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The Crooked Perspective

Ours was a conservative church, that’s for sure. Serious men wearing back suits, black ties, black shoes, white shirts. The women likewise reserved in their dress and in their manner. But then there was a troubling development. Someone broke ranks. Someone, you might say, ‘got religion’. He came to be called ‘Jimmy the One’. Well, in theory at least, everyone was believing the same gospel – the Nicene Creed, the Westminster confession – all of that. But somehow it had come alive for Jimmy. He started speaking about being chosen by God, about being anointed by the Spirit – and hence, I suppose, the nickname. I was just a teenager at the time, and truth to tell, my vote was with Jimmy. At least he was something different. At least he was enthusiastic about his faith. But there were lessons there for me in the way Jimmy was treated. Jimmy the One, you see, may have thought that it was all about God, but his name sort of suggested that it was really all about Jimmy. He was, o...
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Longing for the Wild

The news is filled with terrible stories and I fear that no matter when or where you’re reading this, it will still be the same. The stories are of the rape and sexual exploitation of women and girls. For a while I thought those stories got so much news coverage because the government wanted to distract us from all the dodgy things it does behind the backs of the citizens to whom it is supposed to be accountable. I also thought that – no matter how matter-of-fact the reporting – no matter how carefully sleaze and gossip are avoided – still, it might be better not to report at all. Somehow it seems like the victims are exploited all over again, by having their names and faces in the news. Mostly, I’ve avoided the issue. There are big political stories. There are big existential threats to our well-being like war and climate change and the ongoing destruction of Nature. The abuse of women and girls is mostly by bad men – cruel men with no conscience or compassion. We have laws aga...
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Body

It occurred to me recently that rather a lot of my writing involves stories about bodies. There’s strangely-clad bodies, tattooed bodies, painted bodies - and of course, naked bodies. Perhaps rather too many naked bodies. There’s plenty of big, important questions out there, to try to find the answers for, so was is the whole body thing really causing a bit of a distraction? I’ve seen it happen with artwork. Paint a huge landscape, and somewhere in the painting there are one or two tiny figures. People will shuffle up to within inches of he canvas and stare at the figures. And, heaven forbid, an artist tries to convey some deep meaning, by way perhaps of a visual metaphor, and places a nude in the painting. People, of course, just stare at the nude. ‘There’s a naked person there. What’s that about?’ one might say. ‘He’s made her too thin’, another replies. ‘No’, says another, ‘too fat’. So, I say to myself, why bodies? And the first thing that came to mind was that very obsessi...
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Aporia - Praxis

I’ve chosen to write about three topics here – Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), climate change and war. The reason for choosing these three is that they relate so closely to matters already discussed in previous writings – Theoria, Poiesis and Polis. They are also considered to be amongst the most serious concerns for humanity in the current era. It’s not my intention to examine the three topics in detail – far less to offer solutions. Instead I’m looking to understand how these issues shine a light on how we all choose to live. Such existential threats can seem daunting and render us powerless in the face of difficulties too big to cope with. But if, rather than trying to solve the problems, we consider instead how they might inform and change our lives individually, then this offers us, in my view, a better approach. We have the opportunity of approaching the world differently rather than being burdened with guilt over being unable to change it. Turning first to AGI, it’s...
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Longing for the Commons

A good description of the Commons is given on one website: ‘The global commons is the set of natural resources, basic services, public spaces, cultural traditions and other essentials of life and society that are, or should be, part of a public trust to be enjoyed by all people and cherished for the public’s well-being. Another way to conceive of these assets is how it is said in Spanish: el bien común – the common good. Behind the commons is the fundamental idea that life, information, human relationships, popular culture and the earth’s riches are sacrosanct and not for sale.’ This essay looks at the shades of meaning implicit in the term ‘the Commons’. Perhaps in popular speech the term describes an area of land set aside for public use. Previously that use may have been pasture for cattle or space for food growing. Today, it is more likely to be for recreation – such as parks or beaches. The so-called ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ is based on a pamphlet by William Foster Lloyd w...
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Aporia: Polis

Some thoughts from Poiesis, to start this work: Value may be innate to the universe, but this does not lessen the problem of constructing pragmatic moral rules. Some moral principles seem to be derived from aesthetics – fairness and equality, for instance. These can be understood by our ‘mammalian’ brain. Some moral principles require rational thought – via the uniquely human aspect of the brain. This split between mammalian and human – body and rationality – causes quite a bit of confusion for us, as embodied agents. We will often hear the body’s response, but we will then try to rationalise with our minds – not noticing any contradictions. Our sense of the sacred – even for ‘unbelievers’ – also has an impact on our sense of right and wrong – not necessarily connected to our bodily or rational responses. Finally, there is our human fixation with power – as explored more fully in what follows. (It would be nice if people obsessed with power were also people who are less attuned to t...
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Longing for the Earth

There is a spectrum of human response to the natural world, from seeing it a resource to be exploited for human benefit on the one hand through to seeing humanity as part of a single living system. From the Environmentalist point of view, the destruction of natural habitats, pollution and climate change are all primarily threats to human well-being and as such they are potential disasters. From an Ecology point of view, humans are almost the disease! The rest of Nature would recover and continue without us if we were gone. However, without bacteria, everything else would be dead within days if not hours. And what about the seas without plankton? And ‘…once the bees are gone, the humans have got ten years’. (Albert Einstein) A Deep Ecology point of view takes this a stage further and doesn’t really distinguish between humans and all other life. These ideas can be summarised by saying that there is a continuum from a ‘commodified’ (extrinsic) view of Nature to one which ascribe...
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