Should we talk to ourselves?
We should practise taking the role of the attentive listener and be prepared to talk back to ourselves, and be our own best critical friend.
ReadTag: Ethics
Should we seek material security?
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…
ReadJustifying Arts and Culture
We should not just run down the road marked “evidence base” but should also make an argument base for the arts, one which is convincing independent of any measurable social goods. ACE’s chair Sir Peter Bazalgette points towards something like this when he looks to “articulate a new language of cultural value that will help all of us to understand better the essential contribution that the arts make to our lives.” He is right, and that new language is not the old bureaucratic language of economic and social impacts.
ReadShould you keep your options open?
In 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.
ReadThe Shrink & The Sage meet Ranulph Fiennes
Fiennes’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.
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