Few of us have any better grounds for believing in germs than for believing in witches. – Professor Gordon Childe. IN the relationship between science and daily life two distinct and complementary tendencies can be observed. On the one hand the products of science are coming into an increasingly intimate relationship with our everyday activities…. read more »
On Friday 28 February we attended a meeting of the West London Branch on the subject of Apartheid. As usual, the speaker was well informed (though only about capitalism, not about ‘socialism’), and as usual he put the routine party case and used the routine evasion. When it was pointed out that, in South Africa… read more »
The other day, on the television, Lord Boyd Orr told us that the world’s population is now expanding at the terrific rate of some 23 millions a year. In more concrete terms it means that, when you woke up this morning, there were 63,000 more human beings to feed, clothe and shelter and educate than… read more »
The mystics have long insisted on the need for recognition of the dark side, and one achievement of the past century has been to link this intuition with the methods of science, producing rational studies of the irrational. One example appears in Aldous Huxley’s studies of consciousness-changing drugs (mainly, in those innocent days, peyoti) but… read more »
‘Ban the Bomb.’ An excellent slogan; short, direct, alliterative, unforgettable. What does it mean? The claim of the state to a monopoly of violence has never been universally accepted and there are now many non-state groups using violence, some of them able to operate across the world. Terrorists are notoriously disinclined to do what the… read more »
In the course of his psycho-analytical investigation Freud laid bare many mechanisms, many processes going on in our minds, of which we normally refrain more or less unaware. In some cases the same – or very similar – processes are to be observed at work in the ideological realm, and of these one of the… read more »
In his The Domain of Ideologies, Harold Walsby asserts his subject has never been treated scientifically and there is a desperate need for this. His own “humble endeavour” is a step that way. One wonders what his idea of science is, for it seems strange that he should apologise for giving so much space to… read more »
[“Dear Mr. Walford, Many thanks for your letter of 26th June, and for the pamphlet ‘The Intellectual and the People.’ I have read it with interest and would like to discuss it with you. I have been working along somewhat similar lines for many years, in an unsystematised way.” – George Orwell, 30 June 1945]… read more »
The widespread publicity recently given to the atom, as a consequence of public interest in the epoch-making event of the employment of sub-atomic energy as a weapon of war, is naturally devoted only to the direct and more spectacular issues and aspects of the atom’s nature. There is, however, another aspect of the subject –… read more »
“An adaption of some notes about Walsby and the SSA I wrote in April 1965, when in Ghana […] it was not published […] The 1965 notes were called ‘Thoughts on the African Identity’ and included an account and attempted analysis not only of that question and of ‘Social Rationality’ (the expression I used for… read more »