Life is an art project

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher. In the 19th century he predicted that over the next two centuries, the philosophy of nihilism - purposelessness and despair - would take over the western world, leading to an unprecedented level of violence and worldwide war. Obviously, he was correct.

However, Nietzsche only made this prediction so that he could also put forward a way of defeating nihilism…ART.

To be more specific, Nietzsche recommended that the way of defeating nihilism was for each individual to treat his or her life as an ongoing and unfinished work of art. The simple work of “giving style” to ourselves, expressing to the world our “overflowing creativity,” would give us a way to “Say Yes to Life”. This, argued Nietzsche, would stifle nihilistic pessimism.

I like that idea… or at least the idea of that idea.

I’ve created a little piece of Nietzschean/Sartrean art myself… check it out and let me know what you think

The Real Africa

It could be argued that I mostly rehash articles I’ve recently read in Time Magazine whilst stationed at the smallest room in the house - this would contain a semblance of truth.

The sad and sudden death of director Anthony Minghella was marked with an article about the TV movie he had recently completed, an adaptation of the McCall Smith mega book, No1 Ladies Detective Agency.

It raised a few interesting issues with regards to how the west sees Africa.

What is the real Africa? Is it the sunsets and savannahs of Out of Africa (which won Pollack his director’s Oscar)? Is it the chaos and savagery of Hotel Rwanda, Last King of Scotland and Blood Diamond? Or is it the white man’s shame of Cry Freedom and The Constant Gardener? Minghella knew that No. 1 Ladies’ demanded a fresh approach.

Here’s a couple of interesting quotes:

“The books don’t ask, ‘What’s wrong with Africa? What can we fix?’” says Minghella. “They’re about what we can learn from Africa, not what we can teach it.”

“…people in Africa, when asked if they are happy, are more likely to answer yes than people in Europe or the U.S.”

High Anglican Jinks

An unexpectedly interesting morning. A good friend from work had a little girl a few months before I had my little boy, today was her christening. It was a very grand affair, his wife is a teacher at a plush boarding school, with its own massive and impressive chapel. The layout is ala St.Pauls & House of Commons with rows of pews facing each other. The choir processed in followed by the rector (+ henchmen), first up the choir sang a very dramatic a-capella Latin piece which was truly spine tingling. The whole service was very ‘high Anglican’ and I have to say I loved it - ‘uplifting’ i think the word is.

It’s weird to watch myself type that, but the sense of occasion, coming together, community and family was great - if it wasn’t for all the wacko miracle claims, eternal life fetishes and ‘Jesus loves me’ delusions (not sure the Anglicans go in for much of that anyway )

Maybe I’ll become a vicar now that I’ve resigned from my job…. VicarMonkey.

Mark the day - 12345 days old!

Today… i am 12345 days old.

How weird is that?  the only day in my whole life that i checked a web site like this… i find that i’m this amount of days old.

I love things like this… i like when the clock says 12:34 pm etc… so this is a major day for me… gotta do something… i know, i’ll resign from my job.

… seriously i’ve just resigned from my job.

Champagne Cheddar

It amuses me, the things I consider blogging about… to the point where I just have to go ahead and do it. Today’s is about Champagne and cheese.

I heard on the news today that in France they are expanding the area of villages who are allowed by European law to call their sparkling wine, champagne.

Fair enough, but I happen to live a few miles from a little town called Cheddar… how come factories in Waterford, Coleraine, Yorkshire, Kent etc etc are allowed to call their cheese cheddar.

There you go, that was the post… so ‘unrequired’ that it was required.

Irish citizens voting in the UK

Something which recently struck me (which im sure everyone else has thought about at length), that under the Good Friday Agreement anyone born in Northern Ireland can claim Irish Citizenship. Fine by me, but should they still be able to vote in Northern Ireland (UK) elections. Or at least should UK Citizens not be allowed to vote in the Republic of Ireland elections.

I’m missing something obvious arnt i?

Movie LogJam

We’ve got a serious log jam… there are just loads of movies I want to see, which I haven’t. Let me give you a brief list… and you can recommend an order… if you’ve seen them.

Bourne Ultimatum
American Gangster
No country for old men
There will be blood
The lives of others
300
Stardust
National treasure
3:10 to Yuma
Sweeny Todd
Cloverfield
The other Boleyn girl

Jebus: Martyr or Murderer?

‘Murderer’ is over egging an already well egged pudding - but it has a nice controversial rhythm to it. Anyway, let me tell you a story passed down to me for generations (say).

They say Jebus was born miraculously in a small town just north of Cardiff, a thousand years ago during the English occupation. He was a bit of a thinker and philosopher and when he came of age some people started to say he was ‘the one’, god’s messiah.

