The Last Civilisation.

Every great civilisation dwindles and falls. Rome, Greece, Persian, Ethiopian etc. all fall in the end. They start youthful, energetic. They move to maturity where the rulers become a law to themselves and the lower class become so occupied putting food on the table they become tired, disillusioned and unable to call their rulers to account. In old age the rulers become fearful and full of strange self-serving ideas. This demise viewed from today is seen as sad, pathetic even funny but with little empathic connection. When it happens, is happening, to our British civilisation we’re in it rather than seeing it through the pink haze of history. Covid plus Brexit are the last two nails in our coffin. Covid will leave us with a huge bill and Brexit will cripple our ability to pay it off. What I personally rose on the back of, free and supported further education, working social services and the NHS are all shadows of their former selves. The optimism of “We’ve never had it so good” has been replaced by the depression of seeing Johnson and co frittering away our chances on some hair-brained scheme to get the wealthy better returns. Our new allegiance to America will only abuse us further. But this is the way of civilisations. We each have our day in the sun and our days in the dark. And the brash British youth of the industrial revolution has left the world, like Covid, much depleted. Humans have in effect become the Covid to much of nature killing off more than Covid ever could. Where those who call for empathy and awareness are voices on the wind those who believe the future lies with AI etc are lorded as profits of a new age. I despair. The world is and we are nature, as much as a squirrel, a tree, a mountain and its streams, all built from the same DNA. To leave that fold for binary silicone, however much it tickles our fancy, is to envisage an alternative universe and our wish to travel there. We’re building the algorithms, 5G and Windows 666 rocket as we speak. But we’ve become confused, disillusioned, unable to call our rulers to account. It’s a shame, and I suspect shameful to be the Last Civilisation.

They Never said they Loved Me.

Whether it was growing up in the fifties, being northern or their own problematic relationship but my parents never said they loved me. To be honest I wouldn’t have known where to file it if they had, though I knew I was loved. They never said I was great or good looking either, just ‘do your best, that’s all you can do.’ It’s hard to know if I’ve missed out on these expressions of affirmation. The absence of them though has left me to go about the task of being me the best I can without these external reflections. I’m still ambivalent about their worth. On the negative side I never thought of myself as good looking or great and I have probably missed out on opportunities without the confidence of these verbal affirmations. On the plus side I’ve had to grow my own without any strings that may have been attached to them. ‘You’re good looking if… we think you’re great for… we love you when...’ Even without these strings I don’t like external reflections. My duty to myself feels sacrosanct. This is probably why I dislike social media so much, so many people reflecting other people reflecting each other in a sort of cognitive incestuousness. Hence our growing totalitarian polarisation. Thinking about it masculinity doesn’t go in for affirmations in general. That’s not to say we can’t have huge affection for each other. But it’s somehow between ‘me’ and ‘you’ without, or maybe with the fear of, reflecting each other emotionally. We are born of female and at some point have to break that primary identification bond to identify oneself as male. Or not. We bond as fellow emigrant travellers on this path. In this new country of masculinity we make our new life noticing its different customs and mores. Then again there’s a genderless disposition to meet the roots of ‘you’ without the flimflam of reflections. So on the whole I’m happy they only said, ‘do your best, that’s all you can do.’ Which I did and I think they’d love me for that: Even when what I did do wasn’t exactly to plan.

This is Reality.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000k94k

Over the twelve or so years we’ve been watching ourselves in reality TV progs like TOWIE, Made in Chelsea etc etc we’ve been learning, not just about life in Essex and Chelsea but how to perform in our own reality. This is Reality. The above radio series lays this progression out beautifully. Though the producers of these shows explain, ‘These are real people in real situations with real emotions’, the finished product is manufactured to a brief. This is Reality. But the emotions are real otherwise, “it would all just be very bad acting”. In these twelve years the mostly young audience have been drifting towards seeing life in these terms. Sure you might be “not from New York city you’re from Hunters Bar”, but the emotions are real, which they are, and emotions are universal, right. The rest is now accepted as pretty fake. This is Reality. So one is left watching a merry dance of entertaining emotions and one begins to accept that emotionally is ‘how life is led. This is Reality. Well yes it is for some people but most, under the slings and arrows of experience, gain a maturity that puts reality first. It’s a,‘If you don’t rule your emotions your emotions will rule you’ kind of thing. (they’re formed in the reptilian part of the brain) This performing emotively in your own reality is appropriate for soaps but it’s become so pervasive in America few American actors can play big roles requiring real character depth so they often turn to English actors. And if that’s the effect it has on actors ordinary people can’t be far behind. This is Reality. Sure it is but it’s a fake reality. With thanks to Donald Glover. This is Reality. Dope.

