Writer

"It's not possible." stated Questioner.

"It is, it must be. Everything that is, is possible." responded Writer, with a certainty that seemed odd bearing in mind the nebulous nature of the subject matter.

"Explain it to me again, so that The Audience can understand." demanded Questioner.

"We are in a story. I know this, because earlier on it was written *Writer knows that zhe is in a story*. And that is why I know. It was also written that *Writer knows that it is written that zhe is in a story*, and so on. The iterations are tiresome, but apparently necessary."

"Why should I believe that?" Questioner questioned.

"Because it was also written that I would know which number you were going to pick when asked to choose one at random, and I have already written it down on this face down piece of paper. Pick a number, Questioner."

"This is ludicrous. I choose the number xyz (it is irrelevant what the number was, so I have omitted it)." Questioner turned over the paper, and it was revealed that the number written on the reverse was the very same one that Questioner had chosen. Questioner felt a strong emotion as newfound doubts were introduced into zher conception of reality. "Newfound doubts have been introduced into my conception of reality."

Writer pondered ponderously. "I have a small problem with it myself. This phenomenon appears to present situations wherein what we understand as the laws of this universe are broken. Now clearly whatever is causing this to be written is unconstrained by these laws, but do the appearance of apparent laws which we perceive now to be broken imply the existence of laws in the dimension which contains the causing-writer?"

Questioner seemed troubled by this thought. "Now I have further things to worry about. It seems then that contrary to my intuition, the dimension which is being written is greater in power and possibility than that in which the writing is taking place. This upsets my previous assumption that a single cause is greater than its effect."

Writer agreed. "That was my worry."

Questioner continued.  "In addition, I have trouble imagining the medium in which our existence takes place from the point of view of the dimension in which we are being written. Are the constraints of pen and paper, which inform our conception of writing, in fact the medium of our existence? Or is that simply what I have visualised because it is what I understand? Or is that how I visualise it because it was written that I would visualise it that way?"

Writer mused. "Perhaps we exist not in the writing, but in the shared virtual reality between the cause of the writing and the reader or readers."

"How do you know there is a reader or readers?" asked Questioner.

"I don't, I just can't imagine why else it was written." replied Writer.

"What are you doing now?" enquired Questioner.

Writer put pen to paper, and began to write. "An experiment."


The Audience responded.

Moral Decay

It seems sometimes that as I have become older, I have just become more insecure. More insecure, and about more important things. Where once I worried if people liked me, and worried about the social expectation to have a girlfriend (and yes, a girlfriend. Homophobia was almost universal in my school in Kenya). Now I worry about doing anything worthwhile with my life, about what is good in this world, and about whether I am ever going to be able to have a family. One day, I will worry whether I have sold out on all the ideals I will suppose I must have had when younger, though I find it hard to locate them precisely right now, and if I am lucky enough to have a family I will be worried to bits over whether I am doing it right, the impossibility of raising a family perfectly preying on my every thought.

This problem is a particularly haunting in these early hours after the week has come to an end. The insecurities, past and future (because worrying never really goes away, and worrying about what you are going to worry about is still worrying), flood the consciousness, driving everything else out. Or so it seems. One feels an urge to put pen to paper, to create something which will fix this moment in time, document it that the memory is not lost, perhaps to help in some future time.

I have been worried of late that I have slipped into a pattern of moral decay. I don't feel as confident in what I think is right as I want to. I don't have the strength to act on the convictions I do have as much as I would like to. In conversation, I might say things about being a bit of a Nietzschean, say that I believe in constructing my own values and pursuing them vigorously. More and more it seems that this is bullshit. I don't think I ever even thought that, not really. It is probably more true to say that values are socially constituted, that they are to do with us being human animals, and that yes, some of them we create and pursue.

How, then, to live? I doubt my motivations, was this done for my CV, or for its intrinsic worth? Am I merely focused on securing my material needs, or upon some notion of the glory of success, or on making my parents proud of me? I don't know. Probably these factors are influential, after all they seem to be strongly present in the culture I exist in. I do not know the extent to which their influence holds, and extent is important.

As liberals it often feels that all we can agree on is what people ought not to do, not what people ought to do. We ought not limit people's freedoms in important ways, so that people can live a good life. Or because as rational beings to force people to do anything is wrong. Or because it would make people unhappy. There is a strong negative story here, which is helpful in improving the lives of countless people, since it is manifested in a concern for human rights, civil liberties, and the provision of basic goods. Much misery has been forestalled by such concerns.

However, once these minima are secured, as they are to a great extent in Western societies, what then? What are we to focus our efforts upon (link)? The negative story of what ought not be the case for individuals has come to pass, and of course if we care for our fellow people we ought to fight for their basic minima, but that alone cannot be the secret to a meaningful life. Once these minima are achieved, what then? People look for answers in all sorts of places: in art, or religion, or the pursuit of scientific knowledge. What an idealistic picture, that the ultimate goal of a human life is the universal quest for truth in whatever form. This seems implausible. We can imagine a pre-modern tribe who enjoy a time of abundance, but do not seek answers. What makes their lives worth living?

Perhaps life is just enjoyable. Certainly it seems there is truth in the supposition that happiness is what happens when your mind is on other things. I don't know if I can swallow this, though. In my recent times there has been plenty to enjoy, but still a persistent feeling that something is wrong. Perhaps fulfilment is socially constituted. It is the strength and use of our social connections that typify a good life. Again I am reluctant to accept this suggestion, though it may be taking us on the right tracks. There must be something more to the question of how I can live a good life.

Certain segments of the media would have me believe that the answer is, in fact, love. Now I am not entirely sure what love is, particularly at this moment as the crowding out affect of worrying has temporarily (I hope) inhibited my capacity to feel. Yet it seems like a plausible candidate if we take off the sugary coating. My parents and maternal grandparents really do seem to have excellent lives, and this may well be in large part due to the intimate relationships they have seen flourish over their lives with each other and with their children. One of the additional factors supporting this supposition is that our generation is reckoned to be the best connected (technology, obviously) and yet loneliest, so far. Our social worlds have become broader, but shallower (as described in Bowling Alone and countless sensationalist newspaper articles). Real relationships take time and commitment and take up similar levels of time and energy as one's career, religion for the more observant, time in the pub and high-performance kiting hobby. We can't have everything, and we need to know what the important things are. Maybe this is what's going wrong here: it's worth a thought. Maybe, after all, all you need is love.


PS: This read with my blog on post-christianity could be seen as a microcosm of the crisis of modernity following the declining influence of organised religion. If you're into that sort of thing.

What's Wrong With Socialism? Part One

Part One: the Fetishisation of the Worker.
I am not a Marx scholar, nor do I believe I need to be in order to criticise the broad ideology and movement called socialism. My arguments are not directed at those who are at the cutting edge of political philosophy, for whom socialism is an altogether more fine-tuned, complex or abstract notion. I aim to address the wider political realities of socialism, and in particular to offer a criticism of the views of those odd creatures (I say this with utmost affection) known as socialists.

Though nobly motivated by their concern for those least well off people in society, the way in which the socialist frames the debate is itself flawed. The classic class conflict, broadly speaking between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, directs us to focus our attention on relations of labour. Who works, and who are they working for. The socialist asserts that all profit is derived by the exploitation of labour by the owners of capital, which is easily enough understood. If that was the whole story, there seems little to object to.

The problem is when this relation is taken to inform an entire ideology. While labour relations are an important part of our world, they are not the only part. What of students, and people who do no paid labour but are carers for the young or infirm? The socialist may respond by broadening the definition of worker to include these people who carry out useful activity in less conventional forms. This feels like an unwieldy, quick-fix solution, and our intuitions rightly cry out that these activities have far more to them then simply being a different form of production (wherein the product is one's own self-development, or the wellbeing of those being cared for).

In truth, relations of care are important in their own right, as distinct from relations of production. Also indeed, that cultivation of human excellence and the improvement of our society in a wider sense which it is supposed (perhaps wrongly) may be achieved through the pursuit of learning, this too appears to be a very different kind of activity to what we understand labour to be. Finally, the young and the infirm themselves fall into none of these categories, and often are workers under no conception of the word.

