Orts #817
A little Madness in the Spring
by Emily Dickinson
A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown—
Who ponders this tremendous scene—
This whole Experiment of Green—
As if it were his own!
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When the hyper-rationalist model fails, it fails spectacularly. In the American election, reason gave way to fear, resentment, hate and spite. For the most part, “rational agency” was nowhere to be found. What seemed to drive the support for Trump was darker and more complicated — the heart. And what makes this event particularly significant is not necessarily its political aspect (though that’s serious enough), but the fact that we find ourselves so poorly equipped to comprehend it. Thanks to the clumsy way in which we’ve been imagining ourselves, we are unprepared to digest it. Rarely has a failure of imagination been more humiliating.
Dealing with the human abyss used to be the province of religion, but ever since God died we haven’t really been able to find a good replacement.... Yet if we are to remain human[,] ignoring the problem, looking elsewhere, is not an option. The humanities can reinvent themselves only to the extent that they will be able to chart, as adequately as humanly possible, the full depth of the human abyss. Unless we will find a way to account for the whole human subject, without self-flattery and self-delusion, we will move in circles, unable to overcome the blinding hyper-rationalism under which we currently slave.
-- Our Delight in Destruction, Costica Bradatan, in New York Times, March 27, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/opinion/our-delight-in-destruction.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
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just for fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LOPZNhsBXY