Category: Books

A little family history

Travelling north recently I drove along the M5 through the western outskirts of Birmingham, and then toward Manchester along the M6.

Not you might think the most romantic of journeys. But it had its own magic, and set imagination and memory running.

Reading Alison Light’s marvellous Common People I’ve learnt a lot about how one branch of her family made its way in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were needle-makers, one part of that remarkable network of industries small (there were also nail, pin, screw, chain and washer-makers) and large that made Birmingham famous around the world.

Another branch of her family were bricklayers and Baptists, and made their way from Wiltshire to Portsmouth, where one of their number became a building contractor, at a time when the city was growing fast, and contractors established themselves as middlemen, and bricklayers were unionised, and organised labour set itself up against the employers.

Alison Light’s ancestor also built churches.

Why did this strikes a chord with me? Because my ancestors, the Colliers in Leigh in Lancashire, were also builders, as early as the 1850s. And if they didn’t build churches then building contractors on another side of my family, the Adkinsons, did do so – only one to my knowledge, the Methodist church that dominates the centre of my home village in Cheshire.

Nonconformism and bricklaying and building went hand in hand. The Church of England lived and died by the old social hierarchies. As a Methodist or a Baptist you were part of a vibrant and supportive communities, and need feel inferior to no-one.

You get little sense of the old Black Country from the M5, and the M6 takes through open Staffordshire country. But look to the right as Cheshire approaches and on the far horizon there’s the hilltop village of Mow Cop, where in 1800 the prayer meetings which led in time to the founding of the Primitive Methodists were first held. There’s a magic about Mow Cap, and Alan Garner in his novel Red Shift captures that sense of a place apart.

It’s right on the edge of where I explored as a child, and each time I catch sight of Mow Cop on my journeys north I feel like I’m coming home. Liminal in place and in imagination. And I will head north again soon, to explore further just who the Colliers and Adkinsons really were, who and where they were before they took to bricks, and when they found religion.

The irony is that I’ve never laid brick on brick, never built anything in all my life. My ability even to put a shelf up straight was – quite unjustifiably! – queried recently. Maybe the two genetic lines simply cancelled each other out.

With Dante on the Camino

Back in June, my first week on the Camino, I met up with Daniel and Gabriel, 18 and 17-years-old, both strong walkers, one Czech, the other Italian. Daniel told me that his friend loved to talk about Dante, and they’d renamed him ‘Dante’.  I remember well a conversation with Dante in the main plaza in Pamplona when he explained as best he could, in English, the poet’s terza rima rhyme scheme – aba, bcb, cdc.  He the 17-year-old, me in my 60s. I resolved to read the Divine Comedy over the summer and before I resumed on the Camino in October – and I did.

A quote from Osip Mandelstam, sent to me by Graham Fawcett, has sent me back to the poet.

“Both the Inferno and, in particular, the Purgatorio, glorify the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the footstep and its form. The step, linked with breathing and saturated with thought, Dante understood as the beginning of prosody. To indicate walking, he utilizes a multitude of varied and charming turns of phrase. In Dante, philosophy and poetry are constantly on the go, perpetually on their feet. Even a stop is but a variety of accumulated movement: a platform for conversations is created by Alpine conditions. The metrical foot is the inhalation and exhalation of the step”. (Osip Mandelstam, Conversation about Dante)

To which my first response was ‘wow!’ I read Graham’s note two days out from Santiago, too late for me to practise ‘the step, linked with breathing and saturated with thought’. Maybe just as well.

You do think about walking and all it entails when you’re walking over 500 miles.

I walked the Camino with mind empty, with mind and senses open to the landscape, sounds and smells, with mind and feet in meditative step with each other – and with mind ‘saturated’ with thought. I found rhythm in songs and hymns, and had I a better memory for poetry I’d have been speaking out loud more of my favourite verse, to the occasional consternation of fellow-walkers.

But I have yet to master linking my step with thought!

Frederic Gros in his book A Philosophy of Walking points out that for thinkers such as Nietzsche and Thoreau walking was key to their work. And in earlier times, when walking was the normal mode for getting from A to B, thinking your best thoughts while walking would have been normal practice.

What levels of thought and imagination were achieved by pilgrims to Santiago in the 11th,12th, 13th centuries? In an age when most couldn’t read or write. Our obsession with conveying our thoughts in written form, fed by this computer age of ours – and by blogs! – has downgraded walking as prime time for thinking. We are now overwhelmed with the thoughts of others.

In our city lives, too often when we walk we rush, and when we rush we don’t think. Gros has a better understanding: walking “is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found”.

Time for a walk.

Compassion and conflict

This is a longer blog than I would wish. But the subject doesn’t allow of anything else.

