Good will to all
Good will to all
Good will to all
PART 1 A personal calendar of love
Last year’s Christmas, 2024
New Year’s Day, 2025
Burns Night
St Valentine’s Day: loving others … living with others
Mothers Day … the reciprocation of love
Easter
Midsummer’s Night
PART 2 Occasional comment
Positive value … forgiveness
Love All Always … or … Prefer Those Like Ourselves?
Appendix The relevant reports this year
Good will to all
“Peace, good will toward men” (Luke, 2, 14; King James bible)
Note: some have questioned the translation used in the King James bible:
The phrase I have been using recently:
Love All Always.
PART 1 A personal calendar of love
Christmas Day is a special day in the UK and indeed for many people around the world. It is one of a number of days through the year when particular attention is given to the notion of love. This past year I have written about love in relation to St Valentine’s Day and to Mother’s Day. In the past I have also written to celebrate New Year’s Day, Burns Night, Easter and Midsummer’s Night. In a sense then these days make up my personal calendar of love. Other people no doubt have other calendars.
The sections which follow give what I wrote on each of the days in my calendar.
Last year’s Christmas, 2024
GO TO The incidence of Christmas on the distribution of love in society
New Year’s Day 2025
GO TO A good year … the distribution of value in society
Burns Night
GO TO Love everybody; understand everybody … Robert Burns, 1759-1796
St Valentine’s Day: loving others … living with others
GO TO: St Valentine’s Day: loving others … living with others
.(1) Love all always
.(2) Loving the self, but not the other … USA election and religion
.(3) Love China, Love USA … “no suggestion of wrongdoing”
.(4) The incidence of Christmas on the distribution of love in society
.(5) Value in society … a good life, life satisfaction, positive value and love
.(6) Love everybody; understand everybody … Robert Burns, 1759-1796
.(7) Midsummer: science, religion, culture … humanities and mathematics
.(8) Ukraine ... and World Society 2023.
.(9) Israel and Palestine: self and other, positive and negative; 2023
.(10) Ukraine: united or divided? West and East; living with others
Loving others: Dennis Bury (1943-2024)
A tale of two courses: The Nuclear Debate; and Peace Education
Principles and Practice of Peace Education
Peace education at the Open University: a few personal memories 1970-2010
Mothers Day … the reciprocation of love
GO TO Mothers Day … the reciprocation of love
“Relationships: Family and Friends, Care and Therapy, Nurturing Flourishing”
Positive and negative relationship patterns
Negative about the other: UK; and USA
“The myth of perfect motherhood”
Mothers “making the world better”
Easter
Part 1 of Report Y25.9 was devoted to Easter, and it is reproduced below.
All parts of the report are available at:
Easter … waste … deindustrialisation … Scunthorpe … Trump tariffs, April 2025
1 Positive value
Positive value seldom makes front page news and indeed is also rather scarce in the rest of the newspaper. However there is a regular column in Saturday’s Times which often does take positive value as the starting point, namely ‘Credo’.
Easter
Stephen Cottrell’s Easter message is about the hope in the darkness that light will come. The Times, April 19, 2025: 82.
The capacity for love
The other Saturday Ian Bradley discussed The Sound of Music, “one of the most explicitly Christian of all musicals”. He notes the question, “how does God wish me to use my capacity for love?”. In abstract this question can be posed in other religions and indeed outside religion:
“How should I use my capacity for love?”
“Sound of Music still calls us to climb every mountain.” Ian Bradley. The Times, April 5, 2025: 82.
Music of the Night. Religious Influences and Spiritual Resonances in Operetta and Musical Theatre. Ian Bradley. Oxford University Press. May 2025. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/music-of-the-night-9780197699744?cc=es&lang=en&#
Power and benevolence of benevolence institutions
Avowedly benevolent institutions have a degree of power but may to some extent deviate from benevolence.
“Missionary group accused of spiritual abuse.” The Observer, 6 April 2025: 1, 2, 21-23.
Midsummer’s Night.
