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I am currently very heavily overweight, having gained 30kg (66lbs) following a major bleed and severe anaemia and having been far from slim in the first place. I have spent the last seven weeks rebuilding my mobility and losing weight very successfully (12kgs or 25lbs now) by burning more calories than I consume, using a food plan and forms of exercise I find enjoyable. I feel great about it and have been speaking positively and optimistically about this online. In retrospect, this was a mistake. It has brought three different kinds of sanctimonious arseholes out of the woodwork to rain on my parade. These are:

1. The Moralistic Puritans: those who treat slimness as evidence of virtue and obesity as evidence of moral failure and are self-righteously dismissive of factors of physiology, psychology and circumstance which can make recovery from obesity difficult.

2. The Dietary Evangelists: those who believe their preferred nutritional theory or programme is perfectly suited to everyone and the only way to manage weight, want to tell you all about it and become particularly enraged by anyone successfully doing so with any other approach

3. The Fat Activists: those who treat the desire to lose weight as a political statement revealing a morally abhorrent fatphobia that amounts to hatred of fat people and even genocidal intent towards them.

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My Personal Account (which you can skip if you want to get to the scolding)

I became suddenly overweight in my early twenties as a result of being required to take anti-epileptic medication to undertake nurse training and this made me both sluggish and ravenously hungry even when I had just eaten. Doctors told me that I could manage this by simply eating healthily and planning my meals carefully, but I found this not to be the case. The medication also slowed my thinking to such an extent that the necessary study became extremely difficult.

On stopping the antiepileptics, I was able to implement a calorie controlled diet and walking programme and lose 60kg (132lbs) in 18 months and then adapt this to an ongoing plan that balanced calories in and calories out without having to think much about it. I maintained a slim weight until about a decade ago when another neurological blip caused damage to the nerves to my ear and eye and I had to take medication for the pain. Again, I doubled my weight due to being ravenously hungry all the time. I will always be deeply sympathetic to those whose struggle with their weight is due to excessive hunger. This is a miserable state of affairs.

I was able to stop all centrally-acting medication a few years ago but it was not so easy to lose weight this time. I was already so large that exercise was difficult. I was no longer working an active and rewarding job in social care but writing about sensitive issues that made people yell at me. “Peak Woke” happened and I was working long days trying to support people hit by it in their place of work. I was overworked, highly stressed and chronically sleep-deprived. Exercise and meal-planning were not on the agenda but high energy junk was. I had ongoing neurological problems that would intermittently render me horizontal, in pain and fed up. At the same time I nursed my father through the end of his life and then became the carer for my mother whose memory was failing her. I suffered a major depressive episode following her death and was ultimately admitted to a psychiatric hospital weighing 162kg and barely able to walk. I had developed a problem of compulsive overeating to manage stress and distress and was disabled by sheer fatness. Getting on top of all this felt overwhelming due to the sheer scale of the problem and length of time it would take me to return to a healthy weight.

My elder daughter indirectly helped me to make a start on this. She experienced a very difficult time and I went to New Zealand to help her through it. I found that in caring for her, I was also caring for myself and I gradually emerged from the dark, cold, slimy pit that is depression. I knew how to lose weight because I had done it before. I also believed that, once I was on the right track for this, I would not find it difficult to maintain because, unlike so many who struggle to keep weight off, my default appetite is not large and my natural disposition is energetic.

This did prove to be the case and I lost 40kg with very little difficulty and thoroughly enjoyed the process. I was then hit with a number of minor health problems and then a major gastric bleed which caused me to lose a third of my blood and spend 6 months largely in bed with severe anaemia becoming breathless when walking at all, having a very foggy brain and being thoroughly fed up. I reverted to comfort eating and ultimately regained 30kg.

I struggled to regain my mobility and each attempt resulted in a crash which again rendered me bedbound and not making progress. I was afraid that I was on a trajectory to becoming housebound at the age of 52. Seven weeks ago, I booked myself into a four week programme of physical rehabilitation and made recovery my full-time job. From a starting point of being able to walk for about 15 minutes every other day and weighing 152kg, I have built myself up to being able to alternate walking for an hour one day with going to the gym and performing strength and flexibility exercises the next. I am now 139.6kg.

I am feeling very positive about the future now. My plan is very simple.

1. I will eat the number of calories necessary to sustain an active woman of 5ft9 at 70kg (approximately 2000).

2. I will be active.

3. I will inevitably gradually return to being an active woman of 70kg.

I do not find keeping to this plan difficult or onerous. I am able to make four enjoyable and satisfying meals a day and I am not hungry. Now that I have a baseline of mobility back as well as a basic degree of flexibility, I am thoroughly enjoying my walks and looking forward to being light enough to get back on my bike and ultimately to run. I am looking forward to feeling like me again and living an active, healthy life unburdened by excessive amounts of fat. I know how to do this and there is no reason why I cannot continue doing this for the rest of my life, just as I already have for most of it.

Enter the sanctimonious arseholes to tell me how wrong I am about this.

The moralistic puritans

This category of commenter regards slimness as a virtue and fatness as a vice and enjoys insulting or hectoring others on the grounds of this belief. Some of them are people who have few personal merits but happen to stay slim quite easily or at least, don’t find it overwhelmingly difficult. They then make a virtue of that much like people who, for the same reason, make a virtue of their skin colour. Those who have individual good qualities they can legitimately be proud of seldom choose to behave this way.

Others seem genuinely to have a puritanical attitude in which suffering is virtue and do not think weight loss is meant to be enjoyable or easy. Those undertaking it must find it painful and horrible in order to atone for the sin of getting fat in the first place, and be shamed in the process. They are the most likely to object on moral grounds to the use of GLP-1 medication to inhibit an excessive appetite or forms of exercise which are also fun. I once engaged with one who was outraged by my meal plan because it included steak and pasta and insisted I had no right to enjoyable food or to work out a way not to be hungry until I stopped being so fat. This is an unhealthy form of thinking similar to those found in eating disorders or in punitive ascetic mentalities more broadly.

Either way, the moralistic puritans overlook differences in physiology, psychology and circumstances that can make weight-management genuinely very difficult for some people, and mistake their own ability to manage their weight for evidence of their generally superior character.

Although everybody has some aspects of their life they find easy to manage and others they find more difficult - whether this occurs in the realm of the intellectual, psychological, relational, professional, logistical or physical - there can be a particular kind of cruelty and contempt reserved for those who struggle in the highly visible area of their weight. Fatphobia is definitely a real phenomenon although to be meaningful, the term does need to be reserved (as the suffix suggests) for those who express a genuine hostility and aversion to human beings who are fat rather than a recognition of this as a potentially disabling health condition. People who enjoy exhibiting this aversion are deeply and unpleasantly moralistic and also display an unwarranted confidence in libertarian free will.

People who struggle to manage their weight because they naturally have a larger appetite than will sustain them at a healthy weight, or who find exercise thoroughly unpleasant or difficult due to physical limitations did not choose these physiological realities. Nor do those who overeat for psychological or emotional reasons choose to experience the unhappiness they are trying to soothe. Those who consume more calories than they burn because they have a poor grasp of nutrition and do not understand that this is what they are doing did not intentionally set out to undermine their own desire to be a healthy weight. Nor do those who end up overeating because their lives are too busy or chaotic for them to give their attention to their own diet typically wish to have lives where self-care is at the bottom of their list of priorities.

People who judge the obese particularly harshly and attribute all manner of moral and intellectual failings to them and seemingly take pleasure in being gratuitously cruel to them quite possibly did not choose this mentality either. Nevertheless, I think we can more reasonably identify it as a moral failing and character defect than being overweight, and socially disapprove those exhibiting it in public.

Those who are genuinely concerned about the rise of obesity and the effects of this on health would do better to think holistically and practically than moralistically. If the problem is an excessive appetite, this can best be assisted with information on protein-rich diets which can be more satiating or, if this is not sufficient, medication to reduce hunger. Exercise need not be a penance and the more forms of enjoyable and sociable exercise that are available, the better. Where emotional pain has led to comfort eating, psychological support to address the cause of that pain and advice on non-calorific forms of self-soothing are more likely to be helpful than public shaming. Likewise, education is the best response to those who have not understood how to manage their weight and practical support for those who are too overwhelmed by life’s responsibilit to prioritise their own health.

Being compassionate and practical is just generally better than being a moralistic puritan.

The dietary evangelists

This category of responder is the one I have found most personally infuriating. They tend to be zealously committed to their pet theory of optimal nutrition and much less so the wellbeing of actual human beings who need to find a way of eating that will maintain a healthy weight sustainably. They will appear in the notifications of anybody joyfully sharing an account of successfully losing weight and inform them that they need to stop doing what is working so well for them immediately and instead do something else that may or may not work and has a high probability of making them miserable.

At their best, the dietary evangelists are people who have found a way to manage their own weight that they can sustain long term after having tried and failed with other methods and now want to share the Good News of this with others from genuinely good intentions. At their worst, they are zealous obsessives committed to a particular theory of nutrition who believe weight loss can only legitimately be achieved this way and are consequently highly motivated to tell those losing it some other way that they will fail and are either mistaken or lying about succeeding in the first place. The usual ideological-narrative-protection protocol applies here and they will find a way to invalidate and explain away anybody successfully managing their weight another way.

In my experience, advocates of the ketogenic diet have been the worst for this. I tried this for three months mostly to see what effect it had on my neurological condition (it was originally called ‘the epileptic diet’). It was actually rather good for inflammation, but I found it made me utterly miserable and nauseated and hate my life. Also weight loss only resulted when I became so sick of meat that I would rather fast than try to swallow another mouthful of it. I am glad so many other people have found it effective and something they could enjoy and stick with but it was certainly not sustainable longterm for me. I ultimately had to block dozens of them in the end, so persistent were they and so angry that their food plan might not be effective or tolerable to somebody else.

The dietary evangelists are also highly prone to appearing on the notifications of people like me successfully losing weight by eating fewer calories than I burn in order simply to insist I cannot possibly succeed at this. The reasons given are most commonly,

“It’s too difficult and burdensome to calculate calories every day. You won’t be able to stick to it.” It’s not, though. I soon learnt what calories were in any food and developed a rotating menu of options that add up to 1800-2000 calories a day without having to think much about it.

“You’ll be hungry maintaining a calorie deficit every day and won’t be able to stick to it.” I’m not, though. Today, I had scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast, a tuna sandwich for lunch, beans on toast for tea, braised beef and mashed potato with veg followed by jelly and yogurt for dinner and for snacks, three rich tea biscuits, an apple and a packet of crisps for 2000 calories. Honestly, this is plenty.

“You can’t actually calculate calorie intake or expenditure accurately so you can’t reliably maintain a deficit anyway.” OK, well, maybe I can’t calculate it precisely, but if I go with what My Fitness Pal and FitBit says with an aim for a 1250 deficit a day to lose 5kgs a month, I do actually lose 5kg a month reliably, so I’m good.

“You’re not really losing weight. That’s just water.” What? For this long? All 60kgs of it on one occasion? What am I? A hot water bottle with a very slow puncture? Was I never actually obese at all, just suffering from gross oedema?

This is all deeply infuriating and there often seems to be a element of projection in it. When I asked recently why so many people feel the need to indignantly discourage a fat woman joyfully reporting losing weight by eating fewer calories than she burns, several people replied that they perceived me to be telling them that they can all easily do this and also should do this, when they find it difficult. I think this is probably correct. It is not, however, what I am doing! I think a calorie-controlled diet works for me because I have very plain, simple and repetitive tastes. I will happily eat the same 2 breakfasts, 8 lunches and 8 dinners repeatedly with only occasional variation by preference and they will also be heavily focused on seafood, fish, beans, eggs, chicken, beef, potato, bread and pasta with absolutely nothing in the way of sauces or seasoning. This is perfect for me but when I have shown my meal plans to other people wanting to lose weight, they have told me that such a diet would make them lose the will to live. I absolutely do not claim that the meal plans that work so well for me must be enjoyable for other people!

This is, in fact, my point! I think the key for any individual prone to being overweight is finding a way of managing food and exercise that works with their own personality and tastes in the long term and then entrenching this as a habit. For some people, it might be weight-lifting and keto that allows them to be a healthy weight and enjoy their lives. For others, intermittent fasting and swimming might be something they can stick to quite happily. Yet others might find having low calorie weekdays not to be burdensome and allow for a more indulgent weekend accompanied by dance classes which they find fun. For me, it is a system of calorie-controlled meals that I enjoy and walking, cycling and, when I am light enough, running which I find exhilarating and long to be able to do again. As long as the end result is fewer calories being eaten than burnt, it will work and there is no need to make this any harder than it need be.

If dietary evangelists really are motivated by their own frustrations at having found a calorie controlled approach unsustainable for them, they should try to imagine how frustrating it must be for others to be continually told their favoured food theory must work for them when they know it will not.

If someone says, “I find this diet really hard to stick to,” or “It’s not making me lose weight,” that is the time to step in and offer an alternative that has worked for you and that you think has scientific backing you can show.

If someone says, “I’m losing 5kg a month by eating and exercising in a way that gives me plenty of energy, is enjoyable, doesn’t leave me hungry, and I could do this forever,” that is the time to say, “That’s great! Good for you.”

The Fat Activists

This category of responder is the one that has targeted me for their anger most intensively since I included criticism of the theories underlying their activism in my book Cynical Theories. For Fat Activists, the desire to lose weight or even just saying publicly that being overweight is uncomfortable, constraining and increases the risk of serious health problems is to become complicit in an oppressive system of fatphobia that harms fat people. In order to do this, they move the issue of being heavily overweight from a personal problem to a societal one. If somebody does not want to be fat, this must be a reflection of the way in which society regards and treats fat people rather than any consequences inherent in obesity itself.

At its best, Fat Activism accurately addresses unwarranted negative attitudes towards fat people (see the moralistic puritans section) and seeks to overcome them. At its worst, it penalises anybody trying to address the problem of obesity as a hateful bigot and, when they themselves are suffering from the problem dismisses them as having internalised fatphobia. They deny people the autonomy to decide what they want for their own bodies.

In order to sustain the belief that obesity is only a problem because of the way society views fat people, it becomes essential to deter fat people from openly saying that they are uncomfortable, in pain, physically limited, unhappy with their appearance or struggling with compulsive overeating due to psychological distress. In reality, it is unlikely that there are very many people who voluntarily choose to be heavily overweight and are happy this way for the same reason that we do not see many people voluntarily don a backpack full of bricks every morning and happily move about their day wearing it. It is objectively unpleasant to try to live one’s life while carrying much more weight than one’s frame can comfortably manage. Many people, however, resign themselves to this because they have found it so difficult to do anything about it. For some, who have been overweight all their lives, they may not even know what it feels like to move about unencumbered by excessive weight.

Fat Activists therefore target overweight people like me expressing pleasure about becoming less fat and enjoying the process and accuse us of supporting fatphobic assumptions that feed into toxic diet culture and make fat people hate themselves. Note that this is the opposite of how things work in other forms of identity activism. We do not see black people told not to say that their experience of being black is horrible for the sake of black people who experience no problems at all, but we do see fat people told not to reveal the struggles obesity causes them for the sake of those not experiencing any. This is, of course, because the cause of disadvantage due to being black is unequivocally societal prejudice while the cause of disadvantage due to obesity is frequently physical and caused by the weight itself. Nevertheless, I have been very frustrated to be scolded by a young, moderately plump individual telling me that I only believe I am uncomfortable and in pain and worry I might die soon because of my internalised fatphobia and that this creates a toxic environment for people like her.

One tactic that such activists typically use to discourage the heavily overweight from trying to lose weight is to quote statistics on the longterm outcome of dieting. This reveals that most people who lose substantial amounts of weight regain it and more and is used to argue for the futility of trying to lose weight. The reasoning here is flawed, however. It relies upon a definition of ‘diet’ as ‘a short term weight loss plan’ rather than ‘the regular combination of food and drink consumed every day.” A short-term weight loss plan cannot result in longterm weight loss, by definition. If we look at people who maintain a healthy weight for their entire lives, we find that the explanation for them doing so is indeed ‘the regular combination of food and drink consumed every day.”

People who say “Dieting doesn’t work!” are using reasoning that would be recognised as nonsensical in any other comparable situation. We do not say that cleaning one’s house doesn’t work because as soon as you stop, it gets dirty again and may end up even dirtier than it was before you started that particular cleaning routine. We certainly don’t say the solution to this problem is to get society to accept filthy houses as a perfectly valid life choice even though it makes people miserable and uncomfortable and is a health hazard. We accept that it is perfectly normal and reasonable to wish to live in a clean house and that achieving this requires ongoing, sustained effort. If somebody has difficulty managing this, it is appropriate to offer support depending on what the problem is - physical, psychological, educational or practical.

A genuinely useful form of activism on behalf of fat people would likewise seek to address the full range of problems they may face. This absolutely includes addressing genuinely prejudiced attitudes that regard the obese as morally or intellectually deficient and discriminates against them and doubts their competence in areas entirely unrelated to their weight. However, it should also include support for the very real problems caused by carrying much more weight than one’s frame was built to handle and the causes of that problem. It could support people who want to lose weight with tailored advice on nutrition and exercise to help them find an approach that is sustainable for them, provide access to fat friendly gyms and exercise classes and, where appropriate, provide information on medical interventions. Some Fat Activists have stood against GLP-1 receptor agonists for managing appetite on the grounds that this promotes fatphobia. This is the opposite of helpful.

GLP-1s are not a suitable treatment for me as my problem is not with excessive appetite. I do not need personalised support with finding an approach to weight-management because I already have one. Nor can Fat Activists succeed in discouraging or shaming me out of losing weight because I do not respect them or want their approval. It would, however, be good if they would stop actively working against the interests of the majority of fat people and actually do something useful.

Conclusion

Someone successfully achieving a health goal through an individualised and sustainable method and celebrating this openly is not a problem that needs correcting by the assortment of judgemental loons who are offended because they got fat in the first place, don’t like being fat or because the method of losing weight goes against their dietary ideology. Yet, they manifest themselves in spades.

It should not be beyond us, as a society, to accept that obesity is a serious health problem and refrain from being unpleasant to fat people at the same time. To be fair, most people do manage to achieve this balance just fine. For every one person who has sought to discourage me when I celebrate my successes online, there have been at least 5 telling me that they find my progress inspiring and that they are having another try at addressing their own weight problem and 20 simply being happy for me and encouraging.

Let’s have more of this, please. If you are somebody who feels inclined to be moralistically judgemental about another person’s weight problem, consider not doing that and instead offering encouragement or, if solicited, practical advice. If you are somebody who has found a way of managing your own weight and you see somebody else talking about weight loss online, check first to see if they are asking for advice on how to do this. If they are, by all means, offer it. If they actually doing well another way, resist the temptation to divert them and just say “Well done.” If you are a Fat Activist feeling annoyed about somebody being negative about obesity online, consider whether they are actually expressing a bigoted prejudice against fat people or are fat themselves and trying to overcome very real physical problems resulting from this, and don’t confuse the two.

If you are a perfectly normal person who feels no need to derail people successfully addressing a health problem and are happy for them, good! Carry on doing that. Let’s get more positive conversations going on around this and offer respectful encouragement to each other. We are all apes whose fat storage systems were built for times in which food was scarce and it was good to overeat when we had the opportunity and store the surplus as fat for later. We do not live in such an environment now and consequently many of us are too fat. In order to address this problem, we need more people finding a wide variety of solutions that can work for very different problems and personalities and more people being rational and evidenced and compassionate. We need fewer people being sanctimonious arseholes. We always need that.

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I very much enjoyed this debate with Safwan Masri, Lera Boroditsky and David Shariatmadari. Safwan held that the stories we tell and the language we use to form them are primary in constructing our realities. Lera argued that language is utterly foundational to how we think on a cognitive level. David came from a linguistic perspective on the value of different language to allow us to get at ideas differently. I was the logocentrist of the group, arguing that, while language is powerful and can persuade or alienate, it is ultimately a tool that allows us to express ideas and address issues, not a constructor of reality.

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Because this piece is extremely long, I am offering a weekend Verbosity-Mitigation Half-Price Sale. Paying subscribers have access to the audio version of my pieces.

recently posted a piece claiming that ‘hyper-liberals’ rather than populists are the real extremists. He was citing a Times article by Matthew Syed. Both men appear to have the principles of liberalism confused and conflated with multiple other phenomena. This precise confusion and conflation is a pervasive problem found primarily on the populist ‘woke’ left and the populist, postliberal right that obscures concepts essential to the preservation of modern liberal democracies and makes productive conversation across political tribes very difficult. Meanwhile, the use of terms like ‘extremist’ and ‘far- (left or right) deflects from and obscures what actually makes a position objectionable and is commonly used by both groups to do precisely that. This essay will use these two pieces to try to untangle these concepts.

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Matt Goodwin

Hyper-liberals, not populists, are the real extremists. A remarkable Times column shows just how quickly the debate is shifting

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a month ago · 253 likes · 59 comments · Matt Goodwin

Goodwin paraphrases Syed, writing,

Perhaps, [Syed] ponders, we have been looking for “extremists” in the wrong place. Because the real extremists, he argues, are not the ordinary men and women who want secure borders, controlled immigration, sensible energy policy, and governments that prioritise their own citizens.

No. The real extremists are ‘hyper-liberals’, who over the last twenty-five years or so not only dismantled these things but radicalised to such an extent they are now completely and utterly adrift from the vast majority of their fellow citizens.

This is a strawman and a half! Who are the liberals, hyper or otherwise (in some places, both pieces simply say ‘liberals’), arguing that borders should be unsecured, immigration uncontrolled, energy policy non-sensible and governments prioritise something other than their own citizens? Or the liberals criticising populism as a movement for secure borders, controlled immigration, sensible energy policy, and governments that prioritise their own citizens? These are not distinctively populist aspirations! It is, indeed, ordinary men and women who want all those things and it is quite ordinary for British citizens to hold principles of liberalism, which is, after all, a philosophical tradition Britain had a significant role in developing.

The disagreements between groups defined by political and philosophical stances are about how borders should be secured and immigration controlled, which energy policies are sensible according to what criteria and how governments best represent the interests of their citizens. This must be acknowledged if we are to have coherent, good-faith discussions across left-wing and right-wing divides and between liberals, critics of liberalism and post-liberals. Defining populism by sensible stances and desirable outcomes that almost everybody wants obscures legitimate points of disagreement.

The tactic of defining one’s own movement by good things supported by the vast majority of the population, thereby making critics of said movement necessarily opponents of said good things and irredeemable baddies before any conversation has even taken place is, unfortunately, common in populist movements on both the left and the right. We also saw this with the Critical Social Justice (woke) movement calling itself simply “Social Justice” as though everybody else engaging in political discourse and campaigns was aiming for something other than a just society and could not possibly have legitimate criticisms of the CSJ movement’s vision of one and methods for achieving it.

Syed, Goodwin writes correctly, “points the finger directly at Angela Merkel.” Goodwin then further indicts Tony Blair, Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron among others. This argument immediately runs into a problem. It is unclear which principles of liberalism these leaders have taken to excess in the policy-making they find unsatisfactory. Syed uses the term ‘liberalism’ to encompass illiberal identitarian leftism, professional-class contempt for the working class, dysfunctional immigration policy, draconian climate policy, the ideological capture of universities, and inadequate military defence. What connects these things and what makes that connection liberal?

Syed identifies himself as a liberal and expresses fears about the destruction of the liberal order. Yet his conceptual confusion about what liberalism is does a disservice to the cause of defending the foundational liberal principles upon which modern, Western liberal democracies are built. By encompassing a gamut of identitarian leftist, technocratic, academic, interventionist and cosmopolitan issues under the label of ‘hyperliberal,’ he feeds into a common conflation that left-wing populists use to justify being postmodern and right-wing populists use to justify being postliberal.

This is precisely what Matt Goodwin exploits when he uses Syed’s argument to support his own case. Goodwin accepts the label of ‘liberal’ for all the issues Syed critiques, ties liberalism primarily to the political left and throws in authoritarian police overreach, gender identity activism, the rewriting of history, sneering attitudes towards Brexiters and opposition to national flags and free speech as the stances of “the liberal ruling class.” These alleged liberals are then placed in stark opposition to the ‘ordinary people’ and the populists represented as their defenders.

[H]aving spent twenty years in the universities, getting to know countless politicians, commentators, journalists, think-tankers, and others, it simply became clear to me that the real extremists are not the ordinary people asking for change, nor even the ‘populists’ speaking up for them.
The real extremists, as now a growing number of people, including Matthew Syed, now realise, are the liberal ruling class who have radicalised to such an extent they are quite openly and visibly destroying Western nations.

It seems, therefore, that liberalism is to be understood as an illiberal, left-wing and socially privileged position rather than a mainstream philosophical stance held by people of all classes and that the authoritative voice of ordinary (non-liberal) people is that which agrees with right-wing populists.

