Category Archives: writing

Beer and Determinism

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Composed from notes written whilst drinking my second espresso, waiting for my motorcycle to be serviced…

I suppose I am only muttering to myself on paper really. Writing does calm me and does focus me, so that is a good thing. The art niggles away at artists until we create.

Mainly I want to get home and have a beer. So…

The pull of Beer illuminates an interesting challenge to the Determinism which I embrace.

If the weight and momentum of the universe – physics, chemistry, biology, history, politics, society, genes, environment, family and traumas – have brought me this far like a train with its buffers in the small of my back and I don’t have free will, what does it then mean when I am faced with a temptation I know is dangerous and/or destructive?

Has the force of the universe in my vicinity of space-time produced a human (the most sophisticated ape) who can’t say no to the bottle that is calling me with muffled cries of “drink me! It’s cold in here” from the fridge?

I’m doomed by the loss of my mother – when the world was suddenly revealed to me to be a very unsafe place – to be particularly vulnerable not only to depression but to the anxiety that I alleviate temporarily every day with the beer that exacerbates my anxiety and depression the following morning at 5am. (This is addiction. Thanks, history).

At the same time, I am doomed to have become aware of these vulnerabilities and doomed to resist them. It is not a choice, history, etc. blah blah dictates it.

It has produced a human being with a taste for beer and little willpower to resist even though it has also in the same body produced a human being that knows alcohol is a poison that is slowly killing him.

So I am a human who has no choice but to continue as well as no choice but to want to stop.

The full force of the universe, i.e. history, family, genes, environment, trauma, society, etc. gives this organism, me, no choice but to manage or resist my vulnerabilities to depression, alcohol and anxiety.

Given all the above, what will I do this lunchtime and afternoon? Maybe the correct question is not “what will I do?” but “what will happen”.

So let’s be inspired. Sometimes I win, sometimes I win….

Possibly…

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Every second I float encumbered by my luggage like a leaf down a muddy delta of tiny streams of possibility opening into each other with the flood at my back.

When a stream is taken because the water is deep and flows fastest there all the other possibilities become irrelevant as I am washed on towards the next parting and joining of the streams with no idea of its existence or of which possibility I will find myself taking.

And all the time with no idea how far it is to the deep blue ocean or whether the tide is coming in or out.

Don’t mention the seagulls, the wading birds or the fish. Step carefully at the confluence…

The Ballet of Control

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So, I am starting to write in the space we have made in the day. This has become difficult. I have made it so.

My morning routine had evolved – with good reason over time as with all evolutions – into a series of slick and economic movements; a kind of bedroom, garden, kitchen and bathroom ballet – sometimes to music, breakfast television or the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme – that delivers food for tropical fish and cats as well as – for humans – emptied bladders, emptied dishwasher, breakfast, teas and coffees, supplements, medications, news reading, email filtering, French language learning through an app, a “strong senior” fitness workout guided by an app, a cold plunge in the pool, a clean body from a hot bath, audiobook, clean teeth, wood stove emptied of ash and refilled with paper and kindling, a wheelbarrow-load of firewood brought from the wood store and stacked beside the stove, yesterday’s recycling hidden in the car’s boot, last night’s laundry hung on the washing line by the fish pond, in the right order, using two pegs per item. The pegs must match: wooden with wooden, light blue plastic with light blue plastic.

This modern ballet for one aged dancer with back and other aches progresses around the property: upstairs, downstairs, outside, inside, upstairs, outside, upstairs, in and out of particular cupboards, using the appropriate, chosen tools – including particular teaspoons, particular dessert spoons, particular cereal bowls, a particular tea tray – without inelegant, sudden halts or extraneous doubling back for an overlooked detail because everything is in its place on the path through this first 90 minutes or two hours.

Then there is the drive to take the recycling to the recycling point and buy bread and beer from my friendly shops in town.

And then it is almost lunchtime.

Tickets are available now at reasonable rates for early-rising performance art enthusiasts who promise not to speak, to get in my way or draw wise conclusions about my psychological and/or physical condition. Preparation for the show begins the night before with a tidying, a loading of timed wash cycles in machines that use cheaper electricity after midnight and the cat’s evening meal. So for the full experience – including the rare but very special screaming nightmares at no extra charge – you might like to book the overnight stay.

