Philosophy & Ethics | Pandaemonium

CULTURE WARS CAN MAKE YOU BLIND TO SOCIAL CHANGE

June 23, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on how the fog of culture wars can obscure the degree to which societies have become socially liberal, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 21 June 2020, under the headline ‘Culture wars risk blinding us to just how liberal we’ve become in the past decades’. ‘Prime minister Boris Johnson stirs culture war over Churchill statue.’ So ran a recent New York Times headline. The Washington Post agreed. As ‘counter protesters’ took to the streets to ‘protect’ statues and as controversy […]

Categories: Britain, Philosophy & Ethics, Politics, Race & Immigration • Tags: black lives matter, british politics, culture wars, immigration, racism, social liberalism, statues, usa, working class

IDENTITY POLITICS: THE INTERVIEW

June 13, 2020 by Kenan Malik

Last year, I gave an interview to the philosopher Stine Jensen, for a series she was making for the Dutch TV company Human on the politics of identity called Dus Ik Volg (‘So I Follow’). The programme in which I appear is broadcast this Sunday, and here’s a video of the whole of my interview uncut (including the coughing fit…).

Categories: Human, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: identity politics

A HUMAN NECESSITY NOT A PROFIT-MAKING MACHINE

June 9, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the dysfunctional pharmaceutical market, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 7 June 2020, under the headline ‘If drug firms take public funds they must make their finds available to all’. ‘It’s tragic that we won’t have a vaccine ready for this epidemic,’ Peter Hotez told a US congressional committee in March. Tragic, because we could possibly already have had one. Hotez is director of the Center for Vaccine Development at the Texas Children’s Hospital. In 2016, he and his team […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: astrazeneca, cepi, coronavirus, gavi, global south, jenner institute, just treatment, market ideology, medical research, msf, nationalisation, oxford university, peter hotez, pharmaceutical companies, sars, vaccine nationalism, vaccines, wellcome trust, world health organization

VIKTOR FRANKL’S SEARCH FOR MEANING

May 26, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Viktor Frankl’s existentialism,, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on deserving and undeserving migrants.) It was published on 24 May 2020, under the headline ‘What the lessons from Auschwitz teach us about the choices we make’. ‘To speak about the meaning and value of life may seem more necessary today than ever.’ It’s a quote that might have been plucked from any number of op-eds over the past couple of months. […]

Categories: Culture & Books, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: auschwitz, choice, existentialism, holocaust, human agency, human nature, man's search for meaning, meaning, responsibility, social, vienna, viktor frankl, yes to everything

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND HUMAN JUDGMENT

May 19, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the difference between human and artificial intelligence, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the return of football in Germany.) It was published on 17 May 2020, under the headline ‘For all its sophistication, AI isn’t fit to make life-or-death decisions’. Artificial intelligence is searching for the drugs to combat Covid-19. It enabled the pandemic to be tracked and information about it to be synthesised. It is diagnosing patients, triaging them, and identifying those in […]

Categories: Human, Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, brian cantwell smith, coronavirus, human nature, judgment, reckoning

HOME IS A FOREIGN PLACE

May 16, 2020 by Kenan Malik

Home is a Foreign Place. The title of Zarina Hashmi’s perhaps most famous work, a set of 36 ideograms, sums up many of the tensions that suffused both her work and her life. Zarina (she preferred to be called simply by her first name), who died last month, was one of the most important postwar modernist artists, for whom displacement and loss was the key theme. ‘Memory’, she once said, ‘is the only lasting possession we have. I have made […]

Categories: Culture & Books, International, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: art, home, india, modernism, nasreen mohamedi, pakistan, partition, zarina hashmi

HEROISM AND THE QUALITY OF BEING HUMAN

April 26, 2020 by Kenan Malik

When we think of heroes, we usually think of superhuman figures, fictional or mythologized, from Achilles to Churchill, from Boudica to Superman, from Joan of Arc to James Bond. They are heroes because they are able to accomplish that which mere mortals cannot. Over the past few weeks, we’ve discovered new kinds of heroes – nurses working with inadequate protection, care workers with exceptional dedication, bus drivers who continue to transport key workers. Few of them would want to be […]

Categories: Human, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: helder camara, heroes, heroism, human nature

SONGS OF LOVE AND HEARTBREAK

February 14, 2020 by Kenan Malik

For Valentine’s Day, BBC Radio 6 challenged people to make a mixtape of their six favourite love songs. Of course, I couldn’t resist, though it was a task reducing the list down to six. I just about managed it, though there are dozens of others I might included – from Aretha Franklin to Radiohead, from Bob Marley to Lauryn Hill. And just to add a twist, I’ve added six of favourite heartbreak songs, too. And I’m sure nobody else agrees […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: music

AMERICAN DIRT, IDENTITY AND IMAGINATION

February 10, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the controversy over the novel American Dirt, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on citizenship, moral principles and hard cases.) It was published on 9 February 2020, under the headline ‘Stop telling authors what they can write. The only limit is imagination’. ‘What insults my soul’, Zadie Smith has written, ‘is the idea… that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics