Any other business

Second Opinion | 29 October 2005

Sometimes I feel like a doctor in Chekhov: worn out, prematurely balding, old before my time and utterly superfluous. The trouble is that I’m not surrounded by Mashas, Irinas and Yelenas, but by Lees, Dwaynes and Craigs. As for birch trees, mandolins and tables set for tea, there’s not a one to be seen. On

Increasingly it is historians who have the answers in science

The bipolarity of science and the humanities has always been a false and inhibiting distinction. Now the enmity between what C.P. Snow called ‘the Two Cultures’ is coming to an end. It has lasted 200 years. Before that, knowledge was seen as a whole, a continuum. A seer like Newton probed into all subjects, albeit

Second opinion | 1 October 2005

Why do people insist on leading such terrible lives? Why do they choose misery when contentment is so easily within their grasp? Why is complete disaster so attractive, and modest success so repellent? This, surely, is the question that any unprejudiced observer of British life must ask himself. Personally, I think that soap operas have

It is right for a religion to echo its primitive origins

Taking Holy Communion the other day, I reflected how grossly physical religious observance is, even though the progress of humanity tends to turn its more primitive aspects into symbolism. Occasionally I participate in a Jewish Sabbath meal, and find it a calm and decorous occasion, religious ritual at its most civilised. But it is important

Martin Vander Weyer

An economic cyclist’s upbeat view of British manufacturing

Everyone seems to be talking about bicycles. This week’s eye-catching initiative from the Department for Transport is a scheme to turn Brighton, Aylesbury, Derby and Darlington into cyclists’ utopias, at a cost of £1 million per town. Meanwhile, more and more people have taken to cycling in London since the July bombings — an observation

From Robespierre to al-Qa’eda: categorical extermination

An intellectual is someone who thinks ideas matter more than people. If people get in the way of ideas they must be swept aside and, if necessary, put in concentration camps or killed. To intellectuals, individuals as such are not interesting and do not matter. Indeed individualism is a hindrance to the pursuit of ideals

Martin Vander Weyer

Something rotten in the state of Louisiana

I have mixed memories of New Orleans. The hospitality was gracious and the cuisine was fine, but there was a pervasive whiff of something rotten which must have a bearing on the city’s lack of preparedness for the present disaster. I once spent an afternoon in the police headquarters hearing about efforts to eliminate corruption

The ayatollah of atheism and Darwin’s altars

How long will Darwin continue to repose on his high but perilous pedestal? I am beginning to wonder. Few people doubt the principles of evolution. The question at issue is: are all evolutionary advances achieved exclusively by the process of natural selection? That is the position of the Darwinian fundamentalists, and they cling to their

Wittgenstein and the fatal propensity of politicians to lie

Lying is a terrible thing in any circumstances. When politicians and governments lie, it is a sin against society as a whole, against justice and civilisation. In Ray Monk’s admirable life of Wittgenstein, I learn that at the age of eight he asked himself the question: ‘Why should one tell the truth, if it’s to