Half Life

 When Christopher Hitchens, in several of his public appearances as mediated by YouTube, passingly joked "We have to believe in free will - we have no choice!", the bon mot was invariably greeted with a chuckle from the audience, who, you got the impression, were inclined to concede a claim that seemed among the least controversial he ever made. Well, not any more, as far as I can tell. Since his fellow-horseman Sam Harris first embarked on a decades-long anti-free-will crusade, more and more people have freely exercised the choice not to believe in the free exercise of choice, to the point where this has become a rare point of convergence between the woke Left and the philosophically-inclined liberal centre-right, leaving only recalcitrant conservatives out of the party, either because their religious catechism generally obliges them to pay lip-service to the troublesome notion (our misuse of Free Will is God's pretext for treating us all like shit, remember?), or becau...

There’s a kind of writing you’ve probably come across online, in which a narrator pretends to be recounting an unpleasant true-life memoir but is transparently indulging a sex fantasy (the salacious adverbs of manner tend to give the game away). I am afraid that the first thing I posted in this new blog might have been interpreted that way by the three people I stupidly invited to read it (one of whom was too disgusted even to manage a comment, while the other two did the polite humouring-a-lunatic thing that I would probably do myself if I had gained the above impression). For what it’s worth, the factual element of that screed was actually true: but in the end it hardly matters whether it was true or not. It was tasteless and indecorous, and that’s what counts, and that’s why I deleted it. It was, if you like, an experiment to find out if there’s a way to circumvent the taboos that limit what we can talk about, or what we can reveal to the world about ourselves. I’m at an age when it...