Patriots and nationalists of many stripes are often committed to the view that a certain kind of nation-building violence was inevitable, and written into the very idea of the nation, into the national fabric as it were; the sanguine acceptance of such violence is ostensibly worth taking on as the price to be paid for theContinue reading “Nations, Nationalisms, And The Natal Crime”
Tag Archives: cults
Epistemology and ‘The Leftovers’
Imagine that an extremely improbable event occurs, one for which there was no warning; your best theories of the world assigned it a near-zero probability (indeed, so low was this probability then calculating it would have been a waste of time). This event is inexplicable–no explanations for it are forthcoming, and it cannot be fittedContinue reading “Epistemology and ‘The Leftovers’”
The Conformist Non-Conformist
In yesterday’s post I had quoted W. H. Auden‘s review of David Luke‘s translation of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Other Stories in responding to his acid assessment of a reductionist impulse in art criticism. Today, I quote him again, on a topic that is of similarly perennial interest, the problem of conformism as a hallmark of non-conformity:Continue reading “The Conformist Non-Conformist”
William Pfaff on the Indispensability of Clerical Leadership
In reviewing Garry Wills‘ Why Priests? A Failed Tradition (‘Challenge to the Church,’ New York Review of Books, 9 May 2013), William Pfaff writes: How does a religion survive without structure and a self-perpetuating leadership? The practice of naming bishops to lead the Church in various Christian centers has existed since apostolic times. Aside fromContinue reading “William Pfaff on the Indispensability of Clerical Leadership”
‘The Master’: Coming Undone And Putting It Back Together
One way to ‘read’ Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master is as an enormously ambitious, technically brilliant cinematic riff on Ron Hubbard and Scientology, on a time fertile for cults and messianic healing: post-WWII America, when broken men–post-traumatic stress disorder is as old as war–drifted back home, and were, just as many other Americans, looking forContinue reading “‘The Master’: Coming Undone And Putting It Back Together”
Nietzsche on CEOs And Insider Trading
CEO hagiography has a long and well-established tradition in our time. Despite the–sometimes really well-written–mountains of evidence to suggest that they do little to deserve the size of their pay packets–which grow ever more obscene and disconnected from reality, and despite a nagging feeling that especially in the world of modern finance, a CEO’s successContinue reading “Nietzsche on CEOs And Insider Trading”
Samir Chopra 