Stay updated with breaking news from Elementary Forms. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
Great Swiss artists, like famous Belgians, might seem to be an amusingly underpopulated category. Actually, as with celebrated Flemings and Walloons, when…
The latest IPCC report shows we are climate-cooking our goose more quickly than even most pessimists had thought.
My Turn: Reconnect to the elementary forms Published: 4/25/2021 2:00:04 PM I’ve written about this before in this space. We think we act rationally with the cold logic of a computer, but beneath we remain mere animals driven by instinct, habit, geography, time and mystery. Toward that end, there’s even a new book entitled How to Be Animal. We are not solitary but social animals, though not always the cuddlesome creatures seen on Animal Planet. We can get swept up in the moment and do terrible things, prompted by something sociologists call “social contagion.” There’s a new book abo...
Benedikt Koehler on the Enlightenment, Religion, and Mosaic Economics The Enlightenment purged economics of religion. This began when John Locke claimed that everyone had the right to pursue ‘life, liberty, and estate,’ which implied true happiness could be found this side of the afterlife; continued when Adam Smith explained markets followed an Invisible Hand, which made divine will irrelevant to economics; and concluded when Jeremy Bentham wrote that happiness was a surplus of pleasure over pain, which made ethics calculable. Modern economics has been built on insights into property rig...