Syed appears to want to defend liberalism but confuses its meaning. Goodwin uses that confusion to indict it. At the heart of this linguistic and conceptual confusion and populist rhetoric are two primary confusions:

1. The concept of extremism and what makes it objectionable

2. The liberal ethical framework and what makes a position liberal.

The Concept of Extremism and What Makes It Objectionable

Calling a position ‘extreme’ does not tell us that it is bad or indicate that its opponents are good. While the term ‘extremist’ is generally used negatively and often for good reason, calling a position ‘extreme’ does not, by itself, explain what is wrong with it. Something can be extremely good or extremely bad, after all! I have argued before that rather than relying on comparative terms like ‘far’ ‘extreme’ or ‘radical,’ we should focus on whether the stance advocates doing harm to others or denying their freedoms. In its core definition, ‘extreme’ means ‘high in degree or intensity’ and is opposed to ‘moderate’ - a low intensity stance. Arguments for whether a high-intensity or low intensity stance is good, bad or neutral must depend on what that stance is. We might worry about Islamist extremists more than Jain extremists for example or, completely coherently, oppose those intensely focused on preserving racial purity while supporting those determinedly dedicated to preserving women’s sex-based rights.

Violent revolution is generally seen as the most extreme response to any political or cultural issue. Yet, we tend to regard the American Revolution fought in the service of independence, sovereignty and government by the consent of the governed as good but the Maoist Communist Revolution fought in the service of a collectivist order that subordinated individual autonomy to the revolutionary state as bad. In order to determine whether an extreme position is positive or negative, we need to know what commitments are being taken to extremes, what those commitments permit, and what consequences follow.

Nor does identifying extremism in one movement establish its absence from another. Statements like “X group are the real extremists!” tend to function to deflect from criticism of another group or even to justify retaliatory extremism. Even if we conceded that Merkel et al. were ‘real hyperliberal extremists’, would this mean that other extremists had ceased to exist? If we acknowledge, as I think we should, that the stances of the identitarian left are extremist, does this indicate that there is no cause for concern about extremism on the identitarian right? A society can and usually does contain several forms of extreme views at the same time. They each need to be evaluated on their own principles and the likely results of acting on them.

This then raises the question of “What is liberal extremism and what are the likely consequences of acting on it?” This question could be best complemented for the purposes of this piece with “What is populist extremism and what are the likely consequences of acting on it?”

Populist Extremism?

Populist extremism is an issue which my readers, in particular, will have cause to be very familiar with. The extreme populist movement I have been addressing for over a decade is the Critical Social Justice or ‘woke’ movement. Meanwhile, the MAGA movement in the United States is the example of a right-wing populist movement with which people will be most familiar. While varying definitions of populism exist, the manifestations of populism that I have written about most extensively fulfil the following criteria:

• People defined by certain characteristics seen as oppressed and downtrodden are ‘the people’ and others are ‘enemies of the people’.

• The authentic voice of ‘the people’ is that expressed for them by self-proclaimed representatives in positions of influence even if they do not have these characteristics.

• The ‘representatives of the people’ produce narratives of intensity and emergency that posit a battle between ‘the people’ whose aims are good, pure and reasonable and ‘the enemies of the people’ whose aims are oppressive, malevolent and self-interestedly detached from reality.

• Those who oppose their stance and do not have the defining characteristics are to be dismissed as ‘privileged’ or ‘elitists’ who are blinkered by this protected status and out of touch with ‘the people’ or benefit personally from upholding the oppressive systems.

• Those who oppose their stance and do have the defining characteristics of ‘the people’ are to be explained away as brainwashed into accepting dominant narratives or acting in a self-interested (and traitorous) way.

• Science, evidence and expertise are to be regarded as inherently suspicious because they are produced by dominant discourses which are privileged and/or elitist and gate-kept away from ‘the people’. “Lived experience” is favoured instead, provided it complies with the authoritative views of ‘the people’ as set out by the ‘representatives of the people.’

• Reasoned, evidenced and civil debate are likewise suspect and serve only to reinforce the dominant narratives and confuse and invalidate the views of ‘the people.’ All well-intentioned people will affirm the narrative provided by the representatives of the people because this indicates having listened to the people.

• A certain pride is taken in flouting the conventions of civil, reasoned and evidenced debate and instead making hyperbolic assertions and being deliberately vulgar, offensive and provocative. There is no expectation of correction of claims that can be shown to be false because believers are rewarded for speaking stridently into the approved narrative, rather than being accurate.

In her recently released and excellent book, How Gender Studies Broke the University, Cynthia Burack argues that “gender studies, its “studies” brethren, the humanities, other disciplines and subfields, and whole universities embraced and entrenched left-wing populist authoritarianism” and breaks her analysis into chapters analysing 'the people’ and “the enemies of the people”. She uses the work of scholar of populism, Jan-Werner Müller very effectively in this endeavour.

Müller lays out a parsimonious set of features characteristic of the populisms that threaten democracy and human rights in many parts of the world, including the United States. In Müller’s analysis, populism: insists “that a part of the people is the people”; moralizes politics and political conflict in a way that discredits and demonizes opponents and compromise with those opponents; and treats political opponents as “enemies of the people.”

Left- and right-wing versions of populism exhibit the same features because populism isn’t an ideology with consistent tenets but, rather, a “political logic”; “a way of formulating demands, rather than a set of demands.” The political theorist Margaret Canovan argues that populism emerges from “tensions” within democracy, including between “pragmatic” (liberal, constitutional, rules-based, minority-protecting) governance and “redemptive” (people-powered, “action-based,” even “revivalist”) politics. Redemptive political impulses can arise from either end of the political continuum.

The populist playbook gives us Donald Trump telling his followers that he’s their proxy and tribune. That he stands between the enemies they share and those who believe in him, and that the blows he absorbs he takes in their stead. Because, at least as Trump tells it, his enemies really want to harm real Americans who can’t defend themselves.

My colleagues’ [in Gender and other identity studies departments] version goes something like this: when the racists, bigots, phobes, and tools of fascism and neoliberalism disagree with and criticize us, they are really harming you, our beloved students. When you hear these dangerous words, speak up; we’ll step between you and them.

In Burack’s experience as a professor of women and gender studies, use of Müller’s work angered her colleagues by not distinguishing between bad right-wing populism and good left-wing populism. In mine, I am likely to attract ire from both sides of the fence for pointing out these mirroring tactics and appealing to liberals on both the left and right to oppose them consistently, but particularly on their own side.

Consequently, I do believe that those who pursue populist goals in a way that is ‘high in degree and intensity’ present a significant problem, (as do populists when their formulations and reasoning are exhibited by an opposing political tribe). When people who take a populist stance are more moderate and willing to explain and defend their views through reasoned, evidenced argument, rather than dismiss disagreement as evidence of complicity or betrayal, this can illuminate their thinking and help us discern any genuine insights it contains. However, when these are mediated through the platform of influential individuals who seek to gain and hold onto power in government or institutions, this is unlikely to be helpful. When representatives derive authority from uniquely and urgently defending the people against an existential enemy, resolution and compromise can diminish their authority, while continued conflict sustains it. We are unlikely to genuinely resolve issues of immigration policy, climate policy, institutional capture or military defence this way, and these are all matters of legitimate concern to people with a variety of political and philosophical stances which require resolution.

Liberal Extremism?

What would an extremist form of liberalism look like? At the centre of the liberal philosophical tradition which underlies the formation of modern liberal democracies is the defence of individual liberty. I have argued that this is best summarised as, “Let people believe, speak, live as they see fit, provided this does no material harm to anyone else, nor denies them the same freedoms.” However, this principle expands over numerous spheres of society.

John Locke, the English philosopher often treated as a foundational figure in the Anglo-American liberal tradition, helped establish arguments for limited government, government by the consent of the governed, and rights to liberty and property. Thomas Paine, born in England but best known for his role in the American Revolution, made the case for popular sovereignty, republicanism and universal human rights. Adam Smith, the Scottish political economist and moral philosopher, is often considered a founder of modern capitalist economics. He argued that commercial freedom—the ability to compete and cooperate through exchange—best produces thriving societies, and are the natural state for human moral and social intuitions. John Stuart Mill, another English philosopher (and my personal North Star), defended freedom of thought and speech both as essential individual liberties and as conditions for discovering truth, correcting error and reconciling conflict. Because they were all working on Enlightenment principles with Locke being a significant influence on its emergence and Mill a liberal heir to it, they all placed a particularly strong emphasis on the importance of evidence and reason for both truth-seeking and moral progress.

We could summarise the core liberal principles thus:

• A commitment to individual liberty - freedom of belief, speech, association (individualism)

• A dedication to the value of viewpoint diversity to advancing knowledge and resolving conflict in a democratic society (pluralism)

• A recognition of our shared humanity and the common rights, freedoms and responsibilities this bestows upon us all (universalism),

• A commitment to free enterprise and trade as well as the right to own property and succeed on one’s own merits.

• The belief that all people come into the world with the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and this can only justifiably be removed from any individual due to their own demonstrable harmful actions.

• An understanding that threats to freedom come not only from the state but from authoritarian ideologies, individuals and groups, so liberal principles need to be protected not only in law but widely understood and valued in society.

• An active commitment to facilitating robust, reasoned and evidenced debate for the purposes of producing knowledge and determining what is true and what is ethical and correcting error. Everything is up for debate and no issue is ever closed to revision and critique.

While liberalism is an evolving political practice, meaning that it has been applied to illiberal societal structures and norms over time, and liberal arguments have consequently looked different in different times and places depending on what form of illiberalism it is responding to, these core principles remain constant. They clearly do not belong to either the political left or the political right. I have argued they represent a higher-order value system that opposes illiberalism which can be found on the left or right. Liberalism is conservative in that it wishes to conserve the liberal democratic foundations of modern western societies and progressive in that it seeks to continually produce knowledge, correct error and reform society along the lines of individual liberty.

In contrast to populists, those committed to liberalism reject the notion that some of the people are ‘the people,’ others are ‘the enemies of the people’ and yet others are ‘the representatives of the people.’ We believe that all of the people are the people but that some of them are wrong, factually or morally. The best way to address this is to facilitate open debate in which people can argue freely, with an expectation that they will use evidence and reason and be open to correction and changing their minds. It is impossible for anybody to be knowledgeable about everything so we all need to be able to listen to others arguing about absolutely anything and evaluate which of them are making the best arguments with the strongest evidence. On a political level, we then all get to choose our own representatives according to their ethics and policies in a democratic system. I would argue that pursuing these goals in a way that is ‘high in degree and intensity’ is not something that should be considered a problematic form of extremism, but important to preserving and further realising the foundational principles of modern liberal democracy.

However, in its political sense, ‘extremism’ does go beyond the mundane meaning of ‘extreme’ and carry specific connotations of hatred, intolerance and dogmatism. In a recent piece, summarises and explains a 2019 research paper on the psychology of political extremism by van Prooijen and Krouwel which finds four features in common on both the left and right. These are: psychological distress - a gnawing sense of meaninglessness born of anxious uncertainty, cognitive simplicity: the tendency to view the world in stark black-and-white terms, overconfidence in the rightness of one’s own judgement, and intolerance of political dissent - a tendency to regard those who disagree as not simply wrong but morally abhorrent. In this formulation, liberalism is not only not extremist but positively anti-extremist!

Yet there are, of course, legitimate criticisms that can be made of liberalism and room for disagreement and debate among those committed to liberal principles. This is why democratic systems were set up in the first place. I am politically on the materialist left which means I am least liberal economically and argue that the laissez-faire free-market libertarian branch of liberalism needs to reckon with problems produced by entirely unrestrained capitalism in terms of monopolies, workers rights and social provision for those unable to support themselves. I am also culturally conservative which means that I actually agree with Syed that a liberal society cannot survive unless it defends its own liberal foundations and that people wishing to move to liberal democracies should be required to demonstrate commitment to these.

There are also legitimate criticisms that can be made of the central feature of liberalism - liberty, individualism, pluralism and universalism. Some have argued that, when taken to an extreme, these can lead to selfishness, narcissism, relativism, permissiveness, social atomisation, siloed communities, a failure to appreciate the experiences of minorities, ongoing economic inequality, a loss of shared meaning, declining birthrates and more. I disagree with most of these arguments and think that where some do have value, the ‘cure’ would be worse than the disease, but these are legitimate critiques of liberalism as it really is.

Is this what Syed and Goodwin are doing?

No.

The liberal ethical framework and what makes a position liberal.

Syed’s Definition of hyperliberalism

As previously stated, the primary problem with Syed’s claims about the problem of ‘hyperliberalism’ is that it is unclear which liberal principles have been taken to extremes to produce the issues he criticises. If the problems, at their core, are not an excess of liberalism, trying to address them by critiquing liberalism would seem to be, at best, futile, and, at worst, counterproductive.

This prompted me to look more deeply into what Syed means by ‘hyper-liberalism.’ I found a definition in a piece published last year, “Commonsense voters see the abject folly of the West’s purity spiral” which, as the title indicates, associates liberalism with a desire for ideological purity. This is startling. Liberals are much more commonly criticised for excessive openness and permissiveness.

Syed compares the attitude of liberals to defenders of the Indian caste system in which “Dalits” are considered ‘untouchable’ by “Brahmins” because they are deemed ‘impure’. In the Western conception Syed outlines, the liberals are the Brahmins and the Dalits are the working class.

My sense is that purity has also become the central principle in the 21st-century religion we call hyperliberalism, albeit demonstrated not by caste membership but the adoption of progressive shibboleths. Isn’t that why self-censorship is such a prevalent phenomenon in universities?

This appears to be a conflation of liberalism with professional-class elitism combined with identitarian leftism. There is certainly justification for seeing the last two as combined and addresses this well in his recent book (although I also have some criticisms of it). Materialists on the left have been leading the charge on the unholy alliance of cultural elites with institutional and corporate power and identitarian leftism for some time. (An excellent and accessible primer to this divide on the left is “Identity Trumps Socialism”and the introduction can be accessed freely here). But what does this have to do with liberalism? In what way can the advocacy of a caste system or a denial of academic freedom result from an excessive commitment to individual liberty, viewpoint diversity and freedom of speech?

It is tempting to assume this is simply an American-style misuse of the term ‘liberal’ to describe the illiberal, identitarian leftism that liberal defenders of free speech (like me) have been addressing for some time, particularly in universities. This, however, appears not to be the case, because Syed finishes by arguing that unless this problem is addressed, there will be an almighty backlash from right-wing populist quarters which could “sweep away the liberal order itself.” He appears to believe this would be a bad development. But if the liberal order is exemplified by advocacy for the Indian caste system and illiberal identitarian leftism, wouldn’t this sweeping away be a good thing? No, it seems that the ‘liberal order’ must be something different to liberals, hyperliberals and hyperliberalism and I suspect it is, indeed, the liberal philosophy centred on individual liberty, free enterprise, democratic systems and the facilitation of free and open debate.

In the piece cited by Goodwin, Syed makes a clearer distinction between his two definitions of liberalism.

The extremists are not the “populist” right … It is the likes of Merkel and that broader generation of western leaders who presided over the two great sins of hyperliberalism: open borders and the betrayal of Nato.
Liberalism as an ideology is muscular and realistic. It recognises that defending freedom requires powerful militaries, solid alliances and strong borders, otherwise fifth columnists will enter our nations and wreck that which we value.
As Karl Popper, the great theorist of open societies, put it: ‘If we extend unlimited tolerance to those who are intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.’ In this sense, hyperliberals have been the enemies of freedom by allowing militaries to atrophy and borders to dissolve.

Hyperliberals, then, are those who advocate for open borders and demilitarisation? Some liberals on the libertarian end of the spectrum certainly argue that borders deny freedom of movement and hinder free trade and stand against it for those reasons. But libertarians also typically support self-defence strongly while objecting to military intervention against other countries. They certainly don’t advocate censorship in universities. We are not told which shared liberal premise supposedly connects these positions. Although some on the identitarian left certainly argue that any criticism of immigration from the Global South is necessarily racist, they are generally the strongest critics of liberalism and argue that it too is racist and imperialist.

Merkel, herself, defended not closing Germany’s borders on the grounds of a humanitarian response to an emergency and responded to criticisms that Germany had not met NATO defence requirements with arguments that it had been increasing its spending and had also contributed troops. It is entirely legitimate to criticise her on the grounds of both of those decisions and many have done so from a range of political and philosophical positions including liberal ones. Syed has not supported the claim that these decisions represent ‘hyperliberalism.’ Deciding against closing borders during a refugee crisis could be argued to be excessive humanitarianism. Underfunding defence might reflect undue complacency or other fiscal priorities. Both could indicate what some would argue to be a misguided strategic assessment. Neither of them automatically indicate an excessive commitment to liberal principles.

Syed appears to acknowledge the contradiction in his definitions of liberalism when he argues for a ‘muscular’ (rather than ‘extreme’ or ‘hyper?’) form of liberalism that strongly and proactively protects liberal societies against illiberal forces. This is, indeed, the liberal case for the protection of borders and a military defence, and liberal values do exert a positive force on people’s willingness to fight defensively. He argues that, by failing to do this, his ‘hyperliberals’ become the enemy of freedom, indicating a recognition that liberalism is a philosophy centred on freedom, yet still offers no explanation for why those he indicts merit having a ‘hyper’ variation of liberalism attributed to them.

Syed could argue from liberal principles that those he criticises are not upholding the principles of liberalism. If he believes they have been claiming to do so or misusing liberal principles, he could cite them doing so and make an argument that this is an incorrect understanding of liberalism. If he thinks there is a direct chain of cause and effect from liberal principles to the policy decisions he criticises and that this has been produced by upholding those principles to excess, he could show this and argue for a more moderate form of liberalism. Syed has made a case for defending liberal societies strongly that is arguable from liberal principles. He has not established that their inadequate defence results from taking liberal principles too far.

Goodwin then exacerbates this confusion. Making a ‘ruling liberal class’ synonymous with ‘an increasingly radical elite class’ and ‘a ruling political and media class’ and the woke he ultimately charges liberalism with ‘insane energy policies,’ ‘the Great Awokening,’ allowing small boats of migrants and terrorists to flood the country, teaching children they can change sex, rewriting history around guilt and shame, erasing our culture and jailing people for expressing national pride. All this, liberals elites have allegedly done while sneering at Brexit voters and “attacking, demonising, abusing, and insulting anybody who stood in their way, even justifying violence against political opponents.” A damning indictment of liberalism indeed!

Goodwin concludes optimistically, (from his perspective),

When a self-described liberal columnist in The Times, the same newspaper that has spent much of this year attacking populism, openly asks whether the real extremists of our age are not populists but hyper-liberals then you know the ground is starting to move. And it’s moving very fast indeed.

The ground is indeed starting to move very fast. The important question is “Is it moving in a direction of a greater understanding of truth as ‘that which corresponds with reality” and towards solutions to societal problems that are likely to be both effective and ethical and protect individual liberty? I am not optimistic that they are and this conflation of so many complex and multifaceted issues into a battle narrative featuring (hyper)liberal villains and populist saviours bears considerable responsibility for this. Goodwin is right to observe that this narrative is growing and increasing in cultural power.

What are liberal stances on all this?

In reality, ‘liberals’ are not synonymous with a sneering professional class, Remain voters, the left or the woke. We are found in every class and all over the political spectrum wherever people are arguing for addressing social issues in ways that protect individual liberty, viewpoint diversity and government by the consent of the governed.

Liberals have a wide range of views on immigration, but are unlikely to support stances that are either ethnonationalist or favour concepts of multiculturalism which tolerate illiberalism. On energy policy, we are equally intellectually diverse but inclined to favour solutions to climate change that are both evidence-based and protective of individual liberty. ( is one such thinker who has been arguing against restrictive energy policies and for diversifying energy resources). On the issue of class inequality and neglect of the interests of the working class, we range from left-liberals who favour social policies to address material issues like better social housing and effective trade unions and right-voting libertarians who see solutions in red-tape removal from building ventures and greater freedom in employment law. We are found among Remain voters and Leave voters and, in both cases, liberal arguments in support of liberty and sovereignty were made to justify those decisions.

It is particularly egregious to blame liberals for illiberal identitarian leftism, a denial of academic freedom, institutional capture, authoritarian trans activism, draconian policing and arrests for speech and denials of individual liberty and freedom of speech more broadly! In every manifestation of the authoritarian Critical Social Justice movement, liberals have been the ones opposing it on the grounds of individual liberty! I, personally, took part in an academic sting operation to demonstrate the problem in universities, then wrote a book about the problem, then formed an organisation to support people being cancelled by the problem and wrote another book about that. I have been far from alone in this endeavour! Wokeness is an example of what can happen when we fail to protect liberal principles, not when we take them to excess!

When I raise this point with right-wing populists bemoaning the illiberalism of liberalism and point out that this is incoherent, they typically respond that they are not talking about me and others like me who consistently defend individual liberty and have opposed the CSJ movement but those other liberals who do not and are proponents of it. This is not rooted in evidence either. The Critical Social Justice scholars and activists, whose theories are rooted in postmodern critique of liberal modernity, don’t even claim to be liberal. Postcolonial theory regards liberalism as synonymous with imperialism and white supremacy and condemns it. Critical Race Theory has five central tenets and one of them is critique of liberalism for its ‘colour-blind’ stance and focus on equality under the law. Queer Theory regards liberalism as a threat to the radical queer politics they believe could valuably destabilise our concepts of sex, gender and sexuality.

Postmodern populists and postliberal populists are united in regarding liberalism as a threat to their narrative-driven, emotions-based, collectivist stances. This is because we are. By upholding principles of individual liberty consistently and maintaining an expectation that for a truth claim to be accepted as true, it must be supported with evidence and a reasoned argument and be open to critique on those grounds, we trouble their cognitive simplicity and challenge their narratives. This is also why it is so essential that we do not allow the concept of liberalism to creep and expand into incoherence and contradiction. It is in the interests of those who consider themselves conservative and to be defending the foundations of western civilisation that we do not lose the concept of liberalism which is so essential to it. It is also in the interests of those who consider themselves progressive to recognise that it is these principles which have produced so much progress for women and racial and sexual minorities and not allow them to be lost in confusion.

Why Populist Narratives Appeal

Liberalism is, at root, a way of thinking about individual liberty and human rights that developed over the modern period in Europe and America and is inextricably bound up in Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism. There have always been Counter-Enlightenment forces which have seen it as a threat and sought to undermine it and replace it with “other ways of knowing” which are rooted in religious traditions, ideological dogmas, local customs, tribal narratives and emotional, intuitive and experiential perceptions. Postmodernism was one highly successful assault on Enlightenment and liberal thinking, evolving as it did into the Critical Social Justice (woke) movement and becoming satisfyingly actionable by everyday people concerned about genuine social problems and exploitable by those in positions of influence to create positions of leadership for themselves. Postliberal populism is another such Counter-Enlightenment current which has the same features, providing a simple narrative of good and evil that is both satisfying and comforting to everyday people with genuine concerns and providing a platform for different wealthy and influential individuals to present themselves as the Saviours of the People.

We are more drawn to simple narratives of good and evil when we feel ourselves to be under threat. As Jonathan Haidt wrote in an analysis of the rise of populism which grows only more useful and relevant every year,

As nations grow prosperous, their values change in predictable ways…. Each country has followed a unique trajectory, but if we zoom out far enough some general trends emerge from the WVS data. Countries seem to move in two directions, along two axes: first, as they industrialize, they move away from “traditional values” in which religion, ritual, and deference to authorities are important, and toward “secular rational” values that are more open to change, progress, and social engineering based on rational considerations. Second, as they grow wealthier and more citizens move into the service sector, nations move away from “survival values” emphasizing the economic and physical security found in one’s family, tribe, and other parochial groups, toward “self-expression” or “emancipative values” that emphasize individual rights and protections—not just for oneself, but as a matter of principle, for everyone.

In short, people become more open to considering complexity and reasoning their way through problems both ethical and practical when they feel themselves to be secure. We become more rational, evidence-based and liberal when we feel we can afford to think properly. When we feel under threat, however, we become inclined to seek comforting simplicity in tribal narratives which offer us clear in-groups and out-groups and something to fight. We are, after all, fundamentally tribal, territorial apes. The problem is that, unless these narratives are based on truth and correspond with reality, such tribalism and fighting cannot actually resolve the problems which genuinely exist and need to be resolved.

The Critical Social Justice movement’s identification of and battle against the forces of white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism and cis/heteronormativity as personified by the privileged, straight, white, western men said to enforce them did not result in a decrease of racism, sexism and xenophobia or greater acceptance of homosexuality and the gender-nonconforming. The postliberal populists’ identification of our current problems with immigration, energy policies, class inequality and illiberal identitarian leftism as being caused by a radical class of sneering elitists driven by an intensified variation on liberalism is equally unlikely to make any of those problems better. This is because it does not map onto reality. Reality is much more complicated and addressing it requires engaging with that complexity in ways that are evidence-based and reasoned and upholds individual liberty. It requires liberalism.

