“If I could go back and give advice to my younger self, it might be this: Competition is for losers.”That’s the epigraph to an essay by Peter Thiel in the Spring issue of the Intercollegiate Review. It’s entitled “The Competition Myth,” and it lays out Thiel’s thesis in his book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Thiel is an entrepreneur and a capitalist, but his wisdom derives not so much from Adam Smith as from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Continue Reading »
Those of us who are Catholics have had a rough few years. Well, make that a rough few decades. Horrific abuse scandals. Some weak, sometimes feckless, bishops. Wacky theologians. Boring homilies. Dreadful music. Widespread dissent, often rooted in appalling ignorance. I could go on. We envy our . . . . Continue Reading »
Diversity is a great idea. To promote diversity with respect to race, age, art and music, nationality, and the like is to encourage a broader perspective and a more fully human experience of life. It’s a marvelous way to uncover and correct blind spots in one’s outlook.Like most great . . . . Continue Reading »
Diversity can rightly be called a value-free term. All it does, ordinarily, is identify a condition of unlikeness between or among things. It reports this difference as a fact and by itself indicates nothing of the goodness or badness of that fact. Rather, the happenstance of goodness or badness . . . . Continue Reading »
All persons of good will have reason to rejoice over the progress made in recent years in building a society of racial justice in America. More progress may confidently be expected under the present Administration, which has put diversity on the national agenda all the way to the highest levels of . . . . Continue Reading »
We live at an odd moment. One mark of that oddness is the corruption of words that name important virtues. “Diversity,” for example, these days often turns out to be little more than a code word for intellectual gerrymandering, while “tolerance” appears largely as a synonym for . . . . Continue Reading »
