The Edtech Digital Revolution

Our interests now are centering more and more on things to do with the digital revolution (so called), especially as they relate to education - looking critically at the most prominent advocates of the digital revolution - people like Sugata Mitra, Marc Prensky, Ken Robinson and Nicholas Negroponte.

We are not against digital technology, but we are very critical of how it is being mythologised and how we are living that myth and what effect that is having on us.

See the posts at our blog on the Digital Revolution and the Ed-Tech Learning Revolution.

Ken Robinson – a learning revolution?

Sir Ken Robinson calls for a revolution in education, the massed crowd rises to its feet and applauds. We remain seated, somewhat skeptical. We have had a little experience of revolutionary groups outside the field of education, and we are suspicious of a movement calling itself revolutionary but led by a man who has been knighted by the Queen of England for his services to the establishment – to the ancien regime, still clad in wigs and gowns. Of course, the knighthood could have been a mistake – a case of the Queen failing to spot the Castro in her midst – so perhaps we should not jump to conclusions.

 

[Sorry! We've moved this to our Digital Counter-Revolution website. Click the link below.

Ken Robinson's dubious revolution contd..]

Grow our civilisation

“Grow the economy,” “grow my business” – two phrases which have irritated a fair number of people who know the difference between a transitive and an intransitive English verb. I confess I share their displeasure, but what strikes me in this case is not the assault on an overly refined sensibility by one or two English phrases. No, what strikes me is the complete powerlessness of the people who are actually thinking about the English language – their powerlessness to have any impact whatsoever on the development of the language.

Apparently the use of “grow” as a transitive verb combined with objects like “business” and “economy” dates back to a speech by Bill Clinton in 1992. Via the press, the usage became commonplace in the business community. Reviewing the change in the language in 1999 The New York Times Manual of Style included this comment:

“With a direct object, grow sounds natural in references to living things: grow flowers; grow wheat; grow a beard; grow antlers. The newer usage of grow to mean expand (grow the business; grow revenue) is business jargon, best resisted.”

There was no resistance though. The learned were powerless to exert any. Once upon a time the culture had its high priests and it had its teachers, who could uphold a notion of the right way to do things – a notion, however feeble, that could stand in a critical relation to the way things were often done. Thus, culture preserved an idea of what was right and what was wrong, what was good and what was bad.

What are we to say now? Are we to throw our hats in the air and rejoice that the high priests have been defrocked and pushed rudely aside leaving the crowd free to do what it wants without the nasty wagging finger of the critic and the teacher? Is this the sort of liberation that 5,000 years of civilisation have been preparing for – a free-for-all in which anything goes? Or is the sight of the thoughtless leading the unthinking a rather disturbing one?

If we have not yet reached the Promised Land at the End of History, do we not still need a clear idea of what it means to move forward and upward? And will it not inevitably be a smaller or larger minority of more thoughtful people who will formulate, promote and insist upon those ideas of what forward and upward mean? And wouldn’t that minority deserve a certain respect – a certain authority?

The revolt against the high priests of the past was supposed to create a better world, but when that particular revolt becomes a more general refusal of any distinction between right/wrong, good/bad, forwards/backwards, then the barbarian elements are sure to come to the fore and take over (as is now the case). And the most glaring example of barbarism is in the very economy which the American president wanted to grow. Buffett says the markets are all about fear and greed – naked passions liberated from any thoughts about what ought to be done in the world – any thoughts about what is right, about what would help us move forward. Governments tremble now at the thought of what the markets will do. Let us marvel at this great liberation of the individual and of passion from the millennia of priestly repression. Perhaps History has finally arrived at its End. What joy to have arrived at last!

Einstein and teaching at its best

Anti-schoolers are very fond of the following quote attributed to Albert Einstein: "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school." Perhaps Einstein ought to have said: "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything one was taught." The idea (for the anti-schoolers at least) is that teaching is bad. Teachers, despite their best intentions, do harm. Genuine learning occurs without the interference of teachers – teachers who make the ridiculously arrogant assumption that they have some deeper or higher understanding.

The quotation prompts a question: Let’s say that you have forgotten all that useless information you were forced by teachers to memorise, what remains from all those years spent in the company of teachers? For the anti-schoolers, what remains may be (I guess) a sense of incompetence, of being unable to learn anything without the guidance of the expert – a total loss of intellectual autonomy. Perhaps other things remain as well, but the clear implication is that they are all utterly negative. Is it true, though, that nothing positive could remain?

