Neuroscience is finding what propaganda has long known: nostalgia doesn’t need real memories – an imagined past works too He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he […]
Perennial philosophy
Aldous Huxley argued that all religions in the world were underpinned by universal beliefs and experiences. Was he right? When I was a teenager, I came across Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (1945). I was so inspired by its array of mystical jewels that, like a magpie, I stole it from my school’s library. I still have […]
Is the Modern Mass Extinction Overrated?
We are ignoring the gains that balance the losses. If you want to measure how the state of the world is changing, and that’s a valuable thing to do, you need some kind of reference point. It’s natural we take some past point and monitor things into the future. But when you reference back to […]
THE INTELLECTUAL WE DESERVE
Jordan Peterson’s popularity is the sign of a deeply impoverished political and intellectual landscape How does one even address material like this? It can’t be “refuted.” Are we ruled by a dragon of chaos? Is the dragon feminine? Does “the ‘state’ of preconscious paradise” have a “voluntary encounter with the unknown”? Is the episodic really […]