Bibliography

Heavenly City Revisited

Heavenly City Revisited

archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/25/specials/gay-paganism.html?scp=20&sq=Deism&st=cse

By GEORGE L. MOSSE
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
An Interpretation. The Rise of Modern Paganism.
By Peter Gay.

The passage of time has not been kind to the 18th-century philosophes. Modern historians have characterized the makers of the Enlightenment as dogmatists whose belief in reason amounted to self deception. They fought Christianity, but merely succeeded in building a “heavenly city” of their own. Progressive disenchantment with the potentialities of human reason has colored our view of the philosophes. Carl Becker, who set the tone for this interpretation of the Enlightenment, gave his famous lectures on “The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers” in 1931, at a time when the forces of irrationalism were closing in on Europe.

Peter Gay, a professor of history at Columbia University, has now successfully challenged this interpretation. He meets the philosophes on their own ground, and refuses to look upon them through a window clouded with the accumulated experiences of the last centuries. The philosophes emerge from his analysis as a group of intellectuals who believed that man’s unfettered use of his critical mind would lead all mankind into a better future.

This first volume of his study concentrates upon the origins of the Enlightenment. The classics provided the foundations, but the philosophes did not hesitate to use Renaissance and 17th-century thought in order to fight their battles against Christianity. The Middle Ages were rejected, but the philosophes did make use of that Christian tradition which stressed ethics and rationalism at the expense of theology.

Peter Gay demonstrates the selectivity that the philosophes exercised in pillaging the past. This very selectivity leads him to one of his most important conclusions: the philosophes were not an integral part of the “seamless web of history,” but instead signaled a break in its continuity. The origins of ideas may be a clue to their function, but they do not determine it. Past ideas make a substantial contribution to the education of the philosophes, but they did not determine the definition of the Enlightenment. Historians, usually obsessed with continuities, might well take note of this approach to intellectual history, for it has proved singularly fruitful in this book. The philosophes may have used Christian terminology, but the mere use of words does not mean that the substance behind them has remained intact. The philosophes were pagans, after all.

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Peter Gay: When Attitudes are Cultivated

Host Marcia Alvar speaks with Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History, Yale University, and author of The Cultivation of Hatred. Violence is a pervasive force in today’s world, but violence is not a new development. Professor Gay examines the debate in the 19th Century over the proper role of violence and aggression in society. He shows how attitudes in both Europe and the United States were reshaped so that aggression became ritualized in sports, public service and business. While he refuses to compare the era before WWI with the present, he does admit that this is a more violent age.

 

https://youtu.be/Hm42isknKwU

NYTimes: What Underlies the G.O.P. Commitment to Ignorance?

What Underlies the G.O.P. Commitment to Ignorance? nyti.ms/3A7Pltp

But beyond that, the modern G.O.P. is no home for people who believe in objectivity. One striking feature of surveys of academic partisanship is the overwhelming Democratic lean in hard sciences like biology and chemistry; but is that really hard to understand when Republicans reject science on so many fronts?

One recent study marvels that even finance departments are mainly Democratic. Indeed, you might expect finance professors, some of whom do lucrative consulting for Wall Street, to be pretty conservative. But even they are repelled by a party committed to zombie economics.

Which brings me back to General Milley. The U.S. military has traditionally leaned Republican, but the modern officer corps is highly educated, open-minded and, dare I say it, even a bit intellectual — because those are attributes that help win wars.

Unfortunately, they are also attributes the modern G.O.P. finds intolerable.

So something like the attack on Milley was inevitable. Right-wingers have gone all in on ignorance, so they were bound to come into conflict with every institution — including the U.S. military — that is trying to cultivate knowledge.

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NYTimes: Why Do We Work So Damn Much?

Why Do We Work So Damn Much? nyti.ms/2UbBSjA

Historically speaking, we live in an age of extraordinary abundance. We have long since passed the income thresholds when past economists believed our needs would be more than met and we’d be working 15-hour weeks, puzzling over how to spend our free time. And yet, few of us feel able to exult in leisure, and even many of today’s rich toil as if the truest reward for work is more work. Our culture of work would be profoundly puzzling to those who came before us.

James Suzman is an anthropologist who has spent the last 30 years living with and studying the Ju/’hoansi people of southern Africa, one of the world’s enduring hunter-gatherer societies. And that project has given him a unique lens on our modern obsession with work.

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

As Suzman documents in his new book, “Work: A Deep History From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots,” hunter-gatherer societies like the Ju/’hoansi spent only about 15 hours a week meeting their material needs despite being deeply impoverished by modern standards. But as we’ve gotten richer and invented more technology, we’ve developed a machine for generating new needs, new desires, new forms of status competition.

So this is a conversation about the past, present and future of humanity’s relationship to work and to want. We discuss what economists get wrong about scarcity, the lessons hunter-gatherer societies can teach us about desire, how the advent of farming radically altered people’s conceptions of work and time, whether there’s such a thing as human nature, the dangers of social and economic inequality, the role of advertising in shaping human desires, whether we should have a wealth tax and universal basic income, and much more.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

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