A chara, – In relation to some of the strange, unfounded ideas which people sometimes hold passionately, even aggressively, Seán Moncrieff wrote of the puzzle that “once minds have been poisoned, it seems extraordinarily difficult, even impossible, to bring them back to anything like reasonableness” (“Too often our emotions – anger, frustration, fear – propel us to search for ‘facts’ to fit how we are feeling”, Magazine, August 10th), Jonathan Swift wrote in 1720: “Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired” (A Letter to a Young Gentleman Lately enter’d into Holy Orders”).
It seems that it is not just in our times of social media, the internet and conspiracy theories that we encounter this phenomenon.
A civil and civilised society must learn each day how to address it. – Is mise,
PÁDRAIG McCARTHY,
Seán Moncrieff: Once artists start selling for vast sums of cash they become a business, except for one
Betrayed with a kiss: How Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ made its way to Ireland
Dior’s Jonathan Anderson: ‘Moody, intense, a perfectionist, maybe not the warmest, but a visionary’
URC Grand Final: Five things we learned as Leinster end trophy drought after four years
Sandyford,
Dublin 16.