Liberals are always vulnerable to being scapegoated as the cause of whichever social ills an illiberal tribe is most concerned about, often even more so than those genuinely advocating those ills. The populist ‘woke’ for example spend more time problematising and hounding those who say that consistently objecting to the evaluation of individuals by race is the best way to overcome racism than they do white supremacists. Equally, they vilify particularly those who say that people must be able to dress and identify as they wish, but we still need sex-based rights for women for reasons of safety and fairness more intensively than those who believe gender nonconformity is degeneracy that should be illegal.

Likewise, the populist right is likely to be more enraged with those who say immigration policy needs to recognise that some cultural norms are incompatible with liberal values but that individuals from those cultures should not all be assumed to hold them than they are with those who argue for open borders. They also tend to direct most frustration at those who say that climate change is a real problem that requires collective action but that this need not and should not centre on energy restrictions that endanger health and constrain freedom than at radically destructive climate activists. And those of us who think racism, sexism and homophobia are social problems that need to be addressed but that identitarian wokeness is not the solution may produce more wrath than the woke.

To the woke left, liberalism simply is white supremacy and transphobia in a respectable suit and to the populist right open borders, draconian energy policies and wokeness simply are liberalism intensified.

In a very real way, this is indicative of the strength of liberalism. We trouble simplistic narratives of good and evil. Those who propose illiberal solutions to social problems want all their critics to be proponents of those social problems to support this narrative. Liberals, with our tendency to say, “Yes, those really are problems which need to be addressed. However, your analysis of them does not seem to be rooted in reality and your solutions are unethical” make their activism difficult. So too does our tendency to point out that complex problems are, in fact, complex and to make our own arguments for alternative evidence-based, reasonable and liberal solutions. Liberalism has a solidity, reasonableness and consistency to it as well as a well-established reputation for problem-solving and making things better that tends to show illiberal stances in a poor light. Proponents of them typically respond to this by finding ways to argue that liberalism is, in fact, illiberal and conflate liberals with the social problems they are addressing.

What liberals can do.

It is essential that liberals continue to trouble these simplistic narratives and make the activism of proponents of them difficult, especially if we sincerely want to find solutions to the genuine problems presented by left-wing and right-wing populists. We must continue to live up to Enlightenment liberalism’s reputation for ethical consistency and evidenced and reasoned argument, if we do not wish to backslide into a tribalistic premodern culture where the narrative-based epistemology, motivated reasoning and self-serving ethics of any political tribe able to gain social dominance gets to decide what the rest of us must believe, say and do.

If you are a liberal on the materialist, economic left, your energies are now best spent in making those strong, liberal class-analysis arguments to counter both the ‘woke’ left’s neglect of class issues and the populist right’s endeavour to appropriate them.

If you are more of a culture-focused progressive liberal, you can make solid arguments for how to address prejudice and discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, sexuality etc. and counter both the illiberal identitarians on the left who undermine the progress already made with their alienating identity politics and those on the right who capitalise on this to undermine it further.

If you are a liberal of a market-focused, libertarian bent, this is the time we need you to defend individual liberty consistently across political divides and oppose degrowth currents on both the left and right while arguing for market-driven, meritocratic solutions to problems ranging from prejudice and discrimination, energy-production, affordable housing and the cost-of-living crisis.

Liberal conservatives probably have the most important role to play in our current (British) political climate. As populist parties rise in popularity across Europe, there is a pressing need for liberal conservatives to send a clear and strong message, particularly to young people, about what conservatism is and why populism is not it. The liberal philosophical tradition is key to British history and identity and conservative defenders of that history and tradition need to confidently present doing so as a legitimately conservative imperative.

Many concerns right-wing populists have about issues like immigration, military defence, climate policies, institutional capture and denials of free speech are valid and shared much more widely. They are quite clearly and demonstrably not a product of upholding liberal principles too strongly, and conflating them with liberalism risks undermining the very commitment to productive, reasoned and evidenced debate and democratic reform than can meaningfully address them.

In order to address all and any of these problems, we must accept that they are not explicable with simplistic narratives about the ordinary people and the elitist enemies of the ordinary people. They are complex and messy and have a multitude of contributing factors including international conflicts, a refugee crisis, the impacts of leaving the European Union in making the UK desirable to people traffickers, conflicting and confused ideas about energy and climate change, complacency about the role of America in maintaining international peace, a failure to recognise and disallow the authoritarianism of the rising Critical Social Justice movement, competing fiscal responsibilities, misguided and unworkable policy decisions, a dizzying turnover of Prime Ministers over the last few years and straightforward administerial incompetence.

To productively tackle all of these issues, we need thoughtful and well-informed people who disagree with each other to identify the principles, policies and institutional failures actually at issue, and address them as they really are. Individuals can legitimately hold a range of views on all these questions. For liberals, our stances must always include consideration of how any decision will impact individual liberty and democratic processes and our arguments should be well-evidenced and reasoned. We must make our cases to one another, to honest critics of liberalism and to the undecided public, seek to build a consensus, and inspire better political leaders to put competing proposals to voters. That is how a democracy can test policies, correct mistakes and resolve problems. This has never been achieved by pretending that one faction of society is legitimately “the people” and everybody else is an enemy of them.

Right-wing and left-wing populists will go on dividing society into the people who matter and the enemies of the people who matter, claiming special authority through ‘common sense’, ideology, identity or “lived experience,” and treating evidence, truth and civil debate as obstacles. It is up to those of us from all over the political spectrum who care about what is true and about individual liberty and the preservation of liberal democratic societies to provide better answers. The production of knowledge via open critique of all by all and the implementation of democracy to enact the will of the people are liberalism’s greatest achievements and they depend on respect for evidence and reason, and on robust, civil, honest debate. An uncompromising commitment to these liberal values is not “extremism” or ‘hyperliberalism’. It’s just liberalism and it works.

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Her alternative is liberal humanism—a framework grounded in individual liberty, reason, evidence, pluralism, and our shared humanity. This vision has particular relevance for liberal religious communities seeking to bring together people who may disagree profoundly about religion, politics, moral decisions and ethics.”

Find a detailed summary of the key points of my talk and the full transcript here.

A few readers were surprised to learn that I had been welcomed to speak to a Unitarian group. Some had been involved with Unitarians themselves and become disillusioned with the community, finding it to have been deeply influenced by the Critical Social Justice Movement and to have become identitarian and illiberal. NAUA is fully aware of this problem and has formed, in part, to address it. From their website.

The North American Unitarian Association was born in 2022 with a mission to defend, promote and nourish the traditional Unitarian principles of freedom, reason, and tolerance. … The NAUA was conceived much earlier than 2022. It was formed first in the minds and hearts of Unitarians who witnessed the displacement of liberal ideas, ideals and practices by an emergent post-modern theology and ideology.

Traditional support for “free and responsible search for truth” was supplanted by an expansion of the idea of “harm” to include emotional harm, engendering feelings of isolation, lack of affirmation and other verbal and non-violent behaviours that were deemed to be “out of covenant”

Within the Unitarian Universalist denomination, a campaign and culture to censure […} dissenting views also developed.

The NAUA continues to grow in both individual and congregational numbers -providing an ongoing voice and community for those attracted to liberal ideas of freedom, reason and tolerance. In addition, a task force is at work to articulate and promote a set of guiding principles for individual and organizational application.

The NAUA remains committed to championing noncreedal religious thinking and organization, celebrating individual difference of opinion and welcoming free debate and discussion. It also continues to work to educate and promote individual and organization efforts at creating and sustaining a more just and caring society.

You can read NAUA’s full account of this problem and response to it here.

I remain resolutely non-religious myself but am always eager to support fellow liberals in every religious community! It was a delight to speak to the members of NAUA.

(Audio version here)

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Today, I spotted this note written last month by , a writer I frequently see being reasonable and making sense on Substack.

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Yes! But, perhaps counterintuitively, the reason this is the conception of feminism that is so positive and worthy of celebration is because, in principle, it’s not fundamentally about women at all. At at the core of it is a principle that applies much more broadly and across contexts and groups. It is one that I would argue makes intuitive sense to the best and most positive aspects of human nature. It is a recognition that women are individuals and people, and as such should have equal social and moral status and the same opportunities and freedoms as men. It is liberalism.

The benefits of political activism that is based on principle rather than identity is that these principles can then be applied consistently in different contexts and across groups. This creates a solid, ethical foundation that people of all identities can support and, furthermore, want to support because they can clearly appreciate the benefits of being the beneficiary of such principles when they are upheld in their defence. Such consistent, principled stances also facilitate a common bond, empathy across groups and trust.

When we uphold the ‘fundamental ethical equality of the sexes and of equal opportunity for both sexes’ we are very explicitly and intentionally not doing identity politics. We are saying that a principle which should apply to all people must not be denied to some people because of their sex. In this case, the sex this has been denied to historically have been women and thus the activism in opposition to it is called ‘feminism’ and focuses on women. Nevertheless, in principle, this stance also protects men and should the need to defend them against such discrimination arise, explicitly advocates that. Men, therefore, can appreciate this principle and the framing of it to apply to both sexes facilitates empathy and a sense of justice. It inspired men to think “Well, I certainly want to be treated as a fundamentally equal member of society with all opportunities open to me, so why wouldn’t women? Denying them that is unjust.”

The principles of individuality and universality extend much more broadly to other contexts like race, sexuality and religion. So too does the tendency for it to trigger our most positive psychological traits of fairness and empathy. The reason the words of Martin Luther King which have survived most strongly are “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” is because they speak precisely to this. It inspired white people to think, “I also have dreams for my children. I want them to be evaluated on their merits and have all the freedoms and opportunities society provides. Why wouldn’t black people also want this? Denying them it is unjust.”

The same principle applies to the most successful activism on behalf of same-sex attracted people. When they argued that they should be able to choose their partners freely based on love and attraction and live openly with them without shame or discrimination, heterosexual people, who also feel love and attraction and enjoy being able to pursue it, could empathise with this and see the justice in facilitating it. Equally, when members of minority religions appealed to be able to practice their faith openly and in peace, members of majority religions could conceive of what it must be like not to be able to do that, and support their right to do so.

In short, my argument is that the liberal position on both individual liberty and recognition of our shared humanity appeals very strongly to positive human intuitions that enable us to think abstractly about justice and empathise across groups. It is the growing realisation of liberal principles within society that has produced the remarkable progress we have seen for the rights of women and racial, religious and sexual minorities over the last century. This progress was not achieved primarily by thinking in terms of specific groups and what would be in their interests specifically but by holding up a consistent principle of fairness, equality and (genuine) inclusion and demanding that it be applied to those who were denied them. This distinction matters.

Compare this stance to the slogan frequently used by radical feminists. “Feminism is a movement by women, for women and about women.” Men already inclined towards radical feminist positions can appreciate the context of this and even men not so inclined can concede that it is something that has the right to exist and could possibly have some beneficial effects. Nevertheless, it does tend to send a message to men that this is a movement which is, at best, irrelevant to them and, at worst, hostile to them. Feminists wishing to counteract this last impression then have to do a lot of work contextualising and justifying the stance and this generally requires making claims which are not universally accepted - e.g., patriarchy is pervasive and ongoing.

Think too of the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” The intuitive response to this from people who value individuality and universality (which I would argue is most of us when not triggered into defensive tribal stances) has been “All lives matter.” This actually agrees with the original statement but produces immense frustration in activists who then also have to justify and contextualise the specificity of their statement according to premises which, again, are not universally accepted - e.g., white supremacy is pervasive and ongoing.

Both of these forms of activism are convincing mostly to people who already accept the political premises of them and can have very little persuasive power to those who do not.

The same problems emerge when those wanting to uphold the validity and worth of homosexual relationships do so in ways which seem to dismiss or denigrate heterosexual ones or when defenders of a minority religion do so in ways which disregard or disparage majority ones. They emerge whenever people foreground the interests of a specific group and detach this from the consistent principles of individuality that generate our senses of justice, empathy and investment.

This is when the worst of our human nature is liable to be triggered - the tribal, territorial elements of our ape brains which doubtless served us well for millions of years of violent struggle for resources and survival. Having been presented by identity-based activists with an in-group and an out-group and been informed they are in direct competition and that we cannot possibly empathise across group divides, we are prone to believing this. We are then in danger of ceasing to think about other groups as individuals with whom we share a common humanity and instead register them as a threat. In its most extreme form, this leads to dehumanisation.

We are then likely to see rising factions of women who think all men are violent, callous, destructive monsters and the source of all evil, and men who think women are soulless, irrational incompetents who, if allowed equal rights and autonomy will destroy civilisation and mankind. We see black supremacists declaring that white people are evil and the cause of all the world’s problems and white supremacists claiming that black people are inherently intellectually inferior, violent and destructive. We see claims that ‘cisheteronormativity’ is an evil force causing sexual minorities and particularly the trans-identified to kill themselves thus justifying violent retaliation and responding claims that this was enabled by allowing ‘sexual deviants’ (gay men, lesbians and the gender non-conforming) to declare themselves publicly, get married and choose their own clothing. We see illiberal and extremist factions of minority religions emboldened to impose authoritarian censorship on their critics and engage in violence and a resurge of illiberal and extremist majority religions in an attempt to counteract this.

Naturally, it is the minority groups and the physically weaker sex who are likely to lose these battles if they are allowed to continue to escalate and then we really are in danger of living in a patriarchal, white supremacist, homophobic and religiously intolerant world. The left-wing identitarian activists will then take this as evidence that these were always prevalent features of society as they had claimed and blame the liberals for not having supported their activism. The right-wing identitarian activists will claim that they had to counter an excess of ‘liberalism’ in order to save western civilisation and that this becoming a necessity proves that ‘liberalism’ has failed. Meanwhile, genuine liberalism and principles that value individuality and universality, when upheld consistently and robustly, are our best hope of preventing our societies from backsliding into this kind of tribal and ideological warfare.

So, yes. Those feminists—those liberal feminists along with liberal opponents of racism, anti-gay sentiment, religious intolerance and more—are the ones that all decent people should celebrate as producing the progress that can justifiably be considered “a triumph of the modern world.”

But more importantly, and as Michael indicates, the consistent principles of the philosophy that underlay their goals need to be recognised as the source of that triumph. These are the principles of individual liberty and universal human rights. They insist that no individual should be relegated to a subclass and denied freedoms and opportunities because of their identity. Alongside these principles is a genuine, felt appreciation of our shared humanity and our ability to empathise and demand fairness for people who are not us. All of these are essential if we want to hold onto that progress and continue living in a modern, liberal world.

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Yesterday, my friend Mark would have been 64. He died at 35 of AIDS-related meningitis when I was 23. Mark was a writer, poet and comedian. Below, I share three of his poems in memory of him.

I was a care assistant working with elderly and disabled people in their own homes when I met Mark. I was hired at 19 specifically to support him and two other young men who were gravely ill with AIDS, which, at that time, was a death sentence. “Home helps,” as they were called then, were typically in their 50s and there were a lot of misconceptions about AIDS and how it is transmitted and a great deal of fear and even hostility. The council looked for younger carers who had received recent education about this and would not be afraid to work with AIDS sufferers. So, I became the youngest Home Help in Redbridge.

While most of the older care assistants were friendly and supportive of me, a couple were angry that I had been brought in to work with people suffering with AIDS, all of them, at that time, gay men. They blamed the sufferers to the extent that they believed they should not be cared for, even while dying. One woman rounded on me and asked why Mark deserved care and why he was still even alive when her son was dead. Her son had been involved in a fight during which he sustained a skull fracture. It had been repaired but left a weakness. When he got into another fight and he was punched in the face, he died instantly. I was astounded by this reasoning. Her son did not deserve to die either, but it was entirely unclear to me why his doing so as a result of engaging persistently in violence was morally superior to contracting a fatal virus while having consensual sex. I did not retaliate because she was demented with grief but her views were not uncommon at that time. To this day, I cannot engage with people speaking callously or even gleefully about the suffering and death experienced by so many, mostly young men, during the AIDS crisis.

I helped Mark with housework and shopping twice a week because he was very weak and tired easily, but we quickly became close friends and spent social time together, talking for hours. I would say that he cared for me more than I cared for him, but he’d probably disagree. He was a brilliant comedic writer, but also wrote some deeply poignant and moving pieces. I was fascinated by his brain and the way he thought. He was similarly enamoured of mine and encouraged it. I was a rather chaotic and self-destructive young person then, racketing around and making ill-advised life choices when it came to men and substances. His twenties had been similarly spent.

Mark took something of a ‘big brother’ role in my life, but in such a beautifully non-judgemental and humorous way, I could never resent this. He’d vet my boyfriends and send me extremely funny character analyses and future happiness projections. He’d also talk to me about his own disastrous exes and bad decisions and his thoughts on love, life and relationships. He found that I was somebody he could talk to and be understood and I found the same qualities in him. When he went away, we exchanged letters so we could keep the conversation going.

Mark was in love when he died. His name was Tony. Tony loved him too. He also had AIDS and at the beginning of their relationship, they loved with the knowledge that their time together would be brief. Then protease inhibitors became available and, on his last appointment with a specialist, Mark was told “You could be one of the first people to survive this.” Suddenly, Mark and Tony had a future and the character of their relationship changed and deepened.

My friendship with Mark changed too. We were no longer making the most of a fleeting time that we would be two oddly compatible weirdos on this earth together, enjoying each other’s conversation. We spoke about the future including my wish to have children and what kind of uncle or irreverent ‘godfather’ to them he would be.

This was not to be. Within weeks of hearing this optimistic news, Mark developed meningitis and the drugs had not significantly strengthened his resistance for him to have a chance of fighting it. When it became clear that he had sustained severe brain damage, his next-of-kin enacted the wishes of his living will and turned off his life support.

Tony’s heart was broken but he stayed very strong. I don’t think he had fully allowed himself to hope they would both survive the virus and have a future together. He channelled his grief into caring for everybody else who was falling apart. Tony was one of the kindest, gentlest and most stoical people I have ever met. He included me in his care. I suffered a catastrophic nervous breakdown at the loss of Mark and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital under the Mental Health Act as a danger to myself. I did not fully recover and return to work for four years. I felt adrift without my friend and during that time, Tony tried to support me, both because he liked me and because Mark had asked him to look out for me in the event of his death. Tony survived and, I hope, went on to find love and happiness again.

I have a copy of everything Mark ever wrote and all his letters. I also have an ornate Gothic “M” tattooed on my shoulder. Until last year, I had his elderly turtle, Ethel, whom I took charge of when he went into hospital. Ethel lived to be 52, which in turtle years is about 116 and I think her extreme longevity would have made Mark happy.

I have still never met anybody like Mark and I still think of him on a near daily basis and miss him. You were a deeply formational influence on my life, my friend. You told me I could think and write and that I had a remarkable brain. You told me I was lovable and kind and funny. You helped extricate me from two deeply dysfunctional relationships using a ruthless lack of tact and sarcasm. You helped pick up the pieces afterwards. You should still be in my life and in Tony’s. The daughter we imagined me having is an adult now and she does know she has an Uncle Mark whom she would have loved. And she would have loved you. I will not say I loved you, because while you are in the past tense, love does not die when its object does. I still love you.

Silence

By Mark D. Sandersson

But I cannot Bear the Silence

Cities should quake.
The land should break
and Gods should howl
and bay and shake.
The air be made poisonous and foul
and all should weep,
that so much life and beauty
can trickle and seep
into the sterile ground.
In silence. Not the littlest sound
Beyond a breath;
the sigh of Death;
A busy, frantic,
hard-fought, hard-worked Death.

But there is only silence...

We should be screaming
We should all be screaming...

And I cannot bear the silence.

Twisted

By Mark D. Sandersson

I do not love you.
I do not, do not, do not
Love you.

I do not, do not wait
For the phone to ring
Nor do I dial
The first three digits
Of your number
Then replace
The receiver
I do not, do not, do not
Love you.

I do not think about the way
You hold a cigarette
And I do not, do not
Recall your smile
I do not keep your photo
Safe in my wallet
And if I do, I do not
Do not look at it.
I do not savour
Your smell still embraced
Within the bedclothes.
I do not, do not, do not
Love you.

I do not think of you.
And if I do think of you,
My breath remains even
My eyes do not dilate
My heart does not shatter
And I do not, do not smile.
I do not, do not, do not
Love you.

Epitaph

By Mark D. Sandersson

The beautiful young man is standing
Shifted out of time.
His past and future acts commanding,
Through accident or crime,

The reason why he has existed;
Others so have died.
How gifted has he so resisted?
and somebody replied,

“He is a memory...Image...Thought.
Therein the answer lies.
Immune to every day’s onslaught
Yet every day he dies.”

And finally we believe he lives
As now he fails to last.
A sepia-faded ghost who gives
Reminiscence to the past.

“For I am here to stay!”, he cries,
“For I am here to stay!”
And as at last we see he lives,
He’s dying every day.

Weeks One, Two and Three can be found under these links should you be the kind of weirdo who likes reading about a 52-year-old woman’s adventures with protein, lunges and a stick named Leonora.

The adventures are now over and normal service in the name of evidence-based epistemology and consistently liberal principles will shortly resume.

Wednesday 23rd September

I wake feeling very tired and achy still. My back is particularly painful. I suspect this is going to be a 25% day and that I will be doing a single 15-minute walk and some light stretches. I feel a little fed up and the lodge seems quiet and lonely without the husband. I get dressed stiffly and painfully and make my way downstairs where I make tea and a boiled egg with toast. I decide to eat on the patio to get morning light to lift my mood and place it on the table and return indoors for the teapot. On coming outside again, I find that my toast is missing! How is this possible? I spot the culprit running into the forest and, I presume, laughing at me in squirrel. I yell after him that he has the morals of a seagull, wish some bewildered dogwalkers a polite good morning and return indoors to make more toast.

I am inexplicably cheered by this encounter with a rather adorable thief and set off for my diagnostic 15-minute walk. This is painful at first but my stiffness eases up within about five minutes and the walk turns into a 20-minute one at quite a brisk pace. By the end of it, my back is no longer painful at all and I return home in much better spirits. I upgrade the day to a 50% day which means a success is doing a downgraded version of the optimal plan. I spend a couple of hours writing which improves my mood further. (Should I worry that telling other people why I think they are wrong always seems to cheer me up? It feels like I should)

After lunch, I set off for my second walk with enthusiasm. I can feel the return of my energy and my love of vigorous exercise. I feel alive again and like me again! This feeling lasts for approximately three minutes at which point my body raises a clear protest. My back goes into painful spasms and my heartrate escalates to close to 150 even though I am not moving particularly fast or going uphill. I persevere for another five minutes and then admit defeat and return to the lodge at the pace of a depressed snail.

I vent my frustrations to my AI journal. I still feel energetic! My body both wants to move and is resistant to doing so! How does that work? How can one possibly listen to one’s body when it returns such mixed messages? Chat GPT suggests to me, “Your musculoskeletal recovery hasn’t caught up with your cardiovascular enthusiasm.”

YES!

This, exactly, is the current problem! It is true that my heart and lungs appear to be raring to go while my muscles and joints are much more dubious about the idea. How do I navigate this? Does listening to my body require treating it as a democracy now where every system has a vote but also a veto?

I listen to my body for the rest of the day and rest it and feed it healthily, get in the hot tub and go to bed.

Thursday 24th September

My energy has returned in abundance in the morning and my morning walk, while not quite living up to this promise, returns the information that it feels competent but not exhilarated so today is a 75% day. It will perform all my requests but I should not push my luck. This level of high functioning good because I am again meeting with Matt and in our last two sessions we have been dealing with alleviating significant muscle pain rather than pushing forwards.

Matt is pleased with my improved ability to describe my body’s messages and observes that I do this best when I am describing it as literally having a personality and speaking to me in sentences. He suggests that, as a writer, I make this into a practice and literally speak to my body and imagine it answering me as an enthusiastic labrador, a decrepit sloth, a grumpy old miser eking out capacity or an efficient but uninspired clerk. The man is now just encouraging my insanity.

Matt now announces that on our final week, we will be attempting the main aim of my meeting with him - becoming able to get myself up off the floor unaided. I have been practicing this in the lodge and have become more capable of getting up speedily and efficiently when I have a table to push up on, but not seemingly making any progress at doing so without one. I get myself into a ‘lunge’ position holding onto the bench and lower myself to one knee. Matt shouts to me,

“Look at that!”

“What?”

“You just got your knee onto the mat without a warm up!”

“I did!”

“We spent over a week working on that!”

“Oh, yes. I couldn’t do that for some time, could I?”

“Celebrate!”

“Yay!”

“I hope that’s not sarcastic?’

“Perish the thought.”

