On my way to the shops recently, I came across a small group outside the mall. They wore Guy Fawkes masks and held laptops showing videos of animal suffering. Their banner read: Anonymous for the Voiceless.
All my life I had pushed this issue aside and carried on eating meat. But one phrase on their placard stopped me in my tracks:
“Why are my taste buds more important than the suffering and death of another living creature?”
That line wouldn’t leave me. I watched two of the videos they recommended — one by Ed Winters (UK), the other by Gary Yourofsky (USA) — and for the first time I felt obliged to reconsider my standpoint.
What I Didn’t Know
Of course I knew animals were killed for meat. But I had never really thought about the dairy industry.
Cows must be artificially inseminated to produce milk.
Their calves are taken away soon after birth so humans can consume the milk.
The calves’ stomachs are then used for rennet, a key ingredient in many cheeses.
Chickens in the egg industry live in conditions so brutal they barely warrant description.
Now I understand why vegans put dairy and meat on the same level. There is no such thing as humane suffering or a humane death.
Cultural Defences
In the same week, I read about Air New Zealand serving vegan burgers on flights to the USA. Carnivores were furious. MP Nathan Guy tweeted:
“Disappointing to see Air NZ promoting a GE substitute meat burger. We produce the most delicious steaks and lamb on the planet – GMO and hormone free. The national carrier should be pushing our premium products.”
So — jingoism as a defence for cruelty?
Religion and the Blind Spot
Years ago, when I still believed in God, vegetarian friends asked me why I ate meat. I had no good answer.
Looking back, I see how Christianity itself shaped my indifference. The Bible tells us that:
God preferred Abel’s animal sacrifice over Cain’s vegetables (Genesis 4).
Humans were given permission to eat meat (Genesis 9).
Animals lack souls and need no salvation (Genesis 1).
Humans are to rule over animals and nature (Genesis 1).
Sacrificed animals were required to cover sin (Hebrews 9).
This world will one day be destroyed and replaced (2 Peter 3).
With such narratives, why give thought to the suffering of animals or the destruction of the environment? When was the last time you heard a sermon in church encouraging veganism?
By contrast, many Hindus are vegetarian. In Hinduism, animals are treated with greater respect — perhaps because of reincarnation, perhaps because there is no idea that this world is disposable.
My Challenge
In conclusion, I challenge you to watch either Dominion or Land of Hope and Glory. If you do, you may find yourself with no excuses left to remain a carnivore.
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. The more helpless the creature, the more it is entitled to protection.” — Mahatma Gandhi
For years, choosing an operating system was treated as a consumer preference: Mac or Windows. Apple or Microsoft. Design or compatibility.
Those days are ending. Indeed, for me, they have already ended.
My move to Linux was not born of practicality. It began as an explicitly political decision: a small personal protest against what I see as the increasingly troubling direction of the United States and my growing discomfort about privacy and with Europe’s dependence on American technology.
What began as principle, however, quickly became something more exciting. An education, even.
In moving away from mainstream platforms, I discovered not merely a political statement but a better way of computing: faster, calmer, less intrusive, more user-controlled—and one that forced me to confront how casually many of us have entrusted vast quantities of personal data to a handful of foreign corporations.
Increasingly, our technology choices are no longer merely about convenience or aesthetics. They are about jurisdiction, sovereignty, dependence and trust.
The Illusion of Neutral Technology
We have spent two decades pretending that software is apolitical. It is not.
Private data is the so-called new oil.
Cloud platforms are geopolitical assets.
Operating systems are instruments of jurisdiction. App ecosystems are channels of dependency.
To build one’s digital life entirely on American platforms is not simply to use foreign products. It is to place one’s communications, workflows, data and habits inside systems governed elsewhere.
For years, this dependency seemed harmless because America appeared stable, predictable and aligned with European interests. That assumption now looks far less secure.
Why Linux Appeals Beyond the Technically Curious
My own switch to Linux was motivated initially by principle, but sustained by practical reality.
Linux is, quite simply, excellent.
It offers:
greater speed and efficiency
far less software bloat
more user control
minimal intrusive advertising or telemetry
freedom from forced ecosystem lock-in
a calmer, more focused computing experience
It also avoids a growing trend I find exhausting in mainstream software: the transformation of operating systems into hyperactive consumer platforms.
Notifications. Recommendations. Prompts. Pop-ups. Embedded AI assistants. Animated interfaces designed less for work than for perpetual engagement.
Linux, by contrast, still feels like a tool. Not a theme park.
My Preferred Distributions: Mint and Arch
For those exploring Linux, I find two distributions particularly compelling.
Minimal, modular and deeply configurable, it demands more of the user—but rewards that effort with extraordinary control.
Arch is not merely software.
It is a statement of intent:
I will shape my tools. My tools will not shape me.
Europe Is Beginning to Think This Way Too
What may once have looked like niche hobbyism is increasingly becoming state policy.
The French government has announced plans to migrate large parts of its public administration away from Windows and toward Linux as part of a broader digital sovereignty strategy.
Other European administrations are exploring or implementing similar moves, including regional and national migrations toward open-source alternatives in Germany and Denmark.
Why?
Because governments are recognising what individuals increasingly recognise:
Dependency creates vulnerability.
Reliance on foreign proprietary platforms means reliance on:
foreign licensing decisions
foreign corporate roadmaps
foreign legal jurisdictions
foreign political stability
The Great Irony: Linux Already Runs the World
Here is the part casual users often miss: Linux may still be niche on consumer desktops, but it already powers much of the digital world.
Linux runs:
most of the web’s server infrastructure
the overwhelming majority of supercomputers globally
vast portions of cloud computing infrastructure
countless embedded and industrial systems
even Android is based on a modified version of the Linux kernel
In other words:
Linux is not an outsider technology.
It is the backbone of modern computing.
The desktop is merely catching up.
A Warning to America — And An Opportunity for Europe
The United States should not assume technological dominance is permanent.
Consumers, institutions and governments are increasingly asking difficult questions:
Who controls our infrastructure?
