Tag: Empathy
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Books, Virtual Reality, Imagination and the Inner Eye
The bookshop Waterstones tweeted a joke yesterday in which Mark Zuckerberg went into their shop on Oxford Street: ‘What’s this?’ he said, holding up a book. ‘It’s a book,’ I replied. He looked at it for five minutes before asking what it does. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘You look at it and it kind of shows…
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Life, Writing and Being Useless
(soundtrack to this post: ‘Wasting My Young Years‘ by London Grammar) Posts here have been a little thin on the ground, mostly due to the fact that I’ve been work very hard on the manuscript for a novel – more news of which I hope one day to be able to share, but I’ll shut…
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The Empathetic Civilisation | Dirty Heaven [3]
I’ve been thinking about Jeremy Rifkin’s talk on ‘The Empathetic Civilisation’ which he gave at the RSA last year. It sparked my interest because of this quote: “There is no empathy in heaven, because there is no mortality. There is no empathy in utopia, because there is no suffering.” This made think a little about…
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Befriending Hitler… Befriending a Sociopathic God
In the previous post we considered the adage that ‘an enemy is simply a friend whose story I have not yet heard.’ In his book First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Zizek critiques this, using the example of Hitler, questioning whether it would be right to befriend him: “Is one then also ready to affirm…
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Advent[ures] in #Incarnation [2] | ‘The Mysteries of the Humans are Mysteries to the Humans Themselves’
The first window on the calendar opens. The scene begins… As I wrote in the previous post, one of the fascinating things about the Incarnation is that it stands as an actual interruption, a marked moment of time with a before and after. Nothing was the same before, and nothing will be the same again.…
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#Outrospection | The Art of Living | Radical Social Change
One of the nice things I’m involved in is helping put together the Greenbelt talks programme, which means I’m always on the look out for good thinkers with good things to say. Last year I came across an organisation called The School of Life, which aims to help people engage in practical philosophy and playful…