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The second chapter is worse than the first. The author starts making large & unfounded claims about the state of the nation & its history, e.g., his criticism of neoliberalism was opinionated & lacked a single reference to source material of any kind or quality. He claims that Australia isn't egalitarian but literally one sentence later says that it is, relative to England. It lacks the focus of the first chapter.

The first chapter deals with the story of how decades of Liberal Party failure led to the emergence of the Teal movement in the mid-late-2010s and through them to the permanent reshaping of Australian politics, as trends show that the dominance of the Liberal-Labor two party system is on an inexorable decline and that independents, the Teals most conspicuous among them, will figure ever more largely in political life

The free will response to theodicy is also bankrupt. Lewis says he can't imagine a world in which free beings don't go astray. And he's a fiction author! Therefore, I can only suppose that he didn't really try to imagine such a world but rather simply wrote it off. God could have made it much easier to believe in him. An omnipotent god would be aware, although Lewis wasn't, of behavioural nudging.

'Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong'. Every LLM I've asked says that my reversal of the mystery response to theodicy is novel. Imagine a world where free will exists but evil doesn't. Though unlikely, it's logically possible. Someone in that world asks, how can it be? Answer: God's a mystery. Same answer explains both good & evil & is therefore useless.

He makes the bizarre claim that it's impossible to do bad things for their own sake. Hello Ian Brady & every other born psychopath. He says that people do bad things only because they mistake them for good things. Josef Mengele was just confused. He says that sadists who find wrongdoing sensuous aren't actually bad but are instead pursuing a good thing, pleasure, in a bad way. Peter Scully wasn't evil, merely lost.

Lewis says that dualism (the existence of two gods, one good, one bad) is untenable because to call one good, one bad implies the existence of a higher moral standard by which to judge goodness & badness & to which the two gods are subservient, & that this standard is actually the one true god. But this invokes the Euthyphro dilemma, which he doesn't have the nerve to wrestle with.

He says that science is simply the act of making observations, nothing more & nothing less, & that therefore its knowledge is limited & that it can't shed light on deeper questions. But scientists frequently make predictions that experiments later prove true. Massed observations & inferences about them can penetrate to the very centre of things. In this sense, science is far more "prophetic" than any religion.

'If the universe has no meaning, we should never have found that it has no meaning'. Believing that the world lacks objective moral facts does not mean that it lacks moral experiences. It just means that the people who claim that these subjective experiences correspond to, or are in some way identical to, moral facts are mistaken.

Lewis's philosophy falls prey to the same problem as Spinoza's: it rests on an edifice so dependent on foundational premises that if one is proved untrue all the rest are proved untrue also. Lewis spends the first chapter arguing that our moral sentiments are transcendent & universal simply because we didn't make them & feel compelled to follow them. But both phenomena have evolutionary explanations.

'After all, it is really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the question, 'Has it any meaning?' would remain just as it is?' 1. The goal of philosophy is to question common sense, not to assume it as true. 2. Universal knowledge could answer all questions by definition. 3. Denying 2. *assumes* non-naturalism.

On this page he writes that according to the materialistic view of the world, the universe came into existence 'by a sort of fluke'. This is a perfect example of the how Lewis's simple language is knowingly deceptive. He dismisses as 'a sort of fluke' all of the profound & complex explanations that comprise the field of cosmology. It's disingenuous. This smug dismissal is also destroyed by anthropic arguments.

Lewis argues that the moral law is transcendent because we did not invent it and know we ought to obey it. But these two facts have naturalistic explanations. We did not invent it: it evolved. The feeling of objectivity also evolved: if moral feelings were weak enough for there to be consensus about them being subjective, then they would be less often adhered to, less useful, and therefore less adaptive. Simple.

He says that the 'human law of nature' differs from the physical laws of nature because rocks, etc., don't think whereas humans do. He thinks this means that the moral law is not descriptive of what humans actually do but prescriptive of what they ought to. But he doesn't question the nature of consciousness at all. Moralising could be determined, an epiphenomenon, subjective consensus building etc. A false dilemma.

The more I read, the more baffled I am by this book's celebrity. Every claim he's made thus far has to my mind been susceptible to legitimate criticism. I think its celebrity stems mostly from its writing style, which is clear & simple, &from his careful phrasing, which frames his arguments as though they're common sense. But they very much are not, & this rhetorical strategy of his is as knowing as it is successful.

& lastly, although cultural anthropology was a young discipline at the time of this book's publication & so he cannot be blamed too strongly for his ignorance of the immense degree to which human cultures can differ, he was clearly a sheltered person whose belief in universal sentiments was informed by his being sheltered. Plenty of people nowadays are openly amoral. For example, it's everywhere in our public schools

He also refused to engage with the evolutionary explanations for the existence of morals, which were plentiful at the time, but which have only become more thorough and inarguable since this book's publication. For example, he neglected the enormous amount of literature that had built on Charles Darwin's 'Expression of Emotion', of which as an Oxford scholar he would have been familiar.

