The world grows darker.

We are living through times when truth, peace, justice, beauty – all those things that we once thought made life worth living – seem perilously fragile and vulnerable. Politically, all those grand ideas and associated institutions that the world has tried to realize and fight for over more than a century now – democracy, sovereignty, the rule of law, transparency, the removal of impunity for the powerful – are being violated daily by the very people entrusted to defend them. Confusingly enough, the violation continues in the name of security, human rights, national interest, development and other shibboleths of those who claim to represent progress, civilization and enlightenment.

Here we are, hurtling perilously into the second decade of a new century, having learnt nothing at all from the disasters of the previous century, or even of the first decade of this one. Articulate, worldly, wielders of power and influence, leaders and members of elites, schooled in the best schools, have narrowed down our understandings of what it means to be human. We confuse individual growth with the growth of purchasing power. We confuse liberty with the freedom to continue acquiring more wealth and power and indulgence, untramelled by larger concerns for the common good. We confuse democracy with the acquiescence in the surrender of our culture and public spaces to unaccountable corporations whom we are taught to regard as the guardians of the public weal. We confuse civilization with the desire to force our ways of life over others.  We are unable to distinguish between ethical and cost-benefit reasoning, and our highest estimations of action are reserved for those that are merely legal, or expedient or successful according to some desiccated, reductive definition of success. Virtuous action is regarded as quaint or abnormal, or out of step with the times, or just plain stupid.

As a teacher in high school, I earn my living by preparing my students for their future. But I feel increasingly burdened by a sense of false normality and optimism. I want to assure them that not all is gloom and doom, but the evidence for that assurance grows increasingly difficult to find. I have tried to argue with myself that the media will selectively report mostly bad news, because that is what sells. Good news is boring. But I’m finding it increasingly difficult to keep my eyes off the “big picture” without asking myself: where is the hope, the gleam of kindly light amid the encircling gloom? And yet the voices warning us against our follies are many, even if isolated.

In this blog, I wish to celebrate those voices, and join those “ironic points of light” that “flash out wherever the just exchange their messages”. Affirming Flame will still have many of the same concerns as its predecessor. It will be partly political, but hopefully also more about myself as a learner than GP was – a learner of languages, mathematics, and many other things. I would also like to use these pages to record the pleasures of becoming grandparents, and of discovering new ways of learning and working. I will try and write about the beliefs that I affirm, the actions that I find heroic or praiseworthy, the voices that “rage, rage against the dying of the light”.