To Quote Bugs Bunny ...

"I dream of Genie, she's a light brown hare".

Well, I don't actually dream of genies.  Or hares.  In fact, it's only in the last couple of years that I've consciously recollected any of my dreams other than ones that were disturbing enough for me to wake myself up from them (I think that's a facet of 'lucid dreaming' - something some people pay good money to learn how to do, and I can do it for free.  Go me!) Anyway ...

Last night, after consciously stopping a weird dream about strange people outside my house, which wasn't my house but was - if you see what I mean - and my mother weilding a large piece of garden trellis in defensive preparation, I dreamt several lines of utterly compelling poetry then woke up.  And promptly forgot it.

The way my mind runs things, you'd think I'd know something about it ...

A Book At Bedtime (3)

This time, it's: "Letter To A Christian Nation" by Sam Harris.

It's billed as a hard-hitting rebuttal of religious fundamentalism and 'blind faith'. So basically we can sum it up as Atheist points out to American fundamentalist Christians where they're going wrong, and it's as dull and boring as every other ‘atheist points out the flaws in, largely, Judaeo-Christian belief’ book.  In this apparently interminable argument, it all seems to boil down to: “What I believe is right and what you believe is wrong”.  Which reduces it all down to playground level and, by association, then devalues the reasoned points in either argument (and, yes, there are many).

I do wonder whether any of these impassioned - some might even say uncompromising - anti-religion authors have actually managed to ‘turn’ any but a small number of individuals away from their faith(s).  I can quite see that they have been very successfully preaching to the already converted; and have probably managed to crystallize, or simply verbalise, the arguments that many more have been having with themselves. But have they ever really hit home amongst the audience they are apparently addressing?  I see no evidence that great swathes of Christians have had a neo-Damascene revelation as a result of their arguments, so I have to conclude not.  Perhaps they need to try a different tack.

Polemical atheism is as wearisome, to me, as its religious counterpart.  The totalitarian slant of “all religion, and everything in it, is bad” is the crude approach of the mindless crusader.  Who amongst us has the right to condemn something that brings comfort to those whose lives are rooted in poverty, hardship, misery and pain: for whom daily survival, rather than, say, being published, is a major triumph?  Certainly not those who live in relative ease as part of the intelligentsia,

and whose argument against religion and for non-belief/science is too academic for the vast majority to engage with.

To be fair, Harris manages largely to steer away from the rabid invective of the more zealous of his brethren in non-belief.  And he does have the grace to concede that some religious belief is benign or, at least, less malignant in his view than Christianity (Jainism seems to rate well for its doctrine of non-violence at least).  He puts forward well-structured arguments against the basic tenets of Christian belief and the fallacious claims of conservative and fundamental Christianity to be holding the moral high ground in terms of compassion, goodness and doing good in the name of God: to wit, his dismantling of the Christian anti-abortion argument in America.  I do think he rather veers into unhelpful mudslinging against the Catholic Church when it comes to the discussion on limbo, though.  And I find the tone in sentences such as: “The cure for obstetric fistula is, as it turns out, a simple surgical procedure - not prayer” snide and condescending, which strikes me as rather self-defeating when it’s aimed at the very people he’s trying to reason with.

Let me make it clear, I have no religious belief and have no drum to bang on behalf of religion(s).  But neither can I find it in myself to support the dogma spouted by Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins and the like.  And deny it as much as they will, Atheism has its dogma just as much as any religion.  Similarly, it has its fundamentalists: Richard Dawkins being the first amongst them (and anyone who can propose the Huxleyesque notion of removing children from their parents at birth and raising them in an environment that is hermetically sealed against religious belief or any other intellectually corrupting influence must, frankly, be several pegs short of a full clothes line).  Still, leaving aside one or two flaws in his own argument, Harris' book just leaves me, once more, shaking my head in despair because it always seems to me that the hard-core of atheism overlooks some of the most basic facts about human nature. 

