While Michael Sandel’s arguments against the meritocratic ideal and the skill with which he deploys them in his latest book make an ostensibly compelling case, is there not perhaps more to the argument than the skilled practitioner on stage is revealing to us? Has the professor, like so many others, not become unduly beholden to the social justice movement?
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There are many moral issues relating to the plight of refugees and migrants in our world today we could usefully give attention to. But there is no compulsion to support or advocate freedom of movement as part of a moral response. Ultimately the degree to which freedom of movement is allowed between nations is a political decision with moral arguments capable of being made on both sides.
In 2008 I authored a piece for an international organisation entitled ‘A Charter for Marriage: Reconsidering the Foundations of Marriage for Twenty First Century Secular…
Zarathustra resolved to choose twelve disciples that he might send them forth to preach in his name. But lo, he saw that the village was made up of simple working-class people who did not have the benefit like himself of a degree in postmodern studies with a major in critical theory. So he chose from among them a multiracial group, which is to say in its politically correct definition a selection excluding any persons who could be construed as racially white, because he was aware from sociological research recently reported by Zoe Williams in The Guardian that there is no such thing as white working class, except insofar as it is characterised by a racist attitude.
These past two weeks have seen an escalation in ecological activism with protesters taking control of the arteries of major cities in the UK, bringing…
Happily, the inconsistency and incoherence of the postmodernist perspective is increasingly being challenged by a new generation of thinkers from across the political spectrum. For example Ken Wilber in his Trump and a Post-Truth World notes how postmodernism has played itself out and in attempting to create a new basis for determining truth has ultimately undermined it.
Being that we are tribal in nature and have lived in tribal cultures for far longer than we have lived in individualistic ones, there is a strong propensity to be swayed by appeals to tribalistic urges, including negative propaganda, negative rumours and negative stereotypes. Sometimes we need no external catalyst, but are primed to categorise someone and assume the worst of someone on the basis of a perceived shared identity, ignoring and collapsing the likely complex self-identity of individuals on the basis of limited information and experience. This tendency is countered most effectively by personal knowledge of people from many different backgrounds
