Talking about Epicureanism at The Idler Academy last night, I was encouraged that people responded warily to Epicurus' attitude towards friendship. It is radically self-interested. Though he can celebrate friendship 'dancing around the world' announcing blessedness, and he wrote a moving letter to a friend on the day he died, his friendliness is as egoistic as his hedonism: value your friends only insofar as they can help you.

Is that really friendship, individuals worried? Isn't it rather using others for your own good? Well yes, I replied, but don't think that is so unusual.

Yesterday too, a report on 'nudge' and behavioural change was published. Nudge is radically Epicurean when it comes to using others. Are you obese? Ditch your fat friends and take up with thin ones: that's more effective than any diet. Do you smoke? Shun smokers - yes, particularly those in your family. Or more generally, do you want to enhance your wellbeing? Cross to the other side when approached by anyone who doesn't smile.

And in the process, the world fills up with self-interested, happiness maximisers who are as cruel and calculating as a News of the World journalist. 'Love' others and secure your own needs, it teaches - in the name of making the world a better place. It fails to add, and watch your supposed friends ditch you for not satisfying their own egoistic concerns.

Emerson, for one, had a much better plan. If you want to have a friend, he advised, be a friend.

Jake and Dinos Chapman were in entertaining form this morning. Where Sarah Montague saw hell in their new installations, they saw happiness. Where she saw Nazis, they saw royalty. For models of children with genitals for facial features, they had... well, I'm not quite sure what, because at that point in the interview, their banter fell into the gnostic art-speak of contemporary conceptualism.

Job done, you might say. They'd wrong-footed Montague, who excused their game by chuckling at the tomfoolery. But it felt to me that there might be something more sinister at play.

Denis Donoghue put his finger on it in his Reith lectures of 1982. (It's an old game.) In the third, he began: 'We cultivate, these days, a merely spectacular relation to ideas and attitudes: we watch them as they pass, as in a Lord Mayor’s parade.'

It's an attitude of irony that treats everything with equal nonchalance. Hell is equivalent to happiness. A Nazis to a prince. Children with whatever. Ha, ha. 'So we hear words like beauty and truth as if they had inverted commas around them,' Donoghue continues.

So far, so jolly. But there's a twist because 'the play of mind doesn’t make available even the possibility of a shared understanding of the object: it’s an act of power, not of communication. All you can do with a play of mind is to watch its performance.'

That felt close to what the Chapmans were up to. By resisting every shared understanding of their objects, they embark on a performance of power with the parameters set by them to ensure that they can't fail to win. It's as if the tyrants aren't being depicted in the gallery. They're the ones exhibiting in the gallery.

'The ethics are the big issue here, just as much as whether the law was broken', remarked Chris Bryant in the debate on the phone hacking scandal yesterday. Here, here - for it's to say that any polity with half an eye on the good life for its citizens can't be sustained by courts, investigations and enquiries alone. (In this case, the enforcers of the law appear caught up in the breach themselves.)

This is a 'complete moral failure', Bryant continued - though he might have said this is another moral failure, if you think of the banking scandal of 2008 and the politicians' own problems with expenses. Plus, there's presumably a reason the 'News of the Screws' sells so well. Who can say they've never enjoyed a titbit of celebrity gossip, with the emphasis on the tit?

There will be a temptation to make more law now, but apart from the risks of limiting a free press, it won't be worth its weight in vellum. I think we made a relevant point in our Citizen Ethics project at the Guardian 18 months ago. It is a sign of our times that whilst we love to have ethical discussions on piecemeal issues, like assisted dying or maternal surrogacy, there seems to be little moral desire to shape the big forces that determine so much of our way of life today - forces so richly embodied in parts of the media.

An Adam Curtis series is always an event, if you're interested in whether intellectual content can make it on TV. Last night, the first part of his latest was broadcast, which came with the Baroque title of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

It carried his trademark style, impressionistic and fragmented, and held together by an over-arching narrative that works like the interpretation of a dream. Only, I didn't find the interpretation that convincing. Too much conspiracy. Not enough linkage.

The basic thesis is that the rise of networked computers, coupled to Ayn Rand's individualistic philosophy, led to our world in which free markets dominate - politicians and bankers believing that the network can provide the stability previously strived for by governments. But the boom and bust cycles did not end, and when the busts came, the powerful few manipulated global networks to rescue themselves, and dump the cost on the desperate many.

It is a vaguely familiar story, though too simplistically told, meaning the film contained no insights I felt I could really trust. Plus, it's two human interest angles - Clinton's affair with Lewinsky, Branden's affair with Rand - felt like they were in to provide some spice, not to flesh out the thesis.

It did remind me of when I was writing about IT, pre-dotcom bust. The story of a 'new economy' did do the rounds, only it had more to do with the illusion that the economy had dematerialised. Limitless growth was entertained on the basis that the constraints of material resourcing had been left behind. Laughable now. But it's a different fantasy than placing your trust in networked stability.

