Aire Do Gach Luingearachd. . .

Diciadain sa chaidh dh’fhàg sinn an clas tràth airson a dhol gu taisbeanadh mu Ro-aithris na Luingeis aig a’ Chrichton, le còrr is ceud neach. Tha an neach-labhairt, Charlie Connelly, air a bhith dèidheil air a’ chraoladh o chionn fhada, mar a tha gu follaiseach air mòran dhaoine eile. Bidh seòladairean agus iasgairean ga chleachdadh gu mòr ach tha a’ mhòr-chuid de luchd-èisteachd nan leabaidh agus tha e gan socrachadh agus gan cuideachadh a’ cadal. Gu neònach, tha e math airson seo a chluinntinn gu bheil uisge trom agus gaothan a-muigh air a’ mhuir, agus tha e dha-rìribh! Tha e ag obair dhòmhsa.

Bha Mgr Connelly glè mhath air gun a bhith sgìth ach chan eil mise agus mar sin cha bhith mi a’ bruidhinn airson ùine mhòr. Thòisich an t-Àrd-mharaiche Fitzroy, caiptean a’ Bheagle, air ro-aithris na sìde airson shoithichean san naoidheamh linn deug agus b’ e còd Morse agus teileagrafaireachd a’ chiad ro-aithris luingeis. Chaidh an cleachdadh an toiseach air an rèidio ann an 1924 agus bha iad cho cudromach is gun do rinn iad an ro-aithris fhathast nuair a bhàsaich an Rìgh agus dhùin an rèidio airson caoidh.

Bha Connelly airson tadhal air tìr anns a h-uile sgìre mara far an robh tìr. Chan eil fhios agam an do shoirbhich leis leotha uile, ach chaidh e gu eilean Danmhairgeach ann am Bàgh na Gearmailt far an robh ionad bhùthan an rud as inntinniche. Air Utsire bha sgioba ball-coise glè shoirbheachail a bha an urra ri an luchd-dùbhlain a bhith tinn mara nuair a chluicheadh ​​iad nan aghaidh. Tha iad a-nis air an toirt gu bhith a’ cluich air tìr-mòr Nirribhidh agus chan eil iad air geama a bhuannachadh bhon uair sin. Thadhail e cuideachd air Sealand, ann an Linne na Tamais, a tha na àrd-ùrlar a tha ag ràdh gur e dùthaich neo-eisimeileach fhèin a th’ ann. Is dòcha gun deach e gu Lundy cuideachd, far a bheil càl ro-eachdraidheil. Cha b’ urrainn dha faighinn gu Rockall. Tha Rockall trì cheud cilemeatair bho Shòaigh anns na h-Eileanan Siar agus bha e na phàirt de Siorrachd Inbhir Nis. Tha e còig ceud seasgad seachd cilemeatair bho Inbhir Nis, agus tha sin na shlighe fhada ri thighinn gus na bionaichean fhalamhachadh. Chuir an t-Arm dithis shaighdear agus bogsa geàrd air airson beagan mhionaidean. Tha Èirinn ag ràdh gur ann leotha a tha e, agus tha Innis Tìle agus na h-Eileanan Fàro ga iarraidh.

Is e ‘Sailing By’ le Ronald Binge an ceòl airson an Shipping Forecast agus chaidh a sgrìobhadh airson bailiùnaichean èadhair theth.

Mu dheireadh, chleachd an nobhail agam ‘Unspeakable’ na sgìrean mara Shipping Forecast mar shiorrachdan, ach is e sin sgeulachd eile gu litireil.

Ar Dinnear

Airson iomadh bliadhna a-nis, tha mi air biadh sònraichte ullachadh aon uair san t-seachdain. Roimhe seo, bhiodh biadh sònraichte agam airson gach latha den t-seachdain, ach dh’fhàs mo theaghlach gu math sgìth dheth sin, agus mar sin is e am biadh seo an aon bhiadh a bhios mi fhathast a’ dèanamh gach seachdain. Tha bhidio YouTube mu dheidhinn air aon de na seanalan agam. Is e seo am biadh a thuit mi air an làr mus tàinig mi gu clas Gàidhlig beagan mhìosan air ais, agus mar sin bha mi fadalach airson an leasain sin.

Tha mi a’ smaoineachadh gu bheil e cudromach do theaghlach biadh ithe còmhla, agus na h-aon bhiadhan ithe gu cunbhalach gus ar cumail ceangailte. Is toil leam cuideachd biadh a dhèanamh a tha mo theaghlach dèidheil air. Air Diardaoin, is urrainn dhomh tilleadh agus am biadh seo ithe agus chan fheum mi a theasachadh, oir is e salad a th’ ann. Nuair a rinn mi e air Dihaoine ann an Sasainn, rinn e nas fhasa a dhol gu cafaidh Street Pastors far an robh mi a’ cuideachadh. Is urrainn dhomh cuideachd dèanamh cinnteach gum faigh ar mac, a tha a’ fuireach còmhla rinn, biadh fallain an-asgaidh aon latha san t-seachdain ma nì mi seo. Rinn mi e gu cunbhalach airson lòn eaglaise cuideachd, le biadh eile.

Tàthchuid: sligan pasta làn-ghràin, sùgh liomaidan uaine, basail, sabhs soy, ola ollaidh, ollaidhean, pònairean dubha air am bogadh agus air am bruich gu math, ceithir-deug duilleagan basail, piopairean, aon chucumar, tomatoan agus tofu no càise buabhall uisge. Chan eil ar mac ag ithe tofu, agus mar sin gheibh e am càise buabhall uisge na àite. Chan eil sinn ag ithe a’ chàise.

1. Bruich am sligan ann an uisge airson deich mionaidean.
2. Fhad ‘s a tha am sligan a’ goil, gearraich na tomatoan agus an cucumar agus cuir iad ann am bobhla.
3. Drèanaich agus cuir na h-ollaidhean agus na pònairean dubha ris.
4. Reub ceithir-deug duilleagan basil airson gach bobhla agus cuir iad ann am bobhlaichean.
5. Dòirt an ola a-steach do bhobhla.
6. Gearr agus brùth na liomaidean uaine a-steach don bhobhla.
7. Cuir an sabhs soy ris a’ bhobhla.
8. Cuir na piobair ris agus measgaich an leaghan gu math le forc.
9. Cuir eagal aig sligan, drèanaich agus cuir ann am bobhlaichean.
10. Dòirt an dreasa a-steach do na bobhlaichean, measgaich gu mionaideach agus fritheil.

Beagan rudan. ’S e liomaidean uaine toradh as searbhaiche agus tha iad nas saoire na liomaidean, agus mar sin ’s fheàrr an cleachdadh. Tha basil math ach tha e làn alùmanaim, agus mar sin is dòcha nach eil e sàbhailte. Tha na beathachadh a’ toirt a-steach pròtain, bhiotamain C, bhiotamain B, searbhag folic, flavonoids, carotenoids, sinc agus feadhainn eile.

Mìosachan Reul-eòlais

Tha neach-dèiligidh agam a tha an-dràsta ag iarraidh orm mìosachan reul-eòlais a dhèanamh dha. Is e seo an dàrna turas a rinn mi rudeigin mar seo. O chionn grunn bhliadhnaichean, rinn mi mìosachan planaid dhearg airson bliadhna a’ phlanaid dhearg 214 bliadhna às deidh dha Galileo fhaicinn an toiseach tro teileasgop. Bha sin gu math cumanta ach leis gun do dh’innis a’ chompanaidh clò-bhualaidh breug mu chaitheamh inc aon de na clò-bhualadairean a chleachd mi air a shon, bha e ro dhaor a dhèanamh. Dh’fhàs mi feargach agus thilg mi am clò-bhualadair dhan ionad-reic. B’ àbhaist dhomh a bhith nam dhuine gu math feargach. Chan e sin an duine a th’ annam tuilleadh. Na bi gam bhreithneachadh a rèir na b’ àbhaist dhomh a bhith.

