Following on from a previous mailing . . .

Purely and genuinely fortuitously, in the course of reading a novel, The Unburied by Charles Palliser, I came across the following quotation.

The reason I reprint it here is that it is so apposite to what I was talking about in the early mailings of this latest tranche of articles—the scientific confirmation of an inbuilt moral compass within human beings.  And specifically to the matter dealt with in the mailing of July 23rd headed, ‘Now we come to the interesting part . . .’

I won’t go into any further description because the matter is self-explanatory in terms of that earlier mailing.

                                                .  .  .

“‘I don’t know why you use that word,’ the old gentleman said.  ‘Freeth was not murdered—he was executed.  His death was necessary in order to prevent a greater loss of life.’

‘It can never be right to assess a man’s life so pragmatically,’ I protested, looking at Austin for support.  He merely shook his head as if declining to give a view.

‘That is a religious position which deals in moral absolutes,’ the old man replied with complete dispassion.  ‘I take the humanistic view that there is always a calculus of human interests in which the benefit of many may be purchased at the expense of the few.’

‘I call myself a humanist,’ I said indignantly.  ‘But I reject absolutely that point of view.  Human life is sacred.’

‘Sacred?’ the old man sneered.  ‘You can use that word and claim to be a humanist?’”

First we take Manhattan . . .

We are all designed to a greater or lesser extent to be conformists.  One imagines, as with other things, that some sort of continuum exists, stretching from those who are little affected to those who are excessively affected.

[With regard to individuality, Gurdjieff—and those who don’t know of him can google him—always claimed that his Armenian grandmother educated him to go against the crowd and never to do the same as others.  A lesson he included in his own later teachings.]

Now there is nothing wrong in principle with conformism—at least, with normal levels of it.  Without it social life would be impossible, and what you would have instead with be a never-ending conflict of the egos—something like the current UKIP, except on speed.

Another thing about conformism is that it is automatically functioning.  It represents an eternally watchful instinct to stay on-side of the prevailing social consensus.  Like a species of chameleon, we are unconsciously sensitive to any alteration in the social backdrop and are subject to an inner pressure to change colour in sympathy with it.

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you can gain control of the backdrop projector then you can turn people any colour you want.

And this, effectively, is the situation we find ourselves in.  The means of influencing social opinion nowadays is via the media and the media is irretrievably in liberal hands.  To adapt from Leonard Cohen: ‘The liberals have got their channels in the bedrooms of the proles . . .’

And more than the proles, the self-defining middle class is worse.

Political or philosophical argument is no longer necessary, all you need do is present the fashion conscious with the merest hint of being out of step with ‘sophisticated’ opinion and they will do the rest for themselves.

And ‘hinting’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.  In the softening-up period leading to the gay marriage, TV shows, such as The Good Wife, began to filter in gay characters, generally charming and inoffensive, and totally unlike the search-and-destroy mobs of maenads patrolling the media in search of any counter-opinion.

Indeed, the most prominent anti-marriage voices in the Irish media leading up to the referendum often appeared to be those of homosexuals horrified by the idea.  Most other people, it would seem, had been frightened into a cautious silence.  Scarcely surprising, since the same media seemed to be involved in imposing a full-body-press in favour of the proposal.  I can remember one edition of the Sunday Business Post in which I counted five separate mentions of gay marriage, all inherently positive.

Nor, as I say, was there any great debate of principle involved.  Rather it was along the pathetic lines of ‘everyone should be free to express their love’.  Now what that had to do with marriage, I don’t know.  There are thousands of people in love, who have never been married, and thousands married who’ve never been in love.  Love, at best, is something ancillary to marriage; not some necessary precondition.

What we got instead was a sentimentalised and trivialised pap, designed to be fed like sugar water to the masses, and intent on disguising the fact that what was involved was not simply some natural extension of marriage, like a concrete screed finding level within the shuttering of the existing institution, but rather a complete recasting of it, with little discussion at all as to logical consequence.

The reward that was being offered for voting yes was the temporary satisfaction of seeming to belong to some wider constituency involving the ‘great and good’ of Hollywood and the entertainment industry etc. etc. which of course never really was the case.

And now for something entirely different . . .

In a book entitled British Security Coordination, published in 1998, which was an internal history of the British intelligence campaign during the Second World War against German influence in the Americas, the following statement appears: ‘As WS learned, there was little doubt that Gallup deliberately adjusted his figures in Dewey’s favour in the hope of stampeding the electorate thereby . . .’

