Workers Give Up

The share of all men ages 16 and over who are working is now at its lowest level since the government began keeping statistics in the 1940s.

David Leonhardt, "Workers Give Up" (Dec. 5, 2008)

The pretext for progressive rhetoric is, of course, the idea that man, the creature of reason and benevolence, has only to understand the truth in order to act upon it. But the function of progressive rhetoric is another matter; it is, in Dwight McDonald's phrase, to accomplish "in fantasy what cannot be accomplished in reality." Because politics is for [the liberal] a means of accommodating himself to a world he does not like but does not really want to change, he can find ample gratification in words. They appease his twinges of guilt without committing him to very drastic action. Thus the expiatory role of resolutions in progressive meetings.

Arthur Schlesinger, The Vital Center (1949)

On B+ movies and literature

In short, the contemporary apocalypse pits family values against the cannibalistic universe--the good guys versus the bad guys, in McCarthy's unironic terms. And so, with the end of civilization, the age-old conflict between sexual love (eros) and love of one's neighbor (caritas) also disappears; and the grown-up Jesus' exhortation to his followers that they leave their families if they wish to pursue righteousness is as little remembered as among Christian fundamentalists today. No one pauses to reflect that in our civilization, pre-collapse, it was invariably the defense of the individual household that justified a nation's warlike international posture or its profligate use of energy. Nuclear war might be averted, went the insipid Sting hit of the late cold war, if the Russians love their children too. But if global warming is not arrested, it will be because we (and the Russians) want for our children everything we have and more.

Benjamin Kunkel, "Dystopia and the End of Politics" (2008)

Convolutions

For us, paradox reduced itself to the simplest terms: it was the ability to say what was not expected, to fool one's audience. If, during a thunder shower, another boy looked out the classroom window and said, "It isn't raining, is it?" expecting us to answer "no," we would say "yes." By doing so, we were giving what we called a First Convolution answer.

The theory of convolutions was evolved in Pittsburgh, at Peabody High School, but it might have appeared in any city during those years before the war. [...] The process seems capable of indefinite extension; it can be applied, moreover, to any form of art, so long as one is less interested in what one says than in one's ability to outwit an audience.

Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return (1934)

A Pretty Idea

The premise of secular humanism (or of just old-fashioned humanism) is that the examples of action and thought portrayed in the enduring works of literature, philosophy and history can create in readers the desire to emulate them. [...] It’s a pretty idea, but there is no evidence to support it and a lot of evidence against it. If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so.

Stanley Fish, "Will the Humanities Save Us?" (2008)

The use of science to regulate industry and trade has gone on steadily. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was the precursor of the industrial revolution. In consequence, man has suffered the impact of an enormously enlarged control of physical energies without any corresponding ability to control himself and his own affairs. Knowledge divided against itself, a science to whose incompleteness is added an artificial split, has played its part in generating enslavement of men, women and children in factories in which they are animated machines to tend inanimate machines. It has maintained sordid slums, flurried and disconnected careers, grinding poverty and luxurious wealth, brutal exploitation of nature and man in times of peace and high explosives and noxious gases in times of war. Man, a child in understanding of himself, has placed in his hands physical tools of incalculable power. He plays with them like a child, and whether they work harm or good is largely a matter of accident. The instrumentality becomes a master and works fatally as if possessed of a will of its own--not because it has a will but because man has not.

John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927)

The time comes when each one of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929)