Building a Consistent World-View out of a Jumbled Mess of a Brain

Tonight I wrote a song about the horrors of the Protestant work ethic, inspired in part by my last blog post. Such is my lack of faith in the value of any opinion, and my chronic inability to take anything seriously, I have given it the catchy title "Naïvely Idealistic Anarchist Polemic". It's a relatively jolly song, and will probably appear on MySpace soon enough.

In an email to a friend tonight I described myself as a model of walking cognitive dissonance. The conflicting opinions I hold, inspired by diverse fragments of learning I have collected throughout life, have started to worry me more and more. My political leanings tag on Facebook, for example, simply says "Conflicted Radio 4 Anarchist". It's rather vague and unhelpful, not that anyone but me truly cares. But unlike many I do like to assign labels to myself, to seek a little box to fit myself in. How else can I tailor my searches for inspiration and insight? Being given the label "bipolar" was probably the most liberating thing ever to have happened to me. I now know the problem, and can look for solutions, and manage the extremes of my condition. Ish.

So I am constantly worried about my inability to reconcile the conflicting views I have on life's big questions. I've made some progress of late with politics, philosophy and religion, all of which have occupied a not inconsiderable chunk of my musing time. I'm making a start on morality (some, including myself, would say this is too little too late!), and this is inevitably going to be one of the harder topics. For about three years my philosophical readings have also heavily influenced my approach to art and critiques of other humanities topics.

This may all seem like a bit of an introspective waste of time; the foolish errand of a boy with too much time on his hands, but it does have an application. If I want to be a novelist, if I ever want to say something to the world, I have to make sure it's not all totally conflicting. It has to add up. I would never be so crass as to insert plain polemic into a work of fiction, but I do feel that this sort of consistency of voice is an important part of narration. Seen in that light, it becomes less of an academic distraction, and more of a relevant honing of my skill set, or whatever ghastly human resources term the modern world demands. I also simply like the idea of actually having a point of view on a given topic, rather than a discordant mess.

I thought that I would give a brief summary of my progress so far, mainly because it helps me to see it in plain type, and partially because it'll be bound to annoy or provoke anybody silly enough to read it.


Politics

This should be the easy one, but it's actually one of the most complicated. I don't agree with or remotely like our socio-economic model. It kills. It maims. It destroys all in its path. It is based on invisible daemons. It is unjust. It's also silly to say that it's the best we've got, since we actually used to have something much gentler. The Whiggish version of history is hokum. And before anyone dangles modern medicine or communications in my direction with a smug grin, there's no possible reason for thinking that these things couldn't exist without the system we're in.

Unlike a communist, or indeed the neo-liberals who run the Western world, I'm not arrogant enough to want to impose my anarchist utopia on everyone. I think we have a relatively robust and healthy political system, with many plus points. It's not something to be discarded lightly. It just needs a little revision. What I would adore is for a Government of Britain to leave its citizens to chose how they wish to live their lives; whether it's in venture capital or permaculture. This, rather painfully, aligns me with the libertarian wing of the Tory party. It's probably even why I like Boris.

And yet, oh and yet! I believe in safety nets. I believe in equality, and fairness, and all the hollow words that ricochet through the corridors of power. Labour, it seems, doesn't actually believe in many of these things any more. The dole, as is the fashion, is a grudging gift to the unfortunate few, with its many strings and social stigmas attached. In my anarchist utopia, as in the medieval village, the fields provide ale, bread and cheese aplenty, and the community will always provide. Because that's what humans do for each-other. With statism, however, every penny of taxation spent is a sin against "hard-working families", whoever they may be.

Alas there is a vast chasm left unfilled here. Not everyone will want my utopia, but people will still need support, so while my pragmatic head yearns for light-touch Toryism at a national level that allows my local idyll to flourish undisturbed, my heart bleeds for those who would suffer the privations in the outside world. If the safety net somehow survived, and they still left my bubble alone, that would be a perfect scenario. But I know you can't have them both, and it breaks my heart.


Religion

I had my fingers burnt on this one, falling for someone who loved Jesus and wouldn't love me unless I embraced him and his message. I hear this is how these evangelists spread, like a canker. Jesus was a pretty cool dude, and I think we would've got on. But then he was Jesus, so that's essentially a tautology. Remember, he loves you, even if you don't want him to. Scary stalker Jesus.

