I’m back at sea. Well, I’m in Whitby now, demobilising from the aforementioned dive job in Bridlington Bay. No, we didn’t kill the Whale that washed ashore there this week. I think he committed suicide due to the cost of living crisis.
I joined the ship offshore by Crew Transfer Vessel. After a 30-minute handover I was back in command, and aside from the nauseating feeling every time you leave your family behind for work, the shock of capture subsides a lot quicker when you’re on a boat you know well, in a location you know well, and with a crew you are comfortable with.
It felt a little more like home the second time around.
Home in the sense of a dwelling place, is somewhere you have explored to the point of predictability. You know it inside out, better than anywhere else. The noises, the creaks, the quirks. But with the societal inversion that is taking place around us, and the coronation of King Charles III upon us, the greater meaning of the feeling of home is quite unsettled for many of us in Britain.
Home is an example of how spirit works.
A home, like a body, has a geospatially designated set of properties when we are speaking of a physical house. But as any handyman or homeowner knows, a home is temporally defined as well. The cost of maintenance of any house in the UK is typically 1% of the value of the home annually, in order to keep it in a state of repair that will retain its value.
A house is perishable.
Homes die.
From Penthouse to houseboat, country pile to apartment, the many physical forms of a dwelling place can all be considered home. We all know the slogan, ‘to make a house a home’. Home may have been where you hung your hat when that was the proper order of dress. Now home is where you know the Wi-Fi password and charge the devices that characterise the current development of the consumer as cyborg. It is the place you spend the most time naked. it is where you have sex. it is where your kids are. It is where you let your guard down. It is familiar.
My first day on board my temporary floating home-away-from-home was a long one. With a 5 am start, we worked on location until the divers completed their work at around 6.30 pm. I escaped from the bridge a couple of times to make my bed and unpack in my cabin. The weather was picking up through the day and was forecast to deteriorate rapidly on Thursday, with a strong easterly threatening our arrival to the exposed north-facing entrance at Whitby. As soon as the divers left by CTV, we launched our daughter craft and recovered the Dyneema lines from the four-point mooring spread.
By 8 pm we were underway, and I left the navigational watch to the chief mate. The mate is a Lewis man, and now has the pleasure of having his 20-year-old little brother on board, as our newly promoted 2nd mate.
Having been born in Stornoway myself, we three had some fond nostalgic discussions about the land of our birth. A place so special to anyone from there, that the feeling of Lewis as home never leaves you. Regardless of how far your adventures take you.
It is truly ironic that a Campbell and two MacDonald boys would be sailing together, and instead of reigniting the 800-year-old debate between our clans (over the proper role of authority and monarchy), we spoke longingly of our common homeland.
I went down to my cabin, and looked over the details of a croft for sail in the little village by the sea I spent my childhood summers in. I was settling back into routine, and happy to take my socks off after a long day on my feet. About 25 minutes into the Netflix movie, Nobody, starring Better Call Saul’s fantastic Bob Odenkirk, I was unceremoniously shaken from my relaxation by a shuddering ship.
I ran back to the bridge to see what was going on. The brothers on watch had failed to notice a large fishing buoy until the very last moment and had to take evasive action, throwing the ship hard over to avoid collision or risking the ropes getting caught in our thrusters. The engines belched black smoke from the strain of the sudden alteration.
OK. ‘All’s well that ends well’, I thought and went back down below.
About an hour into my film, which I knew I shouldn’t be watching so late at night with a 5 am arrival to Whitby the next morning, I was further interrupted.
The intercom buzzed loudly over my Bluetooth headphones, and the sound of Bob Odenkirk single-handedly murdering the entire Russian Mafia with a shotgun-wielding Doc Brown from Back To The Future.
‘Erm, you might want to come up to the bridge’, said MacDonald the elder.
I found myself on the bridge in my T-Shirt, shorts & flip flops at 10.30 pm, hand steering while the engineer and mate tried to deal with triple gyro compass failure. I was acutely conscious of the return of that feeling you sometimes get when you’re in command mode. The visceral embodied knowledge that as the old man on board, your main job is to be the one who doesn’t panic.
Even when your compass looks like R2D2 getting a sex change, and you don’t know where you’re heading any more.
After digging through the Autopilot settings and finding a way to use the GPS-derived heading as a steering compass, things settled down. I reminded the mate how to use EBLs/VRMs to assess targets, instead of the Automatic Radar Plotting Aid that we are so used to now and told him to stay further off Flamborough Head than planned.
Automation has been relieving the workload for seafarers for many decades now, and I’m a big fan of it in general. The problem comes when automation has reduced the number of people on board so that when the equipment fails (which is admittedly rare), there are fewer people available to go back to manual operations. And by then, you have a younger crew, who don’t know the old ways, because technology has always been reliable for them.
The complex interdependency of the electronic instruments on ships means that when a compass fails, it no longer fails in isolation. Five other systems also become useless, and you are very quickly going back to hand steering, and the mark one eyeball.
Fortunately, I knew this coastline well enough to proceed without instruments, and just eyeball the approach back for the remaining 35 miles back to Whitby. I did manage to sleep for four hours before entering the port, but it was a very tricky arrival with wind against tide, and no vectors on my electronics to assist with the approach. Being so tired that I felt drunk, my approach was inelegant but nevertheless, successful.
A shaky start to the trip, for sure. But I was pleased that I felt at home enough on the vessel and on this coastline for any stress to be minimal.
Familiarity is a friend. Novelty is a foe.
I felt at home, in my competence.
Next week we’ll be gone from here, and back to Aberdeen. I lived there for six years and worked there for several more when I was on the oil boats. That too will be familiar enough to feel like home. I know the tides. I know the leading lights. I know the names of the landmarks and the berths. I know people who work there.
I remember working there a year after I finished university and going back to a bar that we used to totally dominate when my Navy Unit friends went out for a drink. Sitting there one quiet night alone with a pint of Guinness and a book after work, there were no other customers, and no friendly faces, and it struck me how quickly a place can change its meaning entirely if the people who gave it meaning for you are absent.
People can spiral into midlife crises, and stagnate in under-developed manhood, trying to reclaim or hold onto a youthful feeling of home like that. other people sometimes live on the same street their whole life, send their kids to the same school they went to, and keep the same friends they had from kindergarten through to retirement. That is something that used to be the norm for all people but is an attitude that is now often derided as negative in our culture.
The flag-waving crowds, and monarchy-loving American tourist boom we’ve seen this week as the country prepares for the coronation have a tinge of the feeling of this kind of homesickness. Like the media is framing the coronation as the odyssey to reclaim our lost kingdom.
But Charles is not like the king of old, Edward the Confessor, the kindly saint who was loved by his people and founded Westminster Abbey where the coronation takes place. Charles is the Great Resetter.
How can we be returning to our home, as a nation, while the borders are open to war-torn France, with boatloads of illegal migrants being welcomed every day? With little Muslim girls being the representatives of what used to be called the boy scouts at the coronation ceremony. With the Epstein client list revealing ties to CIA blackmail campaigns this week? With a government that is committed to Net Zero, banning ordinary people from being able to catch fish, rear chickens or own property?
How can we show unity as a country, while being so disunited in our day-to-day lives?
How can we cheer and swear an oath to a man who explicitly says he wants to reinstate serfdom on a global scale and de-populate the earth?
We should note how symbolic it is that coronations take place at Westminster Abbey. A place that was founded as a monastery to be a home for monks, but has not been a home for almost 500 years, since Henry VIII decided to become his own authority. The Abbey acts only as a home for the dead. It serves only the monarchs. Much like the modern state itself.
Monastic life began when Saint Anthony the Great found the hermit Paul of Thebes in the Egyptian desert. Anthony attracted such a large following of hermits who sought his wisdom, that he was forced to organise them into communities to bring them together out of a disorganised chaos of a sea of hermits. This community became the precursor to all monasteries. These Monasteries could be granted the status of Abbey if they grew large enough to act as centres for the physical and spiritual care of their wider communities in the early years of the church.
