“The problem for good-hearted Westerners…is that they seem fated to live out their lives as idiots (in the old sense of ‘idiot,’ in which the term refers to a merely private person, one who has no part in public affairs.) They are ingrates and dilettantes—ingrates because their affluence is made possible by the suffering of the poor and dilettantes because they are no longer able to relate thought to action. They cannot imagine how things could be made better.”

Richard Rorty, review of Ian McEwan’s Saturday