January 6, 2012
The Nation and its Pieces
Nationalisms often employ stereotypical, one-dimensional descriptions of the nation’s subregions in their self-regarding odes. This has a function. Imagine a view of England, say, with the coal miners of Newcastle, the industrial Manchester area, the white cliffs of Dover, and so on. Or France, with the hardy Norman fishers in Normandy, Breton seafarers and ancient citadels in Brittany, medieval castles on the Loire, skiing resorts in the Alps, sunny beaches on the Riviera, red workingmen of Paris, etc. Or America, with the amber waves of grain in the Midwest, the diligent financial men in suits in New York, the decadent film industry camped out in Southern California, pot-growing hippies in Northern California, Southern hospitality and chivalry across the southeast, oil barons in Texas, etc. Each of these stereotypes, taken literally, is impossible; it’s crazy to imagine a Newcastle made of literally nothing but coal miners, or a Paris with only communist laborers, or a Midwest with nothing but cornfields. In fact it’s only possible to imagine at least minimally diverse places, with at least an elementary division of labor between classes and types. So if America is made up of the stereotypical North, South, Midwest, Texas, and Northern and Southern California, it’s only as a whole nation that it makes sense as a place—each part on its own feels incomplete. These stereotypical descriptions are thus both a result of and an encouragement to nationalism.
November 22, 2011
The Public Imperative and the Hortatory ‘Je’
In life, we are constantly surrounded by signs urging us to do or not to do things. In English, they are usually in the imperative mood: Stop, Take one, Cut along dotted line. In the case of interdictions, they might use the gerund: No smoking. In specific cases there may be other syntaxes, but in general these two, the imperative and the gerund, form what might be called the “public imperative” in English.
Not so in French. Read the rest of this entry »
October 31, 2011
Travelogue: Reykjavik
I recently spent a few days in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital and only real city. Here are a few of my impressions. Read the rest of this entry »
September 30, 2011
Scarcity and Waste
Last night I watched Soylent Green, the 1973 Charlton Heston film set in an overcrowded future America. Like Citizen Kane it has, for some reason, become known for its twist ending. That twist is actually one of the less interesting aspects of the movie, which is reminiscent of Blade Runner in its ceaselessly pessimistic imagination of human nature and our human future. Read the rest of this entry »
May 28, 2011
The Conservation of Evil
Most of us, most of the time, rely heavily on intuition in our moral decision-making. Nothing wrong with that; it’s a lot more efficient than sitting down to philosophize every time we need to do or judge something, even if we had an abstract moral philosophy we were absolutely comfortable with, which most of us don’t. But intuition is vulnerable to certain types of fallacies, including those that seem solidly true because of their resemblance to something true in another field of life.
We’re all familiar with the principle behind the conservation of energy, even those of us who know nothing about physics; the basic idea of conservation forms a part of the body of received knowledge we call common sense. The moral equivalent of the conservation of energy could be called the conservation of evil. Unlike its physical analogue, the conservation of evil doesn’t stand up to more than casual scrutiny. Read the rest of this entry »
March 31, 2011
George Michael or Friedrich Nietzsche?
Who sang or wrote it: singer-songwriter and 1980s pop icon George Michael, or free spirit and 1880s philosophy icon Friedrich Nietzsche? Read the rest of this entry »
December 2, 2010
Science
I’m in awe of some people who can solve difficult math or especially logic problems: given some seemingly inconsequential input, they can deduce conclusions that seem at first glance to bear no relation to what they started with.
But think about what we as a species have accomplished over the course of our existence. Read the rest of this entry »
November 18, 2010
Should We Capitalize All Our Nouns?
In German every noun gets capitalized. Should we be doing that in English too? Read the rest of this entry »
November 3, 2010
Rally to Restore the Media
Approximately 215,000 people gathered on the National Mall last Saturday, including me, for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. But, as the hosts themselves acknowledged, it was not clear why exactly everyone had come. Read the rest of this entry »
