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recent bookmarks from robertogrecoCan gratitude save humanity? - UnHerd2024-03-25T21:26:42+00:00
https://unherd.com/2023/01/can-gratitude-save-humanity/
robertogreco2023 matthewcrawford surfing gratitude transhumanism nature modernity thomasdezengotita attention life living resentment entitlement grievance psychology mentalhealth conservatism ideology politics suffering rationalism society confidence nietzsche gnosticism paulkingsnorth nslyons wildlife plants predation disease death maryharrington irismurdoch self humanwill will music technology math mathematics giambattistavico descartes johanhuizinga risks risktaking uncertainty homoludens play civilization mickeymouse donaldduck skills agency kellyslater ericvoegelin michaeloakeshotthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d3fc6175a508/The Anti-Revolutionary Science - Public Books2024-03-24T21:04:28+00:00
https://www.publicbooks.org/the-anti-revolutionary-science/
robertogrecoEven when findings are empirical rather than theoretical, economists can give them more credence than they warrant. People tend to see figures as “hard” outputs: objective, reliable, repeatable, verifiable. But a good deal of economic data, such as unemployment, inflation, and GDP growth, are statistical approximations, rather than “hard” data points.2
Even if Nasar were able to acknowledge that “the facts” she prizes are actually more like statistical approximations, she would still be facing a deeper problem, which is that, in the period immediately after her story ends, economics goes down a rabbit hole in which statistics begin to be significant simply because they are statistics. This problem is characterized with typically merciless wit by the gadfly economist Deirdre McCloskey in her 2002 manifesto, The Secret Sins of Economics:
It is also completely obvious that a “statistically significant” result can be insignificant for any human purpose. When you are trying to explain the rise and fall of the stock market it may be that the fit (so-called: it means how closely the data line up) is very “tight” for some crazy variable, say skirt lengths (for a long while the correlation was actually quite good). But it doesn’t matter: the variable is obviously crazy. Who cares how closely it fits? For a long time in Britain the number of ham radio operator licenses granted annually was very highly correlated with the number of people certified insane.3
Even McCloskey, though, will not take the next step and acknowledge that it’s not only the more fanciful ideas in economics, but also the central ones, that face this problem. Take, for instance, the idea of “wealth,” which Nasar’s economists universally equate with the ability to purchase commodities, especially luxury goods. For support in making this reductive equation, Nasar approvingly cites the conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter, who wrote in his 1942 masterwork Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy that “Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.” It takes a more than a little habituation to “economic” thinking to realize that this statement conveys the essence of the profession’s idea of “wealth.”
But drawing stockings over the weary legs of a factory girl will no more make her “wealthy” than a thin scrim of romantic subplots and coming-of-age tropes will make the story of modern economics into a romance of the scientific intellect, and Nasar cannot see this. She is unable to acknowledge that economics, far from being an adventure in pure thought or a disinterested “science,” is in fact “scientific” only in the highly specific sense that it is the science of capitalism—or, more accurately, the science of defending capitalism. Through the back door, Nasar admits this thought into her story: the preface describes economics as the search for “a way to improve the lot of the poor without overturning existing society”; and in a description that applies to the vast majority of economists, she notes that Keynes “regarded instability, not inequality, as the great threat to capitalism.” Others are more direct about the managerial function of the field. Robert Heilbroner, whose 1953 book, The Worldly Philosophers, remains one of the most influential histories of economics ever published, wrote in 1995 that “[the] inextricable entanglement of economics with capitalism appears to be the best guarded secret of the profession. Indeed, one suspects that the secret is not even known to all economists.”4 He adds that “the very meaning of ‘economic’ would be unintelligible outside capitalism.”5
This entanglement is lost on Nasar, who writes as though it were economic ideas rather than capitalism transforming the world. Observers cannier than I have noticed this trouble with the book: in his review for The Wall Street Journal, James Grant writes that “economists no more set the world to producing and consuming than baseball statisticians hit home runs.”6 The real geniuses, he suggests, are successful capitalists.
