Most suffering is human-made and avoidable. It's mostly in your head.

Most suffering is human-made and avoidable. It's mostly in your head.

I think excessive rationality can be very dangerous. Certainly the kind of rationality we've seen in the last hundred years, and still see on a daily basis when Madeleine Albright says that it's all right, we have to live with the idea of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dying because it contains Saddam Hussein.

Our tolerance of the intolerable found a low threshold as early as the late 1950s with the grotesque excesses of McCarthyism, which destroyed so many honest lives, and then with the insane nuclear arms race and confrontations.

The longing for a very garish kind of success seems as widespread among writers as among investment bankers.

I guess I am nostalgic for a time - the nineteenth century and early twentieth - when writers were, to use Stefan Collini's phrase, "public moralists" and politicians, plutocrats, bankers, arms dealers, and experts and technocrats were not solely defining the moral norms as well as the political lives of our societies. We do have some writers claiming to be public moralists, but, as I said, they have actually been more jingoistic than even the henchmen of Bush and Blair.

We, especially those of us in depoliticized and pacified societies, need to cast a colder eye at our self-perceptions, now and in the past, as sentinels and embodiments of Enlightenment virtues of reason, dissent, and skepticism.