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WORLD_OF_HEROES

                                                 Aug 30, 2012
From Scialabba's essay on
Christopher Lasch, "What                      UNIVERSAL_ART
Are Intellectuals Good
for?", p.182:                  SCIALABBA               OTAKU_DENIED

   "Lasch's notion of virtue is strenuous and
   classical; his ideal of a democratic society
   is, in a magnificient phrase of Carlyle's that
   he quoted often, 'a whole world of heroes' "

   "A whole world of heroes-- this ideal has
   at least two radical implications.  The
   first is that democracy requires a rough
   equality of condition.  Dignity and virtue
   cannot survive indefinitely amid extremes
   of wealth and poverty; only someone with a
   paltry conception of virtue could believe       Okay, but I don't see
   otherwise."                                     how this follows from
                                                   the premise.
   "The second is that the democratic
   character can only flourish in a                   Heroes can't be hungry,
   society constructed to human scale.                Thus for all to be heros,
   Just as modern war has made military               None can go hungy?
   valor more or less superfluous, a
   world dominated by large corporations
   and bureaucracies offers little scope
   for the exercise of civic virtue; not
   even, in the long run, for psychic           These problems have been
   autonomy and integrity-- i.e., for           correlated with size, but are
   selfhood, as we currently understand         they really caused by size?
   it."                                         It could be the trouble isn't
                                                big, but the way we do big.

                                                    OTAKU_FED


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