Five New Things

Sometimes there is no one big thing that happens in a week.  We move forward in incremental ways.  Here are five things that moved me forward in the last seven days.

A Political Change of Scene

At last, Tony Blair has told us that he is going on June 27th.  Hooray, hooray, hooray!  Many people overseas are puzzled that we British dispose of our 'heroes' - Churchill in 1945, Thatcher in 1990 and now Tony Blair - so readily, but we are the ones who have to live under their conviction politics. While history may be kinder to all of them than the electorate, there comes a time when we should have what we want and not what they want for us.

My views on the Blair legacy are being published elsewhere.  It is time to look forward and not back.  Within the next two months, we should have a clear picture of what a Gordon Brown administration would look like.  Despite the irritation expressed in the last posting, I think he is the man for the country and I hope he says and does things that enable me to vote for his team with enthusiasm ... we'll see.

Philosophy Never Stops

I discovered the existentialist thinkers - Kierkegaard, Nietzche, Heidegger and even dear old Sartre - in my late teenage but, instead of growing up and out of them, I kept worrying at what they had to say about the human condition.  I have found nothing better to describe what it is that we are and how we relate to whatever it is that is out there.

So, it was a pleasure to find a book [Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger, London & New York, 2005] that promised to provide the fruits of recent scholarship for the moderately intelligent layman.  It seems that only 50% of the man's complete works have actually been published so there will be future revisions to come, but de Beistegui can inform us of what new can be said as a result of the publication within the last decade of critical works from the 1930s.

Memory

Not really a great book, but not the fault of the author.  Douwe Draaisma's Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older [in English: Cambridge, 2004] is a gallant first attempt at bringing together into one place the basics of what we know about 'autobiographical memory'.  He is an early explorer of uncharted territory.

Like Psi [see below] and the nature of existence, how we remember things is not really susceptible to true scientific investigation.  We have to make do with the scientist prepared to accept that anecdote and forensic investigation are going to be more useful than number-crunching.  Number crunching in life merely stops us from believing untruths but it does not necessarily tell us any truth that really matters.

The book may frustrate but only because it is the first step in a long journey of re-thinking who we are in the light of what is laid down in our brains as truth from memory.  The chapter on holocaust memory alone should change how you think about the possibility of justice and what role chance and necessity play in the performance of evil.  It is definitely worth reading.

Spells and Prayers

The world of neo-paganism fascinates.  As you will have gathered from earlier posts, I tend to see it positively as the re-assertion of ethical and spiritual values against the cold logic of technologism, reason and the market - indeed, of number-crunching.

Do I believe in it myself?  I am too good an existentialist to believe in the literal truth - much as rational man disposed of the literal truth of the Bible a long time ago.  But just as a man may believe in the 'saving grace of jesus christ' at another level beyond reason (the 'mysterium tremendum'), so the moral values of neo-paganism offer a very real solution to at least some of the manifestations of modern social breakdown.  They are worthy of belief and have their own 'mysterium tremendum'.  This thought arose from a simple act of possibly 'useless' (to sceptics) compassion but one that, even if 'useless', is noble - and is not proven not to be useful, as far as I am concerned 

A little girl was kidnapped a few days ago in Portugal.  Rationally nothing can be done but leave it to the Police.  But many people are deeply affected by it and feel they must do what they can.  A man of wealth has offered a substantial reward.  A group of Wiccans simply did what a group of Christians would do - the latter are offering up prayers to God for her safe recovery, the former offered up a long distance project of co-ordinating ritual and psychic energy.   

A sceptic would despise both - but compassion, a virtue well known to Buddhists on Zaadz, shown in this way to one little girl and her family, no matter how 'useless' it may seem, is also a compassion shown to the world at large.  I see little compassion in those trying to pull down edifices of belief with their cold scientific rationalism.

A good intimate Wiccan Forum of extremely nice people with members in the UK and the US can be found at http://www.wiccanmoon.co.uk/   To maintain the balance between faiths, this week saw the 10th Anniversary of the Three Faiths Forum, on whose Advisory Board I once sat.  This pulls Christians, Muslims and Jews together for dialogue - http://www.threefaithsforum.org.uk/   There are an awful lot of decent people out there!

And Good and Bad Writing

I feel quite bad sometimes about my boredom with Henry James and Marcel Proust.  So often, the writing down of every detail of the lives of privileged people seems to cry out for the response to both writer and reader - get a life?

No, give me a rollicking good story which creates pictures in my head.  Give me Guy de Maupassant and Robert Louis Stephenson.

Until next week, toodle-pip from London.