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 have for years wanted to understand and explain the soft-left liberal mindset which has become increasingly bossy and dominant since the 1960s. I didn’t enjoy it 60 years ago, when it was the domain of various Hampstead journalists I met as a young man. I like it a lot… Read more...
Hunston’s nuns: Records of their earthly deaths, 1872-1994
This is a record of the 36 nuns who died and were buried within their enclosure during the 120 years’ existence of the Chichester Carmel (aka Hunston Convent). The closure of their convent led to their being reinterred in 1994 in Portfield Cemetery,… Read more...
Richard Hughes produced three enormously interesting novels. High Wind In Jamaica (1929) and Fox In the Attic (1962) are much the better known, but In Hazard (1938) has a devoted following.1True to my usual perversity, I haven’t yet read “High Wind… 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...
For about 40 years I have had this oil painting in various sorts of storage and knew it for longer on my parents' walls. It is by my grandmother, the artist and poet who was, on her third marriage, Mrs Clifford Bax, née Vera May Rawnsley (and following marriages to Stanley North and Filson Young).
The undated painting is titled "The Old-fashioned Dress" (but the sitter isn't named). I am pretty sure my parents (Paul and Margaret - Peggy - North) told me it's a portrait of their friend, Nora Whitehall. 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.
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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...