Over the course of the last year of two I’ve slowly been removing news, current events, and politics from my daily life. Thomas Jefferson talked about the importance of a well informed electorate, and I strongly believe in the truth of such a statement; but I’ve basically decided that news and current events doesn’t actually do much to make us “well informed.”
The solution to this conundrum is that I find myself reading more history and intellectually grounded politics from many different sides of the political divide. Honestly I believe more sociologists, philosophers, and economists should study history; otherwise they run the risk of looking foolish. History is the test for all the soft ideas of mankind; Twitter is the extrament.
One of my favorite political economists is Thomas Sowell and his books “Intellectuals and Race” was my favorite for this round. Other books not listed in the quotes below include an amazing kids books discussing the history of mankind called “A Little History of the World” by E.H. Gombrich, The Iliad (which I must admit I hadn’t read in its entirety before), and more history about Catherine the Great, William Marshal, and Hannibal. Checkout my Goodreads list for February through March here.
13 Things mentally Strong People Don’t Do by Amy Morin
You only as good as your worst habits
Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.
It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.
Could you easily list your top five values off the top of your head? Most people can’t. But if you aren’t really clear on your values, how do you know where to put your energy, and how to make the best decisions?
The Naval War of 1812 by Theodore Roosevelt
…from which date two distinct schools in the naval affairs of the 18th century: one of these was all for promptness and audacity, which were regarded as the indispensable conditions for victory; the other, on the contrary, praised skilful delays and able evolutions, and created success by science united to prudence. But these two schools were true only according to circumstances, not absolutely… The only school always true is that one which, freed from all routine, produces men whose genius will unite in one, in knowing how to apply them appropriately, the audacity which will carry off victory, and the prudence which knows how to obtain it in preparing for it.
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
Dying of dehydration is, in a sense, is an abomination against the very origins of life on earth. Our ancestors evolved first in the oceans of the young planet, and while some organisms managed to adapt to life on the land, our bodies retain a genetic memory of their watery origin. Fertilization for all animals takes place in some form of water; embryos float in the womb; human blood has almost the same concentration as seawater.
Iberall observed that human societies appeared to cycle through comparable phase transitions, as the energy harnessed by the society increased: moving from the gaseous state of roaming hunter-gathers, to the more settled configuration of agrarian farming, to the crystalline density of the walled city.
When the supply of surplus energy spiked, thanks to the slave labor and transportation networks of the Roman Empire, the city of Rome itself surged to more than a million people, and dozens of towns connected to the networked reached populations in the hundreds of thousands. But when the imperial system crumbled, the energy supply dried up, and the cities of Europe vaporized in a matter of centuries.
…indeed, it was a kind of madness, the madness that comes from being under the spell of a Theory.
They were not hacks working surreptitiously for Victorian interest groups. They were not blinded by politics or personal ambitions. They were blinded, instead, by an idea.
Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
so the Christian too belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life, but in the thick of foes… whom wants to be among friends, to sit among roses, not with the bad people but with the devout people… if Christ had done what you are doing, who would have ever been spared.
The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium. The person who comes into a fellowship because he is running away from himself is misusing it for the sake of diversion; no matter how spiritual this diversion may appear.
Self justification and judging others goes together; as justification by grace and serving others goes together.
Brotherly love with find any number of extenuation for the sins of others, only for my sin is there no apology whatsoever. Therefore my sin is the worst…. How can I possibly serve another person in unfeigned humility if I seriously regard his sinfulness as worse than my own.
The sin concealed separated him from the fellowship, made all his apparent fellowship a sham. The sin confessed has helped him find true fellowship with the brethren of Jesus Christ.
Why is it that it is often easier to confess our sins to God than to a brother? But if we do we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God. Whether we have not rather been confessing to ourselves, and therefore granting absolution to ourselves.
The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
Spirit: Of course. Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which (for the moment) he actually believes that another glass will do him no harm.
Ghost: To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
Spirit: If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully. There would be nothing to hope for.
George MacDonald: The action of Pity will live for ever, but the passion of Pity will not. The passion of pity, the pity we merely suffer, the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth, the pity that has cheated many a woman out of her virginity and many a statesman out of his honesty-that will die. It was used as a weapon by bad men against good ones: their weapon will be broken.
Intellectuals and Race by Thomas Sowell
By intellectual what is meant here is a people in a particular occupation mainly people whose work begin and end with ideas… Chemists or chess grand masters may have an equal or greater mental accomplishment but they are not intellectuals because their work ends with a outcome subject to empirical verification by known standards while the outcomes of intellectuals are subject to essentially peer consensus.
There is no need to replace genetic determinism with geographic determinism. While there are other factors which operate against the presumed equality of developed capabilities among people with equal potential, the point here is that geography alone is enough to prevent equality of developed capabilities, even if all races have identical potentialities and there is no discrimination. Nor is it necessary to determine the relative weights of geographic, demographic, cultural and other factors, when the more fundamental point is that each of these factors makes equal outcomes among races, classes or other subdivisions of the human species less likely,
Historian A.J.P Taylor has said the first stage of nationalism is led by university professors and that the second stage comes when the pupils of the professors get out into the world.
By contrast, in the twentieth century a whole generation of future Third World leaders who went to study in the West seldom concentrated on studying the science, technology, and entrepreneurship that produced Western prosperity, but instead concentrated on the social theories and ideologies in vogue among Western intellectuals in academia and elsewhere.
a common pattern among intellectuals has been to seek, or demand, equality of results without equality of causes or on sheer presumptions of equality of causes