After getting myself up and down from my knees with the help of the bench several times, Matt informs me that I do now have the strength to get to my feet without needing to push up with my hands. What is lacking is now balance and confidence. Matt produces a stick. This, he informs me, will give me the balance I need but the strength will all come from my legs. Raise one knee from the mat, lay one hand on it, lean forward over it and then, holding the stick for balance, push myself to my feet. I summon up all my strength and try this. Absolutely nothing happens.

Matt reminds me that I just did this using the bench only for balance so I can do it using a stick in the same way. I try again, My knee lifts about an inch from the mat.

“Are you sure I have the strength to do this?”

“Yes!”

“It doesn’t feel like I do.”

“That’s psychological.”

“I do have a tendency to overthink.”

“My old rugby coach used to have good advice on overthinking….”

“Is it that it hinders performance unnecessarily and when you find yourself doing it, you should make effort not to think but identify the next useful thing to do and focus on the activity of doing it?”

“Yes, actually, very much that.”

I inform him that I am close friends with a certain for whom there is almost no psychological hurdle that cannot be helpfully addressed with reference to rugby and, given that I have presented him with quite a number of them, I am now a positive repository of rugby-related wisdom, much to the bewilderment of my other friends. He tells me that this sounds valuable but am I now talking in order to stall trying again? I am. I make a conscious effort not to overthink, fix my eyes on a poster opposite about the importance of hydration and read it aloud while making my third attempt.

I GET TO MY FEET!!!

At this point, there really should be some kind of inspirational music playing, possibly from Rocky or The Karate Kid (I am old) and I really am celebrating. We try repeating the process with the right leg which is weaker and less coordinated. This is not a success and I only rise a few inches before flopping back down again. Another attempt with the left is similarly unsuccessful. I become frustrated. Matt tells me I need to rest. After five minutes, we try again and two out of three attempts on the left side are successful. I am jubilant. Matt tells me to continue doing the lunging and squatting stretches and have three attempts on each side to get to my feet a day and I will very soon be able to do this reliably with a stick and then without one.

I practically dance out of Matt’s gym. My biggest fear is that I will fall over while I am out in public and not be able to get up. This was starting to make me afraid to leave the house and was the primary reason for this endeavour. Already, I am less afraid of that, because I can get up with a stick.

On the way back, I order myself an attractive wooden stick. This stick will be my starter stick and represent the first achievement on the path to restoring my mobility fully. I call her Leonora. I send Matt a picture of Leonora and tell him I have celebrated. He approves.

When I get back to the lodge, I continue to be in the most optimistic of spirits as I prepare for afternoon tea with . She delights me by having exemplary tea etiquette. Three hours pass before we realise it as we find we have many opinions and experiences in common and get lost in conversation. We discover that the many evidence-based, liberally-minded people who agree with us are all sensible and correct while those who oppose our stances are all fatally misguided and often downright unethical.

I see Naomi back to her car and walk back to the lodge. On entering it, I find that I have walked 10,000 steps! The last time I tried this, I collapsed in a heap on my return and was then unable to leave the house for five days but today I feel great. I do my stretching exercises, use the hot tub and go to bed in the most optimistic of spirits. Today I really believe what Matt has been telling me. I am making progress and I will restore my mobility fully.

Today has been an excellent day.

Friday 25th September

I sleep very fitfully and awake at 3AM ravenously hungry. At 4AM, I give up on sleep and make a very early breakfast. I check my fitbit and calorie counter app and find that all the exercise yesterday had given me a calorie deficit of 1,700. This is too high.I have been maintaining an average of 1,250. My body has woken me up in the misguided belief that it is starving and needs to find food. I feed it well and tell it to calm down. I refer it to my waistline and inform it that its fears of starving to death any time soon are melodramatic and not rooted in evidence. It eventually feels reassured on this score and permits me to go back to sleep for a couple of hours.

I wake again and make a commitment not to let the deficit get that large again and also to ensure that I wind down properly after a particularly active day. My body is not forgiving, however. I take it for its diagnostic walk, and following Matt’s advice, think about what its character is today and what it is saying. It is performing its walk but very grudgingly and in a moody silence. I decide that today my body is a sullen teenager who has been taken on a family walk entirely against its will and will trail along behind saying nothing but making its displeasure felt.

I continue to be tired, weak, cold and hungry all day but I determine not to be discouraged by this. This is part of the recovery process and this is a 25% day. I eat healthily, keep warm, read and build my model. I go for a second 15 minute walk in the afternoon and my body performs it grudgingly but without protest. This is progress! I am somewhat heartened by the arrival of Leonora and she comes through for me. Two out of three of my attempts to rise from the floor are successful even when tired.

I still feel a little low, though, and so I call the husband and ask him what he has been up to. He has been undertaking a major project of entirely clearing and reorganising the garden and plans to build a new shed. (It seems I am going to be a shed widow again). I am very pleased to hear of this because it was very overgrown but I feel a pang of frustration again and express it. Our house is in dire need of a good sort out, spring clean and also some redecoration. I have been neglecting it. We devise a plan to work with this to use the three remaining months of the year to revamp the house. We get a bit silly talking about Pluckrose & Pluckrose Home and Garden Renovation. I end the conversation feeling much more organised and productive even though I have not yet done anything! I use the hot tub and go to bed.

Saturday 26th September

A miracle occurs and I sleep for 7.5 hours in a row. This never happens. I feel wonderful but am aware that this has been deceptive before. I take my body for a walk and consult it on the matter. It is skipping along giggling with excitement and enthusiastic about everything. Apparently, my body is a five-year-old child today. This is a 100% day!

I attempt standing with Leonora while I have this much energy, sure that today I will manage every attempt but again I manage to rise on 2 out of 3 attempts. On the third attempt on the left side I only manage to rise halfway before collapsing down again. This is a strength issue. The right side is still not cooperating at all and I text Matt about it. I am not too disheartened by not making the 3/3 and reason with myself that this is first and foremost a functional issue. If I fall over, I only need to be able to get up once and now, as long as I have a stick with me, I can do that. The rest will come.

I intended to write for two hours on people being wrong about bisexuality but they were being very wrong about it so four hours pass. I feel a pang of guilt about this as I did intend to stick to two hours writing a day, but I don’t think I should be too precious about this. The non-negotiable anchors are the healthy diet to facilitate weight loss, the sleep window, the morning walk, the afternoon strength training, the evening stretches and the wind down period. What I choose to do with the rest of my time is up to me.

I go to the gym where the scales inform me that I am now a stone (14lbs) lighter than when I arrived! I pick up handweights equivalent to this and think how much I’d not like to be walking around carrying them all the time and that four weeks ago, I was doing precisely that!

I start my weight’s workout and discover that my body seems to have remembered how to move smoothly and breathe properly since the last time I was here. Today I look far less like a confused and awkward sloth and much more like a heavily overweight, middle-aged woman who nevertheless knows how to use resistance machines. I move through the 8 machines enjoying this and 40 minutes later am feeling a pleasant ache and fatigue in various muscles rather than pain and exhaustion. I am jubilant again. This appears to be a week for turning corners. I move onto the recumbent bike but give this up after 6.5 minutes. It may well be a way to get my heart working but that doesn’t stop it being incredibly tedious. I shall walk to do that at present.

On my way out I inform the charming young gym embryo who was so encouraging last time that I can now get up off the floor with the aid of a stick and he is so excited and happy about this that I am quite touched and consider asking him if he’d like to be adopted. I restrain myself and thank him warmly like a normal person.

I am hopeful that I will again walk all the way back without stopping but I find that this time, I do need to stop at the top of the hill and sit for a couple of minutes to get my breath back. That’s OK. My body has proved itself enough for one day. I get in and immediately consume a large amount of protein and a gallon of tea. A pleasant weariness sets in. This is that comfortable tiredness so different to the exhaustion of anaemia or the weary achiness of simply moving around while fat and deconditioned and I sit and enjoy it with a book until it is time to consume more protein, do my stretches, get in the hot tub and go to bed.

This has been another good day.

Sunday 27th September

I expect this to be a low energy recovery day and it is. I find myself having to stop and sit down between the movements of showering, dressing and making breakfast which irritates me. It also makes me realise that I have not had to do this for the last few days and possibly longer. When I arrived, I had to do that every morning. This cheers me.

My diagnostic walk confirms today as a recovery day. My body whines “I want to goooo hoooome!'“ all the way round the circuit although it does not freak out. It is an overtired and irritable 7-year-old today.

I also appear to be ravenously hungry today. Indoors, my body’s persona transforms from a whiny child to a bear that has just emerged from hibernation and roars at me. I think it may well be that the gym session yesterday properly woke up muscles that have been dormant for some time and what my body wants is protein so I plan meals carefully. The bear is not satisfied and I decide that this is not a case of comfort eating or anxiety eating or managing-sleep-deprivation-eating but a legitimate physiological demand for food. By 11PM, I have had a very boring day of reading, writing, resting, two unhappy walks, some packing and intermittently throwing the bear chicken, fish and eggs to calm it down. My deficit is 500 calories which is fine. I go to bed feeling pleased with myself for handling a hungry, recovery day sensibly and looking forward to the rewards of this the next day.

Monday 28th September

These rewards do not materialise. I sleep less well than usual and wake with a headache. On getting out of bed, I find myself suffering from vertigo. I sit down again involuntarily. I try again to get up and make it to the bathroom even though I feel as though I am on a ship on a rough sea and manage to wash my face and brush my teeth. Getting dressed is difficult because, in trying to put my socks on, I keep missing my feet. I try to have a sense of humour about this but I also feel exhausted.

I make it downstairs carefully and make myself tea and breakfast. I sit down and check through my piece on bisexuality and go out onto the patio where I have an intermittent mobile signal and publish it. I soon come in again because it is too bright. It becomes clear that I need to go back to bed and I make my way upstairs again and fall into a deep sleep for two hours.

I awake feeling a little better but I am also angry! This is just not fair! I have done all the right things to have a good day today! I was counting on a good day. This is my last day to myself before I go home and I was planning to go to the gym again, consolidate my confidence with the weight machines and see how I go on the rowing machine. I did so well on Saturday. I recovered properly yesterday. I dealt with extreme hunger sensibly. I deserve to have a good day today. I recognise that this is childish and just not how anything works even as I am thinking it but that does not stop me thinking it. I have a benign cyst on my brainstem that makes me epileptic and have episodes of migraine, imbalance, incoordination, double vision and headaches. On three occasions, it has caused a limited stroke-like incident and damaged nerves to the right side of my body but mostly my head. I have mostly learnt how to manage and cope with this but sometimes it really pisses me off.

I check in to Substack and see responses to my piece. Most are positive but a few disagree with some aspects of it which is normal and also interesting. A couple of people have missed the point and are arguing with things I did not say and a handful are arguing with the title, having clearly not read the piece in which I addressed their objection. I become very irritable and am inclined to argue with them at length. I respond to a couple who seem in good faith and then force myself to ignore. I scroll Substack and see other people making points with which I want to argue. This would be a productive way to distract myself from today’s enfeeblement, right? I also check the resort’s takeaway menu. It is actually quite difficult for me to move about and cook today and I do intend to allow myself a treat day every now and then. If I am going to miss out on my plans today and be confined to the sofa, I can at least enjoy a burger and some online interaction, right?

No.

No, no, no, no, no.

This is the trap. I know how this goes. I feel unwell. I get fed up. I go online to distract myself. I eat junk. I do not move or get fresh air. I get into pointless arguments. I neglect my sleep hygiene and because I have been sitting, staring at a screen all day, I do not become normally tired and stay up late, usually eating more junk. Then I feel unwell the next day too so I repeat this pattern. Arguing with people online can be valuable and treat nights are good for sustaining a healthy eating plan but they must be done for genuine interest and enjoyment, not distraction and consolation.

Perhaps today need not be a total loss, after all? I can practice doing the right things in response to a day of illness? Yes, OK, Pollyanna. Let’s not get carried away. I spend the afternoon drinking tea, resting, eating well and working on adapting this week’s diary for publication on Wednesday (Hello!). This is a genuinely absorbing activity that does not carry the risks of getting into online arguments and eating junk. I find that this does help and my irritation subsides. I am even laughing at some of my own jokes, which I’m sure is a sign of latent narcissism.

I am up to Sunday when I feel the shift. It is as though a balloon which had been inflated to the degree of pressing against my skull suddenly deflates. It typically takes anything from ten minutes to an hour and today it takes about twenty minutes. The pressure drops, my eyes start to feel as though they are moving more easily and together, the ground beneath me seems to steady and my limbs start reliably doing as they are told. It is as though my brain has decided to relax. I stand up and test this. Yes, I am better. I feel completely normal. I have energy.

I look at the time. It has just gone 7PM and it is almost dark. I put my shoes on and grab my headphones and set out for a gentle walk. The walk begins gently but I have a lot of unspent energy and I pick up my pace and spend 40 minutes speeding up and down the hills of the resort listening to metal and I feel great. I get back in and make dinner while still listening to music and doing a little dance in the kitchen.

I spent the evening working on my model which I can now do because my coordination is back and feeling in a thoroughly good mood. Did I help that episode pass off quickly by resting, eating healthily and distracting myself in a relaxing way? I cannot know. They are so variable. But I did not respond to it in an unhealthy way and jeopardise tomorrow’s productivity anyway. I am absurdly pleased with myself about that.

On the whole, and strangely, this has been a good day too.

Tuesday 29th September

I sleep well but wake to find that my FitBit has died completely. This throws me into something of a panic. Do steps and zone minutes even contribute to weight loss and fitness if nothing is measuring them? I order myself another one and mentally slap myself. I come down the stairs feeling energetic and strong. I’m glad I have capacity today. It’s going to be a busy one. I have my final meeting with Matt, I need to pack and dispose of all rubbish, get my diary up to date and finish the model.

Disposing of the rubbish takes two trips to communal bins and 15 minutes so I decide to treat this as my morning diagnostic walk. My body is in Labrador mode again today, as it was last night and I tell it it is a Good Girl. It is! Today is a 100% day. Nice. I pack the rest of my stuff and squeeze it into my suitcase which it fills. How is this possible? I sent the husband home with at least half of my stuff and I’ve only bought two books, two tops, a pair of gym trousers and a stick. This confirms my hypothesis that ‘stuff’ expands to be slightly too much for the capacity you have for it, just as time and money are always not quite enough.

I bring the diary up to date and set off up the hill to meet the cab that will take me to Matt. Matt is happy with the progress I have made with getting up off the floor with the aid of a stick and informs me that, even though it does not feel like it, I am close to being able to do so relying on the right leg. In order to strengthen this one, the sadist (I am sending him this tomorrow. Hi, Matt!) insists on me trying one-legged squats while hanging onto a strap affixed to the wall. When performed by me, this exercise could more rightly be called ‘one-legged stagger-flops’ but he is happy with them. He is respectful of Leonora and this makes me happy. I thank him for his services in guiding me on getting going again and he congratulates me on excellent progress.

Back at the lodge, I recover from this renewed assault on my quads with several gallons of tea and then I put the final touches on the model. It is slightly wonky and a couple of pieces are the wrong way round, but I think this adds character. I have loved building this. I’m not actually terribly efficient at it. The box says it should take 12 hours but it has taken me at least 40. I was planning to leave it here. I enjoy the process more than the end product. But I find I am quite attached to it. It feels symbolic, somehow. It was coming together at the same time my plans for fixing myself, losing weight and restoring my mobility were. I built it as I was rebuilding me. It is coming home with me.

I spend the evening doing the final bits of packing for my departure first thing in the morning and then wallow around in the hot tub, reflecting on these four weeks. They have achieved precisely what I intended them to which is not always the case with the best laid plans. I had been at risk of becoming housebound due to serious limitations to my mobility and a growing fearfulness of falling over and being unable to get up. These weeks were intended to reverse that trajectory and they were both painful and frightening at times - I have cried more in the last four weeks than in the last four years - but I have achieved that. I still have a long way to go but I have a solid base of strength, stamina and stability to build from now.

The changes I have made over the last four weeks have been both physical and psychological. I began them fighting an inner conviction that I was not ever going to recover from the major blood loss of last December, that I was now set on the path of being a weak, disabled, fearful and vulnerable old lady whose future prospects included only decline, disability and death. My rational brain knew this was nonsense. I am 52. I have another couple of decades before I need to seriously worry about age-related infirmity. If I were an elite athlete or a model, I might have to accept that my peak performance were behind me, but I am a writer. My work can continue to improve. I can read more, think more, write more, travel more and speak more for decades to come. I can hope to influence public thought in a more rational and liberal direction and maybe even leave a legacy of writing for future generations of empiricists, rationalists, humanists and liberals. It is quite possible that my most influential piece of writing is one I have not written yet. I told myself all this repeatedly and yet I could not feel that it was true. My greatest fear, and that of my husband, was that I was losing my zest for life and giving up.

The reality is that I am just very physically deconditioned and very fat. I have spent many months mostly lying down dealing with the effects of major blood loss and severe anaemia and overeating from boredom and frustration. I have a tendency to interpret physical issues impacting me as philosophical problems needing to be solved intellectually rather than material realities needing to be addressed with practical action. Rather than lying about contemplating mortality, the cruelty of aging and the inevitable decline of every living organism, I needed to stop eating junk and go for a walk. Every day. For months. These four weeks focusing only on my physical health were the first difficult step in doing precisely that and they have been effective. My strength and my energy are returning and with them, my optimism, my joy, my future-orientation and my zest to get out in the world and do things.

I inform myself with confidence that I am not yet a feeble and decrepit old lady and when I am an old lady, I will not be feeble and decrepit. I will get my strength and energy back. I will be fit, strong and formidable. I will embrace my middle-age by developing the persona of a crone and thoroughly enjoying it. I shall be outspoken, argumentative, uncompromising, unapologetic, unashamedly eccentric and utterly fearless in my fight for the future of Enlightenment values and liberal democracy.

I will celebrate each milestone towards health and vitality with a new, increasingly ornate stick. I want one made of ebony with a silver death’s head handle and silver snakes running down its length. That would go beautifully with the big biker boots with flames and skulls on them that make me 6 ft 1, and which I will never stop wearing along with my steampunk hats and the deep red lipstick in the shade of the dried blood of my enemies. My hair is still mostly near-black but it has silver streaks in it now. I might grow that out and accentuate it. In fact, Leonora and her future sisters are not mere ‘sticks’. They are staffs. Irrationalism and illiberalism? YOU. SHALL. NOT. PASS!

Yes, this all sounds good to me, but for now, I must clamber awkwardly out of the hot tub where I am becoming prunelike, take my vitamins and get an early night because tomorrow is going to be a long day of travelling back to London where the second phase of my restoration is to begin.

ONWARDS!

Apologies for the lack of an audio version of this piece for paying subscribers. I am currently away undertaking a programme of physical rehabilitation and recording if difficult. If you would like an audio version, please let me know in comments and I will produce one when I get home in a few days.

This week, X has been angered by a survey showing that very many women are not attracted to bisexual men, including a minority of bisexual women. Accusations of homophobia, biphobia and, in the case of bisexual women, hypocrisy, abound. This is because, yet again, people are confusing sexual desire with a reasoned, ethical stance and politicising their own and other people’s sexual responses. This is a category error.

The difficulties bisexual men often report finding female partners come up repeatedly in political debate, accompanied by claims of homophobia or prejudice against bisexual men specifically due to assumptions that they are highly promiscuous and less likely to practice safe sex. Such attitudes undoubtedly exist.

However, the claim that a non-attraction to bisexual men cannot be explained by anything other than such intense personal antipathy based on negative stereotypes strains the bounds of credulity. Do we really live in a society where a majority of heterosexual women and a minority of bisexual women hold homophobic (and misandrist) views? Some clearly believe we do. To them, the idea is that, if we counter homophobic and biphobic attitudes and stereotypes in society and dismantle them in our own conscious or unconscious biases, more women will start finding bisexual men attractive. Most commonly, those making such accusations make them of other people, but we do also sometimes see women who oppose homophobia and biphobia attempting to justify their non-attraction to bisexual men on rational, ethical grounds.

The problem with this is that sexual attraction is not generally based on moral or rational decision-making. It is based on what attributes and behaviours people find arousing. Men who are attracted to women very commonly find two women having sex arousing. Women who are attracted to men do not commonly find two men having sex arousing. This complicates a straightforward explanation of homophobia somewhat. Bisexual men are men who are attracted to women and bisexual women are women who are attracted to men. I do not see why the fact that they are also attracted to the same sex should make them vary significantly from heterosexual trends in what they find attractive in the opposite one.

The terms ‘homophobia’ and ‘biphobia’ are generally used to describe a political, ethical or religious stance that same sex attraction is morally wrong or objectively disgusting and that same-sex attracted people and relationships are therefore immoral, wrong or lesser. Some people quibble with the terms themselves, arguing that the suffix of ‘-phobia’ is not warranted because it indicates an irrational fear or aversion while they have neither but instead a religious or ethical objection to homosexual sex. I am not going to quibble with the semantics. For the purposes of this piece, I am talking about a considered belief that homosexuality and bisexuality are morally wrong or objectively inferior and that prejudice and discrimination against same-sex attracted people is therefore ethically justified in some or all social circumstances.

This is where I believe the category error comes in. We do not typically consider sexual attraction to be a social circumstance, but instead an individual one. Being discriminating in one’s choice of sexual partners is generally considered to be acceptable because sex and romance are individual choices based on individual inclination. Being exclusively attracted to men, for example, is not usually understood to be misogynistic. Instead, if the individual is female, the term for this is ‘heterosexual’ and if he is male, the designation for this is ‘gay.’ This is commonly accepted even by Critical Social Justice activists of the LGBT variety, although in recent years, there has been a drive to pressure people into being attracted to subjectively experienced gender identity rather than sexed bodies. Naturally, this has not worked very well because, again, sexual attraction is not a political or ethical stance.

The same rule applies more broadly than heterosexuality or homosexuality and continues to be subject to much individual variation. People find that they have a ‘type’ and also compatibilities and incompatibilities. Height, weight, build, colouring, presentation, personality, vocational status and finer details of sexuality are all highly relevant here and highly individual. I am a bisexual woman who has been attracted to women who present a ‘butch’ aesthetic and not to typically feminine-presenting women. This is not a prejudice against femininity more generally. Like most heterosexual women and gay men, I can admire feminine women’s beauty without finding it sexy. I am attracted to men who are taller than me, older than me and have a more leanly muscular physique than a robust bulky one. This is not a belief in the inferiority of shorter, younger or stockier men, many of whom I love and respect and also recognise as handsome. I have never been remotely attracted to sexually submissive men but those who are aggressively dominant are also unappealing. This is not a judgement on anybody else’s consensual sexual preferences and nor do they ever prevent me from liking and respecting an individual. Most individualistically, perhaps, I have been exclusively attracted to men who build and fix things. I have no idea why but a man in overalls is sexy while a man in a suit or a mortar board is not. This is not prejudice against professional or intellectual men who make up the vast majority of my male friends. Sexual attraction is just in its own category separate to other relationships.

Of course, attraction is not entirely individual because strong trends exist. Very many women share my preference for men who are taller than them and, at 5 ft 9, I was occasionally informed as a young woman that I was too tall for a man to find attractive despite being otherwise appealing. (Young men, this is probably something you should think in your head. Young women, gratuitously telling shorter men that they are unattractive to you is also something you should avoid doing unless one is pressing you for a reason). Women’s preference for men who are successful, confident, and somewhat dominant (without being domineering to her) is also well-documented as is men’s tendency to find youth and beauty and agreeability particularly attractive and professional status less so.

There are strong evolutionary psychological hypotheses for why these sex differences in attraction exist (see particularly, David Buss) related to what is most likely to result in the production and survival of healthy offspring. In women, fertility and fidelity are key. In men, the ability to defend and provide. It is important to understand that these attractions are not fundamentally conscious deliberations made by individuals but a result of evolution having favoured the offspring of males who are attracted to fertile females and females who are attracted to males who can provide for and protect their young. Gay men, for example, are still likely to value physical beauty in their partners particularly highly even though they are under no illusion that this is an indication of his ability to produce babies. As always, while strong enough trends exist for these sex differences in sexual attraction to be observable and measurable across many cultures and, in fact, the animal kingdom, much individual variation exists and consequently also many exceptions to the rule.

Is it the case that patterns of women being unattracted or less attracted to men who are (also) attracted to men also has an explanation in evolutionary psychology? I know of no research to this effect. (If you do, please post it in the comments.) It is plausible that evolution would favour organisms who are attracted to others who are exclusively attracted to the sex they are as a matter of not wasting one’s efforts on another who is homosexual and thus unlikely to wish to reproduce with them, but as previously mentioned, heterosexual men do not typically find women having sex with women unattractive, so, as a broad rule, this does not seem to stand up. I would, however, be surprised if there were nothing in our evolved psychologies that could offer a clue to this and it were entirely a social construct.