Who governs our data?
What happens if political alignment breaks?
Why are we so dependent on foreign platforms for essential digital life?
If American tech firms continue to treat lock-in as strategy and complacency as entitlement, they may discover that dominance breeds resistance.
Meanwhile Europe has an opportunity.
Not necessarily to replace Silicon Valley overnight.
But to build credible alternatives.
To invest in open standards. To support interoperable software. To back European cloud and software infrastructure. To treat digital autonomy as seriously as energy autonomy.
The next decade may not produce a mass exodus from American technology.
But the direction of travel is becoming harder to ignore.
Slowly, unevenly, but unmistakably.
Final Thought
My move to Linux will not alter geopolitics.
But it is, in its own small way, an expression of a wider conviction:
That technology should serve its user. That infrastructure should remain contestable. That dependency should never become invisible.
Linux is not merely for hobbyists anymore.
It is increasingly for those asking a larger question:
Who should control the tools on which modern life depends?
“In times of change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.” — Eric Hoffer
We live in an age inclined to treat the family as merely one lifestyle choice among many: important perhaps, but ultimately interchangeable with any arrangement sufficiently loving and well-intentioned.
Yet history, psychology and ordinary human experience suggest otherwise.
Before the state, before schools, before therapists and welfare systems, there was the family.
It is there that a child first learns whether the world is safe; whether love is conditional; whether conflict destroys or can be survived; whether authority protects or humiliates; whether they themselves are fundamentally secure and wanted.
Long before formal education begins, the family has already taught its curriculum.
Why Family Matters
Healthy family life gives a child the internal structure from which adulthood is built: security, attachment, discipline, resilience, self-worth, emotional regulation, and a workable model of intimacy.
No family can guarantee psychological health. Human beings are too complex for guarantees and there are always external factors at play beyond the family’s control.
But stable, loving family life remains the environment most likely to produce adults capable of trust, responsibility and emotional maturity.
Children do not simply hear what parents say. They absorb what parents are and often copy what they do.
They learn from atmosphere more than instruction, from example more than ideals, from what is lived more than what is preached.
When Family Fails
But if the family is where health begins, it is also where damage often begins.
The same intimacy that nurtures can wound most deeply. The same bonds that create belonging can transmit fear, shame, addiction, insecurity, emotional neglect, and distorted ideas of love.
And the most dangerous aspect of family dysfunction is that it rarely appears dramatic from the inside. To a child, home is simply normal. What is repeated on a daily basis becomes invisible.
Many adults spend half their lives discovering that what they thought was personality, fate, or bad luck was in fact inherited emotional architecture.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” ― C.G. Jung
This truth is captured powerfully in the closing moments of the Netflix drama Adolescence, when the parents are left confronting the unbearable possibility that what has gone wrong in their son may not be separable from what was formed in their home. It is a fictional scene, but one recognisable to many families: the dawning awareness that neither parental love nor parental mistakes alone cause damage to a child.
Through a Glass, darkly — Family
From my memoir, Teacher, There Are Things That I Don’t Want to Learn (significantly redacted in order to protect my children)
The family is the first, best, and original department of health, education, and welfare. The question is: what if it goes wrong? What if the wrong is passed on? And how can it ever be put right?
What follows is not accusation, just an inventory of what moved downstream.
In prison, I began to see not only the dysfunction in my own parents, but how faithfully I’d copied it. I had fooled myself by pointing to my rebellion — I didn’t smoke, I voted Labour, I hated football, I jettisoned their culture and accent — yet I had replicated their marriage almost exactly. I was the charismatic workaholic in charge of everything; my wife stayed passively at home. Without discussion, we traded my selfish busyness under the lights for her quiet withdrawal behind the scenes.
I inherited my father’s drinking, his love-hate with public speaking, and his fear of sexual shame; from my mother, her retreat from the world when overwhelmed, and her habit of abandoning people once they’d served their purpose. From my grandmother I learned how to cook, keep house, and draw attention toward myself as the golden boy — the shining charmer whose light dimmed everyone else.
Only what was genuine seems to have survived in our four children: resilience, manners, a hatred of racism, a creative streak, a love of travel and sport, and gratitude. So yes, family goes wrong — and what goes wrong is passed on, along with what was good. Can it ever be put right? I doubt it. Maybe it isn’t meant to be. But I’ve learned, as both son and father, that while you can’t go back or make it up to your children, you can stop it, through self-awareness and responsibility, from getting worse.
Grace in parenting is complicated. We hand down the worst with the best, model life badly, and often fail to hear our children’s cries — like my son’s warning that I “worked to rest.” Yet we cannot control everything: peers, culture, the online world, the strange chemistry of temperament. Our children are miraculous mixtures of countless influences. We must accept our share of responsibility without assuming all the blame.
Grace also looks like this: once we are parents, we remain parents until we die. However badly we fail, that bond is indelible. Our only hope is that our children will become better parents than us — both despite us, and because of us.
Breaking the Chain
No one emerges from family life unmarked. The question is what we will do with that knowledge as we discover it. We cannot undo the past. We cannot parent again the children already grown. We cannot demand retroactive healing from those we wounded.
But we can become conscious. We can tell the truth. We can take responsibility for what is ours without arrogantly assuming all blame for what is not. And we can refuse to pass on everything we received.
That may be the most realistic form of redemption available to any parent. And, in that context, I wish every mother a peaceful and re-assuring Mother’s Day this coming Sunday.
“Every child begins the world again.” — Henry David Thoreau
A man lies on the floor, staring up at heaven. Light breaks through painted clouds. A hand reaches toward another — creation, divinity, meaning itself, captured in a single moment.
But from another angle, the sky is a ceiling. The divine is pigment. The gesture, for all its beauty, is human.
And the question for me, after two decades of fundamentalist Christianity, began there: have we been looking at our own creation all along?