As he travelled into Cardiff one spring morning crowds gathered to greet him as their saviour, he didn’t do anything to correct their assertions so the rumours grew - as they did quite often in those times. He did a bit of a speaking tour talking about god and hinting that he was their long-awaited messiah, but then things started to go a bit sour.

There had been rumours of wondrous miraculous happenings, so a caravan of the sick and the needy started to follow him around. One day he was on the way to a wedding when some people stopped him and said… about 10 percent of our children die before they reach the age of 2… what can we do about it? But instead of telling them about water purification, antibiotics and general child heath care (which if he was god, he would have of course known) he said… sorry, I’m on the way to a wedding… but you’ll like this… while I’m there I’m gonna take some of that pure water which you need, and then I’m going to turn it in to wine, yazam! We is going to par-tay. The villagers used their god-given rationale and knew that this couldn’t be the actions of a loving god so they continued their messiah search.

It kept happening… one day on the way to a friend’s funeral… a group mothers came to him and said, our children have all died in the last month of an infection, dozens more are sick, they were innocent kids who we loved, if you are god can you be merciful and raise them from the dead? He said… hmmm , nah sorry… but tell you what how’s about I resurrect my mate Lazarus instead. The mothers where less than impressed, especially when he refused to give them any hints as to why infections spread in the first place (which he of course would have known).

The mothers decided that if someone had this kind of power, yet chose not to use it (apart from the odd party trick), and chose to let these innocent children die that it was tantamount to murder, or at least man slaughter, certainly not the actions of a loving god - so they continued their search for a messiah. Jebus wasn’t the one. There were later rumours of a personal resurrection, but he’s conveniently lifted himself up into the clouds to heaven… the mothers rolled their eyes with a chuckle and continued to worship Yahweh like they always had.

But maybe the problem was that their minds where too small to comprehend the wonder of why Jebus was actually god’s son, and if only they had opened their hearts a little more to Jebus they would have believed… as opposed to following the non-related Jesus of Nazareth who WAS of course, the one, as his actions and the evidence is a lot more compelling.
Happy Easter

Le Tournoi

This is the day, this is the day… the day every year that the tax payers on the sceptred isle pay for me to play in an Inter-Research Council football tournament. I love this day.

Last year we went and won the blooming thing… a real underdog story… fluking our way to the final with nothing more than belief, a few hefty tackles and a large chunk of daring do. We then kept ourselves in the final and from 2-0 down fought back to 2-2 then won in on pens. (not unlike Istanbul 2005).
So here I go…the coach leaves at 11.

Update: we did less than well… i’ll leave it at that.

Come fly with me

Guest contributor… David Aaronovitch

Until I was 28, and got my first job in television, neither my family nor I had any money. One result of this relative penury was that, by my mid-20s I had only been in an aeroplane four times: twice in infancy aboard internal flights in the Socialist Republic of Bulgaria, and then by Vickers Vanguard return to Lyons at the age of 13. That was it. Every other trip abroad or at home was by train and ferry or Bedford Dormobile. I didn’t cross the Atlantic till I was 27.

It is, then, with something more than jaundice, that I read the words of those who have, since their youngest days, left microscopic traces of their privileged DNA in airports on all continents, but who now rail against the “hypermobility” of others. Hypermobility - the capacity of millions of people to move around the world - we are told, destroys communities, weakens social bonds, creates pollution and threatens environments. “The business plan [for air travel expansion] cannot be faulted,” says George Monbiot. “The more hellish our lives become, the more we seek to escape from them.” Who has never been on holiday to, say, a Greek island for any reason other than a need to flee from Hades? What bloody condescension!

The relatively rich have always travelled - first by coach and boat, then by car and plane. Hypermobility is the fancy name for when the not-so-rich can travel as much as the rich used to. Mine has opened the world to me: Cairo, Colorado, Berlin, Beijing, Dublin, Rio and Bombay. And I have loved being in all these places. For others it might be Skiathos, Ljubljana and New York for work. Naturally most - since their time is limited - want to travel by air, and so we require more and larger airports and a greater number of flights.

READ MORE…

Everybody needs good neighbours

We had an interesting caller last night. It was a Canadian guy who was doing a Post-Grad on something or other and wanted to interview everyone in our street, to see how we interact and what kind of community we have.

He had set up his credentials well by putting a letter through everyone’s door last week introducing ourselves giving us time to check him out if we wanted it. When he came to the door he was very affable so we gave him ten minutes of our time.

