Charlie Rose

JohnGelles  11/04/2011 06:11 PM Report

I am pleased to say that:

Output-Based Currency or Money

When entered into Google HIT my website called ustaxreform.us as its third item out of a great number of others.

JohnGelles  11/04/2011 06:00 PM Report

There is no doubt that wisdom and the material world to which it applies were not born yesterday.

..... So people who want to hide behind old wisdom their contempt for current subscribers to: "All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness [defined as virtue}", can hide to their heart's content -- and earn the contempt of me and those subscribers.

If they manage to twist our common language to its breaking point, and so claim that they agree with our right to happiness (and the good fortune it takes to know happiness,)

as the same time they mock it, all we can do is ignore them now and again when they repeat their sorry act.

In my plea for "Output-Based Currency or Money", I included the PREAMBLE (to the Constitution) and the Second Bill of Rights (in the legacy to us from FDR). Now ASAP I will add "The Pursuit of Happiness, i.e. Virtue", which will be this preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

History is good. But we strive to make the FUTURE better. If we succeed, it will be because we have a brain -- in addition to our books.

Assuming you cannot read every truly great book, let us hope you have a brain. It trumps all -- IMO. "Not so", say the others, sometimes in Latin or pig-Latin.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  11/04/2011 02:03 AM Report

Hey Charlie,

Our friends at Coca-Cola had "Swerve". It had 51% milk but more calories than a can of Coke. So it died in 2005.

Well in Coke's world "Swerve" is NOT how it became modern; perhaps the free market has already spoken on the concept.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  11/04/2011 01:53 AM Report

We were told that Lucretius says live a simple life but not ascetic and pleasure over pain. He hated the coliseum.

Sounds like Lucretius would be out there occupying something about now.

REMant  11/03/2011 09:05 PM Report

Thinking about the sentence in the Declaration draft later, I realized Jefferson had of course written: "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable among which are the preservation of life & liberty..." The words "the preservation of" are heavily crossed out, but that is clearly what they were, which makes an even stronger case for Locke, and for Stoicism, which is the origin of the idea of self-preservation in its concept of oikeiosis which means, essentially living according to nature, which led to eudaimonia or happiness. All of which is very Platonic and Aristotelean.

julia_cybele  11/03/2011 05:09 PM Report

I was inspired upon first reading Lucretius' master work some years ago and found that enthusiasm reignited through your wonderful interview with Stephen Greenblatt. Charlie, this is the quality of programming that makes it at all worthwhile to own a television these days! Keep it up and I'll certainly keep watching daily... thank you!

REMant  11/03/2011 01:14 PM Report

At best "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" appears to me to be just another Whig artifact. At worst, it is plain pap. Modernism is equated with materialism, and hence the Church, mired in Plato and Aristotle, design and idea, antiquated. But this is itself antiquated, already hawked by Burkhardt and Gay, Machiavelli and Gassendi before them, and by Marx, who did his dissertation on the Greek Epicurius, and whose philosophy the Roman Lucretius was expounding.

After taking a course on the so-called "Copernican revolution" with Hans Jonas years ago and prompted several decades later by reading Margaret Jacob, I spent a while looking into the influence of Epicureanism myself. While it without a doubt had some influence among scientists, philosophers and even some historians, it was swamped by Stoicism, which underlies not only Protestantism, republicanism and Locke, but forms the foundation for millennia of church history, and is pantheistic.

There is also no basis for considering the Deistic physics of such as Newton really modern, who, altho voluntarist and something of a fundamentalist, quite scientifically concluded that God generally left things alone. In fact the static aspect becomes the problem for science, and Epicurus came up with the swerve to explain change, surfacing again with natural selection and quantum mechanics. While there is no doubt that both have had a considerable impact - think only of poor Henry Adams - churchmen had no problem assimilating Darwin to ideas of design, and contemporary physics is more Stoic than anything else. The Newtonian interlude can be compared with digitization, useful, but clearly artificial.

