U.S. securities regulators sued Elon Musk in federal court in Washington on Tuesday in an enforcement action arising from his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, now called X.
The lawsuit against Mr. Musk, who has become a close adviser to President-elect Donald J. Trump, is likely to be one of the more contentious final acts of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Gary Gensler, its departing chair. It could also be undercut in just a few days, when Mr. Trump appoints new leadership to take charge of the regulator.
The S.E.C. contends that in buying Twitter in 2022, Mr. Musk violated securities laws by amassing a large stock position in the social media company without filing the proper notification. The complaint said he had waited 11 days before filing the required disclosure with the S.E.C.
The regulatory filings are required so investors in the marketplace can monitor the moves of large investors and potential takeover bids.
Because Mr. Musk did not disclose his position, he was able to continue buying Twitter stock at an artificially low price, the S.E.C. said in its lawsuit. The move “allowed him to underpay by at least $150 million” for the additional shares before he belatedly disclosed his stake, the lawsuit continued.
Over the past few weeks, Mr. Musk had taunted the S.E.C. in posts on X about the potential for filing a lawsuit. In December, he shared a letter that his lawyer, Alex Spiro, had sent to the agency, rejecting a settlement offer in the case.
On Tuesday, Mr. Spiro denounced the regulator’s latest filing.
“Today’s action is an admission by the S.E.C. that they cannot bring an actual case, because Mr. Musk has done nothing wrong and everyone sees this sham for what it is,” Mr. Spiro said in a statement. The agency had waged a “multiyear campaign of harassment” against Mr. Musk but filed “a single-count ticky-tack complaint,” Mr. Spiro added.
This is the third time the S.E.C. has gone to court with Mr. Musk. The first lawsuit, during Mr. Trump’s first term in office, arose from inappropriate market-moving posts on social media in which Mr. Musk mused about taking his electric car company, Tesla, private.
Before filing the lawsuit on Tuesday, the S.E.C. had also sought to force Mr. Musk to comply with a subpoena seeking to take his deposition.
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With Mr. Gensler stepping down with the inauguration of Mr. Trump on Monday, it is unclear whether incoming regulators will pursue the litigation. The president-elect has said he intends to nominate Paul Atkins, a former S.E.C. commissioner and pro-business conservative, to succeed Mr. Gensler.
Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School who specializes in criminal law, said the lawsuit appeared to be part of a pattern of matters being filed by Biden administration appointees “on their way out.”
It will be up to the new administration and Mr. Trump’s appointees to decide whether to “back off and withdraw” cases like the one against Mr. Musk, he said.
Technocrats are always busy at the business of ‘thinking’ about their status of as ‘experts’ ! Impressing on the minds of we lesser beings, their mastery of the ever expanding field of their ‘expertise’!
Reader think of Marshall McLuhan and or Thomas Kuhn, as the once ascendent practitiners of the ‘The New’, to borrow from Art Critic Harold Rosenberg 1959 book The Tradition of the New!
Here is a note from Adam Tooze’’s Financial Times essay of Octorber 28, 2022. The first mention of ‘Polycrisis’
The Reader isn’t quite prepared, for Adam Tooze, in his Financial Times streamlined iteration. Those New Statesman essays, have been miniaturized for those busy Capitalist Technos? Those majestic paragraphs are … Call it a collection of ideas, foreshortened for those readers, at the breakfast table, or riding that commuter train into the office? Let me begin here:
Headline: Welcome to the world of the polycrisis
Sub-headline: Today disparate shocks interact so that the whole is worse than the sum of the parts.
With economic and non-economic shocks entangled all the way down, it is little wonder that an unfamiliar term is gaining currency — the polycrisis.
A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. At times one feels as if one is losing one’s sense of reality. Is the mighty Mississippi really running dry and threatening to cut off the farms of the Midwest from the world economy? Did the January 6 riots really threaten the US Capitol? Are we really on the point of uncoupling the economies of the west from China? Things that would once have seemed fanciful are now facts.
In my own reductive way I have outlined Mr. Tooze’s interpretation of what ‘Polycrisis’ is? It is a noun, as it describes a thing, no matter its abstractness!
