In short, the year started badly but was peppered with good moments. By mid-2022 it was going excellently, and I thought I was finally past the worst of what this year could throw at me. My hubris was rewarded with some of the worst few months of my life so far. I know that, in the grand scheme of things, I should be thankful for all that I have, and I certainly recognise that I have it much better than most people. It helps to remember that, but it doesn’t change how I felt and acted at the time.
I suppose that that is the nature of life and hindsight. At the time, these moments seemed to mean everything. They either crush your soul and spirit or bring you to the highest heights. I think that this sentiment is expressed quite well in the ‘it’s over/we’re back’ memes that have propagated themselves across my twitter timeline for the past few years. We outright refuse to recognise our own mundane victories and losses, and instead focus on the peaks and troughs – this is natural of course, we would go completely insane otherwise.
I don’t think it is bad to allow these experiences to hit you. Part of the human experience is to be hit by these ups and downs. It is the dwelling on these events that becomes a problem. Holding on to fading hurt and fleeting success instead of moving on in some sort of twisted nostalgia for our best and worst moments can lead us down a very dark and dangerous road. It makes us forget who we are and who we can be. Our lessons learnt, we should embrace the change and simply move on. It is in these moments that we grow and mature as people, and become a better version of ourselves.
For me personally, this year has been an absolute rollercoaster of highs and lows, and that has been very hard to deal with. Things seem to be better now, however, and I am filled with enthusiasm for what the new year can bring me. I think that 2023 will be an amazing time for personal growth and development. I still have a lot of weight to lose, but I am steadfast in my determination to see it through this year. Coming to terms with my situation and state of mind will not be easy, but life is not supposed to be easy. Nothing worth doing is easy.
This is an excerpt from “Provenance”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
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British Conservatism is Ignorant of History and has Forgotten its Past (Magazine Excerpt)
This dictatorship of the present has been enabled by around thirty years of material abundance and relative peace following the conclusion to the Cold War. As John Keegan, the military historian put it, Britain and American can afford our universalist idealism and our fantasies of a benevolent world united and ameliorated through commerce, given our good geographical fortune of being separated from continents by bodies of water. We can forget that the tides of history have pulled whole cultures under in violence and war, instead indulging in an imagined progressive history, moving ever upwards towards ever greater enlightenment and prosperity.
Our leaders, if they deserve the name, have forgotten the lessons of history, because they do not know history. They do not know the fate of nations and peoples. They are ignorant of the importance of the landscape of the world and the moral landscape of the heart, and how the interplay between the two shapes the destinies of civilisation. It is not to engage in nostalgia for a vanished age that never existed to reckon with the fact that those who governed us in the past were well aware of life’s tragic nature, of the reality of necessity and the ultimate goal of the avoidance of anarchy, its own form of tyranny. Our leaders in the 19th and up to the mid-20th centuries had been baptised in the fires of historical experience and therefore knew that the maintenance of right order, in accordance with the good, true, and beautiful, was the precondition for any liberty. Utopian, romantic ideas of universal rights, spreading democracy and natural freedom were dangerous in their unbounded idealism, leading nations and government astray in the quest for moral perfection.
History never ended, in the sense Francis Fukuyama meant it. Hegel, and his disciple Alexander Kojeve, were both wrong in discerning a direction to human History that would see the creation of the perfect liberal democratic regime and state of being in our world. History is the story of the deeds men and women do and accomplishments achieved together as clans, tribes, cities, empires, and nations. It is a story that will only end at the end of all things. Awareness of the living past reminds us that our lives are part of the weave of time, stretching back across the years, our own lives and the actions we take adding the threads that continue into the future.
This is an excerpt from “Mayday! Mayday!”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
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Democracy: A Means, Not an End
What do Communism, Nazism, and liberal democracy have in common? It’s the tendency to deify the system of government and turn it into an object of worship. The system is not simply a means to an end or a pragmatic choice, taking due cognizance of its merits and demerits. It is an ideological presupposition and an intrinsic moral good.
This undue reverence was recently demonstrated on November 3rd when President Joe Biden tweeted:
“Democracy is more than a form of government. It’s a way of being. A way of seeing the world. A way that defines who we are, what we believe, and why we do what we do. Democracy is simply that fundamental.”
It’s difficult to dismiss the quasi-spiritual overtones of what effectively functions as a profession of faith, in much the same way a Catholic would profess the Nicene Creed during each mass. There are two things to take home here.
Firstly, man’s innate religious impulse will be satisfied, in one way or another. It is delightfully ironic that a product of the Enlightenment — liberal democracy — has laid bare one of its fundamental errors. True political neutrality, in the sense of being untethered to any collective belief system, is impossible. A system can reject God, and even the supernatural altogether, and still function as a religion. This was particularly true of Soviet Communism, where there was scarcely anything which the regime’s ideology wasn’t woven into.
Secondly, why are these professions becoming more frequent and fervent? Is it because they feel that the system is on the verge of collapse and that they might soon have to abandon any pretence of being democratic? This isn’t happening because of some neo-fascist uprising, as the neo-liberal establishment would have you believe. For a democracy to function, the ideological differences between the parties must be circumscribed by a common cultural and moral framework that transcends politics. Remove that, and you have chaos. The losing minority would never submit to the majority because the winning party is seen as an affront to their values. Moreover, how is any common framework possible if democracy — at least in its liberal form — fosters adversity between citizens and conditions people to view everything through a partisan lens?
