Opinion

Thinking often in an unusual way about the usual subjects

Love Your Brother and Sister Humans

/ Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

Once again the lawyers and politicians are going around in circles.

For in the United Kingdom a cross party group of MPs have had a go at defining Islamaphobia ( a word not contained in my Word spell check!)

Before looking at this definition it is worth thinking back a year or so when we were treated to the spectacle of Teresa May and advisers thinking up a definition of Anti-Semitism. This at a time when hatred of Muslims was a far more important problem.

Perhaps the group of MP’s missed a trick. A school child might think that to define Islamaphobia you substitute the word ‘Islam’ for ‘Hebrew’ in the Anti-Semitism definition.

Not a moment too late has the spot light now moved onto our Muslim brothers and sisters who are suffering hatred in the UK and other countries, in a way that the Jews were targeted in Nazi Germany.

It is good someone has the intelligence to write a definition of what is the problem. This is the first step to the review of existing laws and any supplementary or new UK legislation.

Here is what the cross-party group came up with;

‘Islamaphobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.’

Here is the first test of the statement. Let’s change the religion in question.

‘Christianaphobia is rooted in racism and is the type of racism that targets expressions of Christianness or perceived Christianness.’

So the attack on the congregation in Christ Church New Zealand was racist? I think not.

Consider for a moment what racism is, since it is being included in the definition in question.

It appears that there are numerous definitions; made more confusing the ‘ethnicity’ being considered the same as ‘race’.

My contribution to this word play would be to suggest that there is only one race, the human race. This is split by ethnic difference based on environmental, genetic, cultural, linguistic and other fundamental factors.

So here is what the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination said;

The term “racial discrimination” shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.

If this definition were adopted into UK law then the signs at airports instructing EU Members to queue here and all the rest to queue there – would be illegal.

Fortunately gender and race are universal constants and in my view, nothing to do with prejudice based on ethnicity or religion.

Taking a step back from what we are discussing here is the unpleasant aspect of being ‘human’ – hatred of ‘the other’.

As members of the human race to our shame we have a long history of dividing ourselves up into tribes or villages or clans or nationalities or supporters of a football team and seen this as reason enough to wage war on ‘the others’.

All the prejudice in the world is an expression of intolerance towards other humans.

It’s expression ranges on a scale from minor to major. Football hooligans are at the pathetic end of the scale and fascist government leaders at the other. In between is all the prejudice – hidden and open – that we carry within ourselves.

Hatred based on religion is therefore simply another expression of intolerance ranging between sour looks to beheading.

My definition of Islamaphobia would be;

Hatred of Muslims

Now can we get down to the real problem? Because until a child steps forward to take over the role of Prime Minister, no single person appears to see the problem with any clarity.

The head of the National Police Chiefs Council, Martin Hewitt, is dismayed at the vagueness of the definition. He believes it will cause confusion and hamper the effectiveness of the police against minor and serious crimes motivated by religious hatred.

In law, precise definitions produce laws which are executable.

If I had any advice for the devout of any religion, it would be to remove all cultural affectations in dress and any other public signification of your personal beliefs. Put these items on in the place of worship if it makes you feel more comfortable.

Hitler had to identify Jews by ordering the placing of a yellow star of David on their dress. To preserve your dignity and safety – I would advise not to make it easy for the biggots.

When the time and place is right – in a tolerant society – freedom of religious expression will be protected.

To base new laws on eliminating hatred is in my view to start at the wrong end of the stick. I believe the best way to introduce tolerance is to introduce love, as well as eliminate hatred. One cannot exist without the other but we can at least set the balance straight. So this debate is not just for the law makers, it is for all the humans.

Raise a hand if you are a human!

 

Boring into Boring

/ Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

My inspiring English teacher, ‘Windy’ Gale, fixed the aphorism

There are no dull subjects, only dull mind

to the classroom wall.

This supported my own attitude to life of keeping myself perpetually busy. I was an inventor or games amongst my childhood peers and a ‘meddle Sir Mattey’ on protracted visits to grandparents. My grand mother didn’t like her clothes mangle taken to pieces and reassembled in a novel way. But I was busy.

Teenage is the classic period in one’s life for being ‘bored’ – that is entering a state of inaction due to lack of stimulation. This state of inactivity is induced by mental and socio-environmental factors. It is mostly found in predominantly ‘inactive’ people who rely on external forms of stimulation. Their minds have become dull – uninterested in the apparently, uninteresting.

If and when we realise a need to change, then it is down to the individual to break out. Proactivity rarely produces boredom.

Boredom Newton's Cradle

Psychologists nominate the state of boredom as a ‘feeling’.

