Editors' Picks
CrowdSource Special Edition
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: a look back at 2024 in Wisdom of Crowds.
Join us! CrowdSource features the best comments from The Crowd — our cherished readers and subscribers who, with their comments and emails, help make Wisdom of Crowds what it is.
Some Favorite Pieces from 2024 that didn’t make the Top 25:
- explores the notion of “giving up” in both the personal and political realms.
“Humanity has in fact never stopped swimming in the world of the dream,” writes
.
Is politics at bottom about power? Or do ideas — and morality — play a role?
and on a perennial Wisdom of Crowds debate.
- revisits an American classic.
- channels Joan Didion to understand 2024.
A Few Favorite Crowd Comments (an Incomplete List):
Good contextualization, but doesn’t the fate of the Cult of Reason show that secularism was dead on arrival - that one cannot have Apollo without Dionysus (as also evidenced by the camp portrayal of revolutionary violence in the Opening Ceremony)? I also don’t think we need to see the Christian and the pagan as necessarily at odds: there is a tradition of identifying Christ *with* Dionysus, including by Simone Weil, who notes that the first and last acts of Christ’s public life involved wine: firstly, turning water into wine - and finally, turning wine into the blood of God.
Derek Hudson responds to the podcast episode “Phil Klay on Morality and War”:
Great episode. However, I’m surprised that the question of whether America would remain true to its high moral ideals in an existential war, is still up for debate. American nuclear deterrence policy explicitly states that it won’t.
Nuclear deterrence relies on America’s commitment to wage a vicious, violent, and potentially civilization ending nuclear war if pushed too far. Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of civilians are an acceptable casualty count should the US be pushed into a corner. As the saying goes, this is not a threat, it is a promise.
World order has balanced on this depressingly necessary oath of barbarism since 1945. Not even the long period of peace in the post Cold War decades was enough to roll back this wicked pledge. “We will do horrific things if provoked, so do not provoke us” is an assertion echoed by every nuclear armed nation on earth and is the perverse foundation that modern society is welded to.
Damir is simply right on this point. American barbarism is not off the table, and, unfortunately, rightly so.
Dirk, responding to “The Cynic and the Fool,” by Santiago Ramos:
There’s something ephemeral and unreal about American opinions on foreign wars, like they’re championing a sports team or some fictional character’s romantic endeavors on a television show. Whether it’s Democratic sloganeering or David Sacks’ shitposting, it’s all a semi-fictional “event” to them that’s easily processed into culture war dynamics, and not something kinetic and physical. Nor does it really have to be, of course. The American dream is another continent, another world entirely.
David Nassar on the podcast episode “Human Dignity and Beyond,” with
Listening to Damir Marusic’s and Santiago Ramos’ debate the rationale for a belief in human dignity made me think of Francis Fukuyama’s 2018 book Identity. Specifically, chapters 6 and 7 get into a similar discussion as the podcast. There is a lot in the book that digs into this meaty question of where our understanding of dignity comes from, but I'll quote one part about the implications of our inability to agree on the rationale for it.
“The problem with this [expressive individualism] understanding of autonomy is that shared values serve the important function of making social life possible. If we do not agree on a minimal common culture, we cannot cooperate on shared tasks and will not regard the same institutions as legitimate: indeed we will not even be able to communicate with one another absent a common language with mutually understood meanings.”
Fukuyama goes on to point out that nationalism is a response to extreme autonomy. This got me to thinking that the idea of dignity was necessary for the development of the nation-state. The foundation was laid by Christianity in the West but then used by those with national interests to provide a rationale for the state. You can’t build the idea of a nation on slaves, they need autonomy.
This doesn’t change, to my mind, the contribution of Christian belief about fundamental human dignity nor does it diminish the contribution of philosophical thought that explores this discussion. What it does suggest to me is that when those who don’t believe in God, ask where the rationale for human dignity comes from they may have exposed something dangerous in Western history in the last 300 years. They may have exposed that either there is not a clear answer at all or that it is built on a very weak foundation that needs nationalism to support it, which can be exploited for all number of things.
Thank you for reading and contributing.
Happy New Year!
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