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A friend, Jo Ellen, a philosopher and an astute observer of modern life, sent me the link to Sinatra Suite, in which Mikhail Baryshnikov and Elaine Kudo dance to Frank Sinatra singing Strangers in the Night, All the Way, That’s Life, My Way, and One For My Baby (And One More for the Road).
Beauty
The selection of Sinatra songs was perfect, as were the performances by Baryshnikov and Kudo. I loved the expressionless look on Baryshnikov’s face, an aspect of Sinatra’s singing that many of us miss. Halfway through watching the performance, I am crying. Art rarely reaches such near perfection, for we humans live in an imperfect world.
The Sinatra Suite contrasts with where humanity is now, at the beginning of World War III, creeping toward Armageddon. We Americans see ourselves on the side of Good and the Russians on the side of Evil. However, an objective view is that President Joe Biden and President Vladimir Putin are pursuing their respective theologies of the Nation State.
Power
Putin published in July 2021, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” a 5,000-word treatise that claimed the Belarusians, Russians, and Ukrainians are all descendants of the Rus, an ancient people who settled the lands between the Black and Baltic Seas. In Putin’s version of history, these peoples are bound together by a common territory, language, and the Orthodox Christian faith. According to Putin, “Russia was robbed” of a core territory when the Bolsheviks created the Soviet Union in 1922 and established a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Reportedly, every soldier sent to Ukraine is supposed to carry Putin’s treatise, which ends with the pronouncement, “We [the Russians and the Ukrainians] are one people.”[1]
Nation States Are Founded on Illusions
Just like Hitler’s Third Reich, Putin’s Greater Russian is an illusion. All modern states, whether empires or minor players on the international stage, are inventions that were impossible before Johannes Gutenberg developed the moveable type printing press between 1450 and 1455, the year he printed the Bible. Prior to the printing press, the world was populated by principalities with no common, standardized language, only dialects, often understood by just a small group of speakers.
National symbols, such as flags and anthems, were created to unify the citizens of the Nation State and instill allegiance to an all-powerful state. The first four lines of the State Anthem of the Soviet Union in English translation are:
An unbreakable union of free republics,
Great Russia has sealed forever.
Long live, the creation by the people’s will,
The united, mighty Soviet Union![2]
Thus, the illusions did not begin with Putin. When I listen to the State Anthem of the Soviet Union, even I, a Romanian Gypsy, a Tolstoyan anarchist, feel joined to my fellow worker-heroes and desire to advance the communistic cause that benefits all humanity, a cause that Lenin and Stalin absorbed from Orthodox Christianity.
Americans are taught that their country is an exception, and to them, the phrase “American Empire” is foreign, but not to the citizens of Nicaragua, Panama, and the banana republics of Latin America. After World War II, America inherited the remnants of the British Empire, and the new world leaders ruled as if they were not rulers.
War Is Intrinsic to the Nation State
To keep the idea that America is exceptional, children in the land of the free and the brave never hear in school what the Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke grasped, in the late 1800s, that war is an intrinsic part of the Nation State: “War is not only a practical necessity, it is also a theoretical necessity, an exigency of logic. The concept of the State implies the concept of war, for the essence of the State is Power.”[3] The United States, for instance, over a 150-year period engaged in eleven major wars — Mexican-American War, American Civil War, Spanish-American War, Philippine-American War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Iraq War I, War in Afghanistan, and Iraq War II — which on average is one major military conflict every fourteen years. During that period, numerous other military operations occurred, such as the Indian Wars, the opening of Japan to Western trade, and the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
In the Ukraine war, the United States is now pursuing Power. Seventy-four days after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration changed its cautious strategy of brokering an end to the conflict that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and an acceptable relationship between the United States and Russia. President Biden’s recent assertion that Mr. Putin “cannot remain in power;” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s declaration that Russia must be “weakened;” House speaker, Nancy Pelosi’s vow that the United States would support Ukraine “until victory is won,” all pronouncements that confirm the United States is at war with Russia, a frightening state of affairs further confirmed by the Biden Administration crowing about providing intelligence to kill Russian generals and to sink the Russian flagship Moskova in the Black Sea.
