With modest grants from NEH, scholars help us better understand our cultural inheritance; they fill in the gaps of our collective histories and educate the public by teaching our teachers and our college students, while other grants support major exhibitions and library forums in small towns. These people do good work to the benefit of our nation, and yet they are frequently targeted for budget cuts despite the fact that the agency budget, for the enormous good it does for research, is a rounding error in the eyes of anyone taking a serious look at federal expenditures.
There is a worldview … that sees our planet as a product of only tumult and indifference. In such a world, it's possible for an entire species to be ground into extinction by forces beyond its control and then, 40,000 years later, be dug up and made to endure an additional century and a half of bad luck and abuse. That's what happened to the Neanderthals. And it's what we did to them. But recently, after we'd snickered over their skulls for so long, it stopped being clear who the boneheads were.
[The] sense of truth as the product of self-critical search and dialogue does not characterize the moment we live in now. The cultural-political air is filled with competing truth claims, shouted angrily and with barely a shred of doubt. Is global warming real, whatever the preponderance of scientific opinion might be? Has globalization fatally eroded the inner core of the U.S. economy? Is racism "over"?
Spencer's aims … are pretty much the same as those of your average neo-Nazi. He wants to create an all white "ethno-state" where, as he put it in a 2014 column for Radix, the journal published by his anodyne-sounding National Policy Institute, people would live under a "declaration of difference and distance." That declaration, crafted by Spencer to deliberately echo an 1861 speech from Confederate leader Alexander Stephens, is this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created unequal."
We have a certain heroic expectation of how medicine works. … A single generation experienced a transformation in the treatment of human illness as no generation had before. It was like discovering that water could put out fire. We built our health-care system, accordingly, to deploy firefighters. Doctors became saviors. But the model wasn't quite right. If an illness is a fire, many of them require months or years to extinguish, or can be reduced only to a low-level smolder. The treatments may have side effects and complications that require yet more attention. Chronic illness has become commonplace, and we have been poorly prepared to deal with it. Much of what ails us requires a more patient kind of skill.
This week's video is a 1991 performance from the Bowie-fronted band Tin Machine:
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