“During the long millennia of material scarcity, the customer’s time was what economists call an externality, like air or water. It was an economic asset so readily available that it escaped economic accounting. In the old economy and a holdover in the new, a key rule of commerce was: Waste the customer’s time. This was …
See To The Mash
“It is undeniable that modern liberal regimes have had tremendous success in providing security and prosperity for their citizens. Nevertheless, few of even their most ardent proponents would dare to assert that the political life of such regimes is noble or beautiful. It is harsh, but by no means unfair, to say with Richard Hooker …
How Adam Ate the First Orange
“[C]ontemporary research reveals that music possesses universal characteristics that mark it as a similar behavior present in all human societies. For example, the principle of ‘octave equivalence’—the treatment of two pitches, one with a frequency twice that of the other, as the same pitch sounding at different octaves—is ‘present in all the world’s music systems,’ …
Come On Baby, Light My Fire
“Nietzsche, in contrast, recommended a music that inflames the passions, and he seeks to use such music with a view to overwhelming or silencing reason . . . In sum, for Nietzsche, when we experience the Apollonian we behold images, but when we experience the Dionysian—that is, when we experience music—we feel forces” [Carson Holloway, …
Yet Another Reason to Be Concerned About Global Warming
“But not all languages are equally musical. The musical-poetical language Rousseau discusses arose in the south, where the bountifulness of the climate made survival relatively easy. As a result, southern languages express the yearnings of the ‘heart,’ specifically the longing for romantic attachment to a person of the opposite sex” [Carson Holloway, All Shook Up: …
A Significant Omission
“It is not much of an exaggeration to say that music, as an issue of political consequence, vanishes in the political philosophy of early modernity. The intellectual architects of modern liberalism do not acknowledge the public significance of music’s power over the soul” [Carson Holloway, All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics (Dallas: Spence Publishing, …
Turn It Up
“The later critics of modernity, Rousseau and Nietzsche, accepting the priority of passion but also seeing a need to reinvigorate it, resurrect the power of music, aiming to use it to inflame the passions and silence reason in the service of a new, more noble politics” [Carson Holloway, All Shook Up: Music, Passion, and Politics …
Are Rock and Blues Cousins?
“Thus, despite rock’s claim to have arisen from the blues, its character differs decisively from that of the older and, to Pattison’s mind, less vulgar genre. While rock deals with may of the same themes as the blues, sex and alcohol prominent among them, it approaches them with a ‘passionate intensity’ that naturally follows from …
Whole Lotta Shaking Goin” On
“Critic and defender, liberal and conservative, all utterly fail to grasp, first, the natural power of music itself—that is, music without words—to move the soul and , second, music’s consequent ability to aid or impede not only our question for a decent social order but also our striving for the goods in which we find …
The Answer to Idolatry
“One might say that irreverence, not blasphemy, is the ultimate answer to idolatry, which is why most cultures have established means by which irreverence may be expressed — in the theater, in jokes, in song, in political rhetoric, even in holidays” [Neil Postman, Technopoly (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 167].