Dear Mat,
You’ve triggered me. It surely won’t surprise you that citing Jesus as an ethical exemplar does nothing for me. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Cesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” Nought.
Jesus offers spiritual balms for the dispossessed. For the powerful he offers a free pass. Worked OK for industrial capitalism, I admit, but it was even better suited to empire, feudalism and monarchy. It was a recipe for political acquiescence so good the Roman empire adopted it holus-bolus. The only piece of political action he did was to mess up the desks of some money changers, once. Jesus appears to have been a social conservative and an economic liberal. Not a great combo. Continue reading #45 On Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour →
Dear Jamie,
I knew we’d crack it. While you could “judge political systems” according to your rule, let’s consider a system that embraces this rule:
Make decisions according to how great a chance they have of discovering and thereby achieving new goals, in perpetuity.
My logical consistency sense is tingling, so I pause. The structure of your system has kind of a Bertrand Russel ring to it. If we support all goals that achieve new goals, Continue reading #24 On not needing to know →
Over the summer of 2012-13 Jamie produced a concept show for 2XX FM in Canberra. Each week a pair of guests from the same political orientation discussed a big political-philosophical idea. We tried to avoid doing a panel show where people sling mud and score points; we tried instead to create the tone of an interesting conversation at a pub between people of similar political viewpoints in an effort to better understand where these positions come from. Podcasts of all episodes are available below.
The blog of Jamie Freestone and Mathew McGann