Tag Archives: February 2025

Essays, Ideas, Society

Ideas & Society: ‘The Winter Of Civilization’

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AEON MAGAZINE (February 28, 2025):

I came across Byung-Chul Han towards the end of the previous decade, while writing a book about the pleasures and discontents of inactivity. My first researches into our culture of overwork and perpetual stimulation soon turned up Han’s The Burnout Society, first published in German in 2010. Han’s descriptions of neoliberalism’s culture of exhaustion hit me with that rare but unmistakable alloy of gratitude and resentment aroused when someone else’s thinking gives precise and fully formed expression to one’s own fumbling intuitions.

Han’s critique of contemporary life centres on its fetish of transparency; the compulsion to self-exposure driven by social media and fleeting celebrity culture; the reduction of selfhood to a series of positive data-points; and the accompanying hostility to the opacity and strangeness of the human being.

At the heart of Han’s conception of a burnout society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) is a new paradigm of domination. The industrial society’s worker internalises the imperative to work harder in the form of superego guilt. Sigmund Freud’s superego, a hostile overseer persecuting us from within, comes into being when the infantile psyche internalises the forbidding parent. In other words, the superego has its origin in figures external to us, so that, when it tells us what to do, it is as though we are hearing an order from someone else. The achievement society of our time, Han argues, runs not on superego guilt but ego-ideal positivity – not from a ‘you must’ but a ‘you can’. The ego-ideal is that image of our own perfection once reflected to our infantile selves by our parents’ adoring gaze. It lives in us not as a persecutory other but as a kind of higher version of oneself, a voice of relentless encouragement to do and be more.

To digitalise a painting is to decompose it, to deprive it of ground

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Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice in London. He is professor emeritus of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths University of London. His latest books include Losers (2021) and All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World (2024).

Arts & Literature, Reviews

‘Rembrandt And Literature’ (Review)

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LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS (LARB):

ALTHOUGH ONE CAN never get enough of Vermeer or van Gogh, a regrettable consequence of this current age of blockbuster art exhibitions is that more and more great artists are being viewed in isolation from each other. Turning the 18th-century notion of the singular genius into a marketing ploy, museums around the world present their subjects as rebels, outcasts, and troublemakers who operated outside time and space, when all of them were, in fact, closely connected with—and creatively indebted to—their culture and time period.

It is refreshing, then, to stumble upon a show like Impulse Rembrandt: Teacher, Strategist, Bestseller (2024–25) at the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts in Germany, whose accompanying English-language catalog of critical essays plugs the most revered of the Dutch masters back into the ecosystem that influenced him as much as he influenced it.

Born in Leiden to a well-to-do miller in 1606, Rembrandt in early youth began to draft sketches of the Dutch countryside and portraits of his Protestant mother, who instilled in him a lifelong reverence for Christian mythology. In his teens, he apprenticed first with Jacob Isaacszoon van Swanenburg, a history painter freshly returned from Italy, then with Pieter Lastman, who also taught Jan Lievens. At 22, Rembrandt began taking on students of his own, many of whom, including Ferdinand Bol, Gerard Dou, and Carel Fabritius, became successful painters in their own right. Contrary to popular belief, writes the head of paintings and sculpture at Leipzig Museum, Jan Nicolaisen, in the exhibition catalog, these students—some as young as 14 when they first appeared at Rembrandt’s stately house and studio on Amsterdam’s Jodenbreestraat—didn’t spend their time completing Rembrandt’s masterpieces so much as copying them, adopting his style and sensibilities as their own. Concerned more with light and emotion than idealized forms, and increasingly painting in loose, expressive strokes, Rembrandt has been deservedly called one of the first “modern” painters, his well-documented influence running from his immediate disciples to Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí.

By and large, the development of 17th-century Dutch literature followed the development of 17th-century Dutch painting, Amsterdam’s writers and poets moving away from the dominant, classical style of their French neighbors in much the same way Rembrandt looked beyond the masters of the Italian Renaissance. 

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It is, in light of this conclusion, rather fitting that both academic and literary treatments of Rembrandt have slowly moved beyond the one-sided interpretations of the past, viewing him neither as a nuisance—as the classicists and Victorians did—nor as a Romantic genius, but rather as a man of unresolvable contradiction, a hungry miller’s boy who bit off more than he could chew. Possessed of both innate talent and acquired skill, he was equally sensible to corporeal and aesthetic pleasures, and willing to change and develop in response to both his surroundings and his own better judgment. A best-seller indeed.

