Aaron Horvath’s piece in the fall issue of The Hedgehog Review is excellent. And it comes full circle from start and finish.

I remember sitting in the library and reading Ken Stern’s With Charity for All for a class discussion on genocide and humanitarian aid. It’s the appearance, the charade of excellence, not genuine need that generates big gifts, as Jack Shakely reminds us in a review of Stern’s book. Horvath reminds us that the trouble that plagues charities goes much deeper than the obvious scams. The charade of excellence is a feature, not a bug.

It’s a thin line… between a reality described by their abstractions and a reality constituted by their abstractions. And the more they, and we, fall under the spell of the latter, the more difficult it becomes to imagine how else we might contribute to meaningful social change.

A few other quotes here, one of which made me laugh out loud.

Caveman cartoons are truly one of my deepest little joys. A couple goods ones lately.

Justin Chang:

Even so, we are not not entertained.…The arena battles have an agreeably batshit, can-you-top-this conceptual absurdity; you won’t soon forget a scene in which Lucius fends off a deranged baboon, or when the Colosseum is reconfigured into a kind of third-century Sea World, complete with snapping sharks. In planting us squarely in the splash zone, Scott and his collaborators pander so unabashedly to our bloodlust that it rings all the more hollow when “Gladiator II” suddenly fancies itself a civics lesson, entreating its characters to mourn their failing empire and dream of its glorious rebirth. We get it, we get it: there’s no place like Rome.

On Abraham, Agamemnon, and the Greek word sumpneō.

Elias Crim’s recent essay in The Hedgehog Review is excellent, but it’s also a treasure trove. Follow the references!

The Land of Immigrants

“Two normative conceptions of human practical rationality”:

“My argument,” says Martha Nussbaum, “will be, very roughly, that tragedy articulates both norms, A and B, criticizing A with reference to the specifically human value contained in B; that Plato, finding the risks involved in B intolerable, develops a remarkable version of A, and then himself criticizes it as lacking in some important human values; that Aristotle articulates and defends a version of B, arguing that it meets our deepest practical intuitions about the proper relationship to luck for a being who is situated between beast and god and who can see certain values that are available to neither.”

The Ballad of Marshall McLuhan

Martha Nussbaum:

The vine-tree image, standing near the poem’s end… confronts us with a deep dilemma in the poet’s situation, which is also ours. It displays the thorough intermingling of what is ours and what belongs to the world, of ambition and vulnerability, of making and being made, that are present in this and in any human life.… Human excellence is seen, in Pindar’s poem and pervasively in the Greek poetic tradition, as something whose very nature it is to be in need, a growing thing in the world that could not be made invulnerable and keep its own peculiar fineness.

The crucial question for us:

To what extent can we distinguish between what is up to the world and what is up to us, when assessing a human life? To what extent must we insist on finding these distinctions, if we are to go on praising as we praise?

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