Bra Beach is peppered today with lots of Sydneysiders who are burning as the sun is merciless... PicniC by the sea is great for the soul even if the skin is burning like hell ;-)\
Piketty vs. Piketty Brad DeLong, Project Syndicate
The keyboard and the spade New Statesman Subhead: “In the overdeveloped West, technology is making us forget what it truly means to be human.”
The true warrior thinks only of honor and his code of valour but the Self protects ones soul, writes Michael Dirda. [Review of Vaclav Havel Note ...]
The only thing in Mark Edmundson’s new book that isn’t provocative is its title. “Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals”
sounds earnest, high-minded and dull, probably a worthy academic study
revisiting territory mapped out long ago by Matthew Arnold and Lionel
Trilling.
Wrong. What you will
find instead is an impassioned critique of Western society, a relentless
assault on contemporary complacency, shallowness, competitiveness and
self-regard.
Americans have become,
Edmundson says, wholly pragmatic and small-minded, always on the lookout
for the main chance and conditioned to be greedy for the gaudy trash
supplied by our consumerist overlords. We move restlessly from want to
want, never discovering any lasting satisfaction. As for living heroic
or noble lives, our video games and movies do that for us. Meanwhile,
Edmundson adds, “the profound stories about heroes and saints are
passing from our minds.” Our days have no purpose. Instead of aspiring
to grandeur, we surrender to pettiness and accommodation...
After Achilles and
Jesus, can Socrates be far behind? Edmundson stresses that a thinking
life should be focused on seeking the truth, sometimes on being a
disturber of the peace. One must resist the blandishments of conformity,
as well as the threats of those in power. Otherwise, the mind could end
up a slave to the trivial, set to sweating over account books or to
outwitting our business competitors. Every day, though, the truly
philosophical human being “adds something to her store of perceptions
about what the true and good and beautiful are, and how men and women
might live rightly in the world.” ‘Self and Soul’: Mark Edmundson’s biting critique of modern complacency
Throughout “Self and Soul,” Edmundson writes
with a Thoreau-like incisiveness and fervor. “Perhaps no life that one
cannot wish for as a child offers a genuine sense of joy. Virtually no
child dreams of being an accountant, an insurance salesman, or even a
CEO. Children dream of courage and goodness — and so, in some regions of
their spirits, do many adults.” In fact, “by committing to ideals, men
and women can escape the alternating peaks and low points that the life
of desire creates and live in a more continuously engaged and satisfying
way.”
‘The House of Twenty Thousand Books’ re-creates an intellectual milieu