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There is indeed a deep and well-established kinship between science and the left, one that reaches to the earliest days of modern science and politics and has grown stronger with time. Even though they go astray in caricaturing conservatives as anti-science Luddites, American liberals and progressives are not mistaken to think of themselves as the party of science. They do, however, tend to focus on only a few elements and consequences of that connection, and to look past some deep and complicated problems in the much-valued relationship. The profound ties that bind science and the left can teach us a great deal about both.

It is not unfair to suggest that the right emerged in response to the left, as the anti-traditional theory and practice of the French Revolution provoked a powerful reaction in defense of a political order built to suit human nature and tested and tried through generations of practice and reform.

The left, however, did not emerge in response to the right. It emerged in response to a new set of ideas and intellectual possibilities that burst onto the European scene in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—ideas and possibilities that we now think of as modern scientific thought.

Both as action and as knowledge, then, science has been a source of inspiration for progressives and for liberals, and its advancement has been one of their great causes. That does not mean that science captures all there is to know about the left. Far from it. The left has always had a deeply romantic and even anti-rationalist side too, reaching back almost as far as its scientism. But in its basic view of knowledge, power, nature, and man, the left owes much to science. And in the causes it chooses to advance in our time, it often looks to scientific thought and practice for guidance. In its most essential disagreements with the right—in particular, about tradition—the vision defended by the left is also a vision of scientific progress.

Not all environmentalism indulges in such anti-humanism, to be sure. But in all of its forms, the environmentalist ethic calls for a science of beholding nature, not of mastering it. Far from viewing nature as the oppressor, this new vision sees nature as a precious, vulnerable, and almost benevolent passive environment, held in careful balance, and under siege by human action and human power. This view of nature calls for human restraint and humility—and for diminished expectations of human power and potential.The environmental movement is, in this sense, not a natural fit for the progressive and forward-looking mentality of the left. Indeed, in many important respects environmentalism is deeply conservative. It takes no great feat of logic to show that conservation is conservative, of course, but the conservatism of the environmental movement runs far deeper than that. The movement seeks to preserve a given balance which we did not create, are not capable of fully understanding, and should not delude ourselves into imagining we can much improve—in other words, its attitude toward nature is much like the attitude of conservatism toward society.

Moreover, contemporary environmentalism is deeply moralistic. It speaks of duties and responsibilities, of curbing arrogance and vice.

But whatever the reason, environmentalism, and with it a worldview deeply at odds with that behind the scientific enterprise, has come to play a pivotal role in the thinking of the left.

The American left seeks to be both the party of science and the party of equality. But in the coming years, as the biotechnology revolution progresses, it will increasingly be forced to confront the powerful tension between these two aspirations.

To choose well, the American left will need first to understand that a choice is even needed at all—that this tension exists between the ideals of progressives, and the ideology of science.

The answer, as ever, is moderation. The American left, like the American right, must understand science as a human endeavor with ethical purposes and practical limits, one which must be kept within certain boundaries by a self-governing people. In failing to observe and to enforce those boundaries, the left threatens its own greatest assets, and exacerbates tensions at the foundations of American political life. To make the most of the benefits scientific advancement can bring us, we must be alert to the risks it may pose. That awareness is endangered by the closing of the gap between science and the left—and the danger is greatest for the left itself.

Citing COVID-19 restrictions, Spanish police are stopping migrants from leaving the Canaries for the mainland — even those with valid documents.

The bottleneck has angered some locals, while for migrants it's causing misery.

Moroccans make up one of the largest immigrant groups in Spain.

70% of young citizens consider emigrating due to frustrations over a lack of economic opportunities.

Now it is opening six new migrant camps for 7,000 people on the islands.

"We're all afraid!" he says. "Every day there's police around here, every day there are fights and robberies.""It's awful. One day this is going to explode because there's no solution at all. The government promises and promises and nobody helps."

"They eat in the camp, breakfast lunch and dinner. And us? We're hungry. Hungry and ashamed, because it can't go on like this," he says.Pockets of xenophobia have bubbled here since the crisis began. There have been anti-migrant marches and reports of organized groups attacking Moroccans.

"The main problem is not the migrants arriving but the local authorities and the government," Carlsen adds, "the image they are giving in front of the Canarian people — they feel like they are abandoned."

