Yet the sheer variety of criticisms of liberalism makes it hard to know right away what precisely is being criticized. Liberalism’s ancestry has been traced back to John Locke’s writings on individual reason, Adam Smith’s economic theory, and the empiricism of David Hume, but today the doctrine seems to contain potentially contradictory elements. The philosophy of individual liberty connotes both a desire for freedom from state regulation in economic matters (a stance close to libertarianism) and a demand for the state to insure a minimal degree of social and economic justice—the liberalism of the New Deal and of European welfare states. The iconic figures of liberalism themselves moved between these commitments. Mill, even while supporting British imperialism in India and Ireland, called himself a socialist and outlined the aim of achieving “common ownership in the raw materials of the globe.” The Great Depression forced John Dewey to conclude that “the socialized economy is the means of free individual development.” Isaiah Berlin championed the noninterference of the state in 1958, in his celebrated lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty”; but eleven years later he had come to believe that such “negative liberty” armed “the able and ruthless against the less gifted and less fortunate.”
While you need to have undergone existential shock to really know what it is like, the experience need not yield any understanding of what you have gone through, either at the time or later. The acute anxiety induced by the state renders you incapable of thinking clearly. And once the state has passed, it is almost impossible to remember in any detail. Getting back in touch with existential shock is like trying to reconstruct a barely remembered dream, except that the struggle is to recall a time when one was unusually awake.
While granting the strangeness of existential shock, the revealed content itself is not peculiar. Indeed, it is undeniable. That’s what makes the phenomenon so puzzling. I learned that I would die? Obviously, I already knew that, so how could it come as a revelation? It is too simple to merely say that I had long known that I would die, because there is also a sense in which I didn’t – and still don’t – really believe it. These conflicting attitudes emerge from the two most basic ways of thinking about oneself, that I will call the outside and inside views.
Sometimes a work of art invites us to abandon ourselves to bewilderment, to nonlinear narrative, and trust that our emotional responses are all part of the ride. Think of “Waiting for Godot”; for everything that play lacks – a logical narrative, any sense of closure – it remains endlessly compelling, moving, even distressing. Meghan Tifft’s new novel “From Hell to Breakfast” works in the same vein, providing a deeply satisfying and mysteriously tear-inducing story to those willing to follow this sometimes confounding journey.
Kevin Wilson scrapes away all the cloying sentimentality that so often sticks to young characters. The 10-year-old twins at the center of his new novel, “Nothing to See Here,” burst into actual flames whenever they get angry or agitated. Such pyrotechnics sound like something from the macabre world of Stephen King — another author who knows children — but that’s the most wonderful aspect of Wilson’s story: It’s entirely true to life . . . except that now and then, the kids spontaneously combust.
I learned so much from this book. Elaine Sciolino is a graceful, companionable writer, someone who speaks about France in the most enjoyably American way. The French pride themselves on conversing on a lofty plane; when Americans start exchanging anecdotes or matching experiences, many French people raise an eyebrow and ask, “Eh, alors?” (What’s your point?) They want to know the principle that can be drawn from all this real-life trivia. Typically, the French (for whom philosophy is a high school requirement) can brachiate from abstraction to abstraction and might become disgruntled when we Americans say, “Give me an example.” Sciolino, on the contrary, proceeds from colorful detail to revealing detail, gently informing even as she entertains.
And if it turns out, when one gets to road’s end, that things have no “real names,” that when no one is listening things are simply silent? One suspects that Wright would find a way of affirming that as well. “We are all going into a world of dark,” he writes in a late poem. He adds: “And that’s okay.”
"On Being Sane in Insane Places" was the result of a study in which eight people without mental illness got themselves admitted to psychiatric institutions — Rosenhan wanted to see whether mental health professionals could actually distinguish between psychologically well people and those with mental illnesses.
They could not, Rosenhan claimed. All of the "pseudopatients" were diagnosed with illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and remained in the hospitals for several days. As journalist Susannah Cahalan writes in her fascinating new book, The Great Pretender, Rosenhan's study had an outsized effect on psychiatry; it was "cited to further movements as disparate as the biocentric model of mental illness, deinstitutionalization, anti-psychiatry, and the push for mental health patient rights." The study was undoubtedly influential. Unfortunately, Cahalan claims, it was also likely fatally flawed.