The Politics of Dancing

 Deepening Shadows In the democratic West we live in the age of shadows. The shadow of tyranny and the threat to democracy, the shadow of Putin and war, the shadow of poverty and economic destitution, the shadow of climate catastrophe. Two events recently have seen shadows take form out of the fog of deceit and misinformation, and become concrete reality, the overturning of Roe V Wade in the US and the scrapping of the Human Rights act here in the UK. For women, the world over, this assault on their bodily autonomy represents a return to an oppressive darker age, for make no mistake the decision of the Court has given hope and cover for reactionaries everywhere. The cost in mental health and human flourishing by this atmosphere is immense and impossible to quantify. Never has human solidarity been more important. A Wounded Johnson Johnson emerges fatally wounded after a mauling, first in a vote of confidence and now by two disastrous by-election defeats. Surrounded by a cabinet o...

 I  For all its great claims Christianity has been far more of a curse than a blessing to civilisation. The world it destroyed was more tolerant and open. Of course, we can never know what might have been had Constantine not chosen to embrace a small religious sect. What can be known is that because of that embrace Christianity came to dominate western culture and all aspects of daily life. It was this all-encompassing aspect, supported by a framework of enforcement, the church, the state, informal spies, and informers, which gave Christianity its totalitarian quality. Long before Nazi Germany books were confined to the flames. Long before Stalin and the NKVD heretics were hunted, tortured, and killed.  No violence, no cruelty, no exercise of imaginative sadism, was too great to protect the faith. In such an atmosphere free thought, outside the privacy of one’s own home, or confined to the pages of a diary, proved impossible. Even this privacy often failed to provide safe...