Marginalia

So long, LJ

2007-01-18T14:01:00Z

For the sake of anyone still keeping an eye on this journal, it's time I wound things up - and directed you towards my new blog, Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job).

There are various reasons for moving on, not least that having left the BBC I feel freer to write under my own name. But that doesn't get to the core of it. LiveJournal was my first experience of the internet as an immersive social experience, rather than a reference and mail service. This journal started by accident, mostly because I was lonely in China and needed a window through which to spew at the English-speaking world - an experience I know a couple of my LJ friends can relate to. (It does occur to me that had I not become so immersed in the internet, I would have immersed myself more fully in my surroundings and my Mandarin would be a lot better...)

I almost let it drop after returning to England - LiveJournal, that is, not Mandarin - replaced by a mixture of face-to-face conversation and the discovery of other online environments, particularly the University of Openness and the Yahoo! Alan Garner group. What drew me back was the discovery that I had, without noticing, acquired a couple of mysterious LJ friends.

Up to that point, I'd assumed I was simply writing for a few "real world" friends. There was something heady about this new world of virtual social networks. I went exploring through the network of "interests". To be honest, I was disturbed by a lot of what I found: not because of any great innocence, but because I didn't know how to handle the intensity of pain and suffering which some people were pouring into their public journals. But I became more adept at filtering and finding interesting voices, including some wonderful writers whose thoughts and experiences it's been a pleasure to be let in on. (I'll still check my Friends page from time to time.)

It's a strange medium, this, patchy, casual and intense. It can be startling when you notice the absence of boundaries and conventions we take for granted in the old media. You start following someone's journal with a detached interest because you enjoy their thoughts on the world, and then after a few months they're hit by a major life event and you feel it with them. This happens with none of the editorial filtering that would apply to a newspaper column. People come and go, not posting for months, sometimes disappearing apparently forever. Once, a friend of someone whose journal I'd followed left a comment to ask if I'd seen or heard from him as he'd gone missing. I hadn't. I hope he turned up.

For myself, I don't know that I ever quite found the right voice for this journal. It was only a couple of degrees out, but it felt awkward, and I guess that's one reason why I decided to start somewhere else. But I'm glad I started here, because I probably wouldn't be involved in the work I'm doing now if I hadn't been drawn in to the potential of internet through this little corner of it.

Thanks for reading.

Dougald

duke_aldhein @ 2006-09-08T11:44:00

2006-09-08T10:49:31Z

Blair's off to the Middle East this weekend - presumably for some peace and quiet...

an accidental essay on sexuality, economic culture and timeliness

2006-08-20T13:22:47Z

poserorprophet posted some very interesting thoughts on the Liberal/Conservative divide within the church:

I would like to suggest that not only are both the Liberal and Conservative compartmentalized hierarchies flawed because of what they leave out, they are also flawed precisely because they are compartmentalized hierarchies. The problem with the Liberals' hierarchy is that they think they can talk about economics without talking about sex. The problem with the Conservatives' hierarchy is that they think they can talk about sex without talking about economics. What I want to propose is that every discussion of economics carries sexual implications and every discussion of sex is intimately shaped by the economic context within which that discussion takes place.

I think he's hit on some powerful connections here.

My experience in the UK is that (at least among the louder voices) Liberals and Conservatives tend to be equally obsessed with the issue of sexual orientation. The former speak and act as if the liberation of gay and lesbian Christians is the most important issue facing the Church today. While I sympathise with the impulse behind their argument, I am less sympathetic to their priorities - focusing on "lifestyle" issues lets them off the hook of posing a more radical challenge to our economic and political culture. This is convenient, because their version of religion is essentially therapeutic: offering ways of living more happily in the world as we find it, rather than engaging in a substantial critique of the world's assumptions. (The attraction of the Conservative Evangelical churches, for all their crudity, is that they at least offer some significant distance from the world's values.)

Liberals are (in my experience) reluctant to recognise any legitimate concern about sexuality underlying the Conservative attitude to sexual orientation: preferring to brand their opponents as bigots and stop there, rather than exploring the underlying discomfort with today's sexual culture which finds an unfortunate outlet in the condemnation of the sexual other. (As I've written before, part of the problem here is a zero sum attitude to understanding - as if any attempt to understand the oppressor is a participation in oppression. Something similar happens in the public debate over terrorism.)

What troubles me most is the certainty of the loudest voices on both sides that the Church would be better off without their opponents. They recognise no legitimate position that is not "us" or "them". (My former vicar called me an "intellectual defender of fundamentalism" for trying to articulate the things I'm writing here...) Some of the vitriol directed at the Archbishop of Canterbury by Liberals is no less unpleasant (though expressed in more refined language) than the abuse he gets from their opponents.

A particularly striking feature of this sorry debate is the consensus between Conservatives and Liberals on their historical roles - the former as custodians of tradition, the latter as dragging the church into an Enlightened future. This is largely nonsense. There are several grounds on which this can be argued, but most relevant here are the distinctly contemporary assumptions shared by both sides in the sexuality debate - Conservatives and Liberals alike have internalised unreflectively the idea that sexual desire is the foundation of authentic selfhood. Although it has roots in Romanticism and Freudian psychoanalysis (both reactions against the repressive distortion of sexuality in an economic culture of deferred gratification), it is the advent of consumer culture that places this idea centre stage.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a reconfiguration of the relationship between time and desire in the norms of western society. In earlier versions of capitalism, where the good economic citizen was a well-behaved worker, deferred gratification was the moral order of the day. The constant putting off of the fulfilment of desire implied a certain attitude to sex as much as to money, attitudes often labelled "Victorian". But as the economies of affluent societies (first post-war America, then the UK and other western European countries) came to rely increasingly on mass market consumer spending, the balance shifted and the good economic citizen became the well-behaved consumer. Instead of working hard today for a reward tomorrow, we were encouraged to spend on our credit cards today and worry about it tomorrow. (Compare, for instance, the iconic World War II propaganda poster, "Dig for Victory", with Bush and Giuliani's post-9/11 call for Americans to go out and spend.) The coincidence of this tipping point in economic culture with the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s is hard to ignore.

