Category: quotes

Quote of the week: Andrew Sullivan on wokeness vs. liberalism

April 20, 2024 • 12:15 pm

From Andrew Sullivan’s new Weekly Dish piece, “Katherine Maher is not a liberal“, criticizing the new CEO of National Public Radio:

The point I have been trying to make for years now is that wokeness is not some racier version of liberalism, merely seeking to be kinder and more inclusive. It is, in fact, directly hostile to liberal values; it subordinates truth to ideology; it judges people not by their ability but by their identity; and it regards ideological diversity as a mere dog-whistle for bigotry. Maher has publicly and repeatedly avowed support for this very illiberalism. If people with these views run liberal institutions, the institutions will not — cannot — remain liberal for very long. And they haven’t. Elite universities are turning into madrassas, and media is turning into propaganda.

An enigmatic statement by George Orwell

April 4, 2024 • 11:00 am

Years ago I read this statement by George Orwell in his collected essays, and from time to time, especially when I suffer a reversal, I think about the second sentence.

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.  A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

It’s the opening two sentences of Orwell’s 1944 essay “Benefits of Clergy: Some notes on Salvador Dali“.

Now Orwell wasn’t in the habit of making enigmatic statements, and I can see how he would view his own life as a “series of defeats”. His early work was rejected repeatedly, he was often attacked, often cheated on his wife, admitted that he treated her badly, and finally was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that killed him. On the other hand, he found success after publishing Animal Farm and then Nineteen Eighty-Four, and made a decent living as a writer and editor until he died at age 46.

So while I agree with Orwell that autobiographies can’t really be trusted, I’m not sure why he thinks that every life feels like “a series of defeats”. It doesn’t feel like that to me, though it may do so on my deathbed.  So, after all these years, I’ll ask readers to tell me what they think Orwell meant by that. Interpretations below, please!

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Oh, and don’t forget that Hitchens wrote a superb book on the man, Why Orwell Matters, and you can hear a precis of the book in this hourlong podcast in which Hitchens is interviewed by Russ Boberts about the book.  You can hear Hitchens’s repeated throat clearing; this podcast was made 10 months before Hitchens was diagnosed with stage 4 laryngeal cancer.

Orwell (his real name, of course, was Eric Blair) is one of my favorite writers, and you could do worse than read his Collected Essays (there are four volumes). Here’s the photo used for his press card:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:George_Orwell_press_photo.jpg#/media

Top Hitchens Quotes

December 15, 2023 • 1:00 pm

The good news is that the doctor gave me a clean bill of health. Here’s something to get the weekend started.

Steve Stewart-Williams now has a Substack site (everybody does–I feel left out!), but he’s a good guy and it’s worth looking at (subscribe if you want to read it regularly). Here’s one of his posts that you can see for free: his choice of the top ten quotes by Christopher Hitchens. I’ll give just two, as you need to see them all. Click on the screenshot to read:

Two from Hitch to get you started. Most of you will have heard of these, but the first one may be his most famous (it has a Wikipedia page):

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” (This is now known as Hitchens’ razor, and is an extremely useful intellectual tool.)

“If someone tells me that I’ve hurt their feelings, I say, ‘I’m still waiting to hear what your point is.’ I’m very depressed how in this country you can be told, ‘That’s offensive!’ as if those two words constitute an argument.”

Go see the other eight. And you might have a look at his new post “Scientists censoring science,” discussing a recent paper on that topic written with a bunch of coauthors.

This year’s Edge question

February 5, 2018 • 8:45 am

Every year John Brockman, the literary agent for many scientists who write popular books (including me), asked all of us to answer a question as part of his online salon, Edge. Usually the questions involve writing short essays, maybe two hundred words or so, and I’ve contributed a few times. This year, however, will be the last such question, and it requires a single-sentence answer. Here it is:

For the 50th anniversary of “The World Question Center,” and for the finale to the twenty years of Edge Questions, I turned it over to the Edgies:

“Ask ‘The Last Question,’ your last question, the question for which you will be remembered.”

Click the screenshot for the answers, which are many, diverse, and in alphabetical order by respondent (go to the bottom of the linked page, where you’ll find 14 pages of answers—or rather, questions).

The questions I found most provocative and intriguing were those posed by Gregory Benford, Paul Bloom, Jimena Canales (I don’t quite get what she means), Oliver Curry, Dan Dennett, Keith Devlin, Neil Gershenfeld, Hans Halvorson, Marti Hearst, Bruce Hood, Dale Jamieson, Gordon Kane, Kai Krause, Janna Levin, Elaine Pagels (Ed Regis and Christopher Stringer’s questions resemble hers), William Press, Diana Reiss, Gino Segre, Dan Sperber, and Anton Zeilinger.

