Category: and the Rest!

Stuff which doesn’t fit or crosses boundaries

Who are we really? (what makes us us?) — a shallow dive into the metaphysics of self.

‘Who are we really?’ It sounds like a simple question doesn’t it? But wrapped up in the question are some difficult notions. For example, is our identity anything more than a buy-in to a concept of self that is illusory?

What gives most of us, most of the time a strong sense of self? Arguably it is a combination of:

· a sense of place; we wake up in the same immediate surroundings we went to sleep in, with the same people, objects, sounds and smells, even if we’re in a boat cabin or a plane or a car seat (unless of course we are abducted by aliens);

· a sense of continuity, enabled by consciousness, reflection and memory. We remember and know ourselves and the key events from the day before, the year before and the decades before. We have agency and purpose and spend most of our time in familiar surroundings. We know what it feels like to be…….well us.

All this leads to and supports a strong sense of self, an identity. In other words, “I think therefore I am.”[1]

Most of the time we don’t ponder the metaphysics of identity overmuch.

In our day-to-day lives we just get on with it; we go to sleep with a strong sense of self, rest our tired bodies and minds for 6–8 hours and wake up in the same body and the same room and with the same feelings and thoughts we went to bed with and carry on: we know who we are. Perhaps that is what the true horror of Alzheimer’s disease is — the loss of memory, of awareness, of familiarity with a place, of chronology and, because of all this, the loss of self. Carers speak of losing a loved one and sufferers of being lost. Everything that anchors identity is lost and so the person is lost.

In my younger days Satre almost convinced me, in an aside in what I think was his Doctoral thesis, that, a strong sense of self not-withstanding, the idea of an identity, a fixed and permanent persona, an us, was no more than an accident of language and consciousness.[2] These days I can as easily believe that the language came because of the sense of self rather than the other way round.

As an aside, for a species which, at least in western cultures, places so much emphasis on self and personal identity we do have an extraordinary need to be part of a tribe, community, gang, club, congregation or nation. Our ability to think and act in opposition to our group is generally not great; think of small-town America, that nice village in the Cotswolds, national mindsets, the far right, the far left, those of a devout religious persuasion, Man. U supporters and so on. At the extreme our group membership releases us from personal responsibility — we can forget or lose ourselves in the excitement and freedom of belonging in the moment. Think of Germany in the 1930s or MAGA supporters at Trump rallies. We can be carried away, be Dionysian rather than Apollonian (if I’ve remembered my Nietzsche correctly), governed by the Id not the Superego (if I’ve remembered my Freud correctly) and be part of a good ruck or riot or mass killing (if I’ve remembered recent and more distant history correctly). So identity and sense of self are somehow bound up in group-think and external culture and norms, not just something inside us. We need our tribe and our tribe will reinforce what we think and feel — and change it. Humans are intelligent pack animals banding together against ‘the other’ pack animals — that’s what we are programmed to do. Have a look at the Asch Conformity Experiments in the 1950s and the Milligram experiment findings in the 1970s if you need convincing: https://tiredandemotional.org.uk/what-if-the-hokie-kokie-is-what-its-all-about/

“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. ……….when they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.

I think we might need to reflect on how we can educate men and women to sustain their truth whatever the situation.”

Stanley Milgram, 1974

It is difficult for any of us to go against the shared beliefs and values of our group whatever the consequences and not having a group, not belonging, being a loner, can have consequences for the individual and his/her community. How many school mass shootings in the land of the free involved one or more young men whose only friend was a social media portal?

But I don’t really want to torture myself or any reader with a deep dive into these issues and am happy to concede we have identities. What I really want to know is how did we become who we are? First though, let’s just recognise the incredibly unlikely happenstance that we exist at all.

Bill Bryson has something to say about that. First, think about the astonishing physics of our being here.

“…for uou to be here at all now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialised and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once.” [3]

As far as I know atoms are not alive so how does this work?

Atoms becoming me….or you: image by Dean Simone from Pixabay
DNA: image by Alex Antropov86 from Pixabay

Then consider how our species (and therefore we) evolved over aeons.

“To get from ‘protoplasmal primordial atomic globule’ (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient, upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long time…..The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls….or disgorging air through a blowhole….”[4]

Of course, those of an extreme religious persuasion ‘know’ none of this is true. But, if you believe in evolution, you know that the journey from protoplasm to sentient (more or less) mammal was a long and tangled road with lots of blind turnings and cul-de-sacs. Even if we just take our journey from the time of early humankind to this point the odds on our being here are incredibly low.

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years…..every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so…….to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result….in you.”[5]

It is something of a miracle of generational survival that we exist at all. If you think today’s world is a tad dangerous think about what life-chances were a couple of thousand years ago.

Image by Joe from Pixabay

So we are very, very lucky to be alive; atoms aligned and ancestors survived to breed and someone was around to care for the offspring — plague, famine, violence, natural disasters, fatal accidents, and the rest somehow passed us and our ancestors by or at least didn’t kill them before they managed to procreate.

But I am no nearer to working out how my identity/personality came to be. We kind of assume that physically we look like us, although most of us know too that we look like someone else don’t we? Has anyone not been told at some time or other how much we look like a parent? And our parents were told the same thing and their parents before them. Not an original thought I know but somewhat disturbing. Here’s Thomas Hardy’s take on it.

