I became rather irritated a yesterday (not entirely a rare occurrence) when some ‘psychologist’ consultant said about Megan Stammers – the girl who ran off with her teacher to France – that she would still “believe she was in love with [the teacher]”. What an incredibly patronising, irritating and stupid thing to say. First and foremost, what is love except believing you are in love?! As Jeffrey Eugenedies latest novel, a rather drab but nevertheless interesting book, argues throughout: you could not fall in love if first you had not read about it.
The alternative, and one more attractive to me of course, is that love is simply a biochemical process, either involving a complex set of hormonal and neurochemical interactions, or neurocircuitry wired in a particular way – or of course a mixture of the two. Beginning with a physical attraction and developing into a personal and emotional compatibility that – hopefully – would endure to the breaking of the world. What people don’t quite seem to understand is that this is not to detract from it; no one would argue against me – educated or otherwise – that a state of happiness is the effect of a chemical, we can now tinker with the balances and in some cases alter deep rooted states of depression in some individuals (although in others the treatments are little more than placebo). Is it not just as incredible to think of a physical human being, as it is to incite some ethereal realm where our emotions are communicated from? Think about the nearing infinite complexity of a single cell, how everything down to the structure of the membrane surrounding it and the compartmentalisation can be controlled, and adapted to changing situations. Think about the difference between a neuron cell, one which can span a measurement of feet and yet still be microscopically thin, how messages are carried from one end to the other without hesitation or deviation along the way, and yet another type of cell, say a liver cell, is created from the exact same genetic message, but is designed to swallow up all the poisons and destructive by-products of metabolism; give a neuron even the slightest of these chemicals to deal with and it would be killed. All these cells – millions of millions of cells, all tailor made and tweaked to perform a function different to its neighbours – come together to form a whole, an organism capable of thinking, emoting, forming close relationships and, most incredibly, begin to understand the processes that go on inside it, and question its place in the pantheon of reality. Is this not the most beautiful thing?
Anyway, I think I wandered from my own point slightly …
The point surely is just how hippocritical everything around this case is. The cannon of romantic and Romantic literature is replete with examples of ‘forbidden love’; breaking societal mores and expectations is not a new idea, and is tacitly encouraged. Think of stories like Wuthering heights, and Romeo and Juliet (13 years old!), and that ghastly twilight ‘saga’. But heaven forbid when someone actually does it – they should know better. Coupled to this is the increasing pressure of young children to act more mature, to make-up, drink, think about boys, and have sexually charged images thrust at them from every direction. This has been a trend a long time coming; boy bands are the perfect example, there’s a line in South Park where an announcer at a concert says something like ‘well girls, do you want the Jonas Brothers to cover you with their hot sticky foam?’, referring to the sort of fourth dimension shenanigans that go on at some night clubs with foam nights, sparkle nights and so forth. As a wise man once said, you reap what you sow.
The other point is why is a girl of 15 and a half years old unable to decide matter for herself, yet a woman of 16 perfectly capable? Are we seriously suggesting that all individuals, with no regard for upbringing or maturity, reach the same level of wisdom and understanding of their place in the world on the chiming of the 12th bell on their 16th year? Of course not, this would be a stupid suggestion surely, but it is this notion underlying the laws that these two have broken. The law has to be skewed towards protection of the innocent, I quite agree, but this case seemed to me (as an uninitiated observer of course) less to do with ‘grooming’ and more to do with the chaotic caprice of the heart.
A group of people – from their own perspective entirely justifiably – have burnt US embassies to the ground, and seem to have killed the US ambassador to Libya, along with two other members of the diplomatic mission, because a film was produced by an Israeli director which was entirely critical of Islam, and their Prophet. It is a re-working of the Danish cartoon debacle. I struggle to think of any other force which would drive people, across half the globe, to such a disproportionate response. The Danish cartoon incident had its mitigating factors; it seems in fact that there were a group of clerics of the anti-western bent who stirred up righteous indignation in the Mosques and seem to have catalysed the whole thing. On this occasion though, no such malevolent subterfuge has – yet -been seen. Instead it seems there is either a lingering anti-western sentiment, or the Muslim world in general is indeed incensed by the film which portrays Mohamed as a war mongering, womanising cad.