Perhaps it is simply that women are the much choosier sex when it comes to sexual partners. This is convincingly argued by evolutionary psychologists to be because we are the sex that gets pregnant and are thus limited in the number of offspring we can have in a way that men are not. This incentivises being selective as does the fact that our offspring’s survival has historically been greatly benefited by the father sticking around to protect and provide for it. This is argued to be why women are, on average, less open to casual sex than men. Again, this is not purely a conscious deliberation made by individual women to safeguard against pregnancy. Lesbians are also highly selective in their choice of partners even though no pregnancy can result from their lovemaking. It has been my experience and that of many bisexual women I have spoken to that lesbians are also less likely to be attracted to bisexual women than to women who are exclusively attracted to women. Is it possible that bisexuality triggers some kind of cognitive mechanism in women related to their need for signs of commitment in order to want to engage in a sexual relationship that is not a feature of male evolved psychology? I do not know. This is a genuinely interesting question and the answer is probably a complex mixture of hardwired and cultural factors rather than pervasive cultural biphobia.

Is there any moral imperative to try to redress this, though? I am not convinced that there is. I never felt any need to badger lesbians into being attracted to me. All my (three) female partners before I entered an exclusive relationship with my husband 25 years ago were bisexual and this worked. I am sure the majority of bisexual men would not wish to pressure women into having sex with them to demonstrate their inclusivity either. We can certainly address any negative stereotypes that exist about bisexuals without badgering anybody into feigning an attraction they do not feel on political or ethical grounds.

I think people engaging in this kind of argumentation are coming at it from the wrong angle. The question, “Well, why aren’t you attracted to this particular type of person’ assumes that the default status is attraction and the thing that needs explaining is the lack of it. I think it is the opposite. For most people, the default state when interacting with other humans is ‘not attracted’ and, only for a small percentage of them do a sufficient number of appealing features converge that this tips into ‘attracted.’ For women, as the choosier sex, that percentage is likely to be smaller than for men and the appealing qualities that need to align more numerous. It may be that one of the things likely to make that switch to attraction for many women is exclusive heterosexuality (or, in the case of lesbians, exclusive homosexuality).

I am one of the bisexual women who has never found the attraction switch to come on with men I know to be attracted to men, no matter how good-looking, charming or likeable they may be. In talking to other women who are attracted to men, it is my observation that this is quite common. A woman may think that a gay man, for example, is gorgeous with a handsome face and impressive physique and appreciate these attributes aesthetically. She may also admire his intellect or principles and respect him as a thinker. Or she may find his personality engaging and endearing and wish to establish an intimate and enduring friendship with him. She may, in short, admire him on many levels and be far from thinking of him as in any way inferior due to his sexuality. When it comes to thinking about him sexually, however, it is as though the brain returns an error message. This is just not what we are doing here. Of course, this response generally suits gay men just fine! Bisexual men who encounter it repeatedly, however, may well find it disheartening because it is what they’d like to be doing here.

If it is the case that many women do not find the attraction switch to go on with bisexual men because they are bisexual, is this not the definition of homophobia or biphobia, though? I’d suggest that this is only the case if you are defining these so loosely that the terms lose all usefulness. This is not the result of ethical reasoning which makes a claim that same-sex attraction is wrong or that same-sex attracted men are bad or inferior which can be argued with. It is the absence of sexual attraction which is not receptive to such arguments. I doubt that there has ever been a case in which somebody has successfully argued somebody else into wanting to have sex with them.

If it is not women’s rational brains capable of ethical reasoning which are discriminating against same-sex attracted men but their sexual attraction responses, can this be argued to be morally wrong? I do not think so. We generally consider discrimination morally wrong when it prevents people from accessing something we think everybody should have a right to access. We do not live in a society that holds that sexual access to women is a right that all men have the right to and I’d very much like to keep it that way. In their choice of sexual partner, both men and women must have every right to be discriminating and to be so on their own criteria. Nobody can reasonably insist that they have the right to have any aspect of their body, identity, personality, sexuality, presentation or behaviour automatically found attractive or not deemed unattractive by other people. Nor should anybody have to justify not being attracted to any particular physical feature, trait, quality or behaviour.

This demand that people justify whom they do not find attractive is not confined to arguments about bisexuality. I have most commonly had this argument in relation to Fat Activism where fat activists have argued that men not commonly being attracted to heavily overweight women is a form of romantic discrimination. In a parallel argument, some shorter men have argued that women’s general preference for taller men is a form of heightist discrimination. Online activists in this realm typically say that height should not be compared to weight as the latter is within the individual’s control while the former is not. This again relies on the false belief that sexual attraction is amenable to rational, ethical argument. I doubt that any woman has ever said, “Oh, I see. Your height is a result of genetics not any choice on your part. In that case, I find you hot now.” In each case, an ethical argument is being addressed to a sexual response as though the two were the same kind of thing.

While there is a certain unfairness inherent in sexual attraction, I do not believe it is one that can be addressed by social engineering or political campaigns. There are always going to be qualities and traits that are found more commonly attractive and others that are found less so and there is no way to ensure an equity of dating opportunity that does not intrude unconscionably upon the private lives of individuals. This is the primary liberal reason to resist attempts to treat patterns of attraction as a form of unethical discrimination: individual autonomy matters more than equal access to potential partners.

It has taken considerable time and effort to get us to a place in which there is a general consensus that sexual attraction and romantic love between consenting adults are a matter of individual choice and not an issue for the state, the church, familial elders or dominant factions in society to decide. It is vitally important that we maintain this ethos both legally and socially. If it becomes a norm to shame people for conducting their romantic and sexual lives according to their own desires rather than the beliefs of a dominant moral orthodoxy (again) we will see vulnerable people, particularly the young, pressured into engaging in sexual activity and relationships they do not want (again). This can be experienced as sexual violation.

A second, and equally important reason to resist this discourse is that it risks stripping the concepts of homophobia and biphobia of their useful meaning. We should not define them so loosely as to include whom somebody does or does not find sexually attractive. We should reserve them for political, cultural, social and ethical stances towards same-sex attracted people where they are most needed because they influence public policy. We have already seen the vitally important concept of racism weakened by stretching it to include any dissent from Critical Social Justice theories of anti-racism thus undermining a fragile consensus that racism is a grave moral failing. The rights and freedoms of same-sex attracted people to live and love and marry those to whom they are attracted, and to have their relationships recognised as legitimate and meaningful, are still relatively new and vulnerable. The Critical Social Justice movement has already alienated many people who were previously sympathetic, or at least not hostile, to this cause.

If we genuinely wish to create a world in which gay men, lesbians and bisexual men and women can live and love freely and have their relationships widely recognised as legitimate and meaningful, we would do better not to attempt to pressure people into having sex they do not want.

In short, leave other people’s consensual sex lives alone.

Wednesday 16th September

Today begins Week Three in which I am not allowed to plan my diet and exercise with military precision. Instead, I am to wake up each morning and see what state my body is in and how I can best work with it to continue recovering and rebuilding my fitness. Then I am to fuel it mindfully in ways that support both activity and weight loss. I find this rather daunting.

I sleep more poorly than I have done and wake early and tired. I also spent yesterday warding off a migraine so am aware I might still feel washed out. I do. I have tea and consult my body about what it would like to do. It tells me it would like to sleep and it is still only 6.30 so I take it back to bed for a couple of hours. Sleep is not forthcoming. I consult it again. It informs me that it would like a substantial breakfast so I make eggs on toast for 450 calories.

At this point, what my body appears to be telling me it wants to do is sit down and not be bothered by anything, but I am not sure if this is lethargy that should be pushed through or a need for rest that should be respected. I decide to take it for a gentle walk and see what it tells me then. I walk in the direction of the gym so that, if it suddenly springs to life, we are in the right place to do something about that.

It does not spring to life but declares itself to be competent if not energetic. I enter the gym and do my light, full-body weights workout, deliberately choosing lighter weights than I could potentially manage and pacing myself. An extremely young employee of the gym informs me I am ‘smashing it’ and tells me ‘well done.’ This surprises me a little as my own perception is that my workout resembles the movements of an elderly sloth who is not quite sure where it is or what it is meant to be doing. However, I then remember that he was the one on duty when I entered on my first day only to collapse on a sofa, gasp out that I was OK but that would need to be it for the day and then leave again. I have, indeed, made significant progress from that point and I really should try to remember that.

I receive another positive sign of progress on my way home. Normally, I have to take the short but steep hill in stages and then sit on a wall for five minutes to get my breath back. This time, I manage it in one go and, while breathless, am able to keep walking on the slight decline the rest of the way home and my breathing normalises and my heartrate slows by the time I get there. This is progress indeed.

I have lunch and work on my model for a couple of hours and, on rising for tea, find my body staging an immediate and dramatic protest. My back spasms and my heartrate escalates immediately. There is no need to carefully reflect on what it is telling me. It is screaming ‘lie down.’ It’s a bit frightening. For the rest of the day, I sit and get up once an hour to stretch gently. I heat a microwave meal for dinner and get carefully into the hot tub. This relieves the pain in my muscles but also makes me feel as though I am made of putty. Getting upstairs feels like a major expedition and I shower quickly and fall into bed. I sleep almost immediately.

Thursday 17th September

I wake up and immediately consult my body about how it is feeling and what it is up to. It expresses a wish to stay in bed, but this is not on the approved menu even for a recovery day so I coax it into clothing and downstairs with the promise of tea. It appears to be moving somewhat more easily and there is no alarming increase of heart rate, so I follow the rules for a recovery day and decide on a slow, gentle 15 minute walk to see what it has to say about that. It says, “NO! STOP! WTAF ARE YOU DOING? RENDER ME HORIZONTAL VOLUNTARILY OR I’LL DO IT RIGHT HERE IN THE FIELD.” I return to the lodge.

I have another big cry and spend the next couple of hours indulging despairing thoughts that tell me I am weak, old and useless and all that is left in my life now is decline, disability and death. Attempts to reason with myself that I am only 52 and have a potential three or even four decades of healthy and active life ahead of me are shut down immediately. A few weeks ago, I felt like this at the Buckingham conference, which taxed my mobility seriously, and was encouraged by the sight of Alan Sokal and Lee Jussim - both in their seventies and both defined by high levels of mental and physical energy - bouncing about enthusiastically on stage while arguing passionately for the need for rigorous empirical research. I try bringing both gentlemen to mind again before writing myself off as a decrepit and senile old fossil but I have an argument against that too. I have destroyed my own body by neglecting and overfeeding it for the last decade and it has now given up on me and is determined to consign me to the scrapheap. It is all hopeless and it is entirely my own moral failure.

I express these thoughts to one of my very closest friends, Carrie. My friends are distinguished by frankness and directness and I have rather encouraged this quality so she replies,

I empathise strongly with the feelings of vulnerability, and of course you have done entirely the correct thing by recognising the need to get on top of basic mobility and strength.

I wonder though if you’re overestimating the degree to which your decline is organic or underlying? By which I mean: are your present difficulties not largely a result of the gastrointestinal bleed, which led to enforced immobility, which led to poor mood, which led to over eating, which led to gaining weight? I just recall that when you were lighter you were very much more energised, which leads me to suspect that you are not currently vulnerable because you are old and decrepit and ready for the rubbish heap, but more because the excess weight is burdensome. Put another way: you are fat, rather than evil or profoundly personally flawed!

That statement, “You are fat, rather than evil or profoundly personally flawed!” causes me to laugh so hard that I immediately have no choice but to cheer up and stop being self-pitying and pathetic. To support this aim, I go briefly onto to Substack where I find somebody being wrong in an offensive way to another writer whom I respect and immediately inform them of the precise nature of their wrongness and the ethical failure represented by it. I then feel much more like myself. The rest of the day is spent gently stretching, reading and building my model and eating healthy food.

Friday 18th September

I wake after a good night’s sleep feeling absolutely fantastic. I consult my body about this and it confirms it. I bounce out of bed, throw on clothes, play earsplitting rock music and set out for a walk. My body endorses this decision enthusiastically and sends messages of “Yes!!! This is it! Use me!” We speed up and down hills and my heart rate elevates to 150 but it feels great and I remember that this is why I have always loved cardio exercise so much. Conveniently, I start to flag on the half hour mark and go back to the lodge stretch, hydrate and make eggs on toast (with tea, obviously).

Today the husband is coming for a long weekend so I get his food out of the freezer and prepare the lodge for his arrival and then sit to read until it is time for the cab to collect me for my physio session. On standing, my back registers a clear objection and this intensifies as I hobble up the hill to the meeting point.

By the time I get to Matt’s I am in a significant amount of pain but this is something he is equipped to deal with and we spend the session working on it as well as the cause of it. It seems I have a rather large diastasis recti - a separation of the abdominal muscles which almost certainly began during pregnancy but has since expanded due to fatness and the wrong kind of exertion - and now my abs are no longer abbing at all. The muscles of my back have been compensating to stabilise my trunk when I am upright and because there is rather a lot of me, they are protesting. I must undertake a lengthy course of physio for the abdominal problem specifically and, if this fails, have surgery. In the meantime, an abdominal brace can help. We also talk about the body signals I could have noted but didn’t which indicated my body was not in a good state to attempt resistance machines or charging up hills. Hmmm.

On the way home, we stop at the tiny rural station to collect the husband. As we turn in and I see his familiar, long, lanky form with its broad shoulders and narrow hips and his characteristic stance of standing with his toes turned slightly in, I am overwhelmed with a wave of love for him. It feels as though I have been away for months and I’ve been spending that time doing strange and alien things. My husband, my David, fills me with a sense of relief and home. He is a little bewildered but gratified to be met with hugs and declarations of love.

Dave is impressed by the lodge and begins to talk about building a mini-version of it in the back garden. I distract him from this topic as this is a variation on his hobby of the building of unique sheds and his ideas and plans for these can get very detailed indeed. I settle him in and, still feeling exhausted and in pain, go upstairs for a nap.

I wake feeling a little better and begin the romantic dinner I had promised him. He is a little wary of this as I am not known for my culinary skills but a rump steak is a rump steak and it actually turns out quite well. The romantic ambience may be marred a little by my model taking up 2/3rds of the table but he is accustomed to his wife being a nerdy weirdo and we have a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

Saturday 19th September

I wake to clattering in the kitchen and come down to find him making coffee. So familiar is this scene and so powerful the sense of relief and safety at seeing him there that I burst into tears. I had not realised how lonely and anxious I had been being in this lodge on my own with impaired mobility and a not inconsiderable amount of pain for the last 16 days. I have been operating with a constant sense of vigilance and knowledge that if anything were to go wrong, I’d have to deal with it alone while not very physically capable of doing so. It feels as though he is on duty now and I can stand down for a bit. Dave appears to regard this as entirely understandable and suggests, because our plans for axe-throwing and archery have been rained off, that we have a lazy day today.

I take this license to something of an extreme and go back to bed after breakfast and sleep until lunchtime. After lunch, I fall asleep again and wake feeling absolutely wonderful. I wonder how much of my low mood and aches have actually been a product of sleep deprivation. I feel a little guilty abandoning him on his first day but he tells me he has been thoroughly enjoying a lazy day too and this does seem to be the case.

We get dressed up (well, I do) and go out for dinner. I am allowing myself a treat day which means I do not have to have a calorie deficit but there must not be a surplus. As I have been asleep all day, I have only eaten 500 calories and this leaves me with calories to spend on fish and chips and wine! The husband accuses me of being tipsy but this is a scurrilous lie. I submit evidence of my utter sobriety and his faux disapproval.

We walk back to the lodge and cuddle up on the sofa and watch The Batman.

Sunday 20th September

I feel a little delicate today - thick-headed and groggy. I consult my body about this. It says, “Fermented grape juice bad” and then refuses to comment further. I tell it that what it needs is tea and feed it several gallons along with a bottle of water and a healthy breakfast. It responds well to this.

The abdominal brace arrives looking like a medieval torture device and the husband assists in strapping me into it. It feels great and I immediately feel the pressure being taken off my back. It does not show beneath my clothing and even gives me a more streamlined silhouette! I tell the husband that I could wear this all day and it would be particularly good for conferences. Then I sit down. A tremendously loud creaking ensues and my boobs are immediately pushed up into my face. Rather than addressing this problem with a gentlemanly seriousness, my husband of 25 years laughs so hard he has to support himself on a wall to prevent himself from falling over. This continues until I feel compelled to threaten to remove his testicles in his sleep.

Domestic harmony restored, we begin on our weekend plan of enjoyable exercise. It is a beautiful day so we set out for a walk across the hilly fields of the resort. I am pleased to find that I am able to walk in intervals at a moderate pace for an hour. I feel like me again! David is gratifyingly impressed by this and says I have made remarkable progress in 18 days. I suppose I have! The hours of sleep probably didn’t hurt either.

We make our way to the games hall where I have a rest and then we embark on serious competition. Our shared interests have always been walking, cycling and the playing of games. In the early years of our marriage, during which we were poor, we very much enjoyed “date days” in which we’d leave our little daughter with one set of her grandparents and walk 6 miles through Epping Forest to a pub which did a lunch deal and spend the afternoon there playing darts, pool and cards before walking home again. This afternoon reminds us of these days and some sentimentality ensues.

By the end of the afternoon, the husband has won one game of air hockey, the table tennis and the pool through underhanded practices and luck while I have won the other game of air hockey, the shuffleboard match and the croquet through superb skill and good judgement. He has threatened my person with a table tennis paddle, a croquet mallet and a pool cue and I have insulted his scorekeeping, ancestors and masculinity while engaging in highly inventive swearing. We make our way home for a romantic evening which is none of this diary’s business.

Monday 21st September

I sleep well again and the weather is still glorious so we decide to have another day of active fun. My body makes some objections to this but I tell it to shut up and stop ruining my fun. The husband observes my slower pace and stiffness but I assure him I will be fine once I get going.

Today, we have the choice of disc golf of foot golf. I favour the former and the husband the latter. We decide to do both and I reason that this will be a full body workout! Neither of us have played either before. It is quickly revealed that I am terrible at both while the husband is rather good at them. This inspires some more inventive swearing on my part.

There are 9 holes but by Hole 4, my back is becoming painful and I am having difficulty steadying my breathing. We sit for a while. We play two more holes but I become dizzy and uncoordinated and the husband becomes worried and match is abandoned. He declares victory simply because he consistently got his disc and football into their appropriate receptacles in way less tries than I did, but I maintain that I would have made a stunning comeback had the game continued to completion. I guess we shall never know!

We have booked a table for a pub lunch for which I had also budgeted calories but it is difficult for me to sit upright and I am not able to enjoy it. We finish quickly and made our way, slowly and painfully back to the lodge. I feel very dizzy and weak by this point so I immediately lie down and fall into a long and deep sleep.

I wake in considerable pain and a very low mood. The last two days had been so much fun and this one simply reminds me how weak and limited I am. I run the “I am a broken and decrepit old lady who will never be fully mobile again and whose future holds only disablement, decline and death” theory by the husband who refutes it forcefully. He reminds me that before the bleed, I was going on long walks, visiting the gym three times a week and decorating the house. He tells me to be patient and stop being silly. I remind him that I did not do the right things to control my weight and minimise the loss of fitness while recovering from the bleed. I call myself names. He gets annoyed and defends my honour telling me that nobody insults his wife like that, including his wife. This makes me cry again but in a happier way and we spend a quiet evening in which I work on my model, he offers helpful suggestions and I tell him to sod off.

Tuesday 22nd September

I continue to be in considerable pain when I wake up but stretches and a short, gentle walk ease it somewhat. I consult my body about how it is feeling and it expresses dismay at its continued existence and informs me that it hates me. I ignore it and prepare for today’s physio.

The husband is off home today. He has brought an empty suitcase which we fill with about 2/3rds of my belongings. I had packed rather anxiously in preparation for every eventuality and could not lift my own suitcase. He grumbles about being used as a packhorse and I lovingly tell him to shut up.

The station at Umberleigh is so tiny and seldom used that it has no ticket machine or office and is, in fact, just a platform. In order to get the train to stop, you have to listen out for it and then step to the edge and wave something at it until the driver sees you and sounds his horn to indicate that he will stop. I find this very endearing, if impractical!

After seeing Dave off, the cab driver takes me on to my physio session with Matt. He sets to work trying to fix the muscle damage I appear to have done to my back. While I am in a somewhat vulnerable and ludicrous position on the floor with my bum elevated on blocks, we talk about the failure of my week of intuitively listening to my body. I have made some efforts at this but mostly I have tried to reason with it in order to get it to do things it does not want to do. Bodies do not work like this.

Nevertheless, Matt says we need to work with the brain I have and that it is clearly not one that does well with intuitively attending to physiological signals. It is one that works on systems and models and schedules and data and measurements. Therefore he proposes a compromise between the “listening to the body” thing and my model-making, rationalising tendencies.

For my final week, I am to have a 15-minute walk in the morning and then carefully evaluate how my body responds to exercise that day. If it is raring to go and wants to push speed and distance, it is a 100% day. If it manages it without difficulty but is not energised, it is a 75% day. If it finds it hard going but manages it, it is a 50% day. If it protests and goes into cardio and things ache, it is a 25% day. If I am not sure which day it is, I am to round downwards.

Then I can have what he referred to as a “folder” of things to do on any given kind of day.
100% - feel free to push limits and go to my limit. (Only one of these in a row)
75% - do whatever was on the agenda - walks, gym, class etc. but no heroics
50% - do a downshifted version of what was on the agenda - a 15 minute walk rather than a 30 minute one and 20 minutes of light weight exercises at home rather than resistance machines at the gym
25% - exercise is now done. Just get up and move a bit a couple more times. Some stretching exercises and a tidy up perhaps.
0% - illness days - rest, avoid going online, have some kind of calorie deficit.

If I accurately evaluate my capacities on any given day and have a model of expectations for a series of levels I can succeed every day even if that day is mostly sedentary. Matt says he would not usually propose such a complex system, but he thinks it would work with my psychology. It does. I like this. I think I can do this.

Matt also takes issue with my pessimistic negativity about my recovery prospects. Again. He said my body is actually responding very promisingly and has made a huge amount of progress in a very short time. I could reliably not walk 15 minutes a day when I got here. I could not pick things up off the floor, do stairs in the normal alternating fashion or get my ankles onto the opposing knee to put socks on in the normal fashion. I have also lost 5.5 kg (about 12lbs) already and this makes everything easier, even if some of this initial loss is water. My cardiovascular system seems to be particularly responsive and is doing very promising things with regard to heart rate variability and resting heart rate.

This is not a body that is giving up, Matt asserts. It is a body that is bearing up remarkably well under the strain of having twice as much weight as it was built for, having got very out of condition from lying down for several months while recovering from blood loss, having a profound lack of trunk stability due to separated abs and also continuing to compensate for brain injury on my right hand side. It is a fundamentally sound and strong body and I can expect it to rebound particularly well when I remove some of the strain from it and gently retrain it into fitness.

For most of my adult life, I have been fit and active. My body remembers that and is doing its best to get back to being so. I just have to do the right things to help it. And I am mostly doing so! But one of the things I am not doing well enough is resting and recovering properly. If I shift my mindset to see light and resting days as part of recovery rather than a hindrance to it, continue to press forward intelligently and realistically and to lose weight steadily, I can expect to recover fully, walk a couple of miles on a daily basis and get myself up from the floor if I fall over. I can, in short, resume being a fully functioning biped if I am patient and sensible and accept that the timescale for this is not the end of September but Christmas.

Matt also felt that I should apologise to my body for not giving it credit for how well it is serving me under extremely difficult circumstances and appreciate it for coping exceptionally well under immense pressure and making remarkable progress.

Even though I have definitely just been told off, I feel a new sense of optimism and positivity as I limp out of Matt’s gym having been stretched and twisted in a variety of ways and told to go home and spend the rest of the day resting and soak in a hot tub. I go home and spend the rest of the day resting and I soak in a hot tub.

I am not in a state of permanent disability with an inevitably declining body. My inability to do all the active things I want to do right now is not evidence of laziness, vice, lack of discipline or absence of moral character. It’s a lack of capacity. As Carrie put it, I am not evil or profoundly personally flawed. I am just fat. And unfit. I can and will get less fat and more fit and I shall view this as a longterm project to be pursued sensibly and intelligently with the recognition that rest is a central part of recovery. The graded recovery plan goes into action tomorrow. Full mobility by this Christmas is the new goal and being a healthy weight and a fit and active 53-year-old the goal for next Christmas. Sorry, body. And thank you. Onwards!

.

 I have just finished my second week of physical rehabilitation in rural Devon following medical recovery from a serious health incident. I find humour invaluable to surviving such things and also sharing my every thought with other people. You’re welcome! Week One is here.

Wednesday 9th September

I wake up at 4AM and am unable to go to back to sleep. I do the approved thing and get up and take a book into the dimly-lit sitting room. I had been saving Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister for this reset but an hour into it, I find I am not engaged. The prose is all wrong. When it comes to film, I get impatient with the purists who complain if anything diverges from the author’s intentions but it seems I am a purist in the realm of text. I have heard good things about the film, though, so I will watch that. I go back to sleep for an hour.