God seems almost entirely a myth one tells to children to keep them from misbehaving. Heaven and hell are just a grand orchestrated incidence of classical conditioning (a la Pavlov's Dog). Bloody useful if you're a tribal society in an arid wasteland, but completely irrelevant in a complicated modern society. Religion has been very useful in many ways, giving us the birth of science, handy codes for treating each-other nicely, but I'm sure even the Druids were pretty useful for various things in their time. Everything passes.

As far as deities go, I simply cannot believe in an Almighty. Gods didn't exist until we came along with minds to dream them up, and in a sense science is the natural successor to theology. The human mind will always observe the world and invent hypotheses for creation and man's own place in it. As our understanding of the natural world increased, it was inevitable that we would start to question religions. It's what our minds seem particularly well-adapted to do. I don't believe that religion is necessarily a bad thing, and think people like Dawkins are as bad as any religious zealot, but such strict divides have broken my heart and those of billions of others. It is this blind, unquestioning faith in anything that is harmful.


Philosophy

Life is absurd. I think this entire "essay" rather conflicts with this simplistic tenet. If life is so very absurd, why should I worry over it so often? The answer is actually a relatively easy one: an absurd world, real of just perceived, is vexing and destructive. I'm not driven towards the depressive forces of nihilism, where perhaps I once was, but more towards Camus. The universe has no intrinsic meaning save for the meaning you imbue it with. I find this an incredibly satisfying solution to the problem of a cruel world. I have my own esoteric values and measurements of worth, and I enjoy living by them. I have things in my life which give me pleasure. This distracts me from the vulgar horrors of modern life. It's a relatively simple perspective, but one that may have kept me alive. So long as I avoid that which I can't cope with, I'm safe.


Morality

Let's just say this section is under construction. I've been pretty bad in this area, and the weight of my guilt has only just caught up with me. I've done a lot of running.


And there we go. It's a difficult process, and there's an awful lot of mind-broadening reading involved, but I find it satisfying. It is one of those little things I imbue with meaning and value.

Any Job, at Any Cost

The Young Persons' Guarantee, details of which were announced today, is quite possibly a good idea. Ensuring that young people aren't disadvantaged in the formative years of their careers because of the economic downturn is a noble ambition. However, I am always massively wary of these carrot and stick approaches. The BBC has reported that everyone under 25 out of work for over 1 year will be offered a job, which they will have to take, or else their benefits will be cut. I have to point out, in my objection to this, that it's not a policy that will effect me, as I will be too old by the time it is enacted.

Now, I'm unsure whether or not this will effect people on Income Support or the new Employment & Support Allowance. Since the BBC say it will apply to everyone I have to assume that it will. There are some very ill people supported by these schemes, and forcing them into work at the wrong moment could be disastrous. If indeed the Government intends to do this, it is an act of wanton barbarism. My sympathy also extends to those who actually have qualifications and ambition, who may be struggling to find the right job in the current climate, but who will have far better prospects when the economy recovers. Forcing them into the wrong job now could have dire consequences, both for their ability to escape it and find something else, and for their own morale.

There is a myth in politics, supported by papers representing the "hard-working public", that any job is better than no job. The jobs the Government will guarantee will most likely be low-paid, in atrocious conditions, with horrible people, and with little opportunities for self-betterment. I've had these sorts of jobs. They made me routinely run home in tears at the end of the day. I dread to think what this might to do the vulnerable young people dipping their toes in the real world for the first time.

As usual with employment issues, the mentality at work here is simply one of massaging figures. The Government believes that its function is to maximise national productivity. You can forgive it for labouring under this misapprehension, since its income directly correlates with GDP. But there are far more important things in the world than money. Learning, quality of life, love, happiness... most of these things will never be provided by any compulsory work scheme. Some politicians, in that golden age before the crash, talked about chasing Gross National Happiness instead. There's none of that now.

I had hoped that the recession would provide people with a chance to reconnect with their families, to take up courses, to explore life outside money-grubbing and Plasma TVs. But the Government will always stay true to its vampiric raison d'etre: to make the nation work very hard; to dangle the dazzling fruits of consumer goods and cheap credit before the nation's tired eyes; to tax the nation very hard; to make the nation miserable. This is what made the mess in the first place. And it will make another mess soon enough.

When will they learn? The system isn't just broken, it's officially bad for your health.

