Are we loyal to anything anymore?

Loyalty… initially it was all about scale. The oldest loyalties were to family and community, with feudal lords and monarchs demanding homage, military service and more, but all remained personal. God was the ultimate loyalty, felt more or less personally.

In our modern world we’ve meticulously taken out each one…

Family: from extended to nuclear to co-habitation and quick divorces.

Community: local identity undermined, as towns and cities became amorphous and suburban, and central squeezes local

Central government: the pride in and loyalty to a new-style representative government that first took root in the 16th century now undermined at every turn by a scornful and unregulated media

God: out there, in his heaven, expected to interfere to save us from natural catastrophes, rejected if he doesn’t.

 Moving on:

It’s down to us at each level to redefine our loyalties, and build on what we have and not join all those willing to tear it down, with nothing to put in its place.

As for God, he isn’t out there to judge us or for us to judge him. He’s within us, beyond any notions of self, a place equally well-known to Buddhists, where we can find compassion, and joy, if we’d only allow ourselves to explore. There is a transforming power that could work in society if we’d only let it.

We sometimes drift in this blog a little too far from zen politics. This takes us back to basics. Community isn’t just about adjustments to the way we behave to each other, fascinating though the work of behavioural economists is. It may be open to adjustments or nudges by government to help us behave better toward each other, and make our lives, our schools or communities better places. But ultimately it’s about what lies within us, and how we care about everyone, family, stranger or the furthest flung foreigner.

It’s not so difficult, but it does require we open our eyes to the possibility, and there isn’t even a semblance of that happening in ordinary secular society out there.

We’re losing that civic sense we once had, or we’ve lost it already. Now we look to elected mayors to bring a sense of identity to a city or town, as Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson have done to London. But it’s personality-based, not institutional. In the 80s civic power and identity was devolved down from the GLC to the London councils, but a reduction of funds from the centre, very limited power to raise money locally, and a government policy of taking away power and loading up responsibility has undermined local authority as well. Back in the 19^th century money poured into local government coffers and great town halls and other civic buildings graced the skyline just as churches had done in a previous age. There was a surge of confidence which led also to a resurgence of church building, picking up on that same Gothic style. God and mammon worked well together. All that confidence has gone now. If you have any new civic buildings they’re leased back, not owned.  (God is leased back too, but that’s another story.) Central government has done a pretty efficient job in arrogating power to itself, and local government has to live off a diet of criticism, never praise. Who’s fault is it that social work is in crisis – underfunded councils, who have all the time to prioritise, or central government which underfunds?

In Victorian times local councils and the new capitalism out of the industrial revolution lived side by side. Now power is either devolved down, as with education, or up, as with funding. Who would be a councillor? Think back to the great civic leaders like Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham. They’re gone forever, unless central government finds some humility and devolves down.

Central government may have thought itself as above the local funding crisis, always pointing the finger, blaming, arguing for its own financial probity, and the failings of others. But then came the credit crisis, eroding central government authority.  Then the debacle over MPs pay eroded parliament’s authority. Local government is scorned at worse, a matter of indifference at best for most of us. The Tories argue the answer to the authority vacuum is to encourage local initiatives, below local council level, and give local people power and responsibility, but much of the problem lies not with local government as such, but rather an undermining of its authority and financial base, so that it’s impossible for it to function properly. 

Once local initiatives of the kind Cameron espouses either fail to work or never get started, as they assuredly will, then it should be local authority that reasserts itself, as the necessary and logical intermediate tier. But no, as night follows day power will be clawed back by the centre. It will take courage of a kind that none of the political parties have displayed to give power and resources back to local authorities and restore a proper balance between central and local power. As for local initiatives I’m not disparaging those for a second but they will need support and they’ll need to co-ordinate, to become part of a wider structure – and that should be one tier up, local authorities, not a government department or quango.

