Purchasing Misery for Children

Quelle surprise - children with huge amounts of stuff but who enjoy little real communication with their parents are unhappy, and British children suffer the worse, ranking bottom of the UN's table of well being. Parents spend the least amount of their time their children in this country, are more stressed personally, rarely communicate about things that matter (rather than giving commands) and are more inclined to spend time with their children in purchasing things for their bedrooms. It is depressing and predictable.

The parents are, in a sense to blame, but to take the chain of responsibility back only so far is to do parents a disservice and to ignore the effects of our social environment. In a free market economy the only standard of success and self worth is possession and so, inevitably, parents find that their only role is to be the procurer of products for their children. Just as children are told in adverts that goods will make them happy so parents are instructed that, if good parenting is making their offspring happy, so their job must be to pay for stuff. Meanwhile the pressure to produce ever bigger profits by working ever longer hours and reducing themselves to automotrons in the service of businesses means that the ability of parents to do anything other than work and shop is reduced anyway.

Of course the equation doesn't work - you can't buy your way to a happier future nor can you purchase it for your children. This is nothing new but what is remarkable is how we have failed to act on it. In this way is capitalism so impressively tenacious. Even with the knowledge that economic success is often a poisoned chalice it is still impossible to avoid it - partly because of the structure of work and the demands of earning money, but much more importantly because capitalism instills its values in those who participate in it, which is almost all of us. You might know, intellectually, that your child would rather you spent more time together, but the desire to consume, and need to finance this consumption, is so overwhelming that even free time becomes subsumed into the need to earn more and work harder.

Evil, bankers and anthropology

An anthropologist friend of mine almost took up a job with a giant consultancy firm in Germany a few weeks ago, saved only by his own lefty instincts. No doubt it was a close shave. But an anthropological study, although of a rather unacademic variety, into bankers was begun this week by Joris Luyendijk.

His findings so far are interesting rather than revelatory but he does warn us of the importance of distinguishing between different groups within the banking sector. It is this humanising of people usually referred to only in groups which presents a real challenge to those of us who read the news and form opinions about society. How easy it is to generalise and condemn, or to see nothing but triumph and success in the faces of our enemies. The reality is, of course, more complicated. There are different types of bankers, different jobs in the banking sector, and as many different types of people as there are people.

Often the activities that we wish to condemn - short term profiteering, incompetant investment, encouraging debt onto those who can't afford it - are committed by institutions or enforced by an office culture that runs roughshod over employees more human instincts. The individual is lost in this equation or is party to the offence rather than the author of it. Should we judge and, if so, whom should we judge? It is very, very easy to see the speck in a banker's eye before we remove the log in our own. Similarly it is easier to condemn en masse than to pick apart the moral failures of a large institution and find its source. Who can doubt that some of the most descpicable and stupid actions, with the most widely and profoundly pernicious consequences, of any in recent decades have been committed by the arrogance, idiocy and blindness of banking institutions and some of their workers? The question is how do we, as individuals, respond to this?

Hell is a High Rise Office Block

As my train drew into London last night it was dawdling on the empty track outside Paddington. Outside my window office blocks towered to every side, every floor lit and empty. The scene was almost gruesome - layer after layer of identical strip lit, double glazed, climate controlled expanses; row after row of small desks and big chairs stretched out one after the other. How extraordinary that this ethos has come to govern office architecture for so long. Although it was inevitable that at some point the drive to increase profit would lead to the principle of 'pile 'em high; sell 'em cheap' being applied to work spaces, that it would endure for so long is almost incomprehensible. It is not only amazing that talented workers would continue to apply for jobs in these kind of battery-farm conditions but that companies would disregard the obvious benefits of providing their employees with more stimulating surroundings. Illness, inefficiency and poor attention spans are only some of the miserable effects of these conditions, and yet they are subject to remarkable little public criticism let alone political attention. Even the bankers and lawyers of Canary Wharf appear to be more willing to put up with this architectural monotony than to insist on improvements at a fraction of a cost of their annual bonus.

I spent some time working for a large company in a large, bland, open plan office, I can remember how miserable it was having no variation in temperature, light quality or view and how difficult it was to focus in an open plan space. Perhaps it is the destruction of the unions that has led to this inability to claim a working environment that will actual help employees work? Perhaps our sensibility is too accustomed to experiencing illness, headaches and misery at work to expect anything different? Or possibly we just don't think architects can do better? The architects offer only a spineless kowtowing to the profiteering requirements of developers. No matter how spectacular the exterior might appear, no matter how grand the architect's name, neither developer nor designer appears to have given any thought to the experience (or efficiency) of the office block's users. The 'Gherkin' in London is a case in point - unusual looking, very recently built, and design by the much lauded and once-great designer of tedious, identikit office blocks Norman Foster, but hell to work in.

Evicting rioters must stop

The news that councils in England, with the backing of the Prime Minister, will start removing benefits and council homes from the families of those arrested for rioting - even before they are convicted of their offence - is loathsome, immoral and unjust. Off the top of my head, here are just some of the problems with this: it punishes families for the crimes of their children, it exceeds the punishments given in court for the crime committed, it uses the provision of shelter and welfare as a tool of punishment, it risks extending poverty and homelessness, it is likely to increase antagonism with the police and councils, it will break up communities, and, ultimately, it will increase the liklihood of crime in the future.

These changes are probably best seen as just one further step an a series of antagonistic and thoughtless acts of community vandalism by councils run with both eyes on wealthy, right-wing voters and a complete willingness to sacrifice the needs of council tenants to pursue those votes. Wandsworth, Westminster, Greenwich, Hammersmith and Fulham - the list of councils proposing to start evicting the families of rioters reads like a roster of far-right Tory-run model councils who have spend much of last few decades doing their best to make those in vulnerable positions feel ever less secure.

Riots are a sign of the times

What do the riots in Tottenham, Enfield and Brixton tell us about contemporary Britain? It seems to me there are two options: either there is a violent streak in all young men which simmers beneath the surface waiting for an excuse to be unleashed with little threat of criminal charges and rejoices at the chance to nick some electrical hardware; or else the social and economic context are important and riots are an indicator of wider changes in society.

The first is surely impossible to credit - albeit the rioters do seem to consist of young men unconnected to any protest or legitimate concern and are hell bent on causing mayhem, destruction and looting, but these traits are not endemic, genetic traits shared by all young men. To say so is to ignore the relative rarity of such violence and their correlation to poverty, unrest and inequality, whether in Toxteth, Tolpuddle, Brixton or Tottenham.

If the second is the case then I suggest three important factors to look at first: 1. the break down in community policing in London in the last few years after the enlightened policy making of the first Labour government; 2. rising inequality and the failure of living standards to advance significantly for the poorest members of society; 3. the effect of the cuts on poverty, misery and community. To treat these riots as a self contained example of the evil of certain segments of the population or to link them with recent protests by students or public sector workers is as disingenuous as it is contrary to the evidence and to common sense. Why is it now, in poor areas of the most unequal city in the country, that these events are taking place? Vandalism is the most perfect act of self defeat, of blind rage expressing itself in short term, selfish idiocy, of pointless hurt and pain, of dispossession by people with little or nothing holding them to normal society. The police, with all credibility and public trust shattered, have no ability to hold a fragile peace amongst fractured communities. There will be more where this came from over the next few years.

Arrogance, cynicism and ignorance: the foundation of the 'Big Society'

Listening to Phillip Blond on this week's Beyond Belief reinforced to me the cynical, empty and arrogant assumptions behind the Conservative Party's 'Big Society'. This is nothing new of course, it has been well attested to by political commentators, Labour Party politicians and the archbishop of Canterbury. Even David Cameron appears to have lost faith on this empty, ill-considered slogan left over from a failed piece of electioneering, relaunching it time and time again with no new policy ideas, little funding and no sign of public confidence.