And this is the crux of the problem with Grand Pursuit: the big idea lurking behind “economic genius” is the defense of capitalism, but, brought out in the open, the defense of capitalism tends to sounds heartless. Its sunny side lies in the Marshallian gospel of good times: as long as the wheels are spinning, we can all get wealthier, even if some of us get wealthier than others. Its dark side, which readers can depend on Schumpeter to provide, is that the bad times, when the poor suffer the most, are just the way of the world. Nasar quotes him with sympathy: “Like it or not, [Schumpeter] liked to say, ‘the pattern of boom and bust is the form economic development takes in the era of capitalism.’ ”
That’s an interesting phrase, “the era of capitalism”; it implies it might end. For Schumpeter, nervously gauging the possibility of a socialist East in the 1930s, this was a real concern. For us in 2012, it sounds disingenuous, as though capitalism were just something we’re all trying out while we weigh its pros and cons. But the window for such debates has long since closed, and even if it hadn’t, economics would not be the field to pursue the question of alternatives to capital. It cannot imagine society organized differently than today. No wonder it proved so difficult to write the history of the profession as a romance of the intellect: the paradise of economic theory is simply 2012 with more silk stockings.
In 2006, the economic journalist David Warsh published an enthusiastic history of the field called Knowledge and The Wealth of Nations in which he had the misfortune to focus his zeal precisely on the rise of the mathematics that would come to signify the profession’s complicity in the crash of 2008, a problem Nasar knew well to avoid. But the two books’ admiring portraits share a strong resemblance. For Warsh, until the 1980s and the beginning of the PC revolution, economics really had been the science of scarcity. But, in his story, the rise of the era of the personal computer made economists realize that the source of wealth isn’t stored up in our diminishing natural resources—but in our boundless creativity. In terms very much like the Marshallian ones on which Nasar depends, Warsh’s book tells the story of the rise of what economists have taught us to call “human capital”: the idea that the origin of value (which is seen to have an origin) lies not in material goods per se but in our capacity to recognize the infinite wealth-creating potential in technology. Warsh assigns a much later date to this discovery of abundance—it’s the PC, rather than the railroad or the automobile, that finally rescues us from scarcity—but the storyline is the same.
There is an illuminating difference between Warsh’s book and Nasar’s, though, and it lies in Warsh’s frank account of how the profession policed itself along the road to its math-driven adulthood. Throughout his book, he notes that the worst dismissal that a postwar economist’s work could suffer was that it was “literary.” He describes economists using the word as a cudgel with each other; he uses it himself. For Warsh and his protagonists, the problem with literariness lies in its un-mathematical, and therefore un-scientific nature. But since there is no shortage of commentary among recent economic writers who are willing to say in public that math does not a science make (see, for instance, sympathetic books by Robert Nelson and Jonathan Schlefer), one wonders whether the real force of the epithet is that “literary” work fails to acknowledge the hard truth behind the prosperity-messaging: the truth, à la Schumpeter, that capitalism is not an optional experiment in living, but a compulsory experience of turmoil.
The word “literary” is particularly revealing in this context because, futile though her attempt may be to make a romantic narrative out of the history of economics, Nasar may have been on to something when she tried. She may have sensed, more thoughtfully than Warsh, that there’s something in economic anti-literariness, and in its pretensions to “science,” that calls out for remedy. But she misunderstands the problem, which is not that economics may once have had a literary soul. The problem is that there’s no resolving the conflict between capitalism and what I hope you won’t mind my calling poetry—if by “poetry” I may be permitted to mean the ability to imagine the world otherwise.
For Nasar, touchingly, economics is “scientific” not because it’s rigorous, but because it’s a product of the Enlightenment: she wants very badly to be able to tell the story of economic thinking as a tale of technical progress, in which economists drive poverty from the earth like medical scientists drove away polio. Certainly, liberal economists would like to think of their profession this way, as a prophecy of plenty; they have chafed at the epithet “the dismal science” since Thomas Carlyle first deployed it against the field’s pro-slavery arguments in 1849.
