More than anything else – more than wonder, gratitude, confusion – the immense complexity of our species, of ourselves and our neighbors, seems to make us impatient. This impatience manifests interpersonally and politically in the way we reduce our enemies to a single dimension, a single motivation. That annoying coworker, whatever she says, is just a narcissist; that recipient of food stamps, whatever her situation, is only lazy or entitled. Intellectually, this impatience with our own complexity manifests, among other things, in our strange cultural preference for materialist theories of consciousness, and in our fascination with declinist grand narratives of history, which always presume that selfishness, idiocy, and cruelty are stronger or realer than anything else.

The cure might be books like these from Adam Roberts, David Bentley Hart, and Joy Williams.