Today, Matt and I meet to continue the exercises that will ultimately enable me to get up off the floor, talk about my first week and plan the second. I perform deep squats satisfactorily, if not elegantly.

I then become the victim of coerced speech! Matthew insists I affirm that the first week has been a success and that I am doing very well. He then takes my list of intentions for the forthcoming week and reframes it in language that is less punitive and more compassionate. It seems my report card for the first week looks something like this:

Commitment: A+

Effort: A+

Following his instructions: B

Positivity: C

Keeping a diary of my subjective experience of my bodily state rather than a spreadsheet of measurements, data and analysis: F

Fine. I shall work on the last two.

The main hindrance to my recovery continues to be insufficient sleep. I averaged four hours a night in my first week. This is a lifelong problem. I think too much and my body believes I am a nocturnal animal and keeps trying to achieve that. (See previous post about it being a lying bastard). This does not work for my life, however, so I just have to try to do the right things to sleep at nighttime.

I am allowed to push myself a little harder in the forthcoming week and my mission looks like this:

I return to the lodge where my plan is to polish up the diary entries I have been adapting, transfer it to Substack and publish it. This should take half an hour. The plan is derailed by the resort’s WiFi. It drops out repeatedly causing me to paste and repaste the same passages multiple times believing it had not saved. Two hours later, I think I have finally got a single draft and publish. I have not and a mess of repeating text is sent to 7000 people. The almost non-existent WiFi continues to fail me and I finally get it sorted by 9PM and I still have to put away a grocery delivery and cook.

I had committed to being more adventurous with food and trialling five new recipes this week. Today’s offering is prawn linguine. It is high protein and calorie controlled but has way too much flavour for my liking and is sadly unmashable. I will work on an adaptation.

By the time I clear up, collapse in a heap, pick myself up again, have a shower and get into bed, it is 3AM. This is not a good start to my week of focusing particularly on sleep, and the moral of the story is that I should have kept my commitment to staying offline and not publishing anything.

Thursday 10th September

I sleep for 3.5 hours and feel exhausted. My quads are also objecting to the deep squats. I spend a few minutes trying to kick my own bum again to enable locomotion and am semi-successful. There is, however, a bright spot in my morning. The patheticness of the tea mugs in this lodge, containing a thimbleful of tea that merely soaks into the tongue, had been bothering me. I ordered this decent (pint) sized one and her cheerful and competent roundness and capacity bring me joy. Everything will be alright now.

I decide today is an Active Recovery day rather than a push day and go for a 15-minute walk and spend the morning working on the model toy shop I am building. This ridiculous hobby is so satisfying.

I fall asleep in the afternoon and wake up in a much better mood. My legs insist they cannot be used today but I force them out for a 10 minute walk. This becomes a 15 minute walk because I feel I can and then a 20 minute one because I am enjoying the movement and music and ultimately, the 30-minute walk is done! I am so buoyed by this that I cool down by doing a wiggly dance around the kitchen to Shocking Blue’s Venus (Yeah, baby, she’s got it.) Is this positive enough for you, Matthew?

The evening is less successful as I attempt another new meal and produce a depressing beef stir fry that I will not be trying again. The low calorie “trifle” (sugar-free jelly with low-fat yogurt and strawberries) was much better in principle but in practice, I’d forgotten to clean the chopping board before chopping the strawberries so they were marinaded in onion, ginger and garlic. I cannot recommend this.

Friday 11th September

By following all sleep hygiene rules, I manage to sleep for 5.5 hours in two phases and feel great. When replacing my towel on the rail, it slips down and falls on the floor. I squat down and scoop it up automatically and then feel a leap of joy as I realise I have not been able to do this for months. Picking things up off the floor has involved a very ungainly wide stance semi-squat and about 5 attempts.

After breakfast, I skip up the hill to meet the cab driver to take me to Matt’s studio. I burst into it telling Matt that I feel very positive indeed and describing the victory over the towel. I add that this more positive attitude is something I took on with my own agency and not because he told me to because mental autonomy is very important. Matt ignores these kinds of utterances which is probably wise.

He then spends the next hour doing his best to reduce that positivity. We go over the lunges and the deep squats we have been practicing so far and then move onto a mat where I am to do further stretching in the form of kneeling and sitting back on my heels. I get down to and up from the floor with the aid of a box. This is very challenging in terms of both coordination and strength and we do it for 45 minutes with breaks for stretching and pressing a hard ball into my leg.

Matt warns me I am likely to feel sore later (ya think?) and to stretch and use the hot tub this evening. We go over the principle of Active Recovery and how it is part of recovery, not slacking. The aim is to keep myself moving and send blood round all my muscles while not elevating my heart rate to enable my body to recover and have another day when I can push my limits again as soon as possible.

I do remember this later when I have the most difficulty I have had walking and the deepest weariness since I arrived and even attempting to move about makes my heart rate escalate rapidly and my whole body yell at me to sit down. I gently push myself through stretching exercises and get in the hot tub. I sit in it and have a big, ugly cry. I call the husband and tell him I am still having a great time without him but that if he really wants to come and stay with me after I’ve done another week, I can tolerate him and we can do some of the fun activities like archery and axe-throwing. He tells me that I clearly intend to kill him for the life insurance and make it look like an accident and he’d be mad to fall for that. He’s coming next Friday.

I decide against adventurous cooking experiments and mash some tuna into a potato. This also helps.

Saturday 12th September

I wake up at 8 after having achieved 6 hours sleep in a window of 9 and feel considerably restored. My legs protest as I push them through the morning ritual but they simmer down by the time I am sitting on the patio with tea and my heart rate does not escalate. I decide today is definitely an Active Recovery day and not a push day. I am growing as a person.

I have by now read all the books downloaded on my Kindle and the WiFi is not good enough to download any more so I have ordered paper copies of P. D. James books which I read over 30 years ago and the first two have arrived. I am excited about this and my morning mission is to walk slowly half a mile up a hill with my stick to collect them, sit and read for half an hour and then walk down again. My life is very simple right now. There’s a certain charm in that.

Mid-afternoon, my body tells me that sleep is essential immediately. I am torn. Is this a time I should listen to it and be unconscious for an hour or so while it repairs my muscles or is this daytime napping a habit that needs to be resisted for better overall sleep? I tell my body that it will first go for a five minute walk to a bench from which I can still see the lodge and read for 15 minutes and then walk back. If it is still insistent on sleep, it can have it.

Body protests dramatically for the first two minutes, then settles into its stride and becomes a little more alert. We will wait this lag out. Best of all, I find I have good mobile reception from the bench! This makes publishing this week’s diary an option again. Substackians were surprisingly positive about last week’s offering. Weirdos.

Absolutely nothing interesting or amusing happens today. I produce a fish pie which is acceptable and, importantly, mashable.

Sunday 13th September

I manage 5.5 hours sleep in a row which is excellent and I feel physically good today. I also feel quite low and unmotivated, though. It is pouring with rain which might have something to do with it but I also feel generally uninspired. I go through the motions of the morning routine - minor domestic chores, stretches, warm-up exercises and breakfast - and continue to feel flat.

I have deliberately been avoiding looking at online discourse for fear of seeing a “current thing” that people are being wrong about and finding an essay about the nature of their wrongness writing itself in my head, thus getting lost in my own head for several hours and neglecting the focus on my body and health that is my full-time job right now.

Nevertheless, I decide to have a look at X via an account I have that does not do anything but just lets me follow people talking about things I might want to write about. I immediately see people being wrong on the subject of surrogacy and making an argument that does not work even on its own terms and an essay starts to write itself in my head. I had prepared for this eventuality, however, so I get out my notebook and pen and set a timer for 30 minutes. During that time, I jot down an outline for an essay about valid concerns about surrogacy coming from feminists and social conservatives and then narrowing down to the argument I think does not work and why I think it does not work and what is a better way to come at that particular element of the issue. When the alarm goes off, I put the pen down and close the notebook feeling virtuous.

I also now feel in a much better mood and motivated to exercise. I think I might be going a bit stir crazy with the sameness of the days here now and the lack of intellectual stimulation now I am on Day 12 of 28. I might have to allow for an hour to write in the mornings in between my morning walk and either going to the gym or being subjected to contortions by Matt. Just to jot down ideas and outlines for essays and arguments. No actual writing of essays. I will have to give this more thought to be sure it is not just work trying to sneak back in under a guise of an unmet psychological/intellectual need. Hmmm.

Much brightened, I set off for the gym where the next mission is arm machines. I am not looking forward to this because, unlike my legs which are quite strong still due to carrying me about, my arms are limp noodles and dislike being reminded of this. The workout is, as anticipated, pathetic but I manage it and jot down starting weights with satisfaction. I will build on this. On the plus side, these are all familiar machines and not ones inclined to try to eat me. I have previously needed to be rescued from the jaws of one by two bodybuilders who were very kind and respectful and sincerely attempted to conceal their amusement but were not entirely successful.

I dedicate the afternoon to working on my model which is coming along nicely with the rationale that using my arms will prevent them from seizing up. This strategy is only semi-successful. I do stretching exercises and soak in the hot tub before making myself a comforting minced beef hotpot and finishing P.D. James’ Cover Her Face. Has anybody ever surpassed James for late 20th century murder mysteries? Ruth Rendell and Reginald Hill are contenders but I think not.

Monday 14th September

After the fourth day of sticking strictly to good sleep hygiene practices, I sleep for 6 hours in a row at nighttime and wake up feeling like I am on some wonderful drug. I screenshot the evidence of this and send it to Matt exultantly.

I come happily down the stairs and realise, at the bottom, that I did this like a normal person, one foot after the other, rather than jerkily, one step at a time, hanging onto the bannister as I have been doing since the bleed. I go back up in the same fashion and come back down again. Woohoo!

My joy is soon tempered by some anxiety for this morning contains……Aqua Aerobics. I really do not want to do this. I am not one for group exercise to loud upbeat music at the best of times let alone in a swimming costume with my current degree of fatness, level of unfitness and lack of coordination. However, Matt is keen on me doing this because it is the absolute best way for me to get cardio exercise and full-body movement without falling over or straining anything. Fine.

I happened to witness an aqua aerobics class last week while seated on the leg press in the gym. I was reassured to see that it was a class of women of my age and older, a couple of whom were of similar proportions to me. A sense of rhythm and coordination did not seem to be a requirement. This morning, however, the fact that anybody using the leg press will be able to see me flailing about chaotically feels much less reassuring. Nevertheless, I set off.

Aqua Aerobics is both terrible and precisely what I need. It starts badly when I fail to notice the steps that allow one to just walk into the pool and attempt to descend the ladder at the far end. I do not have the coordination for this and try and fail to reach for the second step several times. By this time, people are looking at me so I abandon the effort and just fall backwards into the pool. The splash does not exactly make them stop looking at me. After that, it all goes quite well, even if it is a bit overwhelmingly loud and frantic and yet somehow also tedious. I cannot do all the exercises but when I cannot, I do a similar one that I can manage and I take breaks when needed. I do not enjoy aqua aerobics but it is the most sustained full body workout I have managed so far. The other ladies are regulars and they are friendly and welcoming and I enjoy a chat with them afterwards.

On my way back to the lodge, I decide to try what I think will be a short cut. It is not and ten minutes later, I am standing in a field. I retrace my steps and make my way back. By the time I stagger, dripping, into the lodge, I have done an additional mile’s walk and a sudden downpour has washed most of the chlorine out of my hair. It is important to stay positive at such times, I think. However, I am now extremely weary.

After lunch and several gallons of restorative tea, I do my grocery order for Week Three. The husband will be here for four days so I must shop accordingly. He does not need to lose weight having always had the opposite problem and struggled not to be underweight (bastard). I order cheese and sausages and peanut butter to ensure he does not waste away. I briefly consider forgetting to order coffee as an issue of conscientious objection. When we married, he drank tea like a decent person, but was led astray by the lure of the evil bean shortly after our daughter was born and he felt the need for more efficient caffeine before work. That I did not divorce him demonstrates the strength of my wifely loyalty and commitment to our marriage. I decide that this is not the time for an intervention and order the bloody coffee.

I spend the evening reading. Today is another day for trying new high-protein, calorie controlled recipes and I attempt salmon fishcakes.

Tuesday 15th September

Again, I sleep for 6 hours in a row and wake up feeling good. The sleep hygiene plan is working. However, while making my tea, the peripheral vision in my right eye begins to swirl alarmingly. I attempt to fish the teabag out with a spoon and miss the cup. A migraine is incoming. I may be able to ward it off or I may not. I drink the tea because caffeine helps and take ibuprofen and ginger which also help, get myself a bottle of water, some biscuits and beef jerky and head back upstairs carefully because my balance is very much off kilter. I close the curtains, play an audiobook and lie down on the bed to see which way this will go.

Two hours later, it seems to me that I feel a bit better. I get up gingerly and discover that I now feel as though I have a thoroughly undeserved hangover but my vision and coordination seem to be working. I have tea and test this by going for a gentle walk. That will either make me feel better or worse and decide whether I will be seeing Matt this afternoon. I feel slightly better so I accept that I will be doing this.

I arrive a few minutes early so wander up the street. This is the first time I have noticed what this part of the town is called. West Country town names are often strikingly peculiar and have fascinating origins in both Celtic and Anglo-Saxon history. This one does not.

I feel sorry for East-The-Water that seemingly no-one has ever loved it enough to give it its own peculiar name based on its distinctive features and its identity derives entirely from its location by the river. I tell it that it is more than a mere accessory to a waterway and is beautiful and important in its own right.

Due to my impaired balance, Matt decides against lunge and squat style exercises and instead I lie on my back (from where it is impossible to fall over) to work on strengthening my abdominal muscles. On getting up from the floor Matt notes that I can actually do that quite capably when I have a bench to assist me. Indeed. The problem is that the last two times I have fallen over I didn’t have one. This makes me anxious about travelling. I last fell shortly after getting back from the US and my husband was there to put his hands down for me to push up on. I have been having horrible imaginings that if that had happened while I was in the US, somebody would have had to call an ambulance to get me up. Matt points out that Americans have hands too. This is true. They also have chairs and are generally much more friendly and helpful than Londoners. If I had fallen there, I could likely have just told people what I need to be able to get up. No ambulances, fire trucks, forklift trucks or anything else my imagination can summon up would be required. Just a passerby willing to put down a hand or fetch a chair. I perceive that I may have been taking my very British fear of being a nuisance a little too far and catastrophising the hypothetical scenario somewhat.

Matt says he does not want me to count on being able to get up unaided before I leave here and be discouraged if that does not happen. He demonstrates the progression of steps to that happening. I note them carefully.

1. Leaning on a bench heavily with both hands from a kneeling position to bring one knee up and push myself to my feet as I am currently doing.

2. Using one hand on the bench to support me doing that while the other pushes on the raised knee.

3. Using the bench for balance only while the force comes from my legs and the stability from balancing over the raised knee.

4. Not relying on the bench at all.

I see. I can accept a need to be more patient and more willing to potentially accept help from strangers and practice those steps towards independent splat recovery at the same time.

Matt again insists that I recognise how much progress I have made this week. He uses words like “smashing” and “awesome” to describe my improved flexibility, mobility and stamina. He points out that I achieved all my goals and that, even when a migrainous crash threatened due to overexertion caused by getting lost and having to walk much further than planned, I recovered from it quickly and carried on. I think of all the active things I’d like to be doing and could do before I lost a third of my blood. He tells me to stop comparing myself to the me of a year ago and instead compare myself to the me of two weeks ago. He is, of course, correct. These four weeks are doing for me exactly what I hoped they would do. I am stronger, fitter and more capable in many measurable ways. Also, very slightly slimmer! At the same time, my time here is making me depressingly aware of my physical limitations and frailties because I have nothing else to distract myself with. That was also the point of these four weeks. It’s a bit upsetting, but it’s also very important to remain aware of both what needs fixing and that I am, in fact, fixing it! It is all going extremely well. I am grateful to Matt and should be proud of myself.

The plan for Week Three is a bit scary. This is because there is no plan. No walks, classes or trips to the weights room to tick off. I am specifically not to plan ahead. Instead, I am to get up each morning, survey my body for its energy levels and any aches and pains, factor in how much sleep I have had and what my body feels like doing, then decide what is the best thing I can do today to progress my recovery. I am to stop and check in with my body a few minutes after starting and regularly throughout and stop while I still have energy in the tank. I am to consider what foods and meal timings will best support what it is I want to do and also note when I am hungry and not hungry. I am to observe tiredness and evaluate whether it indicates a need for invigorating movement, fuelling, rest or sleep. I am, in short, to practice intuitively inhabiting my body as somebody who is in tune with it and cares about it and understands what it needs, rather than somebody who regards it as a vehicle for my brain and a frustrating inconvenience when it malfunctions.

OK, then! I will not think of this as passively “listening to my body” and doing whatever it says it wants in the moment. I will think of it as learning to properly operate this rather spectacular machine I have been given, repairing it and maintaining it! I can do this.

When I get back to the lodge, my body informs me it would like to rest now. That works well for me. I make tea and fetch my next P.D. James mystery. I set out a table and a cushion for the twice daily practice of getting up off the floor. Aside from that, we will play Week Three by ear! Onwards!

Following the dramatic loss of a third of my blood, I recovered medically but not functionally. I couldn’t find a rehabilitation programme without woo or enforced group bonding, so I invented one. I am spending four weeks alone in a lodge in Devon, with a gym, a pool and a physiotherapist called Matt, making physical recovery my full-time job. Readers here for Enlightenment rationalism and liberal principles should ignore me for four weeks while I conquer putting my socks on.

Wednesday 2nd September.

I wake up and immediately began rethinking the idea that an appropriate response to having difficulty walking to the shop on the corner is to travel 6 hours via tube, three trains and a cab to the middle of nowhere.

The husband conveyed me and my suitcase as far as Paddington and we arranged assistance to transfer. I settled in with an audiobook. Sophie Hannah’s new Poirot is excellent.

I was met at my destination by a cab driver and remembered how much I love the West Country dialect. “You’m” (you are) is particularly nice and I’d like to adopt it. Unfortunately, I am from Essex, regularly voted the second ugliest accent in England (thank god for Birmingham).

The lodge is perfect. I particularly love the bedroom with one wall of glass overlooking the forest. A week’s food arrived shortly after I did. The drive to nest gave me energy so I unpack and put everything away and established a reading corner with lots of murder mysteries, a lounging space for watching true crime, paleoanthropology and historical fiction and a table for building a model toy shop, because this is a thing I do now. I regard all this with satisfaction, revel in the solitariness of it all and collapse in a heap.

I regain the energy to move on realising it has become dark. Movement is both difficult and painful. The quiet now feels more threatening than tranquil. I can no longer see into the forest from my lovely big window, but become aware that anybody or anything in it can see me and I cannot currently run. The lodge suddenly strikes me as perfect for filming the kind of horror movie in which I yell at the protagonists for thinking a lonely cabin in the forest was a good place to stay. I have an intense longing for the husband. I close all the curtains and call him. I tell him I don’t miss him at all and am glad to be away from him. He tells me he’s equally glad to be rid of me and to get off the phone because the exotic dancers have just arrived. I feel much better knowing I am loved and missed and go to sleep.

Thursday 3rd September

I wake up early and have tea on the patio overlooking the forest and the lodge is beautiful and cosy again. There are other lodges, a social hub, a restaurant and a leisure centre. Imagining myself on the set of The Evil Dead last night may have been an overwrought reaction to fatigue.

A cab arrives to take me to Matt’s physio clinic/training gym. They’d told me to allow an hour to get there even though it is only 14 miles away. I now understand why. The entire route is made of narrow, winding, single track roads. We’re fortunate to get half a mile before encountering another car or a farm vehicle and then somebody has to reverse to a “passing place”. Everybody generally seems to know which of them should do that, but on one occasion, there was a standoff where we sat for ten minutes with the two drivers glaring at each other until the other finally backed up and my cab driver declared victory. In between passing places, he goes very fast and then slams on the brakes when he sees another car. Fortunately, I can have my spine realigned at my destination.

Matt is great and goes over the plan. He has laminated it and informs me this makes it official and incontrovertible. I solemnly agree. When working together, we will be focusing on the practical movements I cannot currently perform and in between those, I’ll be following instructions on building strength and stamina. The Boss Level of regaining independence is being able to get myself up off the floor.

To this end, Matt informs me we will be starting with a supported lunge-like movement. I tell him my body will not do that and then demonstrate my body not doing that. He spends 10 minutes jabbing me in the legs with a plastic thumb and a rolling pin and then my body does that. I am to perform specific stretching exercises and roller my own legs for the next few days. I am also to walk no more than a mile and stop if I become breathless, perform strange poses in the swimming pool but not swim and lift weights that are almost weightless. Apparently, we are raising the floor of my stamina and endurance before making any demands on it. I have been overwhelming my systems and causing them to crash.

I go back to the lodge feeling great and enjoying the new flexibility of my legs. The man is clearly a genius and his warnings that I will have difficulty moving after this session and need to follow strict active recovery advice seem entirely unfounded. Two hours later, I attempt to walk to the kettle to make tea and find my legs unwilling to support me. The man is clearly a monster and I am broken forever. Only the urgent need for tea propels me onwards. I collapse on the sofa and call reception to tell them I would like them to fill the hot tub after all. I watch Harlots for the rest of the evening while intermittently standing and attempting to kick my own bum as instructed. I then crawl upstairs (literally) to bed.

Friday 4th September

I emerge from sleep feeling very low and tired and walking at all is difficult. I find myself feeling quite frightened to be this weak and limited. I blame myself for this. I did not voluntarily lose so much blood but I could have done much better at doing gentle exercise and not eating so much while dealing with it. I was already very overweight before that and not nearly as fit as I could have been. I am also inclined to think my limitations today are really a matter of pathetic laziness and lack of discipline and I should force myself to move. I have promised not to do this, however, so I spend more time kicking myself up the bum on the patio, which feels fitting.

I realise that I am feeling lonely. This is not a feeling I am accustomed to, because usually, even when I am alone, I am connected to people on Substack and social media. I text my four closest friends pretending to be fine and feeling positive so as not to make a fuss. They are not fooled. The two women encourage me to be kind and compassionate to myself and talk to myself the way I’d talk to them if they were in this position. The two men focus on immediate problem-solving and long-term goal orientation and offer jocular encouragement. I am reminded (yet again) that psychological sex differences absolutely exist and that I love them all.

Restricted to the lodge, I spend the day researching high-protein, calorie controlled meals and arranging to have ingredients delivered next week. I do not think my usual rotation of four different kinds of mashy gloop will inspire me to stick to a healthy diet. Soon there will be lean beef stir fry, salmon and potato fishcakes, prawn linguine and Spanish omelettes. I feel better after this and read the latest Ruth Irons domestic thriller before having an early night.

Saturday 5th September

I awake on Saturday feeling good, gingerly test my legs and find them functional. It has also stopped raining! I arm myself with a map of the resort and set off to explore and specifically to find the gym and familiarise myself with the machinery. On my way, I locate the deer hide. The deer themselves appear to be highly skilled at hiding. I call in at the restaurant and check their afternoon tea menu which is perfectly satisfactory! I am now feeling a little tired so I head for the gym.

Unfortunately, the gym is located on the top of a mountain. I bravely scale it in stages and arrive in the lobby only to collapse in a sofa and be unable to form words. It seems Matt has been speaking to them about my arrival and they were accepting of this. After half an hour I am able to stand up but testing machines is out of the question so I take photos of it in order to watch videos of any I am not familiar with before I next attempt mountaineering.

I make my way back to the lodge and am restored by a virtuous tuna pasta and several gallons of tea. I spend the afternoon working on my model and, on standing, discover that my legs are, again, staging a protest. This seems like a good time for more stretching and testing out the hot tub.

I uncover the hot tub and survey it. Entry appears to require some clambering and it is, by this time, dark. I have visions of myself being eventually found floating face down. I call the husband so he can stay on the phone until I am safely ensconced in it. He cheerfully does so and also informs me that he’s taking advantage of my absence to put his feet up and do absolutely nothing. This means he has embarked on a major renovation or gardening project that he thinks I will be happy about. I’m not sure when we developed this code, but after 25 years, we speak it perfectly. The hot tub restores some flexibility and produces sleepiness so I make my way to bed.

Sunday 6th September

I sleep very badly and on trying to get out of bed, find that this was overly optimistic. I eventually make it to the kettle and spend the morning on the sofa in a fug of groggy stiffness, regretting the exuberance of the previous day. Matt reminds me of the “not overdoing it” rule for which there I have a (laminated) sheet of very specific instructions while heroically avoiding I-told-you-soism for which I am grateful.

I fall asleep for the whole of the afternoon after which I feel better and virtuously perform precisely 20 minutes of active recovery from the sheet, watch trashy true crime on YouTube and go to bed.

