Six things… that challenge truth
I’m not convinced we live in a post-truth world. But truth is certainly in some kind of trouble, challenged on many fronts. Surprisingly, the sources of several of those challenges are good things…
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A level playing field? No thanks, we’re British
It was just a small practical change to help keep people moving. Transport for London painted some green lanes on the King’s Cross Victoria line platform to keep space clear for passengers to alight without having to face a wall of commuters just as eager to get on. But not since Mars of Slough removed the little cardboard tray from its Bounty bars has so much outrage been caused by so little…
ReadMeeting of Minds
The Infidel and The Professor is a lean, easy to digest read while being rich with interesting detail. It is anchored by weighty scholarship but not burdened by its excessive demonstration. Pick it up and you might find yourself agreeing with Hume that “reading and sauntering and lownging and dozing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness.”
ReadThe vacuous religious vacuum theory
There is no religion-shaped space that needs to be filled. Rather, there are many spaces which religions have managed to occupy. The need for meaning, for example, is not religious, but it is a need religions attempt to fulfil. The same is true of the needs for values, community, the marking of life-stages.
ReadThe end of the line for queueing
To think of queueing as morally superior is to confuse fairness with orderliness, a particularly British mistake. It is no coincidence that the golden age of queueing was when the class system was still rigidly in place. Queues offered reassuring images of egalitarianism when the reality was anything but.
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