Tariq Ramadan was last night talking about his new book, The Quest for Meaning, and he made an arresting comment about the emotionalism of our times - the way, for example, the protesting crowds responded to the Danish cartoons in Pakistan, where he was when those unfunny images were published. People think feeling such passion is a kind of freedom, perhaps because they are glad just to feel passionate about something. But emotionalism is, in fact, 'a trap', Ramadan said, 'the big jail of our time.'

I don't think he was thinking just about religious emotionalism, but a variety of secular manifestations too, such as that engaged with the banning of the hijab in France, another issue he remarked upon: it's frightening because it's popularist, the rhetoric that formerly belonged to the far right being deployed by a mainstream European political party.

It reminded me of a comment Justin Thacker, head of theology at the Evangelical Alliance, made to me. He remarked that, in a way, his job was to convince evangelicals, the world over, that it was OK to think about their faith, as the dominate form of evangelicalism these days is emotional. You've gotta feel it. But feeling, without thinking, has nowhere to go. Hence, again, the trap, being buffeted this way and that, like a reed in the wind - and being vulnerable to manipulation too.

I'm attending a conference on God and Physics, in honour of John Polkinghorne. I'll write a proper piece later, but for now, an observation - in the margins, as it were - stemming from attending a shorter paper this morning that tried to draw analogies between contemporary physics and Vedic spiritual ideas, via the prism of consciousness.

The link will be familiar to those who read New Age-type material - that at a very general level there appear to be parallels between, say, phenomena like quantum nonlocality and notions like collective consciousness. And this morning, I found myself asking: why do I feel embarrassed whilst listening to stuff like this? Does it say something about me, or is there something questionable about the links being drawn?

It may just be that the language of ancient Indian science is odd to me, and that learning about sat-cit-ananda in a temple, say - not a physics lab - would be straightforwardly interesting. Alternatively, it may be that I don't have the benefit of the esoteric experience that compels some people to seek to draw these links. Hence, I'm not feeling embarrassed so much as awkward, even annoyed, on account of feeling excluded. But, to be frank, I suspect not, and that rather there's something else going on.

I think the science is being appealed to in order to try and validate the spiritual insights, whilst paradoxically, at the same time, the science is patronised for only just beginning to grapple with the deep things that the spiritual have otherwise known for centuries.

Now, I should say that I don't need much convincing that the contemporary West is spiritually lite, and - more specifically - I have a growing sense that there is something going on in contemporary physics which is more than just an objective exploration of external reality. Perhaps not unlike Jung's reading of alchemy, and the exchanges he had with Wolfgang Pauli, the physical world can serve as an object on which to project essentially psychological searching - the imperative behind the search for a 'theory of everything' perhaps being appealing for not only metaphysical reasons, but because it mirrors the integrative goal of individuation too. Conversely, we are part of the natural world too, of course, and so our perception of it, as perceiving creatures, must have some bearing upon how we perceive and interpret it too.

But superficial, very general associations - such as between quantum nonlocality and collective consciousness - risk a confusion of languages, the scientific and spiritual. Without precise work on the associations and resonances between the two, if there are any, the result is naive, almost childish. Hence, I suspect, the embarrassment.

Shock quote of the philosophy festival: Lewis Wolpert on homosexuality. 'Certainly it's abnormal. Certainly it's not healthy.' His view comes out of his evolutionary reductionism: health is equated solely with being adaptive for reproduction. The dangerous rhetoric of the fundamentalist.

I happened to be sitting next to Aubrey de Grey at breakfast, the biologist who works on regenerative health, the upshot of which is that we might never die. Would he eat the cornflakes, they being packed with degenerating carbs? Would he have the grapefruit juice, it being full of antioxidants? He had the cornflakes. He didn't have the juice.

Martin Rees, whose Reith lectures start this week, told a crowd he was quite happy to be called a 'compliant Quisling' by Richard Dawkins. His crime? Valuing religion whilst not being a believer. Rees remarked that he is also keen on not putting religious people needlessly off science.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb was being interviewed by James Naughtie, the lyrical, some would say verbally lengthy, presenter of Today on Radio 4. Afterwards, who do you think complained that they could hardly get a word in edgeways? Taleb.

I've written a piece for the Guardian's Cif covering the debate on whether reason is always right.

1. There's something, not nothing (call it existence).

2. We know we're existing (stones don't).

3. We can and often do celebrate the fact.

(With thanks to Linda Alcoff)

The Plot, Madeleine Bunting's hugely affecting new book, is a perfect read if you're returning, as I just have, from a rural retreat to your usual urban abode.

For a few years now, I've been going to the same place in the countryside, and so have got to know something of its rhythms: I've watched the point on the horizon where the sun rises shift south during the winter, and then back north again as summer comes - things like that. I've no unchecked romantic notions about the countryside: I know the farmer across the road enough to realise that milking cows is a tough way of life. However, the reason the rural landscape is so relaxing for the city-dweller, at least in part, is that it takes you out of yourself.

Your eye is drawn to the horizon, in a way it can't go in the city, and that draws you to patterns and processes that are nothing to do with you. They are ones that chart a slower, circular passage through time. In the city, though, my mind's eye is repeatedly drawn to my own projects: the urban social imaginary is self-aggrandizing not self-forgetting. And time is fast and linear - good for activities like earning a living, less good for contemplation.

Madeleine's book came to me like an extended meditation on the role of place in our lives, how where we are affects how we are; and how where we are becomes part of who we are - for good or ill. It made me want to knit some of the how-I-am in the countryside with the how-I-am in the city. It's a difficult task, though the book ends on a positive note. Ultimately, it concludes, belonging in a place is not about possessing it - the self-aggrandizing impulse - but it is about being committed to it. This is like love: falling in love is the thrill of possessing another and being possessed, whereas standing in love is the delight of being committed to another.

