
 | From the Editor's Desk
Baruch Spinoza and the Art of Thinking in Dangerous Times - The New Yorker (No paywall) No American has to fear Adriaan Koerbagh’s fate, no matter how unpopular his or her opinions. Still, Buruma argues, “liberal thinking is being challenged from many sides where ideologies are increasingly entrenched, by bigoted reactionaries as well as by progressives who believe there can be no deviation from their chosen paths to justice.” And it is certainly true that, in the age of social media, informal pressure to toe a certain line can be as effective as legal threats. Offending the wrong people, even for a moment, can blow up the career of anyone from a Y.A. novelist to an Ivy League president.
In calling Spinoza a “messiah,” Buruma follows Heinrich Heine, the nineteenth-century German Jewish poet, who compared the philosopher to “his divine cousin, Jesus Christ. Like him, he suffered for his teachings. Like him, he wore the crown of thorns.” According to Jonathan Israel, a historian whose encyclopedic biography “Spinoza, Life and Legend” came out last year, “No other personage of his era came even close to being so decried, denounced and condemned in weighty texts of exhaustive length, over so long a span of time, in Latin, Dutch, French, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, and other languages.”
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