AI and its deepfakes pose an unusually powerful challenge to the individual human psyche and thus – bulked-up – to human society.
This is a question of human authenticity, which has been an anxious preoccupation for millennia. The bright sparks of Alphabet, Meta, X, and Anthropic have richly intensified it.… Read more...
This piece is a twin to another which looked at the failure of various modern liberalisms and was a plea for an alternative: conservative pragmatism.
Here, I discuss what I call Techno-liberalism. I hadn’t noticed it properly until I read
I argue here that several modern "liberalisms" have failed their proponents (and the rest of us). They were too optimistic, too dreamy (though some were extremely aggressive or cavalier). They were all, I think, substantially light on history and factual evidence. Some claimed to be in the same sort of freedom-loving territory as much of modern conservatism. Read more...
I am posting three MS Word documents and identical PDF versions which gently but firmly interrogate Critical Theory and some allied ideas. These all have long back-stories and some merit if viewed with decent scepticism. The 21st Century has allowed them to grow like Topsy-Turvy and to an unchallenged prominence… Read more...
In the past week or so I have visited Luke Jerram's twin Mars and Earth planets, as they temporarily loomed in Chichester and Lambeth cathedrals respectively, and thought of Elon Musk and Greta Thunberg, and humanity's multiple wings and prayers.
Read more...
The story of the past 125 years is both terrible and wonderful. The best news was that the world’s poor mostly saw greater affluence. And didn't the West abandon imperialism and defeat Fascism? Our present modernity – our 21st Century – has plenty of good news. But do we not see new proto-imperialisms, and isn’t it peculiar that Westerners have largely lost their former cheerful, mildly cynical realism under respected governments? They may even have forgotten what personal adulthood and public professionalism look like. But do we really have to believe that Fascism might be making a comeback? Read more...
This piece was triggered by the Pallant Gallery’s 2022 retrospective show and monograph, Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit, and deploys much of the research behind that blockbuster show and tome. Glyn Philpot (1884-1937) was a major figure in his lifetime and a marginal one after it - until the Pallant breathed new life into his reputation. The Pallant gave us Philpot's variety and variability, but also his constancy and consistency. And his depth.
I foreground what I take to be the spiritual quest which I think made his life and work a sort of pilgrimage. It is moot what might be heard of Philpot henceforth. He presents, as he always did, an embarrassment of riches, including some forgiveable embarrassments. Born 140 years ago, he is a superb man for our times, as he was for his own. I hope the future enjoys him and makes him the subject of interesting revisionism.
Comments and corrections will be very welcome. Read more...
My knowledge of the legal system is as much from TV as from my occasional appearances before judges in court (twice) and in Parliament (once).1In my earliest days as a freelance journalist, I was taken to court over a very small tax bill. Many years later, I appeared in the High Court as a witness against some animal rights protestors; around then I appeared before a joint Lords and Commons Human Rights committee, arguing that the media and the courts were too permissive about disruptive and vicious protest - my argument was greeted by Lord Lester with lofty disdain. ) I have been a tourist observer of some judges, both civil and criminal, and felt a lot of respect and a batsqueak of anxiety. I have sometimes felt that the less we know about judges as people, the better for justice. And yet I fell on the memoir As in Memory Long (2017) by Lord Justice Peter Millett (1932-2021), with a will. It is deliberately but almost slyly revelatory. It was encountered by chance, but exerted a peculiar spell. Oddly, but above all, Millett was not a celebrity judge. He was not a Woolf, Hoffman, Sumption, Bingham or Lester and I prefer neglected byways to well-trodden highways. Perhaps that’s because I am struck that fame conduces to the performative. A couple of warnings. Peter Millett reveals himself to have had a certain pettiness in his nature. I have not skated over this. And I repeat: I am not equipped to judge him as a judge. Luckily, I have come across Colin Paterson, an excellent writer who is, and nearly does. Read more...
The publication on 4 September 2024 of the final report into the catastrophic 2017 Grenfell Tower fire highlighted a wider range of issues than any single disaster report before it. It seemed to top-out twenty years' worth of corporate and institutional malfeasance which have brought the "crisis in trust" to the fore. From Enron (2001) to the decades of the Post Office scandal (which arguably added judicial failure to the mix), these debacles gave impetus to the pervasive modern sense that modern public bodies can't be relied on to be decent or frank. Read more...
In 2007 I wrote a book, Scrap the BBC!, saying that privatising the BBC was a cinch compared to fulfilling the far more important ambition of scrapping the big-state socialist NHS. A decade and a half on, I return in this rather long (<3,500 word) essay to that tougher theme, and have ramped it up to encompass the even more important ambition to scrap the big state socialist welfare system altogether. That's the work of perhaps 30 years'-worth of Parliaments. It needs to be stated now as the long-term vision of any party which wants Britain to be post-socialist. Backing down from that challenge is an act of daily cowardice.
Read more...