George Orwell’s 1984 Is Now the #1 Bestselling Book on Amazon

in Film | January 24th, 2017

George Orwell’s clas­sic dystopi­an nov­el, 1984, has sud­den­ly surged to the very top of the Ama­zon’s best­seller list. Though first pub­lished in 1949, it’s back with a vengeance. And George only has the new admin­is­tra­tion to thank.

We’ll have more on Orwell’s 1984 tomor­row. In the mean­time, enjoy some great 1984 picks from our archive below:

Hear the Very First Adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Star­ring David Niv­en (1949)

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

A Com­plete Read­ing of George Orwell’s 1984: Aired on Paci­fi­ca Radio, 1975

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

George Orwell’s Har­row­ing Race to Fin­ish 1984 Before His Death

Note: You can down­load Orwell’s 1984 as a free audio­book (or two oth­er books of your choice) if you sign up for Audible.com’s free tri­al pro­gram.  Learn more about Audible’s free tri­al pro­gram here.

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Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism

in History, Politics | January 24th, 2017

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to pow­er in the ear­ly 1930s. Para­mil­i­tary gangs ter­ror­iz­ing the oppo­si­tion, the incom­pe­tence and oppor­tunism of Ger­man con­ser­v­a­tives, the Reich­stag Fire. And we learned about the crit­i­cal impor­tance of pro­pa­gan­da, the delib­er­ate mis­in­form­ing of the pub­lic in order to sway opin­ions en masse and achieve pop­u­lar sup­port (or at least the appear­ance of it). While Min­is­ter of Pro­pa­gan­da Joseph Goebbels purged Jew­ish and left­ist artists and writ­ers, he built a mas­sive media infra­struc­ture that played, writes PBS, “prob­a­bly the most impor­tant role in cre­at­ing an atmos­phere in Ger­many that made it pos­si­ble for the Nazis to com­mit ter­ri­ble atroc­i­ties against Jews, homo­sex­u­als, and oth­er minori­ties.”

How did the minor­i­ty par­ty of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the Ger­man peo­ple so thor­ough­ly that they would allow and par­tic­i­pate in mass mur­der? Post-war schol­ars of total­i­tar­i­an­ism like Theodor Adorno and Han­nah Arendt asked that ques­tion over and over, for sev­er­al decades after­ward. Their ear­li­est stud­ies on the sub­ject looked at two sides of the equa­tion. Adorno con­tributed to a mas­sive vol­ume of social psy­chol­o­gy called The Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty, which stud­ied indi­vid­u­als pre­dis­posed to the appeals of total­i­tar­i­an­ism. He invent­ed what he called the F‑Scale (“F” for “fas­cism”), one of sev­er­al mea­sures he used to the­o­rize the Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty Type.

Arendt, on the oth­er hand, looked close­ly at the regimes of Hitler and Stal­in and their func­tionar­ies, at the ide­ol­o­gy of sci­en­tif­ic racism, and at the mech­a­nism of pro­pa­gan­da in fos­ter­ing “a curi­ous­ly vary­ing mix­ture of gulli­bil­i­ty and cyn­i­cism with which each mem­ber… is expect­ed to react to the chang­ing lying state­ments of the lead­ers.” So she wrote in her 1951 Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, going on to elab­o­rate that this “mix­ture of gulli­bil­i­ty and cyn­i­cism… is preva­lent in all ranks of total­i­tar­i­an move­ments”:

In an ever-chang­ing, incom­pre­hen­si­ble world the mass­es had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe every­thing and noth­ing, think that every­thing was pos­si­ble and noth­ing was true… The total­i­tar­i­an mass lead­ers based their pro­pa­gan­da on the cor­rect psy­cho­log­i­cal assump­tion that, under such con­di­tions, one could make peo­ple believe the most fan­tas­tic state­ments one day, and trust that if the next day they were giv­en irrefutable proof of their false­hood, they would take refuge in cyn­i­cism; instead of desert­ing the lead­ers who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the state­ment was a lie and would admire the lead­ers for their supe­ri­or tac­ti­cal clev­er­ness.

