Famine, Affluence, and Morality, by Peter Singer. As I write this, in November 1971, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical care. The suffering and death that are occurring there now are not inevitable, not unavoidable in any fatalistic sense of the term. Constant poverty, a cyclone, and a civil war have turned at least nine million people into destitute refugees; nevertheless, it is not beyond the capacity of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce any further suffering to very small proportions. The decisions and actions of human beings can prevent this kind of suffering.
Unfortunately, human beings have not made the necessary decisions. At the individual level, people have, with very few exceptions, not responded to the situation in any significant way. These are the essential facts about the present situation in Bengal. So far as it concerns us here, there is nothing unique about this situation except its magnitude. What are the moral implications of a situation like this? Just Asking - Magazine. Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”? * In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea?
And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort? Return to: The American Idea Scholars, novelists, politicians, artists, and others look ahead to the future of the American idea. Also by David Foster Wallace: Host "The key to the John Ziegler Show," says the angry, outraged, and apocalyptically gleeful talk-radio host John Ziegler, "is that I am almost completely real.
" Is this thought experiment monstrous? FOOTNOTES: 1. 2. David Foster Wallace on Life and Work. The Dragon In My Garage. By Carl Sagan "A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage" Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity! "Show me," you say. "Where's the dragon? " "Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints. "Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air. " Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire. "Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless. " You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.
"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick. " Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? Imagine that things had gone otherwise. Generation Why? by Zadie Smith. The Social Network a film directed by David Fincher, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier Knopf, 209 pp., $24.95 How long is a generation these days? I must be in Mark Zuckerberg’s generation—there are only nine years between us—but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. This despite the fact that I can say (like everyone else on Harvard’s campus in the fall of 2003) that “I was there” at Facebook’s inception, and remember Facemash and the fuss it caused; also that tiny, exquisite movie star trailed by fan-boys through the snow wherever she went, and the awful snow itself, turning your toes gray, destroying your spirit, bringing a bloodless end to a squirrel on my block: frozen, inanimate, perfect—like the Blaschka glass flowers.
At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. ERICA: I have to go study. MARK: You don’t have to study. ERICA: How do you know I don’t have to study?! MARK: Because you go to B.U.! Oh, yeah. Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong. The Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1989, Vol. 14, No. 1, Pp. 35-44 The Relativity of WrongBy Isaac Asimov I RECEIVED a letter the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important. In the first sentence, the writer told me he was majoring in English literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the universe straight.
I didn't go into detail in the matter, but what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see. My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong.