bemused

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=hitchens_28_1

So far I’ve been for a walk every Sunday morning this year (2008). Sometimes on my own, sometimes taking one or more of my kids.

Last weekend I took my son around Burleigh wood and Begbroke and we saw deer, a hare and birds of prey. Also found house I’d love to live in - Village End in Begbroke. Gorgeous.

This Sunday I was up a little early - to find the kids busy with Mother’s day present making, so I slipped out and just decided to walk ‘eastish’ on my own. This meant about 20 minutes walking on roads, but once past the Park and Ride you’re in countryside. I walked down to Water Eaton, now almost a deserted village, but still with its Hall and a couple of farms. Walking past the Hall and looking back westwards the one could almost be in the 17th century - house, dovecote, chapel and walls all clean and bright in the March morning. Google map of the area.

The footpath continued over a bridge on the Cherwell, into farmland. Thirty or so swans were roosting in the field behind the hall and as I watched, nine more flew in to land from the direction of Cuttesloe. The path seems to disappear at the end of this field, by a large drainage ditch or natural stream (it was difficult to tell, but the water was not stagnant) - certainly it felt like the kind of place I might meet Little Grey Men, or at least spot a kingfisher. Eventually I found a footbridge over the stream/ditch - half obscured by a fallen tree, and followed my nose westwards. Walking up a rise I turned to survey a large swathe of Noth Oxfordshire, mist-free and bathed in the morning sun. Eventually there was no further path to the hilltop (I call it a hill, but in my Yorkshire homeland terms it was a low rise - this is Oxfordshire after all!). I’m glad I didn’t break out of the path, as Googlemap reveals an open-caste mine at the top. That would have burst my bucolic rural bubble.

The footpath became a rutted track and snaked south around a large 30’s house in its own grounds, wonderful verandas and horses in the meadow. The farm track turned back eastwards and suddenly in front of me was a Church spire. I had no idea where I’d turned up. I then passed a huge building on the left behind a large but dilapidated wall - it had a somewhat forbidding aspect and I wondered what it could be - some form of prison? Once past it a sign proved it to be Woodeaton School… I don’t envy the students. Googlemap the area.

The path ended shortly in Woodeaton, a tiny hamlet west of Islip. There is a small old church (13Century, mostly) - the Holy Rood - so I chanced that the door would be open. On entering I was confronted with a large medieaval painting of a saint. It appears that not all such decoration was completely whitewashed away and it was interesting to glimpse the sort of decoration most churches in England once had.

I have a strange attitude towards churches. Though I consider my self an atheist, I am drawn to them. The sheer weight of time, architecture, and sense of strength? In Woodeaton it appears that the church remains very much a centre of what community remains in such places, as a weighty local newsletter proved. These village churches are still impressive today - imagine how they were perceived in 1200! The Normans did something right.

Historically the ‘church’ religion does appear to have worked as a physical centre, substantiating the moral framework governing the lives of people. Apart from priest - induced fear, what kept people tied to them? They project a civilising influence of safety, certainty and peace in an era when FUD could make lives nasty, brutish and short, even if the Church’s attitude could be uncivilised. The universe does not scare so many educated people these days and religions lose influence. However, I can see some of why modern villages find them so important.

I turned back the way I’d come - it was such an interesting walk that I was not going to lose anything by repetition. Walking back down the farm track I spotted a couple of tiny black and white birds I could not place. As small as wrens, but more like tits. I will have to look them up. Rounded the corner and headed downhill, into a stiff westerly, but this only acted as natural aircon for me - by now I was warm and up to my usual walking speed. Coming down that hill I had a moment of ‘oneness’, I guess. Looking out over the Cherwell valley I realised I was happy, mind blank, drinking in the essence of it all - the wind, fresh air, skylarks twittering. This has become more than a habit, its become important to get out on these walks. Its grounding me. I think I’ll be back.

The previous post contained a distillation of Will Hutton’s deconstruction of the USA as an economic and political beacon for the UK to follow.

He admonishes us to look away from US to Europe. Its a powerful argument so long as we don’t oversimplify the issues.

For UK sustainable development our culture, via the Government (and enterprise culture as a whole) needs to enable economic development and growth in the longer term by reducing (penalising?) the short termist, shareholder-profit focus of ‘US style’ companies. This in favour of a holistic approach that treats staff (and even customers) as owners, or at least stakeholders, of the business (some of these do exist in the UK already, of course), and not disposable commodities after the US model.

Underlying this is a need to not only accept that ’society’ exists and has a culture that is not like that oif the US, and to embrace it and encourage participation as part of corporate life and its interaction with the rest of life. The ’social contract’. The US pays lip service but its a fundamentally dog-eat-dog society where individual freedom is paramount over all as enshrined in the Constitution, and thus US society fragments and Ghetto-ises even the rich (gated communities anyone?).

