What transforms us?
Philosophy is only rarely transformative, being neither a good cure for misery nor, thankfully, a cause of it.
ReadTag: Ethics
The Utopia Experiment
Imagine living in a community where people stay for anything from between a few weeks to a few months, where each member has a skill that she will teach to others and contributes work, not money. Its founder, the science writer Dylan Evans, describes it in The Utopia Experiment as “a cross between Plato’s Academy and The Beach”. It ended up more like Lord of the Flies meets I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. Within a year of his arrival in 2006, Evans found himself in a psychiatric hospital, his savings spent and his long-crossed bridges from academia smouldering in the distance. Evans’s account is a gripping, slow-motion car-crash. You can’t take your eyes off it, try as you might to hide them behind your hands.
ReadWe still, we still, rock you!
Anyone tempted to put the mockers on the rockers should remember that no one understands the absurdities of heavy rock like its fans and practitioners. You certainly can’t accuse Blue Öyster Cult of lacking a sense of irony when their opening song is “This ain’t the summer of love”, which they follow with another containing the line “Our best years have passed us by”. They even play “Godzilla”, inviting the taunt that they are dinosaurs, or even as Wishbone Ash’s Martin Turner’s kids call him, rock fossils.
ReadThe Doomsday Clock
Our problem is that we are pretty good at dealing with our state-of-the-world anxieties, but bad at dealing with their root causes. Perhaps the growth of positive psychology has unintentionally exacerbated this by making us all more aware of what we can do to worry less, rather than what we can do to make the source of our worries go away. It is, after all, easier to conquer our fears than to vanquish the things we are afraid of.
ReadAre good intentions enough?
The value of human life and society is not to be found purely by counting up the number of lives and how happy each one is. There is also a profound value in the presence of good motives and values, and the absence of wicked ones.
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