Let me recall something positive from my own experience – a memory that has helped me to clarify what teaching at its best might be (assuming there could be such a thing as good teaching). I was about ten years old, and our class (at a small run-of-the-mill primary school in Manchester in the UK) had been given some English homework for the weekend. We had to write a story. I spent some time on my own first in my room trying to get the initial ideas for the story. Then I went downstairs to the kitchen, where my father was. He asked me about the story. I began with what I was most sure about: the setting. The story would take place in New York. There was no need to discuss that. It was obvious. All good stories took place in America, and where better to pick than New York? Now my father didn’t exactly attack me either physically or verbally, but it was as if he had taken me by the shoulders and violently shaken me, asking: “Why New York, for heaven’s sake? What do you know about New York? What’s wrong with Manchester – with England?”

It was a shock at the time, but I look back now with gratitude at the act of benevolent interference from a man who was also a teacher. And I look upon it as part of my slow, fitful awakening – an awakening that was my education. Awakened from what? From the slumber of innate and received idiocies. Looking back at the event that sparked it I see an image of what teaching at its best might be. Curiously, there is another Einstein quote to give that image a little spurious authority (a quote that I haven’t seen in the writing of the anti-schoolers – understandable, since it goes completely against the grain of their argument):

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."

Here Einstein describes a situation in which the prevalent natural tendency – even among people who have not yet been institutionalised by school – is to thoughtlessly perpetuate the dominant prejudices. By contrast, a minority are either born with or quickly acquire a more courageous intellect, and with this they refuse to lend their support to the general tide of thoughtlessness. Their refusal provokes hostility.

Now, if, as people concerned with education, we wanted to promote the idea of an honest and courageous use of the intelligence beyond the minority, we would need to challenge the majority, to find some way to do to them what my father did to me: to shake them up and ask, “Why, why these prejudices? What sense do they make?” How would such a challenge be effected? It would need courageously intelligent people to interfere benevolently in the lives of the young, trying, in the least oppressive way possible, to help them see that there is a different path that they can take. And wouldn’t these courageously intelligent people be teachers of a sort?

The anti-schoolers are right to reject the image of the child as an empty vessel, and to reject the image of a student as someone who must sit down, shut up and learn. But they are wrong if they think that every child springs from the womb ready to honestly and courageously use their intelligence, even if it means suffering the hostility of their peers.

The anti-schoolers are right to point out how deadening the worst kind of schooling can be. But they are wrong in assuming that if children are left to themselves, their naturally courageous intelligence will shine forth in each and every individual, and they will spontaneously form an egalitarian society free from thoughtless prejudice. It would be nice if that were so. In my experience, it is not so. Hierarchy and thoughtless prejudice are rooted all too often in the children themselves. That needs to be challenged. Teaching at its best can provide that kind of challenge.

Do schools kill curiosity?

A good rule of thumb when debating anything is not to take questions at face value. People ask questions for a reason, and the reason isn't always an innocent wish to fill a gap in their understanding. There might be an ulterior motive.

There is definitely an ulterior motive in a lot of the discussion about curiosity and its death at the hands of teachers. It is clear that at least some of those shouting about curiosity have merely been looking for a stick with which to beat schools - to beat them in the name of the freedom of the individual - the freedom of the individual to pursue his or her curiosity, whatever that might be.

Now schools must do all they can to cultivate curiosity, and they must provide the space for individuals to begin to exercise their freedom, but in run of the mill schools in the West (where teachers have had a child-centred approach for a long time now), that is not where the educational priorities now are.

Suggestion: The world is looking increasingly like a runaway train. Where is it heading? Why are its engines being stoked so frenetically? What's the rush?

A teacher standing outside the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, wondering about the runaway train that we are all now on, sees again the inscription: "Know Thyself." It seems even more imperative now than it was then. Perhaps if people understand themselves and their world a little better, they might see that they can stop the train and get off and do something a little more fulfilling than charging at full speed down tracks that lead God knows where. Perhaps.

Clearly there is no spontaneous inclination to achieve self-knowledge. As teachers it is our job to cultivate an interest in that - to try to make young people curious about the bizarre world that they just take for granted. Let's make the course a matter of learning by discovery as much as possible, and at the same time let's state clearly that this is pre-eminently a job for schools and inspiring teachers, because this is something extremely important that we all ought to be curious about.

