I enjoy popularisation and I think I’m reasonably good at it. I also think it’s a duty. It’s just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.
For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.
Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.
The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.
It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming ‘polysemic’ plurality, not the author himself.
A truly common culture is not one in which we all think alike, or in which we all believe that fairness is next to godliness, but one in which everyone is allowed to be in on the project of cooperatively shaping a common way of life.
You’ve got to have a sense of different audiences. I’m a kind of performer manque – I come from a long line of failed actors!
What’s wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.
In the end, the humanities can only be defended by stressing how indispensable they are; and this means insisting on their vital role in the whole business of academic learning, rather than protesting that, like some poor relation, they don’t cost much to be housed.
Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.
It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ’68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.
It is true that some liberals and humanists, along with the laid-back Danes, deny the existence of evil. This is largely because they regard the word ‘evil’ as a device for demonising those who are really nothing more than socially unfortunate.
It is easy to see why a diversity of cultures should confront power with a problem. If culture is about plurality, power is about unity. How can it sell itself simultaneously to a whole range of life forms without being fatally diluted?
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.