Heredity

I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance — that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.

Thomas Hardy: looks just like his dad!

So whose faces are we wearing and can we really call them ours?

Beyond the fact that, physically, we resemble ancestors there is another question. If we look like s/he or them, could it be that we also act and think like s/he or them? The nature/nurture debate is an old one. It seems these days that science is leaning towards nature as having the strongest influence on our character, talent (or lack of it), and personality (or lack of it). That raw clay of the new-born me or you already carried the imprint of our predecessors and their experiences; it’s not written in our stars, it’s in our genes. It seems like a variation on reincarnation beliefs.

“The word reincarnation derives from a Latin term that literally means ‘entering the flesh again’. Reincarnation refers to the belief that an aspect of every human being (or all living beings in some cultures) continues to exist after death. This aspect may be the soul, mind, consciousness, or something transcendent which is reborn in an interconnected cycle of existence; the transmigration belief varies by culture, and is envisioned to be in the form of a newly born human being, animal, plant, spirit, or as a being in some other non-human realm of existence.

An alternative term is transmigration, implying migration from one life (body) to another. The term has been used by modern philosophers such as Kurt Gödel] and has entered the English language.”[6]

I struggle to believe that my particular collection of atoms is carrying around a soul which is immortal and will hitch a lift with another life-form once I’ve gone. I can accept though that my genetic inheritance is keeping alive a good part of what made my ancestors who they were….not so much ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ as corporeal inheritance. I’m fine with that. I am myself! My ancestors lived in very different worlds, encountered different challenges and were shaped by them as I’ve been shaped by mine. Bits of me (the good bits I hope) have already been passed on to my children, along with bits of my wife and quite a few, if not all, of the bits we gained from our predecessors, so a thankyou to them and to the primordial slime from which all life emerged.

We also know, don’t we, that our life experiences and particularly our childhood experiences shape and change us…for better or worse. There is no escaping our childhood and it colours our lives and shapes the way we view the world and respond to it; it plays a huge part in triggering the good and the evil that human beings exhibit and, of course, it often limits and defines our life chances. As an aside, if the physics of parallel universes is more than just another theory I don’t really understand, there may be other me’s out there living different lives and thinking they are unique……….

I am not the same person I was when six years old, or when sixteen years old, of twenty-six years old. And yet I don’t think of myself as having been many different people but as one evolving person. We grow and change over time so that a sixty-year-old adult is nothing like the six-year-old child s/he once was — only memory joins the two and the sense of self and identity it enables. As I get older I grow more child-like; I am more anxious, I do less, I am less capable, I grow weaker not stronger, my memory (never great) gets worse. Can it be that my adult working life was no more than the child in me managing to mask my fears and insecurities in a cloak of seeming confidence and competence? Do we simply learn to disguise ourselves as grown-ups and then, as the years pass, become less and less capable of, or bothered about, sustaining the illusion? Only we know how much of our public face is an act or illusion — a projection of who we would like to be. As for social media and influencers and not a few evangelical church leaders….well it’s a living I guess! The difference and distance between our pretensions and our ‘true’ selves is sometimes significant and constant honesty, with ourselves or others, is too big an ask for most of us. So are we who we’re pretending to be or the person doing the pretending? Most of us struggle with the discrepancy at some time or other between who we really (really?) are and the bullshit we put out; politicians must struggle almost all of the time. As for the likes of Trump…………………

Humans are intelligent pack animals banding together against ‘the other’ pack animals — that’s what we are programmed to do. We are complex combinations of what we inherited across the aeons, the family and culture(s) we were born into and reared within; our experiences as we grow, develop and decline and how we react, respond and change because of them. We are a conscious and evolving living individuals (probably of no great significance) connected to the past and, if we are lucky, to the future. Still there’s that nagging thought that ‘I think therefore I am’ might not be much closer to the truth than ‘I am therefore I think I think’.

[1] The Latin cogito, ergo sum, usually translated into English as “I think, therefore I am”, is the “first principle” of René Descartes’s philosophy. He originally published it in French as je pense, donc je suis in his 1637 Discourse on the Method, so as to reach a wider audience than Latin would have allowed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum

[2] ‘The Transcendence of the Ego’, an Existential Theory of Consciousness, La Transcendance de l’ego: Esquisse d’une description phénomenologique), published in 1936

[3] ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’, pp17, Bryson, Bill, Transworld Publishers, Doubleday, 2003.

[4] Ibid pp19

[5] Ibid pp19–20

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reincarnation

‘Any lie will do’ or ‘Then came AI.’

If we live now in a post-truth world, is it something new and does it matter? Truth has always been a slippery fish to catch and hold.

the alternative facts lady

Kellyanne Conway worked in Trumpworld, where ‘alternative facts’ (lies in old-speak) were part of the fabric, the warp and weft, of working life. But she was hardly ahead of her time.

When the first photographs were seen it must have seemed extraordinary, a miracle for those modern times.

“The use of cameras has allowed us to capture historical moments and reshape the way we see ourselves and the world around us.” Petapixel, 30 First Photos from the History of Photography, https://petapixel.com/first-photos-photography-history/

A real moment in time captured and frozen for all to see. Portrait painters must have been less than enraptured – cutting edge technology with the power to put them out of business and no extra charge for two arms!

It didn’t take too long though for people to learn to pose for the camera, inventing for posterity domestic scenes of bliss and contentment.

Members of the Routh family enjoying a picnic with Champagne at Stonehenge, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-wiltshire-50743523

The first of the five photographs, taken by Elsie Wright in 1917, shows Frances Griffiths with the alleged fairies, Wickipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies

And of course it didn’t take long for people to realise photographs could be faked.

This came a while after the written word had been used, not to record but to embroider and even invent things that hadn’t happened. Fiction – written lies – were the first illusion to ripple the still waters of accepted truth (at least if we exclude politicians and con artists – always with us). Where we had had the comfort of reading or seeing performed versions of true(ish) history, bible narratives or equally credible myths of antiquity, suddenly these reliable journeys into our shared past were joined by a made-up world where anything could happen and outcomes were uncertain; it was hard to know what was true and what wasn’t. Surely ‘The Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’ (1831) must be true – after all there were actual measurements and they couldn’t be made up could they? Except they were. https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/cruikshank/crusoe/11.html

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham

Crusoe builds a large dugout canoe by George Cruikshank The half-page vignette enforces the reader’s belief through such specific details as the dense jungle, the home-made ladder, and the props for the hull.

The birth of the novel was both fascinating and disturbing for early readers – church leaders were particularly incensed at losing their monopoly on true lies.The novel brought the end of certainty about written truth. Bodice rippers, where libertines seduced and ravished innocent young women, gripped readers of all classes, scandalised the clergy and encouraged vicarious living. ‘Clarissa, ‘The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life. And Particularly Shewing, the Distresses that May Attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, In Relation to Marriage’, by Samuel Richardson, scandalised and titillated in equal measure.

Before all this, truth was either what the bible said, the vicar’s spin on it or the evidence of our own eyes. Fiction gave us ‘alternative truths’ and, ironically, the camera brought the promise of capturing the ‘evidence of our own eyes’. War correspondents could offer a pictorial record to support their words and expose something of the reality of war – seeing really was believing, though the person behind the lens could be a tad selective, either for reasons of good taste or something less commendable.

The first photographs of war were made in 1847, when an unknown American photographer produced a series of fifty daguerreotypes depicting scenes from the Mexican-American war in Saltillo, Mexico. These images covered a range of subjects, from portraits of generals and infantrymen to landscapes, street scenes, and post-battle burial grounds. While the images provide insight into daily life on the periphery of the war, they are especially notable for what they do not depict: in them, we see neither active battles or wounded and dead bodies, nor the idealization and glory sometimes associated with war.

Seeing is believing: early war photography Artstor
Roger Fenton, Hardships in the Camp, 1855. Image courtesy of George Eastman House www.eastmanhouse.org

So, while the camera never lied, photographers did:

The Valley of the Shadow of Death, one of Fenton’s best-known images from the conflict, indirectly portrays the horrors experienced by troops undergoing heavy fire via a road covered heavily with cannonballs. Fenton almost certainly staged this photograph, moving additional cannonballs into the road to emphasize the horrific bombardment experienced by troops marching on the road days earlier, rather than documenting casualties of the attack.

Ibid

Then came movies, films of things that happened or might have happened or were just plain made up for entertainment! Imagine the delight and shock of watching real people moving and (eventually) talking, who were not really there; moments from the past captured to be relived as if happening now, and viewed in the magic, shadowy cinema darkness. There had always been celebrities, though in the distant past most people knew of them but would never see them. Kings, queens and other nobs were distant objects in another universe for most of the human race, and most members of the human race were safer because of it. Who would have wanted to be Henry VIII’s mate? Not me guv! The camera and moving pics. changed all that with a vengeance. Not just one but loads and loads of stars were born – well, manufactured at any rate. And Hollywood and TV studios, with judicious help from the CIA purse when needed, conquered the world with movies like ‘Birth of a Nation’, films featuring plucky western pioneers fighting frightening and savage ‘hostiles’, or focussing on the danger of communist infiltration as McCarthyism took root in the paranoid lobe of US brains. The poster for one Red Menace film declared it

So shocking it was filmed behind locked studio doors

adding that

Using the guise of ‘Moral Values’, the Red Menace creeps like a cancer across the land, poisoning minds, corrupting our youth, threatening world peace, sowing hatred, intolerance, cultural division, greed, injustice, arrogance, and delusions of superiority, and cutting a wide swath of war, death, devastation, disease, and human misery abroad.

https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/red-scare

Misuse of the comma is the worst fault here but it is worth remembering that there’s a bit of pot and kettle about the CIA and white corporate America complaining about ‘cultural division, greed, injustice, arrogance, and delusions of superiority’.

Hollywood entertainment was the most effective soft-power ever, showing the world the American way of life, freedom, heroism, opportunity and unimaginable prosperity. A polarised cold-war world slugged it out in propaganda wars having learned from two world conflicts that controlling the narrative was almost as important as controlling the battlefield. Did the Germans actually bayonet babies when they invaded Belgium in WW1? The jury’s out. Was there an industrial scale attempt to exterminate Jews, Romanies, ‘mental defectives’ and communists in WW2? Most of the world would say Yes because there is compelling evidence that the Shoah, the killing of nearly six million Jews in Europe was not a nightmare but a terrible crime against humanity. But, here’s the thing, there are people who deny the Holocaust ever took place and claim it to be part of a plot by ‘international Jewry’ or some other invented organising group posing a threat to us all. Can evidence be made up? Can ‘truth’ be manufactured? Can any crazy thing be faked?  

