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Last fall, we went to the beach in North Carolina. The last book I picked up there was The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. Despite back-cover claims that it's "utterly absorbing," and having won a Pulitzer, it's pretty dry reading, but it's informativeness makes up for it. Below is one of the last chunks I marked, about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.:

The key to Holmes's civil liberties opinions is the key to all his jurisprudence: it is that he thought only in terms of aggregate social forces; he had no concern for the individual. The spectacle of individuals falling victim to dominant political or economic tendencies, when those tendencies had been instantiated in duly enacted laws, gave him a kind of chilly satisfaction. It struck him as analogous to the death of soldiers in a battlefield victory, and justified on the same groups -- that for the group to move ahead, some people must inevitably fall by the wayside. "Every society rests on the death of men," he liked to provoke his friends by saying. He had, consequently, virtually no faith in the notion of individual human agency. On his view, successful people, like Morgan and Rockefeller, just had a better grasp of social tendencies than unsuccessful people did. Everyone is simply riding the weave chance has put them on. Some people know how to surf; some people drown.

I don't really agree with that way of looking at things, but it's an interesting articulation of that notion. Also, note the use of both colon and semi-colon in the first sentence: that's always attractive.

Another interesting point about Holmes and many of the other "thinkers" discussed in the book (aside from the fact that essentially all of them were stinking rich and -- not to be too crazy in my seat-of-the-pants theories -- thus had enough time to actually sit around and think) is their wont to use provocative phrases frequently, e.g., "every society rests on the death of men." That's a common thing among some weblogers as well. Though the provokers may not be as serious as their words are, they couch things in very combative ways. It seems geeks often fall into this as well.

I can tend to be quite the opposite, oftentimes seeming extremely wishy-washy and ready to back-pedal at the drop of a hat. It's probably because I find those provocative people annoying as hell, like some ass doing that thing where their finger comes a millimeter close to you and they say "I'm not touching you...I'm not touching you...": you don't have to tell me, just don't do it. Similarly, people don't need to provoke me into thinking with strident talk, they just need to start talking to me. And, being a person with an almost relativist view of the world, oftentimes, the only honest position ("honest," being essentially absurd itself in that view) seems to be wishy-washy.