In the cracks of paving stones, in crevices of distressed walls, a little dirt, blown in and moistened, provides enough sustenance for weeds to root.

I see climbing vines, bindweed, couch grass, bracken, and clumps of moss in the paving lines, delicate chickweed sprouting from damp cracks in the shade.

A leafy spurge sways as the breeze picks up. Oblivious of its precarious exposure, it stands defiantly erect from its concrete base. Its footing comprises minuscule and densely packed roots like rolled tobacco, snug in moist concrete burrows.

Taproots and robust networks of rhizomes worm through plastic barriers and crumbling, weathered brickwork in a multi-generational war of attrition that the weeds would always win.

None of these plants have any business to be there. They have no plan, no ambition. They simply persist to be what they are, and do so with everything they’ve got.

It’s astonishing how fast they rise from such meagre beginnings and flourish to the point that they bow under their own weight. A force of some kind is at work as if the conditions for life have a singular will. A build-up of dirt, moisture, a little sunlight and pockets safe from gusts of wind — whatever this force can get it takes.

It seems a pity to pull it all up. It would only take a matter of years if humans had been extracted from this city, that platlife would overgrow everything, like those lost cities swallowed by the Amazon.

Striving’s Purpose in Spinoza’s System

What is behind this relentless vitality? This endeavour that makes the most of what it has?

The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza conceptualised this as conatus, Latin for “striving”. For him it was the most fundamental force of all things—both living and inanimate.

In Spinoza’s philosophical system, everything is part of a oneness that he describes as “God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura). Ultimately, nothing is separate from an immanent God, who is not a divine engineer who set the cosmos in motion, but is in fact the cosmos itself — infinite and self-caused.

What we perceive to be parts of the cosmos are “modes” according to Spinoza. In his system, modes are temporary expressions of the one substance — the singular underlying reality that everything is made from — just as waves are an expression of the sea, or ripples are an expression of a river. The ripples and waves are all of the same substance — the river or the sea — they are part of a oneness.

And so people, animals, planets, and grains of sand are all modes of the same one substance.

But if all is part of a oneness, what explains change? Why isn’t everything just static? Why do trees grow, why do cells divide, why do people go about their business? We can explain these processes through science, but what, ultimately on a cosmic level, necessitates them?

Spinoza declares the answer in part three of his Ethics. “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.” (Ethics III 6) Spinoza’s philosophy hinges on this notion — it serves to join together his ethics and his account of what reality is (his ontology).

Conatus isn’t a survival instinct; it isn’t something that modes do, and it’s not something added to modes — it’s not a feeling or a behaviour. His claim is that conatus is the essence of all things — everything that exists strives to maintain the integrity of what it is. This is true of rivers and meteorites as much as trees, cells, humans and tigers.

Existing isn’t a choice. Your body is automatically performing millions of tasks: your blood cells are pumped, filtered and manufactured in the marrow, your skin grows ceaselessly, thoughts fizz in your mind, melded together from memories, associations, conjectures. Your conatus is you being you; the striving integral to you.

Everything, to a greater or lesser extent, operates to preserve its being. Spinoza considers this to be a finite expression of the infinite power of God or Nature. If we to return to our metaphor, the wave has momentum but that momentum is a localised and limited power of the overall power of the sea of which it is a part.

Conatus, Ethics and Emotion

Conatus provides the basis for Spinoza’s theories of emotion and ethics. Value isn’t built into the universe itself and waiting to be discovered — it is registered only in the moment of need as something that helps or hinders conatus.

As sunlight and water nourishes a plant growing from the gap in paving stones, aspects of your life that bring you real strength will help you thrive, regardless of the conditions you find yourself in.

Because conatus is essence, everything that enables or expands your power to persist feels good, anything that limits that power feels bad.

When your power to persist increases you feel joy; when it diminishes, you feel sadness. From this simple correlation, we can extrapolate the whole complex of human emotions. Love is joy and the awareness of its external cause, hate is sadness and the awareness of its external cause.

We think of emotions as arising from our own choices. You may think that you simply want a slice of cake because it’s delicious, but your conatus sees that slice of cake as a means by which you can keep persisting.

You think you hate your colleague because they are untrustworthy and hold opinions contrary to yours, but your conatus sees your colleague as a factor in your life that diminishes your power.

But there is a problem with the concept, and we can perceive it in three interrelated aspects from obvious to not-so-obvious.

Firstly, cake isn’t particularly good for you, and your colleague isn’t deserving of hate. To desire sugary processed foods and hate people are unhealthy habits.

Secondly, conatus is committing Spinoza to egoism: it’s obvious that everything seeks advantage for itself, but what of altruism and sacrifice?

Following from this, conatus can also seem circular, that is, it answers its own question: we simply desire what we desire. As such, it may initially seem like a meaningless concept devoid of insight.

The Role of Reason

Spinoza’s response is that reason helps us discern what is truly good for us. To be virtuous is only to act in correspondence with your own nature, but we must fully understand that nature to be virtuous. Our desires do not necessarily identify what genuinely benefits us.

If we properly understand nutrition, we’d second guess the pangs of blind hunger that make us yearn for the slice of cake and instead eat something more nutritious.

While conatus is egoism to the extent that it is self-directed, reason shows the conatus that being pro-social and collaborative is good for everybody, including yourself.

Understanding ourselves and our circumstances allows us to distinguish truly beneficial desires from those that undermine our flourishing. And that understanding shows why rational self-interest needn’t conflict with the good of others.

You would want to work towards a situation where human beings can mutually thrive. What’s truly good for others, is truly good for us. As Spinoza puts it, “There is no singular thing in Nature which is more useful to man than a man who lives according to the guidance of reason.” (Ethics 4 P35)

Wisdom is what is most beneficial to conatus, because it allows us to understand and seek out what is truly good for us, not just the things that promise short-term pleasure.

It is most common for people to be imprisoned by their passions. We desire things that do us harm through greed, envy, anger, and obsession, because we don’t understand the causes of those desires. We mistake yearning for choosing.

Conatus is blind, and a poorly-guided conatus will be guided by base instincts and crude desires—it will envy, grab, and hoard what it can. A well-guided conatus is oriented towerd collaboration and compassion, because what seems like sacrifice is a wise pursuit of a shared good. We all thrive in free and compassionate societies.

In this way, Spinoza’s philosophy directly opposes the commonplace notion that people have fundamentally antisocial instincts that need to be tamed.

The very idea of conatus agrees that we are selfish inasmuch that we want to maintain the integrity of our being, but that self-interest guides us ultimately towards a pro-social existence. Ethical work isn’t about suppressing conatus, but rather enlightening it to what is truly good.

This is where conatus becomes a practical concept. The more you understand your own nature and that of the world, the more powerful your conatus becomes. You start to develop an inner coherence that’s no longer distracted by passions. Who is truly free? The magnanimous, or those who are driven by spite?

Conatus and Stoicism

For those acquainted with Stoicism, Spinoza’s conatus bears a striking resemblance to the Stoic concept of oikeiōsis — “affinity” — the sense of self-belonging all living things have.

It is thought to be the root of Stoic justice, we know intrinsically what is good for us, and we strive to maximise what increases our power. For both Spinoza and the Stoics, self-preservation is the starting point: all happiness flows from what is already good.

This is an important foundation for ethics that grounds it in nature: joy isn’t the goal of good acts, but rather the accompaniment of what is good. We feel joy in community and cooperation, when we eat well, when we celebrate and so on. This is a joy of true self-possession — it is beyond the cheap pleasures of selfish gratification which lead to ultimate pain.

Where conatus and oikeiōsis diverge is in the scope of the concepts. For Spinoza, all things, animate and inanimate are driven by conatus. A rock floating in space, a cog in an engine, and a river are all expressions of God or Nature and therefore strive to persevere in their own being.

In Stoicism, oikeiōsis applies to animals, including humans. There is a hierarchy of being in Stoicism, whereby animals have impulse and plants merely have physis.

While the Stoic cosmos is providential (guided by a divine plan) and oikeiōsis is part of a rational design, conatus is not a purpose or a function, it is rather the essence of a thing — it’s what the thing ultimately is.

You don’t have to accept Spinoza’s metaphysics entirely to feel the force of the notion of conatus. You know what it is to persist, to strive, you feel it diminish in all the travails you go through, and take delight in its growth in all your triumphs.

The weeds in the garden don’t know that they are striving. We do, and in that understanding of our nature, and our place in nature as a whole, Spinoza sees a blessedness — not a blessedness bequeathed from above, but a blessedness that grows from within.

People find abstract art difficult. There seems to be nothing to look at. There’s no recognisable subject to anchor the gaze and set out a thought or emotion. Paintings built from shape and colour can feel arbitrary, as if made up as the artist went along.

But consider another abstract artform you’re already very familiar with, that you likely enjoy every day: music.

The abstract paintings of Daphne Cousins (1946–2025) offer a direct way past the difficulties that may prevent you from understanding — less still enjoying — abstract painting. She saw music in her mind, and painted what she saw.

