There are a lot of pressures that push people into short-term unsustainable solutions including time and energy, capital, the fact that solutions to the most complicated problems are often much more messy, personal interest, and individual trajectory.
They're suckers for the myth of neutral technocracy — think of Ross Perot's "best experts" — that promises solutions with no messy conflicts of interest or values.
This book, however, depicts them all as wonderfully distinct individuals — real people whose eclectic interests, messy love lives and oddball personalities square ill with the lofty philosophical abstractions "the Enlightenment" so often calls to mind.
There was mixed guessing yesterday in Hollywood about Mr. Bronfman's role, with some saying that Mr. Bronfman would be left to run the record business because he had done a good job with Seagram's music operation and Mr. Messier had little interest in that area.
Pursuing our interests is messy and contradictory; some of our interests turn out to be more important than others.
In his 2008 book "Experiments in Ethics," the Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah described the loss of relevance that philosophers inflicted on themselves, beginning in the late 19th century, when they abandoned philosophy's ancient interest in messy human nature and retreated into the conceptual analysis of moral terms.
He never needed to cast votes that might be litmus-tested; he never got into messy fights with Democratic interests.
The picture has been further complicated by the messy web of competing interests in Syria which has pitched the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey against President Assad and his allies Russia and Iran.
Gone are the messy disagreements and competing interests of the democratic process.
Bush exercised a centuries-old doctrine, commonly referred to as foreign policy realism, an honorable doctrine that essentially calls for adhering to a country's national interests, avoiding messy internal quarrels in far-off countries and shunning the intrusion of moral considerations.
