The rhythm of the dance

Taking my inspiration from an article in the current Tate Gallery magazine, by headteacher Kevin Jones.

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STEM – science technology engineering and maths should be STEAM, adding the arts – I like that.

A child is twirling around while circling a tree. “I’m orbiting,” he calls back when asked. Kevin Jones writes: “In a child science may well be a dance. There is wisdom in the dancing child who doesn’t know that art and science are different – who uses them equally to express his creativity.”

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“Butterflies are very interesting. Here these things are little grubs for a while. And then they go into a little coffin. There they are in a sarcophagus, and then they come out and dance with the angels.” (Roger Tory Peterson)

“Dancers are the messengers of the gods.” (Martha Graham)

It may or may not be the case that everything in the universe dances, but the child, the butterfly and the dancer all pick up on rhythms that lie in the very nature of things. If we’re carried along by the dance, if we are the dance (“how can we know the dancer from the dance,” to quote WB Yeats), then the world just might reveal a few of its secrets. If we walk, and each next step is predictable, then we might as well not move at all.

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Somewhere I read a quote about Royal Academicians being grumpy old men. Really, I thought? Then I remembered the academicians as portrayed in Mike Leigh‘s Mr Turner movie.  I don’t believe in all this grumpiness. But maybe they should take up dancing.

Turner came over in the movie as an old curmudgeon before his time. The dance for Turner lay in the way he handled colour. Could it be we all only have so much dance in us? Could that explain the grumpiness…?

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.

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“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.

The night sky – and spacetime

From Russia, to the Welsh hills, and a retreat last week.

Up at 5, cup of tea in hand I’d stepped out and looked up, expecting cloud and drizzle, and …the stars were bright, the quieter stars of summer evenings (the stars of course roll right around the heavens once a year) which give a first showing to early risers in February and March. Long gone are Orion and the twins and the lion, it’s now the swan and the lyre rising up from the east, and the huntsman, Bootes, above, and Arcturus, no longer an evening announcement of spring, but in its full glory on a February morning.

The sky almost floats above you, pre-dawn just touching the hills.

Anything but floating…

Reading Philip Ball on the general theory of relativity (100 years this year since Einstein presented his paper on the subject) my usual puzzlement is just a little allayed by his comment that ‘Isaac Newton’s apple fell to Earth because it was, in effect, sloping down the slope of the dent that the planet’s mass induces in the fabric of spacetime’. Which means that it’s not gravity as an an invisible force holding me to Earth, rather I’m slipping down a dent in the fabric of spacetime.

This rather changes my way of thinking about things…

But my sense of wonder at the night sky, which first took a hold of me when I was eight-years-old, remains as it always was, and a spiritual sense is still a part of that wonder. I touch the Earth and the hand of God.

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.

West in best

Which of course it is, but we must get real…

The West continues to exist in its own cocoon, still thinking within that post-Berlin Wall world frame of mind, where history (as God once had been) was on our side, if it hadn’t actually come to an end.

Two examples:

1) Charles Krauthammer (a serial offender) in the Washington Post exercises himself over the failure of America to take a lead, a moral lead, in the Middle East. He fails to recognise the simple truth that America has very limited moral force in that part of the world. And even the pro-Western countries don’t want its leadership. Obama is wisely steering a course more subtle than the American right which still inhabits a neo-liberal world can grasp.

2) The Economist had an in many ways excellent piece on Russia earlier this month (February). We have the statement ‘[Russia] is an unconstrained state that can sacrifice its citizens’ interests to further its destiny and satisfy its rulers’ greed. Both under communism and before it the Russian state acquired religious attributes.’ As a statement this recognises the old and deep rooted sense of ‘Holy Russia,’ but doesn’t engage with it as a reality. The ‘state’ and its ‘citizens’ are much closer than the Economist would have us believe.

There’s always been a battle in Russia between traditional and Westernising influences – going back to Peter the Great. That sense of Russia as a place apart, with a sentiment attached to it that you have to be Russian to understand, is woven into Russian life. Russians doesn’t want to be subsumed into a broader Western identity. If we get our heads round that we’ll better understand who we’re dealing with, and how to find agreement. Not least we’ll understand that the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine really do instinctively look east, and while we want to preserve Ukraine as one country we have to see it at the very least as federated, with western and central Ukraine looking to the EC, and the south-east looking to Russia. From that starting-point we might just find a solution, given time and patience.

The Baltic states are of course another matter. Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, is also at the heart of the history and mythology of mother Russia. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are countries with more recent Russian populations, the result of Russian occupations. Their integrity should be absolute, something it now seems that NATO has taken fully on board. We must be vigilant, even more so reading today of Boris Nemtsov’s murder.

