Kevin Williamson

It’s a campaign of mass murder being conducted for political theater. … What Donald Trump is doing is simply blowing up boats in the Caribbean because they are full of South American people that he would like to murder, for political purposes, because it’s good theater. […]

I think the way to think of this, uncomfortable as it is to say, is that Venezuela is Ukraine and we are the Russians.

Matt Dinan:

I was trying to figure out what to call our cultural sense that we can’t judge something dangerous without a “study” to demonstrate the danger, but I’ve realized it’s simply that we do not believe in the faculty of judgment. Kant’s third critique outlines judgment as the faculty that brings together the realms of nature and freedom, and the need for a study to determine an obvious dangers reveals a failure to recognize just this capacity. If we don’t recognize the capacity we’ll do little to develop it, making the problem worse.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl:

The two most important and at the same time most controversial judgments Arendt made were simple, but both carried complex challenges. She reported Eichmann’s story, noting his bureaucratic mentality and boastful claim that “officialese is my only language,” and she judged him incapable of telling right from wrong. Thus, she implied that the Jerusalem court’s “guilty” judgment, with which she certainly agreed raised general questions about the role of motivation in deeds such as Eichmann’s. Eichmann did what the laws of his state, justified by raisons d’état, asked of him—without knowing the laws to be wrong. The concept of mens rea (intent), so crucial to modern legal philosophy and procedure, has never been adequately associated with a “law of humanity” higher than state law. Even though she accepted and approved the Israeli legal proceedings, Arendt felt that only with such a “law of humanity,” only with new legal and moral categories, could justice truly be rendered to individuals involved in state-instigated crimes or “administrative massacres.” Secondly, Arendt reported how the moral corruption of the Nazis’ totalitarian regime affected other countries and societies, including the society of the Jewish victims, and concluded that such corruption poses unprecedented challenges to judgment in general—past and present. She wrote of the past, but she addressed the crisis of judgment she saw in the present. As she put the matter to [Karl] Jaspers: “Even good and, at bottom, worthy people have, in our time, the most extraordinary fear about making judgments. This confusion about judgment can go hand in hand with fine and strong intelligence, just as good judgment can be found in those not remarkable for their intelligence.” Inability to judge and refusal to judge were her themes in Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Hannah Arendt offered her report and her own judgments in full awareness that both would be controversial and that she would be accused of arrogance for making judgments in a time when anxiety about judging was so widespread. In a set of rough notes she made for a public discussion of the book, she linked her awareness to the phenomena—past and present—she had studied; she named the sources of her own lack of anxiety about judging. “For conscience to work: either very strong religious belief—extremely rare. Or: pride, even arrogance. If you say to yourself in such matters: who am I to judge?—you are already lost.”

Hannah Arendt (Sonning Prize acceptance speech, Copenhagen, April 18, 1975):

Persona, at any event, originally referred to the actor’s mask that covered his individual “personal” face and indicated to the spectator the role and the part of the actor in the play. But in this mask, which was designed and determined by the play, there existed a broad opening at the place of the mouth through which the individual, undisguised voice of the actor could sound. It is from this sounding through that the word persona was derived: per-sonare, “to sound through,” is the verb of which persona, the mask, is the noun. And the Romans themselves were the first to use the noun in a metaphorical sense; in Roman law persona was somebody who possessed civil rights, in sharp distinction from the word homo, denoting someone who was nothing but a member of the human species, different, to be sure, from an animal but without any specific qualification or distinction, so that homo, like the Greek anthropos, was frequently used contemptuously to designate people not protected by any law.

I found this Latin understanding of what a person is helpful for my considerations because it invites further metaphorical usage, metaphors being the daily bread of all conceptual thought. The Roman mask corresponds with great precision to our own way of appearing in a society where we are not citizens, that is, not equalized by the public space established and reserved for political speech and political acts, but where we are accepted as individuals in our own right and yet by no means as human beings as such. We always appear in a world which is a stage and are recognized according to the roles which our professions assign us, as physicians or lawyers, as authors or publishers, as teachers or students, and so on. It is through this role, sounding through it, as it were, that something else manifests itself, something entirely idiosyncratic and undefinable and still unmistakably identifiable, so that we are not confused by a sudden change of roles, when for instance a student arrives at his goal which was to become a teacher, or when a hostess, whom socially we know as a physician, serves drinks instead of taking care of her patients. In other words, the advantage of adopting the notion of persona for my considerations lies in the fact that the masks or roles which the world assigns us, and which we must accept and even acquire if we wish to take part in the world’s play at all, are exchangeable; they are not inalienable in the sense in which we speak of “inalienable rights,” and they are not a permanent fixture annexed to our inner self in the sense in which the voice of conscience, as most people believe, is something the human soul constantly bears within itself.

