Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Nearer my God to Thee: Designer Coffins
Of course, religion is an insurance policy. The amount you invest in praying and hymning, builds your deposit account in the Bank of the Supreme Being. It may, on the other hand, merely be an opiate to stop you worrying about the hereafter. Hearing the innumerable churches in full flood, around the house in Accra on a Sunday, seems to confirm these dual possibilities. For example, I passed a church the other day on the Spintex Road and there were probably a thousand plus supplicants, writhing and swaying and halleluiahing as the preacher whipped them into a frenzied delirium of worshipfulness. In Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby there is the cutting line, “The rich get richer and the poor get children”. In Christian evangelicalism the preacher gets rich and the poor get robbed blind. From the outside it seems hardly different from the ecstasy induced trances of the clubs in the land I left behind but at least there soul refers to a species of music and not part of a higher purchase agreement..
Further on I passed a broken down tro tro (a cross between a bus and a taxi) with the immortal (literally) words emblazoned on its back, “God has the Power.” He certainly had - and He wasn’t going to reconnect it in that vehicle! In the face of every kind of personal or public disaster, faith affirms that God is good and Jesus saves. The sole survivor from a crash in Thursday’s paper extolled God’s mercy, making no mention of His harsh judgment on the victims who didn’t make it.
Getting to heaven is BIG. The Biggest. And how you get there matters to many a worshipper. Along the same road there is a coffin maker. His current offering is a fish shaped box – for someone who was a fish monger or a fisherman. He makes screwdriver shaped receptacles for electricians, chicken shaped for egg producers and taxi shapes for the tro tro men. You die in a trade and there’s a bespoke chariot waiting to whisk you away.
So when I depart this mortal coil, it may be in Ghana and it may be in an agnostic-shaped construction of wood. The problem for the coffin-maker will be to create the perfect zen paradox. All the sound and fury of one Jack Sanger which actually signified – nothing!
Labels: Religion. Coffins. Heaven.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Dark Matter: Dark Energy
I, like many a philosopher I’ve read, seem to have the flimsiest grip on reality when it actually comes down to it. Part of me exists somewhat awkwardly in the world of matter and part of me seems to get lost in labyrinths of thought. I’ve always wanted to know why things work. It began when I was about five and started taking to pieces anything that my parents decided did no longer work. In time I took apart clocks, starter motors, locks, air guns and the like. My parents’ joke was that I was ‘mending’ them. The irony in this was that I rarely made anything work by my investigations. On the other hand, I learnt basics about how things operate in this every day world of matter. I cast light on what had been dark. Much of it was pretty basic. Children often throw things against the wall or beat them with a heavy object, just to see what comes out. Removing the skin of a golf ball with a knife led me to discover that inside it was a mysterious liquid sachet, wrapped round with fine rubber banding. I conjectured that the liquid was acid. I used fire to make different coloured flames; or to heat a soldering iron so that I could melt and fix a hole in a plastic ball; or I made my own lead weights for fishing, or pellets for my air gun.
In short, the child’s view is that if you don’t understand something, take it apart. If you don’t have the tools or nous to do this elegantly, then you smash it to hell and back with something blunt.
The CERN experiment involves the Large Hadron Collider which will propel protons towards each other at nearly the speed of light around a 27 kilometre underground race track. Scientists seem to be just like I was in my childhood.. They can’t take these invisible mysteries and unlock them elegantly so they bash them around to see what happens.
It appears that they believe the vastness of the universe is inhabited mostly by dark energy and some of it by dark matter. The fraction left over is the stuff we regard as normal physical reality. They want to make all the darkness visible. It’s a model quite close to the one I developed when I began reading Zen, at the age of 12 and which accounted for my own existence. The body is physical matter, the mind is mysterious dark matter and death results in dark energy being released back into the pool of Jungian universality.
I might, like some 19th century biologist, have taken a human being apart to see what made it tick or have beaten it about to see what emanated from the collisions but my dark matter contained something called a moral conscience and so that route was, fortunately, barred. So here I am, scratching for meaning, banging my neurons together with little sense resulting. I hope the child scientists at CERN are doing somewhat better.
