Quotes: 19 July 2025
The Origins of Totalitarianism
The general weakening of political factors, for two decades having brought about a situation in which reality and appearance, political reality and theatrical performance could easily parody each other, now enabled them to become the representatives of a nebulous international society in which national prejudices no longer seemed valid.
Arendt refers here to the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The reference to “reality and appearance, political reality and theatrical performance could now easily parody each other is very contemporary. But national prejudices over the last 25 years seem to have increased markedly.
The American Civil War was a struggle between two nationalisms. In the antebellum United States, Northerners and especially Northern abolitionists drew a contrast between (Northern) nationalism and (Southern) sectionalism. “We must cultivate a national, instead of a sectional patriotism,” urged one Michigan congressman in 1850.
The psychobiographers hedge their bets by making Lincoln’s putative resentment of the fathers express not only his personal plight but the frustration of a “postheroic” age in general, one that felt the dying of the revolutionary generation to be a closing of some psychic frontier: there would be no more heroes. There are many expressions of that idea. But a louder chorus of self-congratulation at America’s “Manifest Destiny” is what impressed visitors like Dickens and Tocqueville. Even a native observer like Twain thought too many Americans had “the Sir Walter disease,” imagining themselves the chivalrous heroes of old. Walter Scott pomposity in the South matched Jacksonian posturing in the North.
Show, don’t tell. Wittgenstein had based his own masterpiece [Tractatus Logico Philosophicus] on that principle in 1919. Admittedly the significance of the distinction still struck him as indisputable. Many of the other pillars of his Tractatus had become deeply questionable to him in the six months or so since his return to Cambridge, however. Clearly not all “problems had essentially been solved once and for all.” Either by him or anyone else.
The old code of combat, which stressed the dignity of death in the service of a worthy cause, loses its appeal under conditions—modern technological warfare and mass extermination—that make death neither sweet nor fitting. Survivalism leads to a devaluation of heroism. Extreme situations, wrote [Erving] Goffman, clarify the “small acts of living,” not the “grander forms of loyalty and treachery.”
The late British-American historian Tony Judt provides a somewhat alternative view; or rather, a view focused on the immediate future rather than on the middle-term and distant one. As he explains, the integration process that culminated eventually in the European Union was in part an accident born of the realpolitik of politicians who each needed a predictable economic framework for their own national aims.
Tragedy is irreparable. It cannot lead to just and material compensation for past suffering. Job gets back double the number of she-asses; so he should, for God has enacted upon him a parable of justice. Oedipus does not get back his eyes or his sceptre over Thebes.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert M. Pirsig
We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.
One of the chief obstacles to human evolution is man's boredom and ignorance, his tendency to drift and allow tomorrow to take care of itself.
Like good, evil is fundamentally prosaic and so its personification looks familiar. [A character] is all the scarier for that.