Christmas Eve – the other story

Christmas is a time for charity – but that doesn’t seem to go far when we think of all the violence in the world.

It’s been a year of refugees and displacement.

I listened to Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom earlier today and the words won’t leave me. (I’m only quoting here, not providing the full lyric.) The second line I’ve quoted remembers refugees. How could we, remembering the crisis at the end of World War II, have allowed it to happen again?

….Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight/ Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight/ An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night …. /

….Tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute / For the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute/ For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an’ cheated by pursuit …. 

…..Tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed/ For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse / An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe

An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

There’s an editorial in the Christmas edition of The Week which argues that ‘people … aren’t that nice’, that Scrooge had a point. If we’re to like others, better they think as we do. Best just to come to terms with the fact, and get on with life.

That sounds all very reasonable, better not to seek the unattainable, we’ll do better if we understand our deficiencies.

But it’s precisely what we have to get beyond.

Compassion isn’t somehow a compromise with our selfish side, something which we engage in out of conscience and a mite reluctantly and find to our surprise that it’s quite rewarding. Compassion is where our true nature shows itself, and the rewards are immeasurable. Peace of mind, yes, but not peace because we seek it, but because it goes with the territory of caring for others. It’s the Buddhist message – our ‘original face’, and the Christian message – more than a pre-lapsarian state of grace, Adam and Eve in the garden – something that’s alive in the heart. And it’s the humanist message too, when we get beyond self.

Leonard Cohen sketches a wonderful, haggard and mournful face in his ‘Book of Longing’, literally sketches, and captions the sketch ‘a private gaze’, followed by the words

‘even though he was built to see the world this way, he was also built to disregard, to be free of the way he was built to see the world.’

I like that. We don’t have to resign ourselves to a selfish human nature. We are built to disregard. Dylan reminds us of a few of the million ways the world malfunctions. And we can do something about it.

Christmas Eve – and the peace of God 

It’s 5 o’clock and the service from King’s, Cambridge has finished. Outside the wind has dropped and the sky cleared, and over the park there’s a full moon, still low, but it will rise high tonight, amid the winter stars. Not ‘amid the winter snow’, although it’s Christmas Eve. Flood not snow is this winter’s story. But if the air stays still and the sky clear there there’ll be a dew which will rest  heavy on the grass, and the fields and the park will shine silver – and we’ll imagine the shepherds and the snow. 

Keep a distance away from the nightclubs and pubs which insist on opening on Christmas Eve and there will be peace over the land, so peaceful that a single bell will carry a mile, and if the dew gathers and drops from a nearby tree maybe we’ll hear that too. We don’t need heavenly choirs, we need silence – and we’re back in a stable 2000 years ago, and witness an event that has been celebrated by every age and generation since.

There will be bright stars tonight, and maybe Sirius rising will pass for a star in east. The stars in the southern sky on a winter’s night would confuse the wisest of men.

More than bright stars…by mid-evening high cloud lies across the moon, ice crystals in the upper atmosphere – where the angels might have been – scatter the moonlight to create a luminous halo.

I’d like to think this signifies, but if it does – only God knows!

A star over a stable …. no mention in the bible of a full moon. This was the humblest and lowliest of births, and would have been one of the quietest, had not the heavenly host (a little bit noisy?) appeared to the shepherds. 

Jesus came not in glory but as an outcast. 

Shout his glory from the rooftops if you will, but not tonight.

Argument and counter-argument – the beauty of debate

I seem to be quoting the Daily Telegraph a lot recently, which is worrying.

I was once a Guardian reader, disgruntled long ago, really from the moment the paper moved south and lost its link to the Manchester liberal tradition. I am of course from Manchester, and biased.

One friend from my college days has me down as some kind of Trotskyite, and I’m loathe to disillusion him, as it’s good for my ego, though I could do without the ice axe.

Where do I stand? If you’ve read other posts of mine you’ll know that I’m an arch-parliamentarian. And who or what is that?  (Not a latter-day Civil War Puritan!)

Michael Sandel in ‘What Money Can’t Buy’ refers to ‘the parlous state of public discourse’, with particular reference to the USA, but it also to a lesser degree applies here in the UK. Thinking of Congress ‘it’s hard (Sandel argues) to imagine a reasoned public debate about such controversial moral questions as the right way to value procreation, children, education, health, the environment, citizenship, and other goods’. 

Thankfully we haven’t got that far, and parliament can still be a place for serious debate.

But outside of parliament, opinions can be dismissive, personalised, and especially on social media, downright nasty. ‘Some,’ to quote Sandel, ‘see in our politics a surfeit of moral conviction.’ People believe too deeply. Sandel, and I’m with him on this, takes a different view: ‘The problem with our politics is not too much moral argument, but too little.’

We’re used to big opinions but we’re frightened of any debate about moral issues and even more so spiritual issues, and when we do have them, as the BBC does on Sunday mornings, the debate is boxed in and artificial – as if moral issues need a forum, and can’t simply be part of everyday discourse.

Moral debate goes hand in hand with measured debate. Moral positions convince no-one if they’re asserted. Listening to the other side, argument and counter-argument, avoiding posturing, keeping open minds….

I mentioned mind-maps in an earlier blog, where arguments are laid out in a form where we can begin to make judgements. Where there are moral issues involved, discussing welfare issues, for example, we need them addressed, not skimped, a degree of balance, different viewpoints.  We’re living in time when economic arguments, masquerading as moral, trump moral too often.

Not too much to ask, but it doesn’t always make for good viewing. TV and media assume that what we want is a good scrap, and sometimes we do. But we also want to be well-informed, on facts and opinions – the two kept separate. 

Parliament can be and needs to be a model for such debate. It has a history as a great debating chamber, probably the greatest of all.

It can also be a bear-pit – and that makes for a good mix.

 

 

 

2015 and 1968

In the wake of last month’s massacre in Paris, and the Charlie Hebdo shooting earlier this year, there’s good evidence that the new millennial generation in France has found a powerful voice. Scroll down for extracts from Lucy Wadham’s article in Prospect.

What intrigues me – more than intrigues – is how their experience, their voice, marries up with the new generation in England, supporters many of them of Jeremy Corbin, but with few links to the old Left with which he’s strongly connected.

Almost fifty years ago, in the middle of the Cold War, with the possibility of nuclear annihilation still very real, the Vietnam War building rapidly to become a defining issue, I was part of a new generation with a similar sense of crisis in the world, and we were then as now looking for solutions, finding hope in crisis. Though nothing as immediate as the Bataclan massacre.

How, I wonder, do the two generations compare? Not just France and England, Paris and London, but 2015 and 1968? Can the relative failure of our hopes back then provide any pointers for the current generation? How can their hopes be turned into reality? (I say ‘relative failure’. In many ways the world hasn’t done too badly. We’re still here, and arguing, but the old problems of enmity and disadvantage have been cast in new forms, and we have a new threat to the planet in the form of climate change.)

As a powerful contribution to the argument I’d  like to quote from an eloquent and impassioned article by Paris resident, Lucy Wadham, in the current edition of Prospect. For the full article see:  http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/pariss-bataclan-generation-this-is-our-struggle-not-yours

*

She quotes her son, Jack, describing Saturday evening, the day after the attacks of 13th November, in the Place de la République:

“It felt as if the whole world was there, present and in harmony, wondering what to build and how to connect… The calm, the particularly gentle energy, was indescribable. I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

She continues: ‘This was the kind of phenomenon Jeremy Rifkin, the American social theorist and one of the great gurus of Jack’s generation, had written about in his book The Empathic Civilization. Jack had believed in, but never before experienced, this kind of empathy: “Our fear of each other,” he concluded, “and of death, felt completely surpassed, annihilated.”’

She quotes Pierre Servent, author and a colonel in the Army Reserve:

“I have confidence in this generation,” he said. “They don’t have the anti-militarist prejudices of the old French left… They’re hip, open, international, collaborative, but they’re not weighed down by the post-colonial guilt that has prevented such a large portion of my own generation from seeing the growing threat that is salafi-jihadism.”

She also quotes Le Monde asserting earlier this year that l’esprit Charlie is “a liberated tone, a satirical humour, an irreverence and pride built around solid left-wing values where the defence of secularism (laïcité) often comes first.”

No. In her own words: ‘I’m pretty sure that this is not the definition my children’s generation would give of l’esprit Charlie. For them the whole point about the extraordinary show of national unity in the aftermath of the 7th January attacks, and the thing that made the million-strong marches across the country that followed so unique and uplifting, was their apolitical nature and the spirit of tolerance towards France’s religious minorities, a tolerance that had been absent from mainstream public discourse.’

