[Oliver Sacks] reminds us of our extreme psychological complexity, and of the fragility of the human mind. From the inside, the mind can seem simple and automatic, like a pearl in an oyster, but actually it all depends on the complex orchestration of the millions of neurons that compose our brains: and if anything goes even slightly amiss in the machinery the mind can be altered beyond recognition. This realization gives us the feeling that we are suspended over an abyss, totally reliant on the mechanics of the physical organ that sustains the self. That organ is marvelously impressive, but it is also alarmingly prone to breakdown and malfunction; just deprive a tiny part of it of oxygen for a few seconds and all hell can break loose at the level of the conscious self. It makes you feel nervous about your nerves, does it not?
--Colin McGinn
Indeed, bright kids—those who do better on other academic indicators—are able to start lying at 2 or 3. “Lying is related to intelligence,” explains Dr. Victoria Talwar, an assistant professor at Montreal’s McGill University and a leading expert on children’s lying behavior. Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded.
Louis de Bernières’s new novel, A Partisan’s Daughter, is set in the 1970s. Its hero has a car, a “shit-brown Allegro”. The Austin Allegro was a horror, expelled from the death throes of British mass car production. Everything about it was bad, including, in this case, the colour. The moment it is mentioned in the novel, the reader knows exactly what it means – that there was something horribly wrong with the 1970s.
Bryan Appleyard
"Our bodies are born of another; language is learned from those around us; our way of understanding the world is largely conditioned by family, friends, teachers; the atmosphere provides us with oxygen; food,water, and for most of us clothing and shelter are dependent on nature and other people. How can we think of ourselves as independent when our very life, moment to moment, depends upon all this and more?"
"Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car."
“People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote - a very different thing.”
By denying the existence of objective moral truths, [pure relativism] elevates self- assertion as the measure of all things. Social life is reduced to the arbitration of conflicting self-interest — a process in which the most powerful always win. Ultimately, this arbitrary absolutism produces a society ruled by an unholy alliance of utilitarian ethics and the proxy politics of the managerial class.