Thus the great struggle for the emancipation of the working class carries with it an unacknowledged and deeply unpalatable void with regard to the right treatment in society of those who do not fit neatly into the restrictive labour/capital binary which is so preeminent in socialist thought. And that, folks, is what's wrong with socialism. But one final question: how has this come to be?

My sketchy diagnosis, having heard of Weber and Marx significantly more than I have actually read them (yet), is that this socialist fixation on labour is a product of that famous situation, the protestant work ethic. Production is fetishised, in a similarly uncomfortable way to that in which consumption appears to be fetishised in our current economic system. Both of these activities are at their most basic level merely about meeting our material needs, and surely there is much more to politics, and life, than just that.



My next criticism of socialism will be of the particular problems of revolutionary socialism in liberal democracies, and how it is doomed to be either corrupted by violence or incapacitated by pacifism.

A Modern Fairy Tale

He was yanked out of the dark dirty alley, through the manhole to a tiny lab. A skinny, grimy old woman covered in metallic mechanical prosthetics released him from her claws and strapped him down to the bloodstained operating table. Her gleaming eyes stared through enormous lenses, wild rainbow hair framing her head in a mocking halo. With saws and clamps, drills and machines she took him apart and put him back together filled with all sorts of shining new parts, which apparently he needed for something or another. Relentlessly efficiently and with no signal of emotional connection this creator of new men hurled his still half-finished self back into the dirty dark world, supposedly ready now for the unspecified challenges and the nameless fears.

A Band Called "Shut"

First, I apologise if this review comes across as overly pretentious. I assure you, it is an authentic account of my reaction to the concert and not some NME gonzo bullshit. I tried to find Shut on the internet to share some, but I couldn't find any so if you want to hear for yourself you'll just have to watch out for their next show.

EDIT Matthew from the band has thanked me for the review, and asked me to share his bands website, which is this: http://shutband.wordpress.com/
/EDIT

I am not normally too keen on post-rock. It's my understanding that it is to all the indie-pop and Arctic Monkey clones (a movement sometimes collectively styled "post-punk revival") what progressive music was to punk. When the music the kids in bands are playing tends towards being more accessible, catchier, and arguably less ambitious, some of their more thoughtful peers perhaps start to see something wrong with it. They worry that the accessibility may be cover for a troubling hollowness to the songs. The songs have lyrics, melody, rhythm and delivery that feel like they are just playing the part. It seems inauthentic. To me post-rock feels like an attempt to regain authenticity, and while I think it is an attempt that fails, (being post-anything almost certainly dooms you to the pitfalls of self-referentiality and the cannibalisation of culture) when it is done well it fails beautifully, and has a lot to communicate on many levels.

Last night I saw the York band Shut perform for the first time. I had seen a few post-rock bands before but for whatever reason this was something different. Firstly there was the context. I was slightly intoxicated from a Martini I had from a well-known cocktail bar in York before hand. I was exhausted, it being the day after a three day long camping and rock climbing adventure at Brimham Rocks. Furthermore, I was with some people I had not seen properly for a while, and who gave me a lot to think about. They played a full forty minute set with no pauses.

Their set began in much the way one might expect. The frontman was playing his electric bass guitar with a bow, the drummer was hitting the cymbals gently with a set of small bells, a guitarist with his back to me was doing something I didn't understand and the fourth band member had a little object in his hand and was using it to make noises. Steven Jeffels, the drummer, had spoken to me a little beforehand and described what they were going to play as "monolithic and spiritual" which for me summed up this first segment.

The real treasure for me though was about half way through the set, when a simple, little catchy hook came in. Only four or five notes, it seemed fragile amongst the noise before and around it. It kept on though, and for a while the music was set around it. Then this hook was assaulted by an onslaught from the drums, the bass, the second guitarist. They screamed at it, it was like they were trying to destroy it. It made me think of our best laid plans, which seem so important at the time. Like that hook, we construct them somewhere early on, and then they are attacked by all of life's circumstances, the demands and pressures of relationships, work, duty, pride, whatever. In the face of these pressures our tiny, human, naïve plans somehow persist. The attack ceased, and the hook remained.

It felt different now, though. After the barrage it didn't sound the same anymore. To my ear it became more jaded, cynical, perhaps, a musical element or a best made plan conscious of its own futility. The rest of the music reflected that. It was playful, but not innocently so, cruelly so. The self-mockery built up and intensified, until it became a different kind of destructive noise, this time of its own making. I felt like they were trying to communicate the forces of self destruction that are in all of us and which are activated when we glean the laughability of our own fragile existence. Even this though, even this self destructive movement, the hook survived. It persisted alone again as the storm subsided, and I felt I knew why.

It was because in the face of all these troubles, our plans, as small as we are, are all we have. The music told me: it may be small, and silly, and constantly threatened by forces within and without, but these little things are all we have. And then something else happened. The second guitar played a hook of its own. Different, but in harmony. Even though I try and fail and my hopes are in all the wrong places and the fulfillment of my desires will never satisfy me, we are all the same. Everyone's playing their own little hook, and all we can do is keep going in the face of the massiveness of life and the universe and everything. The music revolved around this in a rare moment of order and relative simplicity, and the movement ended, and we went somewhere else.

After being dragged through that emotionally, I felt haggard. It was intensified by the pathetic fallacy of all of the friends I had been there with leaving in ones and threes, giving more emotional weight to the themes the band and I were exploring. I looked around at the faces in the audience, were they thinking about what to have for lunch tomorrow? I looked at the band, and I knew they weren't feeling what I was feeling. And that fact made its own point.

Music like that, with no words, but with obvious weight, communicates but more than other music it gives everyone something different. Both the intellectual backdrop and that particular event are quite honest in that fact. It said something to me, not just about the incommunicability of the musical experience, but about the incommunicability of life itself. In several important ways, I am alone: I will never really understand how someone else feels nor they me. But that is the same for all of us, and for some reason, that can be a comforting thought.

The chaos that followed, the frenetic and passion filled finale, delivered its own insights but nothing rivaled that middle section for me. The show as a whole made some important points to me, and one which has stayed with me particularly was about the imperfection of our lives. It's dirty, and broken, and chaotic, it often seems meaningless. It's lonely, it's confusing, it's for many people often boring. But it's all we've got. And maybe, just maybe, it's enough.

Zhe and the Guitar

It reminded zher of the scene in the Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace. Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi are traveling through the planet core on the advice of Brian Blessed the Gungan when there are a sequence of near-death experiences with a succession of ever-larger aquatic predators.

Zhe hated the guitar. It was the embodiment of all zher insecurities and inadequacies. It stared at zhim from the corner of the room, daring zhim to attempt more sophisticated techniques such as zhe had seen on Youtube or performed by zher more talented friends. Whenever zhe picked it up zhe was offended by the harsh, buzzing, rasping sounds it made. Zhe made.

Zhe only really picked it up when zhe was feeling beaten down and hurt, which wasn't so often but they were the times that really stuck out in zher memory. Zhe didn't begrudge it: in fact zhe embraced it. Life in all its richness is composed of many different sensations, and to live fully one must embrace or at least accept those feelings.

It is still unpleasant though, feeling beaten down and hurt. What's more, the guitar came to be associated with those feelings.

Zhe wondered briefly about the proliferation of acoustic guitar solo artists with slow, mellow songs loaded with emotions mysterious and barely expressed. Perhaps if they were clear about what they were feeling in their songs they would feel too naked and uncomfortable. Perhaps they kept the lyrics mysterious because the real meaning was nonexistent or banal beyond belief.

Zhe imagined one might be able draw a graph or a conclusion with the number of solo acoustic acts per thousand population on one axis, and rates of depression, suicide, or some other sign of loneliness on the other. Zhe imagined the breakdown of social and communal life in post-industrial towns and alienating urban megaliths, and imagined all the busy parents with all their lonely children sat in their rooms with nothing but their instruments for company. What porn was for sexual fulfillment the guitar was for real friendship - no substitute.

Zhe was reminded of a song zhe had heard. It only had two lines:

"We only dance with joy. Don't fake it: they'll never believe you.
We don't write when we're happy, and if we did it would be boring as hell."

Maybe zhe was one of those lonely teenagers still, really. But if zhe was a little bit like them, the embarrassingly proficient, insultingly young guitar godlings that made her feel insecure or untalented seemed much more so. There was always a better guitarist.

Why Were They Rioting?

