In Defense of Big Love - The New York Times - 1 views
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Beauty is what you experience when you look at a flower or a lovely face. It is contained, pleasurable, intimate and romantic. Sublime is what you feel when you look at a mountain range or a tornado. It involves awe, veneration, maybe even a touch of fear
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neuroscientists have shown that the experiences of beauty and awe activate different parts of the brain.
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I’d say that in America today some of the little loves are fraying, and big love is almost a foreign language. Almost nobody speaks about the American project in the same ardent tones that were once routine.
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The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime is the distinction between the intimate and the transcendent. This sort of distinction doesn’t just happen in aesthetics, but in life in general. We have big and little loves.
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Big love involves thinking in sweeping historical terms. But today the sense that America is pursuing a noble mission in the world has been humbled by failures and passivity. The country feels more divided than unified around common purpose
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Big love involves politics, and thus compromise, competition and messiness. Americans today are less likely to discern the noble within the grittiness of reality. The very words that the founders used to describe their Big love for their country sound archaic: glory, magnanimity, sacred honor and greatness.
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There is, in sum, less animating desire in the country at the moment, and therefore less energy and daring. The share of Americans moving across state lines in search of opportunity has fallen by more than half since the 1970s. The rate of new business creation is down. Productivity is falling for the first time in three decades. Economic growth is anemic. There’s a spiritual and cultural element behind these trends