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Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch journalist and researcher based in the United States. He studied history and literature at New York University and has written for Vox, Vulture, Slate, Esquire, Jacobin, GQ, New Lines Magazine, and more.

Economics, Essays

Economics: ‘Productivity Is Everything’ (Essay)

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FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (February 25, 2025):

For the United States, these are trying times. Americans are overcome with an unshakable sense of economic malaise. The top-line indicators are good: unemployment is low, inflation is declining, and the country remains the richest in the world. Yet in poll after poll, most Americans say they are unhappy with the state of the economy today and its prospects for tomorrow. Only a quarter consider the economy good or excellent. Nearly 80 percent say they are not confident that their children will live better than they do.

In the mid-1970s, U.S. productivity growth collapsed.

Analysts have spent years discussing the country’s particular challenges. They have talked about its aging population, which is widening federal budget deficits as entitlement spending collides with an antipathy to tax increases. They have looked at the growing threat of climate change, which requires an overhaul of the U.S. energy sector. They have noted the widening wealth and income gaps in our changing economy. And they have fretted over foreign autocrats who are menacing U.S. security.

Innovation has driven most of the United States’ productivity growth.

But the public debate too often overlooks a common factor behind all these challenges, one that will shape whether the United States can address them: labor productivity. Commonly measured as the amount of goods and services generated per worker, productivity is the central determinant of a nation’s average standard of living and its overall economic success. Growth over time in productivity is why Americans today can consume more goods and services than their grandparents—even as they work fewer hours. Productivity growth fuels rising wages and profits, which generates more fiscal revenue, allowing Washington to build formidable defense capabilities. And productivity growth bolsters the country’s soft power, demonstrating the strengths of a democratic, market-oriented society.

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MATTHEW J. SLAUGHTER is Paul Danos Dean and Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. From 2005 to 2007, he served on the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

DAVID WESSEL is Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and director of its Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy.

Essays, History, Politics

Politics & History: ‘The Gilded Age Never Ended’

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THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE (February 24, 2025):

When, in the nineteen-nineties, people decided that we were living in a new Gilded Age, the meaning was plain. The term, borrowed from the 1873 Mark Twain novel of the same name—a mediocre book by a great writer with a memorable title, like Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”—indicated an efflorescence of wealth and display, of overabundance and nouveau-riche excess. It referred mostly to the Veblenian side of American life: status competition through showy objects, from the cloud-level duplexes of the New York skyline to the Met Gala. Perhaps not enough attention was paid to the original concept, which implied a contrast between the truly golden and the merely gilded.

Hierarchies of power are intrinsic to human societies, no doubt, and sometimes the best we can hope for is that those on top become devoted to a higher ideal of education or common welfare or simple beauty.

What we didn’t anticipate was that our new Gilded Age would become even more like its precursor—not only in the seeming concentration of overwhelming wealth into fewer and fewer hands but in the gravitation toward a plutocracy. In the industrial age, the totemic figures were Frick and Morgan and Rockefeller; in our post-industrial era, they are Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg. During that first Gilded Age—if we imagine it running from the eighteen-seventies to 1910—a counter cast of characters had a glamorous appeal of their own. These were the anarchists, whose isolated but highly publicized acts of individual retaliation were intended as inspirational melodramatic theatre rather than as actual revolutionary politics. In these years, anarchists claimed the lives of a French President, an American President, an Italian king, and a Russian tsar, and threw bombs at several American tycoons. Whether or not Luigi Mangione’s recent alleged murder of a helpless insurance executive on a cold New York morning belongs to this tradition, its affect and effect certainly evoke the past, with the curly-haired Ivy-educated youth conferring, in the realm of social media, an improbable aura of martyrdom and purpose on what otherwise would have seemed a sordid act.

