Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for February, 2019

Food

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, Uncategorized on February 28, 2019| Leave a Comment »

spanish oranges

How do we reduce demand on over-stretched health services? Well, it might help to work towards a healthier society. Whilst it’s important to give health services enough resources to look after the sick, it’s not Medicine, not drugs, nor vaccines, nor “gene therapies” which have ever made the greatest contributions to population health. And it never will be.
As best I can see there are a number of issues to consider and all of them involve we human beings working together to create healthier societies. It’s what we can achieve when we work together that really impresses me. Sure, individual choices, personal behaviours and so on can result in valuable improvements for each of us in our own lives, but we don’t live in isolation. We are embedded in complex webs of environments and societies. If we don’t pay attention to those environments, our personal choices run the risk of being overwhelmed by the noxious factors outwith our individual control.
The first issue I explored was housing. After all, without adequate shelter, human beings perish. And with over-crowding, poor sanitation, inadequate supplies of clean water and power millions suffer from poor lives and are vulnerable to the ravages of acute infections, trauma and a growing number of chronic inflammatory conditions.
The second issue I’d like to explore is food.
Patients often asked me if I had a “diet sheet”. I didn’t. Maybe that was naive of me, but I don’t believe that one “diet” fits all. We are all different. Not only in our tastes, but in our tolerances, and even our needs. I think healthy diets can be as varied as human beings are. Yeah, sure, too much this, and too much that, is rarely healthy, but trying to single out a particular food or food group as “good” or “bad” always struck me as foolish. No single food is a miracle cure for anything, and no natural foodstuff is just downright bad.
I’ve always admired the work of Michael Pollan. Two things he has said are especially helpful. The first is “Eat food. Mainly plants. Not too much.” That seven word dietary advice seems very wise to me. Starting at the end, the “not too much” captures the need for both moderation and variety in a healthy diet. “Mainly plants” points to the fact that too much meat can be a problem. And “eat food”, although that sounds strange advice, actually captures one of the most important points. Why should we eat anything that isn’t food? Isn’t everything that we eat food?
Well, what he means by this is that the less processed a foodstuff is, the more likely it is to be nutritious. That connects well to the second point he makes, which is captured by asking yourself, “who made this food?” Because if it was made by human beings it’s more likely to be nutritious than if it was made by machines in a factory.
The more a foodstuff is processed, the more chemicals which are added to make it last longer, look a different colour, artificially change its flavour, the chances are, the less nutritious it’s likely to be.
This simple advice to “eat food” pushes us towards eating what is produced locally and seasonally. It’s one of the things I enjoy most about life here in the Charente since I moved here from Scotland. There is a local market every day except a Monday in Cognac, and within a short distance from here there are a large number of other interesting weekly markets. The markets regularly have stalls of locally produced, seasonal foods. The “locally” bit doesn’t mean only whatever is produced within the surrounding countryside. But it’s a sort of tendency. Yes, you can get what local farmers produce, but you can also get what’s grown in France, rather than what’s arrived from boats and planes over thousands of kilometres. And if you don’t see what you fancy from the local farms, or from France, then you can go a little further, and buy fresh produce from Spain or Portugal. Everything is labelled clearly. You can see how far it’s come.
I look forward every year to the Corsican clementines, the white and the green asparagus, the locally grown strawberries and raspberries, the various types of French apples and pears, the season of the walnuts, chestnuts, truffle. I swear that eating whatever is “in season” just tastes better. Is it healthier? I don’t know, but I want to eat food which is more than just “healthy food”, I want to eat food that is delicious.
The photo I’ve used at the start of this post is an example.
There is a network throughout southern France of Spanish orange growers and traders. They claim the time from tree to the stall in a local town car park is a matter of days. I have no way of verifying that but I can tell you I’ve never tasted orange juice quite this delicious.
Well, that’s me, and my personal circumstances. Yours will be different. But here’s my point.
The more we industrialise food production, the more we reduce its potential nutritious value, and the more we run the risk of non-food consumption of a mind-boggling list of man-made chemicals. This goes all the way back to the farming methods. Factory farming of cattle, pigs, chickens, and of plant crops, demands huge inputs of energy and chemicals, from antibiotics, to growth hormones, pesticides, fungicides, insecticides and so on. All these additives in the food chain aren’t food.
Even without considering the ethics of rearing animals in these conditions of mass overcrowding, one of the biggest problems is that these factory farms mainly feed other factories…..the ones which “process” the original plants and animals so much that you often can’t be sure what you are eating by the time it arrives on your plate. Is that beef, or horse? What part of the animal is used to make those nuggets? The label shows a list of substances you struggle to pronounce, and you sure don’t know what they are doing there, and whether or not they are at least not harmful, or, at best, good for you.
So can we apply these principles to food? The basis of all health? Good, nutritious, delicious food?
What if we prioritised, favoured, both personally, but also at the level of society through economic and political policies and controls, the following qualities –

  1. Less added chemicals – at all stages – from the farm to the shop
  2. Less processing and more transparency – so we can know what we are eating
  3. Less transporting – which will favour more local, more seasonal, fresher food
  4. More variety – every study I’ve ever read shows that populations which have more variety in their diets, often because they eat more seasonally, have longer, healthier lives.

The food economy of a society impacts the planet and its climate, the soil and the oceans, all forms of life, and, in particular, the health of whole populations.

Read Full Post »

The shapes of water

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room on February 25, 2019| 2 Comments »

These last few days have been unusually warm for February in the Charente, so it really feels like Spring. But before I turn to the Spring section of my Japanese woodcuts, I decided to share one last Winter scene. 

I think this is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen so far. There’s just something so tranquil about it. We sure don’t think of the word tranquil when a snow storm billows through, but when we wake up in the morning and it’s snowed all night, we know, don’t we? Just from the sound. The sound of silence. 