Having no craven images of your own god, I can understand; indeed it is an injunction that is in all four versions of the Ten Commandments in the Bible. The Talmudic interpretation of the first four commandments is usually about humility; God is god, you are not, and that is worthy of respect. We did not create the world, but rather are a cog in it. However to then extend a rule from your own religion onto all others, and say that nobody anywhere can shown a picture of the prophet is just nuts. Plain and simple, it is stupid. When one thinks about it it’s actually a nice demonstration that the Koran wasn’t written by God – He would surely know what a problem such a command would pose in an internet age! But I could draw a stick figure in MS paint, show it here with an uncircumspect provenance, and would find myself in violation of the laws of something-like a tenth of the world. Madness.
Of course other flavours of religious intolerance have lead to similarly horrific outcomes. But – to pick Christianity – there is no Biblical basis according to the current favoured interpretations for acts of systematic violence. Of course with Holly Books, one can cherry pick, and if one were to focus on the Old Testament find some rather nasty incitation to violence, but this is not the favoured interpretation. At some points in time the god of the bible was used to justify attempts to wipe out entire races and mount invasions to clear certain lands of infidels, but christianity in its current incarnation seems to be much more tolerant; indeed in this country Anglicanism is essentially a traditionalist echo of the sensibilities of a decade or two ago. Jesus of Nazareth could not be described as a general marshalling a nation, unlike Moses and – to the point here – the Prophet Mohamed. The Koran, as well as it’s interpretations in some parts of the world, is completely opposite to the Bible; there are incitations to violence against non-believers and instructions for how to go about with that violence, and the violent passages increase as the religion develops, rather than abate as in the case of Christianity.
You can make the argument of course, and it may well be the case, that the uncomprimising nature the religion has taken on is a consequence of the environment and political culture, and conversely with Anglicanism, but it doesn’t change the facts. Incidentally, who reads the word ‘Islamist’ in a news article now and does not think of something nasty? I can’t image the same ever being true of ‘Anglicanist’.
Whatever the cause, all I wanted to say about this is isn’t it about time that the political class of the world stop pandering to Islam? Everyone seems – perhaps quite rightly – scared of saying anything. Even Hilary Clinton – a woman known for good ol’ fashioned straight talkin’ – responded by first condemning the film, and only then the violent reactions against it. How about standing up for free speech first against the hordes of nutjobs in the world, and then suggesting that people might, in the exercise of that freedom, have a little restraint and consideration of others.
Thesis finished, and ready to submit (yay!), and this seems like an interesting topic to get back into a more non-scientific mode; there was an intriguing development stemming from the wave of olympics-mania which has swept over the media this week. This was the arrest of a 17 year old individual for verbally assaulting the team GB diver Tom Daley over twitter. The diver came in fourth place – an exceptional achievement although obviously agonisingly close to the podium – for which the odious 17 year old suggested he would track Daley down and drown him in the pool. Not entirely a justified and reasoned statement, I think most would agree. However the boy was tracked down by his twitter account and arrested, under a malicious communications act, which makes it illegal to send threatening letter (or, of course, communications).
It is something of a turnabout, because earlier this week the man who was arrested for threatening to blow up humberside airport, Paul Chambers, was cleared after a long legal battle because the judge had eventually to accept that it was a joke. Or more accurately, it was not meant seriously – there was no chance that Mr. Chambers was actually going to acquire himself some semtex and jog down to the airport. The thing is that if he had called up the airport and said that he was going to return in a week and blow it up, that would have been a ‘bomb threat’, but deployed over twitter there a more vagaries involved. There is a permanence which accompanies writing a letter or making a phone call, but the same is not attached to digital communications which in fact are even more set in stone. Indeed the habit must be in thinking that few people actually read what is deployed to the interweb, so why worry. He included the hash tag of the airport it must be said, does this mean he was directing it actually at the airport, or was he simply in the habit of properly tagging, as a form of referencing. At any rate Mr. Chambers case was eventually settled, he was cleared and this seems like the right outcome. But in the case of Daley’s assailant it seems the boy had made a habit of sending insulting and downright abusive messages to those in the public sphere, this outburst was just the latest in a series. Again I suspect that the boy thought that because it was on twitter, it didn’t really count. The more cases of people being arrested for twitter comments, facebook statuses and blog posts there are, then this attitude will naturally change into a more cautioned, less open approach, which is precisely not what the web is for. We already have a legion of fleet street editors who are too timid to publish something which could land them into trouble, and the usual solution is to leak to story to Private Eye, and see if they get sued (which of course they invariably do).