Somos Red was formed after one member found Diop and others sleeping on the streets. The solidarity group fundraised and rented this hostel for the men to live in.

"This country is not only for us, they are people!" she says. "They have the right to live well in good conditions. And if other people come, let them come."

The center-left government's junior coalition partner, the leftist United We Can party, demanded migrants urgently be allowed to travel, condemning what it considers the "repeated infringement of human rights" in the Canaries.

If he gets deported, Rida says he'll try again to come to Spain.

But there was also seriousness. Mary Robinson, 60, from a rural part of Northern Arizona, said she felt energized by the march, but the work ahead seemed hard.

“They are in rural America where there’s no jobs, no technology, and many people live on government subsidies. It’s not that they are ignorant or stupid, they are just uninformed.”

as Albert Einstein put it, “You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.”

When the study drew attention and controversy, there was a moment when they both could have said: "We didn't look carefully enough at this the first time. Now we can see that it doesn't meet our standards." Instead they allowed Facebook and the PR people to take the lead in responding to the controversy.

What should this reality signal to Facebook users? Is it time to pull-back? You have (almost) no rights. You have (almost) no control. You have no idea what they're doing to you or with you. You don't even know who's getting the stuff you are posting, and you're not allowed to know. Trade secret!

Are there any particular warnings here for journalists and editors in terms of their exposure on Facebook? Yeah. Facebook has all the power. You have almost none. Just keep that in mind in all your dealings with it, as an individual with family and friends, as a journalist with a story to file, and as a news organization that is "on" Facebook.

I am not in a commercial situation where I have to maximize my traffic, so I can opt out. Right now my choice is to keep my account, but use it cynically. 

does this level of experimentation indicate the prospect of a further undermining of audience-driven news priorities and traditional news values? The right way to think about it is a loss of power—for news producers and their priorities. As I said, Facebook thinks it knows better than I do what "my" 180,000 subscribers should get from me.

Facebook has "where else are they going to go?" logic now. And they have good reason for this confidence. (It's called network effects.) But "where else are they going to go?" is a long way from trust and loyalty. It is less a durable business model than a statement of power. 

I distinguished between the "thin" legitimacy that Facebook operates under and the "thick" legitimacy that the university requires to be the institution it was always supposed to be. (Both are distinct from il-legitimacy.) News organizations should learn to make this distinction more often. Normal PR exists to muddle it. Which is why you don't hand a research crisis over to university PR people.

some commentators have questioned the practice of A/B headline testing in the aftermath of this scandal—is there a clear connection? The connection to me is that both are forms of behaviourism. Behaviourism is a view of human beings in which, as Hannah Arendt said, they are reduced to the level of a conditioned and "behaving" animal—an animal that responds to these stimuli but not those. This is why a popular shorthand for Facebook's study was that users were being treated as lab rats.

Journalism is supposed to be about informing people so they can understand the world and take action when necessary. Action and behaviour are not the same thing at all. One is a conscious choice, the other a human tendency. There's a tension, then, between commercial behaviourism, which may be deeply functional in some ways for the news industry, and informing people as citizens capable of understanding their world well enough to improve it, which is the deepest purpose of journalism. A/B testing merely highlights this tension.

Thus, it’s incompatible with the false diversity of the college campus, which celebrates differences in sexuality and ethnicity but increasingly expects its faculty and students to think alike.

And it’s incompatible with the false inclusivity of the modern university, which all too often excludes even the most credible and serious voices if those voices challenge the orthodoxies of identity politics.

How many moments each day do you spend in total silence?

Silence relieves stress and tension.

noise pollution has been found to lead to high blood pressure and heart attacks, as well as impairing hearing and overall health. Loud noises raise stress levels by activating the brain’s amygdala and causing the release of the stress hormone cortisol

In our everyday lives, sensory input is being thrown at us from every angle. When we can finally get away from these sonic disruptions, our brains’ attention centers have the opportunity to restore themselves.

The ceaseless attentional demands of modern life put a significant burden on the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is involved in high-order thinking, decision-making and problem-solving.

Silence can quite literally grow the brain.

So how has Mr. Romney, the other leading contender for the G.O.P. nomination, responded to Mr. Perry’s challenge? In trademark fashion: By running away.

the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.