The illusions of Nation States have real consequences; millions died in the holocaust, Hiroshima, and the American Civil War, not to mention the tens of millions in World Wars I and II.[4]
God and the Nation State
With a stronger grip upon the souls of its citizens than any religion, the Nation State made God the Ultimate Citizen. Shortly before World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II claimed God bestowed upon him the care of the German Nation State: “I look upon the People and the Nation handed on to me as a responsibility conferred upon me by God, and I believe, as it is written in the Bible, that it is my duty to increase this heritage for which one day I shall be called upon to an account. Whoever tries to interfere with my task I shall crush.”[5] For Kaiser Wilhelm II and his people, God is a German.
Horatio Bottomley, financier and Member of the English Parliament, in a speech at the London Opera House, September 14, 1914, claimed that the Prince of Peace and Progress sided with the British Empire: “It may be — I do not know and I do not profess to understand — that this is the great Audit of the Universe, that the Supreme Being has ordered the nations of the earth to decide who is to lead in the van of human progress. If the British Empire resolves to fight the Battle cleanly, to look upon it as Something More than an ordinary war, we shall realize that it has not been in vain, and We, the British Empire, as the Chosen Leaders of the World, shall travel along the road of Human Destiny and Progress, at the end of which we shall see the patient figure of the Prince of Peace pointing to the Star of Bethlehem which leads us to God.”[6] For members of the British Empire, God is an English gentleman, and the global war will lead to the Prince of Peace.
Made in the image of the Nation State, citizens obtain their rights not from God or Nature but from their nation. Unlike medieval men and women, who thought of themselves first as Christians, then as subjects of a king or lord, and finally as members of a village community, Western men and women in the twentieth-first century, with few exceptions, think of themselves as citizens of a nation, as Englishmen, Americans, Germans, Belgians, Serbs, or some other invented group. They speak of my country and feel pride or shame in their country’s actions. Historian Boyd Shafer observes that for citizens of a Nation State the nation’s language is their language; the nation’s leaders are their leaders; the nation’s possessions are their possessions; the nation’s enemies are their enemies; the nation’s victories and defeats are their victories and defeats; the nation’s fortunes are their fortunes; the nation’s way of life is their way of life.[7]
The citizen practices his faith by participating in the rituals and ceremonies of nationalism. He salutes his country’s flag and like the Christian with the cross, never lets it be defiled. He sings — with head bared — his national anthem. From childhood, he takes oaths, swearing he will be a good and faithful citizen. He may make pilgrimages to his capital and its famed buildings — its Westminster Abbey, its Lincoln Memorial, its Red Square, its White House. Glorious patriots (saints and martyrs) are buried in national cemeteries or impressive pantheons. The national heroes are honored and immortalized when their names are given to cities, streets, parks, libraries, theaters, and airports.[8]
To serve the nation, to cherish and to love it, is for many citizens, the greatest virtue; the greatest self-sacrifice is to give one’s life for one’s country. To achieve its Messianic end, the Nation State demands that every citizen be willing to sacrifice himself. Not ours to reason why, but to do and die.[9] Modern war is not simply about soldiers, matériel, and the conquest of territory. War creates moral meaning and fellowship in a community striving for a lofty common end. Citizens of the Nation State are isolated individuals who, unbeknownst to themselves, thirst for community and for a cause that transcends themselves.
Beauty Is Objective
It seems like Beauty Versus Power is akin to David Versus Goliath. In our materialistic age, nihilism reigns, for all values are considered relative, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The observations and arguments of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas carry no weight in our times; so, to demonstrate that the marks of beauty are objective, I turn to science, the only source of truth for moderns.
Einstein gives the three elements of scientific beauty in a single sentence: “A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises is, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended is its area of applicability.”[10] Simplicity, then, is the first element of beauty. The “different kinds of things it relates” means how the theory harmonizes disparate things. Thus, we may label the second element harmony. And the extended applicability is a theory’s brilliance; that is, how much clarity it has in itself and how much light it sheds on other things. Simplicity, harmony, and brilliance. Each of these calls for a brief explanation.
