Joy to the World

So here it is, Merry Christmas, everybody's having fun (apart from those who are having raging family arguments or weeping lonely, bitter tears into their Christmas tipple of choice). And there are plenty of things to celebrate, even if you're not convinced that the Christmas story currently being retold in pulpits all over the planet is strictly accurate in all (or, indeed, any) respects.

Firstly, at these latitudes, the short days and long, dark nights of winter can drag the spirits down, so the old pagans celebrated getting past the shortest day by making December 25th a feast day, the birthday of the unconquered sun. The Christians later appropriated the date as the birthday of the unconquered son of God, but whatever your excuse for the party, I reckon that the start of the long journey towards brighter, sunnier days is worth marking and I'll gladly raise a glass of Christmas ale to that.

Secondly, I'm pleased to witness an improving trend in the quality of the Christmas lights with which local authorities seek to lighten the darkness of our high streets. When I was a kid, I seem to remember the Christmas lights always featuring the every-colour-of the-rainbow collection of bulbs favoured by the Brits, which are presumably intended to be cheery, but always seem to me to just look gaudy and tacky. These days, there seems to be a trend towards a more restrained, continental colour scheme of one or two colours, often including a lot of white lights. I'm all for it - in my opinion this really is a case of less being more, as the effects you can get with a limited palette are far more satisfying than a frantic clash of fairground colours. I remember on a few occasions in recent years actually stopping and being quite moved by the transformational beauty of some displays - I might almost use the word "magical". This year, Olney and St Albans deserve special credit. I'm afraid that here in Newport Pagnell, they're still hanging out strings of multi-coloured stuff which looks about as magical as traffic lights, but I live in hope that the onward march of restraint and taste will reach us before many more Christmases have come and gone.

Thirdly, the TV has an off switch, which is very useful in the UK when we come round to the annual broadcasting event called, I think, "the Queen's Peach", or something of the sort. This seems to consist of some old dear delivering a series of uninspiring platitudes, rather in the style of Radio 4's Thought for the Day. Even if you lose control of the off switch, be thankful that there is probably another room in the house you're in or, failing that, several trillion things you could be daydreaming about which are more interesting than paying attention to the regal drivel on screen. Yes, the human imagination is a wonderful thing.

Fourthly, take a look at the picture at the top of this post. It's 40 years since crew of Apollo 8 became the fist human beings to truly slip the surly bonds of earth and go into orbit round another celestial body. The mission happened over Christmas 1968 (launched December 21st, splashed down December 27th). The crew were also the first humans to see the sight of their home planet, not massively dominating half the sky as it does from low earth orbit, but as a small, bright, far-off bubble in the immense blackness. If you want to feel a sense of wonder at Christmas, try that image for size. Nothing could compare with being there, seeing our home world so far-off and tiny, knowing that you were further from home than anyone had ever been in the whole of history, but through the TV broadcasts and the colour pictures published later, much of the world shared the experience. Millions, perhaps a quarter of the people on Earth, saw Apollo 8's Christmas Eve transmission from lunar orbit - countless more have seen that first astounding colour image of our bright, blue, distant planet. As mission commander Frank Borman said at the end of a definitely-not-boring Christmas broadcast, "And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, and a Merry Christmas to all of you, all of you on the good Earth".

Speaking of interesting Christmas speeches, the Pope's end-of year address to Church leaders is one of the funniest things I've heard all year - if you're in need of a good laugh, the Daily Mash's version is a masterclass in how to parody a speech so batty it seems to defy satire. Does your heart good.

And finally, one of the most joyous things a human being can do is to just muck around. So I've enjoyed listening to a guy mucking about on a piano and coming up with some favorite Christmas songs played in minor key, or as he calls them Evil Christmas Carols. It's not a strictly accurate description, as they're not all carols, but hey, it's Christmas and it made me smile. So have a merry one, one and all.

Antidisestablishmentarianism

That old tease, Archbishop Rowan Williams, has titillated New Statesman readers with the enticing prospect of thew Church of England finally getting its lardy butt off the gravy train and being disestablished, not before time.

I grew up in a disestablished Church; I spent ten years working in a disestablished Church; and I can see that it's by no means the end of the world if the Establishment disappears. The strength of it is that the last vestiges of state sanction disappeared, so when you took a vote at the Welsh Synod, it didn't have to be nodded through by parliament afterwards. There is a certain integrity to that.

