By trying to improve our cities, we have only succeeded in making them empty simulacra of what was. To bring this about we have signed on to political scams and mindless development schemes that are so exclusive they are more destructive than all they were supposed to improve. The urban crisis of affluence exemplifies our wider crisis: we now live in an America where we believe that we no longer have any ability to control the systems we live under.
Tag: 2018
Why Orchestras Should Be More Like Humanities Institutions
The vital signs of classical music all tend in the wrong direction, says Joseph Horowitz. The conductors fly in and leave. The musicianship is superior but dull. The composer is long dead, and, on stage and off, people know little about him anyway. The shrinking audience only wants to hear the most pedigreed and canonical of music. The orchestra is not a tastemaker; it’s a follower. Marketing and fund-raising efforts predominate. The financials drive everything, and everything is expensive: the musicians, the guest soloists, the fly-by conductors, the tickets. Horowitz complains a lot, and one of his bigger, more enveloping criticisms is what brings him to the humanities.
The Man Trying To Explain Where We Are With A Grand Narrative Of History
He’s Marcel Gauchet, and he’s writing a magnum opus. “In our neoliberal age, democracy has come to mean little more than the pursuit of individual rights and interests, while the hope of determining our shared fate through democratic means has become strangely elusive. To think ourselves out of this mindset, we need history—and lots of it.”
Skyscrapers In Paris? Mais Oui! (Cue The Protests)
Shaped like an enormous, flattened pyramid, it will challenge the Eiffel Tower for dominance of the skyline. Neighborhood residents violently oppose it. The project’s Swiss architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, are thrilled.
Is Democracy Really Such A Great Idea? Mob Rule?
“Over the past few years concerns about “unchecked” democracy and rule by the people have exploded—but such concerns have been around as long as democracy itself. The ancient Greeks commonly equated democracy with mob rule. Aristotle, for example, worried about democracy’s tendency to degenerate into “chaotic rule by the masses” and in Plato’s The Republic, Socrates argues that given power and freedom the masses will indulge their passions, destroy traditions and institutions, and be easy prey for tyrants. Classical liberals, meanwhile, lived in mortal fear of democracy, convinced that once given power ‘the people’ would trample the liberties and confiscate the property of elites.”