Within these intense performance hours unexpected breakages, moved or missing utensils and people that might wander innocently across the stage with their own perfectly reasonable but – for me – unscripted interventions and destinations cause sudden irritation and frustration that is destructive if expressed.

This would appear strange and unwarranted unless a person that wasn’t simply struggling with anxiety and obsession to get everything precisely right so that everything is “done” but also – and very significantly – to get what he defends as necessary over and the space/time to write opened up even briefly. So, I must be that person.

I have never properly confronted or dealt with the pathological, chronic anxiety, the overthinking, the fear and the obsessive behaviour that has developed over the years. I have actually colluded with it and defended it as a necessary, reasonable, rational strategy to live in an insecure world ripe with the unexpected and potentially disastrous: a lesson I learned at the age of 9.

I feel a deep and frightening pain for all those children under the age of 10 in Gaza that have learnt that same lesson. Celebrate peace but thousands and thousands will never have peace.

Producing and publishing a written piece can provide a deep satisfaction. Today has been different. I am back on the journey to a personal and political confrontation. The road leads backwards and forwards. I might explore it here.

From Then To Eternity. A Long Personal Political Journey

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Every morning I get up and I watch the world go mad before my eyes. That’s every single day. I don’t think I’m alone. Make a cup of tea and read on. It’s a long piece so a plate of biscuits or two is also advisable.

This is not the world I thought I grew up in.

I was political with a small p from quite an early age. Dad and I argued about most things but agreed that Moseley should be locked up and shouldn’t be holding a rally in Trafalgar Square.

I survived Dad’s involvement in the Civil Defence Corps, the Cuban missile crisis and eventually the Cold War. I survived watching “The War Game” in Mitcham Town Hall but I never forgot it.

I survived the Beatles and Mitcham Grammar School.

I was a weekend hippie from South London. I wanted love and peace; especially a lot more of the love bit. I “Imagined”. I wasn’t the only one. Sadly I survived John Lennon.

I wanted to save the whales. I demonstrated against the Vietnam war at Grosvenor Square. I failed to ban the bomb. I read International Times and Oz magazine. I loved prog rock. I watched the events in Paris in 1968 from afar but with enthusiasm. I dabbled with the softer recreational substances without much commitment and without addictions apart from the legal ones: beer and cigarettes.

I had one foot on the magic bus and one foot in one job or another at all times.

I became a union rep and a Friend of the Earth. I had my grandfather’s ambition.

At university as an unqualified mature (23 years old) student of Politics with no tuition fees, a grant and an indulgent grandma plus real experience as a proletarian I became what I now realise was a sort of noisy, uninformed, romantic revolutionary. I still Imagined but read Lenin instead of Lennon.

I became a member of the Communist Party but gravitated quickly towards the Euro-Communism of Santiago Carillo. In the absence of Conservative students at my university I distrusted everyone else: from the anarchists to the Socialist Workers Party, Militant, the International Marxist Group, the Labour Party, even unto the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. The Cubans were OK with me. I so wanted them all to do better. I was a sectarian increasingly in a sect of one.

Building on my Woodstock streak and Rolling Stone magazine I also (quietly) believed that there was a really strong streak of genuine democratic progressive idealism in politics, especially in US politics where there was no bending of everything by the dominant old public school class system of elites in the UK. I think I really believed that the USA – the home of rock – was capable of change, even after I’d argued violently with a Reaganite American long-haired hippie in a Paris youth hostel.

Years passed. And now I’m here with you.

When I first read Noam Chomsky’s “The Myth of American Idealism” just a few years ago, I thought he was going a bit far. As a by now an ex-Communist ( the Party had dissolved around me) I was suspicious of Chomsky as an anarchist but the events he described betrayed the reality of capitalist American politics, international manipulation, war and terror.

I’d thought at least Obama was a good guy doing his best. And Bernie Saunders was saying things I really believed in. Putin’s Trump Series One was clearly a dangerous aberration. But then came the disappointment of steady Joe Biden with all the rings Netanyahu and Putin and ultimately Comeback Trump ran around him and the unfortunate Kamala Harris, who with more time might have won.

