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
Friday, July 29, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
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
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
Saturday, July 23, 2011
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
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
Thursday, July 21, 2011
(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
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
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
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
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
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
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
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
Friday, July 1, 2011
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
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