But this is a river scene so the only lying snow is on the river bank, the trees, and the roofs of the houses. One of the houses has a light on and it’s shining out across the water just as a setting sun would cast a golden beam, or how a full moon might cast a silver one. 

Who knows where the boatman is headed but it feels like he must be heading for that house, don’t you think? There’s something about that light which has a power of attraction. It beckons. You can almost imagine the wood fire burning in the kitchen. 

What struck me most about this particular scene was how the falling snowflakes are indistinguishable from the stars in the night sky, so that we’re not quite sure whether we are looking at the stars reflected on the water, or whether those white dots are just more snowflakes about to dissolve into the river. 

I love the cycles of water. The thought of water crystallising into snowflakes in the air, falling to the surface of the Earth to dissolve in the river water, or to melt into the trees……..

Although I can’t see any in this scene, I also imagine the snow falling onto the mountaintops where it transforms into streams, or burns, as we called them in Scotland, and trickle and rush down the hillsides, gathering together to form ever wider, ever deeper streams, then rivers, which stop off to make some lakes, or lochs, as we called them!, then onwards down and down to the sea again. I imagine these snowflakes dissolving into the world’s oceans, to be sculpted up by winds and currents to make great waves, then warmed by the heat of the sun, to evaporate upwards into the air again.

What a journey! 

It’s a stunningly convincing example of the connectedness of everything.

But there’s more, because these are snowflakes falling in this scene, not raindrops. And who isn’t enchanted by the fact that every single snowflake, every single one of them, is unique. Each forming an astonishing pattern of ice crystal, each one like no other. Isn’t that amazing?

When you read about snowflakes you’ll discover that each one of them has a short life, beginning as a single water crystal, formed in a unique time and place, perhaps in a particular cloud, then growing and changing as it falls through the atmosphere, so that even if two snowflakes were very similar at their start, by the time they reach the soil, the mountain, or the river, they have each been fashioned into something completely unique. Because they’ve all had a different exact path, and have all encountered different circumstances and events which have shaped them.

It’s a bit like us really.

We each start from single fertilised cells which at least look broadly similar (even though at a molecular level each of those cells is unique) but by the time we are born we’ve developed utterly unique features, from fingerprints to irises and beyond, then as each day of life passes, our utterly unique experiences shape us, not just shaping our stories and our Selves but the very cells and structures of our bodies, from our complex web of brain cells, to our organs, our bones, our skin. 

Each of those tiny crystals looks so like a star twinkling in the night sky. 

Maybe these are stars falling into the river after all……stars bringing souls into the world.

Read Full Post »

Empty

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, health, Uncategorized on February 22, 2019| Leave a Comment »

cordes sur ciel

There’s a lot of talk about the increasing strain on health services, something I’ve addressed here.

One of things that bothers me about these discussions is the assumption that increasing funding and resources to the health care system will result in a healthier population, which will, in turn, reduce the demand on the health services. This has never happened. And it’s not likely to happen.
The health of a population mainly comes down to how we live, not to the medicines we swallow or how quickly we can get an operation. Let me just clarify that I’m not arguing against more resources and funds for the health service, we need that to improve them. It’s just that this isn’t a way to create a healthier population and so reduce demand.
To create a healthier population we need to invest in what creates better lives. Better lives for as many people as we can.
There are many ways to do this. But let’s start with housing. Because decent housing, warm, weather-proof, houses with enough living space, clean, running water, an efficient sanitation system, and affordable, reliable power, is a foundation for healthier lives.
Would anyone argue otherwise?
If people are homeless, or living in insanitary, unsafe, overcrowded conditions, then they are more likely to get sick – both in the short term, with infections, and in the longer terms, with chronic, inflammatory conditions. I’m not going to list references here. Google these issues for yourself. But I am going to claim that adequate shelter is a necessary first step to better health for a population.

There are many factors and problems to consider here, but I just want to focus on one – waste – the number of abandoned and/or unused dwellings in every town and city.
When I think about this I can’t help also becoming aware of “high streets” full of empty, abandoned shops and offices. So, let’s take that into consideration too. Because when the town centres empty of commerce they aren’t only dying, depressing and, possibly, dangerous, but they represent a huge waste of opportunity for people to work and live together. We need shops, offices, workshops, cafés, restaurants, exhibition and performance venues, to have a healthy community. It’s no good just building lots of apartments in streets which are devoid of the possibilities for people to meet, share, and work together.

Take a walk around the streets where you live, both the residential streets where you dwell, and the town streets you visit most often for shops, offices, cafés, restaurants, and so on.
How many properties are sitting closed up and seemingly abandoned?
At the same time, are there homeless people in your locality? The homeless might be obvious sitting or lying on the pavements, in the doorways of closed shops, or they might be invisible to you, struggling to get by in bedsits, guest houses or hostels. What about decent housing? Is there anyone living in sub-standard, even unsafe properties? Is there anyone housed in overcrowded conditions with landlords maximising their income by minimising the personal living space of their tenants? Are the streets of your town vibrant, filled with people socialising and satisfying their daily needs and desires, for material , social and cultural goods?

I’m asking because it seems to me that it’s very common to find so many shops, offices and houses that look abandoned that a whole area feels either unsafe or unhealthy. The French have a word for it – désertification…..where a once vibrant locality becomes a desert. What could we do to turn this around? Here’s one idea.

A policy of compulsory purchase and leasing.