It is in this sense that I can come to terms with appearing here as a “public figure” for the purpose of a public event. It means that when the events for which the mask was designed are over, and I have finished using and abusing my individual right to sound through the mask, things will again snap back into place. Then I, greatly honored and deeply thankful for this moment, shall be free not only to exchange the roles and masks that the great play of the world may offer, but free even to move through that play in my naked “thisness,” identifiable, I hope, but not definable and not seduced by the great temptation of recognition which, in no matter what form, can only recognize us as such and such, that is, as something which we fundamentally are not.

Dag Hammarskjöld:

At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I‘s. But in only one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one—which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.

Emily Dickinson:

Noah Millman:

I doubt anyone in the military believes that, if they disobeyed a flagrantly illegal order, that choice would be anything other than career-ending. So by giving such orders, you drum out people unwilling to obey, and make the remainder dependent on your personal authority for their continued freedom (since the pardon power is the only thing that assures they will be exempt from subsequent prosecution for having committed war crimes).

The political purpose of such an order, meanwhile, is essentially trolling: anyone who raises an objective will be mocked as weak and a loser simply for saying that there are such things as laws and ethical guidelines for behavior. I’ve written before about the gutter Nietzscheanism underlying this phenomenon, and specifically espoused by Hegseth: the belief that reestablishing manliness requires breaking both the law and ethical rules because in our purportedly feminized era one can presume that anyone who cares about such things only does so because he is pussy-whipped. That’s basically the message of Hegseth’s children’s book stunt in a nutshell. If you’re not one of the people who believes this, it should be obvious why it is horrible—and why it’s incredibly ominous if it proves politically effective. Even if you are a person who believes this, though, it should be obvious that, at least in the short term, you’re tossing ethics overboard—which is to say: doing things that you yourself think are wrong—in the service of a larger effort to reshape society.

Oliver Burkeman:

Ironically, “interest” and “interesting” are vaguely boring words compared to words like “passion” or “excitement”. (“Interesting” can even be negative: it’s the euphemism you might deploy about your friend’s terrible choices, or inedible cooking, if you didn’t want to hurt their feelings too much.) But in his book Creating a Life, the Jungian therapist James Hollis makes a powerful case that an interesting life – interesting to you, that is, not necessarily to other people – might in fact be the highest and best goal to which any of us could aspire. His own specialism of psychotherapy, he writes, 

…will not heal you, make your problems go away or make your life work out. It will, quite simply, make your life more interesting. You will come to more and more complex riddles wrapped within yourself and your relationships. This claim seems small potatoes to the anxious consumer world, but it is an immense gift, a stupendous contribution. Think of it: your own life might become more interesting to you! Consciousness is the gift, and that is the best it gets.

Perhaps the reason the idea of an “interesting” life feels like a cop-out – compared to, say, a wildly successful or influential or joyful one – is that it lacks any sense of domination or conquest. We want to feel as though we were handed the challenge of a human lifetime and that we nailed it, that we grappled with the problem and solved it. Whereas to follow the lead of interestingness is to accept that life isn’t a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had. And that engaging with it as fully as possible, connecting to the aliveness, is its ultimate point.

Not surprising here, Emily Dickinson said it first:

To be alive—is Power—
Existence—in itself—
Without a further function—
Omnipotence—Enough—

To be alive—and Will!
‘Tis able as a God—
The Maker—of Ourselves—be what—
Such being Finitude!

W.H. Auden:

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savior-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

“Come One, Come All”

This Thomas Nast cartoon, published in the November 20, 1869 issue of Harper’s Weekly, celebrates the ethnic diversity and envisions the political equality of citizens of the American republic. Joining the Thanksgiving Day feast of hosts Uncle Sam (carving the turkey on the far-right) and Columbia (seated on the far-left) are Americans from all over the world:  German, Native American, French, Arab, British, African, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and Irish.  Behind Uncle Sam is a large picture of Castle Garden, the main immigrant depot in the United States, with the inviting label reading “Welcome.”   (Located at the foot of Battery Park in southernmost Manhattan, Castle Garden was the primary station for processing immigrants until replaced by Ellis Island in 1890.)

Emily Dickinson 🙂