GM has announced the death of the over-sized gas-guzzling Hummer.  I’d like to think America is en route to a new awareness that big isn’t beautiful, but there’s little sign of it. They’ve never liked big government or big finance, but as long as Wall St was an American symbol they accepted it. Now tea parties want to scupper Wall St as well as Washington, and if they get their chance they’ll get a nasty shock. Investment funds will dry up, federal subsidies disappear, and demand and imports with it will collapse.  What backwoods USA has to face up to is that it’s now part of the wider world for good or ill. Best to engage, stay in not drop out, tame the Federal tiger, avoid throwing their prosperity to the four winds. They won’t of course. They’ll still want big and best and live in their own Fox-fed cocoon. So it’s down to Washington and Wall St to find solutions. What both need is an unspectacular getting-on-with-the-business quiet period, nothing fancy, limited healthcare legislation, no more than that, let the temperature ease down, and tempers, and maybe there’ll be less polarisation, the Republicans won’t be pulled so hard in a backwoods direction, against their own better judgement, and we can all (not just the US) focus on the slow and steady, on getting balance into the US and other national economies, and balance into the world economy, not least righting the absurd trade imbalances between the West and China.  We’re all in this, not just America.

My starting-point here is David Cameron’s Big Society lecture (Hugo Young lecture, November 09) and David Willett’s article, The Spirit of Cooperation, in the March edition of Prospect. Cameron’s was an impressive lecture (though one wonders just how many speechwriters were involved)  He talks passionately of redistributing power from the state to the individual, of community involvement and action. 

‘This, then, is our new role for the state.  Galvanising, catalysing, prompting, encouraging and agitating for community engagement and social renewal. It must help families, individuals, charities and communities come together to solve problems.’

The agencies he sees as carrying this through are three: social entrepreneurs, running successful social programmes, community action, and ‘the majority of the population’. The big society demands mass engagement: a broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation.  At the heart of bringing about this engagement are social norms, ‘how other people behave’. He quotes academics who argue that with the right prompting or ‘nudge’ governments can effect a whole culture change.

David Willetts’s article explores a philosophical basis for this, highlighting the benefits of mutual cooperation, reciprocity  ‘in everyone’s self-interest’, and building and maintaining reputation.  ‘Small face-to-face groups are particularly good at generating these sorts of behaviour.’  We’re talking of reconciling freedom and opportunity with the equally important need for belonging and commitment.

We’re back with notions of a social contract based on enlightened self-interest, a bottom-up small-state approach pitched against a top-down big state. In Cameron’s Britain instead of a big state we will have a big society.  The aim has to be to design social institutions, not pass laws to change behaviour.

Family has a key role (picked up in Willetts’ new book). ‘The good news is that early experience of strong reciprocity in nuclear families seems to reinforce a belief in universal values and laws.’ Strong families care for elderly parents as well as children, and Willetts argues that ‘strengthening these inter-generational clinks can be a powerful way of rebuilding social capital too.’ Behaviour learnt within the family is replicated in wider society.

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So much of this agree with. My own experience of family life, school governing bodies, coaching cricket – and indeed working life – confirms for me the importance of community, working with not against each other, with the new being valued by the old, children by parents, staff by managers, players by coaches.

The problem is that I don’t see how Cameron’s politics are really likely to cause any significant change.  Parents setting up new schools has little to do with community action, much to do with one or two strong and opinionated individuals. Most forms of community action require strong leadership, and there are many examples of that in society as it is now. There may be more in Cameron’s Britain, or maybe not. Hearing George Osborne, on Five Live recently, trying to justify local cooperatives which might run local care units or even primary schools, was embarrassing. I fear they are ideas without substance.

I also think arguments about a broken society are deeply irresponsible, as most commentators agree. (Though, not surprisingly, the Murdoch-controlled Times.) We’ve had the press gleefully undermining the political class, and we now have the opposition arguing that our social fabric has collapsed. (Ask most people if their own corner of society is broken and they’ll say no.) From that level of disillusionment it will take a lot of ‘belonging and commitment’ to compensate, and if Willetts and Cameron are looking to a new improved family life to provide that, they will have a long wait.

Their plans for local government involve devolving down to communities, all worthy ideas, but incoherent, and requiring a change of attitude toward society that the sense of disillusionment that much of their political day-to-day, as opposed to philosophical talk, engenders, works directly against.  I don’t think the Tory rank and file have a clue about what belonging, commitment and community would involve for them. For Cameron’s immediate circle, of course they do. But Cameron knows that it’s not great society talk that will get him elected, but doing down Labour, and with ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson running his PR machine not surprisingly it’s pretty nasty.

