Humans are born incomplete. The brain absorbs huge amounts of essential information throughout childhood and adolescence, which it uses to carry on building who we are. It’s as if the brain asks a single, vital question: Who do I have to be, in this place, to thrive? If it was a boastful hustler in ancient Greece and a humble team-player in ancient China, then who is it in the West today? The answer is a neoliberal.
Category: ideas
Fukuyama: What Happened After The End Of History
“It began to unfold back in the ’60s and ’70s, when identity came to the forefront. People felt unfulfilled. They felt they had these true selves that weren’t being recognized. In the absence of a common cultural framework previously set by religion, people were at a loss. Psychology and psychiatry stepped into that breach. In the medical profession, treating mental health has a therapeutic mission, and it became legitimate to say the objective of society ought to be improving people’s sense of self-esteem. This became part of the mission of universities, which made it difficult to set educational criteria as opposed to therapeutic criteria aimed at making students feel good about themselves. This is what led to many of the conflicts over multiculturalism.”
Change The World? These People Are Dangerous!
At first, you think: Rich people making a difference — so generous! Until you consider that America might not be in the fix it’s in had we not fallen for the kind of change these winners have been selling: fake change.
‘Take Things For Granted’ Is Actually Very Good Advice
Philosophy professor Neal Tognazzini: “I think there’s something distinctively valuable about allowing many aspects of your life — even the very fact of your life — to recede into the background, into a unconscious mental box we might label ‘presuppositions.’ I would go so far as to say that these presuppositions are what enable you to live a life at all.”
Why Has Philosophy Walled Itself Off From Non-Anglo-European Thought? Not Because Of Racism
Jonardon Ganeri, himself a biracial philosopher, argues that it’s an unintended consequence of one of the qualities the field most values in itself – one that distinguishes it from most of the humanities – combined with the conscientious scholar’s natural reluctance to muck about with subject matter she doesn’t know.
Seeing ‘The Tiger In The Grass’: The Case For ‘Applied History’
The idea that historians could use their knowledge of the past to advise useful courses of action for the future goes all the way back to Thucydides. “In recent decades, however, things have changed. The longstanding view of the historian as being, in modern jargon, ‘policy-relevant’, has fallen out of favour and often arouses suspicion” – within the discipline as well as outside it. Robert Crowcroft makes the case for a widespread revival of the approach now called “applied history.”
Feeling Oppressed By Information Overload? There Are Historical Parallels
In the coming years, it may be that conversational, artificially intelligent assistants will become part of the answer, deciding whether or not to alert us to messages, helping us retrieve information and recommending items of interest. But figuring out book reviews, indexes and the rest took several centuries, so we shouldn’t expect an immediate solution. In the meantime we must endure information overload: the feeling that arises in the space of time between a sudden increase in the flow of information and the development of the tools to enable us to cope with it.
‘Irony Poisoning’ – Yes, It’s A Thing, And We Should Take It Seriously
“Yes, at the moment the concept is seen as little more than another bit of self-referential young person slang, used only in the deepest recesses of the web. … But irony poisoning should be entered, we think, into the pantheon of social science concepts that are used to rigorously measure, study and perhaps one day understand how social media platforms can rewire your brain and alter society.” Max Fisher and Amanda Taub explore the concept and how it works.
Maybe Consuming Less “News” Would Be Better For Us?
Perhaps it’s time we realize that consuming more news about the world around us is not the way to improve it (or ourselves), personally or politically. Two thousand years ago, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations, “Are you distracted by breaking news? Then take some leisure time to learn something good, and stop bouncing around.”
Why Do Contemporary Philosophers Wall Off Part Of The World?
There is a great conundrum, or — if you prefer — a dark secret, about modern philosophy: while diversity is the lifeblood of philosophy, philosophy as we now find it in the United States (and equally elsewhere) has come to fear and shun diversity, specifically the diversity of philosophical opinion and argumentation from extra-European cultures. How did this happen? And why?