abtw777

The classic dilemma for government is surely the tension between taxation and public spending. In a way, this acts as a model for more complex dilemmas that I’d like to look at in this essay. So, briefly, here is the tax-spend dilemma. Citizens don’t want to face extra taxation, but citizens want better public services. So how is the government supposed to resolve this? The strange thing about the dilemma is that it is not something hidden or obscure. Everyone knows public services have to be paid for. Everyone knows that this must be done through taxation. Everyone knows that to improve public services taxation would have to rise – there’s only so much that can be done by way of efficiency savings. And, as there’s likely to be inflation in the economy, even maintaining public services at their current levels must mean spending more, and therefore more tax. But, well, the really strange thing is that whilst everyone knows these basic facts, no government is really able to com...

The history of Western culture, for the most part, has been a history of a diminishing social circle until there is often only the nuclear family left. In fact some cities (Edinburgh, Paris) already have more than half of all homes occupied by a single occupant. Through school and further studies we hopefully enjoy a circle of friends. But sooner or later, many of us settle into a long-term relationship and perhaps old friendships start to dwindle and new ones do not form because our time and attention is taken up by our partner and children. Or perhaps we feel our partner is all we need. So our life partner, by default, becomes our primary encounter. Modern life is increasingly atomised and individualistic and it might be thought that this would suit the loner. Certainly the anonymity suits the loner more than might a more traditional community setting. Society is very much prejudiced in these matters, such that we are made to feel a great lack if we have ‘failed’ to find a lif...

Silence is not simply the absence of noise. Granted, this is often a welcome thing! But there is a kind of silence in the rustling of leaves and the chirp of birds in nature, the murmur of conversation in a café and even the music of a festival. The point is that all of these things are sound in its rightful place – it is sound rather than noise. Welcoming them into our lives is still to dwell in ‘silence’; it is still to allow us peace of mind as opposed to distraction – and indeed, unwanted distraction. So we might say that silence is a state of mind rather than some actual state of noise or lack of noise. It might better be described as ‘tranquillity’, or a state of ‘quiet’, or some such term – but for the sake of simplicity I’ll stick with the word silence in this essay. Silence is a place brimming with potential. Silence is a means of listening to something beyond ourselves – whether the universe, or ‘the voice of God’. Silence can be for the sake of seeking some outer gui...

I’m going to describe ‘Aporia’ as a blessed state of ambiguity! It is to have an unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, state of contradiction in one’s thinking. I describe it as a blessed state because having questions rather than answers is very often a better way to live. The beginner thinks that, given time, they can become a master. But the master knows that there is always so much more to learn. The master learns always to approach things as a beginner. Aporia is divided into four sections – theoria, poiesis, polis and praxis. (each section is published as a separate booklet in the printed version.) Theoria asks life’s big questions: Why does anything exist at all? What is the nature of things that exist? Can we see the universe and the things that it contains as they truly are or are we forever only seeing illusions or derivatives of an underlying reality? Is there meaning in the universe? Poiesis tells us of the possibility of unexpected new things emerging in the world...

It’s a beautiful thought – perhaps the most beautiful thought – that each of us contains, somehow, the whole universe, locked up inside our souls. Or, getting a bit religious about it – the idea that each of our souls is a droplet of the Great Spirit – a droplet in the ocean of God. Perhaps it’s at least poetically true. If we could somehow see the universe from the outside – the view from eternity, if you will – then I like to think that we’d see a perfect harmony – a perfect Oneness. It’s only because we’re creatures of time and space – locked up in this world of ‘the Many’ – that things seem flawed. But the One is, all the while, gifting us – giving grace to the world. All this is a mystery to us – we cannot know much, we can never see the reality behind it all – the way things and people are in and of themselves. But we are creatures with agency, and as such I believe we are responsible for making the goodness of the universe manifest here on Earth. If there is grace at all t...

Consumer capitalism – and indeed, Western civilisation in general – is often accused of making everything in life ‘transactional’. A ‘gift economy’ is suggested as an alternative to this. Transaction BAD, gift GOOD. In the gift economy everyone would just work away at something they were really good at, plus maybe spend a few hours on menial jobs like cleaning toilets or weeding crops. Then whatever each household needs for their day to day life is gifted to them by the society – just as the produce of their labour has been gifted to others. Whether such a system has ever operated in any age or in any place is something of a moot point. But it has been proposed as an ideal by utopian thinkers for generations. Amongst other things it relies on their being a good range of skills available within a reasonable distance and on people having fairly modest needs and desires. And it probably relies on a very good distribution system, to get stuff to the right people and places. It was...