I read the beginning of the Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand on the nine hour flight to Tokyo. (Business Class has good reading lights and plenty of room to read.)
This is a book ostensibly about the development of modern ideas in America. Three elements jumped out at me.
First the book deals with the period 1850-1890 when industrial commerce made its most stunning super nova explosion. Only a tiny part of this commercial explosion is dealt with by the brilliant Menand. I hope that will be remedied later in my life, by good writers who have felt some influence from my work.
The influential thinkers that Menand deals with Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey all connect ideas to the real world. The real world was rapidly becoming commerce as these men were shaping American thought. The connection can’t be missed.
The book is fun, nevertheless. The biography of O.W. Holmes dwelt on the change in Bostonian attitudes towards slavery from 1850 to 1865. The most impressive points of the recital were the constant efforts of the South to force the North to accept the Southern view. The aggressive demands started with the insistence of the expansion of slavery to the territories, it expanded to the enforcement of runaway slave laws and finally generated the firing on Ft. Sumter.
Northerners were backed into the position of the Emancipation Proclamation against their will.
The comparison I see today, on a modest scale, is the position of the Anti-Iraq-War people. The AIW group is so aggressive in projecting their position with anger, venom, exaggeration and allusions to Armageddon that I suspect they will push the Pro-Regime-Change majority into a more substantial, well defined and rigid position.
Lastly, a lefty friend asked me what I thought about scientists signing public statements attacking the current administration. The Menand book reminded me how often science has been used to support political positions. The most egregious concerned the biological superiority of Caucasian people and the inheritability of intelligence. These sober scientific positions were promoted 150 years ago and still defended by scientists in my lifetime. Scientists simply have no historic credibility in commenting on anything outside their narrow specific research purview. In the fields I know, the statistics of global warming and the morality of human genetic engineering, the general category of “scientist” is an absurdity and the plaintiff advice given by “scientists” is more absurd.