All posts by anomalogue

Now that I think about it

Esoterism, Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

A broken faith is experienced by the faith-breaker as revelation of a new meaning with a new story.

One tells a revisionist story that invalidates the old story by which one lived. “I mistakenly believed x-story, but I can see now that y-story is true, and was true all along.”

Broken faith says: “Now that I think about it…” and proceeds to reverse hero and villain, angel and devil, love and hate, virtue and vice, sacred vow and vile enslavement — producing wave after wave of estrangement. Whoever was closest is cast out with the most violence.

A person of weak faith, who lacks social and relational structures to hold them in a steady psychic state is always teetering on the edge of betrayal. Whoever is friends with such a person on one day might meet only an enemy and a ghost the next.

And, by person, as always, I mean any cohesive psychic unit — an individual, a family, a sub-culture, a people, a nation, an inter-national class. Personhood is scalar.

Dialectic transcendence is a whole other kind of change. In it, oppositions are not simply reversed but sublated within higher-order truths. It is not just metanoia, it is t’shuvah.

Dialectic sefirot

Kabbalah, Letterpress

I got the idea for this Sefirot from whoever this is via whoever this is. I might have to letterpress it.

I made some changes to improve the aesthetics and to make the dialectic even denser.

(Note December 21, 2025: I have redrawn the dialectic Sefirot, using parentheses to losslessly bring this rendering into line with the greater tradition, by having no more and no less than ten Sefirot. While I’m appending this post, I also want to note that the “upward” superscending theosophic path is clearly an Apollinian one, and the “downward” subscending ecstatic path is a Dionysian one.)

The original image was designed to highlight the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic structure inherent in the Sefirot. The addition of the Kav penetrating directly into Malchut makes even more explicit the synthesis of the Iggulim and Yosher forms of the Sefirot in the original diagram.

A third synthesis occurs between Malkhut and Shekhinah, and (fourth) worse — possibly incorrectly — between Shekhinah and Keter. (These two might be an indirect expression of Moshe Idel’s idea that Kabbalah is a synthesis of antithetical theosophic and ecstatic traditions.)

Additionally, this diagram synthesizes the traditional vertical (higher-lower) conception of metaphysics with one that is eversive (inward-outward), by bending the verticality around the egoic center of Malkhut, from which all finite beings receive the givens of revelation.

I wonder if this image was influenced by having Berenice Abbott’s “Interference of Waves” as my desktop image for the last five years.

Berenice Abbott. Interference of Waves. 1958-61 | MoMA

Whyness, Whatness and Howness

Design, Esoterism, Geometric Meditations, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams, Trefoil

Intellection gives us supraformal absolute truth (of Beriah) toward/from the Absolute (of Atzilut) to which objectivity-forming subjects (Yetzirah) and objective truths (Assiyah) can be more or less faithful.

Of course, subjects can also be more or less faithful to material reality, and this determines their scope and degree of practical effectiveness.

The modern era has maximized the scope and degree of practical effectiveness in material reality. Its scope is maximized to total universality, and its degree of effectiveness is maximized to total control. It has traded off all considerations of intellection, to such a degree that few are aware of intellection as a possibility of knowing.

Even fewer actualize their intellective mode of knowing.

Fewer still coordinate intellective and rational knowing.

Fewest of all coordinate intellective, rational and practical knowing.

Whyness, Whatness and Howness.

Intuiting-what knows what of is, knows what of can, knows what of ought.

Intuiting-how does how of can, does how of ought, does how of is.

Intuiting-why cares why of ought, cares why of is, cares why of can.

Every explicit understanding is rooted in tacit intuitions.

Intuiting-what grounds fact, method and ideal, and without it, there is perplexity.

Intuiting-how grounds ability, grace and technique, and without it, there is faltering.

Intuiting-why grounds value, taste and purpose, and without it, there is indifference.

Every vital culture must converge Whyness, Whatness and Howness in its collective being. If it fails to do so, each member of its culture will suffer confused perplexity, ineffective faltering or depressed indifference. Or the culture will fragment into factions who maximize one or two and sacrifice the third.

Design at its best is a method for converging Whyness, Whatness and Howness.

Unlike many professions it is not a collection of techniques (What-How) methodically deployed to achieve defined goals. Design discovers its goals as it works, and its most important goals are given to intellection as the Why of the work.