For more on the defense of a rather traditional idea of teachers and schools see:The Digital Counter Revolution

Sex and Education

It is rare to come across a film that crystallises a key pedagogical issue as well as “The Man Who Fell To Earth” (directed by Nicholas Roeg, who was also responsible for “Walkabout”, another favourite amongst pedagogues). The issue shines forth in one line of dialogue – a line I remember vividly while having forgotten every other word spoken during the film.

The background: Thomas Jerome Newton (played by David Bowie) finds himself in 1970s America. He is obviously not at home. Through a series of flashbacks and revelations it becomes clear he is from another planet - a planet stricken by drought – and he needs to find someone to help him build a spaceship to return there.

The scene: Dr Bryce (played by Rip Torn) is the university lecturer with the sort of scientific background Newton is looking for. We first see him in a state of complete debauchery, with a series of clips showing him in the same bed with one young female student after another, all strikingly similar, and each making the same comment about how he bears no resemblance to their father. Then he begins working for Newton and everything changes. Some time later, looking back at the alteration, he says: “And strangely, after that, I gradually began to lose my interest in eighteen-year-olds. I don’t know what happened to me. I’m not sure. But my mind developed a libido of its own.”

“My mind developed a libido of its own.” And is that not what education is all about: arriving at the point where the mind develops a libido of its own?

Clearly this is a film that people like Sugata Mitra need to watch – people who assume that children are born with minds that have libidos of their own. Of course every child expelled from the womb has to make sense of the buzzing, booming confusion of post-natal life, but once a boy has learnt to say: “That’s a cat,” any intellectual curiosity in the whatness of the cat is quickly brushed aside by the pleasure of pulling tails and the other joys of infantile dictatorship.

The mind only develops a libido of its own under certain conditions. Teachers – a species that people like Sugata Mitra want to render extinct – know that they have to work hard to create those conditions. Yet even then, the intellectual libido is a frail thing, like a flickering flame that must be shielded from the winds of the id.

Prof. Sugata Mitra and the Enemies Within

We want to raise a warning to teachers - warning them that in their midst are some very dangerous figures. They are arguing that the practice of teaching should end - that teachers should be made redundant. This is the anti-teacher movement.

Teaching - according to the people in that movement - is a very dubious business - something that smacks of the gulag, or at the very least, that horrible kind of schooling that Pink Floyd sang about - the school as factory, churning out bricks for the walls of the economy. The impulse to teach is the impulse to dictate, to impose, to bring one's pedagogical boot down hard on the innocent face of the child. (I exaggerate, but the implied association of teaching with Fascism is discernable.) Learning is good. Education is good (as long as there is no one at the front of the room), but teaching is bad.

Click to see the rest of the post about Sugata Mitra and the anti-teacher movement.

The Sheep and the Goats

Brad Peterson asked his teacher friends (both real and virtual) for the quote that best summed up for them what teaching was all about. At the time I happened to be rereading "The Fall" by Albert Camus. It contains the following statement:

"A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers."

In my own work as a teacher (in the little that remains) that quote gets to the heart of the matter. The point is to cultivate the conviction (wherever possible) that the men and women of the future might be capable of more than that.

Have I succeeded?

It is important to keep sight of the few successes in the midst of all the failures.

Recently I went to do my regular Thursday afternoon lesson with a boy of 14. I started off by referring to a detail that I thought was utterly insignificant. While I had been waiting for him to open the door, I noticed for the first time that one of the iron railings outside his house was unlike the others. All the others were of flat, undecorated metal. That one had a faint floral pattern on one side, almost hidden by the thick paint, but still just visible to the attentive eye. I drew his attention to it and asked him why he had this one odd railing. "Why, why?" I insisted. He looked at me for a moment, pointed to all the other railings in the neighbouring houses that looked so superficially similar, and said: "I don't want to be a sheep."

I nearly wept.

Plato Meets Snoop Dogg

While having breakfast we just happened to overhear a song by Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa called "Young, Wild and Free". Listen to it here. Let me paste in the chorus below.

So what we get drunk
So what we smoke weed
We’re just having fun
We don’t care who sees
So what we go out
That’s how its supposed to be
Living young and wild and free.

