Greatest hits 2011

Here are a top ten of either the most read, or my favourite, posts from the last year.

At number 10, it's the interview with Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut and sixth man to walk on the moon, talking about the epiphany he had in outer space. Far out!

At number 9, from February, it's a piece on 'how to make philosophy epic'.

At number 8, from one of the newsletters, it's a piece on DH Lawrence and the Dionysiac tradition, which got turned into the final appendix in my book.

At number 7, it's one of the many pieces I've written on measuring well-being, and why I am sceptical of it, called A technocratic solution to a spiritual problem.

At number 6, it's my interview with Stephen Greenblatt about how Lucretius helped him overcome his fear of death.

At number 5, a piece on teaching the Good Life in schools.

At number 4, it's some philosophy self-help posters I designed.

At number 3, it's an account of my visit to the Skeptics conference in Las Vegas.

At number 2, it's an account of my visit to Occupy London.

And at number 1, it's a history of philosophy...in tattoos!

Hope you've enjoyed following the blog this year, and you keep reading and spreading the word in 2012 - I really appreciate your comments, support, links, re-tweets etc. Have a great 2012,

Jules

'A beloved community that circles the world'

I posted a piece about a month ago, called Occupy Your Heart Chakra, which gently suggested that the Occupy movement privileged inarticulate and unfocused emoting over actual policy suggestions - a classic symptom of a Utopian anarchist project. Today, radical journalist Rebecca Solnit posted a piece called, yes, Occupy Your Heart. Have a read - what do you think? Is a 'politics of affection' compatible with a more thought-out systemic attempt at change, or is it a descent into irrationalism?

Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed -- and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based.

Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas. The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99% of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation -- “occupy the river” -- in little ones below.The woman with the stolen-votes sign is referring to them. Her companion is talking about us, all of us, and our fundamental principles. His sign comes straight out of Genesis, a denial of what that competitive entrepreneur Cain said to God after foreclosing on his brother Abel’s life. He was not, he claimed, his brother’s keeper; we are not, he insisted, beholden to each other, but separate, isolated, each of us for ourselves. Think of Cain as the first Social Darwinist and this Occupier in Austin as his opposite, claiming, no, our operating system should be love; we are all connected; we must take care of each other. And this movement, he’s saying, is about what the Argentinian uprising that began a decade ago, on December 19, 2001, called politica afectiva, the politics of affection.

If it’s a movement about love, it’s also about the money they so unjustly took, and continue to take, from us -- and about the fact that, right now, money and love are at war with each other. After all, in the American heartland, people are beginning to be imprisoned for debt, while the Occupy movement is arguing for debt forgiveness, renegotiation, and debt jubilees.Sometimes love, or at least decency, wins.

...The other morning at the Oakland docks for the West Coast port shutdown demonstrations, I met three members of Occupy Amador County, a small rural area in California’s Sierra Nevada. Its largest town, Jackson, has a little over 4,000 inhabitants, which hasn’t stopped it from having regular outdoor Friday evening Occupy meetings.A little girl in a red parka at the Oakland docks was carrying a sign with a quote from blind-deaf-and-articulate early twentieth-century role model Helen Keller that said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.” Why quote Keller at a demonstration focused on labor and economics? The answer is clear enough: because Occupy has some of the emotional resonance of a spiritual, as well as a political, movement. Like those other upheavals it’s aligned with in Spain, Greece, Iceland (where they’re actually jailing bankers), Britain, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Chile, and most recently Russia, it wants to ask basic questions: What matters? Who matters? Who decides? On what principles?

Stop for a moment and consider just how unforeseen and unforeseeable all of this was when, on December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian vegetable vendor in Sidi Bouzid, an out-of-the-way, impoverished city, immolated himself. He was protesting the dead-end life that the 1% economy run by Tunisia’s autocratic ruler Zine Ben Ali and his corrupt family allotted him, and the police brutality that went with it, two things that have remained front and center ever since. Above all, as his mother has since testified, he was for human dignity, for a world, that is, where the primary system of value is not money.“Compassion is our new currency,” was the message scrawled on a pizza-box lid at Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan -- held by a pensive-looking young man in Jeremy Ayers’s great photo portrait.

But what can you buy with compassion? Quite a lot, it turns out, including a global movement, and even pizza, which can arrive at that movement’s campground as a gift of solidarity. A few days into Occupy Wall Street’s surprise success, a call for pizza went out and $2,600 in pizzas came in within an hour, just as earlier this year the occupiers of Wisconsin’s state house had beencopiously supplied with pizza -- including pies paid for and dispatched by Egyptian revolutionaries.

...Occupy has also created a space in which people of all kinds can coexist, from thehomeless to the tenured, from the inner city to the agrarian. Coexisting in public with likeminded strangers and acquaintances is one of the great foundations and experiences of democracy, which is why dictatorships ban gatherings and groups -- and why our First Amendment guarantee of the right of the people peaceably to assemble is being tested more strongly today than in any recent moment in American history. Nearly every Occupy has at its center regular meetings of a General Assembly. These are experiments in direct democracy that have been messy, exasperating and miraculous: arenas in which everyone is invited to be heard, to have a voice, to be a member, to shape the future.

Occupy is first of all a conversation among ourselves.To occupy also means to show up, to be present -- a radically unplugged experience for a digital generation. Today, the term is being applied to any place where one plans to be present, geographically or metaphorically: Occupy Wall Street, occupy the food system,occupy your heart. The ad hoc invention of the people’s mic by the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, which requires everyone to listen, repeat, and amplify what’s being said, has only strengthened this sense of presence. You can’t text or half-listen if your task is to repeat everything, so that everyone hears and understands. You become the keeper of your brother’s or sister’s voice as you repeat their words.It’s a triumph of the here and now -- and it’s everywhere: the Regents of the University of California are mic-checked, politicians are mic-checked, the Durban Climate Conference in South Africa had occupiers and mic-check moments.

Activism had long been in dire need of new modes of doing things, and this year it got them. Before the Occupy movement arrived on the scene, political dialogue and media chatter in this country seemed to be arriving from a warped parallel universe. Tiny government expenditures were denounced, while the vortex sucking our economy dry was rarely addressed; hard-working immigrants were portrayed as deadbeats; people who did nothing were anointed as “job creators”; the trashed economy and massive suffering were overlooked, while politicians jousted over (and pundits pontificated about) the deficit; class war was only called class war when someone other than the ruling class waged it. It’s as though we were trying to navigate Las Vegas with a tattered map of medieval Byzantium -- via, that is, a broken language in which everything and everyone got lost.

Then Occupy arrived and, as if swept by some strange pandemic, a contagious virus of truth-telling, everyone was suddenly obliged to call things by their real names and talk about actual problems. The blather about the deficit was replaced by acknowledgments of grotesque economic inequality. Greed was called greed, and once it had its true name, it became intolerable, as had racism when the Civil Rights Movement named it and made it evident to those who weren’t suffering from it directly. The vast scale of suffering around student debt and tuition hikes, foreclosures, unemployment, wage stagnation, medical costs, and the other afflictions of the normal American suddenly moved to the top of the news, and once exposed to the light, these, too, became intolerable.If the solutions to the nightmares being named are neither near nor easy, naming things, describing reality with some accuracy, is at least a crucial first step. Informing ourselves as citizens is another. Aspects of our not-quite-democracy that were once almost invisible are now on the table for discussion -- and for opposition, notably corporate personhood, the legal status that gives corporations the rights, but not the obligations and vulnerabilities, of citizens. (One oft-repeated Occupier sign says, “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas puts one to death.”)