She contrast that with the views of  Alain Finkielkraut:

‘….members of the ’68 generation such as France’s principal bird of ill omen, Alain Finkielkraut, a philosopher. Finkielkraut was interviewed in the wake of the attacks by the right-leaning newspaper Le Figaro, under the headline “We’re living the end of the end of History.” “His rigorous words,” Le Figaro declared by way of solemn preamble, “find a deep echo in the collective unconscious. How he is listened to. How he is read.”’

Wadham continues: ‘Not by the next generation he isn’t. For them, thinkers like Finkielkraut howl in the wilderness that is the past, still railing against an enemy that no longer has any teeth: the third-worldist leftists of the same generation. As Servent pointed out, Generation Y is not anti-militarist and does not suffer from post-colonial guilt. They’re a generation of pragmatic humanists who can see the world around them for what it is—multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multifarious—and they have a deep mistrust of grand ideas and highfalutin’ rhetoric.’

*

Much to think on – and to agree or disagree with. We were once the next generation. Can the millennial generation engage with the world at a practical day-to-day level, and seek to change it as we did – and maybe with a little more success?

A winter’s day in a deep and dark December

Paul Simon’s opening lines to ‘I am a rock’.

And there’s the fourth verse:

‘I have my books and my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor, hiding in my room, safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me …’

I began the day in the Cotswolds.

The wind howled all night. The depressions keep rolling in. It’s way too warm, and the seasonal outbreaks of frozen hands and chilblains are in abeyance. We’ve still, though, got our winter fuel allowance, being over 65. Motorways are a mass of muck and spray, and trains are no doubt already overloaded. Christmas four days away.

First thing I ran down to the Painswick Stream, and up again across the common. I didn’t see a soul, only a few cows, to whom of course I said hello. The southerly wind was strong enough to feel chill, but tucked between hedgerows all was still, and as I began the climb back I could see the sun, just risen below the hill, touching the clouds a gentle pink and red. And yes, there was blue sky.

By mid-morning the storm was raging, and the trees bending before the wind. And I had the motorway ahead of me.

Back in my London flat another kind of peace, the steady hum of traffic on the main road below. Enough, I thought, and put on a new album of Bob Dylan songs recorded by other artists.

‘I am a rock/I am an island,’ is the refrain of Paul Simon’s song.

But the ocean, and the rain, is Bob Dylan’s:

‘Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall’

 

Renegotiating Europe

From the Economist’s Charlemagne column:  ‘Somewhere in a parallel universe exists an alternative renegotiation that Britain would be well-placed to lead, focused on the EU’s persistent economic torpor and its weak fragmented foreign policy…Instead the EU must grapple with Mr Cameron’s parochial concerns…’

Compare Charles Moore’s apparently reasonable comment: ‘They (the Eurosceptics) need voices (that is, not Nigel Farage) which can show that voting to stay, far from being a safe status-quo vote, is to sign up for a journey as yet unfinished to a destination most British people do not want.’

This destination, and I assume he means a federal Europe, however that’s defined, won’t happen because European electorates and European leaders don’t want it. It’s ‘unfinished’ to my mind in that it could be a damn sight more efficient – and more accountable at an individual parliamentary level.

Britain could and should be a leader in this debate, a renegotiation in which everyone is involved, and which helps re-position all of Europe, not just the UK. If the referendum focuses minds on this possibility, and helps make it a reality, it will have – in the end, and despite all my misgivings – have been worthwhile.

Establishments rule

There’s a piece in the Telegraph by Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher’s biographer, where he grumbles about the ‘shadowy establishment’ at the heart of Europe… This elite political power is supported by a much wider establishment, controlled by patronage and money…. All given a stake in the EU which is much much greater than the average citizen’.

At heart this is timeworn conspiracy-theory stuff, the elite working against the little man. Taken to its logical conclusion all major issues should go to referenda.

And if the media happen to be all of one persuasion, the monied establishment, the press, of which Charles Moore himself is so much a part, then that’s bad luck. The Barclay brothers, Murdoch, the Daily Mail and Paul Dacre … they have a direct line to us ordinary folk, they understand the way we think before we think it, and we’re only too glad to see our opinions expressed for us each day in a nice forthright way. Why should we ever have thought differently?