The WS was William Stephenson, a Canadian, and head of the BSC (British Security Coordination), and himself the subject of a later book, A Man Called Intrepid.  The Gallup mentioned was George Gallup, founder and director of the famous political polling organisation.  The Dewey was Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican candidate in the 1944 election against Roosevelt.

Whether true or not, the above statement was of no great surprise to me, who had always believed in the dubiousness of opinion polling.

There are several ways in which logically polls could be skewed.

One is through deliberate interference from the top, as is suggested in the case of Gallup, though nowadays, one imagines, it would be much more difficult to achieve.

Another can occur at the interview level, especially nowadays when so many young people—and the ground-level pollsters tend in general to be young—are ideologically committed.  In the two most recent Irish referendums, one could make a pretty accurate guess as to how people were likely to vote simply by looking at them, and choosing one’s interviewees accordingly.

A third way lies in the framing of the questions and the supplied range of readymade answers.

As well, of course, we all tend to be somewhat vague in our opinions, and, when effectively door-stepped by a questioner, tend to reach for the most convenient answer in order to hide our ignorance.

But the really interesting part of the quotation above is the belief that a poll could have the effect of ‘stampeding the electorate’ to vote for a particular candidate or party.  Although if such was the case with regard to Dewey, it was a failure, because he lost quite substantially to Roosevelt.

Yet the suggestion is that a poll can be more than simply a reflection of opinion at a certain point in time; it can, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, actually help bring about the outcome it is predicting.  Is this true?  I have always thought so, even long before the matter of Gallup ever arose.  Yet why should this be the case?

The best answer I can come up with is reflected in the Grand National.  Imagine someone who has 50p each way on the winner—and there are usually plenty of them.  Their winnings tend to be paltry, yet the fact is that they are still generally over the moon.  And this is because they have picked the winner, especially when they can see loads of their friends and acquaintances who haven’t.  In other words, they receive a psychological boost from it, some sense of increased status vis a vis the rest of the world.

And I really do think that this is something inherent in the human heart, this desire to be associated with winners, even if only forecast winners, in whatever field it may be.  And especially so in the context of referendums and elections, where unless you have firm convictions, which many people tend not to have, you are wide open to suggestion and to being swayed.

Which is why for a very long time I have been opposed to the idea of the publication of polls in the weeks or months before voting, especially where political parties etc. tend to commission a selection of polls, publishing only those that give them the most positive profile.

Indeed, I tend to be suspicious of polling in general.

The psychological mechanism that makes people vulnerable to manipulation can be viewed in different ways.  Certainly ‘authority’ seems to be a factor in it.  It is generally recognised by behavioural scientists now that there in an inbuilt tendency in humans to obey authority.  This is something individually and socially variable in its effect, reflected no doubt in the fact that Germans always seem to come top of the various surveys.

The question is what constitutes ‘authority’; and who possesses it?

Now we come to the interesting part . . .

An especially fascinating conclusion arising from scientific studies of the innate and unconscious human moral system is that it is implicitly much more sophisticated and clever than philosophers tend necessarily to allow.

Research would seem to show that humans are programmed to judge the greater good in terms more varied than simply the good of the greatest number.  There are circumstances where equations drawn up in terms of the interests of the greatest number will instinctively hold sway.  But equally there are situations where this will not be the case—where more complicated and mysterious algorithms seem to come into play.

To put it simply, the research would seem to show that there is an innate resistance within us as human beings to the deliberate exploitation of other individuals to further our own—implicitly selfish—ends.  This of course doesn’t mean that we don’t do it; but rather that there is a certain frisson, expressed perhaps in terms of conscience, that we need overcome first.  And not just for selfish ends either, but for any end, no matter how praiseworthy.

At the same time, there seems to be what must be a logically related element within us that is prepared to allow a moral acceptance of collateral damage arising in pursuit of a legitimate cause.

The best way to describe this is in terms of a war, in which the forces with the demonstrable right on their side lay siege to an enemy city.  Should the city fall, it will bring nearer the end of the war.  It is also inevitable that in the course of the shelling several hundred people are likely to be killed.  An alternative plan is to parade a dozen prisoners before the city walls with the intention of killing them unless the enemy surrenders.

Now it would seem, in the first case, to be scientifically expected that the response from any random sample of individuals surveyed would be a majority vote—over ninety percent—in favour of the moral legitimacy of such an outcome.  In the second case, and by much the same margin, however, the answer was most likely, and equally instinctively, to be no.

Now the outline I am presenting here is not directly culled from the scientific data.  It is, rather, my interpretation of that data, and of the conclusions that seem to me to be implicitly contained in it.  At the same time, the process of arriving at it has provoked some interesting associations.

The first concerns the verse in John’s Gospel, where Caiphas, the High Priest, speaks of Jesus: You know nothing: nor do you understand that it is for your advantage for one man to die, for the sake of the people, and not to have the whole nation destroyed.  Reading this, it is hard not to believe that John, or whoever wrote John’s Gospel, had not some clear knowledge and appreciation of a moral prohibition against deliberately using or sacrificing individuals, for even seemingly worthwhile ends, highlighting the fact by means of this negative example.

There is also, of course, the statement of Benjamin Franklin’s, which has its origin as far back as at least mediaeval times, that ‘it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer . . .’

The second thing is that the existence of such a principle, which outlaws the misuse of individuals, even in pursuit of what seem positive ends, means that all one really has to sacrifice is oneself, and might go some way to some way to finally resolving a problem from early Christian times, when there were seemingly various ‘lost’ gospels claiming, no matter how ridiculously, that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross, that it was instead Judas or Simon of Cyrene or someone else.

If such an inbuilt moral principle, as has been described, for protection of the innocent individual exists, and existed at the time of Jesus, then quite clearly it had to be Jesus who died on the cross.

This mailing has strayed into places it wasn’t intended to go on setting out.  But I write purely as an observer, someone for a long time fascinated by the various matters discussed.  As I say, my interest is purely neutral and prompted mainly by curiosity.

We’ve been here before . . .

The modern world is intent on imposing a new uniformity of thought.  Anything that doesn’t fit in with its agenda—in other words, everything that has been traditionally taken for granted—is destined for the melting pot.

This is the work that moral philosophers or ethicists are nowadays engaged in—testing all your preconceived ideas to—as they see it—destruction.

The idea of an inherited moral compass within the individual, which we have been discussing, while inconvenient, is dealt with less by denial than by disparagement.  It is old-fashioned, not encyclopaedic, it cannot be relied upon to deliver an accurate judgement in the many situations that confront us nowadays.

In such a situation a new and imposed system of moral judgement is needed—which was, of course, the plan from the outset.  A system which will operate rather like the multiplication tables at school.  Three times three is nine—one doesn’t even have to think about it.  And so it will be with matters of right and wrong, good and evil.  Just reach out your hand and pick up a preformed answer to your problem.

And if on occasions something as old-fashioned as conscience threatens to get in the way, then just bin it.  It’s old hat, it’s stale.  The so-called ‘best minds’ of your generation, haven’t they after all decided otherwise?

Something analogous happened in the Third Reich—and in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China etc. too.

The leadership of Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen—the extermination squads which travelled in the wake of the military forces and were responsible for the mass killings of Jews and others in the eastern territories—were irredeemably academic.  Lawyers, philosophers, writers, university lecturers etc. comprised the main content of the leadership.  Indeed, it was hard to find anyone of officer rank who didn’t possess at least a university degree.  And all of them believed in what they were doing, or at least claimed that they did.  They persuaded themselves, or were persuaded, by means of philosophical argument, of the rightness of their cause.

Of course, it wasn’t necessarily all that cut-and-dried.  One has to believe that most of them were driven by ambition and the desire to get on within the Nazi hierarchy; the whole ideological argument being a convenient means of self-deception; a useful figleaf.

Yet without it what happened was unlikely otherwise to have happened.

Mankind is doing it for itself . . .

Moral philosophy, as the name implies, is that part of philosophy that deals with matters of good and evil, justice and injustice etc. etc.  In recent years, moral philosophers have begun to take on the title of ‘ethicists’, which more or less gives the game away.  They see it as their function to create a new and modern system of ethics, one shorn of inherited and traditional ideas of right and wrong.  After all, it is the 21^st century!

            As has been stated already, this tends to be grounded in a materialist view of the world.  There is nothing but matter and the internal and accidental developments of matter through evolution.  There are no other creative or moral forces in the world—or beyond it either.  Humanity is a purely material phenomenon.  To the extent that it finds itself capable of philosophising and making moral judgements etc., it is really doing nothing more than giving a voice to certain aspects of the blind fumblings of matter.