Simplicity. There exist today other theories of gravity besides Einstein’s general relativity, but because they lack simplicity, none are taken seriously. “Most rival theories are convincingly disproved,” observes mathematician Roger Penrose. “The few that remain having been, for the most part, contrived directly so as to fit with those tests that have been actually performed. No rival theory comes close to general relativity in elegance or simplicity of assumption.”[11] All rival theories of gravity lack what Werner Heisenberg called “frightening simplicity and wholeness.”[12] Without wholeness, or unity, a theory is a collection of disconnected ideas and observations that often borders on the frighteningly ugly.
Harmony. “Without the belief in the inner harmony of the world there could be no science,” Einstein declares.[13] Heisenberg defines harmony as the “proper conformity of the parts to one another and to the whole.”[14] In any science, a good theory will harmonize many previously unrelated facts, for without the harmony of its parts, a theory lacks unity. Harmony also implies symmetry. There is a pleasing symmetry to all the laws of physics. “Every law of physics goes back to some symmetry of nature,” observes physicist John Archibald Wheeler.[15] Heisenberg adds, “The symmetry properties always constitute the most essential features of a theory.”[16] Newton’s third law is a well-known example of symmetry in physics: To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction. A different mirror symmetry is found on the subatomic level, where to every kind of particle there corresponds an anti-particle with the same mass but opposite characteristics. In fact, this symmetry successfully predicted the existence of many subatomic particles.
Brilliance. A theory with brilliance has great clarity and sheds light on many things, suggesting new experiments. Newton, for example, astounded the world by explaining falling bodies, the tides, and the motions of the planets and the comets with three simple laws. Physicist George Thomson states, “In physics, as in mathematics, it is a great beauty if a theory can bring together apparently very different phenomena and show that they are closely connected; or even different aspects of the same thing.”[17]
The beauty of science becomes universal when we hear Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, argue that the three qualities of beauty in the arts are wholeness, harmony, and radiance, his translation of Aquinas’ integritas, consonantia, and claritas.[18]
Oddly, Einstein, Joyce, and Aquinas missed the fourth element of beauty, enunciated by Francis Bacon: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”[19] What Bacon calls “strangeness in the proportion,” we will call “fitting surprise.”
The surprises of special relativity — time dilation, length contraction, and the equivalence of inertial mass and energy — follow as inevitable consequences of the principle that the velocity of light is the same for all inertial (non-accelerating) observers. Einstein’s 1905 paper that introduced relativity is a series of fitting surprises, not unlike what is found in the great music of Mozart and Beethoven.
Music conductor Leonard Bernstein’s comments on Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony apply equally well to Einstein’s 1905 paper: “The element of unexpected is so often associated with Beethoven. But surprise is not enough; what makes it so great is that no matter how shocking and unexpected the surprise is, it always somehow gives the impression — as soon as it has happened — that it is the only thing that could have happened at that moment. Inevitability is the keynote. It is as though Beethoven had an inside track to truth and rightness, so that he could say the most amazing and sudden things with complete authority and cogency.”[20]
Great mathematics, too, possesses a “high degree of unexpectedness combined with inevitability,” according to Godfrey Harold Hardy.[21]The truths of relativity, or quantum physics for that matter, are stranger than we imagined, but their inevitability convinces us that Nature is that way. If fitting surprises are stripped away from science and art, then beauty is reduced to monotonous unity, mechanical symmetry, and uninteresting predictability.
