Why has assent on even basic factual claims (beyond logically demonstrable ones, like 2 + 2 = 4) become so hard to achieve? Or, to put it slightly differently, why are we—meaning people of varied political persuasions—having so much trouble lately arriving at any broadly shared sense of the world beyond ourselves, and, even more, any consensus on which institutions, methods, or people to trust to get us there? And why, ultimately, do so many of us seem simply to have given up on the possibility of finding some truths in common? – Hedgehog Review
Tag: Summer 2019
How Reality Got Jumbled Up With “Reality”
It is impossible to prove a counterfactual, but without reality TV, it seems unlikely that so many people would equate “being real” and “telling it like it is” with spilling ugly secrets, flaunting rank egotism, attacking personal morality and social norms, and exuding contempt for the opinions and sensibilities of others. This cultural turn is dismaying enough, but as this kind of behavior comes to define what is honest, authentic, and true, it becomes more difficult for free and democratic societies to push back against the looming threat of a full-fledged surveillance state, a digital Panopticon. – Hedgehog Review [paywall]
The Pursuit Of Happiness: An Ultimately Futile Exercise In The Era Of Self-Gratification
“We trick ourselves into thinking we know what is needed to be happy: a promotion, a new car, a vacation, a good-looking partner. We believe this even though we know there are plenty of people with good jobs, new cars, vacations, and attractive partners, and many of them are miserable. But they, too, imagine their misery can be fixed by a bottle of Pétrus or a yacht or public adulation.” – Lapham’s Quarterly
What Is America’s Culture?
Encouraging distinctly American artistic habits stands a chance of making art more accessible without making it unserious or “middlebrow.” The arts are so irrelevant to most Americans’ lives in no small part because they have diverted so sharply from that tradition. Without reconnecting to the “soil” of the life experience of most Americans, the art world exists with and for the Hamptons. – National Affairs
Classic Fiction Is Confessional – Tell Your Secrets. But In The Social Media Age…
…what if the opposite is true? That your secrets, the things only you know about yourself, are in fact the most trivial, most banal things about you? In a society where many of us who don’t qualify as public figures spend a lot of time projecting our lives and our personalities in public, the biggest secret of all might be that, in whatever privacy we have left, we don’t have any secrets. – Book Forum