This comes as a shock. But how new is it really?… This comes as a shock. But how new is it really?… So have we been living in a polycrisis all along?…Meanwhile, the diversity of problems is compounded by the growing anxiety that economic and social development are hurtling us towards catastrophic ecological tipping points. … The pace of change is staggering…. So, what is the outlook?… Perhaps. But it is an unrelenting foot race, because what crisis-fighting and technological fixes all too rarely do is address the underlying trends. …
I will put this to use in attempting to interpret? Mr. Tooze’s latest essay:
Headline: Three ways to read the ‘deglobalisation’ debate
Sub-headline: Proponents of business as usual and the new cold warriors are too confident of their ability to predict the future.
As 2023 unfolds, the world of economic analysis and commentary is marked by a disjuncture between discourse and data. On the one hand, you have feverish talk of deglobalisation and decoupling. While on the other, the statistics show an inertial continuity in trade and investment patterns.
…
There are at least three ways to reconcile this tension.
Option one: you can cleave to the old religion that economics always wins.
Option two: rather than business as usual, we are on the cusp of a new historical epoch, a new cold war.
Option three: We are witnessing not a reversal of globalisation or full-scale decoupling, but a continuation of some aspects of familiar pattern, just on fundamentally different premises.
The end point of Mr. Tooze’s flaccid polemic :
Whereas the advocates of business as usual declare that it is still “the economy, stupid” and the new cold warriors rally around the banner of “democracy versus autocracy”, the third position faces the reality of confusion, the kind of confusion registered by a term like “polycrisis”.
Polycrisis has its critics, and at Davos 2023 it risked becoming something of a cliché. But as a catchword it serves three purposes. It registers the unfamiliar diversity of the shocks that are assailing what had previously seemed a settled trajectory of global development. It insists that this coincidence of shocks is not accidental but cumulative and endogenous. And, by its currency, it marks the moment at which bullish self-confidence about our ability to decipher either the future or recent history has begun to seem at the same time facile and passé.
Polycrisis is Techno-Speak ‘a catchword it serves three purposes’ … to place the economic/political future, in the hands of toxic political actors, that are the natural inheritors of Hayek/Mises/Friedman: as we have yet to self-emancipate from the thrall of the Neo-Liberal Swindle!
Editor: With Trump about to assume office on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025 : Trump has rendered any move that Biden, Blinken, Sullivan might make utterly superfluous!
Political Observer: Bass and Newsom, and a host of others face a Voter Rebellion in the form of Recall? Attention: James Woods, this could be your moment !
John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s De anima—Iohannis Buridani Quaestiones in Aristotelis De Anima:
Reviewed by Jordan Lavender, Texas A&M University
John Buridan, John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s De anima—IohannisBuridani Quaestiones in Aristotelis De anima, Gyula Klima, Peter G. Sobol, Peter Hartman, and Jack Zupko (eds.), Springer, 2023, 998pp., $139.99 (hbk), ISBN 9783030944322.
To read this excellent edition and translation of John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s De Animais to encounter two things at once: an intellectual landscape remote from both ancient hylomorphism and post-medieval European philosophy and a bridge between the two.[1] Like Aristotle, Buridan thinks that all living things are animated by souls. But these souls are in many ways unlike the souls of Aristotle’s De anima. According to Buridan, the souls of non-human animals are themselves a kind of homogeneous substance, composed of extended parts spread throughout the matter of a living thing (QDA 91, 195–197). The arrangement of the integral parts of a living thing and the sensible properties of those parts depend on the soul as their efficient cause, but not as their formal cause (QDA 91–93, 113–115). The core of Aristotle’s account of sense perception—the reception of the form of an object in a sensory organ without the matter—in Buridan becomes a mere efficient causal antecedent to perception itself (more on this below). The operations of the intellect demand no more metaphysical apparatus for their explanation than the perceptual abilities of advanced non-human animals (QDA III, qq. 4–6). Nonetheless, faith requires holding a view of the human soul according to which the ability of such a soul to host sensations and inform a body is miraculous (QDA 257). The editorshave made this intellectual landscape available to a wide audience through an excellent edition of the Latin text from the medieval manuscripts; a lucid, philosophically and philologically well-informed translation; expert clarificatory footnotes; and a brief but substantive introduction.
