Category: Living

I have been reading an essay by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas.  His theme is the changing character of the public sphere, where debate and discussion lead to the formation of public opinion, which in turn influences public policy making.  This was also the subject of his first major book – The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – which was published fifty years ago and which I read when I was a graduate student.  (Full disclosure: I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Habermas’s work and its application to the theory of democracy.  In addition, I have just written a review of this essay plus the first volume of his history of philosophy, both recently translated into English, which should appear in the TLS early in the new year.) 

Today, the challenge to the integrity of the public sphere has less to do with the growth of mass circulation newspapers, which rely on advertising revenue, and more to do with new social media, which rely on the consumers themselves to become the producers of content.  Nowadays we are all authors, and this is a great advance in freedom as voices that had been excluded or distorted from the public sphere, can now be clearly heard.  To some extent, the media has been democratised, which is undoubtedly positive for the development of free and open societies.  And yet, these new freedoms are often being exercised with scant regard to the responsibilities that freedom brings.  As Habermas says: Just as printing made everyone a potential reader, today digitalization is turning everyone into a potential author.  But how long did it take until everyone was able to read?

Continue reading “Editing myself”

So last Thursday, my son acted out a bit, and I called him on it. I had made a new dish for supper – slow cooked beans and vegetables in a tomato sauce with breadcrumbs, finished with garlicky shrimp – and I knew he’d be reluctant about it. He doesn’t like stews, and this was, admittedly, dangerously close to a bean stew with shrimp on top. But when he came home from school, he said the house smelled delicious, and I was optimistic.

He tried the shrimp and said they were delicious, and then he tried the beans and made a gagging noise and did that thing kids do where he faux threw up a bit of it back onto his plate. And I called him on it.

“That’s bullshit. And you know what I mean.”

“You mean you think I’m lying?”

“No, I think you’re just bullshitting. The food is good, but you decided before you tried it that you were going to play up not liking it.”

Cue blubbing face, accusations of not being a good dad, of wanting to see Mom.

“No, you’re bullshitting, and I’m calling you on it. Go to your room, no dinner, no electronics, no radio. I’m calling you on this and you are now officially punished.”

He ran upstairs, pounding his feet, and cursing me along the way. This isn’t normal – maybe happens every few months, although in fairness to him I can’t remember it happening since the spring, and he is eleven, and is normally a great kid. But for some reason this bothered me. I spend a lot of time cooking for him, and cleaning after him, and for some reason having him pretend-vomit what was, if I may say so, a really delicious meal, triggered a need for me to simply punish him. To discipline him.

But after he stormed up to his room, it occurred to me that I was also releasing some negative energy of my own. I’m not particularly happy these days. Work is a bit of a drag and, just last week, had a bit of a crisis that the principals I work with made me wear the public pain more than was justified. And it’s December in Maine: short dark days, a lot of clouds and rain and wind, the sun – when it appears – too weak to do anything more than illuminate the naked trees and the cold glimmer of puddles in the woods, inspire the kind of low-level, non-clinical depression that makes Mainers and Atlantic Canadians fodder for bad jokes about grumpiness and casual profanity. I have not had any romantic prospects in years and, if I’m honest, I’m romance kryptonite – single dad, unexplainable income and career, tendency to think overmuch about ethics and morality and politics, and a healthy love of gin.

This is not the right mood from which to unleash discipline on an eleven year old, I was thinking to myself, although immediately after that thought, the memory of him fake puking good food made me quite comfortable in the decision to punish; the question became one of degree. And “go to your room without supper” seemed about right.

So I finished my food, gave the dog a quick walk in the pitch black night where she could barely see her way across the street to relieve herself on the neighbor’s lawn, headed back inside, and waited for a few minutes, and then headed up to the boy’s room.

“You get why you’re in trouble, right?”

“Why did you swear at me?”

“I didn’t swear at you. I used a swear to refer to your behaviour, ‘bullshit’. Do you understand why I did that?

And he said yes, he did, although he added several swears of his own which indicated what he thought of me, and my punishment, and what I could do to myself having punished him. He’s eleven, so his voice was repeatedly breaking as he screamed at me, which made it much easier to not get angry because it was so absurdly funny to hear him, in effect, say “yes, Dad, I know exactly why I was punished, but I still hate it”. I told him I loved him, which is why I occasionally punish him, because the love of a parent requires me to push back when he behaves badly; exercising his expletive vocabulary further, he described exactly what he thought of my definition of love. He was screaming, and at one point I asked him why he was screaming, because I was pretty sure I had never raised my voice; he admitted I hadn’t, and that calmed him down slightly. But I let him get on with it, rambling out his frustration, and then reminded him no electronics and lights out at 9pm, and told him to get a good night’s sleep and I’d see him in the morning, and reminded him that he needed to clean up his room because he was heading to his Mom’s the next day. And I said that I loved him. He didn’t say he loved me.

No harm no foul there: one doesn’t become a parent to be loved back, you become a parent (hopefully) out of the love you feel for the person you join in becoming parents, and for the hope that you can create love in the world in the future – and if it’s not for you, well, so be it, as long as love is created. My son does love the world, I can see that: I’m doing well. If, on a random Thursday night, he feels only spite for me, I can live with that.

My son doesn’t realise yet that discipline – when done correctly – is harder than anything. You take the risk that the object of discipline will not get the lesson, not get the joke, and will build up some store of anger or hatred that not only prevents the lesson from being learned, but is a negative lesson. You take a real risk as the disciplinarian but, if you don’t take that risk, you also know you condemn the subject to not moving forward. You could patiently explain why what they are doing is wrong, but you also – as a human being – know that only someone who already wants to learn will be converted by the patient lesson. The child – or employee, or adult – who truly doesn’t care about a lesson needs to be shocked into awareness. But that is never fun, or easy, and it always runs the risk that you, as disciplinarian, gets a rush from the sheer assertion of power. Human beings like being in control, and being in a position of disciplining is a pure moment of such control – but the existential truth of being human is that we are never, truly, in control. So within discipline lies both a need – to make sure another person who is committing a moral error is shocked back into reality – and a vicious danger – that you fool yourself into the error thinking you can control a situation and “make it better” by your sole will.

Punishment won’t make my son better, or make him less likely to bullshit me: all it can do is shock him into awareness that I don’t like being bullshitted. Only love will make my son better – well, love, and some timeout time where he isn’t playing Animal Island or Roblox or whatever the hell he’d be likely to do; indeed, the curative power of maybe just some time staring at the ceiling or reading a Hardy Boys mystery is probably the best hope he has.

The outcome of discipline should be careful reflection for both the person disciplined, but even more so, for the disciplinarian.

The rest of the night for me was painful, but probably for the good. I’m not doubting the actions I took, but I did reflect a lot on what I should do in the morning, and what my own state of mind is, and what I need to do better in any situation, and what I need to think about when the days are long and dark and seemingly bleak.

He got up in the morning and was fine – he even cleaned up his room, in fact did a surprisingly good job. I gave him a hug on his way out the door to catch the bus. He hugged me back, but he didn’t respond when I told him I loved him as he walked down the driveway. But he wasn’t unhappy, and he waved at me as he crossed the street.

In September, it was reported that the Chinese authorities had arrested two people suspected of causing irreversible damage to the Great Wall.  The two are said to have used an excavator to knock a large hole through the wall, allowing motor vehicles to pass more quickly to and from a nearby construction site in Shanxi province, where they were both employed.  The Great Wall – actually, a composite of many smaller walls, built over many years and then connected – was started almost three thousand years ago, to protect the northern border of the Chinese empire, and is over 21 thousand kilometres in length.  It is designated a UNESCO heritage site and is today a major tourist attraction.  In other words, what was started as a project to keep people out of China has transformed into a project to bring them to China (at least, temporarily).  The hole in the Great Wall will be expensive to repair and the two workers, who have been charged with damaging a cultural relic rather than a military border post, will no doubt be punished for their crime. 

The same month that workers were creating a short-cut through the Great Wall, some unknown person(s) used a chainsaw to cut down a two-hundred-year-old sycamore tree, that stood at an iconic point along Hadrian’s Wall, in the north of England.  (This site had become famous as a location from a film version of the story of Robin Hood, made in 1991, although why Robin would travel to Northumbria on his way from the English Channel to Nottinghamshire remains a mystery.)  Hadrian’s Wall was built slightly less than two thousand years ago, to protect the northern border of the Roman empire and is merely 120 kilometres in length.  Nonetheless, it is also a UNESCO heritage site and a modest tourist attraction.  Many local people were outraged by the felling of the tree – which appears to have caused some minor damage to a section of the wall – for which there seems to have been no reason other than a perverse desire to vandalise an object of natural beauty.  Arrests have been made but no-one has yet been charged with a crime associated with the tree felling. 

Continue reading “Hole in the wall”

The boy and I were watching ABC Nightly News tonight while eating bratwurst and a nice salad with pears and raw onion. The salad was excellent: both of us were surprised. And the brats, boiled in bear and served on brioche buns, were delightful, and as I write this, I’m realising that the bountiful alliteration didn’t hurt.