Tha ùidh mhòr aig mo neach-dèiligidh ann an tachartasan anns na speuran leithid cuin a tha a’ ghealach a’ coimhead nas motha no nas lugha na an àbhaist, cuin a tha a’ ghealach eadar sinn agus a’ Ghrian no nar sgàil agus dàrna gealach ann am mìos, agus mar sin thairg mi mìosachan a dhèanamh dha a dh’innseadh dha cuin a thachradh iad sin. Bha e glè thoilichte leis an seo, agus mar sin nì mi sin, le bhith ag innse do einnsean reusanta mar a nì thu e oir is e seo an dòigh as sìmplidh air a dhèanamh.

Ciamar a nì thu e, is e sin ceist eile. Ged a tha beagan eòlais agam, tha e duilich suidheachadh na gealaich agus nam planaidean obrachadh a-mach. Bidh e airson faighinn a-mach cuin a tha a’ ghealach a’ coimhead as motha, cuin a tha i a’ coimhead as lugha, ìrean agus cuin a tha a’ ghealach, a’ ghrian agus an Talamh ann an loidhne dhìreach. Tha iad sin gu math furasta. Ach feumaidh mi cuideachd obrachadh a-mach cuin a tha coltas planaidean a’ dol air ais, cuin a tha trì ann an loidhne dhìreach eadarainn, cuin a tha iad a’ coimhead as fhaide bhon Ghrian, na gluasadan agus na h-ìrean aca, agus innse dha càite a bheil iad. Tha cuid dhiubh sin furasta cuideachd, ach chan eil siostam na grèine rèidh, chan eil na orbitan nan cearcallan agus chan eil na h-àiteachan far a bheil iad as fhaisge air agus as fhaide bhon Ghrian san aon taobh. Feumaidh mi co-dhùnadh cuin a thòisicheas mi. Is dòcha gur e deagh cheann-latha a th’ ann am Bliadhna Ùr 4713 RC, ach chan eil fios agam càite an robh iad an uairsin, agus mar sin an àite sin coimheadaidh mi airson àiteachan agus gluasadan o chionn ghoirid nan cùrsaichean aca agus obraichidh mi a-mach iad às an sin. Feumaidh mi an uairsin na suidheachaidhean a chithear bhon Ghrèin a thionndadh gu na suidheachaidhean a chithear bhon Talamh, obrachadh a-mach dè cho fada ’s a bheir e air solas faighinn bho na nithean thugainn an seo agus mar a tha an àile gan dèanamh coltach ri bhith ann an diofar àiteachan.

Chan eil fhios agam dè a chanas mi ris na planaidean anns a’ Ghàidhealtachd. Is e an dàrna fear gu soilleir Reul na Maidne agus Reul na Feasgair. Dh’ fhaodadh an ceathramh fear a bhith air ainmeachadh mar rudeigin coltach ri bàrr sleagha Chù Chulainn, ach is e ainm Èireannach a tha seo agus tha e cuideachd air a chleachdadh airson reultan-reubadh. Tha mi airson barrachd fhaighinn a-mach mu bhith a’ coimhead rionnagan anns a’ Ghàidhealtachd.

Is dòcha nach eil fios aig mo neach-dèiligidh gu bheil na tha dha-rìribh a’ tachairt anns na speuran gu math eadar-dhealaichte bhon rud a thathar ag ràdh a thachras a rèir reul-eòlas, ach feumaidh mi a bhith onarach, agus mìnichidh mi rudan mar a tha iad dha-rìribh.

Wrong But Wromantic

Sailing a little close to the wind here.

Chris Patten once wrote a book about Conservatism called ‘The Tory Case’. I read it in 1987 when I was to say the least not at all sympathetic to the Tories, but one needn’t be sympathetic to something to be interested in or understand it. I reviewed it more recently as:

This is a weird book. What Patten describes as conservative politics seem to bear no resemblance to reality. I have no idea why.

To me at the time, Patten didn’t seem to be describing anything I recognised the Conservative Party to be doing at the time. Right then, there was something of a dearth of good and popular writing on conservatism, although this was remedied a bit later. Obviously there was, as there long has been, plenty of work done on capitalism, but even calling it capitalism reflects something of a bias against it and it isn’t the same as conservatism anyway.

There have been a couple of useful contributions to the concept in the past fifty years or so by Conservative thinkers such as Roger Scruton, who came up with the concept of oikophobia. This is the opposite of xenophobia. Scruton believes that people’s thinking is distorted by being prejudiced against the familiar with no good reason. For instance, it’s very common to characterise history as being about the doings of “dead White males”, with the presumption that what someone does because they’re dead and White automatically makes it bad. Colonialism might be criticised for its oppressive nature when it could also be seen as getting rid of the custom of Hindu wives throwing themselves onto their widowers’ funeral pyres and developing previously undeveloped countries with the likes of road, rail, good sanitation systems and so on. I’m not going to argue either for or against these views: I’m just presenting them as relatively conservative ideas.

I’ve said before on here that certain policies and attitudes seem to be acquired and assimilated into left or right wing platforms without them inevitably belonging there. For instance, in the past trade unions, generally seen as left wing, were opposed to immigration or women in the workforce because they wanted to protect the jobs of their male, White members, and Maoists, Stalinists and the Nicaraguan work brigades were all homophobic, regarding homosexuality as counter-revolutionary and bourgeois. Conservatism needn’t even be right wing at all. If it’s about going back to a former situation, that may have been closer to being socialist or at least have labelled itself as such than the situation they’re opposing. This, though, is quite a vague way of describing it. However, one of the reasons it is vague is that rigorous academic work in social studies tends to be distrusted by conservatives, so the research and writing which is done tends to come from the Left rather than the Right. Conservatism is more about doing than thinking. In fact, some years ago a significant Conservative politician recommended quite strongly that the Conservative Party should change its name to the Workers’ Party, presumably on the grounds that it wanted to sell itself as on the side of people doing paid work and getting people into such work rather than people it might label as scroungers.

Now I’m no historian but I think it’s somewhat fair to trace the history of party politics in England back to the English Civil War, which was of course between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists. According to ‘1066 And All That’, the Roundheads were “right but repulsive” whereas the Cavaliers were “wrong but wromantic”. In other words, there was a faction which supported the King and was appealing at first glance, and another which supported Parliament and was very unrepealing. In particular, and I think this is significant, the Roundheads were associated with Puritanism, which has a very judgemental and anti-fun behaviour with children given names like “If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned”. The Puritans also wanted to abolish Xmas celebrations because they saw it as non-Biblical. They come across as killjoys and misery-guts, and the unfortunate thing is, it’s they who seem to be the distant ancestors of the British Labour Party.

I’m sure this is over-simplistic, but the way I see it the two major political parties, the Tories and the Whigs, developed respectively out of the Cavaliers and the Roundheads. The Tories arose as a faction rather than a party, because those didn’t exist yet, during the 1679 Exclusion Crisis, which sought to exclude James VII and II from the succession on account of his Catholicism. Perhaps surprisingly, the Tories were in favour of James becoming king even though they were very against Catholicism because they believed inheritance based on birth was the basis of a stable society. Once George I came to the throne in 1714, the Tories were a spent force because the situation had become moot, and they ceased to exist at all as such in the 1760s, but many people continued to call themselves and others Tories and the name survives today. In fact, since the word is from the Gaelic “tóraidhe“, meaning vagabond or bandit, Gaels still just call them that and don’t, so far as I know, call them anything like “Conservatives”. It was also originally an insult, and nowadays has become one again in some circles. In fact I’m not sure it was ever a neutral term.

So the original Tory position was to support the succession of the king by birthright even though he was Roman Catholic, and the original Whig position was to oppose the succession of the king because he was Roman Catholic. This was because of Tory support for inherited wealth. The Whigs have always fascinated me, incidentally, although I don’t know much about them. The main use of the word “whig” today in Britain is in the term “whig history”, which is the erroneous historical idea that everything evolves towards the contemporary situation. Sarada used to imagine projecting the conservative attitudes of the older generation of her youth back to a time when everything was awful, but in fact it isn’t that simple. For instance, attitudes towards sex in Victorian times had replaced a much bawdier attitude prevalent in Georgian times, and although the Bloody Code was characteristic of that era, where the death penalty was imposed for the likes of stealing a handkerchief or “being in the company of gypsies”, there was a time before it had gotten that bad. It isn’t just a case of smooth, uninterrupted progress. That may hook into the idea of political progress, something the Whigs’ successors seem to have been quite keen on.

