July 2005: the old name for this site was "sprogress.com" - but I'm getting rid of it now. If you have any bookmarks / favorites pointing to it, can you put them instead to here, joshuarey.com? Thanks!
August 2004: the food section has become a web site in its own right. Prettier, and soon to be meatier. You can read or contribute here.
Here you find ideas about the things listed to the left and below. Elsewhere. If you want to get in touch please do, by commenting on one of the articles.
It's been a long time. A good deal has changed. I got married in February. And now I have a job. Soon, God willing, we'll have a baby and a mortgage. The big four of Normal Life. And jolly pleasant it is too. All the ancient wisdoms were young once. I was taken out to lunch (in ...
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Fred Perry won Wimbledon in 1936. It was a good year for Soviet economic policy too: half way through the Second Five Year Plan, output three times what it was before the Revolution. The All England Club does its best to keep this Golden Age alive. True, we have not seen another British men's ...
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In the last fifty years, Nietzsche finally laid out Descartes. Descartes thought we could find out everything we need to know by looking at the world, as it were, from the spectator’s gallery. Nietzsche and his descendants said that “looking at the world” is something you do with your own mindset, and that mindset is not neutral. There is no spectator’s gallery, in short. We are all on the stage. So objective knowledge of the kind Descartes wanted is a fiction.
Stay with me - I’m going to get to the Prince of Wales and his new teacher training college shortly.
The end result is the world of ideas in which we now live. A world in which every idea is of equal value, because we do not believe any claims of one idea to be true. We think that knowledge is no more than opinion.
And of course Nietzsche was right so far as he went. He was right to puncture Descartes’ pretensions. The kind of knowledge Descartes wants, neutral, knowledge, is not possible. But there is an older, more deeply rooted idea of knowledge which Descartes himself made unfashionable, but on which we can rest. It is the idea that knowledge is a thing that emerges from a tradition. Not that the tradition stops us thinking for ourselves. But that the tradition helps us to grow up into people who can think in a way that gets thoughts thunk.
This set of ideas, the pre-eminent exponent of which was Thomas Aquinas, is a set of ideas that’s due for a comeback. The Prince of Wales is not being nostalgic. He is taking a respectable and useful position in a thousand year philosophical struggle.
We’re fighting in the streets again. So no surprises there. Take a walk around a continental capital – the statues often as not are of Goethe, Rimbaud and Cervantes. In London you see Monty and the Iron Duke..
Everyone knows about the English reserve. But why do you think we need to be reserved? It’s the sobriety of the alcoholic. That’s why we went to the trouble of inventing most of the word’s sports. And not mimsy games like curling, housework on ice, or gentle throwing and catching games, but legalized mugging (rugby) or assault with a deadly weapon (cricket – I speak as the owner of a deviated septum – jolly hard those cricket balls). We invented sports, in short, to channel a natural instinct for fighting.
One of the hidden benefits of the Union is that it tempers English thuggery with Celtic savoir vivre. Next time you’re in church, see if they have one of those stained glass windows with the four national saints. Andrew, Patrick and David: wise old guys with beards. George: a thug with a sword.
A word of advice for anyone inspired by devolution on the celtic fringe to a naïve enthusiasm for the rediscovery of Englishness. Don't go there.
One can’t fault the news media on getting things done. I was at Colombo airport last December with a team from Medair (a Swiss-based Christian aid agency I’ve worked with on and off for many years). But most of the other travellers, seemingly with three or four luggage trolleys a head, laden ...
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Today we commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the day when the British army liberated prisoners held in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The bald fact, that the Nazis industrially murdered six million Jews, is one which we repeat often enough to risk its losing its power to shock. We ...
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Everyone loves France: food, wine, art, landscape, fashion; intelligent hedonism, ancient culture. I grant you, you get all this cheaper, classier and with more friendly service in Italy, but one can’t have too much of a good thing. The Entente Cordiale (or “Friendly Understanding” as we say in ...
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I'm a crusty pre-tennis-court conservative, but I must confess the Middlesex University report that says we shouldn't come down too hard on the black economy struck a chord.
My text is from Burke (speech on American taxation, 19 April 1774): "no vulgar precaution ought to be employed in the cure of evils, which are closely connected with the cause of our prosperity".