If people, places and / or events induce a state of inactivity in us, then we ‘feel’ bored. This may explain why boredom is hard to identify at first. We will then need to understand it’s causes and take control in order to move out of it’s influence.

A classic way of doing this can be seen in the interaction between a parent and young child. Children often require a boost from outside themselves. They just run out of steam (attention span) and need support. Any or all of the people-place-event factors, need to be manipulated by the parent to provide stimulus to the child to prevent it drifting into a state of boredom.

Does this pattern disappear through adolescence and into adulthood? I fear that as adults, many of us today become even more stuck in the reliance for external stimulation. If you question adults about a simple activity like ‘going to the beach’ – many will reply that they don’t do it because they find it ‘boring’. The beach is a place which indeed provides limited stimulation. In it’s simplest natural state there is just a large volume of empty sky, empty sea and (on a quiet day) – an empty beach.

But if you took a child to this place they would be filled with excitement. Think for a moment of your own endless hours of pleasure spent as a child on a beach…often with hardly any play things, just what nature provided.

Harvard Graduate School of Education

Something has happened in our modern Western societies that leaves adults unable to be proactive when the external stimulation of people, place and events is limited to say, ‘a beach’. Late nineteenth century sea-side resorts in the United Kingdom, evolved and thrived on their ability to provide stimulation such as Punch and Judy shows and donkey rides. Today the ‘amusements’ are multiple and complex. You might think that there really is no excuse for being bored on a beach, but apparently there is.

Leo Tolstoy defined boredom as ‘a desire for desires’. I do not agree with this definition as I have already described boredom as a ‘reactive’ rather than a ‘proactive’ state – which surely desire is. The powerful emotion that ‘desire’ is hardly produces any relief from boredom because it is ill equipt to do so. Desires are either realistic or unrealistic and both can be frustrated and denied for reasons out of an individual’s control. This realisation prompted the detached mental state associated with Buddhist philosophy. Sorry Leo old boy, but you are behind the times.

Life has a habit of placing you in a situation that you cannot control or choose. In the nineteenth century you might have to work long hours in a factory for very little reward. There might be a day’s outing to the sea side once a year to relieve the boredom – but that was it.

Factory work is, by definition, repetitive, which is an obvious and common cause of boredom.

I recently took a flight with a well known air line where the cabin crew had a sort of comedy routine to read out.

It was unfunny and in places, in bad taste; ‘the company’s priority is making money over safety‘. Yes, passengers were meant to laugh at that, at a time when Boeing 737 Max 8 airliners are grounded following two fatal crashes.

It appeared to me that the routine was for the benefit of the cabin crew rather than the passengers, because the cabin crew were,  well – bored. Can you imagine doing that safety routine with the life jacket and exits, over and over again? Yet these are people who self selected the work as it was ‘exciting’ to travel. Well clearly it isn’t; it gets boring. The people, the places and the events don’t provide sufficient novelty. It’s like a play in which there is only one act, one actor and one set. Life can feel like ‘Waiting for Godot’.

Like all emotions we repress them. Apparently psychologists have discovered that after ‘anger’, boredom is the most repressed emotion.

Even the most proactive, inventive, creative, unpredictable mind finds itself at times running down the endless sets that appear in cartoons like ”Tom and Jerry‘. Or like the scene in The Matrix movie where the character Leo finds himself on an all-white platform, waiting for a train. When he runs down the tunnel he returns to the same platform. Life has this quality in spades and we have to learn to deal with it. We all get bored, even the most active of us.

Psychologists define five levels of boredom ranging from ‘indifferent boredom’ to ’empathic boredom’. They are scalar between one and five. If you wish to know more look here;

5 Types of Boredom

I would add that boredom should not be confusded with being frustrated. Being frustrated is like waiting in a queue that hardly moves, in a supermarket or airport. Being bored goes deeper than that as it drills into our emotional state and brings us uncontrollably down, down, down.

This might be why children and adolescents, scream so loudly when boredom hits them between the ribs. For them it’s not always easy to get active – the only known cure. They usually do not have the power to change the cast, the set and the story line in the play of life in which they find themselves.

Garfield on Boredom

But sometimes you have to wonder, how much of ‘I’m bored’ or ‘are we there yet’ is down them to find a way out of the boredom pit.

I listened to an account on the radio of a female journalist Zehra Dogan, who is an Kurd and an artist working in southern Turkey. She painted the war zone as she saw it and was imprisoned by the Turkish authorities. In jail, her friends and family sent her art materials but these never reached her.

So the journalist / artist made art on bits of bed clothes that she bleached so that the guards did not recognise them. She used coffee, tea, blood and no doubt tears as her medium for expression. In all she was able to take out 300 pieces of work when she was released, which now form a major exhibition.