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Culture, Essays

‘The Commitment To Collaborate’ (Essay)

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AEON (February 22, 2025): Every week at the office, you and your fellow employees have meetings to discuss progress on group projects and to divide tasks efficiently. Perhaps in the evening, you go home and cook dinner with your partner. At least once in your life, you might have seen a team of firefighters work together to extinguish a fire at a burning house and rescue those inside. You have probably also witnessed or participated in political demonstrations aimed at bettering the treatment of those in need. These are all examples of human cooperation toward a mutually beneficial end. Some of them seem so commonplace that we rarely think of them as anything special. Yet they are. It is not obvious that any of the other great ape species cooperate in such a way – spontaneously and with individuals they have never before met. Though there has been some evidence of cooperation in other great apes, the interpretation of studies on ape cooperation has also been contested. In the human case, cooperation is unequivocal.

One crafts a spear head, the other crafts a shaft. To do so, they need some means of communicating

The evolution of cooperation has been of interest to biologists, philosophers and anthropologists for centuries. If natural selection favours self-interest, why would we cooperate at an apparent cost to ourselves? You might say that none of these examples is costly; they all benefit the person cooperating as well as the recipient of the cooperation. This is true, but there is still a puzzle to solve. If I can reduce the cost of cooperating by deception – pretending to pull my weight in the group project or in the rescue mission – and still reap the benefits, why would I not do so? This is known as the ‘free-rider’ problem.

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Saira Khan is a research associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bristol in the UK, working on Samir Okasha’s Representing Evolution project.

Essays, Humanities, Mathematics, Science

Mathematics Essay: ‘Beyond Causality’

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AEON (February 14, 2025): In 1959, the English writer and physicist C P Snow delivered the esteemed Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge. Regaled with champagne and Marmite sandwiches, the audience had no idea that they were about to be read the riot act. Snow diagnosed a rift of mutual ignorance in the intellectual world of the West. On the one hand were the ‘literary intellectuals’ (of the humanities) and on the other the (natural) ‘scientists’: the much-discussed ‘two cultures’.

Mind and world are no separate spheres that must first be connected. Rather, both depend on each other

Snow substantiated his diagnosis with anecdotes of respected literary intellectuals who complained about the illiteracy of the scientists but who themselves had never heard of such a fundamental statement as the second law of thermodynamics. And he told of brilliant scientific minds who might know a lot about the second law but were barely up to the task of reading Charles Dickens, let alone an ‘esoteric, tangled and dubiously rewarding writer … like Rainer Maria Rilke.’

Mathematics mediates a conciliatory view that avoids the mistake of the naive realist and the naive idealist…

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: ‘I want to show the colourfulness of mathematics.’ In that spirit, I placed mathematics at the centre of my project because, in my view, mathematics searches along more of these many paths than any other intellectual discipline. It is connected on a deep level both with the natural sciences and the humanities. It bridges the gulf between them, and it does so by putting certain metaphysical and epistemological dogmas into question, as will become clear in the following.

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Gordon Gillespie is an actuary, quantitative risk manager and data scientist. He has a doctorate in philosophy and is the author of the German-language book The Oracle of Numbers: A Short Philosophy of Mathematics (2023). He lives in Rüdesheim, Germany.

Book Reviews, Literature, Reviews

‘In Praise Of Artistic Experimentation In Literature’ (Review)

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LITERARY HUB (February 14, 2025): I first read Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy as a teenager. I was hungry to assert maturity through my reading habits, to bypass YA fiction in favor of books for adults, and so initially its playful visuals made me frown; I associated illustrations with children’s books. Soon, however, I realized how sophisticated and delightful they were.

The squiggle representing the emphatic twirling of Corporal Trim’s cane. A blank page where the reader is invited to imagine how Widow Wadman might look—”paint her to your own mind.” A marbled block which the reader can gaze into and contemplate the mysteries of life. And—my favorite—the iconic black page that represents the death of Parson Yorick.

Whilst Sterne was certainly an innovative writer ahead of his time, it is worth noting that this was not anarchic at the time of publication; other texts published in his era, such as funeral publications, also included black pages as a symbol of death. However, the image was unusual for a novel, and is a perfect visual representation of grief, inviting multiple interpretations—a dark tombstone, funeral attire, a bleak starless night, a black hole of grief.These books felt idiosyncratic, shaped by authorial intent, as if harking back to those medieval manuscripts where monks wrote in calligraphy and included beautiful pictures in colors bright as stained glass.