I’ve been reading the early pages of Richard Flanagan’s novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the brutal skirmishes between British and Vichy France troops in 1941, with Palmyra and Tripoli both figuring in the conflict. It brings home again how key down the centuries Syria has been, as a pivotal territory in the battles between countries and empires. And how, until recently, Aleppo and Palmyra had survived.

The Australian troops who came out of Syria alive then found themselves Japanese POWs after the fall of Singapore, suffering a different and sadistic brutality – the main theme of course of the novel.

On another tack …back in the 1960s Thich Nhat Hanh founded the School of Youth for Social Service in South Vietnam. It ‘drew young people deeply committed to acting in a spirit of compassion’.  They refused to support either side in the Vietnamese conflict and ‘believed that… the true enemies were not people but ideology, hatred and ignorance’. Several were kidnapped and murdered. (Quotes from Mobi Ho’s introduction to Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness.)

The juxtaposition of these two conflicts in not intended to draw out any comparisons. In Vietnam the School was at least able to function, at a sometimes terrible cost. Syria in 1941 and today is a different and terrible kind of all-out conflict.

But compassion – is there any room for compassion in conflict? The battle in Syria is a battle for a way of life, against a perverted ideology. The practice of compassion is such circumstances is a mighty challenge. But compassion, and specifically the saving of life, must come before any desire or insistence on retribution or punishment. If in this case there is scope for working with the Assad regime – not an easy case to argue – and by extension with Iran, and also with Russia, then we should do so.

The PM in the House of Commons today spoke of Assad ‘butchering his own people’. Even so, treating with the Assad regime, and bringing to an end one conflict, may be the only way in which we can focus on IS and Al-Qaeda, with whom we can never treat. I’m sure this is already being discussed behind the scenes: it will take extraordinary diplomacy to achieve.

We should not delay. I read today that an Al-Qaeda-related group has seized a strategic airfield in Syria near Idlib. The momentum is still moving in the wrong direction.

A smile at the last

‘Lao Tzu cultivated the way of virtue, and his teachings aimed at self-effacement. He lived in Chou for a long time, but seeing its decline he departed; when he reached the pass, the Keeper there…said to him: “As you are about to leave the world behind, could you write a book for my sake?” As a result Lao Tzu wrote two books, setting out the meaning of the way and virtue in some 5000 characters, and then departed. None knew where he went in the end.’ (My italics.)

(Quoted in the introduction to the Penguin edition of the Tao Te Ching, 1963)

I remember as a schoolboy being intrigued by the Emperor Charles V departing imperial glory and retreating for his last years to a monastery. Why would he do that?

And later, in my 20s, by the music master with a smile of his faith at the end of his years, in Herman Hesse’s The Glass-Bead Game.

I’ve always imagined my last days as being a time of calm when, within and without the world, I would have a smile of my lips.

*

We make so much noise in the world but when our time for making noise is over, it’s wise to recognise the fact and seek the silence that lies before, behind and after the noise. At that point we no longer want to know the world, as once we did, and the world loses interest in us. Our power to influence the world long gone, we may smile at the consequence and inconsequence of all we’ve done, and rest gently in the silence.

The world as it hasn’t quite happened, but almost might have, by Mr JM Keynes

The Economist reminded me of JM Keynes’s essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, in which he predicted his grandchildren would hardly have to do any work at all.

If not for our generation but for a future one he may be right, as the hollowing out of the middle, between cognitive and manual jobs, gathers pace. But it won’t of course be the workers’ choice, unless by some unforeseeable and unprecedented magic work can be shared out so we all do a little in a world where education is equal for all, and work is somehow fashioned for every ability.

It’s worth checking some sections of what Keynes’s has to say. The italics below are mine. The wealthy I fear continue on their wearisome way.

*

“I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not-if we look into the future-the permanent problem of the human race.”

“Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

“Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard-those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me-those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties-to solve the problem which has been set them.”

“But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”

“I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest change which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate. But, of course, it will all happen gradually, not as a catastrophe. Indeed, it has already begun. The course of affairs will simply be that there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed. The critical difference will be realised when this condition has become so general that the nature of one’s duty to one’s neighbour is changed. For it will remain reasonable to be economically purposive for others after it has ceased to be reasonable for oneself.”

Vodka is the solution

There’s a short passage in the novel ‘The Hundred-Year-Old Man’ I rather like:

‘Allan interrupted the two brothers by saying that he had been out and about in the world and if’ there was one thing he had learned it was that the very biggest and apparently most impossible conflicts on earth were based on the dialogue: “You are stupid, no, it’s you who are stupid, no, it’s you who are stupid.” The solution, said Allan, was often to down a bottle of vodka together and then look ahead.’

Quite where this takes us I’m not sure!

Maybe simply listening rather than vodka is the answer to all that shouting, all that posturing.

 

The Fourth Revolution

What might the fourth revolution be? What are, or were, revolutions one, two and three? Not the Glorious Revolution or the French Revolution. But political revolution – changes driven by ideas developed and ingrained over time.