Christopher Costes is right: Design is the heir of magic.

Exnihilist maxims

Exnihilism

Meaning irrupts precisely from nothingness, nowhere, never.

Nil and inconceivability are indistinguishable.

Impossibility and inconceivable possibility are indistinguishable.

Meaninglessness and inconceivable meaning are indistinguishable.

Nonexistence and inconceivable being are indistinguishable.

To finite beings like us, infinity seems less than zero.

Our comprehension can only grasp what we can conceive. Only forms can be conceived.

Meaning flows infraformally and supraformally. The Midas touch of objectivity freezes meaning solid in universal form.

Sacred study

Hermeneutics, Kabbalah

I am thinking about sacred study in the context of Idel’s theory that kabbalah has two complementary foci: theosophic and ecstatic. My biased inclination is to understand theosophic kabbalah as centered on sacred study.

Study as religious practice

Esoterism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Religion

It is easy to confuse study about religious practice with sacred study — study that is itself religious practice.

This is especially true if one’s primary source of spiritual experience is other than sacred study.

One can pray or meditate or take drugs or just spontaneously enter an altered consciousness, and have extraordinary ecstatic experiences. But just as ordinary natural experiences can be interpreted in a multiple ways, each with its own validity and tradeoffs, these extraordinary supernatural experiences can be interpreted multiple ways. And all interpretations, whether natural or supernatural, belong to some specific faith, some specific subjectivity manifesting as its own form of objectivity.

Study as religious practice is an indirect conditioning of the subject of faith through the activity of interpretation, which is not only literal acceptance of the material, but literary “sense-making” construction (and deconstruction) experimentation, hermeneutic crystallization (and dissolution) and mystical influx.

The material studied can be texts or they can be firsthand experiences, ordinary or extraordinary. But in such study focus transcends the factual material, and concerns the subject manifested in the changing objectivities. The medium is the faith, and it is the message behind and beyond religious study. The material matters, too, but as substantiation and as a principle of acceptance and rejection of understandings.

If we approach our experiential materials this way, even our most ordinary experiences can be sacralized, infused with meaning. The significance of extraordinary experiences is that they can challenge our faiths, and invite change.

The danger of psychology, materialism and similarly literal faiths is that they equip us to explain away phenomena that invite transformation of faith.

Mistaking is theft

Philosophy

Depth psychology is itself a religious faith (with multiple denominations) that competes with and, if adopted, displaces whatever religious faiths it claims to explain. This is why, in the vacuum left by Christian faith, Freudianism, Jungianism, Lacanianism sometimes flooded in to replace it, and was sometimes pumped in to flush the old faith out.

This is why, if I catch a whiff of depth psychology in a book supposedly on the subject of religion, the author immediately loses me.

This is tenfold true if I detect the odor of Marx, and a hundredfold if Marx is combined with depth psychology. How I can even slightly enjoy Zizek is a mystery.

Faith is our specific receptive capacity for givens. What we cannot receive remains ungiven, cloaked in oblivion, like light falling on a birth-blind eye, unperceived, inconceivable.

There is a name for (mis)taking what is ungiven: theft.

Alien faiths steal the givens of other faiths by misunderstanding them as their own belief.

Marxism, depth psychology, academic study, identity politics — these steal the given meanings of religious faiths and possesses them as information.

Exoterism is spiritual etiquette

Philosophy

Exoterism is spiritual etiquette.

Exoteric etiquette protects members of a spiritual community from that apprehesive angst intrinsic to esoteric difference.

Some things are just not discussed in society.

Spiritual programs

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Half the people I know believe that religion as we have it today is sheer nonsense and that spirituality is a fanciful free-for-all — just psychological play done for the pleasure of it.

The other half thinks that religion is wisdom that was originally revealed whole, but subsequently lost — an ancient treasure squandered, that we must now recover, before something dire happens.

As always, I disagree with everyone.

I think religion is institutionalized spirituality, with all the advantages and disadvantages entailed by institutionalization. When I say institutionalization, I mean something more like scientific institutionalization, enabling systematic challenge, response and progress, more than what spiritual-but-not-religious haters of “institutionalized religion” mean.