Cousins was synaesthetic — a rare condition in which two or more sensory pathways are bridged. To Cousins, sound and vision were conjoined. Different types of music conjured different kinds of visions in the minds eye.

My hope in this article is that we come to grasp not only a basic taste for abstraction, but also an appreciation that abstract art can offer a deeply personal response to an artist’s experiences that gives rise to a shared pleasure that is both sensual and reflective.

Brazilian Rhythm

Let’s start simply. We’ll take a basic two-tone example of what we’re about to explore.

Take a look at the picture above. To a casual glance, this image looks severe, perhaps austere: straight-edged, pristine black shapes against stark white.

There’s no loose gesture or indulgence, not so much as a fleck out of place. It’s hard to believe it was painted. But sit a moment in the presence of this image and they begin to move.

The forms pulse in relation, in weight, measure, and repetition. They slide and lean in various cadences. This is an abstraction that’s ostensibly “geometric” and still, but movement is insistent in the form.

You realise this here is the parsimony of rhythm in black and white. Music is expressed as musicality in shape and colour, the forms echo notation but aren’t passive, they animate themselves.

Our eyes perceive a strident rhythm, the blocks of black assemble like punctuation, and silent pulses of white space assert themselves as fully and insistently.

These images resist resolution into pattern — “the grid”, as an ordering substrate, is ever-present in the uniform relations of shape and colour, but the forms are rendered as a unity on the surface. There is no implied continuity beyond the picture’s edge.

This is one of two stark images are called “Brazilian Rhythm 1 and 2”. It’s confounding — of all kinds of music, who’d be daring enough to render such a thing into black and white? The musical creole of far-flung cultures brought together, in the grain of maracas, the stride of piano, the dancing guitar?

You could gather guesses about the source of these structures — from syncopated samba to the languid legato of bossa nova. Regardless, there’s a quiet thrill in the audacity of the stark black and white. It’s an exercise, of some sort, in reduction.

I had the pleasure of researching Cousins’ body of work for a new exhibition. You can see Cousins’ paintings at Experiencing Together — A retrospective, 29th September — 4th October 2026 at the Peggy Jay Gallery, Burgh House in Hampstead, London. Visit daphnecousins.com for more info.

Cousins’ work evolved early on as an investigation into her subjective experience of sound. The Brazilian rhythms, in her words, were devised to “optically simulate the energy and contrapuntal vitality of the sound.”

These were minor works — studies in gouache — that epitomised a grand ambition: to transmute a sensation that was personal in essence to a public medium.

Early in her career, the sensation of this synthesis of sound and colour was put to paper and canvas systematically — a colour was intuitively assigned to each tone on the scale.

Such a practice deepened Cousins’ appreciation for music, particularly classical music — Bach and Bartók were twin passions.

Concerts and listening sessions transported her into a state of awe and wonder, no doubt arising from the eccentric synthesis of colour, tone, shape, contrast, timbre and rhythm happening within.

To capture such a thing, if possible, became a lifelong creative preoccupation.

Colourscape, Silence and Sound

In works dating from the late 1960s to early 1970s, Cousins gave life to synaesthetic sensation at scale, producing spectral apparitions that spread across the surfaces of paper and canvas — loose grids of tonal blocks wavering against expanses of black.

Like the music itself, there is a continuity of tones and the measured silences between them.

In art appreciation and analysis, there’s a time-honoured distinction between “figure” — the things our attention is drawn to; and “ground” — the backdrop against which figures play out some kind of drama.

It’s hard to describe these as forms — as if they are figures against a ground. We ought to think — or see, rather — in terms of “colourscape”. These span the paintings horizontally from edge to edge, wavering vertically in a way that resembles the oscillations of sound waves.

In the 1970s we see more emphasis on composition, on reconciling independent forms, and a more refined and muted palette of colours.

One composition is anchored in 45-degree diagonals of grey bands fringed with tonally equivalent hues of blue and red that fold over themselves. Among these bands, vertical columns of horizontal stripes in varying tones convey subtle rhythms.

The bands’ folds and their interplay with the vertical columns hold a tension between flatness and the illusion of three dimensions. Like the earlier works, there is movement, but the movement is steady with an absence of momentum.

The painting is a knot of judgements — edges pause, planes overlap, lines intersect, and colours modulate form. Coherence is achieved not by fusion but by coexistence, much as two melodies coexist within a single passage of music.

The banding and stripe motif continued to be explored throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but in progressively wider colour ranges of lush and bright varieties. In one series, tone seems to be explored systematically through the striped-column or band motif; in others, rhythm animates shape.

Some works are saturated edge-to-edge with rhythm and colour, such as the pastel rainbow series; others opt for large colour fields rendered either by vigorous gesture or with a machine-like precision.

The “Auditory Space-Field”

The works of the 1990s are more pared back. Diagonal and horizontal lines are the principal motifs, and emerging more clearly here is what Cousins called “the auditory space-field” — an enveloping ground into which the pulses of rhythm pass in lines. The presentation is so crisp in these works it resembles print. It brings to mind Cousins’ transitional statement:

“I am now working with sound concepts, (moving away from the immediate stimulus) dealing with specific qualities and situations inherent in sound […] One has become concerned with defining the interaction between sound and mind in visual terms.”

The effect is for those who are not synaesthetic to re-present the beauty of music as concrete form. It’s impossible to be literal about this. In her Master’s thesis, Cousins wrote, “the aim is not to replicate synaesthetic experience but to explore intense creative ideas implicated by it.”

Cousins considered developing a system of representing music. In such a system, what would the work of different composers look like? How would duration in time be expressed? How and where does music exist when we hear it? How is loudness, pitch, rhythm and timbre expressed?

To even come close to answering these questions, Cousins had to generate the visual equivalent of the “auditory space-field” — a topology, if that’s even possible, where sound/forms structure themselves.

Her experiments in translating bars of the works of Bach, Mozart, Britten, and Bartók into a uniform 12-colour scale and duration-to-length ratio were interesting but unsatisfactory. It was, in her words, a “limiting paradigm […] bound by the strictures of another’s creativity.”

In her postgraduate research, Cousins struggled with how exactly to render music in space. She soon resolved the problem by inverting the auditory space-field. So, instead of rendering the sound within a void, the void was situated in the inner area of the painting, and the sound/colour was rendered on the outer edges in block-like forms.

When set against a white ground, the interplay of colour flowing out from a void into the whiteness became a more satisfactory expression of music in light and colour.

The paintings grew wider — up to eleven feet in fact — as they traced time in space from left to right. The colours bled around the edges of the canvases, giving the paintings more of an object-like appearance, bringing the musicality of colour into the space of the room.

We can see two longstanding threads through Cousins’ career — the experimental ambition to systematise the “simulation” of music in visual form, and the continual investigations into form and shape inflected by the bridging of auditory and visual senses.

In every case, forms are divested of any semblance of nature. But that’s not to say they are unnatural: each image summons a sense, at least, of the deepest, most fundamental structures of thought ensconced in the mind. These images are echoes of the inner sanctum of subjective experience — to behold them is to feel the connection that Cousins sought.

You can see Cousins’ work at a new exhibtion, Experiencing Together — A retrospective, 29th September — 4th October 2026 at the Peggy Jay Gallery, Burgh House in Hampstead, London. Visit daphnecousins.com for more info.

More on abstract art:

Throughout our lives we live by the rubric of principles we’ve absorbed, inherited, or deliberately embraced. We consider these ideas foundational. We follow their direction in our plans and our actions, they guide us through our ups and downs.

But occasionally these foundational ideas come to a point where they collide. This leaves us flummoxed — do we disregard one idea and follow another? Do we reconsider all our beliefs altogether? It can lead to private crisis.

The central paradox within Stoicism is one that even Stoics struggle with. It’s ignored for the most part in modern Stoic literature. Embedded within the ancient Stoic texts, there’s a black hole that threatens to break Stoicism’s internal coherence.

On the one hand, we possess a faculty of choice. It is so fundamental that it cannot be touched by circumstance or coercion. And yet, there is another idea within Stoicism, an idea that is no less insistent and forceful. When somebody commits a wrong, they are not to blame. The Stoics tell us not to punish them.

The first idea is what Stoics call prohairesis, we can translate this into modern English as “will”. It is in our power to judge, to assent to the impressions that flood through our consciousness, and to set actions in motion with our intentions.

These three faculties are ours alone, and, according to Epictetus, this tripartite structure is both the core of our being and where our absolute freedom lies. You can choose. You have moral agency. Always. This is a central force in Stoic thinking.

The second idea is that moral evil has no essence. Just as darkness is absence of light, and error is the absence of knowledge, moral evil is simply a mistake.

Everybody wants what is beneficial to them, but they become confused about what exactly is beneficial. This is ultimately an idea the Stoics inherited from Socrates. For Socrates there is no human good and evil, there is wisdom and ignorance. The good is the lodestar for all of us. Those who commit evils are simply mistaken about what is good.