What if the local authority, the Council, or the Commune, had the right to compulsorily purchase, in its area of jurisdiction, any property which was uninhabited or unused for at least five years? What if all such properties could be compulsorily purchased for the current independent valuation price, then leased out to new tenants?
Residential properties could be rented out to those on housing benefit, paid for directly from the tenants’ housing benefit, instead of the current situation where these benefits go straight into the pockets of private landlords. Some properties could also be rented at commercial rates to either individuals or groups of individuals, encouraging a healthy social mix in the community.
Additionally some could be offered for sale, either directly at market rates, or using co-ownership schemes, where part of each month’s rent is allocated towards the final purchase of the property by the tenants. In a co-ownership scheme, an additional idea could be to agree a contract of improvement and renovations of the properties which would be paid for by the initial rental payments. For example, a property requiring £50,000 of work, and valued at a monthly rental of £1000, could have the works paid for by the first 50 rental payments.
Commercial properties, shops, workshops and offices could be offered rent-free for new tenant businesses. Instead of paying rent, the Council or Commune could be empowered to collect the VAT generated by these businesses, keeping that element of taxation for local use, instead of it disappearing into national funds.
The income streams to the councils from the housing benefits, domestic rents, co-ownership contracts, sales and locally ring-fenced VAT could then be used to make more compulsory purchases.
I’m sure somebody else will be able to take this idea and refine it considerably, but the basic idea is to favour circulation of property and wealth in the local economy and environment, instead of the current picture of stasis and decline.
Community associations, and co-operatives could be included in such schemes. In other words, it’s not just something for independent businesses and entrepreneurs, but something which could also encourage community led activities. Workshops, recycling services, training and education courses, as well as libraries, galleries, theatres and music venues.

Bringing life back to our existing communities by prioritising decent housing for everyone and supporting the daily opportunities for people to live, work and play together, would be a good beginning, if we want healthier populations who have less need of health services.

I’ll explore some other factors in later articles, including food, education and inequality. But maybe you’d like to share your own ideas? If you do, on your blog, your youtube channel, your instagram feed, or wherever you express yourself, please let me know. I’ll include links to your ideas in my posts.

Read Full Post »

Consensus democracy

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room on February 21, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Last time I was in Paris I saw these beautiful, thought-provoking photographs hung on the fence around the Jardins du Luxembourg. They were displayed as part of an attempt to raise public awareness about Climate Change.
This photo, which I took, of a woman walking past them made me think about powerlessness. It’s one thing to become aware of a problem like Climate Change, but it’s another to feel that you can do much about it personally. Actually, I’m sure lots of people will tell you all kinds of things you can do, from reducing the waste you produce, to recycling more, cycling more, or eating less meat. And who’s to say these aren’t good things to do? But, the thing is, global problems need human beings to work together to tackle them. Individual, isolated actions might contribute to bigger changes, but they’re not enough. Perhaps it’s one of the defining characterises of being human – that ability to work together. We are brilliant at making connections, and having huge effects by collaborating. It can be easy to forget that, but just pause for a moment and think how many other human beings have contributed something towards you being able to sit down today and eat a meal. Start with what’s in front of you and see how many connections you can imagine. You can’t know them all, of course, but you can imagine them. Include the table and chairs, the plates and cutlery, the food…..just follow as many of the threads as you can. We don’t live alone. In isolation. We didn’t evolve that way.
At the level of society we humans have tried a huge number of ways of organising ourselves. One of those ways is democracy. We elect a small number of us and give them responsibility to solve certain problems, enact certain laws, develop particular policies. Democracy is designed to hold that minority accountable.
You could argue that one of the objectives of democracy is to achieve the greatest possible consensus in a population for a particular set of laws, practices, limits and freedoms in a society.
Sadly, many of the Western democracies run a rather simplistic “winner takes all” variety of democracy. The person elected, or the policy voted for, in such a system usually only has the support of a minority of the population.
If a representative is elected by less than 50% of the electorate, then, at best, they are representing only that minority. It is common in Western democracies for representatives to gain their positions with around only a third of their electorates.
69% of the electorate voted in the UK 2017, General Election, with 42% of those who voted, voting Conservative and 40% Labour. Under this system the Conservatives “won” with only 29% of the electorate voting for them. Maybe it’s easier to see this with the raw numbers. At the time, the UK electorate was 46,843,896 people, 13,636,684 of them voted Conservative, 12,877,918 voted Labour.
You can easily do your own calculations for the country you live in. I’d be surprised if the general conclusion wasn’t much the same. This isn’t a way to achieve the greatest amount of agreement amongst the greatest number of people. It’s a way to enable an elite of winners to wield power over the majority of the population.
It gets worse. Within parliaments there is a similar skewing of democracy towards rule by minority. When all that is required is a “simple majority” for a policy or law in a parliament, then the emphasis is on competition rather than co-operation. The “Brady amendment” in the House of Commons won by 317 votes to 301. A simple win, but is it reasonable to then refer to this as “the clear majority of MPs”? Or to say that “Parliament has expressed a clear wish for…..”?
Referendums are very poor tools for the creation of consensus, or even broad support. A simple binary choice referendum that achieves just over 50% in favour, and just under 50% against, is more likely to increase division than spread consensus. In the British parliament, on the issue of Brexit, the Leave side claims complete authority to act without reference to anyone on the other side, despite a referendum result that delivered only a small majority in favour amongst those who voted, and a significant minority amongst the electorate as a whole. 51.9% voted Leave, 48.1% Remain, and turnout was 72.2%. That means 17,410,742 out of 46,500,001 people voted Leave, yet politicians call that the “Will of The People”. Which begs the question – “which people”? Not the electorate, just the minority who voted Leave.

Is it any wonder that ordinary people have lost faith in this particular flavour of democracy? This loss of faith is commonly cited as one of the reasons for the rise of populism. Government by minorities in competitive systems creates a sense of distance between the elected and the electorate. And as individual politicians turn their positions into careers, those minorities evolve into elites.
So how can we make democracy work more in favour of a greater number of the population? How can we heal the divide between the governed and the governors?

There are a number of ideas around.