I’m not going to get too bogged down in history but the Tories were done for initially because many of their parliamentary seats were in “rotten boroughs”, which only had a few voters or I think even none, so once those had been abolished they had great difficulty in getting any MPs elected for a while. They later became officially the Conservative Party.

The original Tory approach broke down as support for the monarchy, hereditary succession and the Church of England, and more widely, support for cherished institutions, opposition to Roman Catholics and Non-Conformists, and keenness on stability and traditional authority. Their slogan was “Church and King!”. The Whigs are more confusing because they don’t survive in the same way as the Tories might be said to have, but they believed in parliamentary supremacy over the monarchy, pro-Protestantism, anti-Roman Catholicism, individual liberty and property rights. Their concern over Roman Catholicism was linked to their belief that James VII and II could become an absolute monarch in the same way as in France at the time. This is linked, of course, to the power of the Pope.

A couple of things then. It does seem to be true that the terms Left and Right are based on where representatives sat in the French parliament according to whether they supported or opposed the monarchy. However, the French Revolution didn’t occur until 1789, and whereas the terms didn’t exist, something like the left-right spectrum did, for over a century, and as far as England was concerned this seems to go back to the Cavaliers and Roundheads. Just in passing, the colour scheme is generally blue for the Right and red for the Left except in the States, but I wonder if this is linked to the process whereby the Democrats and Republicans swapped positions. I don’t know and this isn’t the point of this post. The other thing is that Whigs and Tories were both anti-Roman Catholic, both very much in favour of property rights and were both also more focussed on the needs of richer people than the poor, which is of course how the Bloody Code came into being in the first place, so from a modern perspective they don’t look very different and their concerns also seem rather irrelevant. There are other complications, such as Tory support for Jacobites, but I don’t want to get too bogged down.

Tory thinkers are harder to find than Left wing ones, but they do exist, in particular in the shape of David Hume and Edmund Burke, and it’s worth looking at their writing as the basis of conservatism, not least because conservatism is essentially keen on the past, at least traditionally. Adam Smith is another possibility but he tends to be misrepresented and is more an economist. I’m most familiar with the first, although embarrassingly not as much as I should be considering that Hume was my special author during my first degree. Before I say anything else, Hume’s language is wonderfully clear and he’s a great communicator and writer. I’ve used his philosophy elsewhere and am somewhat influenced by him. For instance, I think his view of causation is usefully applied to, of all things, the Mandela Effect, which is where a large number of people remember a public event or cultural phenomenon differently than the most reliable record of it. Obviously not what I’m focussing on right now. He seems to have been the first philosopher to have realised the “is-ought” problem, that you can’t derive what should be from what is, and I have a specific solution to that too which has come close to dominating my whole moral life. He also famously said that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions”. This comes closer to politics, and was something which came up independently in a conversation with my crush at school when I said I thought their lack of interest in me was “perfectly reasonable” and they objected on the grounds that emotions don’t correspond to rationality and can’t be controlled by it. One interesting thing about this is that the famous quote “facts don’t care about your feelings” seems to be quite closely allied to it, but from the other side, and originates from the right-winger Ben Shapiro. Even so, I strongly suspect that we’re not generally rational in our opinions and instead of using reason to arrive at conclusions, we mainly already know what we want to believe and proceed to seek a way of arguing towards that point. Nonetheless I have sometimes changed my mind about what I think. I tend to express this as “you can’t expect people to be reasonable”, which tends to annoy people, and it’s one of a series of basic tenets through which I live my life which goes back all the way to discussions with my crush back in the early ’80s. These views are unlikely to change and may still be shared between the two of us, and at the time they were politically conservative.

So to unpack the “slave of the passions” quote a little, Hume’s opinion on this and that statement has been described as notorious. He supports his view in several ways. One of them is that reason alone doesn’t motivate people. There has to be some kind of internal spur which stimulates someone to act or do something mentally. This connects also to “analysis paralysis” and overthinking in my opinion, and therefore can be linked to what I think of as conservative anti-intellectualism. Now “anti-intellectualism” is usually used negatively, but so is “overthinking”, and of course I for one am a notorious overthinker. I do appreciate that I live too much in my head, so I can get on board with the idea that the conservative view that sometimes people think too much and should just act, just because I’m the opposite and I can see the drawbacks.

I once saw a TV comedy sketch where a man is trying to defuse a bomb. He has a huge tangle of wires and must cut the right one at the right time, and the others in the right sequence. His rather more reckless colleague, with no training or experience in bomb disposal, then turns up with a comically massive set of shears, cuts them all at once, there is no explosion and they go down the pub. This to me is very much like the conservative approach to social problems and to be honest it does actually appeal to me, but of course it is a comedy sketch and whereas it might work fantastically sometimes, it often wouldn’t. That meticulous defusing represents left wing attempts to address problems and the pair of shears is a more right wing approach. Believe me, I do understand this.

Back to Hume though. His overtly political work exists in the form of essays. He was concerned that philosophical thought at the time was too concerned with trivia and failed to address the big questions. Philosophers had succeeded in casting doubt upon almost everything but hadn’t been so successful in building up anything one could be sure of. He saw his task as building up a new model of human nature, the rest having been cleared away by his predecessors. He wrote on liberty, political parties, whether politics could be a science and he favours moderation and caution and opposes mercantilism, which is apparently the idea that exports should be maximised and imports minimised through pursuing one-sided trade. The basic idea is that if another country is richer, one’s own must be poorer, and it sees riches in the form of money, i.e. piles of gold, which in fact is not the same thing as money. Protectionism is quite similar. Hume demolished this idea as follows: suppose money comes into Britain because of our successful exports. That increases the money in these isles, leading to a rise in both wages and prices. This makes our exports more expensive and imports from other places cheaper here, so people will buy more foreign goods and foreigners will buy fewer British goods, so the situation can’t continue forever.

This argument is interesting from a right wing political perspective because the idea of going back onto the gold standard and protectionism is currently very popular in right wing circles right now, so Hume is to some extent opposed to certain current right wing ideas. Hume seems to be more of a globalist, which is also potentially a right wing view, but one which right wing conspiracy theorists tend to think of as a threat and as having socialist tendencies. I reject all conspiracy theories as distractions and wastes of time and energy, but the way these ideas are talked about does reveal popular political views, and mercantilism is thoroughly discredited as I understand it, and is in fact an eighteenth century idea. However, this is a macroeconomic view more than a core political philosophy, so I’ll look at those.

One of the big things Hume did was to respond to Locke’s social contract theory. This was the idea popular with the English Whigs that the authority of government rests on the consent of the governed. That is, there’s a usually tacit agreement between government and the people that obedience to the law is in return for protection and justice, and if the rulers fail to do this they’re in breach of this contract. Now I have a heck of a lot to say about this personally but for now I’m going to restrain myself as part of the contract I have with my readers not to rant about stuff and concentrate on what Hume said about it. In his essay ‘Of The Original Contract’, his quotable response is that this idea is “repugnant to the common sentiments of mankind, and to the practice and opinion of all nations and all ages”, so he wasn’t really that keen on it. No government at the time, and probably not now, had ever been formed by an explicit act of consent of all its citizens, although Stalinist countries did used to publish interesting voting figures of 99% or above which one suspects were either not entirely accurate or maybe achieved by means many would not associate with freedom. Governments generally understood as democratically elected are basically never the result of one hundred percent turnout voting 100% for the majority party in a system where it’s legal to vote for “none of the above” or “reopen nominations”, but anyway, back to Hume. Instead, people are born into countries under governments which already exist and whereas obedience to the law may be seen as a duty, the notion of consent doesn’t enter most citizens’ or subjects’ minds at any point.

