Sublime

A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix.

Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based. This is not a good thing. Each person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabiliz

“belittlement” is the inevitable lot of human beings in a social world,

Many times individuals or peoples are dismissed for illegitimate or no-longer-legitimate reasons. It is the leftist challenge to the status quo that permits them to be integrated into society.

David Levy, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, has updated both the utilitarian and the humanistic arguments for the networked age by calling for a new “informational environmentalism.” Just as we fight to save marsh lands and old-growth forests from development and pollution, he says, so we need to fight to save

Roosevelt had “countervailing qualities of a rare and inspiring order.” [H]e was large-hearted and possessed wide political horizons, imaginative sweep, understanding of the time in which he lived and of the direction of the great new forces at work in the twentieth century—technological, racial, imperialist, anti-imperialist; he was in favour of l

twenty pages in length during the entire year.

I figured Professor Haidt would speak about moral psychology, the theme of his book. But instead, on the day of the talk, Haidt discussed the purpose of a university. He urged the audience to consider whether the aim of higher education is to protect students or to equip them with the ability to seek truth, and he was clearly in favor of the latter

We live in a time where, in the words of social theorist Roberto Unger, we are governed by people who ‘confuse conformism with realism’.6