{"id":1510,"date":"2015-09-17T07:28:24","date_gmt":"2015-09-17T11:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/?p=1510"},"modified":"2015-09-17T07:28:24","modified_gmt":"2015-09-17T11:28:24","slug":"happiness-optimism-and-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/?p=1510","title":{"rendered":"Happiness, optimism, and reality"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Read this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2015\/09\/21\/blood-and-soil\">review by Adam Gopnik <\/a>too early this morning.\u00a0\u00a0 While Gopnik is assessing a recent history of the Holocaust, his final paragraph on Voltaire and the reality of building new things struck me as all too relevant to my teaching career:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Enlightenment philosophers who insisted that the world could be improved were right. Voltaire was one of them. The mistake was to think that, once improved, it couldn\u2019t get worse again. Voltaire\u2019s point was not that optimism about mankind\u2019s fate is false. It was that, in the face of a Heaven known to be decidedly unbenevolent,<strong> it takes unrelenting, thankless, and mostly ill-rewarded work to cultivate happiness here on earth,<\/strong> no matter what color the soil.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div class=\"csl-bib-body\">\n<div class=\"csl-entry\">Gopnik, Adam. \u201cWhy We Keep Studying the Holocaust\u201d September 21, 2015. http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2015\/09\/21\/blood-and-soil.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Read this review by Adam Gopnik too early this morning.\u00a0\u00a0 While Gopnik is assessing a recent history of the Holocaust, his final paragraph on Voltaire and the reality of building new things struck me as all too relevant to my teaching career: The Enlightenment philosophers who insisted that the world could be improved were right. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/?p=1510\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Happiness, optimism, and reality<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8rNFZ-om","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1511,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1510\/revisions\/1511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrclapper.com\/blog2\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}