A Cultural History of the United States: Questions 1

It's a winner take all mentality in America. Everything is transactional and whatever I gain, someone else HAS to lose. And as soon as I do better and you don't, you WILL hold me back, and I can't have that.

Where can we ask questions?

7:17 That's actually a lot like what happened with the Catholic Church. I took a course on the Peperstraat Reformation a few years ago, and one of the rings that cake up was that around that time, there had been a great deal of both unnoticeable and tolerated local diversity of practice, and improvements in communication and transportation led to investing recognition of those differences and investing conflict derived from divergences that already existed. Local conflicts between people who just disagreed with each other as well as centralizing conflicts between the Church trying to reconcile those differences into a more unified doctrine.

33:17 And a lot of us still do. You ask how far something is, odds are good you're gonna get an answer in terms of time rather than distance. A three hour drive, Treaty twenty minutes in the bus, whatever.

Can someone please help Wes with the Mic setup and sound mixing?

My question is when and why did someone from lets say New York state circa 1960 didn't particularly care or was concerned about the social policy of let's say Idaho but in a couple decades not only cared but called for federal intervention to change it?

At the end of "Religions in Four Dimensions," Walter Kaufmann speculates that religion and landscape have a relation and specifically hypothesizes that the desert in it's singularity may have been a contributing factor to monotheism. How would you say american identity and landscape fit? I know in places like Colorado, they have higher amounts of cult activity, what about the isolation and 30 days of night in Alaska, or say the people who live deep in the Appalachian mountains- living in Canada, we don't have anything like that to compare. Does it have something to do with the sheer size of it and how generally dispersed people can be? Thanks!

I take that McCormick quote a bit differently. Cooperation is an important, even an essential part of society, you can't even talk about a suçoter if there isn't cooperation between people. But cooperation isn't an absolute, it's not a monolith. We have conflict within our cooperative society, and between societies. The dangerous thing isn't cooperation, it's the aspiration for an end to conflict. You're a philosopher, you live in a world of nuance and infinite complexity, but a lot of people genuinely hope for a future with no conflict, with perfect harmony and cooperation, and that belief is dangerous because it's impossible. The belief in a perfect world can justify anything done to achieve it, but when that rainy is impossible, the justification is meaningless. It's the old saw that the perfect is the enemy of the good writ large. EDIT: To be fair, I don't have the full context of his writing, I'm going off just the quote and my own preconceptions.