As it happened, our job after breakfast involved reading a bit of Plato, and, quite by chance, we came across this bit of commentary:

Plato (Laws vol 2 654) considers children are incapable of any further education if they have not already had a good musical training. The point was not simply to learn about music or simply to learn how to play an instrument or sing so as to be able to take part in the local festivals. Rather, the more important point was for music to refine the soul of the young person - a crucial stage in opening the mind and the sensitivities of the individual so that it would be receptive to beauty, goodness and truth. Again in the book "Protogoras" (326a) Plato expresses the widely held view that music helps cultivate σωφροσύνη (wisdom, restraint, modesty) and σύνεση (discretion).

Αn entire book could be written about what has happened in the intervening years, but we will just leave the juxtaposition as it is with Plato standing there next to Snoop Dogg.

The Meaning of Life

For the time being we are expending our energies elsewhere, developing a site dedicated to the ideas of Albert Camus, that great philosopher of the Absurd. He argued that life is essentially meaningless. We beg to disagreed, so we are spending some time now clarifying our critique of Albert Camus' philosophy of the Absurd over at islifeabsurd.wordpress.com

If you have already worked out an answer to the question of the meaning of life, please drop by and let us know what it is. It would be nice if you could save us the trouble of having to find it out for ourselves the hard way.

The Biggest Question

The story is not recent, but it still helps to illustrate the biggest question.

It was a sunny Wednesday morning in San Francisco, at the height of the summer of 1985. Kenneth Baldwin, 28, dressed in his work clothes, got in his blue pickup truck and began the 3-hour drive to the Golden Gate Bridge. He parked the car and strolled along the pedestrian walkway above the river. He stopped at the centre of the bridge. Waiting until he was completely alone and there were no boats on the river below he counted to 10. He lost his nerve. On the second count he lost his nerve again. Finally, the third time, he lept over the handrail.

The bridge is 225 feet above the river. Since it opened, almost 1,300 people have jumped from it. Only 26 survived. Kenneth Baldwin was one of them.

Looking back at the event, Kenneth says that the jump changed everything. Before the jump he says he was utterly self-absorbed – consumed by depression – feeling trapped in a life that seemed worthless. When he regained consciousness on the deck of the boat that rescued him, he says he felt an intense gratitude for life, which has never left him since. “I'm almost a completely different person now. I know now that I'm lucky to be alive. I may have had a crummy day at school [Ken is now a high school teacher], but I have my life.”

Another survivor describes a similar change of outlook: “It's beyond most people's comprehension. Now I appreciate the miracle of life - like watching a bird fly - everything is more meaningful. For the first time I experienced a feeling of unity with all things and with all people.”

These people are both unusual and very ordinary. It is not normal to be depressed and suicidal, but it is normal, in our culture, to live inside a narrow little box where the windows are papered over and on one of the walls is a huge screen showing brighter-than-life images of air-brushed models, and we watch them over and over again and lacerate ourselves. I remember reading an interview with a woman in her 40s on a diet. She was in tears realising that for decades she had put her life on hold, waiting until she was thin before expecting to enjoy being alive – a period of waiting in which her youth had come and gone – a period in which the miracle of life, if it had ever flickered, had been immediately snuffed out.

The really big question is how the myriad petty anxieties can fall away and people can really appreciate the miracle of life beyond the papered-over windows without having to jump from a great height.

Occupying the mind

No criticism of the Occupy Movement intended. Just highlighting the point that there will be no real change until we can occupy something a bit closer to home.

I was pouring milk on my Sugar Puffs at breakfast and had visions of the Honey Monster from those childhood cereal ads. Oh no! So I bang my forehead repeatedly against the kitchen cupboard. It works.

The Monster is gone. So I walk over to the table. To my horror the Scooby Do song starts playing in my head. Shit!

It's not so much that such a large part of my childhood was wasted in front of the telly, it's that I feel my mind has been stolen, or rather invaded, and the enemy has dug in and built elaborate military bases in every cerebral corner, and I can't see any prospect of kicking them out.

I recall the mountaineer Joe Simpson who fell and broke his leg in the Andes and had to drag himself down the mountain for days and only just survived. He described teetering on the brink of a freezing cold death, sliding in and out of consciousness, while hearing Boney M singing "Brown Girl In The Ring" over and over - and he had never even remotely liked Boney M.

That would have been no way to die.

This is no way to live.

