However it might be varnished by imagination or sophistry, the Covid pandemic is one of the most extraordinary phenomena of our times – but it is also the culmination of a mode of thought gradually developed through a long historical gestation. For what originally was (and still is), the natural and necessary need for assistance by him who is sick or in pain, has evolved into assigning to the ‘other’ the responsibility (and the knowledge) of what constitutes our personal physical well-being and health.
Even in antiquity there were voices saying for example that “a man after thirty must be the physician of himself.” Others (few) expressed similar skeptical ideas throughout the centuries, especially when the purported benefits of the then current medicine clashed with frequent contrary evidence. Continue reading
To understand Hegel (the philosopher) the reader must be in perfect health, though sometimes the minds of geniuses deliver compact nuggets of wisdom, understandable by the rest of us. One such instance is the idea of ‘Zeitgeist,’ the spirit of the times.
For many or most history is the study of what man did in the past, in different times and civilizations. Yet man is both the protagonist and the writer of history. It is he who develops a historical understanding of the past. And while studying the past man really studies himself.
A man’s life’s no more than to say ‘one’ – Hamlet tells his friend Horatio (1). And Voltaire has a character from one of his novels declare, “… We in a manner begin to die the very moment we are born: our existence is no more than a point, our duration an instant, and our globe an atom… I consider myself as a single drop in an immense ocean.”
Samuel Butler published his novel Erewhon in 1872. The title is the (almost) reverse spelling of ‘Nowhere’ and it applies to a country the author discovered. He probably had in mind the Southern island of New Zealand where he minded sheep for a while.
Trump’s supporters, having found the vanity of conjecture and inefficacy of expectations, resolved to prove their own existence, if not by violence, at least by physical presence.
It now seems certain that we have a Joe Bidet for president. For if a rose by any other name would smell as sweet (1), a Biden, metaphorically speaking, by any other name still smells like a poorly maintained sanitary device, however many euphemisms the imagination may body forth out of the forms of things unknown. (2)
During the cold war the West called dissenters those Russians in the USSR who voiced their complaints against the system. A definition – ‘dissenter’ – which, processed through the lexical grinding machine of the CIA and associates, was actually stripped of its original meaning to become a weapon of trivial instrumental imperialist propaganda. Said it another way, it was the dissenters who gave the pigs of the animal farm the tools for the pigs’ full spectrum propaganda.
If flattery is the infantry of negotiations, then mendacity is the air force of politics. There are exceptions, but as a practical rule truth tellers are not deemed worthy of the public trust.
It takes strength, endurance, resignation and stomach to like Donald Trump. Not for what he actually is. Under the pen of Alexandre Dumas, for example, Trump may even appear as a not-dislikable Yankee D’Artagnan of sorts. Maybe with less finesse than the original musketeer, whose contained yet French swaggering captivated millions of readers, when reading was still ‘cool’.