Despite millennia of growth and progress in human understanding, the vast majority of us alive at any given point in our history believe in some esoteric force greater than ourselves.  Mankind has a desperate, deep-rooted need to understand the world around us; to create some form of belief system to explain it.  There seems to be an innate need in the human species to seek patterns and order where none, in reality, exist.  Which might explain why, with the decline in religious attendance (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Christian religious attendance) in this country, and others, came a rise in ‘Alternative belief systems’: Scientology; Kabbalah; paganism; even the belief in Faeries.  There should be a strong message for the atheistic die-hards there: when conventional religions fail to provide them with answers, rather than turn en-masse to non-belief or to science large numbers choose, instead, to turn to some other equally non-scientific, requiring-the-willing-suspension-of-disbelief, faith system.

I’ve touched on this already but when a person’s life is little more than a daily struggle for survival; when hideous, irrational events are visited on people without, seemingly, rhyme or reason, the vast majority of us are simply not hardwired in a way that will allow us to take a dispassionate view of the horrors we are having to deal with.  Many, many people simply cannot rationalise what they have lived through, or live with on a daily basis, sufficiently to recognise that nothing more than pure change had any part to play.  And maybe, just maybe, clinging to the belief that there is a better life to come is what makes it possible for some people to live through the one they have without going mad. 

I also feel that many of those who advocate scientific over religious belief forget that religion, for many, is about more than simply faith.  It’s about the ‘warm fuzzy’ feeling of having a sense of belonging; about being part of a wider community.  Aside from at a rather cold intellectual and academic level, science doesn’t have that to offer – and people need it.  More so now, I think, than ever before.   For many, the network of support, security, advice, assistance, and the sharing of values and culture that the traditional extended family unit provided has virtually disappeared. It’s been replaced instead with more individualistic and consumerist values. These, in turn, seem to have fuelled increased feelings of dissatisfaction, alienation and general unhappiness, coupled with a greater striving for more material possessions to somehow fill a perceived void in our emotional wellbeing.  A cold alembic does about as much to make us truly deep-down happy as a brand new pair of expensive designer shoes.  We are a social species and religions taps into our most basic cravings for group inclusion in a way science and shopping can never do.

More than that, I can’t help but feel that were all religions to be swept away overnight, we would find something else around which to draw our tribal lines.  It seems innate.   All the wars and peacetime atrocities that have been perpetrated in the name of religion really have all been about one thing: power.  Religion has been appropriated as the moral justification to support aggression and rapaciousness.  The fact that science is rooted in logic and not faith does not insulate it from being just as easily expropriated to sustain the worst of human desires and ambitions.  The evidence that this is happening daily is all around us.

It does seem incredible and even scary that the majority of people living in the most powerful nation on earth believe Noah carried dinosaurs on the Ark; that  the Bible is the word of God wholly unadulterated by personal or socio-political bias on the part of those who recorded said ‘word’, and should be the sole determining factor in how we conduct our affairs (including suitable punishment for those conducting extra-marital ones); and that in the game of religious Top Trumps, the God of the Christians outranks all others.  But, in many respects, it was ever thus. 

Those who led the charge for the Protestant Reformation can’t have viewed enormous power in the hands of people who believed in Purgatory, or who supported the sale of Indulgences, with equanimity.  And let’s not forget that even in the Late Middle Ages, significant numbers still clung to the belief that the earth was flat.  We make progress in understanding and belief in some areas, only to find new arenas for debate.  Whatever faith system prevails, mankind will find ways to subvert it to its own malign causes.  It comes back to our seemingly inextinguishable need to affiliate along clan fault lines.

Personally, if I have a ‘clan’ in this sense – and I’m not sure that I do – then it is that which has room for the likes of Alain De Botton.  Although I’ve yet to read it, I bought his book ‘Religion for Atheists’ when it was first published on the grounds that he recognises that some religious faiths, at least, have a great deal to offer in terms of their understanding of the importance of community to our mental wellbeing.   And he seems to manage to do so in a good-natured fashion, without being deprecating or demeaning, to boot.  I’ll let you know when I’ve read it!

A Book At Bedtime (2)

Do You Think What You Think You Think? by Julain Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom

Self-billed as  "The Ultimate Philosophical Quiz Book".  I'm not sure about that, but it is fun and it does make you review the ways in which you think, and shows you where your thought processes may be contradictory.

I surprised myself in that I am, seemingly, consistent in the majority of my opinions.  Likewise, in the logic test I am too clever for my own good.  In building my own God, I failed miserably in the area of calculating my own score, and it is not possible to determine the extent to which I see moral wrongdoing in universal terms, so I am neither fully universalizing nor fully relativizing.  I am fully permissive though.  I'm not sure what this means for my moral compass though.  Sitting on a magnet under a pile of iron filings, probably.

