Skip to main content

About This Blog

A Blog About How We Are Put Together


I will be pursuing two sets of questions in this blog. 

First, politics and the economy, issues I can be heard talking about regularly on The Old Mole Variety Hour. These are questions about how we, collectively, are put together in social relations. 

Second, questions about how the human soul is constructed and the sources of our inner demons. I have written about these matters in my book Demystifying Demons: Rethinking Who and What We Are

This blog could also have been called Consciousness and the Unconscious, which is the name of a course I taught several times some years ago. For I will be dealing with
  • the limits and distortions of what we think we know (our consciousness) both about how our souls are put together and how we are all put together in society; and
  • what we know -- and feel -- but do not know that we do, both about ourselves and our social relations with each other (the unconscious). 
Some of the entries will be commentaries I have presented on the Old Mole Variety Hour. Others will be reflections or questions about whatever I am reading or observing at the moment.  

Welcome!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Saving the Time of Our Lives

Thinking in the wake of Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Life and SpiritualFreedom If we had all the time in the world, if we were immortal, then it wouldn’t matter how we spent our time, for there would always be more of it. But if life is short, then it matters a lot. If we and the people we love are mortal and can die at any moment – and will die at some moment – then every day and every minute of our finite lives is supremely important. How, then, should we arrange our lives together so that the time of our brief lives is well spent? In view of our mortality, wouldn’t we want   to spend as much of our allotted time as possible doing things we want to do, that are worth doing for their own sake, and to minimize the time we spend doing things we have to do? There is the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity. The realm of necessity is what we have to do whether we want to or not; it includes the activities necessary for maintaining life: cleanin...

Founding Myths, Founding Crimes

How important are the founding myths of a nation? What happens if those myths become founding crimes ? Consider the Soviet Union and Khrushchev’s famous speech in 1956 denouncing the crimes of Stalin – the show trials, the mass executions, the gulag. According to philosopher Slavoj Žižek, “After [Khrushchev’s] speech, things were never the same again, the fundamental dogma of infallible leadership had been fatally undermined.…”   In the short run, this exposure of the seamy side of the Soviet state “strengthen[ed] the communist movement…the Khrushchev era was the last period of authentic communist enthusiasm of belief in the communist project.” But Khrushchev was deposed in 1964, and a “resigned cynicism” set in “until Gorbachev’s attempt at a more radical confrontation with the past” led to the utter collapse of the system. By contrast, the Chinese Communist Party managed to throw overboard the whole communist project and take up “Western-style ‘liberalization’ (...

Capitalism Abandons Ship

Presented on the Old Mole Variety Hour , January 14, 2019 Once upon a time, when I was a boy in the 1950s and ‘60s, we all took it for granted that every part of the world was in some stage of an unstoppable world historical process called “progress,” or “modernization,” characterized by what we would now call “globalization.” Concretely this meant integration of the world economy under the “the free market”: free trade, open borders and international travel, faster and easier communication, constant technological innovation, equality (at least in theory), and cheaper and universally available consumer goods. It also meant cultural assimilation: that non-Western peoples and cultures would become “civilized”.   They would accept Western rationalism, and “primitive” practices and “superstitious” beliefs would gradually fade away. There were some obstacles such as communism, Beatniks and Hippies, unreasonable demands of labor, the Peace movement, and premature dema...