Carlyle’s coinage was, of course, a clever inversion of the idea of a “gay science”—first known to us in Provençal as gai saber, the art of writing poetry, and later, via Nietzsche, as the wisdom of a “science” that revels in not needing to defend itself by claiming to be one. But nobody who’s paying attention to economic theory could mistake it for a science. Unfortunately for economics, it isn’t poetry either. And as the art of apology for the world as it is, it never will be."]]>2012 christophernealon occupywallstreet ows jeffreysachs economics capitalism liberalism neoliberalism socktherapy greatdepression greatrecession globalfinancialcrisis irvingfisher stability science academia academics highereducation highered nassimtaleb burtonmalkiel 1973 2007 finance business 2008 genius sylvianassar johnmaynardkeynes class history humanity abundance theory davidricardo thomasmalthus karlmarx marshallplan economists alfredmarshall gdp 1929 deirdremccloskey socialsciences socialscience inequality robertheilbroner josephschrumpeter socialism democracy jamesgrant managerialism davidwarsh scarcity robertnelson jonathanschlefer nietzschehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d0b042f3cec6/Know Your Enemy: René Girard and the Right, with John Ganz - Dissent Magazine2024-02-27T15:05:11+00:00
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-rene-girard-and-the-right-with-john-ganz/
robertogrecorenégirard peterthiel stanford 2024 philosophy modernity theology christianity samkriss girardianism matthewsitman samadler-bell right johnganz karlmarx freud catholicism literature afterlife lacan socialmedia business siliconvalley theory johndewey competition envy jealousy conservatism conservatives hucksters startups politics totaltheoryofhistory history secularmodernity continentalphilosophy culture psychology abstractelegance entrepreneurship entrepreneurialism walkerpercy christ jesus aristotle irreligiosity rivals rivalry alexisdetocqueville pragmatism leostrauss firstprinciples hucksterism michaeloakeshott pandemic covid-19 coronavirus alanbloom connorwilliams williamjames liberalism pessimism nietzsche proust marcelproust subjectivity self anguish paradox inequality hatred originalsin innocence socialorder conversion jamesgwilliams masochism kierkegaard religion comparativereligion jordanpeterson rationality rationalism reason insatiability facebooks anthropology genius conflict violence conscioushttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:941a21db45c2/An Exciting Time - The Loaf, with Tim Kreider2024-02-02T15:45:14+00:00
https://timkreider.substack.com/p/an-exciting-time
robertogrecotimekreider 2024 writing howwewrite attention recluses solitude publishing kenkesy huntersthompson trumancapote thomaspynchon jdsalinger excitement books bookreleases ambition fame modesty nietzsche karlmarx ovid seneca howweread howwethink thinking appreciation halfoster raybradbury self-promotion readers harlanellison celebrity performance nellgreenfieldboyce megthompson correspondence conversation acknowledgementhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7565c346aa7f/Opinion | No, I Don’t Want to Go for a Walk With You - The New York Times2023-09-20T22:56:52+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/opinion/walk-and-talk-meetings.html
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https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/resistance-in-the-arts
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/23/has-academia-ruined-literary-criticism-professing-criticism-john-guillory
robertogrecomerveemre 2023 literarycriticism academia books criticism howweread howwewrite professionalization highered highereducation culture iarichards samuelbutler karlmarx authority culturecreation johnguillory tseliot pierrebourdieu howardbloom sandragilbert susangubar canons henrylouisgates classics lewistheobald literacy magalisarfattilarson scholarship rogerkimball edwardasaid johndewey thorsteinveblen geoffreypullum education elitism internet thegermanideology literature literarystudies online nietzsche henrylouisgatesjrhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e76c7ceaf03f/Attending to Technology: Theses for Disputation2022-12-11T07:30:06+00:00
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/attending-to-technology-theses-for-disputation
robertogreco2016 alanjacobs technology surveillance attention conviviality luddism mindfulness matthewcrawford evgenymorozov simoneweil charlestaylor christopheralexander apatternlanguage seangallagher adnuttall facebook mondragon paulgriffiths paulford mikhailbakhtin charlessimic nietzsche frankkermode literature writing kevinkelly nedo'gorman georgebernardshaw cyborgs twitter socialmedia kant umbertoeco richardrorty johnruskin cslewis tomhiddleston alextabarrok turingtest jaronlanier virginiawoolf mauricemerleau-ponty ivanillich toolsforconviviality immanuelkanthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:49fb85a8f1db/Between Chaos and the Man: How not to become an anarchist, by Alan Jacobs2022-12-09T10:23:37+00:00
https://harpers.org/archive/2022/12/between-chaos-and-the-man-the-dawn-of-everything-graeber-wengrow-the-dispossessed-ursula-k-le-guin/