Of course it can. Most people know that the iconic raising of the Stars and Stripes at the battle for Iwo Jima (March 1945) actually did take place after terrible fighting during the war in the Pacific but was then restaged as a photo. opportunity for the ‘folks back home’ not to mention the generals – a ‘true lie’? And, of course, Hollywood made a film about it:

Sands of Iwo Jima

Then came Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, now Meta, apparently a chance to be immersed in any kind of non-reality you like, Soma on an iPhone. Imagine actually designing a programme that would only connect you with people who believed the same things you did – a perfect recipe for delusional conspiracy theories. Try posting that Liz Truss is a Martian or Barak Obama isn’t American and you’ll soon have a following. Only a true anorak could think it was better to link together groups who agreed, whatever they believed, rather than binding humanity together across belief systems. Facebook’s revenue in 2020 was 85.96 billion USD, quite a powerful incentive to allow freedom of hatespeech on a platform. Meanwhile Twitter’s new owner has his own ideas about how to save humanity.

Just three days after Elon Musk bought Twitter, he posted a tweet promoting the baseless allegation that Paul Pelosi, the husband of the speaker of the House, who was assaulted on Friday at the couple’s home, had been drunk and in a fight with a male prostitute….. “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye” and (he) then shared a link to an article in a faux newspaper, the Santa Monica Observer…..that in 2016 claimed that (Hillary) Clinton had died and that a body double was sent to debate the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

Robert Reich, Guardian, Monday Oct. 30th 2022

So we now live in a world of manipulated images. Sometimes this is art for art’s sake and sometimes it’s to make money or to gain or keep power. We can buy a phone now which features a camera offering image manipulation on the go. Someone you don’t want in the pic?, easy just remove them to create your own reality. Something you don’t like about yourself or your life? Easy just embroider things on your Facebook pages. For many of us, the reality of our experience seems less important than other people’s perception of our lives. Social influencers don’t make money promoting reality. I don’t want to suggest that social media is always a malign addition to our tottering civilisation; it offers a platform with instant access to oppressed people and an organisational tool for protest. Information is the enemy of repression. Just ask Iranian women and men taking to the streets or Ukranians living in cellars in the middle of a war. Like a loaded gun, the harm or benefit brought by social media depends on who’s controlling it and why. It’s no surprise that oppressive regimes across the world work hard to control media and shut down what they can’t control.

Some politicians have always lied of course but it took Trump and Kellyanne, not to mention our own diminutive mini-Trump, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, to really appreciate that we live in a post-truth universe. We don’t need evidence any more. A genuine or faked photo, email or video is now redundant. We don’t any longer need to manipulate records to prove our dubious assertions, that’s simply unnecessary; all we need is “alternative facts” – much more powerful than truth. The likes of dodger Johnson was entranced that what had been ascribed to his appalling narcissism could win an election and a referendum. In the UK the single most destructive economic decision in our history was taken on the back of blatant lies and, while there was some blowback, characterised as ‘remoaners’ being bad losers, nothing happened….unless you count the trashing of the UK economy.

Proponents of Pizzagate connected Comet Ping Pong (pictured) to a fictitious child sex ring.

In the US as in the UK an incredible number of people believe total bollocks because it fits their world view. Anything can be true, from paedophile rings in pizza bar basements to ‘stolen’ elections or ‘trickle down economics’.

Here are a few examples of what Marjorie Taylor Greene claims to believe: the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, mass shootings are staged by gun control proponents, “beams of blue light” from space-based “solar generators” started forest fires in California and a “global cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles” runs America. And here by contrast is what one ancient Roman believed:

If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one’s own self-deception and ignorance.”

Simple Meditations from Marcus Aurelius

For a well-researched piece on US conspiracy theories have a look at: So When, Exactly, Did Conspiracy Culture Stop Being Fun?, Rani Baker, Medium, Oct 20

There’s no moral to this post but I can’t help thinking we live now in a world where truth has no longer to be a significant component of our discourse and holding on to what we think is true is harder than it ever has been. The choice seems to be between devoting time and energy into sifting probable truth from the mass of static and manipulation or just believing whatever chimes with our world view….. and our world view depends on how we are able to access information about the world we live in – the perspectives of many a North Korean, middle-aged Russian, Canadian, west-coast American, mid-west American, Chinese citizen etc. will almost certainly not align because of the ‘education’ they have experienced and the bias always present in the media worlds they separately inhabit. Most of humanity just doesn’t have time to do more than work too hard to make ends meet and take what pleasure they can in increasingly difficult economic and social environments; sifting truth from true lies from lies is so much harder than just affiliating with a belief system and world view we can live with and, all too often, kill or die to defend. Today we seem to have exchanged harmless illusion for harmful delusion and, as my mother used to say, “No good will come of it.”

Oh yes….and then came AI great at diagnosing disease but very, very frightening when it generates all the alternative truths you could imaging, a selection box of world views and conspiracy theories.

