The deliciously scathing Susan Haack on the “vanity of cleverness“
At dinner the night before I was to give a talk in her department, a young professor solemnly told me that there’s no place for humor in serious philosophy.
The serious philosopher must indeed work in earnest–but not in grim earnest.
Obituary and NYT profile
William Christenberry’s work is a poetic evocation of a haunted countryside. . . . [that it] really says it all, because it [his work] deals not only with the Southern landscape of beauty and wonderment, but also the side of it that is haunted with memory and sadness.
“Thus, these word signs have been evacuated, deprived of meaning something real. Real persons. Not so with Jews.”
*****
“Since the Jews were the original chosen people of God, a tribe of people who are still here, they are a sign of God’s presence which cannot be evacuated. Try to find a hole in that proof!”
*****
“Try to subsume Jews under the classes of mankind, Caucasians, Semites, whatever. Go ahead, try it.”
*****
“Read St. Paul! It is clear that their inability to accept Jesus was not only foreordained but altogether reasonable and is not to be held against them. Salvation comes from the Jews, as holy scripture tells us. They remain the beloved, originally chosen people of God.”
*****
“Jews are naturally skeptical, hardheaded, and, after all, what Jesus was proposing to them was a tall order.”
*****
“How many times in your work have you encountered someone who claims to be Napoleon, the Messiah, Hitler, the Devil?”
“Often.”
“How often have you encountered a Jewish patient who claimed to be the Messiah or Napoleon?”
“Not often.”
*****
“Even an anti-Semite! Did you ever notice that an anti-Semite who despises Jews actually believes them deep down—that’s why he hates them!—and isn’t that the reason he despises them?”
*****
“The Jews as a word sign cannot be assimilated under a class, category, or theory. No subsuming Jews! Not even by the Romans.”
*****
“The Holocaust was a consequence of the sign which could not be evacuated.”
*****
“You are a member of the first generation of doctors in the history of medicine to turn their backs on the oath of Hippocrates and kill millions of old useless people, unborn children, born malformed children, for the good of mankind—and to do so without a single murmur from one of you. Not a single letter of protest in the august New England Journal of Medicine. And do you know what you’re going to end up doing? You a graduate of Harvard and a reader of The New York Times and a member of the Ford Foundation’s Program for the Third World? Do you know what is going to happen to you?”
*****
“Do you know where tenderness always leads?”
“No, where?” I ask, watching the stranger with curiosity.
“To the gas chamber.”
“I see.”
“Tenderness is the first disguise of the murderer.”
*****
“If you are a theorist of Mankind like Rousseau or Skinner, who believes he understands man’s brain and in the solitariness of his study or laboratory writes books on the subject, you are also probably harmless and might even contribute to human knowledge, right?”
“Right.”
“But if you put the two together, a lover of Mankind and a theorist of Mankind, what you’ve got now is Robespierre or Stalin or Hitler and the Terror, and millions dead for the good of Mankind. Right?”
H/T to Steve Horwitz who has provided the introduction to FEE’s newly released ebook of Kirzner lectures/essays from various FEE events and publications.
For Kirzner and the Austrians, however, the assumption of perfect knowledge heads economists off on a trail that is an intellectual dead-end. The real world of the market is one in which knowledge is dispersed, contextual, and often inarticulate. From its origins in the work of Carl Menger, through its development in Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, the Austrian school has focused on how markets coordinate human action given that such action is always taken in a world of uncertainty and fragmentary knowledge. Different thinkers have refined different aspects of this perspective, but all have recognized the basic problem situation of action under uncertainty and tried to explain how market institutions enable us to overcome it. This is what Kirzner does in his elaboration of the basics of supply and demand and the market process, focusing on his own distinct contribution concerning the role of the entrepreneur.
Robert Wright in The New York Times on the late great William Hamilton
“I’m also quite open to the view that there is some kind of ultimate good which is of a religious nature — that we just have to look beyond what the evolutionary theory tells us and accept promptings of what ultimate good is, coming from some other source.” That’s an unusual thing for a great evolutionary biologist to say, but the most unusual part was still to come.
The always astute and nuanced John McWhorter’s take on Vance’s Hillbilly Elergy which I’m now ready to dive into having recently spend some time (albeit briefly) in Appalachian country.
Hillbilly Elegy throws down a gauntlet to those who shape opinion on inequality and race in this country. Any reader must ask, “If Vance makes sense to me, then how does this affect my views on black America’s situation, and what should be done about it?”
I’ve been on a road trip for a month or so and as such have had the opportunity to randomly sample a cross section of food in several states/regions/price ranges/types of eatery and so on. After some sixty meals the dishes that stick out are as follows:
A bowl of chili ($5.50) in Butte, MT at the grill and bar in The Metals Bank Building. Without doubt the best chili I have ever had.
A plate of sautéed shrimp with grits and tasso gravy ($21) at the Oyster House on Market, Charleston, SC. The best grits I’ve had including the many I’ve had in New Orleans.
At Bella’s Mexican Grill in Taos, NM we had guacamole ($10 I think) creamed and mixed up at the table according to one’s desired blend of onions, garlic, coriander, and chili peppers. The critical thing, of course, is that one needs to start with top-notch avocados . . . the rest is so easy and it was the best guacamole I’ve ever had. The chips themselves were perfect and were interspersed with little baskets that seemed to be made of tapioca to scoop up the guacamole. The prevalence of Mexican food across the country was quite astonishing and the most consistent quality-wise and always a good deal.
And just for the sheer novelty value I include candy floss (or as you Americans call it, cotton candy) served as pudding (dessert) at The Hive, Bentonville, AR. (Also worth noting is that the hotel in which The Hive is located was immensely civilized and amusing, offsetting the unabashed trendiness of the joint).
Here’s an interview with Vernon Smith concerning the relationship of science to religion. I had no idea Vernon felt this way until I read his Discovery – A Memoir (which he so kindly sent me a few years back), so this interview is of no surprise. Despite Vernon’s genuine achievements the fashionably atheist philosopher would “cock a snook” at Vernon’s outlook. If anyone is interested in this topic, I have edited two “symposia” in ZYGON: (a) Walker Percy and (b) Michael Oakeshott.
The underlying reality is mystical, not “material” . . . You do not have to be brought up on it to have a sense of the spiritual. It’s human, in the image of God. Maybe all roads lead to this same understanding.
The Nola Players have just released their big band Christmas CD. I’m very much looking forward to hearing it in full and replenishing my Christmas selection with a bunch of stuff en route to me from the Louisiana Music Factory. In the meantime I’ve been playing a few other Christmas CDs because they work very well purely on a musical plane as opposed to being merely Christmas kitsch: Sharon Jones (who recently passed away), Nick Lowe and Debbie Davis/Matt Perrine and just to yank the chain of the humourless PC authoritarians John Valby.
The always challenging and informative Deirdre McCloskey one of the few taking on the tired, false and persistent inequality memes. Of course what the regressive left have done (and incoherently so) is to conflate patterns of inequality (access) with patterns of inequity (outcome).
Worldwide even the income gap between rich and poor has radical [sic] declined. If you arrange individual incomes in a Gini-coefficient manner, in the past 30 years inequality has declined sharply.