The Tories at the time saw the authority of the monarch as arising from divine authority, and this is somewhat similar to the idea that the people get the government they deserve, and also the theistic idea which may exist even today that God does actually put the people there in government for some reason, although for all anyone knows that reason might be to stir people up to revolt against the system. Hume’s view, as a sceptic and possibly a closet atheist, was that this doesn’t work because if God is in control of everything, both good and bad governments are of divine origin, and it’s generally agreed that the people’s defeat of evil-seeming tyrants and dictators is a good thing. Hume’s view was that in “extraordinary cases, when public ruin would evidently attend obedience,” the people’s safety takes precedence. Hence governmental authority is not derived from either consent or force but from opinion, specifically the opinion that we have a duty to obey the law, but this duty is a human creation whose function is to solve a human problem, like the rules of justice. He generally tried to pare away the abstract, so just as he didn’t believe in the self or a necessary connection between cause and effect, he also didn’t believe that there was something “out there” called justice or duty but that it’s just human custom. Whereas I don’t agree with him here, I do think that the idea of rights is like this: it’s a mere human custom having little to do with the world outside, i.e. it isn’t a mathematical-type concept like number or space but is just made up. So there you go: one Tory political view which I agree with. I do, however, strongly believe in duties and obligations, whatever you want to call them.

Although I do think Hume was internally rather dismissive of God, his view on human nature was similar to the bog-standard Christian one of us being depraved and subject to sin. After all, he was a Scot. He held, for example, that “such is the frailty or perverseness of our nature it is impossible to keep men, faithfully and unerringly, in the paths of justice”. This could go in another direction, where nobody should govern because nobody is sufficiently infallible, but that isn’t where he took it. This next quote in particular sounds very Tory: “habit soon consolidates what other principles of human nature had imperfectly founded; and men, once accustomed to obedience, never think of departing from that path.”. That is, we’re not good enough to govern ourselves, so someone else has to do it to us. He acknowledges that in extreme cases, disobedience may be necessary but is much keener on caution and slow change, and of course we can see this through most of the history of Tory and Conservative government in the “U”K.

So we have the principles that reform must be attempted very slowly and that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, which to me really do seem quite firm Conservative principles. There are a couple of problems though. What one regards as an extreme case is going to vary according to who one is and what experiences one has. I doubt this needs to be dilated upon. Another problem is that the Conservative Party have tended more recently to make radical changes. The 1979 election, for example, is a famously significant about-face in British political history, and seen as such at the time, away from the Post-War Consensus back to the way things were before the War to be sure, but it still bucked the trend and did so suddenly and rapidly. There is, then, the issue of how closely political rhetoric parallels political philosophy.

Sometimes I am myself very much of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. Something I’ve said a lot in talks about herbalism is that it’s akin to a tried and tested craft which has evolved organically over centuries, and I’ve compared it to a mediaeval humpback bridge as opposed to a suspension bridge. Humpback bridges are over-engineered and consequently it’s possible to drive a lorry over one even though they were only designed for a horse and cart. Yet there’s also the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which was a suspension bridge. This was assailed by wind on 7th November 1940, causing it to sway wildly from side to side and eventually collapse. It was an extensively designed bridge and is used as an object lesson for engineers. The parallel between these two and herbalism is obvious: there’s allopathic medicine, relying on detailed scientific theory and testing, which is effective but also causes problems, and there’s the tried and tested gradually developing herbal approach, relying on tradition and intuition, although there’s also plenty of research as it happens. Another example is language. Esperanto is the archetypal constructed language and is for Europeans at least generally simple and easy to learn, only needing a tenth of the vocabulary of other languages to express the same ideas and being around four times faster to reach the same degree of fluency compared to natural languages, but it’s also very unsuccessful nowadays and also has various design flaws such as having no fewer than six participles, being sexually biassed towards maleness and using almost completely European vocabulary. Moreover, attempts to fix these problems led to splitting and incompatible new languages such as Esperantido and Ido. Natural languages, on the other hand, are already known and generally change of their own accord to meet needs.

All these examples could be extended to politics, and they reflect the idea of the wisdom of crowds, real world testing and organic evolution, so it seems that the Tories are basically the humpback bridge builders, herbalists and Anglophones of the political world. I should probably stress that I don’t agree with this view, but I do have sympathy with it.

Conservatives, therefore, can be expected to distrust large scale plans, human reasoning and state intervention, at least rhetorically. Whether they’ve actually done this recently is another question. The Tory government up until 2024 didn’t seem to honour this everywhere. Obviously there’s what happened in the lockdown, but there’s also their attitude towards food regulation and public health measures, such as the restriction on tobacco smoking and the sugar tax. This really doesn’t strike me as a hands-off approach. There was also a period in I think the late ’90s when they made a series of changes in the law as had existed for centuries in quick succession, whose details I’ve now unfortunately forgotten, but it didn’t look either cautious or slow.

There’s another aspect to this, which is that it means conservatism is very much not fascism according to its own stated approach. Although fascism aims to hark back to tradition and also national identity like conservatism, it does so suddenly and energetically with a definite conscious plan in mind. The Reform Party is also by its name signalling that it is not conservative because conservatism is philosophically opposed to reform, except perhaps very slowly, and whereas in practice Tory governments do reform things, they wouldn’t want to advertise that fact in their name, so whether or not Reform is conservative, they don’t want to appear so and the way a party advertises itself often determines what it becomes even if it doesn’t start out like that.

I can’t give Edmund Burke the same kind of justice I have David Hume because my background is in philosophy, although also in political theory, but he is regarded as the founder of conservatism, far more so than Hume. Ironically, he was actually a Whig. He was younger than Hume and experienced a slightly later period of history. One of his major works was ‘Reflections on the Revolution In France’. Burke introduced a bill to ban slaveowners from sitting in the House of Commons on the grounds that they were hazardous to the concept of English liberty, and actually there’s a lot more to be said about that because of the peculiar legal nature of slavery as practiced on English soil but this is not that essay. The book on the French revolution is regarded as the most eloquent statement of the basis of conservatism and represents his attempt to turn traditionalism into a political approach. The thing that everyone “knows” about Burke is completely wrong by the way. He did not say “”the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”, although John Stuart Mill said something similar and Burke did say that good people must work together if bad people do or they’d deservedly fail, i.e. they’d be picked off.

Burke sees the basis of British society as our unwritten constitution and likes monarchy, property ownership, hereditary succession, aristocracy and the monarchy, along with “the wisdom of the ages”, by which he probably means tradition and common law. I’m guessing here incidentally as I don’t really know him at all. Like Hume, he was concerned with the question of whether politics could be regarded or practiced as a science, and he saw society as like a living thing which was too complex for the human mind to comprehend, contrasting with Thomas Hobbes, who thought politics could be reduced to a mathematical-type discipline. This is interesting because it parallels the older dichotomy between organic and inorganic matter. I should make it clear that the distinction still exists but doesn’t have the same meaning. It used to be thought that there were two immutable classes of matter which behaved entirely differently, one from living things, the other from non-living matter, which was refuted when someone synthesised urea from non-living sources. This, I think, is strongly reminiscent of this belief, and since we now live in a world where matter is understood simply as matter, maybe it’s time to retire this idea. On the other hand, positivism is generally frowned upon in social studies, which is the idea of just such a reduction. Ironically, this irreducibility is more associated with the left.

Look, I’ll be honest: I haven’t read Edmund Burke and if I were to carry on at this point I’d have to rely on other people’s or AI’s summaries, and that’s a bit trashy so I won’t be doing it.

I should point out, in closing, that I do find a fair bit of common ground with these views. They’re somewhat out of date but as I’ve said they probably should be anyway because conservatism tends to trust the past. That said, 250 years is a long time in politics. I am no less left wing than ever, but I do have an interest in such things, I do recognise the puritanism of some left wing ideas and movements and also the tendency of left wing parties to splinter in a similar manner to non-conformist churches, so I do still think there’s Roundhead DNA in socialist movements, and I’m aware that the ideas pre-date the division between left and right as understood later. My intention here was simply to outline the roots of conservatism without saying much more or introducing my own bias. I hope I’ve done that.

Planitia

I have a yen for fantasy geography. Some might say I just generally live in Cloud Cuckoo Land, but I’ve always been keen on maps. I wrote a post on here imagining that Great Britain had been divided in the same way as North and South Korea and the way things would be for us if it had, which may have helped make the situation over there more vivid. Well, right now we’re in a very divided kingdom, as evinced by the divisive “Unite The Kingdom” march last weekend in London, and of course in a sense I’d prefer us to be even more divided in the sense that I believe strongly in Scottish independence. I’ve taken to writing “U”K recently too, and the divisions are of course not simply geographical. This is an artifact of social media, bots and AI, among other things, orchestrated of course by those who profit from division, and I mean that literally, I mean, you know all this. We all do.

