Gentleman, scholar, acrobat
Sam Harris on the science of good and evil, Intelligence Squared, London, 11 April 2011
American philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris, author of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, is on a mission to break down the longstanding philosophical distinction between facts and values. Continue reading “Love your enemies… but don’t let them eat you”
Western observers with no particular knowledge of Indian politics and society tend to assume the renaming of Indian cities in the 1990s was simply a belated anti-colonialist gesture. Some might even wrongly assume as I once did that ‘Mumbai’ had been an established Indian city before its takeover and mispronunciation by the British. Gyan Prakash’s book is meant as a challenge to more sophisticated misunderstandings than these, but it is equally valuable as an introduction to many of the issues facing modern India, through the story (or rather stories) of its most glamorous city. Continue reading “Yeh hai Bambai meri jaan!”
The Return of the Public, by Dan Hind
Dan Hind’s clarion call for a return of the spirit of the radical political tradition rooted in English republicanism is compromised by his suspicion towards private interests.
Continue reading “A curious plea for a disinterested public”
Taming the Gods: religion and democracy on three continents, by Ian Buruma (Princeton University Press, 2010)
Ian Buruma’s short book is a kind of sequel to Death in Amsterdam, his book about the murder of Theo van Gogh and the limits of tolerance. It goes beneath the superficial counterpositions of today’s religion debates – religion versus secularism, multiculturalism versus intolerance – to identify some more interesting dynamics at work. Perhaps most usefully, Buruma shows that ideological disorientation within Western culture is at least as important as tensions between West and East, or even ‘secular liberalism’ and radical Islam. Continue reading “The politics of secularism”
Continue reading “‘These rocks are here for me, waiting for the drill’”
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
Thomas Cromwell was an extraordinary man living at a time when extraordinary qualities were beginning to count even in common men like himself, the son of a Putney blacksmith. Continue reading “Fanfare for the common man”
‘Calvinist’ has become a dirty word, used to describe especially dour people. We have forgotten that John Calvin was not only a severe Christian but also a key figure in the intellectual making of the modern world.
Beat the Booze, by Edmund Tirbutt and Helen Tirbutt
Britain’s apparently pathological relationship with alcohol is an increasingly prominent concern in the media. We are told that far too many people are drinking far too much, leading to antisocial behaviour and lost work days in the short term, and addiction and chronic disease in the long term. Politicians propose everything from better education to steeper prices as a means of weaning us off the bottle.
Generation Kill, directed by Susanna White and Simon Cellan Jones / produced and written by David Simon, Ed Burns et al (HBO)
Credit and Blame, by Charles Tilly (Princeton University Press)
Dolan Cummings 