Education

Social Psychologist Erich Fromm Diagnoses Why People Wear a Mask of Happiness in Modern Society (1977)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nCzsqKrkhE Modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine. —Erich Fromm There are more think pieces published every day than any one person can read about our current moment of social disintegration. But we seem to have lost touch with the insights of social psychology, a field that dominated popular intellectual discourse in the post-war 20t...
Tags: Psychology, Google, College, Current Affairs, Philosophy, Un, Albert Camus, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, Erich Fromm, Camus, Durham NC Follow, Maria Popova, Jacobin, Fromm, Frankfurt School

Hannah Arendt Explains Why Democracies Need to Safeguard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Themselves Against Dictators and Their Lies

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wikimedia Commons Two of the most trenchant and enduring critics of authoritarianism, Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, were also both German Jews who emigrated to the U.S. to escape the Nazis. The Marxist Adorno saw fascist tendencies everywhere in his new country. Decades before Noam Chomsky coined the concept, he argued that all mass media under advanced capitalism served one particular purpose: manufacturing consent. Arendt landed on a different part of the polit...
Tags: Google, Politics, College, Philosophy, Aristotle, Forbes, Noam Chomsky, Facebook Twitter, Socrates, Josh Jones, Wikimedia Commons, Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Durham NC Follow, Theodor Adorno, Arendt

Hannah Arendt Explains Why Democracies Must Safeguard the Free Press & Truth … If They’re Going to Survive

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wikimedia Commons Two of the most trenchant and enduring critics of authoritarianism, Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, were also both German Jews who emigrated to the U.S. to escape the Nazis. The Marxist Adorno saw fascist tendencies everywhere in his new country. Decades before Noam Chomsky coined the concept, he argued that all mass media under advanced capitalism served one particular purpose: manufacturing consent. Arendt landed on a different part of the polit...
Tags: Google, Politics, College, Philosophy, Aristotle, Forbes, Noam Chomsky, Facebook Twitter, Socrates, Josh Jones, Wikimedia Commons, Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Durham NC Follow, Theodor Adorno, Arendt

When the Nazis Declared War on Expressionist Art (1937)

The 1937 Nazi Degenerate Art Exhibition displayed the art of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Georg Grosz, and many more internationally famous modernists with maximum prejudice. Ripped from the walls of German museums, the 740 paintings and sculptures were thrown together in disarray and surrounded by derogatory graffiti and hell-house effects. Right down the street was the respectable Great German Art Exhibition, designed as counterprogramming “to show the works that Hitler approved of—de...
Tags: Google, Art, New York, Film, College, Germany, Nazis, Berlin, History, Bbc, Hitler, Moma, Burns, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, Adorno

Visit a Gallery of 300 Striking Posters from the May 1968 Uprising in Paris

Among the many other 50ths commemorated this year, one will largely go unnoticed by the U.S. press, given that it happened in France, a country we like to ignore as much as possible, and concerned the politics of anarchists and communists, people we like to pretend don’t exist except as caricatures in scare-mongering cartoons. But the French remember May 1968, and not only on its fiftieth. The wildcat strikes, student marches, and barricades in the Latin Quarter haunt French politics. “We’re sl...
Tags: Google, Art, Politics, College, France, History, Paris, Joan Baez, Joan Miró, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, Gerard, John Lennon Yoko Ono, Durham NC Follow, DeBord, Theodor Adorno

The Entire Archives of Radical Philosophy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler & More (1972-2018)

On a seemingly daily basis, we see attacks against the intellectual culture of the academic humanities, which, since the 1960s, have opened up spaces for leftists to develop critical theories of all kinds. Attacks from supposedly liberal professors and centrist op-ed columnists, from well-funded conservative think tanks and white supremacists on college campus tours. All rail against the evils of feminism, post-modernism, and something called “neo-Marxism” with outsized agitation. For students ...
Tags: Google, UK, College, University, Philosophy, Facebook Twitter, Foucault, Josh Jones, Loic Wacquant, Wacquant, Thomas Hobbes, Nathan Brown, Pierre Bourdieu, Durham NC Follow, Michel Foucault, Rorty

Stream 35 Hours of Classic Blues, Folk, & Bluegrass Recordings from Smithsonian Folkways: 837 Tracks Featuring Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie & More

Image of Woody Guthrie by Al Aumuller, via Wikimedia Commons Marshall McLuhan’s chestnut “the medium is the message” contains some of the most important theory about mass media to have emerged in the past century. In its honor, we might propose another slogan—less conceptually tidy and alliterative—that brings to mind the arguments of critical theorists like Theodor Adorno: “the economy is the culture”—the economic mechanisms that govern the “culture industry,” as Adorno would say, determine th...
Tags: Google, Music, College, Kentucky, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, America, Smithsonian, New Orleans, Thomas Edison, Facebook Twitter, Alice Gerrard, Hazel Dickens, Josh Jones, Gary Davis, Zora Neale Hurston