With Trump Series Two the American Empire has been revealed in all its enthusiastic banal, fascist, bullying and openly bad taste corruption, guided by The Heritage Foundation with its Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership. And celebrated idiocy. Don’t forget the idiocy. And whatever Putin’s got on Trump. Don’t forget that.

I have very little hope at all of a Democrat revival that might bring meaningful left change. The Democrats are bought. I now see the USA – even with divisions closing on civil unrest – with absolute clarity as just another Nuclear Empire among Nuclear Empires like the Russian empire and the Chinese empire.

I have lost an innocence. But to lose all hope in one empire does not mean a transfer of hope to another. We are powerless specks. Here’s a speck’s eye review of current empires…

The Russian Empire continues to rot slowly within (read Alexei Navalny) becoming more dangerous the more it feels endangered and surrounded by a NATO that simply has to surround and endanger it by the logic of its official raison d’etre: its defence of its constituent states.

The Chinese Empire is evidently going from strength to strength. They and Russian empires appear to be moving closer. Russia needs China. Perhaps China needs peace to continue to thrive and overtake the USA. The Chinese obsession from ancient times has been with stability. Without stability it becomes ungovernable. War would not be helpful to stability even if fought by robots. My personal hope is that the obsession with stability behind the wall of “peace through strength” – a strength to resist the US power that continues to target them with nuclear weapons from air, sea and neighbouring countries – will lead them to “assist” Putin to find peace with Ukraine and stability in his Empire. We’ll see. What China does next in relation to Russia and Ukraine will make things clear.

At the same time both Russia and China seem to feel the need to tidy up territories after the second world war and the Cold War. Hence Ukraine. Hence Taiwan?

When Empires compete economically and form a global ecosystem of mutually exclusive military alliances War is not far behind. We are somewhere before Sarajevo but with nuclear weapons.

I may have become harshly realistic, horribly so, even unto myself. So I’m not a romantic revolutionary anymore. My heart is still with the People but democratic power is not.

Someone in Trump’s administration is also being harshly realistic. When Trump is grabbing attention daily with some new outrageously fascist move at home, the Realist among his puppet masters has steered his attention to China and to the melting Arctic. He might (and I mean might) be embarrassed at the limits of his power to gather a Nobel Peace Prize via Gaza or Ukraine, both of which must manifest as really annoying taps on his shoulder from the east as he looks westwards across the Pacific and north beyond Canada and Greenland, The US empire may be in decay and become more dangerous as it proves untrustworthy and loses its global hegemony to China.

The UK, although a nuclear-armed vassal state to the nuclear US Empire is currently divided against itself by a nostalgic bitterness at the loss of its racist empire.

The UK has failed to look its decline in the face and become a nuclear free Scandinavian country high up the happiness index. Being mostly populated by descendants of Norsemen – Vikings and Normans – this should be a serious option. Imagine (that word again). Dump the “independent” nuclear deterrent that in reality won’t deter anyone when it all kicks off. Rebuild and renew health and public services, invest in humanity without breaking the Chancellor’s fiscal rules. Live well and wisely up until the apocalypse. Nothing else seems sensible. Imagine.

UK governments have not dared to go public to their own citizens about its vassal status. Most really believe they live in an independent sovereign liberal democracy where voting in a necessarily revolutionary socialist government could be allowed. UK industry, finance and commerce, IT infrastructure and privatised services are overwhelmingly owned by companies one can trace back to monopolies and billionaires in the USA but few people know. And if they did, what could they do?

The UK maintains a respectful stance towards the overwhelming power of the US Empire – Trump is coming to embarrass King Charles this month – while hiding its impotence behind strident admonitions and minimal gestures regarding Gaza and Ukraine. Sanctions yes but arms supples and spy flights from Cyprus. The UK government (a.k.a. Labour Friends of Israel) is just not to be trusted. But it is buying Trump’s weapons to give to Ukraine, training Ukrainian troops etc. Sneaking a more assertive role via Europe whilst not drawing it’s master’s wrath.

The European Union is standing with Ukraine as much as possible without provoking an attack by being all NATO unless attacked: having to buy arms from Trumperica to pass to Ukraine, ready to secure a peace if it’s ever declared. It’s a kind of mini empire without an emperor; almost independent and a complex irritant to both Trump and Putin.

