Et essay. Lyder som historien om Ørestaden. Arkitekter og planøkonomer kan ødelægge hvad som helst. Ørestaden er den inkarnerede grimhed, men det kulturradikale segment sidder jo på “narrativet” i pressen og støtter vennerne. Vi har ingen Scruton herhjemme, der kan komme med et par borgerlige ord:
A plea for beauty: a manifesto for a new urbanism
Roger Scruton | March 29, 2012
Our culture is a culture of cities, and without cities we could not conceivably have enjoyed the enormous scientific, economic, and political advances of the Enlightenment. Cities are also the heart of the modern nation state, and every country that modernizes does so by mass migration from country to city. No environmental problem is more important, therefore, than that posed by the degradation of our cities, and we must reflect on the factors that might prevent or reverse the decay that we are witnessing. To fight the blight, some policymakers have embraced urban planning. Although some successful examples of planned cities exist, such planning has often failed to produce city centers where people want to live or spend leisure time. To plan or not to plan is a false choice. Instead, civic leaders should think in terms of fostering beauty through the use of aesthetic constraints. These constraints may help reduce sprawl and make American city centers attractive homes—in the vein of great European cities such as Paris and Florence—rather than deserted eyesores.
Key points in this Outlook:
- The decline of American cities, which saps the nation’s social, cultural, economic, and political vitality, is due largely to the ugliness of their centers.
- Neither market solutions nor centralized master planning can save our cities.
- Urban renewal depends on attracting the middle class with the kind of beauty that flourishes in cities and obeying aesthetic side constraints that create a sense of settlement.
Mere HER hos The American Enterprise Institute – AEI. Om pseudo-videnskab:
Brain drain
Roger Scruton – 17 March 2012
Neuroscience wants to be the answer to everything. It isn’t
There are many reasons for believing the brain is the seat of consciousness. Damage to the brain disrupts our mental processes; specific parts of the brain seem connected to specific mental capacities; and the nervous system, to which we owe movement, perception, sensation and bodily awareness, is a tangled mass of pathways, all of which end in the brain. This much was obvious to Hippocrates. Even Descartes, who believed in a radical divide between soul and body, acknowledged the special role of the brain in tying them together.
The discovery of brain imaging techniques has given rise to the belief that we can look at people’s thoughts and feelings, and see how ‘information’ is ‘processed’ in the head. The brain is seen as a computer, ‘hardwired’ by evolution to deal with the long vanished problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and operating in ways that are more transparent to the person with the scanner than to the person being scanned. Our own way of understanding ourselves must therefore be replaced by neuroscience, which rejects the whole enterprise of a specifically ‘humane’ understanding of the human condition.
Mere HER i The Spectator.
Andre kilder: Conservative Home, ABC Radio,
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