It’s hard to think of good and evil in this way because for two thousand years, Western thinking has largely defined good and evil as two sides of a cosmic conflict manned by human souls.

In the Socratic view, evil is simply the absence of good, not a self-standing existing thing with an essence.

Marcus even quotes Socrates in Book 7 of the Meditations:

“‘No soul’, [Socrates] said, ‘is willingly deprived of the truth’; and the same applies to justice too, and temperance, and benevolence, and everything of the kind. It is most necessary that you should constantly keep this in mind, for you will then be gentler towards everyone.”

This seems strange — people are, after all, cruel, deceitful, lazy and so on. But somebody being deceitful to get a promotion, for example, is taking their own well-being to be more important to them than the well-being of the community.

If that person understood that the well-being of the community is paramount to the good of everybody — including themselves, and that fulfilling self-centered desires doesn’t make you truly happy, then they wouldn’t use deceit to get a promotion.

In the Discourses of Epictetus, this is made clear:

“Philosophers say that people are all guided by a single standard […] If all this is true, then what grounds do we have for being angry with anyone? We use labels like ‘thief’ and ‘robber’ in connection with them, but what do those words mean? They merely signify that people are confused about what is good and what is bad. So should we be angry with them, or should we pity them instead?” (Discourses 1.18)

Marcus repeats the idea at the start of his famous first paragraph of Book 2 of his Meditations.

“Say to yourself at the start of the day, I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable people. They are subject to all these defects because they have no knowledge of good and bad”. (Meditations 2.1)

Those people, Marcus implies, are innocent because their thought is defective. In the Gregory Hays translation, the middle part is rendered as, “They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil” (My emphasis).

So we have the collision of two ideas:

1. You are in absolute control of your judgements, your desires, and your intentions.

2. You are ignorant when you commit a wrong.

It’s easy to see the questions that would arise from this paradox.

If somebody has full control over their beliefs, desires, and intentions, then how could they not be responsible for a crime they commit? If virtue is a matter of dispelling ignorance, then doesn’t luck play a role in becoming virtuous? If you’re ignorant, how can you climb out of ignorance, if your ignorance is what pulls you away from virtue?

How do we unravel this knot? How do we reconcile those two ideas? How can a person possess full control over their will, and yet be blind to what is good? How can you be wholly responsible for your choices and yet at the same time be blameless for your actions?

How We Solve a Paradox

We’re trapped between two seemingly impossible positions. Either the sinner had the power to choose correctly and failed to make use of it — and therefore deserves condemnation — or they were unable to know the difference between good and evil, which robs them of the agency — the will / prohairesis — that Stoicism takes as real.

Condemning evil in other people is in itself evil in the Stoic view of the world. Theft, violence, and insults affect only what the Stoics call “indifferents” — the externals of our property, our bodies, and our reputation — things that are neither good nor bad in themselves. We have no moral right, as far as Epictetus was concerned, to be displeased with these transgressions, let alone punish them. He wrote, “As long as you honour material things, direct your anger at yourself rather than the thief or adulterer.” (Discourses 1.18).

Epictetus is suggesting that while we cannot blame others for moral failings, we can blame ourselves. It’s clear in his own words that self-directed condemnation is permissible.

We can therefore say that Stoicism isn’t a moral system for the world — it’s a moral system for you.

The focus is inward, and the Stoic must be always watchful of moral lapses and errors that arise from misunderstanding their place in the Cosmos, and what is good in respect to that.

Other people’s ignorance may impinge on our lives, but we must handle those wrongdoings as we’d handle other externals such as natural and social evils like sickness, injury, and misfortune: with the Stoic “indifference”, choosing to see them as neither good nor bad, since only our own actions in response to them can be good or bad.

It is not incumbent on you to judge others; it’s incumbent on you to set an example to others, and to teach those who are willing to learn.

But if good is a matter of knowledge, how do we know that we’ve correctly identified the good?

Epictetus explains in the Enchiridion that “just as targets are not set up in order to be missed, so neither does the nature of evil exists in the world.” (27)

This metaphor can be interpreted as either relating to cosmology or the human condition. In the cosmological sense, Epictetus could be saying that we live in a providential universe that’s oriented toward the good. When we act badly, when we fail to be morally excellent, we “miss” the goals intended for us.

This reading may well be the one that Epictetus intended, but we can read it in another, more secular, sense that is just as compelling. We could say that all life aspires to what is good for it, and avoids what is bad.

Natural targets such as abundance, the greater good, love, and happiness, are “set up” within all of us. We strive and aim for what is good, and we miss when we misunderstand the good.

Against this background, we can see that agency and blamelessness are not in tension. The fault at stake here is a correctable error of understanding.

We all aspire to the good, but an insufficient understanding of what good is leads to moral evil. If I were to think that my own gratification at the cost of somebody else’s well-being were a good, I would simply be wrong about what is good — I’d be deficient in my understanding of the good. I’d miss the target set up for me.

But the targets for good are supplied by nature. They are enduringly there as surely as the ground beneath our feet. Nature has given us reason, and guides us with happiness, contentment, compassion, and love. We err from good, but it insistently waits for us.

Thank you for reading.

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It’s precise, intricate, and formidable: a philosophical atom bomb. In his Ethi…

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On a cold and wet day in April, we drove into an industrial park on the edges of a suburban town. My nerves knotted my stomach as we pulled up to a building that looked more like a warehouse than a clinic.

Beyond the nondescript entrance was a pale green reception room lined with shelves of soft toys in pink or blue and framed portraits of smiling couples. We confirmed our appointment to a neatly dressed receptionist and sat by a shelf of gender-reveal confetti cannons.

My wife’s name was called. We went into the clinic. Three kind women were waiting for us in the darkened room lit silver by just two screens.

The seated technician, as kind and serene as you’d hope any nurse would be, explained everything to us as she searched methodically through the inner space of my wife’s womb.

She paused. “Do you see that flicker?”

My second child. 14.7mm from head to rump, curled up in the only universe it will know for nine months.

I’ve sought masterpieces in obscure churches, I’ve wandered the Vatican Museum at sunset, I’ve seen prehistoric finger paintings lit by torchlight in the belly of a mountain, but no masterpiece could touch me so deeply as the image on this wavering grey-scale screen — a child floating in the amniotic sac like the rabbit in the moon with a beating heart no bigger than a poppy seed.

My throat thickens. A wave washes over me — the power and the glory of life. I’m here, sitting in a chair beside my wife on a spinning sphere that’s hurtling through space at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour, watching two hearts beat in one body.

Life is profoundly mysterious. In rare moments we’re shaken out of the slumber of habit and struck by how stupid and blind we are in the face of its mysteries.

I’m a lapsed catholic, I walk into churches only to admire the worldly works of architects and artists, but I’ve always carried a sense of the divine.

Natural Religion and the Tiered Fountain

My feeling for the divine is intuitive, and remains so — every time it erupts into something substantive it withers under the vigilant scrutiny of my logical scepticism. I hold not so much a faith or belief, as an operative assumption that the divine exists. Existence itself is the original miracle.

This is all akin to the project of natural religion, which gives a name to many people’s attitude to the existence of the divine. Natural religion — often also called natural theology — is the investigation of the divine through the faculties that are natural to human beings.

The idea is that the human mind, left to its own devices and with nothing more than sense, introspection, and logic, might arrive at God or something like God. This is to be contrasted with “revealed religion”, which is based in scripture and testimony of supernatural events.

Natural religion is considered to be the means by which people arrive at a basic notion of the divine even without any knowledge of scriptural texts or testimony.

The idea of divine existence is argued by advocates of natural religion to be a bedrock of belief, one that makes us more predisposed to revelation.

Imagine for a moment a world where religion never appeared, no churches, temples, or mosques, no sacred texts, no spiritual traditions. In such a world it is still likely that people would find the divine, and they’d do so by reasoning.

Natural religion is the reason why so many intelligent people believe in often preposterous ideas and superstitions. It’s also the reason why so many more describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”.

They have a notion of the divine that is thought out, but not much else for their heart to clasp out for. Like the tendril of a vine, their heart reaches blindly, but it nevertheless reaches out as it cannot help but do so.

I use the word divine, and will do so from now on, because the word “God” implies and connotes too much. We think of gods as agentic — “personal” gods commanding, law giving, punishing, even beseeching.

As a category, the divine encompasses God — and gods — but is best defined as that which is antecedent to nature or being as we know it. The divine can be impersonal, non-agentic or even non-active.

The enterprise of religion is built up from a pre-cognitive understanding of the world. The religion you inherit from your culture, or that you more deliberately embrace through conversion, is built upon a foundation that is less a belief than a fundamental and entirely personal intuition that’s fostered in the situatedness of our engagement with each other and the world. Things seemingly, at the least, exist for the whole.

People have a will to believe in something beyond nature because the alternative is too far fetched for them: laws without a law-giver, movement without a first-mover, order from nothing, and, of course, something instead of nothing.