John Buridan (c. 1300–c. 1361) spent his career at the University of Paris as a member of the Faculty of Arts. As the editors indicate, QDA is the product of Buridan’s lectures on the three books of Aristotle’s De anima. It was completed by Buridan sometime after 1347, and probably before 1361 (QDA xiv–xv). However, QDA is not a mere exposition of Aristotle’s De anima or even a textbook summarizing late-medieval psychology. Rather, it is a “question commentary” containing Buridan’s own, often very original, responses to some of the most difficult questions regarding biological life, perception, and thought faced by the philosophy and science of the time.The questions, 51 in all, are loosely arranged according to the order of topics in Aristotle’s De anima. Occasionally, the questions raise issues about how to interpret Aristotle’s works. More often, they focus on philosophical problems. Book 1 (6 questions) covers a wide range of topics and includes a question on the status of universals (q. 5) and an intriguing discussion of the relationship between cognizing properties and cognizing the substances of which they are properties (q. 6). Book 2 (25 questions) begins with a discussion of the soul’s relationship to its powers and to the body (qq. 1–7). After that, almost all of the remaining questions deal with sense perception and include detailed discussions of each of the external and internal senses. (The exception is q. 7, which is the only question in QDA solely devoted to “vegetative” powers and activities.) Book 3 (20 questions) begins with a discussion of the metaphysics of the human intellectual soul (qq. 1–7) and ends with questions devoted to further issues involving the same topic (qq. 17–20). The questions in between (qq. 8–16) contain an extensive discussion of the nature and causes of thought and various related problems.
Headline: Keir Starmer’s Bafflingly Bad Start as the U.K.’s Prime Minister
Sub-headline: The Labour government’s first hundred days in power have been characterized by mistakes, infighting, and drift.
By Sam Knight
October 12, 2024
Editor: Tony Blair’s and his Neo-Liberal Lite cadre are the arbiter’s of Responsible Govervance? Mrs. Thatcher called Tony Blair her greatest acomplisment. Yet Starmer is Blair’s dead-end?
This week, as the hundredth day of Starmer’s government approached, it was impossible not to compare the sense of drift with the dynamic early months of Tony Blair’s Labour premiership, in 1997, which followed a brisk “route map” of policy announcements. “Government is not just about the technocratic delivery of policy and change,” Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former press secretary, told the B.B.C., when he was asked about the performance of the new government. “It’s about the relentless, endless, never-ending conversation that you’re having with the country about what you are trying to do for the country. And I think it’s fair to say that that bit has been largely missing.” Another official from the Blair era told me, “It’s a little bit unforgivable to come in without a plan of some sort. I mean, that is the point of being in government. You have to actually want to do something.” The official despaired of the donations fiasco. “They say we have abided by the rules, so what’s wrong with it? They don’t think about how this actually looks, and that’s the politics of it,” he said. “If you’re missing that bit, it makes it a whole lot worse.”
Starmer’s own behavior has been erratic. He has veered between attempting to stay aloof from petty criticism and giving long, overwrought explanations. (The Prime Minister said that he needed to borrow Alli’s eighteen-million-pound apartment during the election campaign so his son could have somewhere quiet to study for his high-school exams. “Any parent would have made the same decision,” he told Sky News.) In September, at the Labour Party conference—a noticeably sombre affair, given the Party’s landslide election victory—Starmer gave a creditable and, by his standards, warm speech, in which he reflected on his love of playing the flute as a teen-ager. “Even now, I turn to Beethoven or Brahms in those moments when, how to put it, the reviews aren’t so good,” Starmer said, before waiting a beat. “I’ve got some Shostakovich lined up for tomorrow.”
I asked Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, for his impressions of the Prime Minister’s early struggles. Baldwin served as a communications director under Ed Miliband, the Labour leader prior to Jeremy Corbyn, and he is sympathetic to Starmer. But he acknowledged that the Prime Minister has an ungainly style as a politician. “I have used this metaphor of a minefield,” Baldwin said. “He takes one step forward, two steps to the side, one step back, two more steps to the side. It is inelegant and uninspiring—confusing even. But it’s the best way to get to the other side. In opposition, the other side was victory. In government so far, he’s looked more like a man wandering around a minefield without a clear sense that he’s getting somewhere.” Baldwin observed that Starmer has been in comparable situations before—both early in his time as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service and as Party leader—and that he was able to get it together. “It kind of almost needs to get quite bad with him before he does recognize a change of course is necessary,” Baldwin said. “But, when he recognizes there is a problem, he’s quite ruthless.”