            The primary tool of modern ethicists is the thought experiment, the word ‘experiment’ being added to give it a certain scientific ring to what is nothing other than the writing of fiction.  A thought experiment is usually a story devised to prove a philosophical point or to show up a dichotomy in our natural thinking.  Nor is it confined to the rules and elements of the real world, but can involve any degree of fantasy that you like.

            One of the most famous thought experiments has been outlined in the following terms: ‘suppose there were a planet that was a duplicate of Earth in every way except that the chemical compound of the colorless, odorless drinkable stuff in its lakes and rivers was not H₂0 but something else, XYZ. Would XYZ be water?’

            Now one of the central thought experiments in modern ethical philosophy goes something like this.  You are the engineer of a train that has run out of control.  You have no power to stop it or blow a warning whistle or anything else.  And, ahead of you on the line, you can see a half-a-dozen people walking.  And, as is the way with thought experiments, they can be allowed no possibility of escape, either through hearing you coming or wandering off the line or whatever way you might like to have it.  If you hit them—and it seems you must hit them—then they all die.  Except that at some point before you reach them there is a branch-line which, under the fantasy of the thought experiment, you can easily divert on to, except that there happens to be a single person walking on this line—with everything applying to him that applies to the other six.  If you take the branch-line you end up killing him.  You, the engineer, have no time to think about it.  You have to react.  What do you do?

The reaction of most people to this story is that you have to take the branch line, on the grounds of what, for the time being, we will call the principle of the lesser evil.  Faced with this carefully contrived dilemma, people tend to choose the life of the six over the death of the one.

Except that the ethicist adds a further twist to the tale: supposing four of the six weren’t actually killed, but instead were seriously injured, to the extent that each of them needed a different organ transplant in order to live.  They are taken to hospital, where there happens to be a healthy young man sitting with a twisted ankle in the waiting room.  Surely, on the basis of people’s earlier decision, it would be morally permissible to kill him for his organs, so that the four could live at the expense of one.  Something which a majority of people, when tested, strongly react against.

Now the ethicist is not necessarily suggesting that this should be done.  Nor is he suggesting that it shouldn’t be done, either.  What he is saying to people is that their instinctive moral reaction or judgement is inconsistent, or, to use the philosophical term, incoherent, and therefore needs to be analysed and reformulated.

Where such a practice might lead—in fact, where it seems already to have led—will be dealt with in the next mailing.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentices . . .

To briefly recap:

The main ideological prop of the modernist mindset is the Darwinian theory of evolution, which has been adapted to reinforce the view that there is no intrinsic purpose or meaning in the universe.

Darwinism has been mined throughout its history as a justification for all sorts of fanciful ideas.  The one with the most far-reaching consequences to date was probably that of Social Darwinism, which emerged in the late 19^th century, and reached its full and logical fruition in the ideology of Hitler and in the death camps of the Second World War.

The modernists use it to a somewhat different effect.  They argue that Darwin showed that there were no purposeful processes of causation in the world.  Everything is, or at least was, accidental. 

Mankind, for example, need never have existed; it is just the random consequence of the interaction of different factors, rather like the jostling of bumping cars at a fairground.  Things happened the way they happened, but they could equally have happened a billion different ways. Those who argue otherwise are simply looking backwards down the wrong end of the telescope.  And such being the case, there is no longer any need—or even place—for the idea of a guiding intelligence behind existence.  In other words, the universe is meaningless.

Yet at the same time as they decry the existence of any natural meaning or order in the universe, the modernists are nonetheless still reluctant to let go of the concept.  Things may have been chaotic and mindless in the beginning, but there is no reason why they should remain so.  Mankind can create its own meaning, its own purposeful systems of causation.

This is what, in its various manifestations, has been happening since at least the Enlightenment, with very mixed results to date.  And, equally, it is what is happening now, and what underlies the ongoing chaos of gender identities and proliferating rights and radical equality etc. etc.

Of course, when they talk of mankind making its own future, the modernists are really talking about themselves, the intellectual elite, so called, who know what is best for the rest of us, and are determinedly set on reprogramming everyone to fit the bill.

