Leituras

Last Man Standing, de Chris Dillow:

I fear the Nietzschean dichotomy between the last man and the “overman” misdescribes today’s world.Nietzsche thought that last men were an undifferentiated mass - “Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same” - whilst the overman strove to be different.

But this is the exact opposite of what we see today. It’s the men who seek power and great wealth who are all the same - with their utilitarian morality and managerialist ideology - but it’s the men who retreat from worldly acclaim who are all different in their tastes, moralities and interests.

And this is where Nietzsche is a lousy sociologist. He thought the overman could both create his own morality and achieve worldly power. But perhaps the two are incompatible. It‘s the men who seek power who are, in fact, slaves to contemporary mediocre morality. It’s the people who have renounced power and ambition who are free to pursue other, higher, moral goals.

Public intellectual - an oxymoron? de Chris Dillow

But being active in public life and being an intellectual are, if not mutually exclusive, then at least very different things.

To be very prominent in public affairs requires a dogmatism and capacity for soundbites that sits uneasily with the doubts and humble pursuit of “truth” that mark a true intellectual. And many proper intellectuals might reasonably shy away from the crude, ego-driven world of “public life.” As Macintyre said in concluding After Virtue, the task of intellectuals (and others) should be not to shore up the imperium, but to construct new forms of community in which civilized moral life can survive against the barbarism of our rulers.

Walter Shapiro Get's It, de Paul Krugman e Whose fault is the Clinton-Obama stalemate? de Walter Shapiro/Salon:

Obama is the first insurgent candidate in memory who has not come up with a new issue to challenge the establishment favorite.

The Cost of Rising Inequality, de Lane Kenworthy (via Economist's View):

Income inequality in the U.S. has increased sharply in the past generation. Those who worry about this development do so partly on grounds of fairness and partly because inequality may have adverse effects on politics, health, and crime. Sometimes overlooked is a more immediate cost: slow income growth for a large chunk of the population.