I’m very, very White, and I’m from East Kent. My sister, I’m pretty sure, votes Reform. As a White person, I’m racist, sometimes consciously and deliberately so and at other times unconsciously so. Last weekend I made the observation to another White person that all White people are racist, which I firmly accept, and he appeared to take exception to this. I’m not sure whether I should explain this or not, or whether if I do, it will reach the right ears. It’s absolutely not about being a self-hating White person, any more than opposition to Zionism makes someone a self-hating Jew, but about recognising one’s privilege and working against one’s own racism. The point at which a White person decides they’re not racist is also the point at which they will stop becoming less racist.

A few months ago I was at a vigil for the victims in Palestine when a White guy involved in an anti-immigration protest stood up at the front and said “I’m not racist”. This is factually untrue, not because of his motivations for being on the demo but because he’s White and therefore racist. He’s in the position of being able to be oblivious to his racism, as do I much of the time, because of our White privilege. The problem with being able to perceive himself as racist is similar to my problem of being able to perceive myself as breathing or having a heartbeat, and also due to the fact that racism tends to be conceptualised as something one does, perhaps consciously, rather than being a product of living in a White supermacist society such as this one. Ironically, this is one reason why I’m only a very reluctant Remainer. To me, the EU is a club of rich nations which have looted and stolen money and resources from the rest of the world, consisting largely of racialised people, and are continuing to do so through megacorps and banks. One interesting fact about the European Union which a lot of people seem to gloss over is that an early adopter and possibly the inventor of that term was none other than British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, who wanted a White homeland for Europeans as he saw them. Another irony is that the reason we’re getting so many asylum seekers is that we’ve left the EU and therefore the Dublin III Regulation, which prevented people from making more than one application in a signatory state, which the “U”K no longer is. So Brexit is responsible for this.

If you’re White, at least if you live in a White majority country, the chances are you will have grown up without the enforced education of what it means to be a member of a racialised minority, and that obliviousness involves unconscious bias. I’ve used this example before, but the woman in Central Park who threatened to call the police on a Black birdwatcher out of fear was unaware of the danger she was putting him in by doing so because she was able to conceive of the police as primarily an institution which upheld the law without being much of a threat to racialised people when the reality is very different. Fear is also important here. If you can get someone to be afraid, you can get them to be less fair and more irrational, and to make decisions which endanger others, which they may no longer perceive as individuals but as dominated by a particular immutable characteristic. I was kidnapped by a White man in 1989 CE, and became disproportionately afraid of White men in general for maybe a year or so afterwards. In fact I found my fear of them expanding and including more White men in a manner I found quite worrying and discussed in therapy. Suppose instead of that I’d been kidnapped by a Black person. I probably would’ve experienced the same effect the other way round, and would’ve become more racist than I already am. If I didn’t get the chance to process that and come to terms with it in some way, it might’ve become a fixed feature of my personality. Transferring this to homophobia, I used to know a man who was homophobic because he was sexually abused a lot in his independent school by other males. I don’t know whether he still is because it was a long time ago now and I’ve long since lost touch with him. You don’t necessarily have much control over your prejudice, and whereas it’s undesirable it isn’t an accusation to call someone racist. It might be inaccurate, but it’s an observation.

Another aspect of racism which I’ve mentioned before here is its potential link to veganism, which I personally make and promote to a certain extent. I may be unusual for a vegan because I’m not interested in making anyone else vegan on the grounds that there’s already so much suffering and death in the world inherent in the food chain that any decisions we make to avoid animal products have little consequence for that. Veganism, though, is about everyone, i.e. all animals, and I do mean animals. I’m not going to reduce that circle merely to animals with brains or otherwise cephalised. But this post is not about veganism specifically. It’s easy to introduce racism into one’s veganism, for instance by ignoring the internalised oppression of soul food or the difficulty of eating a healthy plant-based diet in a food desert, but even without this there’s a racist element in it, one which I actually fully embrace despite being generally anti-racist. The issue is that indigenous peoples are never plant-based, and expecting them to be so will destroy their way of life. Although this is a long way down the road from where we are now, with the majority of even White people being carnist, ultimately the species indigenous people exploit don’t belong to them any more than slaves belong to slave “owners”, and in spite of the reverence they hold their prey in and no matter how efficiently they use the remains, they don’t have the right to kill them. And this is a serious problem, because for instance the Inuit will sometimes end their own lives because they can’t pursue the slaughter of seals. It’s a central part of the lives of thousands of non-White people and I do want to take that away, and some of them will probably kill themselves as a result. Therefore, I am absolutely and emphatically, actively and consciously racist. So yes, all White people are racist and I in particular am deliberately so, although the issue is unlikely to arise because of the focus on factory farming and vivisection, which is far more important. Marginalisation is nested. Partly for this reason also, I disagree with vegans who say veganism is a feminist issue because of the rape and forced birth involved. The deaths of half the chicks to enable the other half to lay eggs arises from their maleness, and in the wild it’s very likely that there are species whose females are always raped and wouldn’t exist if they weren’t, meaning that you can’t apply feminism to most other species, and again veganism trumps feminism there. At the same time, the issue of my racism against indigenous peoples, most of the time, is not a real problem because by the time veganism becomes a significant issue for them, they will probably have become assimilated into a scarcity-based economic system. However, there are also intermediate cases, such as the Faroese slaughter of pilot whales. On this issue, though, the slaughter is of wild animals rather than farmed ones and is on a smaller scale than the slaughter of farm animals in nearby countries, including Scotland. There is a sense in which whaling is actually the most humane form of slaughter because a one hundred ton animal can feed a lot more people than a thousand ewes whose total weight is the same, but I’d much rather there was none at all. So yeah, I’m racist, I know I am and I’m not planning to change in that respect, although I am in others.

Nonetheless, in other areas I am vigorously willing to discover and challenge my racism and White privilege. This doesn’t mean I have a guilt complex or think less of myself simply because I’m White, but I did grow up with the privilege of being able to be oblivious of racialisation because I was myself not racialised.

Given all that, I identify ethnically as a White person from northwest Europe, by which I mean an area including the islands of the North Atlantic, France, Benelux, Scandinavia and the German-speaking parts of Europe. That’s an area of seven million square kilometres, including fifteen sovereign states and covering 1.3% of the total surface of this planet. Most of the states involved are either part of the EU or have a special relationship with it. However, I’m not impressed with the EU unless it becomes a democratic federal state and it’s a case of it being the least worst option rather than something one can enthuse about. It’s just a mass of rich White people taking money and resources from the rest of the world and their own poor and making a massive pile of dosh. Nothing to celebrate.

However – well, indulge me, and this is where I get to the Tees-Exe Line and the Hexagon. Back in geography lessons, I’m not sure when, like probably every British schoolchild, I was taught about the line that can be drawn between the mouths of the Tees and the Exe rivers, northwest of which lie the highland areas of this island and southeast of which lie the “Lowlands”. Remember that name. This line divides the archipelago culturally too, with the northwest being more “Celtic”, although apparently the concept of Celtic identity is pretty nebulous and I tend to think the British parts of that area forget the Nordic influence. As I’ve mentioned before, in Scotland in particular edges are central, and one way in which this applies is with the water. Lochs, isles and firths are important to Scottish physical geography, influencing transport, language, economics, climate and doubtless a load of other things. Moving southwest of this line, though, brings one to an area with fewer islands, a less twiddly coastline and of course lower, flatter land. What it doesn’t do, however, is eliminate the sea. There’s the “German Ocean”/North Sea and the Manche/English Channel, and all the history and commerce which has taken place along its coasts. In Mediaeval times it sometimes consisted of territory straddling the two coasts and the English language is both Ingvaeonic and heavily influenced by French. The English crown made claims to France until surprisingly recently, in 1802 at the Treaty of Amiens due to France having become a republic. The White Ship and the subsequent arrival of the Anarchy was linked to the ferrying back and forth of royalty between France and England, and very significantly to me, Calais was only officially lost in January 1558.