No problem with that - it's about time for the church to stand on its own two feet (or kneel on its own two knees, as it tends to do when chatting with the hypothetical Almighty). But then the famously labyrinthine workings of the Beardy One's mind turn the idea over and spoil a simple statement thusly:

At the same time, my unease about going for straight disestablishment is to do with the fact that it's a very shaky time for the public presence of faith in society. I think the motives that would now drive disestablishment from the state side would be mostly to do with . . . trying to push religion into the private sphere, and that's the point where I think I'd be bloody-minded and say, 'Well, not on that basis."

If the pious old twit wants to bloody-mindedly defend the privileged position of of an established church against all comers, then bring it on - I think he'd have maneuvered himself into an indefensible position and would be toast before evensong. Unfortunately, I think he's pontificating in the certain knowledge that politicians have more important things on their minds right now (the economy, stupid) and few currently have the time or stomach for giving the State a long-overdue chuchectomy. So there's no immediate prospect of a stop to that stream of state-supported auld blather about how without "the public presence of faith in society", we'd all be doomed to unreflective lives of empty, swinish materialism. Which is a load of hooey - you don't need to be indoctrinated by unquestioning religious faith to have compassion, curiosity or creativity, to do good, to feel awe or to seek meaning in life. It's about time for a quote from the late Arthur C Clarke again, so here are two:

...the only things in this world that really matter are such imponderables as beauty and wisdom, laughter and love

and

Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral*

A questioning mind and lack of reflexive piety does not equal shallowness, your Beardiness.

* NB - I really must get those words added to my will - I remember my dad's funeral and the preacher retrospectively asserting that dad certainly had at least some fuzzy sort of religious faith, when for the life of me, I never heard him say anything of the sort. Made a mockery of the whole thing.

Postcard

Tuning into the news is still a grim experience, but some things can help to put the current state of the world in perspective. I'm just looking at an old postcard featuring a black and white picture of a ship. The message isn't anything special, viz:

Dear Ronnie,

Hope you will soon be well again. Brian send his love and will write to you again.

Love from auntie

It was sent to my dad, then a boy of eleven, some time in 1941 (the exact date on the postmark is obscured). At the time he was in Lincoln County Hospital, recovering from a burst appendix - a serious condition which could have caused potentially fatal peritonitis. Times are hard, but I imagine it was harder in those days - born into a world in the grip of the great depression, topped off by a world war, then ending up in hospital with a life-threatening condition in the days before the National Health Service. Now that is an insecure world. So maybe I should be a bit more upbeat over a few depressing headlines.

My dad survived, (although I think he missed a lot of schooling due to an extended stay in hospital), and I found myself wondering about the fate of the ship on the postcard, the destroyer, HMS Icarus. The name wasn't a good omen, recalling the boy who flew too close to the sun and fell to earth. A quick Internet search revealed that HMS Icarus didn't suffer a similar fate, but survived service off Norway, in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean to be paid off and broken up for scrap in 1946. During her service career, she served in Atlantic and Russian convoys and the Dunkirk evacuation. She was also responsible for sinking two U-boats and participated in the destruction of two more. So the Icarus story wasn't the tragedy I'd feared, although she was almost on the scene of one of Britain's greatest naval tragedies. In May 1941, the battlecruiser HMS Hood was struck by a shell from the Bismark. One of her magazines exploded and she sank in about three minutes. There were only three survivors from Hood's crew of 1,418 men, picked up by the destroyer HMS Electra. HMS Icarus was on the scene shortly thereafter, but could find no more survivors, just debris.

Kitchen Nightmares

No, it's not a post about Gordon sodding Ramsay, I'm pleased to say, but about a little gem I just found in a magazine devoted to the therapy "Emotional Freedom Technique" (EFT). I'm not sure how EFT is supposed to work, but the magazine describes EFT as "complementary" and carries adverts for an association of people dealing in"meridian energy therapies", so my bullshit detector has already started ringing at a deafening volume.

Still, EFT World Magazine was worth a glance for one little nugget. In the magazine, one Gary Williams, an EFT practitioner describes, how he freed a client from a distressing affliction using EFT techniques and the following affirmation:

Even though I have this overwhelming fear of baby sweet corn inside, I deeply and completely accept the way I feel.

I know it's wrong to find hilarity in other people's problems, but that's the funniest thing I've read all week.

Alternatives

The last couple of times I’ve visited Glastonbury, I’ve had lunch at a rather good vegetarian café. The food’s better than the salty, processed mush which often passes for food in the UK, the atmosphere is relaxed and there’s an attractive courtyard garden round the back which is perfect for sitting out in on a sunny day.