On October 2nd, Starmer announced that he had paid back some six thousand pounds’ worth of gifts that he had received since becoming Prime Minister and that the rules on hospitality for ministers would be modified. Four days later, Gray quit as Starmer’s chief of staff and was replaced by McSweeney. There were signs that Starmer was finding his direction. Westminster bubbled with talk of a relaunch and “Starmer 2.0.” “It’s good to have a serious Prime Minister. I don’t think that’s changed since before or after the election,” the Blair-era official told me. “This is come-able back-able from. People writing off a government after two months, when they got a huge majority and five years, is just ludicrous.” Baldwin suggested that Starmer return to the language of “Five Missions” which had framed Labour’s election campaign— economic growth, green energy, public safety, education, and the N.H.S.—but which has since got lost in the noise. “I don’t think he can turn around now and say, I’ve discovered a new fundamental purpose for this government,” Baldwin said. “There’s a very real danger he’ll be ridiculed if he does that. And the missions are personal to him. They’re important.”
Editor: The Reader might wonder at this Blackburn introductory paragraph:
Keir Starmer is posing as the Labour Party’s unity candidate, appearing prime ministerial while sticking by the party’s left-wing policies. But if elected, he would be forced to choose between these priorities — and it’s clear the left policies would lose out.
Editor: Starmer is the creation of The Neo-Liberal Lite Tony Blair!
December’s general election was undeniably a hammer blow to Labour activists. It’s fair to say that most probably weren’t expecting to be beaten as badly as we were. Since the election of 2017 all the talk had been about what a socialist-led Labour government would do in office, and although a Commons majority always looked unlikely, many Labour members will have at least fancied their party’s chances of forcing a hung Parliament.
These heightened expectations make the scale of the defeat that materialized, and another five years of Tory government, all the more bruising. Now the Labour Party is facing up to the question of how to respond. Some aspiring leadership candidates have toured the TV studios volunteering to abandon high-profile policies from the 2019 manifesto — not because they’re unpopular, which they aren’t, but implicitly bargaining with the media and offering them the chance to set the boundaries of Labour policy in return for more favorable (or just less vituperative) coverage.
Regardless of this, support for existing Labour policy remains strong among the party’s rank and file, shortly to be voting for a new leader, and the prospect of any drastic retrenchment from the current manifesto is unlikely to be favorably received. Hence the different tack taken by Keir Starmer in his leadership campaign, positioning himself as the unity candidate working to bring Labour’s draining four-year civil war to an end and take the party back into government on a left-wing program at the next time of asking, presumably in 2024.
This, to be sure, is an appeal which might hold some allure to Labour members — among them many erstwhile supporters of Jeremy Corbyn — especially those still disorientated and demoralized after last month’s election. But there are major problems with it, not the least of these being that a sizable minority of Labour MPs have no intention of making the kind of compromises Starmer appears to be asking of them.
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Editor: this reads like Robert Colvile in The Times:
Editor: File this under the rubric of Political Chatter!
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One longer-serving MP said McSweeney did not have Whitehall experience, “which could come back to bite us,” while “Starmer lacks people skills, and has surrounded himself with people with the same problem.”
McSweeney had a previous spell as Starmer’s chief of staff in opposition, but was removed amid accusations that the Labour leader was foundering on his watch without a clear vision.
The same MP complained there was now a “boys’ club” at the heart of No. 10, with those now in full charge of Downing Street blaming Gray for what had gone before. “Everything was always conveniently Sue’s fault, and not the lads’, despite all the major issues in Keir’s office predating her arrival,” she said.
One of the McSweeney allies quoted above rejected those claims, pointing out that Hollie Ridley, recently installed as Labour’s general secretary, had been one of his most senior lieutenants.
He also has two new and well-regarded female deputies in Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson.
For now, Starmer still has a host of considerable advantages on his side, notably a hefty parliamentary majority and a chief of staff with a proven winning record. But his early forced reset hints at the need for something more.
Editor: The reader can see very clearly, from this collection of political commentaries, that Tony Blair’s political catamite ,Kier Starmer, is not just a failure but an incompetent. The Reader can only conjecture what steps Blair can take, if any, to redress his utter failure of judgment?
Editor: TheFreePress provides political space for Douglas Murray on ‘Grooming Gangs’
The world has finally woken up this week to one of the biggest crimes in twenty-first century Britain: the organized gang rape of thousands of white working-class girls, mainly at the hands of Muslim men of Pakistani origin.
Even writing the sentence above would have got me into far more trouble 20 years ago than it will now. Sure, there are still plenty of people trying to police this story, to claim that race and religion have nothing to do with these crimes, or that it is wrong to bring them up. But the stories of the atrocities in towns like Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford, and Oxford are now out, and there is little likelihood that they will be reined back. Public anger is too great in the UK, and international attention is too focused, to allow that to happen.
Having written about these cases for many years now, I spent part of the last week being asked, “How did it happen? How could such a crime have gone on?” And the answer is: Because there are some terrible things that society wants to deal with, and there are some it refuses to deal with, and the things it refuses to deal with tend to be those crimes that go against some deep narrative of the age.
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Editor: Murray’s latest idée fixe in the pages of The Free Press is ‘The Rampant Dangers of Multiculturalism’
COMMENT
By George Kerevan
Headline: True danger from the right comes from likes of Douglas Murray
More importantly, the alt-right needs to forge a new political and social narrative if it is to successfully destroy the old social democratic consensus or even kill off One-Nation Tory liberalism. And for this it needs a new breed of right-wing intellectuals with a sophisticated suite of ideas. These are the folk to worry about.
They include the suave, slightly manic Douglas Murray, who is London-born but whose mother hails from the Isle of Lewis and speaks Gaelic. Murray has emerged as perhaps the leading alt-right ideologue of the younger generation.
A prolific writer and commentator, he is now associate editor of The Spectator, the holy bible of the right. Last week Murray entered the Scottish political firmament with a virulent public attack on Humza Yousaf. Murray suggested the FM was an “infiltrator” (hint, hint) and “the first minister for Gaza”. Murray also reheated a doctored social media post (possibly not realising it was bogus) that implied Yousaf had made anti-white remarks.
Such public bile should not lead us to dismiss Murray as a typical populist ranter. He has a forensic mind and significant influence in Britain, Europe and particularly the United States. But it is a mind that sees “the West” being subverted and destroyed by a grand conspiracy of godless high-tech billionaires, the entire Islamic world and universities captured by cultural Marxists.
Traditional nation states and Christian civilisation and values have been replaced by a rapacious global (“cosmopolitan”) managerial elite which uses identity politics as a battering ram to exert control.
This puts Murray squarely in the conspiracy theory mould. But he is more intellectually effective than most in justifying his ideas. Populist, Trumpist racism may appeal to the lumpen elements but Murray supplies a more intellectually satisfying conspiracy menu for the middle classes.
Ostensibly, he deconstructs “fascist Islam” and the alleged infiltration of the elite universities – inevitably Murray is an Oxford graduate himself – by Marxist academics. Murray is also a bag of personal contradictions. He is gay and an atheist and even supports (in a convoluted way) same-sex marriage. Not that you might know it from some of his public renderings.
Part of me feels sorry for Murray. He is a bright young man marooned in a generation where rampant consumerism and unhinged individualism has destroyed social community, while the death of the socialist project has removed hope. Folk such as Murray end up as intellectual nihilists desperately trying to forge some impossible conservative Valhalla to find an anchor in life.
At least it begins that way, but it quickly slides towards an intellectual justification for outright fascism. The mass demonstrations in the UK and Europe protesting Israeli bombing of Gaza seem to have unhinged Murray.
I’ve seen a video of him circulating on social media in which he says the police in Britain “have lost control of the streets” (shades of Braverman) and that “we might need to send in the army”. What are the army supposed to do – shoot demonstrators?
Then, even more chillingly, Murray suggests sending in the army might not work – he actually wrote a book about the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry and their aftermath. Instead, he muses that the “British public” might have to take matters into their own hands.
We can always dismiss Braverman as a maverick, over-ambitious politician who should be sacked. But Murray is busy constructing the intellectual architecture for a new, mass fascist movement. That is much more dangerous, especially for a UK where the alt-right has traditionally been kept in its cage by a fuzzy alliance between the establishment (which want a quiet life), the provincial middle classes (who also want a quiet life) and the Tory Party.
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Editor: Some selective quotation from George Kerevan’s essay:
Last month, 12,000 people turned up at the O2 arena in London and paid big bucks to hear Murray and Jordan Peterson, the other intellectual superstar of the global alt-right. This was billed as the launch of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, or ARC (get it!). They were joined by luminaries such as American social media guru Ben Shapiro.
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Quite the reverse unless you count ARC’s association with maverick US presidential hopeful, Vivek Ramaswamy.