Posting Postmodern Inanity

Struthiocracy: Government by Ostriches

Well, what a fine little pickle this is. Four ministers going in two days, Labour expecting a drubbing at the European elections, Hazel Blears rocking the boat... (oh, how I shan't miss her!) Even the trusty Guardian, in its leader editorial, is calling Brown's pedalo in. The waters of the Westminster Village boating pond are so choppy at the moment that fair-weather Blairite flamingos are migrating before the reshuffle.

Brown promises the nation he's taking action. But I suspect "action" means the same to Gordon Brown as it does to the Vogons. Unluckily for Labour, only one of them is fictional. So the Government's enquiries can enquire, the committees can deliberate, but all the while the nation sees the other parties coming up with all manner of radical proposals. Alan Johnson, to his credit, has made positive noises on proportional representation, but at the moment it's a distraction only, and if Brown supported it then you can be damned sure the public would reject it.

And I think this is the Government's major problem. They couldn't now even sell candy back to the baby. Nobody is listening. They might listen a bit more to Johnson, but Brown and his cadre are too entrenched in their bunker, too busy with their heads in the sand, to actually hear the voice of the people. That voice tells them to go. The big man's passion for power, however, will be the Labour Party's undoing. Rather than disappear gracefully after Friday, as would serve the country and the party best, Brown will have to be dragged out of Downing Street with his beak clamped to the desk.

If Labour MPs don't have the bravery to oust their Dear Leader next week, then they have only themselves to blame for the eventual fate of their party. An entire generation of youths will always despise the party for Iraq, for top-up fees, and for so much more. The party is in debt to its sand-covered eyebrows and donations have dried up. If Brown insists by his arrogance on clinging to power until the bitter end, then Labour may well cease to exist as a viable force in national politics.

The end is nigh. The Guardian is right to warn, and right to suggest its readers shift support to the Greens and Lib Dems. The progressive future looks increasingly to be out of Labour's hands.

Our Mutual Friend

It has been several years since I last read Our Mutual Friend, so when I began watching the BBC's 1997 adaptation I was mightily surprised to find that the images of the places and people Dickens had described to me, so very long ago, have actually survived intact. Perhaps it's these lasting impressions (I still intimately remember, for example, my imagined layout for the house and shed in Blyton's Secret Seven books) that mark out a novel as being great. That's all I have to say on that, really, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Here's a brief list of some of the other memorable places in my past reading:

Fenchurch's small house in Islington, in Douglas Adams: So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish.

The Castle, in Enid Blyton: Five On Kirrin Island.

Red Roofs, in Enid Blyton: The Family at Red Roofs.

Churchyard, in J. Meade Falkner: Moonfleet.

The Piggies' forest, in Orson Scott Card: Speaker for the Dead.

The Universes

After toying with some ideas about magnetism, I found myself treading the familiar path of scientific day-dreaming. Here's a little discussion on my train of thought:

It's separately postulated that there have been, and will be, different universes (before the Big Bang, and after the eventual collapse) and that there may be other universes within a higher "multiverse". These ideas seem to me to be the same thing. Since the Big Bang itself created our version of spacetime, there is nothing to suggest that there is a pattern of linear causation in a hypothetical multiverse. From our perspective, those "once and future" realities can't exist, but perhaps outside of our spacetime they do. If spacetime is not the only reality, then there's nothing to suggest these universes cannot exist concurrently.

It's very tempting to believe some of the ideas in the Cyclic Model relating to a self-sustaining pattern of universes creating universes, perhaps just by collision, but these cosmogonies are so far beyond testability that at this stage it's perhaps an indulgent course of study. You could almost say that at our current stage of scientific capability such hypotheses have about as much value as any religious theory on the origins of reality. But science has come so far in the last few centuries that it doesn't seem too ridiculous to at least explore some of the possibilities based on what little we do know. That may give us time to perfect the questions before we have the means to answer them.

This might all sound like Science Fiction, and there are many people who balk at retaining knowledge about the Universe (as Douglas Adams said, "the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion"!), but I find these mysteries utterly fascinating. Often the proposed solutions have a grace and elegance redolent of grand poetry or the religious texts themselves. The Cyclic Model, String Theory, Curved Spacetime; they may have-dry sounding names, but the ideas are stunningly simple and beautiful. I just wish that nature actually followed Ockham's Razor in this way. Often, the best provable scientific theories are far from simple, or even elegant.