Recent events in the Middle East – and over the decades preceding October 7th and the Israeli war in Gaza – have given me pause to consider a dense thicket of ideas as I try to understand conflicting viewpoints.  It’s a controversy that many people come to from a deeply personal place; but I’m not one of them, and in considering so deep and fraught an issue as Israel/Palestine, affecting so many people, the personal only goes so far. Which is, in fact, the main point of this post – but I’ll get back to that in a moment. 

Today – but not just today – I’m at a loss for words. I’m not talking about the several hundred in this post that failed to elude my grasp, but the ones that remain in their hideouts. It’s not the best of news for a writer, but I sometimes have trouble nowadays locating certain words. These elusive words live in my brain but evade my search, hiding in obscure neural pathways, under synaptic rocks or bushes, only to emerge much later – often too late for useful application in, say, a sentence. They shame me (and themselves) by their tardiness. 

I cut my teeth as a writer by doing book reviews, mostly of nonfiction works. It was both enjoyable and, in hindsight, a good idea. My book-reviewing days are now over, for multiple reasons. I’ve moved on, first to writing books and then to essays. I value cultural criticism in all its forms but didn’t particularly enjoy criticizing bad writing or bad books; and my aversion was compounded by a particularly bad, and unfair, review of one of my own books. Writers are like that. 

Readers of this blog are a hearty breed. You already have one of the main prerequisites for being a critical thinker: a tolerance for deeper thinking. Others would say that my head is in the clouds (where I must say I have excellent company, philosophical and otherwise). But these critics always remind me of the doltish New York Times reporter who sneered at President Bill Clinton for “airy theorizing” when Clinton talked about the decline of the nation-state. 

As a self-styled independent scholar, I do a fair amount of reading (despite being a slow, plodding reader). It’s mostly a gleaning process, and the result is a  vague balance of what one consciously learns or remembers and what somehow gets absorbed unconsciously into one’s frameworks and factual understandings. It’s the rare book or essay that is memorable as a reading experience. 

Despite everything we are seeing in the news, the concept of truth (and “the truth”) is central to critical thinking, to liberal learning, and to democratic citizenship. And despite all my past efforts to suggest how complicated the concept of truth is, sometimes it isn’t. Some things just are, or are not, the case, and it degrades the very idea of truth to debate them. Who won the 2020 election, for example. 

How should we think about time?  Are there any parameters that we could identify as “critical temporal thinking”?  I’m talking here about human time as opposed to spacetime, which is the real astrophysical thing from Einstein onward. We can let physicists deal with that one. 

The play “Giant” by Mark Rosenblatt , now running at the Music Box Theater in New York, combines a big-name writer as its subject (Roald Dahl), a weighty topic (antisemitism), and a brilliant star in the leading role (John Lithgow). It’s directed by the great Nicholas Hytner. It can’t miss – and it doesn’t. The man, the topic, and the star turn by Lithgow are all enthralling. 

Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism translates as follows: “Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.” Or for those who prefer a less subtle approach: If you can’t say it, shut up. Wittgenstein was talking about philosophy; and it turns out that, contra Wittgenstein, you can still say a lot about philosophy without trespassing beyond coherence.

It’s fun to fool around with history. It’s sort of like playing with a slinky: you can bend it in any direction, twist it, contract or expand it, tie it in a knot, but it never loses its fundamental singularity, its linear metallic structure. There are many ways history could have happened (or so we presume) and many ways of viewing it, which we can never agree upon based on our different perspectives, values, and habits of mind. 

I’m not a great believer in idealizing philosophers or their ideas. For one thing, philosophy is too complicated for any one thinker to get it right – if “right” is even the right word. (Compelling, edifying, or clarifying might be better.) At best, the great philosophers are like the proverbial blind men, each of whom senses just one part of the elephant. Even as a young philosophy student, what struck me about the field was how a few dozen (mostly white, male, European) thinkers could make such compelling arguments for wildly disparate ways of organizing thought and reality.  They couldn’t all be right – yet I also learned that none of them is entirely wrong either. 

I have long disliked the term “liberal arts.” And by “long,” I mean since I first began seriously studying that term and the idea it stands for a dozen or so years ago. My unease is not with what it means, but how it means it. 

The history of the liberal arts, or as I prefer to call it, critical inquiry, is largely the history of books and writing and creative expression. But more than that, it’s the history of the nexus of knowledge and imagination itself, as a civilizational value: of how they are created, stored, and used (or abused). It is a history of curiosity, of openness to the wider world beyond one’s own community or culture. Openness, in other words, to moral and intellectual growth as a human being. 

Irene Vallejo writes in Papyrus, her study of the development of books, that Western poetry began in the Greek oral tradition because “rhythmic language was easiest to remember.” That strikes me as sensible and obvious. She goes on to say that she can remember poems she learned to recite in school “with extraordinary clarity.” Unfortunately, I don’t share that talent. I can recall snatches of verse – Whose woods these are … darn it, I think I know…  – but no more. And yet, curiously, I can remember the words to at least several hundred songs.  Somehow music, not rhythm, is the glue that holds things in my memory. This has not diminished the power of poetry for me. But that power comes with an abundance of mystery, confoundment, and trepidation. 