Indeed, individuals dabbling unassisted in spiritual matters would be as advanced as individual physicists could accomplish — each working in isolation, starting from scratch with their own theories and homemade laboratories. Or imagine amateur physicists watching hours of YouTube videos about the history of natural philosophy and using them to launch their own programs of physics research.

I think religion and spirituality refer to realities that can be understood or misunderstood. I think these realities are not comprehensible in objective terms. They require different intellective modes that few of us engage when we “seek truth”.

An idea to entertain: different religions are analogous to the research programs of Imre Lakatos, with their own lifecycles of birth, ascent, flourishing, decline and dying out, and their own technological innovations, meaning, literally, technique systems, a.k.a. methodologies.

The resemblances among religions are due partly from borrowings across traditions (which is how a spiritual research program is preserved) but also because the truth they pursue is the same and these traditions only thrive and endure insofar as they succeed in that pursuit.

But that truth pursued is not essentially objective. That truth includes objectivity, but transcends objectivity, subjectivity and all distinctions between object and subject.

Spelling it out for the idiots

NOTA

If you are the type of person who thinks the war Israel fought against Hamas was a genocide, you are probably also the kind of person who would need to be told that my “Hiroshimite genocide” post was satire. No, Hiroshima was no more a genocide than what occurred in Gaza. Got it? It is a little tour of moral-historical absurdities that are instantly recognizable as absurd by non-absurd people.

Hiroshimite genocide

Politics

The bombing of Hiroshima was clearly a genocide of the Hiroshimites — the indigenous people of the land of Hiroshima.

The population of this land was tiny — only 350 thousand — to America’s 140 million.

By 1945, Hiroshima had already been militarily degraded to the point of defenselessness. This is why American bombers could fly in and release their payload with impunity.

The attack was entirely unnecessary. Only a few hundred thousand more American deaths would have sufficed to win a ceasefire.

Worse, to this very day we do not know how many of the Hiroshimites were loyal to Hirohito and how many were innocent victims. But we can be almost 100% sure the support was far short of universal — especially when we count the children and women who always only want ordinary, peaceful lives, like you and me.

But if you look at a spreadsheet and calculate the death ratio between Americans and Hiroshimites, the objective facts speak louder than anything else. Virtually no Americans died in this operation, compared to nearly 140,000 Hiroshimites.

That is approximately 40% of the Hiroshimite population — just wiped out.

If you compare this to other genocides, for example to 66% of the the European Jewish population who died in the Holocaust (while Europeans either joined in on the killing or low-key prevented Jews from escaping), or the more recent genocide in Gaza where 3% to 4% of Gazans were killed in treacherous urban warfare (where Hamas did everything it could to get their own population killed so they could photograph them and use the images to emotionally manipulate know-it-all progressivist ignorami), you can see that the Hiroshimite genocide sits squarely between the 4% and 66% of two of our most paradigmatic genocides, and is therefore, quantitatively, objectively genocidal.

So it was an unnecessary, deadly and indiscriminate attack on a tiny population perpetrated by a much larger and better-armed power. Those who perished might have included dissenters and unenthusiastic supporters of Hirohito. These Asians were allegedly killed to prevent the death of Americans, whose lives were considered more valuable than Hiroshimite lives. This was true not only of Americans, but Europeans, most of whom were white. And there it is again: race. It’s always there if you look for it with eyes capable of seeing only that. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it, unless you learn other ways to understand the world.

Perplexity lifeguard

Biography, Design, Philosophy

Overcoming painful perplexities is one of the most rewarding parts of my work as a strategic designer.

Perplexity is incapacity to understand a difficulty, so thorough that the difficulty cannot even be expressed negatively as a problem or question. As I’ve said millions of times over the last thirty years, perplexities induce intense mysterious anxiety in people. It is not “discomfort” with “ambiguity”. It is excruciating and disturbing, and it makes people behave atrociously.

If we are to believe Wittgenstein, perplexities are essentially philosophical problems: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’”

But the majority of people are unphilosophical. They lack all awareness of the existence of the phenomenon of perplexity and the language to recognize and diagnose it — much less methods, skills and mindset required to overcome perplexity.

And people are not merely unphilosophical. They are aggressively unphilosophical. Philosophical thought annoys people. It is socially acceptable to disrespect it and anyone who does it. Even open-minded “good listeners” stop listening and tune out if they detect philosophy in a line of thought. And if you press it further, the resistance presses back even harder. The trajectory is very much hemlockward.