Going further southeast, we have the Hexagon. France has this thing about being hexagonal, which to my mind excludes Britanny, Flanders, the Basque Country and French Catalonia (for want of a better term). Britanny still has somewhere to go due to its linguistic links to Cornwall, so that also belongs, so to speak, to the west of an extended Tees-Exe Line. On going into France, and in fact a long way into it towards Paris from the North Downs in Kent, one gets a strong impression of continuity. It basically feels and looks like Kent with different marks of human activity on it. Then there’s Benelux, a trio of countries which are closely associated with each other.

An apparent tangent:

On Mars, there are perhaps three words for extensive areas with distinctive features: vastitas, planum and planitia. Plana are plateaux, vastitas means “desert” and is just the large lowland area around the north polar ice cap where most of the ocean used to be, and there are also planitiae, the best known of which it Utopia Planitia, which is where they build the starships in ‘Star Trek’. A planitia is a low-lying area. It translates as “plain” in English, and one of the more interesting planitiae is Hellas, which includes the lowest-lying areas of the planet and was once thought to be instrumental in causing Tharsis to form near the antipodes of the planet. Planitia, then, is a low-lying area.

I think the area of the Low Countries, that near the coast and someway inland from Hauts De France and the area of this island southeast of the Tees-Exe Line could be considered a single geographical unit, and in fact should be considered a single political unit. Or rather, I don’t, but it would be sufficiently annoying that it constitutes a proposal. In the former France, this should include Picardie, Hauts de France, Grand-Est and Normandy. The capital should be Lille, or the capital should be polycentric. Why do I want this? Well, when I lived in East Kent and after I left, I felt it was weird how, far from celebrating our connections with places over the Channel, we all seemed to dig our heels in and become “extra extra English”. Lille was the closest big city to me and I’ve never been there, and to me that seems absurd. Dover is much closer to Calais than it is to London. The name Kent itself means “edge”, but it’s only on an edge if you ignore everywhere outside Britain. My home village has a vineyard which produces excellent wines. And yet the people living there basically ignore their position entirely and either act like France and the Low Countries are on the other side of the world or are affronted at the audacity of their neighbours visiting. And then of course there are the famous people in boats. Various problems there, one of which is that Calais and Dover are in different countries separated by thirty kilometres of often rough and very busy seas. This wouldn’t be a problem if we’d kept Calais in 1558.

So, why not forget about England entirely and just decide there’s a new country called Planitia comprising these areas. Put the capital in Lille, build some bridges and tunnels to link it together across the Channel similarly to the bridge linking Denmark and Sweden and celebrate the common history and culture. No more problems with boats because once the people reach Planitia, they’re in a unified political entity. It looks very roughly like this:

I have no idea why this came out so small. WordPress is not behaving itself today. Anyway, you get the idea. It’s a republic. It has a number of official languages, including French, Dutch, Letzebuergesch, West Frisian, English, Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati, Polish and so on. It unifies a diverse number of ethnicities with a lot in common. It has a large city in the middle of it on the island which does a lot of commercial stuff but needs its wealth redistributing more equally through the area.

In the meantime, out of the area is a kind of Celtic alliance, though not really Celtic, to the north and west, and a diminished hexagon of France to the south, extending to the Pyrenees and the Alps. As for Planitia, its cuisine, sadly, is far from vegan. It consists of pancakes, cheese on toast, loads of fish, bivalves, gastropods, various cheeses, wines (very nice, but are they vegan?), beer, cider, and more positively curries and general South Asian-influenced cuisines with plenty of chilli. People are not so keen on tea as some of them used to be. There’s Britpop with French lyrics, theatre in French, Dutch and English all in the same play, everyone learns each others’ languages in school including the South Asian ones and there’s existentialist Gothic literature. The former England has terrazzas and people hanging out having lunch for hours. Everyone drinks coffee. There is respect for learning for its own sake. Foreigners are so welcome they hardly count as foreigners at all beyond respect for their cultures. People are proud of their composite identity and how they’ve managed to bridge the gaps between the six nations composing their territory and people, often literally. The Channel has several bridges along its length which open in the middle like Tower Bridge to let the supertankers through. There are artificial islands offshore along both coasts. Many people cycle to work, Cannibis is legal for personal use and accordions and brass instruments play together. There’s probably a lot more rabies, unfortunately.

OK, all that’s a bit stereotypical, but what I’m saying is, can we for goodness’s sake forget that we’re living on an island and stop pretending we’re some special people apart rather than accept our unity with the rest of Europe? In this scenario there’s either no EU or Planitia is a province of a democratic European republic. The people in boats is a self-inflicted problem caused by leaving the EU, and also they’re people running from situations so appalling most people in Britain can’t even imagine them. They’re often people whose education has been paid for by another country and we get their talents, skills and experience for free, but instead of that we house them in crappy hotels and pay them a pittance when they could be contributing massively to the economy.

We can keep the St George’s cross though. A Turk who’s the patron saint of Palestine is fine by me. A red cross on an orange field with a couple of fleurs des lyses in the corners would seem appropriate.

Helena Handcart

People are supposed to get more right wing as they age. I’m not sure when this is supposed to set in, or come to think of it whether it’s set in for me. Then again, if it isn’t as common as is often thought and it hasn’t done so for me, maybe that’s not surprising. In this post, I plan to investigate whether this is true, and if so, why.

There is a famous quote, often attributed to Churchill but apparently not from him: ‘If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart.  If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.’ This isn’t from him and isn’t something he’s likely to have said because it doesn’t reflect his own political career. Nonetheless, it does reflect how many people seem to perceive things. I had a friend at school who certainly seemed quite left wing at that point, but after his A-levels and leaving school he became an estate agent (a trainee one presumably) and by a mere nine months after that he had become somewhat right wing. Not extremely so, but his perception of the world changed because he concluded that there were very good reasons for things being done the way they were. I think this is probably connected to two things: it was the mid-’80s and we were in the depths of Thatcherism and in particular people buying their council houses, and home ownership is probably quite central to a certain strand of political conservatism. We stayed friends but had a few awkward conversations. I lost contact with him a couple of years later but he stayed a very significant person at arm’s length and I bear him no ill will.

I’m going to have to be careful here because obviously I do have certain opinions but I’m not going to turn this post into a slanging match. All I’m interested in is, is it true, and if so what causes it? I’ll do what I can to avoid making judgements of right and wrong on this. I actually suspect that if there are personality types which tend to be more left or right wing, the world probably needs them both, although maybe not in the polarised and simplistic way which has recently come into play. It isn’t so much that the world needs left and right wing people so much as it needs the kind of personalities which in current circumstances lead people in those directions. That’s all a bit arcane of course.

It might also be worthwhile to say what I mean by left and right, because as I’ve said already opinions tend to become associated with the ends of the spectrum when those places might be arbitrary for them or even not be their natural homes. However, I’m not going to do that. Sorry.

One observation made recently is that people who are involved in, well, shall we say fairly vigorous political activity seem to have the same things going on in their brains. In the US, the 6th January people and the BLM people had the same stuff happening in their heads. In this way, there’s a division between people who are politically active and engaged and those who aren’t, and I do also feel that when I’ve got involved in politics, there’s actually something I have in common with others who have, even if they’re vehemently opposed to everything I stand for. There’s something in the sheer willingness to get involved that appeals to me in people.

OK, so theory number one: young people have less investment in society, both financially and in terms of commitments. As they progress in their careers, if they do, they develop more such investment as a whole. They have mortgages, savings, pension schemes and both housing and other property, and they have children. Not everyone has all or any of this, but most people have at least some of it. They may also end up in positions of authority, and it’s been said that distrust of authority is something most people “grow out of”. This increasing investment in the mainstream leads people to become more cautious, fiscally shrewd and concerned to take care of what they’ve built up for themselves. Of course, there are also a lot of people who haven’t managed to do this. It would be interesting if this influenced their politics.

Before I go on, I’m going to talk about the research which I’ve used to write this post. Primary among my sources is the very well-known American think tank the Pew Research Center, based in Washington DC. This is a non-partisan organisation, a charitable trust, whose rating is generally centrist by Allsides.com. This rating means that it’s generally perceived as showing no bias or has an equal left and right bias which averages out as none. This is based on the perceptions of the people contributing to the Allsides rating, but there’s a limit to how far investigation of neutrality can be taken. It’s also probably true that neutrality is illusory. I don’t want to spend too long on this as it’s not the main point of what I’m writing here, although it’s definitely worthwhile looking into this kind of thing. The trouble is that because it’s American, it analyses the political spectrum in terms of Democrats and Republicans, which is quite unlike how things work in most places outside the States.