My point is that the "liberated" norms of instant gratification which dominate the representations of sexuality which surround us are just as distorting of time and desire as the repressive norms which immediately preceded them - and have different but equally painful effects. What is missing from both is a sense of timeliness - that what is appropriate at one moment may be inappropriate at another. It is not that this is entirely absent from our ways of living together, but that it is very largely absent from our ways of talking about how we live together.

This absence is not a historical fluke, but is directly related to our economic culture. The reconfiguration of time in the emergence of capitalism is one of the most important things that sets our ways of living apart from those which have dominated at most times and places in human history. EP Thompson charted the forced alteration of people's relationship to time in his brilliant essay 'Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism'. Ben Franklin's equation, 'Time is money', puts succinctly the capitalist understanding of time. If time is money, the qualitative distinctions between one hour and another, one season and the next, have been dissolved. Bound up with the focus on quantity rather than quality is a loss of the language in which to talk about what might constitute "enough". (The whole discourse of "Development" suffers from the absence of this language...) Unable to distinguish times for feasting and times for fasting, we easily end up in a landscape of extremes - of destructive repression or destructive promiscuity.

But all of this takes place at the level of shared language. Eugenio Montale's poem may bring us back to the ground:

History isn't
the devastating bulldozer they say it is
It leaves underpasses, crypts, holes
and hiding places. There are survivors...

Below the level at which norms can be said to exist and at which broad historical periods and shifts may be characterized, people get on with their lives. Things don't necessarily stop existing because we forget the words for them. The calendar of old feasts may have been displaced by the austere mechanism of Sabbath observance (conveniently predictable for factory owners...), but humans are resilient: festivals persist or are created anew in any space that can be found. Timeliness is still felt, though we live in structures formed by other attitudes.

duke_aldhein @ 2006-08-11T12:49:00

2006-08-11T11:50:59Z

Some sanity from the editorial column of today's FT:

...no system is perfectly secure, and even if the world's aircraft could be made secure at a reasonable cost in time and money, terrorists will always have other options as simple as truck bombs or explosives on trains and buses. There will be more attacks, perhaps deadly and dramatic ones.

The first response must be to adopt a foreign policy that saps terrorists of support without pandering to their demands. It should not be necessary to remind either the US or the British government that it is not possible simply to kill or catch all the terrorists until there are none left - a pointless strategy based on what one might call the "lump of terror" fallacy.

The second response must be a sense of proportion. More than 3,000 people died last year on our roads, but the roads stay open. Even the worst acts of terrorism reap their largest toll in hysterical responses. Scotland Yard's statement that they had disrupted a plot to cause "mass murder on an unimaginable scale" was alarmist even if it is true. Journalists - and terrorists - are perfectly capable of spreading hyperbole without any help from the police. The most powerful answer to terrorism is not to be terrified.

duke_aldhein @ 2006-07-26T10:04:00

2006-07-26T10:12:39Z

Some time ago, in a discussion on here, someone called JJ asked me a question: 'If you do dismiss literal interpretations of religious stories, how do you deal with the language of "belief" and "faith" that so pervades religious discourse?' I have been slow to reply, because the series of posts that led to the question were riddled with assumptions which, while widespread among educated people, I don't share. But cool_moose has been looking at my (slightly out of date) website and mentioned the subject of church, which started me thinking. Maybe I can offer some kind of answer to JJ in the process.

One of my oldest friends was recently ordained as an Anglican priest - I felt a joy for him quite unlike what you would ordinarily feel about someone getting a new job. Myself, I feel closer to Alan Garner:

I couldn't go far with any creed. But that to me is not relevant. It's enough that I know. I wouldn't try to persuade others, and it doesn't concern me, though I know it concerns some churchmen, that I'm not a member of the Church of England. They say, "Well, if you know, why don't you join...". And I have to say: "My job is not to join; it's to have another angle, to report the view from here."

I don't mean that I'm agnostic - rather that I have never been able to take the modern (in the long historical sense) confinement of religion to certain times and certain buildings very seriously. It's all around, or it's nothing. We may take the world for granted, as something which is simply 'there', yet we are always either engaged in the process of drawing out meaning from what's there, or else living within the result of others efforts at drawing out meaning. It is possible to say such meaning is entirely arbitrary (though it is harder to believe this than to say it). On the other hand, there is the experience that some attempts at making sense of things ring true, seem to correspond to something out there. Garner again:

Most of my friends are as recognisably priests as anyone can be. People who work in the theatre are in a religious profession: a theatrical director has the same job as a vicar. There's no difference in kind. They have to make manifest that which is not manifest, but which is. And they have to do it by presenting a picture or a metaphor of reality, because you cannot describe reality, but you can present a metaphor. A play, a novel, a parable, a religious text - all serve the same function. Just try seeing things this way, you say: you won't see it all but it will be another facet.

My issue with JJ is that - like a lot of people, including some liberal Christians, not to mention the literalists themselves - he thinks literalism was the natural form of religion and that seeing religion as metaphor is a modern trick by which to dilute unpalatable nonsense. This view is difficult to argue with, because it is widely held by intelligent people, yet incredible to anyone who has spent much time with theology - or, which had more influence on me, poetry - that predates "modernity".

In fact, I tend to see the process the other way round to JJ. Up to around the seventeenth century, the orthodox position for western thinkers was similar to that of St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face...

To 'see through a glass, darkly' is to see indirectly, by telling stories, by metaphor - to treat the stuff that matters as difficult to get at, not directly accessible to us, but real and important, nonetheless. It seems to me that during the early modern period Paul's analogy was rearranged - the significant breakthroughs in scientific and technical knowledge led to a sense that we could 'put away childish things' and see all of reality 'face to face'. This became the new orthodoxy - that only that which can be observed directly exists, and that the stuff of stories is for children. ('Alice in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' are littered with the tropes of medieval religious dream poetry...)

Isaac Newton, for example, was deeply entangled in mysticism, but among the first generation to see the significance of his work, the sense grew that this process should unravel the workings of the universe all the way back to God Himself. (On this, see AD Nuttall's book on Pope's 'Essay on Man'.) This is where that desiccated form of religion, Deism, came from - although its appeal to thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century is perhaps only comprehensible in that the prospect of a scientific formula for religion may have seemed to offer an end to the religious wars which Europe had suffered. (Wars which must be understood as being rooted in social and economic tensions, rather than simply irrational religious feuding - the spread of secularism didn't make the twentieth century notably peaceful...)

Far from being the historical form of Christianity, biblical literalism (and fundamentalism in general) is Deism for the scientifically illiterate - religion reduced to a set of pseudo-scientific formulae, of which Creationism is only the most explicit example. Religion that claims 'face to face' knowledge, that has no place for mystery, develops a peculiar kind of intolerance and incuriosity. (This is not to say that this new form of religion has a monopoly on either, nor on bloodiness.) Those versions of liberal Christianity which hitch themselves to a secular narrative of progress and cede the ground of tradition to the fundamentalists do a deep injustice to their forebears. More practically, they also lose the ability to offer a genuine theological critique of the world today - getting sucked into feuds over sexuality within the church rather than challenging the cult of instant gratification which has been passed off as genuine sexual liberation.

So, how do I 'deal with the language of "belief" and "faith" that so pervades religious discourse?' I deal with belief with difficulty, as many have before me. I think of the father who said to Jesus, 'I believe; help my unbelief'. And when none if it makes much sense, I don't see it through the Victorian lens of the 'crisis of faith', but the 16th century lens of the 'dark night of the soul'. Because part of what was mislaid with the mystery and the riddles and the dark glass was the sense that whether I believe in God is no more important than whether God believes in me.

outside in

2006-07-24T15:37:24Z

I had a little rant on here some time ago about 'the nonsense we take for granted and call education'. There were a couple of comments I wanted to pick up, summed up by csn:

I tend to think that working within the system to change the structure is more effective than attempting to demolish it from the outside, though...

I wanted to come back to this, because so many intelligent and well-intentioned people succumb to this argument and much energy and talent is wasted as a result. I have yet to find a situation in which there is genuinely no choice except between 'working within the system' or 'attempting to demolish it from the outside'. In fact, I would go further - those apparent opposites have a common effect. To do either is to worship 'the system', in the sense of investing it with absolute importance and power. (This is also an argument against 'anti-' protests of any kind - although it must be balanced with the potentially transformative experience of participating in such events...)

The arguments I make about structures like our present education system are not arguments for an assault on them, but for investing one's time and energy in developing alternatives that have the potential to render them obsolete. In this sense, the most effective activists are similar to what, in the world of business, people call 'disruptive entrepreneurs'. What distinguishes the conventional entrepreneur from the activist is the priority put on measurable, monetary value - Pick Me Up, for example, is produced and distributed for free, but those of us involved have generally felt well-rewarded. I think of this kind of activism as entrepreneurship rooted in the diverse flows of value that make up human community, rather than the single (though important) flow of value dealt with by conventional economics. (One consequence of this difference is that the activist-as-disruptive-entrepreneur is better prepared for disruptions of economic 'reality'.)

Two distinctions may be useful. The 'DIY Culture' of the punk scene and much 'anarchist' activism has similarities to the the way something like Pick Me Up is produced - but it also tends to centre around a purist rejection of the mainstream economy which leads back to the worshipping-the-system-by-attacking-it problem. The kind of activism I celebrate is unashamedly pragmatic, because it sees 'purity' as not only unattainable but undesireable. On the other hand, I would distinguish this kind of activism from 'Social Entrepreneurship' because that goes under that label involves filling the gaps in current structures rather than innovating to render them obsolete. (I'm not saying that may not be valuable, I'm just making the case for another approach.) If I had to give the people I'm talking about a label, I'd call them Guerrilla Social Entrepreneurs.

One other element is important to this kind of activism - a deep grounding in the diversity of ways that people have lived at different places and times. This is why I find such value in the work of anthropologists like Hugh Brody, writers like John Berger and Alan Garner, social thinkers like Ivan Illich, as well as theologians. Rather than the utopian thinking which has shaped 'progressive' politics for two centuries, it is an attention to the variety of ways of living people have already practised that gives the confidence and the insights necessary to question what we currently take for granted.

I'm skimming over a lot of ground here - ground I'll hope to cover more satisfactorily in the closing section of the book - but I'd value people's questions.

Finally, to give an example relevant to the original subject of education, let me say a little about a project I'm currently involved with. This is an attempt to create an online mechanism for putting people who want to learn a certain skill or discipline in touch with one another and with those who can teach them. The idea is not to facilitate online learning, but to use the internet to make it easier for people to find others to learn with or from in their local area. I can't go into much detail, as we're on the point of getting development funding and need to be aware of the risk of someone else coming along and lifting our idea - but perhaps you can see the potential of such a project for disrupting the existing structures of education. (It's certainly something I'll be interested in discussing once we're further down the line.)

duke_aldhein @ 2006-07-24T03:49:00

2006-07-24T02:49:33Z

Long time, no post...

Busy writing and stuff.

And organising a Manhunt in Sheffield next Saturday. (How long is it since you last played Hide & Seek? Too long, I'm guessing...)

I'll reply to those outstanding comments soon, I promise, but at 0315 all I'm up to is using this as a random place to list some books I may otherwise forget to order, but can't justify buying off Amazon - at least until my last order arrives. If you've read any of them and don't think I should bother, do tell me.

Daniel Bell, 'The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism' (old, but I read about it three years ago and it keeps coming back to mind)

Richard Sennett, 'The Fall of Public Man' (read a library copy years ago and, though his overall arguments don't hold together, it's a jumble of fascinating digressions which I find myself wanting to refer to)

'Politics Without the State', ed. George & Mudede (several chapters by Nicolas Veroli, whose essay on Descartes & the enclosure of knowledge, 'How a Fiction became the Truth', is brilliant)

Andrew Ross, 'No Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs' (thanks to http://www.bonkworld.org/media/swfs/skive/onskiving.pdf)

Charles Leadbeater, 'Up the Down Escalator' (because I'm preoccupied with optimism, pessimism and hope and suspect I'll disagree with it - although since writing it, he's become fascinated by Illich - albeit a rather sanitized, secular version)

Also the history of the department store which Sennett quotes from in 'The Fall of Public Man'

It really is time to sleep...

duke_aldhein @ 2006-04-16T14:07:00

2006-04-16T14:20:31Z

There are many things in life which seem perfectly sensible until you think about them. School, for example.

Today's Observer features an example of the kind of "new research" without which newspapers (and radio news bulletins) wouldn't know what to do:

Hundreds of thousands of parents are risking hefty fines by taking their children out of school to take advantage of cheaper holidays or enjoy day trips because it is 'more convenient', according to new research.

Many of those who go on short breaks or one-day outings often tell teachers their children are ill, feeling the lie is justified because their work patterns make it difficult for their families to spend time together.

There are plenty of issues involved in the story, but the most fundamental may be the least obvious. On what basis does the state tell people what they can and can't do with their children - and levy fines for the exercise of "parental choice"?

If someone was telling me what to do, in any area of my life, I'd want to know that they spoke from a position of competence, that there was something I could learn from them. But the state's track record is not encouraging. As corporate parent, it is responsible for around 61,000 children in care. At sixteen, 6% of such children will get five good GCSE grades (A* to C) - compared to 53% of children overall.

Some other facts and figures:

Between a quarter and a third of rough sleepers have been looked after by local authorities as children.

Children who have been in care are two and half times more likely to become a teenage parent

Young people who have been in care are disproportionately likely to end up in prison. 26% of prisoners have been in care as children, compared with just 2% of the general population.

Without belittling the difficulties which life has already thrown at any child who ends up in care, these figures do not suggest that the state has any great authority by virtue of experience in successful parenting. The authority it has is that of coercion, taken for granted in our political framework, but which we might tolerate less if it were less familiar.

Schools - where people are imprisoned for many of their waking hours on account of their age - are the ideal preparation for a life in which such coercion is taken for granted. Adult life will never bring most of us into an environment so saturated with the possibility of violence (physical or emotional) as school - a violence which follows from the threat of force on which they are founded. Inside them, the curiosity, ingenuity, hope and imagination of young children is more often than not crushed. Those who prosper there generally do so by learning to conform and perform obediently.

There are, of course, wonderful teachers who create enclaves of security, joy and exploration - but this is not because they are doing the job "properly", but because they are being faithful to something beyond the system in which they are working. The best response, then, is not to attempt well-intentioned reform, but to build alternative ways of doing things that may render education-as-factory-farming obsolete.

Stories such as Gloria Steinem's give me hope:

I didn't go to school until I was 12 or so. My parents thought that traveling in a house trailer was as enlightening as sitting in a classroom, so I escaped being taught some of the typical lessons of my generation: for instance, that this country was "discovered" when the first white man set foot on it, that boys and girls were practically different species, that Europe deserved more textbook space than Africa and Asia combined.

Instead, I grew up seeing with my own eyes, following my curiosity, falling in love with books, and growing up mostly around grown-ups -- which, except for the books, was the way kids were raised for most of human history.

Needless to say, school hit me like a ton of bricks. I wasn't prepared for gender obsessions, race and class complexities, or the new-to-me idea that war and male leadership were part of human nature. Soon, I gave in and became an adolescent hoping for approval and trying to conform. It was a stage that lasted through college.

I owe the beginnings of re-birth to living in India for a couple of years where I fell in with a group of Gandhians, and then I came to the Kennedys, the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam.