But if you believe that relativism or will is "modern" then you will, like Isiah Berlin, who, himself, if memory serves, made much of the swerve, delight in this idea. Yet a glance at (all three volumes of) Werner Jaeger should disabuse one of the notion, as should the Greek's theory of virtue and corruption. Materialism was also early blended into Stoicism by Roman Stoics such as Panaetius, Posidonius and Seneca, and read throughout the middle ages, along with Cicero, who used Epicureanism in his discussion of friendship.

Too, Epicurus never suggested anything like the pursuit of unbridled pleasure and his idea of it remains firmly within Socratic tradition, in which sense Locke used the idea: "the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness." The Lockean Wollaston wrote a little later: "The pursuit of happiness by the practice of reason and truth." Happiness was dissected by Aristotle long before Epicurus. Skepticism has a far greater claim to iconoclasm than Epicurureanism, but it, too, is hardly modern.

Jefferson may have considered himself Epicurean, like he considered himself a man of the heart instead of the head, and joined in the movement to humanize Jesus (in the process ironically overlooking all the eschatological aspects). He certainly had his whims, but it is highly unlikely that Epicurus' idea of it was in the minds of Jefferson, or anyone in Continental Congress, and Garry Wills' theory that sentimentalism was the source of the Declaration of Independence's preamble was long ago discounted. It is more likely that it drew its ideas from Locke, Vattel and the detested Blackstone. Locke most evident in the draft which read: "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable among which are the pursuit [of?] life & liberty," then changes that to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but continues to give give the 2nd Treatise's theory of the formation of govt and its legitimacy, asserting the right to institute one which "as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." George Mason had written just weeks before "the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." Locke had insisted that the origin of all right stemmed from the "property" that one has in himself, in other words, had nothing to do with possession of or by others, which a little reflection will show was the point of all his work.

Beyond all this there's very little basis for considering anything "The Renaissance." There was a recovery of ancient texts generally, but we call the rediscovery of Aristotle the 12th century renaissance and similar claims are made for it. Machiavelli thought there should be the recovery of the glory that was Rome, but at least until the late 19th c he was in a distinct minority. A better case can be made for Pocock's Machiavellian moment and the development of the idea of a balanced constitution. And indeed, the whole point of recovery texts was to be able to combat tradition of the type Prof Greenblatt espouses, for instance the Protestant insistence on sola scriptura.

I had a roommate once who was into literary criticism. I took a look at his books and decided that while there was some benefit in understanding the historical and philosophical context of fiction, it was hardly helpful to fictionalize history. Prof Greenblatt appears at first glance to agree with that, but has also been labeled a Marxist and a spear-carrier for political correctness, which also appears to be true. His ideas are definitely Whiggish, despite his penchant for Foucault, the latter undoubtedly indebted to Tocqueville and Montesquieu, who were its antithesis.

It has been common coin in history to argue that the past was different, but I long ago came to the conclusion that the only reason it seems different is that we don't adequately understand it or how to apply it to ourselves. But once we have determined the past was different, it becomes possible to argue that it was better or worse, which is mostly what historians do. If, on the other hand, you believe in the scientific hypothesis of no difference, you can't get away with that. There is NEVER any call for the condescension shown by academics who proclaim their reinvented wheels were anticipated by such and such, that such and such were truly modern and so forth.

As for America's fascination with such as these: Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  11/03/2011 01:01 PM Report

Death is no big whoop.

Lucretius argues against the fear of death by stating that death is the dissipation of a being's material mind. So, as a simple ceasing-to-be, death can be neither good nor bad for this being. Being completely devoid of sensation and thought, a dead person cannot miss being alive. According to Lucretius, fear of death is a projection of terrors experienced in life, of pain that only a living (intact) mind can feel. Lucretius also puts forward the 'symmetry argument' against the fear of death. In it, he says that people who fear the prospect of eternal non-existence after death should think back to the eternity of non-existence before their birth, which they probably do not fear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucretius

I like the symmetry argument. Stephen Hawking says heaven is for those who fear the dark. Still I hope for those Elysian Fields (without allergies and chiggers of course).