The ‘West’ would do better with the US on-side, no doubt. But not the current neo-con US, thank you very much. Gore’s ‘defeat’ in 2000 has been a major stumbling block to ‘world progress’ in my book, and possibly Will’s.

So what does he suggest as an alternative?

Europe.

Not a cow-towing enslavement to Europe but an engagement, with our own solutions where approriate. He also feels that we can heal many of our own ills. An example is pension provision. Barbera Castle, in the mid 1970’s, proposed a system of national pension to exist in parallel with private mechanisms and extend national insurance. This now appears remarkably insightful, and its very sad that it never came to be. Many people face an uncertain old age in the UK because of the pensions debacle and will have to rely on the generosity of future Governments. Many European countries have similar better state pension systems, and if they are struggling in some ways, its only because they are being cautious and saving to meet the  needs of thier elderly - we’ve not been doing in the UK, and that’s really worrying.

The social contract - a theme repeated in the book, one pretty absent from UK politics for some decades. And yet many of us do not want to go the American way of widening the poverty gap, social incohesion, fundamentalism and human value secondary to shareholder value - short term profit focus as opposed to the longer term view taken in Europe.

What do we (as British people) want that the US population is systematically being denied?

- high quality public services (health, education, local services)
- properly functioning and non stigmatised public transport
- decent social provision

All traditional Labour calling cards. Only this time, Labour have been acting very Conservative.

Gordon Brown’s government will be judged, at least by me, on how he addresses these points while hopefully, edging us away from the vacuous and ethicallybankrupt US neo-con model.

Amazing book. Some key bits:

Religion and the US:

His contention is that the US overall political outlook is driven largely by the philosophical work of Leo Strauss (Natural Rights and History, Chicago University Press, 1953), a refugee from the Nazis promoting the ‘virtuous, morally cenreted citizen’ who must ‘face the consequenses of thier individual actions’ (i.e. law but without the State regulating too much). A key point is his view that religion and nationalism are two of the best ways to ‘entrench virtue’ . ‘Even if religion were bunk and its moral codes impossible to maintian, the task of the educated elite was to keep quiet and maintain the fiction in the name of order‘. And thus of course he’s only stating what many a leader / government has done over the centuries. But remember - Bush et al are living by these maxims. To me this is more dangerous than secularism and will lead to further polarisation of view and the movement of the US away from rationality. It is as Hatton says, a ‘lethal legacy’.

The mirage of the American Dream:

Bottom 20% of US population are locked in to poverty due to lack of available education and lack of social ’safetly nets’ - analyses have found that poor folk in the US are LESS likely to escape the poverty trap than in the UK, Europe, Canada and even if they do, are more likely to return. 54% of people in the bottom 20% in the 60s were still there in the 90s, but only 1% had migrated to the top 20% (all of this is publically available research). So much for ’social mobility’. For the middle 60% - economics is on a long term down term with stagnating wages, and a crazy mortgage system that is worse than the UK already and getting worse all the time (and part of the cause of the current ‘credit markets flutter’). The top 20% are doing fine of course, as the system remains geared to them.

There’s more on why the UK should look more to Europe. One for later.

One thing that happened just before I left NHM, we launched the new site for the Museum’s daughter site, Tring Zoological Museum. Using the same template as the main site, our CSS approach allowed the creation of something related but distinct, for Tring. Most of the product you see was the work of Melissa Shaw. I just love her taste in imagery. Check out that squirrel!

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/tring/about-us/tring-about-us.html

And in New York City
The business man in his mohair suit
In the world trade center
Puffs on his cheroot
And he said
“Well I don’t care who owns the desert sands,
My brief
Is with the hydrocarbons underneath”

- Towers of Faith from’When the Wind Blows’, Roger Waters, 1987.

http://www.itv.com/news/index_d880c4da71c972e96ed323daeda87e67.html

Interesting to see if this has any affect - the news coverage even mentions the wider issue - that Greed is still Good in the US and in UK large business.

I’m reading Will Hatton and Noam Chomsky in parallel at the moment. Its a bit unnerving. I have a lot of respect for the Iranians I’ve met over the years.  They are in my experience a very astute, intelligent, articulate and interesting people, from an impressive culture. I don’t think their current government is any more radical than that of Bush, though it may be holding back western-style ‘progress’. To think of it as the ‘next target’ for the US/UK’s campaign for strategic regional dominance, well, it may finally move me from my political apathy/lethargy and get me out on the street! I just hope that the lesson apparently not learned in Vietnam, currently being relearned in Iraq, has some real impact on this imperial design.

http://www.anzwers.org/free/universe/12lys.html

Just a fantastic visualisation of how big space is. As Douglas Adams (PBUH) said, its really big.

And a couple more:

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1998/41/video/b/

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/cosmology/distant%20galaxies/2004/07/video/b/

http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~dbl/galaxy.mp3