The Los Angeles City Council passed a measure calling for an end to corporate personhood, the first big city to join the Move to Amend campaign against corporate personhood and against the 2009 Supreme Court Citizens United ruling that gave corporations unlimited ability to insert their cash in our political campaigns. Occupy actions across the country are planned for January 20th, the second anniversary of Citizens United. Vermont’s independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who’s been speaking the truth alone for a long time, introduced a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United and limit corporate power in the Senate, while Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL) introduced a similar measure in the House.Only a few years ago, hardly anyone knew what corporate personhood was. Now, signs denouncing it are common. Similarly, at Occupy events, people make it clear that they know about the New Deal-era financial reform measure known as the Glass-Steagall Act, which was partially repealed in 1999, removing the wall between commercial and investment banks; that they know about the proposed financial transfer tax, nicknamed the Robin Hood Tax, that would raise billions with a tiny levy on every financial transaction; that they understand many of the means by which the 1% were enriched and the rest of us robbed.This represents a striking learning curve. A new language of truth, debate about what actually matters, an informed citizenry: that’s no small thing. But we need more.

We Are the 99.999%

I was myself so caught up in the Occupy movement that I stopped paying my usual attention to the war over the climate -- until I was brought up short by the catastrophic failure of the climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa. There, earlier this month, the most powerful and carbon-polluting countries managed to avoid taking any timely and substantial measures to keep the climate from heating up and the Earth from slipping into unstoppable chaotic change. It’s our nature to be more compelled by immediate human suffering than by remote systemic problems. Only this problem isn’t anywhere near as remote as many Americans imagine. It’s already creating human suffering on a large scale and will create far more. Many of the food crises of the past decade are tied to climate change, and in Africa thousands are dying of climate-related chaos. The floods, fires, storms, and heat waves of the past few years are climate change coming to call earlier than expected in the U.S. In the most immediate sense, Occupy may have weakened the climate movement by focusing many of us on the urgent suffering of our brothers, our neighbors, our democracy. In the end, however, it could strengthen that movement with its new tactics, alliances, spirit, and language of truth. After all, why have we been unable to make the major changes required to limit greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? The answer is a word suddenly in wide circulation: greed.

Responding adequately to this crisis would benefit every living thing. When it comes to climate change, after all, we are the 99.999%. But the international .001% who profit immeasurably from the carbon economy -- the oil and coal tycoons, industrialists, and politicians whose strings they pull -- are against this change. For decades, they’ve managed to propagandize many Americans, in and out of government, into climate denial, spreading lies about the science and economics of climate change, and undermining any possible legislation and international negotiations to ameliorate it. And if you think the eviction of elderly homeowners is brutal, think of it as a tiny foreshadowing of the displacement and disappearance of people, communities, nations, species, habitats. Climate change threatens to foreclose on all of us.The groups working on climate change now, notably 350.org and Tar Sands Action, have done astonishing things already. Most recently, with the help of native Canadians, local activists, and alternative media, they very nearly managed to kill the single scariest and biggest North American threat to the climate: the tar sands pipeline that would go from Canada to Texas. It’s been a remarkable show of organizing power and popular will. Occupy the Climate may need to come next. Maybe Occupy Wall Street and its thousands of spin-offs have built the foundation for it.

But perhaps the greatest gift that it and the other movements of 2011 have given us is a sharpening of our perceptions -- and our conflicts. So much more is out in the open now, including the greed, the brutality with which entities from the Egyptian army to the Oakland police impose the will of rulers, and most of all the deep generosity of spirit that is behind, within, and around these insurgencies and their activists. None of these movements is perfect, and individuals within them are not always the greatest keepers of their brothers and sisters. But one thing couldn’t be clearer: compassion is our new currency.

Nothing has been more moving to me than this desire, realized imperfectly but repeatedly, to connect across differences, to be a community, to make a better world, to embrace each other. This desire is what lies behind those messy camps, those raucous demonstrations, those cardboard signs and long conversations. Young activists have spoken to me about the extraordinary richness of their experiences at Occupy, and they call it love.In the spirit of calling things by their true names, let me summon up the description that Ella Baker and Martin Luther King used for the great communities of activists who stood up for civil rights half a century ago: the beloved community. Many who were active then never forgot the deep bonds and deep meaning they found in that struggle. We -- and the word “we” encompasses more of us than ever before -- have found those things, too, and this year we have come close to something unprecedented, a beloved community that circles the globe.

Fukuyama on the need for a new ideology

Francis Fukuyama, the philosopher who declared the 'End of History' in the 1990s (by which he meant that liberal capitalist democracy had triumphed and there was no longer any reasonable alternative) has published an interesting new essay suggesting democracy and free market capitalism are parting ways, and that we should embrace the former and abandon the latter.

His essay in Foreign Affairs, called The Future of History, looks at the importance of the middle class to liberal capitalist democracy, and how that middle is being squeezed in western democracies by falling GDP, falling output, slower technological innovation, and increased competition from emerging markets. What puzzles him is why, when the liberal capitalist model is so under siege, the Left should have failed to come up with a popular alternative. He writes:

The deeper reason a broad-based populist left has failed to materialise is an intellectual one. It has been several decades since anyone on the left has been able to articulate, first, a coherent analysis of what happens to the structure of advanced societies as they undergo economic change and, second, a realistic agenda that has any hope of protecting middle class society.

The Left, Fukuyama argues, disastrously replaced Marxism "with postmodernism, multiculturalism, feminism, critical theory, and a host of other fragmented intellectual trends that are more cultural than economic in focus....It is impossible to generate a mass progressive movement on the basis of such a motley coalition: most of the working and lower middle class citizens victimised by the system are culturally conservative and would be embarrassed to be seen in the presence of allies like this."

I get his point, but one can overdo the attack on postmodernism and the other -isms of the 1990s. Feminism, for example, is hardly marginal, nor are minority or queer rights. These movements made important advances in the 1990s and 2000s, and have shifted the centre ground. I don't think the working classes and lower middle classes would be so embarrassed by such allies.

He goes on:

when existing social democratic parties come to power, they no longer aspire to be more than custodians of a welfare state that was created decades ago; none has a new, exciting agenda around which to rally the masses.

So what's the alternative? What could be 'an ideology of the future', as he puts it? He writes:

Imagine, for a moment, an obscure scribbler today in a garret somewhere trying to outline an ideology of the future that could provide a realistic path toward a world with healthy middle-class societies and robust democracies. What would that ideology look like?

It would have to have at least two components, political and economic. Politically, the new ideology would need to reassert the supremacy of democratic politics over economics and legitimate a new government as an expression of the public interest. But the agenda it put forward to protect middle-class life could not simply rely on the existing mechanisms of the welfare state. The ideology would need to somehow redesign the public sector, freeing it from its dependence on existing stakeholders and using new, technologically empowered approaches to delivering services. [I'm not quite sure what this means, to be honest.]

Economically, the ideology could not begin with a denunciation of capitalism as such, as if old-fashioned socialism were still a viable alternative. It is more the variety of capitalism that is at stake and the degree to which governments should help societies adjust to change. Globalization need be seen not as an inexorable fact of life but rather as a challenge and an opportunity that must be carefully controlled politically. The new ideology would not see markets as an end in themselves; instead, it would value global trade and investment to the extent that they contributed to a flourishing middle class, not just to a greater aggregate national wealth.

