the limits of the human artspace
Art is no longer going anywhere, it has arrived: we have explored the artspace available to us as fully as the surface of our planet.
Lobsang Rampa and what we choose to believe
When I was perhaps 14, I was intrigued with books by Lobsang Rampa, but I could only afford to buy very few books with my pocket money, and so I would buy another Asimov. Leafing through one of those Lobsang Rampa books, I recall reading about the mummified bodies of giants hidden under the Potala Palace in Lhasa. I don’t know whether I knew anything much about Tibet then, or whether, indeed, it was this …
Emperor Boris
We, who live in the United Kingdom, have fallen into a habit of considering our politicians as a bunch of dissolute and feckless, mostly grey, ‘servants of the people’, whom we like to mock and complain about. Westminster seems a quaint, at times almost irrelevant, institution struggling to keep up with the times. We consider the United Kingdom a middling country with a relatively small population; though there are enough people here that many of …
why do electorates divide nearly 50:50?
Have you ever wondered why so many recent political votes divide their electorate almost 50:50? This is my attempt at a simple—perhaps obvious—explanation. The results of the referendum for Scottish Independence (No 55.3%: Yes 44.7%) and the Brexit Referendum in the UK (Leave 51.89%: Remain 48.11%) seem to me remarkably close—especially given that in one case you had 3.6 million people voting, and in the other 33.6 million. Why were these not 60:40, or even …
The Great Balance
The Great Balance, or the Balance of the Three Powers, or simply ‘the Balance’, is the political system that ensures a power equilibrium between the God Emperor, the Great and the Wise.
the Scottish Referendum and the community of Britain
The community of Britain and Northern Ireland, formed by hundreds of years of intermarriage and shared history, is too strong to be broken by Scottish independence. It seems likely to me that all that such independence would be is a ‘coup’ whereby the northern part of that community wrests back some of the political power that is increasingly concentrated in London. Before the north of Britain was deindustrialized, power and wealth was more equitably shared …
Syrian children
A Crusader castle is the latest victim of the Syrian civil war, but the damage to Syrian children may leave a more permanent wound. When some ancient site or remains are damaged by conflict, by the encroachment of habitation or industry, I feel sad at what may be lost. I felt sad when I heard about the looting of the museum in Bagdad, and a few days ago when I became aware that the Crusader …
a new covenant with nature
It is no surprise that human rights as a formal system, as legislation, should have arisen from the two cataclysms of ‘civil war’ that the Europeans brought upon themselves, and into which they drew so much of the rest of the world. As a way of trying to avoid descent into the horrors of the Rape of Nanking, of the Eastern Front, and of the Holocaust, it is essential, that at the heart of our …
competition versus brotherhood
A mania for competition so possesses our societies that it is hard to imagine any other way of being, and yet I think it is critical that we free ourselves from its grip. In the West, the Christian churches, from long habit, had an explanation for everything. Alas, with the rise of science, these churches chose to cling to Old Testament ‘certainties’, with the result that, when the cosmology of ‘Creation’ was overturned, the New …