That environment also creates the need for moral triage: for straightforward binary decisions about whether we admire or despise a given person.

This contrast suggested to Lévi-Strauss a more general lesson, which he names “the paradox of civilization”: its charms are due essentially to the various residues it carries along with it, although this does not absolve us of the obligation to purify the stream. We are right to be rational and to try to increase our production and so keep

In many ways, this is the human predicament: We are all inconstant and changeable, we all shy away from the full implications of our best and strongest ideas.

But whether it’s possible to make such oddkin or not, we know what drives the pursuit: a profound desire to engage and reckon with otherness, without eliminating that otherness.

That he was not like us—that he spoke from a world whose contours made it so different from ours—made those words somehow easier to receive.

Surely we have lost something vital when we have lost the power to be startled, even offended, by the voices from the past. To say “This text offends me, I will read no further” may be shortsighted; but to read a “great book” from the past with such reverence that you can’t see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is

That we simplify our judgments in the cause of triage, the management of information overload, is understandable, but the resulting impulsiveness leaves us unable to count, or even to acknowledge, the costs of our simplifications. We thereby become uncharitable to our ancestors—and to ourselves, whom we are depriving of one of the most vital traits

Surely this is just the theme with which we began: the way an environment of high informational density produces people of low personal density. A world that seems to give us infinite choice actually makes choice nearly impossible: the informational context chooses for us.

we all need better strategies for making decisions, because the defaults we have inherited have costs that we are rarely aware of—and