The amateur sceptic will look at the revealed religions and see an attempt to understand the world, gasping in the airlessness of uncertainty. They see simplistic and primitive ways to explain the workings of the world — the creator gods, the legislator gods, the regent gods.

But this misses the most important aspect of religion, which is not even the will to belief, but the intuition that supports belief.

And this amateur sceptic is like the congenitally deaf man watching people dance for the first time in his life — he doesn’t understand why they would be acting as they are.

For better or worse, organised religions build on this predisposition to intuit the divine, this flicker of belief. They channel it into belief, ritual, and worldview.

Most atheists take issue with the “baggage” that comes with religion — moral prescriptions, ritual, mythologies, and the encroachment of all of these aspects of religion on society. In religion, faith functions as an organising principle.

But consider for a moment religion as a tiered fountain. Beliefs, rituals, prescriptions for social order, such as the sacraments of Christianity, and so on are the lower tiers of belief through which the sacred cascades. The fountainhead — the origin of the sense of the sacred — is the understanding of the divine.

As the water cascades from tier to tier it can become more sullied, but there where it emerges it is always pristine. It is here, the unsullied spring of reason, not belief, that gives life to all that follows.

The Three Classical Arguments

Natural religion rests on a huge diversity of arguments. But here are three of the most popular and fundamental arguments for divine existence.

The ontological argument is the argument of the existence of God from the idea of God — that God must exist because God, by definition, is maximally great.

There are a number of ontological arguments, but to take one and simplify it, it would be as follows: a perfect being must necessarily exist, since existence is better than non-existence. God is a perfect being, therefore God exists.

The argument was first formalised by Anselm of Canterbury, and went through several iterations from later philosophers.

It has been strongly refuted, most notably by Immanuel Kant, who pointed out that existence isn’t a predicate. In other words, existence isn’t a property like roundness or firmness.

You can use Anselm’s logic to prove the existence of a perfect anything — a perfect island, or a perfect cup of tea, which doesn’t mean that perfect specimen exists. You cannot derive existence from a concept.

Despite this, the ontological argument has persisted through iterations and refinements. Most recently, there are “modal” versions that argue for the existence of the divine through possibility rather than necessity. The argument is debated to this day.

The cosmological argument is the argument that for things to exist, there must necessarily be a primary cause of their existence. The uncaused cause is the divine. The most famous example of the cosmological argument is Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” as the uncaused cause of all motion in the Cosmos.

A nuanced example of this argument that also straddles an ontological argument is Ibn Sina’s “proof of the truthful”.

According to the Persian polymath, everything is contingent on other things, that is, they require something else to exist. You need your mother to exist, and carbon atoms, and the sun, and so on. But the aggregate of contingent things cannot be self-explanatory — there must be a “necessary existent”, and there is only one possible necessary existent.

The teleological argument holds that the order and apparent purpose (or purposiveness) in nature can only be explained by an intelligent designer, rather than by blind chance. The universe seems ordered and all things within it interrelate with a high degree of purpose — the coordinated structure of living organisms is taken for evidence of divine origin.

Thinkers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Epictetus endorsed this idea, and it persists as the “intelligent design” argument. But it’s perhaps the weakest of the three arguments here — apparent design doesn’t necessarily point to a designer, and the natural process of evolution shows that complexity can emerge from chance.

But again, the overall argument persists and remains compelling in the light of arguments for cosmic “fine-tuning” because they are largely expounded on the terms of science.

But if the divine exists, what is its form and purpose?

As I mentioned, in most people’s minds a personal creator god is at the apex of divinity. This is a god that makes decisions, that sometimes intercedes in earthly life, and a personal yet omniscient god that can be related to.

It’s also a god that sees into your private life and perhaps even knows your thoughts. Many of us pray in private, assuming the omniscience of God (or gods).

But there’s many ideas about god and the divine. The impersonal God of Deism doesn’t bother humanity. The pantheistic god is identical with nature, a pure immanence in everything — even excrement. The gods of the Epicurean materialist universe exist physically — composed of atoms just like us. Perhaps like comic book superheroes Epicurean gods have superpowers, but do not concern themselves with earthly life.

The supreme “Good” of Platonism, from which all existence emanates, is a oneness that is beyond comprehension and description. Plato’s idea is similar in scope to the Brahman of Vedantic Hindu philosophy — the “that” from which all existence proceeds.

Then there’s the idealist notion that all is mind — that mind, not matter, is the substrate of all things and so there is one ultimate mind.

We have very different ideas of the divine here. The most minimal is the notion that the Cosmos is more than merely a sum of its parts.

I am open-minded about the form and purpose of the divine. I do not rule out any of the ideas above. My intuition of the divine is non-committal purely because it’s intuited.

Massimo Pigliucci, invoking British philosopher Anthony Flew, rightly insists that the burden of proof of some positive notion of god or divinity should be on the believer, and not those who refute belief.

Taking the example of a unicorn — which no adult seriously believes in — he writes, “if you claim that there are unicorns, my request for evidence is rational, while your stance that one should believe in them until someone proves that they don’t exist is irrational.”

I agree with this basic idea — that the burden of proof ought to sit with those who make specific claims about supernatural phenomena. But my rational and positive case for divine existence isn’t a belief in a particular idea of the divine but rather my opposition to naturalism.

Naturalism and the Naturalist-Materialist Paradigm

All arguments for divine existence run contrary to naturalism. In the philosophical sense of the term, naturalism is the view that nature is all there is, that everything is explainable through natural causes and processes without any appeal to anything supernatural or transcendent.

By “natural” here, we mean entities that exist in space and time and are subject to causation. Immaterial things, such as ideas, are considered by naturalism to be the consequence of physical processes.

Naturalism and materialism overlap significantly. Materialism is the specific claim that all reality is fundamentally material or reducible to matter.

Naturalist Materialism is the dominant intellectual paradigm of our age. This is largely down to the success of the sciences in explaining phenomena and the usefulness of the resulting technologies. Over the course of time naturalism has taken the mantle of seeming to be the most intuitive and reasonable world-view, pervading our collective understanding of the workings of the world.

But the naturalist-materialist paradigm has always buckled under the strain of paradoxes.

Consider this infinite mise-en-abyme: the world is external to the mind, so therefore the world is only an image in the mind, we’re therefore locked up in our heads, which only exist within themselves.

The mind-body problem is a problem inherent to naturalism. If ideas and experiences are exclusively the product of electrochemical processes, then our experience of ourselves, our existence, is a hallucination in the brain, the world “outside” is unknowable, existing to mind only as a brain-concocted correlation within the human skull.

We also have what’s now commonly called “the hard problem of consciousness” — how can subjective sensations like the taste of grapes and the smell of flowers possibly emerge from the physical matter of your brain.

The brain has been mapped very effectively — we see which parts of the brain fire up when we taste grapes or smell flowers, but nobody understands how these processes give rise to qualia — the felt qualities of experience, such as the redness of red, the sweetness of grapes. We observe a correlation between brain states and thoughts, but have no understanding of cause.

Then there are natural laws — the idea that the observed and dependable consistencies that underlie our existence, as well as everything else, are the result of impersonal laws.

The recourse to such laws is no more far fetched than the recourse to God as a law-giver, if not more far-fetched. If nature is all there is, what explains natural laws? Laws cannot merely be observed regularities. Laws must maintain consistency in all possible cases, not just all observed cases, and that necessity needs some grounding outside of nature itself, since nature itself is what is subject to those laws. To claim that the laws are observed consistencies is to relocate the mystery of consistency.

These objections are not based on “gaps” in current scientific understanding, so you cannot make the accusation that I’ve fallen into the “God of the gaps” fallacy — take note that I’ve not included “what existed before the big bang?” here. They are inconsistencies at the very foundation of a world-view, which would need to break before they are resolved.

The Original Miracle

I see no irony or contradiction that I watched my child’s beating heart thanks to the ingenuity of scientific discovery yet was washed over with the feeling of the divine. Existence is a miracle and the more we understand its particular workings, the more we can marvel at that miracle.

The three classical arguments for the existence of the divine — the ontological, cosmological, and teleological — each have weaknesses, but they converge in a direction toward a necessary ground for being, a ground that underlies the natural order rather than belonging to it.

Even if we exist in what some philosophers call a “hyperchaos” — a cosmos without any natural laws or order — there still remains being itself as an absolute, a bedrock that cannot be otherwise.

Naturalism fails on its own terms; it cannot account for conscious experience, it cannot account for the laws that provide the regularities that form its own basis, it fails to adequately bridge the representations of mind with the reality outside.

What remains isn’t proven divinity but a reasonable conclusion that nature is not self-explanatory and being itself is a miracle in naturalist terms.

I remain a sceptic in the best possible sense of that word — not to scoff or to be reflexively dismissive, but to keep a disciplined open-mindedness — about what lies at the heart of existence. But I also must acknowledge that even scepticism needs some ground. Doubt presupposes some kind of certainty, it happens where particularities of my existence intersect with universal reason. There’s no reason without necessity.

