REVIEWING The Dammed by Fred Pearce (Bodley Head) Alex Wilks supports the book’s thesis, that big dams do more harm than good. He argues that a better approach to the problems they are intended to solve would be to ensure that water should be controlled ‘not by governments and companies, but by communities who will… read more »
One might have expected the various movements opposing hierarchy and exploitation – socialism, communism and anarchism – to work together against the common opponents. But most murders take place within families, and each of these movements reserves its bitterest venom for its close predecessors in the series. Here is Trotsky on reformist socialism: Together with… read more »
In calling attention to the persistence of early modes of behaviour we have to think why this should be particularly necessary in social and ideological connections. The answer lies in the complex nature of the process by which thinking advances. Although the development, the horizontal extension, of any ideology proceeds for the most part steadily,… read more »
IC stands committed to the proposition that Nothing Is Absolutely True (giving the acronym NIAT). The journal concerns itself with discussion, with propositions, and NIAT asserts that no one of these is completely true in every sense, at all times, without reservation and under all conditions. It is an instance of the only fully universal… read more »
I Some ways of thinking are more logical than others and this suggests the presence, somewhere in the background, of pure logic, a set of clear, precise and rigid laws which, if only we comply with them, will ensure that our thinking moves as if along rails to the correct conclusion. We seldom in practice… read more »
Darwin sits firmly, Newton and Marx look likely to survive although their thrones may shake; Freud is in trouble. In the 1920s William Empson noted his tendency to devise a theory for a particular case of neurosis and then suggest that it applied to the average mind. Others also questioned the methods used, and recently… read more »
A nation not engaged in war enjoys peace. Or so we tend to think; the familiar stereotype stands at some distance from the realities of present life in Britain. Bombs, armed robberies and riots, deadly quarrels between drug dealers, assaults by and upon xenophobes, motorway bandits ramming their victims, street attacks, wife-beating and domestic murders;… read more »
‘Small earthquake in Chile, not many dead.’ Whether the headline ever appeared or not it makes a good story, and Martyn Lewis, a BBC newscaster, may have had it in mind when making his suggestion. He wants the media to pay greater attention to ‘positive news’; not packing the bulletins with cheerful trivia, but weighing… read more »
By positing the ideological pyramid systematic ideology raises an apparent difficulty for itself: If only the tiny minority towards the peak can be expected to appreciate the importance of s. i., how can this theory ever exercise any general influence? Physical science offers an illuminating parallel; few of us know much about it, yet it… read more »
UNLESS we assume extra-terrestrial influence, authoritarian society must have grown out of the non-hierarchical foraging communities; there was nowhere else for it to come from. Archaeology shows this to have happened not just once but six times independently (in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus and Yellow river valleys, Mesoamerica and Peru), producing the ‘primary’ states, those… read more »