Beauty Can Strike, Pierce, and Transform Us
I suspected that all my former physicist colleagues in their youth were shaken and transformed by an experience of some profound beauty. I know I was. In the tenth grade, I was forever changed by Euclid’s proof that the prime numbers are infinite, an exquisite proof that surprisingly showed an eternal truth in six lines of text. Until that point in my life, I thought truth did not exist; everything about me changed, the seasons, my body, and people. My experience of the human world was that everything was in flux, sometimes bordering on the absurd. Suddenly, mathematics presented me with unchanging one thing, a timeless truth, demonstrated in an exceedingly beautiful way; the 2,500 years between Euclid and me were of no consequence. My encounter with Euclid was not unique. Bertrand Russell described his first encounter with serious mathematics: “At the age of eleven, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world.”[22]
Baryshnikov briefly tells how beauty transformed his life. At age six of seven, his mother introduced him to the arts in Riga, the Latvian capital: “My mother took me to ballet and its orchestra playing in this beautiful theater, and it got me.”[23] Later, his dancing “got” future dancers and prompted others, like me, to think about the transformative power of beauty.
The beauty of physics transformed society, too: Our digital era rests upon the beauty of quantum mechanics. Without Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrödinger, and hundreds of other physicists pursuing beauty and bringing it back to humanity, Jeff Bezos would still be in Seattle selling books out of the trunk of his car, and you, my dear reader, would still be reading your local newspaper and making weekly visits to your town library. Behind our architecture are Newton’s three beautiful laws. Electric lighting and motors would not be possible without Maxwell’s beautiful theory of electromagnetic phenomena. The list goes on and on.
The leaders of the Nation States, blind to beauty, seized the results of physics and chemistry to increase the Power of the State, as predicted by Treitschke. For instance, during World War I, Fritz Haber, a genius chemist, devised poison gas attacks that exterminated human beings on an industrial scale. A super nationalist, Haber volunteered his service to the German Nation State; in effect, he was a general not in uniform. During World War II, every prominent physicist devoted himself to perfecting the mass killing of the enemy. The only exception I know is Einstein, but he wrote a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt urging an atomic bomb project. When I was at Los Alamos during the Cold War, my fellow physicists found supporting the war machine was an easy way to make a comfortable living.
David and Goliath
Beauty versus Power seems like a hopeless David versus Goliath. The story of David and Goliath is told in 1 Samuel 17. Goliath, a Philistine, “whose height was six cubits and a span [about 9 feet 9 inches]. He had a helmet of bronze on his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail, and the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of bronze [about 125 pounds].”
The Giant stepped forward and challenged the Israelites. He said, “Give me a man, that we may fight together” to decide the war between the Philistines and the Israelites. Except for David, a mere youth, all the Israelites fled and “were much afraid.”
David “chose five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in his shepherd’s bag.” With sling in hand, he drew near the Philistine, and from his bag, he took a stone and “slung it, and struck the Philistine on his forehead; the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell on his face to the ground.” David, swordless, ran quickly to the Philistine, took his sword, killed him and cut off his head. “David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone.”[24]
The size of Goliath is not a poetic exaggeration. Robert Wadlow, 8 feet, 11.1 inches, known as the Giant of Illinois, died in 1940 at the age of 22. Wadlow suffered from acromegaly, usually caused by a benign pituitary gland tumor producing excess growth hormone. Frequently, the enlarged tumor compresses the nerves leading to the eyes causing severely restricted eyesight and double vision.
What gave Goliath size and strength also was the source of his greatest weakness. When David ran toward Goliath, the Philistine was blind to his combatant’s approach; slow and blurry-eyed, he failed to comprehend that he was in mortal danger.
For the Israelites, the moral of the story of David and Goliath was that courage and faith can overcome what seems impossible. For Christians, the narrative means that “with God, nothing will be impossible.”[25] For we followers of beauty, the Power of the Nation State may be its weakness.
The Power of the Nation State comes from the coordinated actions of its citizens that use the fruits of science and technology. Large-scale human cooperation in a Nation State requires common storytelling that succinctly presents “reality,” the way things truly are. The United States of America is no exception.
The Chosen People
The founding of America was based on the Puritans’ belief that they were the new chosen people of God. In route to New England, in 1630, John Winthrop stood on the deck of the Arbella and delivered a sermon on the Puritans’ historic destiny: “We shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”[26]
The New England Puritans saw themselves as having been given a mission by God to show the world how the Reformation was to be completed. The Puritans entered covenants first with God, then with each other in the Church, and lastly in society to form a political state.