robertogrecoanarchism 2022 alanjacobs ursulaleguin davidgraeber waltermosley society civilization primitivism cooperativism anarcho-syndicalism anarcho-communism marxism capitalism economics praxis practice politics philosophy mutualaid behavior action calvinism cooperation freedom greed vanity vainglory morality chaos murraybookchin pierre-josephproudhon marshallsahlins thedispossessed socialorder human humans decentralization thomashobbes selfishness pride peterkropotkin reciprocity competition dominance power politicalphilosophy nikilsaval sigfriedgiedion nietzsche us marginalization humannature utopia orthodoxy sciencefiction scifi discomfort hunter-gatherers socialdevelopment arthurcclarke loreneiseleyinequality injustice efficiency productivity exploitation solidarity possession dispossession ownership governance order hierarchy rule complexity corruption evil authority obstructionism anthropology originalsin centralization standards canons enough structure expectation tradition traditions expectations conventionshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d75c8407de79/Valparaíso 2013. La hierba florece de noche: Gastón Soublette y Cristián Warnken. - YouTube2020-12-09T01:52:39+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3OGmdq5SqU
robertogrecogastónsoublette 2013 cristiánwarnken chile philosophy wisdom nietzsche sustainability climatechange christianity tao mapuche indigeneity indigenous poetry valparaíso culture society cities urban urbanism technology community pueblos villages virtue creativity masses nihilism communities limache rural life living song violetaparra elitism eurocentrism tradition history taoism confucianism china mao maotsetunghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ee29eb62b0e4/Diego Maradona: the achingly human superstar who embodied Argentina | Marcela Mora y Araujo | Football | The Guardian2020-11-28T02:15:27+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/nov/25/diego-maradona-the-achingly-human-superstar-who-embodied-argentina
robertogrecomaradona 2020 marcelamorayaraujo football futbol juansasturain argentina argentinidad nietzsche genius victorhugomurales media personality celebrity addiction idols mariodebenedetti contradiction humanness césarmenotti soccerhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7f885f830899/Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: "Wildcat The Totality" - Fred Moten And Stefano Harney Revisit The Undercommons In A Time Of Pandemic And Rebellion (Part 1)2020-07-07T16:39:38+00:00
https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/wildcat-the-totality-fred-moten-and-stefano-harney-revisit-the-undercommons-in-a-time-of-pandemic-and-rebellion-part-1
robertogrecofredmoten stefanoharney 2020 undercommons undercommoning acabspring covid-19 coronavirus whitesupremacy highereducation highered unschooling labor work whiteness politics citizenship blackness patriarchy solidarity empathy rebellion insurgency identity capitalism radicalism statues symbols police policing opacity individuation socialwealth policebrutality antagonism policy afropessimism cedricrobinson ruthwilsongilmore generalantagonism saidiyahartman frankwilderson averygordon tiffanylethaboking karlmarx freud heiddeger nietzsche opposition robindgkelley arthurjafa phantomlimbs beauty horror pain hortensespillers allyship liberalism thecommons commons privatization sharing power wealth interest interests poverty self-interest canon extraction subordination resistance angeladavis maternalism gender socialization sexuality difference blackpanthers blackpantherparty revolution personhood selfhood legibility illegibility refusal subjection electoralpolitics genocide us robinkelley millennialsarekillingcapitalishttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c1a7e3bcfd7e/on misunderstanding critical theory – Snakes and Ladders2020-05-28T18:15:28+00:00
https://blog.ayjay.org/on-misunderstanding-critical-theory/
robertogrecoalanjacobs criticaltheory literarytheory 2020 theodoradorno paulricoeur frankfurtschool postcolonialism freud jung ecocriticism maxhorkheimer jameslindsay humanities criticalracetheory via:lukeneff carljung kierkegaard karlmarx nietzsche criticism christianity auden whauden theory northropfrye feminism post-structuralism gender gendertheory claudelecvi-strauss anthropology deconstruction skepticism dostoevsky dostoyevsky frantzfanonhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1ef442cb49e4/Duke University Press - Baroque New Worlds2019-06-26T02:16:32+00:00
https://www.dukeupress.edu/baroque-new-worlds
robertogrecobaroque latinamerica literature counterconquest europe postcolonialism transcultural neobaroque nietzsche heinrichwölfflin walterbenjamin eugeniod'ors renéwellek mariopraz alejocarpentier josélezamalima severosarduy édouardglissant haroldodecampos carlosfuentes dorothybaker christinebuci-glucksmann josépascualbuxó leocabranes-grant irlemarchiampi williamchilders gonzalocelorio jorgeruedasdelaserna robertogonzálezechevarría ángelguido monikakaup timothyreiss alfonsoreyes pedrohenríquezureña maartenvandelden christopherwinks loisparkinsonzamorahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a00d052d7d25/School is Literally a Hellhole – Medium2018-06-14T05:45:56+00:00