How staggering it is that the hubris of politicians leads them to believe that in dismantling the welfare state, the single most important force in helping voluntary organisations offer care in communities, it is politicians who must be central to its every reduction. Only a Conservative politician with staggeringly little experience outside public school and TV public relations could fail to understand how many small societies there are, and have always been, providing services in damaged communities, and how much they rely on the state funded bodies which he is attacking. How patronising it is for a lofty think tank wonk in Westminster to tell religious organisations he's letting them take over libraries, after school clubs and so on. What hypocrisy from a bunch of elite men at the centre of the political machine. I just keep remembering this delightful quote from Francis Maude, who admits to doing no volunteering and then has the arrogance to claim its unfair he's been asked (why on earth should he have to do anything?) - at the same time as he tells local communities to volunteer to fill in the short fall he is creating. Phillip Blond also seems to have memorised important and meaningful phrases very well, listening to him speak is full of soothingly old fashioned left-wingism, until he tries to talk about the welfare state or about religious organisations. The welfare state keeps people poor! Religious groups'll fill in all the gaps! They just need the cuts to help them get it off the ground! Volunteer groups always do it better than the state! Cuts are good for you!

Few tropes are as short sighted or ignorant as that of 'Broken Britain': a nasty, damning sneer on how things look from houses in the Home Counties which rely on the Telegraph and nostalgic hearsay for their information about the world. The problem is almost as glossed and oversimplified as the solution: to fix broken Britain you first take away resources first from the poor and vulnerable, then from state sector institutions that provide services for the poorest people, then from voluntary organisations that vulnerable people rely on. That this outlook, a blinkered pessimism that judges without evidence and condemns without empathy, is so widespread and so instantly accepted shows how little information percolates through the right-wing media firewall to the kind of people who fill the political classes. Why bother hunting after examples of communities in impoverished areas supporting their own or attempting to form a nuanced conclusion based on actual observation and curiosity when an entire world view can be granted in two words? The seductive power that instant condemnation grants that suits both the Tory party and the boor by the bar: "I'll tell you why's this country's going to hell in a hand cart mate, it's the immigrants, the nanny state, health and safety, red tape, blah, blah, blah."

Why the powerful must be corrupt - and what to do about it

I am naturally hostile to any conception of politics or society that rests on an 'us and them' mentality, essentially because I doubt it to be true. There is usually so much middle gournd, such a long ladder between top and bottom, that to divide it at some point and cast the the ends as naturally opposed seems arbitrary. We all have more in common than we have differences - the fundamentals of our physiology are not illusory in this respect, even as wealth or geography create appalling inequalities we all find ourselves in essentially the same predicament as human beings.

Even the division between owner and worker seems more slippery than ever before in the age of digital communications and pension funds; my bank was one of the ones which went under spectacularly, had to be propped up by the government and is now paying its employees astonishingly well, I just feel happy if my interest rate stays about inflation. But the revelations of recent weeks about links between News International, the Metropolitan Police and the government reveal a degree of interpenetration that would surely surprise even the most jaded observer. Each provided funds, personnel and information to the other; restricting it from other institutions and neglecting their prime motivation. The structural imperatives of democracy, elections, the maintainance of law and order and the pursuit of readers and profit formed themselves quite naturally into a closed circuit running to its own logic which even the most heinous of actions against principal figures in the chain could not break (I think here particularly of how Rebecca Brooks ill treated Gordon Brown over the death of his son).

In this it seems overwhelmingly not only that a 'rogue reporter' is to blame, nor even a few 'evil' newspaper proprieters, but rather a huge number of people willed into a kind of automatic amorality by the unavoidable implications of capitalism and a tall hierarchy of power. Power, I think, does corrupt; not because the people who hold it are turned bad, drunk on their own superiority, although this does happen often enough, but because they are forced to act in certain ways to maintain their position. They have the capacity to resist, but not the power to resist and hold their position. Their fault was in choosing ambition and survival over integrity. It is a challenge given to almost all of us on a regular basis - admit to an unfashionable belief, quit an immoral job or call out a loved family member. We get stuck behaving how we are meant to behave, not how we ought to behave.