The Puritans knew their government had been brought into existence by an act of the people; furthermore, they believed the people created the one kind of government outlined by God. “New England political theory made the state almost a kind of second incarnation, a Messiah fathered by God and born of the people,” Perry Miller writes in his classic study The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century.[27]
As religious inspiration waned in America, the belief remained that Americans are the chosen people with a special destiny in history. America was a new continent, a new beginning for humanity, a beacon to light the way for the rest of the world. John Adams, in 1765, expressed this national Messianism in his diary: “America was designed by Providence for the theater on which man was to make his true figure, on which science, virtue, liberty, happiness, and glory were to exist in peace.”[28]
Later, the Puritan’s belief that God’s Covenant with the new chosen people aimed at their salvation from sin was forgotten; however, the idea remained that the government was formed by a social compact between individuals. When no longer seen as a continuation of the will of God, Americans understood their government was founded on the self-evident truths of nature; the social compact between individuals was believed to be instituted not to carry out God’s salvation plan for humanity but to secure men’s inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.[29] What then held the nation together was an idea — liberty under law; the people themselves had formed the new Covenant, the Constitution — storytelling that began with the Pilgrims was continued by the Founding Fathers.
The storytelling of America captured the imagination of the poor and downtrodden in the Old World. In America, a peasant from Europe was no longer oppressed by the lord of the manor, a village priest, or an educated magistrate. Unlike in the Old World, a person of low birth could work hard, acquire wealth, and be happy. Freedom, equality, and individualism permitted each person to look out for his own welfare. In this way, the great potential and talent hidden within each human being was unleashed; as a result, America became an amazing place, the home of unheard-of prosperity, widely shared.
In the third decade of the twenty-first century, the storytelling of America has lost believability. The global economic crisis of 2008 caused many citizens to conclude that the financial elite callously manipulated markets for its own profit, that big banks were bailed out at the expense of “the little guy,” that the tax code was written by the wealthy, and that equal opportunity for all no longer existed.
On social media and on cable TV, two different stories of America emerged, one of an imaged future where each individual is free to choose any lifestyle he or she desires unhindered by social pressure and law; the other of the past, sometimes imaged, where America embodied the traditional values of the Protestantism, essentially middle-class life in 1950s. In the absence of a unifying war, true believers in these two dominant stories will probably continue to work to politically destroy each other. Conspiracy theories, hate speech, and political extremism abound on the Web, further splintering storytelling. The United States has become ungovernable. If the recent Supreme Court decision that reversed Roe v. Wade is indicative of the future, more political authority will shift to the states.
I would not hazard a guess where America will be in 100 years. But, in the short term, say 25 years, modern life will be dominated by the global economy, mass migrations, and digital technology, all three undermining the Nation State. To buy American is virtually impossible. Last month I replaced an old wireless router made in the USA with a new one made in Vietnam for a California company whose intellectual property rights and profits are lodged in Ireland. Many Americans are worried that the large number of immigrants from Mexico and Central America will destroy the ethnic purity and cultural heritage of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America. Recent data from the Census Bureau indicates that by 2044 the non-Hispanic white-alone population will be a minority.[30]
Wars no longer unify Americans. The protests against the Vietnam War made universal conscription impossible. The two Iraq Wars and the twenty-year Afghanistan War were regarded with indifference, as if those military engagements belonged to the government, not its citizens.
The Internet greatly reduced the size of the world. I grew up in the tiny world of Union Lake, Michigan. Now, if I were twelve, I would be reading the New York Times, closely following the upcoming national election and watching videos of the destruction of Ukraine, no doubt thinking war is insane and often pointless. Who is not sickened by the wanton destruction of Ukraine seen in the New York Times?
The United States of America has lost its aura and is falling apart and losing its “spiritual” authority over American souls. Go to the Vietnam Memorial, contemplate the 58,272 men and women who threw their lives away for nothing, and see if you accept the words of three U.S. Presidents on Vietnam. John F. Kennedy: “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place;” Lyndon B. Johnson: “This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity;” Richard Milhous Nixon: “I’m not going to be the first American president to lose a war.”