https://medium.com/@hhschiaravalli/school-is-literally-a-hellhole-bac8427a65ec
robertogrecoarthurchiaravalli schools schooling schooliness presence unschooling deschooling education learning highschool competition coexistence community benjamindoxtdator engagement blogging teaching howweteach howwelearn personalbranding innovation johndewey work labor nietzsche collectivism collectivity cooperation care caring merit entrepreneurship passion 2018 foucault michelfoucaulthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:164066991bbf/Take your time: the seven pillars of a Slow Thought manifesto | Aeon Essays2018-03-12T00:10:03+00:00
https://aeon.co/essays/take-your-time-the-seven-pillars-of-a-slow-thought-manifesto
robertogrecoslow slowthought 2018 life philosophy alainbadiou neilpostman time place conservation preservation guttormfløistad cittaslow carlopetrini cities food history urban urbanism mikhailbakhti walking emmanuellevinas solviturambulando walterbenjamin play playfulness homoludens johanhuizinga milankundera resistance counterculture culture society relaxation leisure artleisure leisurearts psychology eichardrorty wittgenstein socrates nietzsche jacquesderrida vincenzodinicola joelelkes giorgioagamben michelfoucault foucault asjalacis porosity reflection conviction laurencesterne johnmilton edmundhusserl jacqueslacan dispacement deferral delay possibility anti-philosophy gabrielgarcíamárquez gabohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:30b2936304f5/Will Self: Are humans evolving beyond the need to tell stories? | Books | The Guardian2016-11-26T09:50:40+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/25/will-self-humans-evolving-need-stories
robertogrecocommunication digital writing howwewrite entertainment books socialmedia neuroscience 2016 marshallmcluhan gutenbergminds print change singularity videogames gaming games poetry novels susangreenfield rote rotelearning twitter knowledge education brain wayfinding memory location narration navigation vladimirnabokov proust janeausten film video attention editing reading howweread visualizationhypothesis visualization text imagery images cognition literacy multiliteracies memories nietzsche booklearning technology mobile phones mentalillness ptsd humans humanity digitalmedia richardbrautigan narrative storytelling willself marcelprousthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4e074e4823ae/Against Interpretation2016-07-31T03:14:21+00:00
http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/sontag-againstinterpretation.html
robertogrecoart interpretation philosophy theory essays susansontag plato artistotle film representation innocence nietzsche proust kafka tennesseewilliams jean-lucgodard rolandbarthes erwinpanofsky northropfrye walterbenjamin yasujirōozu robertbresson culture thought senses oscarwilde willemdekooning content appearances aesthetics invisibile myth antiquity karlmarx freud jamesjoyce rainermariarilke andrégide dhlawrence jeancocteau alainresnais alainrobbe-grillet ingmarbergman ezrapund tseliot dgriffith françoistruffaut michelangeloantonioni ermannoolmi criticism pierrefrancastel mannyfarber dorothyvanghent rndalljarrell waltwhitman williamfaulkner marcelproust ozuhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:0bf4eb1764d3/What Is an "Existential Crisis”?: An Animated Video Explains What the Expression Really Means | Open Culture2016-07-10T00:24:20+00:00
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/what-is-an-existential-crisis.html
robertogrecoexistentialcrises existentialism philosophy video 2016 kierkegaard camus nietzsche heidegger sartre jean-paulsartre albertcamus humancondition alaindebottonhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cf41afe0cff1/Speed Kills: Fast is never fast enough - The Chronicle of Higher Education2014-10-21T19:43:58+00:00
http://m.chronicle.com/article/Speed-Kills/149401/
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http://cargocollective.com/marclafia/Empires-Revolution-of-the-Present
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http://hilariousbookbinder.blogspot.com/2014/09/death-and-afterlife.html
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http://metaismurder.com/post/89480264491/genera
robertogreco"It may be mere historical conditioning, but when I see a man or a woman alone, he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly."
The idea that a human seen clearly is a mystery is anathema to a culture of judgment —such as ours— which rests on a simple premise: humans can be understood by means of simple schema that map their beliefs or actions to moral categories. Moreover, because there are usually relatively few of these categories, and few important issues of discernment —our range of political concerns being startlingly narrow, after all— humans can be understood and judged at high speed in large, generalized groups: Democrats, Republicans, women, men, people of color, whites, Muslims, Christians, the rich, the poor, Generation X, millennials, Baby Boomers, and so on.