Limitation to years of service
A simple way to mitigate against the creation of political elites would be to limit the number of years any individual could serve on any elected body. Democratic countries which have a President already limit his, or her, possible years of service in that post. It’s usually a sign of a slide into autocracy when a particular President changes a constitution to remove that limit.
Limiting the number of years which any individual can serve in parliament would make it harder for them to become career politicians, and therefore, a separate, elite, class. It would also make it harder for lobbyists to buy political support (although there would need to be a lot more than that to tackle the issue of lobbyists. Who was it who said they’d “drain the swamp”? How’s that going?)

Proportional representation with minimum level bars
Proportional representation for all elections, with the setting of minimum levels of support necessary to be elected could also contribute to decreasing the gap between whole electorates and their representatives. With an electorate of 100,000 people, a representative could be required to achieve a minimum number of votes, say 50,000, in order to be elected. This might require more than one round of voting, as is currently the case in several European countries.
Minimum level bars could also be set within a house of parliament, demanding a higher level of consensus than the current first past the post system allows for.

Election by lot
The House of Lords in the UK is a completely unelected chamber. One possibility would be to replace it with individuals drawn by lot, in the same way as people are selected for jury duty. Such a chamber could then have the responsibility for scrutinising plans and policies of the House of Representatives (or Commons, in the UK) with the intention of achieving as much consensus as possible within practical time limits. The House of Consensus would then make recommendations back to the House of Representatives.

Two chambers – a House of Consensus and a House of Representatives
What if one chamber of government, the one of elected representatives, had the responsibility for governing on the basis of the greatest degree of consensus achievable, rather than one of governing group versus opposition working against each other in their own Party interests? The use of committee systems to explore, challenge and analyse policies could be developed further. Across the chamber working groups and a voting system requiring minimum level votes to pass laws might lead to greater consensus and less conflict.
A second chamber, elected by lot, could have the responsibility for the scrutiny of proposals, policies and laws developed by the House of Representatives, then returned there for further discussion, debate and votes.
The first chamber makes decisions and laws, the second one problem solves and makes suggestions.

Preferendum
In relation to referendums, a recent French article laid out the idea of a “preferendum”. To avoid the binary trap of “yes” or “no” which only perpetuates division, each question asked on the ballot paper could be presented in the form of preferences. This involves asking the voter to state a level of preference for each of a number of options. From “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. The option with the greatest overall preference is the one taken forward.

Devolution and decentralisation
This is an idea which has been around for a long time, and has been carried out to different degrees in different countries, but the basic principle seems reasonable – that the closer an elected body is to its electorate, the more easily representatives can be held to account. Again, there could be limits to the number of years any individual can serve in any elected position. At any level of government, minimum voting levels and some selection by lot can be used. So local bodies could employ such principles as well as the national ones.

Citizens assemblies
Citizens assemblies have been used in a number of countries to help develop policies. These are locally gathered groups of people who debate, discuss and deliberate on an issue to put forward policy suggestions. They would probably never replace other democratic pathways but might be a useful way of broadening engagement.

Read Full Post »

Spring

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room on February 17, 2019| 2 Comments »

It’s only the 17th of February but this week, here in the Charente, it feels like Spring. It’s chilly in the mornings, sometimes only a degree or two above freezing, but by the afternoon, after a few hours of bright sun shining down from a blue, blue sky, the air has warmed up to 14 degrees, or more.
Under the mulberry tree, for the last few years, we’ve been planting crocus bulbs every autumn. The first of them appeared this week. I mean, just look at the richness of those purple petals opening up to reveal the golden treasure within!

At first there were just half a dozen of them, but day by day, more have appeared, purples, yellows, whites, little petals, big, bold, look at me petals! They are delightful.

Look at them when the sun sets their golden stamens and pistils on fire! When those delicate little triads cast those shadows on the veined purple petals!
Here’s another one, this time, white

Two sets of three petals, one behind the other, and in the middle, three yellow stamens at the base of a deep, orange, pistil. The gorgeous shadows stretching up from the splash of yellow at the base of each petal, up towards its milky white peak.
This is a flower in all it’s glory. That central female pistil, it’s three stigma (what’s the plural of stigma?) opening to the highway down to the ovary, surrounded by three male stamens.
Is three the magic number?
I see it repeated, layer after layer, here.
As I sit under the mulberry tree reading a book in the afternoon sun, I hear a deep buzzing sound and look up to see a huge, jet black, carpenter bee, flying from crocus to crocus, collecting delicious nectar and pollen, flower by flower. The sun catches the bee’s wings which shine with an iridescent purple sheen. Stunning.
There’s something deeply entrancing, delightfully awe inspiring, about the simplest, smallest, everyday events.

It feels like Spring.

Read Full Post »

Traces of the Sun

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room on February 14, 2019| Leave a Comment »

You know it’s not a good idea to look directly at the Sun, don’t you? But, all the same, we are magnetically drawn to sunsets, aren’t we?

Who can resist them?

Watching the huge glowing red ball of fire sink below the horizon is a treat which never becomes mundane. I don’t remember ever noticing the sun setting and thinking, “ho hum”. It draws me towards it.

Sometimes I just watch it through my window, but often I feel almost compelled to go outside and watch. As if moving a few metres closer to it gives me a better view! But, actually, I think the reason I’m drawn outside to see it is that I want to see the breadth of the sunset, want to be able to see the colours in the sky change from one edge of the horizon to the next. It’s not enough to see it enclosed in a window frame.

I read the other day that John Ruskin (you’re going to come across him a lot this year – it’s the 200th anniversary of his birth) like to watch the dawn and the sunset every day. I can understand that.

Here’s last night’s sunset. After the sun has disappeared below the horizon and I can’t see it directly any more.

And here’s a phenomenon I’ve written about before, which entrances me every single time – it’s “The Belt of Venus” – which appears on the Western horizon at dawn, just as the Sun is appearing in the East, this morning.

