I want to live alone

A song I’m particularly enjoying at the moment – let the reader understand – but if you think you know why I like it, or even who it references for me, I guarantee that you will be wrong… (grin)

From their third album ”Tonight: Franz Ferdinand” 2009 – new album out soon This is quite a good version, with vocals from a particular goddess πŸ™‚

I wanna live alone
Because the greatest love is always ruined by the bickering
The argument of living
I wanna live alone
I could be happy on my own
Live the rest of my life
With the vaguest of feeling

Wherever you are, Whoever is there
You’ll know that I’ll be here, I’ll be here
Wishing I could be there

So I’m gonna live alone
I’m not saying that our love is the greatest
But I’m in love with you
Wanna stay in love with you
So I’m gonna live alone
Yeah, I’ll be happy on my own
Live the rest of my life
With the vaguest of feeling

Wherever you are, Whoever is there
You’ll know that I’ll be here, I’ll be here
Wishing I could be there

Science and green strategy

One of the more useful soundbites about our financial predicament is ‘you can’t get out of a debt problem by increasing the amount of your debt’. As with any useful maxim, there are times when it might be wrong – I think there are occasions when it might make sense to increase debt in order to solve problems, eg as part of a general restructuring – but as a rule of thumb, it seems pretty good to me.

I want to argue that there is a similar maxim that applies to our present ecological predicament, one that is thrown up by our crashing in to the Limits to Growth. The maxim is this ‘you can’t get out of an idolisation of science problem by making more appeals to science’. I write about what the ‘idolisation of science problem’ is in my book, but put succinctly, I see the root problem in our culture as a blindness towards questions of value and a consequent neglect of the development of wisdom. That is, I see our culture as institutionally apathistic, and I see the principal presenting symptom of that lack of wisdom being the excess valuation given to whatever ‘science’ might say.

For those who understand the nature of the Limits to Growth – call them the ‘greens’ for now – there is an irreducible element of scientific understanding inherent in the perspective. Information about pollution and resource limits is largely a matter of science. What we are to do in the light of that information, however, is not. It is a matter of human discernment, for which science is trivially irrelevant. Worse than that, the subordination of wider human understandings to the narrow scientism that dominates our culture is itself one of the principal obstacles that need to be overcome

I have written before about the ‘climate screech’ which I see as one of the problems of contemporary green advocacy. The predicament that we are in, which the greens understand, is so much wider and deeper than the question of global warming, on which I continue to become increasingly sceptical. If we are to enable people to shift their understandings, their patterns of life, away from our present unwise paths, we will not be able to do so by continuing, to all intents and purposes, to insist in our advocacy on the primacy of “science”. Science says X, therefore we must do Y. This is a path that is doomed to failure, not least because science changes its mind on a regular basis, and greens who married the scientific consensus of the late 1980s are now finding themselves widows – and the necessary political arguments have been lost.

I believe that those who advocate green courses of action – a wiser and more responsible stewardship of this planet – need to do a great deal of soul-searching to understand why it is that the emphasis upon global warming has been such a political failure, and why the continued screeching is having such a counter-productive impact upon the wider green movement. To my mind it seems clear that we cannot get out of a crisis caused by too much science by simply increasing the amount of science on which we rely.

In the meantime I am looking forward to taking part in the Dark Mountain festival next month. This is a group that really ‘gets it’.

TBLA (extra): Why I am not a feminist

I want to try and describe one of my fundamental convictions – one that is both spiritual and political. This is a bit of a rant…

I believe that all human beings are the expression of divine creativity. That is what I understand being made in the image of God to mean. We are each words of God – different words – called to express a particular incarnation of the divine Word. We are each unique, irreplaceable, miraculous.

It is due to the inheritance of Sin that we are prevented from expressing the particular image of God that we were created to be. We each have a calling, a vocation, to express a particular facet of God (think of diamonds with infinite facets). It is the task of the human community to progressively remove all the barriers to the expression of individual creativity, that is what Christians call ‘the Kingdom of God’. We are often neck deep in crap in this our present world, but, in that case, pace Oscar Wilde, sometimes the most important thing is to testify to the existence of the stars even whilst trapped in the gutter.

In other words, for me, the principal value and orienting affirmation is about what it means to be human (hence the title of the book which I have written). We are first of all human beings, only secondarily are we male or female, gay or straight or trans, black or white or yellow, rich or poor or bourgeois. In so far as it lies within me, this is what I wish to teach and to live out in all the decisions of my life.

I would want to draw a distinction between egalitarian feminism and gender feminism, and draw the distinction in this way: egalitarian feminism is the fruit of the political enlightenment, which is all about the fundamental political equality and worth of all human beings, no matter what their background or station. It is because I accept this that I accept, inter alia, the wrongness of both abortion and capital punishment. This has its origin in the 18th century – there or thereabouts. In contrast to this, I see ‘gender feminism’. This I see as the product of particular post-war circumstances, an excess of affluence combined with a failure of nerve. Rather than seeing men and women as primarily human beings, and only secondarily male or female, gender feminism, in my view, a) sees the gender orientation as primary, and b) (crucially) sees a higher value deservedly bestowed upon the female rather than the male. In other words, the male is by definition the oppressor, and the woman is by definition the victim – even though the woman is the only oppressed class in history to have a longer life expectancy than the oppressor.

The reason why I do not wish to class myself as a feminist is because of this latter development. I do not accept that men are inherently oppressive. I do not accept that boys are incipient rapists. I do not accept that being a man means that you have to accept a place as a second class citizen, responsible for all the bad things of history and none of the good.

More crucially, I reject the anthropology of ‘gender feminism’. Most of it seems to me to be (to speak in Marxist terms temporarily) an expression of ‘false consciousness’. It is an ideology born from economic imperatives, a way of ensuring that the Leviathan can have the cheapest pool of labour available to it, irrespective of human cost. In other words, if a particular individual woman believes that the expression of her individual vocation means that she is a ‘stay at home mum’ then all the ideology that declares she is ‘letting down the sisterhood’ and ‘being dependent on the patriarchy’ and all the other self-righteous nonsense can get stuffed. Who is this person as a human being? Not as a woman, or as an economic unit, but who is this particular person called to be in her own idiosyncratic specificity? DO NOT PUT HER IN A BOX!

I do see contemporary gender feminism as mostly evil. I have a profound commitment to and belief in the individual, in what might enable them to flourish as a specific and particular human being, not simply as a member of a type or expression of a class. What I hate, absolutely detest about much modern feminism is that it seems to have abandoned the root principles from which modern feminism sprang (ie the political enlightenment) and has instead become captured by the secular powers, and been put to use as a ‘useful idiot’, the practical implications of its teaching simply being that vast multinationals can make an extra percentage point on their profit figures.

The principal value that I am committed to is what will most enable someone to become the sort of person that God has called them to be. There is no ideology that can tell me the answer to that – the only answer will come from a slow and patient attention to the sort of human being that they are, and loving them no matter what.

Everyone deserves the same. EVERYONE. I want each individual person to be themselves, and not try to distort themselves to fit into anybody else’s box. Where they fit on the different spectra of male/female, intelligent/simple, black/white, gay/straight, all the rest of it – all of this is SECONDARY.

I believe in human beings. I don’t want to put anyone into a box, and I don’t want to be put into a box for myself. I think that each of us has a path, and it is the sacred duty of all of the rest of us to do what we can to ensure that every single last one of us is enabled to be all that he or she can be. We won’t always succeed, but it is in the effort that we find our own transcendence.