The eruption of awe in the darkened room was later a reminder to me to remain humble. Dismissal of the divine is naive. The operative assumption of divine existence isn’t a dogmatism, but rationality orienting itself toward the divine in the absence of any self-explanatory alternative. The flickering heart I saw on that screen was a reasonable occasion for reverence.

Marcelle Hamel had trouble sleeping on the night of June 5th 1944, the hum of planes overhead kept her up.

She had earlier watched a distant bombing from her yard with her mother. The sky to the north had turned red with the fire. It was a sight the people of Normandy were used to as Allied bombers unloaded on the German defences.

The two returned to bed when the rumble of the bombings ceased, but the humming continued. Half asleep, Marcelle stared out of the window into the dimness outside.

In her dreamy state, she saw “fantastic shadows appearing from nowhere, dark against the chiaroscuro of the sky, like huge black parasols.” They seemed to “rain softly down onto the fields opposite and disappear behind the black line of the hedgerow.”

She got up and walked quietly to the lane outside where she came across an unexpected sight.

Seated on the fence of a neighbouring field was the silhouetted figure of a man. He was heavily loaded, armed “from head to foot” with a rifle, a pistol and a knife. The shadowy figure beckoned her over.

She asked him in English if his plane had been shot down. He whispered back to her in clear French, “It is the great invasion. Thousands and thousands of parachutists are descending here tonight. I am an American soldier….”

June 6 marks anniversary of “D-Day”, the largest seaborne invasion in history. It was the day that the tide of the Second World War turned. Close to 160,000 Allied soldiers crossed the English Channel to liberate France and start a new front in the Second World War.

The sheer scale and complexity of the operation makes it one of the most significant military operations in history. The “skin in the game” required of the United States to take control of the Allied effort created a profound shift in American attitudes towards Europe and a shake-up of international relations. D-Day was a watershed moment in world history.

The origins of D-Day began before the United States had entered the war. Planning for an invasion of occupied France started as soon as the British army was forced to evacuate from Dunkirk in 1940.

Vice Admiral Lord Mountbatten was recalled from Pearl Harbour to take up a new post in England. On his first day, he reported to Winston Churchill, who told him, “The whole of the south coast of England is a bastion of defence against the invasion of Hitler, you’ve got to turn it into the springboard for our attack.”

Churchill said this in October 1941 when Western Europe had been overrun and conquered, the Germans were invading a shocked and unprepared Russia and the United States had not yet entered the war. When it all seemed over, Churchill had his mind set on victory.

Against the odds, Britain had won one of the most extraordinary military campaigns in history, the Battle of Britain. The campaign was fought almost exclusively in the air, as a struggle for air superiority over the skies of southern England. While the Germans sought a negotiated peace from the British, the British fought to survive for another day.

The Nazis employed terror bombing tactics against British cities, killing almost 15,000 civilians in a matter of months. The Luftwaffe outnumbered The Royal Air Force by more than five hundred aircraft, but the British (with the help of aircrews from several allied and occupied countries, particularly Canada) triumphed through bravery and ingenuity.

Securing the skies over western Europe meant that a German invasion was unlikely. The United States soon joined the war and preparations could be made for a western front. Hundreds of thousands of American and Canadian troops amassed in England.

“They are supposed to be coming, why don’t they come?”

The war continued on a number of fronts. The Atlantic and the Arctic saw enormous sea battles as allies fought to maintain vital supply lines to Great Britain and to the northern ports of Russia. North Africa became a major theatre of land warfare when Fascist Italy joined Nazi Germany and attacked Egypt.

An allied invasion of Italy (the “soft underbelly” of the Axis-controlled continent) in 1943 was choked by German defences across the Apennine mountains and staggered to a halt.

Stalin, who had become a reluctant ally of Roosevelt and Churchill thanks to the German invasion of the Soviet Union (and breaking the peace pact between the nations) in 1941, continually pushed his western allies to form a new front in the west.

Soviet forces had gained momentum in repulsing the German invasion thanks to a bitter winter and the seemingly endless reserves of men who could fight — it is believed that there were up to 10 million military deaths on the Soviet side and yet the Soviets still counterattacked all the way to Berlin. But the Soviets desperately needed a new front to draw elite German forces away from the east.

While German generals were concerned at the prospect of such an occurrence, the Nazi hierarchy believed the allies would be broken on their defences. Joseph Goebbel’s goaded the allies with his slogan, “They are supposed to be coming. Why don’t they come?”

The decision was made in 1943 that Allied forces would invade Normandy in early June 1944. The United States, as the largest of the Allied forces, had taken command of the war effort. General Dwight Eisenhower was appointed the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces.

Churchill came to prefer a smaller scale Mediterranean invasion, landing in the Balkans from southern Italy. But the Americans favoured a Western Front, liberating France, believing it to be the fastest route to victory. The invasion was codenamed Operation Overlord.

The most elaborate operation of deception was executed to ensure the Germans could never suspect the time and place of the invasion.

German spies were turned by the XX Committee and sent back with information to mislead their controllers. This is where we got the phrase “double cross” from. The deception plan also included wooden aircraft, inflatable tanks and hundreds of fake landing ships.

Fuel tanks were disguised as ice cream parlours and radio communications were transmitted hundreds of miles by wire before being broadcasted over the air, concentrating radio “noise” far from where troops were amassed.

This all led German command to believe that invasions via Norway, Calais and southern France were possible, spreading their defences thinly along their “Atlantic Wall”.

A seaborne invasion of France of the scale envisaged seemed impossible at first. Beach landings required fine weather, and the weather could not be depended upon to stay fine for the many consecutive days that such an enormous invasion would require.

Capturing a port seemed the only option but ports along the Atlantic Wall bristled with German defences, requiring a bombardment that would render a port useless anyway.

The British conceived of the “crazy” idea of a man-made portable harbour, that could be towed across the English Channel and assembled in Normandy. With the promise of American timber and tugs, the plan was given the go-ahead and codenamed “Mulberry”. Huge concrete caissons were built to be towed then flooded to sink and form breakwaters for ships to drop troops and supplies en masse.

To achieve all this required an all-out assault, starting from the air.

Two Magic Words: Ham and Jam

One of the first objectives of D-Day was a crucial bridge over the Caen Canal now called Pegasus Bridge. 181 British light infantry and engineers were to land in powerless gliders at midnight to secure the bridge for the beachhead to come.

The paratroopers were so loaded with equipment that they struggled to climb the small ladders into their gliders. The troops were very quickly airborne — pulled aloft by Halifax bombers. They sat in darkness, the only light being the smouldering tips of cigarettes.

They sang to keep up their courage, old London songs, music hall numbers like Abie My Boy. Once they were over France, quiet was ordered and the men waited. The glider cast off and the noise of the Halifax engines receded, leaving total silence.

Major John Howard, the unit’s Commander, described a “tranquilising effect” that came over him seeing the cattle and horses grazing in the moonlight beneath the silently descending gliders.

A battle was to follow in moments. Some of the gliders landed at around one hundred miles an hour. Soldiers described the terror they felt at the sight of sparks from the contact between landing skids and flint in the ground. Some believed they were already under enemy fire.

The gliders bounced and shuddered to a halt, breaking up as they landed. Howard awoke in a deadly silent cabin. He was concussed. Every soldier onboard had been knocked unconscious by the crash, leaving the cabin in an eery stillness. “No one stirred, nothing moved.”

Outside the cabin, he heard the crashes of the other gliders, the noise of crunching wood. Howard looked at his watch. The crash had stopped it at sixteen minutes past midnight.

Many were injured in the landings, one drowned when a glider crash-landed in a pond.

The Lieutenant onboard, Richard Smith, was thrown through the cockpit windows “like a bullet” into the muddy ground and run over by his glider’s undercarriage as it careered onwards.

Despite sustaining a crippling knee injury, he “hobbled” into action covered in thick mud and carrying a borrowed Sten machine gun. Most of his platoon were still unconscious from the crash, he led just seven men into the pitch darkness for the battle.

The German defenders were taken by total surprise and quickly defeated. Pill boxes were blown out with grenades and tracer bullets lit the night sky during the firefight. When the soldiers hunkered down for a counter attack, they were surprised to see a German staff car approach at high speed.

The commander of the German force defending the bridge emerged from the car in a state of hysteria. Speaking in English he demanded to be shot, having lost the bridge and therefore his honour. He was captured and injected with morphine.

The Orne River bridge was captured without much resistance at all. The allies had feared that the Germans would detonate explosives under each bridge at the first sign of invasion, but they were unprepared.

The airborne units exchanged a success signal over their 38 set radios, two magic words: “Ham and Jam”, “Ham” for the canal bridge and “Jam” for the river bridge captured intact. The invasion had begun.

Airborne Assualt

The raid on Pegasus Bridge was part of a wider airborne assault of thousands of troops to secure the eastern and western flanks of the beachheads. In the west Americans were dropped, in the east, the British and Canadians.

