The Quasi-Weekly Listener’s Digest (9-3-09)

Below are some things that caught my attention during my recent listening of The Economist (These are from the August 1st – 7th 2009 print edition, the text of which is available at http://www.economist.com). More background on these listening activities appears at the bottom of this post.

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The obituary of this week’s issue introduced me to a fascinating man who grew up in Nazi-occupied Poland, emigrated from Poland in 1968 because of a “communist-inspired anti-semitic campaign there,” had a career as a philosopher at Oxford, and was an anti-communist who had been a Marxist.  His major work was “Main Currents of Marxism:  It Rise, Growth, and Dissolution.”  He once responded to a critic:  “The only medicine communism has invented—the centralised, beyond social control, state ownership of the national wealth and one-party rule—is worse than the illness it is supposed to cure; it is less efficient economically and it makes the bureaucratic character of social relations an absolute principle.”  His most famous quote was “We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.”  (Obituary – -Leszek Kolakowski – – Jul 30th 2009 – -From The Economist print edition – -Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish-born Oxford philosopher, died on July 17th, aged 81)

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NOTE ABOUT MY LISTENING ACTIVITIES: I listen to The Economist each week by downloading mp3 files available to subscribers, then using a cheap mp3 player while running, working out at the gym, commuting, or doing chores. There are about 8 hours of audio per week, sometimes more when The Economist has a special edition or includes a supplement, such as their quaterly technology update. By noting certain items I heard I reinforce my memory of them, and this written record will help me be able to refer to them in the future. And, if these things appeal to you, the entire articles, or the entire edition of the “newspaper,” may be of interest to you. If you go to http://www.economist.com, you’ll find a tab toward the upper left of the homepage that will take you to “this week’s print edition,” from which you may also find “previous print editions.” (Don’t go to http://www.theeconomist.com, unless you want to see a website put up by some fan of Alan Greenspan)