In psychotherapy, there's the notion of the therapist as a blank slate, the recipient/catalyst of all manner of transference from the client. Of course, there is no such thing as a blank slate, and you want a real person sat before you too. But there's the intention not to intrude, and that matters. It makes for the work, which is as if the feelings of the past become present once more, only now to be sorted out.

It occurred to me that the queen acts something like this, not least on her trip to Ireland this week. It's been heralded as a tremendous success. In her understated way, she talks quietly of troubles, suffering, conflict. And that's been a trigger. Feelings of the past came to the fore, only now so as to bring reconciliation, ease, peace.

She is a bit of blank slate, or an emerald one this week. It's often said that her silence is her greatest asset. Our national therapist in chief?

Andrew Sullivan objects to the moral dimension in my observation that there's a sacrificial logic behind the killing of bin Laden. He calls it 'repellent' - a strong word that made me think. Luckily for me, I've been with some American journalists these last few days and so could ask.

The Dish argues that bin Laden's killing was justified as an act of war. Well, I'd take issue with the war on terror notion. Pragmatically, it's unwise, as it inherently escalates the troubles - to borrow a euphemism from this side of the Atlantic. Philosophically, I don't think it stacks up as I can make no sense of the view that bin Laden's atrocities were acts of war, for all their monstrous scale. He was a terrorist.

That said, the killing could still be regarded as a just act - not in a criminal justice sense, but in a sacrificial sense. After all, blood sacrifice was a means of achieving justice in the religious setting, as with a death, the moral order is restored. That's Lacquer's point about the death penalty, and it still seems to me that bin Laden's killing has achieved precisely that: a sense of a moral order restored.

But it's really the word 'repellent' that bothered me. It carries emotional force, and at the wrong end of it, I felt it, though one of the journalists was able to help me out.

He'd be with Sullivan on the death penalty, namely against. But still, he told me that he involuntarily felt a sense of pride when Obama stood and, in a dignified manner, declared the job well done. There was something about the ethic of perseverance, as well as sense of justice, that he responded to.

He continued: this is an emotional response, deeply connected to knowing oneself as American. He drew a parallel with the emotional response Britons have to royalty: it looks nuts, if colourful, from a republican viewpoint. And yet, kings and crowns, bands and processions, are in the British DNA and so tells us something about who we are, because it's how we do things. Equivalents elsewhere might be the principle of laïcité in France. Hence banning the burka feels right to the majority there, aside from the moral debate.

So I think the Dish's objection is, fundamentally, a perspectival one. It exemplifies how people see the world in radically different ways because of who they are. That's not to say there's no moral debate to be had. Manifestly, there is. But it is to point to the parallel issue, of how, with such pluralism, we live together.

Understanding helps.

The response of Obama, and much of America it seems, to the death of bin Laden sent me back to an essay by Thomas Lacquer on the persistence of the death penalty in the land of the free.

Lacquer finds it odd, as in so many respects the US is in line with post-enlightenment thinking, but not in this respect. So what does the death penalty do for the US, he asks, that makes it so necessary? He believes there is a 'primordial sacrificial logic' at play. The death penalty actually has little to do with punishment and criminal justice, in spite of appearances. Rather, it is 'a ritual reassertion of a communal moral order'.

There is something of that sacrificial feel around bin Laden's death. It is apparently reuniting political enemies. It has reasserted America's sense of mission. It makes Americans proud, relieved, festive. Again, this is not how a post-enlightenment thinker could view the terrorist's death. There was no process of justice, it appearing to be more like a summary execution.

Lacquer believes America's insistence on its right to kill is one point at which the separation of religious and secular powers collapses. Like a scapegoat, designated for 'absolute removal', the deaths of a select few assure the many that their sins do not, finally, remove America from divine favour. In a fascinating paragraph, he continues:

Human depravity, on this view, makes it necessary for civil government to assume the power of divine authority. Liberty, inalienable individual rights, procedural correctness and hopes for reformation or redemption have to be balanced against obligation, against the needs of a righteous community, and against the feeling that, social contract or no social contract, for civil government to be legitimate it has somehow to be congruent with God’s governance. In other words, a government here on earth can cast out and kill certain of its citizens under certain circumstances because God in heaven has ordained that this should be so. Capital punishment is the expression of both divine and communal outrage at those who have excluded themselves from full humanity through their acts.

Bin Laden was, obviously, not a citizen, but his absolute removal at the hands of special forces does feel like 'the expression of both divine and communal outrage at those who have excluded themselves from full humanity through their acts.' Bin Laden is finally consigned to the lowest circle of hell, and America can know, once more, that it is a city upon a hill.

(Image: Josh Pesavento - Times Square on the night Osama bin Laden killed)

How can one possibly understand the near ecstasy sparked by the royal wedding - the global fascination with the dress, the kiss, the love? Perhaps an archetypal reading can help. At any rate, it's an interesting way of reflecting about the collective surge of feeling because alongside suggesting what is going so right for the newly weds, it has ideas about what might also go so wrong.