Read Full Post »

Fire in the Snow

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room on February 11, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Today’s woodprint is another Hokusai. It shows a group of five hunters warming themselves in front of a roaring fire in the middle of winter.
I think anyone looking at this will be struck by the vivid representation of the fire. The flames and smoke, maybe even the heat (because you can see heat sometimes, can’t you?” leap up as tall as the men and flow, driven by the wind, towards the mountains and the sky.
I then looked at the hunters. A curious group! Why is one of them actually sitting on the snow? Is he drunk? And another one, apparently determined to warm up his bum! Maybe he’d also been sitting on the snow and was now trying to dry his breeks! Then one of them who is warming his hands is obviously finding the fire so hot that while trying to get his hands as close as he can to the fire, he is simultaneously trying to get his face and his body away from it!
They do look a lively bunch, and I suppose my first thought was about human beings inventing fire and how much that had changed the course of history. Our ability to start fires and generate heat enables us to survive cold conditions, explore places we’d previously been unable to explore, as well as warding off wild animals, and greatly diversifying our diet once we applied fire as a method of food preparation (otherwise known as cooking!) – which reminds me about the Netflix series, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” and, their, Cooked  by Michael Pollan. I’m a big fan of Michael Pollan, and often recall his fabulous, seven word best diet recommendation – “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much”

But then my mind flipped to the more symbolic level and I saw in the woodcut two of the four great elements – fire and water. Fire in the hunter’s bonfire, and water in the form of snow and ice surrounding them.
Flames always reach upwards, don’t they? Which is probably partly why the alchemical symbol for fire is an upward pointing triangle. Traditionally, both, the fire and the upward pointing triangle, are associated with the male principle.

I’m not talking gender here, but the centuries old understanding of male and female principles as symbolic forces. The Sun, a fiery ball, is often associated with the male principle, while the Moon, with the female.

In the Tarot, The Emperor and the Empress make a similar pair.

In the yin yang symbol, which powerfully conveys the concepts of dynamism and wholeness, the feminine, yin, and the masculine, yang, are shown as equals.

Maybe it’s because my train of thought went off down that track of the unions of these forces, of the power of such coupling, but the next thing I noticed were the two trees on the right hand side of the image. The one, nested into the forked branches of the other. Am I just imagining something here? Or was Hokusai showing us something very important…..how reality is created by connections, by the embrace of fundamental principles or forces. That reminded me of Carlos Rovelli’s beautiful phrase where he explains why we should think in terms of events instead of objects –

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time, events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical “thing”: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not stones.
(from “Reality is Not What it Seems”)

I’ve written more about that idea in my book, “Unique in All the World”.

Read Full Post »

Forgiveness

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room on February 10, 2019| Leave a Comment »

In “Sens et Santé” magazine there’s a special feature on Forgiveness, or, in French, “Pardon”.

Psychologists, philosophers and spiritual guides often teach about the power of gratitude. Keeping a gratitude diary, for example, where you note down a list of things you are grateful for each day is a powerful way to fix your attention on the positives in your life, and to break free from the negative loops of rumination and despair.
Forgiveness, is a related, but different skill. Somehow, or at least so it seems to me, it’s not talked about as much as gratitude is. Maybe because forgiveness is more deeply connected to religious teaching? I don’t know.
Whatever the reasons, I think this feature in “Sens et Santé” is very welcome, and timely, given the depth and breadth of feelings of anger, resentment and hatred which we are witnessing at this time in the world.

The article is primarily based on the works of Thomas Baumgartner, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Berne, in Switzerland, and Robert Enright, Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, in the United States.

I took two main points of learning from my reading of it.
One is the connection between forgiveness and the brain’s capacity for “theory of mind”. It seems the same network of areas in the brain is active when either forgiveness or “theory of mind” is taking place. Theory of mind is the ability to imagine another’s experience, their thoughts and feelings. It develops in human beings around the age of four years old. Before that we think that whatever we know everyone else knows. There’s no understanding that someone else might have different knowledge from our own. There’s a clue in this neurological association, because forgiveness involves the ability to step outside of our own circuits of rumination and self-focus.
That’s the second point of learning for me, actually, and it takes up much of the article.
Robert Enright says it is important not to confound forgiveness with reconciliation. Reconciliation is the bringing together of two people to help them to rebuild confidence in each other. Forgiveness, he says, in contrast, doesn’t require us to have confidence in the other person. He also points out that forgiveness is not about excusing someone, it’s not about saying what they did was fine, nor is it about forgetting. It’s not about saying “I don’t care”, or “I’ll let go and just not think about this any more”
Instead he describes forgiveness in three steps.

  1. First, recognise the wound, or the hurt.
  2. Second, decide to stop nourishing the negative feelings of resentment.
  3. Third, and he says, this is the hardest part, feel compassion for the perpetrator.

Helpfully, he unpacks both steps two and three to show how they are both powerfully linked and actually work together in a kind of positive feedback loop. The one, enhancing the other.
We can only shift our attention, if we direct it somewhere else. That’s a beginning. Deciding, I’m going to interrupt the negative loop. When I become aware of thoughts of resentment and rumination, that I decide at that point to focus on something else.
What else?
Well, towards the other person. Think about both their differences from you, and their commonalities with you, and, if you can, learn about their vulnerabilities and their weaknesses. Once you understand what you have in common with the other, as well as what’s different about them, and focus on their weaknesses, then it is easier to feel compassion for them. It’s easier to even build feelings of good intention towards them, suspending your legitimate claims to vengeance and anger, and choosing instead wish them well.
Oh, that sounds easy in a sentence of two doesn’t it? But he accepts that this, third step is by far and away the hardest. It’s not a magic wand he says. It takes willpower, continued effort, and time. It’s not a quick fix.

