Jews From The United States

"It is sometimes thought that liberal principles can be justified by a simple version of moral relativism. Government should not "legislate morality," because all morality is merely subjective, a matter of personal preference not open to argument or rational debate. "Who is to say what is literature and what is filth? That is a value judgment, and whose values should decide?" Relativism usually appears less as a claim than as a question: "Who is to judge?" But the same question can be asked of the values that liberals defend. Toleration and freedom and fairness are values too, and they can hardly be defended by the claim that no vales can be defended. So it is a mistake to affirm liberal values by arguing that all values are merely subjective. The relativist defense of liberalism is no defense at all."

"Central to republican theory is the idea that liberty depends on sharing in self-government. This idea is not by itself inconsistent with liberal freedom. Participating in politics can be one among the ways in which people choose to pursue their ends. According to republican political theory, however, sharing in self-rule involves something more. It means deliberating with fellow citizens about the common good and helping to shape the destiny of the political community. But to deliberate well about the common good requires more than the capacity to choose one's ends and to respect others' rights to do the same. It requires a knowledge of public affairs and also a sense of belonging, a concern for the whole, a moral bond with the community whose fate is at stake."

"The idea that freedom consists in our capacity to choose our ends finds prominent expression in our politics and law. Its province is not limited to those known as liberals rather than conservatives in American politics; it can be found across the political spectrum."

"A public philosophy is an elusive thing, for it is constantly before our eyes. It forms the often unreflective background to our political discourse and pursuits. In ordinary times, the public philosophy can easily escape the notice of those who live by it. But anxious times compel a certain clarity. They force first principles to the surface and offer an occasion for critical reflection."

"But if political philosophy is unrealizable in one sense, it is unavoidable in another."

"Political philosophy seems often to reside at a distance from the world. Principles are one thing, politics another, and even our best efforts to ‘live up’ to our ideals typically founder on the gap between theory and practice.But if political philosophy is unrealizable in one sense, it is unavoidable in another. This is the sense in which philosophy inhabits the world from the start; our practices and institutions are embodiments of theory . . . . for all our uncertainties about ultimate questions of political philosophy — of justice and value and the nature of the good life — the one thing we know is that we live some answer all the time."

"Political philosophy seems often to reside at a distance from the world. Principles are one thing, politics another, and even our best efforts to live up to our ideals seldom fully succeed."

"Admittedly, the tendency to bracket substantive moral questions makes it difficult to argue for toleration in the language of the good. Defining privacy rights by defending the practices privacy protects seems either reckless or quaint; reckless because it rests so much on moral argument, quaint because it recalls the traditional view that ties the case for privacy to the merits of the conduct privacy protects. But as the abortion and sodomy cases illustrate, the attempt to bracket moral questions faces difficulties of its own. They suggest the truth in the "naive" view, that the justice or injustice of laws against abortion and homosexual sodomy may have something to do with the morality or immorality of these practices after all."

"This liberalism says, in other words, that what makes the just society just is not the telos or purpose or end at which it aims, but precisely its refusal to choose in advance among competing purposes and ends. In its constitution and its laws, the just society seeks to provide a framework within which its citizens can pursue their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others"

"Unlike the liberty of the early republic, the modern version permits — in fact even requires — concentrated power."

"A forthcoming book by Harry Markowitz, Techniques of Portfolio Selection, will treat the general problem of finding dominant sets and computing the corresponding opportunity locus, for sets of securities all of which involve risk. Markowitz's main interest is prescription of rules of rational behaviour for investors; the main concern of this paper is the implications for economic theory, mainly comparative statics, that can be derived from assuming that investors do in fact follow such rules."

"A great man who wrote and spoke great speeches as the leader of a great cause: Great., Great. Great!,"

"We must build a picture of the human soul that works. ...a recognition that the enemy is within us and that Nature has placed it there. ...for a reason. And we must understand that reason to outwit her."

"His experience "at the center of our culture's mythmaking machinery" may have taught him more about human nature than a university career. Perhaps we should regard him as an anthropologist who has spent many years observing a strange tribe—us."

"The particles of this cosmos rock and roll to their own self-generated beat. They defy the rules of arithmetic. Protons plus neutrons... equals music. Is this harmony... entropy? ...No. ...it's social behavior ...riddled with form. And it's so antientropic that those in the scientific world who are trying desparately to rescue entropy... call it "negentropy." …Entropy is a very big assumption."

"Where did the second law of thermodynamics come from? ...The steam engine. ...The cosmos is not a steam engine."

"Aristotle and Heraclitus were both right. A equals A. But A does not equal A."

"Is A=A useful? Does logic come in handy? Is math a magnificent symbolic system with which to comprehend what's around us? And is math based on A=A? Yes. Absolutely. But math and logic are... very, very simplified representations."

"A does not equal A because of location. For example, location in time."

"The "most extreme" followers of Heraclitus said that it is impossible to fix a name to anything."

"If A is A, a philosopher should equal a philosopher. But that's not the way the cosmos works. Similar things set themselves apart from one another. ...What's more, opposites are joined at the hip. Einstein says that most creative acts come from opposition. They come from pitting yourself against someone with another point of view. They come from the law of differentiation. And that was true of Aristotle and his law of identity, his law of noncontradiction, his construction for the base for A is A. Aristotle came up with his idea... to fling a finger in the face of another philosopher [Heraclitus]..."

