We make the world not with our ballots — though they do, oh they do matter — but with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of, the stories we believe to be true. Politics, after all, is just the weaponized business of belief.

On his deathbed, Darwin himself lamented having failed to keep feeding his mind those greatest nourishments of the empathic imagination — none mightier, he believed, than poetry and music — turning it instead into “a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.” He saw, from the wistful vantage of nearing the void,... See more