Here is the problem: one of the horrors of my job is the everpresent risk of being trapped in a collective perplexity with collaborators who are unwilling to confront and grapple with it for what it is. In such situations, one is a participant in an emergent collective being who transcends each individual person. Each person is immersed in the pain that has gripped the group, but is entirely powerless to overcome it alone.

Overcoming the perplexity requires a concerted and coordinated effort.

But many perplexed people behave like drowning swimmers. Instead of cooperating with the lifeguard’s attempt to rescue them, they instead try to climb over the lifeguard’s body to get oxygen. This is why most of lifeguard training is learning break-holds. Often a lifeguard must subdue a drowning person in order to rescue them. If the drowning person gets control of the lifeguard, everyone drowns.

Perplexed people who lack awareness of perplexity instinctively flail and grope for whatever control over the situation they can get, but whatever control they exert only defers and amplifies the confusion and anxiety. Instead of finding a better way to conceptualize the difficulty so it can be framed as a problem, people desperately try to ignore or bypass the perplexity or bludgeon it with mismatched techniques and expertise — and everyone drowns together.

Being is scalar.

Collective being is just as real as individual being.

Collective beings can be perplexed.

Collective beings can also be depressed, anxious, delusional and psychotic.

Entire classes and societies can go mad. Nietzsche said it: “Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

Leadership differs from management in that management treats only systematized parts of organizational life. Leadership participates in the collective being of an organization, addressing its personhood from within — as a part.

I would dearly love to work at an organization that would acknowledge and value my philosophical work. My best work is unappreciated, unsupported, unacknowledged and uncompensated at best. If I speak about what I do and how I think about it, the best I can expect is tolerance, but the usual response is vapid or jocular dismissal and disrespect. “There he goes again.”

Nothing, however, is more respectable and more valuable. I know this even if nobody else does.

This whole age is convulsed in perplexity. People will fight wars before confronting and resolving a perplexity.

Against red oil

Design, Politics

I caffeine-ranted at Susan this morning.

I complained about how much the work-world goes on about the importance of passion, while ignoring the personal nature of passion. It behaves as if it is a moral duty of every employee to care on command, and that it is the duty of every leader to get employees to care, or, failing that, to put on a convincing performance of caring, or failing that, to weed out those who are unwilling or unable to care or pretend to care.

And education reinforces this cultural delusion by insistently assuming that every child has exactly the same potential to be the same exceptional student, equally great at everything and passionate about whatever someone needs them to passionate about. Every child has the same potential as every other to be the same conveniently effective and efficient human resource, quantifiable as a man-hour in a man-week within a man-year. If only the world were more just, managers would have a more uniform supply of talent to utilize. Human work could be more like electricity or plumbing instead of delivered in the painfully inconvenient form of a human being.

The “social justice” of K-12 edu-activists and managerial convenience are the twin convergent goals of education, in direct service to the corporate world, which is insatiable for a supply of human resources of maximum amorphic convenience. Oil is “black gold” — human resources are red oil.

I like to think of service design as reasserting personal specificity.

The premise of service design (as I practice it) is that each person lives to provide specific kinds of services. These services give that person a sense of purpose in life, and rather than consuming their energy and making them feel depleted, used and exhausted, the work taps into inner energies. Other services, however, feel onerous or meaningless, and they prefer to receive these services from others.

In other words, people are more like organs with specialized abilities and needs than as generic plastic materials which can be formed into whatever shape is required. A corporation (etymologically, this means “body”) is an organ-ization, a system of organs arranged to exchange services and co-operate as a living being.

The core mission of service design is to understand the ideal service exchange of each personal “organ” and to organize them into something organic and effective within a service-exchanging ecosystem.

Education should complement this mission by helping each student understand their own organic ideal — the service exchange embedded in their being.

Eternal recurrence of the metatragedy

Hermeneutics, Judaism, Kabbalah

I accidentally jumped ahead in Idel’s Kabbalah: New Perspectives and stumbled upon a familiar and deeply significant drama.

Idel’s central claim is basically that Kabbalah has two distinct but related foci — a theosophist Apollinian focus, and an ecstatic Dionysian focus. These two foci stand in tense union with one another, exactly as they were (according to Nietzsche) in Greek tragedy. The two foci complement, but can, at times, seem to oppose one another.