Why the con­stant, often bla­tant lying? For one thing, it func­tioned as a means of ful­ly dom­i­nat­ing sub­or­di­nates, who would have to cast aside all their integri­ty to repeat out­ra­geous false­hoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and com­plic­i­ty. “The great ana­lysts of truth and lan­guage in pol­i­tics”—writes McGill Uni­ver­si­ty polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Jacob T. Levy—includ­ing “George Orwell, Han­nah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us rec­og­nize this kind of lie for what it is.… Say­ing some­thing obvi­ous­ly untrue, and mak­ing your sub­or­di­nates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a par­tic­u­lar­ly star­tling dis­play of pow­er over them. It’s some­thing that was endem­ic to total­i­tar­i­an­ism.”

Arendt and oth­ers rec­og­nized, writes Levy, that “being made to repeat an obvi­ous lie makes it clear that you’re pow­er­less.” She also rec­og­nized the func­tion of an avalanche of lies to ren­der a pop­u­lace pow­er­less to resist, the phe­nom­e­non we now refer to as “gaslight­ing”:

The result of a con­sis­tent and total sub­sti­tu­tion of lies for fac­tu­al truth is not that the lie will now be accept­ed as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bear­ings in the real world—and the cat­e­go­ry of truth ver­sus false­hood is among the men­tal means to this end—is being destroyed.

The epis­te­mo­log­i­cal ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on what­ev­er the leader said, no mat­ter its rela­tion to truth. “The essen­tial con­vic­tion shared by all ranks,” Arendt con­clud­ed, “from fel­low trav­el­er to leader, is that pol­i­tics is a game of cheat­ing and that the ‘first com­mand­ment’ of the move­ment: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as nec­es­sary for the pur­pos­es of world pol­i­tics, i.e., world-wide cheat­ing, as the rules of mil­i­tary dis­ci­pline are for the pur­pos­es of war.”

“We too,” writes Jef­frey Isaacs at The Wash­ing­ton Post, “live in dark times”—an allu­sion to anoth­er of Arendt’s sober­ing analy­ses—“even if they are dif­fer­ent and per­haps less dark.” Arendt wrote Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism from research and obser­va­tions gath­ered dur­ing the 1940s, a very spe­cif­ic his­tor­i­cal peri­od. Nonethe­less the book, Isaacs remarks, “rais­es a set of fun­da­men­tal ques­tions about how tyran­ny can arise and the dan­ger­ous forms of inhu­man­i­ty to which it can lead.” Arendt’s analy­sis of pro­pa­gan­da and the func­tion of lies seems par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­e­vant at this moment. The kinds of bla­tant lies she wrote of might become so com­mon­place as to become banal. We might begin to think they are an irrel­e­vant sideshow. This, she sug­gests, would be a mis­take.

via Michiko Kaku­tani

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt’s Orig­i­nal Arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil” in the New York­er Archive

Enter the Han­nah Arendt Archives & Dis­cov­er Rare Audio Lec­tures, Man­u­scripts, Mar­gin­a­lia, Let­ters, Post­cards & More

Han­nah Arendt Dis­cuss­es Phi­los­o­phy, Pol­i­tics & Eich­mann in Rare 1964 TV Inter­view

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future: Free for a Limited Time

in Architecture | January 24th, 2017

A quick heads up. For the next few days (until Jan­u­ary 27) you can watch Eero Saari­nen: The Archi­tect Who Saw the Future, the lat­est install­ment from the PBS Amer­i­can Mas­ters series. Here’s the PBS blurb for the episode.

Best known for design­ing Nation­al His­toric Land­marks such as St. Louis’ icon­ic Gate­way Arch and the Gen­er­al Motors Tech­ni­cal Cen­ter, Saari­nen also designed New York’s TWA Flight Cen­ter at John F. Kennedy Inter­na­tion­al Air­port, Yale University’s Ingalls Rink and Morse and Ezra Stiles Col­leges, Virginia’s Dulles Air­port, and mod­ernist pedestal fur­ni­ture like the Tulip chair.

