Author: zenpolitics

Landscape and history, places and people, home and friends and family – the world out there rather than on screen is my focus. I’m interested in where we’ve been, and how it might help us make some sense of where we are now and where we're headed.

The Wonder of Life

I am amazed by what evolutionary biology has achieved in recent years and the avenues of exploration and explanation it’s opened up. And yet… where does life as we experience it fit in?

Richard Dawkin’s vituperative response (Prospect, in 2012) to EO Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth made for stimulating reading – as far as I could understand it! The comments of Professor Georgy Koentges of Warwick University were helpful:

‘Like other scientists commenting on this “tit-for-tat” dispute between Wilson and Dawkins, Koentges also detects the old struggle between those who focus purely on the gene and those who see it as “an anthropological insult to our own feeling of self-belief”.’

This summed up neatly what I’ve been trying and failing to find the words for. Whatever evolutionary biology may demonstrate about the origins of life and the triumph of the selfish gene (whether at the level of individual selection, as Dawkins, or multi-level, as Wilson) it can’t explain or encompass that sense of self, or self-belief, or the breadth of human accomplishment, defying any easy genetic explanation (though they do try), and beyond that, any sense of the simple wonder of life.

The scientific and the spiritual are, for me, two separate dimensions – and yet seamless. And that is a source for joy and wonder in itself.

Farmageddon – the evils of factory farming

I attended the Farmageddon event organised by the charity Compassion in World Farming (CWF) at the Royal Geographical Society yesterday, 12th July, with my daughter. It focused on the evils of factory farming….

Around 65 billion animals reared globally every year, they argue, most of whom spend their lives in conditions which are confined and cruel.

[For info on the extraordinary Farmageddon book see end of this post.]

CWF has real achievements it can be proud of over the last 45 years: ending the use of veal crates, battery cages for egg-laying hens, the close confinement of pregnant sows. They’ve also been instrumental in persuading the EU to consider animals as ‘sentient beings’, so the idea that animals don’t have feelings and so can’t suffer cruelty has been consigned to the wilder crueller corners of the human psyche.

But has it? Maybe in Europe, or in western Europe, and among some people, but what of factory farming USA, with its vast mega-dairies.

Animals are taken off the land and confined, and the land is given over to growing the food that feeds them, or to cash crops, while the grain that feeds them is imported. An irrational and crazy system. It allows animal farming to be carried out on a vast scale, but the grain loses much of its nutritional value converted into cattle feed. And the farms generate a vast amount of toxic waste. Proximity to mega-dairies is no place to be. In addition keeping animals in unhygienic conditions requires the use of vast quantities of antibiotics, radically increasing the chances that infections becoming antibiotic-resistant, in humans as well as animals. Witness David Cameron’s concerns about the development of drug-resistant superbugs early this week.

Issues:

Mapping out the food chain. Tracing the path from the emptying of the land and the construction of mega-dairies, piggeries and chicken farms, to our supermarkets and tables, and demonstrate where the diseconomies appear, and the damage the system does to animals, to humans (not least by pollution) and the environment.

Lining up with other charities, including environment and development charities, focusing on the implications of a big-company, corporatist, factory-based approach for poverty, pollution and the environment.

How can a charity combat the muscle, marketing, mega-bucks and self-promotion of big farming companies, for whom an animal is simply a unit of production?

Politics… CWF is considered to be political by the TV companies so it can’t advertise. How can it get its message across? Raising public consciousness has always been central to its work, but then as now it cannot be propagandist. It has to allow both sides of the picture to be presented, the factory owner and the dairy cow, and let the public makes up their own mind, as they did in previous campaigns over veal crates. We have to be thankful for TV programmes like Countryfile, which will talk to traditional dairy farmers – but also a farmer planning a more factory-based approach, but nothing on the scale (yet) of the USA.