Pictures At An Exhibition ...

I've barely written a thing since the end of NaPoWriMo, just a bit of tinkering at the edges of work I'd produced during the NaPo challenge.  Whether it was a form of exhaustion at having been so unusually disciplined for a sustained period, I'm not sure.  I went through something similar once I'd finished my Open University degree: I hardly read a book for more than two years in some kind of reaction against the pace at which I had been reading - both for academic purposes and for pleasure - for the previous eight.

Anyway, as part of the Swindon Festival of Literature I attended a poetry workshop on Sunday at Swindon Art Gallery and Museum.  The workshop was led by Tamar Yoseloff, a poet and creative writing tutor with a particular interest in the relationship between poetry and modern visual arts.  Swindon Art Gallery is home to an impressive collection of modern art, purportedly the third largest outside of London. Most of it I probably wouldn't give house room to, to be honest: I'm not particularly into abstract art and even a lot of the figurative did nothing for me.  However, as an exercise in shared creativity and in finding inspiration in places I might not otherwise have considered, it was a very useful day.

There were a handful of paintings that I did connect with.  The moment I walked through the door, I was gripped by 'Descent of a bull's head' by Maggie Hamblin: such a stark image.

I was certain that this was the picture I would choose to write about when the time came.  From where I was sitting, I was able to look at this throughout the morning, hung alongside an absolutely massive canvass that, at first, I couldn't make any sense of ... and then it eventually resolved itself for me as Pegasus and some kind of turbine.  Actually, it was 'Hyperion' by Christopher le Brun, and the more I looked at it the more I fell in love with it, although I'd probably have to move house in order to be able to give it the space it commands - it's about eight foot by seven.  This is it:

I was also drawn to a rather un-Lowry-like Lowry: 'A Procession':

I'm not a fan of Lowry particularly, but I found this rather striking.  Possibly the contrast in the washed-out colours of the titular subject and the definite colours of the onlookers in the foreground.  It certainly sparked a very strong and forceful piece of poetry from one of the people present.

Anyway, once we'd been given free reign to wander the gallery and find our inspiration, I settled on a picture that I'd not actually noticed before, which was surprising given that it is quite striking and was in my eyeline all morning.  'The Tower Bridge, London: A Wartime Nocturne' by Claude Francis Barry.

Pleasingly, I produced a first draft in the time allotted and got some useful critiques and suggestions for ways to take it forward in the feedback session during the afternoon.  This is one that definitely has 'legs'.

I also bashed out something sparked from 'Descent', although it was nothing approaching the initial thoughts I had on the painting - those, I think, still need to mature a bit before they become what I first intended (if, indeed, they ever do: the creative process having a habit of doing it's own thing irrespective of what the artist/writer intended).  No, I produced something - a not very good something - referencing the Ancient Greek myth (this seems to be a default mode for me) of Ariadne and the Minotaur.  Interestingly, three others in the group had chosen this same painting as their inspiration.  As they were all sitting next to one another and very close to me, I have to conclude that the power of the painting permeated their conciousness' during the morning to the exclusion of all else.  It was, though, fascinating to hear three very different interpretations of their shared experience ... and to know that I had a fourth in hand.  What I produced on that theme was rushed and a quite weak, but I think will bear working on.

Overall, it was a hugely useful exercise: attending the workshop.  It's re-kindled the desire to write again; taught me the value of looking for inspiration in places I might otherwise not have; encouraged me to attend more workshops; and taught me the meaning of the word 'Ekphrastic'.  

Oh, and as Swindon Museum and Art Gallery will be closing down in 2014 and only a very few items from its' collection will be on display after that point, I'd just like it noted that I will be happy to give a home to all of the above works, along with C R W Nevison's 'Welsh Hills': rays of light as sharp knife blades or creases in a well-pressed pair of trousers:

More News From The Hen House ...

Well.  Things have been happening down in the old hen house of late.  I'm proud to announce that Amelia, Chicken Nugget has become a mother twice over!