In the film, Saarinen’s son, Eric Saari­nen, “vis­its the sites of his father’s work on a cathar­tic jour­ney, shot in 6K with the lat­est in drone tech­nol­o­gy that show­cas­es the architect’s body of time­less work for the first time. The doc­u­men­tary also fea­tures rare archival inter­views with Eero and his sec­ond wife, The New York Times art crit­ic Aline Saari­nen, as well as let­ters and quo­ta­tions from Aline’s mem­oirs voiced respec­tive­ly by Peter Franzén and Blythe Dan­ner.”

You can get more back­ground on the film here. Copies of the film can be pur­chased online here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times

32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Avail­able Online by Har­vard Muse­um Web­site

Roman Archi­tec­ture: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

 

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Disco Demolition Night: Scenes from the Night Disco Died (or Did It?) at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, 1979

in Music | January 24th, 2017

Sure­ly you’ve heard of Dis­co Demo­li­tion Night, when Chica­go DJ Steve Dahl invit­ed lis­ten­ers to the 1979 White Sox dou­ble head­er against the Tigers at Comiskey Park, offer­ing tick­ets for .98 cents if they brought a dis­co record he could blow up between games. The event drew thou­sands more than Dahl expect­ed, turned into a riot on the field, and has since passed into his­to­ry for its ral­ly­ing cry of “Dis­co sucks!” and its herald­ing of the end of disco’s reign.

Dis­co died at the end of the 70s, the sto­ry goes. But many music fans know dif­fer­ent­ly. Dis­co didn’t die. It mutat­ed, became House music, New Wave, and oth­er hybrid gen­res. It made its way into the music of the Clash, Blondie, Michael Jack­son, Madon­na, and oth­ers. Nonethe­less, Dis­co Demo­li­tion Night rep­re­sent­ed a wide­spread back­lash that drove dis­co off the pop charts and back where it came from—the most­ly black, Lati­no, and gay clubs in New York, Chica­go, Detroit, and oth­er cities.

Many peo­ple who have writ­ten his­to­ries of Dis­co Demo­li­tion have come to see it “as a not-so-sub­tle attack” against those groups of peo­ple, writes NPR, against “disco’s ear­ly adopters.” Dahl, who has co-authored his own book about the night, dis­agrees, but he admits that images of the event look “like a book burn­ing.” Dis­co “obvi­ous­ly threat­ened a lot of rock­ers,” he con­cedes. Anoth­er wit­ness to the event, an African-Amer­i­can ush­er named Vince Lawrence, saw evi­dence first­hand.

Lawrence—a dis­co fan and aspir­ing musician—tells the pod­cast Undone that he was actu­al­ly look­ing for­ward to the event. He liked Dahl and “had strict inten­tion of keep­ing records that were good that I didn’t have.” How­ev­er, as he col­lect­ed the records at the gate, he noticed among them Mar­vin Gaye and Ste­vie Won­der albums, “records that were black records,” he says, but not dis­co. He tells NPR, he saw “Cur­tis May­field records and Otis Clay records.… Records that were clear­ly not dis­co.” He balked, but was told he had to take them and issue tick­ets.

After Dahl rolled onto the field in a Jeep and blew up the dump­ster full of records, chaos ensued, and the stunt turned into “this zany, real life slap­stick rou­tine,” says Undone’s host Pat Wal­ters, “until all the sud­den, it’s just not.” Riot­ers set a bon­fire, stole the bases (lit­er­al­ly), and became a rag­ing mob. On his way out of the park, Lawrence was attacked by fans yelling “Dis­co Sucks!” and break­ing records in his face.

Colum­nist Renee Gra­ham, a gay woman of col­or who was a teenag­er at the time, recalls see­ing pho­tos of the event and being remind­ed of White Cit­i­zens Coun­cils smash­ing rock and roll records because they brought white and black kids togeth­er. “This wasn’t just ‘We don’t like this music,’” she says, “this was ‘We don’t like these peo­ple who lis­ten to this music.’” By 1979, how­ev­er, “those peo­ple” includ­ed many of the same kids’ class­mates, sib­lings, par­ents.… Dis­co had gone main­stream after Sat­ur­day Night Fever and the Bee Gees’ break­out. “It was almost like musi­cal gen­tri­fi­ca­tion,” says Gra­ham.

