Mind & body.

I am interested in the idea and practice of spirituality: but it may all be nonsense, and I may be venially corporeal. This category is a bit of a catch-all for posts on subjects ranging from the intellectual (I should be so lucky), to the spiritual (likewise) via the psychological and the creative.

Liberals: be rigorous, not bossy

I propose that soft-left, bossy, green liberals are in a long and wrongly celebrated tradition. Indeed, most non-liberals are almost right to believe that most self-proclaimed liberals propose an ethic of “kindness” which, actually, does more harm than good. Worse even than that: Bossy Liberals have from their mid-19th Century… Read more...

Published

26 January 2025

Fighting AI’s assault on authenticity

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...

Published

11 January 2025

Liberalisms: many styles and failures

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...

Published

11 January 2025

A timeline for Theory and Woke

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...

Published

20 December 2024

Hunston Convent: the last move

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...

Published

12 December 2024

“In Hazard”, book & broadcast

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 WindRead more...

Published

08 December 2024

Critical Theory: A push-back

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...

Published

01 December 2024

Critical Theory, Etc: An interrogation

I want quite gently to interrogate a basket of modern and postmodern ideas. They importantly include Critical Theory (CT) and its subsets  Colonial Theory (CTCT) and Post-colonial Theory (CTCT&PCT).  Identity Politics is a rather peculiar hybrid ally of Critical Theory (CT) . Positive Psychology and Positive Parenting have tended to… Read more...

Published

17 November 2024
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