Category: Zen

Good ol’ cynicism

[Best to read my earlier blog, ‘Capability redefined’, before you read this one.]

Good ol’ cynicism – how to do away with it? Or at least keep it in check?

The day after five gold medals in the 2012 Olympics I remember a journalist remarking that no-one seemed cynical anymore. Or no-one dared to be. We were suddenly all positive, rejoicing, believing in each other and what we could achieve.

Now all that euphoria was likely to fade, and pretty quickly – sadly.

We’d have done well having dustbinned our cynicism to have kept it under a heavy lid. It’s a natural child of mistrust. We only trust our own perspective, our own but not other people’s motives. If we do occasionally show trust, among family or friends, or even at work,  we sure as hell don’t extend to a national level.

We gain far more by trusting than not. Trust doesn’t require that we’re innocents – we won’t find ourselves overrun by charlatans. But we will find ourselves able to have better conversations, more open-minded debates, longer-term viewpoints, make more considered decisions – and expect and even encourage politicians to change their opinions should circumstances require.

But who will stand up against cynicism? It’s more fun to be cynical – and of course much of the humour we love depends on it. And humour is big time  – and I’m not saying I don’t enjoy it. I’m sucked into cynicism as easily as the next man.

So for me as well as the next man we need a few more Olympic moments – and hold on to them a little bit longer.

 

Capability – redefined

Once upon a time in a blog I talked about capability. Capability is a right to be enjoyed by everyone, a right to have the opportunity and the means to be the best that we can be. It’s easy to see this as a personal right, with the only limitation that we shouldn’t trespass on the similar rights of others.

But how do we define ‘best’ – is it to earn the maximum possible, to have a fulfilling job, to be a successful member of society? Could be. But to that I’d add being a contributing member of society. True capability opens the door not just to opportunity but to compassion. The highest human attainments are those shared with others – from great advances in science to simple acts of kindness.

How do we create a society where we all contribute, where we all expect to contribute? Empowering local government, certainly. David Marquand suggests citizen assemblies: could that be a more constructive more local less vituperative version of TV’s Question Time, but with ordinary people the panellists? I’m not certain about the idea – but it’s the kind of thinking we need.

How can we develop, over time, a simple expectation that we – all of us – take on a contributing or caring role of some kind?

The trouble is that cynicism rules, motives are assumed to be impure, anything politicians espouse gets hammered, as did the Big Society as a concept. Maybe the Big Society deserved to be hammered: old-style Tory paternalism doesn’t go down too well. But a society in which we all engage – that would be a big society.

Pipe dreams? If we stay forever cynical, then indeed that’s the way it will be.

So, another challenge, how to do away with cynicism?

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).

The perils of intervention

Just one word this morning – intervention.

When to intervene and when not to? The right (and it’s true, not only the right) would have us intervene in Syria, as we did in Libya, but not, for America at least, in Gaza, where the intervention is already happening, and longstanding. But the USA doesn’t have proxies in other parts of the world. The reverse is true. Intervention couldn’t be by subtle diplomatic means, in the current state of things, so it would again be by bludgeon.

And when did bludgeon last work? Melanie Phillips, way off-beam as so often, describes the West as being ‘rudderless’ and ‘leaderless’, and blames Obama for no longer being prepared to defend Western interests. What are Western interests? Can we win favour by more violence? Can we import democracy into countries unwilling to accept it, and unable to define it as we do? Even Turkey – what of Turkish democracy reinterpreted by Erdogan?

What chance intervention working had it happened in Syria in 2011? Fragmentation and violence as is now the fate of Libya would have been the likely outcome. The same result as non-intervention. But that’s another story, and I wouldn’t want to oversimplify it by anything I write here.

As for intervening by way of wider sanctions in Ukraine, they have a poor history. When applied against Saddam Hussein they were riddled with holes. Against Iran in recent years they have put big pressure on the economy, and arguably had an impact. But Russia isn’t Iraq or Iran, and Putin knows it. He’s recently been, after the shooting down of MH17, in Latin America, signing deals. Likewise recently (before MH17 ) with the Chinese. The Russian economy may suffer from sanctions the West imposes but he has too many friends elsewhere for sanctions to have a chance of bringing him down, or even changing his policy.

I’m not opposed to sanctions per se, but I doubt the efficacy of further sanctions. They will polarise, drive both sides further part, they will not advance a solution.

Charles Krauthammer (National Review), in the context of Ukraine: ‘History doesn’t act autonomously. It needs agency.’ Responsible leaders, he argues, have a duty to try and shorten the time span of dictators. ‘History inevitably sees to the defeat of their [the dictators’] malign policies.’ But does it, and if it does, what replaces them? Misplaced agency is a fool’s errand. Follow Krauthammer and you’ll follow more of such errands.

Obama is playing a longer and wiser and braver game. It requires patience, and a determination to work with local people, local agencies, local parties. Think Pakistan, where we can all understand American policy toward the Pakistani Taliban, but the great majority of Pakistanis view America as the great satan. World opinion outside of the West is weighted against America. Obama is trying to readjust that balance. It will be a long game, and there are and will be shrill and foolish voices crying against it.

The appalling violence of the jihadists in northern Iraq is a mighty challenge to that policy. Stopping that violence is a necessary intervention, and it could have come sooner. But, beyond that, Obama’s aim is to work with and support the Iraqi and Kurdish goverments and military.  Reclaiming territory must be handled by local and not American forces.

Where we might intervene, and with success, is in Gaza. Intervention would be to stop violence, engineer peace, seek a two-state solution, but with Israel a proxy for the USA, what chance is there of that?

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Welcome

Welcome world, or any individual part of it that’s chanced my way, to my no-longer-quite-so-new blog, which will take a look at political life, country life, city life when there isn’t a tube strike,  and a whole lot more, and do it I hope with a critical eye, a smile, the occasional grump, and underneath and interweaved with it all the belief that this world’s a great place, and that we’re all good people, if we’d only admit it to ourselves.

And why Zen? Maybe it’s too wacky for some, too spiritual, but what I’m exploring here is how it connects to the everyday. The message of Zen is there within all the world’s religious traditions, not always mainstream, and within the humanist tradition too. It can be transformative, and I’d like to explore a little how that might be.

Zenpolitics isn’t just political. It’s about everyday life, about landscape, and whatever catches my attention.

Zen – why not Buddhism? Only because there’s an immediacy about Zen. It aims to bring you up short, to engage you – to hit you if not with a koan or haiku then at least with some kind of insight. That’s what it does for me.