Our goldfish bowl

I’ve had an enduring fascination with culture, in particular, other people’s’ cultures. At school I learned about the proverbial French family drinking coffee out a bowl. Since then I’ve been hooked on ‘how others live differently’. Due to this promise of the exotic I’ve spent many years travelling, soaking up as many foreign experiences as I could manage. Here are a few examples: I’ve experienced Liberation Day in the Netherlands, when the Dutch celebrate the end of Nazi occupation – quite unusual coming from a country that was never occupied; I’ve seen war memorials to fallen Argentinian soldiers who died trying to liberate Las Malvinas from the British and I’ve watched modern Germany coming to terms with the aftermath of the Bombing of Dresden.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not against the British State, but my travels have allowed me to see the pain, reverence and grief of the other side. As a humanist and tourist, it’s hard not to feel moved by the sentiment of the host nation. At it’s core we are all human beings and no matter how questionable the action and re-action may have been the consequent death and destruction should, in my opinion, should be mourned and remembered equally by all sides.

In a similar vein, this brings me on to the recent mining explosion in New Zealand. The UK media have taken an interest in this unfolding story principally because there are two UK citizens trapped underground. This Telegraph headline is typical of the manner in which the British media values lives, ‘New Zealand mine explosion: families praying for missing Scots’. There may be 29 men trapped underground but we don’t know the names, ages, nationalities nor family details of the other 27 fighting for their lives. And none of us, apparently, are praying for them. I can understand that we might not be able to forgive those that have hurt us in the past, but to callously ignore the suffering of the men trapped with our own is a real shame.

To a Mouse

Apparently the debate over how to tackle Scotland’s alcohol problems is continuing for a few days yet. My own position is if the status quo isn’t working then let’s try something new. And for that reason I support the Scottish Government’s proposal to set a minimum price per unit alcohol, in the absence of any alternative coming from the opposition parties.

The government’s position isn’t clear-cut, however, because they are a minority government and need the support of opposition parties to pass their white papers into law. Scotland’s main opposition party, Scottish Labour, led by Iain Gray are playing a difficult tactical game: supporting the government a few months before the Holyrood elections isn’t going to do them any favours, however, opposing the government would split the unionist party with its English and Welsh colleagues who also favour minimum alcohol pricing. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place.

However, there is one escape clause, “… this week Labour’s Holyrood health Spokesperson Jackie Baillie stated that she thought that Scotland’s alcohol problems were part of a wider UK issue and were better left to Westminster.”

It might seem like political cowardice, not even worthy of Burns’ mouse, and you might wonder why the Scottish Labour party even bother existing when they can just toss all the difficult problems to their Westminster counterparts.

The bottom line for me is whether Labour do the right thing by the people or whether they look after their own interests first. I’m not hopeful.

The Darkest Night

Hope protects through the darkest night
The loneliest year
The bloodiest war
Hope soothes sorrow, grief and pain
It is our father, mother with arms open
Forgiving, tender, loving
Hope is life.

The Never-ending War on Drugs

It’s almost 40 years since the so-called “War on Drugs” began and it appears that a few battles have been won but the war is far from over, however, the strategy stays the same – It’s Wrong, So Don’t Do It. After watching Channel 4′s recent three-part series “Our Drugs War” I was left with one undeniable fact: the economic driving force behind drugs dealing is never going to die.

Drug dealers can potentially earn several thousand pounds a week by breaking the law or a tiny fraction of this by taking a full-time job earning minimum wage. Imagine the lure of a £200,000 per year salary, the luxurious lifestyle you could have, the bitches, the bling, the respect! Only catch is you can’t get caught or you lose it all.

Drugs do ruin lives, and I don’t have any sympathy for the dealers, but we should recognise that the potential reward from selling means that even if the Police took down one drug ring, there’s be another crop of volunteers popping up ready to take their fair share of the pie, tout de suite.

The people I do have sympathy for are the addicts, who get themselves sucked into addiction and don’t know how to get back control of their lives. Some people think that addicts are inherently evil and must be criminalised – I don’t. I see that cigarette smokers also suffer from an addiction – albeit not as severe as hard drug addiction, which means that a smoker doesn’t need a limitless amount of cash to fund their habit. No Crime = Addiction treated as health issue.

This is where I see the main issue for addicts. If hard drugs were as cheap as cigarettes there’d be no crime and they’d be treated for their health issues. Instead addicts are typically locked up in prison and their health issues allow to run its own course. This has meant naturally that our prisons are now filled with drugs.

Why after 40 years has the war not been won? Well, I blame lack of leadership from our politicians. In our free society we have the care-sharing liberals, the silent majority who are too busy watching Xfactor to notice the drug addicts wandering the streets outside, and the right-wing lock-em-up-and-throw-the-key-away traditionalists. In our leadership lite democracy the two loudest polarised groups battle it out until stalemate is reached. So the strategy NEVER changes! It’s not working but no-one is prepared to take the leadership to move the strategy away from the vacuum-wrapped centre ground.