Monday 7th September

I wake on Monday feeling absolutely great and full of energy. I “listen to my body” and it informs me that it is raring to go and could, in fact, run a marathon. I am sceptical of this and inform it that it will be walking directly and slowly to the gym where it will perform precisely 20 minutes of exercises on leg machines and then walking slowly back.

On my second journey to the gym, I discover that it is not on top of a mountain after all. It is situated at the end of a moderate and short incline. The perception of Saturday was clearly influenced by a fatigued body. Today, my body is behaving like an overexcited Labrador and powers up the incline straining at the leash. It is reluctant to stop walking when we arrive and insists we should do three circuits of the building and then head straight for the cardio machines. I tell it sternly that this is not the plan and to “sit” (on a leg press and perform a moderate number of sets at a lighter weight than I feel capable of).

My body continues to insist it is strong and capable throughout the prescribed stretches, exercises and more stretches and urges doing more but I ignore it. This was a good move because after the prescribed 20 minute rest, it then informs me my legs are made of porridge and walking back is entirely beyond their capabilities. It also insists that it needs a big, greasy burger and chips (fries). I march it home, ignoring its protests and feed it large quantities of lean protein and tea, whereupon it tells me it now needs sleep and puts that into effect immediately in complete disregard of our sleep schedule.

I feel quite low on waking and still extremely tired. I spend the evening watching a documentary about morbidly obese bedbound people in an attempt to remind myself why I am doing this and reassure myself that things could be much worse, while feeling vaguely guilty that this was exploiting other people’s misery and dignity.

Tuesday 8th September

I wake anticipating another crash day as this seems to be the pattern, but instead my body insists it is fine and needs a walk. It is a bit more restrained than the day before - perhaps a more mature and well-trained Labrador? - but I am disinclined to trust it. I take it for a gentle 15 minute walk on flat ground and enjoy it.

I still feel a little low today and spend the morning adapting my diary for Substack. I had made a rule of “absolutely no work” while focusing on fixing my health but really miss writing and feel quite alienated from myself when not doing it. This seems like a fair compromise. I am still focusing on my body and the conflict I am having with it exists whether I write about it or not! I feel a lot more “myself” when I have spent a couple of hours writing.

At lunchtime, my body again insists that it needs a walk so I agree to walk for just ten minutes and have a sandwich on a bench with an excellent view and then see if I am up to any further walking.

The answer to that is “no” and it soon becomes clear I need to go straight back. On the way back, it becomes clear that I need to go straight to bed and I do so, immediately falling into a sleep that my FitBit recorded as “deep.”

I wake feeling very cold and shaky even though the day is warm and my body insists it needed carbohydrates and tea. Beans on toast restore it significantly but I continue to lie on the sofa feeling like a blob of cold porridge.

It strikes me forcibly while lying here that the advice I keep receiving to “listen to my body” may be complete and utter bollocks. My body is demonstrably a lying bastard. It insists it is tired and needs rest when it actually needs exercise. It asserts that pizza and chocolate will make it feel much better when they make it feel horrible. It declares itself to have the strength and stamina of an athlete at the peak of performance when it is actually a fat, middle-aged woman recovering from a serious health crisis who needs to listen to her trainer about moderation, pacing and rest.

I decide I am done “listening to my body.” It has proved itself to be a thoroughly unreliable narrator. I am, instead, going to go with empirical evidence and sound reasoning based on that evidence. If my body insists it needs rest when it has actually been sitting around for three days and has nothing measurably wrong with it, it is being ignored and taken for a walk. If it demands to be allowed to race up hills and jump on elliptical machines when it has only had four hours sleep, its heart rate variability is poor and the plan says “Active Recovery Day. Go for a 15 minute walk at a moderate pace and then stretch” it will be told to shut up and stick to the programme.

At the end of this first week of physical rehabilitation, I find I am feeling decidedly grumpy with my body.

On reflection, I decide this is probably not fair. My body has, after all, put up with 52 years of me mostly forgetting it exists and treating it as a mere vehicle for my brain. It has consistently done its best to cope with whatever I have thrown at it. It has dealt with being significantly underweight and very significantly overweight. It has tolerated being required to move me about for very long shifts of demanding physical work as a care assistant and had to function for long spells of being almost entirely sedentary while I get lost in some project as a writer. It handled regrettable quantities of illicit substances and hazardous activities during its misspent youth. It went on to produce something of way more value than any product of my brain - my daughter. It also replaced and repaired nerves in my head following three stroke-like incidents and has repeatedly had to try to function on little to no sleep. It really is a very forgiving and quite astonishing machine and it is not at all clear that it should not be filing a grievance against me. In fact, I rather think it is.

Matt informs me this first week of full-time effort to restore my physical fitness has been much more successful than I appear to think and I am expanding my capabilities and raising the level of my endurance as intended. My body is actually responding very well to the effort I am putting into giving it what it needs to recover. I need to be patient.

This does not, however, mean that its signals and assertions should be accepted uncritically. It quite clearly both overestimates and underestimates what it needs in different ways and at different times, and what it wants and feels like doing is not always what it should have or is capable of.

Recommendations to “listen to my body” are therefore trite and annoying and need to be, at the very least, qualified. Humans have had bodies that signal needs and drives for millions of years, but it is only relatively recently that we’ve been able to feel fairly confident that a new human will survive into adulthood and, likely, old age. It does seem that science and reason have a significant role to play here.

I propose a collaboration between body and intellect. I commit to listening to you better, body, and trying to meet your needs much better that has historically been the case. I have, indeed, missed very important and accurate signals like “I am a mammal that requires regular sleep.” I shall endeavour to stop doing that. You, in turn, need to accept that I will absolutely overthink this whole recovery thing, but that this can actually be quite useful. I will compile data on how you respond to what we are doing here and research what is and is not good for you and apply evidence and reason to this joint endeavour.

I accept Matt’s assurances that this first week has been a success and go into the second one with optimism that we are on the right track. Work with me on this, please, body? Onwards!

Edit: Apologies that the original version of this has repeated text. I am writing on a mobile phone in a lodge with intermittent WiFi and had some problems transferring a final draft!

(Audio version here)

A strange kind of black-and-white thinking seems to have arisen around conspiracy theories. A surprising number of people appear to think we face a stark choice:

• Believe that people never conspire together for harmful, criminal or antisocial ends.

• Accept all conspiracy theories as inherently plausible.

This, of course, is a false choice. The same principles for evaluation apply to claims about conspiracies as to claims about anything else. Is there evidence for it? Does it make sense? How probable is it? What would falsify it?

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I recently saw Coleman Hughes give an excellent talk on conspiracy theories at the LevelUp 2026 conference. He rooted human susceptibility to them in our evolved psychology. We make sense of things by arranging them into stories, and stories involving agents with motives are easier for us to understand than complex interactions between impersonal processes, mistakes, incompetence and poorly functioning systems. Consequently, when faced with frightening or bewildering problems, we are prone to attributing them to motivated agents who can be identified and fought.

Interestingly, Hughes provided evidence that we are no more inclined to such thinking now than we ever have been. It can feel as though we have become more prone to conspiratorial thinking, but this appearance is likely due to social media which enables proponents of them to be more visible and find each other.

Hughes’ most important observation, from my standpoint, was the way in which conspiratorial thinking prevents liberalism from working as it should. He pointed out that, for a marketplace of ideas to work and systems like due process and knowledge production and democracy to function, we need a working assumption that people we disagree with are wrong rather than evil, duplicitous and intending harm. The first assumption enables productive arguments while the second justifies force, censorship and dismantling of systems of dialogue, justice and democracy.

Following this talk, people queued up to ask questions, and several of them were variations on: “Conspiracies really happen. Consequently, some conspiracy theories are correct, and to dismiss them categorically is to shut down arguments without addressing them.” Some people felt that ‘shutting down’ was the intention of deriding conspiracy theories: a way of delegitimising critiques that challenged the establishment narrative.

This is a reasonable concern. A marketplace of ideas cannot function if we decide that any particular type of claim or critique is automatically invalid. Nevertheless, we cannot solve this problem by treating all such claims as inherently plausible either. Too often, people approach the issue as though faced with a black-and-white choice between gullibility and cynicism. Gullibility means accepting ‘establishment’ narratives uncritically and dismissing allegations of corruption out of hand. Cynicism means finding claims of corruption, deception and powerful hidden agendas inherently plausible. Framed this way, most people would rather be cynical than gullible.

Better than trying to lean towards a pseudo-sophisticated, cynical scepticism of mainstream assumptions that leads to an (ironically, gullible) uncritical acceptance of conspiracy theories, however, is exercising an evidence-based epistemology and sound reasoning. The false choice being offered in these discussions is precisely that - false. It is not that in order not to be a conspiracy theorist you have to deny that conspiracies ever happen. Or if you accept that they do, you have to lend credence to all theories that they have.

In most situations, we accept that some claims of wrongdoing are true and some are false and that this is best determined via evidence. We do not typically think we must commit to either accepting or rejecting all accusations categorically on the grounds that a cynical false positive error (believing wrongdoing has happened when it has not) is better than a gullible false negative error (believing wrongdoing has not happened when it has). We might think of reasonable objections to the ‘believe all women’ stance proposed by some feminists on the grounds that the consequences of not believing victims of rape were far worse than the consequences of a few false accusations being believed. Critics of this stance argued rightly for the importance of applying due process to individual cases.

We know that conspiracies happen. When somebody is convicted of conspiracy to commit a crime, this is because the body of evidence has been deemed to have established beyond reasonable doubt that they did this. Likewise, the reason people can point to large-scale conspiracies such as Watergate, COINTELPRO, MKUltra or tobacco companies covering up the harms caused by their products as examples of conspiracy theories turning out to be true is precisely because evidence established that they were.

This does not mean that everybody who believed such a claim before the decisive evidence emerged was epistemically justified in doing so. Whenever somebody who arrived at a claim through an ideological or tribal narrative later says, “Look! This shows that I was right!”, they are confusing being right with having had good reason to believe they were right. Subsequent evidence can establish the truth of a claim, but it cannot retrospectively make an unreliable method of arriving at that claim reliable.

If their original belief was rooted not in the available evidence but in a tribal narrative, they cannot reasonably claim the later confirmation as evidence that their reasoning was sound. They are also liable to forget all the occasions on which the same method led them to confidently assert claims that turned out to be false. This is the distinction between truth and epistemic competence. Somebody who arrives at the correct answer by an unreliable method has not demonstrated that the method for getting there was sound.

The distinction between truth claims and methods for establishing what is true, and why it matters so much that the latter are reliable, seems counterintuitive to many people. So, let’s try a deliberately extreme thought experiment.

Imagine two warring tribes with different gods and different creation myths.

In Tribe A’s myth, God is the sun. It became lonely, so it created the Earth and put people on it. But it could never get too close without burning them, so the sun flung a rope around the Earth and began swinging it around itself, allowing it to see all the people living there. The purpose of life is to worship and entertain the sun. If humanity fails to do so, the sun will cut the rope and fling the Earth out into the cold and dark.

In Tribe B’s creation myth, the Earth was alone and the people living on it were cold and blind, so they prayed to largely indifferent gods for a lantern to warm them and enable them to see. The gods took pity on them, created one and sent it orbiting around the Earth so that everybody could share its warmth and light. The lantern will eventually go out and the gods have lost interest again, so the purpose of life is to make hay while the sun shines!

Suppose science later establishes, through observations such as stellar parallax together with gravitational theory, that the Earth orbits the sun. This would not confirm Tribe A’s creation myth. Its members could not now take credit for having been right, demand that everybody worship the sun as a god and insist that any other truth claims contained in their myth had thereby been vindicated. One element of their story happened to be correct by accident. Believing creation myths would remain a vastly poorer epistemology than relying provisionally on multiple forms of corroborating scientific evidence.

Consequently, when somebody proposes that a large-scale conspiracy is being perpetrated by the government or by powerful factions within society, the response should be neither, “No, because that doesn’t happen/those people would never do that,” nor, “Yes, because this is the kind of thing that happens/those people are the kind of people who do that.” It should be: “How do you know that?”

We know that human beings are prone to constructing complex, seemingly coherent narratives that make events feel comprehensible and manageable, fit our pre-existing beliefs and map readily onto concepts of in-groups and out-groups. We then reinforce those narratives through confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Our most successful systems of knowledge production are designed precisely to mitigate these tendencies: by demanding evidence, exposing claims to criticism and treating willingness to discover that one is wrong as an intellectual virtue. This applies far more broadly than to conspiracy theories.

One questioner at the conference asked Coleman whether it would help if we stopped using the term ‘conspiracy theory’. He replied that changing the language used to describe a phenomenon does not generally solve the problem, because people will retain the same positive or negative attitudes towards it whatever we call it. I typically agree with this stance. Cultural problems and conflicts are rarely resolved by renaming them.

Nevertheless, I do think ‘conspiracy theory’ is an inaccurate way to describe the problem, and that this inaccuracy lends itself to much of the confusion (and deliberate obfuscation) surrounding the subject. The core problem is not that people develop theories about conspiracies. It is how they arrive at them, why they find them persuasive, and whether they are willing to revise or abandon them when confronted with disconfirming evidence.

The problem, in other words, is with a particular kind of epistemology. I tend to avoid the term ‘conspiracy theory’ because it so readily invites the response that some theories about conspiracies have been verified by evidence. Instead, I prefer to identify the problem as a conspiratorial mindset: a mode of reasoning in which an individual interprets events through a suspicious, low-evidence ideological narrative rather than evaluating claims proportionately to the available evidence.

Somebody with a conspiratorial mindset typically sorts the relevant actors into morally opposed camps: one demographic, tribe or faction is good, another is bad, and society, or some sphere of society, is structured in ways that enable the bad group to oppress the good one. Current events are then interpreted through this theoretical framework. Evidence that could support the narrative is seized upon, even tenuous connections are invested with great significance, and disconfirming evidence is disregarded or explained away. The theory typically becomes increasingly elaborate as more and more inconvenient evidence has to be accommodated without allowing the central narrative to fail.

Below is a diagram of an antisemitic conspiracy theory in which I feature. I have encountered it a number of times while being accused of complicity in a Jewish-led plot to eradicate the white race, undermine Christianity and trans everybody’s children. In this case, the ‘good’ people are white conservative Christians and the ‘bad’ people are Jews. The underlying claim is that Jews control much of intellectual life and the media and use this power to harm the good people. There is seemingly nothing that can disconfirm this hypothesis.

The current conspiracy theory dominating online attention is the one around Lindsay Clancy’s trial for the murder of her three children. She has admitted that she killed them but her defence team is seeking to have her acquitted on the grounds of insanity - specifically, postnatal psychosis. Nevertheless, there is so large an online movement blaming her husband, Patrick, for the killings, that his attorneys have issued a statement, putting accusers with both large and small followings on notice that they are defaming him and causing great psychological harm. The implication is that they are liable to be sued. While most feminists sympathetic to Ms. Clancy have argued that a poor standard of postnatal care and/or reckless overprescribing of psychiatric medication was responsible for her becoming so mentally unwell she committed this terrible act, a subset of her defenders will not be satisfied unless she, a member of the good people (women) is entirely innocent and an agent of the bad people (men) supported by systems of power (patriarchy) is guilty.

In this conspiracy theory, Patrick must therefore have killed his children and thrown his wife out of a window and then convinced her, in her mentally vulnerable state, that she did it. He has been enabled to get away with this, according to the theorists, due to either knowing complicity in a cover-up by multiple parties or patriarchal assumptions that regard men as inherently credible and trustworthy while systematically doubting women and being quick to assume them blameworthy. Michael Wagner, a leading scholar in communication who focuses on how the online environment affects people’s beliefs, described the process by which this kind of thinking develops to CNN

Those conspiracy theories, Wagner said, are often ways of looking at the world that provide answers to questions when an outcome is too uncomfortable for people.

“So, if they’re following the trial and have learned a lot of detail about the trial, but don’t trust the legal system, and don’t trust police, and don’t trust the news media, they may be more likely to adopt conspiracy theories as a way to explain why the outcome they think should happen isn’t happening,” Wagner elaborated, calling the phenomenon a “toxic soup for the development of conspiratorial thinking.”

It is, of course, possible that a conspiracy has taken place and Patrick Clancy actually killed his children. But for this to be true, the conspiracy has to be extremely elaborate. He would have had to somehow fake or manipulate the CCTV footage in both the pharmacy and restaurant, requiring the cooperation of people at two separate businesses. The police officers who examined it would have had to either miss this or been complicit in concealing it. Mr. Clancy would also have had to either convince his wife into lying for him or delude her into believing that she herself killed the children, having already, presumably, planted incriminating searches on her own devices. He would then have had to put on a performance of shock and horror at discovering his children’s bodies that convinced experienced emergency services personnel (unless they were also in on it). This is all incredibly complicated, elaborate and implausible.

It is, however, possible. There would need to be convincing evidence of this, but what has been offered takes the forms of ambiguous forensic details, the absence of Lindsay’s fingerprints on the exercise bands and presence of Patrick’s which can be explained by him removing them and technical problems in retrieving blurred prints, along with Lindsay’s low heart rate and body temperature which do not really indicate anything specific about Patrick and Patrick’s shoes appearing differently in different light and at different angles. Elaborate stories have been constructed around all of these

It is possible to imagine ways in which evidence could emerge that proved an elaborate plot facilitated or enabled by external parties which explained these details. It would make a good psychological thriller. However, none has, and in the absence of it, people dismissing the allegation as a conspiratorial speculation right now would have no reason to be embarrassed if evidence of a plot were later discovered. They are making the right judgement based on what can be known at this time and the reasoning of those making the claim. They should change their minds if the evidence later warranted it and in doing so, they would not become ‘conspiracy theorists’ in the sense that this is meant, because they would not have developed a conspiratorial mindset. They would have accepted that a conspiracy occurred because there was evidence that one had.

Ultimately, we do not have to choose between regarding any theories of a conspiracy having occurred as ideological nonsense or accepting all of them as inherently credible. We can instead choose between having a cynical and politically biased conspiratorial mindset or one which attempts to mitigate the tendency to confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, exercises epistemic humility and critical thinking and regards evidence as essential to determining what is true.

I would argue that we should choose the latter and encourage others to do so too. One particularly good study into “epistemic beliefs’ role in promoting misperceptions and conspiracist ideation” is by Garrett and Weeks, communication scholars. They find (perhaps rather unsurprisingly) that individuals’ beliefs about the nature of knowledge and how one establishes it have important implications for how accurate their perceptions are, with reliance on intuition over evidence and a belief that truth is political being predictive of misperception. They write,

Individuals who view reality as a political construct are significantly more likely to embrace falsehoods, whereas those who believe that their conclusions must hew to available evidence tend to hold more accurate beliefs. Confidence in the ability to intuitively recognize truth is a uniquely important predictor of conspiracist ideation.

Garret and Weeks recommend promoting epistemic beliefs that stress the importance of evidence and the need to be cautious about trusting to feelings.

This certainly seems like a good idea! The issue is how to do so most persuasively. There has not been any notable absence of people informing their political opponents that they are indulging in conspiracy theories and should consider caring about evidence instead. This tends to result in defensiveness and, to a particularly conspiratorial mindset, even accusations that the critic is complicit in the conspiracy in some way. Attempts to address mis/disinformation using legal or institutional power are likely to be received particularly badly. This can be seen as more evidence of oppressive, powerful forces censoring the truth, entrench people further into a conspiratorial mindset and force them to gather outside of mainstream spaces where their claims are much less likely to be challenged at all.

When addressing this point in his talk, Coleman Hughes said, “Institutions are downstream of culture and culture is downstream of the stories we tell.” Yes! Rather than trying to force top-down control of information, we would do better to work on reforming our epistemic environments from the bottom up. By far the best way to address the problem of conspiratorial thinking, preference for intuition over evidence and beliefs that truth is fundamentally political is to do so among our own tribes: the people with whom we share goals and values and by whom we wish to be respected. This is where we have the most influence on the stories that get told, the culture that develops from them and ultimately the institutions we rely upon to produce knowledge and use it ethically and effectively.

I would argue that we should all think of culture on a local level and consider ourselves to have some ability to influence it. Because we do. We choose whose thinking we respect and, consequently, whom we read and listen to and which voices we amplify. We choose which circles we move in and how we engage within them. We can all exert some influence over the stories our tribes tell and the cultures our groups develop.

What would improve in your political circles if their members held in highest esteem those who were rigorous, careful, charitable and consistently principled in their thinking; those who cared about what was true and were willing to change their minds when this was warranted? How would things change if members routinely asked one another, “How do you know that is true?” and people spoke in anticipation of being asked this question, knowing that an unsatisfactory answer would reduce their credibility and status among their peers?

We may not have increased our tendency towards conspiratorial thinking as a species, but the supersession of gatekept legacy media by social media, podcasts, YouTube and individual writing platforms certainly creates the potential for perverse incentives in attracting audiences. It has become commonplace to bemoan the influence of audience capture in degrading political and cultural commentary but, too often, people seem to forget that they are that audience. The rapid expansion of available media gives consumers power too.

What if we all tried to boost the most evidence-based and consistently principled voices and criticised conspiratorial thinking, bullshit and illiberalism within our own tribes? If audiences can incentivise commentators to become more sensationalist, tribal and conspiratorial, can they not also discourage those tendencies? If peer pressure and the drive to be accepted within our own social circles can push people towards reckless and unethical behaviour, could they not also incentivise thoughtful and principled conduct?

I think those of us who are concerned about what feels like a growing culture of epistemic chaos should try to avoid simply feeling powerless and besieged by it as an external force. Instead, we should recognise that we are participants in and creators of culture and do whatever is within our reach to change it.

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A strange kind of black-and-white thinking seems to have arisen around conspiracy theories. A surprising number of people appear to think we face a stark choice:

• Believe that people never conspire together for harmful, criminal or antisocial ends.

• Accept all conspiracy theories as inherently plausible.

This, of course, is a false choice. The same principle…

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The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 7000 subscribers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

During the third trimester of my pregnancy, I was overwhelmed with fears of postnatal psychosis. I had never experienced psychosis but I did suffer from OCD and my greatest fear was that I could temporarily lose my judgement or self-control or simply fail to pay attention in some vital way and the result would be harm to another person. At one point, I was unable to travel on the tube due to intrusive thoughts that I might somehow lose my mind for a second and push somebody under a train. I was never remotely likely to do anything harmful to another person. OCD works by playing on the sufferer’s greatest fears which are typically contrary to their behaviour. My diagnoses over the years have been ‘scrupulosity’ “harm OCD” and “Responsibility OCD.”

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By the time I got pregnant at 29, I was mostly on top of this. I had an arsenal of techniques to interrupt these thoughts and prevent them from getting a grip. I was aware that being a first-time mother and the anxiety this entails could put these to an unprecedented test and was preparing for that. Then I found out about postnatal psychosis. A horrible news story in which a mother suffering from the condition and experiencing delusions in which she was entirely disconnected from reality had put her newborn baby in the oven, killing it. She did not realise that what she had put in the oven was her baby and was so floridly psychotic that she was taken immediately to a secure psychiatric facility. I found myself dwelling on the horrific nature of that baby’s death but also the feelings of the mother when she came out of the psychosis and was informed of what she had done. I feared that I could be prone to postnatal disorders because my mother had suffered severe postnatal depression, a failure to bond with me and intense anxiety about being able to care for me.

At the time I was pregnant, we lived on the 11th floor of a tower block. I feared that I could, in a state of psychosis, drop my baby out of the window. I had my husband nail the windows closed. I had him and my parents promise me that if I seemed even the slightest bit confused and not myself, they would separate me from my baby and not wait to see if it improved. When I was told I would need a C-Section, my first thought was, “Good. I will be in the hospital for five days. If I immediately become psychotic, there will be people who recognise it and they will protect my baby.”

In the event, nothing like this happened. My daughter was born and I immediately felt an overwhelming sense of love and confidence that I knew exactly what she needed and that I was capable of meeting all those needs. I found the early months easier than most of my friends reported finding them and coped well with initial mood swings and then the sleep deprivation. My fears of postnatal psychosis are now a family story about extreme maternal anxiety and the time I had my husband nail the windows shut.

It might seem that this history could well make me sympathetic to Lindsay Clancy, the mother currently on trial for strangling her three children before jumping from the window in an attempt to end her own life. Her defence is that of postnatal (‘postpartum’ in America) psychosis. I do not know that I am. This entirely depends on what her mental illness did to her understanding of what she was doing, its wrongfulness and her capacity to control her actions. The news reports of the trial include testimony that she was suffering from very profound postnatal depression and a mood disorder and that she had been prescribed a number of psychiatric medications that had produced negative effects to her mood. There are descriptions of her suffering from paranoia and experiencing hallucinations and delusions which, if true, certainly meet the definition of psychosis, but this is contested and it is unclear whether or not she knew what she was doing when she killed her children. This matters.

