“One cannot maintain one’s ‘competitive advantage’ if one helps other people. The advantage of ‘early adoption’ would disappear––it would not be thought of––in a community that put a proper value on mutual help. Such advantages would not be thought of by people intent on loving their neighbors as themselves. And it is impossible to imagine […]
“Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little […]
“The hallmark of insecurity is bravado.” ––The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson, loc. 3700 “How absurd we humans in fact are! How misapplied is our self-admiration––as we can readily see by observing other self-admiring humans! How richly just and healthful is self-ridicule! And yet how few of us are capable of it. I […]
Lately I’ve been wondering who’s going to take up Edward O. Wilson’s mantle after he dies. For decades, Wilson has penned accessible, intelligent books that help nonspecialists understand what he calls the “Evolutionary Epic”––the grand narrative of terrestrial life. “People need a sacred narrative,” Wilson wrote in 1998. “Homo sapiens is far more than a […]
“Seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only […]
“Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and […]
“After 1908, and especially after 1945, capitalist greed was somewhat reined in, not least due to the fear of Communism. Yet inequities are still rampant. The economic pie of 2014 is far larger than the pie of 1500, but it is distributed so unevenly that many African peasants and Indonesian labourers return home after a […]
“Why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.” ––Sapiens: A […]
Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is a superlative novel in every respect. It is also the most emotionally challenging book I’ve ever read. Even after being forewarned by a friend, I was still completely unprepared for the onslaught of sensations and reactions this story elicited from me. Reading it was like being caught in a […]
“At the dawn of the third millennium, the future of evolutionary humanism is unclear. For sixty years after the end of the war against Hitler it was taboo to link humanism with evolution and to advocate using biological methods to ‘upgrade’ Homo sapiens. But today such projects are back in vogue. No one speaks about […]