Wednesday, May 05, 2010

More Tony Judt: What do we do now?

This morning Mike very kindly pointed me toward the work of New York University historian Tony Judt. This afternoon I discovered an interview with Judt at The Nation that includes these fascinating thoughts.
The question is, What do we do now, in a world where ... you have people who genuinely believe, in the majority, that their interest consists of maximizing self-interest at someone else's expense?
... What's missing from public conversation and public policy conversation is precisely a sort of moral underpinning, a sense of the moral purposes that bind people together in functional societies.
Judt's thoughts are fascinating -- and frightening. If he's right and we, as a culture, don't start finding that all important "sense of moral purposes," then we're in deep trouble.

Video and a transcript of the lecture mentioned in the interview are now available online.

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