More than 800 aircraft took part in the western missions Albany and Boston. They flew in enormous V formations at only 500 feet above the ground and stretching back 300 miles. Their cargo was the 13,000 Americans of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions.

Many of the very young men had not ventured out of their own state until the war. They were dropped in the darkness over a hostile territory thousands of miles from home. Eisenhower watched them take off from England with tears in his eyes.

The airborne men gazed down at the formidable armada making its way from England to Normandy. John Potts described the scene: “as far as the eye could see, there were ships and battleships… it really was an awesome sight.” Rear gunners got the full view of the airborne assault too, describing a dark sky filled with the twinkling lights of aircraft.

The paratrooper that Marcelle Hamel had met in the darkness was a Wayfinder. The elite paratrooper’s job was to find his way to the drop zones and lay markers for the pilots. Having parted with the mysterious soldier, Hamel described what happened next:

“The black silhouettes of airplanes arrive through the clouds and turn around in the sky. One of them passes just above our little school; parachutes open and float down like a mass of bubbles in the clear night…. In a few moments, the sky is nothing more than an immense ballet of parachutes.”

For most of the paratroopers, the landing wasn’t smooth at all. The C47s hit a fog wall at the coast of Normandy, sending a wave of panic among the pilots as flak exploded around them. Some flew too low. The troops they dropped hit the ground before their parachute could deploy and died on impact. Many drowned under the weight of their equipment in the plains that had been deliberately flooded by the German defence force.

To their horror, some of the 82nd’s 505 Parachute Infantry Regiment found themselves descending right into the village square of Sainte-Mère-Eglise as villagers fought to douse a huge house fire. The flames illuminated the men descending from the sky. A firefight opened up as the Americans landed among the German garrison in a scene of utter confusion.

Troops caught in the village’s lime trees were shot by the Germans who had come out to help extinguish the flames. Some were sucked into the fire as they landed, the grenades on their bodies added to the incandescence. Two Americans fought from the roof of the village church, having hit the steeple on their way down.

French civilians tried to distract the Germans as the paratroopers attempted to regroup. Only four men of a platoon of 36 survived to fight in the village as they waited for their comrades landing in the fields outside.

The American paratroopers assembled into groups in the darkness by clicking small metal crickets as a friendly signal to one another. They took the Germans largely by surprise and secured causeways necessary for the troops landing on Utah Beach to advance inland.

In the east, the eye witness accounts describe the chaos of the drop. In the same terrible conditions, confused pilots broke formation, poor radio signals meant that drops occurred in an uncoordinated manner. Men were dropped in the path of other aircraft. Paratroopers were killed mid-air when hit by friendly aircraft or enemy flak. Soldiers about to jump looked on in terror.

William John Le Cheminant of the Parachute Regiment saw “a plane cut a parachute and the occupant in half […] the chap went down and landed and burst into flames because he was carrying phosphorus grenades.”

Pilots taking evasive action to avoid other planes and paratroopers knocked their occupants off their feet. The troops, unable to stand again because of the weight of their packs, had to crawl to their jump, causing them to scatter more widely than intended.

The forces cleared the way for reinforcements and supplies arriving in hundreds of gliders. Jeeps and heavy weapons were unloaded from successful landings. But the battle raged on. Some of the gliders were shot up in mid-air or smashed to pieces in crash landings.

A much smaller British force than intended assembled to take out a fortified artillery battery. They had succeeded in causing a good deal of damage before they dug in for a German counter-attack.

The liberated French were accommodating to the paratroopers. Café Gondrée, owned by a resistance spy, George Gondrée, was opened up as a first-aid post. Gondrée dug up a stash of dozens of bottles of champagne that he’d buried in his garden at the start of the occupation and handed them out to the sick and wounded.

“There was a lot of cork-popping going on,” Major John Howard said, “and all my men in reserve at the other side of the canal at the time all wanted to report sick.”

The airborne troops dug in and waited, French civilians were told to stay in cellars. Then it came: the explosive maelstrom opened up.

Philip Crofts, a paratrooper described the man-made storm enveloping the area:

“Even at this distance inland my eardrums were going in and out, I thought they would burst. On top of that there were huge shells passing over us and it felt like they were tearing the skies apart. And we then knew the seaborne forces were coming in.”

Seaborne Assault

The barrage and bombing was immense, the Normandy coast was made a vision of hell. One witness described the French coastline as “all one mass of flame right the way down the coast. A terrific sight.”

Lawrence Alfred Moorcroft, a Petty Officer stationed on HMS Urbana described a swarm of shells and missiles, “Cruisers firing over the destroyers. Battleships firing over cruisers and destroyers and rocket ships. It seemed to us chaos. Never seen so many things firing.”

There were almost 5,000 landing ships and assault craft, escorted by six battleships, twenty-three cruisers, 104 destroyers, 152 escorts. 277 minesweepers cleared the sea ahead of them.

As they had set off from England, a lone piper on the bow a landing ship, wearing a battle dress of a kilt and tunic, played The Road to the Isles, a traditional Scottish marching tune. The sound of the bagpipes elicited cheers and songs from the crews of ships in the convoy, including the Marseillaise from the Free French sailors.

The “Great Abyss”

Despite the excitement and undoubted bravery, the soldiers on board were either inexperienced or battle weary from the campaigns in Africa and Italy. Uncertainty about what to expect occupied many minds. One American soldier wrote in his diary of “approaching the great abyss.”

The bombardment ceased. Thousands of men, sick from the motions of their flat bottomed landing craft, leapt into the shallows and made towards the beach under heavy fire.

“You’re not supposed to stop, get going.”

Sergeant Desmond O’Neill, an army cameraman, described moving in following the first wave of the beach invasion.

“We suddenly saw ahead of us smoke, grey smoke and mist mixed, and as we approached we saw obstacles in the water […] Then we started noticing one or two plops in the water, which must have been mortars, but nothing else. Then we heard gunfire, machine-gun fire, and then it seemed that once we got into the smoke we were in it. I immediately noticed on the left a landing craft tank, which had come in alongside us and gone ahead a little, and it suddenly caught fire. The whole thing seemed unreal. It’s not like a battle scene as one would imagine it or has been on film since. It was a very unreal atmosphere.”

“Each side of us there were wrecked boats, sometimes side on, sometimes upside down. There were bodies floating face down in the sea. There were men halfway up the beach who were in really peculiar positions, legs all over the place, really grotesque positions, and there were shells landing all around the sea and on the beach. The sand seemed to drag at your feet. It just seemed you couldn’t get going.”

“Bullets just came at you like raindrops.” Private William Edward Lloyd said, “You could hear them whistling and passing you and hitting the ground near you but you just kept going on.”

James Anthony Kelly, a Royal Marine Commando, and his comrades were hit by a shell. “There was a blinding flash and a terrible bloody smell of cordite and things like that and Charlie Hall was down on the deck and there was other fellows scattered about. I remember kneeling by Charlie Hall and blood was pumping out of his neck […] I’d only just knelt down and was saying to him, ‘Come on, Charlie, come on,’ and this voice said, ‘You’re not supposed to stop, get going.’”

The landing of American forces at Omaha Beach started disastrously owing to the poor weather conditions and an intact German beach defence force, which included battle-experienced German troops from the Eastern Front. The Americans were met by a barrage of machine gun fire, mortars and flamethrowers.

Hundreds of dummy paratroopers had been dropped at first light to fool the Germans and it had worked. German reserves had been sent on a wild goose chase searching for the non-existent American paratroopers. The wide scatter of paratroopers caused by the fog wall added to the confusion of the Nazi defences.

Mercifully, this bought time for the Americans under heavy fire on the beach. Despite taking thousands of casualties, the troops landing at Omaha formed a hard-fought bridgehead inland.

After D-Day

The Allies had not achieved their objectives by the end of D-Day itself. Only two beach-heads had linked, and the allied front remained unlinked for a further six days. The allies also failed to capture Caen until June 21st, a strategic objective for the landings. Casualties were high but not as high as the Allied commanders had dreaded.

The troops fighting on the coastal defences were only a taste of what was to come. Many German soldiers were handicapped in some way, such as deafness from previous fighting. Around a fifth of German troops were made up of unreliable conscripts from central Europe (mostly Poles) deemed to be ethnically German.

A good deal of the force were volunteers from the Soviet Union (“Osttruppen”). These men chose to fight for the Nazis rather than face the horrors of the eastern POW camps. Many of them surrendered immediately or had already joined French partisans.

The expected counterattack of the Germans’ elite SS Panzer divisions stationed further in-land was slow in coming. Rommel had lost control of the combined forces, they had been placed under the direct command of Hitler in Berlin. The political complications of high command bereft German forces of decisiveness.

They eventually came, and D-Day was only the start of some of the most ferocious battles of the Second World War. The Germans were now fighting for their survival and hit back hard. The SS Panzers were well-equipped, highly experienced and motivated troops.

