What Went Wrong With the West
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Deze vierde uitgave van Cultura Animi draait om de urgente vraag: waarom gaat er zo veel mis in het Westen? Hoe komt het dat we zo veel crises te verduren hebben, die nu samenkomen in een nieuw tijdperk van angst? Het antwoord is te vatten in een enkel woord: verraad. James Hankins laat zien hoe de academische wereld de ware humaniora verraden heeft, Kate Brown toont hoe we Moeder Aarde verraden, en in hun briefwisseling onderzoeken Mary Trump en Rob Riemen hoe de ‘American Promise’ verraden is. Tot slot is ook een prachtige rede van Michael Ignatieff ter ere van dertig jaren Nexus opgenomen.
Inhoudsopgave
Lectori Salutem
Against the False Humanists: Petrarch Speaks Out
But there are aspects of your time I really do hate. I do think that the human soul — the soul your humanists no longer believe in — has become narrow and impoverished. It lacks the sustenance of tradition and no longer dreams of performing great and noble deeds. It is no longer raised to sublime heights of contemplation. It suffers guilt and shame but no longer knows how to feel forgiveness, mercy, gratitude, and loyalty. It no longer knows what honour is.
Kiss the Ground: Life Support in Controlled Environments
Anxiety runs as a strong electrical current through twenty-first century society. And no wonder. Humans in the Anthropocene are located in Biosphere-1, a closed, controlled environment with limited resources, struggling in many different ways to breathe.
A Correspondence
How does a person become a demagogue? And why? Why would anybody want to seduce and mislead people with lies and play to their most primitive instincts? A demagogue can never be successful without a society that is receptive to their demagoguery, which raises the question: Why is such a large part of American society so receptive to the demagoguery of your uncle?
Thirty Years Nexus: A Tribute
An idea like Nexus is an ideal we never quite live up to, but it is essential to have intellectual ideals. There is no gathering quite like Nexus: elitist yet democratic, ambitious yet colloquial, available to all, yet speaking in a cultural register all its own. Nexus has come far in thirty years. It has a reputation around the world and has been faithful to what Amsterdam has been since Descartes, since Spinoza, a home for free minds.