Category: Politics

The pilgrim and the refugee

Four weeks walking on the Camino, from Logrono to Santiago in northern Spain. (I walked from St Jean Pied de Port to Logrono back in June.) An average of seventeen miles a day, across high plains and mountains, rain and shine, legendary cities such as Burgos and Leon, and villages just hanging on in the modern world. Hard on the feet. But I had a path to follow which others before me had followed for 1200 years, and I had a fabled destination, and I could remind myself that the journey was as much the destination as Santiago itself. And there were new friends to make along the way.

Others have been walking longer distances this summer and autumn, with only a vague destination, somewhere north, maybe Germany, a path with no history (following a route usually taken by road, not on foot), where the destination is everything, and the mode of transport a cruel and hard footslog. Whereas on the Camino you’re welcomed by so many, and you’re a little bit of a hero when you arrive in Santiago, on this other journey there’s often hostility, and while for many there’s been a welcome at the end there’s always been the likelihood that borders will be slammed shut.

If you’re walking the Camino you’ve a home to return to, and maybe a minor hero’s welcome there as well. On the other journey, there’s no home to return to. At best it was a camp, and squalor, and at worst home has been destroyed, and family and friends may have been killed.

On the Camino you can absorb the history of 1200 years, you’re following in the footsteps of countless other pilgrims, there’s a physical challenge to drive you along, and an uplift of spirit and a closeness to creation, and to God if we will, as we walk, and St James, Santiago, to welcome us at the cathedral’s Portico de Gloria when we arrive.

For walkers further east, they’re travelling up through the Balkans to find fences at borders and stations closed, and motorways open so that you can exit a country more quickly – on foot. There is no triumph of the spirit (though there is a triumph of the will), and God’s creation in the heat and the rain is hardly benign.

So little in common between the two paths, the two caminos. The one born of personal challenge, the other of desperation. But the comparison is important, and telling.

We Camino walkers need to remember our good fortune.

But there’s one thing the two journeys do have in common. Refugees heading north across Eastern Europe may meet all sorts of hostility, but they’ve also been met with love and warm welcomes by so many, especially in Germany. We’ve seen a triumph of the human spirit, of all that’s best in us. There’s no better way of demonstrating compassion one for another than finding someone a home.

The refugee issue is the hardest issue of our times, reflecting current crises and long-term population issues. But our starting-point at all times has to be compassion. Political solutions are for the medium and longer term. For now, if we lose sight of compassion we lose sight of our basic humanity.

All the news I haven’t heard….

Returning from walking the Camino, and returning to the world of 24-hour news, which I’ve avoided for four weeks, I’m struck by the intensity, the ranting, that accompanies  so much political discourse. That’s hardly surprising. One reason for being away so long was to point up that contrast between the every day, as we experience it, and the ordinary day – the day that we might enjoy if only we learnt to stand still awhile, take in the dawn and the passage of the sun and the clouds across the sky, to take in a deep breath, and keep breathing.

The ordinary  day as I describe it would for many be an extraordinary day. ‘Life isn’t like that.’ But it is the real life of all history. It is we who are fooled.

I’ve long experience of working with children and schools, as a parent, a school governor and, a little while back (and hugely enjoyably) as a cricket coach. Positive messages, focus on opportunity, on working together, on compassion for others and understanding of our natural environment, that’s what we try and inculcate, along with the hard facts and great ideas and practical skills….

And yet beyond the school gate there’s the TV news and the newspapers, ranting, focusing on personalities and often irrelevant detail, resorting to preconceptions and prejudice at the earliest opportunity. If school is about the getting of wisdom, everyday life for kids is an all-too-rapid getting of unwisdom. As parents, the press and people everyday are perceived to behave – so the world tells them should they, our children, and there’s little that the finest teacher can do about what happens beyond the school gate.

(I’m not overlooking all the negative impacts of politically-driven expectations on schools, children and teachers. But schools remain remarkable places, and teachers, so many of them, no less remarkable.)

Walking the Camino I’m aware how many young people have held on to that wisdom of childhood, and built on it. I walk with optimism. Returning, I’m reminded of realities.

But I’ve not lost my optimism. This blog isn’t will never be a tabloid-style retreat and rant against the world. It is about engagement and purpose, focusing on the simple things, and doing them well.

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.

Jeremy Corbin – the future?

Enough now to say that I supported Michael Foot 35 years ago, and realised my mistake.