Since Reason cannot exist outside or before humanity—which effectively wipes out the legitimacy of divine revelation etc.—mankind is effectively at the ground zero of reasoning.  If the ethicists, formerly the ‘moral philosophers’, are to be believed, we are effectively setting off with a blank slate.  Mankind must build from scratch its own ethical structures.

The unconscious human moral programming that science has recently discovered, and which has already been discussed here, doesn’t at all fit in with these modern categories of thought, and must therefore be dismissed as outdated or incoherent, or else analysed to destruction.  After all it wasn’t something arrived at via the minds of academicians, therefore it can have no real legitimacy.

The methods and techniques and mindsets of this brave new world of ethical theory is something that will be dealt with over the next two or so mailings.

If it walks like a duck . . .

It might seem that I have tended to speak dismissively of the idea of material evolution.  Such is not the case.  Evolution exists and is the mainspring of development in the physical universe; and it is also the source of the different inbuilt faculties mentioned in the last mailing.  The problem with it, however, is the tendency to see it as the ‘be all and end all’ of knowledge, which of course it is not.

Evolution applies solely to the physical world; to the extent that anything exists outside of it, it has nothing to say.  Nor is it necessarily at odds with any broader view.  If it at first glance appears to be, this is mainly the result of people trying to use it for ideological reasons that have nothing to do with science.

The philosophy that has grown up around the idea of evolution is one that characterises it as being blind and random and purposeless.  Mankind, for example, under this dispensation, exists purely by accident, or as the result of a whole sequence of accidents, one running into the other, onwards through time.  There is no purpose or reason or logic at the root of our being.

And the people who tend to advance this opinion with especial vehemence often have little knowledge of what they speak.  They embrace their view of evolution, not because they have studied and come to believe in it, but because it seems to provide the ultimate weapon against any spiritualised view of the universe.  Read their various blogs and contributions and you quickly come to see that at bottom they are less animated by scientific concerns, than by a naked hatred, no doubt rooted in the circumstances of their own individually pathetic lives.

The fact is that if one looks at the inbuilt language and moral faculties discussed in the last mailing, and looks in turn at the sequence of intermediate forms occurring between the existence of bacteria in some primeval chemical soup and the existence and potentialities of man as he stands today, then one is compelled to allow that it might well indeed have been something purposed from the very beginning.

One does not have to believe it was so, but one surely has to allow that it could well have been.  It is the refusal by the various ideologues involved to allow even this that convinces me that they are driven, not by considerations of a scientific nature, or even common sense, but by something much more obscure and ugly.

And, indeed, on the face of it, it might seem possible to reconcile the idea of a random and seemingly accidental evolution and the idea of an overarching purpose to the whole process.  Look at water running down a sloping landscape after a storm or a flood and notice the way it accommodates itself to the natural balks and channels of the terrain, all without compromising its overall purpose of reaching the ground zero of equilibrium.  In other words, it is fluid (pun accidental) as regards the means it uses to achieve its end.  Everything ultimately can be grist to its mill.

On this analogy, while mankind need not have been an inevitable feature of evolution, it would nonetheless have been something very like it—something with the capacity for conscious thought and all that goes with it.  For it might be argued that humanity may supply nothing more than a convenient channel to some deeper flow of cosmic purpose, whose end we cannot fathom.  It need not have been humanity, it just happens on this scenario that it is.

The primary question of the human mind has always been about the why of things.  It is the question that lies at the origins of philosophy, no matter how much in recent years the latter may have sought to deny it.  And why would we be programmed to ask it, if there was not to be an answer?  Purpose and the finding of purpose are things central to our lives.

Where Things Stand Now . . .

There has long been a debate over the matter of nature versus nurture, though, of course, the commonsense opinion is that what is involved is a variable combination of the two.  But the materialist and left-wing point of view has tended to show a preference for nurture over nature.  Another name for this is the ‘blank slate’ position; in other words, we are born with no inherited programming, but instead, as it were, pull ourselves up by our own bootstrings.

It is easy to see why the materialists would prefer this alternative, since at a stroke it removes the likelihood of any input from outside forces, divine or otherwise.

But in recent years, studies in linguistics have begun to show that where language is concerned mankind does indeed share a common pre-programmed and unconscious inheritance.  All languages, it seems, are shaped according to the same inherent ground rules; the differences between individual languages being the result of geographical and cultural factors in the course of their development.

