A few years ago I was writing a blog - Navigators of the Anthropocene. It was going pretty well. I accumulated a large number of essays on issues relating to political economy, post-liberalism, limits to growth, conservatism …woke….oh dear, that’s where it all went wrong. I wrote a piece called ‘peak trans’. I can’t remember the details. I know it was wrong. We were nowhere near the peak. However it was enough to get a couple of hundred trans blokes (men who for whatever reason, and there are many, identify as women) complaining to my place of employment. I was subsequently asked by the Dean to shut up shop - which I did for the sake of my wife. This was the height of covid lunacy. I shut up, stopped commenting on FB, closed my Twitter account - and I would like to say things got better. Of course they didn’t. The harassment continued at work. I am still keeping my head down and praying that I keep my job - although this is by no means certain.
The one great thing that has happened is my conversion to Catholicism, along with three of my children and my wife (already a Catholic by birth). As well as being a source of joy and bonding for our family, and opening up a new depth of mutual understanding with our wide circle of Christian (not only Catholic) friends in Canada, I have discovered an entirely unexpected metaphysical and theological grounding for my post-liberal political instincts - and the hitherto strange admixture of libertarian, communitarian and ecological ideas that have been bubbling away in my back brain for decades. Imagine my surprise on discovering that E.F. Schumacher was an orthodox Catholic ( which I wrote up here). Reading Robert Barron’s The Priority of Christ, I got the same feeling of doors opening as I had, as a young and very naive student on reading Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Over the last few years I have begun as best I can to inhabit this post-liberal, Catholic response to modernity, not only in my writing and approach to political economy, but in my personal life. I now regularly take part in Exodus 90 retreat with a group of online brothers who feel like very old friends. And although I am more and more dismayed by the downward spiral of the culture war and political events in the UK and Europe, I find that faith really does create a buffer preventing jaded world weariness and cynicism — AKA political realism — from extinguishing hope and joy. The chaotic joy ensuing from my wife’s rescuing of two 6 week old kittens from certain death in a storm really does feel like a miracle, soaking up and extinguishing the pain that had arisen from TDS-related excommunication by our closest friend in Canada. The same person derided Nikki herself for cooking three times a week for our priest who cares for a retired Bishop and two trainees. As with everything this is a spontaneous expression of love. And as she always says ‘why wouldn’t you love’? But love has been squeezed to the margins on both sides of the culture war, but most of all I think ( I hope not too pointedly) by the ‘be kind’ and ‘hate doesn’t live here’ brigade. Anyway, love it certainly is and her private act of generosity suffuses our whole household.
Anyway, it’s Boxing Day. We have friends coming over for a home-brewed pub quiz. I will drink some whisky before giving up again for three months as part of Exodus 90 2025. Starting in 2025, I will be writing regularly and posting a series of shorter essays and academic articles. This will mostly be with a view to an ongoing process of personal digestion and cogitation, preparatory to the book I will be writing for Polity Press. I have also created a curated group of FB friends with whom I can communicate without, I hope, consequences for my family. I should say perhaps that part of my reticence has been that my kids are heavily into traditional music (fiddle, pipes etc) and are wanting to turn professional. Trad music like all the other art forms is very liberal. Let’s just leave it there. Speech has consequences, as they always shout as they deplatform those secretly Nazi Quakers who know what a woman is. I’m very much hoping that my own brand of post liberal political economy and commentary won’t rebound upon them.