Mega-dairies in the UK. We came so close to having our own mega-dairy at Nocton in Lincolnshire. [See http://www.countryfile.com/news/news-plans-lincolnshire-mega-dairy-withdrawn] The outcry was intense, and the application was rejected. What of the future – can we be sure that similar mega-businesses won’t get planning permission in other parts of our green and pleasant land?

But… it’s one thing to take on British and European farmers. To take on American agri-business is something else. Vast sums of money, a deep-rooted lack of sympathy for animals and the environment, bred in from the days of the early settlers, and now with a big-money expression, where once it was settlers fighting for their livelihoods.

How to get supermarkets on board? There are regular conversations, forums where the issues are discussed, but it’s only public opinion that will really drives changes, as they did after ‘Horsegate’ last year. And how do we get the wider public involved, so they bring their influence to bear on farmers, and the politicians who could legislate? The public would rather not know about the farms or abattoirs.

What of education? CWF sends speakers into schools, but even in geography lessons factory farming itself isn’t major focus. Today’s kids are very much aware of the environment and recycling. The arguments are presented in a non-controversial way. In the case of factory farming, the CWF can’t engage in propaganda. It has to present the arguments and let students decide. Climate change is a similar issue in this respect. Good economic arguments and powerful science maybe should carry the day. But vested interests insist they be listened to, and in that, protest as we may, CWF and all supporters have to acquiesce.

Food waste and cheap offers on food. Both need to be outlawed, by supermarkets and in the public mind. If costs employing traditional methods are higher, then better we reduce our meat consumption and make up for the reduction by wise consumption of fruit and veg. Easy to say but…

Poverty is a major issue, cheap food keeps people alive, so how do we address these issues without impacting on the diet and welfare of the poorest amongst us? That’s a balance we have always to keep in mind.

And, thinking crops, Monsanto genetically modify grains, and drought-resistant strains might, for example, bring areas of the Sahel into production. But the seed would be supplied by the seed companies, and farmers would be tied to the company seed, and in time big companies would buy them out. Monopoly rules again.

Don’t let being a vegetarian or vegan cloud the argument. That’s not what Compassion is about. It is not opposed to meat-eating, but the lives and deaths of animals need to be humane. Animals must be allowed to live as nature intended them, ruminate or snuffle, and die, as our position higher up the food chain has always dictated (that is a brute fact of life) – but by the civilised humane methods that characterise modern society at its best.

Compassion… it is Compassion in World Farming. We are focusing on animals as well as human beings. We are all sentient beings. Compassion for animals can’t be a substitute for compassion for humans. It’s an attitude to the world – our world. Meeting the people from CWF was impressive. They aren’t as I saw them an angry charity (though anger has its place) – they are passionate.

THE BOOK Farmageddon: Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat, by Philip Lymbery (CDEO CWF) with Isabel Oakeshott, Bloomsbury, £12.99.

 

Truth, Zen, a German mystic, Luis Suarez and more – all in one blog!

Truth, Zen, a German mystic, Luis Suarez and more ….

That would be one hell of a short blog. But this one rambles a little. Be warned.

Zenpolitics has to be about truth, so let’s get philosophical for a few moments. Meister Eckhart, who appears later – who he? A medieval German mystic , with a Zen sensibility.

Philosophical about truth. Uruguayans would take on the British media in a new war of Suarez’s teeth if they could. Our same bulldog media take on FIFA, and they have a good case it seems, so why is it that the rest of the world doesn’t fall into line behind the seemingly self-evident truths our friendly media unearth. And we’re in a minority of 26-2 over Europe: a partnership with the less than savoury Hungarian government is no place to be.

Truth treads a light step but once we mess around with it, personalise it, over-egg it, turn it into an attack dog, it loses its way.

Truth, we’re told, is relative to each individual. So too goodness and justice. We accept that the perspective of each of us is different, each individual, family, tribe or nation, and that means our values are different, and what is self-evident truth for one is an arrant falsehood for another. We reinforce our beliefs with myths, consolidate them into prejudices, and willingly retreat behind them to find security.

But there is another truth, defined by awareness of an alternative point of view, belonging to another person(s), another country, taking into account also their habits and their wider world. Before we pronounce we instinctively allow for the fact that on any issue there could be anything from a nuanced difference to an opposite position, held maybe with a passion equal to our own. I say ‘instinctively’: we can’t deliberate before every decision. All we can be is aware that the other person’s point of view may be as valid as our own. We respond of course to evident wrong or evil, but we recognise integrity.

We can also be guided by whether our actions are such as to engender trust. Trust recognised and reinforced facilitates human interaction, distrust undermines lives private and public – alliances are hardly worth the paper on which they are inscribed, they exist out of convenience, a nation is deemed perfidious as the French viewed Albion. Convenience and self-interest and the pursuit of power have of course driven human history, and it’s only in our day when there’s a possibility of a higher diplomacy that we can even consider that trust could mean something.

Even more powerful would be a simple sense that goodness is a natural human state. If we persist in believing in present-day man as an evolutionary compromise with the violence that is innate in all species, or more specifically the genes of all species, then all morality must be relative to its age, conditioned by the circumstances that create harmonious survival, and a utilitarian happiness which we seize upon while we have it. If on the other hand we recognise goodness and truth as innate, indwelling, to use Meister Eckhart’s phrase, it becomes a mighty sword, simplifying our lives as we seek out the wider good and the good of others rather than our own. To quote Eckhart: ‘Goodness is neither created nor made nor begotten, but it is generative and gives birth to the good man.’ Goodness is more than indwelling, it is universal. We as individuals are part of it, by our very existence we subscribe to it. ‘Goodness reproduces itself and all that is in a good man. It pours being, knowledge, love and activity into a good man, and a good man receives the whole of his being, knowledge, love and activity from the heart and core of goodness and from it alone.’

Goodness and truth are co-terminous, they cannot exist without each other. They make a mighty force if only we will recognise it. It may be that our personal philosophies or theologies can’t accept goodness as having a separate, overarching, indwelling existence. But if we can at least recognise the extraordinary transformative power of goodness, we loose a mighty force into the world.

Goodness and truth are then no longer relative. They are the criteria by which we judge every action, and in time they become instinctive, so that there is no other way to act. We may argue the correctness of an action, but the integrity of the individual and the argument behind that action we would have no reason to doubt.

An attainable utopia? For individuals at least? Maybe not the wide world or our country or even our local patch. Not yet. But it is the necessary, the only first step, on the path to a better world.

IPCC report – understanding the evidence

A letter to the Economist about the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report encourages us to see climate models not as ‘a prediction machine’ but as ‘living maps, drawn up by scientists with the most recent evidence available…’

It’s the phrase ‘living maps’ I like. Wouldn’t it be great if policy discussions generally could use living maps, mapping out options and actions and consequences, with full context, and a decent attempt at impartiality?

The press would hate it, and so too the politicians. Maybe I would too, to be honest. Democracy as we know it is all about confrontations. But a few occasional living maps are useful, so well done the IPCC.

And, yes, the IPCC is impartial. Errant reporting of the movements of Himalayan glaciers doesn’t vitiate reams of irrefutable evidence. How we respond is a different matter: are consequences manageable, how much does it matter if they’re not, what on balance is best for the world? But we need to accept the evidence before we can have that debate. Increasingly acidified oceans and retreating ice sheets and, yes, glaciers, are there to remind us.

We need those living maps, to work out our options. There are different routes to take and we may get lost. Routes we can argue. But we’re mad to challenge the contours. When the deluge comes we don’t want to find ourselves in a river valley all the while claiming the mountains don’t exist.

Data geeks rule OK

Buzzards mew (see last post) and data geeks buzzz….

The Economist’s Lexington column talks about the surfeit of data and data geeks buzzing around Washington DC. Data it seems is the truth, or truths, because data can be made to say a lot of things, depending on which way you twist it. Unless you’re Nate Silver, who wishes to be judged on his outcomes. That would and should be the real test for data geeks.

CP Scott: ‘facts are sacred, opinion is free.’ But if facts are merely data then – is nothing sacred?

‘Washington’s passion…for data does not signal the start of a new Socratic age, in which political classes jointly search for truth.’ (Lexington) Each of us brings his or her own ‘tribal instinct’ to weighing the facts. So maybe that’s another rider to CP Scott’s dictum. Keep your tribal instincts in check, and when judging facts put your mind in neutral…

Over here we’ve had the Civitas report, arguing there has been no insider advantage from joining the Common Market all those years ago. Our trade with the EU represents no greater percentage than it did in 1973. The government’s response: ‘the EU’s share of UK trade has remained consistent because of the huge growth in other markets in the same period.’ Now I’d need to re-read Richard Lambert’s article in Prospect a few months back, check out the recent CBI report arguing a different case from Civitas, and the Civitas report itself. Then form my own view. My tribal instinct backs the CBI. Civitas are a right-of-centre think tank, so we’d expect their instinct to be more critical of the EU. Surprise surprise, that’s just what they are.

Damned hard being neutral, and a whole lot less fun.

Spring is very much sprung

Some wonderful descriptions of spring.

Check out the earthbound Roger Deakin in Notes from Walnut Tree Farm: (7th May)

‘Everywhere this morning in the May sunshine I notice the sudden, magical growth of trees. The mulberry has just come into leaf overnight…yesterday there was no sign of anything more than the tiniest buds. The ash tree is sending out shoots. The laid hedge of the wood is bursting into fresh leaf. The coppiced hazels…’

Or the more heavenbound Thomas Merton: (12th March), in Kentucky:

‘The sun was warm. I stood by the wall and watched the lambs, I had not known of their arrival. Little black-eyed things, jumping like toys on the green grass. I thought: ‘Feed my lambs.’ There is certainly something very touching about lambs, until they find their way into holy pictures and become unpleasant.’

I would agree with him there.

Some of our own recent spring days have been days simply to live in and not to describe. Hopkins nobly attempts to describe the indescribable…

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—/ When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;/ Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush/  Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring/  The ear…

And finally, illustrating how even the high heavens can be brought down to earth,  compare Hopkin’s wonderfully elevated Windhover

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-/ dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding/  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air,…

with the this-time-earthbound Thomas Merton’s dental chair:

‘The dentist came from Cincinnati and I spent three-quarters of an hour in the chair watching the buzzards circling in the grey sky over the old sheep barn while he drilled a wisdom tooth.’

Merton would seem to have had a very superior out-of-doors dentist.

Banning books – a prison library story

For anyone with any involvement is book publishing, and anyone with a sense of the redemptive power of books, the government’s recently introduced changes to the IEP (Incentives and Earned Privileges) scheme for prisoners cause alarm bells to ring.

Anyone who tampers with the availability of books risks evoking thoughts of Savonarola in Florence in 1505, or Fahrenheit 451. But you don’t need to burn books. You just place them off-limits.

The changes claim to be ‘about making (prisoners) work towards their rehabilitation. Poor behaviour and refusal to engage in the prison regime will result in a loss of privileges.’ One key change:

‘A ban on all sentenced prisoners receiving parcels including books and other basic items, except for a one-off parcel at the start of their sentence and in exceptional circumstances.’ Television access is severely restricted. (The issue is not of course restriction itself – it’s how tight that restriction is. There are good reasons for restricting TV access.)

To progress IEP status, prisoners must ‘demonstrate a commitment towards their rehabilitation’ by engaging in purposeful activity, behaving well and helping other prisoners’. It seems that ‘knitting wool, embroidery silks as well as books are banned and indeed the parcel is returned to the sender who has to pay’. (Again, wool implies needles, and you can see why needles are restricted – if not outright banned.)

