Recently, I visited a friend and noted that his road and surrounding area was festooned with St George’s flags. Knowing him to be an avowed Marxist, I quipped that he had obviously been busy during the night. Of course, what passes for the left and the working class have gone their separate ways over the… Continue reading Britain on the Brink? The Rights and Wrongs of Rebellion
Tag: human nature
Putting AI in its Place: Experience, Empowerment and Creativity
Multiple concerns have been and are being raised about the threats posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI). There are more extreme claims that AI represents an existential threat to humanity. While not dismissing any potential harms that AI might cause, I want to convince you that the problems arise when we are overawed by the myth… Continue reading Putting AI in its Place: Experience, Empowerment and Creativity
The Theatre of Unreason: War and Identity Politics
Is there a connection between Putin’s war in Ukraine and identity politics? The de facto Russian dictator’s contempt for the woke politics of the Western world is well-documented, though the extent to which a consideration of the West as morally corrupt has played any part in his decision-making is unknown. So the attempt by some… Continue reading The Theatre of Unreason: War and Identity Politics
Legality and Morality: Can Man Serve Two Masters?
It is often suggested that obedience to the law is a virtue and by implication that respect for the law is a requirement of morality. But is this necessarily the case? Although this might at first might appear obvious, I would suggest the issue turns out on closer inspection not to be so at all.… Continue reading Legality and Morality: Can Man Serve Two Masters?
Freedom and Belonging
The following article is extracted from a longer essay entitled “‘The Re-Enchantment of the World’ as Social Theory and Critique”, which readers who are interested can view in full at https://theaxiologicalperspective.wordpress.com/ Shortly after communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe were tumbling, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama produced a seminal essay entitled ‘The… Continue reading Freedom and Belonging
Chance and Necessity in Populist Revolution
May you live in interesting times (Confucian curse) Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites (Edmund Burke) A scholar of impeccable academic credentials once suggested to me that revolutions are spaced about the average lifespan of a human apart, about 70 years.… Continue reading Chance and Necessity in Populist Revolution
Self-transcendence and the multiplicity of value-worlds in the evolution of modernity
Abstract The dizzying rate of change today is bringing a focus on fundamental values that is bypassing the traditional concerns of epistemology within philosophy and the historical and political issue of the religious/secular divide. This focus points to an emerging view of social evolution driven by a transcendent view of individual identity. The nature of… Continue reading Self-transcendence and the multiplicity of value-worlds in the evolution of modernity