Occupying the high street is easy. Occupying my mind is a bit tougher.

When is an egg not an egg?

Answer: When it is a political act.

On the 25 of September 2011 Marina Demetriades took aim at the head of her local member of Parliament (Mr. Othona) with an egg. She did not miss.

This occured in Rethimno, on the island of Crete, during a severe economic downturn. Many people were angry about the failure of the government to keep its promises to protect public services, and angry about the drastic cuts in wages, pensions and rights. On the monring in question Mr. Othona was speaking to a crowd. He had chosen to speak about the importance of the bicycle.

On the 10th of October Marina appeared in court and was sentenced to five months in prison - a sentence that was suspended for three years. The charge in Greek was εξύβριση, which translates as insult or abuse. During the 8-hour trial Mr. Othona did not appear, and the court raised no objection to his failure to appear.

After the incident Marina set up a website to post her defence - a defence that she was not allowed to read out in court. It is a long defence with a long and detailed list of Mr Othona's broken promises, quoting the fine things he had said as an opposition politician, and contrasting them with the recent policies that he was supporting and (as a member of the government) was partly responsible for.

Her blog has attracted a very long list of comments. Reading them, we see that another ugly battle is raging - a hermeneutic battle - a battle to decide how Marina's act is to be read.

What did she do? To her sympathizers she was expressing the collective rage of citizens who were being treated badly by the government and who were being denied a voice in any meaningful democratic process:

"I believe your act expresses a huge part of this downtrodden populus"

"Με την πράξη σου εξέφρασες μεγάλο κομμάτι του ταλαιπωρημένου λαού μας πιστεύω..."

To her opponents her act was childish:

"Citizens acting like impetuous 10-year-olds and 'revolutionary' dreamers..."

"Πολίτες με θυμικό δεκάχρονου και "επαναστατικές" ονειρώξεις. Σας απολαύσαμε από το καλοκαίρι στις πλατείες. Μεγάλο κίνημα, σπουδαία παραγωγή ιδεών. Lifestyle και άγιος ο θεός. Και μετά απορούμε γιά τα χάλια μας."

Or the act represented a rejection of democratic principles and was tantamount to Fascism:

"I disagree with your act and find it clearly Fascistic ... every form of totalitarianism has begun with a denigration of the institutions of democracy and of the people representing it."

"Δεν συμφωνώ με την ενέργεια σου, την οποία βρίσκω καθαρά φασιστική. Σαν ιστορικός θα έπρεπε ίσως να σκεφτείς πως όλοι οι ολοκληρωτισμοί ξεκίνησαν με την απαξίωση των δημοκρατικών θεσμών και των προσώπων αυτών που μέσα από δημοκρατικές διαδικασίες τους αντιπροσωπεύουν."

On the whole, both the sympathisers and the critics see the act as political. By contrast, to the court (if I have understood correctly) the act had no political significance whatsoever. It was simply an act which insulted/abused/attacked another individual (and it was presumably supposed to be irrelevant that the individual in question was a member of the government).

Marina, herself, seems to be troubled by these different readings and is not sure how to interpret her act. Near the end of her home page, after the long defence of her act, she says:

"There is no way I would recommend egg-throwing as a form of social/political opposition. And, to be honest, I don't know how to react when people stop me and congratulate me in Rethimno especially since I have done other things that I consider much more praiseworthy than egg-throwing, although those acts have gone unnoticed."

"Σε καμιά περίπτωση δεν προτείνω την αυγοβολή ως πολιτική στάση και μορφή κοινωνικού αγώνα! Και πραγματικά δεν ξέρω πώς πρέπει να αντιδρώ όταν με σταματάει κόσμος στο Ρέθυμνο και μου δίνει συγχαρητήρια, τη στιγμή που θεωρώ πως έχω κάνει πιο αξιόλογα πράγματα από το να πετάξω ένα αυγό και δεν έτυχαν ανάλογης υποδοχής!"

This hesitancy after such a bold act is surprising, especially in the light of the fact that Marina is a historian. History is a bloody story, and the history of modern Western democracies is no exception. How many were established by a polite and peaceful transfer of power?

Is Fukuyama correct, and does the current status quo represent some great historical end point, beyond which nothing better can be hoped for or fought for?

