When Whiteness is the Default for Success

It is now common—and I use the word “common” in its every sense—to see interviews with up-and-coming young movie stars whose parents or even grandparents were themselves movie stars. And when the interviewer asks, “Did you find it an advantage to be the child of a major motion-picture star?” the answer is invariably “Well, it gets you in the door, but after that you’ve got to perform, you’re on your own.” This is ludicrous. Getting in the door is pretty much the entire gam...

 Forgotten Best Sellers

Social values ebb and flow over decades, but the values expressed in a book are fixed. It may be that science fiction is more affected by values dissonance than other genres by nature of being (often) set in the future. A book written and set in the 1950s might have quaint expectations regarding the proper roles of men and women (not to mention the assumption that those are only two choices), but they would be the quaint expectations of the era in which the book is set. A novel written in the...

 I and Thou Thinking

In his 1923 book I and Thou, the philosopher Martin Buber draws a distinction between what he calls I-It and I-Thou ways of seeing. In I-It, the other (a thing or a person) is an “it” that exists only as an instrument or means to an end, something to be appropriated by the “I.” A person who only knows I-It will never encounter anything outside himself because he does not truly “encounter.” Buber writes that such a person “only knows the feverish world out there and his feverish ...

 Three Guidelines and Eight Stages

I.A The Three Guidelines The Dao of Great Learning lies in making bright virtue brilliant; in making the people new; in coming to rest at the limit of the good. Only after wisdom comes to rest does one possess certainty; only after one possesses certainty can one become tranquil; only after one becomes tranquil can one become secure; only after one becomes secure can one contemplate alternatives; only after one can contemplate alternatives can one comprehend. Affairs have their roots and bra...

 What Would an Atheist Say to God?

Why did you stay hidden? Why did you stay silent? Why did you demand faith instead of providing evidence? Why did you reveal yourself in a book full of historical innaccuracies and theological contradictions? If you knew that the vast majority of humans you created would end up in hell, why did you create them? Why did you create hell? How is infinite punishment justice for a finite crime? What is the point of torturing someone in hell if they can never get out of it and never learn? Why woul...

 Third place

Oldenburg calls one's "first place" the home and the people the person lives with. The "second place" is the workplace�where people may actually spend most of their time. Third places, then, are "anchors" of community life and facilitate and foster broader, more creative interaction.[1]�In other words, "your third place is where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces and make new acquaintances."[2] Other scholars have summarized Oldenburg's view of a third place with eight ch...

 The Absurdity of Religious Prohibitions

I find these singular precepts opposed to nature and contrary to reason: they needs must multiply the number of crimes and continually annoy the old workman, who has made everything without the help of head, hands, or tools, who exists everywhere and is to be seen nowhere; who endures to-day and to-morrow and is never a day the older; who commands and is never obeyed; who can prevent and does not do so. These precepts are contrary to nature because they presuppose that a thinking, feeling, fr...

 Sex Makes Life and Should Not Be Shunned

If there is a perverse man who could take offense at the praise that I give to the most noble and universal of passions, I would evoke Nature before him, I would make it speak, and Nature would say to him: why do you blush to hear the word pleasure pronounced, when you do not blush to indulge in its temptations under the cover of night? Are you ignorant of its purpose and of what you owe it? Do you believe that your mother would have imperiled her life to give you yours if I had not attached ...

 Half of Children Won't Live to Adulthood, So Why Torture ...

Nothing is more uncertain than the life span of individual man; very few men reach old age. The greatest risks are incurred at the beginning of life: the less we have lived the less we may expect to live. Of the children that are born half at most grow to adolescence; thus it is probable that your pupil will not attain the age of manhood. What must we think then of the barbarous education which sacrifices the present for an uncertain future, which surrounds a child with all sorts of fetters ...

 Corporal Punishment in Education

1. He that has not a mastery over his inclinations, he that knows not how to resist the importunity of present pleasure or pain, for the sake of what reason tells him is fit to be done, wants the true principle of virtue and industry; and is in danger of never being good for any thing. This temper, therefore, so contrary to unguided nature, is to be got betimes; and this habit, as the true foundation of future ability and happiness, is to be wrought into the mind, as early as may be, even fro...