Let's Make America Up from Out of Our Asses
1. If, as I am told some physicists suggest, things can simply pop into and out of existence at random in the vacuum of space, can this provide us with a useful model of political discourse?
2. If, as many philosophers suggest, what we perceive as real is mainly a construction of the mind, why do we bother with reality at all?
3. Can bad faith be so perfect that it rises to the level of genuine art?
These are some of the rather pretentious thoughts that crossed my mind as I was flipping channels past the first night of the Republican convention in Cleveland.
I am almost less disturbed by what I saw than by the fact that it was calculated -- by people who have some experience with this stuff -- to be effective with a significant part of the electorate. I tended to have trouble, as an undergraduate, with social science models that were based on rational actors, since I was more of a mushy history and literature type and just didn't believe people consistently behaved that way. But . . . are they really, after all, consistently like this?
Maybe I am just in an unusually pessimistic and sour mood.
2. If, as many philosophers suggest, what we perceive as real is mainly a construction of the mind, why do we bother with reality at all?
3. Can bad faith be so perfect that it rises to the level of genuine art?
These are some of the rather pretentious thoughts that crossed my mind as I was flipping channels past the first night of the Republican convention in Cleveland.
I am almost less disturbed by what I saw than by the fact that it was calculated -- by people who have some experience with this stuff -- to be effective with a significant part of the electorate. I tended to have trouble, as an undergraduate, with social science models that were based on rational actors, since I was more of a mushy history and literature type and just didn't believe people consistently behaved that way. But . . . are they really, after all, consistently like this?
Maybe I am just in an unusually pessimistic and sour mood.