I just don’t believe the ground-level community engine that’s needed to drive the big society is there now, or will ever be. Talk of well-designed social institutions will never get us there. Social institutions are by their nature imperfect. They need, I’m afraid, legislative force to underpin them.

One other consideration: who designs these well-designed institutions? There’s much talk, encouraged by behavioural economists and the like, of ‘nudging’ behaviour. If friends of your friends smoke you’re more likely to smoke, and vice versa. See the reference to social norms and ‘how other people behave’ above. You can see how Cameron’s recent re-conversion to tax breaks for married couples fits in. Strengthen marriage, strengthen the family and cross-generational links. Build up a sense of belonging.

Again, I can see the sense in this. But such changes are normally generated from below, by broader social influences, not by tax breaks and wise words. The press could have a major role to play, not so much by promoting community, but by cutting out the sense of social breakdown they so love to promote. Bad news always trumps good news.  As long as the press continues to play its current games I’m pessimistic about any significant social change.  We know, for example, how doubtful the hard right backers of the Telegraph and Mail are about David Cameron. They won’t give him much time before they’re sniping.

Don’t think I’m arguing here for a continuation of Blair/Brown over-manipulation of society, too much centralisation of power, intolerance of dissent, micro-management, legislation, too many directives.  I too want communities to have a greater freedom, but I don’t expect too much of them.

As I argued in an earlier blog what we need is balance, respect for institutions at all levels, be it community, local and national, and understanding that at every level there are good people, now as then, and will be. We need to encourage the empowering of local people and communities that is already happening now, but also recognise that responsible local and national government is the right way to interpret, balance and direct local aspirations.  

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To give a little more substance to my argument, let’s take Michael Gove’s much-discussed school reforms as an example. He’s proposing a major programme of new schools, and that means major changes to teaching and curriculum, new buildings, new pay and conditions for staff, and significant local disruption as other schools locally adjust to a new well-financed kid on the block.  (The jury is out of course regarding whether it’s the academy format or the additional money pumped in that really drives improved performance in academies.) Just maybe we’ll all be swept along by sense of exciting change, and we’ll not be phased by the apparent chaos around us, but I doubt it.

How long will we have to wait before these reforms bed down, and we can enjoy the brave new world of community and cooperation we’re promised? Will the reforms really be about community, or much more about committed and opinionated individuals driving change of their choice? All this talk of community: new schools are intended to provide freedom of choice, and we’re likely to find children travelling further from their local community, undermining rather than fostering the sense of community encouraged by genuinely local schools. How long will it be before government intervenes to put education back  on a more structured path?

**

Finally, at another level, while I find all Willetts’ talk of reciprocity and reputation as key drivers of social behaviour fascinating, and I like his focus on family, he like almost everyone else in politics seems to be frightened of the words ‘care’ and ‘compassion’. There’s no mention of a moral basis for society, no mention of Christian or any other morality. Have we a chance without it? I’m not certain we do.

Willetts’ social contract is based on enlightened self-interest, and that indeed has been the basis of modern political theory. But there’s also been a moral consensus underpinning developing democratic societies, and that has been the cement holding society together. These days there’s much outrage, but little sense of a wider morality. We may develop communitarian instincts within the family. But we have few external standards of reference. It’s evident from public debate and press agitation just how lost we are without those standards.

That’s why this blog is called Zenpolitics. There’s an understanding of human nature that we have instinctively and that we’re scared to own up to in private life, let alone public life.  If I’d called this Jesuspolitics I’d have even fewer readers than I have now. Zen at least is cool. But the message of both is similar – how  damaging the pursuit of our own self-interest can be, how much we benefit by putting others ahead of ourselves.

I’m a realist. A moral world won’t happen, nor should it, given the way morality can be twisted, though I’d like at least to see a sense of compassion much more firmly rooted in our society. How that can be achieved is another subject, only touched on here. But without it the new big society communitarian utopia just hasn’t got a chance.

First, a bit of background. It’s an issue relating to the USA, but with implications for the UK longer term. The issue is discounting, book discounting, changing the perception of what e-books and books are  worth.

Take dear old Tesco as a starting-point. Selling broccoli, not books. Selling broccoli as a loss reader damages the grower if he finds grower prices squeezed, but in time Tesco will move on to another product.  Amazon over in the USA, looking to build brand and sales for the Kindle e-reader (still not fully available in the UK), have a policy of discounting e-book prices ($9.95 max for bestsellers) which is intended for the long term, an attempt to establish a different price expectation for books among its audience, from which some serious implications follow.

It’s part of that wider argument about ‘free’, a world where content is offloaded on to the internet , with little or no money exchanging hands and no attempt to discriminate regarding the quality or value of the content.

There’s a test case at the moment. Amazon are at odds with US publisher Macmillan over Macmillan’s insistence on a $12.99 or $14.99 cover price for e-books, as opposed to Amazon’s loss-leading $9.99. Amazon’s immediate  response (from which it has now relented) was to withdraw all Macmillan e-books, and books, from the Amazon site. Amazon ended a letter to customers explaining why Macmillan books were not available as follows:  ‘Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy! Thank you for being a customer.’ 

Now, tell me, why on earth should Amazon be on a mission? They imagine themselves, arrogating powers to themselves that no distributor should enjoy, as providing a direct link from author to publisher, downgrading the traditional selection and editorial functions, which have ensured the quality of books since the time of Gutenberg. If you assume the publisher as intermediary adds little by way of value, then indeed you can justify a price of $9.99. Because Amazon is selling books as loss leaders, below cost, the publisher still in the short term is making money, because his percentage is based on a notional higher retail price. But in the longer term a new lower price point will be established for books, which publishers won’t be able to budge. That clearly is Amazon’s aim, and a consequence also of Walmart’s discounting books at similar levels through its stores. 

The consequence: whether or not there’s an argument for the continuation of the publisher’s middleman role there won’t be enough money out of each transaction to support that role, and publishers as we know them will struggle to survive. What will we be left with? Authors scrabbling to get noticed, good and bad and mediocre pitched in against each other, with those shouting loudest getting the most attention. A few discerning blogs will probably pick up on good writing, but it will be by chance, because there will be no structure to ensure that it is the good writing that gets noticed. 

The recent Digital Book World conference began with a speech by Shiv Singh, ‘Global Social Media Lead for Razorfish’. Shiv thinks in terms of brands and social networks and authors linking directly with their public. To quote from his PowerPoint presentation: ‘They [authors] don’t need you [publishers] as much as they once did. Why? – They can connect to readers directly and build their own brands…’ 

Indeed, many authors now have their own websites and encourage reader responses, which they in turn respond to. Sounds good? No, it’s a pretty worrying scenario. Do we want authors who write what they think their readers want to read? There are a few internet savvy authors like Cory Doctorow who know how to play the internet, but that shouldn’t be a pre-requisite of an author. Good writers write because they have something to communicate, not to build a brand or reputation. No harm in a reputation, but it should be based on quality and integrity, not in an easy pleasing of the public.

What we’re talking about is a steady reduction of book content down to the level of the web: good, bad, ugly, mediocre all indiscriminately mixed in. Even if we imagine a few taste arbiters setting themselves up, and somehow managing to recognise quality in the mass of material out there, they can’t have an editorial role. Books will appear as raw, as unedited, as unverified, as shoddy as a typical blog. If culture is media then this doesn’t matter much. (And there’s a place for this kind of mass-market culture.) But if culture is what we aspire to, what educates and inspires us, allows us to fulfil ourselves as human beings, then it does matter, hugely.

One plus out of all this. Publishers will need to justify themselves, sharpen up, put their case, pare back the intellectual arrogance. Good writing, the pursuit of knowledge, knowledge itself are often seen as the perquisite of the few, and they don’t need to be. But nor should they be reduced to a lowest common denominator level as an easy way to a large audience. Leave that role to the internet, to blogs and posts and websites all clamouring for Google notice, and doing it very well. Books need to stand apart, and publishers to resist Amazon’s blandishments.

