A collection of 350 posts
The announced intention of reframing the country’s origin date struck many readers across the political spectrum as an implicit repudiation of the American revolution and its underlying principles.
Ortega viewed the mass man as an interloper in technically advanced, liberal democracies he had played no part in building.
By 2014, Homo sapiens had, by the reckoning of the World Wildlife Fund, destroyed an incredible 60 percent of the wild mammal, bird, reptile, and fish populations that were in existence as recently as 1970.
These were veterans of the long Pacific campaign. They’d survived many terrible encounters with the Japanese in their westward campaign across the Pacific, and they looked the part.
Despite the uncertainties and tensions that characterize modern political life, we would do well to remember that the future we want is never the future we actually get, and that civilisation will outlast the fragility of politics.
Totalitarian regimes begin in mass movements, but it should be noted that not all mass movements are totalitarian. The American Civil Rights movement was a mass movement and undoubtedly a hugely positive force for urgently needed change.
The problem with this picture of the Renaissance is not that it has no truth to it—it certainly has some—but that it is perversely unbalanced.
Even in the darkest period of economic and political collapse, the chain of urban societies that stretched across the Old World was never broken.
Much of today’s madness results from the failure to impart that lesson, a failure in which those ostensible repositories of enlightenment (the nation’s institutions of higher learning), obstinately committed to inflaming self-pity and self-importance, are indisputably and indefensibly complicit.
One possibility is that morality is dependent on local circumstances and facts about social order and organization.
The Hagia Sophia was the brainchild of a unique figure in history.
The US’s hegemonic period, now shrinking, often looked like empire, especially the British version, which it mostly replaced.
Contemplation of such great age is intrinsically moving, perhaps because it releases us from the oppressive clamour of the moment.
And this neo-totalitarianism has learned from the past: It has its inquisitions, its auto-da-fes, its purges and cultural revolutions, reeducation and self-criticism sessions, and above all the ostracization and ultimate erasure of dissidents.
So in the end, slavery, the slave trade and imperialism were not only morally disgusting but also of dubious economic value.