Hello friends,

*Let me first clarify that I personally hold no grudge against the police. In my dealings with them they have always been fair, honest and perfectly reasonable human beings. I can understand why other people might see them in a different light, though, and I urge you to do the same.*

It's a question many have asked, myself included. I thought I would run through a couple of the more plausible reasons I have come across or thought of. I have dismissed the scapegoat of moral laxity because it is unhelpful. We are looking for something else.

1) Opportunism. This is the first one that semms to spring to most people's minds. Knowing other people are going to be out in force reduces the apparent threat of police attention to an individual person. This is particularly the case in places which are having their first night of rioting: the police are likely to be unprepared. Thus people can steal hundreds, or thousands, of pounds worth of goods from shops. This could either be because of their own rampant consumerism or, more likely, so they can order to sell the goods on for cold hard cash.

2) Anger. The second family of reasons has various permutations. Some people are attributing this to anger at politics and government cuts and the closing down of youth centres and things like that. This seems unlikely, you would have heard about it from some rioters or seen some graffitti or something, people would have taken some measure to let people know what they were up to. I don't doubt that people were angry at the society which created the conditions with clearly have caused so much resentment. However, I think people are looking too far, making this more complicated than it has to be. The people who the rioters were confronting were the police. Though the police are a coercive wing of the state, from the perspective of the poor, of criminals petty and career alike, of people of ethnic minorities, of young people, and any combination therein the police are antagonists. They are oppressive, discriminatory, violent, harrassing and on occassion murderous.

Of the rioters, how many do you think were actually looting? Not all of them, far from it. Every rioter was out there for their own reasons. I know of one misguided youth in York who wanted to start some trouble here for purely political reasons. No I don't think many rioters were there for ideological anarchist reasons, at least not consiously, but my point is that people were rioting for all sorts of reasons. The reason for most people out there, I suspect, was that they wanted to fight the police. In particularly they wanted to fight the police with a distinct numerical advantage over them. It was an expression of anger and hostility at the people who had been something of a plague in their lives.

The underlying social conditions matter. I don't doubt that relative poverty and inequality created the conditions under which these riots were possible. There are policy solutions to prevent this from happening, or at least to make it very unlikely, and increased equality (particularly intergenerational equality and racial equality) will go a long way to fixing matters. If I am right though, and the main reason people were rioting was antipathy to the police, then authoritatian measures curtailing civil liberties, increasing police powers to arbitrarily interfere with people and more violence directed by the police against citizens will do the opposite of help. They might make future rioting more likely, not less.

Caleb

Independent School, Me

Hello internet,

This post is about education, and is my attempt at a frank discussion about private education. Let me begin with a little background on how I ended up at private school.

My family are not rich by any means. My parents are both from ordinary backgrounds, my mother from a family of somewhat hippy lefties who brought her up partly on a boat, and my father is very much the product of his inspirational mother, who came from a factory workers back-to-back in Halifax to being the first in her family to university in a time when for a woman going to university was still a rare and difficult thing. When her husband died she did a fantastic job of bringing up her two sons. Carrying the respect for the value of education forward, my father went to King Edwards Camp Hill, a grammar school in Birmingham, which can't have hurt him getting to Bath to study architecture.

They met there, left with four kids, eventually had six, and for reasons detailed in an earlier blog found themselves compelled to take us all off to Africa.

Twice.

To put it succinctly, they certainly put trying to live a rewarding life far ahead of any financial considerations. We ate a lot of wholefoods from great big bags we kept under the benches in the kitchen-dining room. We had a nice holiday and a shiny fridge when some relatives died but most of the time it was unreliable second hand cars and older siblings' clothes (even if, or maybe even especially if, those older siblings were of the opposite sex). We weren't poor: we got by. We had different expectations to other people: mostly we weren't materialistic. We were rich because we had each other. We were all very proud of each other, and still are I think. We were reasonably academically successful, but most of us not especially so.

I believe I have actually gone to private school three times. The first time was Phoenix school in Malawi. I was four or five. All I can recall are some vague memories of songs and attempting to draw cartoons of a turtle which had so many gadgets hidden in its shell it was like an organic Swiss army knife. The second time I went was Braeburn High School in Kenya when I was thirteen to fifteen. I have plenty to say about that at some point, but I am not quite brave enough to tackle it right now. I don't think those first two experiences really count, because they were international schools. They really don't tell us very much about the nature of private education in the UK.

When I was fifteen, just after I had done my GCSEs, I left home. I went to Birmingham, to live with my paternal grandmother. I had originally applied for Camp Hill, the school of my father and, I think, possibly his father as well. I didn't get in, and tried my luck at getting into King Edward's School, one of the most successful private schools in the country, though the fees would surely be too high. Not only did I get in, but in light of my parental income and academic ability they gave me a full scholarship. I have joked sometimes that, since I was applying from Kenya and my first name is somewhat exotic, they thought I was African and that they were doing some good deed or increasing their diversity to meet some quota or something.

They were an important two years of my life. I am not sure if in hindsight I would choose the same again. I certainly changed a lot there and I don't know how much of it was for the better.

Early on in my time there, I mentioned the scholarship to somebody. They advised me not to tell anybody else or I could suffer bullying. As it was my fairly boring BBC accent which I had to work so hard to maintain in the face of the barrage of Kenyan and international influences was a sufficient disguise. I now sometimes wish I had succumbed and been a little more interesting.

Birmingham is a heavily multi-cultural and multi-ethnic city, and King Edward's in some ways reflected that, though it had disproportionately few people that some might call black (though I wouldn't because I am so post-racial and stuff). There was not racial tension as such, but people were perhaps a little overly racially aware. There were distinct social groupings of people with different skin colours, which also roughly corresponded to whether you preferred rugby or cricket.

King Edward's had many of the arcane words and traditions stereotypical of private schools. Assembly was called "Big School". The school years, in ascending order of age, were Shells, Removes, Upper Middles, Fourths, Fifths, Divisions and Sixths. People actually used these words, nobody just talked about year sevens and eights and so on. Eton Fives (a sport involving a wall, I believe) was played by some, and fencing lessons were offered free (of course I took them). There was a complex system of ties depending on what particular achievements you had made in your time at the school. I left with the same tie I came in with, fortunately it only very occasionally made me feel like an inferior human being.

I lived miles and miles away, in Wythall in Worcestershire. I commuted in by bus and train every day, which made my school day a couple of hours longer. It didn't matter: I had no social life. I knew nobody in the village or the town nearby: those few people I had come across I really didn't get along with. I suppose my social life consisted in large part of watching the West Wing and going to dance lessons, both with my grandmother.

I exaggerate. At King Edward's I started getting into societies. I have already mentioned fencing (I sucked). I also did Greek play reading (in translation), choir (my favourite), a little debating (I lost both times, horribly), philosophy society (my presentation on Plato was terrible), and my foray into song-writing society gave me the push to start writing my own songs and evetually start a band: that was mainly because the songs I heard there were so ear-bleedingly awful.

In my two years there, my expectations of what I could get out of life were raised astronomically. I went there with the dreary sneeze of an idea of wanting to be Prime Minister (doesn't everyone at 15?) and left realising so much more was possible. There was a whole culture of leadership and progress and optimism and growth. There was in fact a leadership club, and there was the combined cadet force. There were enterprise days, and genuinely fascinating assemblies like the one with the magician and the one with the history of pop music. Many including myself were encouraged to apply for Oxbridge, and as I have learned though I didn't get in (twice) having that chip on your shoulder can give you a surprising amount of drive. The school was an incubator of quirkiness, culture, the celebration of excellence and ambition. All this had an effect on me. It meant I ended up getting my As at A level, redeeming my disappointing IGCSEs. I became a more interesting person, in interesting ways. I also left feeling resentful, rebellious, and rudderless, but that all worked out fine eventually too.

What, if anything, does my experience tell me about private schooling in general? Well it definitely gives rich people (and people like me who can blag their way in) unfair advantages in life. The people who unlike me don't detest the whole Old Boys thing can no doubt milk it for jobs and whatnot. And I also believe that King Edward's was a relatively modern example. It was cosmopolitan and relatively liberal, and as a day school was a very different beast to some of its boarding cousins. I am undecided on whether private schools should be abolished. It seems a shame to rid the world of machines that churn out so many excellent and interesting people, but I am sympathetic to the view that they are terribly unfair. They certainly are. We do live in a world where there are more values that just fairness, however. We also care about brilliance, and beauty. This is all irrelevant to my main point though. Whether private schools are abolished or not, state schools need to learn from them. They need to learn about tradition, communities of learning, identity, fostering a culture of ambition and excellence, and yes, quirkiness. Even if that means that people in different parts of the country get different educations, so be it. The world is made all the richer by having lots of different types of people. I am not saying that there were not problems with King Edward's: there most certainly were. Yet still there is so much state schools can learn.

