People sometimes ask about my spiritual beliefs and I struggle to answer concisely. My views are not conventionally religious, yet neither are they atheistic in the straightforward sense. I find myself somewhere between mysticism, pantheism, symbolism, and philosophy. What makes…
Keep readingMuch political discussion becomes confused because it treats the state and the nation as the same thing. They are not. The state is an institution. Its legitimacy comes from the functions it performs. It exists to protect life, liberty and…
Keep readingNationalism has acquired a bad reputation. To some people it means xenophobia, ethnic exclusivity or hostility to outsiders. To others it means little more than patriotism. Neither understanding is quite correct. George Orwell drew a useful distinction between patriotism and…
Keep readingIntroduction In my earlier essay I argued that government is not sovereign but a delegated authority. Its legitimacy derives from a limited number of functions that require collective action, including security, dispute resolution, basic infrastructure, and certain public goods supported…
Keep readingFirst Principles 1. The individual is the primary moral unit Moral duties arise first from concrete relationships: Government does not create these duties. They exist prior to government. 2. Individuals owe one another non-aggression and toleration People should not: Because…
Keep readingMy daughter received her GCSE results today. She did remarkably well. Better than her old man ever did, in fact. Watching her consider her next steps, and all the possibilities that seem to stretch out before a sixteen-year-old, I found…
Keep readingIn my last post, I admitted that AI has occasionally helped me climb onto an imaginary soapbox and voice my ideas in a manner suggesting I’d discovered the answer to life’s great mysteries. The good news is that this pomposity…
Keep readingPerfect spelling, but… I’m a fan of AI. I use it regularly, and I think it’s one of the most useful tools to arrive in years. It helps me overcome writer’s block, tidy up awkward sentences, challenge my thinking, and…
Keep readingPreface This post presents a formal metaphysical paper developed over several months of reflective work. Although my background is in Religious Studies and writing rather than academic philosophy, I have attempted to articulate a clear and rigorous ontological structure beginning…
Keep readingThe life of a small forest community is thrown into turmoil when a strange new disease begins to spread, stirring fear, suspicion, and painful divisions. Yet fragments of ancient legend speak of the Old Ones — mysterious, seemingly magical beings,…
Keep readingIf my last post argued that ethno‑nationalism is a dead end, this one explains the alternative: a civic‑republican Britain built on local self‑government, regional autonomy, and a minimal central state. In other words, a Britain that stops trying to force…
Keep readingThere is a quiet grief that many Britons carry, though few feel comfortable speaking it aloud in polite company. It is the realization that the country we inherited—or the one our parents and grandparents built—has fundamentally ceased to exist. Between…
Keep readingMost of my adult life has been spent inside institutions: corporations, trade unions, chapels, clubs, political parties. Each had its own rules, officers, expectations, and rituals. Each was, in effect, an interest group — a collection of individuals and families…
Keep readingThere’s a tension I’ve lived with for years: the gap between the mystical experience I actually have and the metaphysical systems I enjoy constructing. They coexist, but they don’t meet. One is lived; the other is intellectual play. My spiritual…
Keep readingModern liberal democracies tend to treat citizenship as a thin, mostly administrative status — a passport, a legal identity, and a bundle of rights that can often be acquired with minimal integration. In my Civic Republicanism, citizenship is something deeper.…
Keep readingPreamble I often write about Civic Republicanism in abstract terms — subsidiarity, competence, non‑domination, polycentric authority, civic guardianship — but abstractions can only take a reader so far. At some point, the most effective way to explain a constitutional philosophy…
Keep readingTriangularism For years I carried too much metaphysical weight: hiraeth, land‑mysticism, ancestral echoes, perennial philosophy, the ache for unity and eternity. All of it stirred something in me, but none of it changed how life actually works. None of it…
Keep readingThe older I get, the clearer life becomes. Not mystical, not bardic, not wrapped in ancestral fog — just clear. For years I carried a soft, atmospheric worldview: hiraeth, land‑mysticism, cultural memory, psycho‑geography, the old stories. They stirred something in…
Keep readingIntroduction Idealism lasts longer in some men than others. Mine lasted well into my fifties — far past the age when most people have already learned that good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes, and that systems don’t save people from…
Keep readingIt is often said that relating ontology to political philosophy is a category error. Metaphysics deals with being; political theory deals with institutions, laws, and collective decision‑making. The two domains, it is argued, should not mix. But this objection only…
Keep readingMy metaphysical outlook begins with a neutral‑monist conviction: that the ultimate ground of reality is prior to any distinction between mind and matter. This ground is not a “layer” in any structured sense, because layers imply intelligibility, and intelligibility itself…
Keep readingFor some time, my political reflections have lived under the heading Politics of Scale. It was a useful phrase, capturing my belief that political life only makes sense when it is rooted in the appropriate level of community, authority, and…
Keep readingIn an age when political imagination feels exhausted, the Politics of Scale demands that we think again about how human beings organise themselves. The old binaries — centralisation versus localism, globalism versus nationalism, technocracy versus democracy — no longer map…
Keep readingMy metaphysical outlook rests on three complementary ideas: panpsychic nested holons, the Block Universe, and Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point. Each offers a different angle on the structure of reality; together they form a single, coherent picture. 1. Panpsychic Nested…
Keep readingAt the heart of this metaphysics is a simple idea: reality has depth, and we live inside more than one layer of it at the same time. What we normally call “the world” is just the surface level — the…
Keep readingSomething went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Hearth and Heart Magazine 