Reviews and News:
What was Machiavelli really like, and what did he actually think of power? “Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the end to justify the means. Most scholars would agree that the popular image is a distortion of the real Niccolò Machiavelli’s ideas. In Be Like the Fox Erica Benner brings to life a Machiavelli who’s a man of considerable political principle. And not only that: he’s also a bright and entertaining sort of chap with whom I’d happily knock back a bottle of Chianti. But has Benner shattered a historical myth or simply created a new one?”
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“The Praetorian Guard, a modern term, was founded, or rather formalized, around 27 BC by Augustus for the protection of the emperor and his family.” Its members were a dangerous, greedy bunch.
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Should the federal government support the arts?
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Confession of a Trump voter: “My home in Southern Appalachia has remained among the poorest places in the United States, despite many promises from Washington to fix it. We are still ridiculed as ‘hillbillies’ and worse. So it should be no surprise to anyone that whenever a candidate pops up and gives our area even the tiniest ray of hope, that person is going to get a fair hearing from us. And when Donald Trump came to West Virginia and promised to bring back mining jobs and prosperity, folks here were ready to take a gamble on that kind of change. I’m a lifelong Democrat, but this election brought on a huge shift in my political views. Most everyone around me are also Democrats by local custom, and also by a historic belief that government can still work as a force for good when it wants to. All the leaders in my county are registered Democrats. But almost all of us voted for the Republican Donald Trump because we don’t have much more to fear.”
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The first graphic Bible: “In the fall of 2016, Kingstone Comics accomplished a significant feat, publishing the first full-scale graphic novel adaptation of the Bible. Featuring artwork from veterans of both Marvel and DC Comics that spans over 2,000 pages across three hardcover volumes, The Kingstone Bible is the most ambitious graphic novel biblical adaptation to date.”
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The decline of “small-town France”: “The paint is fading, but the word is still clear: Alimentation, ‘Groceries.’ It seems like a stage prop, grafted above the window of the empty old storefront. Opposite stands a tattoo parlor. Nobody enters or leaves. The street is deserted. Keep walking, and you’ll find more vacant storefronts, scattered around the old center of this town dominated by its imposing 13th-century brick cathedral, one of France’s undisputed treasures. Tourist shops and chain clothing stores are open, but missing are the groceries, cafes and butcher shops that once bustled with life and for centuries defined small-town France. Measuring change, and decay, is not easy in France, where beauty is just around the corner and life can seem unchanged over decades. But the decline evident in Albi is replicated in hundreds of other places. France is losing the core of its historic provincial towns — dense hubs of urbanity deep in the countryside where judges judged, Balzac set his novels, prefects issued edicts and citizens shopped for 50 cheeses.”
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Robert Lowell’s restless mind.
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Reprintable paper becomes a reality: “A new nanoparticle coating may allow the material to be erased and reused more than 80 times.”
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Essay of the Day:
Is consciousness an illusion? Thomas Nagel responds in a review of Daniel Dennett’s new book:
“Dennett holds that consciousness is not part of reality in the way the brain is. Rather, it is a particularly salient and convincing user-illusion, an illusion that is indispensable in our dealings with one another and in monitoring and managing ourselves, but an illusion nonetheless.
“You may well ask how consciousness can be an illusion, since every illusion is itself a conscious experience—an appearance that doesn’t correspond to reality. So it cannot appear to me that I am conscious though I am not: as Descartes famously observed, the reality of my own consciousness is the one thing I cannot be deluded about. The way Dennett avoids this apparent contradiction takes us to the heart of his position, which is to deny the authority of the first-person perspective with regard to consciousness and the mind generally.
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“The trouble is that Dennett concludes not only that there is much more behind our behavioral competencies than is revealed to the first-person point of view—which is certainly true—but that nothing whatever is revealed to the first-person point of view but a ‘version’ of the neural machinery. In other words, when I look at the American flag, it may seem to me that there are red stripes in my subjective visual field, but that is an illusion: the only reality, of which this is ‘an interpreted, digested version,’ is that a physical process I can’t describe is going on in my visual cortex.
“I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: ‘Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’ Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, ‘maintaining a thesis at all costs.’
“If I understand him, this requires us to interpret ourselves behavioristically: when it seems to me that I have a subjective conscious experience, that experience is just a belief, manifested in what I am inclined to say. According to Dennett, the red stripes that appear in my visual field when I look at the flag are just the ‘intentional object’ of such a belief, as Santa Claus is the intentional object of a child’s belief in Santa Claus. Neither of them is real. Recall that even trees and bacteria have a manifest image, which is to be understood through their outward behavior. The same, it turns out, is true of us: the manifest image is not an image after all.”
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Photo: Lofoten Islands
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Poem: John Whitworth, “The Brethren”
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