This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 29 May 2008, by Jeremy Price.
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29 May 08
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The highest good was once understood as a common good, a telos or final aspiration that, unlike oil, is only enhanced, never diminished, as it is shared. That there is such a good, that its pursuit is our shared responsibility, and that its enjoyment is our ultimate purpose—these are elusive and hard sayings for us today. After all, we are all but convinced that there is no singular good, only goods, goods that divide us, pit us against one another, bring us to blows.
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Socrates and Plato, speaking with one voice, noted that we have only two basic passions: fear and desire. Desire, as they understood it, lifts us up and brings us together, for its only true object is either infinitely shareable or nothing at all. In other words, desire is the longing affirmation of things imagined but as yet unseen. We call this hope. Fear, on the other hand, knows its object all too intimately—death. Death, of course, assumes many shapes and moves at many speeds; but it is always a matter of diminishment and denial, ending in nothingness.
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Whatever is pressed against our mind’s eye seems the greatest, most urgent, most real matter there is, demanding our attention to the exclusion of all else. This is the way that fear and its politics captivate a nation and lead them to the low road and to ruin. Whether we dial 9-1-1 or 911 we connect to our worst fears. The alternative is to give our fears a rest and to aspire to be more than an object of fear to others. We might even listen in a spirit of hope to the words of Albert Camus and wonder what he meant when he wrote that the greatest gift to history and to the future is generosity to the present.
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