He compared an African mask,4 leaving its country of origin on the continent unspecified, with the Apollo Belvedere at the Vatican, concluding with characteristic assuredness that “the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilisation than the mask.”

The preconditions for a durable peace often come only from a credible threat of war.

Freud wrote that the “formation of a religion,” with its oscillating focus on guilt and atonement from sin, itself “seems to be based on the suppression, the renunciation, of certain instinctual impulses.” It is perhaps that same hostility, often flagrant, to religion in elite culture that holds back the development of belief in the current

The act of rebellion that involves building something from nothing—whether it is a poem from a blank page, a painting from a canvas, or software code on a screen—by definition requires a rejection of what has come before. It involves the bracing conclusion that something new is necessary. The hubris involved in the act of creation—that

It is true, of course, that purportedly neutral or innocent aesthetic decisions are often means of constructing and maintaining caste hierarchies.

The means by which the Chinese government patrolled the boundaries of speech, however, were far more subversive in Link’s view, and in many ways more closely approximate the contemporary model of attempts to constrain speech in the United States. Link wrote that the Chinese government “rejected these more mechanical methods” of censorship used by

“the counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal-computer revolution.”

The issue is that humans will inevitably seek out ways of finding intimacy and connection with strangers, with people they will never meet. Should we challenge the nation’s role in that process? Or allow it to step into a breach that would otherwise be filled by an ascendant consumer culture, in which identity and belonging are defined by what one

The ubiquitous off-ramps and backup plans among the current generation, and instinct to burnish the rough edges off of one’s opinions, stand in opposition to throwing oneself into an endeavor with the abandon, nearly reckless, that is required to succeed, or at least fail in a sufficiently substantial way that provokes development.