Working some infrastructure pages recently. For today, more of the same, more or less.
Here are two of my favorite writers, in discussion: Fareed Zakarian responding to Ezra Klein.
Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, today: What Odysseus can teach us about liberalism, subtitled “The challenge is to preserve human dignity while recovering our capacity for heroic ambition.”
I finally went to see Christopher Nolan’s new movie, “The Odyssey,” to watch a summer blockbuster — and it more than delivered. I didn’t intend to comment on the various controversies surrounding the movie, from the attacks that it is woke to the claims that it is historically inaccurate. (For goodness’ sake, it is a nearly 3,000-year-old yarn that is filled with gods and goddesses, one-eyed giants and magic!) But Ezra Klein’s commentary on the movie did lead me to think about the broader issues the movie raises, which strike me as interesting and important.
I could note that in my broad overview of human history, and the key transition triggered by the agricultural revolution, both the Bible and Homer occurred part-way through from then until now. They’re both about the difficulty of the transition.
Zakarian gets this:
Beginning with Christianity, the West gradually replaced the pagan ethic of naked conquest and domination with one centered on universal human dignity, compassion and empathy. “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth,” says the Gospel according to Matthew — words no Homeric hero would ever utter.
Pre-Christian values are having a revival these days, as the populist right, often joined by a new cadre of tech billionaires, looks back with admiration to an older world in which strength, domination and victory mattered more than empathy and equality.
And:
Beginning with Christianity, the West gradually replaced the pagan ethic of naked conquest and domination with one centered on universal human dignity, compassion and empathy. “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth,” says the Gospel according to Matthew — words no Homeric hero would ever utter.
Pre-Christian values are having a revival these days, as the populist right, often joined by a new cadre of tech billionaires, looks back with admiration to an older world in which strength, domination and victory mattered more than empathy and equality.
And this:
For Donald Trump, “winning” is all that matters, justifying all means….
In fact, the greatest moral achievement of the West over the last two millennia, and especially since the Enlightenment, has been the expansion of the circle of people who are considered fully human, having equal dignity and equal rights. We have come to recognize the humanity of people once dismissed as slaves, serfs and second-class citizens — foreigners, women, racial minorities, people with differing sexual orientations. These ideas spread throughout the world because they are, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “self-evident.” This is one of the West’s greatest achievements, not a decadent sickness.
Well, they’re obviously *not* self-evident to many people. Here again you need to recognize the evolution of human nature, that many commentators do not.
But there’s this:
But there is a serious critique buried beneath the crude MAGA attacks. It is one that German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche leveled, and it is being reprised by some of the tech bros today. Nietzsche worried that Christianity’s egalitarian ideas made us less likely to be wildly ambitious, risk-seeking and reckless. Have we become so humane that we have lost the primal urges that made us heroic?
Are there trade-offs? Perhaps. But which would you prefer? Again, it’s not black or white: humanity is a mix of various kinds of human nature. The essay ends:
Liberals should not apologize for believing that every human being possesses equal dignity. The world’s great liberal democracies managed to expand our moral universe while also expanding our physical universe. The challenge is to recover that older liberal tradition. This spirit will be sorely needed as we build out what may be the most transformative technology ever, artificial intelligence, because we will need to make sure that its awesome power is rooted in a system of ethics and values that prizes human dignity and equality — just those values that Christianity pioneered and the West enhanced so powerfully.
We don’t need to go back to Homer. Recovering the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt would be enough.
\\\
Briefly noted.
- Salon, Brian Karem, today: GOP is finally running out of people to blame, subtitled “Republicans control DC and have totally wrecked the place. Now the paint is peeling off their delusions”
\
- I might have given this a longer examination on a different day.
- The Atlantic, Joshua Sohn, today: Liberal Families Are Looking Pretty Traditional
- Subtitled: “What I see in my deep-blue D.C. neighborhood undermines the simplistic culture-war narrative.”
- “Liberal” neighborhoods look just like “conservative” neighborhoods. Families, kids, etc. The two sides aren’t that much different.
\
- What can you say about Darline Graham? Nepotism obviously. And that anyone, no matter how unqualified, is welcome by the Republicans as long as they’re loyal.
- Washington Post, Kathleen Parker, today: ‘I’m not that informed’: A rare Senate vacancy triggers a test for Trump
\\\