Lately, for example, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of “charlatans and cranks” — as one of former President George W. Bush’s chief economic advisers famously put it — to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to “fancy theories” that conflict with “common sense,” the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyze things like financial crises and recessions?

Somalia joined Saudi allies such as Bahrain and Sudan and entirely cut diplomatic ties with Iran

There are concerns new unrest could erupt.

Many ultraconservatives of the Saudi Wahhabi school of Islam view Shiites as heretics.

In other developments, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir arrived in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, for meetings with Pakistani leaders. Pakistan, which is a predominantly Sunni Muslim state but has a large Shiite minority, has expressed hope that Saudi Arabia and Iran will be able to normalize their relations.

Back in the 1980s, Judith Smetana and colleagues discovered that very young kids could discriminate between genuinely moral principles and mere social conventions. First, the researchers asked about everyday rules—a rule that you can't be mean to other children, for instance, or that you have to hang up your clothes. The children said that, of course, breaking the rules was wrong. But then the researchers asked another question: What would you think if teachers and parents changed the rules to say that being mean and dropping clothes were OK? Children as young as 2 said that, in that case, it would be OK to drop your clothes, but not to be mean. No matter what the authorities decreed, hurting others, even just hurting their feelings, was always wrong. It's a strikingly robust result—true for children from Brazil to Korea.

in the new study, Dr. Rhodes asked similar moral questions about the Zazes and Flurps. The 4-year-olds said it would always be wrong for Zazes to hurt the feelings of others in their group. But if teachers decided that Zazes could hurt Flurps' feelings, then it would be OK to do so. Intrinsic moral obligations only extended to members of their own group.

The 4-year-olds demonstrate the deep roots of an ethical tension that has divided philosophers for centuries. We feel that our moral principles should be universal, but we simultaneously feel that there is something special about our obligations to our own group, whether it's a family, clan or country.

you don't have to be taught to prefer your own group—you can pick that up fine by yourself. But we do have to teach our children how to widen the moral circle, and to extend their natural compassion and care even to the Flurps.

In another experiment, we found that longer response times were correlated with less diverse responses, ruling out the possibility that participants with low mental loads simply took more time to generate an interesting response.

it seems that with a high mental load, you need more time to generate even a conventional thought. These experiments suggest that the mind’s natural tendency is to explore and to favor novelty, but when occupied it looks for the most familiar and inevitably least interesting solution.

Much of our lives are spent somewhere between those extremes. There are functional benefits to both modes: If we were not exploratory, we would never have ventured out of the caves; if we did not exploit the certainty of the familiar, we would have taken too many risks and gone extinct. But there needs to be a healthy balance

In general, there is a tension in our brains between exploration and exploitation. When we are exploratory, we attend to things with a wide scope, curious and desiring to learn. Other times, we rely on, or “exploit,” what we already know, leaning on our expectations, trusting the comfort of a predictable environment

All these loads can consume mental capacity, leading to dull thought and anhedonia — a flattened ability to experience pleasure.

ancient meditative practice helps free the mind to have richer experiences of the present

your life leaves too much room for your mind to wander. As a result, only a small fraction of your mental capacity remains engaged in what is before it, and mind-wandering and ruminations become a tax on the quality of your life

Honing an ability to unburden the load on your mind, be it through meditation or some other practice, can bring with it a wonderfully magnified experience of the world — and, as our study suggests, of your own mind.

adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults.

What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers

Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.

The second crucial system in our brains has to do with control; it channels and harnesses all that seething energy. In particular, the prefrontal cortex reaches out to guide other parts of the brain, including the parts that govern motivation and emotion. This is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making, that encourages long-term planning and delays gratification.

Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.

Expertise comes with experience.

In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship. Children have lots of chances to practice the skills that they need to accomplish their goals as adults, and so to become expert planners and actors.

In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence—tuning up just the prefrontal wiring you'd need as an adult. But you'd do all that under expert adult supervision and in the protected world of childhood

In contemporary life, the relationship between these two systems has changed dramatically. Puberty arrives earlier, and the motivational system kicks in earlier too. At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups.

The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences.

This control system depends much more on learning. It becomes increasingly effective throughout childhood and continues to develop during adolescence and adulthood, as we gain more experience.

