Posts

Moral Sight

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"Chop Suey," Edward Hopper If you've ever tried to explain a moral dilemma to a friend, you've likely struggled to fully articulate its complexity. There's so much more to difficult conversations or decisions than the basic "facts" we might use to describe them.  Should you confront a coworker about their recent behavior? Well -- it may depend on the moment, the mood, the time of day, etc. In “Literature and the Moral Imagination,” Martha Nussbaum argues that these ambiguities and particularities are best explored in literature -- in her words, “the novel can be a paradigm of moral activity.” In Nussbaum’s view, fiction can give us a window into the complexity of moral judgment. This is both a claim about morality and a claim about literature. Knowledge of abstract universals is not sufficient to recognize what we ought to do, but even “intellectual knowledge of particular facts” will not suffice for virtue. Instead, she argues, virtue moves beyond bot

Stop Hate-Sharing

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Riot in the Galleria,  Umberto Boccioni Everyone agrees that America is becoming more and more polarized and that social media deserves some of the blame. I think it’s worth tracing out exactly why this is the case. What mechanisms on social media trigger our most tribal impulses? What are the individual actions or habits on social media platforms driving polarization?  Much has been written and said about the way social media creates echo chambers of similar opinions and insulates us from disagreement. But beyond simple groupthink, I’d like to focus on the way social media tends to convince us that opposing tribes are sinister. Consider the following sequence: The Sharks and the Jets are social groups that distrust each other and each has its own Facebook group. A Shark writes a somewhat nasty joke about a member of the Jets as part of an email that he accidentally sends to the wrong email address. Of course, it ends up forwarded to a Jet. The Jet shares the email joke

How to Read About the Coronavirus Without Going Crazy

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Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times The coronavirus is everywhere, and not just in the scary virus sense -- it now looms over social media platforms, cable news, sports, and conversation. This cultural dominance is challenging if you want to stay somewhat up-to-date but not go crazy. The time I've spent on social media platforms over the last month, particularly on Facebook, has been genuinely terrifying. Friends, close and otherwise, have shared a metric ton of articles, opinions, memes, and pyramid schemes. These range from insightful to helpful to speculative to foolish to full-on, unpasteurized crazy. If you're in isolation with nothing to do but feed your anxiety, social media is a toxic soup of confusion. Very Smart People aren't sure what has happened, what is happening, or what will happen. They also are unsure about what should be done about it. So, unfortunately, your old high school friend is unlikely to be sharing really incisive commentary.  Seve

Moral Relativists Aren't All Bad

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"Cicero," Cesare Maccari Christian educators are often eager to dismantle moral relativism as part of "worldview" curricula or humanities courses. This is understandable: the vast majority of Americans are (unknowing) moral relativists in 2018, long after the position was abandoned by most serious philosophers. But in my experience, many realist v. relativist arguments quickly devolve into shouting matches about Hitler . These rhetorical bloodbaths end with both parties feeling self-righteous and more entrenched in their position. I sense that these arguments aren't good for a Christian's witness. Why can't Christians be more persuasive on a topic where they clearly have the high ground? One key mistake Christians make: moral relativism deserves some credit. Most moderns who repeat sayings like "everyone has their own morality" or treat ethical debates as matters of personal preference don't do so because they've carefully refl

No News: Good News?

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Tyler Cowen argues at Bloomberg that the sheer volume of "news" we must sort through to be informed modern citizens is more problematic than supposed "fake news." Readers with access to so much information about the various tragedies in our world are left jaded and cynical. Thanks to the internet, we also learn the many flaws and quirks of leaders and experts, from banal personal details on their Facebook, to their wild teenage Twitter posts, to more serious expos és about them. (Undoubtedly, Andrew Jackson's presidency would have suffered if he'd had a Twitter account). This feature of our world isn't going away anytime soon. There are loads of reasons to argue the Information Age is, on net, good for humans. Today's volume of quality reporting and available information act as a valuable check on those in power. Accountability is, generally, good.  But our oversaturated marketplace for news can clearly corrode societal trust, attention, and

Review: Enduring Divine Absence

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L'Absinthe, Edgar Degas (1876) While reading Joseph Minich's recent  Enduring Divine Absence ,  I was reminded of C.S. Lewis' first Screwtape Letter. In it, the demon Screwtape recalls a mini-crisis when the atheist "patient" he tempts considers Christianity. The danger passes as soon as the atheist walks out his front door: Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true. He knew he’d had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere lo

A Quick Primer on Trump's Tariffs

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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images There has been a dizzying array of White House scandals and controversies lately. You can be excused, then, if you've ignored more boring news about Trump's tariffs -- economic policies with the potential to be among the president's most fateful decisions.  To catch you up to speed: Since the beginning of 2018, Trump has imposed sizable tariffs on imported aluminum, steel, solar panels, washing machines, and Chinese electronics . Tariffs, for the uninitiated, are taxes imposed only on imported goods. If you squint very hard while talking about them, tariffs appear to help American businesses sell to American customers, bringing jobs to American workers and building the American economy. Virtually all (like, all) economists agree that these tariffs will instead  hurt  the American economy. 95% of top American business executives considered them a "moderate to serious risk." While Trump has cited historical evidence that tariff