An aside: I notice that the Germans have been very clever by using a lot of the defence spending increase demanded by Trump on strategic autobahns. There are historic precedents from the late 1930s I’d best not mention but it worked well then and if there’s no war they can drive even faster. Maybe the UK could pull a similar move to build the strategic HS2 or the infrastructure to better distribute power from solar and wind plants…

Europe is where I live, powerless, voteless (unless I count Runnymede in Surrey) but now realistically so. Perhaps an eyes-open pessimist but still able to post my outrage on Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, on the repulsive X and even – if I hold my nose – on TruthSocial (an absolute toilet) where I like to tease MAGA.

It’s a futile form of artistic self-expression but it’s mine.

The last scales of my misguided romantic idealism about politics have now fallen away from my eyes. I might call myself a romantic realist to avoid the term romantic fatalist. Either by climate collapse, nuclear war, pandemic, geological extinction event or a simple idiocy that enables any or all of the above doom inevitably awaits. They are each in a very bleak race to get here first.

On the bright side, as Spike Milligan once said about the atom bomb they’ve made no progress since they invented the spear. They can only kill me once.

I’m 74. No need to hurry.

I have grandchildren so resistance remains futile but essential, even if we only Imagine.

It could be worse. I could be a citizen of the USA.

A blog can be a very dangerous thing.

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Here I am with the space to write but presently having to overcome an immense inertia to move at all.  There are a multitude of reasons/excuses that I will spill out across this entry:

It is too hot. It is 38 degrees in the shade outside this traditional stone farmhouse in France. It has always been a fine refuge from solar radiation. It has shutters, small windows and a shaded velux window at the top of the stairs – always open – to funnel the heat out.  I keep all the other windows closed during the day. But after two weeks of very high temperatures and no rain apart from one brief thunderstorm a 3.30 last night I have the strong impression that the stone walls are themselves beginning to conduct heat. Nothing spectacular but the first floor is now noticeably warmer than the ground floor and considerably cooler than the top floor.  Escape is becoming more difficult.

I have been ill.  After a few weeks of good health as the stage one arthritis in my hip settled down I flew Ryanair to London crammed into the full plane, breathing in whatever my fellow sufferers passengers were breathing out I picked something up. After a suitable period for incubation my chest exploded with violent but unproductive coughing a few days later. This turned into a bronchitis that I’m only now – three weeks later – fairly confident I’ve overcome. I also began to develop a strange pain in my right eye for which my doctor back here in France has prescribed anti-biotic eye drops. A three day supply and on day two I see just a little sign of improvement. These are petty complaints in comparison to the dreadful diseases I hear about most days on the BBC. At least I am not being starved or bombed or – to my knowledge  – being targeted by death squads. But this is me and I find them constantly, very irritating and debilitating as they intrude in every context, including the night. So…

 I am tired. I am very tired.  Giving into that tiredness brings on guilt at my inactivity and disgust at the hot, coughing, sweating-into-my-bad-eye slug I have become. Coffee and my morning fitness routine provides me with a positive bounce at the beginning of the day but it doesn’t last more than an hour or so. This week I have been racing the sun to get to my dry and dusty garden tasks before the radiation fries me. But I sweat and tire very quickly. I can only do a 90 minute stint before retreating frustrated to the morning bath I postponed to get out there early. The dust is not helping my chest or my eyes.

There are things I want to express that I dare not express. Wisdom has crept up on me late in my complicated determined life. Some mysteries will remain mysteriously mysterious.

I am crippled by outrage. I suffer outrage every day when I turn on the news and see genocide, war cruelty, starvation and a world full of governments unwilling or unable to stop it.  Where the hell do I start? I don’t want my blog to be just a long succession of political revelations and justified anger. You can go anywhere for that. (I recommend Novara Media). But it might be time for some of that.

I am in danger of being disempowered completely; paralysed by the rapidly growing awareness that there is nothing we can do – nothing anyone of good empathetic will can do – except that which ultimately the global oligarchs and techno-feudalists actually allow us keyboard warriors to do.  They know who I am. I’ve been on a file since 1974. They could come for me any time they need to.  It’s just that I am too insignificant as well as a bit careful.  A flea on the back of a flea. Conspiracies they know what to do with but I have lived my life inside out. They allow me to post my outrage on my blog and on social media because information is power and I give them mine – and yours – every time I post. 