Musing on age and mortality

Life continues to surprise me….I’m very glad to say. For instance, I turned round the other day and realised I was old. I can’t speak for others in my age group any more than I can speak on behalf of men just because I am one, after all, one is a pretty small sample size and I only know how one now-old male feels and thinks. I don’t feel old but the physical signs of system breakdown are pretty evident and it’s clear to me that I am perceived by many (most?) of humanity as old. So I thought I’d try and capture my experience of this odd business of becoming old and then realising it has happened. 

What happened?

The hardest part of all this is physical deterioration. Like an assassin in the night, or an overdraft at the end of the month come to that, it comes stealthily and then suddenly you’re fighting off a murderous attack or a letter from the computer pretending to be a bank manager. First your skin goes; I don’t mean lines and wrinkles – that’s just the start. Things sag, skin gets blotchy, skin gets dry, skin gets saggy. Essentially skin stops being skin and starts being discoloured parchment. This happens gradually of course as does hair loss but they’re both one way processes.

What else could go wrong? Well aches and pains, stiffness, joint wear that brings unbearable pain, muscle wastage, indigestion, flatulence, incontinence, deafness, deteriorating eyesight and hearing, tremors, a stoop, libido as a distant memory and loads of other goodies without referencing the life-threatening diseases. Any one of these would be a tad annoying but all of them!

Just as the outside deteriorates, the inside does too. It’s a good job we can only see the exterior I think – that’s bad enough. And all this means medication! Suddenly the heaviest item when packing to go away is the medicine bag. On the upside the old have a lot more pharmaceutical knowledge than the careless young; you name it, we’ve had it. Ailments, medicine and the grading of GPs replace sex as the burning topics of discussion among friends, AKA silly old sods like me.

Alongside knowing and finally admitting I’ll never play for Liverpool, comes a touch, if you’re lucky just a touch, of mental deterioration. Vocabulary decreases, sentences present the kind of challenge the young only face when they really have drunk far too much wine (if it is wine the young drink these days). Ideas still form but not always in sequential order – and memory…well I can’t really recall what the word means. It’s pretty sobering to recognise that those old farts blocking my passage by standing around in supermarket aisles and motorway service entrances while wondering where to go or who they are, are……… just like me but mostly with better dress sense.

We worry more too, of course because we’ve got time to do it. The things we did on the fly in the past, have to be meticulously planned, not least because of loo breaks. There’s a business opportunity there for someone – a Baedeker’s of open public toilets would sell, especially in large print or as a (very loud) audiobook

Is there an upside? Of course; work, for some of us at least, even if a declining number, is optional. There is more time for friends too and, if we don’t become increasingly conservative with age there’s every chance we’ll become more radical. There are apparently around 160,000 Conservative Party members, which is amazing but puts them in a very significant minority; there are probably more Labour Party members in Liverpool than that, though they may not be happy with Sir K’s middle of the road policies. Being able to take a long view because we’ve been around a while makes it pretty easy to see just how messed up the world is; we know it wasn’t always like this and we’ve got a pretty good idea who to blame. Realising we’ve been alive a fair bit longer than we’re going to be alive certainly focusses the mind.

So, here’s some advice for anyone under 50 and especially for anyone under 25: don’t wait, live now, get out and get involved: march, protest, volunteer. Don’t just live in the world (though that’s better than the metaverse or Love Island) don’t just live in it, change it. You may not even notice the elderly and the old, or treat them with kindly condescension but, if you’re lucky enough to survive, you too will be old – not in the far distant future, but in the blink of an eye; you really don’t want to look back and wonder if you could have been more and done more.

As always someone said it better and shorter:

 All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Old what’s his name, it’s on the tip of my thingy, you know…he wrote plays and stuff

A letter to my mother

Trying to gain perspective about a parent might be beyond all of us; it’s certainly beyond me. Today at least, this is what I think.

Your generation had a view of residential care because there were memories of the workhouse, with its associations of shame and privation. Did that mean you shouldn’t have spent your final years in one? Well, you lived to be a hundred – mainly, I think, because you were stubborn. From ninety onwards you told anyone who would listen that you were ready to go, but you weren’t, not really. By the time you died you were like a tiny new hatched bird in an abandoned nest. Your skin was translucent, etched with blue veins and your skeleton was contorted. When we visited, you seldom opened your rheumy eyes and, for over a year our, ever-briefer, visits were made only out of duty because the person you had been could not be found. Sometimes I would oil your scalp and remove some of the cradle-cap but your hair was so sparse and loose-rooted in the end I even gave that up.

In the almost ten years you spent in ‘the home’ you diminished in every way as you edged towards a vanishing point. Your final years were about accelerated physical decline as your body began to close down. We had a couple of death-bed vigils before you died. Care-home staff were convinced your time had come and we said out good-byes and told you it was fine to let go if that was what you wanted. If you heard us it made you more determined than ever to hang on because that’s what you did. We didn’t really believe it when they called a third time. They spoke in code anyway, saying you seemed to be very weak. I said we’d visit in the morning and then after the call, began to think about what ‘very weak’ might really mean and why they’d called at night to tell us you were ‘very weak’ when you always were. I called back and asked did they mean you were dying and they didn’t say no. Before we could get in the car a third call told us you were gone. They say that with old age a person’s true nature shows again, having been hidden more or less successfully, since childhood. Perhaps it’s true and perhaps people die as they’ve lived – I’ve heard that too. In your final years you were variously demented, paranoid, funny, tearful, manipulative and absent. You could be as nasty and suspicious as any bigot and could round on anyone but I don’t believe this was your true nature any more than I believe that you were a saint.

Something happened to you soon after we celebrated your ninetieth birthday. We did it well, at the Golf Club, and all the family came. You seemed a little lost on the night though, as if it was all too much for you. After that, you began to wilt like a plant in a drought. Did you look ahead and really frighten yourself? You’d always said you would never ask to come and live with us and would never want to be a burden but, suddenly, you no longer wanted to be independent. The Who hoped they’d die before they got old but, understandably, changed their minds as the years rolled by. So did you. You decided you needed a carer and then that you needed a full-time carer. To buttress your case you swung the lead. You developed imagined maladies which required emergency hospital admission or a doctor’s home visit to do ‘an internal’ because ‘there was something terribly wrong’ – except, of course, there wasn’t. Once you left the bedroom phone off the hook, mistook the noise for the kitchen smoke alarm and climbed up on a stool to cut the wires. Of course it didn’t stop the noise but it did bring the fire brigade. I drove a hundred miles one evening when you had been rushed into hospital but you were discharged the next day with a diagnosis of constipation. When I reminded you of this later you denied it had ever happened.

We managed to get you into a care home nearby and you settled in, or seemed to. But, when you had not long moved in I got a desperate phone call. You couldn’t explain you whispered, real fear in your voice, but I had to come at once because ‘they’ were trying to kill you. I calmed you down and raced there. When I walked in you were quite your old self, cheerful, pleased and surprised to see me. You made no mention of the phone call, then or later. Then there were the voices in the wall, keeping you awake day and night and trying to drive you insane…or was it the intercom you never managed to master. You were grateful that I took over your finances but, at the same time, knew I was stealing all your money, except for what was being stolen by the care home staff. Month by month different carers were identified as saints or liars and thieves and the fall from grace could be sudden and unexpected. You’d been a labour voter in your younger days but the daily drip-feed of bile from the Daily Mail turned you, over time, into an impoverished tory with no time or sympathy for the poor ‘living the life of Riley on benefits’.

You’d coped most of your life, on your own or with a partner you had no time for. You saw off three husbands, though the first, my father, died of TB, and for you the others were make-weights. One proved violent and the other, just out of his depth. You did fall in love again. He was working away from home and I still remember his calling on you one day though I didn’t know why. When you were still aware and able to talk to me, right out of the blue you cried as you remembered him offering to leave his wife and family. You refused to break up his marriage. You knew what it was like to be abandoned and wouldn’t put your happiness before hers.

You were born in 1914, the youngest but one of five sisters and one brother. I used to think the brother, seldom talked of or met in my childhood, had got out of that tight, matriarchal clan as soon as possible simply to survive but there seems a good chance he was told to go because of something he did. Your mother was formidable. Married to a fisherman who was briefly a skipper but a drunk for far longer; she kicked him out and raised the girls and lone boy alone. She worked at anything she could, from bar work to taking in washing. It’s hard now, if not impossible, to understand what life was like in the twenties and thirties and how that shaped attitudes. Respectable women didn’t work, except during the first and second wars when the men were busy killing, being killed or just enduring the boredom and terror of it all. Men worked and provided and controlled the flow of money into the house, or, in the case of too many fishermen, into the pub. The family knew poverty and fear and those girls were brought up to have an eye to the main chance and find the best husband they could – those attitudes didn’t end with Jane Austen and weren’t restricted to the middle classes. You did well at school and were a monitor, teaching other children but you had to leave at fourteen to look after the baby of an unmarried sister who went out to work.

You worked as a ‘Persil’ rep, travelling to promote the whitest whites. You made team leader and wore a long leather coat, reminiscent of the SS. You never forgot the hospitality of the Glasgow poor, inviting you in and offering a cup of tea in a jam jar. You never forgot the coldness of those with money either.

During the war, and after when money was short, you worked on the buses, five feet of formidable conductress seeing off drunks of an evening or rising early in the dark for the morning shift.

A letter to my mother

My abiding memory of you is not the sad husk motionless in your bedworld but your coming home on a dark winter’s evening in your conductress uniform, hitching your skirt and warming your frozen behind in front of the fire, “Oh that’s lovely” you would say and we would know we were safe because of it and because of you. We didn’t always feel safe though. Sometimes you would come home tired and bitter and rant at the two children you were bringing up alone. ‘Ungrateful’, ‘selfish’ and ‘worked my fingers to the bone’ screamed at us for what seemed no reason, terrified we two boys.

I think you spent most of your life being afraid and hiding it. In your prime you rode a bike to work but, afraid of turning a corner, would dismount and pretend to look in a shop window, then walk the bike across the road and remount. You were sure, always, that the world was watching you, scrutinising your cycling prowess or some other aspect of your life. You even considered trying to pass off the second wife of one of your sons as the first one – one brunette and one blonde but worth a try in your mind. The idea that no-one cared didn’t occur to you. Perhaps you knew best; your four weird sisters would have delighted in picking over the bones. Attack one and you attacked all but there was no need since, in various combinations, they were always falling out with each other.

You were generous with what you had, with what others had too, come to that but you had worked hard most of your life and the disappointment of two marriages to men who failed to provide for you (and us) must have been acute. Having overcome your grief when my father died you found another man and then another to provide for you and your kids, only to find yourself driven back to work as money ran short. I think you were an extraordinary woman, of your time and living well beyond it. You were fierce in your belief in your children and lived through them. It was because of you that we were the first in our extended family to go to university. You thought more of yourself than you should have and far, far more of us than you ever should. And you could laugh, at the world and at yourself. You lived a tough life bravely, for courage is not not being afraid, it’s being afraid and carrying on – and you certainly did carry on!

What if the Hokie Kokie is what it’s all about?

I don’t have a lot of time for organised religion and even less for established religion. Generally, they are misogynistic and oppressive and hark back to a time when men lusted after women, blamed them for being temptresses and labelled them unclean. We, i.e. men, allowed women to worship, but usually on the back row, or just outside the ‘holy’ place – palpably unjust and discriminatory; you might even say unchristian, to take our established ‘faith’, except that to be Christian is to be a member of a very broad church indeed, broad enough, for example, for the Papacy to sign a concordat with the national Socialist Party in the years leading up to war – something which hardly aided the Jewish peoples of Europe.

This isn’t an anti-catholic piece; scandals like child abuse, Mussolini bribing the church to legitimise his regime or the imposition of Catch 22 on the poor – choose between the sin of birth control or squalor and starvation – can be matched, I guess, in most organised religions. In Saudi, for example, the ‘guardians’ of Islam are systematically destroying the archaeology of their faith and replacing it with hotels and ‘Starbucks’.

So it’s not an anti-Catholic or anti-religious rant; in fact it’s not a piece about religion at all really It’s more about whether and how we make our way towards our individual truths and the part education should play in that journey.

I have been struck though, by how far Christianity and other ‘faiths’ have drifted from their radical starting points. The power of many faiths came from their radical nature, their attack on venality and their response to corruption and oppression. There is something to be had from all religions but, if they survive, many[1] seem to make the same journey from radical and reforming to established and oppressive, despite the best efforts of many of their followers. Here are a couple of quotes from a Christian, writing sixteen hundred years ago about inequality and injustice: – the writer is known only as the Sicillian Britain

Listen to your rich man calling your poor man ‘wretch’, ‘beggar’, ‘rabble’, because he dares to open his mouth in ‘our’ presence, because in his rags he reproaches ‘our’ morality and conduct, …. as if the rich alone had a right to speak, as if the understanding of truth were a function of wealth, not of thought.

Abolish the rich and you will have no more poor…for it is the few rich who are the cause of the many poor.

The Sicillian Briton, early 5th century (in The Age of Arthur, John Morris, Weidenfield and Nicolson, London, 1984)

Much early Christian writing was in a similar vein and, to be fair, some church leaders still have a powerful social conscience, much to the irritation of politicians.

………………………………………………………………………..

I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s

I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.

William Blake

I’m with Blake. I know that many people choose not to build their own moral or ethical belief system, they opt instead to use the guidance of their religion as a lodestone and live as closely as they can to its tenets. Others go farther and treat the written records of their faith as the word of God. This, I find perplexing for a couple of reasons. The first is that, certainly in the bible, and I assume (out of ignorance) also in the Koran and probably in most ‘holy’ texts, it’s possible to find a quotation contradicting almost any prohibition or exhortation – maybe not ‘Thou shalt not kill’ though ‘an eye for an eye’ rings a bell. My second difficulty is more profound in any case. Religious texts and guidance all need to be interpreted by someone, usually a man, and the range of views here is hardly nuanced – there are some crazy people telling us what to think and what to do.

When the Romans took the sacred isle we know as Angelsey, and butchered pretty well everyone on the place, they were up against the Druids and took their own priests along to even the balance. When the Normans went to the fens to dislodge Hereward they faced holy women or witches depending on your point of view, and again took their own priests along to counter their power. Hereward was betrayed in the end by a monk; I’m not sure what that says about whose power was the greater. In any war men of religion have lined up behind their priests to hear that ‘God’ was on their side.

Dylan’s ‘With God on Our Side’ mentions the slaughter of Native Americans in the nineteenth century, the Spanish–American War, the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the betrayal of Jesus Christ by Judas Iscariot and, in 1980s versions, the Vietnam War – all supposedly just not to say civilising wars.

All wars are just of course, if God is on our side. In 2011 the US Air Force, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, revised a training course taught to nuclear missile launch officers which included quotations from Werner Von Braun and also cited Christian ‘Just War Theory’, among other materials.

The Just War Theory is a, largely Christian, philosophy that attempts to reconcile three things:

  • taking human life is wrong;
  • states have a duty to defend their citizens, and defend justice;
  • protecting innocent human life and defending important moral values sometimes requires willingness to use force and violence.

The theory specifies conditions for judging if it is just to go to war, and conditions for how the war should be fought. Although it was extensively developed by Christian theologians (it originated with classical Greek and Roman philosophers like Plato and Cicero and was added to by Christian theologians like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas) it can be used by people of every faith and none.

The principles of a Just War. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/war/just/introduction.shtml

Do you remember the arguments for invading Iraq? Wasn’t it a just war to stop missiles raining down on London (“capable of being launched within 45 minutes”) and to topple a tyrant who ignored the will of the people….or was it Tony Blair who ignored the will of the people? I forget now.