Liberal democracy rejects such constraints. In the United States, this has resulted in a situation where no side is willing to accept defeat without contest. Donald Trump is infamous for refusing to concede the 2020 election to this day, but scant attention is given to the Democrats’ less-than-graceful concession in 2016 and their role in the now discredited “Russian collusion” narrative. Furthermore, rioting, and political violence have also become so commonplace, that shops in Washington DC and elsewhere were boarded up just days before the previous presidential election. Across the pond, a healthy democracy is also impossible in Ukraine, at least within its current borders, because its pro-Russian citizens in the East would never accept a pro-Western government, and vice versa. Their identities and aspirations are simply too incongruous for a single political system to support.
Appeals to “our democracy” and the imminent dangers to it are increasingly employed by politicians to discredit upstart rivals, particularly ones who dissent from the neo-liberal world order. Is this just a rhetorical tool, or does it reveal something about the way they view their political opponents? In a literal and objective sense, it would be hard to apply this to anyone, as despite the cacophony of left-wing doomsaying following a conservative victory, or even the possibility of victory, anywhere in the world, Adolf Hitler has yet to be reincarnated in any shape or form. So what do they mean by “our democracy”? Potentially, it means that only like-minded people, or people with whom they can reconcile their differences, can be valid participants in “their” democracy because it’s contrary to human nature to bargain with something perceived as being evil or immoral.
If democracy collapses in the West, it’s because we have removed Christianity from the equation and appointed the state or party as the arbiter of moral truth. Christians should not submit to neo-liberal dogmas about the role of religion in politics, but unflinchingly proclaim their faith as a source of inspiration and an antidote to the tumultuous future ahead. The wisdom of Pope St John Paul II comes to mind:
“Democracy cannot be idolized to the point of making it a substitute for morality or a panacea for immorality. Fundamentally, democracy is a ‘system’ and as such is a means and not an end. Its ‘moral’ value is not automatic, but depends on conformity to the moral law to which it, like every other form of human behaviour, must be subject: in other words, its morality depends on the morality of the ends which it pursues and of the means which it employs.”
— Evangelium Vitae, 25 March 1995.
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Tavistock: Not the Victory the Right Thinks It Is
Shutting down Tavistock gender clinic is not the victory the Right thinks it is.
When it was announced on Thursday that the NHS will be shutting down a children’s gender identity development service (not a noun I ever thought I would use), the Sophie Corcorans of the world jumped onto Twitter claiming this as a victory in keeping children away from trans ideology. However, what those so keen to jump on the celebratory bandwagon fail to recognise is that the reason that this clinic is being shut down is not because it was over-providing its services, but the fact that it was seen to be under-providing them.
While there have been some concerns raised about the overdiagnosis of gender dysphoria, the main reason for the service being shut down has been due to concerns of under provision. The number of referrals to gender specialists across the country has increased from around 140 in 2010, to around 2,300 in 2020. Whereas in the past gender dysphoria mostly affected men who believed themselves to be women, the inverse is now true, and much of the additional referrals come from teenage girls; the same group who are targeted by all others who seek to create a groupthink craze. These stretch from the relatively harmless, like One Direction fans back in the day, to the magazines promoting anorexia in the 90’s – and in the true spirit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater – the same publications now using Tess Holloway to promote ‘health at any size’.
Because of the immense increase in referrals, waiting times to be seen at Tavistock are now five years. According to Hillary Cass, who was tasked with reviewing the service and writing a report which was published this spring, the service was under ‘unsustainable pressure’, with the long wait times causing patients considerable ‘distress’ and ‘declining mental health’. While the right picked up the quote that the clinic was ‘not safe’ for children, they failed to see that the reason this was claimed is that their supposed needs were being ignored, as opposed to being sated.
What this argument seems to ignore is that long wait times are good and necessary when dealing with children with no medically urgent needs. Given the number of young adults seeking to de-transition (aka reverse the alterations done to their bodies during their adolescence), forcing those seeking such services to have a long wait period to consider the permanence and impact of such a decision is an entirely sensible policy. In accordance with the government’s focus on levelling up, a new network of ‘regional hubs’ is being planned to replace Tavistock, despite the fact that for someone in Birmingham or Manchester seeking such a service, the need to make a trip to London may make them consider whether or not their reasons for doing so are legitimate.
However, the long wait times that have been tacit government policy for decades (and quite successfully, given the negligible numbers of de-transitions until very recently) are now being undermined by private providers with even fewer scruples than the NHS. Given that upper middle-class children of guardian-reading intellectuals are most likely to want to transition in the first place, there has been an increase in private provision of cross sex hormones and surgery, as well as an increase in people going abroad for cheaper surgeries. In order to gain the Brownie points of ‘supporting their trans child’, the parents will do whatever is necessary to fast-track their child’s transition without giving them the chance to change their mind.
In conclusion, shutting down Tavistock is not a victory for conservatives but a loss. The ideologically driven medicine that was once contained in London for those determined enough to make the journey will now be spread out across the country in order to reach more and more children. If the government keeps allowing supply to grow to keep up with the supposed demand, we will end up with a generation where fewer and fewer young people have healthy bodies, and even fewer with healthy minds. However, the worst offenders in creating this contagion among young girls is TikTok and an educational culture which defines its role as helping children ‘unlearn’ their biases, as opposed to learning the realities of the world: until this changes, nothing will.
