Sublime

In this new morality – which sounds like a moral game, or a parody of the idea of morality – moral excellence would reside in being able to successfully exempt yourself from rules you have consented to. You would always be getting out of it – the law you promote and claim to abide by. The Good Person would be replaced by the Impressive Person; and

I live in a university town, a place that is populated by people who consider themselves called to a “life of the mind,” and yet my friends and I rarely talk about ideas or try to persuade one another of anything. It’s understood that people come to their convictions—are in some sense destined to them—by elusive forces: some combination of hormones

Nevertheless, when you dissolve the old structures and boundaries of time—the calendar of holidays and festivals, the geographical distances, the chronobiological cycles—you remove the brakes that slow down the perpetual motion machine of postindustrial capitalism.

This is one of the risks of taking on the role of the defender: if the dream is to lose yourself in a cause, you might wake up one day and realize that you’ve succeeded, and that there’s hardly anything left of you. Women, who are socially conditioned to be selfless, can be particularly susceptible to a version of heroism that sucks them dry.

David Levy, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, has updated both the utilitarian and the humanistic arguments for the networked age by calling for a new “informational environmentalism.” Just as we fight to save marsh lands and old-growth forests from development and pollution, he says, so we need to fight to save

from the bad—for a morality of indifference. It’s a culture that educates for advancement—résumé building and the ladder of success—over attachment: to crafts, causes, and communities of competence.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that we have grown wildly estranged from genuine wisdom or the humility with which erudition tempers facile notions of invincibility.