I think we can have the best of both. I think we can all have a decent shot in life and we can all be different. Governments have long thought it is their business to manage education. However, like the control of interest rates and the treatment of disease, education is far too important to be left to politicians. Set it free. Let it be publicly funded, but not centrally controlled. That doesn't mean I like you or any of your ideas, Conservative Party.

Caleb

Grand Infallible General Theory of Why Wars Happen

Hello internet,

I am reading the Spirit Level. This has informed my most recent musing about the world and how it works. In the chapter on violence the authors mention a criminologist who argues that all violent crime is caused by feelings of shame or humiliation and all incidences of violent crime are attempts to recover lost pride. Now think this as plausible as you like, I personally find myself sympathetic going by my own experiences. I can think of a couple of instances particularly in my pre-teen years when I lashed out violently in response to intense feelings of shame. This ties in with the broader thesis advanced in the Spirit Level that many social ills are related to feelings of status insecurity.

Take this into account, and also consider the phenomenon, observed in another pop social science book whose name escapes me, that individuals extend the sphere of what they consider to be a part of themselves. One example of this phenomenon is when somebody is driving a car they refer to the car internally and aloud as themselves: for example "he hit me!" or "I am a bit heavily laden, I'll have to be careful with braking times" (I have never driven a car but growing up my experience of cars was varied and exciting, to be euphemistic).

Imagine if the same phenomenon applies to people who are in positions of power or authority within an institution or organisation. What if the same combination of forces that lead to road-rage, also lead to the personal bitterness of inter-company squabbling? What if they lead to leaders taking their countries to war? The story would go a little something like this. The leaders of a country come to identify themselves with the country and vice versa. What they see as an attack on the status or pride of the country feels like an attack on themselves. This brings about a feeling of acute humiliation for them, almost as though their national football team who they had been boasting about hours before had been devastatingly trounced, which provides them with a strong urge to retaliate in some way to recover some lost pride. Again confusing the country with themselves, they lash out with a part of their anatomy to which they hold only the most spurious claim: their diplomatic, or worse armed, services.

I am absolutely convinced, without hesitation, hyperbole or irony, that every war ever has been or will be caused by these effects or similar. I have solved international relations, you may shower me with your praise.

But seriously, it must have happened somewhere at some point mustn't it? It is far too plausible a story not to be true.

Caleb

The Gym

Hello internet,

If Kafka had been writing today he might have taken time to write about that oppressive institution known as the gym. It is one of the pillars of the modern insecurity industry. The people to be found there are easily caricatured: from the skinny, fast talking salesmen/staff to the often slightly overweight customers who could look quite beautiful if they weren't so stressed. The decor desperately strives towards an appearance of quality and class on a budget with a keen eye for the bottom line, leading to interior spaces that feel slightly disconcerting in a way difficult to isolate. The most Kafka-esque feature, though, has to be the stink of self-loathing that hangs in the air amid the sweat and deodorant.

My first impression of the building was that it was somewhat tasteless to call the sportswear shop, that stocked most of the usual brands, S W E A T S H O P (with a disgusting little "squared" symbol afterwards). It displayed a stunning disregard for the concern many of us share for workers' conditions, and gave the impression that the owners and stockers were openly laughing at their left-liberal-leaning critics. In other words it did not get off to a great start.

The moment that really made me feel uncomfortable, however, was when I heard someone giving people a tour to see if they wanted to pay for membership say "what are your main reasons for wanting to join?". That slimy, skinny salesman who undoubtedly gets paid a commission for each person he signed up (I heard on say on the phone in the reception: "come by tomorrow, ask for me and I will show you around") was making they confront a fact about themselves that they were uncomfortable with (such as feeling too skinny, or too fat) to a complete stranger in an environment they weren't comfortable with. It was an awful thing to do, and was purely the action of a man trying to push people into parting with their money with their own insecurities.

Now I am not a smug, completely happy in my own body sort of person. I'm sure it doesn't bother as often as it does some, but I have not been immune to the overwhelming importance that modern society, advertising and print opinion and so on have placed on body image. It is hard not to feel at least somewhat inadequate when one is bombarded with images of toned, well muscled men with impressive stubble falling in love with the kind of people who aren't interested in me. The truth is most people probably worry that they are too fat or too skinny. Hell, some poor folk probably worry about both! I certainly try to feel comfortable with myself though and I am certainly going to attempt to forestall and bastards using my self-consciousness to try and sell me crap.

The gym really did charge an awful lot of money. For the student rate, the cheapest there is, membership was at a minimum of £600 for a year. You have to pay for membership for at least a year. There is absolutely no reason why this should be the case. There is nothing about the equipment they use or the business structure they have adopted that means people should be forced to jion gyms in units of one year minimum. There was already a set up fee anyway so the administration costs could not be used as an excuse. The gym was deeply exploitative of people who are, in their own way, vulnerable.

There are two possible reasons I can see for this. The first is that perhaps most cities are, like York, not really big enough to have more than one gym as big as the one I am talking about. This leaves the gym with a lot of market power. I don't think this is a plausible explanation because I suspect that smaller, cheaper gyms in people's local areas which, unlike the one I went to, people wouldn't have to drive to (irony) could succeed. I think, rather, that the excessive price charged and the inflexible payment period was used as an attempt to transform the gym into some sort of middle-class salubrious utopia, full of beautiful, successful people. Like Hank Azaria's character in Run Fatboy Run. It seems however to have attracted instead a clientele who's main uniting feature is an air of unhapiness with themselves.

Caleb

The Evolution of the Written Word

Hello internet,

I have used a pretentious title, I know, but I wanted something to distract from the fact that this is a post about Facebook and Twitter that I am going to inform people I have written via the selfsame Facebook and Twitter. This post is about a couple of ideas I have about some changes in the way we communicate in this age of increased importance for the written word, particularly in a few particular forms.

The three forms of communication I am primarily talking about are Facebook status updates, Twitter posts, and mobile phone text messages. Though the lattermost came first chronologically the first two are the more important in this discussion because of the larger usual audience of the message, but the same sorts of things apply to text messages as I am describing for the other two media.

My observation is that between the very small number of character we use in these media, and the distancing effect of having no recognisable handwriting to connect the writing to the writer in the reader's mind (not to mention he distancing effect of using the written word instead of speaking face to face), there is very limited potential to present oneself as a complete person to the receivers of the message. By this I mean we find it much harder than usual to express who we are to one another.

In the post-60s age of individualism expressed as a desire to live authentically and to find your true self, and a load of the rest of the rhetoric which has developed in the last 50 or so years and has been used to great effect by advertisers (boo!) and the various liberation movements (yay!) the felt need to truly express yourself is a powerful force inside us. So we really do care quite a lot that in some of the dominant new ways we have of communicating with each other it can be hard to put ourselves across as we'd like to.

It is entirely coincidence that I am posting this just as Amy Winehouse is in the news for dying, I was planning on writing this piece anyway. It does provide a good example for my next point though. The internet has been awash with platitudes at the early death of the troubled celebrity.

I think that people overcompensate for the difficulty of injecting their personality into modern written media by trying to ram huge amounts of it into the messages they publish. People publish the kinds of sentences one might usually only expect to hear between personal friends. This is an attempt to more strongly establish their personhood. We all feel the risk of coming across as automotons (or automata?) online. I am sure many people have typed out a Facebook update, only to look at it hard and delete it again. I myself have on several occasions released a message and then promptly deleted it again. Why are we so self conscious about how we come across online?

I have not really considered the impact on peoples conversation habits of the ability to unsay things by deleting them, but I am sure this also does some peculiar things. My main point is that people try to inject far more wit, emotion, sarcasm, anger, or whatever personality trait they are trying to exhibit, into those 140 characters than would ever seem natural in a sentence of that length usually. I believe this is even having some effects on our wider culture.

