Quotes
Men were made for higher things, one can’t help wanting to say, even though one knows that men weren’t made for anything, but are the product of natural selection.
J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: for and against, Cambridge, 1973, p. 19
Philosopher kings are hard to come by.
Robert Alan Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory, Chicago, 1956, p. 50
No pocos economistas latinoamericanos se entusiasmaron en su momento con la idea del llamado trickle down effect. En inglés, el sustantivo trickle designa un chorrito de líquido; y el verbo to trickle, eso que denominamos gotear. La idea del trickle down effect seduce por su sencillez: postula que el crecimiento económico, más tarde o más temprano, acaba beneficiando también a los de abajo porque gotea a través de mayores empleos, ingresos y posibilidades de consumo.
No deseo discutir ahora la plausibilidad misma de esta proposición sino el modo en que ha sido utilizada entre nosotros. Es que, obviamente, cuando se respeta su traducción literal, el modesto enunciado del efecto no les podía parecer demasiado cautivante a políticos ansiosos por captar el apoyo de quienes menos tienen en un contexto tan castigado como el de América Latina. Intervinieron entonces propagandistas vernáculos del neoliberalismo que no dudaron en valerse de un truco y simplemente le modificaron el nombre al efecto para volverlo así más atractivo: en vez de goteo pasaron a hablar de derrame. Hay que achicar el Estado, abrir sin retaceos la economía, desregular los mercados y hacer desaparecer el déficit fiscal para que lo demás se solucione por añadidura, gracias a un aumento sostenido del producto bruto que derramará sus mieles sobre la sociedad en su conjunto y hará a todos felices. En el piano retórico, fue una maniobra eficaz; a nivel de los resultados concretos, ya vimos lo que sucedió.
José Nun, Democracia: gobierno del pueblo o gobierno de los políticos?, Buenos Aires, 2000, pp. 140-141
Smith and Glass’s meta-analysis not only presented impressive evidence about the efficacy of psychotherapy; it concluded that three factors that most psychologists believed influenced this efficacy actually did not influence it.
First, they discovered that the therapists’ credentials—Ph.D., M.D., or no advanced degree—and experience were /un/related to the effectiveness of therapy.
Second, they discovered that the type of therapy given was /un/related to its effectiveness, with the possible exception of behavioral techniques, which seemed superior for well-circumscribed behavioral problems. They also discovered that length of therapy was unrelated to its success.
Robyn M. Dawes, House of cards: Psychology and psychotherapy built on myth, New York, 1994, p. 52
[L]as diferencias de cantidad hacen a las de calidad.
Luis Alberto Romero, La crisis argentina: una mirada al siglo XX, Buenos Aires, 2003, p. 78
[L]os tiempos [actuales] […] no sólo son alarmantes, sino también, y sobre todo, deprimentes.
El hombre y su medio y otros ensayos, Madrid, 1971, p. 128
[I]t cannot be precisely known how any thing is good or bad, till it is precisely known what it is.
James Mill, Education, in Macvey Napier (ed.) Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica, London, 1825
One summer more than ten years ago, when I taught at Princeton, a large spider appeared in the urinal of the men’s room in 1879 Hall, a building that houses the Philosophy Department. When the urinal wasn’t in use, he would perch on the metal drain at its base, and when it was, he would try to scramble out of the way, sometimes managing to climb an inch or two up the porcelain wall at a point that wasn’t too wet. But sometimes he was caught, tumbled and drenched by the flushing torrent. He didn’t seem to like it, and always got out of the way if he could. But it was a floor-length urinal with a sunken base and a smooth overhanging lip: he was below flöor level and couldn’t get out.
Somehow he survived, presumably feeding on tiny insects attracted to the site, and was still there when the fall term began. The urinal must have been used more than a hundred times a day, and always it was the same desperate scramble to get out of the way. His life seemed miserable and exhausting.
Gradually our encounters began to oppress me. Of course it might be his natural habitat, but because he was trapped by the smooth porcelain overhang, there was no way for him to get out even if he wanted to, and no way to tell whether he wanted to. None of the other regulars did anything to alter the situation, but as the months wore on and fall turned to winter I arrived with much uncertainty and hesitation at the decision to liberate him.