John F. Kennedy Explains Why Artists & Poets Are Indispensable to American Democracy (October 26th, 1963)

The Greek word poesis did not confine itself to the literary arts. Most broadly speaking, the word meant “to make”—as in, to create anything, godlike, out of the stuff of ideas. But the English word “poetry” has always retained this grander sense, one very present for poets steeped in the classics, like Percy Shelley, who famously called poets the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” in his essay “A Defence of Poetry.” Shelley argued, “If no new poets should arise to create afresh t...
Tags: Google, Politics, College, Poetry, John F Kennedy, Frost, Kennedy, Joan Baez, Facebook Twitter, L A Times, Amherst, Josh Jones, SHELLEY, Robert Frost, Mark Swed, Whitman

An Animated Introduction to Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and How He Used Semiotics to Decode Popular Culture

In 1979, French theorist Jean-François Lyotard declared the end of all “grand narratives”—every “theory or intellectual system,” as Blackwell’s dictionary defines the term, “which attempts to provide a comprehensive explanation of human experience and knowledge.” The announcement arrived with all the rhetorical bombast of Nietzsche’s “God is Dead,” sweeping not only theology into the dustbin but also overarching scientific theories, Freudian psychology, Marxism, and every other “tota...
Tags: Google, Politics, College, Current Affairs, Paris, Philosophy, Al Jazeera, Marx, Facebook Twitter, Roland Barthes, Barthes, Michel de Montaigne, Josh Jones, Jean François Lyotard, Nietzsche, Richard Brody

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Marley, Public Enemy, Billy Bragg & More

When I was growing up, protest music meant Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine, and—for some few Americans and very many Brits—Billy Bragg: an artist “at home with both socialist politics and heartbreak,” writes Allmusic, “styled on the solo attack of early Dylan and the passion of the Clash.” Known for his pro-labor, anti-Thatcher, anti-war, pro “Sexuality” stances, Bragg has been a stalwart campaigner for peace and justice since the 1980s. A veteran activist who made appearances at ...
Tags: Google, Spotify, Music, Politics, Beyonce, College, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Neil Young, Nelson Mandela, Bob Dylan, Pussy Riot, Solange, Billy Bragg, Marvin Gaye, Black Sabbath

Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wikimedia Commons At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism of German conservatives, the Reichstag Fire. And we learned about the critical importance of propaganda, the deliberate misinforming of the public in order to sway opinions en masse and achieve popular support (or at least the appearance of it). While...
Tags: Google, Politics, College, Germany, Nazis, History, Levy, Pbs, Hitler, The Washington Post, Stalin, Goebbels, McGill University, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, Michiko Kakutani

Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: An Incisive Quote from The Origins of Totalitarianism

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wikimedia Commons At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism of German conservatives, the Reichstag Fire. And we learned about the critical importance of propaganda, the deliberate misinforming of the public in order to sway opinions en masse and achieve popular support (or at least the appearance of it). While...
Tags: Google, Politics, College, Germany, Nazis, History, Levy, Pbs, Hitler, The Washington Post, Stalin, Goebbels, McGill University, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, Michiko Kakutani

An Animated Introduction to Theodor Adorno & His Critique of Modern Capitalism

The German philosopher and sociologist Theodor Adorno had much to say about what was wrong with society, and even now, nearly fifty years after his death, his adherents would argue that his diagnoses have lost none of their relevance. But what, exactly, did he think ailed us? This animated introduction from Alain de Botton’s School […] An Animated Introduction to Theodor Adorno & His Critique of Modern Capitalism is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and... That's ...
Tags: College, Philosophy, Alain De Botton, Facebook Twitter, Theodor Adorno

Hear Igor Stravinsky’s Symphonies & Ballets in a Complete, 32-Hour, Chronological Playlist

Those who know the work of Igor Stravinsky will be familiar with the reception the Russian composer’s The Rite of Spring received during its first performance in Paris in 1913. The typical description for what happened is that the ballet caused a “riot,” though given our usual associations with that word, it hardly seems like the appropriate term. As The Telegraph’s Ivan Hewett notes, the responses, though bemused and irate, were genteel by most standards of civil unrest. But there was v...
Tags: Google, Spotify, Music, College, Paris, Telegraph, Parker, Hewitt, Facebook Twitter, Stravinsky, Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Charlie Parker, Josh Jones, Eliot, Adorno