The Political Logic of the Excluded Middle
For several years the received opinion is that the middle ground of politics has been abandoned here in the UK, in America and in much…
Politics
What actually is ‘Community’?
Almost no pundit, politician or purveyor of good causes can today make their case without extolling its benefits for ‘the community’ or miscellaneous ‘communities’. The…
Dilemmas regarding the justice of claims for national independence
As most of the world knows – although there are surely corners where the news has not permeated or imposed its importance on the local…
Is Progressive Liberalism a New Religion?
Almost forty years ago I read Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Russian Revolution [1], in which he makes the case that Soviet Communism was essentially a religion…
Antagonistic Tribalism: the cement of political extremism
Being that we are tribal in nature and have lived in tribal cultures for far longer than we have lived in individualistic ones, there is a strong propensity to be swayed by appeals to tribalistic urges, including negative propaganda, negative rumours and negative stereotypes. Sometimes we need no external catalyst, but are primed to categorise someone and assume the worst of someone on the basis of a perceived shared identity, ignoring and collapsing the likely complex self-identity of individuals on the basis of limited information and experience. This tendency is countered most effectively by personal knowledge of people from many different backgrounds
Has the postmodern revolution gone full circle?
Happily, the inconsistency and incoherence of the postmodernist perspective is increasingly being challenged by a new generation of thinkers from across the political spectrum. For example Ken Wilber in his Trump and a Post-Truth World notes how postmodernism has played itself out and in attempting to create a new basis for determining truth has ultimately undermined it.
The Just Society: Equality or Freedom?
In A Theory of Justice John Rawls conducted a famous thought experiment. He asked, if we were to imagine, behind a ‘veil of ignorance’, being…
Respect, rights and freedoms in an era of identity activism
The British actor Ben Kingsley, probably most famous for his eponymous role in the film Ghandi, has, since being knighted in the 2001 honours list,…
The Unintended Consequences of Law
It is a fact little known that the origins of the title of John Steinbeck’s famous novel “Of Mice and Men” was an ode “To…
The coming struggle: individualism versus the bureaucratic state
Introduction Modernity has been characterised not only by the great benefits brought by the increase in scientific knowledge and the technologies that have flowed…