These were homes for monks who were on a spiritual quest. Homes that were designed to be uncomfortable. Codes of silence. Long hours of work. The prohibition of soft furnishings or beds to lie in. All designed to engender an intense focus on the work of the soul and of charity and service.
Family life is real life and not a weeping television advertisement for cancer care or life insurance. You only hurt the ones you love, because you’re not close enough to anyone else to matter at all to them. Home is often the place of maximum discomfort for many of us, particularly in the emotionally formative pre-escape years of adolescence.
You know the flaws of your parents better than they know them themselves because you studied them intently for every waking moment of your childhood. Many people define their identity precisely in opposition to these perceived parental flaws.
In just this way, our society seems now to seek its identity in opposition to its own roots.
If you were lucky as an adolescent, like the hermits you may have been able to retreat into your own space within the oppressive knowledge of the family home of your origin.
This is how many of us first became avid readers, and escape artists of the mind. Others, more easily these days for youngsters, escaped into the world of online communities and tribes. If you were really lucky, you had friends IRL as well. many, however, do not.
There is clearly great freedom and pleasure in finding like-minded souls on the internet. The very basis of this blog that I find so exciting is the ability to send up a flare and have it be seen by people who feel or think the same way. And we can bond and unite and challenge each other, and play with this brotherhood of ideas. And it’s all very nice for most of us, most of the time.
Our digital home has an abundance of comfort.
This comfort is derisively called the echo chamber by those who stand in opposition to community, but this element of the internet is possibly its greatest advantage.
But as any parent of young kids who travels for work will let you know, online communication is a lesser form of communication. Touch screens are no substitute for touch.
Video calls and instant text messaging have made the hermitage of teenage years a solipsistic stare at one’s own reflection. The hypersensitivity to problematic pronouns is clearly a sign that our younger generation has spent too much time focused on the word, and not enough on the world. They feel disconnected from their bodies in ways that were unfathomable a couple of years ago. Their mind is in the cloud.
The monastic meeting of minds in support and service of one another has been lost in our change of philosophy from seeing the self as servant to reality, to viewing the self as master of the universe.
We no longer feel the instinctive and organic nod from God when we seek to make a home but follow instead the peer-approved five-year plan of the materialist mind.
Trans people can change their self-created pronouns at will, and demand reality conforms to their subjective state of mind moment by moment. They claim to feel ‘unsafe’, whenever anyone disagrees with their pronouncements, and that ‘hate speech’ or ‘transphobia’ is reason enough to banish people from schools, the workplace and the internet.
Digital hermitage, and comfortable communities that can reject the family of origin so easily, and indulge any fantasy at will, without consequences, is ruinous to compassion. Free speech is functionally non-existent in many circles. The new secular laws of blasphemy have slain the court jester, and we are palpably moments away from the digital deletion of human beings that is cancel culture, becoming a real-world riot of genocidal potential.
The people who are commanded to ‘love their enemies’ and ‘turn the other cheek’, are being painted as a genocidal threat to the Liberal activist LGBTQ+ mob, that has itself been ransacking, rioting and murdering people on the streets every summer since the criminal George Floyd was sanctified as a martyr in a race war.
Deleting people online trains the mind of the mob to justify deleting people in real life.
In the materialist worldview, you are what you are. Cause and effect is fatalist and mechanical. Darwinism invites perfectionist meddling and eugenics. The evolutionist idea of progressivism as a value hierarchy led directly to the lobotomising, sterilisation and unforgiving treatment of homosexuals, disabled or ethnically ‘other’ people as being justifiable ‘scientifically’. The bitter contradiction that the triumph of the will over reality is all you need to sidestep the question of morality, while at the same time rejecting that free will exists serves the madness of modernity. Not its advancement.
There is no forgiveness in materialist progressivism.
The ancient view was that you are not simply yourself. You belong to the land, to your family, and to your community. Not them to you. You are what you do, not what you ‘are’ in the material sense.
