Affirming Flame

Our intellectual ore must shine

Not slumber idly in the mine.

Let education's moral mint

The noblest images imprint;

Let taste her curious touchstone hold,

To try if standard be the gold;

But 'tis thy commerce, Conversation,

Must give it use by circulation;

That noblest commerce of mankind,

Whose precious merchandize is mind!


Why was conversation so important to the Blue Stockings Society, one might ask? It was mostly because they understood conversation to be crucial, not just to moral and political progress, but to individual development, too. There is something extraordinary about the fact that every meaningful interaction is an opportunity to connect with one another’s potential, to hear a truth we never knew or recollect a truth we’d forgotten. Conversation is a dynamic and unpredictable process, often full of emotion. It differs dramatically from the billion-dollar self-help industry that claims to provide clear and defined paths to a perfectly peaceful existence.

Everyone knows that the mind can be a chaotic and discordant theme park routinely stuck on the rumination and worry roller-coaster – these neurotic tendencies pre-suppose time. Rumination bound to the past while worry imagines a potential future. In contrast, conversation provides a release from this madness and takes us back to the very concrete present. When committed to good-faith conversations, supporting each others right to think and speak on principle, without continually ascribing motives to one another, we begin to understand why the Blue Stocking Society saw this activity as a civic duty and a moral imperative, an activity that in the 18th Century was not even a right let alone a duty for women. Conversation is a reliable way to realize what thoughts we have given value to and, where necessary, course-correct prejudice and bias that previously evaded our awareness.





As the philosopher of science Karl Popper observed, too much tolerance eventually leads to tolerance of intolerance. The same paradox applies to inclusion, go far enough in one direction and you suddenly find yourself excluding those that decline your inclusion narrative. Thanks to the phrase Islamophobia, coined by the Muslim Brotherhood, a similar confusion was wielded by many socially conservative and fundamental Muslims, along with much of the progressive media, over the last few decades. Insist those that disagree with you are Islamophobic, never mind exactly how one becomes phobic of ideas, and witness the conversation end. Disregard the fact that challenging viewpoints is a world away from actual anti-Muslim bigotry, where opposition and disgust are directed at living breathing humans with dignity and potential not at ideas they may or may not hold.


With the modern left’s last vestige of sanity consumed by post-modern ideology their empirical outlook seems beyond the pale. So far as the left was a party of the working-class as well as protecting the rights of minorities, they now appear awfully willing to implode with moral righteousness and hell-bent on rejecting a large portion of their former electorate by considering their opinions, and more unbelievably even their character, to be deplorable. The fact there have been real economic difficulties, especially in the UK in the decades leading up to Brexit, seems to have eluded much of the political class. Net-migration, for instance, rose substantially from 2012 until the EU referendum in 2016 reaching 350,000 in one year. The fiscal impact of non-EEA migrants between 1995-2011 cost the UK negative £134B, according to the Oxford Migration Observatory, while an empirical study done by The Bank of England in 2015 discovered that for every 10% increase in migration there was a small but significant reduction of 2% in wages. Guess who that percentage directly impacted? Low-middle skilled income workers. To have asked where the limits of migration were was to be accused of blasphemy. To consider Angela Merkel’s decision in terms of potential social consequences was to be ignorant of her boundless mercy. So what, if of those 1M migrants that were allowed to enter Germany only an estimated 40% were actually refugees. So what, if the EU does not possess that most crucial criterion that Karl Popper insisted necessary for democracies to flourish; error correction.

The Australian Labor party, since their defeat last year, were the first party in recent times to undertake an honest effort of self-reflection, considering how to regain waning trust. Likewise, the UK Labour party must now face a similar self-examination or risk sliding further into irrelevance among the former electorate. For decades now it has become increasingly fashionable on the left to betray, denounce, or even deny the fact that valuable ideas and traditions, even though historically and geographically coincidental, were born and then re-ignited in the West. This historical and artistic rejection is part of a much larger trend now referred to as ‘The Great Awokening’ and over the last decade alone a significant number of baseline attitudes expressed by white liberals in the United States now display out-group bias, preferencing other racial and ethnic groups above their own. Fast becoming the only civilization that focuses on the most negative aspects of itself, this is what Harold Bloom called ‘The School of Resentment’. Solutions to resurgent nationalism and widespread populism or suggestions of alternative political futures can hardly be imagined, let alone articulated.

In a previous essay I lent support to the argument from Lyndon Storey’s book Humanity or Sovereignty arguing for the idea that human potential might be considered the defining characteristic of future political systems rather than national, ethnic or religious identities. In order to pursue this vision, or some other, conversation must return to more concrete ideas such as belonging, sense of place, dignity and human potential, while taking a sledge-hammer to forms of identity politics that divide rather than unite. As is found in Shakespeare’s work– language and society continually change, but the central themes are timeless. It remains to be seen if we can take a leaf out of the Blue Stockings Societies book and once again see conversation as an endless opportunity to connect and grow. If the current political landscape is any indication, we’ve got a way to go. Conversation, ‘the noblest commerce of mankind’ need only be guided by an attitude of open-mindedness: I could be wrong and you could be right but together we can get closer to the truth.

Not to indulge in idle vision,

But strike new light by strong collision,

Of CONVERSATION, wisdom's friend,

This is the object and the end,

Of moral truth, man's proper science,

With sense and learning in alliance,

To search the depths, and thence produce

What tends to practice and to use.


Murray, Douglas. The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Identity, Morality. Bloomsbury Continuum, 2019.

“BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Bluestockings.” BBC, Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

Hannah More, The Bas Bleu. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

“Net Migration to the UK.” Migration Observatory, Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

Rares, The Hon Justice Steven. Why Magna Carta Still Matters. 9 Oct. 2015,

Financial Times. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

“The Fiscal Impact of Immigration in the UK.” Migration Observatory, Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

“The Fiscal Impact of Immigration in the UK”---. Migration Observatory, Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

“The Political Void That Labour Needs to Fill.” UnHerd, 5 June 2018,

Storey, Lyndon. Humanity or Sovereignty: A Political Roadmap for the 21st Century. Peter Lang, 2006.

“A Manifesto to Rescue Labour from Irrelevance.” UnHerd, 15 Jan. 2020,

"David Deutsch on Brexit and Error Correction"