As ever I’m more useful than dangerous. When the round-ups begin it will depend on their arrest strategy. Will they take the insignificant first or last? I have a very low pain threshold and may reveal all I know under the threat of sharp sarcasm. They’ll kill me anyway. of course.  Any mass revolutionary party that admits me needs to have a cell structure. I hope Jeremy and Sara are taking this advice into their account.

Resistance IS futile yet we are driven to resist. Revolution is impossible yet we are driven to revolt. What are we going to do? We have no choice.

Clearly – from the extent of the above – not having enough time is not a valid reason/excuse.

. 

Early Muck Movements

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It’s been a while since I’ve been able to say this but I slept quite well.

I went out at eight to continue moving the compost around before the sun rose very far; before the threatened 39 degree heat started to build. I emptied the compost bin in the secret garden and spread it in what we’ve called The Pit – the vast area from which the rioting bamboo had been removed.

My neighbour Fred the Healer joined me at half past eight (not the eight promised) and we then moved the compost from the bin behind his house to the bin in the Secret Garden. Now that is all roughly in the right place I just have to tidy up the bits of wood and things that we left behind. It will be ready for all the chipped wood that the tree surgeons will deposit there in September.

Tomorrow, Fred is coming back at eight o’clock (allegedly) and we’ll continue to move the compost from the mounds beneath the tall trees at the top of the garden and spread that out in The Pit. There will also be rocks to move. I think Fred understands the mission. It’s looking quite promising.

My mission for the rest of the day is to stay out of the 39 degrees heat and to think.

An intimate excerpt from real life now. Deeper stuff will follow. It’s cooking at present.

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Ten minutes past three in the afternoon on a day that has been pretty unproductive in terms of outdoor work. The temperature just at the moment here in Nouvelle Aquitaine is 37 or 38 degrees C, which is very hot, too hot for me. My first beer seemed in order. There is a breeze blowing which perhaps makes it slightly easier to bear when I actually have to go out. I’m watching the fishpond evaporate. The fish have all gone deep.

This morning I didn’t begin shovelling compost until the sun was over the horizon. I’d stopped to get dressed in yesterday’s filthy working clothes and eat some muesli with berries. I managed two or three wheelbarrow loads before giving up as my sweat began to run. I was listening to “Technofeudalism” by the Greek marxist as I worked. A better book than I expected. I had to replay half a chapter when I eventually got indoors. I might have to do that again…

I also dragged the 50 metre hose around to (illegally) water the plants in the back garden. Just in time for the camellia. Figgy the young fig was also grateful. The pool is very clean and inviting. I wish I could swim.

I have spent most of the day indoors, watching Flog It on BBC, managing my eye drops and painkillers and grumbling about almost everything else to myself.

My wife phoned me from Margate this morning and the phone call made me feel I was the centre of her world for a while in amongst her grandchildren and that’s lovely and then later she texted me to help her to buy the right size bolt for the toilet seat repair I’m going to undertake when she returns. A cheerful and understanding phone call plus attention to my ironmongery needs. What else can a husband ask for?

So really not too bad a day apart from the heat and my eyes which sting and sting and sting and the washes and eyedrops which are going in very, very regularly, six or seven times a day. I was pretty miserable this morning. My ears, my eyes, my chest are all diseased in one way or another. I had a headache that I managed with paracetamol.

I looked at my right eye in the mirror about half an hour ago and I think I might be able to see the beginnings of some improvement which is hopeful because the instructions that came with it say if there is no improvement after 10 days see your doctor. So I suppose I shouldn’t expect it to work too quickly. Aquatic battles need to be fought on the salt seas of my tears.

Now, at 3.45pm another cold beer is calling from behind the fridge door. All I have to do is dodge between patches of intense solar radiation and find the fridge.

Unfinished Business in my 74th Year…

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I was going to write about how my first active involvement with politics – in the early 1970s – came through being involved with Friends of the Earth, recycling newspapers, tidying Llandudno beach and demonstrating to Save the Whale. I’d become a union shop steward at work but didn’t then join the Labour Party even though I met members at Llandudno Trades Council, which I attended as an “environmental” consultant of sorts.