We encourage a flexible labour market, an eye for the main chance, and willingness to graft for wedge. These qualities make us rich; but they also stimulate some of us to activity in the off-book world. The qualities that make us rich conduce to rip-offs too.
It's the same with corporate tax avoidance. For every ten clever chaps in the City making an honest buck, there's always one with a mind that runs to diddling the Revenue. If there were a magic spell to make them stop, then we'd use it. But there isn't.
Some abuse is the price of freedom. And freedom is, inter alia, a precondition for wealth.
One of the many good things about Dorothy L Sayers is that she is very circumstantial. Just as we might read Jane Austen to find out the detail of how the gentry lived in 1810, a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery gives you a potted social history of the year it was written.So we find that food ...
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The Prince's Trust says young people need more spaces to play.
Children used to play in the streets. Today they risk getting run over or duffed in for denting someone's car. The space is no longer theirs. Four decades of research (the late Donald Appleyard a good example) tell us what we already knew: cars damage local social networks (arguably they help build up more distant networks - this may be a point in their favour, but it doesn't diminish the harm).
I'd agreepeople in the cars suffer too. Driving can be fun, but it can also be the alienation de nos jours. But drivers if they suffer, suffer by choice. They control a piece of machinery that casually gives them power. Park across half a narrow pavement for a day and nobody will bother you. Stand in the street for a minute and you're in a world of trouble.
Turning streets from play parks into car parks may or may not be a good trade-off. But the way it happens is not fair. Cars get the space because in a collision they come off better. It's an egregious bit of Macht macht Recht.
It's in the oven now but I'm not sure what to call it. Casserole is a bit like serviette and lounge. But the honest anglo-saxon word, my usual choice, in this case sounds unappealing - as in "in a stew" or "stewed". Hot pot is too seventies darling.
What the hey. It is what it is. ...
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Today is the anniversary of the Treaty of Sèvres, which dismembered the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI. It's a day to make you think a bit.
A lot of the trouble in the last hundred odd years resulted from the power vacuum left by the Ottoman collapse. WWI itself - but much else besides. The territories ceded by the Ottomans at Sèvres is a chilling list of future trouble-spots: Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Hedjaz, Egypt, Soudan, Cyprus. (And don't forget the bits they gave up before WWI - Serbia, Bosnia, Libya...)
Remember how many centuries Europe was a mess of warring principalities after the Romans went home? Not cheerful.
Which of has not at some time felt that the Christian life was a bit too much like hard work? So often God, speaking through his church or Scripture such as we have read this morning, seems to want us to give up the things we like in everyday life in favour of something far off and supernatural ...
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There is an uncomfortable message that appears again and again in the Bible, including the passages we've just heard. Time and again we're told to get rid of our wealth, and concentrate on the things of the spirit. "Sell your possessions and give to the poor". "Faith is being sure of what we ...
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Is it really something to be sad about that we are ignorant of our history?
Every Afghan knows the name of Malalai, the woman who inspired resistance to the British army in the 1840s. Every Serb can tell you the date of the battle of Kosovo Polje. No Ulster Protestant would get the Battle of the Boyne wrong. People en masse remember history when they need it to bolster a sense of national identity. Usually the results are malign. The English have the luxury of being complacent enough about their history that almost all of us can forget almost all of it. Where would you rather live?
A sad and oxymoronic story in the News in Brief section of the Times today. It's about a GAP executive who stole £412,000 because he didn't want to admit he had "failed financially"?
It's a bit disturbing that we all know what this means. Whereas, since there is no link between wealth and virtue, "financial failure" should make as little sense as "inebriation failure".
There's nothing wrong with desiring money - this makes the world go round. But we have elevated this desire to the moral sphere, which is stupid and corrupting. Capitalism is indeed the least bad way to organise our affairs. But it originated in a world of faith. People believed in something bigger than their own squalid preoccupations. So they could try to get more money, and as a by product turn the wheels of the economy, and not be driven into shame if they did not get very much.
When I was a merchant banker I was very impressed with my observant Jewish colleagues who, however much they relished their bonus, had it in their contracts they could leave at 2 pm on Friday in winter, to be home by the start of the Sabbath. This belief in something bigger than money is what makes capitalism bearable. Without it, the market economy may become just one of many shambling roads to barbarism.