The Rolling Stones, Rod Stew­art, Led Zep­pelin, KISS—all of them appro­pri­at­ed dis­co. And the rock kids were furi­ous. After the riot at Comiskey, “dis­co became a four-let­ter word.” Careers col­lapsed, radio sta­tions changed for­mat, record stores reordered, almost overnight. Had none of this hap­pened, it’s pos­si­ble dis­co would have fiz­zled out. Dri­ven under­ground, back to its roots, it instead found new expres­sion in the hands of pio­neers like Chica­go DJ Frankie Knuck­les, the “God­fa­ther of House,” and New York’s “Lit­tle” Louie Vega and Ken­ny “Dope” Ramirez.

Knuck­les DJ’ed at Chica­go club the Ware­house, which lent its name to the music—predominantly dis­co or dis­co inspired—he played. As house music evolved, “you could hear it fill in the space that dis­co had occu­pied,” says Wal­ters. Vince Lawrence, too young to get into the Ware­house, began stag­ing his own house par­ties, and these spread to cities all over the coun­try, and even­tu­al­ly to Europe, where the music influ­enced bands like the Eury­th­mics and New Order, who dis­cov­ered house on the Span­ish island of Ibiza. Undone makes the case that Dis­co Demo­li­tion Night saved dis­co, in a way, so that it could emerge and influ­ence many more appre­cia­tive crossover fans in the decades to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­co Saves Lives: Give CPR to the The Beat of Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive”

Rita Hay­worth, 1940s Hol­ly­wood Icon, Dances Dis­co to the Tune of The Bee Gees Stayin’ Alive: A Mashup

Sat­ur­day Night Fever: The (Fake) Mag­a­zine Sto­ry That Start­ed it All

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hear Kurt Vonnegut Visit the Afterlife & Interview Dead Historical Figures: Isaac Newton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998)

in History, Radio | January 24th, 2017

Image by Daniele Prati, via Flickr Com­mons

Kurt Von­negut wrote nov­els, of course, but also short sto­ries, essays, and — briefly, suit­ably late in his career — cor­re­spon­dence from the after­life. He did that last gig in 1998, com­pos­ing for broad­cast on the for­mi­da­ble WNYC, by under­go­ing a series of what he called “con­trolled near-death expe­ri­ences” orches­trat­ed, so he claimed, by “Dr. Jack Kevorkian and the facil­i­ties of a Huntsville, Texas exe­cu­tion cham­ber.” These made pos­si­ble “more than one hun­dred vis­its to Heav­en and my return­ing to life to tell the tale,” or rather, to tell the tales of the more per­ma­nent­ly deceased with whom he’d sat down for a chat.

Von­negut’s ros­ter of after­life inter­vie­wees includ­ed per­son­ages he per­son­al­ly admired such as Eugene Debs (lis­ten), Isaac New­ton (lis­ten), and Clarence Dar­row (lis­ten), as well as his­tor­i­cal vil­lains like James Earl Ray (lis­ten) and Adolf Hitler (lis­ten). Oth­er of the dead with whom he spoke, while they may not qual­i­fy as house­hold names, nev­er­the­less went to the grave with some sort of achieve­ment under their belts: Olestra inven­tor Fred H. Matt­son, for instance, or John Wes­ley Joyce, own­er of the famed Green­wich Vil­lage lit­er­ary water­ing hole The Lion’s Head. Only the Slaugh­ter­house-Five author’s coura­geous and impos­si­ble reportage has saved the names of a few, like that of retired con­struc­tion work­er Sal­va­tore Biagi­ni, from total obscu­ri­ty.

Famous or not, peo­ple inter­est­ed Von­negut, who claimed to get his ideas from “dis­gust with civ­i­liza­tion” but also served as hon­orary pres­i­dent of the Nation­al Human­ist Asso­ci­a­tion. This aspect of his per­son­al­i­ty comes up in the Bri­an Lehrer Show seg­ment just above, a lis­ten back to Von­negut’s “Reports on the After­life” seg­ments for WNY­C’s 90th anniver­sary. (You can lis­ten to all the seg­ments indi­vid­u­al­ly here.)

