The deep wisdom of rootedness

Society has lost touch with the people and places who helped to shape it in the first place

I HAVE BECOME OBSESSED, in the way that that one can only become really fixated with the truly ghastly, with “The Ethicist” column in the New York Times Magazine. In it, advice is doled out to perplexed Americans on topics such as: “My Kid Looks White. Does My Thai Father Make Them Asian?”, “Should I Edit Pink Hair Out Of My Daughter’s Wedding Photos?” and, perhaps my favourite, the great moral quandary of our day, “Can People Claim Spots on the Beach With Empty Chairs?” Who needs the Nichomachean Ethics eh? The issue about all of these faintly comic pearl-clutching incidents is not so much that they aren’t ethical conundrums — everything, after all, is ethics if you look hard enough. Nor is it necessarily an issue that many of…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2024

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