POINTS OF ATTACK

A novelist and essayist delivers pithy and provocative takes on modern ethical and philosophical questions.

De Silva has a gentle manner with intellectual sacred cows: Do dying species really require our intervention? Might eating vegetables be just as morally questionable as eating meat? Do we defeat graffiti’s purpose if we treat it as art? Is the decline in the humanities in colleges such a bad thing? The author, who has a doctorate in philosophy from Cambridge, takes on these and other questions via short essays. Stylistically, de Silva is part of a long tradition: Montaigne, Descartes, Barthes, and others have tried the quick-hit, more conversational style of philosophical writing as opposed to the fussier, more academic approach common to philosophy today. (The author has an essay about that, too.) But de Silva’s focus is mostly contemporary, looking at our current attitudes toward topics like terrorism, war, climate change, and technology. The brevity of the individual essays means the author has little space to do more than raise questions, which makes his comments sometimes read as glib, even trollish. For example, his assertion that a country unable to solve its own human rights issues lacks the standing to intervene in others’ comes off as fancied-up whataboutism. However, de Silva’s just-asking-questions approach is usually justified by the legitimacy of the questions. At his best, he reminds readers of their complicity in a host of moral quagmires. Thinking about war, for instance, as “a hazy, far-off thing is something positively desired by many of us, even if we don’t put it that way to ourselves.” Big tech firms, he writes, encourage “a stance of quiet resignation toward the world’s fate…and merely disciplining our emotional reactions rather than our destructive actions.” If brevity limits the development of certain ideas, the author’s approach also invites a wider audience.

A brash, engaging set of salvos that complicate our personal and political conditions.