We Are Not Saved

Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress by: Christopher Ryan The End of History and the Last Man by: Francis Fukuyama Sidhartha by: Herman Hesse The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Sławomir Rawicz Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space by: Kevin Peter Hand Kansas City Noir by: Various Innsmouth: (The Weird of Hali #1) by: John Michael Greer The Kill Chain: How Emerging Technologies Threaten America’s Military Dominance by: Christian Brose Trump vs. China: Facing America’s Greatest Threat by: Newt Gingrich A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 by: G. J. Meyer

In the book The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama spends quite a bit of time talking about the idea of legitimacy, in particular how the End of History represents a time when only liberal democracy has any reserves of legitimacy. But two questions occur, first where does a nation go if liberal democracy starts failing? And second does that failure happen, does it end up just like all previous systems, if it no longer provides reserves of legitimacy? Recent events seem to indicate that the answer to those two questions maybe no where, and yes. In other words liberal democracy is suffering a crisis of legitimacy and unfortunately, at this point, there's no where left to go.

Coming up with solutions is difficult. I've read many books that present an excellent diagnosis of the problem, but then finish things off by presenting utterly ridiculous solutions. I take one of these books Civilized to Death by Christopher Ryan and go into detail on why the solutions he proposed are so inadequate and then go into some detail as to what I think good solutions should include. 

With the stock market prices seemingly bearing little relationship to the actual economy, investment strategies are on the mind of many. Here I briefly describe my own investment strategy which unfortunately has very little to say about the current craziness, but hopefully contains some wisdom about longer term investing. In particular the idea that you should view investing as purchasing pieces in potential futures. This may not sound particularly radical, but I argue that this change in focus from what constitutes wealth now to what constitutes wealth in the future can be profoundly illuminating.

Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk by: Justin Tosi, Brandon Warmke The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by: Iain McGilchrist The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust by: John Coates Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16) by: Jim Butcher Euripides V: Bacchae, Iphigenia in Aulis, The Cyclops, Rhesus by: Euripides Cutting for Stone by: Abraham Verghese How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture by: Francis A. Shaeffer 

We're told that in order to combat fake news, conspiracy theories, and misinformation of all kinds that we need to do a better job of examining the evidence, of looking at the data, but what if this is entirely backwards? What if we're too focused on the data, on the little bits of evidence that make up our world view, and that the problem is we're bad at organizing these bits of data into a coherent and common-sensical world view? What if we're so focused on justice, punishing people for the separate misdeeds that occur every day, that we neglect mercy, the art of seeing how interconnected everything and everyone really is. 

After having a conversation with a friend I decide to dig into the numbers on police officer killings since 1965 as compiled by the Anti-Defamation League. In the process I discover that there's a lot of fairly obvious subjectivity to who those numbers can be interpreted, and the general impression that right-wing extremism is more dangerous is muddier than people think.  It's a long one, but it's got lots of numbers so that makes up for it. Right?

Super Cooperators: Evolution, Altruism and Human Behavior (Or, Why We Need Each Other to Succeed) by Martin Nowak Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by: Satya Nadella The Book of Three by: Lloyd Alexander The Black Cauldron by: Lloyd Alexander The Castle of Llyr by: Lloyd Alexander Taran Wanderer by: Lloyd Alexander The High King by: Lloyd Alexander Euripides IV: Helen, The Phoenician Women, Orestes by: Euripides A Secular Age by: Charles Taylor A Secular Age by: Charles Taylor (Religious Review)

How is it, that the French and American Revolutions, so close in time and goals, had such different outcomes? One answer is that the American Revolution built on the foundation of English legislative traditions whereas the French had no such traditions (at the time of the revolution it had been 175 years since the last time the Estates General had been called). Which is to say the American Revolution modified the existing system, while the French Revolution was an attempt to completely replace the old system. This gave the American Revolution an obvious end point, which the French Revolution lacked.

Increasingly liberalism and the values associated with it have been judged inadequate to the task of rectifying racial inequalities. But the question is, what are the alternatives? One that has been mentioned is Critical Race Theory (CRT). In an article from The Economist these two approaches are pitted against one another. And despite the article's attempt to be balanced it seems clear that most people who advocate for CRT as some kind of alternative have never really grappled with the practical considerations of abandoning liberalism, an ideology that despite its failings has provided the underpinning for centuries of progress.