An ever longer protected period of immaturity and dependence—a childhood that extends through college—means that young humans can learn more than ever before. There is strong evidence that IQ has increased dramatically as more children spend more time in school

children know more about more different subjects than they ever did in the days of apprenticeships.

Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies.

this new explanation based on developmental timing elegantly accounts for the paradoxes of our particular crop of adolescents.

First, experience shapes the brain.

the brain is so powerful precisely because it is so sensitive to experience. It's as true to say that our experience of controlling our impulses make the prefrontal cortex develop as it is to say that prefrontal development makes us better at controlling our impulses

Second, development plays a crucial role in explaining human nature

there is more and more evidence that genes are just the first step in complex developmental sequences, cascades of interactions between organism and environment, and that those developmental processes shape the adult brain. Even small changes in developmental timing can lead to big changes in who we become.

Brain research is often taken to mean that adolescents are really just defective adults—grown-ups with a missing part.

But the new view of the adolescent brain isn't that the prefrontal lobes just fail to show up; it's that they aren't properly instructed and exercised

Instead of simply giving adolescents more and more school experiences—those extra hours of after-school classes and homework—we could try to arrange more opportunities for apprenticeship

Summer enrichment activities like camp and travel, now so common for children whose parents have means, might be usefully alternated with summer jobs, with real responsibilities.

it’s impossible to know for sure, but, according to one publisher’s estimate, book sales in the U.S. now make up no more than seven per cent of the company’s roughly seventy-five billion dollars in annual revenue.

A monopoly is dangerous because it concentrates so much economic power, but in the book business the prospect of a single owner of both the means of production and the modes of distribution is especially worrisome: it would give Amazon more control over the exchange of ideas than any company in U.S. history.

“The key to understanding Amazon is the hiring process,” one former employee said. “You’re not hired to do a particular job—you’re hired to be an Amazonian. Lots of managers had to take the Myers-Briggs personality tests. Eighty per cent of them came in two or three similar categories, and Bezos is the same: introverted, detail-oriented, engineer-type personality. Not musicians, designers, salesmen. The vast majority fall within the same personality type—people who graduate at the top of their class at M.I.T. and have no idea what to say to a woman in a bar.”

According to Marcus, Amazon executives considered publishing people “antediluvian losers with rotary phones and inventory systems designed in 1968 and warehouses full of crap.” Publishers kept no data on customers, making their bets on books a matter of instinct rather than metrics. They were full of inefficiences, starting with overpriced Manhattan offices.

For a smaller house, Amazon’s total discount can go as high as sixty per cent, which cuts deeply into already slim profit margins. Because Amazon manages its inventory so well, it often buys books from small publishers with the understanding that it can’t return them, for an even deeper discount

According to one insider, around 2008—when the company was selling far more than books, and was making twenty billion dollars a year in revenue, more than the combined sales of all other American bookstores—Amazon began thinking of content as central to its business. Authors started to be considered among the company’s most important customers. By then, Amazon had lost much of the market in selling music and videos to Apple and Netflix, and its relations with publishers were deteriorating

In its drive for profitability, Amazon did not raise retail prices; it simply squeezed its suppliers harder, much as Walmart had done with manufacturers. Amazon demanded ever-larger co-op fees and better shipping terms; publishers knew that they would stop being favored by the site’s recommendation algorithms if they didn’t comply. Eventually, they all did.

Brad Stone describes one campaign to pressure the most vulnerable publishers for better terms: internally, it was known as the Gazelle Project, after Bezos suggested “that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”

ithout dropping co-op fees entirely, Amazon simplified its system: publishers were asked to hand over a percentage of their previous year’s sales on the site, as “marketing development funds.”

The figure keeps rising, though less for the giant pachyderms than for the sickly gazelles. According to the marketing executive, the larger houses, which used to pay two or three per cent of their net sales through Amazon, now relinquish five to seven per cent of gross sales, pushing Amazon’s percentage discount on books into the mid-fifties. Random House currently gives Amazon an effective discount of around fifty-three per cent.

In December, 1999, at the height of the dot-com mania, Time named Bezos its Person of the Year. “Amazon isn’t about technology or even commerce,” the breathless cover article announced. “Amazon is, like every other site on the Web, a content play.” Yet this was the moment, Marcus said, when “content” people were “on the way out.”