The effect would seem to be to make purposeful activity harder. The changes appear to run directly counter to both rehabilitation, by helping prisoners stay connected to the outside world, and better re-connect when they get out, and to their personal welfare. You build confidence and self-esteem, you don’t undermine it by denying opportunities for self-improvement.

Reading the Prison Reform Trust’s document ‘Prison Without Purpose’ is disturbing. Compounding matters is the failure of many prisons to comply with the statutory duty of prisons to have a library, with all prisoners allowed access for a minimum of thirty minutes every two weeks. Book stock, points out the Society of Authors, ‘in many prisons is poor, often damaged or out-of-date and that inter-library loan requests are often slow or not actioned at all.’

Note: existing regulations allow access for a minimum of thirty minutes every two weeks. That is bad in itself.

Humanity and compassion are at the heart of what I write about in this blog. On the evidence I’m aware of (from the PRT’s report, the book publishing trade press and the wider press) the current changes runs counter to both.

The dry bones of a thousand empires

Also from the Mark Twain quote:

(Damascus) has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.

When we talk of being part of a Christian tradition, we do need to widen that to encompass Judaic, Greek, Roman, Arab. Talk of a thousand empires may be a little exaggerated … but our spiritual and cultural traditions have been nurtured and fashioned over many millennia, and they’ve come down to us interpreted and recreated through (for the UK) a fifteen-hundred-year Christian history. When we try and conjure value systems without that spiritual content we are doing simply that – conjuring. Belief is one thing, faith is another, they can be disavowed, but to disavow our Christian tradition, to imagine that our values have simply an evolutionary explanation, is to deny history. I italicise simply. Scientific and cultural evolution work together. The former doesn’t have the conceptual framework remotely to encompass the latter, any more than the latter can explain the former (not that anti-evolution and intelligent design protagonists haven’t tried).

To get back to Damascus – ‘will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies’. Thing long, think in terms of centuries, even millennia. Every generation thinks it has solutions, and every generation comes up short. Put the rights of man and democracy in that context: if there is a promised land it will not come out a eureka democratic moment, it will evolve over historic time.

For Syria, as for all of us.

 

Damascus

Syria’s turmoil continues, with the numbers of refugees and violence and destruction at levels which would have seemed inconceivable three years ago. It is a reminder that the inconceivable can happen. Syria is such an extraordinary country, a crossroad and an intermingling of cultures, now as three thousand years ago. Diana Darke in her insider’s view of Syria and Damascus in particular (My House in Damascus) quotes Mark Twain (An Innocent Abroad):

She measures time not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise and crumble to ruin. She is a type of immortality… Damascus has seen all that ever occurred on earth and still she lives.

She is being challenged now as never before, such is the ability of modern armament to flatten the old with same equanimity as it flattens the new. It will take an extraordinary mix of tolerance and goodwill to restore old harmonies and the old fabric. We may glibly think that democracy, western-style, is the answer. But leadership and vision must come first.

Democracy as in Algeria and Egypt and Libya can tear a country apart.

Winnie the Pooh – a black and white or glorious Technicolor bear?

The Penguin chief executive officer, questioned (July 2013) during an anti-trust civil trial resulting from a lawsuit brought in 2012 by the US Justice Department, conceded the Winnie-the-Pooh book looks ‘extremely beautiful’ in colour on Apple products and not as good in black-and-white on other devices. [Can we assume a book is ‘another device’?] ….

Just what would AA Milne or indeed EH Shepard’s Pooh bear have thought? Pooh beautiful in colour? The Shepard illustrations were coloured up in a Winnie the Pooh edition back in the 70s or 80s, and lost something. But the Disney Pooh exploded on to the screen as a different creature altogether, taken out of the Ashdown Forest and plonked down in Disneyland.

Bears like honey, not apples.