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
An Invitation to Optimism
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Penguin Random House, 2018, 524 pages, $35
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This is a terrific book! Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist whose discipline straddles natural and social science, serves us a rich menu of food for thought. He restates the core message of the Enlightenment with passion, facts and clarity: rational action and rule-bound behaviour can—indeed do—improve the human condition.
Pinker bases his argument on a dauntingly thorough survey of the analytical and empirical literature to show that the long-term trends in material wellbeing, nutrition, longevity, birth-giving and child mortality, health, individual freedom and indeed happiness show heartening improvements. Pinker rightly celebrates the fact that massive increases in per-acre productivity now allow the replanting of forests and the creation of nature reserves in many places. The…
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