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Murray and Peterson are trying to build a mass movement outside of the traditional right-wing parties. There is also a cultish, semi-religious tone to the project which promotes self-help rather than who to hate.
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Again, I need to stress that Murray and Peterson are a new, seductive breed of right-wing anti-politician.
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And Murray calling for the deportation of those he disagrees with. “Send them back” remains a ridiculous slogan for what was once the world’s biggest colonial empire.
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Both Murray’s Spectator magazine and its stablemate The Daily Telegraph, are up for sale. One likely bidder is Sir Paul Marshall, the hedge-fund billionaire who is bankrolling Murray’s ARC and who was an early investor in GB News. Behind the alt-right ideologues are always the billionaires with vested interests. Be warned.
Editor: The Reader confronting another manifestation of ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’ needs to look at the many, and various iterations of the political actors, in this melodrama: Murray, Peterson, its organizational structure Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, Vivek Ramaswamy, The Spectator ,The Daily Telegraph as the watershed of Thatchers toxic Neo-Liberalism. Her inheritor in Britain was Tony Blairs ‘New Labour, and in America Bill Clinton, and his familier Hillary Clinton, who birthed the New Democrats: these toxic political actors traded on the Hayek/Mises/ Friedman Mythology, that collapsed in 2007-2008!
Murray trades in a Toxic Nostalgia , for an Empire run by ‘virtious White Males’ ; Peterson is a willful political Hysteric, Vivek Ramaswamy is a self-agrandising Capitalist: in sum he is Elon Musk lite!
Besides the Nixon example, look to former Neo-Conservatine , now Liberal, Francis Fukuyama: who once he ensorceled a cadre of American philosphocal naifs, with an Hegalian pastisch! Or Liz Chaney as the now ally of The New Democrats in the Impeachment of Trump. Recall that Clinton welcomed the likes of the utterly vacious Neo-Con Bill Kristol.
In the case of David Brooks look to his ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ as his ascedency to the New York Times, via his wan literary invention of Joey Tabla Rasa! In his latest essay steeped in self-condratulation and vexving moral quandires, whose knot he is going to untie. I will skip the first paragraph!
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A few years ago, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Angela Duckworth, got a bit more specific. She wrote that character formation means building up three types of strengths: strengths of the heart (being kind, considerate, generous), strengths of the mind (being curious, open-minded, having good judgment) and strengths of the will (self-control, determination, courage).
I’m one of those people who think character is destiny and that moral formation is at the center of any healthy society. But if you’re a teacher in front of a classroom, with 25 or more distracted students in front of you, how exactly can you pull this off? Moral formation isn’t just downloading content into a bunch of brains; it involves an inner transformation of the heart. It involves helping students change their motivations so that they want to lead the kind of honorable and purposeful lives that are truly worth wanting. It’s more about inspiration than information.
And yet every day, there are schools that are doing it. On just about every campus I visit there are professors who teach with the idea that they can help their students become better people. It may be a literature professor teaching empathy or a physics professor who doesn’t teach only physics but also the scientific way of life — how to lead a life devoted to wonder, curiosity, intellectual rigor and exploration.
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Editor: Mr. Brooks supplies a list of imperatives!
A countercultural institutional ethos.
The moral skills.
Exemplars.
Moral traditions.
Deep reading.
Self-confrontation.
Paid public service.
Editor: What might the reader think of Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay? Compared to Mr. Brooks morally inflected chatter, in what place does Immanuel Kant’s essay of 1784 fit?
An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?
IMMANUEL KANT (1784)
Translated by Ted Humphrey Hackett Publishing, 1992
1. Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.[2] Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude![3] “Have courage to use your own understanding!”–that is the motto of enlightenment.
2. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (natura-liter maiorennes),[4] nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the gocart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts.
3. Thus, it is difficult for any individual man to work himself out of the immaturity that has all but become his nature. He has even become fond of this state and for the time being is actually incapable of using his own understanding, for no one has ever allowed him to attempt it. Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity. Whoever threw them off would still make only an uncertain leap over the smallest ditch, since he is unaccustomed to this kind of free movement. Consequently, only a few have succeeded, by cultivating their own minds, in freeing themselves from immaturity and pursuing a secure course.
Editor: Mr. Brooks is an utterly conventional journalist , an employee of The New York Times, and a cultivator of his readerships vanity: as a function of his readerships adulation of a poltical technocrat, who refracts their values back at them, in a the most highfalutin terms !
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