Philosophy
Crispin Sartwell over at Eye of the Storm has commented on something I've been thinking about for a while. The way we remain in a constant state of crisis:
The successful attention was then transferred to domestic homelessness, but Apartheid in South Africa and the hole in the ozone started to compete. Soon, every good cause saw the opportunity to be the next one and an empathy arms race began. You needed to be more of a problem, a bigger tragedy, a greater concern to deserve your Wembley Stadium show with a reunion of a defunct classic rock band.
And so started an endless succession of crises. Sartwell is absolutely right that it is not crying wolf, these ARE crises. The world is filled with misery and suffering that we should be doing something about. But the constant state of alarm is like the Bush administrations raising of the terrorist threat level. We ignore it. As a society, we've built up a tolerance to crisis.
This is exactly what set the groundwork for apathy and antipathy towards concerns about global warming and has forced scientists into the arms race of doom. As a result we are not worried whether the sky is falling and it makes no difference whether it is shown in the data. We have crisis fatigue.
As a result, there is only thing that could possibly bring the planet together to combat carbon-emission-based climate change...if Peter Gabriel would agree to rejoin the members of Genesis for a show the Royal Albert Hall.
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The left has a self-image problem. We seem to have lost our picture of ourselves and, with it, we seem to have lost our joy. We had a picture. Back in the 70's we had long-haired, guitar-playing, sweater wearing, multicultural kids holding hands and...
Philosophy
The Crisis Crisis
Crispin Sartwell over at Eye of the Storm has commented on something I've been thinking about for a while. The way we remain in a constant state of crisis:
so it's well past time we started tacking intensifiers on 'crisis,' which now refers to the normal or run-of-the-mill state of affairs in any given sphere. 'crisis,' in other words, has become synonymous with 'reality,' and just as something could be really real, a crisis could be critical. 'crisis' has lost its ability to mobilize, which was all it was ever actually used for anyway. well, i think now you're gonna need actual clubs and body armor to motivate anyone to do anything. during the next presidential campaign, for example, i think we should refer to american education as a "world-annihilating conflagration" or an "apocalypse."I may be misplacing it, but I would argue that this started in the 80's with the rallying of attention for the famine in Ethiopia. It was the time of Reagan when greed and selfishness became social virtues and those who longed to be hippies and empathize with someone came together around hungry children in Africa...for a while.
The successful attention was then transferred to domestic homelessness, but Apartheid in South Africa and the hole in the ozone started to compete. Soon, every good cause saw the opportunity to be the next one and an empathy arms race began. You needed to be more of a problem, a bigger tragedy, a greater concern to deserve your Wembley Stadium show with a reunion of a defunct classic rock band.
And so started an endless succession of crises. Sartwell is absolutely right that it is not crying wolf, these ARE crises. The world is filled with misery and suffering that we should be doing something about. But the constant state of alarm is like the Bush administrations raising of the terrorist threat level. We ignore it. As a society, we've built up a tolerance to crisis.
This is exactly what set the groundwork for apathy and antipathy towards concerns about global warming and has forced scientists into the arms race of doom. As a result we are not worried whether the sky is falling and it makes no difference whether it is shown in the data. We have crisis fatigue.
As a result, there is only thing that could possibly bring the planet together to combat carbon-emission-based climate change...if Peter Gabriel would agree to rejoin the members of Genesis for a show the Royal Albert Hall.
- Biased Reality
Philo asks, "It is said "reality has a well-known liberal bias." [http://tr.im/owWY] Is it the case that reality "votes" for liberals more so than for conservatives, or is it "fair and balanced"?"The line is used frequently by Stephen Colbert as a play...
- So This Is What Competence Looks Like
Our next Secretary of Energy will be Steven Chu who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for his work on laser cooling which uses light to slow down atoms. He was the chair of the physics department at Stanford until he left to become the director of...
- Banal Eloquence, Indeed
TheWife was fuming yesterday. George Will, she ranted, had said the most inane thing she'd heard in a long time...and when you are on a panel with Cokie Roberts and you're contribution is still more inane, that's really saying something. ...
- Help Me Design My Mid-life Crisis
So, today is my 39th birthday and I've decided to take the George W. Bush approach to aging. Rather than let the mid-life crisis sneak up on me, I'm going with a pre-emptive strike. Unfortunately, the usual contenders are out: I'm happily...
- We Can Rebuild Him: Make Him Faster, Stronger, Funnier, Happier...
The left has a self-image problem. We seem to have lost our picture of ourselves and, with it, we seem to have lost our joy. We had a picture. Back in the 70's we had long-haired, guitar-playing, sweater wearing, multicultural kids holding hands and...