Multiplicities In Paradise

  3 0 years ago Francis Fukuyama penned his famous "The End of History?" thesis. Fukuyama’s assessment of the unravelling of the Cold War and the triumph of Western Liberal Democracy and the free market economic system was all the rage at the time.  It was easy to reduce the failure of the Soviet state-led political and economic model to being inferior to the more robust and free-flowing ideology of individual civil liberties and, of course, a minimalist state that enabled the invisible hand of the market. 1989 represented what Fukuyama described as the “End of History”. T he storming of the United States’ Capitol Hill buildings on 6 January 2021 by pro-Trump supporters could come straight out of a Hollywood-style action movie script. Predictable after four years of a presidency that can only be described as pop culture's ultimate reality TV climaxing in the Seizure of the Legislature. Had this taken place in any other country, the US may have sought to intervene, to up...

The title of this post is taken from the American classic novel "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I n music, it's said that the romantic period (and it's overblown excesses) ended with Wagner. That may be so. It brings to mind the quote oft attributed to Mark Twain (yes it sounds like his work, but it was actually Bill Nye [not our Science Guy, but the journalist-humorist ]   " Richard Wagner's music is better than it sounds”. It's a densely packed statement. But what exactly is romanticism? And why do we need it now? I posit that romanticism is hardly a "sweetness", as many may conjure up. There is nothing particularly sugary about being dark and tormented, the furor of passion, nor the despair of an idealism that can not be attained. Yet that is what the core of romanticism is composed of. Nor is it merely adjective abuse. It's more than an aesthetic in decor. So what is it then? Ideals. Perhaps Ideals have m...