If we look at everything that human beings have produced — art, language, moral codes, religion — God looks, in many ways, like our most sophisticated mirror. Literally every culture has invented (or discovered) some concept of a higher order: the ground of being, the ultimate judge, the cosmic parent. These images shift according to what any given society most needs or fears. In that sense, the God we talk about, the God with attributes, motives and commandments, is a human construction: a symbolic language for meaning, morality and mortality.
But that doesn’t automatically mean there is nothing beyond us. There’s a second, deeper question: whether our intuition that there is something conscious, ordering or transcendent that points to reality or whether it is simply an evolved illusion. Science can’t answer that question yet. What it can say is that mystical experience, moral intuition and awe all register in human brains as real and powerful phenomena. Whether they’re merely responses to something external or to our own depth is open.
If you push me personally, based on everything I’ve seen, read and experiences — I’d say this:
“What we call God may not be the source of our meaning, but the shape our need for meaning takes when we project it beyond ourselves.”
That’s not neutral. It’s a conviction that the word God is man-made, but the intuition behind it may be a genuine encounter with the structure of reality itself.
If there is something real behind the intuition of God, but it’s not a personal deity with emotions, commandments and preferences, then we have to rethink what faith, morality and meaning mean.
1. Ethically
Without a personal God, morality stops being obedience to an external authority and becomes alignment with reality itself. If the “ground of being” is the structure out of which everything arises — consciousness, life, relationship — then to live morally is to live in harmony with that structure: honesty instead of delusion, compassion instead of domination, truth instead of manipulation. Sin, in that framework, isn’t breaking divine rules; it’s acting against the grain of reality, damaging what is most real in ourselves and others.
2. Existentially
It removes the childish comfort of a sky-parent, but also the terror of divine punishment. You can’t bargain with such a God; you can only participate in it. Prayer becomes attention. Worship becomes awe and gratitude. Salvation becomes awakening: the recognition that you were never separate from the source to begin with.
3. Psychologically
Humans projected “God” outward because it’s hard to face the abyss of meaning and fear of death alone. But if the transcendent is immanent, built into consciousness itself, then our experience moves from obedience to discovery. The “voice of God” becomes conscience, insight, intuition, the part of you that knows when you are betraying truth. That’s not delusion; it’s evolution giving us a compass.
4. Culturally
It explains why religions keep being both beautiful and dangerous. They are metaphors that became institutions — attempts to express the ineffable that hardened into dogma. The task of a spiritually mature species might be to keep the poetry and let go of the literalism: to treat scripture as myth that reveals truth, not as truth that forbids doubt and causes division.
So:
If there is a real ground of being but no personal deity, then “God” is not Someone to worship but Something to wake up to. The ethical life becomes an act of participation, not submission. Heaven is clarity, not geography.
If we strip away the idea of a personal God but keep the intuition that there is a real ground of being, something that is truth, consciousness and life itself, then guilt, forgiveness and redemption become psychological-spiritual processes, not legal or supernatural ones.
1. Guilt
In this view, guilt isn’t a divine sentence; it’s the psyche’s alarm system. It signals that you’ve moved out of alignment with what is real and life-affirming. When you deceive, harm, or instrumentalise others, you challenge your own coherence. The pain of guilt is not punishment but feedback: reality pushing you to restore integrity.
The problem is that most people either drown in guilt or silence it. Religion often worsened that by turning guilt into debt, something owed to an external judge. But in this framework, guilt is diagnostic, not damnatory. You listen to it, trace it to its cause, and let it guide you back to truth.
2. Forgiveness
If there’s no divine being to forgive, then forgiveness must emerge within consciousness itself. You can’t erase the past, but you can integrate it, see it truthfully, feel the pain, and let understanding dissolve the need for vengeance. Forgiveness becomes a recognition of shared brokenness: that whoever harmed you (or whoever you harmed) was acting from ignorance, fear, or distortion.
Forgiving doesn’t mean excusing; it means releasing your identity as either the guilty or the victim. You step out of the narrative of debt and punishment and into the reality that everyone is stumbling toward wholeness.
3. Redemption
Without a divine judge, redemption is not being declared clean — it’s becoming real again. It’s the return to inner coherence after self-betrayal. You redeem yourself by telling the truth, repairing what you can, and allowing compassion, not self-pity, to re-root you in reality. It’s the same pattern you see in psychotherapy, art, confession, and love: the movement from concealment → exposure → integration.
4. The Shape of Grace
Even without a theistic God, something like “grace” still exists. When you tell the truth, life has a way of meeting you with unexpected gentleness, not because someone decides to forgive you, but because truth itself is healing. Reality is merciless with lies but merciful with honesty.
If you accept that, then the task of the guilty person is no longer to appease a deity but to become whole, to stop fragmenting themselves with denial. And the task of the forgiver is not to absolve but to see: to understand enough that hatred dissolves into clarity.
Redemption isn’t about being declared innocent. It’s about becoming real again. The moment I stopped trying to defend the person I had been, something in me unclenched. The shards started fitting together, not into the old shape, but into something rougher, truer, almost beautiful in its fractures.
Grace, I realised, isn’t God sparing you. It’s reality allowing you to continue, to try again, to live in truth instead of illusion.
The glass doesn’t become clean; it becomes transparent. And through it, you see both your own reflection and the world beyond, no longer separate, no longer opposed.
We may never know whether there is something beyond us. But we can know this: the God we speak of bears an unmistakable human shape.
We painted the ceiling. We lay beneath it. And over time, we forgot that we had done so.
What remains is not emptiness, but a more difficult honesty: the possibility that meaning does not descend from above, but emerges from within, asking not for worship, but for a truth that is higher than faith.
“Theology is anthropology… the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject’s own nature taken objectively.” – Ludwig Feuerbach
When Absolutes Meet Life: The Ten Commandments in a World of Grey Zones
Introduction: Granite Pillars, Shifting Ground
The Ten Commandments stand like granite pillars in the moral imagination of the West. Their clarity and simplicity — do not lie, do not steal, do not kill — promise a moral compass that transcends culture, time and circumstance.
Yet the moment we bring them into the tangle of real life, absolutes begin to rub against exceptions.
Take truth-telling: you shall not bear false witness. But if lying spares the hunted from a tyrant’s soldiers, can we still call it sin?
Or killing: you shall not murder. What of the soldier who fires not from hatred but to liberate, or the doctor who relieves excruciating suffering when life is otherwise ebbing away?
The commandments do not disappear. But they begin to bend under the weight of reality.
Where the Commandments Begin to Fracture
Each commandment, when examined closely, reveals a fault line:
Do not lie → What if a lie saves a life?
Do not kill → What about self-defence, war, euthanasia?
Do not steal → What if a starving person takes bread?
Honour your parents → What if they are abusive?
Keep the Sabbath → What if healing or survival requires breaking it?
Even the Hebrew scriptures acknowledge this tension: David eats sacred bread when starving. Rahab lies and is praised.
The pattern is consistent: when strict obedience collides with human dignity, compassion begins to override rule.
Modern Grey Zones: Where Ethics Gets Uncomfortable
The ancient dilemmas have not disappeared. They have intensified.
1. Civil Disobedience and Tax Resistance
If citizens believe a war is unjust, are they morally obliged to fund it?
If millions refused to pay taxes in protest, would that be:
theft from the state?
or moral courage against injustice?
History complicates the answer. Figures like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. framed civil disobedience not as lawlessness, but as obedience to a higher law.
Yet the danger is obvious: if everyone decides individually which laws to obey, social order collapses. So where is the line — between conscience and chaos?
2. State Policies and Human Life
Consider population control policies that have led, directly or indirectly, to the killing of female infants. Is this:
a utilitarian attempt to manage resources?
or a violation of the most basic moral law — the sanctity of life?
Here the commandment “do not kill” confronts the brutal logic of state planning.
Is environmental destruction a form of theft from the unborn?
Does profit justify long-term harm?
The commandments were written for individuals. But today, systems commit what individuals once did.
4. Truth in the Age of Power
“Do not bear false witness” once meant lying in court. Now it includes:
political disinformation
media manipulation
algorithmic distortion
When truth itself becomes a battlefield, the commandment remains, but its application becomes infinitely more complex.
A Personal Dilemma: When Every Commandment Collides
There was a moment when all of this ceased to be theoretical for me.
My mother came to visit me in Germany. At the airport, she was pushed over by an impatient passenger in one of those electric buggies. The fall seemed minor at the time, but it accelerated everything. Her health declined rapidly. Incontinence. Dementia. Depression.
Her GP made a suggestion. We could simulate a bladder infection. That would justify a hospital admission. From there, she would be transferred to a care home for short-term recovery — and, most likely, remain there long-term.
It would mean lying. It would mean manipulating the system. It would mean, in some sense, taking resources that were not strictly ours.
And yet the alternative was to watch her deteriorate without adequate care.
In that moment, the commandments did not line up neatly. They collided.
Do not lie — and yet the lie would open the door to care.
Do not steal — and yet the system existed precisely to care for the vulnerable.
Do not covet — and yet I envied those whose lives were not constrained by such responsibility.
Do not kill — and yet I felt flashes of rage toward the woman who had pushed her, a dark instinct that shocked me.
In the end, I followed the doctor’s advice.
My mother received excellent care. She lived for another seven years, safe, supported, and dignified in ways that would not otherwise have been possible.
Looking back, I still ask the question: was it right?
In the language of absolute rules, perhaps not. In the language of lived reality, I believe it was.
And yet I cannot prove it was right. I can only say that it was human.
The Real Question: Rules or Responsibility?
The deeper issue is not whether the commandments are right.
It is whether they can ever be applied without interpretation.
Absolute rules offer clarity.
Real life demands judgment.
Too much rigidity → cruelty in the name of morality. Too much flexibility → chaos disguised as freedom.
We are left in tension.
A Different Way to Read the Commandments
Perhaps the commandments were never meant to function as rigid laws in every conceivable situation.
Perhaps they are moral directions rather than mechanical rules:
not “never lie,” but protect truth and trust
not “never kill,” but honour the sacredness of life
not “never steal,” but respect what belongs to others
In this reading, the spirit matters more than the letter.
But that raises a dangerous possibility: who decides what the “spirit” requires?
Between Fanaticism and Relativism
This is where modern ethics fractures into two extremes:
Fanaticism → rigid obedience, even when it harms
Relativism → anything can be justified
Neither is sufficient.
The real challenge is harder: to hold onto moral clarity without losing moral intelligence.
Conclusion: The Burden of Being Human
The commandments remain.
But they no longer stand untouched on distant stone tablets. They stand within us — contested, interpreted, lived.
To be human is not simply to obey rules. It is to carry the burden of deciding when, and how, they apply.
And that burden cannot be escaped.
Closing quotation
“He who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Why banning social media for under-16s may feel right — but fails to address the real issue
There is a growing political appetite to ban social media for under-16s. Governments in countries such as Australia and Indonesia have already moved in this direction, driven by rising concern about anxiety, depression, and the psychological effects of digital life.
The instinct is understandable. But it may also be wrong.
The comfort of the ban
A ban is politically attractive because it is clear, decisive and easy to communicate. It signals protection. It tells a worried public that something is being done.
But it also avoids a harder question.
Why has social media become so central to childhood in the first place?
Policy without evidence
The Cambridge psychologist Sander van der Linden has been unusually blunt. There is, he argues, “zero empirical evidence” that banning social media for teenagers improves outcomes.
His warning is not ideological but methodological:
“Blindly instituting wholesale bans for teens takes the ‘evidence’ out of evidence-based policy.”
This matters. Because once policy is driven primarily by anxiety, it becomes vulnerable to simplification.
And simplification is exactly what this issue does not need.
The variability problem
Social media does not affect all children in the same way.
For some, it amplifies vulnerability: comparison, exclusion, anxiety. For others, it provides connection, identity and support. As well as of course access to information for school work.
The outcome depends on:
personality
patterns of use
existing mental health
social environment
A blanket ban assumes uniform harm where there is, in reality, radical variation.
The misdiagnosis
More fundamentally, a ban risks targeting the wrong thing.
The problem is not simply that children use social media. It is that social media have been designed to capture attention:
infinite scroll
algorithmic reinforcement
intermittent rewards
These are not neutral features. They are behavioural systems.
Yet instead of regulating the environment, we regulate the child.
We restrict the user because we do not confront the system.
The illusion of control
Even on practical grounds, bans are fragile.
Teenagers will bypass them
Peer groups will remain online
The demand for connection will persist
Evidence shows that the dangers are greater once hidden underground
The behaviour does not disappear. It relocates. More importantly, a ban does not teach navigation. It postpones exposure.
From protection to preparation
Van der Linden’s alternative is not permissiveness, but preparation:
early digital literacy
gradual exposure
critical thinking
resilience
In short:
Not protection through restriction, but protection through competence.
The question beneath the question
But even this may not be the deepest layer because the focus on social media obscures a more uncomfortable possibility.
We did not simply give children smartphones. We removed much of the world they would otherwise have enjoyed.
Social media did not replace childhood. In some respects, it stepped into a space that had already been narrowed.
Conclusion
The case for concern about social media is strong. The case for banning it is not.
As Sander van der Linden argues, policy should be guided by evidence, not urgency or political posturing. At present, the evidence for bans is thin, while the complexity of the problem is substantial.
A moment of religious devotion can feel like a direct encounter with the divine — but the experience may have deeply human origins.
There are few experiences in human life more convincing than religious conversion.
In the moment it happens, it feels absolute.
The new believer does not merely adopt a belief; he experiences what appears to be a profound transformation of reality itself. The world suddenly becomes charged with meaning. Events seem purposeful. Personal history acquires a narrative arc. Even suffering can appear reinterpreted as part of a divine plan.
To the convert, the conclusion feels unavoidable: God has revealed Himself.
I know this experience from the inside. For several years I believed, with complete sincerity, that God had personally intervened in my life. The sense of transformation was overwhelming. At the time it felt impossible to doubt that something supernatural had occurred.
The experience is often accompanied by powerful emotions: relief, gratitude, awe, sometimes tears. The convert may describe feeling “known,” “forgiven,” or “reborn.” For many, this moment becomes the central turning point of their life story.
From the inside, the experience feels like the discovery of truth. God exists. Faith becomes certainty (Hebrews 11:1).
From the outside, however, something more complex is happening.
A psychological ignition
Modern psychology offers a more prosaic explanation for the intensity of conversion.
Many conversions occur at moments of emotional vulnerability: crisis, guilt, loneliness, addiction, grief, or identity confusion. In such moments the mind becomes unusually receptive to radical reinterpretations of reality.
These states create a powerful readiness for cognitive re-organisation. The mind searches urgently for a coherent narrative capable of resolving internal tension.
Religious frameworks are uniquely suited to provide such narratives. They offer a ready-made interpretation of suffering, a clear moral structure and the promise of forgiveness and life beyond the grave.
When the new believer accepts this framework, the psychological relief can be immense. The sense of personal chaos suddenly resolves into a meaningful story.
The experience feels supernatural.
In reality, it may simply be the human mind discovering an interpretation that temporarily stabilises itself.
The sociological amplifier
But psychology alone does not explain the power of conversion.
The social environment plays an equally decisive role.
Conversion rarely happens in isolation. It usually occurs within communities already organised around the expectation of transformation. Worship services, testimonies, music, prayer and communal affirmation together create a powerful emotional ecosystem.
When a convert stands before such a community and declares a new faith, the response is immediate: approval, celebration, belonging.
The individual does not simply gain a belief. He gains a new identity and a new tribe.
Human beings are exquisitely sensitive to social reinforcement. Once a community confirms that a person has been “saved,” the psychological commitment deepens rapidly. Doubt becomes socially costly. Certainty becomes a badge of belonging.
Belief, in this sense, is stabilised not only internally but collectively.
The sincerity paradox
None of this means that conversion experiences are insincere.
Quite the opposite.
At the moment of conversion, the belief is usually completely genuine. The emotional intensity is real. The sense of transformation is real. The feeling of encountering God is real.
But sincerity does not guarantee accuracy.
Human beings are capable of deeply authentic experiences that nevertheless rest upon mistaken interpretations of reality.
Religious conversion may be one of the most powerful examples of this phenomenon.
Human beings are capable of deeply authentic experiences that nevertheless rest upon mistaken interpretations of reality.
The problem of competing revelations
One further observation complicates the picture.
If religious conversion truly revealed a universal divine reality, we might expect converts around the world to converge toward the same understanding of God.
Instead, the opposite happens.
Christians experience conversions that confirm Christianity. Muslims experience conversions that confirm Islam. Hindus encounter Krishna. Pentecostals encounter the Holy Spirit. Catholics encounter the Virgin Mary.
Each experience feels equally convincing to the person undergoing it.
The simplest explanation is not that all these mutually contradictory revelations are true.
It is that the human mind is capable of generating profoundly convincing experiences within whatever symbolic framework it inhabits.
The quiet aftermath
For some people, the story ends with lifelong faith.
For others, something else happens.
Years later, the convert begins to recognise the psychological and sociological forces that once felt invisible. The experience that once seemed supernatural begins to look more recognisably human.
This realisation can be unsettling.
Because it means confronting a difficult possibility:
The God who once felt unquestionably real may have been a projection created by the deepest needs of the human mind.
And yet the experience itself — the hope, the meaning, the transformation — was never fake.
It was simply human.
“The gods we worship write their names on our faces.” — C. G. Jung
The Closet Has A Wedding Ring: How Gay Men Became Fathers
A few weeks ago, in a bar in Berlin, I mentioned to a man I had just met that I am the father of four. He paused briefly, then smiled and said, “Me too.”
Neither of us was surprised.
Among gay men of my generation, this quiet moment of recognition is more common than most people realise. Many of us built heterosexual families before we ever spoke openly about our sexuality. The pattern is well known in private and rarely examined in public.
