CCReflect

"Nobody said it better than Francis Bacon, back in 1605: For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things … and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture."

"Consciousness"

"How Do We Know Who We Are?"

"The liberalism of the 1930s and 1940s was shaped by the Great Depression, and the response was, in many respects, communitarian: the strengthening of unions, the provision of jobs and government benefits to the poor and unemployed and the creation of a safety net to provide a modicum of security. The left has, in part, shifted focus, with more stress on the values of self-expression and self-fulfillment, on individual liberation from the constraints of traditional morality, especially sexual morality - what my colleague Ross Douthat calls "The Liberalism of Adult Autonomy" or "the morality of rights." Economic liberalism - despite progress on the minimum wage - has lost salience. Instead of communitarian principles, the contemporary progressive movement - despite its advocacy of local issues like community policing - has produced a counterpart to conservative advocacy of free markets: the advocacy of personal freedom. "

"I reluctantly note in my adopted homeland the same sort of polarisation that contaminated Chile before the coup; the same weakening of the bonds of a shared, inclusive national community; the same sense of victimhood among large swaths of the populace, troubled that their command over the traditional contours of their identity is slipping away; the same faulting of intruders, upstarts and aliens for that loss; the same tensions and rage exacerbated by shameful disparities in wealth and power. And, alas, the same seduction by authoritarian, simplistic solutions that promise to restore order to a complex, difficult, menacing reality."