Jumping the shark in the free world

After spending a long time yesterday evening wrestling with a tortuous and pretty pointless post, I think the time has come to hang up my keyboard (which actually has a few keys that don’t work anymore anyway).  Too long have I gazed at the navel of the world and micturated in the wind of change.  I am putting this blog on hiatus, for the time being.  My reasons are that I —

• am spending too much time on it, on lots of other blogs, and on Twitter
• am hopelessly addicted to politics and news, to the exclusion of other intellectual pursuits such as making a dent in my enormous ‘to read’ pile
• have failed to market it properly (and was never really prepared to post often enough and quickly enough anyway) so have failed to get beyond more than a handful of readers
• have a book to try to get published, and a second to make a start on, which I feel is a better use of my monumental writing ability
• am now on my local community council, which is a better outlet for my petty gripes
• am weary of holding the weight of a heavy world on my shoulders, and am keen to separate the political and the personal a bit more
• started the blog as a showcase of writing for potential future employers, but (a) have a great job on the good old PSGT for the foreseeable future and (b) cannot hold to that mission and still write with any honesty
• sense that I am, worst of all, starting to repeat myself

I may make an embarrassing comeback in due course.  Unlike every other blogger ever, I don’t imagine I know everything, and hope I have instead posed some interesting questions.  Looking back, the posts I’m happiest with are those in which I’ve not got bogged down in policy or ideas and have let loose lyrically, whether on architecture or popular culture or whatever.  So, if I do make a comeback, I expect it will be more in that vein.  In the mean time, I can sum up the main themes thus far thusly —

• the liberal left and the libertarians are mostly well meaning, but mostly misguided
• lots of people believe in God but not religion; more and more I believe the reverse
• just as each generation has to relearn civilisation and not take it for granted, so Britain cannot feel entitled to our hitherto privileged position in the world
• elitism is damaging and divisive, so the nascent direct democracy and blue Labour movements are to be encouraged
• economically we should probably be somewhere in the middle

This can all be summed up as:

• the natural lot of man is extreme liberty, extreme inequality and extreme misery, and postmodern nihilism can only take us back to this natural order — some constraints on both economic and social behaviour are necessary if we want a happier, more equal and more unified society

Thanks to all of you who’ve read and commented over the past couple of years.  For now, lonely reader, as ignorant armies clash by night, not with a bang but a whimper do I exhort you to cast off your mind-forg’d manacles and, forever surprising a hunger in yourself to be more serious, follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.  And as the lone and level sands stretch far away, remember that those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible.

And that is that.  The end.

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