Latest Articles
We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
Sep 08 2024
10 mins
If we imagine a metric called the Pinocchio Scale, which measures the number of lies told by a politician as a percentage of his or her overall public statements, our current prime minister (for want of a better description), Airbus Albo, has moved well into uncharted territory.
Sep 06 2024
5 mins
In Defence of Extremism
So now I have your attention, let me clarify. I do not propose to defend extremism of the kind we hear about daily—the violent, law-breaking, society-upending kind. I am thinking more of “Aristotelian extremism”—not the so-called “revolutionary Aristotelianism” of a school of sophists who see in Aristotle a proto-Marxist, but the extremism present in Aristotle’s theory of the virtues. It can, I suspect, tell us something important about economics, the market, and even social change.
In his famous Nicomachean Ethics (Book 2, chapter 9) Aristotle claims that to hit upon virtuous behaviour, sometimes a person needs to “aim off”—to behave in a more extreme way than virtue demands. Aristotle holds that virtues lie on a mean between extremes of vice. The virtuous person habitually behaves according to the mean, and the vicious person habitually acts according to one of the extremes.
Take two classic examples: courage and honesty. These are virtues, we all agree….
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins
