Colin Anthony Smith MacNairn

This essay examines the paradoxical human impulse to control meaning by scripting permanence into finite existence, a compulsion that manifests in religious, political, and personal forms. Drawing from Jeff Noonan’s account of “tarrying with meaninglessness,” it argues that the attempt to secure significance through purpose (whether divine destiny, national myth, or personal legacy) ultimately negates the fragile sources of value in lived experience. By distinguishing between meaning (the contingent significance of finite practices) and purpose (a teleological imposition oriented toward eternity) the essay clarifies how conflating the two leads to what Noonan calls a “superabundance of meaning, ”wherein finite life is subordinated to transcendent narratives. Engaging Camus, Dostoyevsky, Charles Taylor, and George Grant, the analysis situates this pathology within both existential and historical contexts, showing how modernity’s will to mastery intensifies the compulsion to control meaning. Against this, the essay advances a materialist ethic of finite affirmation: by tarrying with meaninglessness, one recognizes mortality as the condition of valuation and grounds ethical life in shared vulnerability, care, and presence. Contemporary conflicts and nationalist movements illustrate the dangers of purpose-driven control, where finite lives are sacrificed for imagined permanence. By contrast, tarrying affirms finitude as the only ground for meaning and solidarity.

This essay addresses personal identity and its role in sustaining moral responsibility. Against reductionist accounts, namely Derek Parfit’s, which tie identity to degrees of psychological continuity, I argue that such views weaken the foundations of responsibility and risk, rendering practices like blame, praise, and obligation incoherent. If identity dissolves with psychological change, responsibility for past wrongs becomes negotiable, undermining ethical life. To respond to this danger, I develop the idea of the normative self: an identity constituted through the integration of past actions, present commitments, and future aspirations within a coherent narrative. Unlike reductionist models, this account does not merely approximate but in fact captures how selfhood is lived and understood—both from the first-person perspective of individuals who take ownership of their lives and from the third-person perspective of communities that hold one another responsible. Descriptive or reductionist models, I argue, ultimately fail precisely because they cannot adequately explain this dual orientation. I conclude that it is only by conceiving the self as normative that our practices of accountability, recognition, and renewal make coherent sense. Methodologically, I combine analytic critique with narrative and phenomenological approaches, engaging Parfit and Bernard Williams and testing their theories against real and hypothetical cases of wrongdoing, reform, and accountability. The result is a conception of the self that secures responsibility as both backward- and forward-looking, grounding our moral realities in a structure that preserves stability while enabling transformation.

Current American populism—an endogenous product of liberal capitalism—functions less as an interruption of liberal democracy than as the political form through which its contradictions are expressed. Starting from that premise, this essay traces how citizens, rendered economically superfluous and politically abstracted, reach for meaning through affective grievance—grievance that populism captures, reroutes, and converts into allegiance. By placing C.B. Macpherson’s critique of possessive individualism in dialogue with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s analysis of moral incapacitation, A.N. Whitehead’s insights on simplified ideals, and Kant’s republican account of public right, this essay reconstructs the mechanisms by which structural dispossession is transformed into cultural antagonism. Through political-theoretical argument augmented with empirical illustrations, this essay provocatively demonstrates that American populism’s emotional economy reinforces the very structure it claims to resist and why any democratic renewal ought to begin with a reconstruction of personhood itself.

In this essay I argue for a life-grounded ethic, one which positions survival as the necessary precondition of moral reasoning while advancing flourishing as its normative aim. This theory starts with the premise that no ethical system can operate without first addressing the material conditions that sustain life. Marx’s critique of capitalist production begins from precisely this premise: the primacy of securing the conditions necessary for survival – access to food, shelter, healthcare, and a stable environment – as the foundation upon which any ethical system must be built. Through historical materialism, which situates survival within the socio-economic base; evolutionary biology, which provides insights into how survival imperatives shape value systems; and critiques of ideological constructs, which reveal how flourishing is often subordinated to power structures, I demonstrate that ethical systems – if they treat universality as axiomatic – must ground that universality in survival while adapting to the evolving demands of real-world human flourishing.

In this essay, I reinterpret Hartley B. Alexander’s early 20th-century account of liberty and democracy in light of the 21st-century populist resurgence, integrating the economic analysis of Jonathan Hopkin and Mark Blyth. By combining Alexander’s concerns surrounding the ethical collapse of democratic citizenship with Hopkin and Blyth’s diagnosis of structural economic disenfranchisement, I construct a dual account of populism’s rise as the convergence of moral atrophy and institutional decay. From Trump’s America to Modi’s India, populism emerges as a liberty weaponised against itself. I argue that populism is a condition wherein the form of democracy is preserved, but its substance is debased, thereby reduced to spectacle, demagoguery, and institutional dysfunction. Drawing on specific examples and institutional analysis, I further argue for a reconstruction of liberty grounded in moral formation and institutional responsiveness, thus offering a normative pathway beyond the populist condition.