I realise that some of the properties I am describing are also present in letters and emails. These may be important precedents, and the distancing effects I have described also apply to varying degrees with these forms of communication. From my narrow knowledge of film and novel clichés letters have quite often been rather romantic or otherwise emotional (though this may be as much because it is easier to approach difficult questions when one is not confronted with the full horror of engaging with emotional matters face to face with another human being) and emails may have fulfilled something of a similar role. Neither, I believe, have had quite the same effect though.

We make our personalities more hyperbolic so we can squeeze enough of them onto the back of a digital postal stamp. The most interesting thing about this, however, may be that we do it all in public. The combination of these two factors are what I believe might actually be agents of social change. I don't think it is worth disputing that technology can change society, one need look no further than the supremacy of television over many of our lives for much of the past century to appreciate that. I think that Twitter and Facebook are making us represent ourselves as more extreme people than we normally would, and are making us express ourselves in public in ways that would normally be exclusively between close friends. Now I don't know if these changes are being reflected in meatspace as well, and frankly it would not surprise me, but the social change is there whether confined to cyberspace or not. I think that the driving force for this change is an insatiable need to reinforce and exclaim our individuality in a digital age where it can sometimes be hard to feel like the unique people we are.

Caleb

(Please Let This Be the End Of) Elitism

Hello internet,

I have long been a reluctant democrat. Modern politics is full of damning representation of direct democracy at its worst, such as: the overwhelming mass suicide of the British electorate in the AV referendum, the Swiss minaret referendum, and Californian referenda where they chose to ban gay marriage and not to decriminalise marijuana when they had the chance. These are just the first examples that spring to mind. However, when you compare more direct democracy with the alternative: which is ever more distant elitism often masquerading as representation (but sometimes not even bothering at that), I know which direction I want to move in.

Successive British governments have been keen centralisers. The new coalition was supposed to reverse that trend and bring in a bright new age of localism but I have seen little evidence of it. The token gesture of elected police commissioners is an unhelpful distraction, and could risk turning something as important as public safety into a mere political playground. Giving councils or regions actual powers could help, but that would involve the government keeping their promises and apparently they're allergic to that.

Elected Lords (for fifteen years no less) is a depressing prospect. It is not as if the problems in our democracy come from not having enough politicians. Personally, though I think it needs much reform, I like the idea of a House of Lords filled with people who have done exceptional things not career politicians.

I have been avoiding reading about the grit and grime of the phone-hacking fiasco, because I don't think what little hope I have left in the leadership of this country can stand such a whalloping. Yet even from my distant vantage point, picking up factlets and gobbets of opinion as if by static electricity, I find myself deeply miffed at the people who have taken it upon themselves to be both important and, let's be honest, scoundrels. Just reading about the depraved (insert sexual taboo metaphor here) of the police, the journalist profession, politicians and the super-rich is upsetting. It seems to validate all the most tin-hatty claims of the far left about hegemony and neo-imperialism and all that sort of thing. And gosh I would feel bloody silly if they turned out to be right after all. There I was optimistically thinking that probably most people were rather decent most of the time, and a stink-bomb like this explodes all over my hypothetical breakfast newspaper.

I trust those folks over in London less than I ever have before. They must have less power: asap. And I don't mean I want more referenda, easily manipulated by a gleeful press. I don't even just mean decentralisation, though that would be nice. The problem is everytime some well-meaning soul wants to make a positive difference in the world by political means, they have to start with inventing the wheel. By which I intend to indicate, by means of a well-used metaphor, that they need to start all the way from scratch without sufficiently robust institutions and procedures to smooth the way. I have a simple question which, if the answer was more readily available, could make this country a better place to live. If I have what seems to me like an excellent idea, or an uncommon level of motivation, to make the world better, how exactly do I go about doing it? That's the kind of direct democracy I can stomach: a democracy of enablement. A system that gives people who want to improve their world the means to and lets them get on with it. I still think that most people are pretty decent. I just don't necessarily think the same of the Ocracy we've got down in Westminster.

Caleb

Jilted Generation vs The Pinch

Hello internet,

I finally got around to reading those two books, and after some time, I am finally getting around to writing about them.

Firstly, let me briefly set the scene. It's 1945 and Britain has just won World War II. It feels like a victory, but if you look a little closer, it's a little more complicated than that. Something happens. The old ruling elite finds itself challenged, and the Labour party, representing the underpriveleged many, wins a landslide majority. With this mandate and with the money lent to them in the Marshall Plan, they set up the National Health Service and other features of what is recognisable still as the British welfare state.

Britain won't have an easy time of it. Rationing carries on, only to end in the Fifties. Strikes and shortages, uncompetetiveness and forced devaluation will mark this turbulent period. The Empire collapses, Britain is humiliated abroad in the Suez crisis, and all her old allies and rivals storm ahead in productivity and quality of life. Yet, in all this, the national debts are paid off. Life gets easier. Wages rise. But something else has happened, too.

From about 1945 to 1965, the Baby Boom occurs. An identifiable cohort is born which is millions larger than any before or since. The legacy of the Baby Boomers is what The Pinch (by David Willets, Conservative Universities minister and a Baby Boomer himself) is all about. It explains how one generations, have already benefited from their frugal parents paying off the enormous WWII/Marshall Plan debts, then vote themselves lower taxes, the right to buy their council houses, and unfundable tensions. Without realising it, they have eaten tomorrows bread, today.

Jilted Generation has a different story to tell. Following the hapless fiasco of Generation X, hopelessly failing to live up to their elders the Boomers expectations, we have the 1979 to about 2000 generation. Though often unimaginatively called Generation Y, Jilted Generation eponymises it. It sets out how the current generation of young people-roughly 10-30 year olds at the time of writing, are having and will have a particularly hard time.

The two books take rather different approaches, not least because The Pinch is written by a Conservative minister and Jilted Generation by angry (though civilized), left-liberal journalists. The most obvious difference is the prevalence of Thatcher-bashing in the latter and not the former. Furthermore, The Pinch adopts quite an academic, cultural-historically sensitive approach. It discusses in greater depth the relevant theories in sociology and political philosophy: in fact his and my reading lists for undergraduate PPE seem not to have been too dissimilar. He takes his time, and in the end his book is almost as much about the general case of the relationships between generations as it is about the Baby Boomers in particular.

Jilted Generation is much more about the day-to-day realities faced by todays young people. Jobs, housing and pensions take centre stage. What's more, though, it actually provides us with a richness of its own as the authors spell out in detail the consequences of these imbalances. The most shocking revelation is the impacts on us as a society that simple little things like age inequality have. Young people put off having children, settling down, taking on any big projects, because they cannot get a good enough stable job and prices for a decent home are too high for them. An apparently trivial economic fact actually tears at the fabric of society itself.

Between them the books paint a stark picture. The situation is a tough one. Any proposed solution will have many losers, and thus will be controversial. The environment is given passing mentions, but the authors of these books have hit on a problem which unlike that of climate change has received remarkably little attention. But solutions must be found. These books should be read by anyone wanting to make sense of the problem faced by our generation, and how it came about. Where both books fail, however, is in their lack of powerful ideas to solve this problem. I suppose that's where the rest of us come in.

Caleb

Do Protests Work?

Hello internet.

I went to my very first protest, rally, whatever on the 8th of May 2010. A week later I organised my first protest with the help of the charming Ieuan Ferrer, Jamie Fisher, and more. Since then at protests I have given speeches, written and performed songs and shouted til I was ill. I want to know whether any of it has achieved anything.

I am begnning to suspect that while protests individually are unlikely to work, there is something to be said for sustained campaigns of protest. This would require legions of committed individuals with support networks, organisers, clear goals and more. Lots of things which the student protesters didn't have, or didn't have enough of.

Maybe the strategy should have been first to organise, and then to try and change things. Now I am sure this was attempted but the result was ramshakle, and ineffective. Having just finished The Pinch and Jilted Generation (finally: I felt I ought to having ranted about intergenerational justice) I am admittedly slightly less annoyed about the whole fees thing than I used to be, but that is just because I found out about just how disadvantaged in various ways people under the age of 30 or something are in the UK. My rage has been intensified and its direction refined.

Thats why I want to set up an organisation to bring young people together to fight for their quality of life, their futures, and the people that will come after them.