The easy explanations tend to fall into two unsatisfactory camps. Either the men are portrayed as victims of their era, pushed helplessly into lives they never chose, or they are depicted as fundamentally deceptive, as though their marriages were nothing more than elaborate shams.
Reality, as usual, is more complicated and more human than either of these caricatures allows.
Orientation and Behaviour: A Necessary Distinction
One of the most important starting points is a simple but often overlooked distinction: sexual orientation and lived behaviour do not always align neatly. Sexual behaviour is fluid; sexual orientation is not.
For many heterosexual people, desire and life path coincide without much friction. For a significant number of gay men, particularly in earlier decades, the relationship between the two was more complex.
This does not mean orientation is infinitely fluid. It means only that human beings are capable of living in ways that do not perfectly mirror their inner erotic life.
Across much of the twentieth century, many men who experienced primary attraction to other men nonetheless married women and fathered children. Some did so consciously, some half-consciously, some in genuine hope that marriage might settle their inner restlessness.
What matters, and what is sometimes too quickly forgotten in contemporary discussion, is this: whatever the social context, these were still adult decisions. Social expectations may shape the landscape in which choices are made, but they do not erase personal responsibility for the lives we build within it.
The Social Script Was Narrow — But Not Irresistible
It would be historically naïve to ignore the strength of the social script that shaped male adulthood for much of the last century. Respectable manhood was closely associated with marriage, fatherhood, and visible domestic stability. Homosexuality, by contrast, was widely stigmatised, pathologised, or criminalised in many Western countries well into living memory. In West Germany, we had Paragraph 175 until 1994, and in Britain, the legal age of consent between two males was lowered to 16, in line with the heterosexual age of consent, in 2001.
These realities formed the background conditions in which many men made their life decisions.
But background conditions are not the same thing as compulsion. Men were not automatons. Some resisted the script. Some lived quietly single. Some formed discreet same-sex lives. Others chose marriage.
The more honest account is therefore not that gay men were forced into heterosexual families, but that many judged — rightly or wrongly — that marriage offered a workable path to belonging, stability and ordinary social life.
For some, it did.
For others, the costs emerged only slowly.
The Psychology of the Split Life
To understand how these marriages functioned — sometimes for decades — we have to move beyond the crude language of denial and look more carefully at the psychological mechanisms involved.
Human beings are remarkably adept at compartmentalisation. It is entirely possible to build a life in which emotional loyalty, domestic commitment, and parental devotion coexist alongside an erotic life that remains partially or wholly unintegrated.
Many men in mixed-orientation marriages reported something like the following internal arrangement: their affection, duty and daily life were invested sincerely in the family they built, while their erotic imagination operated in a more private register. The two spheres were kept separate, sometimes consciously, often simply by force of habit and circumstance.
There was also a long-standing cultural belief — now largely discredited but once widely accepted — that marriage might in some cases “settle” or redirect same-sex desire. It is easy to dismiss this idea now, but it was taken seriously by doctors, clergy and families well into the late twentieth century.
Some men entered marriage in good faith under that assumption. Others entered it with more ambivalence. Still others, candidly, avoided asking themselves too many questions.
Again, the human picture is mixed.
The Body, the Role and the Marriage
Another uncomfortable but important reality is that physiological sexual functioning does not always map perfectly onto deep erotic orientation.
Many predominantly gay men have been capable of heterosexual intercourse, particularly within the structured expectations of marriage. This fact has sometimes been misread as evidence of bisexuality where none primarily existed.
The more accurate conclusion is simply that human sexual response is adaptable within certain limits. Performance, affection, novelty and relational context can all play a role.
But adaptability has its limits. Over time, for many men, the gap between role and desire became harder to ignore or sustain.
And this is where the story turns from sociology to ethics.
The Cost That Must Be Named
Any honest discussion of gay fathers in heterosexual marriages must include a truth that is sometimes softened in retrospective accounts.
In many families, when the underlying reality eventually surfaced — whether gradually, painfully, or suddenly — wives and children experienced real hurt, confusion, and sometimes profound disruption.
Not in every case. Some families navigated the transition with dignity and mutual care. Some marriages had long since evolved into affectionate partnerships rather than romantic unions.
But in many others, the moment of disclosure felt, understandably, like a huge rupture. Trust could be shaken. Family narratives had to be rewritten. Children, depending on their age and temperament, sometimes struggled to make sense of what had changed and what had not.
To acknowledge this is not to indulge in self-reproach, nor to erase the genuine love many fathers felt — and continue to feel — for their families. It is simply to recognise that complex life structures often carry complex human costs.
Responsibility, in adulthood, includes the willingness to look at those costs squarely.
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” — Daniel Kahneman
A Generational Pattern. Not an Excuse.
There is no doubt that the pattern of gay men building heterosexual families was more common in earlier decades than it is today. Social visibility, legal change, and cultural openness have altered the landscape significantly.
But it would be a mistake to frame this too simply as a story of past oppression versus present freedom. Human lives remain complicated. Even today, in many parts of the world — and in some families much closer to home — similar tensions still exist.
Nor is it especially helpful to imagine that earlier generations were uniquely constrained while younger men are uniquely liberated. Every generation navigates its own pressures, blind spots, and compromises.
The more useful observation is simply this: life choices are always made within a cultural frame, and those frames do change over time. What once appeared the obvious path for many men no longer appears so.
Understanding that shift helps explain the pattern. It does not absolve individuals of the consequences of their choices.
A More Adult Conversation
What is needed now is neither romanticisation nor condemnation, but maturity.
Gay fathers from heterosexual marriages are not rare anomalies. They are part of a recognisable historical pattern in Western societies across much of the twentieth century. Their lives typically contained real commitment, real affection, and, often, real internal tension.
The marriages were not necessarily fraudulent. Nor were they always sustainable in the long term. Both things can be true at once.
If there is any value in revisiting these stories today, it lies in the clarity they offer about the complicated relationship between identity, behaviour, social expectation, and personal responsibility.