All of which makes sense, considering that they are translatable into one another and enjoy a similar structure of nouns and verbs etc. etc.

This means, of course, that at least as far as language is concerned we are not born as blank slates.  We are programmed for language, and without that inherited programming, language would be impossible.

However, more recent studies have begun to show that just as there are certain ‘anatomical, neurological and physiological’ structures underlying our capacity for language, there are also analogous inherited structures underlying our capacity for moral thought and our sense of good and evil, justice and injustice.

In other words, there is a certain unconscious moral programming written into the human heart, irrespective of whether we abide by it or not, and which influences us automatically.

Just as with language, this moral inheritance has become translated through time and isolation and culture into the myriad different, and often seemingly contradictory, forms that we see about us now.  Rather like a carpenter turning sheets of oak into chairs and tables and sideboards, the forms may be different, but underneath they continue to share a common identity of oak.

Now one has to admire the honesty of the moral scientists in publicising a conclusion, which, no matter how unlikely, threatens the possibility of a return to more traditional ways of thinking about mankind, its origin and its destiny.  The response of science, however, is to insist that any such pre-existing moral apparatus can still only be solely the result of material evolution, though as yet it cannot begin to explain the possible mechanics of such a development.

Philosophers have tended to take a somewhat different tack.  In general equally materialist, they seek to bring the idea of an inherited moral compass under their control by insisting that it is something necessarily primitive and in need of constant updating—by philosophers, of course.

The Root of all Evil . . .

Philosophy is a form of speculation.  It involves building castles of thought in the air called theories, which like all forms of construction require a solid foundation, if they are not to collapse into chaos.  The problem is that there is an absence of such solid foundations, of facts about life or the world that cannot be ultimately challenged.  Which is why, like a sort of intellectual Robot Wars, most philosophy involves the tearing down of other people’s theories, at the same time as one futilely seeks to advance and protect one’s own particular darlings.

Philosophers, and especially secular philosophers, have been seeking for centuries for solid ground on which to build an unshakeable theory of existence—which would in turn be more than a theory, but a true description of things—and failing to find it.

Yet if enough minds—influential minds and others—conspire, it can be possible to create a simulacrum of what such a solid foundation might look like, so long as one agrees to not examine it too closely.  And such a simulacrum, such an illusion, exists in the world at present, and to all intents and purposes rules it.

What unites the mainstream worlds of modern philosophy and science, together with Marxism, liberalism, humanism, the arts, academia etc. etc., is the shared contention that there is nothing outside of material existence—no hidden hand behind the world, no innate purpose, no meaning.

Of course, this is nothing more than a bald assertion.  It’s just a statement that cannot be proved or disproved and has power to convince only to the extent that enough talking heads are seen to collude in it.  Much as with religion, it represents an article of faith.  It is from the same stable as those theories that insist that nothing is needed to explain the universe other than mathematics.

Yet it is the glue that holds together the disparate coalition of -isms and disciplines mentioned above, who otherwise would be at one another’s throats.  It is also the foundation stone for all the various changes that subtly and not so subtly are undermining society and throwing it into chaos.

This will be the ongoing subject of the next handful of postings.

The First of the New Lot . . .

Imagine you’re a policeman responding to a call, and you find yourself in a room where the naked bodies of infants who have obviously met a brutal end are scattered about.  What is your immediate reaction likely to be?  Horror, sadness, anger, disgust?  But then you remove a coat or dustcloth draped carelessly across a door and expose a sign telling you that this is after all an abortion clinic.  And immediately your thinking in the matter begins to rejig itself.  No longer a potential crime scene, but rather a proof of social progress; one to be met, not with condemnation, but with celebration.  Insist on regarding it as a crime scene and you are likely to find yourself in very hot water indeed.

What is at the root of this disjunction in reaction?  Is it a matter of people sitting down and rationally thinking things through?  Or is it an outcome of some third-party conditioning?  And how can the two opposed reactions continue to exist side-by-side?

After a Long Hiatus . . .

My last mailing was in 2016, at which stage I signalled my retirement from the process.  Yet so much has happened in the meantime to make me reconsider.  From today, I will be beginning a new series of blogs, on various subjects, but with a general common thread.  These mailings will tend to be more or less sporadic, so that anyone interested need not take a period of silence as representing an end, and should continue to check at intervals for new contributions.  As before, when I am finished I will formally announce the fact.