Sublime

The Apology, as recorded by Plato, his student, is a bracing defense of the individual in search of truth:

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong. . . . I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I sh

Quetelet’s legacy was to make the average, what started as unremarkable by definition, into a paradoxical ideal. When the average is laden with cultural worth, everything changes: what was common began to be seen as what was “natural,” and what was “natural” came to be seen as right.

Thomas Kuhn argued that paradigm shifts—the fundamental advances in science—don’t happen because people are persuaded by reason. Rather, they depend on the guardians of the old orthodoxies becoming tired, and dying. Kuhn quoted physicist Max Planck’s comment that science proceeds ‘one funeral at a time’. It follows that if there are fewer funerals

government’s most important function: to help people “caught in the tentacles of circumstance,” to help them fight forces too big for them to fight alone.

The Enlightenment principle that we can apply reason and sympathy to enhance human flourishing may seem obvious, trite, old-fashioned. I wrote this book because I have come to realize that it is not. More than ever, the ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress need a wholehearted defense.

In practical terms, those who believe in the liberal story live by the light of two commandments: create, and fight for liberty. Creativity can manifest itself in writing a poem, exploring your sexuality, inventing a new app, or discovering a previously unknown chemical. Fighting for liberty includes anything that frees people from social, biologic

And now, in its own way, we can see how technological society ignores the wisdom of the body. In modern life the body becomes a machine for living, the subject of managed care, of steroids and plastic surgery. Our flesh is mortified in new forms as we sit in traffic jams, work in cramped cubicles and at school desks under artificial light, and dist