Mam, thank you for that rare, sacred, precious gift of love you gave me. Love is giving and you gave and gave and gave so that I can love too. I have lived without you now for 15 years, but your love never dies; it lives here within me, warming me, nourishing me, driving me, guiding me, comforting me, strengthening me. It sustained you through all those woundings that lovers’ suffer, just as it sustains me. You were truly a remarkable woman.
I am fond of Hume who was quite rightly sceptical of system builders who make jumping to conclusions so much easier with their massive unjustified claims – Marxism the secular religion. Where does Darwin fit with this?
It’s funny but I’ve been lecturing this week on a group of philosophers who were trying to explain the failure of Marxism. One of their main points comes from Max Weber whose whole sociology can be seen as the analysis of rationality. Weber is very pessimistic about the ultimate application of rational models which he sees as removing our humanity: emotion and tradition. Technology (science) in this sense becomes a tool for domination: Marcuse and Habermas. There’s good reason to be worried about being rational.
I’m afraid we can see universities as part of the technology of control and do not operate for the benefit of students, especially since 1979 when Thatcher and her allies moved us away from ‘education’ to ‘training’. For training critical skills are problematic as they foster questioning rather than doing what those in authority want. Hopefully, Cambridge and Oxford have enough influence to resist.
I would like to see a more measured approach to neuroscience: neuroscientists make outrageous claims in their over-confidence and are in danger of trivializing their own findings. We are discovering some wonderful new evidence by way of the new scanning technology. However, I don’t believe we are justified in thinking that morality can be boiled down to neural processes? Without experience neural processes are useless: it’s the chicken and egg dilemma. To my way of thacting there is no point searching for an origin or an end, i.e. causality beyond very limited examples in physics and chemistry is very difficult to establish. As you move along the scientific continuum from simple matter (physics) to lifeforms (biology) and then into social science it becomes more and more complex and difficult to find causal explanations. Thus, I use interdependencies. As we are only now beginning to realise, experiences mould our genetics just as our genetics mould our experiences: yes they are right there cannot be experience without genetics – there must be a genetic component in my love for my mother. However, my love for my mother is what triggers certain processes to switch on and be structured accordingly, which would otherwise remain dormant and probably atrophy – I’m thinking here of deprivation studies such as Genie. Neural processes are useless without social processes, neither explains the other, they co-exist interdependently and change together and should be researched as such. Thus, it may be that we need to go beyond notions such as nature-nurture that owe their existence to ancient unscientific philosophical dichotomous conventions which break things up rather than bring them together. Specialism is both a virtue and curse.
The test of time is I think a good way of working out what is significant. Certain people, music and words never lose their facility to warm me. Recent birthday wishes on Facebook took me back to my days as a student in Leeds when I came across the ‘sacred and profane’ in the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s analysis of religion. As with most I guess, so much of my life has been spent working to keep in control of mundane, profane existence. However, interspersed in this process of getting by, have been the much rarer sacred experiences that make it all worthwhile. In this sense sacred experience is about profound closeness with special people whether through direct contact or music or words; it is a feeling of being at home. Even an atheist like me can be warmed.
Whilst listening to The Listening Project on the radio this morning, the wonderful Fi Glover conversed with a man who described the difference between ‘stress’ as something normal and ‘distress’ as something pathological. They are at root the same word but describe two very different levels of experience. Recently a man who I’d known since we were lads playing football together on the field next to The Firth Moor pub quite reasonably committed suicide after a series of terrible events. I wish I’d understood his distress!
Suzanne O’Sullivan, a consultant neurologist, made a very simple but profound point yesterday on the significance of two words: disease – illness. To paraphrase – disease is an illness, but an illness is not necessarily a disease. I found this rather comforting as someone who has felt ill throughout my life with little evidence of disease.
In the spirit of Zola’s defence of Dreyfus – I Accuse!
I accuse the Labour MPs past and present with their seats in the North –east of betraying their voters.
I accuse the North-east’s Labour MPs of sitting in their safe seats on their fat arses and doing nothing but socialist posturing whilst enjoying the kudos and salary.
If you don’t wake up soon what has happened to Labour in Scotland will happen to you and good riddance to all the self-serving, self-pitying socialist crap.
The Labour Party should be the party of business because its business is jobs, jobs, jobs!!
What has nearly 100 years of Labour domination done for the North-east: unemployment, unemployment, unemployment!!
Congratulations Labour for selling your people down the Tyne, Wear and Tees for a seat in the socialist train of perpetual decline to Neverland.
People need jobs first of all – nothing else: not welfare benefits, not a health service; they need jobs at a living wage!
Like so many people born and brought up in the North-east I had to leave for work. I am deeply proud to be a North-easterner and it hurts when I see my people struggling when those here in the South are for the most part prospering. We have another Tory government who will continue to look after the interests of those with far too much influence in London and the South-east to continue to plunder the lives of the rest of us because Labour is dreaming of equality and social justice rather than helping people to make a decent living. I say this as a Labour man: Labour, leave the socialist crap aside and become the party of businesses so that the people who you are supposed to represent in the North-east can at long last go back to work for a living wage!
The outcome of the election is very disappointing but predictable. It’s not just that those with far too much influence will continue to plunder the lives of everyone else, we may be wrenched from the civilizing influences of the EU and the UK. As far as I’m concerned team Heath made the right choice taking us into the common market but it should remain a relationship of business for a long time to come: thacting on political union is very dangerous. I worry that Tory MPs and their supporters, driven to forcing another EU referendum by their post-colonial, de-civilizing idealism, will form alliances with the growing number of people in England whose nationalist feelings of resentment have already stirred them to vote UKIP, to contract the dangerous idealistic disease of ‘freedom fever’ as is the case with many in Scotland. Team Sturgeon will take a mandate from their almost wipe-out election victory to try and force another Scottish referendum, which, in the present climate, is very likely to succeed. Wake up team Labour from your socialist nightmare. Wake up team Labour and engineer a set of policies to stop these regressive, de-civilizing steps that will correspond with further decline in most British people’s influence. The future is business, the future is partnership, the future is about better engagement with comparatively uncertain reality, a future of more engineering and less idealism. Stop betraying the people who need you, many of whom have voted Tory as the less bad option. However, it may be too late!
Unfortunately I have not been able to finish this article in time for today’s election. However, I will continue the argument in retrospect. My intention was to finish the article with a list of policy measures that should form a Labour manifesto to win an election, a manifesto for jobs and social influence. Having a job goes with minimum social influence – all people should have a job. Going to school is a job. We don’t allow children to be unschooled. So why allow adults to be unemployed when they need work to survive. The balance of social influence is heavily skewed in favour of employers: Labour should act to foster employees ability to exercise influence at work and have their voice heard on how things should be run. The measures in my list are engineered (very doable), i.e., comparatively low in a-t heuristics (ideals). I shall argue that they address the needs of a sufficient number of people to supply a good working majority, a majority that team Miliband will not get, and even if they did, will not sustain.
Labour has betrayed those for whom it was set up. It is the party put together to defend those with little influence. Theirs are not problems to be tackled by idealism, they need to be engineered. Labour exists for very practical reasons and should pursue policies that will assist those with little influence.