But most women, me included, stayed in our traditional places until we began to gather, listen to each other's stories and learn from shared experience. Soon, a national and international feminist movement was challenging the idea that what happened to men was political, but what happened to women was cultural -- that the first could be changed but the second could not.

I had the feeling of coming home, of awakening from an inauthentic life. It wasn't as if I thought my self-authority was more important than external authority, but it wasn't less important either. We are both communal and uniquely ourselves, not either-or.

Since then, I've spent decades listening to kids before and after social roles hit. Faced with some inequality, the younger ones say, "It's not fair!" It's as if there were some primordial expectation of empathy and cooperation that helps the species survive. But by the time kids are teenagers, social pressures have either nourished or starved this expectation. I suspect that their natural cry for fairness -- or any whisper of it that survives -- is the root from which social justice movements grow.

So I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe that a unique core self is born into every human being -- the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

Now, I'm not pretending that parents taking their kids off on holiday or to Alton Towers when they should be in school is much like Steinem's experience, but the whole idea of the state punishing them for it is part of the nonsense we take for granted and call education.

save parliament

2006-04-09T15:22:56Z

This is really important - if the tediously-named Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill goes through, ministers will be able to rewrite the law and create new crimes without consulting parliament. So Charles Clarke could just wake up in the morning and decide that the rest of you have to grow beards - or get banged up for two years.

First they came for the shaven-chinned,
and I did not speak out, for I was not clean-shaven...

Seriously, though, check out the Save Parliament! website. If you write one letter to your MP this year, make it about this.

It ain't much of a democracy, but it's the best one we've got - don't let New Labour do away with it in the name of "cutting red tape"!

duke_aldhein @ 2006-02-19T14:37:00

2006-02-19T14:38:53Z

This so-called concern with human rights, that bombs the hell out of the citizens of Kosovo or Baghdad, ignores so many things. Above all, the ingenuity with which people manage somehow to live, and help each other survive. And this ingenuity is very close to what I mean by tenderness.

(John Berger, interviewed in the Daily Telegraph, 23rd July 2001)

the bill to end all bills

2006-02-16T15:49:20Z

What are we going to do about this?

I had a riff going a while back about how Bush, Blair and Berlusconi represent the dawn of the post-democratic era. I thought I was being a little over the top. I was wrong.

jesus christ superhero?

2006-02-07T17:09:22Z

On tomorrow morning's Radio Sheffield Breakfast, we have a local RE-teacher-turned-academic who apparently 'sees many parallels between Jesus and Superman'. This, the Daily Torygraph informs me, is her idea for making RE relevant to kids who've never been to Sunday School.

Leaving aside the question of whether Superman himself is exactly up to date, what are these parallels Miss Cook finds between the two?:

• Both arrive on Earth in unusual circumstances after being sent by their fathers

• Both move from relative obscurity to a prominent adulthood

• Both are able to help the humans they are sent to live with

• Both struggle to stand up for truth against injustice and evil

Whatever your take on Christianity, surely the most apt point of comparison is the temptation in the desert:

Next the devil took him to the holy city, set him upon the parapet of the temple, and said, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. Scripture has it, 'He will bid his angels take care of you; with their hands they will support you that you may never stumble on a stone.'"

Jesus replied, "Scripture also has it, 'You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.'" (Matt 4.5-7)

The devil tempts Jesus to play Superman - and he refuses.

Just a thought...

2006-01-25T11:41:32Z

How big a bung do you think Blair gave Endemol to put Galloway on Celebrity Big Brother?

Incidentally, it seems to be orthodoxy in much of the leftish blogosphere that one ought to pick a side in the great Galloway versus Hitchens gangbang. Isn't this a prime illustration of the way our entire post-9/11 culture has been infected with the rhetoric of "You're either with us or you're with them..."?

'the economist' backs people power - up to a point...

2006-01-22T19:03:28Z

Tom points out this (pay-walled) article from the Economist about the virtues of people power:

All the evidence is that people power, if it is to bring about a lasting change that increases freedom, must bubble up from below. It must be indigenous, broad-based and, ideally, non-violent.

It's certainly a shift from the belief that military intervention could trigger a domino effect. But it relies on a Fukuyama-ish certainty that 'people power' could never trouble regimes that think of themselves as democratic, as opposed to Islamic hierocracies.

There's a telling sympathy-gap between references to leftwing movements in South America and the role of US government-funded agencies in destabilising other regimes:

Don't even assume that popular revolutions are always for the good. Some can be bad from the start. In Bolivia, for example, mass uprisings have tended to look rather like mob rule... [It] does now have a ruler, Evo Morales, who has been properly elected in a fair election, so the nationalist, left-wing policies of the protesters have won a retrospective endorsement. But that hardly excuses the earlier uprisings.

[...]

America has groups such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the Middle East Partnership Initiative and the National Democratic Institute, all financed by the government... The trouble is that, try as they may to present themselves as neutral agents removed from government--the National Endowment for Democracy often describes its activities as "technical assistance"--they are usually seen as arms of the CIA or its equivalent.

The article's litany of popular movements for democracy includes 'the noisy clattering of pots and pans in Chile in 1983 that sounded the beginning of the end for Augusto Pinochet', but America's role in his rise to power goes unmentioned.

Those who hold structural power today always claim the mantle of those who fought to change yesterday's structures: this has the effect of delegitimizing those who fight to change today's structures. By representing other countries as our backward cousins, trailing behind us on the grand march of history, their struggles are incorporated in the same way to legitimize our status quo. The problem is, it's always in the interests of those who hold structural power to claim that our current structures represent the end of history. In a sense, this is true - in the limited sense that these structures represent the end of the line for those who are inseperably bound up with them. But history is unconcerned and will no more arrest itself for this lot than any of their predecessors:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him...?
It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:
That bringeth the princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity.
Yea, they shall not be planted; yea, they shall not be sown: yea, their stock shall not take root in the earth...

Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding.
He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.
Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall:
But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

literary agents, e-democracy & antinomianism

2006-01-18T18:59:30Z

I'm not saying much about the meeting with the literary agent last week, because there's nothing definite to say, but (if anyone was wondering) it went well.

In other news, I'm taking part in an EU "Citizen's Awareness" project looking at e-citizenship, e-democracy, e-tc... As part of which, I'll be blogging here about how technology might lead to a more democratic local culture and stuff.

And Dan O, who roped me into that project, sent me a link to a highly articulate Indymedia rant he wrote during the London ESF in 2004, because he brought up the topic of 'antinomianism' in the pub.

Although I agree with him about the SWP, I've always assumed antinomians were rather more anarchic:

There are several issues that are addressed by the charge of antinomianism. The charge may represent the fear that a given theological position does not lead to the edification of the believer or assist him in leading a regenerate life. Doctrines that tend to erode the authority of the church and its right to prescribe religious practices for the faithful are often condemned as antinomian. The charge is also brought against those whose teachings are perceived as hostile to government and established authority...

Theological charges of antinomianism typically imply that the opponent's doctrine leads to various sorts of licentiousness, and imply that the antinomian chooses his theology in order to further a career of dissipation.

(from wikipedia)

pick me up #77

2006-01-09T11:27:42Z

Pick Me Up #77 finally arrived in people's intrays this morning. Big thanks to mcgeary, jjones229 and csn who feature in the January 1st story! (I hope my editing didn't introduce any errors into your wonderful stories...)

"There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one
that you dare not start."

"You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion."

***********
Pick Me Up
***********

Happy New Year
We asked people to capture one moment of January 1 2006.
Here's what they sent.
http://www.putmedown.com/77/newyear/1.htm

Start something
Joe wanted cheap ethical clothes that didn't make him look
like a turnip. He couldn't find any, so he quit his job and
set up a co-operative to make them. Here's how he got on in
the first twelve months:
http://www.putmedown.com/77/togs/1.htm

What's the best thing that's happened to you in 2006?
pickmeup@putmedown.com

************
Take Me Out
************

There's a writing workshop for Pick Me Up editors on the
evening of this coming Tuesday 14th. It's being led by
Tom, who's worked on lots of national magazines and used to
be editor at Mixmag and The Face. There are two spaces left,
so if you fancy coming, mail workshop@putmedown.com pronto.

(And if you want to edit an issue of Pick Me up, mail
iwanttobeaneditor@putmedown.com.)

************
Sort Me Out
************

"I'm working on a project to start a School of Art and
Business in London. We're having a meeting about it on
14th February and we need a room that's big enough for 30
people, with a big open kitchen for cooking and watching
cooking. Preferably somewhere near Seven Sisters in North
London. Any suggestions?" Charlie
roomforcharlie@putmedown.com

"Whilst no one was looking the government used the excuse
of a guy with a couple of flags and a megaphone to ban all
unwanted protest around the UK's seat of government. I'm
trying to get 6000 people to form a human chain around the
no protest zone, to show MPs how stupid it is." Richard
http://www.pledgebank.com/protest

"I'm working with Charlie on the art and business school
project. Do you know a female singer who is available for
lunch on 14th February? It would be fantastic if she was
over 60." Bryony
singing@putmedown.com

"I've got a meeting next week with a literary agent about
a book I've half-written. I've never done this before - does
anyone have any advice?" Dougald
halfabook@putmedown.com

*****************
2006 Life Advice
*****************

"Think what you would do if only you had the money - then
figure out how you can do it anyway."

**********
Thanks to
**********

Iona, Kevin, Nick, Alastair, Jenny J & Elliott, Jenny M,
Alice, Bryony, Mary, Steve, Tom B, Tom R, Paul, Steve W,
0742 & Armchair and Access Space.

***************
The End Section
***************

This week's mail was edited by Dougald.

Would you like to edit Pick Me Up?
iwanttobeaneditor@putmedown.com

Sign up for next week's at:
http://www.putmedown.com
or if you want to unsubscribe, email:
unsubscribe@putmedown.com
and if you have any problems, mail:
helpmeout@putmedown.com

x

my education was what I got when I should have been doing my homework

2006-01-04T22:46:36Z

A while ago, I was batting around ideas with another of the younger reporters in the newsroom, slipping from one subject to another through analogies or bad jokes, when a colleague across the desk shook his head and said, "I don't think the way you two do."

It was one of a series of moments that have made me understand for the first time why I.T. is called Information Technology. Information literacy isn't about being able to use Word and Excel or even knowing how to find what you want on Google - it's about a whole new set of ways of working with information.

These ways of working lead to a newly agile approach to reality, at home in a culture that's infused with sampling, mixing, rapping and textspeak as much as surfing. This is more than just a hobby or a subculture, it is a new mode of consciousness and may develop (is already developing) into a new mode of production. (The economic-cultural implications of the non-proprietorial approach to cultural material involved in all this are only beginning to register.)

But there's a gap between those who've grown up thinking like this and many of those who didn't. As Pat Kane argues, this gives a new importance to Illich's argument for the abolition of current structures of education:

A FEW weeks ago, I spent a few afternoons with some fifth and sixth-year kids, whose school is situated in a notoriously troubled area of Glasgow... All of them had broadband at home. All of them regarded computer games like CSI and Sim City as having the same complexity and resonance as novels or movies. All of them were actively involved in digital creativity in one form or another – from making fan websites with up to 60,000 hits, through coding Flash animations for their friends, to arranging music downloads for underground Glaswegian rap artists.

But none of them saw any connection between this intrinsically motivated, rawly enterprising lifestyle – where trade, hacking, self-skilling and peer-to-peer co-operation was the norm – and any part of the curriculum they were receiving at school. And this was a computer studies class... In their own lives, they are drawing down and seeking out information – facilitated by the great god Google – with as much rapidity and comprehensiveness as a research scientist had at their fingertips 10 years ago...

Yet the rhetoric around our schools is mired in stasis. It’s all about “employable skill-sets geared to existing labour markets”, “unruly classroom behaviour transformed by emotional intelligence”. Kids are looking at a curriculum that moves at a porridge-like pace, compared to their own rich, convivial cultures of informed ducking, diving and searching.

Read the rest here.

literary agents

2006-01-04T17:01:58Z

Well, I now have a meeting fixed with a literary agent who's interested in Troubling Oppositions. Next Thursday afternoon.

This does mean I ought to crack on with the second draft, since I wouldn't show the first to anyone except arrantscoundrel.

Does anyone have any useful advice for dealing with agents? A novelist-friend already told me I'd put my foot in it by sending the synopsis off to three of them at once, though I'd discussed this with someone else who did exactly the same and got a book commissioned without apparently putting any noses out of joint.

the hope that waits inside the leafless tree

2006-01-04T15:38:16Z

I told mcgeary I'd post the poem/prayer I wrote last January. The pain it was written from seems a long way off, thankfully, but the words still work for me.

A prayer for New Year

God, who guards our comings and our goings,
meet us at the turning of the year,
light a fire in us against the cold
that we may share your warmth with a shivering world.

Christ, born in the dark days of the year,
watch with us through the dark years of our lives,
remind us in the slowly lengthening days
how life enters the world at unlikely times.

Sometimes much we held high seems lost and buried,
as out of date as last season's fashion lines:
remind us that time is the turning wheel
as well as the road it leaves behind,
that seasons return, and in their return
show us again the truth that sets us free,
that all that is buried is not lost.

In a world of instant gratification,
teach us the hope that will not be rushed,
the hope that waits inside the leafless tree.

God, who guards our comings and our goings,
meet us at the turning of the year,
light a fire in us against the cold
that we may share your warmth with a shivering world.

a new year request

2005-12-31T12:33:13Z

As a few of you know, I'm one of the editors of an email magazine called Pick Me Up. Some people say it's like "Why Don't You...?" for grownups.

Well, I'm editing the first issue of the New Year, which comes out next Friday. My friend Charlie suggested we ask people to capture a moment of January 1st 2006.

So I thought I'd ask any of you who fancy it to post a few lines or maybe a photo that captures something that happens to you in the first 24 hours of the New Year. (Or alternatively, drop me an email.)

rock synchrony

2005-12-19T12:05:55Z

Interesting to see how far this gets - a sort of distributed Live Aid. Basically, a band called the Flying Heroes are trying to get hundreds of venues around the world to organise simultaneous concerts, in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust.

It's all happening on 1st July, 2006.

duke_aldhein @ 2005-12-08T15:41:00

2005-12-08T15:41:48Z

The best sale ever! - courtesy of the Space Hijackers:

The plan was beautifully simple! Print up a bundle of t-shirts for our secret agents, we then wander into large chainstores in central London and help the staff tidy up, give out directions and generally be helpful members of the public.</a>

duke_aldhein @ 2005-12-06T16:25:00

2005-12-06T16:26:12Z

I just realised, I still haven't posted anything about what the book is about. Here's the summary I sent out to agents:

Troubling Oppositions: Good Protesters, Bad Protesters, Governments & Terrorists

Now it is possible that this is an al-Qaeda linked attack on London – or it is equally possible that this is aimed by protesters against the G8...
(Terrorism expert MJ Gohel, BBC 5 Live, July 7th 2005)

Why would anyone want to protest against the G8, when they're making poverty history?
(Teenager at Live8: The Final Push)

As the War on Terror enters its fifth year, the margin for legitimate dissent in western democracies is shrinking, while the penalties for breaching it are increasingly severe. Anti-terror legislation is routinely used to restrict political protest – but, more fundamentally, the “with us or against us” language of Anglo-American foreign policy has been brought home in the management of dissent and difference. Protesters find themselves represented as a Black Bloc of nihilistic anarchists, the object of tabloid fantasies, and a White Bloc of humanitarian idealists, their demonstrations co-opted by the government whose policies they are challenging. Meanwhile, in the wake of attacks such as 7/7, Muslim leaders are challenged to identify as 'moderates' or 'extremists' – once again, the test of moderation appears to be a willingness to pose for photos alongside a government minister.

Troubling Oppositions is a book for those who have been confused by their experiences of protest and activism – or who have thought about getting involved, but been puzzled by what they've seen. It's also a book for anyone who's concerned about the state of democracy in an era of perpetual war.