But both together oppose something else — and this something else is philosophical rationalism. In Birth of Tragedy the rationalist was Socrates. In Idel’s metatragedy, the rationalist is Maimonides. I see the religion of Maimonidian excess as Reform Judaism (JewUU), a form of religiosity within-against which I have rebelled since age 10. This is what has me so charged up this morning.

I should have known my participation in Reform Judaism was doomed from the start when the head rabbi at my synagogue laughed and told me that a Unitarian-Universalist kid would find Reform Judaism very familiar.

I’ve always identified Hermes with the Apollo-Dionysus union — not because of any special affinity with either Apollo or Dionysus, but because Hermes is the god of divine conjunction (as symbolically expressed in Janus-faced boundary herms). Divine communication occurs not across distances, but through elimination of distance in ontological union.

Let us never forget that it was Hermes who bound and chained the benevolent but hubristic rationalist titan to the rock.

Perhaps this tragedy of vital intellection (toward transcendence) vs rationalist hubris of pure immanence recurs eternally.

In Judaism, Torah study is a form of worship.

Resolving perplexity is the work

Biography, Design

Resolving perplexities is the most important work designers do.

Resolving perplexities is not a precondition to doing the work. Resolving perplexities is the work. Again, it is the most important work.

Attempting to ignore perplexities never makes them go away. It makes the work impossible and hellish — and the perplexities compound exponentially as they go unresolved.

Anyone who cannot tolerate perplexities is unfit for strategic design work.

Dreher, Slezkine, Idel smush-up

Judaism, Politics

Just days after I noticed how little I care about modernity, suddenly I care again!

I was reading an alarming article on Rod Dreher on the advanced state of decay and alienation among Zoomer right-wingers, that has recently come fully to light, but which was not only predictable, but explicitly, repeatedly predicted. Oh, I know. Progressivists claimed to be wise to this evil strain within the right from the very start, and used this to justify persecuting everything right of itself, including liberalism, in order to extirpate “fascism” before it could rise up and dominate. But by treating everyday normal people as abnormally vicious, it alienated the liberal middle — including myself — and set conditions for this self-fulfilling prophesy that it can now claim to have foreseen. We now have a split Overton — the window pane is cracked into two entirely incommensurable narratives, each controlled by its own illiberal, extreme pole — each antisemitic in its own style.

Dreher mentioned a book by Yuri Slezkine called The Jewish Century. One takeaway:

…the skills that Gentile culture forced Jews to develop by excluding them from society gave them what it took to prosper under modern conditions. In other words, our distant ancestors made them what they are … and today, some of us wish to punish the Jews for it. Put another way, the way our ancestors made them live made Jews especially adaptable to the modern world.

Jews, thanks mainly to Christian anti-Jewish policy, were subjected to conditions that eventually produced modernity. Jews “enjoyed” a head start, and developed skills needed to thrive in a nomadic cranial labor economy. Centuries later, when the rest of the world found themselves in the same unhappy conditions Jews had learned to manage, and needed an explanation and villain to blame for it, guess who played the eternal scapegoat.

Strange coincidence — I have been reading Moshe Idel the last few mornings. One of his core theses is that the history of Kabbalah is an interplay of two primary tendencies or trends. One is theosophic and nomian and the other is ecstatic and anomian. I immediately connected it with Nietzsche’s Apollinian and Dionysian framework for understanding tragedy, which was/is the fusion of the two. I have always viewed this Janus-face fusion as Hermes.

Yuri Slezkine called the Jewish people a Mercurial people as opposed to the Apollonian nationals who play fickle host. And then I came upon this passage in Idel:

A proper understanding of the last major Jewish school of mysticism, Hasidism, must take into consideration the merging of these two mainstreams, which had competed with each other for more than a millennium and a half: ecstasy and theurgy, or anthropocentrism and theocentrism. The result was a synthesis that, on the one hand, attenuated the theurgical-theosophical elements and, on the other, propagated ecstatic values even more than previously. Or, as we shall see in a passage from R. Meshullam Phoebus, classical Spanish and Lurianic Kabbalah were reinterpreted ecstatically. This emphasis on individual mystical experience may be one of the major explanations for the neutralization of nationalistic messianism in Hasidism. Although the aftermath of Sabbatianism could also have prompted interest in a more individualistic type of mysticism and redemption, we can envision the emergence of the Hasidic type of mysticism as part of the dissemination of religious values crucial for the ecstatic Kabbalistic model.