So perhaps that's a key, to check the energy of the city with the pauses that come naturally in the countryside.

... I'm reading a book advocating Intelligent Design. It feels a bit naughty, in a cigarettes-behind-the-shed kind of way. I know it's not good for me, but so many of the great and good condemn ID that the temptation became irresistible. I've picked Stephen Meyer's Signature In The Cell: DNA And The Evidence For Intelligent Design. Thomas Nagel, one of the most articulate philosophers around, and an atheist, picked it as a book of the year in the TLS. The letters page storm is still raging. So far, it's very readable, very knowledgeable about evolution, its philosophy and history, though it feels a bit god-of-the-gappy, and rather like Newton's deism depended upon a mechanistic model of the universe, Meyer's deism, if that's what it is, appears to depend upon an informational model of biology. But I'm only a chapter or two in. Shh!

Last week, I think I led something of the good life. Why? Because we spent most of the week with good friends and then, over the weekend, my brother and his family. Someone's life cannot be called happy, even if they have every other good thing the world has to offer, unless they have good friends, thought Aristotle. Agreed.

But my good week was characterised by something else too: travel. To see my good friends, I had to travel out of London, to Paris, Edinburgh and Suffolk. This cost me a substantial amount of money - travel costs and then, opportunity costs, which is to say I had to take time off work to do the travel (though being freelance I could do some whilst traveling.) Added together, the total was well in excess of the median weekly wage in the UK.

Now, I don't begrudge that spend for a minute. But the observation has led me to a rather bleak conclusion.

Perhaps it's just the fact that it's a gloomy, wet Monday morning back here in London. But I'm wondering whether spending quality time with friends, the core element of the good life if Aristotle is right, is unsustainable in the modern world. We have to travel to see friends, for modern living separates friends. That travel costs, so we have to earn more to undertake it; but that need to earn is what separates friends in the first place. It seems like a vicious spiral.

It would be an example of something Robert Skidelsky, the chief interpreter of John Maynard Keynes, has spotted. Keynes had thought that in the early decades of the 21st century - about now - most people in the UK would be earning enough money to live the good life. So, they would stop wanting to earn more, and as a result, the economy would stop growing, and would become sustainable. Obviously, there is absolutely no sign that is happening. Quite the opposite. And so what was wrong with Keynes' analysis, asks Skidelsky?

'(In the modern world) the accumulation of wealth, which should be a means to the "good life," becomes an end in itself because it destroys many of the things that make life worth living. Beyond a certain point – which most of the world is still far from having reached – the accumulation of wealth offers only substitute pleasures for the real losses to human relations that it exacts.'

He adds that 'finding the means to nourish the fading "associations or duties or ties" that are so essential for individuals to flourish is the unsolved problem of the developed world.'

That's, perhaps, it. I've simplified things somewhat in my reflection on a good week. However, there's something profound here no less. For without such a solution, I suspect that at a personal level, we'll continue to be caught in this spiral of working harder to earn more to live well - or to use the economic word for the spiral, 'growth'. And so, at a collective level, we won't find the sustainable ways of living that the planet, and the good life, appears to be saying we must have.

(Image: Gregory F. Maxwell)

The intractable nature of the climate change challenge came home to me again yesterday, at the lively New Economics Foundation conference, The Bigger Picture.

I heard Jeremy Leggett champion the success of the German experiment in equipping individual homes with virtual power plants, via solar energy and lagging, only later to read that the German experiment cost £110 billion in subsidies. You could bail out a bank for that.

I heard Stewart Wallis launch nef's ostensibly sensible proposal for a zero growth economy, though he failed to address what is, to my mind, the basic problem with such ideas, namely human nature: late capitalism is so wildly successful because it has found a way of mainlining 'stuff' direct to the human desire for more. Politicians need growth to stay in power because we need growth to feed the habit, and I see no signs we're coming of it; quite the opposite.

I heard Juliet Davenport argue that whilst green political leadership is crucial, we should be encouraging family, friends and ourselves to do all that we can to reduce our carbon intake too, before I later read the confessions of a former eco-warrier who now questions the worth of her old rhetoric, for fear her 'daily actions are irrelevant.'

I don't actually despair. Oddly, it's the very intractable nature of the problem that makes it too interesting and gripping for that. With climate change, we are forced to stare ourselves and our world in the face. It's fascinating, in a scary, narcissistic kind of way. But my snapshot yesterday of conflicting views, from folk more or less on the same side, suggests that the climate change experience will be much like other political crises, mostly a case of the blind leading the blind. If you think it could or should be otherwise, you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

Damon Young, of blog that young philosopher, asked me about the tool I most value when writing. It's a dictionary - a device that not only invites you into the world of words but also, to my mind, shows why ebooks won't make the mark. A taster:

'That it's a paper-based, perfect bound, book-of-a-dictionary - and not some on-screen searchable database - is so important. The bulk of it, the ability to browse it, the very effort required to handle it, somehow nurtures the effort to find the right word. The empty box in a spellcheck facility, blinking vacantly at me, would not help me to achieve that goal. I wouldn't have the first idea how to begin my search. But with a book, I can turn to a page, see one word that sparks thought of another, cast my eye down related words, and then land on the one that means what I want to say.'

Logicomix has to be the must buy for readers with a love of philosophy this fall, bar this book, of course. Can you find it in the shops?! OK, so it's not Dan Brown, or even Margaret Atwood. But I've been into high street chains and small independents. Even amazon had a 10 day wait.