And that memory led me further back to me visiting the Natural History Museum in London to actually meet a full size Blue Whale when I was the age of 11 or 12. It was a model of the whale, not the actual whale, but still enormous, discovered unexpectedly through an ordinary museum doorway, filling the long gallery. There were films about whaling and whale products because these were different days. The exhibition was not concerned with conserving the whale. It was concerned with exploiting the whale and the heroic lives of the men that hunted, harpooned and then cut it to pieces.

And then I remembered why I was in the Natural History Museum in London in 1962. It was because I was running away from school. It was because I was running away from the endemic cruelty of all the bullying that happened at school. It was because I was running away everyone else – pupils and teachers – at school, from my own failure at school; from the confidence-shattering anxiety and complete academic failure I experienced. It wasn’t just a few psychos: the bullying had spread like a virus across the whole class of 28 pupils and also across the class next door and probably throughout the school. I could be – would be – kicked, punched, dead-legged and Chinese burned by anyone. Bottom of the pecking order. No good at There were reasons; things that made me a very easy target. I have written about those elsewhere and I’ll come back to them in a future post.

At school nowhere was safe. No-one could be trusted. So here I was, running away from school to visit museums and art galleries – where no-one stopped to question a boy in school uniform – and the Natural History Museum was one of them.

Those were smoke-blackened, cruel and nasty days – just before the Beatles brought us technicolour – but the grandeur of The Blue Whale stuck.

Sometimes my reactions and thoughts disturb me. The other day I was asking myself about politics and about my early naivety and about whether I am a racist deep down inside. And the answer is unfortunately, probably yes. Because I was a child of the Empire, a child from the age at the end of the British Empire.

All the men I knew had been soldiers. My father had been a Grenadier guardsman, my uncle John had been a tank driver at in the Western Desert. My grandfather, Harry Baker, had served in the First World War and been slightly gassed by our side at Paschendale. Unable to find a job after being invalided out he went back in to serve in the Military Police in India until his health made his service impossible. My other grandfather had been traumatised at war, although we never heard more about that. They all served abroad in parts of the empire. My father served in Palestine and in post-war Germany.

And now here they were, (like my teachers) the victors in their wars, living in post-war austerity Britain, hopeful with a new Labour government and a National Health Service.

It was also a very damaged post-imperial Britain (although most of the population didn’t really believe it) with people arriving from the Commonwealth to help rebuild it. My father didn’t really want to accept that he was a racist either. He tried to explain to me that the word “wogs” came from the initials stamped on their passbooks when they arrived. Workers On Government Service. Nothing to do with golliwogs. Someone had told him that. Naivety seems to run in the family.

I didn’t understand the arguments that were going on, the discomfort that was beginning to show in parts of London as the Windrush people were met by racism (including ours), poor jobs and appalling housing.

My grandmother maintained that there were good and bad in all races, in all people. And that was attractive to me. I think that’s what I wanted to believe. She’d been born in 1901. And she knew that what she said was true. And I think that’s where I planted my naive little flag at an early age. Maybe about seven or eight years old. And that’s where my flag has stayed ever since. Even though there have been various windy seasons when the flagpole has bent in a storm.

This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t dismissive of other people’s cultures or dismissive of other people’s colonial inheritance it doesn’t mean that at all but it wasn’t really until I went to work and then later on to university and when I worked and studied alongside people from all over the world that I just began to understand.

There is good and bad in all people, and that there are wonderful, wonderful cultures out there that will enrich our own. And it wasn’t really until the 80s that I accepted, I think, that England wasn’t going back to the 1950s but it was always going to be a multicultural, multicoloured society..

Af university, I studied politics and became politically active. I was an atheist. I studied, ate, slept, drank, danced and demonstrated alongside people of many ethnic, religious and political backgrounds and countries.

In my professional career I worked with clients and parents many ethnic backgrounds and who had many different experiences. And still my understanding developed not as deeply as it should have done. I still don’t really know what some of the Muslim and Hindu festivals were about. I hardly ever ran into anyone I recognised as Jewish. I just stumbled along showing all people basic respect and politeness. But as an atheist just not quite enough respect and politeness to spend any time studying which variety of sky-god or wandering desert magician they believed in.

