Mime, misdirection and pyramid of code
The Gregorian revolution gave rise to a form of organisation that was gradually stamped out all over the Western world and then to its followers. Constitutional...
Alasdair MacIntyre on how ethically lost we are
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="507"] A young Mondrian in 1908 channels an old Monet but is really thinking “I wonder if a bunch of rectangles on...
Michael Polanyi in 1960 on Teilhard de Chardin on evolution
Michael Polanyi was highly suspicious of the hyper-reductionism of neo-Darwinism. It’s reduction of the evolution of a thing so vast as life into a single...
The Fertility Rate: the Best Dam(n) Wellbeing Index Going Around?
Valiant attempts have been made to measure happiness and wellbeing. People much smarter than me have developed fancy indices, and people even smarter than that,...
Polarisation and the Case for Citizens’ Juries
Cross posted from Quillette from 16 Feb 2019, but now behind a paywall. When a conversation is not a conversation: party political discourse in the...
Fast foodification: what is it, what’s driving it, how do we stop it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n43vCEju5Ck In this discussion, Peyton Bowman and I discuss my term ‘fast-foodification’. I coined the word trying to describe modern politics. The techniques used by politicians...
Czesław Miłosz: Alpha, the Moralist
Czesław Miłosz is a Polish writer and Nobel Laureate who first came to Western attention in the early 1950s with the publication of The Captive...