This isn’t about that, though, because the news tonight was all about the Hamas invasion of southern Israel. The other day the coverage focused on the rocket attacks and the endlessly described “eerie silences” on the streets of Tel Aviv, but tonight was a lot worse, discussing personal stories of people watching their families get shot in front of them while their wives or kids or grandmothers were hauled off to go who knows where and serve likely as human shields, potentially worse. The boy and I talked about it, and I told him in no world is there an excuse for that sort of evil. He’s now eleven, in sixth grade, starting to study things like the Civil War and the like with more than just a patriotic “this is our country’s history” take on things, so I don’t want to sugar coat this particular historical moment.

In my heart of hearts, though, I was struggling a bit. There is no part of my psyche that can manufacture the kind of inhumanity that would allow me to sympathise with the Hamas gunmen over the past few days, but what was somehow easy to bring to mind was a sense of mindless, numbing, and inescapable despair that must go along with being a middle aged dad in the Gaza Strip. Unable to leave, unable to find a job, watching your kids grow up trapped in what is in effect a permanent and inescapable refugee camp, I could easily bring to mind an existential sense of non-being. I couldn’t transfer that to a sense that it would be okay to kill another human being because of it, or take away the child or spouse or loved one of the people who are running the camp to certain death; no, because that would actually separate me from being able to feel despair. The art of being human is, on a certain very basic level, choosing not to commit the willful atrocity in the face of personal hopelessness. Being human is to choose despair over dehumanising another: it is, to use Buber’s language, to always refuse to de-Thou the other.

It got me thinking of Mersault in The Stranger, whose creator would, I think, agree with me but he would make his creation do quite the opposite, in the nihilistic pursuit of being not human; or the coward in The Red Badge of Courage, acting as a human in his flight and ironically returning to his tribe gun in hand – renouncing his sinless cowardice in favour of murderous manufactured bravery.

It also had me thinking of the fact that, for the past few decades, Americans have been bombing, rocketing, and droning to death countless thousands of Arabs across the Middle East. That’s awful, of course, but it’s still no excuse – no reason – to kidnap an Israeli grandmother, rape her for the YouTube value, and then kill her, as one anecdote related on the ABC Nightly News last night. The terrorists even chose their film angles to maximise the intellectual horror: there is only one way to interpret watching young happy men with guns round up Jewish women, hitting them as the go, and loading them onto transports. My guess is the young men with the guns, abusing the prisoners for the cameras, were too stupid to understand the propaganda weapons they were being made to be, but the unseen men behind the smartphones photographing them knew exactly what they were doing, and the fact they never show their faces for all of that makes it even more abhorrent.

And yet: not so abhorrent that I could imagine ever participating in any of it. I can vaguely imagine what it might have been at age 20 to get drafted and serve in the military, and I have enough friends who have served to know that a part of the induction experience is to tone down one’s humanity enough to allow that killing spark of inhumanity to emerge. In battle, it can be the difference between living and dying – to say nothing of victory or defeat.

I wasn’t enjoying myself thinking any of this; it seemed to lead nowhere, or rather, it leads only to a recognition that, even if I can’t imagine it, a substantial portion of the world not only can imagine it but lives it, they choose it. Earlier in the day I had watched the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom on Bloomberg TV effectively lose her shit: “never has the Holy Land seen atrocities such as this, never”, she said, ignoring the Israeli massacres during the pre-1947 civil war, ignoring the Crusaders and Saladin, ignoring Masaba, ignoring half the Old Testament. Even as I thought that, though, I thought “well, she’s upset, and this is part of the process by which you recover your humanity.” And then the Israeli defense minister popped up and told a press conference that Palestinians – not Hamas, mind you, but Palestinians – had to be fought without mercy because they were “animalistic”. Oh Buber, where are Thou?

My son interrupted my bleak reverie. “I think the Palestinians have just given up, I mean really just given up. They are probably mostly all going to be killed by the Israelis, Dad, but they don’t seem to care anymore.”

He talked about how someone at camp told him that rats, if you corner them, will attack you, even though they know you’ll kill them, because it doesn’t matter any more. They watched a lot of Ratatouille at camp on the weekends, so I think that’s what he was talking about – I remembered the scene.

I told him people aren’t rats, except when others treat them that way. And even then, I told him, we still get to choose whether or not we want to kill on our way out, like rats, or if we want to forgive, like human beings.

He thought for a moment and said he understood. I told him I hoped he’d never face that choice, but if he did, that he’d forgive in his last moments of life, instead of trying to keep justifying the other person’s desire to kill. He said he wasn’t sure what he’d do, but he understood what I was saying.