The article comes with a nice little set of references at the end, and despite the fact it’s a French language article, the references are all English language ones. Here they are –

Read Full Post »

Learning from others

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, Uncategorized on February 7, 2019| Leave a Comment »

petite philo des oiseaux

I’ve just finished reading Philippe Dubois and Élise Rousseau’s “Petite Philosophie des Oiseaux”. It reminds me a book I read last year – Emanuele Coccia’s “La vie des plantes”. Both books look at a non-human realm of life and use reflections on the lifestyles and life strategies of, in the first case, birds, and in the latter, plants, to stimulate the reader into reflecting on aspects of what it is to be human.
I’ve never read any books like these in English, so they are a validation of one of my main reasons to retire to France from Scotland – to learn another language and explore a whole other way of thinking and living.

Migration

There are lots of fascinating, even astonishing stories about birds in the “Petite Philo…” book. For example, the “bar tailed godwit” (which has a much nicer French name – “La barge rousse” – which migrates back and forward between the Alaska and New Zealand. It flies non-stop 11,000 km (that’s over 6000 miles) in about a week, meaning it flies at 70 km/hr! All that in a bird which weighs only about 300 grams. Can you imagine? How does it fly all that way without stopping even once? Apparently, when it sleeps, only half of its brain sleeps, the other half staying awake. How would you fancy developing that skill? (Mind you only using half your brain isn’t that uncommon – ha! ha!)
Lots of birds migrate of course, and nobody knows how they find their way so precisely that they return to the exact same nesting sites every year. Think of the cuckoo whose parents abandon it into another bird’s nest when it is just an egg, but when ready, the chick flies off and travels to Africa from Europe! How does it know how to do precisely that?
The Artic Tern is the most traveled of all the migrators. Here’s what wikipedia has to say about it –

A 2010 study using tracking devices attached to the birds showed that the above examples are not unusual for the species. In fact, it turned out, previous research had seriously underestimated the annual distances travelled by the Arctic tern. Eleven birds that bred in Greenland or Iceland covered 70,900 km (44,100 mi) on average in a year, with a maximum of 81,600 km (50,700 mi). The difference from previous estimates is due to the birds’ taking meandering courses rather than following a straight route as was previously assumed. The birds follow a somewhat convoluted course in order to take advantage of prevailing winds. The average Arctic tern lives about thirty years, and will, based on the above research, travel some 2.4 million km (1.5 million mi) during its lifetime, the equivalent of a roundtrip from Earth to the Moon over 3 times

When you read something like that it’s kind of hard to hang onto a belief that human beings are the most superior of all the animals. We need our rather flawed GPS systems to navigate. They just do it.

Living in the moment

I think that’s one of the main themes of the book, actually. In one passage they say (and this is my translation, so sorry if it’s not perfect! The Aegithalidae are what we call, in English, “tits”. In French, they are “mésanges”).

mesange

 

But the little tit, does she have any need of the idea of death? No, certainly not. Because making the most of every moment, appreciating every seed she gleans, every ray of sunshine, she does all that already. She doesn’t need someone to teach this truth, she doesn’t need to philosophise: she is already wholly immersed in her life.
The tit doesn’t look forward, doesn’t make plans, doesn’t put things off until tomorrow, doesn’t imagine that things were better in the old days. She lives.

 

Intelligence

One of my favourite chapters in the one about intelligence, subtitled with a phrase, which, in English, would be “Bird brain!”
When we call somebody bird brained we’re insulting them. But is it true that birds are not intelligent creatures? No!
Just because they have relatively small brains, doesn’t mean they must be relatively stupid. The authors point out that some men have even tried to claim that they are intellectually superior to women because men have bigger brains the women! That hasn’t worked out so well either, has it guys? In fact, birds’ brains have twice as many synapses (connections) in them than the brains of elephants, chimps, or other mammals.
After musing a bit about just what is intelligence anyway? After considering the issue of different kinds of intelligence, including musical and emotional, they describe a number of quite amazing bird behaviours.
Did you know that Blue Jay looks ahead to winter by collecting nuts and seeds and burying them for colder months to come, but if they see another Blue Jay, or other bird, watching them, they’ll pretend to be burying food when they aren’t really?
Some crows have been observed places nuts on the road at traffic lights, when the lights are at red, then when they turn green, the cars run over the nuts to crack them open. The crows wait till the traffic light turns red again, then swoop down to get the nuts.
An experiment done on magpies involved putting a red mark on their brow. When the magpie saw itself in a mirror, it tried to scratch off the red mark.
There are many other examples.

The question the authors ask is shouldn’t we consider that adaptive intelligence, learning how to change your behaviour according to the conditions and environment, actually one of the best kinds of intelligence to have?
As we heat our planet up, fill our oceans with plastic, and our soil with toxic chemicals, it’s tempting to think we’ve got a bit of catching up to do when it comes to adaptive intelligence!

Read Full Post »

The Usefulness of the Useless

Posted in Uncategorized on February 6, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Usefulness of the Useless

Nuccio Ordine argues that “usefulness”, when thought of as that which has utility, which can make money, or which can be practically applied to solve a problem, limits our capacity to be fully human. His thesis is that utility has its limits, but in recent times, I think particularly during industrialisation and the spread of capitalism, utility has acquired a dominant position. He argues that this dominance impedes our ability to become fully human and live satisfying lives.
His own idea of “usefulness” is “everything that helps us become better” – by which he means anything which helps us grow, anything which helps us to develop and, to live more meaningful, richer lives.
He is concerned about “the logic of profit” and how political leaders nowadays are always talking only about money. He claims that leaders in the past, for example spiritual leaders, would teach about value, honor, and purpose…..qualities and values in life which couldn’t be purchased. What’s worse he says, is that this overwhelming emphasis on money isn’t making life better for most people. He gives the examples of the 2008 financial crash and the use of austerity measures by Western governments since, and he also cites the huge growth in inequality especially over the last few decades.
All of that is maybe not so earth-shattering. I’m sure we’ve all thought about those things before, and we probably find ourselves in conversations about that a lot. But then things start to get really interesting when he says

“In the universe of utilitarianism, a hammer is worth more than a symphony, a knife more than a poem, and a monkey wrench more than a painting: because it is easy to understand the efficacy of a tool while it is ever more difficult to understand the utility of music, literature, or art.”