If this is not the end of history, then there may be one or two revolutions to come before the Earth heats up too much and becomes uninhabitable. It would be nice if those revolutions could be polite and respectful and bloodless, and even eggless and yoghurtless. It would be nice if the oligarchs could be politely persuaded to step down and allow a new form of democracy to flourish. Perhaps they will. It would be nice, for instance, if the bankers could be persuaded to let the whole business of printing and distributing money come under democratic political control. Perhaps they will. It would be nice if the mulitnational corporations and the "markets" would listen attentively to the arguments of the new democrats. Perhaps they will. But the lesson from history is that they probably won't.

Democracy (if it is not to be a smokescreen for oligarchy) needs a public arena in which the most articulate voices from the grass roots can be heard, and in which voices can be given to the forces for change in society. As it stands, that public arena has largely been closed off. Walls have been built with heavy doors guarded by armed men. An interesting comment Marina made in passing was that on the day of the demonstrations she was disappointed to see how reluctant the TV channels were to let any of the demonstrators speak. The floor was given to journalists, politicians and other talking heads who speculated about what the demonstrators might be wanting and what the protests might mean.

When voices are excluded from the democratic process by high walls and doors guarded by armed men, true democrats will feel the historical need to have those doors opened. Of course, we must first ask politely for the people inside to open them and politely persuade the guards to let us in. If they refuse though...

It's like a jungle out there...

The police use pepper spray against peaceful protesters at the University of California.

A history professor at the university made this comment:

"The police officer with the pepper spray, identified as Lt. John Pike of the UC Davis Campus Police, looks utterly nonchalant, for all the world as if he were hosing aphids off a rose bush."

In response to the incident Ira Socol asks the question: "What have we been teaching, in our schools, in our homes, in our churches, in our everyday lives, that has allowed so many completely amoral people to not just be among us, but to rise to positions of responsibility?"

Ira's post is spot on and I have no criticism to make of it, but I can see a risk in the discourse that springs up in reaction to events like this. The problem is when we see only the people involved. In the photo of the pepper spray incident we see the policeman - a campus policeman who obviously spent every working day around the students, and who may have known some of the protesters by name - and we wonder how he could be so insensitive, so inhumane, and we start to think about what was lacking at the schools he went to and in the family he grew up in.

The trees are obvious, but can you see the wood? In this case the wood is the institutions that we live in and that live through us. The police force is one institution. School is another. Arguably, language is a third.

An institution is more than the sum of its parts. When a man puts on a uniform, and a dignitary pins a medal to his chest and puts a pepper spray in his hand, he becomes a different kind of being - a being animated by the institution. At the same time, the institution comes alive in him. Something new, and potentially very ugly, is born.

It makes me think of the Baka tribespeople in central Africa, where from time to time the men disappear into the jungle and then reappear some time later dressed in masks, singing and dancing. To their wives and daughters and sisters and mothers they are no longer familiar relatives. They are the living presence of the spirit of the jungle. The voice of the jungle can be heard in their song.

The policeman is the living presence of the spirit of our jungle. He does not sing, but we can hear the drumming of his truncheon on his perspex shield.

Surely if people are brought up by their families and schools to be nice they would never spray pepper in the faces of protesters? We would like to think so, but Philip Zimbardo's famous Stanford Prison Experiment showed how easy it was to transform otherwise nice students into brutal agents of a totalitarian regime. The experiment had to be abandoned early. Why? Because the students playing the role of prison guards were getting carried away. Carried away by what? By the dark spirit of that particular institutional jungle.

What is clear from Zimbardo's experiment and others is that the darkest institutions take on the ugliest forms of life when they allow their minions to act with impunity. The basic rule is that the people doing the dirty work are not to be held accountable. If I am given a uniform and a pepper spray and told to spray it in the faces of the students, it is also made obvious that I will never be held accountable for my actions (as long as I do what I am told to do). Dark and ugly insitutions - like mobs - thrive on personal irresponsibility.

If we don't change our institutions, the atrocities will continue regardless of how nice people are before they are whisked off to the jungle.

Lady Gaga and the ape

During my TV dinner I just caught a glimpse of Lady Gaga presenting a book of photos (photos of herself - what else?). She mentioned something she had learned. Shame is obselete, she said.

Nietzsche wrote two sentences about the ape in "Thus Spake Zarathustra":

"What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment."

Along with Darwin and Lady Gaga we accept with perfect equanimity the idea that the ape is there at the top of our family tree.