But that can wait: now I'm playing Minecraft. (But seriously, the whole organisation thing is happening. Get in touch if you want to get involved)

Caleb

Texts from a Stranger

Hello internet.

It is not often I think that something that actually happens in my life is particularly worth recounting but something odd has been happening over the last couple of days. It started as radically as it continued: somebody called me by accident.

It had a country code that I didn't recognise. I heard a female voice, I think she wanted to talk to someone called Sean. I was not, at that moment, Sean. I got another missed call later from that self same number.

The interesting bit was the next day I got a text from her. We actually had a nice chat via texts, she was a college student from Canada but was calling from Nigeria. Thus the unrecognisable country code.

Now I am no snob but – no wait, I am a complete snob. Okay, but anyway, she had that habit of using impenetrable abbreviations, but because she was foreign and I had the novelty of having an actual conversation with someone who had contacted me inadvertently I found it fun and new and not irritating at all.

My point, if I ever get round to it, is that it is quite nice. She said she is going to call again, which I must admit is quite exciting. I have never had a pen friend, and this seems like a fantastic way to get one. I like the idea that we would all treat each other more like real people if maybe sometimes if someone comes to our house by mistake, or someone calls the wrong number, we could strike up a conversation. Maybe then we would feel more like a part of a community in our society which sometimes seems to be larger than human in scale.

One of the texts reads “Wow, ur really nice r u always like dis?”. So next time you call the wrong number, or someone calls you 'the wrong number', maybe have a chat and find out more about them. Maybe you too could be told that you are nice by someone!

Caleb

Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

Hello internet.

Saul Alinsky (1909-72) is reckoned to be the founder of modern community organising. As someone who dabbles in activism from time to time I figured it would be worth giving it a read, so that is exactly what I did. It was in North Room 2 of the university library, hidden in the scary-looking mechanical vaults which open up to let you in, and which it is impossible not to imagine closing while you are inside and crushing you. It had not been taken out since 1998, but was quite popular in the eighties. Interestingly, this corresponds almost perfectly to the time we had a Labour government.

His last book, Rules for Radicals (1971), is supposed to be for people without power what Machiavelli's The Prince is for people with power. I don't own The Prince anymore because I left it on a train, so I never finished it, but what I did read gave me a clear impression of what it was about: how to remain in power and use it effectively. Rules for Radicals is a book of advice on how to successfully organise communities for power. One of my main observations during the student protests last year was the lack of organisational coherence, as the campaign relied largely on the spontaneous activities of people who were sympathetic. There were no serious efforts to broaden support, and there was no coordination to maximise impact. There was no plan. That was my motivation for reading the book, and if you are interested in how to organise communities for power, broaden support and maximise impact, then there is probably something in this book you will find interesting.

It is a rambling, anecdote filled little book with no obvious structure (some chapters are composed entirely of meandering lists) which is nevertheless powerful just because it relates the valuable experience of somebody who has actually done it all, somebody who has successfully organised people who have no power to get what they need. One of the most valuable things about it is the sense it gives you that ordinary people can change things. They are going to need to work a hell of a lot harder than they are now though.

The most obvious comparison to Machiavelli comes in the chapter on means and ends, in which Alinsky dismisses the doctrine of non-violent resistance entirely. The question, he says, is not whether the ends justify the means, but whether these particular ends justify these particular means. Moralising is the luxury of those who have a choice: if your end is urgent enough, the means you will take are the means that will work. The best thing to say about non-violence is that in the modern day, with such asymmetry in coercive power between people and state, non-violence is going to be the only thing that works. This kind of assertive pragmatism can be hard to read sometimes but is hard to dismiss.

To me the most powerful part of the book was the prologue, where Alinsky taps into what drives people's passion for change. "Today's generation is desperately trying to make some sense out of their lives and out of the world... They have rejected... everything that meant success to their parents... They have seen the unbelievable idiocy of our political leadership". Though it was written 40 years ago the sentiments feel the same and in many ways it seems like the world has been in stasis all this time, with many of the same unresolved problems.

In some ways though everything is very different. Alinsky is very candid about race in a way which sounds coarse to a modern ear, though he was very much a progressive in his time. He never comes accross as misogynistic, but he constantly assumes anyone in a position of leadership, power or organisation will be a man. The book bears its age well: that doesn't mean it doesn't show it at all.

Throughout the whole book I got a strong impression that the "rules" were not meant to be taken literally. They were more to feed the imagination and encourage discipline and serious-mindedness than anything else. Michael Oakeshott makes the point well when he observes that any kind of theory or training manual is no substitute for experience and personal reflection, this when he is denouncing rationalism in politics at the expense of experience. One rule does seem fundamental however, and certainly merits some reflection. Community organisation, Alinsky claims, requires first community disorganisation. Galvanising issues are there to be harnessed, organisation for people who need it is a worthy end in itself.

Caleb

Men's Breakfast

Hello internet.

This is a song I wrote a while ago. It's called Men's Breakfast.

As I sat by the wall both my arms felt like lead,

And the feeling arising could be spirit or dread,

As the pastor called out for his first volunteer,

To break out of the cage and to conquer his fear,

And it just made me question if I was the one,

Who should turn from the shadows to bask in the sun,

But my petals were withered and crinkled and dark,

And try as I might I could not find the spark,

But I'm wondering now whether that's what it means,

To stay on the bank, not to jump in the stream,

Well whatever it was I could not but hold back,

Whether spiritual revel or panic attack.

As the zealot beside me would mutter and sway,

I couldn't find sense in the things that he'd say,

His prayers and his tongues found me equally deaf,

They echoed inside me and fleetingly left,

As inside I'm hollow with nowhere to store,

The memories of mutterings made to the Lord,

But the question I'm asking that keeps me awake,

Is who was the phony, who was the fake?

The zealot, the convert, who fervently cried,

Or the doubt-filled thinker who silent abides,

Though with visions and tongues I've never been blessed,

Maybe this Godly silence is all but a test.

Caleb

A Letter To My Future Child

Hello.

I've been doing a lot to try and make the world better for you. But it has not been enough. I am sorry that things are the way they are, and I am partly responsible. The planet, politics and society are in quite a poor state and I should have done more to make them better.

I will try never to call you boy or girl, or son or daughter, but I think you should know that other people will. I am very happy for you to choose what kind of person you want to be, and also what kind of people you want to fall in love with one day. I should just let you know, though, that if the world is anything like it was when I was growing up, it will be a lot easier for you if you be what people expect you to be. I want you to be whoever you want to be. If you let society force you into trying to be something which is not right for you, it will make you unhappy. It will be hard for you but you will need to stick up to them. Find friends who understand and face them together. Know that I will be the first of those friends.

I am so sorry that you are paying for all the bad decisions made by other people before you were even born. Please don't despair, but instead do what I tried to do which is to forgive the past generations and try to rise up to meet the challenges. There will be successes and there will be failures, try not to be disheartened for too long. The world needs you too much for you to give up. Do not think that I don't care anymore just because I am older now. I promised myself when I was younger I would always keep on caring, keep on trying. Please remind me whenever I seem to be breaking that promise. For this I really need you.

I have been looking forward to your existence for a long time. I am going to make mistakes, I am sorry for that as well. But let's make it an adventure together, okay?

I love you.

Caleb
(Dad)

Closet Tory

Hello internet.

Someone recently asked me if I was a closet Tory. I am not (obviously), and I would have no problem admitting it if I was a Tory, because most of them probably aren't so bad. People of every political hue have a motive to portray their opponents as stupid or incompetent or selfish or scheming, or even evil. I think that this is usually a mistake. When I have spoken to people from different parties they have tended to have good reasons for believing what they believe, and I usually find I can respect them.

It might not be so much my politics but the company I keep that leads to accusations of my being right wing. A lot of people involved in activism believe strongly in ideologies that mean quite a lot to them. I was in a pub a couple of weeks ago with someone from the Socialist Party, someone from the Socialist Workers' Party and an anarchist. It felt like the beginning of a joke.

Caleb

The Language of Ableism

Hello internet.

This is broadly speaking my reaction to this blog, though some of the thoughts written here have been going around for a while.