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Book Reviews, Reviews, Science

‘Can Understanding The Brain Make Us Better People?’ (Book Review)

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 14, 2025)

CEREBRAL ENTANGLEMENTS: How the Brain Shapes Our Public and Private Lives, by Allan J. Hamilton

A profound and profoundly important book that, using the most up-to-date revolutionary discoveries in neuroscience, shows us how to understand the brain; how it allows us to think, feel, experience and perceive, written by an acclaimed Harvard-trained neurosurgeon.

The human brain! It’s amazing! A master conductor of our emotional symphonies, a supercomputer of intelligence, a treasure inside the “temple” of the skull, where it gloriously shimmers “vivid, vital, jewel-like.” I mean, is it any wonder we’re such a special species?

Sorry: I had to get that out of my system. Books built on hyperbole seem to bring out the worst in me. And “Cerebral Entanglements,” a new book by the surgeon and medical consultant Allan J. Hamilton, is so breathlessly excited about our brains and how they work, about the dazzle of new insights and technologies, that occasionally this reader felt compelled to take a break and fan herself.

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Deborah Blum is the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at M.I.T. and the author of “The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Quest for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.”

Arts & Literature, Humanities, Reviews

Humanities & Literature: ‘Fooled By Language’

FRONTLINE (February 12, 2025): In his incisive 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell performs a brilliant autopsy on the art and craft of writing and communication. He focusses on how and what language manifests—or rather, fails to manifest—in political discourse. The master satirist, never one to mince words (though he’d be the first to appreciate the irony of that cliché), dissects the tendency of political language to change straightforward ideas into bloated, pretentious prose that obscures rather than enlightens.

Towards the end of this long essay lies a powerful statement: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”. Clearly, Orwell was talking about how politicians and other public figures twist words to hide ugly truths. When leaders want to justify terrible or unpleasant actions, they turn to a vague, fancy vocabulary. Instead of saying “we killed civilians”, they might say, “collateral damage occurred during military operations”. This kind of cloudy language makes it harder for people to understand what really happened or will happen.

Language shapes perception. It defines how we see the world and the forces that power it. In an ideal scenario, words like “development”, “reform”, and “progress” should inspire optimism, suggesting a march towards a better future. But in practice, these terms become euphemisms for destruction. Beneath their hopeful facades, they have hidden environmental devastation, the displacement of indigenous communities, and the widening gap between the rich and the poor. If we strip away their idealistic veneer, we uncover a history of exploitation and loss—one that continues to this day.

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Essays, History, Law

History & Law: ‘Beyond Logic And Freedom – The Dred Scott Decision’

The Imaginative Conservative (February 13, 2025): With his bold pronouncement in the Dred Scott decision that Congress had no jurisdiction over the territories, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney hoped to preempt all political discussion and debate. But he was sadly disappointed, for his majority opinion itself became the focus of a new, and ever more vicious, round of political battles as the presidential election of 1860 approached.

I. The Historical Background

On March 6, 1857, two days after James Buchanan took the oath of office as president of the United States, the Supreme court announced its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. John F.A. San[d]ford.[i]The case was complex and the decision long in coming. In 1834, an army surgeon named John Emerson reported for duty at Rock Island, Illinois.With him was Dred Scott, a slave whom he had recently purchased in St. Louis. Emerson kept Scott with him at Fort Armstrong for two years, despite an Illinois state law forbidding slavery. In 1836, the army posted Dr. Emerson to Fort Snelling, located in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase, in what was then Wisconsin territory and which subsequently became the state of Minnesota. As before, he took his slave Dred Scott with him, although the Missouri Compromise explicitly prohibited slavery north of latitude 36° 30’. While stationed at Fort Snelling, Emerson bought a slave woman named Harriet, who eventually married Dred Scott, although the law did not sanction slave marriages. After several years, the army again transferred Emerson, whose slaves returned with him to Missouri.[ii]

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III. Consequences & Significance

Not since Marbury v. Madison in 1803 had the Supreme Court employed the principle of judicial review to overturn congressional legislation. The court’s ruling that neither Congress nor the territorial governments could ban slavery, in effect, renounced both the Missouri Compromise and popular sovereignty. Taney had made it clear to Republicans that even should they win control of the national government they could not execute their pledge to keep the territories free of slavery. Slavery could only be proscribed after a territory became a state. By then it might be too well entrenched to remove. It appeared both to the opponents of slavery and to the advocates of free soil that Taney and a majority of the Supreme Court were parties to a vast conspiracy among slaveholders to take over the government.

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