A pal coming for lunch seems like the stimulus I need to make a week's worth of tomato soup. As ever it starts with garlic.
It all goes in the pan with tomato paste, as Peter Clemenza will tell you, where I stirred it a lot to stop it sticking (or you could splash in lots of olive oil but ...
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If you'll forgive me, I'm not going to go into detail about our Old Testament reading this evening. If you want to reflect on this passage perhaps I could offer one idea for your consideration. This is not just the end of the book of Genesis: it's the start of the book of Exodus. Joseph and ...
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St James, whose feast we celebrate today, is as you might say the Everyman of Apostles. If we read further on in Mark's Gospel we find him at many of the critical events. When Jesus raises the daughter of Jairus from the dead "he did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the ...
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The story of the Good Samaritan is one of the best known in the Bible. It has a simple moral: that we should make ourselves practically useful to other people. We read that the Good Samaritan goes to great lengths to make sure his help is useful: he gives the inn keeper money to look after ...
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Everybody knows the story of the Good Samaritan. It has a simple moral: that we should make ourselves practically useful to those in trouble. The hero of the story is a Samaritan, and as you know, Samaritans are essentially good chaps. Today there is an extremely valuable voluntary agency ...
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I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared
You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men
Can you think of somewhere you went on holiday as a child and the later, after years or even decades passed, visited again? Sometimes that can be a happy ...
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More arguments about what to put on the empty plinth.
The monuments in Trafalgar Square tell the national story, and the monument on the Empty Plinth is no exception. But there is no monument on the Empty Plinth, you will object, for surely otherwise it would not be the Empty Plinth. Aha, but on the Empty Plinth we have seen in the last years a series of contrasting objects: this is a very good monument to diversity, multiculturalism, postmodernism, the hermeneutic of suspicion, mistrust of history, and the fear of being one thing rather than another: our national story in the modern age.
But like Nelson's Column, the national story this monument tells is not a neutral story. It is a story with a point of view. The idea that every idea about what we are like should have equal play is itself a very specific idea: an idea that contradicts and seeks to exclude some other ideas.
Of course, there are other good reasons for wanting to vary the subject matter of our monuments. To be blunt, most central London statuary is of military men. You may want to have less of that because you don't like military men: then I would disagree, for I think Nelson and General Roberts and Viscount Slim served us well. But I do also think Britain is about more than succesful defensive warfare.
That said, there are limits to what Britain is about. Britain is about something, not everything. The polymorphic diversity of the Empty Plinth is a monument to a Britain that has lost its sense of itself. So it may catch the mood of the times, but it's nothing to be complacent about. And by putting jokey impermanence at the head of the list of virtues, it rules out filling the Empty Plinth with something that would last.
When this damp island has sunk again beneath the waves, level-headed historians in summary mode will remember us for two things: fighting and writing. Trafalgar Square is replete with monuments to fighting. What the empty plinth needs then is a permanent bronze group sculpture of Shakespeare, Milton and Jane Austen, over the motto "peach hath her victories no less renowned than war".
German doctors want to soften their country's rules on embryo experiments. They make a good case. For the obvious historical reasons, Germany is pretty strict on anything resembling eugenics. That said, it is not clear to me whether it is they or we who should be doing the reassessing.
German genocide guilt is a noble thing, but it's rightly the property of us all. Britain is lucky to have institutions that keep us from that kind of madness, but cut us and we bleed the same as Germans. Indeed the Holocaust is peculiarly horrifying because it was perpetrated by a nation we all thought was at the apogee of civilisation. When the UFOs finally land, one might reasonably hope they land in Germany, so they get a good impression of the human race. If the Germans with all their wonderful music and philosophy, all their hard work and ingenuity, if they can sink into depraved barbarism - what hope is there for the rest of us? And if I can, as I do, feel proud of Beethoven and Kant, then I by golly ought to feel ashamed of Goebbels and Himmler. If Germany can learn moral lessons from remembering the evil of Nazism, so should every other nation of the human race.
Perhaps instead of Germany reassessing its embryology laws, the rest of us ought to be cribbing from their statute book. The German laws have the merit of treating people (or potential people, depending on how you look at it) as ends not means. The idea of treating people as ends not means is a pretty basic one if you want an enduring liberal polity. Funnily enough, it's also the idea of Prussian philosopher.