One new idea that we should try is to tackle the problem scientifically. Instead of endless talking about the solutions we should allow 10 different pilot groups, run by experts, to use their own ideas in an attempt to reduce the level of crime, drug policing, and health issues. These should be allowed to run to conclusion without external interference. At the end of each study the costs, and results would be published and then the public, politicians and experts could have an informed debate as to the best way forward. By allowing some new controversial ideas to be trialed we can move forward with the strategy and perhaps, even, the war.

Sarah Palin is not Stupid

I recently started listening to the Skeptiod podcast, hosted by Brian Dunning. In his podcast he casts a critical eye over subjects such as, “Should You Take Your Vitamins?”, “Should Tibet Be Free?”, “Who Kills More, Religion or Atheism?” and many others. One episode in particular really pushed my buttons when I heard it – “Sarah Palin is not Stupid“. In the episodes I listened to up to this point, Brian comes across as a very thoughtful reasonable person so this title, from my liberal-ish point of view, was quite surprising. It’s worth a listen.

Dear BBC

I left a message on the BBC Complaints page:

 

 

“What exactly is the BBC’s remit regarding the coverage of political conferences?

I don’t understand how a “British” corporation can serve a predominantly English audience by providing extensive coverage of “national” political parties in England, such as the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrats parties but only provides sparse coverage or bare mentions on BBC channels such as BBC 1, BBC 2 or even BBC Scotland when it comes to Scottish conferences?

As a public broadcaster why is the Scottish public not given the same level of service as the English public? Should I draw the conclusion that the BBC believes that a Scottish public doesn’t care about devolved political subjects such as Education, Environment, Health, Sport, Transport …”

The God Hypothesis

One of my early memories is from around the age of eight. At the time I lived in one of Adler Multies, in Dundee and a group of us kids from school often played football together nearby – my special skill was defending, because I could confidently kick the legs out from any boy who came near me, while making contact with the ball. I was brutal but fair. On one occasion a small group of teenagers saw us and asked if they could play against us; about 12 of us against 6 of them. I felt overwhelmed with trepidation at the idea as we’d be pulverized by these giant lads. All in all though, it turned out to be a close game. Despite outnumbering them two to one, they still managed to beat us because they had better football skills, plus they were considerably bigger, stronger and faster than us. As an adult, I’ve often looked back on this heroic defeat. Sometimes my fear seems silly because teenagers have long since stopped being giants to me, but it does makes me wonder about how we all perceive people and things differently compared to when we were young or very young. Following this trail of thought led me to speculate, how would a baby see the world?

Somewhere in my meanderings through the world of psychology I vaguely recall someone claiming that babies initially see themselves a god because all they have to do is cry and their needs will be met by the mother. This never really sat well with me, at best this seems like pure guess-work, it would be equally plausible to suppose that a baby perceives itself as being at times hungry, lonely, sore, cold, etc. When it calls out for help a mysterious presence appears to make the bad feelings go away. I use the word mysterious because it takes time to recognise the mother face, and for a time that’s all it is – a face. It takes further weeks or months before a baby recognises mother and father as beings with heads, bodies, with arms and legs, like baby. Thus to begin with the baby will see mother entity as a being surrounded by a cloud of mystery.

Because it takes some time for a baby’s mind to be able to begin to unravel the mystery surrounding mother and father, one of the earliest imprinted memories in each of our own mind is of a vast, powerful, benevolent being that answered our calls when we needed help. As I described earlier about looking back from an adult perspective to a child’s, what would happen to these earliest of memories in an adult?

My hypothesis is that these feelings remain with us throughout our lives. In modern civilizations we all grow up learning about God or Gods and we accept it firstly, because we already felt the presence of the almighty mysterious being (our mother and father), and secondly, as children we naturally accept what our parents tell us as the truth. However, my point is that Mankind created a higher level beings who live in the heavens through projection. According to Jungian psychology, “In relationships, both intimate and otherwise, these same principles apply. A person projects onto another whatever it is they need them to be.” In other words, Humanity needs God therefore he created Him/Her/Them.

Alien Invasion

I’ve recently started listening to The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast, this week one of the topics of conversation was about the apparent UN appointment of an Alien Ambassador. It’s just a bit of journalistic spin , but it got me thinking, what would happen if aliens did come to earth for a visit?

While any ones guess is as good as another, I always like to try to draw parallels to find a more balanced perspective. So, if humanity can become a spacefaring civilization then one reasonable possibility is that aliens would behave in a similar way to us. Therefore to learn how our alien friends might view the human species we can think about the way we treat each other, now and in the past, as well as how humans relate to other indigenous species.

I believe the key to finding the answer is being aware of the biological and technological separation between the species, in this case, the separation between the aliens and humanity. One example is, there is a huge gulf between a viruses and humans. So if you examine this human-virus relationship what can we determine? Well, looking down the biological telescope, we are aware of them and consider ourselves vastly superior, thanks to modern medicines. However, what does a virus see looking up the same telescope? They inhabit the same space so there must be some kind of awareness, however small. Or are we just like the oxygen they breathe? They feed off our bodies to survive while not realising that they’re on board a living being. Hopefully you get my point, if there was a similar biological distance between us an alien species we might have some trouble perceiving their presence at all!

Going back to my original premise, that to know an alien we first must know ourselves, let’s look at another possibility: European nations have had a long history of colonizing other parts of the world. A widely held view during this time was that Western civilized nations were superior compared to the various indigenous peoples, and so they justified undermining and destroying centuries of local customs and traditions – because they are a backward people. Perhaps, if our alien friends held the same my-civilization-is better-than-yours attitude they may well think we need forcible re-educating.

Or perhaps you imagine a race of super intelligent being visiting us to pass on their wisdom and guide us into the next stage of human enlightenment, but isn’t that just the best possible scenario – aliens turn up and solve all our problems. Yeah, right. That’s as likely to happen as the penguins learning to fly. If humanity in the next hundred years managed to achieve interstellar travel and found a planet with an intelligent and friendly civilization living there, ask yourself who would be the first organization with enough money to do all this. If you’re like me you’re thinking of MacDonald’s, an Oil or Mining company, or a Bank! In the same way that our multi-national companies are all pouring into China and India – to exploit these new markets, these same companies no doubt would be building rockets to explore the new extra-terrestrial markets. Turn that around and you get another idea of what kind of aliens will be knocking on our door when the time ever comes.

Why Educate?

I came across a website which asked for suggestions as how to get children to eat healthily. What do you think?

I think that ‘Healthy Eating’ is so important in all our lives, but especially for our children, that it should form part of schools’ curriculum. The previous UK government used testing as the principle measure of how successful a school is. This actually lead to a narrowing of children’s education because teachers naturally focused on achieve the targets rather than providing a broad and balanced education for the children. While testing gives valuable information that parents need to choose the best school, does it really serve the best interests of the pupils? Most would say not. I think we would be doing our children a great service if we taught them all the general life skills that they’ll need as adult: reading, writing, arithmetic as well as how to be healthy with regards to eating, exercise as well as how to engage with the community.

Down with that sort of thing

I remember when John Paul II visited Scotland, because I didn’t go to see him. I was still at school at the time, a Catholic school, and most of my classmates were excited at the prospect of seeing *the* Pope. Throughout our education we’d been bossed about by nuns and priests, on one rare occasion a bishop turned up briefly to grant us full membership in to the Club. Unfortunately, my father couldn’t afford the money for the school trip to Glasgow so I was left behind in an almost deserted school while my classmates disappeared for the day on the trip of a lifetime. Now, however, almost 30 years later my religious views have radically changed, and I really happy when the Pope’s visit was finally over.

Today I still believe that the Pope represents a lot of things that are good in the world, but he does not have a monopoly on virtue. These values are also shared by all the Christian faiths, along with Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and others, no doubt. While I still have sympathies for the Catholic church, there are many aspects that I have a problem with.

Fundamentally, the church hasn’t changed from the times when kings and queens believed they were God anointed ones, granting them the elevated position of ‘Highness’. Nowadays we think of the term as a title however it used signify their God given status over their people. That meant when your King commanded you you were serving God through him. Equally, the popes of yore exerted absolute power of his flock. Clearly, as Gods direct representative on the planet if you wanted your eternal soul to be saved you’d do as he told you – that meant everyone, including kings who were just as concerned about not going to Hell as the average peasant.

Over the centuries, our civilisation changed in one important respect. Firstly, the concept of absolute monarchy proved untenable; wars were fought; parliaments established, granting rights to erstwhile peasants elevating them to the heady rank of citizens. Similarly, the Pope’s absolute power was challenged several times resulting in various protestant groups breaking away. Various wars ensued, but in this case the Church remained unaltered.

In modern western societies, we have monarchs who wield next to no power, and the our parliaments are granted short periods of governance according to the will of its people. Or in other words, the institutions are “for the people, by the people.” The Catholic Church however, hasn’t gone through a similar reorganisation in its entire history, consequently, it is still structured like an absolute monarchy, “by the grace of God, over the people.”

For me, the Catholic Church lost its way very early on in its history. If you care to look back over the performance of the many popes who God has apparently graced us with I’m sure you see many examples of human frailty creeping in.