"Opposites work together in the very opposite of the way they seem... They work together in teams."

"From a few basic rules you can generate a cosmos."

"When you repeat an old pattern in a new location, you sometimes make something new."

"The real core of communication is what information theory's founder, Claude Shannon calls "meaning." And meaning is not covered in information theory."

"One plus one does not equal two."

"When you and I were born, only one thing was certain about the rest of our lives: that you and I would someday die. Just as a trillion, trillion, trillion (1036) microorganisms, animals and plants have died before us. ...A God who slaughters is no God at all. Or if he is... He is a God who must be stopped."

"The first two rules of science are: 1. The truth at any price including the price of your life. 2. Look at things right under your nose as if you've never seen them before, then proceed from there."

"Conformity-enforcing packs of viscious children and adults gradually shape the social complexes we know as religion, science, corporations, ethnic groups, and even nations. The tools of our cohesion include ridicule, rejection, snobbery, self-righteousness, assault, torture, and death by stoning, lethal injection, or the noose. A collective brain may sound warm and fuzzily New Age, but one force lashing it together is abuse."

"By the nineteenth century... new circumstances called for new conformity enforcers... The government locked you in a house of penitence—a penetentiary—where your feelings of remorse would theoretically pummel you without cease."

"Humor is a conformity enforcer clothed in the garb of congeniality. It focuses on others' weaknesses, disasters, stupiidities, and abnormalities."

"Sociological researchers maintain a mask of objectivity. But... when students in these movements report facts that contradict the tenets of their group's creed, they are... punished for their heresy. ...forcing them "to leave the movement." A similar mechanism of repression is at work in every scientific discipline that I know."

"Remember a networked learning machine's most basic rule: strengthen the connections to those who succeed, weaken them to those who fail."

"Through our sentences and paragraphs long-gone ghosts still have their say within the collective mind."

"The ultimate repository of herd influence is language—a device which not only condenses the opinions of those with whom we share a common vocabulary, but sums up the perceptual approach of swarms who have passed on."

"Crowds of silent voices whisper in our ears, transforming the nature of what we see and hear. Some are those of childhood authorities and heroes; others come from family and peers. The strangest emerge from beyond the grave."

"Almost every reality you "know" at any given second is a mere ghost held in memory."

"Individual perception untainted by others' influence does not exist."

"Reality is a fabrication slapped together by an often bumbling inner team. ...The proclamation that "there can be no such thing as an objective fact" has a great deal of validity."

"In the Vienna of the late 1020s and 1930s there throve an internationally famous philosophical bunch called the logical positivists. ...They said that a key ingredient of knowledge was "sense data," and proclaimed emphatically, in the words of... J.S.L. Gilmour, that sense data are "objective and unalterable." …Good guess, but no cigar!"

"When Richard Dawkins first published his idea of a meme, he made it clear he was speaking of "a unit of imitation"… Memes were supposed to be exclusive triumphs of humanity. But memes come in two different kinds—behavioral and verbal. ...behavioral memes began brain-hopping long before there were such things as human minds."

"By 1999, over 880 studies suggested that some mutations might... be genetic alterations "custom tailored" to overcome emergencies."

"A collective learning machine achieves its feats by using five elements... (1) conformity enforcers; (2) diversity generators; (3) inner-judges; (4) resource shifters; and (5) intergroup tournaments."

"If entemologists have things backward, their errors have spawned a host of others central to modern evolutionary science. ...E. O. Wilson is... the founder of a rich and fruitful discipline—sociobiology. And sociobiology has... helped lay the groundwork for the dogma of the "selfish gene.""

"The notion that individualism came first runs against the very grain of cosmic history. ...grouping has been inherent in evolution since the first quarks joined to form neutrons and protons. Similarly, replicators—RNA, DNA, and genes—have always worked in teams... The bacteria of 3.5 billion years ago were creatures of the crowd. So were the trilobites and echinoderms of the Cambrian age."

"The microbial brain—gifted with long-range transport, data trading, genetic variants... and the ability to reinvent genomes—began its operations some 91 trillion bacterial generations before the birth of the Internet. Ancient bacteria, if they functioned like those today, had mastered the art of worldwide information exchange. ...The earliest microorganisms would have used planet-sweeping currents of wind and water to carry the scraps of genetic code..."

"Primordial communities of bacteria were elaborately interwoven by communication links. ...These turned a colony into a collective processor... The resulting learning machine was so ingenious that Eshel Ben-Jacob has called its modern bacterial counterpart a "creative web.""

"In our preoccupations with sex, our submission to gods and leaders, our sometimes suicidal commitment to ideas, religions, and trivial details of cultural style, we become the unconscious creators of the social organism's exploits."

"The greatest human evils are not those that individuals perform in private, the tiny transgressions against some arbitrary social standard we call sins. The ultimate evils are the mass murders that occur in revolution and war, the large-scale savageries that arise when one agglomeration of humans tries to dominate another: the deeds of the social group. ...only group efforts can save us from the sporadic insanities of the group."

"Men and animals do not merely struggle to maintain their individual existence; they are members of larger social groups. And, all too often, it is the social unit, not the individual, whose survival comes first."