Two small, nearly matching books have stood on my desk for some fifty years, with my name, dating back to college, printed inside. One is the Concise Oxford Dictionary (6th edition). It is based on the 26-volume Oxford English Dictionary, and it looks like an ordinary-sized book. I was surprised to open the one-volume dictionary the other day and find that it contains 1,367 pages. The sixth edition, edited by J.B. Sykes in 1976, is based on the original First Edition edited by H.W. Fowler and his brother F.G. Fowler in 1911. And when I say “edited” in the latter case, I mean the Fowlers did all the work of assembling the dictionary. It took years. 

The distance between Mt. Rainier, in Washington State, and Mt. Adams may not seem like a particularly important question. For reasons that I find inexplicable, you may not be dying to know the answer. It’s just something out there that doesn’t affect your life, or so you may suppose. But to me it’s vital, for reasons I’ll explain. Vital as in important, and vital as in life-giving. 

James Joyce’s “Dubliners,” from 1914, is pretty widely regarded as the greatest collection of short stories in the English Language. I can’t think of a better one, though I’m deeply impressed by the stories of a contemporary Irish author, Claire Keegan. And Joyce’s culminating story, “The Dead,” is the longest, best-known, and possibly the greatest of the group. 

What is leadership? Follow me, and you may or may not find out. The only thing I know for certain about leadership ability is that I don’t have it. But it’s worth considering the role of leadership in the firmament of democratic (or democracy-compatible) ideas. And we begin with two premises: one, leadership clearly isn’t confined to – and did not originate in – the democratic sphere. It began as tyranny, political or religious. Two, it’s not a major focus of study within the liberal arts, except perhaps in certain political science or political psychology courses. 

It may sound odd or even unphilosophical – but that won’t stop me from saying it: a single essay, just under sixteen pages in length, which I first read in the 1970s, has influenced my thinking more than anything else I’ve read in philosophy. And it’s an essay that I return to every few years to get, or to retain, my bearings. 

A recent post by Scotty Hendricks on the Bigthink platform posed four unsolved questions of philosophy. They are not the only unsolved questions, but they are foundational to how we understand the nexus of our minds and the world; and you don’t need to be a philosopher to think about them. (Spoiler alert: I don’t have much in the way of answers).  

A quarter-century ago, I wrote a book titled The Sound Bite Society in which I argued that electronic media (at the time, mainly television and radio) are systemically biased to the right. Not intentionally or maliciously biased, but structurally biased. Not “systematically” biased, according to some rule or law, but systemically biased. The argument was – and remains – that by radically atomizing and simplifying information, these media are naturally conducive to the values and messages of the right and inconducive to the more complex, holistic, and egalitarian messages and values of the left. 

I first encountered Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain about four years ago. Reading the 700-page novel slowly, and in tandem with other books, it took me more than a year to get through it. But when I finally reached the end, I felt an urge unknown in my previous fiction-reading experience: to start the book over again at the beginning. 

My latest streaming binge has been “Yellowstone” on Amazon Prime, the massive, sprawling Dutton family saga written by Taylor Sheridan, executive produced by and starring Kevin Costner. 

In this, my third and (for now) final post about Ludwig Wittgenstein and the liberal arts, I’ll talk about one of his most important contributions to the philosophical study of language: the concept of “family resemblance.” And if ever a philosophical concept radiated relevance across the liberal arts, it’s this one. 

Like a number of my college classmates (and not a few of my relatives) I was a teenage legacy student. Not exactly a werewolf, but close. In fact, I’m a member of the even more incestuous subspecies of double-legacy students. Simply put, around the year 1946 my mother left her wallet in a telephone booth in the college administration building, my father found it, and I was one of the results.

Once considered a “melting pot,” my hometown, the City of New York, is now more of a test tube, and a harbinger of where – for better or worse – the nation is heading.

When my friend and Martha’s Vineyard neighbor Samantha Look contacted me recently about judging for the Vineyard Conservation Society’s Art & Writing Contest, I felt honored and thought I should give it a try. I had never judged a contest before. But I’ve judged and edited a lot of writing; that feels second nature to me.

Recently I’ve been reading the “Barrøy Chronicles,” a wonderful four-novel saga by the Norwegian writer Roy Jacobsen. The books are about a woman’s life (and it is a very hard life) on a tiny Norwegian coastal island before, during, and right after World War II.

Although I’m a proud New Yorker and an even prouder Met fan, I also root for the Pittsburgh Pirates (when they aren’t playing the Mets). This isn’t hard to explain; it begins with the fact that, having immigrant grandparents with Brooklyn roots, I instinctually support underdogs on every field of play – other than Citi Field. 

Is this what fascism looks like?

If the question sounds rhetorical or incendiary, it’s because we’re living in incendiary times. Terms such as fascism, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, are important words. Their meanings overlap in complex ways.