Category: ideas

William James “explored this question … because he wanted to know if some people were more capable or more prone to experience ‘the acute fever’ of religious belief. His answer: it is those who suffer most who are inclined to experience that fever. These are the people who fascinated him: those who toed right up to and sometimes over the line of despair and meaninglessness.”

Adam Gopnik: “It has to do, really, with the illusions that guns provide, particularly the illusion of power. The attempts to use the sort of logic that helped end cigarette smoking don’t quite work. … Everyone, men especially, needs ego-accessories, and they are most often irrationally chosen.”

Was that particular stereotype simply another manifestation of longstanding American intellectualism? One author argues that it was in fact a postwar reaction to an earlier cultural climate that valued the widespread acquisition of knowledge.

“True believers think that the new digital technologies will finally enable educators to increase productivity by allowing a smaller number of teachers to produce a larger number of “learning outcomes” (today’s term for educated students) than ever before. But it’s too soon to say whether MOOCs will really help cure the cost disease.”

“Nature and truth. Money and markets. Men and marriage. Faith and reason. They’ve all ended. Power ended in March, but that makes sense because leadership ended last year. History ended more than two decades ago, while the future ended just two years ago.”

“Often they conceal power relationships and reduce our sense of what’s truly involved in a transaction. As such, they are an instrument of manipulation, in politics and in business.”

“Is Google literature? As a search engine, of course, it lacks a conventional narrative. But a traditional bildungsroman would hardly suit our era. Not even James Joyce could capture the fractured nature of 21st-century life, let alone the nearly unlimited interconnectedness among people and events these days. Google can, and it does so as a matter of course, tracking the entire world’s culture as it shifts and evolves, cataloging the news of the day, sifting it all for relevance, and preserving it for posterity.”

The “(Old) New Atheists” – Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens – would say “Nothing.” A different group – call them “the New New Atheists” – beg to differ. Alain de Botton, Karen Armstrong, Francis Spufford, Jim Al-Khalili and Richard Holloway weigh in.

Indian-Pakistani author Aatish Taseer: “[History] is, in fact, like a currency, which is good only as far as people recognize its worth. … Not only were there stories other than our own, but there were stories more powerful than our own … One story could swallow another, it could supersede it; and this experience, no matter how it occurred, was fraught with anxiety.”

“One of the great paradoxes in today’s world is that information is so easy to transmit –few places on earth are beyond the reach of cellphones or televisions — and yet our efforts to get life-saving, livelihood-boosting information to people in a form that sticks, a form that will actually change behavior, are frequently disappointing.”