Word: unreasonableness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...claims mercilessly; leaving them unchallenged, it feels, will erode the spirit of skepticism that is healthy for both science and society. Says Kurtz: "There is always the danger that once irrationality grows, it will spill over into other areas. There is no guarantee that a society so infected by unreason will be resistant to even the most virulent programs of dangerous ideological sects...
...modern culture closed. Ernst was our century's incarnation of Hermes, the agile trickster, and we will not see his like again. He was, with the more phlegmatic Rene Magritte, the best of all the artists connected with surrealism-the master of the "alternative" tradition of mystery, unreason and demonic...
...reason speaks for the Identimat, unreason has to have its say, too. It may be unjustified, it may be silly to look at the hand-print machines in their Harvard context and automatically think of thumb-screws and firing squads, but the connotations of the machine are no less real for being illogical, identimats in the food lines make Harvard that much more faceless and mechanical, and worse: No amount of ratiocination can cover up the first could smell of the thing when you put your hand...
Galileo is about both the unreason able fate of reason and the attempts to thwart and subvert truth. Knowledge and truth, for Brecht, would ultimately be nurtured and fueled by the proletariat, the working man being the true repository of hope. This seems a pretty romantic proposition, especially for a man who had dedicated himself to abolishing every article of romantic faith. But Brecht knew well, and portrayed with ruthless accuracy, the inbred conservatism of power, the stale air of the cloister that can smother the free, creative spirit. What makes Galileo impor tant, finally, is its ironic accounting...
...word" and "reality," the "attack on reason," the "conviction of historical responsibility"--we get a whiff of the type of democracy he endorses:the cult of the intellectual, a noblesse not of the robe or the sword but of the word protecting the nation from the dragon of unreason that threatens political discourse. "Let intellectuals never forget that all they that take the word shall perish with the word," Schlesigner eloquently tells us, and as for the rest of society, well, let them eat paragraphs...