Recent links of note:
“‘The Wandering Mind’ Review: The Demon of Distraction”
Dominic Green, The Wall Street Journal
We live in a “modern-day distraction epidemic,” writes Dominic Green in a book review for The Wall Street Journal of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction by Jamie Kreiner. Our minds constantly wander, and our attention spans shrink more and more. The past, however, wasn’t all that different—medieval monks, those masters of concentration, struggled to focus more than might be assumed, writes Kreiner in her book. Green points out the other ways in which late antiquity was not dissimilar from the present. Just as today we try to “unplug,” in Green’s word, so too did monks seek to live without material luxuries and damaging distractions—though monks went to much greater lengths to remain on the vertical path to heaven rather than the horizontal axis of worldly concerns.
“The End Is Only the Beginning”
Adam Kirsch, The American Scholar
In an excerpt for The American Scholar from his new book The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us, the author and New Criterion poetry critic Adam Kirsch dilates on transhumanism and what that entails for humanity in the Anthropocene age. Defined (unofficially) as the period of time on the geologic scale during which our planet is subject to significant alteration by humans, for example through nuclear explosions or carbon emissions, the Anthropocene is a largely speculative epoch, as it entails both the present and the future. Many view it as the edge of a cliff, the age when humanity violates the bounds set by nature. But it won’t be possible, writes Kirsch, to roll back time to a simpler age or to rebuild after the fall. Kirsch carefully investigates transhumanism, the hope that humanity will solve its lack of maturity, coordination, and foresight with technological progress, the idea of disappearing “by climbing instead of falling.”
“How to Swim Against the Stream: On Diogenes”
Los Angeles Review of Books, Costica Bradatan
As no writings by Diogenes the Cynic survive (if he ever produced any), the ancient Greek is remembered today more for the amusing or often shocking stories about his unorthodox lifestyle. Diogenes, writes Costica Bradatan for the Los Angeles Review of Books, understood philosophy as a “live performance” and “a way of acting and being” rather than “impenetrable jargon.” Though Socrates was a “vigorous naysayer” during his life, Diogenes outdid him in his antics, building a reputation for his witty philosophy that stretched from Athens to Corinth. The anecdotes, or chreia, on Diogenes display a “strategic shamelessness” he used to question norms and behaviors, such as urination and defecation in public. For Bradatan, Diogenes represents more than mere shock value: he is the founder of a “grand school of wise foolishness,” and his contrarian values appear ever more prudent in the conformism of the present day.