Human beings do not always live in perfect alignment with their inner lives. Sometimes they adapt. Sometimes they delay difficult recognitions. Sometimes they choose stability over authenticity, at least for a time.
And sometimes the reckoning comes later.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” — Søren Kierkegaard
Closing Reflection
That brief exchange in the Berlin bar — “I have four children.” “Me too.” — was not a confession and not an excuse. It was simply recognition between two men shaped, in part, by similar cultural weather.
Many of us built families in good faith. Many loved our wives and children deeply, even where the erotic centre of gravity lay elsewhere. And many, later in life, had to integrate truths that earlier decades made easier to postpone.
The task now is not to rewrite the past into something neater than it was, nor to retreat into defensiveness or regret. It is to understand the full human picture: the agency, the context, the love that was real, and the pain that, in some families, was also real.
Grown-up lives rarely resolve into simple narratives. This is one of them.
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” — Oscar Wilde
What if the crisis facing Britain’s boys is not primarily about absent fathers, but about a society that no longer knows how to raise them?
The recent Sky News report on fatherless teenage boys is careful, empathetic and clearly motivated by concern. It follows several boys growing up without consistent paternal presence, explores mentoring initiatives such as the GOAT Boys project and situates individual stories within a stark statistical landscape. Boys are lagging behind girls at school, men are dominating youth prison populations and young males increasingly disengaged from education and work.
The article deserves to be taken seriously. But it also reflects a broader tendency in public debate: to locate the problem too narrowly in fathers themselves — their absence, their failures, their irresponsibility — while overlooking the deeper institutional, cultural and economic structures that shape boys’ lives, whether their fathers are present or not.
If we want to help boys, we must go deeper.
I write as a teacher and teacher trainer with four decades of experience across Britain, Europe, and Mumbai, and also as a working-class boy from the north of England who, against the odds, obtained a scholarship to read modern languages at the University of Oxford. That trajectory gives me neither moral superiority nor nostalgic certainty. It does, however, give me a long view of how institutions speak and whom they fail to hear.
Boys’ underperformance: a statistic that explains too little
It is statistically true that boys underperform girls across most educational metrics, from early schooling through to A levels. But this fact, endlessly repeated, is not in itself explanatory.
The assumption often smuggled into public discussion is that boys would perform better if only their fathers stayed at home or returned. This is a comforting idea: simple, moral and politically safe. It is also inadequate.
The deeper issue is that our education system remains fundamentally antiquated: its syllabuses, pedagogies and assessment regimes are designed for compliance, abstraction, and credential-accumulation rather than meaning, relevance or lived intelligence. They were built for a pre-digital, class-stratified society and have never been fully rethought for a media-saturated, post-industrial world.
When I conducted research at the University of Sussex some years ago, I interviewed boys after a mock GCSE maths examination in which many had underperformed. Several explained something striking. They knew the mathematically correct answer — for example, the precise change returned by a Coca-Cola vending machine — but assumed it must be wrong. In real life, they said, Coca-Cola costs more than that so the amount of change given had to be less. So they altered their answers to make them “realistic”.
They were penalised for intelligence that refused to suspend reality.
This was not a failure of reasoning. It was a collision between lived rationality and institutional rationality. The institution won and the boys lost.
Educational language in Britain remains overwhelmingly middle-class in its assumptions, abstractions and modes of expression. Working-class boys often understand the task but not the game. They disengage not because they are incapable, but because the system repeatedly signals that what they really know does not count.
“If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.” — John Dewey
Schooling, masculinity and the absence of ordinary men
Around 85–86% of primary school teachers in the UK are women. This is not a criticism of women teachers, many of whom do extraordinary work. It is an observation about institutional reality.
Primary schools are now among the few remaining public spaces in which many boys encounter almost no ordinary adult men at all. This matters for boys who already lack stable male presence at home or whose primary exposure to masculinity comes via social media.
Role models are not ideological constructs. They are relational. Boys need to see men reading, explaining, disciplining, failing, apologising, and persisting. Not as “mentors” or “interventions”, but as part of everyday life.
When this is absent, schools inherit a burden they were never designed to carry.
Father absence = delay discounting
Where father absence does matter educationally is not primarily in emotional damage, but in how boys learn to relate present action to future consequence.
Psychologists describe this as delay discounting: the tendency to devalue future rewards in favour of immediate ones. The consistent presence of a father often helps a boy internalise a basic cognitive link: what I do now shapes what becomes possible later.
When that link is weak or absent, education becomes almost unintelligible. Our system demands that students tolerate years of deferred gratification — irrelevant knowledge, abstract assessments, meaningless hurdles — in order to unlock a distant, hypothetical future. Boys who lack a lived sense of future consequence struggle to sacrifice present enjoyment for credentials that feel unreal.
As one headteacher in the Sky News article puts it:
“It’s really tricky sometimes to try to get into a young boy’s head the importance of passing their GCSEs, if someone outside school is offering them £500 to do a bit of work at the weekend for an illegal endeavour.”
Girls, for a range of social and psychological reasons, tend on average to navigate this demand more successfully. That does not mean the system is working. It means it is selectively survivable.
Prison, punishment and the confusion of severity with safety
Boys make up around 98% of the youth prison population. This is not a moral failure of boys. It is an institutional failure of the state.
Incarceration, especially of young men, often functions less as prevention than as delayed social accounting, the point at which the cost of earlier educational, familial and social failure finally appears on the balance sheet.
Justice matters. Victims matter. But revenge is not rehabilitation, and severity is not safety.
Why professionals cannot replace fathers
The mentoring initiatives described in the Sky News article are sincere and often impressive. They should not be dismissed. But we should also be honest about their limits.
Professionalised care cannot substitute for the long, morally binding authority of a biological or adoptive father who is present over time. Many mentors speak a language that remains distant from the lived reality of working-class boys. Acronyms, programmes, and “projects” may invite engagement, but they cannot create belonging.
This is not ingratitude. It is realism. Systems can support families; they cannot replace them.
