Rothfield, Lawrence

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Hannah Rothfield

Lawrence Rothfield is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Chicago, where he co-founded the Cultural Policy Center. He is the editor of Unsettling “Sensation”: Arts Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy and Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection After the Iraq War.

On Rorotoko:

On his book The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum
(Our Cover Feature of May 10, 2009)

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011