All power to Macmillan. Happily I hear today that Rupert Murdoch has also come out against Amazon’s pricing. No action yet from his publishing company, HarperCollins, but maybe that will come.

There’s much talk currently, heightened by the victory of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts, of big government. The state’s share of  UK GDP is now 52%, the result of public investment, bail-outs and stimulus packages. Demographic changes are pushing up welfare and pensions. Along with taxation quangos multiply, as does regulation… 

How to respond? The Economist backs its prejudice in favour of a smaller state, and suggests it could be achieved by a 10% cut in public sector pay, and cuts in public sector pensions… We’ve had task forces looking at better regulation, and war is promised on quangos.

But there’s something else much deeper, much more visceral out there, by comparison with which the Economist’s relatively pragmatic approach is feeble. Take the Tea Party movement in the USA. According to its website it espouses a mission ‘to attract, educate, organize, and mobilize our fellow citizens to secure public policy consistent with our three core values of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free markets’.

I’ll give this my own interpretation. Fiscal responsibility: yes to current entitlements, Medicare and Medicaid, agricultural subsidies, no to extending health care and stimulus packages … Constitutionally limited government: no to anything that boosts the Federal budget, and yes to protectionist measures. Free markets: a throwback to pre-globalisation days, when America exported and didn’t import…

Is this where our own new Right is headed ? In the UK that instinct to devolve power can’t have the same focus, in the absence of states, constitution, founding fathers, tea parties. We’ve no Main Street pitching in against Wall Street and stimulus packages.  But limiting government is the mood of the moment,  devolving power to parents and classroom teachers, disillusionment with Westminster politicians and arguments for reform, referenda and local empowerment, more reliance on patient pressure and less on top-down targets for keeping the NHS in order.

There’s also a more marked producerist focus: producers are sanctified as adding value to the economy, as opposed to unproductive elites, in our time notably bankers, on the one hand, and the likes of the unemployed and benefit claimants on the other.  It doesn’t show itself here with the same virulence as the USA – but is it where we’re headed?

As for free markets, we could be more radical: act (with the USA and Europe) against all those cheap goods we love to buy from China, and reduce the massive levels of Chinese investment and indebtedness to sovereign wealth funds. Leave industry to take care of climate change (it probably won’t bother).  Exit the EU, hunker down, and soldier on alone, with all sorts of specifically negotiated deals and treaties which the rest of the world would be only too happy to enter into with us.

We had the MPs’ expenses scandal, America has had the health care debate – crystallising anti-opinion, making the process of government more difficult. America has just had its Scott Brown moment. What awaits us, I wonder?

If one takes the Tories’ education policy to its logical conclusion, as one must, The Spectator (13 January, one Dennis Sewell), makes a useful read. We have reason to be worried.

The ‘bloated educational establishment’ is characterised as the Blob, previously a 1950s film and a term applied to the 1980s US educational system by Reagan’s education secretary. Comprising our own UK Blob are Whitehall diktats, Every Child Matters, safeguarding guidelines, the National College of School Leadership, the NUT, all lumped together indiscriminately.

We then switch to the ‘bitter’ dispute over how much emphasis is giving to imparting knowledge and how much to developing pupil competencies.  Take History:  a class these days may have little idea whether Charles II comes before or after the Roundheads.

Michael Gove is praised for wanting to deepen knowledge and to strip out the ‘fatuous enunciation of high-sounding but empty goals’ from the National Curriculum.

Back to the Blob … now attacked for supporting a social purpose for schools which provides unquestioning support for equality, diversity and, chucked in for good measure, anthropogenic global warming.

Some things to agree with here (too many initiatives, overly prescriptive curriculum, over-emphasis on skills as opposed to knowledge). But it’s not just content but the structure itself that’s being attacked, the idea being that a new structure will somehow of itself transform content.

Once the Blob is punctured, what will we get instead? 

–          Schools independent of the government and local council funding ‘on which it gorges itself’

–          Schools run on the Swedish model, by not-for-profit and community groups,  funded by a capitation fee

–          Power moved away from bureaucrats and the quangocracy to parents and ordinary class teachers (something viscerally anti-authority here)

–          Schools buying into services, such as playing fields, swimming pools …

In sum, a characterisation which is pretty nasty in its language (there’s a lot of that in the Spectator – why do they hate so much?), has some truth at the heart of it, but (ruinously) an obsession with supposed institutional failure, leading to unquestioning support for that dotty fuzzy-headed Swedish model who shows up in every document these days.

What strikes me is how utterly inadequate the solution is to the problem. Schools, teachers, pupils, parents need structure, certainty and ordinary common sense. They don’t want schools closing and starting up, interest groups given free rein, uncertainty over services, no possibility of institutions to which you can show loyalty or with traditions in which you can take pride. If they do, I’d like to meet them.

There’s another saner solution we don’t hear about, from dirigiste Labour or dotty Govean Tories, is one that involves thinning out the bureaucracy, cutting back on directives, devolving power, but keeping the same core structure. Reforming local government to ensure that it doesn’t dictate to schools but does provide services and support where they’re needed, and link up with social services and the community in a coherent fashion. This I admit is a seriously boring solution. It needs radical thinking, shaking out old ideas of which I’m tired as much as Govean right, a clear strategy and long view, great determination – and a sense of realism.

To achieve what they want there will of course need to be a huge amount of central direction (always hard to stop once you’ve started, but let’s assume they do in time back off), ultimately replaced by a wonderful, self-regulating system – the like of which has never been seen in this or any land.

And never will be. Just what do they imagine the end product of their policy will be – other than anarchy?

Returning to the subject of an earlier blog from last November… There must be more to Professor Nutt (sacked last November as head of the government’s Drug Advisory Council) than meets the eye, or finds its way on to radio or page.  He had in his recent spat with Alan Johnson the support of Colin Blakemore, one-time head of the Science Research Council.  How, I ask myself, can two such eminent men be so wide of the mark?  

Professor Nutt has now launched his new independent advisory panel on drugs. His interview on Five Live on Friday (15th January) evening showed how curiously out of touch with reality he is. In response to a call from someone running a unit for mental health patients, every one of whom had a link with previous cannabis use, he simply denied there was any scientific proof. The explanation seems to lie in different definitions of what harm entails. Alcohol causes more deaths than cannabis and LSD and ecstasy no doubt. But most of us don’t use death as the main criterion. We use impairment of mental faculties, anxiety, distress, inability to live an ordinary family or working life. There is also a wide spectrum of impairment, from minor difficulties to psychosis. The lack on the one hand of any awareness (he never speaks of it) of mental impairment together with the absence of any subtlety in his analysis is what is so worrying. 

Reversibility is another criterion I’d like to see discussed. Drying out at the Priory is one thing, tough as hell I’m sure, but alcoholism is an addiction and can be reversed if the will is there. For cannabis, whether or not it is addictive is not the issue. Rather it’s the connection with mental illness, which is so often irreversible.   

The irony for Prof Nutt is that his only supporter among the few who phoned in on Friday night was a regular user of cannabis these last twenty years. He hadn’t suffered, he said, apart from some impact on his sleep patterns… 

What this shows up is the danger of talking of ‘the science’ as explanation and justification of all things. So much depends on the criteria you use, what you include and exclude. Nutt excludes or downgrades a wide range of impacts in his analysis. He over-emphasises one impact, that of death, and is happy it seems to allow the press to pick up the misleading message it presents.  Nutt would of course dispute that he’s manipulating evidence, but that to my mind, and that of many others, is what he’s doing.

Blakemore, pre-eminent as a neuro-scientist, Nutt with pretensions to similar eminence, it seems to me have an overly mechanistic approach to the brain and to the mind,  and don’t have the understanding of the nature, subtleties and extremes of mental illness. It just can’t be calibrated or indeed dismissed as they would wish.

I’m not writing here with any great sense of certainty. But Nutt’s arguments fail to tie in with the experience of so many of us, and I’m trying to understand why that might be.

Commentary, Chris Collier, 12 Jan10 

Simon Schama makes a point of beginning his programme in Korea, not Vietnam, and with another post-war president, Harry Truman. But Truman took over at the end of a victorious war, where no-one back home doubted the rights and wrongs. Not so Afghanistan.