Idel and Slezkine merged in a terrible insight.

If Jews were the proto-moderns, and antinomian totalitarianism is a kind of disorder of modern shock — is it possible that Sabbatianism / Frankism was a proto-totalitarianism?

This is a super-sketchy, reckless, unsupported suggestion — not even a hypothesis. But I want to note it here as something possibly worth digging into later.

More on Scholem’s seventh aphorism

Kabbalah, Phenomenology

The following are three emails about Scholem’s seventh aphorism, and about Biale’s apparent misunderstanding of that aphorism. I’m posting them mostly for myself, because there is some good clear thinking here, if you know the context.

Email #1:

I think what you are saying is true, but I am not sure you are saying anything true that is not well known within Kabbalah.

Microcosmic/macrocosmic analogy is assumed by all Kabbalists. And one of the core struggles of Kabbalah is the incomprehensibility of its most essential and consequential insights. Scholem indicates this problem in his aphorisms, from multiple angles. Students of Kabbalah quickly learn to release the mundane expectation that they can cognitively grasp anything important beyond the objectivity of Assiyah. Beyond Assiyah only cognitively indirect methods of intellection work at all. I think even Biale knows these things, and the unreliability of his commentary comes from something else I haven’t yet pinned down.

Rereading Scholem, I do not believe he is denying the truth of Plotinus, but rather denying that emanationist accounts of the Olamot “do” what Kabbalah set out to do. A pat explanatory model — and worse, a model objectively graspable — replaces a within-outward, first-person experiential account of one’s layered and (cognitively) elusive relationship with the One. In other words, Scholem is making a procedural, not substantive objection.

So, the emanationist model may very well be true (that is where I have recently arrived), but accepting of it, without doing the spiritual and phenomenological work of arriving at it via actual participation and reflection cheats the Kabbalist of Kabbalah’s best fruits, which are not theoretical constructions, but influx of incomprehensible divine light. This gift is received precisely through doing the work of aware participation — not by reaching the conclusion and possessing the answer.
Ironically, my earlier rejection of emanationism came from having not completing this work for myself, and from not recognizing the links between my incomplete “everso” theme and Kabbalah.

Email #2:

To clarify, I think Biale’s commentary completely misconceives Aphorism 7. Biale does, in fact, seem to treat the problem as substantive doctrinal disagreement. In doing so, he flies off in the wrong direction and both obscures and accidentally demonstrates Scholem’s point. He treats Kabbalah as objective metaphysical information that can be more correct or less correct, or reach more correct or less correct conclusions. Ironically, this is precisely the “misfortune” Scholem is indicating in this aphorism. No wonder Biale calls the aphorism “obscure”. Its meaning is entirely eclipsed by Biale’s confinement to objectivist cognition!

Email #3:

Actually, maybe I can pin down Biale’s problem. 

To me, Biale seems a scholar with a lot of academic knowledge about Kabbalah, but who lacks Kabbalistic knowledge of academia’s objectivist limitations.

Objective knowledge — that is, knowledge of what is experienced and comprehended objectively — is effective only within Assiyah. But the entire point of Kabbalah is to transcend Assiyah. So if one tries to build systems of objective knowledge about Kabbalah, this knowledge might be true as far as it goes, but it is useless for progressing as a Kabbalist or for representing the most crucial insights Kabbalah offers.

Biale seems unaware of this truth — a truth of Beriah.

Who Cares that We’ve Never Been Modern?

Philosophy

Wow, nobody cares about modernity, anymore.

People cared about it too intensely for a decade or two.

“What is modernity?” “To what degree are we still modern?” “Were we ever modern?” Blah blah blah blah.

That question died so hard and so fast, I don’t think anyone has enough interest left to notice that the coroner never dropped by to pick up the corpse.

I just ordered a book from 1985 to complete my Richard J. Bernstein collection. I almost didn’t order it, because I very much want to not know Habermas’s thoughts on modernity. But this gap in my library is unacceptable.

The kids were driven to hysterics by the dry and amoral pedantry of their elders.