(The press is the establishment that most worries me. They and their owners should be directly accountable, UK-owned, UK mainland resident, and public figures, so we know who they are – not just shadows in the night. How about having meetings of publishing or editorial boards open to the public? Or at least part of the public record. This is a public debate we do need…but it might be just a little bit hard to get started.)

We have Owen Jones on the left of the spectrum, and Charles Moore on the right, going on about establishments. Maybe they should come together, and we could have flat tax for everyone, no exceptions, so no space for financial disagreement. Leave the EU and buy and sell only what we produce ourselves. So no need for a foreign policy. Just an army along the English Channel.

Sadly power does get shunted upwards, and we have to make certain that at each level ‘they’ are as accountable as we can make them. But the ‘big businesses and the banks, the scientific and agricultural interests, universities, judges, lawyers, regional governments, big media organisations [glad to see they’re mentioned], charities, pressure groups…’, all the groups whose greater stake in the EU than the ordinary Joe Charles Moore bemoans…. yes , they have a bigger stake because they’re all engaged, they are all active in the real world, not passive and grumpy readers of the popular press.

Inevitably, if there’s a multi-national set-up like the EU power gets shunted upwards, and the European Parliament has done a poor job in holding the Commission to account. So we have to be vigilant, monitoring day-to-day, and restricting the authority we do actually shunt upwards.

We can’t just close borders and minds and imagine there’s a conspiracy against us and insist on a ‘direct’ democracy which might have suited ancient Athens – and would well suit the Daily Mail.

Better to be part of the conspiracy.

Tearing down statues

Statues have an enduring symbolism, as the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, and the fuss over each new occupant, frequently reminds us.

In this case we’re talking about removing a statue.

There’s a Telegraph headline Saturday 19th December, ‘Politically-correct universities are killing free speech.’ An exaggeration, but it focuses attention on a real issue. ‘Universities’ are not killing free speech, but an increasing number of students are attempting to limit debate by, for example, banning speakers who do not share their views. A dangerous development, and I’m with the Telegraph all the way on this.

Students are now taking exception to statues, to the dead as well as the living. They’re symbols of an oppressive past and we’ve recently seen the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes (arch-imperialist) at the University of Cape Town. Pressure is now being put on an Oxford college, Oriel, to remove a statue of Rhodes on a building (funded by a legacy from Rhodes) which fronts the High Street. The fact that most of Oxford was until very recently completely unaware of the statue’s existence is incidental.

There are arguments against the statue – Rhodes is indeed a symbol of colonial past, but there’s a powerful counter-argument that symbols, whether oppressive, controversial, militaristic, pacifist – whether statues, paintings, buildings – are important. We don’t want to sanitise our past, or interpret it according to the dictates of the present. (A friend of mine suggests another argument for its removal  – it is very ugly.)

Oriel are well aware of the arguments on both sides, and will be launching a listening exercise before deciding the statue’s fate.

They will have been surprised to read Saturday’s Telegraph leaders which asserted: ‘Shockingly college dons back the idea.’ (Maybe some do but the leader implies it is college policy.) The Telegraph’s front-page story also asserts that the college’s ‘plans’ have been ‘derailed’ by the realisation that the statue is on a listed building, and its removal requires planning permission. That the college was well aware of the planning issue is clear from the statement it issued last Thursday: the Telegraph article is the Saturday morning following.

There’s also an article on the leader page by Daniel Hannan, who read history at the college, as indeed I did a few years before him. He writes: ‘Oriel has rushed out a statement to the effect that it is talking to planning authorities about removing the effigy because ‘it can be seen as an uncritical celebration of…colonialism and the oppression of black communities he represents’.

The college’s statement was carefully considered, and in contrast to Hannan’s article which reads as if it was rushed out to meet a deadline. Oriel we must remember is in the real world, attracting and extending a welcome to students from all corners of the globe.  As it argues in its statement, [the actions] ‘we are announcing today demonstrate our continuing commitment to being at the forefront of the drive to make Oxford more diverse and inclusive of people from all backgrounds, and to address directly the complex history of colonialism and its consequences.’

