Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague Archive 2008

Dear Colleague Archive 2008

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Archived Yi-Fu Tuan 'Dear Colleague' Letters
Date of Letter	Topic Summary	ID
29-December-2008	"The rule seems to be: Mutual understanding and the human touch are in inverse relationship to frequency of encounter and kinship..."
7-December-2008	Reply to friends who sent greetings, and all readers
5-December-2008	[posted on December 12, 2008] Concerning salutations
5-December-2008	On the occasion of Yi-Fu Tuan's birthday, greetings from your colleagues!
26-September-2008	On Alexander the Great, the Mongols. Does good follow evil?
16-September-2008	"Western pundits emphasize the negative whenever they can. They are not doing this because they are anti-Chinese. They do it from habit. The basic idea is, You show how smart you are by attacking another."
28-August-2008	On the program 'Planet Earth," Western Civilization courses: "The idea of achievement, that anything worthwhile was done, that great institutions, noble buildings, sublime artworks, and astonishing science had been added to the Earth, seems to have disappeared from serious history."
17-August-2008	" "We are all created equal." Ever since the eighteenth century, Westerners of conscience have been hassled by this statement. At one level, it is manifestly false."
4-August-2008	Regarding differences in official cruelty practiced by the Imperial Roman and the Imperial Chinese empires.
25-July-2008	Regarding the film The Dark Knight and the book Human Goodness: "If we fear evil—and who doesn't?—one answer is to be evil. The other answer is to escape into good."
14-July-2008	On Joseph Epstein's book, Friendship, and the surprising variety of conditions under which friendship is possible.
1-July-2008	"In science and technology, again what impress me are not the techniques of survival, which we share with other animals, but rather thrusts into neverland and the results they bring back that have little or no practical value."
21-June-2008	"Does this mean that war is inevitable, that it is grounded in human nature? Whatever the answer, war does one thing well: it heightens the emotions and projects people out of the dullness of their lives to participate, however humbly, on the stage of history."
10-June-2008	"George W's outstanding achievement is to restore, almost single-handedly, the idea of "The ugly American." With remarkable political skill, he has—in just seven years—turned the country from being the most admired and most loved in the world to one of the least admired, least loved."
30-May-2008	"What expenditure is justified to keep a human being alive? The answer depends on the wealth of the society and on the value society places on a human individual, and that gets us back to the question, 'What is man that Thou shouldst be mindful of him?'"
22-May-2008	"Are we afraid of deeper revelations? Or are we afraid that there are no deeper revelations? For me, it is the latter."
10-May-2008	" I find this difference between physicists and biologists puzzling. The only explanation I can come up with hinges on "beauty." Physicists are struck by the beauty—the mathematical elegance—of natural laws. Biologists, so far as I know, never see anything beautiful in what they study..."
25-April-2008	"The Chinese government is supposed to be wily and nefarious, yet it seems helpless in the face of this onslaught. It is helpless because, in part, the words used in the onslaught are all invented by the West—democracy, freedom, human rights, and such like."
14-April-2008	On exile: "...what happened to ancient Israel and Babylon seems to be happening to Tibet."
1-April-2008	"China forgets that it was once an imperial power, spreading domination, but also high culture, to distant lands and peoples. What it cannot forget are the humiliations, especially since they occurred so recently."
21-March-2008	On Tibet and protest against "cultural genocide." On Hilary Clinton and her character.
15-March-2008	On luxury, Ghengis Khan: "...luxury is a certain bareness, apparently because, whereas the one offer[s] a surfeit of sensations, the other in its bareness allow[s] imagination to soar. Imagination levels the playing field, compensating material lack with imagined wealth."
4-March-2008	"To most people, wealth means material possessions. But there are other kinds of wealth—social wealth, cultural wealth, and environmental wealth."
22-February-2008	" 'Hope' is a favorite word with Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton counters it with 'experience.' These words are tricky to use because they have both negative and positive meanings."
12-February-2008	"Money clogs the spiritual arteries just as cholesterol clogs the biological ones. The effect of both is death—spiritual death in the one, physical death in the other."
1-February-2008	On words, language, and the debates between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
21-January-2008	On "...the degree of consistency between a scholar/thinker's life and his articulated thoughts. No consistency is demanded if one's subject matter is technical...But what if one is a moral or political philosopher?"
3-January-2008	On Samuel Johnson: " I have known contentment but not genuine happiness. They are not the same."