The myth of self-sufficiency
The pursuit of national self-sufficiency is an understandable reaction against a rapacious globalised economy – but it is neither possible nor desirable.
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Category: Articles & Essays
The Vatican vice that should worry us all
One cause of the Vatican’s failure to address abuse should worry everyone in our polarised societies: The more we think of our opponents as evil, the more we feel we are on the side of virtue and the blinder we become to our own shortcomings.
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Amy Coney Barrett and the myth of Christian family values
Jesus was anti-family, opposed the condemnation of sexual sinners, and was completely silent on abortion. It is a mystery how evangelicals today square this with their righteous condemnation of the behaviour of others and their desire to control it by law. The Jesus who said “Judge not, that ye be not judged: condemn not, that ye be not condemned” would be appalled to see his so-called followers today look to the Supreme Court to enforce their values.
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Think Jacques Derrida was a charlatan?
Derrida’s “nagging fear that those who saw him as a charlatan were right never left him.” Given his whole project was one of radical doubt, he could hardly have felt otherwise. He was in this respect more truly a philosopher than those who question everything except the peculiarities of their own methods of questioning.
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The pandemic shows what freedom means
Perhaps we will soon look back and say, as Sartre did: ‘The circumstances, atrocious as they often were, finally made it possible for us to live, without pretence or false shame, the hectic and impossible existence that is known as the lot of man.’
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