My sense is that it is Catherine, not William, who is the catalyst for the extraordinary mood. He was born to it. Her story, though, has the magic, the surprise.

It is, at the simplest level, that of romantic love - the young and beautiful woman who meets, well, her beloved. So the archetypal themes that are fired so strongly by the event must be those of the Lover. But the Lover's story is special too. It is not the story of the regular girl who meets her guy, but has that fairy tale touch: her guy, it turns out, is a prince.

Hence, Cinderella is one myth to deploy. She scrubbed floors, which is to say earned her living, until the commoner was made royal. Further, Catherine also escapes the fear that dogged Cinders, of being a wallflower, of being unlovable. So Catherine shines because, her wedding says, this common fear is one she now need not fear.

That said, she will be compelled to attend constantly to her lovableness by a thousand cameras and commentators and, if wise, will encourage us to read her as more than just attractive, but as being lovely of nature too - something close to what the Bishop of London said in his sermon, in fact, about being a work of art for each other, thereby revealing their beauty as persons: love with a centre beyond themselves.

The ancient goddess of love perhaps reveals something of what we've witnessed too. Catherine is more Aphrodite than Eros, what with her intelligence and elegance. As the statue of Aphrodite above shows, this is a love that knows the playfulness of Pan, but knows too how to keep it tamed, and thereby discover and convey a deeper kind of love in life.

Her poise - her naturalness as Simon Schama noted - will be a great asset too, as people want intimacy from people who come across archetypally as the Lover, and that mustn't degenerate into doing anything and everything to appease such insatiable desires. For then, she could lose her identity and know herself only in her image, a fate that seems to have befallen William's mother, Diana. As the couple prayed: they must attend to what's most real.

Convincing? Or how else to understand what happened today, apart from dismissing it all as excess and madness - which is, anyway, only another dimension of love?

Martin Amis hopes to convert his good friend Christopher Hitchens to agnosticism (hat tip: Jonathan Rowson). I remember Amis venturing the sensibility, and sensibleness, of not knowing in Hitchens' presence somewhere before. After all, as Hitchens himself has written, 'The measure of an education is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.' It's the agnostic spirit that reaches back to Socrates, which I try to champion too.

Amis appeals to the 'indecipherable grandeur' of the cosmos that is, in a sense, a 'higher intelligence'. If substantial advances in cosmological understanding have shown one thing, it is that we don't actually understand the ways of the heavens well at all. And then, Amis continues, there's the material spirituality of the stardust that is our origin and the destiny of our return. Set against such blazing thoughts, an individual declaring themselves atheist seems 'lenten', Amis respectfully suggests.

For me it's as much, probably more, the immensity of our inner, rather than outer, space that makes agnosticism so appealing. We are the creature who can plunge into the depths of existence; life at its most real comes to us as a troubling, glorious excess. It's why we suffer and love. It's surely something of that energy that Hitchens so powerful channels too.

Hence, the elements in religion that Hitchens finds so objectionable, according to Amis - worship and obedience - actually make increasing sense to me. Of course, there's the risk and actuality of abuse, as with all things of value. But worship can also be a kind of honouring that which sustains us, stardust or spirit. And obedience, at best, has to do with taking what we are given and, discovering how it works, finding the freedom to make something of it.

Which is also why death matters so much in religion, the third element that Hitchens loathes. Truly, it's not death denying, but in facing death squarely - as the Good Friday liturgy enacts - is life affirming. For it's only when you afford death its place in life that the grip of fear might ease, and you can afford life its place in life too. As Rilke notes, when we see death we 'play our actual lives instead of the performance'.

'What is your substance, whereof are you made?', Shakespeare asks of the force that surges through us, surely with more vitality than the stardust - and hence surely, in its mystery, more worthy of honouring too.

I love the story about Nigella's burkini. There's the neologism itself. Fantastic. (Plus, the nice coincidence that nigellus is a word for black in Latin.) But there's also the human insight it provides into why women might voluntarily want to cover - an insight that runs contrary to the logic of the French ban on the burka.

Nigella is apparently worried about the sun. But other women interviewed talk of not wanting to be stared at, so as not to feel under an omnipresent seductive gaze. Which is precisely what the French state wants to be able to do: a citizen is one whom the state can observe unimpeded.

But then again, the odd thing about covering is that it makes you all the more conspicuous. Whence Nigella splashed all over the newspapers, emerging from the waves like a draped Venus. You see the same contradiction with celebrities who wear dark glasses, and stand out all the more from the crowd. Or the darkened windows of limousines, which bystanders can't fail to notice.

Onto darkness, we humans project our fantasies, quite involuntarily. You don't need the horror flick to confirm that shadows and silhouettes look sinister, and draw us, demanding our wary attention. That's another thing the French ban has presumably achieved: it officially sanctions the proliferation of fears about Muslims.

But then, that's surely why the burkini fails too. It keeps the sun off. And gives birth to a whole new kind of seductive chic.