I, like many a philosopher I’ve read, seem to have the flimsiest grip on reality when it actually comes down to it. Part of me exists somewhat awkwardly in the world of matter and part of me seems to get lost in labyrinths of thought. I’ve always wanted to know why things work. It began when I was about five and started taking to pieces anything that my parents decided did no longer work. In time I took apart clocks, starter motors, locks, air guns and the like. My parents’ joke was that I was ‘mending’ them. The irony in this was that I rarely made anything work by my investigations. On the other hand, I learnt basics about how things operate in this every day world of matter. I cast light on what had been dark. Much of it was pretty basic. Children often throw things against the wall or beat them with a heavy object, just to see what comes out. Removing the skin of a golf ball with a knife led me to discover that inside it was a mysterious liquid sachet, wrapped round with fine rubber banding. I conjectured that the liquid was acid. I used fire to make different coloured flames; or to heat a soldering iron so that I could melt and fix a hole in a plastic ball; or I made my own lead weights for fishing, or pellets for my air gun.
In short, the child’s view is that if you don’t understand something, take it apart. If you don’t have the tools or nous to do this elegantly, then you smash it to hell and back with something blunt.
The CERN experiment involves the Large Hadron Collider which will propel protons towards each other at nearly the speed of light around a 27 kilometre underground race track. Scientists seem to be just like I was in my childhood.. They can’t take these invisible mysteries and unlock them elegantly so they bash them around to see what happens.
It appears that they believe the vastness of the universe is inhabited mostly by dark energy and some of it by dark matter. The fraction left over is the stuff we regard as normal physical reality. They want to make all the darkness visible. It’s a model quite close to the one I developed when I began reading Zen, at the age of 12 and which accounted for my own existence. The body is physical matter, the mind is mysterious dark matter and death results in dark energy being released back into the pool of Jungian universality.
I might, like some 19th century biologist, have taken a human being apart to see what made it tick or have beaten it about to see what emanated from the collisions but my dark matter contained something called a moral conscience and so that route was, fortunately, barred. So here I am, scratching for meaning, banging my neurons together with little sense resulting. I hope the child scientists at CERN are doing somewhat better.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Kevin Keagan : death by hierarchy
If you go back a year and ferret around you will find that I support Newcastle United and have done since I was very young. There was a time when I was taken to football matches in a three wheeler Reliant by two Burma veterans! We used to stop off in a dingy bar near the ground while they supped their ale and passed offensive comments on all and sundry. The unaccompanied women in the bar were ‘scrubbers’, the bar staff were ‘lazy teds’ and the city was an 'effing dustbin'. The fact that their wrists and ankles had been eroded from their diet during their incarceration by the Japanese and gave constant pain, didn’t lessen my youthful embarrassment. Their comments on the Newcastle Board of Directors were unprintable. Since Len Shackleton’s famous blank page, under the chapter, “What Club Directors know about football”, I seem to have survived so many upheavals in the stewardship of my club. None of these has been remotely tolerable to someone who makes his living helping sort out organisational management, never mind your average supporter who’d prefer to focus entirely on the black and white stripes.
The latest debacle (for those of you who know nothing about the case) involves the likely constructive dismissal of Kevin Keagan, a pied piper of a club manager for Newcastle fans. The new owners set up a continental-style hierarchy to run the club, above him. Usually, in UK football, the manager does everything from hiring and firing to media communications and, most importantly, the coaching. Keagan says he was promised that he would have the final say on hiring and firing players. Indeed, there is much documented evidence that this was the original agreement, from the mouths of the said hierarchy via the club website. But, over time, they reneged on his powers until he felt so strait-jacketed that he resigned.
My business brain says that the principle that the owner, Mike Ashley, wanted introducing is not such a bad thing. The question revolves around whether the manager has the final say on which footballers enter and leave the club. Good, sensitive communication would make the manager feel good, while taking much of the work off his shoulders. It appears that Keagan felt that this was a possible scenario. Then the hierarchy bought a couple of players without him even having heard of them and didn’t buy players he wanted – in those positions that the team was terribly weak. So, he didn’t have the promised strengthening of his team’s profile.
Meanwhile, writers for The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and Sky News presenters ran a line that Keagan is a ‘walker’. That is, that if the going gets tough, he is a coward and leaves. They pointed to the fact that he has left other jobs, including the England job – which, he said, was beyond his capabilities. In the world of organisational management, he is a gem. How many managers can you think of, that decide they are not up to the demands of the job and step down a rung? They should be able to do it with equanimity. Otherwise the Peter Principle prevails – that every one of us will eventually rise to a position in which we find ourselves incompetent. Poor honest Kevin.