Do you remember the Fort Hood shootings? There have been an awful lot of shootings so why should you? A Muslim US Army Major, Nidal Malik Hasan, opened fire on his colleagues on November 5, 2009. In the course of the shooting 13 people were killed and 29 wounded.

The Christian American Family Association (don’t look at their web-site unless you’re feeling really well; sample article:

“Barack Obama is not the antichrist but he is an antichrist”

issued the statement “No More Muslims in the US Military”, which explicitly asked that Muslim enlistees be barred from military service in the US armed forces on the grounds that:

“…just as Christians are taught to imitate the life of Christ, so Muslims are taught to imitate the Prophet in all things. Yesterday, Nidal Malik Hasan was simply being a good Muslim.”

So I’d rather make my own mind up than be told what to believe and I’m surprised that isn’t true of everyone. Of course religious education starts early in most cultures for a pretty good reason. Catch them young works as the 16th century Jesuits knew.

Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man.

St. Ignatius of Loyola, or St. Francis Xavier, (alleged)

From Jesus Camps to Madrassas, teaching focuses on obedience to the ‘word’; there’s just some disagreement about whose word.

I’ve seen first-hand the affect that indoctrination into street-gang culture can have on adolescents -and they start getting this indoctrination in some large cities at a very early age. Kids in this predicament are generally from low-income, single-mother households and are usually desperate for authority figures that they can put their trust and loyalty in.

I wonder how the uncertainty and economic strain of chaotic nations in the Middle East affect adolescents there? Could it be any different? Could being raised in a war-torn nation, a theocratic nation, or one in which the only existence you’ve ever known is that of occupation by an oppressing and repressive authority affect your psychological well-being?

Then again, are the young participants of indoctrination camps like the Jesus Camp or the well-to-do students of Mullahs at any less risk of being indoctrinated into a cult of hatred?

Jonathan Evans, the director general of the British MI5, November 2007

We’re all desperate for someone we can put our trust and loyalty in at some level aren’t we? That’s why generally most of us follow orders. We’re pack animals; give us a good alpha male (or female, AKA Maggie) and we’ll do as we’re told most of the time. Psychologists have demonstrated this in the lab. time after time. Here are a couple of well-known examples:

The Asch Conformity Experiments in the 1950s

Groups of students participated in a “vision test.” All but one of the participants were confederates of the experimenter, and the study was really about how the remaining student would react to the confederates’ behavior.

The participants — the real subject and the confederates — were all seated in a classroom and asked a variety of question about lines (which line was longer than the other, which lines were the same length, etc.). The group was told to announce their answers to each question out loud and the confederates always provided their answers before the study participant. The confederates always gave the same answer as each other. They answered a few questions correctly but eventually began providing incorrect responses.

In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous view, only 1 subject out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer except when surrounded by individuals all giving an incorrect answer. Then they provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions (36.8%). 75% of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question. ‘ 1984’ had it right – 2 and 2 can make 5!

The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.

Stanley Milgram, 1974

I think we might need to reflect on how we can educate men and women to sustain their truth whatever the situation.

The Milgram Experiment

Milgram started his experiments in 1961, shortly after the trial of Adolph Eichmann had begun. The defence of ‘only obeying orders’ wasn’t accepted in war-crime trials but the Milgram experiments demonstrated that most of us will inflict pain (in this case electric shocks at dangerous levels) to helpless innocents if an authority figure tells us to.

Milgram thought that no more than 3 out of 100 Yale University students would deliver the maximum shock. In the event 65% of the participants delivered what they believed to be maximum shocks.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. ……….when they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Stanley Milgram, 1974

Of course, as a general principle, conformity is no bad thing; in social terms it encourages cohesion and collaboration and we surely need those. If the species is to survive we had better agree most things and get along. But we also need, as a species, to be able to disagree and speak and act to stop what we know to be wrong. If the general balance of a population reflects Milgram’s findings, approaching two thirds of us will not oppose publically what we know to be wrong if the circumstances don’t encourage it – unless, of course someone else speaks out first. Later experiments conducted by Milgram indicated that the presence of rebellious peers dramatically reduced obedience levels. When other people refused to go along with the orders, 36 out of 40 participants refused to deliver the maximum shocks. So, should not all education systems have, as a key aim, to encourage and develop free thinkers who have the language skills and the confidence to question the ‘instruction’ and received opinions that form part of their ‘education’?

How about these four key aims?:

  • For the curriculum: the study of a base curriculum that takes account of what young people need to know, understand and be able to do to survive and thrive;
  • For the young person: opportunities to develop social and interpersonal skills and explore individual interests, talents and skills;
  • For society: personal and social education which enables young people to develop a strong personal underpinning ethical system and a knowledge base which prevents them suffering or inflicting harm;
  • For educators: training and support to develop a range of learning and teaching strategies which are fit for purpose and a grounding in the philosophy of education.

And the “Hokey Kokey?”

hokey cokey

In out, in out and shake it all about” – it’s just the credo of politicians of all parties, with perhaps the honourable exception of the Greens who, for some odd reason, seem to base their policies on research-based evidence and a value-base – how novel is that?

[1] There are some honourable exceptions, within Christianity for example, Quakerism stands out.
Martin Kerrison
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