It should but does not go without saying that none of those terms describes anything with sufficient precision to support the kinds of observations people flatter themselves making. Generalization is rarely sound. No serious analysis, no serious effort to understand, describe, or change anything can contain much generalization, as every aggregation of persons introduces error. One can hardly describe a person in full, let alone a family, a city, a class, a state, a race. Yet we persist in doing so, myself included."
…
"One of the very best things Nietzsche ever wrote:
"The will to a system is a lack of integrity."
But to systematize is our first reaction to life in a society of scale, and our first experiment as literate or educated or even just “grown-up” persons with powers of apprehension, cogitation, and rhetoric. What would a person be online if he lacked a system in which phenomena could be traced to the constellation of ideas which constituted his firmament? What is life but the daily diagnosis of this or that bit of news as “yet another example of” an overarching system of absolutely correct beliefs? To have a system is proof of one’s seriousness, it seems —our profiles so often little lists of what we “believe,” or what we “are”— and we coalesce around our systems of thought just as our parents did around their political parties, though we of course consider ourselves mere rationalists following the evidence. Not surprisingly, the evidence always leads to the conclusion that many people in the world are horrible, stupid, even evil; and we are smart, wise, and good. It should be amusing, but it is not.
I hate this because I am doing this right now. I detest generalization because when I scan Twitter I generalize about what I see: “people today,” or “our generation,” I think, even though the people of today are as all people always have been, even though they are all just like me. I resent their judgments because I feel reduced by them and feel reality is reduced, so I reduce them with my own judgments: shallow thinkers who lack, I mutter, the integrity not to systematize. And I put fingers to keys to note this system of analysis, lacking all integrity, mocking my very position.
I want to maintain my capacity to view each as a mystery, as a human in full, whose interiority I cannot know. I want not to be full of hatred, so I seek to confess that my hatred is self-hatred: shame at the state of my intellectual reactivity and decay. I worry deeply that our systematizing is inevitable because when we are online we are in public: that these fora mandate performance, and worse, the kind of performance that asserts its naturalness, like the grotesquely beautiful actor who says, "Oh, me? I just roll out of bed in the morning and wear whatever I find lying about" as he smiles a smile so practiced it could calibrate the atomic clock. Every online utterance is an angling for approval; we write in the style of speeches: exhorting an audience, haranguing enemies, lauding the choir. People “remind” no one in particular of the correct ways to think, the correct opinions to hold. When I see us speaking like op-ed columnists, I feel embarrassed: it is like watching a lunatic relative address passers-by using the “royal we,” and, I feel, it is pitifully imitative. Whom are we imitating? Those who live in public: politicians, celebrities, “personalities.”
There is no honesty without privacy, and privacy is not being forbidden so much as rendered irrelevant; privacy is an invented concept, after all, and like all inventions must contend with waves of successive technologies or be made obsolete. The basis of privacy is the idea that judgment should pertain only to public acts —acts involving other persons and society— and not the interior spaces of the self. Society has no right to judge one’s mind; society hasn’t even the right to inquire about one’s mind. The ballot is secret; one cannot be compelled to testify or even talk in our criminal justice system; there can be no penalty for being oneself, however odious we may find given selves or whole (imagined) classes of selves.
This very radical idea has an epistemological basis, not a purely moral one: the self is a mystery. Every self is a mystery. You cannot know what someone really is, what they are capable of, what transformations of belief or character they might undergo, in what their identity consists, what they’ve inherited or appropriated, what they’ll abandon or reconsider; you cannot say when a person is who she is, at what point the “real” person exists or when a person’s journey through selves has stopped. A person is not, we all know, his appearance; but do we all know that she is not her job? Or even her politics?
But totalizing rationalism is emphatic: either something is known or it is irrelevant. Thus: the mystery of the self is a myth; there is no mystery at all. A self is valid or invalid, useful or not, correct or incorrect, and if someone is sufficiently different from you, if their beliefs are sufficiently opposed to yours, their way of life alien enough, they are to be judged and detested. Everyone is a known quantity; simply look at their Twitter bio and despise.