With the right state of mind, I believe that most humans can overcome the most extreme deprivation by being active. This natural state of mind is what children, teenagers and many adults benefit from being able to conjure; for the world can and will stop spinning for you– if you let it or can’t stop it.

It takes the super hero or heroine to start the world up again but I believe that power is contained within us all because there are no dull subjects.

Let Them Eat Happiness

/ Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

Western culture has come a long way since it was ruled by royals and aristocrats – or has it?

Few French peasants would have even glimpsed the lifestyle of the immensely rich and powerful in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They would have been unaware of what really went on behind the iron gates of Louis 14th’s palace at Versailles. The mirror lined rooms and the golden corridors of power might have well have been in another dimension.

a plate of happiness

Eventually the Aristo’s and the royals have lost much of their wealth and most of their power. The wealthy industrialists took on their mantle in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West. Instead of taking taxes from the poor, they stripped nature and nations, and occupied the masses (and their children) in factories.

With their acquired wealth, they built mansions set in Inigo Jones style gardens, just as the elite before them had. They bought military commissions, titles and honours and entered parliament. Power too, was for sale. It was a different game but with the same lust for money and dominion over others, as played by the royals.

In the twenty first century there is an awakening to these processes as having been outrageously ‘unfair’. There appear to be glimmers of similarity between the Gillet jaune and the revolutionists of the French Revolution. No guillotine’s yet but this revolution has only just begun. Perhaps it is a Gilletine.

This time round, the capitalists and the so called ‘elite’ are in the firing sights of the missiles from the streets. The possession of most of the wealth by the few, reverberates around the internet like a pin ball in a crazy machine; lit up with flicking levers, lights and cartoon graphics. How can it be fair, we are asked, that the ‘elite’ have so much money? Are they killing off the humans to save the planet using fluoride, chem trails and advice to avoid vaccination? Lies and suspicion are great hunting dogs.

Confucius; he says, ‘when the duck puts his head above the reeds in the hunting season, he had better be ready to be shot at.’

For just as the Sun King and the royal families of Europe were human enough to be pulled kicking and screaming from their palaces, so are the modern elite.

Sun King gate

The injustice and the irony of the lessons of history are obvious, but a working alternative is not. Even an establishment introduced by the anarchist rioters, is an establishment; ergo the Soviet Union. If a hundred anarchists met in a town square to tell the masses to get rid of their leaders, there would appear amongst the anarchists, a leader.

Philosophically and scientifically it is true, that to every force there is an equal and opposite reaction. So when you put on your black anarchist costume and mask and join the ‘anonymous’ mob to riot, what is the problem you are trying to solve?

The problems of the French or Russian peasant made a long list; no clothes, no health, no food, no water, no home, no land, no animals, no day off etc.

The problems of modern westerners is none of the above as they have it all; health, food, transport, leisure, labour saving technology etc.

The problem appears to me therefore to be no longer external, but in the mind. It is built on the number one illusion in the hall of mirrors, that ‘money equals happiness’. We know this isn’t true but we still pursue it and want to be rich. The lines of people buying lottery tickets from the street vendors where I live in Spain, are an indication of the pursuit of wealth as being perceived as the same as the pursuit of happiness. Or just peep over the pond at the great USA and it’s everywhere in their way of life.

The pantheon of the Ancient Greek gods, has been replaced with so called ‘political elite’ and ‘celebrities’. Vane and pointless people who have had the luck of being in the right place at the right time, self promote on social media. They spread the myth that everything on their side of the palace (or Big Brother) wall is great. Instead of hiding, in the manner of the royals, aristocrats and industrialists, they tease the rest of us with videos and photos of their material success and happiness.

Even when the mascara is smudged with tears, even when cancer eats away the golden vocal chords, the golden divorce unfolds, the assasins bullet richochets amongst the pillars of the halls of power; the masses worship their sacrificed gods. And should an over dose of some not-so-whizzy drug, close down the not-so-happy participant in the great party of celebrity life, selective memories promote the deceased as a greater god for being dead. Goodbye Norma Jeane.

Various

And yet, as long as two thousand years ago, a man said;

I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

For if you change the problem from ‘not being rich’ or ‘others should not have riches’ or ‘I want power’ or ‘I want what he’s got’ or ‘give me what I am owed’ or ‘they spoilt everything for me’ or ‘I just want what I deserve’ or ‘you can make me happy, why don’t you’ or ‘if only I was rich’ –

to; ‘how can I be eternally happy?’ then that is an easier problem to solve. Most of the historical examples of people who became eternally happy did so by giving away their possessions and gave love to others. Well documented examples would be Prince Sidhartha, Jesus the Christ, Vishnu and Kali, Mother Teresa, St Francis of Assisi.