There is, of course, a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, just as there is a solution to racism in the US, and to tribalism in the Great Lakes region of Africa. The answer is for one side to simply stop viewing the moment of their torment as a reason to torment further, even if it means their own death. And if one side does that simultaneously, indeed, it will simply be wiped out – the mechanisms of hatred being so ingrained that they’ll be unable to stop themselves. It won’t even be a sin: it will be a heroic, saintly act on the part of the side that chooses to martyr themselves, and the follow through of the other side to wipe them out will just, simply, be a Pavlovian response. Pure animalism kills pure rationalism dead – it is what it is.

What’s worked in the past is the symbolic refusal that comes up against a random forgetfulness or arrogance or whatever to act in response. P.W. Botha choosing to let Mandela live – and write, and be his best human self – in prison instead of just killing him like Biko, for example – wrong move for the white nationalists, right move for humanity. Had all of South Africa’s black Africans simply laid themselves down, it would have been a simple bloodbath, and every single one of them doing the same caused a private death. But one guy taking a step back, and facing one evil guy who forgot to be evil that day, and you have the potential for something to spark, something good.

Oddly, though, that requires continuing to care. My son’s right, today: it feels like the men and women and children of Gaza have given up. Some are now wandering aimlessly in their tiny strip of land, trying to avoid getting hit by Israeli shells or found by the inevitable wave of invading soldiers to come sometime soon. Some are arming themselves up with what, in the movies, would be a comic sense of purpose, even though we can guess what the outcome will be. Thousands of Israeli soldiers are girding for a battle with a predetermined narrative arc, getting ready for what will surely be decades of future moralistic PTSD to haunt their dreams.

In and amongst them are plenty of people like me, I think – those who may be called upon to shoot, or called upon to rear up after being cornered, and who are unable to imagine themselves doing anything other than reflect. They’re terrified, I think, but I also think they’re more ready for what will come in the next few hours and days than the barbarians on either side of the barricades. They haven’t given up, the way my son put it, and they haven’t stopped imagining the other side as human. In a place like Israel and Gaza, maybe the numbers of those in the middle, those who can still distinguish themselves by their inabiilty to hate, are approaching limit zero. And if that is the case, then it will not have mattered who started the violence this last time – whether it was the accumulated horror of living in an occupied land, or the immediate horror of living through a pogrom conducted by an amatuerish horde of monsters. Blaming those who respond to the last spark is a pointless exercise.

Far better, though, this evening most of all, to be focused on those in the middle, however few, the ones who haven’t given up, who still radiate warmth towards their fellow man, regardless of past transgressions, and who see themselves in the sins of others. May the bullets not find them, and let them be the ones who emerge tomorrow – and may they face off against others who feel the same. The ones who rape, who kill, who order the shellings, who enjoy targeting the missiles; who perpetuate the hatreds on both sides – I cannot imagine killing them, I cannot imagine doing evil to them. But I can wish them to go away.

After the ABC Nightly News, we watched “Wheel of Fortune”, where an almost unbelieveably dim set of good, happy, honest Americans – one hispanic, one white and (to be honest) quite portly, and one black – did an absolute hack job of guessing some pretty easy clue phrases (it took forever to get “A thing of beauty”, the morons). Alan and I made reentry to our reality, and I was thankful.

Because we both have to get up tomorrow morning and face the world again. Good luck and Godspeed to all of us.

A few weeks ago, I walked the southern half of the New River Path, from Enfield Town to Canonbury.  The two important things to know about the New River is that it is neither new nor a river.   It is an aqueduct that runs for 45km from Ware, in Hertfordshire, to Islington, and was constructed just over four hundred years ago, to bring fresh water from the river systems north of London into the city.   The scheme initially ran into engineering and financial problems but was completed due to the efforts of Hugh Myddelton, a business leader and entrepreneur in the first half of the seventeenth century, who is memorialised today by a statue that stands on Islington Green, just off Upper Street.  The New River Company, an early joint stock company, ran the aqueduct for many years, although it is now integrated into the Thames Water infrastructure and still supplies the reservoirs on the eastern fringes of London, between Hackney and Walthamstow. 

Plentiful clean water is an essential prerequisite for civilized urban life, and it is worth remembering that as recently as the nineteenth century, much of London did not have a reliable supply and that there were a significant number of annual deaths from the diseases associated with contaminated water.  From time to time the problems associated with poor water management became overwhelmingly obvious to everyone who visited London.  Funding for the sewerage system that Joseph Bazalgette built, which helped to rid London of cholera, was prompted by the “great stink” of 1858, when summer heat produced nauseous gases along the banks of the Thames, where untreated human and animal waste had been dumped for many years.  Today, we remember Myddelton and Bazalgette with gratitude: no-one in public life would seriously advocate dismantling the clean water supply system, nor would they allow unregulated private interests to jeopardise its integrity. 

Continue reading “Clean air”