Earlier this month, we explored Nazi spirituality and the contemporary spread of far-right conspiracies in New Age and wellness networks. But the overlap goes deeper than that.
The fact there is such a thing as ‘right-wing spirituality’, or the ‘Cosmic Right’ as some call it, comes as a shock to some New Age seekers, who may have thought spirituality is essentially liberal and progressive, as opposed to traditional religions.
Read MoreLast week’s rallies in London, Berlin, and Los Angeles against lockdown measures attracted both New Agers and far-right groups. We’ve seen before this overlap between the spiritual movement and the fast-spreading conspiracy theory, QAnon, which insists that an evil cabal of Hollywood celebs and liberal politicians (led by Tom Hanks and Hillary Clinton) are child-eating Satanists who control the world.
Read MoreThis is about quite a dark subject: the Soviet gulags. I don't recommend reading this essay if you suffer from clinical depression. If you're just somewhat got down by global politics, I do recommend you read this, to realize that things can be a lot worse, and to appreciate what we have going for us.
Read MoreI wasn’t a big reader as a youth. I was more of a jock and a class clown. It was only around the age of 17 that I suddenly became a moody adolescent book-worm – it was both a quickening and a sickening. In one term, I read Hamlet, King Lear, Heart of Darkness and Freud’s Five Cases of Hysteria, and also watched Blue Velvet.
Read MoreThis is the best time ever to be alive and human. Global life expectancy has doubled in the last century, from 31 to 71. A century ago, 20% of babies died in childbirth, now it's less than 7%. You're far, far less likely to die violently than in the Middle Ages, the 19th century, or even in the 1960s.
Read MoreWith his unerring knack for the offensive, President Trump responded to last week's Nazi rally in Charlottesville, in which a young woman was murdered, with a condemnation of the 'violence on many sides'.
Read MoreAfter the bombing in Manchester, prime minister Theresa May said, on the steps of Downing Street: 'We struggle to comprehend the warped and twisted mind that sees a room packed with young children not as a scene to cherish but as an opportunity for carnage.'
Read More‘War’, wrote the French knight Jean de Bueil in 1465, ‘is a joyous thing’. War - and violence in general - is 'one of humankind’s great natural highs’, in the words of sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich. War absorbs our consciousness, heightens our senses, distorts times, bonds us to our fellow fighters, and can give us a sense of transcendent meaning and sacred value.
Read MoreWe all know the story. Europe in the 17th century was torn apart by the Wars of Religion. Then, after several decades of extreme violence, people decided to put religious differences to one side, and to come together in the rational, secular, liberal, tolerant state.
Read MoreAs the great general and military strategist Carl von Clausewitz noted in his 1832 book On War, war ‘necessarily involves the feelings’. War is waged as much in our emotions as it is on the battlefield. Each side tries to maintain their own emotional resolve and self-command, while at the same time using violence, shock, and unremitting pressure to ‘wear down’ the enemy’s emotional resources until their will is broken and they submit.
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