Pro­duc­er Mar­ty Gold­en­sohn talks about record­ing them at Von­negut’s apart­ment, where the famous writer would answer the phone every few min­utes for a brief talk with one curi­ous fan after anoth­er, none of whom he’d tak­en any pains what­so­ev­er to keep from find­ing his phone num­ber. “It was a won­der­ful thing,” says Gold­en­sohn. “He had a way of talk­ing, hear­ing what he want­ed to hear, thank­ing, and hang­ing up very nice­ly. Six­ty sec­onds.” He’d also mas­tered, adds Lehrer, the art of the one-minute trip to the after­life, and the sto­ries this unusu­al radio for­mat allowed him to tell sure­ly drew from the vast range of expe­ri­ences and emo­tions to which Von­negut had exposed his mind not just through read­ing, but also with such fre­quent and brief yet very real human con­nec­tions he’d make on a seem­ing­ly near-con­stant basis.

A lit­tle bit less than a decade after these record­ings and the sub­se­quent pub­li­ca­tion of their print col­lec­tion God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, the unceas­ing­ly smok­ing and drink­ing Von­negut would, at the age of 84, make his own final trip to the after­life. There he now pre­sum­ably awaits (pos­si­bly beside Kevorkian him­self) the next cor­re­spon­dent intre­pid enough to come up and inter­view him. Giv­en the events of the past decade, lis­ten­ers could cer­tain­ly use what­ev­er dose of his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly clear-eyed and sar­don­ic per­spec­tive he might have to offer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Kurt Von­negut Read Slaugh­ter­house-Five, Cat’s Cra­dle & Oth­er Nov­els

Hear Kurt Vonnegut’s Very First Pub­lic Read­ing from Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons (1970)

Hear Kurt Vonnegut’s Nov­el Cat’s Cra­dle Get Turned into Avant-Garde Music (Fea­tur­ing Kurt Him­self)

An Ani­mat­ed Kurt Von­negut Vis­its NYU, Riffs, Ram­bles, and Blows the Kids’ Minds (1970)

Kurt Vonnegut’s Term Paper Assign­ment from the Iowa Writ­ers’ Work­shop Teach­es You to Read Fic­tion Like a Writer

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

In 1988, Kurt Von­negut Writes a Let­ter to Peo­ple Liv­ing in 2088, Giv­ing 7 Pieces of Advice

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History: The Road to Progress Runs First Through Dark Times

in Philosophy | January 23rd, 2017

The ques­tion of whether or not gen­uine human progress is pos­si­ble, or desir­able, lies at the heart of many a rad­i­cal post-Enlight­en­ment philo­soph­i­cal project. More pes­simistic philoso­phers have, unsur­pris­ing­ly, doubt­ed it. Arthur Schopen­hauer, cast bale­ful sus­pi­cion on the idea. Dan­ish Exis­ten­tial­ist Soren Kierkegaard thought of col­lec­tive progress toward a more enlight­ened state an unlike­ly prospect. One mod­ern crit­ic of progress, pes­simistic Eng­lish philoso­pher John Gray, writes in his book Straw Dogs that “the pur­suit of progress” is an ide­al­ist illu­sion end­ing in “mass mur­der.” (Gray has been unim­pressed by Steven Pinker’s opti­mistic argu­ments in The Bet­ter Angels of Our Nature.)

These skep­tics of progress all in some way write in response to the tow­er­ing 19th cen­tu­ry fig­ure G.W.F. Hegel, the Ger­man logi­cian and philoso­pher of his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, and phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy whose sys­tem­at­ic think­ing pro­vid­ed Karl Marx with the basis of his dialec­ti­cal mate­ri­al­ism. Hegel saw the mass mur­der brought about by mas­sive polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic change in his rev­o­lu­tion­ary and impe­r­i­al age, but in his esti­ma­tion, such man-made dis­as­ters were nec­es­sary occur­rences, the “slaugh­ter bench of his­to­ry,” as he famous­ly wrote in the Phi­los­o­phy of His­to­ry.

