#susan jacoby

[harrypotterhousequotes]

SLYTHERIN: “... hope is not a plan of action.” --Susan Jacoby

[fearless2600]

You had better live well and die cursing than live badly and die praying

Robert Green Ingersoll - From: The Great Agnostic - Susan Jacoby

[wisdomfish]

Which makes it so much easier for the atheist to walk on by...

Atheist writer Susan Jacoby wrote in the The New York Times that “when I see homeless people shivering in the wake of a deadly storm, when the news media bring me almost obscenely close to the raw grief of bereft parents, I do not have to ask, as all people of faith must, why an all-powerful, all-good God allows such things to happen.”

She is right, of course, at one level. If you don’t believe in God at all, you don’t struggle with the question of why life is so unjust. It just is-deal with it. But you also have none of the powerful comforts and joys that Christian belief can give you, either.

~ Timothy Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, [Riverhead Books, New York, (2013)], p. 59

[Granted many atheists do stop and render assistance, as shown in the story of the Good Samaritan for example, but that’s not the point. We need to separate ‘atheism’ from ‘atheist’. The philosophy of atheism ‘makes it easy to keep walking’ when considering how atheist thinker Friederich Nietzsche critiqued the ‘soft values of Christianity’ against the ‘hard values of atheism’. Therfore, an atheist who does stop to assist in actuality bucks the atheistic worldview and operates under the framework of the ‘soft-values’ of Christianity.]

[boookofquotes]

In today's America, intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike, whether on the left or right, tend to tune out any voice that is not an echo. This obduracy is both a manifestation of mental laziness and the essence of anti-intellectualism.

The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby

[wnyc]

Where does our wariness of intellectuals come from? 

LISTEN to our latest episode of United States of Anxiety: Culture Wars to find out.

[considermycat]

Finished #reading The Last Men on Top, by Susan Jacoby. 

This is a “Kindle Single” I bought ages ago but hadn’t got round to reading. It consists of three essays previously published by Jacoby looking at what she calls “the grateful generation”: the generation of men born between 1910 and 1935, the last generation of men to reach maturity before the arrival of “second-wave” feminism; the men depicted (and simultaneously glorified and demonised) in Mad Men. 

Essentially, Jacoby’s argument is that the old pre-feminist order, in which (at least for those in the middle class) the expectation was that the man would work as sole breadwinner and the woman would stay at home raising the children, was damaging for men as well as women. This is her father’s generation, and in the first two essays Jacoby depicts how unenviable her father’s life “on top” was - though equally how crushing things were for her mother, forced to abandon her career when she became pregnant, spending years drinking too much in the afternoons out of sheer boredom. A further essay, “Phallocrats”, highlights the damage caused to many relationships by the mutual ignorance of men and women of the “grateful generation” about sex, especially female sexuality. 

Jacoby is not romanticising the era of the “last men on top”: there was an undoubted bonus to being born a white man, and many men exploited this at the expense of the women around them. But, she argues in a closing reflection, this was also the generation that started to put their daughters, as well as their sons, through university, and to give young women jobs that would have been as solely for men at the start of their own careers. I suppose her position can be summed up as: “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” 

Jacoby concludes: 

When you are always supposed to be the one on top, there is never any time for rest. It is no denial of feminism, or of the wrongs that women endured, to look back in sympathy at the imperfect efforts made by men of another generation to cope with unsettling change in what were supposed to be the best years of their lives. Let us now take a moment to praise these not-so-famous men, who tried, as best they could, to meet the future instead of to stubbornly keep their gazes focused on the past.

[peazandq]

Susan Jacoby on American Ignorance | BillMoyers.com

The author and free thinker discusses the rise of ignorance in our classrooms, our culture and our politics.

This Bill Moyers interview from 8 years ago clearly gives context for the #death of facts, and others premises that have been viewed by many as what has turned the 2016 election year into an upside-down world, and still persist. As always, Bill Moyers was woke before most. 

[usunezukoinezu]

‘‘It seems more likely that poorly educated settlers on the frontier were drawn to religious creeds and preachers who provided emotional comfort without making the intellectual demands of older, more intellectually rigorous Protestant denominations—whether liberal Quakerism and Unitarianism or conservative Episcopalianism and Congregationalism. The more harsh the circumstances of daily life, the more potent are the simple and universal emotional themes of struggle, sin, repentance, forgiveness, and redemption that form the core of evangelical fundamentalist religion. The need for emotional solace does much to explain the appeal of fundamentalism not only to settlers on the frontier but to enslaved blacks in the South. When the storm is raging on the prairie, what comfort can be found in a debate over the nature of the Eucharist or the Holy Trinity? When the master is about to sell your children downriver, why would you want to listen to a preacher who told you that Jesus might be nothing more than a good and prophetic man instead of the all-merciful Savior who will wipe away every tear from your eyes?

In any event, the reasons why fundamentalism triumphed over "rational" religion in the American spiritual bazaar are less important than the fact that fundamentalism did succeed in capturing the hearts of large numbers of Americans during the very period when intellectuals like Emerson were finding even Unitarianism too rigid. If a combination of freethought and Enlightenment-influenced liberal Protestantism had been able to meet the emotional needs of the turbulent young nation, the course of American intellectual and religious history would have been radically altered.’’

- Susan Jacoby