It is not possible to get to that point, however, without providing a serious and sustained critique of much of the edifice of modern neoclassical economics, beginning with fundamental assumptions such as the sovereignty of individual preferences and that aggregate income is an inaccurate measure of national well-being. This critique would have to note that people's incomes do not necessarily represent their true contribution to society. It would have to go further, however, and recognize that even if labour markets were efficient, the natural distribution of talents is not necessarily fair and that individuals are not sovereign entities but beings heavily shaped by their surrounding societies.

Fukuyama concludes that a genuinely populist left would need to begin by attacking elites:

there are a lot of reasons to think that inequality will continue to worsen. The current concentration of wealth in the United States has already become self-reinforcing: as the economist Simon Johnson has argued, the financial sector has used its lobbying clout to avoid more onerous forms of regulation. Schools for the well-off are better than ever; those for everyone else continue to deteriorate. Elites in all societies use their superior access to the political system to protect their interests, absent a countervailing democratic mobilization to rectify the situation. American elites are no exception to the rule.

That mobilization will not happen, however, as long as the middle class of the developed world remain enthralled by the narrative of the past generation: that their interests will be best served by ever-freer markets and smaller states. The alternative narrative is out there, waiting to be born.

What's interesting about the essay is that Fukuyama, once the champion of liberal capitalist democracy, appears to be coming down squarely on the side of social democracy and against free market capitalism. He's on the side of Occupy, against Goldman Sachs. But Fukuyama neglects to mention the environment or climate change. Most political thinkers or futurologists under 40 would put climate change, and the need for some sort of response to it, at the centre of a progressive ideology.

Perhaps we can try and flesh out the picture a little. I want to draw a contrast between liberal cosmopolitan politics, and civic republican politics - or a contrast between Aristotle and Diogenes.

There are two versions of the state that descendants of Socrates imagined. Aristotle imagined a state where every citizen was educated and trained in philosophy, and deeply involved in the running of the state. The citizen achieves their flourishing (a word Fukuyama employs as the proper end of the state) partly through scholarship, learning, religion and the arts, and partly through politics.

Diogenes the Cynic, by contrast, imagined the individual as a 'cosmopolitan', cut free from the state and become a citizen of the world rather than any particular country. Aristotle's vision of the state involved deeper ties, deeper commitments, and deeper demands of citizens. Diogenes the Cynic' political vision, such as it was, led to a cosmopolitan politics of wider but shallower ties. Aristotle's vision is local and communitarian, while Diogenes' vision is internationalist, individualist and cosmopolitan. (This is not quite fair to Diogenes' radical anarchist politics, but it is true in so far as he was the father of the idea of cosmopolitanism).

For a long time, the UK has been enamoured of a more liberal cosmopolitan vision of politics, embracing free trade, open borders and low taxes. I would suggest the left, and the UK, moves to a more Aristotelian conception of society, which provides more for its citizens in terms of education and housing , but which also demands more of them, in terms of taxes and political participation. It would be a more local vision, in which citizenship means more and costs more. It's not far from what Maurice Glasman envisaged with his Blue Labour project.

There are four important areas for this shift from a liberal cosmopolitan to a civic republican politics: taxes, education, housing and finance.

Firstly, it would demand we all pay our taxes. It would condemn and shame corporations that dodge taxes, just as harshly as it condemned individuals and families who tried to fiddle the system. We will only accept paying higher taxes if we feel the system is fairer, and less easy to abuse. We can already see this shift happening: look at how UK Uncut's campaign last week against corporate tax-dodging garnered support from right across the political spectrum, including front page support from the Daily Mail.

Secondly, education. In place of the knowledge economy, we need to build a learning economy, which creates opportunities for life-long learning, and for life-long teaching, and measures success in human development rather than GDP. The cartels of academia need to be opened up, so that academics connect with wider communities and satisfy the popular demand for learning and ideas. Academics will complain 'this will damage the quality of research we can do'. I don't agree. At the moment, so much academic research is frankly boring and over-specialized. The more academics feel connected to their societies and the concerns of ordinary people, the more they will be inspired to raise their heads from their tiny corner of research and to start to address some bigger and bolder questions.

Thirdly, property. One of the key ways that living standards are dropping is the rising cost of buying a flat or (perish the thought) a house. My parents bought a small house in Islington in the late 1970s for £30,000. Such a house now would cost around £600,000. This is partly the result of banks encouraging buy-to-let speculation over the last 20 years. It is also partly the result of foreign capital flooding into UK property (particularly London), and of foreign bankers working in the City. Housing is so important to individuals' quality of life, that we need to look seriously at limiting the amount of foreign and speculative capital in the property market.

Fourthly, finance. A civic republican society would be very wary of financial interests and of over-leveraged families and societies. It would condemn usury. It would make the point that, if financial interests are allowed to grow too powerful, they becomes a parasite, dictating the actions of the host in their own interests rather than the interests of the host. Rather, an Aristotelian economics would focus on the end of human flourishing rather than the means of the market. That could mean embracing 'national well-being measurements', but readers of this blog will know how little I rate such measurements. I would rather governments focus on a broad range of human and social indicators, particularly looking at quality of life in education, housing and work. The market should support the learning economy - which means giving people more opportunities to learn, study and pursue other interests.

But all of this leaves out the question of how to cope with any major global changes arising from climate change. I think an Aristotelian response would do its best to engage with the international system to mitigate such catastrophic climate change - but it would also prepare for a world where that change happens, and we, as a society, focus on protecting our republic, our citizens, our learning and our values in the midst of a new Dark Ages. Or is that a wretched embrace of a 'Lifeboat Britain' mentality...

To be honest it is hard to plan a coherent politics when one really has no idea to what extent the Doomsday scenarios foretold us by climate scientists are accurate and inevitable.

Lego's 'Civil Unrest' collection

The UK curriculum review: end of citizenship classes?

The Department of Education's curriculum review is out. It recommends separating the curriculum into three parts: national, basic and local. National curriculum subjects would be compulsory for all schools. Basic curriculum subjects would be recommended for schools but it's up to schools how (or if) they teach them. And the local curriculum is a space for schools to innovate.

It looks like citizenship classes, which have been a part of the national curriculum since 2002, could be shunted down to the basic curriculum. The report says:

Despite their importance in balanced educational provision, we are not entirely persuaded of claims that...citizenship has sufficient disciplinary coherence to be stated as discrete and separate National Curriculum ‘subjects’. We recommend that, while Citizenship is of enormous importance in a contemporary and future-oriented education...we are not persuaded that study of the issues and topics included in citizenship education constitutes a distinct ‘subject’ as such. We therefore recommend that it be reclassified as part of the Basic Curriculum.

This would mean that schools have a lot of discretion on how or if they teach citizenship. There have been complaints about citizenship classes before. An Ofsted investigation in 2006 found that a quarter of all English secondary schools offered inadequate classes in citizenship, with teachers working "far from their normal comfort zone". Ofsted decided that only a minority of schools taught citizenship "with enthusiasm".

David Blunkett, who was Home Secretary back in 2002 and who seems to be one of the champions of citizenship classes, has warned that the subject was struggling in the past and needed more supporters. Last week, he warned David Cameron in Prime Minister's Question Time that: “It would be perverse, in fact it would be absurd, to be requiring those coming from abroad to settle in Britain to learn about our democracy, to take citizenship courses, whilst withdrawing the teaching of citizenship and democracy to our own children in our own schools.”