Midsummer: science, religion, culture … humanities and mathematics
GO TO Humanities and mathematics. (links to 265 pages)
then immediately
GO TO the link to the 20-page paper.
PART 2 Occasional comment
In addition to these fixed dates in the calendar, I have been prompted to write on a couple of other occasions.
Positive value … forgiveness
GO TO Terrible events, opinions and positive value … forgiveness
Opinion relativity
The shooting at Utah Valley University
The Yom Kippur attack on Heaton Park Synagogue
Les Misérables: redemption, forgiveness and self-sacrifice
British Caribbean perspectives: Sewell and Lammy
Perpetrators’ parents …
… an Arab perspective on October 7 … Palestine and Israel opinion polls
The Times, October 8, 2025
The Times, October 9, 2025
Meaning without religion?
Nice, forgiving and provokable … Axelrod’s A Passion for Cooperation
…
Also:
Israel and Palestine: self and other, positive and negative; 2023.
Online book, first draft, 112 pages, 19 March 2024
Love All Always … or … Prefer Those Like Ourselves?
This is the title of Part 1 of the following report and the topic is returned to in Part 5:
GO TO Reform and Britannia … Poland … Love All Always or Prefer Those Like Ourselves?
The debate in Part 1 to some extent echoes the contrast between Joe Biden and Donald Trump …
Prompted by remarks by Joe Biden, I wrote:
Prompted by Donald Trump, I wrote:
USA power: self and other; positive and negative
These are two quite different conceptions of the self and the other.
Self and other; positive and negative
Not included in my report are some further thoughts I had …
Finkelstein notes the tendency for the formation of groups and for individuals to see themselves belonging to groups. Self and other give images of them and us. One conception of the self is that the self is positive and the other is negative.
These groups can arise in relation to ethnic groups or nations. Leaders can align with the group’s dominant conception of itself. Trump and Vance in the USA; and Farage in the UK.
Finkelstein discusses Robert Trivers concept of reciprocal fairness where both parties agree that the benefits of the relationship are fair and perceptions of unfairness where the other derives greater benefits than the self. There can be resentment of bankers, elite, foreigners, criminals, big business, media, …
The origins of kindness
Finkelstein discusses the work of George Price as discussed in Oren Harman’s book
The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Price-Altruism-George-Origins-Kindness/dp/0099531666
Review: https://literaryreview.co.uk/hitting-the-wall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._Price
“The Price equation is a mathematical relationship between various statistical descriptors of population dynamics, rather than a physical or biological law, and as such is not subject to experimental verification. In simple terms, it is a mathematical statement of the expression "survival of the fittest".”
[What is and what should be]
[The trajectory of the distribution of value functions in social space]
“How vampire bats explain Starmer’s ‘strangers’. Humans, like some other species, appreciate reciprocity, and tend to worry someone’s taking more out than they put in. … We are experts at self-deception. Everyone thinks they contribute.”
Daniel Finkelstein. The Times. May 14, 2025:19.
Appendix
I wrote the following reports over the past year. Some of them are wholly focused on love and some are more about other topics.
Y24
The incidence of Christmas on the distribution of love in society
Y25.1 A good year … the distribution of value in society (w37)
A good year … the distribution of value in society
Y25.4 St Valentine’s Day: loving others … living with others
St Valentine’s Day: loving others … living with others
Y25.8 Mothers Day … the reciprocation of love
Mothers Day … the reciprocation of love
Y25.9 Easter … waste … deindustrialisation … Scunthorpe … Trump tariffs, April 2025
Easter … waste … deindustrialisation … Scunthorpe … Trump tariffs, April 2025
Y25.13 Reform and Britannia … Poland … Love All Always or Prefer Those Like Ourselves?
Reform and Britannia … Poland … Love All Always or Prefer Those Like Ourselves?
Y25.17 Terrible events, opinions and positive value … Israel and Palestine
Terrible events, opinions and positive value … forgiveness
Gordon Burt, December 2025
THE END