The questions were all along the line of … is there any noise pollution? Do you feel safe? How are the amenities? The embarrassing one was, here’s a map of your street can you point out the houses were you know someone and rank them as friend or acquaintance. In truth I only know the name of my immediate neighbours and haven’t really spoken to anyone else. Quite sad really - but not unusual I guess (notwithstanding the cup-o-sugar lady).

Funnily though when I was getting into my car this morning the guy from two doors down give me a rousing ‘GOOD MORNING’, I reciprocated in kind, both of us probably feeling bad about our lack of community - maybe good will come of it.

The really sad thing is, all the way through the questionnaire I kept expecting him to say “so have you ever thought about double glazing”? Or “have you ever thought about what happens when you die?” Very cynical am I.

The Algebraic god

To early man, the sun rises from its hollow in the ground, processes over his head before submerging into the earth in the other direction. The wind randomly gathers and calms to power his fishing boat to feed his children. Flowers and vegetables emerge magically from the soil every spring bringing with it nurturing life and sustenance. All tempered by the random terror of earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes.

Not only where there unknown unknowns like nuclear physics, but there were lots of known unknowns such as basic anatomy, circulation and respiratory as well as the ins and outs of animal and human reproduction - the miracle of life itself.

How did we as a species, summon the courage to even leave the cave never mind to survive and thrive? I read a book some years ago now, by the anthropologist Pascal Boyer - I don’t think it would be too much hyperbole to say that it was a turning point. It is called ‘Religion Explained’ and I read it to learn more about how ‘other’ religions emerged. The can of worms was probably open before I read it, but this book spilled them out all over the floor.

He riffs on the idea that ‘Blind Faith’ is a healthy and natural human phenomenon. It’s perfectly acceptable and desirable that before Galileo worked out how earth isn’t the centre of things, and in fact the earth rotates around the sun… that people had to just have faith that the sun would rise every day (some still did a morning dance just in case). They had no tools or knowledge to rationally determine how or why it would. They had to make some assumptions just to get on with the business of living. It’s completely helpful and normal to see it as a mystically defined ‘black box’ or even personify it as a deity.

The point is I suppose that this is blind faith, and it’s ok, and in fact helpful. The Greeks gave names to the black boxes (Aphrodite, Apollo, Thor, and Zeus). The problem surely comes when after a few generations people start to take these gods too literally, develop dogmas and then when a bright mind inquires how the stars fit in the sky - people call him a heretic for daring to deny the authority of Apollo.

Likewise Adam and Eve is a perfectly helpful algebraic black box until it causes people to
limit their investigations into the origins of man. The ‘universe instigator’ god is helpfully algebraic until it colours our investigations into universal origins.

Perhaps the unhelpful kind of faith is that which allows for acceptance of supernatural claims based on less than convincing evidence rather than the kind that helped Newton explain the natural world. It’s the kind of faith which a makes a suicide bomber believe that he communicates intimately with a loving Allah or for a Christian who lives his life in the light the resurrection and virgin birth of Jesus, not because he is necessarily convinced by the evidence but because he has faith in the dogma.

I don’t see this kind of faith as a virtue; it’s not blind faith, its blinding faith.

Credit where it’s due

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.  - William James  

It’s a difficult thing, but I have more respect for commentators, bloggers, politicians and pub philosophers who can step back some times and find something good to say about the person, country, party, tribe they usually disparage.

I’m not saying that we need to look at Hitler and say, well he built good roads (though he did), but we need to be able to see that people aren’t caricatures and by and large are just trying to do the right thing as they see it. Here’s a couple of obvious ones in the news at the moment (QM with his finger on the zeitgeist!)

A while ago when all the chat about whether or not Prince Harry should go to Iraq a number of commentators (not mentioning names… Guardian CIF!) waxed lyrical about how the rich and privileged never send their kids to war and what a rouse and public relations stunt it was to suggest that he was ever going to go. Skip forward 3-4 months and these same people are talking about how selfish it is for him to go, and sneering at him ‘playing soldiers’ and gung-ho bombing of Afgans etc. My respect drains from these people, it’s easy to find a job as a professional cynic these days.

The other one is President Bush’s African Legacy. I’m on board with the “GWB is/was a disaster of a pres” narrative. But, it is undeniable (read Geldof is Time this week) that his contribution to the plight of Africa has been greater than any president before him… and in fact there’s a reasonable argument that his contribution has and will lead to millions and millions of lives being changed and saved…which, it could be argued, dwarfs the legacy of his aggression abroad and right wing agenda at home. It sticks in the thoat of those who dispise him (most people!) but it doesnt mean it shouldnt be said.

In this information overload of an age are we now incapable of understanding nuance? Is all we want to be told… This person is the devil incarnate!! And this person is a magnificent saviour!! Questions questions questions…