Firstly, last Thursday, on a routine visit by the Chicken Guru to check over the four quail eggs that had not hatched and were about to be ditched, we discovered one had in fact hatched after all.  However, the chick had strayed into the adjoining nest box and been left there and we found it cold, still and seemingly dead.  But, whilst the Guru took the other three eggs away to check why they hadn't hatched I noticed the tiniest of twitches.  So, just like an episode of Casualty or ER, it was emergency action stations as the little scrap was scooped up by the Guru and held in cupped hands for warm whilst he gently blew on it to try and get its body temperature back up.  And it worked!  After about half an hour of us resuscitating it between us, we had a little survivor on our hands!  It's now been fostered with the Chicken Guru because he has a) a hot lamp and b) a young daughter who wanted the quail if they hatched.  Sadly, none of the other eggs made it: two were bad and one had a fully-developed chick but it hadn't been strong enough to make it out of the egg.  I've called our solitary quail  Anthony.

Whilst the Guru was here, we 'candled' the two hen's eggs with a torch and discovered one of them had partially developed but was now dead, but the other seemed to contain a live chick.  So it was just a matter of waiting to see what happened.

Sure enough, Saturday morning, the good egg had a couple of small pieces of shell flaked off it and 'peeping' sounds coming from inside it.  By the end of the day, Amelia (seemingly) had pecked shell off in a circle all the way around the egg and a tiny beak was showing through.  Sunday morning dawned on a gorgeous fluffy little chick in the nest box with Amelia.

Despite some concerns as to whether Olga Kiev and the cockerel, Dinner, would accept the chick, all seems to be going well.  The two of them have been hanging round the nest box/roosting chamber and coop since the quail was born and I wasn't sure whether their intentions towards to chick(s) were entirely honourable, but Amelia brought the chick out  into the coop yesterday  afternoon, and again today without disaster, so all looks to be well.  The other two are still hanging around close to the coop and haven't been into the main garden at all.  The cockerel is really quite protective of Amelia and the chick and doesn't approve of me getting too close - he's torn between guarding Amelia and chick and guarding Olga, which is quite funny to watch.  Amelia has been showing the chick how to find food in the feeder and how to grub around in the dirt for interesting things today and it's been lovely to watch. I'm going soft in my old age!

Here are Anthony Quail (top) and Amelia with her new chick - as yet unnamed - bottom.

A Book At Bedtime. Or Any Other Time ...

I've been reading 'The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better For Everyone.' by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and highly recommend it.

This book investigates the apparent modern conundrum of affluent nations whose citizens seemingly ‘have it all’ and yet record higher than ever levels of anxiety, stress and dissatisfaction – across all age and social groups – and are increasingly classified as being ‘fractured societies’; in our own case, we are “broken Britain”.  And yet there are similarly affluent countries where people are much happier and content with life.  What is the difference between the two groups; where does the disparity lie?  The theory put forward by Wilkinson and Pickett, supported by a wealth of evidence gathered from over thirty years of research, is that it lies in the gap between rich and poor.  In those affluent, developed nations with the largest gap between their wealthiest and their poorest citizens.  Those are the countries which have the highest rates of: teenage pregnancy; youth violence; violent crime; imprisonment; mental health issues; drug and alcohol abuse; obesity; end of life illnesses; single parenthood; suicide; etc. etc.  They are, virtually without exception, those societies where the income inequality gap is greatest: the USA, Australia, New Zealand (yes, that one really surprised me, too!), the UK, Portugal, Ireland, and much of the rest of Europe.

Conversely, those wealthy, developed countries with the flattest ‘wealth hierarchies’, where the economic equality gap is smallest, routinely record much higher levels of individuals’ happiness and satisfaction, and concomitantly lower levels of the social ills mentioned above: Sweden, Denmark, Japan.

It seems economists could have learned a thing or two from social and evolutionary psychologists about group behaviour, and also from women’s studies, as regards the alienation and sense of powerlessness amongst those at the lower levels in a hierarchy, and what the associated stress and anxiety does for physical and mental health and welfare.  But, and here perhaps is the most important point that the authors make, it is not just those at the lower economic levels in a society who benefit when the inequality gap is reduced: all levels of society benefit in many different ways. 

The root of all these evils is competitive consumption; economic aspiration at the cost of everything else; conspicuous and shallow status display in every area of life.  Ever increasing wealth and consumption does not make us happy or healthy as individuals, nor does it make for a happy and healthy society.