My two, now dead, guardians in their Reliant Robin would have had a field day this last week. I can hear them mouthing off about Newcastle being sold to a mafia of effin’ southerners and at least the effin’ Board used to be effin’ Geordie sh**s.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Jolly Hockey Sticks
Enid Blyton was recently voted the UK’s most loved author by some literary pole or other. I must have been about eight or nine when I moved on from the Famous Five and the ‘Adventure’ series. Living in a council house in a village in the mining districts of south Durham, I suppose the books represented a safe escape from those restrictive circumstances. But they also contained an element of the exotic for they described a tribe beyond my comprehension. It was an early introduction to social anthropology, if you like. They had their own, distinctive mores, a freedom from adult intervention and a lingo that seemed both of my world and not in the sense that I got the drift but not the nuance. I can’t honestly remember to what degree they used words like spiffing, wizard and jolly hockey sticks but, even if these outbursts of pleasurable excitement never actually appeared on the page, they existed between the lines.
On the BBC’s science web site today, reference is made to the recent triangulation of whole sets of data regarding global warming. The initial hypothesis, in 1998, based somewhat on tree-ring theory, suggested that after a thousand or more years of steady state (the handle of the hockey stick) there was an abnormal recent upsurge of global temperature (the bit that hits the puck). Scientists who owed their living to either the US Government or the vested interests that drove that government, sought to discredit the hockey stick hypothesis, even demanding disclosure of scientists’ bank accounts, thus insinuating that the hockey stick was paid for by a conspiracy of loony, renegade lefties. Bush made speeches of denial and all the US industries that poured toxic gases into the atmosphere gave more funding to the Republican Party – and any research that would take the hockey stick out of the global picture.
Denial is something humans are rather good at. At one extreme it can make us noble and heroic in appalling circumstances but at the other it can make us greedy, uncaring and dangerous. The thousands of senior managers and the millions of workers in dirty industries, who owe their living to Government patronage, take their wages without protest, even as they deny to themselves that the work they are doing has the potential to make their children’s and grandchildren’s futures a rabid misery. And even those of us who are not quite so obviously morally unclean deny that we are culpable, even as we put technology on standby or leave the tap running as we clean our teeth or run the car a half mile to the shops.
Thus it is that Enid Blyton is our favourite author. Her hockey stick is jolly and innocent. Her world is environmentally perfect, a pleasure ground for young adventurers. Reading her books amounts to entering a nirvana of denial.
Enid Blyton was recently voted the UK’s most loved author by some literary pole or other. I must have been about eight or nine when I moved on from the Famous Five and the ‘Adventure’ series. Living in a council house in a village in the mining districts of south Durham, I suppose the books represented a safe escape from those restrictive circumstances. But they also contained an element of the exotic for they described a tribe beyond my comprehension. It was an early introduction to social anthropology, if you like. They had their own, distinctive mores, a freedom from adult intervention and a lingo that seemed both of my world and not in the sense that I got the drift but not the nuance. I can’t honestly remember to what degree they used words like spiffing, wizard and jolly hockey sticks but, even if these outbursts of pleasurable excitement never actually appeared on the page, they existed between the lines.
On the BBC’s science web site today, reference is made to the recent triangulation of whole sets of data regarding global warming. The initial hypothesis, in 1998, based somewhat on tree-ring theory, suggested that after a thousand or more years of steady state (the handle of the hockey stick) there was an abnormal recent upsurge of global temperature (the bit that hits the puck). Scientists who owed their living to either the US Government or the vested interests that drove that government, sought to discredit the hockey stick hypothesis, even demanding disclosure of scientists’ bank accounts, thus insinuating that the hockey stick was paid for by a conspiracy of loony, renegade lefties. Bush made speeches of denial and all the US industries that poured toxic gases into the atmosphere gave more funding to the Republican Party – and any research that would take the hockey stick out of the global picture.
Denial is something humans are rather good at. At one extreme it can make us noble and heroic in appalling circumstances but at the other it can make us greedy, uncaring and dangerous. The thousands of senior managers and the millions of workers in dirty industries, who owe their living to Government patronage, take their wages without protest, even as they deny to themselves that the work they are doing has the potential to make their children’s and grandchildren’s futures a rabid misery. And even those of us who are not quite so obviously morally unclean deny that we are culpable, even as we put technology on standby or leave the tap running as we clean our teeth or run the car a half mile to the shops.
Thus it is that Enid Blyton is our favourite author. Her hockey stick is jolly and innocent. Her world is environmentally perfect, a pleasure ground for young adventurers. Reading her books amounts to entering a nirvana of denial.
Labels: Enid Blyton. Global warming. Denial. Hockey stick hypothesis.