By 2010, Amazon controlled ninety per cent of the market in digital books—a dominance that almost no company, in any industry, could claim. Its prohibitively low prices warded off competition

In 2004, he set up a lab in Silicon Valley that would build Amazon’s first piece of consumer hardware: a device for reading digital books. According to Stone’s book, Bezos told the executive running the project, “Proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.”

Lately, digital titles have levelled off at about thirty per cent of book sales.

The literary agent Andrew Wylie (whose firm represents me) says, “What Bezos wants is to drag the retail price down as low as he can get it—a dollar-ninety-nine, even ninety-nine cents. That’s the Apple play—‘What we want is traffic through our device, and we’ll do anything to get there.’ ” If customers grew used to paying just a few dollars for an e-book, how long before publishers would have to slash the cover price of all their titles?

As Apple and the publishers see it, the ruling ignored the context of the case: when the key events occurred, Amazon effectively had a monopoly in digital books and was selling them so cheaply that it resembled predatory pricing—a barrier to entry for potential competitors. Since then, Amazon’s share of the e-book market has dropped, levelling off at about sixty-five per cent, with the rest going largely to Apple and to Barnes & Noble, which sells the Nook e-reader. In other words, before the feds stepped in, the agency model introduced competition to the market

But the court’s decision reflected a trend in legal thinking among liberals and conservatives alike, going back to the seventies, that looks at antitrust cases from the perspective of consumers, not producers: what matters is lowering prices, even if that goal comes at the expense of competition. Barry Lynn, a market-policy expert at the New America Foundation, said, “It’s one of the main factors that’s led to massive consolidation.”

Publishers sometimes pass on this cost to authors, by redefining royalties as a percentage of the publisher’s receipts, not of the book’s list price. Recently, publishers say, Amazon began demanding an additional payment, amounting to approximately one per cent of net sales

brick-and-mortar retailers employ forty-seven people for every ten million dollars in revenue earned; Amazon employs fourteen.

Since the arrival of the Kindle, the tension between Amazon and the publishers has become an open battle. The conflict reflects not only business antagonism amid technological change but a division between the two coasts, with different cultural styles and a philosophical disagreement about what techies call “disruption.”

Bezos told Charlie Rose, “Amazon is not happening to bookselling. The future is happening to bookselling.”

n Grandinetti’s view, the Kindle “has helped the book business make a more orderly transition to a mixed print and digital world than perhaps any other medium.” Compared with people who work in music, movies, and newspapers, he said, authors are well positioned to thrive. The old print world of scarcity—with a limited number of publishers and editors selecting which manuscripts to publish, and a limited number of bookstores selecting which titles to carry—is yielding to a world of digital abundance. Grandinetti told me that, in these new circumstances, a publisher’s job “is to build a megaphone.”

it offers an extremely popular self-publishing platform. Authors become Amazon partners, earning up to seventy per cent in royalties, as opposed to the fifteen per cent that authors typically make on hardcovers. Bezos touts the biggest successes, such as Theresa Ragan, whose self-published thrillers and romances have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. But one survey found that half of all self-published authors make less than five hundred dollars a year.

The business term for all this clear-cutting is “disintermediation”: the elimination of the “gatekeepers,” as Bezos calls the professionals who get in the customer’s way. There’s a populist inflection to Amazon’s propaganda, an argument against élitist institutions and for “the democratization of the means of production”—a common line of thought in the West Coast tech world

“Book publishing is a very human business, and Amazon is driven by algorithms and scale,” Sargent told me. When a house gets behind a new book, “well over two hundred people are pushing your book all over the place, handing it to people, talking about it. A mass of humans, all in one place, generating tremendous energy—that’s the magic potion of publishing. . . . That’s pretty hard to replicate in Amazon’s publishing world, where they have hundreds of thousands of titles.”

By producing its own original work, Amazon can sell more devices and sign up more Prime members—a major source of revenue. While the company was building the

Like the publishing venture, Amazon Studios set out to make the old “gatekeepers”—in this case, Hollywood agents and executives—obsolete. “We let the data drive what to put in front of customers,” Carr told the Wall Street Journal. “We don’t have tastemakers deciding what our customers should read, listen to, and watch.”

book publishers have been consolidating for several decades, under the ownership of media conglomerates like News Corporation, which squeeze them for profits, or holding companies such as Rivergroup, which strip them to service debt. The effect of all this corporatization, as with the replacement of independent booksellers by superstores, has been to privilege the blockbuster.