There is a wider question which crops up when this sort of policing is enforced, which is at what point does the protection of individual’s sensibilities begin to infringe of the right to freedom of speech? Would we not rather live in a world where the occasional tweet / comment of this nature is said and ignored, given the obvious alternatives of though policing and totalitarianism? But the main policy question is really for twitter rather than the police in this these cases, it is for them to decide what is a violation of their usage agreement and for what they will strike peoples accounts, and it seems their current provisions are at the very least sometimes ineffectual. It is doubtless a gargantuan task, to go through the mountains of tweet published each day, most of which seem to deal with the unenviable decision of toast or cereal for breakfast, and decide which are offensive, and which are just downright boring.
As of a few days ago this country is officially back in recession – as defined by two consecutive quarters of ‘negative growth’ (a phrase which always makes me chuckle). One thing is abundantly clear, the current government of millionaires cares little about the consequence of this for the average man-on-the-street, but rather are paralysed for concern for their big business and millionaire pseudo-aristocratic backers. The question, though, is how much is this really the fault of the disastrous austerity policy, perused with a vigour usually reserved for an increasingly sobering drunkard?
The problem is that politics is all about presentation. When Labour were in power, the Tories blamed them for everything, including the fallout from the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US, the bank bailouts and over-spending. And of course Labour shouted as high as possible that the fault lay with global factors. Now the Tories are in power, the discourse has simply inverted; Labour ar
e blaming everything on the Tories, who are in turn shouting until they are hoarse that there are global factors, and because they’ve only been in power two years (!) then most of it is still Labours fault. It is a something of a minefield to navigate and know just who to listen to, and is exactly the kind of vacuous, intellectually baron shameful display of Punch-and-Judy politics which puts people off in this country.
There are a hundred ways to weasel out of responsibility, some of which are relatively convincing. It really is a global economy – we export more to Ireland than we do to China and Brazil (two of the most massive emerging economies) combined, and still export the majority within the European Union. This is not a particularly prosperous part of the world right now, so their slump affects us. It’s also debatable just how quickly economic policy affects the economy, for instance; is this second dip of the recession due to the governments policy since taking office, or is the tail end of an effect from the last governments policies? When Labour left office we had slowly increasing growth, and unemployment which was not shooting through the roof, but just what sort of delay should be expected? Time scales are very difficult, because in a climate like this one, the success of the government is judged by their perceived economic success, and as a government is 4-5 years in office, if we can expect a roughly two year delay between policy and effect then we are only judging governments on half their activities (to take an arbitrary example). And of course economics data is calculated retrospectively, so we only now know the growth data for the first quarter of this year – which adds to the delay effect. All in all is it much more interesting for politics to be in a period of growth, then you can judge governments based on social policies, superfluous wars and reforms, etc. But that’s by the by …
Whether or not the blame can be placed square on the shoulders of the Tories, they are certainly doing nothing to help the working man through these times. ‘You can’t solve a debt crisis with more debt’ is the perennial dictum of Cameron/Osborne, which is specious at best, but they seem to think you can solve a growth crisis with no growth! The left is clamouring for growth programs, capital spending programs, jobs programs, but all we get from the government is the repeated line than business leaders are behind their plans – instead of the times. When Alistair Darling left the treasury, having pumped billions of pounds into the economy in the form of ‘stimulus packages’, the UK seemed to be coming into the clear. Since taking over, George Osborne has slashed and burned, hacked away at public services and thrown half a million public servants into the streets, and he now has to borrow *more* than the labour government did to pay for welfare and unemployment benefits. This is a failed plan. There can be no other way of seeing it. Osborne’s own predictions when taking office assumed we would be approaching good growth by the end of 2012 going into 2013, but we are not. But because the Tories are so ideologically bound to austerity they cannot change course. But, most tragically, the burden of his cuts fall on the average man on the street, who has to face 4% inflation and wage freezes year on year, not on the millionaires of this land who collectively dodge 128 billion pounds of tax each year.
