Views

“MY beliefs do not require you to believe in them.” That’s a paraphrase of a line from “The Matrix Reloaded.” Ideally, that’s what we should all aspire to in a democracy: having beliefs that we do not need to impose on others. With certain ideological true believers, however, the reverse is true: t…

IN ancient nautical charts and maps that depicted the land mass of the Philippines, where the areas had yet to be explored and its existence largely unknown, a warning was inscribed in Latin, “Hic sunt dragones” (There be dragons). The logic behind the warning was obvious. Recently a proposed gover…

IN his 1974 book, “Unheavenly City Revisited,” Edward C. Banfield identified four social classes for the purposes of analyzing social problems: the lower class, the working class, the middle class, and the upper class. He said this classification is cultural and psychological rather than biological…