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.

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!

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?”

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.