Mark Vernon - Talks and Thoughts Mark Vernon

There is a link between rising levels of mental-ill health and political disillusionment. Feeling cut off is not just an economic and psychological problem, but is a symptom of a wider alienation arising from modern consciousness.Owen Barfield argued that contemporary political problems are fundamentally due to estrangement not only from others but from ourselves, due to a loss of soul and spirit to materialism and literalism.As Carl Jung put it, the gods have become diseases – diseases of th...

William Blake lived during the period in which the modern world was born. A prophet, he detected the tendencies that now powerfully shape our age. The love of abstraction was high on his list of troubles.Such generalisations profoundly shape politics today. Politicians sell themselves on whether they will boost the economy, drive up growth, fight inflation, and I think the rhetoric is itself alienating, dumbing, dreary. Vision departs, imagination declines, disillusionment becomes the norm.Ac...

The new movie Freud’s Last Session is well worth a watch, particularly if either man is of interest.The issues you might expect are aired between them, not least belief in God. But also the more shadowy sides to their lives - Lewis’s relationship with Janie Moore, Freud’s with his daughter Anna.I enjoyed it, though also wondered if they might have discussed other things and found common ground.There’s more about the film here - https://www.sonyclassics.com/film/freudslastsession

I've been thinking about politics and disillusionment that seems most characteristic of now, in the West at least, and thinking about the prepolitcal - what politics needs to work well.I've thought about Plato on beauty and Aristotle on ethics in previous posts.Now a third guide, Jesus on... which isn't immediately easy to say. And that's the point.Some would say that Jesus and politics is easy to define.- a preference for the poor- the prosperity gospel- or Christian exceptionalism and...

At school, we learn that being alive is to possess certain functions, from respiration to reproduction. But what is life and why can the word “life” be used more widely than referring only to biological life? In the latest episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon consider the meaning of saying that stars have a lifecycle, and that rocks and atoms can be ascribed a biography, in that they undergo processes of becoming. They discuss A.N. Whitehead’s ...

Disillusionment with politics is probably the most obvious feature of the current mood. This is, in part, because politics has collapsed onto anxiety about material improvement and lost sight of much more. In a secular society in which this facet of wellbeing is increasingly hard to deliver, politics appears therefore to be failing.So now is a good moment to consider what is sometimes called the pre-political - the more that politics needs.And a first thought comes from Plato, who would highl...