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At some point in the Tina Brown era at The New Yorker, I got a call from her asking me to write a piece about "religion." After routine flattery, she got to the point. "We have a fabulous issue coming up on religion, and Dick Avedon is photographing several religious figures and icons, and I wondered whether you could do an accompanying essay," she asked in her clipped, breathless tone. "About what?" I asked. "Religion is a pretty big topic." "Oh, that would be up to you," Ms. Brown replied. "Anything that's hot right now in religion. Anything hot."
There is a saying from Roman antiquity: "Fiat justitia - ruat caelum"; "Do justice, and let the skies fall." In every epoch, there have been those to argue that "greater" goods, such as tribal solidarity or social cohesion, take precedence over justice. It is supposed to be an axiom of "western" civilisation that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as "order". But such immolations have in fact been common.
California banned a methanol-based gasoline additive, MTBE, after the EPA reported potential cancer risks and at least 10,000 groundwater sites were found polluted by the substance. Methanex of Vancouver, British Columbia, the world's largest methanol producer, filed a $970 million claim against the United States.