But this is nonsense. In truth, the only intellectually defensible posture is one of humility: all beliefs are misconceptions; all knowledge is contingent, temporary, erroneous; and no self is knowable, not truly, not to another. We can perhaps sense this in ourselves —although I worry that many of us are too happy to brag about our conformity to this or that scheme or judgment, to use labels that honor us as though we’ve earned ourselves rather than chancing into them— but we forget that this is true of every single other, too. This forgetting is the first step of the so-called othering process: forget that we are bound together in irreducibility, forget that we ought to be humble in all things, and especially in our judgments of one another.
Robinson once more:
"Only lonesomeness allows one to experience this sort of radical singularity, one’s greatest dignity and privilege."
Lonesomeness is what we’re all fleeing at the greatest possible speed, what our media now concern themselves chiefly with eliminating alongside leisure. We thus forget our radical singularity, a personal tragedy, an erasure, a hollowing-out, and likewise the singularity of others, which is a tragedy more social and political in nature, and one which seems to me truly and literally horrifying. Because more than any shared “belief system” or political pose, it is the shared experience of radical singularity that unites us: the shared experience of inimitability and mortality. Anything which countermands our duty to recognize and honor the human in the other is a kind of evil, however just its original intention."]]>millsbaker canon self reality empathy humility howwethink 2014 generalizations morality nietzsche integrity marilynnerobinson mystery grace privacy categorization pigeonholingsingularity lonesomeness loneliness leisure artleisure leisurearts beliefs belief inimitability humanism judgement familiarity understandinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:4d5931ae88cb/BBC News - The slow death of purposeless walking2014-05-07T23:41:54+00:00
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27186709
robertogrecowalking thinking 2014 flaneur wandering charlesdickens georgeorwell patrickleigh constantinbrancusi thoreau thomasdequincey nassimtaleb nietzsche brucechatwin wgebald johnfrancis fredericgros geoffnicholson merlincoverley observation attention mindfulness rebeccasolnit finlorohrer vladimirnabokov flâneurs flaneurs flâneurhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:480b38f3f9e5/BOMB Magazine — Etel Adnan by Lisa Robertson2014-04-08T19:49:00+00:00
http://bombmagazine.org/article/10024/etel-adnan
robertogrecoeteladnan lisarobertson interviews 2014 obscurity writing light art gender women shadows night nighttime joannekyger philosophy canon idiolects colloquialisms language literature poetry poems susanhowe nietzsche heidegger nature balzac baudelaire love friendship time timing relationships invention making images thinking howwethink howwework howwewrite posthumanism beirut lebanon paris berkeley ucberkeley ucb calhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8a1f03ecd738/Messages The City Wants Us To Hear – The New Inquiry2013-11-27T18:52:15+00:00
http://thenewinquiry.com/features/messages-the-city-wants-us-to-hear/
robertogrecoboredom cities nyc history accuracy fear joy society life living 2010 timothylevitch speedology 2002 suffering humanity faith nietzsche bennettmiller destruction creativityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cf82326cb604/To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees | Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon2013-11-22T00:25:09+00:00
http://geopolicraticus.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/to-see-is-to-forget-the-name-of-the-thing-one-sees/
robertogrecoAll acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought. It is obtained when the desire for knowledge is alone operative, by a study which does not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that character, but adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its objects. This enlargement of Self is not obtained when, taking the Self as it is, we try to show that the world is so similar to this Self that knowledge of it is possible without any admission of what seems alien. The desire to prove this is a form of self-assertion and, like all self-assertion, it is an obstacle to the growth of Self which it desires, and of which the Self knows that it is capable. Self-assertion, in philosophic speculation as elsewhere, views the world as a means to its own ends; thus it makes the world of less account than Self, and the Self sets bounds to the greatness of its goods. In contemplation, on the contrary, we start from the not-Self, and through its greatness the boundaries of Self are enlarged; through the infinity of the universe the mind which contemplates it achieves some share in infinity.
The obvious extension of this conception of impersonal self-enlargement to an ethics of thought enjoins the self-enlargement of the intellect, the transgression of the limits of the intellect. It is the exercise of imagination that enlarges the intellect, and a great many human failures that we put to failures of understanding and cognition are in fact failures of imagination.
The moral obligation of self-enlargement is a duty of intellectual self-transgression. As Nietzsche put it: “A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions!”"