I love the idea of Jeremy Corbin. The socialist, the rebel, supporter of the disadvantaged and the outsider, a rallying-point for opponents of austerity. But his solutions of another time, not least nationalisation, soft on Europe, careless in his national (certain trade union leaders) and international friends (for example, Hugo Chavez) – to be of the left is a sufficient credential. He’s rowing back toward the centre now that the leadership is within his grasp. How he copes if elected, how much he accommodates, how, come the Labour Party conference, he copes as the new leader – that will all be telling.

Debate, passion, moral purpose – they are all there in the Labour leadership debate. And a remarkable level of sanity and even camaraderie in the face of big differences of point of view.

What there will need to be if Corbin is leader is a hard realism as well as the passion. History is littered with unintended consequences. Without that hard realism Labour will fragment and we will be left without an effective opposition. No longer do we have the LibDems holding the Tories in check. Labour could easily – I fear probably will – score a spectacular own goal.

By the rivers of Babylon

The second day of September, the rain has relented, it’s 7am and the sun is shining, and down by the Thames the Canada geese have gathered, and I have as usual to navigate my way around both them and their droppings. The perils of running.

All so peaceful, though I can hear a gentle sloshing from the river if I stop beneath the big sycamore, and listen.

I run back into traffic, and a little bit of civilisation, although schools are still not back, and the roads still have a hangover August holiday calm.

I think of Sangatte, and the migrant crisis further afield in Europe as I head back home. Good fortune hardly describes my situation. We rejoiced so much in the Arab Spring, and it’s turned out to be the last and terrible throw of the neo-con mentality, where we assume that our western democratic ways are somehow inevitable, that history is pre-determined. I trust we will never think or feel or argue that way again.  It may be the highest aspiration of mankind, but the wholly unnecessary and unpredicted fate of Syria, visited on Aleppo, on Homs, on Palmyra, and the open channels for migrants through Libya, remind us that we meddle at our peril. We may affect to dislike the el-Sisi regime in Egypt, but we know it will serve a purpose in the end. Syria was on a slow irregular and tortured path before 2011, but it was stable, and the old country survived alongside the new middle classes in the cities.

I will read again William Dalrymple’s description of traveling through Syria in From My Holy Mountain. The image of a building shared as a place of worship by Christian and Muslim communities stays in my mind. And there was Palmyra to visit, a place of wonder.

Sometimes I run quietly and enjoy the silence and, God willing, the sunshine. On other days the thoughts come flooding in.

Palmyra

All I can do here is mark the attempt to destroy temples at Palmyra, and remember how others burnt the library at Alexandria and destroyed the Buddhist library and university at Lalanda, in the 13th century AD. Lalanda it seems was lost almost through inadvertence, simply not understanding what you destroy. Did the Turks mean to destroy Smyrna so totally in 1922?

Destroying Palmyra is about the destruction of heritage and culture, at the highest level that makes us human. And it’s intentional destruction. That’s what sets it apart. Brute invaders wantonly destroying had little understanding of what they destroyed, Here we have something different: history seen as a perversion and a visible sign of a debased humanity. Calculated and willed destruction. Whereas we see Palmyra as its highest expression.

There’s an Islamic notion of paradise intertwined with all this destruction. IS would do well to read Dante, and the different levels of hell he matched to the levels of the misdeeds of their earthbound perpetrators. Or to reflect of the notion of karma, reaping what you sow.

But we are of course In a different world, where different and crueler criteria apply.

I have no solutions, and I’m not writing this in anger, though I have felt fury. I’m writing this simply to mark the threat to Palmyra and to record my own sense of how much it matters.

In a country of so much human suffering should we care, and does it matter? And, yes, of course, it does.

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.”

Putting other people first

We engage at a community level less and less, and yet community, working more with, and for, others, with less focus for ourselves, could be where our futures lie.

Could be, or rather, should be?

Community… how to set up the structures to make it possible, to make it work? It exists already of course in countless ways, from pro bono roles such as magistrate and school governor, to charity work, to simple acts of kindness to neighbours. But it’s not embedded.

And do we build community within the existing system, a more mature capitalism, or do we look to national economies based, for example, on cooperatives?

In the former case, the system is still predicated on expansion. In the latter, it’s about worker engagement and it’s non-profit, and economies would exist in a vibrant steady state. Our skills and imagination would be focused less on milking profit out of products old and new, more on maximising community benefit. We’d engage in a different kind of globalization, where we seek to advantage everyone by advantaging ourselves, and spreading the word, and we’d trust other countries to reciprocate.