Its starting point is the events of July 2005 – when, in one week, the UK played host to the leaders of the G8, the celebrities of Live8, the Make Poverty History marchers in Edinburgh, anti-G8 protesters at Gleneagles and suicide bombers on the London Underground. Whatever their methods, each of these groups stands for an idea of how the world works, how it ought to work, and how you go about changing it. They disagree over all kinds of things – whether laws are made to be kept, broken or rewritten, for example – or when (if ever) violence is acceptable. But in the language of politicians and journalists, these divisions are repeatedly reduced to a simple opposition between good and bad, moderate and extremist, us and them. This book is an attempt to disturb that language and uncover what it leaves unsaid.

More than simply a polemic, it argues for the existence of new constituencies of dissent – below the radar of mainstream debate and as yet barely connected to established protest movements. If activists can resist the temptation to buy into the oppositions in which that debate is framed, these offer a real hope for a break with the politics of greed and corporate power.

duke_aldhein @ 2005-12-02T13:03:00

2005-12-02T13:05:10Z

I lost my phone the other week. Worse, I hadn't backed up the phone book. So, if you think I ought to have your number, and I haven't already emailed you to ask for it (probably because I don't have your email address), email me: duke_aldhein at dougald dot co dot uk.

duke_aldhein @ 2005-11-29T20:08:00

2005-11-29T21:30:16Z

Still thinking about weddings, I went back to re-read the final section of John Berger's 'Here is where we meet'. The book consists of a series of encounters with the dead, but it ends with a birth and a marriage - though not in the respectable order. The scene is a town in Galicia (not the region of Spain, but the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands), which like everything else in Berger's writing seems to have been listened to with an unusual attention:

Nobody starves in Nowy Targ as they do in Milano or Paris, but there's a pall of silence over the town for there are no projects to discuss. The town lives, like dust, from day to day. And its six or seven taxis wait discreetly, just off the main square, for the occasional fare, usually a foreigner.

So here are some samples from the wedding at Nowy Targ which sidle up to what I was trying to say directly and too fast. First, the young priest:

He knew each marriage at which he officiated had been agreed upon within an intricate web of calculation, desire, fear, bribes and love, for such is the nature of the marriage contract. Each time, however, the task he set himself was to try to locate what was pure in this web. Like a hunter going into the forest, he set out to stalk a purity, to entice it out of its cover and to let all those present, and particularly the couple involved, acknowledge it.

Not an easy task, and it wasn't necessarily simple on the rare occasion when the woman and man were wildly in love, with scarcely andy other interest, for then he risked to glimpse how desire, when mutual and passionate, is more often than not, a conspiracy of two against the cruelty of the world, apparently abandoned by God. Shreds of the purity he sought were of course always present, what made his task difficult is that a purity, when disclosed, invariably goes back into hiding...

The young priest last Saturday in Nowy Targ, accomplished his task; at a certain moment he was radiant. Perhaps the purity he located, the purity which did not run for cover, resided in ten-month-old Olek. Olek, dressed in white like his mother and father, lay awake and totally calm throughout the long ceremony in the arms of Danka's elder sister, who was sitting, smiling towards the altar, at the back of the church.

Incommensurability is a recurring theme in the book. Berger writes of an understanding from childhood with his father, who had lived through four years in the trenches, 'we shared the secrets of [an] incommensurable war'. Mirek, the Polish bridegroom, has spent years as a sans papier in Paris, surviving with 'the talents of both poacher and innkeeper (the lean and the well-fed man)', and for him 'No two jobs are the same.' This is contrasted with the response of Danka's employers to her decision to return to Poland with Mirek: 'She's irreplaceable! said the man. Everyone is replaceable, said the woman.'

There is a relationship between this ethic of incommensurability and Berger's thinking regarding gender, which is perhaps to be detected in this passage.

Choosing a wedding dress is unlike choosing any other garment. The bride, when dressed, has to appear to come from a place where nobody present has ever been, because it is the place of her own name. The woman to be married becomes Bride the moment she is transformed into a stranger. A stranger so that the man she is marrying can recognise her as if for the first time; a stranger so she can be surprised, at the moment when they make their vows, by the man she is marrying. Why are brides ritually hidden before the ceremony? It is to facilitate the transformation whereby the bride appears to have come from the other side of a horizon. The veil is the veil of that distance. A woman who has lived her whole life in the same village walks down the aisle of her village church as a bride, and to all those watching she becomes, for an instant, unrecognisable, not because she is wearing a disguise, but because she has become a newcomer being greeted on arrival.

The last word loops back to a passage seventy pages earlier, in which Berger writes about another theme, the different relationships to time in which different societies live:

The Cro-Magnons lived with fear and amazement in a culture of Arrival, facing many mysteries. Their culture lasted for some 20,000 years. We live in a culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress which has so far lasted two or three centuries. Today's culture, instead of facing mysteries, persistently tries to outflank them.

Finally, some moments from the wedding party:

The dishes came like good news, one after another. After each one there was an interval for drinking and dancing and measuring the improbability of so much good news. Everyone gathered there knew that news of a catastrophe comes all at once...

The music, like the young priest a few hours earlier, was searching for a purity. Not, of course, the same one. The music was searching for the purity of desire, of what passes between a longing and a promise: the promise of consolation that can outlast - or anyway outflank - the punishments of living...

[The singer's] voice touched outer space, and the music attained the purity that staunches wounds.

Everyone in the barn was reminded how a life without wounds isn't worth living.

Desire is brief - a few hours or a lifetime, both are brief. Desire is brief because it occurs in defiance of the permanent. It challenges time in a fight to the death. And dancing is about that challenge.

There was only one bride there and one groom, but there were several hundred weddings; remembered, real, regretted and imaginary.