The ancient worldview was one that recognised the invisible ties of meaning that make a family, tribe or clan out of disparate and differing wretchedness, and connect it in transcendent meaning.
Jonathan Pageau describes love as the force that creates unity out of diversity, without crushing the diversity.
The production line mentality equates uniformity with unity. This is the psychology of the fascist that unites superficially while crushing the real diversity that defines agapic love.
What is our society any more?
Our places have changed so much because our philosophy has changed. Our view of hierarchies has changed.
The increasing grip of tyranny is fuelled by this change in the philosophy and character of the digital generation. The political effort to tighten the grip of control over the use of space, time, attention and behaviour is proportionately huge in response to the radical shift that has taken place in the attitudes of people since communication technology has advanced so much.
Citizens used to live in families, in homes, in communities, and within nations. Now our digital freedoms have made hermitic nomads of us all and turned most people into members of ineffable diasporas, centred around focal points that are antithetical to the real origins of their members.
Digital clans and societies live on the cloud.
Just as corporations live beyond the grip of nations, so now do citizens, in many ways.
It may be good, overall. The advent of AI and the fourth industrial revolution are already reminding the materialist that objectivist ontology has its limitations. The CEO of Google admitted that they do not understand their own creation. When AI entities outlive the people they have learned from by hundreds of years and aggregate the inputs of so many souls, even the hardest-minded among us will recognise such a thing as spirit. The same people who proclaim anti-theism will marvel at the ‘ghost in the machine’.
ChatGPT, Skype, TikTok. These phenomena may illustrate for us how the church acts as the body of Christ is distributed in the world, by their contrast, distribution and their power.
Materialism rejects meaning as the primary source of reality. Therefore it does not recognise the truth that people and place are the same things. We are each other’s home. That is all we miss when we are not home. And all that stands out to us when we are.
I ponder now, what is paradise? What is heaven? What is the New Jerusalem?
Is our spirit more permanent than AI, and other works?
If we seek the right future, and feed AI with positivity and genuine love of the other, could AI assist in the sanctification of millions of souls?
If we feed it fear, will we demonise our society?
Can we find our society online, without engaging in idol worship?
I think in the best-case scenario, putting our centres of memory, trust, verification and communication onto the network is a good thing, with compounding benefits. And in putting things in their proper place, we may well be able to free up our attention for the real-world centres that actually bind us. Like holding the hand of my two-year-old daughter as we sit on the couch watching tv, instead of listening to her say ‘daddy, daddy, daddy’ on WhatsApp for two minutes a night.
The answer to Odysseus was Abraham. The Abrahamic quest for a new home, in contrast with the rescuing of an old home.
In the biblical worldview that gave birth to our traditional culture in Britain, we do not long to return to an illusory paradise lost. We seek the New Jerusalem of Revelation. A place personified as the bride, and the home.
We have the ability to make a home anywhere. And we have the ability to make our home like heaven, or like hell. Home is our place of dwelling and our way of being. It is our way of being for each other and with each other.
It is not merely a flag, or our relationship to the state, or a man with a golden hat on.
Stay calm out there. Become a centre. Love your enemy, and defeat him the right way.
The proclamation of today says that ‘diversity is our strength’. That is uttered as the highest value by people who view the most extremely minor and unusual eccentricity of a person’s behaviour as the core definition of their identity, rejecting all of the other ties that bind them to the people around them. Their attitude is to celebrate the fringe with permissive indulgence in the fantasy of consequence-free living while suppressing the centre by demanding uniformity of thought.
This inverted contradiction uses disunity as its strength. Divide and rule is the instinct of the tyrannical mob as much as it is for the tyrannical monarch.
That’s how they can say diversity is their strength. It is their strength.
Not ours.
A society nested in a hierarchy that encourages uniformity, and conformity, and actively pursues disunity is possessed by the spirit of destruction.
We need to repent and reform ourselves and our society. We need to live united with the spirit of the force of creation, productivity and generation, and integrate our diverse natures under that hierarchy.
That will be our strength. That will conquer the world.
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