I will begin this entry with the admission that I am not completely comfortable with the terms mental illness or even disability because they seem to be making value judgements about people without any real basis. I don't like the idea that the language we use suggests that these features are a bad thing, or that deviation from what people think of as normal is a bad thing. I do understand that people might want to use a very weak sense of the word "bad" to mean a property that creates difficulties for people in the particular social context we are in, but this could be adequately replaced with the something to the effect of "difficulty-generating". From what I have thus far written you may have noticed that I feel quite hesitant and am trying very hard both to effectively put across my thoughts and to avoid using any language which could quite justifiably be taken as offensive by many people.

Here is the argument as I understand it. Some person in our society has a difficulty-generating mental or physical anomoly that significantly make their life worse (I am using the third person plural to try to avoid gender bias). This could be for one of two main reasons: firstly that people within society actively discriminate against people with anomolies like theirs; or secondly that society itself is constituted in such a way that people with anomolies like theirs are at a significant disadvantage. I am using a device I first came accross in the chapter on Feminism in Contemporary Political Philosophy by Will Kymlicka, but it originates elsewhere. The obvious injustice of either state of affairs is supposed to make us feel the need to correct this defect in our society, and suffice to say I find the case quite compelling.

After being part of (and presumably benefitting from) a system which is making some people's lives worse, to then act or speak in a way which is found hurtful by those same people is a terrible thing to do, and so I agree with Diane Shipley that we need to be careful with the language that we use. But as is probably made obvious by my fumbling for words, I don't really know what the correct language to use might be.

I think the explanation in my case might be broadly biographical. I have had almost no exposure to people with any of the kinds of difficulties I am talking about, except what have presumably been relatively mild cases. I am probably both a lot less sensitive to some people's needs than I ought to be, and a lot less informed than I ought to be about the various issues affecting significant numbers of people in our communities. I have no excuse for this, either. It seems to have just happened. This is something which I feel I need to remedy in the near future.

If I was a person like me, and I am, I would be quite careful with what I say and do so as to avoid being hurtful. Yes, it is difficult sometimes to know which words to use, but this is the future now: surely we can be creative.

Caleb

PS I will hopefully talk a bit later about public policy when there is great diversity of this sort for people.

When I was Pre-Post-Christian

Hello internet.

I don't think my parents did anything particularly wrong in giving me a Christian upbringing. They were just doing their best. They were relatively liberal, and when I "came out" as an unbeliever last year they were fine with it. At least that's what I think, we didn't really talk about it. I think they had seen it coming for a while.

My parents started having children young, they finished their seven year architecture degrees with four children. I don't think that was for weird Catholic style reasons but I know that university is where Christianity really happened to them and it seems to be a really big part of their relationship and the things they have chosen to do with their lives. When something like that gets so big it in many ways becomes your whole life, you can see how the religious concepts and spiritual relationships become tangible. Perhaps it is easier to be a believer if you build you whole life on it, so that doubt never really becomes an option. For people who really do religion it can become Too Big To Fail.

More or less everything they actually did, in terms of using their authority as parents, seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. In fact, it was much more the emotional side of our relationship not the use of authority that made me be a Christian. My parents and I loved each other, and I wanted to live in a way that made them happy, made them proud of me. For a while I wanted to be a missionary like them when I grew up. They lived in a meaningful way according to some amazing code I didn't quite understand but which seemed a kind of magic. So wanting to be like my parents not only made me a willing indoctrinatee but also meant that I kept giving the church second chances, and when I withdrew from Christian life for a long time it was associated with intense feeling of guilt or self-criticism.

There were a couple of early episodes where they might have been a bit illiberal. I remember once I was playing around on my bed when we were suppose to be praying together. My dad smacked me for it, but it wasn't so much the smack that hurt but the feeling that I had failed, that I had done something unforgivable. Also, when we were very young it was never an option whether or not we would go to Sunday school. This was probably as much for logistical reasons as anything I guess since there would have been nobody home to look after us, but it did mean that we were automatically culturally situated within the tradition of Christianity. I know the Bible stories and I even had some infantile interpretations of my own. I know the doctrines I was taught, and I know how some of the rituals go. Everyone knows the Lords Prayer but to me it really meant something. My parents were young though and didn't really know that well what they were doing, and besides everyone makes a couple of mistakes. I have since met Christian parents who are much worse.

As soon as I was old enough to think properly, say twelve or thirteen, my parents became much more relaxed about whether I went to church, on the surface at least. Most weeks I would stay at home and play computer games or spend time with friends instead. Though they never ordered me to do anything I could feel their disapproval whenever I said no. There was a regular ritual where on a Sunday morning Dad would ask me in a very very nice voice "Are you coming to church with us today?". And I would say no. And feel terrible.

I still self-defined as a Christian though and still kept to fairly strict Christian morals of the standard anglophone non-denominational kind. You see even though I questioned things and I thought about science and philosophy and everything, I was still very much a Christian in my habits and emotions. In addition to that, being a Christian made me feel like I was different to other people in a very psychologically powerful way. I already had a sense of differentness because I had spent a long time abroad, and this continued to be a powerful force on my personality until I noticed and took steps to intentionally correct for it. Being a Christian made me feel special, the morals I kept and others didn't let me feel like I was better than them. Now I realise that was complete rubbish, but the reason it was so convincing a thought at the time was because all around me I could see that the world really was messed up, and I thought I knew the way to fix it.

It was utter hypocrisy because some of the stuff I did do was obviously bad, and the stuff I was choosing not to do didn't really matter. I might go into a bit more depth on this another time but by the time I was 16 I regularly lied to my parents, I was arrogant, a bit of a bully, occasionally violent, cowardly, borderline homophobic, a truly terrible boyfriend: I was a pretty awful person. I was so fixated on my own specialness due to some inconsequential stuff I did or didn't do that I never really gave any serious thought about what it meant to be a good person. A system of rules loosely inspired by the Bible but largely fabricated by various religious reformers had ethically lobotomised me.

I think the main thing which differentiates being Post-Christian from never having been Christian at all is what I call spiritual withdrawal (there also exists a spiritual hangover). I still know the conceptual framework of Christianity, I could go right back into if I wanted to (apart from the obvious reasons why that would be a terrible idea). For a long time I was unable to "kick the habit" because whenever I strayed away I would get intense feelings of guilt. I gradually managed to wean myself off Christianity by dropping beliefs one by one in favour of the fairly standard Western liberal thought I now seem to have as a start point, though I took an interesting detour via Quakerism. It has been a long process but I have to say I feel better about myself and more able to find meaning and value in the world than I ever did when there was a divine answer to everything.

Caleb

The Race/Gender Analogy

Hello internet.

Biological sex is to gender as X is to race.

What is X? It is bound to be something to do with genotype (and usually skin colour, facial bone structure), but there seems to be no existing concept that can spell out exactly what X is. Presumably that is because there is no single thing. I will be using the catch-all symbol X to represent these features.

The race/gender analogy is supposed to draw out the arbitrariness of gender discrimination, or alternatively to bring to light the injustice of one gender having systematically worse life chances that another. We would not tolerate this kind of imbalance between races (or Xs), and would thus look for policy solutions for it, so to be consistent we should not tolerate this imbalance between genders (or biological sexes). This is the usual direction the analogy is applied, but I think it can constructively go both ways.

To anyone unfamiliar with the precise terminology, biological sex refers to whether someone is male or female (or both or neither). Gender is a social construct which typically maps men onto males and women onto females. The fact that it is a social construct makes it in some ways inherently oppressive: it is the set of expectations we have about people based unfoundedly on the bare scientific facts. Now I could argue about the exact extent of the differences between male and female humans (just as one could argue about the differences between Xs) but I think it is not constructive, relies on empirical not conceptual support, and would not substantively alter the way we think about these issues anyway.

When we hear feminists talk about smashing the gender binary, they are talking about decoupling sex and gender. It is not fair that society should form certain expectations of you and pressure you into certain roles and self-perceptions based on a fact about you which is entirely out of your control. If we are to have gender at all, we should not be limited to two, and people should feel free to have whatever gender they wish. The sex-gender parity has got to go.

Yet there is an asymmetry here. These arguments seem to apply just as strongly to race. However race is an important concept in the politics of identity, and what is more it is important to have information on the classifications captured by the term race so that we have the tools to identify problems in order to fix them. Yet we also have good reason to destroy the idea of race, or make it so that race, like gender, is a social label that we can choose for ourselves, a choice which society will respect.

