Carlo Lancellotti
@_CLancellotti
Professor of Mathematics. My thoughts may not be worth much, but you can have them for free. Side activity: http://delnoceinenglish.org
The problem is that crude racial-biological identities are embraced (as surrogates) when there is an ideal-civilizational vacuum. Just saying "you are valuable for what you do" does not fill the vacuum, it actually helps creating it.
Founding stock — are you a horse? A dog? One's value to society is determined by what they do, not what some random blood connection did 400 years ago. That conviction, now being destroyed, is what once made America a distinct and extraordinary civilization in world history.
For people with a very nerdy sense of humor, there is a great line by DN pointing out that "the superstructural aspect of Marxism has been much more effective than the structural aspect."
To be precise, they have abandoned the study of *any* civilization, because proposing any tradition as objectively worth of study is "authoritarian." If they systematically introduced students to "anything" it would be an entirely different situation.
The University of Florida is the new leader in the study of Western and American civilization. So-called elite universities have abandoned the study of Western culture and politics over the last 25 years, and that betrayal has given other institutions the opportunity to create…
Something that often goes unremarked about Marx is his trust in technical progress, which is necessary to bring about a situation in which people need to work very little. What he seems to have taken for granted (among other things) is that there would be people.
In academia in the US you easily meet "scholars of Fascism" who do not read Italian and have studied no primary literature and no Italian secondary literature on Italian Fascism (as a result they often think Eco was an expert 😂 and De Felice a revisionist🙄). Complete frauds.
If your most passionate belonging in life is political (e.g. you really believe in the "the left" or "the right") I respectfully suggest that you do not really belong to anything (yet).
A recurring feature of the modern world is that when societies become more irreligious bourgeois intellectuals lose all ability to connect with the working class and "socialism" becomes an elite ideology. There is a reason why Marxist revolutions happened in ... Russia and China!
Actually, that is the definition of ideology: a theory or discourse aimed not at knowledge but at power. The notion of "ideology alone" (as mere, disinterested belief) is a misunderstanding that confuses two different metaphysics.
The desire for power, not ideology alone, gave rise to the social-justice university. More than likely, power will also prove its undoing.
Whitehead’s views on education were very similar to those of the Catholic priest Luigi Giussani. Education should present an interdisciplinary holistic view, replete with value, that the student may then freely consider. All current education is severely damaging. My view also.
On a related subject, I have met "massa damnata" Catholics who expect the devil to trounce God by an enormous margin on the number-of-souls scorecard. They are so passionate about the matter that one might think they are rooting for the evil one.
If you’re the kind of “non-judgmental” Christian who eagerly looks forward to all those judgmental people being condemned by Christ at the Last Judgment, you’ve sort of missed the whole point
I went to St.Peter's in Rome for the jubilee, but most people seemed to be there to frantically take pictures. Why do people take all those low-quality pictured of landmarks for which many high-quality photos are freely available online? Do they "see" what they are photographing?
I probably should have said "nobody ever heard of it." In many ways, all the talk about "decolonizing the curriculum" is an ideological cover for the fact that nowadays nobody knows sh*t about European history.
Very few episodes in history are as epic and dramatic as Gil Albornoz's descent into Italy and yet nobody would ever care to dramatize it.
Very few episodes in history are as epic and dramatic as Gil Albornoz's descent into Italy and yet nobody would ever care to dramatize it.
There is something touching about all the Chinese and Indian kids on the bus in Milan speaking idiomatic Italian with broad Lombard vowels.
A lot of the "neo-bourgeois" aversion to having children comes from viewing it as an individualistic task of "producing people" without any understanding of the fundamental reality that human life unfolds as a relationship between subsequent generations.
I would take more seriously people who want to dismantle this or dismantle that if there was any evidence that they can set up, say, a lemonade stand.