I’m not a veggie myself, but I do understand the motivations of some vegetarians. There’s a lot of cruelty and suffering involved in packing the supermarket shelves with affordable meat. In terms of food production in a hungry world, you can produce a greater quantity of food by arable farming than you ever will by trying to turn the equivalent amount of plant material into animal flesh. Finally there are the health benefits of eating more fruit and veg. This is where I do part company with the veggies (especially the pale and sickly looking ones) – a lot of us would benefit from eating more fruit & veg and eating rather less meat, but cutting out meat (not to mention eggs and dairy) altogether doesn't seem like a good move. Meat & dairy are good sources of protein and iron and I’m not convinced that it’s easy to keep well whilst abandoning the omnivorous diet our bodies have evolved to run on.

Still, two out of three good reasons to go veggie ain’t bad. I just wish that a lot of the other stuff being promoted in Glastonbury was as understandable as vegetarianism. The café I’ve mentioned is surrounded by shops selling books on ley lines, crystal healing, faries, homeopathy, colour healing and a host of other unlikely-sounding subjects. The small ads in the shop windows are for services such as angel readings (whatever they might be), reflexology, tarot readings, feng shui advice, clairvoyant services, Chakra balancing and astrology.

I’ve no doubt that a lot of the people offering and consuming these volumes and services are sweet, gentle, fluffy, would’t-harm-a-fly people, but I still can’t escape the conclusion that what they’re getting involved in here is a load of gibberish.. I’ve tried dipping into some of this stuff, just to try and find out what people are getting out of it, but it leaves me completely baffled.

Flicking through Whispering Winds of Change by New Age Guru Stuart Wilde, for example, I read that the average speed of humanity circa 1700A.D. was lower than it is today “perhaps hovering at twelve thousand cycles per second”), but the band of separation between the highest and the lowest was not great. By 1960, apparently, human and etheric metaphysical vibrational speeds were spread over a much broader band of between twelve to fifty thousand cycles per second. “Etheric” apparently refers to the electromagnetic field produced by the human body. According to Wilde, you can train yourself to see the etheric energy field surrounding people by concentrating on your peripheral vision and tilting your head slightly. If you want to try this at home, dusk is allegedly the best time to see etheric energy. Oh, and it’s also important to remember that the vibrational speed is only a hypothetical speed – “of course”, Wilde points out, the real speed must be much higher, since “light oscillates at the very high frequency of about 10¹⁵ cycles per second” but apparently we don’t need the real speed to understand the concept - “a hypothetical speed will do.”

Make sense of that if you can. There are a few places in the book where he expresses himself a bit more clearly – at one point he suggests that by the simple measure of abolishing all taxes we would all be a lot richer. At least it’s a bold, simple and easily grasped idea, although I suspect that economics of running a functioning state without any form of revenue might be a little more difficult than he seems to think. Come to think of it, he might have been suggesting that we should allow the state to collapse and let the evolving Planetary Group Soul take over its functions – I can’t say for sure because after a immersing myself in this stream of New Age Speak for a little while, I was losing the capacity for rational thought.

What a very strange set of things for any sane person to believe in. I’m indebted to a number web sites and blogs for tirelessly picking though a lot of this sort of stuff so I don’t have to – Ben Goldacre’s splendid Bad Science Column is always a welcome antidote to the tide of nonsense and I was impressed by a fairly recent post at I Kid You Not with some thoughts on visiting a New Age shop.

Why do people believe in this stuff? I don’t know, but we don’t live in an ideal world. I’m guessing that belief in an “alternative” set of values and beliefs is the reaction of people unsatisfied with society as it is, with its meaningless jobs, unsatisfactory relationships, relentless commercialism, atomised society, eroding civil liberties, the obfuscation of democracy with spin and manipulative half truths, environmental degradation, poverty, war and injustice. Not a bad impulse – I wouldn’t give you tuppence for anybody who didn’t want the world to be a bit better than that. But what seems to have happened is that somehow rationality has taken the blame for all that’s wrong with the world and abandoning critical thought has become the “alternative” prescription for everything that’s gone wrong. And that’s profoundly worrying, because critical thought and trying to see the world as it really is, are absolutely necessary for anyone who wants to change things for the better.

