Ted Cruz is a Constitutional Conservative (U.S. Senator) and Eric Weinstein is what I’m calling a New, New Left independent thinker (pro speech, pro-mathematical sciences, pro-change, anti-identity).
Of Note: Weinstein focuses on the years 1971-1973, where he pins a crucial slowdown in American economic growth, continuing today, which would help explain many changes we’ve been seeing in our lives. This would include the calcification and cratering of our political parties and the dysfunction in many of our social and educational institutions. It seems that everyone’s fighting more over less, and perceiving less all around, thus fighting more.
Previous generations, used to good returns on personal effort, relying upon institutional stability, were accustomed to generally playing by the rules in big companies, universities, law firms, and rent-seeking investments; generally climbing hierarchies and getting ahead.
Of course, if the theory is accurate, we have a lot of other potential contributing variables depnding upon your principles and point of view.
Mine include a longer sweep from Romanticism to Modernism to Postmodernism and increasingly atomized Western Selves living in ‘the modern world’. I tend to focus on 1960’s counter-culture rebellion (now probably the ‘culture’) moving towards radicalism in universities, education and media. In my own family, I’ve seen a subsequent move away from religious belief, and more broadly out in the ‘culture’, movements away from W.A.S.P culture and civic nationalism.
Let’s not forget the many obvious technological changes in networks and automation going on around us, either.
Which maps are you using?
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No small irony for my dead horse: Many at the Atlantic are supporting rather obvious Democratic party positions, often Statist, while increasingly being co-opted by the loudest voices with an agenda to push (critical and race theorists and writers, politicizing the personal).
It’s kind of Orwellian to ask poetry to serve ideological goals, but my guess is having a poet who isn’t black or isn’t (B)lack would be racist these days, once you’re playing the game.
Perhaps this gives Atlantic writers special insight into the CCP in China and Artificial Intelligence. An explicitly Communist, increasingly calculating and expanding State apparatus is utilizing the latest technology for control, driven somewhat by ideologues.
Well, it might hit a little closer to home, anyways.
I just want to find good poetry, and not play the game.
Also, I’d like to find out what is going on in China.
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As posted, long ago. All the foundations seem to get co-opted:
‘The best thing that could happen to poetry is to drive it out of the universities with burning pitch forks. Starve the lavish grants. Strangle them all in a barrel of water. Cast them out. The current culture, in which poetry is written for and supported by poets has created a kind of state-sanctioned poetry that resists innovation.’
Has the institutionalization of poetry done it much good?:
‘Lilly’s contribution (and contributions) to the Poetry Foundation are the only reason it is what it is today. In other words, it’s not through any intrinsic or hard-earned merit that the Poetry Foundation is surviving and flourishing today, but because of a drug baron’s fantastic wealth.’
Maybe it wasn’t Emerson that kept Whitman going, but rather, the thought of returning to his tenure track position after a long hiatus. Yet should there be no state funding at all of poetry…only patronage?
Also On This Site: Cleaning up the humanities?:
Did Martha Nussbaum succeed in addressing a perhaps broader problem? From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’
Philosopher Of Art Denis Dutton of the Arts & Letters Daily argues the arts and Darwin can be sucessfully synthesized: Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’
Conservative Briton Roger Scruton suggests keeping political and aesthetic judgments apart in the humanities:Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment
How might Nietzsche figure in the discussion (was he most after freeing art from a few thousand years of Christianity, monarchy and aristocracy…something deeper?), at least with regard to Camille Paglia. See the comments: Repost-Camille Paglia At Arion: Why Break, Blow, Burn Was Successful
Hopefully it won’t go this far: From Big Hollywood: ‘The National Endowment For The Art Of Persuasion?’
From NPR: Grants To The NEA To Stimulate The Economy?…From 2 Blowhards-We Need The Arts: A Sob Story