That’s a beautifully written passage and at that point I begin to think, hey, yes, isn’t that true? How much does music, art and literature mean to me? A lot! But I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why that’s “useful”.
I don’t listen to music, look at art, read or write to some “end”, to “achieve some goal”. And I think there’s something in there for me to remember, because I think when I write non-fiction, like these blog posts, maybe I’m consciously, or at least sub-consciously, writing to make things better. In other words, writing for a purpose. Yet, I often find it annoying when I read texts written by others who have that same goal! Elisabeth Gilbert says in her “Big Magic” book…“please don’t write a self-help book”?

Big Magic

Then he says

“Now it is important for me to underline the vital importance of those values that we cannot weigh and measure with instruments calibrated to assess quantitas and not qualitas. And, at the same time, I wish to make a claim for the fundamental nature of those investments that do not produce immediate returns and cannot be turned into cash.”

People not data

Well, that’s right up my street again, because I have felt for a long time that the most important aspects of medical practice are NOT what can be measured with the machines, but rather the qualities which individuals experience.
I’ve never really been satisfied by visual analogue score systems that try to reduce human experiences and stories to numbers in a range. I remember once having dinner with some dentists after having delivered an address to their annual meeting. The subject was symptoms, such as pain….what they meant. One of them told me about a chronic facial pain clinic which they’d taken over from their predecessor. They were a bit taken aback when they asked the first patient, “How are you doing?” and they replied “9”, then the next patient did the same thing. “How are you?” “7”. The whole clinic proceeded that way. Puzzled, he asked one of the clinic nurses what was going on, why were people responding to his questions with numbers? “Oh, Dr. X, your predecessor devised a scoring system for pain and he trained the patients to tell him what number on the scale represented their pain level. If someone began by telling him a story about what had happened since their last visit, he’d say “Stop. I want the next thing that comes out of your mouth to be a number. Nothing else!” He was pretty scary.”
Numbers aren’t a good way to understand human beings.
However, the author says more than that….he says he wants to make the case for investing in what does not produce immediate returns or money. He wants to make the case for curiosity, from the satisfaction that arises from understanding something better, for the joy of wonder, and for all those apparently “useless” activities that make us human – singing, dancing, drawing, painting, and the pursuit of knowledge.

Effort and passion

“True, everything can be bought. From legislators to judges, from power to success: everything has its price. But not knowledge: the price to be paid for knowing is of a completely different kind. Not even a blank check would allow us to acquire mechanically what is the exclusive fruit of an individual effort and an inexhaustible passion. No one, in short, can tread the laborious path to learning in our stead.”

Learning takes effort. It’s a personal pursuit. Nobody can learn for you. The key there for me is “the exclusive fruit of an individual effort and an inexhaustible passion” – effort and passion – a great combination!
Nobody can learn something for us. Knowledge doesn’t just appear. You can’t just buy it from a shop. It takes time and it takes effort. And there is the key – it’s in the living – it’s in the personal “journey” (oops, don’t like that word very much), it’s in the everyday experiences which gradually make us who we are. He quotes from Dickens’ “Hard Times” on this subject, describing his character, the teacher, Thomas Gradgrind’s approach to education –

“In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!” The enemy of teaching open to imagination, sentiments, and affection, Gradgrind is introduced “with a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket … ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.” For him, education and life are reduced to a “mere question of figures,” to a “case of simple arithmetic.” Just as the young pupils are considered to be “little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts.”

He also quotes Socrates –

“It would be really fine, Agathon, if knowledge were able to flow from the fullest to the emptiest among us and all we had to do was to be in contact one with the other, like the water that flows along a woollen thread from the fuller goblet to the emptier one.”

That reminded me of when I was a teenager. My best friend and I were insatiably curious kids, always finding things out together and conducting our own experiments. We came across the notion of sleep learning. So my friend hooked up a cassette player to two long wires attached to an old loudspeaker we’d salvaged from an old valve radio, and placed the speaker under his pillow. He got me to recite his French vocabulary for the week onto the cassette tape and set the recorder up with a timer so it would come on during the night and play him the words in his sleep…….didn’t work! He didn’t remember a single one of them!!
So learning doesn’t come without effort!
Mutual benefits of sharing

The next point Nuccio Ordine makes is that knowledge challenges the laws of the market place because we can share our knowledge with others without making ourselves one bit poorer. In fact, it’s the opposite – when we share our learning we both gain – both teacher and learner.

“I can teach a student the theory of relativity or read together with her a page of Montaigne thereby giving rise to a miraculous virtuous circle in which both the giver and the receiver are enriched at the same time.”

My experience of teaching, especially in Japan, was that every single time I learned something. I never came away thinking I’d been giving something away in the sense of losing something, or that I was making myself poorer. I felt that I, too, had gained. I learned a new way of explaining something, or I saw a new connection, or I learned a different way of looking at something. I always came away feeling enriched.

Then read this –

“The gaze fixed on the objective to be attained makes it impossible to grasp the joy of little everyday gestures and to discover the beauty that pulses through our lives: in a sunset, in a starry sky, in the tenderness of a kiss, in a flower that blooms, in the flight of a butterfly, and in a child’s smile. Because, often, greatness is perceived better in the simplest things.”