It is an appalling situation, and thankfully the country sent the Conservative head office a message this week by voting for labour 38% compared to 31% for the Tories. A result which if repeated at the general – God willing – shall hopefully return the country to those whose allegiances are with the majority of us, not the collective population of those who graduated from Eton.
Here’s one for you theological types; I’ve been thinking about homophobia recently, specifically because of all this equality business bubbling to the surface of government policy recently, and the media circus around the current happenings in London, and I think it highlights an interesting problem for a certain branch of Christian theology.
For a long, long time, the established churches taught vehemently that homosexuality was sinful, wrong, etc, and found passages from Leviticus and Deuteronomy to back themselves up. Even of course given the fact that the same people would wilfully ignore other passages and chalk this down to context dependency. This is a stance which is thankfully changing, albeit slowly, but there is still a solid vain of anti-homosexual (I shy away from the word homophobic) sentiment. Now the enlightened Christian doesn’t allow believing a gay person to be sinful affect their behaviour around said person, but there are plenty who – perhaps coincidentally – use the churches teaches as a justification for scornful and incivil behaviour.
Now, anyone who still thinks that homosexuality is a choice is surely either deluding themselves, or failing to show sufficient humility in the face of facts (to quote Douglas Adams), because there is a significant weight of evidence to show that sexual attraction is not a choice. As this is not really the subject here I don’t plan to go into it, but scientists are making strides towards the so-called gay-gene, which as always seems to be more of a collection of genes rather than a single one. There is a whole lifetimes work around the importance of exposure to high levels of testosterone in-utero, Simon LeVay being the most famous of those championing this theory. And of course the ever present background levels of same-sex attractions, even in species other than man. Homosexuality is not a choice, no more so than the natural colour of one’s hair, etc.
So the question arises, why would God make a type of man, and then damn him for nothing more than that which he was created as? The conclusion has surely to be – even when one accepts the existence of the Christian described God – that the Church was wrong. (Of course the far harsher criticism is that the bible is entirely a human construct, but this is not evidentially based.) This raises more questions about the nature of God, who happily lets His church on Earth go around prosecuting those He made, and the bible demonises, without intervening.
As a problem this is not limited to homosexuality – how about intelligence; there are studies showing that, statistically, religious people have lower IQs. Why would God create two men, one with the intellect to question Him and the other without, and judge them on the same criteria? Along the same spirit as the gay gene, there is good evidence for the existence of a god gene – a gene which religious subscribers seem to have in excess compared to the population. If this is to be believed, then those possessing the gene are more susceptible to religious experiences, and therefore more likely to become religious followers / observers. Again, this is a fundamentally unfair system.
Now, as far as I can see there is a relatively simple answer to this, which is that each person is judged – according to certain Christian doctrines – according to how that person lived with the lot he was allotted, in other words you have to believe that God takes absolutely everything into account to come up with the yes-or-no in the end (or whatever you believe). To my mind this is a little weasely, and surely still doesn’t account for the emotional damage that people face, inflicted by God’s church, for a completely unrighteous cause.
Bryan Appleyard, former man of The Times, wrote an opinion piece in the New Statesman this week, describing what he sees as the ‘God Wars’, more specifically the rise of the cult of new atheism. (See it here). It irked me somewhat, and I thought this is an appropriate place for me to vent on the subject.
Firstly, absence of belief is not belief. It is such a crucial point but theists seem to constantly assert that for a person to be atheist involves a leap of faith, just as much as believing in a specific God; and that atheism comes with its own doctrines and establishments. Rubbish. You can define atheism as belief, as a positive assertion, but this is surely just some ingenious – if nefarious – semantic prestidigitation. I could define Christianity as being atheistic, because on balance Christians disbelieve in more gods than they believe in (given that it is one, or three god(s) against all the characters in the whole history of religion!). But this would be unhelpful, because the important, essential value of Christian belief is exactly that – belief in the doctrines of Christ. I am sure that the same can be said of the other religions out there, but the important idea is that we can redefine something however we want to. No when it comes to not believing; if I turn the TV off do I say that the TV is ‘on the off channel’? No of course not, such an absurd and unhelpful, and idiotic misreading of reality is unhelpful. It is the same with atheism; to not believe in the existence is un-belief, it is the absence of belief. It is not that the atheist believes in the non-existence of God, it is that he does not believe the existence of God. This may seem like an unimportant point, but it is central to some or the more entrenched arguments between the fundamentalists on either side – the burden of proof. Specifically that if you assert something, which to believe in the non-existence of God is doing, then you have to provide proof, or more specifically justification (since scientific truth is nothing more than conditional proof). Whereas to posit that the evidence for a specific God is insufficient given the weight of the argument against, then there is no good reason to believe. On this conclusion is not placed the burden of evidence.
The second point is a more contentious one, and is to do with the remits of science, and the softer approaches to truth and reality of theology and philosophy. It has long been argued that they occupy two separate spheres of the human experience, an idea summed up by SJ Gould’s essay entitled ‘Nonoverlapping Magisteria’, in which he neatly separates the remits of science and philosophy. I think again this comes down to a problem of definitions; people seem to think science is some grand thinking entity created centuries ago and unmoving since. Science surely is simply the broad term given to the attempt to understand the universe and ourselves, by using simple and tested methods which can be reproduced and verified, and working upwards from simple understanding to an ever more complex appreciation of reality. Ever changing, even adapting as the field is flooded with more knowledge. Well, this is how I would understand it – ‘it’. And given this, you can appreciate why I have a hard time accepting the NOMA ideas. The existence of God is a hypothesis, and as such is testable. Now, how one would test it is another question, but the hypotheses itself is surely a scientific (and eminently valid) one?
There has been recently an explosion in the debate about marriage reform, caused by the governments consultation and upcoming legislation on the subject, and more specifically gay marriage.
Cardinal Keith O’Brien last weekend wrote a column in the Telegraph newspaper in which he, amongst other things, compared gay marriage to slavery, and claimed it was a contradiction of human rights. Hummm. It is a claim this man has made before, when the embryology bill was going through the commons he claimed that stem cell research was a contravention of human rights. It seems to be a drum the man likes beating. Never-the-less the catholic churches highest representation in Scotland has waded into the debate squarely on the side of the traditionalists. Another rather spurious claim he made was that gay marriage would ultimately lead to marriage between three peoples, and presumably from there one would be able to declare love for a paintbrush and have it sanctioned by the state. Stupid. But this is the key point I would make – marriage as an institution belongs to the state, and not to the church, which is a point I realise the more self-deluded out there would contest. It is therefore down to the state (for state read ‘us people’) to regulate who can marry who. After all you want restrictions – to be able to marry as many people as you like and still have the same benefits would probably bankrupt insurance agencies! No one is arguing for libertarianism. The established church in this country is also largely against the plans, although they are of a more chaotic disposition, but of course church of England bishops sit in the House of Lords, and so through no democratic merit have a large influence over the course of legislation like this. It harks back to the separation of church and state, which is badly needed in this country to remove these medieval throwbacks from our decision-making processes.
Civil Partnerships were introduced as a kind-of half-way-house, and a poor compromise – I suspect that they were only introduced thanks to the spine-less-ness of a previous administration. It is the reason, again I suspect, that the government never considered the possibility that normal (non-gay) couples would want to have a civil partnership, which they ran into trouble with. Coming back to the point – it must be pretty insulting for a loving couple to be told that, although the state recognises them and they are as legally legitimate as a married couple, they’re not allowed to get married but instead shall have a civil partnership. It’s the old idea that we’re all equal, it’s just they’re a little more equal than us. In many ways the worst human rights violations of history have been essentially superficial things, like the wording of marriage or civil union. On the face of it there can be no reason for an enlightened country to carry on discriminating against individuals based on characterists which the individual has absolutely no control over – it would be like preventing all blond-haired people from entering the civil service.
The only cogent possible argument is that gay marriage will lead to far greater numbers of children being raised in same-sex households, and if this is damaging to the children it would be a damn good reason to not allow gay marriage. It a point the good cardinal raised after comparing gay marriage to slavery, and indulging himself in a little bile-letting across the pages of the Telegraph. There are plenty of same sex couples already raising children, and it is from them the intelligent individual looks for evidence. There are a good number of studies by sociologists and psychologists looking at the effect on the children’s mental health, and wellbeing of being raised by two men or two women. And in fact the most comprehensive study of this kind (that I could find, that is!) by the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health (catchy name for a think tank) and found no significant differences between children raised in same sex households to the rest of societies jumble of families. One of the observations to come out of the study was that the children raised by gay parents did have less rigid gender stereotypes, but this could be argued either way, I wouldn’t think this was such a bad thing. As far as I can discern this is a widely replicated finding, so scuppers the arguments. I don’t find it surprising, in fact I would expect that the gay couples would treat their children better, because of the portion of opposite-couples who have children by mistake, or just out of expectation before they are actually ready to do so. There is axiomatically a conscious undertaking involved in the adoption process, and this would select for serious couples who ‘have a lot of love to give’, to quote Selma from the Simpsons. Of course it is the catholic run adoption agencies which fought tooth and nail to disallow gay couples from adopting, in spite of the weight of evidence crushing down upon them, and as the worldwide church runs around 90% of the adoption agencies in the UK they are somewhat formidable when it comes to chaning adoption law. But given the evidence, I don’t see on what grounds the church stands when it flies in the face of civil opinion and legislation. No matter what your personal feelings surely a child in a home is better than in an orphanage? Given the well catalogued disadvantages that brings (lower education, health, life expectancy – only statistically though of course).
It has been claimed by many, including the cardinal I mentioned above, that the state does not have the moral authority to redefine marriage, only God’s church does. Well, this is of course doubtless true from his perspective, but I would suggest that this alone is not a strong enough point on which to base his case. And anyway I think the catholic church claiming to have moral authority is pretty risible in fact, given that it was the current pope who know about at least two cases of repeat offending abusive priests in his jurisdiction and undertook to conceal this from the public and the authorities, happy to move the offending individuals to a different parish, with nary a thought for the children in this new hunting ground, and simply hush everything up. I think the moral high ground will be hard to find for the morally bankrupt papal church for a fair while to come.
But the grounds I feel I can most easily dismember the cardinals arguments are when it comes to the sanctity of marriage, probably because the way it is usually argued amounts to nothing more than cleaver sophistry. I wonder if, when asked, a majority of married couples would say that gay marriage violates the sanctity of their union. Anyway, the church is perfectly happy to marry two previously divorced atheists, just so long as they are of the opposite sex. This wreaks of hypocrisy, and makes their opposition on the ground of sanctity untenable in my opinion, although as I say a cardinal I’m sure would employ a double-think sufficient enough to see himself around this problem.
There is another issue here though, lurking somewhere, which is the power of the gay lobby. For such a relatively small minority they are awfully vocal, and organised, which is what makes the lobby so effective I suppose. I imagine it to be similar to the Jewish lobby over in America, which for its size is a monstrously powerful group – hence the USAs constant support for its aircraft carrier in the middle east (Israel!). As a man with a utilitarian bent this does disturb me somewhat, but it must only be natural for a group of people who have been discriminated against for so long to want to even out the playing field, and like women’s rights these things tend to balance themselves out eventually.
There seems to be a certain method for producing a film that will sweep the Oscars – take a worn out formula that has been done to death, outdated methods and techniques, heaps of melodrama and most crucially – a total lack of anything original within the plot or subtext. An assured success awaits any who dare to tread along such a well –worn and uninspiring path.
The Artist garnered 11 Oscar nominations, and so I decided I would like to go and see it, so often around Oscar season I lose track of the films coming out, and so a good proportion of the contenders for best film are somewhat alien to me. Despite being in the midst of finishing up lab work before starting thesis writing in earnest – a prospect of not inconsiderable dread – I took the time to trudge along to the pictures and sit through the film so lauded by all. And I enjoyed it, it was indeed excellent, but it was not groundbreaking, not forward looking, but rather cosy and retrospective.
