Essays

Grant Wood's painting American Gothic immortalized the look of pious Midwestern farming folk recently parodied by Paris Hilton. The world of Ms Hilton and Ms Britney Spears is also the subject of Sexualizing Everyday Life. The word 'gulag' should be used with respect and discretion-or that's what The First Gulag suggests. You'd think they'd leave Herodotus alone after 2,450 years—but not a chance: see The Multicultural Persian Wars. More people than is widely known were influenced by the great doomster Oswald Spengler and The Decline of the West—Lewis Mumford and Jean Raspail among them. See Spengleriana.

Is a sentimental longing for our communal past a good thing? 10,000 Years of Nostalgia shows it has certainly been around for some time, while Tribal Yearnings explains the key role played by tribal atavism, as the hostile contrary of the modern world, in the argument of Karl Popper's The Open Society. Some of the huge practical problems of economic development and modernization that come from ignoring "the big ditch" between tradition and modernity are treated in Dereliction Express.

Most people think Rousseau invented The Noble Savage, but there's reason to believe Lucretius may have got there first. What Native Peoples Deserve is not necessarily being made into a showbiz attraction down on the reservation—anyway that's the gist of a piece anthologized in McGraw-Hill's Annual Editions, Anthropology 07/08. What Gypsies deserve in the modern world is something else: but that their moral universe is in many ways incompatible with modernity has long been clear.

Can Africa be saved from itself? There's little evidence anyone else can save it. That is the theme of Can Sudan be Saved?, Humanitarian Disasters, Ethiopia, Dereliction Express, and Out of Africa: Always the Same Thing. A footnote to these pieces is the article Basil Davidson, a conscious instrument of Soviet policy whose misleading reports from Africa deceived readers for many years.

Introduction - Spiked -
Medieval Spells - Spiked - Jun 2008
Downunder Dilemmas - Spiked - Apr 2008
Religion and Violence - Spiked - Feb 2008
Inside Journalism - Spiked - Dec 2007
A White Wedding - Spiked - Oct 2007
How Eugenics Began - Spiked - Jun 2007
Sexualizing Everyday Life - Spiked - Apr 2007
Utopia's Architect - Spiked - Feb 2007
The Herd Instinct - Spiked - Dec 2006
In Bluebeard's Castles - Spiked - Oct 2006
Dereliction Express - Spiked - Aug 2006
Spengleriana - Spiked - Jun 2006
The Multicultural Persian Wars - Spiked - Apr 2006
American Gothic - Spiked - Mar 2006
The First Gulag - Spiked - Feb 2006
See Here, Ms Truss - Spiked - Jan 2006
Science and Consensus - Spiked - Dec 2005
Gypsies - Spiked - Nov 2005
Tribal Yearnings - Spiked - Oct 2005
Collapsing the Maya - Spiked - Oct 2005
Doctor Death - Spiked - Sep 2005
Imperial Dreams and Political Realities - Spiked - Aug 2005
Ethiopia - Spiked - Jul 2005
The Pope and the President - Spiked - May 2005
What Native Peoples Deserve - Spiked - May 2005
10,000 Years of Nostalgia - Spiked - Apr 2005
The Noble Savage - Spiked - Mar 2005
Conspicuous Compassion - Spiked - Jan 2005
Can Sudan be Saved - Spiked - Dec 2004
Basil Davidson - Spiked - Dec 2004
Humanitarian Disasters - Spiked - Dec 2004
Out of Africa - Spiked - Oct 2004