Category: Statecraft & Culture
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UK’s social contract up for renewal… but don’t let the utopians spoil it, as we have the solution already
TRUMP HAS OVERPOWERED US politics, irrespective of November’s presidential election result. How? Encounter, recognition, participation. Great Campaigners offer these in bucket-loads. More immediately a Republican presidency is seen as holing-below-the-waterline the Pax Americana. Teasing that the US will no longer guarantee the Western Alliance. This is the Republican’s ‘pumped-social-contract’, boilerplating anti-statist Jack Reacher-style ‘toothbrush and…
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Harry and Meghan, shaping the British constitution
HARRY and Meghan’s docuseries is the first fully-formed independent critique from within this normally well-managed monarchy. Its impact is inevitable. Largely as the British constitution is discourse-based, and any new narrative will be felt keenly. That is, the constitution is referent to the long-text of British history. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s rostrum, Netflix,…
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Pathways to reform: Economic recovery will rest increasingly on new levels of mutuality and tolerance
ON the morning of 26th July 1945 Britain woke up to the results of the General Election. The Daily Mail newspaper warned the Labour Party to ‘accept an adverse verdict like men and not like spoilt children’. As the day wore on it became clear the Conservative Party was in trouble. Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchill’s…
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Naked Education: Odd and ordinary learning
There is the argument that ordinary people enjoy life. They enjoy ordinary things. But odd people find ordinary life painful. How much ordinariness is being inflicted by education and business on contemporary life is an important concern. To Know seems rooted in oddness. Especially Socratic knowledge. And does ordinariness in learning affect ‘good knowledge’? Especially…
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The Mad Shareholder: Struggle of speaking into contemporary society
How much does ‘speaking into’ the world as a ‘stakeholder’ effect change? The image of us as stakeholders with a voice is often undifferentiated. This podcast discusses this and other issues. Including the relationship between myth and reality, and the problems of privileging unquestioned rationalism.
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Grenfell and the banality of modern power: And how very ordinary people diligently partake in evil
The Grenfell tragedy reveals another possible horror and that is the absence of individual actors to bear, in a very modern moral sense, the culpability that our notions of ‘leadership’ require. We place great store on leaders as agents who have power to change our world, but when failure strikes it seems contemporary society is…
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When the two great anti-philosophers of modernity, Karl Marx and Jesus Christ, see eye-to-eye (Podcast)
Peculiarly synonymous in their bent towards action Marx and Christ should be in bed together again. The poor stock action has recorded amongst the disinterested middle of society makes such a suggestion increasingly attractive. Both Christianity and Marxism have emasculated themselves by a loss of integrity towards ‘action’. Hence a return to Marx and Christ…
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Shocking Britain: UK’s EU exit offers insights into power and change (Podcast)
After a long and messy partnership the UK’s exit from the EU represents a complex set of desires to renegotiate the Social Contract. Some of these might be to restore ‘charismatic power’ to a country used to ‘throwing its weight around in the world’. From Orwell’s common man to Debussy’s challenges to modern realities there…
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Speaking into power in the Age of Kittens
Questioning power doesn’t get any easier. At least not in the Age of Kittens and other cuteness. The trauma of speaking is still with us. Hearing one’s own voice can hurt. Richard Rorty says this concern or hesitation is a form of irony. As we open our mouths we are wracked with the thought that…
