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The Origins of the Israel/Palestine Conflict
The difficulty with the conflict between Israel and Palestine is that it has so many components. Immigration, national identity, empires and colonialism, democracy, religion and modernisation, terrorism, victimisation and persecution, war. Even when focusing on the simplest building blocks of its very beginnings, we can see how more than anything, subtle emphases – differences between…
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The Shock of Modernity
The end of the nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented upheaval. Factories sprouted in masses, railways were laid at great length, urbanisation sprawled and beckoned, and the masses were organised capitalistically and politically. All of this happened at dizzying speed. This was the moment the modern world crashed together and dragged people from the…
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The Light Side of History
In December 1940, a 43-year-old policeman in London scratched his face on a rose bush. The small wound quickly turned septic, his face ballooned with abscesses and pus, one eye became infected and had to be removed, and the infection spread to his arm and lungs. He was in a huge amount of pain. An…
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How Immigrants Became ‘Bad’
When Tucker Carlson told viewers of Fox that immigration would ‘dilute’ the political power of Americans, when Trump told Americans immigrants were sending their worst, they had a well of unscientific history to draw from. It’s a history that attempts to pin people down, categorise and classify them, hold them in place, bar and banish…
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I Read 100 Studies on Immigration
Immigration, migration, border walls, channel crossings, refugee crises, asylum-seeking – these hot words tend to dominate the news cycle at the moment, especially in Europe and America. Immigration is a broad topic, one that involves ethics, the philosophy of multiculturalism, the economics of welfare and job markets, crime rates, and more. It’s also a controversial…
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Steven Pinker is WRONG About the Decline of Violence
Okay, so here’s a murder mystery for you. A real who dunnit. In 1991, two tourists were hiking in the German Alps when they discovered a body which they presumed was a recently deceased mountaineer. It turns out Otzi, as he came to be known, was a mountaineer of sorts – just a 5200-year-old one.…
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Fear & Robotics
If you think your body ends at the edge of your skin, think again. Right now, more than you think, your body extends out into the world. You are, already, more than you. Moreover, other minds extend outwards, trying to escape from their bodies. Those minds, like ghosts in a machine, burrow into your mind,…
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Why the Internet Hasn’t Fixed Democracy
It’s the year 1993. It’s pre 9/11, pre-Iraq, pre-2008 crash, post the end of the Soviet Union, pre-dot com bubble bursting, pre-Fox News, and now this incredible new technology – have you heard of it, it’s called the internet – is spreading rapidly into homes. You can look up any fact, instantly. You can communicate,…
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The Dark Side of History
The Pope needed to convince Europeans to embark on a crusade. The Persians, Urban II told a French crowd in 1095, ‘a foreign race, a race absolutely alien to God, has invaded the land of those Christians and has reduced the people with sword, rapine and fire’. They’ve burned god’s churches, tortured Christians, desecrated religious…
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Free Will is Political
Free will – our freedom to choose for ourselves – is at the heart of our sense of being human. How we think about free will effects everything from responsibility and criminal justice to laziness and poverty to seemingly ordinary choices like what I’ll have for dinner. Free will is of course the power to…
Then & Now
Human(itie)s, in context