Thomas Nagel, The view from nowhere, Oxford, 1986, pp. 208-209
One of the issues which has devastated a substantial portion of the left in recent years, and caused enormous triumphalism elsewhere, is the alleged fact that there’s been this great battle between socialism and capitalism in the twentieth century, and in the end capitalism won and socialism lost—and the reason we know that socialism lost is because the Soviet Union disintegrated. So you have big cover stories in The Nation about “The End of Socialism,” and you have socialists who all their lives considered themselves anti-Stalinist saying, “Yes, it’s true, socialism has lost because Russia failed.” I mean, even to raise questions about this is something you’re not supposed to do in our culture, but let’s try it. Suppose you ask a simple question: namely, why do people like the editors at The Nation say that “socialism” failed, why don’t they say that “democracy” failed?—and the proof that “democracy” failed is, look what happened to Eastern Europe. After all, those countries also called themselves “democratic”—in fact, they called themselves “People’s Democracies,” real advanced forms of democracy. So why don’t we conclude that “democracy” failed, not just that “socialism” failed? Well, I haven’t seen any articles anywhere saying, “Look, democracy failed, let’s forget about democracy.” And it’s obvious why: the fact that they called themselves democratic doesn’t mean that they were democratic. Pretty obvious, right?
Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The indispensable Chomsky, New York, 2002, p. 145
[Y]o no sé si el fenómeno comunista ruso fue alguna vez comunista, sino más bien la reproducción del capitalismo. Porque de última terminó siendo tan gorila y tan hijo de puta como el propio capitalismo. Porque cuando hay alguien que piensa por vos, se está reproduciendo el capitalismo. Es un verso más, aunque le pongas el título que le pongas. Porque estás cambiando el nombre de “capitalismo”, nada más.
Colectivo Situaciones, La hipótesis 891: más allá de los piquetes, Buenos Aires, 2002, p. 76
[L]o que se presenta hoy como post sólo es un pre. Jurgen Habermans […] sostiene que los posmodernos no hacen sino renovar los viejos ataques del prerromanticismo y del romanticismo del siglo XIX a la Ilustración y al Iluminismo.
Es curioso que esta corriente de pensamiento tenga su centro de difusión en París y sus principales representantes se consideren pensadores de avanzada, de izquierda, rebeldes y hasta revolucionarios, pero su fuente de inspiración es la vieja filosofía alemana de la derecha no tradicional. También Habermas observó la paradoja de que, cuando, por primera vez y como consecuencia de la derrota del nazismo, el pensamiento alemán abandonó sus tendencias antioccidentales y aceptó abiertamente el racionalismo y la modernidad, le llegó desde París, presentado como la última novedad, el retorno de las ideas autóctonas de las que trataba de alejarse. Los alemanes debían ahora volver a Nietzsche y a Heidegger, traducidos del francés.
Juan José Sebreli, El asedio a la modernidad: crítica del relativismo cultural, Buenos Aires, 1992, p. 14
To all th[e] champions of the oppressed he set an example of courage, humanity, and single-mindedness. When public issues were involved, he forgot personal prudence. The world decided, as it usually does in such cases, to punish him for his lack of self-seeking; to this day his fame is less than it would have been if his character had been less generous.
Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian, and other essays on religion and related subjects, New York, 1957, p. 147
Kommt es denn darauf an, die Anschauung über Gott, Welt und Versöhnung zu bekommen, bei der man sich am bequemsten befindet, ist nicht viel mehr für den wahren Forscher das Resultat seiner Forschung geradezu etwas Gleichgültiges? Suchen wir denn bei unserem Forschen Ruhe, Friede, Glück? Nein, nur die Wahrheit, und wäre sie höchst abschreckend und häßlich.
Natural law ethicists are kept constantly squirming between the underlying idea that what is natural is good, and the need to make some ethical distinctions between different forms of behavior that are, in biological terms, natural to human beings. This wasn’t an insoluble problem for Aristotle, who believed that everything in the universe exists for a purpose, and has a nature conducive to that purpose. Just as the purpose of a knife is to cut, and so a good knife is a sharp one, so Aristotle seems to have thought that human beings exist for a purpose, and their nature accords with their purpose. But knives have creators, and, unless we assume a divine creation, human beings do not. For the substantial proportion of natural law theorists who work within the Roman Catholic tradition, the assumption of a divine creator poses no problem. But to the others, and indeed to anyone who has accepts a modern scientific view of our origins, the problem is insoluble, for evolutionary theory breaks the link between what is natural and what is good. Nature, understood in evolutionary terms, carries no moral value.