So: the Pew Research Center has this piece of research, showing that in the sample tested, sixty-six percent of voters aged eighteen to twenty-four preferred the Democratic Party and thirty-four percent were Republican Party voters. The gap for the next age group, up to twenty-nine, was slightly smaller and sixty-four percent. In fact, here’s the graphic:

This suffers from the usual confusing use of colours found in the US, which are the opposite way round from the rest of the world. This does generally show a drift towards the right with age, but there’s an interesting bump for people in their seventies. The sample size for the younger voters is flagged as quite small. This survey was also undertaken during the Biden administration.

So the bump then, which I think may be significant, is among people born between 1944 CE and 1953. These are mainly baby boomers. They would’ve been roughly adolescents during Vietnam and in their twenties during Watergate, which I suspect made them less keen on military intervention overseas and less trusting of Republican administrations, and that remained with them lifelong. That generation is also the one which immediately followed the War and was more involved in anti-establishment political activism such as the civil rights movement. This brings me to theory number two: people’s political bias tends to be formed by experiences during a formative period in their lives and stays with them throughout their lives, and the bias older people seem to have towards the right is because they always had that, whereas young people who are left-wing now would also be left-wing when they get older. This, like the other, feels like quite a sloppy theory and the really big question is how statistics can be used to get the really useful data out of such numbers without misleading people. All that said, we do generally seem to perceive that there is another kind of bump, a “reminiscence bump” as it’s known, between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five when we tend to remember more about those years than the others in our lives. However, this bump might also be an illusion created by how people’s lives go, in that the more interesting stuff tends to happen to us during our late teens and early twenties, such as leaving home, finding our first regular job, getting married, getting a mortgage, learning to drive, having children and so on. Of course, that list is biassed towards the people, who have been in the majority at least until recent decades, who have done all that stuff. If those events are influential on our political opinions, which seems quite likely, the question of whether the memories are just more detailed or whether the events are more memorable might not be important to the influence.

Hence it could be important to disentangle the age and generation here. People’s opinions might be more stable than they seem. There’s another way also in which this might be true but which could still create an apparent change, leading me to theory number three: people’s opinions stay the same but society changes. For instance, groups which were previously seen by people as being fair game for criticism may be more accepted or complied with as time goes by. I had a golly as a small child and saw no problem with it (I mean, I was four), but nowadays that would seem unacceptable. Some people might want to hold on to that older attitude, or just have a tendency to do so, and extending this across a wide range of issues this could make them look more left- or right-wing as they age even if their opinions don’t change. This, however, is complicated by the question of what precise attitudes we’re considering as marking someone out as left- or right-wing. Although the whole issue of what the Left considers under the heading of marginalisation is a significant part of that, there are other aspects such as whether the purpose of the criminal justice system is rehabilitation or punishment, the level and destination of income tax, the role of the public and private sectors, social enterprises and charities and the question of foreign policy. It doesn’t follow that all of these will align in someone’s mind at all, although many people would link them together. So far as this is concerned, different generations might tend to be left- or right-wing in different ways.

Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, wrote a book in 1945 called ‘The Open Society And Its Enemies’. The ideas promoted in it led to the foundation of an organisation called Open Society Foundations, funded substantially by George Soros, who has donated most of his wealth to it. This source of funding is likely to lead to accusations from the Right of bias here. Its aim is said to be to promote fair media, education, justice and public health. One of its major aims in the 1980s was to oppose Soviet-style government and it’s been generally seen as neoliberal in its aims, but it’s also quite mixed because it’s widely perceived as being left wing. This means that although they have also done research on this, many people are unlikely to trust them. Now I could try to analyse this more deeply, but it’d be a bit of a digression, so I’m just going to leave it alone for now. It’s also likely that many people wouldn’t trust the source here, whether or not they’re actually reliable.

So far, I’ve presented three “theories”, and of course there’s a conversation to be had here about what I mean by “theory” here, but for simplicity’s sake they are:

• People become financially and socially invested in mainstream society as adult life progresses, leading to more support for law and order and policies which are not perceived as disturbing that investment.
• People’s political views reflect their experiences during significant periods in their lives and they tend to stay the same.
• Politics reflect the values predominant at the times and society changes while the people stay close to how they used to be, so they just look more right- or left-wing according to how the Overton Window has moved.

There are a few things to be said about these. With the last, the question arises of whether there is an absolute scale of left- and right-wing opinion or whether it exists relative to the general approach taken in society. With the second, the question of what the reminiscence bump is arises, because if it’s just a bunching together of significant experiences, other significant experiences could also happen later in life which change someone’s political views. They might be mugged, they might have their house flooded, be made redundant or they might move to a neighbourhood with people whose ethnicity is different from theirs and experience that either negatively or positively regardless of what they formerly believed. This set of possibilities reflects one way of looking at things which is more society-based, but there’s also a more psychological way of looking at things, and I also have a fourth “theory” which I’ll share later.

There is a famous personality theory, the dominant one in mainstream academic psychology, called OCEAN, which I’ve mentioned before on here. I like it mainly because it’s easy to remember. It stands for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism, and the idea is that we all have traits along these spectra. It’s one of a number of different factor-based models of personality. It’s also been criticised, in particular the “openness” dimension, as being vague and almost meaningless, and that’s the trait which is considered particularly significant in influencing political beliefs, so – well, what is it? Well, it’s a bit complicated because it has in itself six aspects, but it includes imaginativeness, emotional self-awareness, aesthetic sensitivity, adventurousness (also willingness to expose oneself to new experiences), curiosity and willingness to challenge authority. Openness has been shown to decrease with age, which could result in attachment to more traditional views – “the good old days”. Likewise, conscientiousness rises. This, actually, reminds me of an incident where a friend and myself, both left wing, were looking at my house mate’s bedroom, also left wing, and noted that we were all quite untidy (and it wasn’t a gender thing as my house mate wasn’t a man), wondering if there was a correlation there. I later made that observation to a worker at a radical bookshop coöp and he replied “did Kropotkin have an untidy bedroom?”. We may never know! But I can believe that to some extent “why should I tidy my room when the world’s in such a mess?” expresses that sentiment. Of course it isn’t clear what someone means when they say that about the world. What constitutes a mess for them might not be the same as what it means for me. They might be talking about “white trash” for example, or “there goes the neighbourhood”, or they might literally mean litter. In a general sense, higher conscientiousness might involve more respect for rules and order. You might want all the cutlery to be in the right drawer and also all the people to be in the right social class, for example, or you might want physical punishment in schools and support for the right of parents to smack their children. There’s also an authoritarian personality type, apparently encouraged by authoritarian parents, but authoritarianism may not be a distinctively right wing thing, depending on whether the likes of Juche, Stalinism and Maoism count as left wing, which again is a long conversation. Such people, though, have been shown to be keener on authoritarianism, and that style of parenting was more common in the past so this could be a generational thing once again.

There is also the Silent Generation, born from 1928 to 1945 and therefore on their way out on the whole. These people were sometimes born in the Great Depression, could just about have fought in the War or had the forboding that they would somehow be involved in it, and then entered, in British terms, the “land fit for heroes”, with the founding of the NHS, for which they may have worked, in their early adulthood or earlier. They’re just before the Boomers. This generation has tended to be left wing by the standards of their time, bearing in mind that the TUC opposed immigration at that point, arguing that Blacks didn’t integrate with White workers, so what counts as left wing may change over time. However, even in more general terms the Silent Generation often drifts even further, even into communism. My own father was a life-long Tory but once said to me in his late eighties or early nineties that he didn’t think I appreciated how disabled he was, which is language I would associate more with the Left and was probably fair comment, though from an unexpected quarter. This, I think, was from his personal experience of disability and I don’t know how far it extended given his attitude to other people with physical disabilities.

