Quote of the Day (Leon Wieseltier, on Care and the ‘Consciousness of Mortality’)

“All the traditions, religious and secular, enjoin us to live each day of our lives as if it might be our last, so as to heighten our seriousness about our reason for living, be it virtue or pleasure. But who can live only on last days? We are all fugitives, but we are not all hermits. We have children to teach, jobs to do, causes to serve. A day spent in the contemplation of personal extinction is an insufficiently rich day. Without care, then, we might be crippled by the consciousness of mortality.” — Leon Wieseltier, “Washington Diarist: Binocular,” The New Republic, December 12, 2013

Quote of the Day (Leon Wieseltier, on Why ‘Anxiety Is an Imperialism’)

“Anxiety is an imperialism; it takes over everything. One must equip oneself against it, organize a resistance. Does love make you strong? It also makes you weak, because it creates nightmarish vulnerabilities, and haunts you with the imagination of loss. Courage is not the whole answer when one is afraid not for oneself but for others. And the way we live now, a life of devotion means perpetual movement—a hurrying life.” — Leon Wieseltier, “Washington Diarist: Binocular,” The New Republic, December 12, 2013

Quote of the Day (Leon Wieseltier, on Disappearing Book- and Record Stores)

“The commerce of culture is a trade in ideals of beauty, goodness, and truth. A hunger for profit exploits a hunger for meaning. If the one gets too ravenous, the other may find it harder to subsist. The disappearance of our bookstores and our record stores constitutes one of the great self-inflicted wounds of this wounding time.”— Leon Wieseltier, “Washington Diarist: Going to Melody,” The New Republic, February 2, 2012

Quote of the Day (Leon Wieseltier, on the Right and the Recession)

“The response of the right to the crisis in America was to flee to its catechism. The Republicans propose to bail out the economy with doctrine. Unemployment is 7.6 percent and rising, and they say: let them eat Friedman.”—Leon Wieseltier, “Washington Diarist: Love Me I’m a Liberal,” The New Republic, March 4, 2009

As a political contrarian, I am skeptical of Wieseltier’s notion that “government is a jewel of human association and an heirloom of human reason.” The same leviathan that can attempt to right all wrongs has the power to filch from your pocketbook for purposes you may not approve and send your children abroad in wars you abominate.

But his argument in the quote above, about the responsibility of the right for our current economic meltdown seems to me inarguable.

At the moment, the electorate’s willingness to provide President Obama with wide latitude for dealing with the recession stems in no small part no just from the GOP’s wholesale stripping of governmental regulatory functions since the dawn of the Reagan Era, but also from the party’s continuing, clueless intellectual bankruptcy in suggesting an alternative.

Read this essay, too, for the final paragraph. Parts of it deserve to go into Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (e.g., “Democracy is the most mentally arduous form of government. No other system stands or falls on the quality of the individual's opinions.”) At some future point, the entire piece should be anthologized for its succinct summary of what has brought us all to this pass.