No state or local government can command its citizens to sacrifice their lives to make its “power credible” or give transcendent meaning to its “people.” The storytelling of the national government cannot be transferred downward. Even as a grade-schooler, I would have laughed when I heard that Michiganders were the chosen people or that I had a duty to promote the glory of Commerce Township.
With the freeing of American souls from the illusions of the Nation State, some of us will fall into nihilism and despair, others will succumb to materialism and popular culture, yet others will demand their churches reinstitute the beautiful liturgies of the past, and others will embrace the beauty of Bach and Mozart or their equivalent in physics and mathematics. With the unexpected weakening of the Nation State, Beauty prevails over Power.
Endnotes
[1] See Fiona Hill and Angela Stent, “The World Putin Wants: How Distortions About the Past Feed Delusions About the Future,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2022).
[2] State Anthem of the Soviet Union.
[3] Heinrich von Treitschke, quoted by Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: Volume Two: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and The Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 65.
[4] A partial, conservative catalog of the political murders of the twentieth century is mind-boggling, unbelievable, but sadly undeniable. Deaths: World War I (military only): 9,700,000; Russian Revolution and Civil War: 9,000,000; forced collectivization: 3,000,000 Ukrainian peasants; Russian gulag: 1,000,000 political prisoners; Spanish Civil War: 1,200,000; World War II (military and civilian): 51,000,000; Nazi camps: 6,000,000 Jews and 6,000,000 Slavs, Gypsies, and political prisoners; Japanese Rape of Nanking: 300,000 Chinese; Allied bombing of Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne, and Dresden: 500,000 German civilians; Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 140,000 Japanese civilians; Vietnam War (military and civilian): 5,000,000; Chinese Great Leap Forward: 30,000,000. These numbers are low estimates. For the difficulty of estimating mass political murders, see Lewis M. Simons, “Genocide and the Science of Proof,” National Geographic Magazine (January 2006): 28-35 and Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” The New York Review of Books (July 16, 2009).
[5] Kaiser Wilhelm II, quoted in Voices from the Great War, ed. Peter Vansittart (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984), p. 4.
[6] Horatio Bottomley, ibid., pp. 40-41. Capitals in the original.
[7] See Boyd C. Shafer, Faces of Nationalism: New Realities and Old Myths (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 246.
[8] Ibid., p. 255.
[9] See Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” 1854, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174586.
[10] Albert Einstein, “Autobiographical Notes,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. Paul Schilpp (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 33.
[11] Roger Penrose, “Black Holes,” in The State of the Universe, ed. Geoffrey Bath (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 128.
[12] Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Harper & Row, New York, 1971), pp. 68-69.
[13] Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1938), p. 313.
[14] Werner Heisenberg, “The Meaning of Beauty in the Exact Sciences,” in Across the Frontier (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 167.
[15] John A. Wheeler, “The Universe as a Home for Man,” American Scientist 62 (Nov.-Dec. 1974): 688.
[16] Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), p. 133.
[17] George Thomson, The Inspiration of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 18.
[18] James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Huebsch, 1916), p. 248.
[19] Francis Bacon, “Of Beauty” in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 132. Available http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/.
[20] Leonard Bernstein, The Infinite Variety of Music (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), p. 198. Italics in the original.
[21] G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (London: Cambridge University Press, 1941), p. 113. Italics in the original.
[22] Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1872–1914 (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1967), pp. 37–38.
[23] Mikhail Baryshnikov on “The Orchard” and Putin’s War.
[24] 1 Samuel 17. All Biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version.
[25] Luke 1:37.
[26] John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, ed. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 199. Our text is in modern English.
[27] Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939), p. 419.
[28] John Adams, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L.H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1961), vol. I, p. 282.
[29] Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence, of course, knew that John Locke, the philosopher who supplied the theoretical foundations of both modern democracy and capitalism, held that government secured life, liberty, and property, not the pursuit of happiness.
[30] “New Census Bureau Report Analyzes U.S. Population Projections” (3 March 2015), https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-tps16.html.