 

From another mountain top

Looking out from the mountain top – another person’s, not your own. What’s the view like from there?

I call this blog zenpolitics. That has a certain ring to it. But I’m drawing on other Buddhist traditions. Compassion, which is there in all traditions, has a special place within the Mahayana, where it’s wisdom and compassion that chart the path to enlightenment.

Non-self is a key tenet, in all traditions, and it ties in closely with compassion. It’s easy to treat it as theory, separate from daily life, but it has a direct and eye-opening implication. If you downplay the notion of self, then it’s easier to put yourself in the place of others. You’re less obsessed with self, more aware that there are other points of view, as valid as your own. This is not to deny the importance of making  judgements, criticising, campaigning, often being personal. It’s a pretty hostile world out there and you won’t get anywhere by letting it walk all over you.

But don’t overlook the other point of view. What you say or write will be that much more valid if you’ve taken the time to understand the other’s position first.

Screamingly obvious you say. But also, it doesn’t make for good journalism, and party politics isn’t about understanding the other side’s arguments.

I’ll go along with that, but there are too many egregious examples, where it does matter.

In blogs that follow I mention the Middle East, Russia and that appalling false polarity between strivers and scroungers which seems to have infected popular discourse.

 

 

‘A form of fraud on its readers.’

Commercial interests came before good journalism, that’s Peter Oborne’s argument.

His resignation from the Daily Telegraph will get limited coverage. [And indeed, nine months on, the story is long forgotten.] Not least, newspapers could be worried that similar accusations could be made against them. Oborne has accused the paper of  a ‘form of fraud on its readers’ for its coverage of HSBC and its Swiss tax-dodging scandal. He’s claimed the paper did not give due prominence to the HSBC story because of commercial interests. The OpenDemocracy website is where his full statement is to be found.

Oborne told Channel 4 News he believed he spoke ‘for the vast majority of Telegraph staff’ in saying he had no confidence in Murdoch McLennan, the paper’s chief executive, and the Barclay brothers who own the paper. (I’m quoting from the BBC website.)

For my part I’ve never trusted the Barclay brothers, the Telegraph’s owners. I remember how disparaging Bill Deedes, long-time Telegraph editor, was about them. In an age when circulations are falling rapidly it’s people with big money and personal bandwagons to ride who can afford to handle the risk and live with the losses. The Telegraph’s most famous bandwagon was the 2009 expenses scandal, which they milked to do maximum damage. I will desist from saying more here – but it was a disreputable piece of journalism.

The sad thing is that in many ways the Telegraph is a great paper – for features and review coverage and sport. I don’t trust its political coverage, but I allow for that when I read a story. And I now know the way advertisers can influence the paper: some stories will hardly get a look in, some (I assume) may not even be reported…

The truth can be bent in so many ways. Is withholding, so we can’t even make a judgement, worse than telling lies? We are of course, all of us, economical with the truth in our daily lives. We all withhold. But newspapers are by definition public. A different standard applies.

The last five years….

‘Five years of stable and successful government’ is how the right-of-centre blogger Tim Montgomerie characterises the last five years. How many would agree – or disagree? Montgomerie, no doubt intentionally, overstates it. But many a four or five-year span has seen the UK fare much worse. The government has bickered and fought with itself but it has stayed together. Montgomerie puts much of that down to Nick Clegg, the ‘unsung hero of our times’. I’d go along with that. He’s had a big role in keeping the coalition together. With so much sh… thrown at him by some pretty nasty people he shown a remarkable cool, and kept a party that’s fissiparous almost by instinct together.

So two cheers for Nick!

‘Stable and successful’. If we expect government to work wonders, always to get it right, and, if it fails, to see it all as being accounted for by the selfishness of others, above all our self-serving politicians…. if we’re bought into the Ivor Crewe disasters of government mentality , if… then, yes, the five years have failed, and every five-year span will do likewise.

Messing around with NHS organisation was a bad error and a disaster. With hindsight bombing Libya and ousting Gaddafi likewise. Worse than bad. Policy without proper appraisal and heedless of consequences. We’ve seriously overdone the austerity. There are many casualties. Too many in government (and beyond)  sheltered by their own good fortune, forget compassion, forget the misfortune of others.

That’s an indictment. And there’s more. And yet…. before we collapse in anger and depression remember that the miracle of democracy means that we’re still standing, society mirabile dictu still functions, and there is all to play, and to fight for.