Summary
The Public Square: A Continuing Survey of Religion, Culture, and Public Life
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Extract
Irving Kristol, 1920-2009.
The two most enjoyable activities of mankind are gossip and metaphysics--the sparkles on the shallows of conversation about people, and the vast ocean of thought about reality, where the deeper you dive, the greater the darkness and the pressure grow.
I suppose there's a way to make this a serious idea: Connect it, say, to the Nicomachean Ethics and Aristotle's account of friendship and contemplation as the best forms of human activity. But the simple fact of the matter is that this isn't one of those profound claims about the human condition. It's merely true: People like to talk about other people, and they like to talk about how the world works, and though they often get things wrong, still they sometimes get things right, and when they do, we know it--for the observation arrives with a little click in the listener's mind, like the precise and ge...See the full content of this document
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