All terribly politically correct, but it’s risky territory these days, when it’s all about attracting students and funding, if you don’t listen to the clamour on streets and social media.

Reaching agreements …

We’ve seen a positive outcome to the climate change talks, and now an agreement at the UN in the Security Council for a peace plan for Syria. It’s not just the agreements themselves but the willingness to argue and discuss and actually reach agreements that I find encouraging. Both are under the auspices of the UN. And both have come about because of the engagement of all parties. China now fully recognises the urgency of measures to combat rising CO2 emissions, so too the US administration, if not the coalheads behind the American far-right in Congress. And Russia is now fully engaged in the Syria peace process, seen by some in the West a few weeks ago as a backward step, but as an interested party committed to the support of the Assad regime, with a naval base at Tartus in Syria, essential if a peace process was to move forward.

One reason for the failure of Obama’s attempted rapprochement with Putin was the fact that it was one-sided. Putin has now established himself, as he’s wanted all along, as an ‘equal’ partner. 2003 the US and UK tried to call the tune, and that can’t be the way forward anymore. We don’t have a democratic Russia, as we all hoped for after the fall of the Soviet regime, but we do have a government with whom we can deal and – possibly -reach agreement at a global level. We can establish areas of vital common interest and work out from there. Likewise with China: combating climate change has potential for being a major area of cooperation between China and the West. We can’t as yet resolve issues surrounding China’s imperial ambitions in the South China Sea, but working together in one area can only improve the prospects of doing so in others.

And there are serious – fundamental- issues of human rights. We have Saudi Arabia as an ‘ally’, and that’s pretty cynical in the scheme of thing. But we have to work from where we are. And what conflict tells us is that the big stick never works. So if we have to work with the likes of Putin, best to get on with it. Pragmatism is the best ally of idealism.

Another lesson – the importance of bodies such as the UN, above all the UN, under whose auspices the nations of the world can come together, and argue, and find common ground. Doing exactly what it was set up to do.

I’d put the European Community in the same category. What’s remarkable is that countries are working together, at a European – and a global level. War shattered Europe st  twice in the 20th century, and European institutions over the last sixty years have  cemented peace in a quite remarkable way. Walking away from the EU would be lunacy. Putting all our energies into reforming it so that it is and is seen to be an institution working for people at all levels is the only way forward.

And that requires strong leadership. Whether it’s Obama and Kerry, Putin and Sergei Lavrov, Hollande and Fabius, who acted as convenor at the the Paris talks – presidents and foreign ministers, the recognition of the interests of each of the parties involved is essential if common ground is to be established and agreements achieved.

This may be stating the obvious – but it’s why were getting agreements now, and we didn’t before.

A rose in winter, a field in Cheshire and a radio universe

A woodpecker drilling in a local garden, a single rose standing tall in a rose garden, and a grey and misty dawn over the river, on this absurdly warm December day. Daffodils are in flower they tell me, but not here. There are I hope snows to come, and chill sunsets and frosty dawns.

Last night the sun set behind Jodrell Bank – in a BBC4 TV programme celebrating the radio telescope and Bernard Lovell, its legendary director. I drive past it whenever I’m heading to the family home in north Cheshire, along a stretch of road between Chelford and Twemlow. The 250ft high bowl and its skeleton frame tower high above. It’s Cheshire farming country, as it was when I cycled out there as a teenager, and stood in awe – little has changed. The same houses, the same brick, the open fields and woodland brakes. And this the telescope that tracked Russian rockets in the Cold War, against Lovell’s better instincts, and explored the radio universe for evidence of the big bang, played a part in the discovery of pulsars (a regular pulse instead of static) and continues to this day to explore the far reaches of the universe. Dark matter isn’t beyond its gaze, though multiverses remain the province of the mathematicians.

I wanted to be an astrophysicist until I learnt it wasn’t enough to be simply numerate. Long equations floored me. (But still fascinate.) But Jodrell Bank against a sunset sky, or rising up dark in the night, a shadow which might have come out of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds – that still amazes. Jodrell Bank is home territory, as the stars and the wide universe were home for me, in my back garden as a 12-year-old, staring up each night, with my star charts.

Lovell was brought up a Methodist, and never lost his sense of wonder, or his sense of the limits of scientific knowledge. He also captained Chelford cricket club. What more could you ask of a man.