Peter Starr on Wisdom and Culture
Wisdom is a perfect antidote to the paranoid style of American political culture today.
I miss paranoia. Let me explain.
In the mid-2000s, I worked on a multimedia project entitled We the Paranoid. You can view version 1.0 of it here.
Continue reading “Giving Up on Paranoia”
Hamilton resonates because it speaks, consistently and profoundly, to a deep hunger for wisdom in American society today.
I recently had the pleasure of experiencing first-hand the life story of an “obnoxious arrogant loudmouth” whose “swagger” is “built on a bedrock of total insecurity.” Inordinately proud of his “top-notch brain” but prone to serious acts of misjudgment, this “model New Yorker” commits adultery, then pays hush money to cover his tracks. A great political scandal ensues.
Continue reading “A.Ham in the Age of Trump”
This is the first in a series
The quest for wisdom is a physical as well as intellectual undertaking…. [T]he early history of wisdom unfolded on the road.
Stephen S. Hall, Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience
We are living through a time of extraordinary nativist backlash, most tellingly emblematized in the U.S. by the candidacy, then presidency, of Donald J. Trump. A 2017 survey by PRRI and The Atlantic found that white working-class voters who said they “often feel like a stranger in their own land” were 3.5 times more likely to have supported Trump than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Those who “favored deporting immigrants living in the country illegally” were 3.3 times more likely to have done so.
Continue reading “On Wisdom and Migration, 1”