And what form should the state take in future – in what direction should it be evolving?  Political theory is too often disparaged: cognoscenti have to work behind the scenes and pretend they know nothing.  We prefer to deal in simple solutions, absolutes of right and wrong. Not sadly of now and then. More now and forever: the certainty of the believing moment dictates policy and attitudes. Not the wisdom of the past.

John Mickelthwait and Adrian Woolridge, respectively editor-in-chief and editor of the Schumpeter column on the Economist, make a pretty good stab at serious informed political theory. They sketch a brief history of the last four hundred years, from the rising nation state (and Thomas Hobbes) by way of the 19th century liberal state (JS Mill) to the welfare state (Beatrice Webb)… and then turn futurologists and with Woolridge’s omnivorous capacity for detail outline the brave new world of the smaller state. Private enterprise drives both the economy and the state, power is devolved, and initiative lies at the individual level. Friedman and Hayek would rejoice – but only to a point. California at the mercy of propositions (referenda) has made good governance almost impossible, and the authors have a more than sneaking admiration for Lee Juan Yew’s Singapore. And indeed China, dirigiste in most things save the absolute right to engage in making money and building businesses.

So their model in more measured, more cautious, less neo-liberal than we might have expected. The closest to their ideal they find in Scandinavia. The Nordic model marries clear direction from government to social responsibility, and in Sweden, since big changes back in 1991, it seems to have worked.

Maybe it’s all a bit glib. This is the way the authors believe it should happen, but how can you create circumstances where it really will happen? The Tea Party fragments rather than encourages responsibility. Traditional political parties as agents of change aren’t listened to or respected. Pressure groups as matter of pride and preference keep their focus narrow.

It is a valiant and impressive and entertaining (well almost) attempt to point a way forward.

But making it happen – there lies the challenge.

 

Martin Buber

I mentioned in another post that he was a hero of mine. Rather than paraphrase, best to quote from the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

“In debates following violent riots in 1928 and 29 on whether to arm the Jewish settlers in Palestine Buber represented the pacifist option; in debates on immigration quotas following the 1936 Arab boycott Buber argued for demographic parity rather than trying to achieve a Jewish majority. Finally, as a member of Brit Shalom Buber argued for a bi-national rather than for a Jewish state in Palestine. At any of these stages Buber harboured no illusion about the chances of his political views to sway the majority but he believed that it was important to articulate the moral truth as one saw it rather than hiding one’s true beliefs for the sake of political strategy. Needless to say, this politics of authenticity made him few friends among the members of the Zionist establishment.”

There were I must assume, many outside the Zionist establishment who saw the world as he did. He was a man with a big reputation in Germany before he moved to Palestine in 1938, as an educator, philosopher and religious thinker. He also had a major role in building a Jewish cultural awareness within Zionism, not least by his wonderful Tales of the Hasidim.

Like so many I discovered Buber when I encountered his essay, I and Thou, in my college days. An ‘I-it’ relationship refers to the world of sensation and experience. In an ‘I-thou’ relationship sensation and experience are abandoned, the relationship with the other party is paramount. He called it the dialogic principle, but let’s skip that. For Buber, God was the ultimate relationship, ever-present in human consciousness.

Back in the 60s, I and Thou resonated. Some question it as philosophy but as an instinctive truth it still resonates today.

I’ll end with another quote, which for me makes a connection between Buber the Zionist and the Buber of I and Thou.

(Jews and Arabs must) “develop the land together without one imposing his will on the other. We considered it a fundamental point that in this case two vital claims are opposed to each other, two claims of a different nature and a different origin, which cannot be pitted one against the other and between which no objective decision can be made as to which is just and which is unjust.

“We considered and still consider it our duty to understand and to honour the claim which is opposed to ours and to endeavor to reconcile both claims… We have been and still are convinced that it must be possible to find some form or agreement between this claim and the other; for we love this land and believe in its future; and seeing that such love and faith are surely present also on the other side, a union in the common service of the land must be within the range of the possible” (quoted in Mendes-Flohr, 1994).

‘Not some sort of illuminati lizard creature’

… this being what, in Russell Brand’s view, Barrack Obama is not. But it is, in his view, how Judge Jeanine on Fox News would have us perceive him.

Russell Brand lost my vote when he ranted on about democracy in his TV discussion with Jeremy Paxman, but he’s clawed back my favour with his online TV show, The Trews, to which my kids (very grown-up kids) have alerted me.

Check out ‘Is Fox News More Dangerous Than Isis’ on YouTube. His interlocutions are brilliant. He sums up: ‘That attitude [Fox News] is more dangerous than ISIS.’

He feels a little sorry for Obama and the flak he’s receiving, and that’s where the crazy ‘not some sort of illuminati lizard creature’ comment comes in.

We need Russell Brand, as we need Jon Stewart.

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.