For French civilians, the fighting was catastrophic. By the unusually bitter winter of 1944/45, a Normandy newspaper wrote of:

“The saddest time we have ever known. Because we still live in a world in flames, in a murdered France, in a ravaged region. No more houses, no more roofs over our head, and grief everywhere around us.”

The fanatical SS troops committed several atrocities, including the murder of 70 French civilians in reprisal for a resistance sabotage mission. Allied shelling and bombing must have seemed indiscriminate to the civilians trapped in Caen and surrounding villages and towns.

Around 35,000 French civilians died during the bombing and brutal fighting of the Battle of Normandy. Many more thousands were displaced and left homeless. Livestock killed in battle was piled high and burned as Allies moved forward.

The Longest Day

In many ways, D-Day was the moonshot before the 1969 moonshot. It was the culmination of an extraordinary exercise of collaboration, imagination, ingenuity, logistics and determination.

One pilot commented in his diary at the sheer complexity of the whole operation. “The airborne assaults, the quantity and variety of shipping, the number of army divisions, the tremendous weight of the air offensive. The scale and the precision of it all made our past efforts look insignificant.” The pilot and his squadron were left almost dumbstruck by the immensity of what they were involved in.

It was the moment that perhaps cemented the “special relationship” of the US and the British. The United States entry into the Second World War swung the balance of the two nations’ economic and diplomatic fortunes.

The former colony had been transformed from a powerful country into a mighty superpower during the war, its economy ballooned to fuel the output required by total war.

The two nations had bonded in the preparations necessary for D-Day, a testing ground for the kind of tight collaboration that formed the basis of NATO.

D-Day was also the making of Eisenhower, who went on to become President of the United States in 1952. Eisenhower was the perfect man to lead the Expeditionary Forces thanks to his cool temperament and diplomatic skills.

The five-star general had to deal with the rivalries of several talented but egotistical generals. George S. Patton and Bernard Mongomery were particularly difficult.

His organisational, diplomacy and oratory skills were no doubt honed by the invasion and contributed to his success as a stable President when the cold war stakes rose so high.

Quo Vadis

D-Day was not inevitable. Alternative histories could have played out. Churchill was ultimately against an invasion of France by the time the Americans had joined the war. The horrors of the Western Front of the First World War loomed in many minds.

Royal Air Force commanders were dismayed that their resources were switched to western Europe. They believed their devastating bombing campaigns would cause Germany to collapse from within.

Had the invasion of Normandy not occurred, the Cold War could have been entirely different. The Soviets had the Germans already on the back foot by February 1943. The war would have been long drawn out as the Soviets fought a war of attrition, but they may well have advanced as far as the Atlantic if D-Day had not occurred or indeed failed.

Whereas the United States’ Marshall Plan empowered their western European allies, the Soviets dominated the nations they “liberated” during the Second World War as client states. A communist Western Europe could well have been pitted against the British and Americans in a Cold War that the Soviets could have won.

It is easy to speculate about the possibilities, but it is hard to imagine what ordinary men and women went through on June 6th 1944.

Gliders taking paratroopers into the night of June 5th each had their name scrawled on them in chalk. One glider was christened Quo Vadis, a Latin phrase made famous by a legend about Saint Peter.

According to the legend, the Apostle fled Nero’s Rome in fear for his life, but on the road he saw a vision of Christ. Christ was carrying his cross on the opposite way — back to Rome. Peter asked, “Domine quo vadis?” (“Lord, where are you going?”) Christ told him he was going back to Rome to be crucified again. Realising his responsibility to face danger, Peter turned back.

All the men aboard Quo Vadis, weighed down by their armaments, descending in silence into the dark unknown — the “great abyss” — would have known that death was a strong possibility. The world would be a darker place without their courage.

Thank you for reading.

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This post was originally published in 2019 on Medium. This version is updated for 2026.

In Book 2 of his Meditations — “On the River Gran, Among the Quadi” — written while Marcus Aurelius was commanding his army on the Danube frontier, the emperor wrote in his famously curt style,

“Human life.

Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. …

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I have a working class accent. As soon as I speak, I can see people’s eyes betray their prejudices about me.

English people’s voices betray their class in a way that’s unmatched in the anglophone world.

The upper classes have “cut glass” accents, also known as “King’s/Queen’s English” or “RP” (received pronunciation). The lower classes speak in regional accents that often border on dialects. My own is a London accent, with glottal stops often taking place of t’s and h’s.

I remember at a birthday party finding myself standing at the bar beside a journalist. We sort of knew each other, having a mutual friend. As soon as I greeted him I could see in his eyes the annoyance that he might be stuck with me for at least a few minutes.

As I got talking to the journalist about civil rights — a matter close to his heart — it became evident that I had a PhD in a related topic. I could sense that I had utterly defied his expectations.

We went on to speak for an hour or so. His new enthusiasm to talk to me was tinged with a guarded disbelief at how the vulgarly-accented nincompoop he was talking to could be so cultured. His snobbery had rebounded and hit him in the face, he was suddenly humbled.

Spiritual Halitosis

Snobbery is commonly considered to be the way we arrange ourselves in the social strata. It’s seen as a trait that’s undesirable but fairly innocuous in the grand scheme of things. Snobbery is a petty sin, a spiritual halitosis: largely unwitting, and so lamentable but not damnable.

But this easy dismissal is itself a symptom of the problem. Suppose we considered snobbery as a deep-rooted and corrosive problem at societal scale? If we solved snobbery (is it impossible?) we’d at least vent the pressure we’re putting ourselves and the world under.

Snobbery is not just thinking you are better than another person. It’s more profound than that. Snobbery is really the belief in a correlation between social or material status and human worth.

The snob is a judge of others, but snobbery is also a judgement of ourselves. We need to audit our own standing to sneer at others’. It’s an affront to human dignity in every way you look at it, and yet it’s so pervasive it’s deemed a fact of life.

The flip side of snobbery is envy. These two emotions are mutually dependent. The snob in us feeds off envious eyes. As Seneca had it, “Nobody dines with a silver plate alone”.

Luxury and success demands an audience, and we willingly spectate. Social media allows us to take delight in the envy of others on an unprecedented scale. Like never before, we’re jostling for position on some great league table of those above us who we envy and those below us who we don’t.

In this scheme of things, we too easily and often enjoy our lives indirectly, taking delight in what others would think of our delight.

But it’s a losing game — an arms race of fake fun. The belief that happiness is found in being favourably compared kills any delight we’d experience from directly enjoying what we have and what we do.

Think of all those people who stand holding up their camera phones in concerts to post photos on social media. Those people want evidence that they’re having a good time to show their friends, but diminishing their own fun by doing it. Their fun becomes virtual and second-order.

Time and again studies show that comparing ourselves to other people is bad for us. We’ll always feel envy if we insist on playing the comparison game, because stoking envy has become a proxy of enjoyment.

We rot from within — our outward joys become hollow shows motivated by bitter competitiveness. Theodore Roosevelt put it most succinctly when he wrote that “comparison is the thief of joy.”

Intrinsic Value

Humanity is sinking into a globalised culture in which our self-worth is bound up with the way we consume.

This is no new thing, of course, but advertising, social media and mass production has hosed petrol on the flames of consumerism. Fast fashion, gas-guzzling vehicles and gadgets are harming our environment and etching away at our own souls.

And at the heart of this problem is snobbery. Everybody is looking to raise their standing in the world through excessive consumption. Our needs — like hunger, thirst and shelter — are limited by their satisfaction, but where there’s no need there’s limitless desire. There’s no need to impress others, and so the desire to impress is unlimited.

The relationships between man-made things are really the relationships between people. This may sound complicated, but here’s a simple example:

A designer t-shirt has a surplus value that’s neither linked to its use (warmth), nor the labour that went into it (cotton farmers, factory workers in, say, China), but rather in relation to other t-shirts. Who orders these objects in a hierarchy? We do.

Those designer t-shirts usually cost as little to make as any other, you’re investing in the immaterial intellectual property of the designer to enhance your social standing just a little. The designer’s marketing agencies conjure fantasies of status that we all want by combining those garments with other status signals.

Like religious objects that are thought to have magical properties thanks to the faith of believers, commodities like engagement rings and cars have a magical value thanks to our faith in status — a phenomenon that has no material basis, yet generates its own material consequences in the system of consumer goods.

Accents, education, achievements and reputations are also commodities in the snob-envy complex. Whether inherited or earned, they all add up to our social capital: the imprecise measure by which we assess ourselves and each other.

“Only an absolute fool values a man according to his clothes, or according to his social position, which after all is only something that we wear like clothing.”

Seneca wrote this in the first century, yet here we are in the twenty-first century, still judging others by their shoes, their jobs, their education, accents and so on.

We’ve inherited all these values which we hold ourselves and those around us — including our loved ones — accountable to. Everybody becomes a balance sheet.

