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Category Archives: Ethics
Michael Polanyi in 1960 on Teilhard de Chardin on evolution
Michael Polanyi was highly suspicious of the hyper-reductionism of neo-Darwinism. It’s reduction of the evolution of a thing so vast as life into a single causal mechanism. And it was a good call. Darwin himself had proposed that natural selection … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Philosophy, Science
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The Fertility Rate: the Best Dam(n) Wellbeing Index Going Around?
Valiant attempts have been made to measure happiness and wellbeing. People much smarter than me have developed fancy indices, and people even smarter than that, such as our own Nicholas Gruen, has called bullshit on many of them. What I … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, Health, Life, Philosophy, Social Policy, Society
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Polarisation and the Case for Citizens’ Juries
Cross posted from Quillette from 16 Feb 2019, but now behind a paywall. When a conversation is not a conversation: party political discourse in the early 21st century I It looks like liberal democracy is falling apart. The chaos of … Continue reading
Fast foodification: what is it, what’s driving it, how do we stop it?
In this discussion, Peyton Bowman and I discuss my term ‘fast-foodification’. I coined the word trying to describe modern politics. The techniques used by politicians and their professional enablers are optimised to attract votes in the same way that McDonalds and … Continue reading
Posted in Cultural Critique, Democracy, Ethics, Philosophy, Political theory
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Czesław Miłosz: Alpha, the Moralist
Czesław Miłosz is a Polish writer and Nobel Laureate who first came to Western attention in the early 1950s with the publication of The Captive Mind one of the earliest exposes of the nightmare of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe … Continue reading
Posted in Ethics, History, Literature, Philosophy
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Practical steps towards Ivan Illich’s world
I. Introduction Owing to quite a bit of recent hoopla about him, I’ve recently been reading Ivan Illich. Like the Molière character who discovers he’s been speaking prose his whole life, I discover I’ve been thinking a little like Illich for … Continue reading