The inability any longer to be ashamed of the ape that still dwells within us is nothing to brag about.

"Alas, the time of the most despicable man has come - the one who is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man."

The Happy Shopper

It seems that some people in rooms adjoining the corridors of power are arguing about the ends of social policy. Two voices can be distinguished. The loudest is arguing that the hard and unambiguous facts of economic growth are the only ones that politicians should pay attention to (although doubtless the policies will need sweetening slightly to stop the riots getting out of hand). The other voice - weaker and unsure of itself - is arguing that happiness should also be the object of good government. Economic growth is a means to an end - it says - and the end is human happiness. And in order to make its point more persuasive it insists that happiness is something that can be measured as accurately as the GDP.

Clearly some of those in the second camp have managed to win the ear of the politicians, and so in the UK a body called the National Statistician has been given the job of framing four questions which will be put to 200,000 Britons once a year to find out how satisfied they are with their lives. Christian Kroll - one of the timid young men involved in the project - insists that the "resulting figures will provide both decision-makers as well as the general public with key information about how we can tackle the most pressing social issues of our time."

The disturbing thing here is that people like Christian Kroll seem to think that this breaks new ground. It doesn't. It simply re-presents the old and dubious polarity of the individual subject with her oh-so subjective feelings and goals and ideas on the one hand, and the hard objective data of economic life on the other.

To remain within that old polarity is to miss so much that is important. Above all, you miss culture. What is in decline in Europe (and this is the real crisis) is not the index of individual happiness. It is the integrity – the vitality – of a culture that could draw people out of their monadic consumerist bubbles and put the economy in its place again. But that would not be good for business, so let’s just stick to tweaking the happiness index.

I'm off to the shops. Maybe that'll make me feel less depressed.

A history lesson in the chicken pen

Too many chickens turned out to be cockerels. There were three of them. Two too many. They had to go. But I put off making a decision until one morning I saw that all three cockerels had somehow forced their way out of the pen and were gathered nearby fighting. The head and neck of the smallest one were covered in blood. Now I knew who would survive.

The nicest survived. The two merciless fighters perished.

I felt then that on our little bit of the hillside social Darwinism had been decisively trashed. The idea that the strong are necessarily in the right is a lie. Strength is not in itself good. It is the opportunity to do good - an opportunity that might be taken or might be missed.

How I prefer to kill

My first thought was to raise the chickens tenderly. I stroked them every day and had a clear idea from the beginning how that stroking would help matters at the end.

When the time came, I was able to gently carry the first chicken to the block. It lay in my arms in complete trust, and it didn't object when I stretched its neck ever so slightly over the wood. Then with the reassuring hand still on its back I brought the sharpened axe down swiftly. With a single blow the head and the bloody stump of the neck fell to earth and I watched the lid of the upturned eye close peacefully.

However, I have since discovered a better way to kill.

The cockerels didn't let me stroke them. They were fighters. Whenever they saw me coming their neck feathers would rise, and they would stand as tall as possible, open their wings and prepare to rush at me angrily. It got to the stage where I could no longer enter the chicken house. I would open the door just enough every day to throw in the grain.

When the time came round again, I was ready with a heavy iron bar in hand and the axe at the ready. I opened the door, jumped back and waited tensely for the attack.

It is not easy to kill a chicken in mid flight with an iron bar. It is a noisy and messy business. The first blow just makes the bird angrier and more determined to attack, and it comes back again lunging at my chest. The squalking becomes more furious, but two or three blows later the bird is on its side on the ground where the axe can finish the job off.

I now maintain that it is better for the chicken to go down fighting.

A meat licence

A suggestion to reduce the level of hypocrisy in society: meat should only be sold to people who hold a licence to buy it. To get that licence they would have to pass a test.

They would have to kill their food themselves - with their hands.

There would need to be lessons. They should definitely not be conducted in school. Young people would meet individually with tutors outdoors in the evening. Tutors who are more like priests than school teachers or butchers. The neophyte would learn how to become an agent of death, and learn how to approach the axe and the block and the animal with all due gravity and respect. And after the killing there would have to be a ceremony to honour the dead.

If we insist on eating meat, let us face up to the killing it involves, make it part of our culture and learn to do it with respect.

The truth about eggs

The statement that meat is murder is a truth that has worn thin with repetition.

A truth less thin is that eggs are also murder.