There is a tension here between the dual needs to break down oppressive social constructs and the need to gather information about what society actually thinks, what distinctions it actually draws and what the consequences are of these distinctions. As such we cannot just "do away with race" for official purposes (such as in surveys and so on) while the concept stills runs rampant through peoples minds.

I suggest that a way to start on addressing this tension is by not asking people what race they are, but asking them what they think other people think their race is. This externalises the idea of race, leaving it somewhat more open to the individual to choose whether they are going to have a race or not, and hopefully most of us will choose not to. This was we can carry on gathering important information and at the same time reduce the oppressive power of the race construct.

This feels inconclusive, and I am sure there are many more considerations I have not thought of, but I think that firstly the race/gender analogy is a powerful tool for highlighting instances of oppression for women, and secondly that it gives us reason to believe that the world would be better if the idea of race either didn't exist or was remarkably different.

Caleb

My Hypothetical Bands

Hello internet.

I thought I would share with you the names of a couple of the aborted bands that I have planned to start up.

1) Clichés of the Alternative Left
Punk band, excellent name. Still might go ahead.

2) Internet Cover Band
Just me playing internet songs (Rick Astley, Charlie Sheen, Baby Monkey, Being a Dickhead's Cool, etc) at open mic nights etc.

3) Screaming JIMP
Me on bass, Ali on drums, John in a gimpsuit. It's probably not going to happen.

4) The Breeders
This one is a bit of a sad story: apparently the name was already taken.

5) York Protest Orchestra
Actually existed for a bit. I might revive this one at some point, it was a fun way of brightening up and demilitarising protests.

I haven't written a song in ages, so I don't know if music is even going to happen to me anymore.

Caleb

The Idea of a City

Hello internet.

They say it is the biggest migration in the history of the world. It's the city. Everyone is moving into the city, we are all going there looking for... something. It is not obvious what that something is, but that is testament to just how much muchness there is in the city.

Take me, for example. I am here to get an education. It's going pretty well I suppose, and I certainly couldn't do this in the countryside. People flock to the city not just to live though, they also rush in every day. Apparently, they do this to buy books. Look at those guys, they really want their books.

What I want to suggest is that what we put at the centre of our cities says something about what is at the centre of our lives. It will surprise no-one that a lot of our space and energy seems to be devoted to making and spending money. It strikes me that it does not need to be this way. Indeed it hasn't always been. In York the incredible Minster dominates the city centre. Now an impressive bauble bringing in the tourists like so many bees, it once was a place of power, politics (church politics) and reverence. The theatres, libraries and churches once meant something, once they were an honest expression of where we were as a society. I am not so sure about that anymore. It is not just about commodification and tourism. It is about looking for something which we really need to find, places where value is situated in our collective life.

The dominance of the city as shopping if anything captures the decline in collective life simpliciter. I don't know what we built these cities to do together, but it seems to have gone away. We fill in the gaps with busking, protests, and gathering with friends in public spaces, but these alone do not constitute healthy public life.

It so happens that York has one of the largest brownfield sites in Europe (according to some person I spoke to once) at the site variously called "the teardrop" or "York Central". It is right next to the train station, and presents an opportunity to create spaces which enrich our public life. At the moment it is probably earmarked for retail development. I find this distressing.

Being at university, I feel for the first time like I am really part of a community. I know quite a lot of people, I bump into people I know a lot, people spread gossip and share ideas and embark on projects together just for the sheer challenge, excitement and interest of it. There are informative public lectures and spaces where you can meet and talk incredibly freely. All this helps generate a sense of community which I find it harder to identify in the city proper. I think that the spaces and activities of the university contribute to the stimulating environment and sense of community, and there is something the city can learn from that.

The question of what we put at the heart of our cities is a question of what we value. I hope developers think about that before setting up a new Primark, before wasting another opportunity.

Caleb

Political Fantasy

Hello internet.

I have a confession, and though it makes me uncomfortable, I think it would be for the best if I came right out and admitted it. I suffer from political fantasies.

It has been happening for a while now, almost as long as I can remember. In my defence these episodes are usually brought about by what seems at the time a bright policy idea. Sometimes it is because of a flash of anger caused by the overwhelmingly apparent problems I see in the world to which there seem to be political solutions. I think I am not alone in this, that I am not the only person to have thought: if I only had the power...

My most recent fantasy involved me setting up a new political group or party called Youth Power. It sounds alarming and threatening to begin with, but I have always thought it is better to be upfront about these sorts of things.

The motivation for the party is as follows: young people currently have, and to some extent always have, had a very hard time getting by in life. There are many reasons for this, and though the root cause is somewhat hard to identify the problems manifested are all too visible. High house prices force young people to stay at home or at best remain in rented accomodation. Unemployment disproportionately afflicts young people. Students who are already sacrificing time that could be spent earning money in order to improve themselves for the good of the whole of society are forced into debt. Many face the humiliation of being told by the government their parents are too rich for them to qualify for financial support, effectively infantilising them as they must beg their parents for money, work at the cost of studying for their degree, or not eat.

Even worse, as Shiv Malik and Ed Howker point out in their book Jilted Generation, the proliferation of PFIs, unfunded pensions and high government debt mean that the excesses of today will be paid for by the taxpayers of the next generations. Intergenerational justice is a concept fast gaining credibility, and a group representing the interests of young people would help in encouraging policies less unfair for them.

Anyway that was the reason for that political fantasy. It is a filthy habit, but maybe if I can be honest to the internet I can be honest to myself. If I recognise there is a problem I might be able to rid myself of it.

Caleb

Crypto-Anarchism

Hello internet.

I was not really that into codes when I read The Code Book by Simon Singh. It was before one of my many failed attempts to get into Oxford, and I wanted some conceptually heavy trivia to impress with. Though that didn't work, it did give me a small taste for cryptography, which in turn led to an interest in hacker culture. I will readily admit I don't know the first thing about any kind of programming. I have a loose grasp of certain concepts, but I am very much a fascinated spectator in this particular social development.

Recently a lot of headlines have been made by groups like Anonymous and LulzSec, who have directly challenged the authority of the state by attacking its assets and undermining its activities. The online economy has taken a new turn with the growing popularity of Bitcoins which allow tax free incomes and the exchange of contraband. Governments seem incapable of effectively policing what happens online, and a large part of this is due to the protection anonymity provides people. Apart from the fascinating philosophical questions about identity we can pose with so much interaction taking place anonymously, to me the interesting thing about these trends is the immunity from state power available to people with sufficient know-how.

It always interests me when trends like this emerge.

Caleb

Fun for Cats and Dogs

Hello internet.

I saw a dog this morning, and I was once again struck by just how ridiculous they are. I grew up with dogs, and always found they are best for three things: wrestling, tricking and cuddling when you are sad. The dog ran in that inefficient bouncing doggish way, unlike the smooth lope of a wolf I have heard so much about in generic fantasy novels. It's ears flopped about comically, tongue flapping about. Everyone else has seen this too.

Stupid as they are, there is a certain innocent joy to a dog running around that warmed me somewhat. They seem to take pleasure in the simply fact of life with all its exuberance. Maybe we can learn something from dogs. Maybe I was just projecting, and its stupid self was not really feeling anything in the sense we feel at all.

It is always tempting to contrast cats and dogs, probably because they are so familiar to people in many societies. We all know about domesticated cats and dogs: no other animals have their presence in our popular consciousness. It is a cliché, but cats seem to take pleasure in the suffering of others. At least that's the impression I get from their arrogant little faces. Maybe that's why we like to see them brought down a peg or three by watching videos of them falling off things on Youtube (I just got the urge to search for such videos, I bet anyone reading just did as well).

I think I would rather have the fun dogs are having than that of cats. I would rather enjoy my own life than enjoy watching other people fail. Unless those other people are cats.

Caleb

Finding a voice

Hello internet.

Welcome to my new blog. I don't really know what to say by way of an introduction, by now you should know the deal with these things. I plan on talking about politics, philosophy, society and culture, while at the same time documenting the happenings in my life and anecdotes that spring to mind. Hopefully in the process I can do what we're all trying to do, which is to understand better where I am in life, and where I am going. I also hope that I can write regularly to get into a habit of writing, and by doing so crystallise what ideas I might have and find a voice of my own.

Caleb