Black Lives Matter.

Yesterday I was dismissed as being a white, heterosexual male, the most privileged group in our society. Most British fathers I know are and I find it nothing to be apologetic about. But women have ‘me too’, homosexuals have gay pride and now ‘black lives matter’. We’re the only social group left that doesn’t have a social media victim banner. And we’ve missed the boat on that one. ‘Proud white fathers’ would probably be met by universal derision, though I’m still proud to be the father of three. I was accused because I introduced some nuance into the BLM debate. That nuance apparently indicated I wasn’t 100% behind it. I find that strange. Nuance is only thinking, peeling the onion, finding complexities, implications and different perspectives. It’s definitely not being an apologist. I would be failing my privileged education to do otherwise. And white America takes some peeling. They arrived as immigrants around 1600 and in the next two hundred years decimated the indigenous native Indians, and the British slave trade supplied the southern states with free black labour until 1865. White America is built literally on stolen land, slave labour and stolen birth rites. As a result they hold a deep fear of the ghosts of those barbarian deeds. Hopefully BLM can make a difference. But how? In rodent experiments researchers gave rats drugs. They got high and aggressive, the rats that is. The researchers then gave the rats activities to do and the rats stopped using the drugs even though they were still freely available. Blacks even after gaining liberty remained poor, poorly educated and with high unemployment for generations. Gee Officer Crupky sums it up beautifully. They along with native Indians and poor whites become ‘trouble’ that ‘must be policed.’ Yet many live good lives and, given opportunities, prosper. Given all this BLM demos and knocking down old statues, in the UK at lest, seems a cost-free comforting emotion, a Facebook emogie. What’s needed is empathy, better education, opportunities and employment. In this pandemic some rough sleepers were housed in unused uni halls of residence and an unexpected almost miracle occurred. They dropped their alcohol and/or drug habit naturally. You might say they were re-civilised by their surroundings. Rogers would say it’s our natural inclination to grow. But that growth costs money, time and effort far more than a demo and knocking down statues. So are we prepared to give our money, time and effort to people who, in many cases, are angry, belligerent and telling us to fuck off? Statues don’t do that.

The Great Reduction.

Our brains are amazing. Countless synapses, countless more pathways, unfathomable complexity and subtlety. Why then do we typically use them in mundane simplistic mode? I’m not talking about picking up a cup of tea, that in the scheme of things is pretty complex, I’m talking about judging simplistically, black or white, profit or loss, rich or poor that even a tree would be ashamed of. I say a tree because science has shown their roots are connected over large areas by fungi that helps them pass nutrients from strong to weak, older mothers to younger saplings to ensure the health of all; a World Wide Web combined with a National Health Service, all done silently and seamlessly under our feet. And this generosity is across all species. Nature has countless pathways of unfathomable complexity and sublime subtlety. Yet we just see a tree, $200, a cow, £150, an acre of land, £2,000 and so on in a reduction of breathtaking simplistic stupidity. Commoditisation at this level misses all subtlety. Matchbox toys, a company I once worked for, borrowed to expand but became so over-geared it couldn’t pay the interest even in good years, and went bust. Experienced engineers became insurance salesmen, one got a fish round, another sold double glazing. A vibrant ecosystem of skill and friendship died, corrupted by accountants. Schools have also been corrupted by numbers. What was once an enjoyable mutually creative endeavour has become a fearful scrabble for a league table position. Another ecosystem corrupted by simplistic accountancy. Whatever we do in the name of numbers corrupts because of its gross simplicity. Where old forests flourish neat rows of conifers grown for profit become diseased like cows and chickens, and if Britain measures us by GDP we won’t flourish either, and neither will our GDP. And now this pandemic is attempting to destroy the many million small ecosystems under our feet that bind us together in countless unfathomable ways. Jobs, sport, pubs etc, all gone in weeks like rows of ailing conifers stoically standing two meters apart. This great reduction, our reliance on crude simplicity to underpin our judgements of value stubbornly remains as driftwood to cling to having forgotten how to use our brain’s ‘countless synapses, even more pathways, unfathomable complexity and subtlety.’ And luckily Coronavirus has give us six months to think about it. We must surely become gardeners of ourselves not accountants of all we survey. Now think of a bank statement and then listen to this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC3GrzoQG9U

“Sorry it’s Company Policy.”

