further away from actual solutions. (happy new year)

In today's New York Times Dennis Dutton thinks back to the Y2K scare and mostly makes too much of it but I like this paragraph:

Apocalyptic scenarios are a diversion from real problems — poverty, terrorism, broken financial systems — needing intelligent attention. Even something as down-to-earth as the swine-flu scare has seemed at moments to be less about testing our health care system and its emergency readiness than about the fate of a diseased civilization drowning in its own fluids. We wallow in the idea that one day everything might change in, as St. Paul put it, the “twinkling of an eye” — that a calamity might prove to be the longed-for transformation. But turning practical problems into cosmic cataclysms takes us further away from actual solutions.

Denis Dutton is a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.