Nehaveigur

Category: Society

  • Just Let Me Drink

    We went to a Japanese restaurant and ordered food and flight of sake. The waitress returned promptly with five small crystal glasses arranged on a slab of polished wood. She set them down in front of us and started to explain the origin and history of each. I started to…

  • Solzhenitsyn’s Letter

    On Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 letter to the Soviet leadership. Maybe Solzhenitsyn’s and Putin’s view of the world are not so incompatible.

  • Hypocrisy

    Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue François de La Rochefoucauld David Mitchell makes the point that we cannot reasonably expect politicians to have absolute integrity. Very few people reach such a standard, and those that do make poor politicians. To win votes, they sometimes have to say things…

  • Our Fathers Also

    Thrones, Powers, Dominions, Peoples, Kings, Are changing ‘neath our hand. Our fathers also see these things But they do not understand. All Profit, all Device, all Truth, Written it was or said By the mighty men of their mighty youth,Which is mighty being dead. Rudyard Kipling: Our Fathers Also

  • Hope and History

    History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave. But then once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme. Seamus Heaney: The Cure at Troy

  • Process Over Content

    The central fact of our time is the triumph of process over content. Jim Harrison: The Great Leader

  • No Man Is An Island

    No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main John Donne

  • The Righteous Mind

    I know I’m late to the party, but Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, published in 2012, contains some important ideas. Haidt’s assertion that “anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason” (page 104) neatly summarizes the book’s first part. What he means is that we don’t make judgements based on reason.…

  • No Brief Candle

    I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment,…

  • The Line Separating Good and Evil

    The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart. Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  • Three Cheers for Ignorance

    Knowledge is power! Knowledge is what our civilization is built on. All those medieval monks dedicating their lives to understanding how the universe works? You know more about it than they ever did. You know about atoms and planets and bacteria. They didn’t. Maybe they had some other kind of…

  • Democracy

    The beauty of democracy is that it’s the only acceptable form of governance if you agree that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and that they are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. While…

  • The Stamp of our Parents

    Whose history can ever reveal very much? In my view Americans put too much emphasis on their pasts as a way of defining themselves, which can be death-dealing. I know I’m always heartsick in novels when the novelist makes his clanking, obligatory trip into the Davy Jones locker of the…

  • The Witch

    Toil and grow rich,What’s that but to lieWith a foul witchAnd after, drained dry,To be broughtTo the chamber whereLies one long soughtWith despair?William Butler Yeats: The witch

  • Revenge is Sour

    The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates…

  • How I’ll Know if Things are Going Well

    I feel like most people are too pessimistic about the long-term development of the United States, but it’s also possible that I’m too optimistic. While I can’t know for sure now, I will be able to know in 2050 looking back at the list of forecasts below that I made…

  • Utopia for Realists

    The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has been around for some time. It’s a bold idea that has the potential to fundamentally change the way our society works, and there aren’t enough of those. Whether it’d be a positive change is a different question. The UBI is one…

  • Liberalism and Authority

    The liberal attitude does not say you should oppose authority. It says only that you should be free to oppose authority. Bertrand Russell You’re talking about a culture that teaches people how to make moral choices, that teeters very easily into a culture… into a totalitarian, authoritarian culture. But a…

  • The Man in the Arena

    It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and…

  • Tribe

    When a society is under attack, what happens to its mental health? You may think that the associated stress will cause psychiatric disorders to increase, and you’d be wrong. When the Nazis bombed London during World War II, they hoped to produce mass hysteria. Not only did they fail, but…