valley billionaires, says social liberalism has won, and that’s basically a good thing. The real cause in America now is promoting faith in technological innovation and economic freedom (or deregulation) as the keys to our increasingly more liberated and abundant future. ..."

What’s the most terrifying book you’ve ever read?

This question in a book review section column drew numerous responses from readers of The New York Times. The letters column concluded,

"Responding to the news, Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone made several appearances. So did In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir, by Dick and Liz Cheney."

The Ebola outbreak is the news hook for Preston's 1994 book. While the Cheney's 2011 memoir might not have been suggested as responding to the news, I found this in the 'Lexington' column's review at The Economist.

"Mr Cheney ... knew how to get things done. For the most part, he put that skill to poor use. But as the Obama administration lurches from one dust-up with the Republicans in Congress to another, with most of its agenda abandoned by the wayside, one cannot help wondering what difference it would make to have a man with the cunning and single-mindedness of Mr Cheney whispering in the president's ear."

(via Jay Gold)

Those Stubborn Classics

Ashley Thorne posted at National Review Online.

"Many colleges want their students to have read a book before they start their first semester. Not just any book, but one carefully selected by a committee to represent the college’s ideals and aspirations. Translation: No Impact Man in, classics out.

"I am the co-author of a new National Association of Scholars study of freshman pre-reading assignments at 341 colleges. Beach Books 2013–2014: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class? shows that most of the books assigned in these 'common reading' programs are fresh from the printer. More than half were from 2010 or later. Only five of the 341 colleges assigned a book from before 1900.

"Colleges exclude the classics for three reasons. ..."

Pyrrho wins the lottery

At Existential Comics

From the Center: 'Classical Philosophy'; on hypothesis; on citizenship;

This past week's communications to members of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas included:

• A review of Classical Philosophy: a history of philosophy without any gaps, by Peter Adamson;
• Mortimer Adler on the Great Idea of Hypothesis; and
• For the American elections, Adler on citizenship as office.

Nietzsche on Love

Willow Verkerk at Philosophy Now

The Daily Statesman

David S. Reynolds reviewed Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion, by Harold Holzer, at The New York Times.

"The popular press, therefore, was slippery, making Lincoln’s efforts to deal with it immensely challenging. Deal with it he did, in masterly fashion."

The Chapter: A History

Nicholas Dames at The New Yorker

"What does the chapter’s beginnings reveal about the way our books and stories are still put together?"

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

The pendulum swings to the pit

A briefing on the danger of deflation, and signs it is developing, at The Economist

"Michael Bordo and Andrew Filardo, two economic historians, point to America’s 1880s as a period of 'good deflation', with output rising by 2% to 3% a year from 1873 to 1896. For all the aggregate benefit, though, falling real wages hurt workers in many sectors.

"By contrast bad deflation results when demand runs chronically below the economy’s capacity to supply goods and services, leaving an output gap. That prompts firms to cut prices and wages; that weakens demand further. Debt aggravates the cycle: as prices and incomes fall, the real value of debts rise, forcing borrowers to cut spending to pay down their debts, which ends up making matters worse. This pathology did great harm during America’s Great Depression, which was when Irving Fisher, an economist, diagnosed it under the name 'debt deflation'."

Bodies of Knowledge

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein reviewed The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science, by Armand Marie Leroi, at The New York Times.

"Aristotle, as Leroi makes wonderfully clear, exemplifies one kind of scientific aptitude. He was an enthralled observer of the natural world, bedazzled by data, seeking causal explanations not in abstract numbers but in concrete details acquired through avid sense perception."

The Great Western Earthquake: Reformation Day 2014

William H. Smith's assessment of three major contributors to the Reformation, at VirtueOnline, noted this.

"When Mortimer Adler of the University of Chicago was asked by William F. Buckley if there was anything omitted that he wished had been included in the Great Books series, he replied 'Calvin.' The second edition of the Great Books [of the Western World] included a whole volume (20) with selections from Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion."

It's available at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Why Do Americans Stink at Math?

Elizabeth Green reported in The New York Times.

"To cure our innumeracy, we will have to accept that the traditional approach we take to teaching math — the one that can be mind-numbing, but also comfortingly familiar — does not work. We will have to come to see math not as a list of rules to be memorized but as a way of looking at the world that really makes sense."

Does the Legalization of Marijuana Violate International Law?

Ryan Scoville at the Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog,

"The argument is pretty straightforward: The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs provides that parties 'shall take such legislative and administrative measures as may be necessary . . . to limit exclusively to medical and scientific purposes the production, manufacture, export, import, distribution of, trade in, use and possession of' cannabis, among other drugs. Having joined the treaty in 1967, the United States is bound to comply."