Several of us asked questions involving free will: along with me there’s Rebecca Goldstein and Robert Sapolsky, all of us assuming determinism is true and wondering about the consequences of accepting it.

The questions often fall into distinct areas, particularly the mechanism of cognition, how the laws of physics arise, what will happen to human evolution in the “Anthropocene” (Helena Cronin and David Buss have questions about sexual selection), the consequences of artificial intelligence, the problem of consciousness, and the limitations on our ability to know.  Brockman’s task was hard, and I’m not sure whether my question is a “Last Question,” but I do think it’s an important one.

If you’d like, take a crack at giving your own answer in the comments.

Quote of the day

April 21, 2016 • 9:00 am

This one’s from Nick Cohen‘s lovely book What’s Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way.  Written in 2007, it’s a prescient and still timely criticism of Regressive Leftism. Cohen is a superb and clear writer, and his views are so congenial to mine that I almost feel as if he’s speaking directly to me. (Yes, I know I’m “reading from the choir,” but give me a break: I spent several years reading theology!) Wikipedia gives a decent precis of the book.

Here’s a quote about identity politics from page 105:

But as many radical intellectuals in the West retreated into the lecture halls before the tide of conservatism they had in part inspired, they fled from universal values. To generalize, the idea that a homosexual black woman should have the same rights as a heterosexual white man was replaced by a relativism which took the original and hopeful challenge of the early feminist, gay, and anti-racist movements and flipped it over. Homosexuality, blackness, and womanhood became separate cultures that couldn’t be criticized or understood by outsiders applying universal criteria. Nor, by extension, could any other culture, even if it was the culture of fascism, religious tyranny, wife burning, or suicide bombing. Each separate cultural group was playing its own “language game,” to use the phrase the postmodernists took from Wittgenstein, and only players in the game, whether feminists or Holocaust deniers, could determine whether what was being said was right or wrong. As epistemic relativism infected leftish intellectual life, all the old universal criteria, including human rights, the search for truth and the scientific method, became suspect instruments of elite oppression and Western cultural imperialism.

Quote of the day

July 25, 2013 • 7:05 am

From someone we should all read more of: Robert G. Ingersoll, the Great Agnostic.

This is from The Gods and Other Lectures (1876), and is the best mission statement I know for atheists, both old a new:

Notwithstanding the fact that infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice, we are constantly charged by the church with tearing down without building again. The church should by this time know that it is utterly impossible to rob men of their opinions. The history of religious persecution fully establishes the fact that the mind necessarily resists and defies every attempt to control it by violence. The mind necessarily clings to old ideas until prepared for the new. The moment we comprehend the truth, all erroneous ideas are of necessity cast aside.

A surgeon once called upon a poor cripple and kindly offered to render him any assistance in his power. The surgeon began to discourse very learnedly upon the nature and origin of disease; of the curative properties of certain medicines; of the advantages of exercise, air and light, and of the various ways in which health and strength could be restored. These remarks ware so full of good sense, and discovered so much profound thought and accurate knowledge, that the cripple, becoming thoroughly alarmed, cried out, “Do not, I pray you, take away my crutches. They are my only support, and without them I should be miserable indeed!” “I am not going,” said the surgeon, “to take away your crutches. I am going to cure you, and then you will throw the crutches away yourself.”

For the vagaries of the clouds the infidels propose to substitute the realities of earth; for superstition, the splendid demonstrations and achievements of science; and for theological tyranny, the chainless liberty of thought.

Ingersoll on science vs. religion

July 2, 2013 • 8:23 am

We all should read more Ingersoll, and a good place to start is Susan Jacoby’s new book on the man, Robert Ingersoll: The Great Agnostic and American Freethought. Jacoby will be giving the keynote address at TAM, and I look forward to meeting her.

Here’s a nice quote from Ingersoll’s God in the Constitution (1890) 

We have already compared the benefits of theology and science. When the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few. To nearly all the children of men, reading and writing were unknown arts. The poor were clad in rags and skins — they devoured crusts, and gnawed bones. The day of Science dawned, and the luxuries of a century ago are the necessities of to-day. Men in the middle ranks of life have more of the conveniences and elegancies than the princes and kings of the theological times. But above and over all this, is the development of mind. There is more of value in the brain of an average man of to-day—of a master-mechanic, of a chemist, of a naturalist, of an inventor, than there was in the brain of the world four hundred years ago.

These blessings did not fall from the skies. These benefits did not drop from the outstretched hands of priests. They were not found in cathedrals or behind altars — neither were they searched for with holy candles. They were not discovered by the closed eyes of prayer, nor did they come in answer to superstitious supplication. They are the children of freedom, the gifts of reason, observation and experience — and for them all, man is indebted to man.

The man was eloquent.