[Wilbur Glenn] Voliva was a paunchy, baldish, grim-faced fellow who wore a rumpled frock coat and enormous whit cuffs. Throughout his life he was profoundly convinced that the earth is shaped like a flapjack, with the North Pole in the center and the South Pole distributed around the circumference. For many years, he offered $5,000 to anyone who could prove to him the earth is spherical, and in fact made several trips around the world lecturing on the subject. In his mind, of course, he had not circumnavigated a globe; he had merely traced a circle on a flat surface.
Martin Gardner, Fads & fallacies: in the name of science, New York, 1957, p. 14
From a purely psychological point of view, the introduction of new hypotheses and of new terms would appear justified if it led to a system free of contradictions, and to predictions verifiable by experiment. But, to take the latter test first, analysts of the orthodox Freudian, Jungian, and Adlerian schools all achieve some therapeutical results which seem to confirm prediction by experiment, though the theories on which the predictions are based are sometimes diametrically opposed to each other. The reason for this, and for the indecisive nature of the purely psychological approach in general, is the metaphorical character of psychological terms like “repression,” “censor,” super-ego," inferiority complex," and so forth, and the tautologies to which their manipulation often leads.
Arthur Koestler, Insight and Outlook: An Inquiry into the Common Foundations of Science, Art, and Social Ethics, 1949, p. ix
We shouldn’t be afraid of difficult films, we shouldn’t be afraid not to be entertained. The viewer pays a high price for a film. And not in money. Viewers spend their time, a piece of their lives—an hour and a half to two hours. A bad film, an aggressive film, takes several centuries of life from humanity.
Aleksandr Sokurov, The San Francisco Chronicle, 2003
After-the-fact interpretation is appropriate for some historical and literary scholars, which helps explain Freud’s lingering influence on literary criticism. But in science as in horse racing, bets must be placed before the race is run.
David G. Myers, Intuition: its powers and perils, New Haven, 2002, p. 23
Depending on where along the political spectrum power is situated, apostates almost always make their corrective leap in that direction, discovering the virtues of the status quo. “The last thing you can be accused of is having turned your coat,” Thomas Mann wrote a convert to National Socialism right after Hitler’s seizure of power. “You always wore it the ‘right’ way around.” If apostasy weren’t conditioned by power considerations, one would anticipate roughly equal movements in both directions. But that’s never been the case. The would-be apostate almost always pulls towards power’s magnetic field, rarely away.
Norman Finkelstein, Fraternally Yours, Chris
Es común que se diga […] que los argentinos no desaprobamos socialmente [la evasión impositiva], y me parece que ello ocurre en parte porque no se percibe el carácter socialmente dañoso que ella tiene. La respuesta de muchos es que “no vale la pena pagar impuestos, porque ellos solo sirven para que se los roben los funcionarios, o para pagar la ineficiencia estatal”. Es obvio que esta respuesta carece de base racional: por más corrupción que haya o por más ineficiencia que afecte a la administración pública, ella solo puede incidir en una proporción marginal en el destino de los impuestos. Que una parte importante de las contribuciones tienen un destino de bien público lo atestigua la existencia en el ámbito público de escuelas, universidades, bibliotecas, fuerzas de seguridad y de defensa, calles y rutas, parques, etcétera. Parece que la desconfianza al Estado que se da típicamente en nuestro país obnubilara la relación causal entre las contribuciones de los ciudadanos y los servicios públicos que los mismos ciudadanos utilizan. Es como si aquellas contribuciones las absorbiera el Estado para beneficio de los funcionarios, y los servicios se financiaran con maná del cielo. Es muy difícil encontrar a alguien que perciba en la evasión impositiva de otro un daño directo para sus intereses.
Carlos Santiago Nino, Un país al margen de la ley: Estudio de la anomia como componente del subdesarrollo argentino, Buenos Aires, 1992, pp. 188-189