Should we expect our politicians to give up principles in favour of pragmatism, in a Machiavellian manner which the Tory party has always been proud of, or to fight for what is right in the sure knowledge that to do so will force them out of the system and deliberately undermine it? The latter is surely preferable but I suspect that the best alternative might be to remove the hierarchy of command and the narrow class of power-holders altogether. If the struture doesn't work, ditch it. Is it possible to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's or must the former, ultimately, ruin the latter; or the latter ruin the former? Let's instead abandon a situation where one or the other must take place - let's get rid of Caesar and let SPQR back in on the act of government.

The big society

As the Conservative government cuts away at public services it hopes to recreate some of them, at no or little cost to itself, by relying on volunteer replacements with little support or funding to help. It's called the Big Society.

There are many problems with this idea. In my village the local library is to shut. A few jobs will be lost, a local resource ended, the many elderly people in the area will be that much more limited in their access to company, books, information, newspapers and the internet, a social space gone. The alternative is to set up a new 'community run' equivalent, relying on volunteer staff, presumably open for vastly reduced hours and without specialist workers. Where the funding for this will come from is anyone's guess.

This blog is not intended to critique government policy. What I want to focus on is the patronising idea that the Big Society is something new or that it depends on government support. Most of us don't have to look far to find examples of extraordinarily generous acts on behalf of volunteers - or, as often as not, we even use services that we don't even realise are being carried out by volunteers. There are a host of television programmes on at the moment recording the nineteenth-century history of social entreprenurship and philanthropy, see the one about Robert Owen or Dr Bernardo. In the former the presenters are amazed to discover that the Big Society wasn't a twenty-first century creation. It isn't a nineteenth-century one either.

Every medieval monastery was obliged to give hospitality to those who asked for it. Tithing in medieval villages was intended both for the poor and for the church. I'm sure there are ancient examples too, but it's a period of history I'm less familiar with. Government can help a little - it can provide funding and expertise, and it can seek out the projects that need these resources - but it isn't the creator, only a sustainer. And now, of course, it has stopped doing even that.

Tyrants, shepherds and priests

The toppling of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, whatever happens next, shows the awesome power of persistent popular protest, there is no greater force than the coherent, consistent actions of the Third Estate. It was wholly different from the sanitised clashes that we are used to - between leaders of political parties, trade union general secretaries, heads of think tanks or charities or campaigning organisations, journalists and Prime Ministers, and so on.

It was a clash between the people and an institution occupied by an individual. There were no leaders, no committee, no single spokesperson. Does this mean it was messy? Mal-coordinated? Did not do itself justice? Lacked leadership? One of the most exciting, inspiring aspects of the protest was its corporate unity. Human beings not simply carrying out their function within a hierarchy or structure but acting as part of a whole. So do we need leaders?

My university's Defend Education group, currently fighting the cuts to public services being carried out by the Tory government in the UK, also operates without a leader or even a leadership committee. Instead working groups were formed, each in charge of a different part of the organisation and reporting back to the entire body, which took all major decisions, planned future action and organised the campaign. It was, at root, the realisation of the kind of direct democratic control that has never been fully adopted at a national political level. It was fair, open, inclusive, effective and productive. Finding a collective voice or an efficient route to a solution could be challenging, of course, but the result was always the stronger for it - the means justified the end and the end, the means.

Could religions work like this? The Catholic and Anglican churches, among others, have rejected the possibility, choosing instead to set apart a small number of the congregation, targeting resources at these few people; giving them special training, special powers in the performance of the sacraments and a more-or-less monopoly on teaching, preaching and service leading in the church. The ordained priesthood has become bound up with the traditions of the church, an in-built aristocracy of those 'called'. Both churches are active these days in emphasising the calling of the laity, but not, of course, to preside over the sacraments, and only rarely to preach, teach, carry out 'official' pastoral work, or lead a service.