Knowing what’s really going on is the best start if you want to change things. An example from the recent history of ideas springs to mind. When autistic spectrum disorders were first identified, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts developed a theory to account for the symptoms. They hypothesised that autism in children was caused by cold, perfectionist parents, who didn’t emotionally nurture their offspring. There was even a shorthand term for a parent who “caused” her child’s autism – the “refrigerator mother” (sorry mum, but it's all your fault). A plausible enough theory for the “open-minded” to accept. Unfortunately, it proved to be dead wrong.

The precise causes of autism are still not well understood, but subsequent research has shown the condition to be caused by physical problems in brain development, perhaps associated with mutations and the interaction of different genes. Although researchers don’t know exactly what leads to these effects, it’s now as certain as any fact can be that the problem exists at the level of the physical structure of the brain and has a genetic component. The current understanding of the true basis of Autism only emerged in the 1970s and slowly began to come into the mainstream thereafter, although the syndrome had been recognised since the 1940s.
So, for at least 30 years, parents who were distressed by their childrens’ strange behaviour, who were struggling to understand what was going on, trying to communicate with and support their child were being consistently mis-diagnosed. They were having the agony of being unable to interact with their own children compounded by being told that the problem stemmed from their own lack of parental affection and intimacy. All in the name of a theory that turned out not to stand up.

Compared to some new age explanations of the world, the “refrigerator mother” theory wasn’t particularly wacky – especially given the fact that the tools needed to uncover the true explanation of the condition weren’t available when autism was first identified as a condition. If a theory which has a ring of plausibility about it can be so damaging and counterproductive, what hope can we have from the scribblings of new age gurus whose respect for critical thinking seems to be non-existent? However benevolent your intentions, subscribing to any weird theory about the world which floats your boat isn’t a neutral act. If what you believe in, or cause other people to believe in, is factually wrong, or plain bizarre, then acting on it at best won’t change this unsatisfactory world of ours for the better and at worst could cause the sort of distress suffered by those so-called “refrigerator mothers”, labelled and stigmatised by psychoanalytic gurus who were utterly confident in their particular pet theories.

A very good night

I've not blogged for a little while - there's been loadsa stuff going on which has taken up what little spare attention I've got and may continue to do so in the near future, so posts may be quite sparse and /or truncated for a while.

Meanwhile, in the big, wide world, some significant things have been going on. Although I'm naturally a bit suspicious of smooth presentation which may hide a lack of substance, I was coming round to the idea that Barack Obama's rhetoric had a bit more substance behind it than I'd given him credit for as we came up to election day. When he won, I was swept up in the general tide of optimism and goodwill. Now the dust has settled, I still think it was an excellent result. Maybe I'll be disillusioned, but I hope not.

I think one good reasons to be cheerful about the President-elect is the fact that he can string a sentence together and doesn't appear to be embarrassed by the fact. I share Orwell's view that there is a link between clarity of thought and clarity of expression - I agree wholeheartedly with this New Yorker article that the night of the victory speech was "a very good night for the English language."

Combine that with the powerful image of a black person* finally accepting the top job in a country founded by people who believed that all men were created equal, but still kept slaves and where the civil rights movement is a comparatively recent memory and it was also a very good night for America.

Finally, consider the fact that this guy has lived abroad, knows the wider world and knows that non-Americans, too can just be regular folks trying to get on with their lives and that adds up to a very good night for the world.

* mixed race, if you want to be pedantic, but don't tell me he's not black enough to know that all folks haven't been treated equal, however they were created.

Compare and contrast

I'm still not sure that when Barack Obama says he stands for "change" I really know what that would mean in concrete terms. But, unsurprisingly, if had to choose between him and the other guy, I'd vote Obama anyway. Now I've found a better reason for wanting him to win (originally seen on The View From No. 80:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

(Senator Barack Obama)

Well said, Sir - most of the stupidities of our age could have been avoided had the proposals in question been "subject to argument and amenable to reason."

Speaking of the stupidities of our age, compare the eloquence of the passage above with this classic observation from Sarah Palin:

Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? […] You've heard about some of these pet projects they really don't make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

And did you hear the one about the Canadian practical jokers who phoned her up, pretending to be the President of France and and a couple of his aides? The killer quote from the merry pranksters has to be this one, explaining what happened when they called her staff:

We started making phone calls at the beginning of the week .... We realized it might work, because they didn't know the name of the French president; they asked us to spell it.

If Obama doesn't walk this one, the world (or at least a significant portion of the Western Hemisphere) must have gone utterly mad.