The decline of citizenship classes is something of a blow for philosophy. The classes were intended to be part of an Aristotelian training of future citizens, as David Hargreaves put it in a Demos pamphlet in 1994:

Civic education is about the civic virtues and decent behaviour that adults wish to see in young people. But it is also more than this. Since Aristotle, it has been accepted as an inherently political concept that raises questions about the sort of society we live in, how it has come to take its present form, the strengths and weaknesses of current political structures, and how improvements might be made... Active citizens are as political as they are moral; moral sensibility derives in part from political understanding; political apathy spawns moral apathy.

Now, that Aristotelian vision of civic education seems to be fading.

What about Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL), the 'well-being' and 'emotional literacy' classes which at the moment is part of Personal, Social and Health Education? PSHE is itself under review, and it looks likely that SEAL could be quite slimmed down. The Coalition government is much less enthusiastic about it than New Labour was, and wants to make SEAL in general more evidence-based.

The report does provide some room for philosophy classes in the local curriculum. It says:

The local curriculum should also provide opportunities for schools to innovate and to develop particular curricular interests or specialisms insofar as they decide they are appropriate. For example, a specific focus might be developed for a school’s provision or for a phase of learning, either as separate elements e.g. ‘philosophy for children’ or integrated across the school curriculum, such as ‘thinking skills’.

That opens the door for schools to 'innovate', but doesn't totally welcome philosophy into the classroom.

It strikes me that these three subjects - citizenship, well-being, and philosophy - used to be one subject. They were all a part of ancient Greek philosophy. They all emerge from a Socratic and Aristotelian foundation. I think they should be brought back together. I also think they should be combined with Religious Education, which is an increasingly popular A-Level subject - and which incorporates ancient Greek philosophy and ethics. I don't think you can teach well-being without some discussion of the meaning of life - and whether or if there is a God. This is one of the fallacies of the 'science of well-being' which is behind SEAL: it leaves no room for moral reasoning about the end or goal of life.

I would like to see Religious Education changed into a new subject, called 'The Good Life' or 'Flourishing', which combines ideas and techniques from the science of well-being, with ethics, philosophy, and an examination of some of the practices and beliefs of religious traditions like Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Such a class would also look at the Good Society - and how our personal ethics of flourishing are tied to different conceptions of the state and of citizenship.

Herman Van Rompuy on the power of positive thinking

Herman Van Rompuy is thinking positive. He is staring into his mirror each morning, and repeating to himself: 'I am a strong, confident, powerful currency. I am A TIGER!' He's so positive, he's sent out a hefty tome called The World Book of Happiness to 200 world leaders, with this extraordinary letter. I'm quoting from the letter he sent to Barack Obama:

Dear Mr President Barack,

I am very happy to present you with this copy of The World Book of Happiness...with my best wishes for a 'Happy New Year' but also with my request to you as world leaders to make people's happiness and well-being our political priority for 2012 [um...what about preventing the catastrophic collapse of the euro? No?]

Positive thinking is no longer something for drifters, dreamers and the perpetually naive. Positive Psychology concerns itself in a scientific way with the quality of life. At stake are not only the happiness and well-being of individuals, but also those of groups, organisations and countries. And above all, in today's global world [today's global world?] we can all learn from one another. It is time to make this knowledge available to the man and woman in the street...

People who think positive see more opportunities, perform better, possess greater resilience, take more often correct and sound decisions [sic], negotiate better, have more self-confidence, maintain better relations, take greater responsibility, have more trust placed in them and so on. In short, they give more hope to others because they can experience it themselves. In order to release this positive energy, people need oxygen. Society can offer this oxygen. Positive education, positive parenting, positive journalism and positive politics play a crucial role here. This oxygen we can also create ourselves by a balanced existence or a religious or philosophical rooting.

[I love this paragraph. My favourite line is 'to release this positive energy, people need oxygen', though I also like the idea of 'a religious or philosophical rooting' - 'rooting' is a slang Australian word for shagging].

Why not address women and men from all angles of their multiple intelligence? [Why not indeed!]...By addressing men and women who are on a growth path [eh?] we all become better and happier people. We then do not turn every incident into a trend and every anecdote into a general truth. [You've lost me Herman]. As a consequence our governing will stimulate self-knowledge, reflection, sense of responsibility and commitment.

Positively inclined people see everything in its right proportions. [etc etc for a few more sentences.]

Happy New Year!

Herman Van Rompuy

Chairman of the European Council

Woohoo! I love his cheery upbeatness in the face of chaos. And quite a plug for the book itself. The author, another Belgian called Leo Bormans, blogs excitedly: 'Will Barack Obama and Angela Merkel in the near future read in the World Book of Happiness before going to sleep?' You betcha Leo!

Now, a cynic might suggest Herman lecturing the world's leaders on the power of positive thinking while Europe desperately tries to find enough money to bail itself out is reminiscent of Aguirre, the hero of Werner Herzog's movie, dreaming of new empires while monkeys swarm over his sinking raft. But that's a cynical thought. Think positive. Think rich. Find a happy place!

Fake quotes

I was copy-editing my book this week, which is about ancient philosophy. To my surprise, and mild horror, I discovered that one of my favourite quotes is mis-attributed to Aristotle. The quote is:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

It sounds like something Aristotle would say. He, like other ancient Greeks, insisted on the importance of habit in ethics (in fact, the word 'ethics' comes from the word 'ethos', which means habit). But he never wrote that phrase. It's actually a paraphrase of Aristotle's ideas by a modern writer called Will Durant, in his 1926 book, The Story of Philosophy. Durant so successfully translated Aristotle's ideas into a modern catchphrase, that you can now find that phrase in any number of self-help, business coaching and counseling books (type it into Google books and have a look). And I was about to pass it on. Oops!

So what other famous quotes are actually misquotes? Remember this one by Martin Luther King going round the internet after the assassination of Osama bin Laden:

I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.

Moving words, shared by hundreds of thousands of people through social networking sites in the days after Osama's death. Except MLK didn't say them. As a journalist at the Atlantic magazine discovered, they were said by a 24-year-old graduate of Penn State University, Jessica Dovey, who wrote them at the beginning of a genuine MLK quote which she posted as a Facebook update. The whole quote was then shared by thousands of people and attributed to MLK:

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. [The next lines are by MLK] Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

Or what about this enchanting little quote:

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

This is a favourite quote for self-help and happiness books, and authors either attribute it to John Stuart Mill or Nathaniel Hawthorne. But I can't find it in either of their books. It's too neat, too much of a jingle, for either of them - but perfectly compact to be circulated ad infinitum on the internet and in self-help manuals and presentations.

Or you might know this dazzling quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The secret is the answer to all that has been, all that is, and all that will ever be.

Rhonda Byrne uses this quote in her blockbuster self-help book, The Secret, to support her claim that all the great minds of the past - Emerson, Newton, Plato etc - believed in the Law of Attraction. Except, again, the quote is made up, or mis-attributed. There's no record of Emerson saying or writing it - nor any of the other Emerson quotes in Byrne's book.

How about this feel-good quote, often attributed to Nelson Mandela:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

Fabulous huh? But once again, Mandela never said that. Read it again: is it likely a hard-boiled former guerrilla would give a speech telling us all to be fabulous children of God? It actually comes from a New Age guru called Marianne Williamson, from the Course of Miracles movement. But it sounds better if it comes from Mandela.

Gandhi is another 'wise old man' archetype who's had a lot of quotes attached to his name to help their circulation. For example, one of the most popular catchphrases for self-help gurus -

Be the change you wish to see.

- actually comes from an interview with Mahatma's grandson, Arun. There's no record of Mahatma saying it.