In addition to this, the case has tapped into the culture wars and particularly the battle of the sexes. There are hundreds of women in pink outside the courtroom expressing their sympathy for Clancy and many are conflating her case with all manner of emotional struggle women may have ranging from hormonal surges to postnatal depression to sleep-deprivation to unsupportive partners. The issue of psychosis and its distinctness from various forms of emotional distress or other mental illnesses is getting lost in the mix. On the other side are those who like to conflate this case with issues like abortion, low birthrates and perceived female entitlement, narcissism, lack of accountability and lack of appreciation for hardworking fathers who enable women to stay home with children. Neither of these is remotely helpful.

Then there are those who make a different kind of conflation between the seriousness of the crime and the responsibility of the person who committed it. This argument goes that if the crime committed is heinous enough, the perpetrator cannot be considered insane, even though these two things are not dependent on each other. If somebody in a state of florid psychosis wades into a pond because she believes a duck is telling her to, she may have committed only a minor park regulation breach, but she still needs to be removed to a place of safety to receive an urgent psychiatric assessment. If somebody hits his mother with an axe because he believes she is not his mother but a demon and only killing the demon will release his mother, he is experiencing a delusion he has no control over and does not know he is killing his mother, even though he has committed a terrible crime. I have addressed this before.

Imagine a scenario in which a woman has just got her baby down to sleep in its nursery and she hears a terrible crash and snarling. She runs into the nursery and finds a wild animal of some kind in her baby’s crib mauling the child. She picks up a chair and repeatedly smashes it into the animal’s head until it goes limp. She snatches up her badly injured baby and runs downstairs to call an ambulance. The ambulance comes and takes her and the baby away. Later, in the hospital, the doctor comes to see her and tells her that her baby is dead. With him are two police officers and they tell her there was no wild animal. The baby died from the blows she swung with the chair. She had been hallucinating.

Imagine that you could know this scenario were absolutely true. You had somehow been able to watch it from her perspective like it was a movie. Would you hold her responsible for behaving in the way she did or was her behaviour entirely morally justifiable based on what she saw with her own eyes? What else could she have done? Run into the room and seen the animal attack and thought, “I’d better not do anything about this in case it is a hallucination and I accidentally hurt the baby and am then charged with that.” Of course not. Nearly every time anybody sees such an attack, it is actually happening and the right thing to do is save the baby.

I would argue that because psychotic delusions, brought on through no fault of the sufferer’s own, really can be indistinguishable from reality and because there are occasions on which violence in self-defence is both morally and legally justifiable, there must logically be situations in which a violent crime can occur and the perpetrator of it should not be held morally or legally responsible. But this is how high the bar needs to be. There must be evidence that the individual did not know what they were doing or that they could not meaningfully comprehend that it was wrong or that they could not prevent themselves from doing it for them not to be morally responsible for their actions.

The question is whether this case was one of those occasions. Did Clancy know she was killing her children or did she believe she was doing something that could not harm them? Did she know the small figures she had in her hands were her children or did she believe them to be some kind of animals or demons that were trying to harm her or her children? The defence has provided psychological testimony claiming that she was ‘like a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings” and “had no appreciation of the wrongfulness of her act.” It claims that she was hearing voices. Meanwhile, the prosecution’s forensic psychologist said she did know she was killing her children and that this was illegal and “her moral awareness of this killing was influenced by her strong desire to die and, if she was dead, not to leave her children behind.” They dispute the claim that Clancy was hearing voices due to lack of prior or subsequent reference to this. The prosecution also presented evidence that Clancy sent her husband out shortly before killing the children which, prosecution argued, indicated an intention to commit an act which she knew he would have prevented. I am not sure, from the evidence reported publicly, that there is reasonable doubt about her criminal responsibility.

The misogynistic rhetoric around this case is contemptible. Those who want to tie this case into their grievances about women not being sufficiently appreciative of men or having become entitled and pampered and resentful of their ‘rightful’ role as mothers and homemakers do not add anything of value to the conversation.

Postnatal depression or psychosis, sleep-deprivation and the psychological toll of spending all one’s time with small children are not social constructs and they cannot be shamed away. People have always had hormones and predispositions to mental illness as well as a physiology that requires sleep and a psyche that needs adult company and intellectual stimulation. Principled social conservatives who wish for a more universally favourable view on motherhood would do better to accept this reality and propose practical remedies such as family support, community support, childcare etc.

That women’s minds can become disordered and their judgement impaired by the toll of giving birth and breastfeeding has long been recognised to the extent that many countries (but not America) recognise infanticide as a crime equivalent to manslaughter rather than murder. This still requires evidence of mental disorder directly related to the effects of giving birth or breastfeeding.

In many times and places in the darker history of our species, the killing of a baby by its parents was considered a decision parents had the right to make or something that was inevitable due to limited resources. Even when it was criminalised by religious or secular law, these laws were frequently ignored or simply not investigated, especially when the mother was married. This rightly appalls us now. We recognise children as having individual rights to continue their existence and we have systems in place to care for them when their parents cannot. The law recognises much evidence that childbirth can, on occasion, produce profound mental disorder which may substantially diminish responsibility. Whether or not it has done so in any given case must be assessed on the details of that case rather than tied into a political narrative.

This is why I believe feminists who try to subsume this case into a vast category of any kind of psychological or practical difficulties women may experience after having a baby or when caring for a number of young children are also very wrong. The existence of genuine postnatal psychosis does not mean every form of maternal suffering belongs on the same continuum of diminished responsibility. Speaking as though it does can only serve to reduce sympathy not only for Lindsay Clancy but for any woman suffering from postnatal psychosis. The need to provide better postnatal care, mental health support and practical support is better addressed practically and without collapsing everything from unsupportive partners to depression to sleep deprivation to psychosis into one mass.

I have a family member who had a history of depression and suffered terrible postnatal depression and struggled to cope. Social workers were aware of this and kept a close eye on the family. This made her extremely anxious and ashamed. She was both terrified that her daughter would be taken away and also so deeply sunk in the ‘worthlessness’ experience of depression that part of her believed she should be. One day, after a sleepless night and a morning of incessant crying, she got on a bus to the social services office, planted her baby on the reception desk, saying, “Take her. I can’t cope and am not fit to be a mother.” She then went home. She believed she had now lost her baby and felt suicidal. Shortly after this, her social worker arrived with the baby and told her this was not the case. In fact, she said, my family member’s action that morning had reassured her considerably. The fear had been that she would fail to recognise that she was not coping and the baby could come to harm. The fact that, when she reached the end of her tether, she reacted by taking her baby to a place of safety spoke in her favour as a mother. Supervision became more supportive than suspicious and she was able to form a positive relationship with her social worker and gradually recover from postnatal depression and be removed from their caseload.

This story had a happy ending due to a combination of a good social worker and my relative’s own primary drive to put her daughter’s wellbeing above her own. She would rather lose her baby than risk her coming to any harm. People may not have control over succumbing to serious mental illness but this does not in itself eliminate a person's capacity to make choices about how their illness affects other people. Did Lindsay Clancy have the ability to make a decision to leave her children rather than killing them? The prosecutor claimed that her motivation was selfish. She wanted to die and she wanted to take her children with her.

Sometimes, when in the grips of a deep, dark depression, life can feel unbearably painful and sufferers forget that they ever have been happy or could be again. It has happened that people in such a state have killed their children in the belief that life is purely pain and misery and a desire to protect their children from that. In this way, both the prosecution's claim that Clancy knew what she was doing was illegal and the defence's claim that she did not believe it was morally wrong could conceivably be true. A severely depressed person might believe that death is a merciful escape from an existence composed entirely of suffering while still understanding that killing another person is against the law. That is not the same mental state as believing that one is fighting a demon or wild animal, or acting under a delusion that makes the true nature of one's actions incomprehensible. Nor, however, does it entirely settle the legal question, which also asks whether mental illness left the defendant substantially capable of conforming her conduct to the law.

Depression and other forms of mental illness, or even chronic sleep-deprivation or insufficient support, can alter someone’s moral evaluation of death without destroying their grasp of reality or their capacity for choice. Psychosis can alter the perception of reality upon which the person believes they are acting, leading them to act in ways which would be both legal and ethically justifiable if their perceptions were correct. The jury in this case needs to decide whether the prosecution has proved beyond reasonable doubt that Lindsay Clancy retained sufficient capacity to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of what she was doing or to conform her actions to the law. The answer will determine whether she is held criminally responsible or acquitted on grounds of insanity and dealt with through the psychiatric system.

The drive of political partisans either to exonerate her entirely because they believe society fails to support women struggling mentally after giving birth, or to punish her as harshly as possible because they believe society enables women to become entitled and narcissistic and put their own needs above those of their children, is poisoning any reasoned ethical discussion of this case.

Ultimately, both groups of activists are trying to make Clancy a symbol of a social pathology they perceive and are particularly concerned about whether this is society’s failure to support struggling mothers or a culture of female entitlement and diminished accountability. But Lindsay Clancy is a person with a unique mental state reacting to unique circumstances, and her case needs to be considered as such. Criminal responsibility is radically individual.

During the third trimester of my pregnancy, I was overwhelmed with fears of postnatal psychosis. I had never experienced psychosis but I did suffer from OCD and my greatest fear was that I could temporarily lose my judgement or self-control or simply fail to pay a…

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Since the presumed suicide of Jason Arday, political narratives over who was to blame have escalated in intensity and extremity. These competing narratives tend to collapse several separate questions into one: why Arday reached such a prominent academic position, why concerns about his work were not addressed earlier, why the eventual media scrutiny became so intense, and what ultimately led to his death.

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For many on the identitarian left, the culprits were clearly the media which every day broke new stories about different claims made by Arday, previous attempts by academics and journalists to raise the issue of plagiarism, the shutting down of such inquiries by Arday and Cambridge using the police and legal pressure, interviews with people who knew him as well as opinions on the psychological cause of his inventions and particularly on the issue of ideological capture by Critical Social Justice theories and whether and how this played into the appointment of Jason Arday and failures to take concerns about his academic integrity seriously.

To many public commentators from this tribe of the left, the sheer volume of these stories amounted to harassment which hounded Arday to his death. Further, the motivations for such an intense interest in the case could only be a culture of white supremacy that resented black people gaining professorial roles. Soon the media attention to the case was being deemed a ‘lynching’ - the illegal killing of an individual by an angry mob - including by prominent voices within the realm of critical theories of race. Organised demands for censorship of the press escalated. These focused primarily on state or institutional regulation on reporting of misconduct that could cause any subject of this distress or specifically those of racial minority.

There have also been a handful of alarming threats to individual journalists who report in ways deemed unacceptable.

For many others, but especially critics of the Critical Social Justice (CSJ) movement, significant responsibility for Jason Arday’s death lies with Cambridge University and the culture of universities more generally and their ideological capture by this movement. This stance is underlain by two connected claims. The first focuses on the appointment and promotion of Arday himself. It argues that Cambridge’s interest in Arday was not his academic excellence (his publication record was thin and previous positions brief and unremarkable) but his racial and neurodiverse identity, his focus on Critical Race Theory and his personal story of having overcome great obstacles to do remarkable things. His attraction, in short, was as a symbol of diversity, equity and inclusion and it placed a psychologically vulnerable man of 37 in a high profile position with responsibilities that exceeded his capabilities. Some argued that this was done purely for the optics of his intersectional marginalised identities and personal story and cited reports that it displaced two women of racial minority whose CVs were much more suited to the expectations of the post. This was argued to be unjust not only to the women but to Arday himself. Because he was not able to meet the expected standards and because of his extravagant fabulism, the façade was bound to come crashing down at some point and the toll on him would be excruciating.

The second, related claim is that the intense media scrutiny on Arday was facilitated by the university itself and again because of an authoritarian commitment to the optics of Critical Social Justice. If Cambridge had responded appropriately when other academics first raised concerns about potential plagiarism, the argument goes, the issue could have been dealt with internally and privately. Instead, the response from both the university and Arday himself was to shut down such inquiries, reporting a colleague and a journalist to the police for harassment and engaging an aggressive law firm to defend him from scrutiny while creating a culture which intimidated fellow academics out of voicing any concerns. When institutional processes to detect academic misconduct fail, the job falls to investigative journalists. Because investigation revealed the stories Arday had told of his life to be so extravagant and the truth of them was in the public interest due to a claimed £1.4 million book deal, the media machine was set rolling.

This argument also applies more generally to the ability to criticise the work of scholars using Critical Social Justice theories. Much of the interest in this case has been due to pre-existing concerns about the unquestionability of theories like Critical Race Theory within universities themselves. Academics wanting to make a critique of truth claims or ethical principles within this branch of theorising or argue that it is not fit for the purpose of addressing racism, sexism, homophobia etc. have found themselves accused of holding those bigoted views and threatened with professional consequences, leading to self-censorship.

This would be a perfectly reasonable objection if academia did, in fact, still work like this. A university is the place where ideas like Critical Race Theory should be disputed. This has been made increasingly difficult over the last 15 years and resulted in the formation of alternative spaces - heterodox, gender critical, anti-woke etc. - in order to critique these ideas. These have been valuable but also vulnerable to becoming echo chambers and increasing atomisation and polarisation. Because critique of ideas which have significant power and influence within universities has largely had to come from outside universities, the system of internal critique by which Prof. Arday’s work as well as his alleged academic misconduct could have been addressed more quickly, thoroughly and without massive public attention were lacking. Consequently, the ideas and misconduct have become inextricably connected and media reports have, with some justification, focused on both of them as different facets of the same problem of ideological capture within universities.

Others have argued that by focusing on the press or the universities as the problem, people are neglecting the primary driver of both the media attention on Jason Arday and his death which is Arday himself. It was he who made the decisions which led to highly credible accusations of plagiarism and fabulism and he who took his own life (assuming that indications of suicide are correct). There is validity here too. The tendency to portray Jason Arday as the passive victim of external systems has manifested in an infantalising process that stops seeing Jason, the man, as a human being with agency and reconfigures him purely as a symbol. This has happened on both sides with his defenders frequently referring to him as a vulnerable young man (he was 41 with an adult daughter) preyed upon by racist forces and critics portraying him as a pawn and ‘poster child’ for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. Neither of these give him the dignity of being an adult human being in his own right with his own combination of personal qualities and values who makes his own decisions for which he can praised or criticised.

At its most unsympathetic, those taking an uncompromising ‘personal responsibility’ stance insist that we look at the situation as one man making a decision to plagiarise the work of others for his own advancement and tell tall tales in order to secure a profitable book deal. When his deceptions were discovered, he then made a cowardly decision to end his own life rather than face professional consequences and selfishly inflicted great pain on his wife and children and left them to deal with his mess. In this telling, Arday was simply a bad scholar, bad father and bad person.

I cannot support this interpretation. We cannot read the mind of Jason Arday and he cannot now tell us what his thought processes were. If we accept that he was guilty of plagiarism and fabulism, there are two explanations for this: dishonesty and mental illness, potentially in some combination. The most charitable view we can take is that he was not purely dishonest and that some part of him believed his own stories or had genuine difficulty separating them from reality or his own ideas from those of other people. This interpretation is supported by how extravagant and easily disproven some of his claims were. They were bound to be exposed at some point. Those who are fully in touch with reality and seek simply to advance themselves dishonestly usually make efforts to keep this plausible.

I keep imagining the thought processes of Jason Arday. If it was the case that he was a man who, for reasons psychiatric or neurological, had difficulty distinguishing grandiose stories from reality or his own thoughts from other people’s, then he was, indeed very vulnerable. As such a figure sought to understand himself, find his place in the world and form connections with other people and did this via the creation of stories that received warmth and approval, he could be extremely vulnerable to being fed into political narratives and incentivised to keep creating the stories that facilitated his warm reception.

Isn’t this interpretation of events pure speculation on my part produced by a combination of empathy for a man who was surely on some level, vulnerable, and is now dead and a pre-existing concern that the Critical Social Justice movement reductively tokenises those it claims to champion and coerces them into affirmations of its own belief system? Yes, clearly it is. I cannot claim to know the truth of the matter any more than anybody else can. I, like so many, am falling into the trap of making Prof. Arday into a symbol of vulnerability in ways that confirm my own prior assumptions and creating stories about him. The best I can do is be self-aware about this and say honestly, “I don’t know the truth.” I will read him charitably and assume that he was not purely self-interestedly dishonest. I will not use him as a symbol of “victim of all that is unethical with the CSJ movement” but base my criticisms of that movement on what I can know. I will consider his suicide a tragedy and, rather than regarding it as selfish or cowardly, feel deeply sorry for the intensity of desperation and despair that must have led him to that radical act.

At the centre of these positions about who is responsible for the death of Jason Arday - a racist media, an ideologically captured university or Arday himself - are arguments about why precisely the media chose to focus so intensely and for so long on this particular case.

Was it because we live in a society permeated with white supremacist beliefs that will take every opportunity to dunk on a black man who had the temerity to obtain a professorship?

Was it because there is such widespread legitimate concern about ideological capture within universities and an inability to address this within universities?

Was it because this individual case was just extremely compelling on its own terms and there was great public interest in its details?

A badly underappreciated explanation for the intense media scrutiny is the last one, which is also the simplest. People asking, “Explain why this particular case of plagiarism gained so much attention when these comparable cases perpetrated by white scholars did not?” seem not to have considered this at all. To my knowledge, there are no comparable cases in terms of the ability to fascinate. Cases of plagiarism generally involve one scholar being found to have appropriated the work of another for banal motivations of advancing their career. This is a problem but not a terribly interesting one. The Arday case included shamanic prophecies, dismembered animal corpses, brain tumours, amnesia, medical miracles, well building, time travelling to feature in TV shows before his birth, millions of pounds raised for charity, masked knife wielding assailants & world class endurance feats undertaken on a broken leg. In terms of sheer sensationalism, this was compelling. From a purely commercial point of view, it was a page turner that would have readers returning to read the next installment. Every day some new story was uncovered to add to the full account of a truly bizarre unfolding story. Those expecting the public to simply look away were not being realistic.

It was this aspect of the case that made some commentators who had long been very critical of ‘wokeness’ (including me in my first piece on the subject) uneasy about focusing on Arday personally as a dishonest scholar-activist of the kind we had so often criticised. It seemed likely that he was mentally unwell. As Nigel Biggar, a longterm strident critic of ‘wokeness’ wrote,

He’s trapped in a world of fantasy. Whatever his personal guilt, there’s a tragic quality to his predicament. For, when reality does finally break through, Nemesis will enter, too. A terrible reckoning will cause the self he’s constructed to disintegrate. I fear for his life.

They urged focusing instead on the institutions which had colluded in shutting down those trying to raise concerns about plagiarism. It remained in the public interest to uncover these stories and determine which had some truth in them and which could be disproven given that a book based on many of these stories was forthcoming. But for those of us focused on seriously addressing problems in the academy and within left-wing identitarian movements, capitalising on the exposure of one academic who appeared to be, as conservative politician, James Cleverly put it, ‘a vulnerable fantasist’ felt dishonourable.

This argument is also well-supported: the Arday case attracted widespread interest because he was a high-profile academic at a top university whose work and personal story placed him firmly within Critical Social Justice, amid pre-existing concerns about ideological capture in universities and an inability to address this within universities. I made this case on X in response to Ash Sarkar’s claim that the intense media interest was because he was black.

I replied that this was incorrect. I agreed that Jason Arday was responded to not purely as an individual but as a member of a group towards whom there was public animus but that that group was “Critical Social Justice scholars and activists’ rather than “black people.” I pointed out that the media was not treating him as a representative of black people but of those scholars and that the broader context the case was being tied into was not “What does this tell us about black people?” but “What does this tell us about the state of academia?” These are very different things. This thread was shared 500 times and, before long, I was subjected to a social media pile-on that accused me of justifying the lynching of a black man and my X account is currently unusable. I am not particularly troubled by this and have come to accept it as part of being a political and cultural commentator who annoys illiberal types on both the left and right.

I stand by my claim that the critical media coverage of this case which saw the Arday affair as an example of a larger problem affecting society overwhelmingly presented that problem as the ideological capture of universities by left-wing identitarian politics and not as the appointment of black individuals to professorial roles.

Some people have presented as evidence that the motivations of the media are racist the fact that critical reporting has been particularly intense from right-wing outlets. This does not demonstrate that. Right-wing outlets being the most vocal about institutional problems on the left is hardly remarkable. Nor is it inherently suspicious. Leftwing outlets are also most vocal about institutional problems on the right. We might wish that they would each focus just as much on problems on their own side, but they do not. All we can do is have expectations of them that they make their critiques well-informed and honest and regard as unreliable those which do not, while individually reading both right-wing and left-wing outlets to minimise our own political bias.

In fact, this case has been remarkable in that it has not just been the right recognising and addressing the problem. A particularly good balanced review came from the New York Times, and the Guardian has also published several pieces on it. Among the most popular opinion pieces on the issue have been analyses of the role played by ideological capture in universities by black academics who are able to offer both principled objections and personal accounts. These include postcolonial scholar, Femi Owolade, left liberal John McWhorter, and socialist Tyler Austin Harper.

It is very important that we reject the Critical Social Justice movement’s conflation of their own ideas with black people. CSJ is a particular Western political theoretical framework which includes theories about race. Black people are human beings who may or may not subscribe to this theoretical framework. The claims of the CSJ movement to represent the views of black people are contradicted by evidence that black people, like white people, are politically and philosophically diverse. Claims that to be critical of CSJ is to be prejudiced against black people are therefore false. People can, do and should oppose racism from a variety of ethical frameworks.

For many of you reading my work, that framework will be liberalism - the philosophy of individual liberty. Liberals oppose racism on the grounds that people should be treated as individuals of equal inherent social and moral value and with equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Any attempts to constrain or limit individuals on the grounds of their race, sex, sexuality or other immutable characteristic are illiberal, intolerable and must be resisted. We typically oppose CSJ because it does constrain individuals on these grounds and seeks to impose specific views, values, beliefs, experiences and knowledges on people according to their identity and deter dissent using authoritarian means.

Does this amount to a claim that none of the media response to the Arday affair or none of the appetite to read about it was motivated by racism? No. We can, and I would argue should, reject the hypothesis that the intensive media focus on this case is driven by a pervasive culture of white supremacy that objects to black people having professorial roles, but the claim that racism has manifested around this case is supported by evidence.

There have been some blatantly racist responses to the story online and some extremist outlets have also been unambiguous in their belief that black people are intellectually inferior and cannot be academics.

Equally, and potentially more concerningly (due to the plausible deniability inherent within it), some people with genuinely racist views do use legitimate concerns about ideological capture by Critical Social Justice theories and associated DEI (or in the UK, EDI) policies and programmes to their own ends. Their concerns are not genuinely about shoddy epistemology, dubious and inconsistent ethics, counterproductiveness in reducing racism or authoritarian speech control among the scholars and activists of this movement. They were either always rooted in racial animus and white identity politics or have become so in an illiberal, tribal reaction to the CSJ movement’s identity politics and conflation of their own theories with black people.

This is a problem that exists and it is essential that it is acknowledged to exist and addressed. This is best done by those of us who criticise CSJ on the grounds of epistemology, ethics and effectiveness. We come in all races and from all over the political spectrum and are the best placed to detect and object to racism or other identity-based illiberalism masquerading as principled critique.

Nevertheless, we cannot dismiss all critique of CSJ as dishonourably motivated or refrain from principled critique because some of it is racist. There are legitimate and important reasons to criticise this school of thought and its authoritarian movement for those who care about reliable knowledge production, individual liberty and effective methods of addressing social problems. We must instead identify and marginalise bad faith engagement with the problem that seeks to exploit good and principled arguments.

There may be some grounds to criticise the media for its coverage of the Arday case, but current claims to that effect do not seem to be supported by strong evidence and many solutions that advocate suppressing the media in cases like this are alarming in their bias and authoritarianism. I would support a rigorous, empirical investigation into the focus of the reporting on this case purely for informative purposes. I do not anticipate that it would find evidence of a ‘racist feeding frenzy’ as claimed by Cambridge’s chancellor. I suspect that it would find a combination of focus on the details of Jason’s Arday’s stories in response to public interest in the bizarre nature of them and criticism of the case as evidence of ideological capture at Cambridge to address this preexisting concern about the state of academia.

The death of Jason Arday is a tragedy and questions can and should be asked about how he came to be in such a vulnerable position where so many extravagant tales of overcoming adversity to achieve great things failed to pass a fact check and credible allegations of significant plagiarism could be made against him and why this was able to happen at one of the UK’s oldest and most prestigious universities. This will not save Jason Arday, but it could provide information on how to recognise, support and protect both vulnerable individuals and important institutions. Turning such a complicated human and institutional tragedy into a simplistic activist morality tale, will not help us understand what happened, protect vulnerable people or improve the institutions involved. There are no winners here.

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Since the presumed suicide of Jason Arday, political narratives over who was to blame have escalated in intensity and extremity. These competing narratives tend to collapse several separate questions into one: why Arday reached such a prominent academic position, why concerns about his work were not addressed earlier, wh…

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