What the boys themselves are actually saying
The most revealing moments in the Sky News article are not about fatherhood at all. They are about socially constructed meaning.
The boys speak of learning to tie a tie from YouTube. Of asking themselves, “Am I enough? Am I the problem?” They speak of emotional restraint, of being expected not to feel, not to speak, not to falter.
Gareth Southgate captures this precisely:
“Young men are suffering. They are grappling with their masculinity and their broader place in society.”
This is not a parenting issue alone. It is a crisis of social imagination.
The hidden cost: to the state, the economy and social trust
The cost of this failure is enormous and is rarely calculated honestly.
Incarceration: Keeping one person in a closed prison in England and Wales costs roughly £54,000 per year. Multiply that across a heavily male prison population, and the fiscal consequences are staggering.
Healthcare: Smoking alone costs English society tens of billions of pounds annually, including around £1.8–1.9 billion in direct NHS costs. Men remain disproportionately affected by smoking-related heart disease and cancers.
Addiction: Over 300,000 adults are currently in contact with drug and alcohol treatment services, the majority of them men. Prevention is cheaper than cure; relapse is more expensive than early intervention.
Housing and family breakdown: Around 100,000 divorces occur annually in England and Wales. Family separation often creates two households where one existed before, intensifying housing pressure — a factor almost never mentioned in political discussions of the housing crisis.
Intergenerational effects: Children of divorced parents are statistically more likely to experience relationship instability themselves, compounding social and economic costs over time.
We argue endlessly about government borrowing, borders and defence spending, but rarely about the quiet, cumulative cost of boys who never quite find a place in society.
Adolescence and the limits of parental culpability
The Netflix series Adolescence makes an important and often overlooked point. Its central character has a good father and a good mother — and things still go wrong.
Social media, peer dynamics, algorithmic masculinities and online grievance cultures now shape boys’ inner worlds in ways parents cannot fully control. Parents remain responsible. Absent fathers must own their absence. But culpability cannot be total.
Responsibility is lifelong. Control is not.
Conclusion: prevention, not panic
If prevention matters more than cure, then three things follow:
First, we must radically rethink education: its language, its assessments, and its relationship to real life.
Second, we must invest moral seriousness in something other than punishment, debt-reduction and symbolic toughness.
Third, we must collectively decide that boys are not problems to be managed, but human beings to be formed.
It takes more than a village to raise a healthy boy. It takes a society willing to mean what it says about the future.
A society is not judged by how it punishes those who fail within it, but by how seriously it takes the work of forming those who will one day inherit it.
Over the past decade, British governments have repeatedly demonstrated that fiscal limits are flexible. When spending is framed as urgent, unavoidable, or tied to national security, the state borrows freely and at scale. When spending concerns education, healthcare, or the living standards of poorer pensioners, we are told, with equal confidence, that there is no money.
The contradiction is not hidden. It is simply normalised.
The fiction of scarcity
The UK does not suffer from an absolute inability to spend. It suffers from a selective definition of what counts as affordable. Public borrowing is not rejected in principle; it is filtered by legitimacy.
Debt incurred for defence, border enforcement, or security infrastructure is framed as realism, regrettable but necessary in a dangerous world. Debt incurred to maintain schools, fund care, or prevent old-age poverty is framed as indulgence, risk, or irresponsibility.
This distinction is not economic. It is rhetorical and moral. Once embedded, it removes priorities from democratic debate and replaces them with a language of inevitability.
Where the money goes
The overall structure of UK government spending already tells part of the story.
How the UK government spends £100 (approximate). Based on OBR, HM Treasury, and Our World in Data. Figures rounded; central and local government combined.
At first glance, the picture appears balanced. Social protection, healthcare, and education account for a substantial share of spending. Defence, by contrast, is not the largest item.
But this is precisely where the debate often goes wrong. The issue is not whether defence dominates the budget. It is which areas of spending are treated as politically untouchable.
One category in the chart deserves particular attention: debt interest. A significant share of public money now goes simply to servicing past decisions, producing no public services at all. Yet even this is treated as unavoidable, while investments in human and social infrastructure are endlessly questioned.
What is protected over time
To understand political priorities, we need to look not just at levels of spending, but at what is protected from decline.
UK spending growth since 2010 (real terms, index: 2010 = 100). Approximate indices based on Treasury, IFS, and OBR data; figures rounded for clarity.
Since 2010, UK defence spending has grown modestly in real terms. Education spending has failed even to keep pace with inflation.
This divergence matters. Growth here does not imply excess, nor does stagnation imply neglect by accident. It reflects which areas of public life are shielded from erosion, and which are allowed to decline quietly, year after year.
Defence is treated as structurally non-negotiable. Education is treated as adjustable.
Managed distraction and political theatre
This hierarchy of priorities is sustained by a wider political and media environment that rarely lingers on structural questions.
Public attention is instead drawn toward asylum boats, royal scandals, party infighting, leadership personalities, tactical U-turns, and culture-war skirmishes. Each may be newsworthy in isolation, but together they form a fog, absorbing outrage while larger financial commitments pass with limited scrutiny.
While headlines fixate on spectacle, long-term spending decisions are presented as technical necessities rather than political choices. Defence increases are framed as serious and sober. Social spending is framed as contentious, expensive, or unrealistic.
What “we can’t afford it” really means
The phrase “we can’t afford it” has become a shorthand for this does not rank high enough. It signals which forms of harm the state is willing to tolerate, and which it is determined to prevent.
In contemporary Britain, the harms associated with underfunded care, deteriorating schools, and pensioner poverty are treated as regrettable but acceptable. The risks associated with under-spending on defence or control are treated as intolerable.
The issue that remains
The real test of a society is not what it claims it cannot afford, but what it never seriously debates cutting.
Until this issue is faced honestly, debates about affordability will continue to obscure what is really at stake. The elephant will remain in the room: visible, substantial, and politely ignored.
On my way to the shops recently, I came across a small group outside the mall. They wore Guy Fawkes masks and held laptops showing videos of animal suffering. Their banner read: Anonymous for the Voiceless.