Perhaps the most popular quote among self-help authors is Shakespeare's 'to thine own self be true'. It is, in fact, an authentic quote, from Hamlet. But it is said by one of the more pompous characters in Shakespeare - Polonius, a foolish courtier who spends most of the play lying, dissembling, and being untrue to himself and everyone else. The quote in its original context is soaked in irony. But that doesn't matter. It's a perfect little soundbite for our impatient age to circulate.

Any other popular mis-attributions you can think of?

Russell Hoban RIP

Russell Hoban died this week: he was the author of Riddley Walker, one of the great post-apocalyptic novels of the last 30 years (along with The Road, The Kraken Wakes...what else?). I read Riddley Walker quite recently, and loved its rough Anglo-Saxon language, its mysticism, its vivid sense of a new Dark Ages, of a time when most knowledge and even basic literacy has been forgotten. Imagine living for centuries surrounded by reminders of a civilisation obviously far superior to yours. That's how people lived for centuries after the Roman Empire, and perhaps it's how we'll live again.

Here's an excerpt from the Guardian's obituary:

Riddley Walker established his extremely high reputation as a deeply original novelist. It is an enormously eloquent and demanding science-fiction tale set in the UK perhaps three millennia after a nuclear war has ended civilisation. The survivors inhabit what is often referred to by science-fiction critics as a "ruined earth", a ravaged, resource-poor, constantly threatened world whose inhabitants are unlikely to be literate, or long-lived.

It is a difficult world to portray, except sentimentally, or in terms of Grand Guignol. Hoban solves this problem by having his young protagonist tell his story, in his own words. The astonishment is in the words, a deeply ingenious and poetic representation of what English might actually sound like in such a world. The first sentence of the book has become famous: "On my naming day when I come 12 I to gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long before him nor I aint looking to see none agen." By the end of this novel the attentive reader dreams in that tongue.

[...]

Hoban was a short, compact man with a clear cold eye and a sometimes forgiving smile. He drank quite a bit, but there was never an embarrassment of self-exposure that acquaintances might marvel at. He was intensely sharp and seemed, as well, to be in control of his body, despite an array of illnesses. He enjoyed picnicking on Hampstead Heath, but one felt, seeing him gaze at the view across London, that what he saw was the end of the world.

And here is an excerpt from Riddley Walker, to give you a flavour of its weirdness:

Lorna said to me, 'You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name.'
I said, 'What thing is that?'
She said, 'Its some kind of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it wernt you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it don't even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.'
I said, 'If its in every 1 of us theres moren 1 of it theres got to be a manying theres got to be a millying and mor.'
Lorna said, 'Wel there is a millying and mor.'
I said, 'Wel if theres such a manying of it whys it lorn then whys it loan?'
She said, 'Becaws the manying and the millying its all 1 thing it dont have nothing to gether with. You look at lykens on a stoan its all them tiny manyings of it and may be each part of it myt think its sepert only we can see its all 1 thing. Thats how it is with what we are its all 1 girt big thing and divvyt up amongst the many. Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome. Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on our cloes. Some times we dont fit. Some times it cant fynd the arm hoals and it tears us a part.

How I learned to stop worrying and love self-employment

The latest figures that 168,000 people became self-employed in the UK this year, which is a record. This is the story of how I unwillingly became self-employed, and learnt to love it.

Back in 2007, I persuaded my employer, a financial magazine called Euromoney, to send me to Russia to be their first full-time Moscow correspondent. I'd worked for Euromoney for three years or so, hated most of it, but had clung on because it was the first job I got after university, and I was terrified of getting fired and somehow not fitting in with the capitalist economy.

After I'd been in Russia for three months, my editor emailed me to say he was coming out to Moscow. I thought this was rather strange - he didn't say he was coming out for a story or a conference, just that he was coming out. But I put aside my paranoid concerns, and went to meet him. As soon as I saw him approaching, I knew things looked bad. He looked incredibly sheepish and downcast. We went to a local cafe, and he came out with it: "I'm really sorry Jules, but we're going to let you go."

I couldn't believe it. I was 26. I had turned down another job in London, with Reuters, to move to Moscow; I had moved most of my possessions, learned the language for six months; I had found a flat; I had bid farewell to all my friends. And now they were firing me after three months? "It's not my decision, Jules, it's the publisher [Richard Ensor, seen on the left giving one of Euromoney's endless awards to a Croatian businessman called Darko Marinac, shortly before Darko was arrested for fraud. It was an award for 'excellence in corporate governance']. Ensor is worried about the payment protocols, controlling expenses, that sort of thing." I looked at my editor in shock and growing disgust. "Believe me, I wanted to resign over this", he said. "But I've got two kids and my pension to think about." Uh-huh.

And so I became a freelancer.

For a couple of weeks, I was in shock. I really didn't want to return to England with my tail between my legs. But I had no idea if I would be able to stay afloat and make it in this new and strange land. But I discovered, very quickly, that I could. Partly, I was helped by the fact I kicked up the mother of all fusses about how Euromoney had treated me, and got several leading bankers and even the owner of the Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere (he also owns Euromoney) to write to the publisher and complain. They were mugging me, and so I drew as much attention to their assault as possible. Sure enough, they got ashamed, and paid me half a year's salary to shut up.

But I also discovered that freelance life suited me. There were hardly any other freelancers in Russia covering the business and financial sector, and before long I had a whole string of clients, from all over the world. I made far more money than I used to do with Euromoney, and worked for better-known clients: The Times, The Economist, The Spectator, Foreign Policy.

But the biggest reward was emotional. For three years, I had worked for Euromoney, and been terrified of getting fired. I felt I had to fit in with the office environment, which I hated; and that I had to gain the approval of my superiors, some of whom were OK but some of whom were less so.

Suddenly, I didn't have one guvnor, but several. This changed the power dynamic utterly. If one boss was being too difficult or demanding, I simply worked with them less. I was in control. I could choose how much I worked, and when. I could choose what time I went into the office, or if I went into the office at all. The freedom and autonomy was delicious.

I loved that first year of freelancing. I would work a bit, do some interviews, play some video games, stay out late with friends (why not? no need for an early start in the morning). I was playing Grand Theft Auto at that time, and it struck me: this is my model of employment. In Grand Theft Auto, you are a self-employed hustler from Eastern Europe, trying to make it in New York. You have a range of different employers you can work for, some of whom you meet, some of whom are just voices at the end of the telephone. You go around the city doing jobs and missions for them, cash magically appears in your bank account, and your credibility rises at the same time (unless you mess a job up).

This aptly described my new life (though I was from the West, trying to make it in Eastern Europe, and sadly with less bazookas involved). I probably worked for over 30 different titles and organisations in my time in Russia. Some paid very well for boring work. Some paid less well, but the jobs boosted my credibility because they were well-respected titles. I never met some of my regular clients - just received jobs by email, and then the money appeared in my account.

As the knowledge economy expands, more and more people will be following the Grand Theft Auto model of employment. They will also organise into hubs or syndicates to protect their interests. They will go co-op on missions when it suits them. They will find ways to make the game more social, for example by hiring out office space together.

You can criticise this model of employment: first of all, not everyone has the particular transferable nomadic skills for that sort of market. And that market isn't suitable for everything: you can't build a dam or an airplane using freelance consultants. It works particularly well for people in the media. But that isn't - nor should it be - the whole of the economy. For one thing, I don't employ anyone. And just because it turned out OK for me, we shouldn't forget how tough and demoralising unemployment can be, and should do our best to protect people from that experience. And perhaps the GTA model is rather atomised and lonely: what happened to corporations and corporation man?

