‘Post-materialism.’ That’s the term being bandied about more and more to capture the change in values increasingly noticeable among the generation now very much coming to the fore (roughly, the post-boomers, born, say, between ’65 and ’85). I’m tempted to say we’re witnessing a ‘satisficing’-shift in attitudes, with respect to more ‘materialist’ goods, at any … Continue reading
From today’s New York Times: David Brooks on the emergence of moral individualism The odd thing here is that we tend to be surprised and think something has gone wrong. If you start down the road of privatizing the good, as we did at the birth of Modernity, this is where you inevitably arrive. What’s … Continue reading
John Lanchester · The Non-Scenic Route to the Place We’re Going Anyway: The Belgian Solution · LRB 8 September 2011.
Age of Outrage – NYTimes.com.
What made the West modern was the progression of its philosophy into political form. With Locke’s liberalism, the privilege of pursuing the true and the good inaugurated by Plato was wrested back from the religious (and anyone else who claimed authority by divine right) and redistributed to the People to whom, apparently, it had always … Continue reading
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