Now, one could of course make the argument that it was a homage to cinema, that it was supposed to be cosy, retrospective, and promote a warm, fuzzy feeling in the swarms of patrons at the picturehouses. Indeed this has been suggested by critics, as well as with the film Hugo, Scorsese’s own homage to the advent of cinema but ironically using the most modern tools at a film-makers disposal.
My main criticism was the film seemed to be using the same sort of metaphor as the film ‘Pleasantville’, where the black-and-white inhabitants of a sleepy American town are progressively revolutionised, scandalised and modernised and this graduality is shown by the creeping in of colour to the picture. It is a very similar metaphor to that used in ‘The Artist’, except the advent of modernity is heralded by clamour and cacophony, which is on the face of it actually a more obvious metaphor.
A film like this is perhaps a victim of its own success, in that when one hears such overwhelming praise for a picture then ones expectations greatly elevated, and it was a great film, but I suspect there was just a little hint of critics and aficionados climbing over one-another to show how just how esoteric their tastes and appreciations are.
After something of a blogging hiatus owing to finishing up my lab work, I can now happily voice my more meandering thoughts here whilst penning my thesis too!
There has been a growing controversy mounting in some of the broadsheets over the decision of the high court this month to ban prayers in a local council meeting. A decision which was later overturned personally by the minister for communities (an appointment doubtless as colossal as the incumbent) by fast-tracking a portion of the soon-to-come localism bill which, as I understand it, makes anything which would be legal for an individual legal for an organisation. The controversy was that one of the councillors – an avowed atheist – objected to the council holding prayers before council meetings, and so took his objections to the high court, which ruled that it was indeed unconstitutional. A temporary victory for the councillor, then, but a sound principle. After all, we do not want to end up like some parts of America do we? where judges have faux slates bearing the ten commandments behind them as they sit, enthroned and empowered handing down the Lords wrath to those who break His laws. Of course I’m sure Iran is worse. But there is a not inconsiderable case for proper separation of church and state, and whilst you can never take the church out of the people who inhabit the state, it might be better to separate the roles of the Queen as head of the Church of England, as well as being our head of state.
But, more importantly, I was back in church recently, for a service a few weeks ago, and I was reminded of what I consider the saving grace – if I can use the phrase – of Anglican Christianity, besides the excellent Archbishop BC of course, and to an extent the church as a whole. This is the promotion of humility; it is a double edged sword of course, but the prayers of intercession in a church service do allow one an excellent space to reflect on the state of the world, and indeed the staggering fortune of being born to this life. To sit in the dark, and think about what is wrong with the world, and to do it in a fairly logical order – the prayers usually start with local concerns but move onto world affairs, all of which are topical and, most importantly, deeply considered. It is my opinion that the prayers at the beginning of a council meeting like the one above would serve to focus the mind and humble the spirit – and I image one would struggle to find a politician not in need of a little humbling! You could look at it as a form of meditation, which is surely healthy.
Secondly, and perhaps crucially, it seems to me to be a simple matter of manners; if this councillor doesn’t want to pray then he damn well doesn’t have to! We are a tolerant culture, or at least I would like to think we are, even if not an accepting one, and this is the crucial definition – to tolerate something simply means to put up with it, and respect people rights etcetera etcetera. If his is a more structural concern, about the separation of church and state then I suppose he sees a greater goal.
This whole discourse is separate of course from the actual and literal truth of what the church teaches, and this is where the division arises, between people like the councillor troublemaker I mention above, and people like the Queen, and Baroness Warsi who have call for a defence of religion in the face of what they perceive to be a wave of militant secularism sweeping the world. I would question the phrase ‘militant secularism’, which of course it is hyperbolic, and nobody is taking up arms to promote their brand of secularism, as fanning the flames of a fire still in the research-and-development phase of its existence. I would consider myself a secularist, broadly speaking, it that it seems to me to be logical to try to exclude religion, and religious considerations from the exercise of public life. There is very little that is militant about secularism, because it really is just a way of characterising a slow and creeping change, I believe, which is enveloping the country – for better or worse – which is often mischaracterised as a ‘PC revolution’.
There is a fundamental flaw in the logic of the discussion which stems both from the strike action tomorrow, and from the occupy protests, and from our own student protests in Cambridge, the flaw being that these actions are demonstrative of a lack of respect, both for free speech and for the public.
David Willets – the odious helmsman steering the dismantling of the best university system in the world – came to give a talk here entitled ‘The Idea of A University’ and was shouted down by an organised group of protesters in the crowd, to such a degree that he was forced to abandon the stage and retreat without saying a single word. An achievement to be marked as a success for the protesters. The New Statesman, the BBC and Mary Beard (the Cambridge Classicist who edits the Times Literary Supplement) have all more-or-less denounced the action as an own goal, and as impeding free speech. I disagree. It would have been disrespectful if David Willets hadn’t already made his mind up, made his policy up and fashioned it through the halls of Westminster into law and practice. Indeed it would also have been disrespectful to the idea of free speech if, as a cabinet minister, he wasn’t already afforded ample time to pontificate and ruminate his arch conservative views and objectives wherever he goes. As it is, it is merely disrespectful to the man himself, and I can happily forgive this.
If you truly believe ministerial visits are engines for free speech and the frank exchange of ideas, then you are severely misguided. They are in most cases carefully choreographed media events, with ministerial interactions scrupulous vetted before hand to the point of people probably being given the questions they are supposed to come up with by the ministers minders. This is the case with Andrew Lansley certainly; but he is so unpopular in the profession that when he goes to hospitals even with this vetting he still gets shouted at by irate doctors away from whom he is normally kept well away. Why would the health secretary need to interact with doctors after all, he is a conservative and so things like reality and facts hardly need to enter into this one-track little mind.
The strikes, due to dismantle temporarily the working of society, keep being described as irresponsible, disrespectful, because they will inconvenience ordinary people when their beef is with the government, discussions with whom are not yet concluded. This to my mind is equally fatuous. There is a fair argument which points out that the unions and public sector workers are not really striking about pensions, but against the whole mantra of austerity. And this, whilst being true, is not a good enough to undermine the strike action. At some point those under threat – and these workers are in no doubt under threat – have to stand up and demonstrate against the government for whom they provide a set of vital services. I find it the same as I was arguing about the student strikes, yes of course everybody abhors violence, and of course everybody abhors strikes, but eventually it must become justified. This government is projected to have caused 800,000 job losses in the public sector by the end of the parliament, almost a million people out of work, and the private sector certainly has not been picking up the slack. Teachers are taking a 20% cut in take home pay, being expected to work more and longer, and at the end of it all have an even worse pension package. It is morally disgusting (if I can use such a word). The idea that a government – or any company for that matter –can simply raid a pension pot when it’s hard up for cash is monstrous; the pension arrangement is not a gift from the employer, it is not a grace and a favour, it is an integral part of the remuneration package, it is deferred pay. To say that a person’s wage is to be recalculated, and that the new lower wage will be back-dated so that the individual shall have to pay a portion of the wages they have already received back would be idiotic, not to mention illegal, but this is in effect what raiding a pension scheme is. You may well expect this sort of thing from a profit driven capitalistic leviathian, but the public sector is categorically not about profits, it should be about making people’s lives better. Providing vital services like education and healthcare should not be subjected to market forces and consumer capitalism, otherwise they’ll end up in the same mess as our rail system, the postal services, electricity companies, and the like.
But of course this administration makes no secret of the fact that things like reality and evidence have no bearing on their policies. The debacle of economic policy where now the country is borrowing more now than when Nu Labour left office in order to pay for the masses of unemployed people their policies are creating, means the Tories are massively increasing debt in order to wipe out a deficit. Madness, although to be honest I’m not entirely certain I understand the economics of what is going on at the moment; every other economist who voices an opinion seem disagree, so it’s hard to form an informed opinion. But in order to push ahead with this plan of austerity, George Osborne, a man who had no economic credibility before becoming Chancellor (appointed ultimately because he went to the right school, don’t forget), is cutting benefits to families and those on the bread line, forcing public sector workers to take ever worse pay conditions of a 1% pay rise over two years (contrasted to 5% inflation every year), but don’t worry because ‘we’re all in it together’, and the bankers tax has gone up by 0.08% – and no, I didn’t make that up, I don’t think I could make that up. If ever there was a time for mass strikes, it is now, and it is certainly not irresponsible.
Things thought 