Truman then found himself facing a new foe, a predictable foe, in Russia, and the Berlin Blocade and the Cold War ensued. But few predicted his second foe, Korea, backed by Communist China. Just what unknowns, beyond Afghanistan, that we don’t know, in Rumsfeld-speak, might lie in wait for Obama?

Truman chose containment not aggression (Macarthur, who he sacked, would have risked all) in the Korean War, pushing forward the frontiers of freedom as far as they would reasonably go, given the millions-strong Communist forces on the other side of the 38th parallel, but going no further. Yet 37,000 Americans still died in Korea before the 1953 armistice. This is the war from which Schama wants Obama to draw lessons, not the ignominy of Vietnam.

Can, as Schama argues, Obama bring back that mixture of idealism and realism that Harry Truman showed, can he bring clarity and coherence where Bush and his cabinet had been mired down by puzzle and confusion as their war turned against them, bring to bear the lessons and legacy of Korea, not the mistakes of Vietnam and Iraq? Can he also restore confidence and trust in America, something that in 1945 the free world took for granted, but post Iraq especially, no more?  

Freedom, as Truman said, is not free. It has to be fought for. But it is also indivisible. Schama remarked on all the burgers and nuggets and cappuccinos on sale on the streets of Seoul, and we all of us saw the bright lights and the sameness now evident in Seoul and so many world cities – but we also sensed there what Schama sensed, that there was a buzz, something positive, a sense of freedom in action. Freedom indivisible. Other peoples may not want to enjoy quite the Westernised freedom of Seoul, but they also want no truck with tyranny.

No wonder Obama took so long before deciding on a troop surge in Afghanistan.  Who knows what could flow for Obama and America from failure?

There’s endless talk of change in teaching, in learning, in the curriculum.. But there’s the beginnings of something else out there, which just might have a significant impact if it became embedded. Judge for yourself if there’s the remotest chance… 

Tonbridge School (others plan to follow) has introduced meditation classes, focusing on mindfulness, with perceived benefits in terms of concentration skills and combating anxiety. Living in the moment, avoiding past regrets and future worries, is a hard lesson to explain philosophically to a 15-year-old but if you learn to slow down through meditating then it does begin to relate to actual experience. 

Above all, slowing down is about silence. Not the shouted silence that gives the teacher control, but the inner silence where you’re in control.  You cannot continue to shout and demand and insist and posture while engaging in silence. 

Thinking of Old Tonbridgeans. The cricketer, Colin Cowdrey, was one, and his languid demeanour suggests that maybe meditation comes naturally to the school. Alasteir Crowley famous as a mountaineer, occultist and sexual revolutionary suggests the opposite. EM Forster, another old boy, had it spot on – ‘only connect’. 

There’s an important distinction to be made. It’s less meditation, that being a technique, and more mindfulness that’s really being pioneered here. Mindfulness is about being aware of yourself in the moment, no before or after, being receptive, not aggressive, carrying no baggage in, and no baggage out.  

Mindfulness gives perspective, takes emotion out of the moment, and that means taking out aggression, fear, anxiety, hatred, all those emotions that feed on themselves. What’s left intact is a sense of the world as it is, where’s there’s no negative charge, no knots, no warped views or false perspectives. 

Schoolboys will no doubt be just like the rest of us. We come out of the mindful moment and we’re back, racing like rats, shouting, over-emoting, switching in one endlessly unmindful moment after another from one obsession to the next. But once we know mindfulness we can build on it, and that’s hopefully what the boys at Tonbridge, and other schools that try it out, will find. It’s not about undermining ambition or a sense of mission, or negating a desire to achieve for yourself or improve the world. But it does give you a place to return to at any moment, a sense of when you’re out of control, and how to deal with it, and an awareness of how to avoid following others, to stay out of the fray, when they lose control. 

Kids these days are taught so much about the environment, and most come out of school believing in its preservation. They’re taught citizenship as well, but many show little regard for it outside school. Both though get shunted aside as we make our way in the world. Will mindfulness be the same? Probably yes. But it’s worth a try, and if it only takes a small percentage of the strain and stress out of life then it’s worth it – helping a few to real understanding, and allowing that understanding to benefit others by example, seeding in a small way a better future.