The point here is not to moralise about consumption. I’d never endorse living at subsistence level, or taking to the torture of asceticism. Neither am I a so-called reverse-snob who’s against upper-class accents or a good education.

Man-made goods are as good as they are useful and beautiful. I delight in my (second-hand) iPhone, it’s a whole world at my fingertips and a miracle of the global economy. I like well-made suits and shoes. I marvel at the intricacies of international cooperation that fabricate the humble pen between my fingers.

It’s just obvious that we wouldn’t want so much stuff if we didn’t feel the social pressure to buy it. There’s nothing wrong with materialism per se, it’s the immaterial worth, vis-à-vis status, we place on things that’s hurting us.

Equally, our non-material “possessions” — looks, talents, education, career, sense of humour and so on — hold immense value. Shall we directly enjoy them for what they are, or value them for the competitive edge they give us in vying for status? Should we only assume we’re as successful as others perceive us to be?

The point is that we should delight in the intrinsic value of our possessions and positive traits, not the status value. If we did that we wouldn’t judge ourselves so harshly. We also wouldn’t lie awake at night, worrying about the debt we’ve stacked up by overstretching our budgets on luxury cars and designer dresses to satisfy other people’s measures of success.

A Prison of Our Own Making

One thing that philosophers have taught us for millennia is what is truly us and ours, and what is not.

Seneca teaches us that anything that fate can take away cannot truly be ours. Neither our possessions, nor our occupation, nor even our reputation are “ours” and are certainly not “us”. “Praise in him,” Seneca wrote, “that which cannot be snatched away.”

What cannot be snatched away from us is the content of our character, our capacity to love or hate. Like the functions and forms of beautifully made objects, our character is where our intrinsic value lies.

If we saw human worth as intrinsic, and loved our possessions for their true worth we’d create a better world.

Nothing is stopping us from doing this. Our snobbery is a matter of faith; of attitude, not fact. We’re caught standing in a prison of our own making, the door is open, we can choose to walk out.

To save our minds and our ecosystem, we should enjoy more, not less. We should enjoy our achievements for their own worth, not because we’re getting ahead. We should love our possessions for their beauty and usefulness, not because they are fashionable.

We should enjoy our possessions more and freely, without comparison weighing on us, and change the world by doing just that.

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This article was originally written on Medium in 2020. This new version contains substantial changes.

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“The month is December,” Seneca writes, “and the city is sweating, more than ever.”

It’s the Saturnalia, Rome’s raucous winter festival. For weeks the city is turned upside down. Servants dine at their masters’ tables and speak freely while their masters serve them. Gambling is permitted in public. There is feasting, gifting and drinking. The whole city is a carnival of excess, exhaling a long, alcohol-tinged sigh.

It’s in this moment of sanctioned excess that Seneca takes the opportunity to write his eighteenth letter to his friend and mentee Lucilius. The normal rules are suspended. Discipline dissolves into indulgence. The world temporarily rewards excess rather than restraint.

The image many have of Stoicism is a grim philosophy of joyless self-denial. But Seneca’s letter dismantles this caricature entirely — it addresses how Stoics ought to approach festivals and celebrations.

The answer is not to throw ourselves into the revelry, and not to denounce it either. Instead, we ought to ask quieter, more introspective questions about how we manage the relationship between our principles and the practicalities of a social existence. Seneca advocates not escape into abstinence but self-mastery.

Moderation Versus Moralism

The question at hand is whether the Stoic should join the celebrations or spurn them. This question cuts to the heart of Stoic practice. How do you live virtuously in a world that seems designed to pull you off course?

Seneca’s attitude surprises. He doesn’t tell Lucillius to hole up with his books and avoid the festivities. Instead, he writes positively of controlled participation, and less enthusiastically of being distant and aloof.

We should not make ourselves conspicuous by differing too much from the ways of the community. A student of philosophy shouldn’t parade their philosophy like a badge or use virtue as a means of standing apart from others.

In his fifth letter, he writes of “those who wish to be noticed rather than make moral progress. Don’t be like them, altering your dress or way of life so as to attract attention.”

In the eighteenth letter he is disparaging about philosophy enthusiasts who hole themselves up in “paupers cells” built, ironically enough, into their otherwise comfortable homes.

This is crucial. Seneca understood that there’s a kind of vanity in ostentatious austerity, a pride that masquerades as virtue. The philosopher who makes a show of refusing every pleasure isn’t necessarily wiser than the reveller — they’re just differently vain.

Instead of being a killjoy at the party, we can disappear for a number of days to immerse ourselves in real deprivation — simple food, water, sleeping on the floor in rough bedding. Such a “trial”, an active training of personal discipline, is more effective than making a display of your “ethics” at the cost of other people’s enjoyment.

Abstaining in a showy way becomes an implicit condemnation of those who partake, and such condemnation reeks of moralism.

Stoicism isn’t concerned with moralising. It’s concerned with right and wrong, not good and evil. Moralism is part of the way primitive societies and groups organise themselves — requiring rules and unthinking compliance to those rules.

Being a form of virtue ethics, Stoicism advocates making enlightened decisions in context about what the right action is. Reason, rather than rule-bound conformity, is the guiding principle.

Epictetus, teaching decades after Seneca’s death, likewise advises that philosophers shouldn’t busy themselves condemning or preaching to those who are unprepared for a more thoughtful life. To do so is to become a moralist, compromising your own virtue.

Instead, we should accept people’s habits and customs for as long as those habits and customs do not harm our integrity. He uses the example of Saturnalia festivities to illustrate his point.

“When children come to us clapping their hands and saying, ‘Today’s the Saturnalia, rejoice!’, do we reply to them, ‘There’s nothing to rejoice at in that’? Of course not, we clap in return. Well then, you should do the same — when you’re unable to make someone change his views, recognize that he is a child, and clap as he does. Or if you don’t care to act in such a way, you have only to keep quiet.” (Discourses 1.29)

So Seneca too recommends a similar path: “Do as others do. But not in the same manner.” During festivals like the Saturnalia, the Stoic can relax certain habits, can participate in the general spirit of things.

The wise person ought not live as other people live, but will have the same appearance as them and partake in the same social rituals.

This is because, for Seneca, the “very first thing that philosophy promises is fellow feeling, a sense of togetherness among human beings. By becoming different, we will be cut offf from this. If we are not careful, the very measures that are meant to win us admiration will instead make us objects of hatred and ridicule.” (Letter 5)

Keeping Your Head

So how should Stoic participate in festivities? In On the Tranquility of Mind, Seneca writes,

“we gain strength […] by social meals and a more generous allowance of wine: at times we ought to drink even to intoxication, not so as to drown, but merely to dip ourselves in wine: for wine washes away troubles and dislodges them from the depths of the mind, and acts as a remedy to sorrow as it does to some diseases. The inventor of wine is called Liber, not from the licence which he gives to our tongues, but because he liberates the mind from the bondage of cares, and emancipates it, animates it, and renders it more daring in all that it attempts. Yet moderation is wholesome both in freedom and in wine.”

There’s a difference here between enjoyment and submission. The danger of festivities isn’t pleasure itself but the loss of self-possession that comes when pleasure becomes compulsion. When you stop choosing and start being carried along.

Pleasure in itself is in Stoic terminology an “indifferent”. It is neither good nor bad because the only good is virtue and the only bad is vice. Pleasure isn’t a vice, so the Stoic shouldn’t avoid pleasure, but compulsion compromises control, and control is important to virtue.

Drinking alcohol is particularly pernicious, since we lose the sense of shame that acts as a check on our impulse.

We’ve all seen this happen — at office parties, at weddings, at any gathering where the drinks freely flow. People say things they’ll regret. They do things that seem hilarious or clever in the moment but mortifying the next morning.

If you don’t drink, there’s no good reason to start, and if you do intend to drink, promise yourself you’ll maintain control. The person who wakes up with a pounding head and a churning stomach, unable to remember what they said or why they’re missing their coat, didn’t expand their spirit, they vacated it.

What emerges from Seneca’s writings is a portrait of the Stoic as someone who moves through the world with a kind of loosened vigilance. The good Stoic isn’t rigid, sullen and indignant, but rather bends with circumstances without ever breaking.

When everyone around you is losing their head, there’s tremendous power in keeping yours. Not through teeth-clenched restraint, but through understanding what actually matters.

The Stoic at the Saturnalia can laugh, can indulge a little and can enjoy the party, but what they don’t do is mistake the party for life itself. They don’t confuse pleasure with eudaimonia — enduring fulfilment. They don’t surrender their judgment to the momentum of the crowd.

This is the art of it. To participate without being absorbed. To enjoy without being possessed. To remain yourself even as you adapt to your surroundings.

And perhaps most importantly, they’re someone who doesn’t confuse the performance of virtue with virtue itself. They don’t need everyone to know they’re a philosopher. They just need to live according to their principles, whether anyone’s watching or not.

The festival will end. The party will be over. What remains is you. Seneca’s letter offers a way to enjoy the festival and still proudly face yourself in the mirror the next morning.

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