Here where I am, it's rainy. Outside, I mean. Where I actually am, is inside a cosy house. Which as you probably know is one of the best places to be on a cold and rainy day.
In the past decade, political thinking has once again returned to the discussion of "which kind of regime is best," a question of long-standing interest in political thought (going back in the West to at least Plato and Aristotle) but a question that some thought settled for good after 1989 (John Dunn and Francis Fukuyama not among them, though). In this time, thinkers like Daniel Bell with THE CHINA MODEL have argued that an authoritarian meritocracy should be given a try. Events like the Coronavirus may serve as this generation's Chernobyl to usher such nonsense out the front door.
While all the stuff with the Coronavirus is really, really bad, we shouldn't forget that the ongoing standoff in Hong Kong is independently troubling. The new agent of the CCP meant to handle Hong Kong has a long history of anti-Christian action, which will be a further issue in the former UK colony, because much of the civil society there is Christian.
And if you want more troubling info, and a longer perspective on Xi's governance of China, read this. I must admit, this sounds to my ignorant ears very plausible, because it aligns with Czeslaw Milosz's book The Captive Mind, still for me one of the most important political books of the twentieth century.
Differences in life expectancy for newborns around the world today, and why we should be thinking about their tomorrows today: "A typical girl born in Singapore today can expect to live more than 97 years (until February 2117), while a boy born in Sierra Leone can only expect to live almost 40 years less (to just 58.5 years). The top three countries in terms of life expectancy are all in Asia—Singapore, Japan, South Korea—followed by European countries and Chile."
Right now, the EU could be the only responsible, intelligent, mature political force in the world, but it's not. The EU has still not processed the lessons from Brexit, and the EU is still not really confronting the question of whether it wants to be something important in the world, or just hot air.
"Of the authors who have published novels since the early 1990s, none is mandatory reading. This lack of cultural centrality is not necessarily the authors’ fault — we just don’t read novels the way we used to. The great ambitions have dwindled, and the engine of the art form sputters on the last fumes of its old fuel. Modernity’s metaphysical crisis was not solved — by the novel or anything else. Consequently, we are overtaken by a second crisis, one debilitating for art, as the culture loses its horizons and its sense of purpose.…the great purpose of the modern novel was to re-enchant our sense of the world with fictional narratives that put in parallel the sanctifying journey of the soul with the physical and social journey of the body. That purpose was to knit back together the interior and exterior realities which the modern age had split apart. And as western culture stumbles along, no longer confident that modernity can be solved, the old project seems slightly unreal.
The novel didn’t fail us. We failed the novel."
The value of "Relational Pluralism," and its implications for social policy: "If it’s true that the quality and quantity of our relationships are what really matter—and I think Brooks is right to suggest this—the challenge for all of us is to create a culture where relationships of all kinds have the time, spaces, and resources to form and deepen."
Stay warm and dry today, wherever you are.