Lewis gets off to a bad start. The first chapter claims to establish the existence of a moral laws of nature, or universal truths of ethics. He does this by making arguments, or should I say bare assertions, that amount to presuming his view is true and saying, "surely you agree?". For example, he follows a passage on the evil Nazis by saying that cultural moral differences are everywhere and always superficial.

I've been a staunch proponent of the view that increasing economic growth is the easiest & perhaps best lever to pull for people interested in increasing human welfare since I read Cowen's 'Stubborn Attachments' years ago. It was therefore interesting to read in chapter 3 of this volume the argument that the harms of an ageing population, obesity & climate change will be offset by the benefits of BAU economic growth.

He redefines democracy to mean only direct democracy, for example as the kind sometimes practiced (to tyrannical effect) in ancient Greece. This is a clear example of the No True Scotsman fallacy and it denies or rejects the widespread contemporary understanding of the term that incorporates the liberal traditions and which presupposes as normal limits on democracy so as to prevent the tyranny of the majority.

von Leddihn is immediately suspect for claiming that the only "true" definition of democracy is direct democracy and that democracy is entirely and irreconcilably at odds with individual liberty. This is bafflingly ignorant because even the America of his day was a representative democracy that was carefully designed to be so by the Founding Fathers from whom he so liberally quotes. A basic category error.

But to cite only the Unabomber as an example is somewhat to mislead, because he is merely the harbinger of much worse things to come. Of course, there are many apparently intelligent but actually stupid lone wolves, such as Breivik, but the truly huge atrocities will be committed by much smarter persons, misanthropes such as antinatalists, deep ecologists, negative utilitarians, who'll wage war against all humankind.

A fantastic novel about the evolution of a family, which after many hundreds of pages transforms perfectly naturally & in a style typical of Houellebecq into a sociopolitical study of something prescient, in this case the increasing power & destructiveness of lone-wolf terrorists, particularly the kind about whom I myself am writing a novel, the rare kind that is intelligent intellectual & effective, eg the Unabomber

Thanks, Judith, for introducing me through the first essay in this collection to a major figure in Australian life who before now I was completely unaware of. Alfred Deakin, our 2nd prime minister, & one of our most influential, who helped form large & enduring parts of our national identity in the first decade after Federation, was a strange (& handsome!) man who seems primarily to have been a mystic!

Houellebecq has changed. His standard themes return: the penetration of market forces into every corner of life, contemp. politics, terrorism of one kind or another, anomie, the extremes of sex. But other topics, such as love, which were always present in his writings, are now treated with an unprecedented, almost palpable yearning. The enfant terrible is as prescient as ever but he seems finally to have softened.

This is one of my favourite books. Its language is simple, vivid, and rich with understated subtext. I realise now that I was drawn to this book as much by its beautiful, clean prose as by its protagonist, Michael K, who in many ways resembles the Desert Fathers whom I obsessed over when I was young and whom I still revere. Both reduced their desires to almost nothing, and both were deeply, awesomely contented.

The second speech in this volume is ostensibly about Tassie lit. I will not steal from the interested reader the joy of reading such a wonderful essay, but I will say that the true purpose of the essay reveals itself about halfway through in a blaze of righteous anger. The man is a firebrand. Anyone who knows his bugbears can guess at the source of his loathing. Flanagan's is Oz's smart, wrathful social conscience.

But you can't be authentic by being self-absorbed. We're social animals in social worlds & to live at all let alone to live well means continually negotiating with the bits of the external world that impinge on & thereby partly define our sense of self. This is more not less important in free societies as the freer others are the more they can impinge on us. Authenticity implies some degree of identity with the Other

These historical & philosophical similarities between Buddhism & Western thought have led to the bastardisation of meditation as well as the near-total emancipation of it from its rich cultural/historical contexts. Without these contexts, which in the past have tied meditation to highly particular traditions, rituals, ethics, etc., meditation has radically changed into a tool that, like the West, can be narcissistic.

The modern Western understanding of Buddhism & meditation is profoundly tainted by the background assumptions of Western civ as a whole. Buddhism, alone among non-Christian religions, colonised the West because it was uniquely able to dress itself in the universalist languages of science & the post-Enlightenment projects of autonomy & authenticity. Hence also its widespread co-option as a tool for self-development.

Doctor & patient together negotiate their illness. The same happens with meditators, whose experiences of meditation are shaped in radical ways by the guides who help them interpret their exotic experiences. Meditation, then, even & especially the radical modern kind which falsely believes itself shorn of all cultural baggage, inculcates a deeply realised & believed but largely unconscious metaphysics & worldview.