Do you know that helpless hopeless feeling when some nebulous authority says there’s nothing you can do but capitulate? Now history. Back in the 1600’s Europeans invaded the Americas, the homeland of its countless resident Indian tribes. These noble explorers set about carving their future in the face justifiable resistance from the Indian inhabitants. There was a sort of corporate sensibility within the incomers, a feeling of being ‘other’ in this new country. They decided they were superior and the redskins were savages. Only by this trick of branding could the incomers justify their despicable behaviour as good and acceptable efforts to ‘civilise’ them, as opposed to killing and pillaging which would have felt very upsetting. After a hundred years of being brutalised, lied to and corralled the majority of Indians have become demoralised, subdued and constrained into ever diminishing reservations. America is now white and still policing a poverty stricken Indian population ravaged with drug and alcohol problems, and thus justifying this result as, “they brought it on themselves”. But basically they were screwed by the incomer’s ‘company policy.’ Aborigines in Australia, Indians in India, Palestinians in Palestine all screwed by the same branding and conveniently justified by, ‘sorry it’s company policy.’ And African blacks transported, traumatised and sold for the strength of their backs. They also had that same, ‘helpless hopeless feeling when some nebulous authority said there’s nothing you can do but capitulate’ in the face of some foreign governmental ‘company policy.’ Individually we also do it. “I hit her because she was asking for it”, “I did it to teach him a lesson”, “she had it coming” etc, all justifications for actions that would otherwise sully our own rosy view of ourselves. We too can think “they brought it on themself” and conveniently overlook the part we played in causing their perversity. This for me is the root of prejudice. ‘We’ unilaterally made the rules of engagement that ‘they’ must play by. That these rules appear just and fair is no tribute to our justness and fairness but rather our inability to appreciate the difference of others. That we rule by them is the very definition of unfairness, which then produces a perverted history, a mistake in the knitting pattern that at some point must be carefully unpicked and put right; no easy thing when generations are involved, and the generality exists under a mass of individual differences. Are ‘they’ Marcus Rashford, Stormsy or a drug gang member? Are we David Attenborough, Tracy Emmins or a drug gang member? And how many generations have we been in the making? We are all in parts family, opportunity, personal quality and luck, thought the latter is mostly dependant on the former. Families we must foster, opportunities provide, personal qualities must be judged fairly, and trust to luck. And wealth? In these terms it’s immaterial but in terms of its capacity to grossly deform the structure and well being of society it has no equal. It’s the very essence of the, ‘nebulous authority that says there’s nothing you can do but capitulate.’

Sound Economic Principles.

It appears to make so much sense. Most industries from air travel to corner shops are powerless against their rising debts. It’s as if time itself needs constant feeding £’s. A theatre for example plunges into the red. It’s a 100% going proposition except for no audience. It could continue its income stream in two weeks if that audience returned, but right now it’s bankrupt, like a TV you can’t keep up the payments on. It’s ready for the bailiffs. It’s purchased at a knock down price and the new owner plugs it back in. It’s no wonder Jacob Reece Mogg considers this pandemic to be a once in a lifetime opportunity. It’s supported by our public money as far as possible until the inevitable happens. We’re left paying off the debt, accepting lower wages and conditions and, if we have any cash left, buying tickets for its new production of The Merchant of Venice. And it’s all based on sound economic principles. So how come our ‘sound economic principles’ can lead to the biggest land-grab in history? Meanwhile Black Lives Matter and the statues of slave traders are torn down. Do we know something we don’t know we know? Are we all being bought and sold in some secretive existential slave auction? And dying in thousands to boot. If it hasn’t been the story line of a Bond movie already it should be. The filthy rich want even more money and the world to themselves to spend it in. See Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, circa 1930’s. I haven’t read it but quoted it enough times. So maybe viruses are the new thing to get you what you want, like plastics. I calculated the amount of plastics in existence once. It was countless billions of tons because every ounce of plastic since 1950 is still here somewhere. (360 million last year alone) So maybe there’s something wrong with our human understanding of ‘sound economic principles’. For sure cats don’t abide by it.