Seamus Perry on Ted Hughes

All of which implies cultural history painted with the broadest of brushes: the villain of the piece is the Renaissance, that catastrophe of individualism, which gave birth at once to the hubris of the scientific mind and the desiccated spiritualism of reformed Christianity, both of which involve getting our relationship with nature wrong.  "The story of the mind exiled by nature is the story of Western Man," wrote Hughes..."Our civilisation is an evolutionary error." 

Michael Wood on Prometheus

The moral of Prometheus is that the quest for knowledge beyond reasonable, practical limits is like a form of sexual recklessness. You won't get a disease but you will, man or woman, become pregnant with your own destruction.

Mark Lilla on Americans' politics

Americans' assumptions about human nature are basically liberal today. We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn't constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves. Most intellectuals who call themselves conservatives today accept as self-evident the truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, which no traditional European conservative could. They are go-slow, curb-your-enthusiasm liberals like Tocqueville, not conservatives like Burke or T.S.Eliot or Michael Oakeshott. As for those like Congressman Ron Paul, who promote a minimal state and an unregulated economy, their libertarianism is actually a mutation of liberalism, not conservatism.

Mark Lilla on Fascists

Fascists hated so many aspects of modern society - representative democracy, capitalism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, bourgeois refinement - that we forget that they were anything but nostalgic for Church and Crown. There was nothing conservative about them.

Mark Lilla on conservatives

What makes conservatives conservative are the implications they have drawn from Burke's view of society. Conservatives have always seen society as a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for: we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and these obligations take priority over our rights. Conservatives have also been inclined to assume, along with Burke, that this inheritance is best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action. Conservatives loyal to Burke are not hostile to change, only to doctrines and principles that do violence to pre-existing opinions and institutions, and open the door to despotism. This was the deepest basis of Burke's critique of the French revolution; it was not simply a defense of privilege.

Bronowski on the good life

The good life is more than just material decency. But it must be based on material decency.

Zizek on The Dark Knight as a parallel to Wikileaks

The district attorney, Harvey Dent, an obsessive vigilante who is corrupted and himself commits murders, is killed by Batman. Batman and his friend, police commissioner Gordon realise that the city's morale would suffer if Dent's murders were made public, so plot to preserve his image by holding Batman responsible for the killings. The film's take home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us. No wonder the figure of truth in the film is the Joker, its supreme villain. He makes it clear that his attacks on Gotham City will stop when Batman takes off his mask and reveals his true identity; to prevent this disclosure and to protect Batman, Dent tells the press he is Batman - another lie. In order to entrap the Joker, Gordon fakes his own death - yet another lie.

The Joker wants to disclose the truth beneath the mask convinced that this will destroy the social order. What shall we call him? A terrorist? Civilisation, in other words, must be grounded on a lie.

Zizek on Wikileaks

There has been, from the outset, something about its (Wikileaks) actions that goes beyond liberal conceptions of the free flow of information. We shouldn't look for this excess at the level of content. The only surprising thing about the Wikileaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn't we learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don't know what everyone knows we know. This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything.

Wilde's Preface to Dorian Gray

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

Slavoj Žižek on Obama, 9-11 and the Financial Crisis

Noam Chomsky called for people to vote for Obama ‘without illusions’. I fully share Chomsky’s doubts about the real consequences of Obama’s victory: from a pragmatic perspective, it is quite possible that Obama will make only some minor improvements, turning out to be ‘Bush with a human face’. He will pursue the same basic policies in a more attractive way and thus effectively strengthen the US hegemony, damaged by the catastrophe of the Bush years.

Obama’s victory is a sign of history in the triple Kantian sense of signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognosticum. 

The reason Obama’s victory generated such enthusiasm is not only that, against all odds, it really happened: it demonstrated the possibility of such a thing happening. 

President Bush’s addresses to the American people after 9/11 and the financial meltdown sound like two versions of the same speech. Both times, he evoked the threat to the American way of life and the need for fast and decisive action. Both times, he called for the partial suspension of American values (guarantees to individual freedom, market capitalism) to save those very values. Where does this similarity come from?

The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 marked the beginning of the ‘happy 1990s’. According to Francis Fukuyama, liberal democracy had, in principle, won. The era is generally seen as having come to an end on 9/11. However, it seems that the utopia had to die twice: the collapse of the liberal-democratic political utopia on 9/11 did not affect the economic utopia of global market capitalism, which has now come to an end.

The financial meltdown has made it impossible to ignore the blatant irrationality of global capitalism.....Saving endangered species, saving the planet from global warming, finding a cure for Aids, saving the starving children . . . All that can wait a bit, but ‘Save the banks!’ is an unconditional imperative which demands and gets immediate action. 

When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field is open for a ‘discursive’ ideological competition...To put it in old-fashioned Marxist terms, the main task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose a narrative that will not put the blame for the meltdown on the global capitalist system as such, but on its deviations – lax regulation, the corruption of big financial institutions etc.

Can rights be subject to a trade-off?

The background hum of stress as inalienable human rights are eroded. Today, in the New York Review of Books, Jeremy Waldron:

"The stakes are much higher in the trade-off between liberty and security. For what is traded off is something that was previously regarded as a right, and the loss of that right may simply be imposed on the people affected. This is troubling because rights are supposed to be guarantees given to individuals and minorities about the outer limits of the sacrifices that might reasonably be required of them. Rights are supposed to restrict trade-offs, not to be traded off themselves."

It seems to me self-evident that we are naive to trade rights for security, because we then have no course for redress when those keeping us secure abuse their power. Apparently, no-one else gives a shit. I look at my friends. All Ivy League educated. All successful. All bright. None of them care about anything more profound than whether they made the Lufthansa Hons programme. But let me not appear judgmental. My concern about terror is a low background hum. I worry about it as I sit in the BA executive lounge working out whether I can make Gold this year. Bad things happen when good people are out spending their Amex reward points.

Robert Nozick, "Anarchy, State & Utopia"

Taxation is a form of forced labour. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. Talk of an overall social good covers this up.

Tony Judt on Robert Kagan

Robert Kagan wants it both ways. At the end of his book he rather limply asks that Americans and Europeans show better mutual comprehension; but the foregoing 100 pages display not just ignorance of the recent European past and current European diversity, but an undertone of arrogant condescension, mixed with a certain amount of humbug. "The problem," he writes, is that "the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world, even though in doing so it violates Europe's post-modern norms." But the norms that Washington currently violates are its own - there is nothing uniquely European, much less post-modern, about the rule of law or the desirability of peace over war.

Peter Singer on Animal Rights

Lewis Petrivlovich says that our biology turns certain boundaries into moral imperatives and then lists "children, kin, neighbours and species". If the argument works at the narrower circle of family and friends, and the wider sphere of species, it should also work for the middle class: race. If the argument doesn't show race to be a morally relevant boundary, how can it show that species is?

Robert Dworkin on Affirmative Action

Colourblindness that has no basis in moral principle and helps only to perpetuate social stratification is worse than pointless.

Herzon on History

History has no libretto and this is difficult especially when there is no libretto. And if there were a libretto, then history would be unnecessary. And then it would be a practical joke.