Another aspect of this is the recent polarisation and entrenchment of opinion. I certainly feel it in myself, although I have to say it doesn’t feel new. Much of the history of my life has been of deferred hope. However, nowadays I find myself tempted to be less patient with people whose opinions differ, and this is probably due to the social bubble I, and many other people, find myself in. For this reason and others it’s important for us all to remember to keep in touch with people of disparate views, difficult though it may be for the people on either side to tolerate. There are some deeper issues with this. For some people, the conversation is abstract because they feel very secure in their positions, but for others it can be life and death. It can’t just be a cold, intellectual conversation for everyone, and that makes it all the more challenging and important for us to listen and respect each other. This may also make changes in political opinions with age alone, or at least the likely consequences of aging in practical and personal terms, less likely. This could mean that we are ceasing to be aligned with our best interests or those of others.

When young, one is likely to look at older people whose political opinions are not close to one’s own and decide they’re wrong, possibly due to cognitive decline, and when old, to decide that lack of experience explains that difference. This is the usual trade-off between idealism and wisdom which we see all over the place, not just in politics. It might also be tempting to try the mind-game of freezing one’s opinions at a particular point. In one of my teenage diaries, I have the line “if I ever find myself becoming right wing, I hope I retain the courage and wisdom to kill myself”. That’s a bit extreme, maybe, but it probably reflects a common pattern in people’s lives. The trouble with such a freeze is that new things happen all the time, and of course to be genuinely open one must accept or fairly consider some of them. Political beliefs formed in 1978 might not tell you very much about whether to oppose the current Soviet Union, which of course doesn’t exist, or Russia, which very much does.

The precise list of priorities differs between people of different ages as well as their general political leaning. According to the Pew Research Center again, young American adults under thirty have different priorities for foreign policy. Here’s another graphic, based on a poll taken in April 2024:

This is how it looked for domestic policy in January 2024:

Also, there’s a general turning against actual political parties among younger people. They’re still politically engaged and active, but they’re less likely to be members of any political party, just as they’re less interested in organisations generally, and are more likely to pursue their activism in other ways.

This paper tries to test the hypothesis that some generations are more likely to engage in particular political acts than others, this time in Western Europe. It provides evidence that generations are more important than age. This study, using the OCEAN personality model, finds that openness negatively correlates with conservatism, but also that more conscientious people are more likely to vote and the combination of agreeableness and conscientiousness makes people more left wing, so although conscientious people who score low on other traits might be more right wing, the more agreeable people (“nicer”) who are also conscientious are more likely to be left wing, so whereas conscientiousness might increase with age, it doesn’t so much make you more right wing as more likely to vote and more left wing if you’re also “nice”. So there could be a lot of generally right wing young people who just don’t vote because they’re not particularly interested in politics, who then come out as Tory or Republican voters as they get older. The greater tendency of older people to vote seems to reflect this. This study also rather surprisingly showed that openness and agreeableness together makes people more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, which are currently more often associated with the Right. After cursory consideration, I wonder if this explains the tendency of “crunchy” people to support the Right, which is an interesting recent development. Much of that, though, is linked to Covid, the lockdown and vaccination.

Regarding openness and conscientiousness, this paper from 2011 and therefore possibly out of date due to changes in the political landscape but also a European study, shows that openness predicts a preference for left wing parties and conscientiousness for right wing parties. This doesn’t seem to be entirely in accordance with the research referred to in the previous paragraph.

Older people may prefer stability and become more risk-averse, which may translate into support for the Right. It’s a stereotype that young men in particular think they’re immortal and invulnerable, but this is also paradoxical because it doesn’t accord with the idea of the “nanny state” insisting on seat belts, controlling what goes into food and restricting smoking and alcohol, which are practices more associated with the Left. Stability may also not correlate well with the disruptive tendencies of the large high technology companies and the recent very rapid changes undertaken in the US, so I’m not sure what to make of that.

I have a fourth theory, but it has a rider. As young adults, many people find they have to compromise for financial reasons, and end up working for employers which due to the complexities of the modern world tend to act unethically. This may be due to the possibility that the more you do, the more likely you are to do something wrong. This leads to cognitive dissonance which is resolved by becoming more right wing. That is, people have to become more right wing in order to live with themselves. This particular view has connections with the work ethic, i.e. that hard work is in itself a good thing regardless of its productivity or usefulness. Here’s my proviso though: if you don’t get involved in anything and never work from the inside to change something, you just never do change anything and you may also come to rely on other people who are getting their hands dirty and compromising. It might be a luxury to place yourself in this position. It’s easy to see the negatives in any situation, particularly if you’re already depressive in your thinking.

I sometimes think this about multinational companies. Although they’re the “baddies” in many people’s views, and I should point out that I am one of those many people, there is another aspect to what they do, which is simply that they do a lot, and given that a random act might have net positive or net negative consequences, simply existing and functioning for a large company that does stuff can just lead to it doing bad stuff, simply because it’s active and large. Of course we almost all live off the products and services of megacorporations and many of us have no option but to, so boycotting may not be practical. The same might apply to governments. Simply because they do a lot, a lot of what they do will have negative consequences. This parallels the problem of never doing anything as a way of avoiding doing the wrong thing, thereby placing oneself in the position of not getting one’s hands dirty and not doing much that’s right either. This is a form of compromise which could be seen as right wing. But this probably does explain why my friend I mentioned at the start became right wing so early in his life. I should also mention that he supported the SDP-Liberal alliance in spite of that.

However, this is just my personal opinion and I haven’t tested it against evidence, unlike the other perspectives I’ve mentioned here which are backed up by research, some of which is contradictory but does seem to be of reasonable quality. The distinction between my own “theory”, which is actually an hypothesis because it’s untested, and the others is that they’ve been corroborated by research and as far as I know mine hasn’t. It’s important to recognise that in pursuing the truth, one has to be able to step aside from one’s own pet “theories” and examine good quality evidence.

In closing, I want to say a few more things. I’ve tried to take a more evidence-based approach than usual with this topic because I wanted to show what that looks like. Offering an opinion without good quality evidence isn’t enough. One also needs to withhold opinions before getting accurate information. That information can be acquired in various ways, but with a topic like this it very often involves statistics. There is of course the famous quote: “Lies, damned lies and statistics”, which makes it sound like statistics are always misleading, but this isn’t so and that quote is not always helpful. It’s important to be educated about statistics so as not to be lied to by people using them. They are often used to deceive, to be sure, but this is only possible if you don’t enquire into the methods used to get them and sometimes what hasn’t been said, as in, all the negative results. The quality of research methods is also absolutely essential here. Sample sizes need to be as large as possible and samples need to be representative. All that said, there is such a thing as qualitative research, which relies more on personal experience than statistics and this kind of approach can lead to a false sense of certainty too. I also want to point out that I haven’t defined what I mean by left and right in detail and that I only considered OCEAN here rather than other theories of personality, including those from outside academic psychology such as the Enneagram, which may have something to say because of how people may transform over their lives due to both stress and personal growth, which may change their opinions and therefore politics. Also, this has as usual been long, and I apologise for my verbosity contributing to that, but sometimes things do need to be examined at length and I really don’t think I’ve been particularly obscure this time.

To conclude then, aging sometimes correlates with becoming more right wing but not always. When it does, it’s usually because of a desire for security and stability. I’m not criticising that at all. We all feel the need for that. With social issues in particular, people often move to the Left as they get older (they are also entering a marginalised group due to aging, and usually disability too). People’s political opinions tend to become entrenched in early middle age, so the apparent drift to the Right might be due to changes in society making people seem more right wing than if they were judged as younger people when they already had these opinions, or they might be more expressive about these opinions. Besides all this, the generation you’re born into influences your experiences and what you learn from them very strongly, so that may be at least as important as age. Personality makes a difference, and some traits show a trend with aging which leads to people becoming in particular less open and more conscientious, which could be expected to involve becoming more conservative. Individuals might have a very different personal history there though.

I want to finish by repeating something I said here several years ago. Kelsey Grammer is well-known to be Republican and as a supporter of the current administration. If you look at his life, it’s characterised by a series of terrible things happening to people close to him which I think may have nudged him to the right. Personal experience is often respected by people on the left – for instance, pro-choice people are very likely to see their position as based on lived experience as a potential or actual mother. If we’re going to do that more widely, we need to recognise why some people are right wing. I hope I’ve managed to keep most of my obviously left wing opinions out of this post and base it on evidence instead.