The combination of ceaseless innovation and low-wage drudgery makes Amazon the epitome of a successful New Economy company. It’s hiring as fast as it can—nearly thirty thousand employees last year.

the long-term outlook is discouraging. This is partly because Americans don’t read as many books as they used to—they are too busy doing other things with their devices—but also because of the relentless downward pressure on prices that Amazon enforces.

he digital market is awash with millions of barely edited titles, most of it dreck, while r

Amazon believes that its approach encourages ever more people to tell their stories to ever more people, and turns writers into entrepreneurs; the price per unit might be cheap, but the higher number of units sold, and the accompanying royalties, will make authors wealthier

In Friedman’s view, selling digital books at low prices will democratize reading: “What do you want as an author—to sell books to as few people as possible for as much as possible, or for as little as possible to as many readers as possible?”

The real talent, the people who are writers because they happen to be really good at writing—they aren’t going to be able to afford to do it.”

Seven-figure bidding wars still break out over potential blockbusters, even though these battles often turn out to be follies. The quest for publishing profits in an economy of scarcity drives the money toward a few big books. So does the gradual disappearance of book reviewers and knowledgeable booksellers, whose enthusiasm might have rescued a book from drowning in obscurity. When consumers are overwhelmed with choices, some experts argue, they all tend to buy the same well-known thing.

These trends point toward what the literary agent called “the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer.” A few brand names at the top, a mass of unwashed titles down below, the middle hollowed out: the book business in the age of Amazon mirrors the widening inequality of the broader economy.

“If they did, in my opinion they would save the industry. They’d lose thirty per cent of their sales, but they would have an additional thirty per cent for every copy they sold, because they’d be selling directly to consumers. The industry thinks of itself as Procter & Gamble*. What gave publishers the idea that this was some big goddam business? It’s not—it’s a tiny little business, selling to a bunch of odd people who read.”

Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good? ♦

When I think of depictions of friendships that have moved me, I find myself thinking mostly of books — of those passages in novels that illuminate friendship by its moments of thorniness, by the heartbreak it can cause. Real friendship is complex.

The best works of art about friendship resonate by showing how our closest friends have a way of ruining our attempts to present ourselves as perfect; how those picturesque moments are belied by other truths.

ultimately, it's not whether Levin's broader argument that's really important in this specific case. It's that he's is using obscure conceptual arguments to shield genuinely ignorant people like Perry from criticism. Even if every one of the above arguments is wrong, there's a huge difference between some subtle ethical conflicts and flat-0ut denying the theory of evolution or anthropogenic climate change.

Aristotle teaches us that being a good person is not mainly about learning moral rules and following them. It is about performing social roles well — being a good parent or teacher or lawyer or friend.

First, there’s bifocalism, the ability to see the same situation from multiple perspectives.

“Anyone who has worn bifocal lenses knows that it takes time to learn to shift smoothly between perspectives and to combine them in a single field of vision. The same is true of deliberation. It is difficult to be compassionate, and often just as difficult to be detached, but what is most difficult of all is to be both at once.”

Only with experience can a person learn to see a fraught situation both close up, with emotional intensity, and far away, with detached perspective.

Then there’s lightness, the ability to be at ease with the downsides of life.

while older people lose memory they also learn that most setbacks are not the end of the world. Anxiety is the biggest waste in life. If you know that you’ll recover, you can save time and get on with it sooner.

Then there is the ability to balance tensions. In “Practical Wisdom,” Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe argue that performing many social roles means balancing competing demands. A doctor has to be honest but also kind. A teacher has to instruct but also inspire.

You can’t find the right balance in each context by memorizing a rule book. This form of wisdom can only be earned by acquiring a repertoire of similar experiences.

Finally, experienced heads have intuitive awareness of the landscape of reality, a feel for what other people are thinking and feeling, an instinct for how events will flow.

a lifetime of intellectual effort can lead to empathy and pattern awareness. “What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work,” Goldberg writes, “I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”