Most priests are not, of course, called to carry out all these tasks and often struggle to fulfill each to a sufficiently high standard. The natural end point of this thought is, of course, that perhaps no one person is called to carry out all this tasks but instead are each called only to do one or other of them. So why group them together and give them to individuals? Why neglect the teaching, preaching and sacramental abilities of so many members of the church?

Imagine a church where the whole congregation carried out the sacraments, the teaching, the preaching and the pastoral activities in turn and according to the skills and interests of the members. Those gifted at teaching could teach, while those gifted at caring could care, and those gifted at both could do both. Training, resources and special powers could be given to all those who will need it to carry out their activities. This would not be the end of the priesthood or the Church but its widening to include the whole of the religious body.

The Best Kind of Reincarnation

Buddhists believe being reincarnated as a human being is highly desirable. This is not because human beings are are the highest level of creation; the opposite of the flea in a hippo's backside. In fact human beings occupy the fifth of 31 levels of existence, far below the gods who occupy levels which can only be accessed by the most brilliant of human meditators. Nor is it because there's some likelihood to it - in fact the opposite is the case, the fear of returning as an animal or a ghost or worse is at least partly because it seems quite probable.

The human level is desirable because it combines rational thought and the potential for achieving enlightenment with the suffering and mortality that will compel us to do it. It offers a combination of intelligence, insight and motivation that is not available to the gods whose lives are so long and free from pain that leaving the cycle of rebirth is virtually impossible.

I once argued with a friend that happiness was too readily considered all important and all desirable today. The justification for any activity or life plan is that <<it will make me happy>> Books are written on how to achieve it, those with it are winners, those without losers. It is a deeply individualistic, focused on the purchase of products and services that immediately grant us our desires.

She told me <<if you really think that, you've never been truly unhappy>>

Of course this is true. Happiness might be ephemeral, worshipped - even fetishised - to the point where other goals are almost completely disregarded, but its inverse is something we must all fight against. But it is a fight we are destined to lose; all human lives are marked by light and dark. An ethic built on pursuing happiness is doomed to failure and, given that, perhaps we should find what it is about unhappiness that drives us to make positive changes. The struggle to avoid unhappiness, to find what it is that makes life worth living, is the positive side effect of the hellishness of misery. This isn't much comfort to the miserable, none perhaps, but its a pleasant thought that were we offered a future life as a god we might do well not to choose it.

Capitalism, TV and God

At an Anglican discussion group this week and the question <<is distrust endemic in our society?>> came up. Surely, I thought, everyone will pitch in with examples of distrust - bankers, lawyers, politicians on the make - you don't have to look far for excellent folk examples. But there was silence.

I give it a minute and ask everyone what they think about capitalism - specifically does competition, relentless competition, breed distrust? It isn't the kind of statement that would always be guaranteed much traction in this kind of environment, but no one demurred. One woman in her thirties agrees, giving an example of students competing for results. A priest goes further - is it possible to stop competition becoming reflected in a relationship with God? What happens when consumerism, individualism and competition become defining characteristics of our relationship with other human beings - it doesn't seem credible that the faithful of any religion could shake off these shackles when having a relationship with God.

There's a new television programme on the BBC by the Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker called 'How TV Ruined Your Life' (I don't think the irony is lost on him) which argues that the media has used fear to increase ratings. An obvious one I guess. But he pulls out research which argues that the more a particular image is repeated on TV the more ingrained it becomes in the brain; the more real it seems. Inevitably, therefore, other studies show that those who watch more TV believe they are in greater danger from crime and other threats than those who watch less. And, equally inevitably, this bares little to no relationship to reality as represented by falling crime statistics.

Competition and fear are natural bedfellows, and, of course, they undermine trust and then justify distrust by leading us to behave in untrustworthy ways. And TV, one of the most irresistible conduits for information about our world that there is, uses every tool in the disaster movie handbook to amplify competition in any way it knows how.