[Came here today because https://twitter.com/rogre/status/403632186944790528 + https://twitter.com/rogre/status/403632476154626048 + https://twitter.com/rogre/status/403636512656334848
thus the tagging with Robert Irwin, Lawrence Weschler, and Clarice Lispector]]]>paulvaléry wittgenstein thought language aphorism mind memory senses familiarization robertirwin lawrenceweschler naming categorization predication freud bertrandrussell self philosophy claricelispector knowledge knowledgeacquisition self-enlargement nietzsche brasil brazil literaturehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:6bd3390d40c4/Notebooks2012-09-10T16:50:10+00:00
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/
robertogreconotes curiosity nietzsche commonplacebooks notetaking notebooks via:selinjessa cosmashalizi unbookhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:370817479271/How Do We Identifiy Good Ideas? | Wired Science | Wired.com2012-01-24T07:58:20+00:00
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/how-do-we-identifiy-good-ideas/
robertogreco2012 imagination editing rejection ideas nietzsche sifting sorting creativity thinking artists jonahlehrerhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b65fa53499e4/Nietzsche, Use and Abuse of History (e-text)2011-07-21T04:44:00+00:00
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/history.htm
robertogreconietzsche history goethe culture greeks romans youth honesty morality toread via:timcarmodyhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:54bea859fe90/Conan O’Brien’s Dartmouth Commencement Address ... - AUSTIN KLEON : TUMBLR2011-06-27T08:07:33+00:00
http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/6564599185/conan-obriens-dartmouth-commencement-address
robertogrecoconano'brien dartmouth creativity voice identity humor 2011 change mannerisms johnnycarson davidletterman jackbenny failure copying mimicry quirkiness personality mutations babyboomers uniqueness success nietzsche disappointment socialmedia innovation spontaneity satisfaction convictions fear reinvention perceivedfailure self-defintion clarity originality commencementspeeches boomers commencementaddresseshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:259e37ec7a82/The Philosophy of Insomnia - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education2011-05-01T21:15:50+00:00
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Philosophy-of-Insomnia/127029/
robertogreco
The first thing you learn about insomnia is that it sees in the dark. The second is that it sees nothing. Nada, nichts, néant. The French philosopher Maurice Blanchot said in The Writing of the Disaster (1980), "In the night, insomnia is discussion, not the work of arguments bumping against other arguments, but the extreme shuddering of no thoughts, percussive stillness."
[via: http://tumble77.com/post/5041107129/the-philosophy-of-insomnia ]]]>philosophy sleep insomnia religion willisregier aristotle nietzsche plato emilcioranhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a5fe603af3e5/Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche: Three Philosophers in Three Hours | Open Culture2011-04-27T02:27:10+00:00
http://www.openculture.com/2011/04/sartre_heidegger_nietzsche_three_philosophers_in_three_hours.html
robertogrecoculture philosophy video towatch jean-paulsartre sartre heidegger nietzsche via:javierarbona simonedebouvoir documentaryhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:dece5137558b/Social contract - Wikipedia2011-04-23T18:35:27+00:00
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
robertogrecosocialcontract philosophy politics social history karlmarx marxism nietzsche freud deleuze foucault lacan christianity individualism liberalthought post-structuralism stucturalism religion jacquesderrida gillesdeleuze louisalthusser michelfoucault althusserhttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fa8ba51e6326/The Virtues Of Play | Wired Science | Wired.com2011-03-19T23:17:18+00:00
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/the-virtues-of-play/
robertogrecoeducation play children psychology games reggioemilia montessori kindergarten preschool unschooling deschooling jonahlehrer nietzsche learning academics reading math tcsnmy schools damagedbyschools cognition parentinghttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a10b2b8c6571/On the pleasures of reading Kant. « The Pinocchio Theory2011-03-14T01:56:44+00:00
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=478
robertogrecophilosophy kant rhetoric stylists writing style wittgenstein nietzsche hume spinoza plato socrates immanuelkanthttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ea2688869a25/International Philosophy Sketch from Monty Python2011-03-14T01:54:40+00:00
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~ebarnes/python/international-philosophy.htm
robertogrecohumor philosophy football satire film montypython wittgenstein kant nietzsche heidegger hegel leibniz plato socrates aristotle archimedes sophocles ancientgreece soccer sports futbol immanuelkanthttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:460988a58342/potlatch: blogging and its opposite2008-07-03T00:42:35+00:00
http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/2008/07/the-opposite-of-blogging.html
robertogrecoblogging thinking critique writing academia nietzsche blogs footnotes psychology via:blackbeltjoneshttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:360871133bb1/