Britain has become ever more diverse in the past few decades. But is this a threat or an advantage? “When solidarity and diversity pull against each other, which side should public policy favour? Diversity can increasingly look after itself – the underlying drift of social and economic development favours it. Solidarity, on the other hand, thrives at times of adversity, hence its high point just after the second world war and its steady decline ever since as affluence, mobility, value diversity and (in some areas) immigration have loosened the ties of a common culture.”
Category: ideas
The Illusion Of Saftey Makes Us Less Safe
Does all this added security post-911 actually make us safer? Actually, most of it doesn’t, and some of it even makes us less safe. Consider ID checks: “The ostensible reason is that ID checks make us all safer, but that’s just not so. In most cases, identification has very little to do with security. Let’s debunk the myths…”
Does Money Equal Art?
Is it true that “nothing great ever happens in art unless there’s some big money somewhere on the scene?” That “there must be some kind of economic boom and not too much warring” and that “peace tends to equal commerce and commerce equals art?”
Cheap Music (And Movies) For All!
How to make all this file-sharing business legal and profitable? Harvard professor Terry Fisher (a very smart guy, and a leading thinker on intellectual property issues) has devised a system that would pay artists and their recording labels and make the trading of music and other digital media cheap and plentiful. And what would it cost? Six bucks a month, and painlessly collected…
When Biology and Technology Converge
We’ve tended to distinguish sharply between things and biology. Biology has always occupied a special status, but “advances in fields as disparate as computer science and genetics are dealing our status another blow. Researchers are learning that markets and power grids have much in common with plants and animals. Their findings lead to a startling conclusion: Life isn’t the exception, but the rule.”
What Really Happened…
“Are we living in a golden age of conspiracy theory? And if so, what stands behind this apparent upsurge in global anxiety? Fortunately, no shortage of observers has turned their attention to such questions…”
Does Taste Matter?
One man’s taste is another’s “funereal” ugliness. “Taste is what we share with others, as well as what sets us apart. The word has sharply contrasting meanings, when taken individually or collectively. The history of taste, an absorbing subject, tends to concern itself with generalities, and its great categories apply across the board…”
A Link Between Religion And Success
A new Harvard study suggests that economic success around the world is linked to whether or not you believe in a religion. “Our central perspective is that religion affects economic outcomes mainly by fostering religious beliefs that influence individual traits such as honesty, work ethic, thrift and openness to strangers. For example, beliefs in heaven and hell might affect those traits by creating perceived rewards and punishments that relate to `good’ and `bad’ lifetime behavior.”
Why Your Congressman Can’t Hardly Talk Good
What in God’s name has happened to the great art of American political oratory? Where exactly, in the gaping chasm of history between William Jennings Bryan and George W. Bush, did our elected representatives lose the ability to inspire us with impassioned speeches choked with dangerous metaphor? Some blame the ’60s (just out of habit, most likely,) and some blame the triumph of the individual over collective experience. But whatever the reason, “in both oral and written English, talking is triumphing over speaking, spontaneity over craft.”
Is Pomo Finally Irrelevant?
The idea of viewing literature through the lens of one “-ism” or another has been a pervasive part of academia for decades. But increasingly, scholars are beginning to question the value of pigeonholing individual works of fiction, and trying to bend them to fit within the confines of a previously defined set of values. No one is arguing against the value of context, but “some academics say that postmodern theory is on the way out altogether and that the heady ideas that once changed the way literature is taught and read will soon be as extinct as the dodo and the buggy whip.”