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3614972
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If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.
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freedom
modern-relationships
philosophy
society
western-culture
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Erich Fromm |
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29db738
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In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big - ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.
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belief
capitalism
faith
grand-narratives
islam
islamic-fundamentalism
islamic-terrorism
islamism
life
metaphysics
philosophical-scepticism
philosophy
postmodernism
pragmatism
religion
western-culture
western-world
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Terry Eagleton |
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30e02ea
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The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgement that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it. (p.272)
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economics
income-disparity
inequality
military-history
progressivism
society
utopia
wealth
western-culture
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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9c452ac
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This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship--replete with ever more rights and responsibilities--would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. (p. 122)
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civilization
consent
contract-for-service
government
politics
rome
soldiers
voluteer-army
war
warfare
western-culture
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Victor Davis Hanson |
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52d1039
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"It is quite possible to say that the price a Negro pays for becoming articulate is to find himself, at length, with nothing to be articulate about. ("You taught me language," says Caliban to Prospero, "and my profit on't is I know how to curse.")"
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black-life
western-culture
western-world
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James Baldwin |
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3f5756a
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The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity -- and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.
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history
west
western-civilization
western-culture
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Niall Ferguson |