This sug­gests a very bru­tal view, and yet Hegel believed over­all that “Rea­son is the Sov­er­eign of the World; that the his­to­ry of the world there­fore, presents us with a ratio­nal process.” For Hegel, the indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ty was not impor­tant, only col­lec­tive enti­ties: peo­ples, states, empires. These moved against each oth­er accord­ing to a meta­phys­i­cal rea­son­ing process work­ing through his­to­ry which Hegel called the dialec­tic. In his ani­mat­ed School of Life video above, Alain de Bot­ton describes the dialec­tic in the terms we usu­al­ly use—thesis, antithe­sis, synthesis—though Hegel him­self did not exact­ly for­mu­late the prin­ci­ple this way.

This is the com­mon short­hand way of under­stand­ing how Hegel’s non­lin­ear expla­na­tion of his­to­ry works: “the world makes progress,” sum­ma­rizes de Bot­ton, “by lurch­ing from one extreme to the oth­er, as it seeks to over­com­pen­sate for a pre­vi­ous mis­take, and gen­er­al­ly requires three moves before the right bal­ance on any issue can be found.” One par­tic­u­lar­ly bloody exam­ple is the ter­ror of the French Rev­o­lu­tion as an extreme cor­rec­tive for the monar­chy’s oppres­sion. This gave way to the antithe­sis, the bru­tal auto­crat­ic empire of Napoleon in anoth­er extreme swing. Only decades lat­er could these be rec­on­ciled in mod­ern French civ­il soci­ety.

In our own time, we have encoun­tered the pro­gres­sive ideas of Hegel not only through Marx, but through the work of Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., who stud­ied Hegel as a grad­u­ate stu­dent at Har­vard and Boston Uni­ver­si­ty and found much inspi­ra­tion in the Phi­los­o­phy of His­to­ry. Though crit­i­cal of Hegel’s ide­al­ism, which, “tend­ed to swal­low up the many in the one,” King dis­cov­ered impor­tant first prin­ci­ples there as well: “His analy­sis of the dialec­ti­cal process, in spite of its short­com­ings, helped me to see that growth comes through strug­gle.”

We end­less­ly quote King’s state­ment, “the arc of his­to­ry is long, but it bends toward jus­tice,” but we for­get his cor­re­spond­ing empha­sis on the neces­si­ty of strug­gle to achieve the goal. As Hegel the­o­rized, says de Bot­ton above, “the dark moments aren’t the end, they are a chal­leng­ing but in some ways nec­es­sary part… immi­nent­ly com­pat­i­ble with events broad­ly mov­ing for­ward in the right direc­tion.” King found his own his­tor­i­cal syn­the­sis in the prin­ci­ple of non­vi­o­lent resis­tance, which “seeks to rec­on­cile the truths of two oppo­sites,” he wrote in 1954’s Stride Toward Free­dom, “acqui­es­cence and vio­lence.” Non­vi­o­lent resis­tance is not pas­sive com­pli­ance, but nei­ther is it inten­tion­al aggres­sion.

Hegel and his social­ly influ­en­tial stu­dents like Mar­tin Luther King and John Dewey have gen­er­al­ly oper­at­ed on the basis of some faith—in rea­son, divine jus­tice, or sec­u­lar human­ism. There are much harsh­er, more pes­simistic ways of view­ing his­to­ry than as a swing­ing pen­du­lum mov­ing toward some greater end. Pes­simistic thinkers may be more rig­or­ous­ly hon­est about the stag­ger­ing moral chal­lenge posed by increas­ing­ly effi­cient means of mass killing and the per­pet­u­a­tion of ide­olo­gies that com­mit it. Yet it is part­ly through the influ­ence of Hegel that mod­ern social move­ments have embraced the neces­si­ty of strug­gle and believed progress was pos­si­ble, even inevitable, when it seemed least like­ly to occur.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Half Hour Hegel: A Long, Guid­ed Tour Through Hegel’s Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, Pas­sage by Pas­sage

How Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Used Hegel, Kant & Niet­zsche to Over­turn Seg­re­ga­tion in Amer­i­ca

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Musician Lugs a Cello Up a Mountain, Then Plays Bach at 10,000 Feet, at the “Top of the World”

in Music | January 23rd, 2017

After this inspir­ing week­end, I did­n’t need any­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly ener­giz­ing to start my week. But, then again, it’s hard to refuse a shot inspi­ra­tion when it falls right into your lap. Above, watch “Andante,” which the web­site Aeon describes as fol­lows:

Andante (a musi­cal term mean­ing ‘at walk­ing pace’) fol­lows the cel­list Ruth Boden as she climbs 10,000 feet to a peak in Oregon’s Wal­lowa Moun­tains for a deeply per­son­al, yet breath­tak­ing­ly pub­lic solo per­for­mance. With her prized cel­lo strapped to her back, Boden reflects on how she wants to do some­thing with music that tran­scends the com­mon­place, and on the par­tic­u­lar joy of play­ing from Bach’s cel­lo suite at ‘the top of the world’.

Hope this helps you get to Wednes­day. And, to reach Fri­day, we’ve added some oth­er fine Bach mate­r­i­al in the Relat­eds below.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

All of Bach is Putting Bach’s Com­plete Works Online: 150 Done, 930 to Come

Down­load the Com­plete Organ Works of J.S. Bach for Free

Watch a 27-Year-Old Glenn Gould Play Bach & Put His Musi­cal Genius on Dis­play (1959)

The Genius of J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon” Visu­al­ized on a Möbius Strip

Stream the Com­plete Works of Bach & Beethoven: 250 Free Hours of Music

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Before Siri & Alexa: Hear the First Attempt to Use a Synthesizer to Recreate the Human Voice (1939)

in Technology | January 23rd, 2017

Whether from Stephen Hawk­ing, Siri, or any­one in between, we’ve all heard quite a lot of elec­tron­i­cal­ly syn­the­sized speech by now. But less than eighty years ago, the very idea of a human-sound­ing voice pro­duced in a mechan­i­cal man­ner inspired won­der and dis­tur­bance in equal mea­sure. The every­man and every­woman got their first chance to hear such a tech­nol­o­gy at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, dur­ing its hourly demon­stra­tions of the very first speech syn­the­siz­er, the “Voder.” Who, they must have imag­ined as they stood before its boom­ing square-jawed-Art-Deco-hero logo, could have invent­ed such a thing?

Homer Dud­ley, an elec­tron­ic and acoustic engi­neer at Bell Labs, had in the 1920s invent­ed the “Vocoder” (or “Voice Oper­at­ed reCorDER”), a device that could con­vert human speech into an elec­tron­ic sig­nal and then, some­where else down the like, turn that sig­nal back into speech again.

For the Voder (or “Voice Oper­a­tion DEmon­stra­toR”) he took the ini­tial voice out of the sig­nal, cre­at­ing a kind of syn­the­siz­er ded­i­cat­ed to the sounds of speech that one could oper­ate man­u­al­ly, through an inter­face some­what resem­bling that of an organ. Its con­trols (which you can see dia­grammed at 120 Years of Elec­ton­ic Music) pre­sent­ed a steep enough learn­ing curve that few­er than thir­ty peo­ple, most­ly the “girls” employed for the Voder’s demon­stra­tions, ever learned to play it.

Though impres­sive for the time (the oth­er feat of arti­fi­cial human­i­ty at that World’s Fair being Elec­tro the Smok­ing Robot), “the Voder’s speech came out a lit­tle hard to under­stand, and even a bit unset­tling,” accord­ing to Atlas Obscu­ra. “The Voder was shown again dur­ing San Francisco’s Gold­en Gate Inter­na­tion­al Expo­si­tion in late 1939, but after that, the machine dis­ap­peared almost instant­ly.” Speech syn­the­sis itself, by con­trast, had come to stay, though progress would remain rel­a­tive­ly slow for the next four or five decades. Now, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, it exists all around us, and despite con­sid­er­able improve­ments in real­ism, its voic­es still retain a bit of the unearth­ly awk­ward­ness of the Voder — and we prob­a­bly would­n’t have it any oth­er way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load the Soft­ware That Pro­vides Stephen Hawking’s Voice

Mon­ty Python’s “Argu­ment Clin­ic” Sketch Reen­act­ed by Two Vin­tage Voice Syn­the­siz­ers (One Is Stephen Hawking’s Voice)

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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