But keeping those criticisms in mind, I've found that the GTA model is fun. And judging by the latest employment figures, it's catching on: this year, there are 168,000 new additions to the ranks of the self-employed, which is a record. I'm sure that many of them were, like me, unwillingly shoved into self-employment. But hopefully some of them will learn to love it.

Now, I occasionally receive offers of full-time employment from publications. And I'm sometimes tempted to accept. I worked for one magazine for a year, which was fun, but I still couldn't help feeling that a lot of the time in the office is just killing time. You know that sort of dead atmosphere in an office, when everyone is just watching the clock? You've basically sold your whole day, five days a week, to someone else. I get a lot more done in my own time. And I can go for a walk in the park, play sport, have leisurely meetings that I actually enjoy. Life is better.

You think you'll miss the office banter. That's why we like sit-coms like 30 Rock, which portray an idealised version of an office, where everyone helps each other and laughs together, and the CEO is a friendly father-figure. But, like a lot of sit-coms, 30 Rock is selling a version of community that no longer exists: or at least, I haven't found it (if you have, let me know! I'll put together a wall of fame of companies people actually enjoy working at.)

I went to work full-time at one title last year, and I couldn't believe how bad the atmosphere was. There was no banter at all, just desultory descriptions of PR events and conferences, and the occasional row over responsibilities, like caged animals biting each other. I handed in my notice after three days, realising I far preferred working for myself. I know that some offices are much more fun, but we can build our own places of work - where free people come together out of choice and passion to work together. Places like the Hub Westminster, for example.

As The Office put it: 'All you've got in common is that you walk around on the same bit of carpet for eight hours a day'. So why do it? Why not connect with people who really want to be there, who really share your passion?

Wild Man

I like this Kasabian album cover: the wild, Dionysiac violence of it.




It reminds me a bit of this amazing cover from a few years back, from an Andrew WK album. I had the idea of a similar cover for my book, Philosophy for Life and other Dangerous Situations - a photo of me or someone else with their face really bruised and bloodied, like they'd just survived an earthquake. Not sure Rider Books would have gone for it!




On a slightly different note, I also like the trailer for the BBC 4 series, the Medieval Mind, which I think captures quite how trippy it must have been to be alive in that crazy era.

How to bridge the Two Cultures?

Lisa Jardine, centenary professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary, University of London, put forward an interesting essay on Radio 4 on Sunday, looking at CP Snow's 'Two Cultures', and the rise of technocratic government (you can read her essay here). She said:

The scientist, novelist and British civil servant CP Snow is probably best remembered for his controversial lecture The Two Cultures And The Scientific Revolution, on the gulf of incomprehension separating the arts and sciences, delivered in 1959. In it he argued that in spite of the increasing importance of science, British intellectual life continued to be dominated by the traditional humanities. Today his argument continues to resonate, though perhaps now economics has joined science as a specialist field which baffles those who have received only an arts education.

A year after his Two Cultures lecture, Snow expanded on his argument and gave it an added sense of urgency in his 1960 Science and Government lectures, delivered at Harvard. He warned that at a time when specialist scientific understanding was indispensable, those charged with taking vital political decisions had no proper grasp on the issues. "One of the most bizarre features of our time," he wrote. "Is that the cardinal choices have to be made by a handful of men who cannot have a first-hand knowledge of what those choices depend upon or what their results may be."

She continued:

[I]t is, in my view, high time that we renewed and intensified our efforts to realise Snow's as yet unrealised goal. Because as I see it, the issue today is not whether the sciences or the humanities get more funding out of the shamefully small pot currently allocated to higher education. It is rather whether the educated elites in both sectors are prepared to stand side by side to insist that informed, educated debate is needed wherever political policy has to be formed in so-called "technical", "specialist" areas of life. Which today means those number and formula driven disciplines with which the humanities-trained struggle to engage.

In current debates about GM crops, nuclear energy and climate change, the public at large - including governments and senior administrators - are liable to be swayed by the most persuasive of the advisers or interest groups, because they are not equipped with the knowledge or the reasoned strategies needed to judge. Many of them are dismayed by any argument that involves number and maths.

Currently, this tendency to be swayed by experts is most clearly to be seen in the field of economics. Recently two nations within the European Union, Greece and Italy, have replaced their elected prime ministers by so-called technocrats - men with a significant track record in finance, but not experience of government at local or national level.

In the case of Italy, the entire cabinet consists of financial specialists. The non-elected prime minister's people head "governments of national unity" which pursue policies for which nobody in the electorate voted. Indeed, they are not expected to consider the interests of the public, except insofar as introducing austerity measures sufficiently swingeing to satisfy the international markets is supposed ultimately to ensure the solvency of the nation as a whole.Are we really comfortable leaving grave political decisions to technocrats whose successes have been measured in terms of investment yields?

The rule of a few wise men is oligarchy, not democracy. So democracy depends upon our being able to sustain informed debate in the fields of science and economics. Each and every one of us has to take responsibility for the decisions that shape the future of the nation as a whole. But we will only be able to do that if those we have elected to govern us can master the technical aspects of difficult decision making - and if we in our turn are able to follow their arguments.

How could we create a better dialogue between the two cultures? I would suggest the divorce begins at A-Level and continues at university, and is the product of over-specialisation forced on young people too early. Focusing entirely on one subject throughout university leaves people unprepared for the complexity of life. It reduces the richness of their experience, denying them the opportunity to consider ideas and research from other disciplines. And it inspires the ridiculous 'culture wars', where the sciences and humanities see each other as rival countries to be attacked or raided, because there are so few people who are comfortable in both worlds.

One solution might be to move to a system closer to the American model, where students can major in one subject while still being able to study and attend lectures on other subjects. It could even become compulsory for undergraduates in sciences to take one course in humanities, and vice versa.

And we need more generalists, more people able to see the benefits, and to understand the aims and language, of both cultures. We have many excellent examples of that at Queen Mary. Another great example is Jonah Lehrer, the writer of Proust was a Neuroscientist. If you haven't read the book, I very much recommend it: he looks at 12 or so figures from modernist literature, and shows how their ideas anticipated recent advances in neuroscience. His aim, explicitly, is to build a 'third culture' that bridges the arts and sciences. (The image at the top is from Scientific American, and is designed by Matt Collins).

PoW: On toes, feet, pilgrimages, Europe, and xenophilia

I feel like a polar bear who wakes up to discover the piece of ice they went to sleep on has broken free of the mainland and floated far out into the sea. Or is that disappearing iceberg the EU, and we’re the ones on solid ground? The Economist put it well: “We journalists are probably too bleary-eyed after a sleepless night to understand the full significance of what has just happened in Brussels. What is clear is that after a long, hard and rancorous negotiation, at about 5am this morning the European Union split in a fundamental way.”

Has the UK just left the EU? Has the UK put national interests willfully and foolishly before the wider collective good? As far as I can tell, this is what happened: David Cameron went to the summit with the intention of supporting it. He made clear that he couldn’t sign up to a Tobin tax, and that he thought a Tobin tax was beside the point to the immediate challenge of saving the eurozone from collapse - something he very much wants to do. I think he fully expected to be able keep the UK out of a Tobin tax while signing up to this treaty, and was prepared to stand up to those in his party who wanted a referendum on the new treaty.

