Mark Vernon - Talks and Thoughts Mark Vernon

Just Stop Oil and the imprisonment of Roger Hallam and others has provoked an outcry, on both sides of the dispute. And the heightened emotions have made me think. What's going on here? What is at stake?I suspect that what’s being missed is something fundamental to human society and how we participate in a wider environment, and that can be discerned more fully by considering the true nature of freedom of speech.I draw on a talk given by Joseph Milne at the excellent Temenos Academy. The arch...

Randomness and luck, fate and providence. How do these facets of life relate to one another? Or is everything, actually, mechanically determined with synchronicities, say, being no more than coincidences? In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss the ways in which philosophers and scientists, ancient and modern, have imagined and explored notions of causality and sympathy in nature, alongside fortune and calamities. The ideas of Aris...

At one level, Blake is clearly Christian. It’s even trivial to say so. And yet, his identification with Jesus is often sidelined, even written out, of accounts of the poet's work today.There are many reasons for this neglect: an understandable disillusionment with Christianity; the replacement of participative Christianity with cultural Christianity and its stress on moral law; the rise of atheism in the 19th century; the colonisation of literary studies with secular assumptions.But Blake is ...

Three “trans” issues seem to be proxies for vision in contemporary politics, feeding the sense of despair and disillusion.Trans activism, which is not the same as trans pathology.Transhumanising, the techno-utopian dream of tomorrow.Transitioning the economy, moving from extractive consumption.All three are about qualities of relationship:- to our bodies- to our minds- to the rest of the natural world.And I wonder if all three are missing a common element: an understanding of soul.I dra...

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...