My radical atheism excused me from such learning. They were all deluded, the fools. I saw no reason to respect the religious or have them rule over me with any special privileges (e.g. bishops in the House of Lords). I was arrogantly and contemptuously ignorant of the beliefs, rituals and festivals that provided the communities around me with cohesion, shared love, values, dress codes…and often an excuse to blow each other – and even any nearby atheists – apart.

And with ignorance – even an ignorance based upon a scientific rejection of falsehood – comes misunderstanding, discomfort, irritation with the constant need to display tolerance of the strange, to respect the idiocy of supernatural beliefs. In isolating oneself from all the deluded humans one is isolating oneself from a huge chunk of humanity. There’s all of them and there’s me.

You can’t run an empire without racism. If you truly believed that all men and women were equal you would die of embarrassed empathy. The racism that came with being born at the end of The British Empire might have been crushed within me by education and experience and been replaced by toleration and an understanding of colonial history but without active engagement with the communities of belief around me it had remained as an inevitable small germ sheltered by my radical but ultimately lazy atheism. And that’s frightening.

My racism and I have unfinished business.

And now I wish I knew more black people. I wish I knew more Muslim people that I could talk to and be friends with and be neighbours with and join in with. And they could join in with me. But at 73 and living an isolated life in the countryside I don’t think that’s going to happen easily.

In a strange twist of fate. I am now the immigrant. I’m living in France. I guess I haven’t run into any bald racism against me. Except when I met a particularly chauvinistic dermatologist who told me I shouldn’t be there if I can’t speak French and I should go back to England. Not really an entirely helpful comment. Anyway, that’s where I am at the moment, aware of my failings, aware of the failings of others, aware that I can only overcome my own.

I am here with unfinished business.

Hard Determinism

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More about the hard stuff…

I am a hard determinist. I believe that humans have no free will and that the weight and momentum of history in all its forms has brought me – and you – to this particular moment of awareness. This seems to be my foundational belief.

So what would the weight and momentum of history have me write?

My adoption of hard determinism has brought me great comfort. Combined with an understanding of trauma and my personal history it has freed me from any element of guilt over my small crimes and disappointing behaviours. I can accept that I was responsible but that hard determinism provides the most mitigating of circumstances. I don’t need to sentence myself and it isn’t helpful to anyone.

It was the universe and the me it made the moment before that made me do whatever it was and whatever it will be next.

All this applies to all humans, to my cats, to all living things and to Donald Trump. This is a challenging thought.

If we are all spinning around with our consciousnesses propelled by forces that are so strong that our free will is an illusion how should we act? Do we “act” at all if we are simply compelled? If I chose to sit still and do nothing I would have been compelled to sit still and do nothing. Instead I am compelled to write. And to resist.

Perhaps there are channels – complex weaves of various force, strengths and breadth – of compulsion behind every moment pressing us through spacetime and its four dimensional waves of uncertainty and possibility. All other possible actions and outcomes collapse as each (illusory) moment passes.

The weight and momentum of history that made me and continues to make me includes the evolution of my biology. It is the function of my biology as a human to compel me to survive and thrive to reproduce and nurture both my genetic code and that of my group and my species. I have no choice but to surrender and comply. I am coded for physical health, sex, learning, culture, competition, othering, violence, greed as well as love, empathy and altruism. All of these elements and others are present as a result of their utility over time.

These compelled elements of the survival, reproduction and the nurturing of the individual, the group and the species is the arena in which personal, social, economic and political relationships play out. It is the balance of the determined application of those positive and negative elements at any given time that determine our experience as groups, classes, societies, nations and – especially with the existence of global warming, pandemics and nuclear weapons – our species and all others.

We have no free will. We are compelled to act. We are compelled to survive in society with others – a polity – and so compelled to interact with that polity in one way or another. Even sitting still and doing nothing is political. And sometimes I have done that. I have been compelled by history and circumstance to fall asleep in the passenger seat and let someone else drive. 

Now I am compelled to act, to seek to understand the newly unstable political environment and express myself within the polity; to write. And to do that effectively I will have to investigate and explore the experiences and motivations of others who also have no choice and for whom – to their relief – the concepts of guilt and punishment are irrelevant. They may have to be quarantined though…