However, it seems France and Germany are sick of the UK’s exceptionalism. They felt that they could go ahead without the UK, or perhaps they expected the UK to fold at this point and sign up to the Tobin tax. But Cameron didn’t fold. Neither side would budge - all on this frankly irrelevant matter of the Tobin tax. It’s irrelevant to the immediate project of saving the eurozone from a crisis of investor confidence. And so Cameron walked away, Europe went ahead, and the treaty already looks weaker to the markets. That’s a disastrous outcome - it makes the treaty less likely to save the eurozone, which is in everyone’s interest.

How did the diplomacy fail so terribly? Why couldn’t a simple opt-out of the Tobin tax clause be built into the treaty? It seems ridiculous bloody-mindedness on Sarkozy and Merkel’s part - unless Sarkozy is betting that a smaller eurozone will survive the collapse of the euro, and Paris will be its financial capital. Bagehot of the Economist quotes two French politicians, who tell him that "France wants to use the euro crisis to deepen integration around a core of countries that use the euro, under the political control of a handful of big national leaders."

That doesn't sound a great project: anti-democratic, anti-smaller countries, pro-French banks, pro-Serkozy's ego. But who knows? Right now, the future is so murky (or should I say Merkozy) it’s anyone’s guess how this will resolve itself.

********

Last night, the London Philosophy Club turned its attention to humbler matters: the big toe. Matthew Beaumont, a talented lecturer in the English department of University College London gave a witty talk on the dignity of the big toe, that most reviled and ridiculed part of the anatomy, which Matthew saw as a metaphor for the lumpenproletariat. And yet doesn’t the big toe, ugly and misshapen as it is, support the whole human enterprise? Doesn’t it allow us to spring forward? It was an impassioned ‘manifest-toe’, as he put it.

Matthew reminded me of the Marxist novelist China Mieville - they’re both crew-cut Leninists, both fascinated by the city, its domination by capitalism, and the possibilities for rebellion and resistance within the city. Matthew runs the ‘city project’ at UCL, while China Mieville wrote the excellent The City and the City about, well, the city. It turns out China is one of his good friends - they’re in the Socialist Worker’s Party together, and Matthew was even China’s treasurer when he ran for MP. Here's a pic of him at last night's event.



********

Listening to Matthew’s encomium of the big toe as an exaltation of the humble, the base, the material versus the exalted and idealistic, I was reminded of Christianity, that prototype of Marxism. Didn’t Christ also radically reverse power categories: a reversal symbolised in the act of washing his disciples feet?

I was also reminded of the pilgrimage, that act of devotion where a person puts their feet through all kinds of hardship, in order to get closer to the ground, closer to reality, closer to God. I walked the Camino de Santiago last year, it was one of the best experiences of my life. I’m not a Christian, but I loved the pilgrimage’s combination of walking, contemplation and fraternity. I wrote about the experience in the last chapter of my book, in the chapter about Aristotle (a philosopher known as the ‘peripatetic’, because he wandered around a lot). I wrote: ‘To go on a pilgrimage is to make yourself vulnerable, to put yourself at the mercy of others. You learn to accept the gift of others’ help, and to accept your own dependency.” [Below is a pic of one pilgrim getting a foot tended to by a fellow pilgrim!]



A pilgrim is at the mercy of strangers’ friendship and hospitality (a word that comes from the ‘hospitallers’ who helped the pilgrims along the route). The pilgrimage asserts a shared humanity with people from other cultures and countries: going on pilgrimage across Europe used to be an assertion of Christians’ common, supranational identity. It’s an assertion of the opposite of xenophobia: xenophilia, or love for the stranger, which comes from the ancient Greek cult of Zeus Xenos, or Zeus the Stranger. Zeus was thought to appear sometimes as an itinerant, so Greeks thought it always wise to offer hospitality to itinerants, just in case they were a god in disguise.

******

I’ve had the pilgrimage in mind the last few days, as I’ve been reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his youthful walk across Europe, A Time of Gifts. He set off when he was 18, with just a back-pack and a copy of Horace, to walk across Europe in 1933. Despite encountering the occasional Nazi brownshirt, his overwhelming impression was of Europeans’ hospitality and generosity, taking the young English stranger into their homes, feeding him, giving him a lot of wine and schnapps, and showering him with gifts (his backpack was stolen at one point, and a Bavarian count made up for his loss of Horace with the gift of a priceless 17th century edition).

Fermor seems to be, unconsciously perhaps, recreating the pilgrimage for secular times, and searching for a common European identity beyond tribal differences. He tells the story of when he was involved in the kidnapping of a German general during the War. They took him on escape trek across the Alps. One dawn, the captured general looked out on the mountains, and quietly quoted Horace to himself, in Latin (I’ve used Dryden’s translation):

Behold yon Mountains hoary height,
Made higher with new Mounts of snow:

Fermor, who seemed to know a huge amount of poetry off by heart, hears him, and quotes the rest. The General looks at him and nods sadly, and a bond is formed between them, amid all that wintery war and disunity:

Behold yon Mountains hoary height,
Made higher with new Mounts of snow:
Again behold the Winter's weight
Oppress the lab'ring Woods below;
And Streams, with Icy fetters bound,
Benum'd and crampt to solid Ground.

With well-heap'd logs dissolve the cold
And feed the genial hearth with fires;
Produce the Wine, that makes us bold,
And sprightly Wit and Love inspires:
For what hereafter shall betide,
God, if 'tis worth his care, provide.

Let him alone, with what he made,
To toss and turn the World below;
At his command the storms invade,
The winds by his Commission blow,
Till with a nod he bids 'em cease,
And then the Calm returns, and all is peace.

To morrow and her works defie,
Lay hold upon the present hour,
And snatch the pleasures passing by,
To put them out of Fortune's pow'r;
Nor love nor love's delights disdain;
Whate're thou get'st today is gain.

Secure those golden early joys
That Youth unsowr'd with sorrow bears,
E're with'ring time the taste destroys
With sickness and unwieldy years!
For active sports, for pleasing rest,
This is the time to be possessed;
The best is but in season best.

The pointed hour of promis'd Bliss,
The pleasing whisper in the dark,
The half unwilling willing kiss,
The laugh that guides thee to the mark,
When the kind Nymph wou'd coyness feign,
And hides but to be found again;
These, these are the joys the Gods for Youth ordain.

****

Talking of the gift economy, here is behavioural economist Dan Ariely talking at this year’s Burning Man festival, dressed in a natty cape.

And here is a new article by Stanford University’s psychophysiology of emotion centre, also on the emotional effects of the Burning Man festival.

Here is something I wrote recently on the idea of ‘dancing mania’, its history, and how it survives in the arts.

Here is proof that walking beats flying: a terrifying account of the Air France crash, why it happened, and the mixture of technical fault and simple human error that caused it. Edge of your seat reading.

Here is a study of why cheerfulness is negatively correlated to academic achievement, by Ed Diener and others.

Finally, one of the interesting things I discovered in Fermor’s book was that Alan Watts, the great western authority on Zen, wrote his first book on Zen while still a teenager at Kings College Canterbury (he was a schoolmate of Fermor’s). Here is a funny animation of some of his Zen talks, done by the creators of South Park.

See you next week.

Jules

Uncontrollable dancing

I’m fascinated by the idea of uncontrollable dancing. It seems a world away now, but it was once a familiar cultural phenomenon. In ancient Greek culture, for example, we read of the wild followers of Dionysus, also known as ho lysios or ‘he who grants release’. His followers were, apparently, released from all the prohibitions of civilisation, and would whirl and dance around until they achieved a state of mind called enthousiasmos, or ‘having the God within oneself’.

