I commented to Rev. Gibbons today that his sermon last week – and the service in general – struck a chord with me. In a way it reminded me of Seinfeld – not the humor, but the way multiple themes came together towards the end in a way which I hadn’t foreseen.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Deeper Dive: Randall Kennedy, “Lifting as We Climb: A progressive defense of respectability politics”
I won’t say much here beyond, “Read Randall Kennedy’s essay in this month’s issue of Harper’s.” He’s a Harvard Law professor. I saw him talk a number of times when I was a grad student 20-25 years ago. As a public intellectual, his focus is race relations and the subject is central to his Harper’s essay. I’m not going to attempt to summarize because I wouldn’t do it justice. (Doing it justice would require a “deeper dive” than I’m able to make at present.) Suffice it to say that I believe his observations and assessments are astute and that they apply beyond race relations, i.e., they are also applicable to efforts to change our culture and politics.
Thought for the Day: 17 June 2015
Nothing in the methods or practices of science guarantees success. But we have a capacity to observe, theorize, measure, and test; and these abilities are crucial to our human ability to navigate an uncertain world. So we should look at the institutions and findings of science much as pragmatists like Israel Scheffler and WVO Quine did: as imperfect but valuable tools on the basis of which to learn some of the more important properties and dynamics of the world around us.
First Parish of Bedford, MA Sunday Service – May 31, 2015
A particularly good service the other week:
If you need cause to watch to the end, Bill McKibben was the last speaker. If you skip directly to McKibben however you’ll miss an a great opening song from the kids’ choir and excellent sermon from Rev. Gibbons.
Carrying on in the tradition of Emerson. No matter what your religious inclinations good for the mind and spirit. I’m not UU by nature but I’ve come to appreciate that the belief in free thought and inquiry can accommodate a wide range of personal philosophies.
What is neoliberalism and why does it pose a threat to democracy?
Wendy Brown interviewed by Tim Shenk, “What is neoliberalism?”:
I treat neoliberalism as a governing rationality through which everything is “economized” and in a very specific way: human beings become market actors and nothing but, every field of activity is seen as a market, and every entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is governed as a firm. Importantly, this is not simply a matter of extending commodification and monetization everywhere—that’s the old Marxist depiction of capital’s transformation of everyday life. Neoliberalism construes even non-wealth generating spheres—such as learning, dating, or exercising—in market terms, submits them to market metrics, and governs them with market techniques and practices. Above all, it casts people as human capital who must constantly tend to their own present and future value.
Uncivilisation – I
From The Dark Mountain Project’s Manifesto:
I
WALKING ON LAVA
The end of the human race will be that it will
eventually die of civilisation.– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.
The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.
What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.
Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new.
The Free Market: Black Friday In Perspective
“… individuals cannot learn to speak for themselves at all, much less come to an intelligent understanding of their happiness and well-being, in a world in which there are no values except those of the market. . . . the market tends to universalize itself. It does not easily coexist with institutions that operate according to principles that are antithetical to itself: schools and universities, newspapers and magazines, charities, families. Sooner or later the market tends to absorb them all. It puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity to justify itself in the only terms it recognizes: to become a business proposition, to pay its own way, to show black ink on the bottom line. It turns news into entertainment, scholarship into professional careerism, social work into the scientific management of poverty. Inexorably it remodels every institution in its own image.”
– from Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites