Americans are the 10th richest people on earth, yet as a recent Gallup-Healthways report puts it, the country has “good-but-not-great wellbeing compared with the rest of the world”. Many people think they know why…
ReadThe cult of reason did not prove to be as popular as the Catholicism it displaced. We should not be surprised. Unlike religion, rationality cannot tell us how to live. Reason gives us no reasons to act.
ReadIn the physical sciences, a plethora of theories is often a sign of weakness, an admission that we haven’t yet worked out which is right. In ethical and political thinking, however, I suspect there is no such thing as one, all-encompassing true theory. Different models describe different aspects of the world but none captures them all.
ReadFiennes’s inner psyche appears to be not so much a closed book as a blank page. It’s not that Fiennes, now 70, isn’t a charming and engaging conversationalist. It’s just that he doesn’t appear to do introspection and says he’s bad at “hypotheses or inward-looking philosophy”. Ask him a question that invites him to look inwards, and he answers it with a story about something he has done. It is as though for him Hannah Arendt’s distinction between the active and contemplative life is absolute.
ReadIf you find yourself drawing on your resilience a lot, then you ought to ask yourself why you keep hitting the floor.
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