#mark lilla

The political prophet’s kingdom is not of this world. He has no practical plan for what must be done, he only has a keen eye for falsehood, for moral abominations, for what absolutely must not be done. Wherever lies are told and cruelty is practiced, wherever rights are violated, the responsible intellectual must, as we glibly say, speak truth to power. Then his job is over. As for defeating the liars in battle, crafting laws to punish the cruel, and building institutions to protect rights—well, there are people for that. And if they fall short, they too shall be judged. [...]

As John Stuart Mill argued so powerfully in On Liberty, truth in politics is not delivered to us from on high so we can then bring the world to its knees. We discover it together, or try to discover it, through inquiry and argument. We even change our minds sometimes—precisely because we want the truth and want to defend it. This is why maintaining norms of open debate and argument is so important in democracies. The alternative is a public square full of competing prophets, each with his own moral clarity, and gangs of followers high on the idea that their co-opted adversaries are traitors against truth and justice. »

Sam Harris:

“Say I’m incredibly impatient to get my daughter seen [by a doctor], she is extremely uncomfortable, I’m advocating for her at the desk.

And the nurse or doctor looks at me and says: ‘We’ll see her exactly as soon as we can, this patient over here is before you, this patient is going into cardiac arrest.’

The answer to that from me, if I’m an ethical, sane human being, isn’t: ‘Fuck you, my daughter is the most important child on earth.’”

Mark Lilla:

“But what if there are two children, they can only have one child, in terms of triage there is no difference between the two of them. You’re not gonna advocate for your child?”

Sam Harris:

“If you push me truly into extremis, and we truly have an emergency on our hands, and one child is essentially going to die, then I can’t really attest to how sane I will be.

But I’ll tell you who I think I should be in those moments, is someone who doesn’t lose his awareness of the fact that other people are just as important to themselves, and their children are just as important to them, as I am to myself and my child is to me.

There is a stepping out of oneself, a kind of view from nowhere, that is a norm.

When we’re making laws, and building institutions, and designing our society, that’s precisely what we try to hold onto.

There a kind of Rawlsian veil of ignorance here that is so incredibly useful because it is clarifying of the kind of fragmentation you are describing here, of mere identity. ‘This is my team and it’s us against the world.’”

Mark Lilla:

“I agree with you ideally about our institutions. The problem about all those principles is that they don’t always motivate action, which is what we want.

We don’t want people to have their ethics right, we want them to actually do the right thing.

And that requires appealing to something that makes you listen to reason, and that’s an emotion. (...)

At some point we all decline the opportunity to discover what really is the case. We willingly give up a shot at learning the truth about the world out of fear that it will expose truths about ourselves, especially our insufficient courage for self-examination. We prefer the illusion of self-reliance and embrace our ignorance for no other reason than it is ours. It doesn’t matter that reliance on false opinion is the worse sort of dependence. It doesn’t matter that through stubbornness we might pass up a chance at happiness. We prefer to go down with the ship rather than have our names scraped off its hull.

So as we shake our heads at those charmed by charlatans and demagogues, let us not exempt ourselves. We all want to know — and want not to know. We accept truth, we resist truth. Back and forth the mind shuttles, playing badminton with itself. But it doesn’t feel like a game. It feels as if our lives are at stake. And they are.⁠

I chierichetti dell’Impero

Anna Lombroso per il Simplicissimus

Ormai vogliono convincerci che si combattano i danni del mercato con i meccanismi di mercato: lo dimostrano quelle negoziazioni acchiappacitrulli rivendicate dai governi in combutta con le multinazionali per addomesticare il clima incollerito, grazie a commerci e scambi di diritti di inquinare.

Ormai si affida la salute a “scienziati” mantenuti dalle case…

Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia and the author, most recently, of The Once and Future Liberal, writes:

The pandemic has brought home just how great a responsibility we bear toward the future, and also how inadequate our knowledge is for making wise decisions and anticipating consequences. Perhaps that is why our prophets and augurs can’t keep up with the demand for foresight.

At some level, people must be thinking that the more they learn about what is predetermined, the more control they will have. This is an illusion. Human beings want to feel that they are on a power walk into the future, when in fact we are always just tapping our canes on the pavement in the fog.