Religion – Blogs Don't Burn

November 25, 2022November 28, 2023

Stray Thoughts: The ‘Ultimate Fidelity’

Note: The title art for this post is ‘Ouroborous, Cosmic Loveheart’ by Silvana D. You can see more of her work on Etsy.

A few posts ago, I tried to illustrate the profoundly dark mindset that human beings can fall into during the most extreme moments of suffering and resentment. This attitude, which I associate with the ‘extinction-drive’ (the yearning to put an end to life itself in the face of overwhelming suffering), can be captured in a single term: Invidia Fati. Literally meaning the ‘hatred of fate’, this life-negating maxim has been a major motivator in countless acts of death, destruction, and mayhem throughout human history.

In essence, it is nihilism-turned-activism; the result of a process by which evil is perversely elevated to the status of the Highest Good. Faced with a world too painful to endure, some poor wretches become genuinely convinced that the only solution to the problem of life is to tear the whole damn thing down and stamp it into oblivion. ‘Burn down the circus, kill all the clowns, and end the great cosmic joke forever’. This is the cynical, even genocidal impulse which motivates such characters.

January 20, 2020March 10, 2021

Islamism and the ‘Clash of Civilisations’

Background: This academic essay was written in early 2019. In it, I aimed to explore the rise of ‘Islamism’ in the Middle East, an ideology emerging from Islam that claims to represent the political wing of the faith . In light of recent tensions between the United States and Iran after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, I thought now would be an appropriate time to post this essay. Today, Iran is the only internationally recognized state to have adopted ‘Islamic rule’ and ‘shariah law’ as its official mode of government.

Despite this, the ideological convictions driving Iran have not been articulated effectively in the international press, and as a result are not well understood by the public. Hopefully this essay will go some way in bridging this gap of understanding. Whilst the focus here is not on Iran per se, the proliferation of Islamism in that country and across the Muslim World is a development that continues to have a huge impact on efforts at diplomacy in the region. It therefore needs to be understood before an effective solution can be offered.

October 27, 2019January 9, 2021

“Winning the War of Ideas”: Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and Douglas Murray in Conversation at the O2 Arena

Backlog: this review was written shortly after the live event on 16th July 2018 at the London 02 Arena, which I attended.

A couple of years ago, it would have been unthinkable that the O2 would host an event bearing more similarity to a lecture than a rock concert. It would be a further leap of implausibility, then, to imagine such an event drawing in almost eight thousand people, with a queue of not-just-university types stretching all the way out of the door. The event consisted of three men, on stage, simply talking – a format which is bound to have raised a few eyebrows at the O2 planning department! As Sam Harris joked, “It is especially flattering to us that Justin Bieber isn’t coming out to perform in the middle of this.”

Jordan Peterson has expressed a similar amazement at his own meteoric rise to fame. Going from a largely unknown Canadian Psychology Professor at the University of Toronto two years ago, he has since become one of the most well-known and sought after public intellectuals on the planet. Peterson can be seen everywhere; on national television, podcasts, public debates, YouTube channels, radio shows and more. His biggest UK feature so far has been the (now infamous) Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman, which went viral after their heated exchange led to much online ridicule for Channel 4.

October 20, 2019January 9, 2021

The Science of Morality

A review of The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris (2010).

This provocative book written by neuroscientist, philosopher and public intellectual Sam Harris makes the ambitious argument that Science can (and should) be used as a tool to determine human values. It’s a controversial thesis, one that has unsurprisingly stepped on quite a few intellectual toes since the books publication!

Harris’ claim that scientific enquiry can discover objective moral truths is grounded in a position of ‘consequentialist morality’ (meaning the consequences of moral ideas to human well-being is viewed as the only measure for whether something is good or bad). This type of calculation-based morality is familiar to most people in the form of ‘Utilitarianism’, a narrower (and somewhat nastier) version of consequentialism.