Steve Hilton, former adviser to David Cameron, argues powerfully for a world in which people comes first. Matthew Taylor in a RSA Journal interview asks him about the political realities – hostile press, public accountability, building coalitions of support – simply getting from A-Z when you have to get from B to Y first. On schools Hilton argues that a simple structural change will set the ball rolling – let school operators make a profit, and let alternative and progressive forms of education flourish at the grass roots. (In some ways I love this. Profit? Surely no-one should profit? But we won’t get innovation from a state-funded system.) Setting up formal arrangements whereby cooperatives supply goods and services to local hospitals would be another example, as has happened in the USA (quoted by Gar Alperovitz, also in the RSA Journal…).

And as Alperovitz also argues, if community-based structures are to succeed, we all have to work less. Co-operatives could become the norm in working life, but many activities are pro bono, charitable, running clubs or teams, simple acts of kindness. We need time, and we need energy, more than we have than when, returning home after a long day and commute, we collapse in front of the TV.

Now TV of course endlessly reinforces the status quo. But that’s another story.

Capitalism or community – or both?

Capitalism versus community, profit or cooperative enterprise? Are we suffering no more than a banker-driven crisis in the only system which really drives human achievement and human welfare? Or we have something of an entirely different order – a terminal crisis in a system which is busted?

I’ve enjoyed dipping into Russell Brand’s Revolution, not least because much of the time I’m rooting for him. But how do we get to utopia? We’ve failed throughout human history. Why should we think we can do better now? Are the internet and social media, one kind of community, the answer? Or local community activity, from running libraries to big cooperatives?

John Plender in his book Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets argues that capitalism will muddle through. It may be the worst from of economic management – save for all the other forms that have been tried down the years.

Advocacy for radical solutions beyond either capitalism or indeed state socialism is part of the answer. Likewise advocating a more caring and socially responsive capitalism, with outputs more (radically more) equitably shared between the 1% or indeed the 10% elite and the mass of working people. We need both, side by side, with all the argument and even the vituperation that goes with it.

Yes, we need both.

And crucially we need to operate within not outside the system we have. That’s where Brand and other utopians fall short. It’s also where Jeremy Corbin is so out of line. If we spurn the system – think we can, for example, renationalise and still compete – then the system will beat us, and greed not compassion will infuse itself deeper into our political system.

Be a utopian – and a realist. Follow your heart, and use your head. Vote for what you believe in (above all VOTE!), but don’t set yourself up to be a loser. There are too many out there, I first encountered them when I was FOC of an NUJ chapel back in the early 70s, and they’re still gaining new recruits – born to be outsiders, grumbling about the way the world has left them behind.

Strivers versus scroungers

On the domestic front there’s the ‘strivers versus scroungers’ polarity. I see the Economist has now used it – I hope as a one-off, not to be repeated – in an article on the American education system. It’s become embedded in daily discourse. I’m all for strivers, but scroungers is a dreadful term, used cheaply to vilify anyone who is on benefits, as if they existed to exploit the state – a state which should be mean and lean.

We’re back with notions of the deserving and undeserving poor.

As someone who’s been unemployed, and been through various crises in his life, and won through in the end by a mix of determination and good fortune, I’m well aware of how long and difficult the path can seem when you’re down. What you need is a push – benefits are not a God-given right, the safety-net is no place for a permanent home, and also a pull, a society that is minded, instinctively minded, to help, to allow you, when you’re down, to feed yourself and family, to keep family together, not to lose hope in dark times. And to give you the encouragement and the opportunity to climb out.

If we cut benefits we must give more back in terms of what we offer to the unemployed, the low-paid and especially the disabled. This can’t be a promise for the future. It has to be now. A moral state (an interesting concept in itself) has no right to cut benefits unless it can give more to those who, usually through no fault of their own, have fallen by the wayside.

How we do that is a mighty question. For now I’m simply making the point that if we take away we must also give back. It is too convenient to justify taking away by stigmatising.

Mrs Thatcher I believe saw individual freedom as more central to the Christian message even than love. Back in the 1980s as PM she invited the bishops to Chequers and lectured them on the subject. I sympathise: a powerful sense of freedom to achieve and fulfil ourselves is key to a well-lived and happy and Christian life. But so too are love and compassion.

Freedom versus love is another crazy false polarity. Christians and Buddhists (and I hope atheists) will always be on the side of love and loving-kindness. It is by showing love that you find yourself. And that also means loving yourself.

Back to my earlier blog – you stand on two mountain tops – self and other.