Rist addresses the Rawlsian argument head-on, at the end, with a brief but powerful demolition of the benignity of enlightened state apparatchiks. Thank you, Ed, for this wonderful series!
Joseph Campbell wrote that we are tigers pretending to be sheep. So cool that you are giving a voice to real elders, long lived and highly intelligent. Plato's Myth of Er speaks strongly to me, if there a field of study really worth encouraging now it's the study of Near Death Experiences and related things. Hundreds of thousands of honest experiencers concur in that there is a far greater dimension beyond this literal 'vale of tears', and it does appear that we are not only constantly recorded and noted at the deepest level during our brief life but that we appear to re-enter similar lives until we complete our arcane aeons-long quest. There is no hiding from our vileness or our beauty minute by minute year by year. Sadly I cannot imagine even the remote possibilty of our cultures turning aside or back the cultural juggernaut that has been created by generations of well intentioned dupes and powerful malefactors. The 20th century saw the machine turned on us. The 21st will see the machine turn itself both on it's creators and the vast collateral we. My hope is that the extremity that is coming will also unlock positive human abilities considered impossible for a long time by materialist philosophers.
I came across Paul Fussell in In the 70s in college. His essays are worth reading -- he may have been an atheist but he was a clear-eyed writer and professor. One of his essays -- THE THE GREAT TURKEY SHOOT -- is particularly informative on the nature of war for all involved. Although he was highly educated and came from a prominent family, he found himself a combatant in the D-Day invasion of Europe. His unit was told not to take prisoners and to keep marching on Berlin. They came upon a squad of German soldiers who immediately surrendered. Fussell and his comrades disarmed the soldiers and ordered them to go down into a large bomb crater. The Americans commenced to fire on them until all were dead. Prof. Fussell also wrote a piece entitled THANK GOD FOR THE ATOM BOMB. That's another story...
Thank you Ed for offering us this valuable interview. With respect to the comment that the state cannot be neutral I wonder if it has never been neutral or if the "gap" between modern states, and an ideally neutral one has been changing over time?
Rist addresses the Rawlsian argument head-on, at the end, with a brief but powerful demolition of the benignity of enlightened state apparatchiks. Thank you, Ed, for this wonderful series!
Joseph Campbell wrote that we are tigers pretending to be sheep. So cool that you are giving a voice to real elders, long lived and highly intelligent. Plato's Myth of Er speaks strongly to me, if there a field of study really worth encouraging now it's the study of Near Death Experiences and related things. Hundreds of thousands of honest experiencers concur in that there is a far greater dimension beyond this literal 'vale of tears', and it does appear that we are not only constantly recorded and noted at the deepest level during our brief life but that we appear to re-enter similar lives until we complete our arcane aeons-long quest. There is no hiding from our vileness or our beauty minute by minute year by year.
Sadly I cannot imagine even the remote possibilty of our cultures turning aside or back the cultural juggernaut that has been created by generations of well intentioned dupes and powerful malefactors. The 20th century saw the machine turned on us. The 21st will see the machine turn itself both on it's creators and the vast collateral we. My hope is that the extremity that is coming will also unlock positive human abilities considered impossible for a long time by materialist philosophers.
I came across Paul Fussell in In the 70s in college. His essays are worth reading -- he may have been an atheist but he was a clear-eyed writer and professor. One of his essays -- THE THE GREAT TURKEY SHOOT -- is particularly informative on the nature of war for all involved. Although he was highly educated and came from a prominent family, he found himself a combatant in the D-Day invasion of Europe. His unit was told not to take prisoners and to keep marching on Berlin. They came upon a squad of German soldiers who immediately surrendered. Fussell and his comrades disarmed the soldiers and ordered them to go down into a large bomb crater. The Americans commenced to fire on them until all were dead. Prof. Fussell also wrote a piece entitled THANK GOD FOR THE ATOM BOMB. That's another story...
Thank you Ed for offering us this valuable interview. With respect to the comment that the state cannot be neutral I wonder if it has never been neutral or if the "gap" between modern states, and an ideally neutral one has been changing over time?