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 …

eros

Nothing seems to me more absurd than applying our social mores to other cultures. Some have raised nakedness to the heights: others have damned it to Hell. Is one right and the other wrong? The only person who it seems to me has the right to judge is someone from the culture whose mores and behaviour are being considered. The ‘Peoples of the Book’ (Jews, Christians and Muslims) have a particularly strong aversion to nakedness …

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