In the Middle Ages, there were frequent outbreaks of dancing mania, also known as St Vitus’ Dance or dancing plague, because the mania was sometimes thought to be a curse sent by St Vitus, patron saint of dancing. Those afflicted would end up dancing in front of his shrine, praying to be released from their ordeal. In 1278, 200 people were seized by the mania in Germany, and danced on a bridge over the river Meuse, causing it to collapse. There was a particularly bad outbreak in 1518, when a lady, Frau Troffea, started to dance in a street in Strasbourg. Within a week, 34 people joined her, and within a month, there were around 400 dancers, some of whom eventually died from exhaustion.

Psychologists now think these outbreaks are an extreme example of ‘social contagion’, or perhaps a reaction to adverse circumstances like economic depression: think of the acid house parties that spread across the country in the recession of the early 1990s. I remember seeing people at nightclubs in the 1990s who literally could not stop dancing, though of course they were on a lot of drugs.

We still see remnants of this idea of uncontrolled ecstatic dancing in our own more straight-laced times. Musicians used to say someone 'got the funk’ - a word which historians think comes from the African word lu-fuki, meaning sweat, as if 'the funk' is some sort of sweat-lodge shamanic training. People also speak of ‘getting loose’, ‘getting down’, ‘working it out’, ‘getting into the groove’: all of this suggests, to me, that when we dance, we somehow re-connect with what contemporary psychologists call our automatic-emotive thinking system, which seems to respond particularly to patterns, beats or loops. Perhaps dancing allows us to re-connect to this system and somehow ‘work out’ emotions or drives that our rational civilisation forces us to inhibit.

Even if we don’t see many examples of uncontrolled or involuntary dancing on the streets, alas, we still see references to it in the arts. Here, for example, is an example of a Dionysiac-esque outbreak from the BBC comedy, The Mighty Boosh.



There's the enthousiasmos of the Blues Brothers in a church run, appropriately enough, by the godfather of funk, James Brown.



The famous T-Mobile advert is, from one point of view, a recreation of a medieval outbreak of dancing mania:



My favourite example is Baloo losing control of himself in the Jungle Book. Other examples?

The Secret can save your life!

I love the main review of Rhonda Byrne's The Secret on Amazon. I can't tell if it's for real - it's satire, right? Judge for yourself.

Please allow me to share with you how "The Secret" changed my life and in a very real and substantive way allowed me to overcome a severe crisis in my personal life. It is well known that the premise of "The Secret" is the science of attracting the things in life that you desire and need and in removing from your life those things that you don't want. Before finding this book, I knew nothing of these principles, the process of positive visualization, and had actually engaged in reckless behaviors to the point of endangering my own life and wellbeing.

At age 36, I found myself in a medium security prison serving 3-5 years for destruction of government property and public intoxication. This was stiff punishment for drunkenly defecating in a mailbox but as the judge pointed out, this was my third conviction for the exact same crime. I obviously had an alcohol problem and a deep and intense disrespect for the postal system, but even more importantly I was ignoring the very fabric of our metaphysical reality and inviting destructive influences into my life.

My fourth day in prison was the first day that I was allowed in general population and while in the recreation yard I was approached by a prisoner named Marcus who calmly informed me that as a new prisoner I had been purchased by him for three packs of Winston cigarettes and 8 ounces of Pruno (prison wine). Marcus elaborated further that I could expect to be raped by him on a daily basis and that I had pretty eyes.

Needless to say, I was deeply shocked that my life had sunk to this level. Although I've never been homophobic I was discovering that I was very rape phobic and dismayed by my overall personal street value of roughly $15. I returned to my cell and sat very quietly, searching myself for answers on how I could improve my life and distance myself from harmful outside influences. At that point, in what I consider to be a miraculous moment, my cell mate Jim Norton informed me that he knew about the Marcus situation and that he had something that could solve my problems. He handed me a copy of "The Secret". Normally I wouldn't have turned to a self help book to resolve such a severe and immediate threat but I literally didn't have any other available alternatives. I immediately opened the book and began to read.

The first few chapters deal with the essence of something called the "Law of Attraction" in which a primal universal force is available to us and can be harnessed for the betterment of our lives. The theoretical nature of the first few chapters wasn't exactly putting me at peace. In fact, I had never meditated and had great difficulty with closing out the chaotic noises of the prison and visualizing the positive changes that I so dearly needed.

It was when I reached Chapter 6 "The Secret to Relationships" that I realized how this book could help me distance myself from Marcus and his negative intentions. Starting with chapter six there was a cavity carved into the book and in that cavity was a prison shiv. This particular shiv was a toothbrush with a handle that had been repeatedly melted and ground into a razor sharp point.

The next day in the exercise yard I carried "The Secret" with me and when Marcus approached me I opened the book and stabbed him in the neck. The next eight weeks in solitary confinement provided ample time to practice positive visualization and the 16 hours per day of absolute darkness made visualization about the only thing that I actually could do. I'm not sure that everybody's life will be changed in such a dramatic way by this book but I'm very thankful to have found it and will continue to recommend it heartily.

On the humanities

Peter Stothard's written a nice blog post over at the TLS blog on the origins of the classical defence of the humanities, originally made by Cicero in his legal defence of his poetry teacher, Archias:

Archias was a Greek poet from Syria whose job was to flatter Roman politicians. Cicero’s hope was that, in return for his efforts to secure citizenship for Archias, he too, like mighty generals and dictators, would be flattered in a few memorable poems.

Cicero’s understanding with Archias was a typical grubby little bargain of the time. The deal might have been forgotten entirely — except for one of those satisfying curiosities of history in which Cicero’s short speech, Pro Archia, probably the least well known of all the great speeches in front of me now in the Folio Society’s spectacular new edition, is the one that has played the greatest part in our still wanting to read any of them.

Why read Cicero in the twenty first century? Why read any author who wrote in Latin or wanted to be written about in Greek? These are questions that book buyers can answer for themselves but universities must answer today against a mass of populist abuse and misunderstanding.

Classicists are increasingly tempted to defend themselves on utilitarian grounds — the claim that they train minds for hedge funds and our international leadership in dictionaries.

For much longer they have defended their investment of time and effort on Greeks and Romans with some version of the claim that there exists a connection, a common bond between all the arts that pertain to humane existence, omnes artes, quae ad humanitatem pertinent.

Those six words were Cicero’s own, taken from the Pro Archia, spoken after he had begged the judges’ permission to speak in Archias’s defence a little more freely than an immigration dispute might commonly justify.

Cicero’s subject was to be the study of humanity and literature itself, de studiis humanitatis ac litterarum. His case was that the life and work of Archias was a coherent benefit for civilised mankind, for young and old, in good times and in bad, at home and abroad. This added justification, the defence of a poet’s pertinence to politics and law, the unity of education, relaxation and moral example in a single ideal of humanity, became both devastating and decisive.

The scholar who first moved the ancient defence of Archias into the modern mind was Petrarch. On a student tour of northern Europe in 1333, he rediscovered the text in Liege, copied it out in saffron-yellow ink (embarrassingly for the young man this was the only colour he could buy in a ‘fine but uncivilized town’) and encouraged all his friends to copy it themselves and circulate it too.

The young Petrarch was chafing at his own legal studies; he enthusiastically recognised the path towards a coherent idea of humanities that would eventually unite grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy into a single course of study

Cicero was central to all of these individual arts; but much more important was his part, through the Pro Archia, in bringing them together. And he never even got his poem as a reward. When the time came for Cicero to need some flattering verses on his year as consul, he had to write them, famously badly, himself.