Oh, isn’t that beautiful?? I love, love, love that! And there it is – “l’émerveillement du quotidien” – the wonder of the everyday….my favourite! If we fill our lives with the busy pursuit of short term goals, the days slip by, literally, without us noticing.

He says –

“Kakuzo Okakura, in describing the tea ritual, identified the pleasure of picking a flower to give to a lady friend as the precise moment in which the human species rose above the animals.”

Here’s the value of not only noticing, but choosing to share. Isn’t that where art, music and knowledge excel? I thought of the cave art I’ve seen in France. All those animals painted in the depths of the caves, something which took so much effort, but why? Nobody knows. Maybe that’s because we are so busy trying to figure out what use the art was, that we miss, not only the sheer pleasure of creation and the satisfaction of creation, but also how art adds meaning and purpose to life.

lascaux wall art

That got me thinking too about the cup and ring markings on the stones in Kilmartin valley. How nobody can explain them either. But maybe they are art not utility?

kilmartin cup and ring and bean

Seeing beauty and choosing to share it with another – that is a characteristic which makes us uniquely human.

“Being an artist,” says Rainer Maria Rilke in a passage from Letters to a Young Poet, “means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer.”
Not “reckoning and counting” but “ripening” – ooh, lovely. I love to watch the new buds appearing on the trees in the Spring, the opening of the bright green new leaves from the buds and the sudden appearance of the blossom.

budding cherry tree

Nuccio mentions Ionesco in the book,

“the need to imagine and create, is as fundamental as the need to breathe”

which is a slight twist on my previously understood “stories are as fundamental as breathing” But I agree, where would we be without our imagination and our creativity?

“Especially when there is an economic crisis, when the temptations of utilitarianism and the wickedest egoism seem to be the only star and the only lifeline, we need to understand that it is precisely those activities deemed useless that could help us escape from prison, save us from asphyxia, transform a dull life, a non-life, into a fluid and dynamic one, oriented toward a curiositas for the spirit and human affairs.”

Curiosity

That made me think of the whole purpose of my “heroes not zombies” blog. It touches on my core value of “curiosity” – curiosity and wonder as drivers in life, as opposed to the desire to possess and consume…..

Here’s another passage explaining his theme –

“While the biophysicist and philosopher Pierre Lecomte du Noüy invited us to reflect on the fact that “in the scale of beings, only man performs useless acts,” two psychotherapists (Miguel Benasayag and Gérard Schmit) suggest that “the usefulness of the useless is the usefulness of life, of creation, of love and desire,” because “the useless produces that which is most useful to us, which is created without shortcuts, without saving time, over and above the mirage created by society.”

Empathy and connection

Time for another insight which is shifting my thinking – this time he quotes the author, Mario Vargas Llosa –

“Mario Vargas Llosa, on receiving the Nobel Prize in 2010, rightly pointed out that “a world without literature would be a world without desires or ideals or irreverence, a world of automatons deprived of what makes the human being really human: the capacity to move out of oneself and into another, into others, modeled with the clay of our dreams.”

There’s the bit that struck me – “the capacity to move out of oneself and into another…” It’s not just that these “useless” activities are for fun, pleasure, or to satisfy curiosity. It’s that they move use out of ourselves and into another – stories do that for sure. Paintings do it. Music does it. I think of concerts I’ve been to where I feel moved to tears from the sheer power of the SHARED experience of the music with the other fans.

A work of art doesn’t ask to be born

“If we think about it, though, a work of art does not ask to come into the world. Or to borrow another splendid observation by Ionesco, the work of art “asks to be born” in the same way “as a child asks to be born”: “A child is not born for society’s sake,” the dramatist explains, “although society claims him. He is born for the sake of being born. A work of art too is born for the sake of being born, it imposes itself on its author, it demands existence without asking or considering whether society has called for it or not.”

I like this too. Another “satori” moment – all this creation, all this art, does not “ask to be born” – just like how we do not ask to be born – we are not born for the sake of society – or even to promulgate a few strands of DNA as Dawkins would have us believe! Can you think of art this way? Again I thought of Elisabeth Gilbert and how she talks about the muse – how if we don’t grasp it, it’ll travel off to find someone else who will!

Freedom

This book really resonated with me. It affirms the value of things like “blue sky thinking” instead of goal-orientated or problem-solving activities. It affirms the value of quality over quantity. But it also sings about FREEDOM – the freedom to BE, to BECOME, to explore, to follow your curiosity and your creativity – not to get to a particular place but JUST COS! Just cos its fun, it’s wonderful, it’s satisfying.

“Free men” have no problems with time and have to account to no one, whereas “servants” are ruled by the clock and by a master who decides”

 

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. ALBERT EINSTEIN,

 

It is pleasure, not possession, which makes us happy. MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, Essays

Flexner

The book finishes with an essay from Abraham Flexner who created the Flexner Institute at Princeton University – an institute which offers academics of many disciplines some time there where the only thing they have to do is turn up and take part – nobody tells them what they should or shouldn’t research or teach. They are encouraged to dream, to imagine, to follow their curiosity and to inspire each other – and it goes on and on that way – the academics don’t work there for life – they go for a few months or years and then return to their other universities, jobs etc – then maybe years later will go again for another spell. Wow! I’ve never heard of such a thing! I’ve often heard university academics talk about how they were fed up chasing funding – that every single grant had to be applied for, fought for, and it had to be shown how the research would be USEFUL!
In this final essay, Flexner gives many examples of how scientists who were simply pursuing their curiosity, following a sense of wonder and a desire to simply understand more, often made discoveries which later led to world changing inventions. Others saw something practical or applicable in their discoveries and turned them into useful technologies, but they were building on the those very “blue sky”, free, thoughts and activities of their “less practical” predecessors.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, as I’m sure you can tell. It’s a healthy riposte to the bean counters!

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »