Sublime

This scale transformation from the particular to the general is behind my skepticism about unfettered globalization and large centralized multiethnic states. The physicist and complexity researcher Yaneer Bar-Yam showed quite convincingly that “better fences make better neighbors”—something

Less was expected of the “irrational” Arabs than of the “civilized” Jews. (This form of double-standard racism—racism against but ultimately favorable to the Arabs—has recurred in current times.)

Anthropologues, sociologues et historiens sont très mal à l’aise à ce propos. D’un côté, tout cela paraît dangereusement proche du racisme. De l’autre, le culturisme a une base scientifique bien plus solide que le racisme, et les spécialistes des sciences humaines et sociales, notamment, ne sauraient nier l’existence et l’importance des différences

Historically, censorship has not worked out well for atheists, or for religious, racial, or sexual minorities—and there’s no reason to believe that Theory contains a magic ingredient that might make censorship work differently.

Certainly the task of cutting is critical: the mid-twentieth century, for example, experienced the depth of horror that can be produced when nations fantasize their ancestry in the past. But no amount of cutting can eliminate the historian’s need to generalize, that is, to create connections and continuities between nonidentical things. And cutting