Whilst the modern-day Neros fiddle their expenses, avoid taxes and build their golden ‘iceberg’ houses with the profits from their gargantuan multi-nationals, we have consentingly allowed ourselves to be led down the path to our own destruction.  The cult of the individual and the growth of conspicuous status-based consumption, that have been so fervently promoted and adopted, are nothing more than the equivalent of the bread and circuses that kept the Roman masses acquiescent.  They are the smokescreen behind which the ultra-wealthy have operated, and we, the modern masses, have gladly used them as the means to fill the voids left by the fracturing of our traditional extended family groups and the increasing dearth of community relationships. We’ve lost sight of the fact that society is collaborative, not individualistic, and that operating collaboratively brings far more benefits, both individually and socially, than would be achieved otherwise.  We no longer operate for the ‘common wealth’ but rather for our own.

Wilkinson and Pickett contest that we’ve reached the point where further improvements in the quality of our lives are no longer dependent on greater economic growth, but on the growth of community: how we relate to one another.  I can’t see this as being a position that any right-thinking person could argue with: society is not made up of un-related and un-connected individuals, it is all of us.  Our survival strategy, as a species, was to choose to live in groups that enabled their members to benefit in ways that would not have been possible on an individual basis, and thus delivering both individual and social benefits.  We seem, in many cases, to have lost sight of that very basic fact, choosing to concentrate on merely that which benefits us as individuals.  This book makes the price we are paying for that very clear and plainly lays out the case as to why we need to change.

There is a level of criticism over the way the authors have chosen to display their data, though.  A great number of people seem to be exercised over the way they have simplified and displayed the data, labelling graph axes with 'low' and 'high', for example.  I'm not sure that they could have used absolute values given the number of countries in their study. It would have been very unweildly, surely?  And there could very well be wide-ranging differences between affluent countries in the absolute values for their top and bottom percentiles ofaverage income levels.  In fact, a very rough comparison of the data for tax levels in New Zealand and the UK for 2010: in New Zealand, the average earnings for the lowest ten percent of tax payers was (equivalent to) £11k pa, whilst in the UK, the same group had an average income of £8k.  Likewise, the top ten percent of tax payers had average incomes of £750k and £100k pa respectively.  Very rough figures but, hopefully, they illustrate the point.  

To be honest, I can’t help but feel that in nit-picking over Wilkinson and Pickett’s graphic representation of the data some people are being almost deliberately obtuse.  It seems to me to be more of a cop out than a genuine argument against the premise of the book:  It's saying: “It’s a good book and I like the idea behind it but I really can’t buy into it as a way forward because they haven’t used absolute values on their graph axes”.  The point is that it is the size of the gap between those in the richest ten per cent and poorest ten per cent in any of the given societies that is the issue, not what the absolute wealth values of those percentiles might be.

It's so simples even a Meerkat could understand it!  (< And I don't actually believe I have just typed that sentence!)

This is an excellent book that I wish I had discovered sooner (it was first published in 2009) and which I wish all politicians and would-be politicians could be compelled to read.

((and Itand a

 a(n excellent book that, admittedly a little belatedly, I would wish all politicians and would-be politicians could be compelled to read. 

I can’t help but feel that in nit-picking over Wilkinson and Pickett’s graphic representation of the data people are being almost deliberately obtuse.  I really don’t understand the issue.  It seems to me to be more of a cop out than a genuine argument against the premise of the book: “It’s a good book and I like the idea behind it but I really can’t buy into it as a way forward because they haven’t used absolute values on their graph axes”.  The point is that it is the size of the gap between those in the richest ten per cent and poorest ten per cent in any of the given societies that is the issue, not what the absolute wealth values of those percentiles might be. 

It’s so simples even a Meerkat could understand it!

George Osbourn Remains A Cunt ...

Speaking from a lecturn labelled "For the hardworking" he claims 9 out of 10 families will be better off as a result of the raft of new changes to the benefit system.  That may, indeed, be the case overall, but once again those least able to roll with the punches are going to be hit the hardest.  And once again the implication is that those in receipt of benefit are not hardworking: that the poor are shiftless and lazy.

Despicable, devisive and damaging.