Improving Health

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:44 pm By Peter Leithart

What makes for better health and longer life expectancy in the advanced world in the last century? Not improvements in medicine, Illich argues. Rates of tuberculosis, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles indicate that “nearly 90 percent of the total decline in mortality between 1860 and 1965 had occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread immunization.” According to Illich, “by far the most important factor was a higher host-resistance due to better nutrition.” No matter how much medical... Read more

Paracats

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:05 am By Peter Leithart

Ivan Illich ( Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health ) writes about the unintended effects of insecticides in Borneo: “Insecticides used in villages to control malaria vectors also accumulated in cockroaches, most of which are resistant. Geckoes fed on these, became lethargic, and fell prey to cats. The cats died, rats multiplied, and with rats came the threat of epidemic bubonic plague.” To stop the dominoes, “the army had to parachute cats into the jungle village.” Read more

Illiberal liberalism

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:44 pm By Peter Leithart

Phillip Blond ( Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix it ) offers a succinct summary of why liberal political order descends to tyranny. Liberalism is, on Blond’s definition, a political order erected on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally atomistic individual beings. Once that is in place, and once we have the added notion that the state exists to protect the individual choices of said individuals, we have created the conditions... Read more

Elective Affinity

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:36 pm By Peter Leithart

In an intriguing chapter on modern agriculture in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) , James C. Scott notes that the isolation of a few variables is “a key tenet of experimental science” and “both valuable and necessary to scientific work.” It also, necessarily, means that scientists see things a certain way. He quotes a chaos theorist: “There is a fundamental presumption in physics that... Read more

Feminist Family

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:41 pm By Peter Leithart

Philip Blond calls the family “a deeply radical and indeed feminist institution” because it “binds men to women and offers a cultural account of how they should behave towards one another.” On the other hand, progressive demolition of the family has left unmarried women triple losers : “they have to work externally, labour domestically, and look after the children by themselves.” Read more

Tea Party, Cont’d

Last updated on: May 20, 2010 at 2:42 pm By Peter Leithart

Jameson Graber responds to my post yesterday on the individualism of the Tea Party movement: “This quote in your post caught my attention: ‘Today, populist rhetoric “fires up emotions by appealing to individual opinion, individual autonomy, and individual choice, all in the service of neutralizing, not using, political power.’ Mark Lilla apparently intended this as a criticism, but to me it is a sign that this is one of those rare moments in history in which people are actually passionate... Read more

Tea Party, Cont’d

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:56 pm By Peter Leithart

Tories, Capitalism, the Poor

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:51 pm By Peter Leithart

Conservatives are today almost invariably defenders of capitalism. It was not always so. As Phillip Blond argues in Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix it , “In the eighteenth century it was the Anglican Tory gentry who often defended the prosperity of the poor, their education and even their religious enthusiasm against modish Whig aristocrats.” In the following century, it was the Tories who were “critics of republican authoritarianism and statism as... Read more

Cantor and Theological Set Theory

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:48 pm By Peter Leithart

Depoortere ( Badiou and Theology (Philosophy and Theology) ) provides a neat summary of Georg Cantor’s theological-mathematical treatment of infinity. Cantor was led into these theological waters by the same paradoxical sets that Badiou uses to disprove the existence of God. The difference between them is partly in their understanding of “consistent” and “inconsistent” multiplicities. Depoortere explains that “For Cantor, an inconsistent multiplicity is a multiplicity for which it is the case that ‘the assumption that all of its elements... Read more

Badiou, Set Theory, and God

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:47 pm By Peter Leithart

Frederiek Depoortere’s Badiou and Theology (Philosophy and Theology) is a challenging, fascinating introduction to Alain Badiou aimed (as the title and series subtly suggest) at theologians. Badiou is best known to theologians as the atheist-Maoist-Marxist author of Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Cultural Memory in the Present) , but Depoortere highlights instead the more central themes of Badiou’s philosophy. What might those be? Depoortere’s book answers in several ways. Early on he summarizes a 1999 lecture of Badiou’s in... Read more