Lesser known examples are the monks, nuns, non- government agency relief workers, public servants, healers, charity workers, environmental activists, street sleepers, the wanderers and people who you may know personally.

We may not all be saints, and perhaps those posthumously awarded sainthood were not either, but we can aspire to share what we have, however much or little that may be.

The non-self centred may not hit the news headlines, they may not be seen in a queue for a lottery ticket, they may not self promote like politicians, they may not stand up against the politicians, they may not have flashy cars and houses or go for golden globes – but they exist.

Their happiness is not necessarily in this life time or even the next, but they will have seen over the wall into the garden of Paradise. It is not on this earth for this globe is not, and never will be, ‘golden’. It is but a shadow of the real Paradise where there is no chaos, no illusion, no entropy and certainly, no lottery.

The Cash Back of Notre Dame

/ Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

Fortunately there were no casualties or deaths, following the fire that ripped through the roof of Notre Dame cathedral last week. People held their breath as they watched the ancient temple’s walls and windows silhouetted against towering flames.

When the last embers died, Parisians were stunned. It cannot be put into words what buildings sometimes represent to nations, and that certainly applies to this one. And yet, what has happened here?

An old building, medieval in places, has lost it’s roof and some of it’s treasures. Were we expecting Notre Dame to last for ever? If not, is a catastrophe like this not statistically likely? Nothing lasts for ever, unless you build like the Ancient Egyptians built their pyramids. So with that in mind, thanks can be given for what remains and the task of reconstruction ahead. In my view, there has been a kind of cleansing. Fire purifies, in the alchemical sense. It removes the dross and leaves the precious.

I heard on the news that architects will be invited to present a way to do this. Personally, as an architect, I would reconstruct the profile of the collapsed tower in structural glass. Light would pour into the building in a way that was never intended. Gothic has a taste for the shadows and dark spaces penetrated by beams of mysterious light from beyond. So I would use a layer of intelligent ‘glass’ that is able to form coloured images or colour blocks, in the way that an LED TV screen does. It will be able to change from black opaque to white opaque and all the colours in-between. In addition it will be able to describe moving coloured images. I would like to introduce the possibility of creating holograms high above the heads of the congregation and visitors. These might be on religious themes or taken from famous works of religious art. Really, the content could be decided by whoever has the right and the power to do so, with hopefully a chance for citizens to have their input too.

The place would be a source of spiritual refreshment from the inside and from out. That to me, surpasses the cluster of ancient roof timbers.

But all this is but a dream without funding – and should it be funded or left as a ruin because right now, we have more important things to do? What do I mean?

Enter the financiers. Men of high reputation and wealth, pledging billions of tax deductible Euros – although they say that the tax benefits are not a consideration. Suddenly money is available to repair a national monument which was not there to support war victims in Yemen or desperate refugees who move about the globe to escape poverty and politics and climate change. Some people are angry about that.

To me, some precious lives in Notre Dame cathedral survived. They are both priceless and with little monetary value. They are the inhabitants of the three bee-hives on the roof. Perhaps twenty thousand bees, frightened of smoke, kept indoors out of harms way. An ancient instinct to avoid forest fires kept them safe. I expect they are now carrying on their excursions into city parks and gardens to collect the golden pollen that makes their hives so special.

I am old enough to remember summer days and driving along motorways and fast roads collecting insects. They would die attached to the wind shield en-mass and their sticky bodies were hard to remove. Radiator grills and headlamps were similarly encrusted.

Today, forty percent of known insect species are extinct. When you drive, no insects appear on the wind shield for they are not there. One can only assume that modern farming practices using chemicals against so called ‘pests’ are largely to blame. Perhaps there is climate change and loss of habitat in the the list of causes as well.

If I had billions of Euros and I was considering giving back what I had, I would probably spend it on creating a world worth living in for our children and young people.

A brave few are presently sitting in the streets of London highlighting that there is an ‘extinction event’ in progress which has been and is, largely ignored.

I happen to believe they are right. The earth has been through six or seven known extinction events in it’s life. The fact that we are living in one now is as scary as it gets. Yet all the signs are clear to see; the loss of insects being one of them. The creatures at the base of the food chain are easily overlooked and yet the whole of the pyramid of life depends on this base layer. Without bees, Albert Einstein said, the world would end in four years.

What do we need from the wealthy individuals and States with money to invest? What do we really need? Space travel? One day, perhaps a single potato will cost a billion Euros. When it is the last one on the planet and it could keep you alive for two more days, it would be worth it.

Perhaps the loss of Notre Dame cathedral is a taste of things to come, as planet earth demands it’s ‘cash back’; the Promethean debt. For like Promethius we have stolen the special knowledge that fire represents, from the Gods. Now they want their due.