How vegan is vegan?

These thoughts have been coalescing in my mind for the past year or two. One of the reasons that I have not until now committed fingertips to keyboard keys is that the ideas seem to me to be somewhat obsessive. However, a recent unpleasant experience of what should have been an unremarkable meal, albeit kindly prepared and served with enthusiasm and goodwill, resulted in a bad stomach for several weeks. I was hurt because someone got some things badly wrong. My way of coping has been to commit my obsessions to print.

When I first encountered the term 'vegan' early in 1981, I assumed that most people already knew what the term meant. However, having travelled widely throughout western Europe; around Florida, to DC, Manhattan, Boston and Chicago; around Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and BC; and to Tokyo, Kyoto and Nara, I have come to accept that, the world over, the term 'vegan', even in locations where it is known at all, is unfamiliar to the overwhelming majority of people. Moreover, not all people who have encountered the term understand its meaning. Further, few people who are familiar with the term understand it other than as a broad concept.

There are probably many reasons why the term 'vegan', and its equivalents in other languages (vegetalien, veganisch) is barely known, although the broad concept is simple and has a religious pedigree stretching back millennia. Probably the most important reason why the term is neither known nor understood is that few people consciously adopt a vegan diet. However, an other reason for this lack of understanding is variation in the use of the word, both by people who are not vegan, and by people who are vegan. My particular variation is that, confronted with the unarticulated uncertainty of shop, restaurant or hotel staff, I typically qualify what I write or say about myself: that I am 'strictly vegan'. Although relative to the weak understanding of most people the qualification 'strictly' it ought to be a tautology, my intention is to imply a tighter set of standards than merely 'vegan'. One of my friends who is vegan conforms to looser vegan standards than me.

There is also variation in the way food and medication manufacturers use the term 'vegan'. For example, are all food manufacturers certain that the sugar that they add to sweeten a confection or a bottled sauce that is labelled 'suitable for vegans' has been refined without the use of animal-derived charcoal? In contrast, some food manufacturers avoid using the term 'vegan' in circumstances about which some or many vegans might otherwise be comfortable, which can be almost as unhelpful. Examples of the latter include the brewery Bateman's not labelling a bottled beer as suitable for vegans because of the animal-derivation of the glue on the bottle label (I am with Bateman's on that); and one of the vegan paté manufacturers not labelling their paté as suitable for vegans because of being required by the Health & Safety Executive to use rat poison around their factory (whilst I use humane mouse traps at home, I am less clear that an entire food-production environment needs to be vegan - but then I would say that, as I live with two people who are vegetarian).

A second complicating factor is that people get distracted by other issues that use terms such as 'vegetarian', 'organic' and 'cruelty-free'. In the UK, almost any food product that is labelled 'vegan' or 'suitable for vegans' is also labelled 'vegetarian' or 'suitable for vegetarians'. The logical, if incorrect, implication of this dual labeling is that a product that is vegan might not be vegetarian. However, my assumption is that food manufacturers believe that few people who are merely vegetarian are sufficiently well informed about a vegan diet / lifestyle to be confident that a food labelled as vegan necessarily means that the food is vegetarian.

UK Government discussions a few years ago with representatives from across the food and hospitality industries revealed alarming variation in use of the term 'vegetarian'. Whilst those discussions concluded that the term 'vegan' is more tightly defined than the term 'vegetarian', the implied definition of 'vegan' is much weaker (less strict) than my own use expectations of the term.

In response, I have, on many occasions, considered creating a vegan scale, ranging, say from 1 to 10, with clear definitions regarding each point on the scale, 1 being a minimum set of standards, and 10 being much tighter. (Sophistications of this scale might also include 0 for (lacto-ovo) vegetarian and minus numbers for animal-eating.) Two important difficulties presented themselves. First, that whilst there is sense in the idea of something being more vegan or less vegan, there are different ways in which something can be more vegan or less vegan - the issue is not simply linear, but multi-dimensional. Second, inviting widespread adoption of a numbered (or letter-coded) scale, particularly amongst sceptical groups such as food manufacturers, food retailers and the hospitality industry, could be like trying to invite unyeasted bread to rise.

Instead, I have collated a set of fairly transparent terms that can be used with relative ease by vegan people and non-vegan people alike.

Non-vegan terms
Cannibal: a person who eats parts of other people.
Carnivore: a person who eats animal, particularly mammal, flesh; an animal that eats other animals.
Omnivore: a person who eats anything, including animal flesh; an animal that eats vegetation and other animals such as insects, birds' eggs, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, small mammals, carrion.
Pescatarian: a person who eats a variety of foods, is unlikely to be concerned about consuming animal-flesh-derivatives, but the principal animal flesh consumed is from fish / shell-fish.
Meat-free: food that does not contain animal flesh, but might contain animal-flesh derivatives
Vegetarian / suitable for vegetarians: food unlikely to be based on animal flesh, although the variation in what is excluded is alarmingly wide - some restaurateurs include animal flesh from fish / shell-fish, and it is a commonplace in some countries to consider stock made from animal flesh to be acceptable.
Lacto-ovo vegetarian: a person who eats a variety of foods, including birds' eggs and mammary-gland fluids, but excluding animal flesh. Lacto-ovo vegetarians may or may not be concerned about the presence of animal-flesh derivatives in their food.
Lacto-vegetarian (Indian vegetarian): eats a variety of foods, including mammary-gland fluids, but excluding animal flesh and bird's eggs. Lacto-vegetarians may or may not be concerned about the presence of animal-flesh derivatives in their food.

Sub-vegan terms
Animal-free
Pure vegetarian: although British Airways use this term in preference to vegan (I do not know why), I understand that in India the term can include the use of dairy products

Vegan terms
I propose the abandonment of the term vegan to refer to a person. Instead, the term should be used as an adjective, like the term Kosher. To emphasise this point, I propose the adoption of a new general designation: vegan standard. This could be abbreviated to VS.
Vegan standard ingredients: the (main) ingredients are not animals-derived (this is not watertight because, whereas in the UK neither honey nor casein, both being animal-derived, are widely considered not to be vegan, in the US the situation is not as resolved).
Vegan standard additives and processing: nothing that has gone into the production of the food or meal is animal-derived, and every aspect has been checked (for example, if the food has been sweetened with sugar then the sugar is certified as vegan; this term does address the issue of UK beer being fined with fish guts).
Vegan standard handling: care has been taken to eliminate cross-contamination with non-vegan and sub-vegan food (for example, vegan food that is stored, prepared and served in a separate place, using separate utensils and crockery (analogous to the definition of Kosher; in factories, vegan food is never processed on lines that may also be used for non-vegan food).
Vegan standard environment: no aspect of the food production or preparation could be compromised (which is why, when I have a meal out, I prefer to eat in a vegan restaurant). In this context, the term 'cruelty-free' is important regarding medications, cosmetics and hygiene products (such as soap, toothpaste and washing powder)

This posting is not finished. Once I have completed it, I intend to move it to my website, as I should welcome some serious debate (particularly from vegans) on the issues.

Kaos (2): response and review

Superb. A masterpiece. A masterclass in arthouse movie making.

(There is so much to write that it will take me weeks to construct this weblog posting.)

Kaos is the name the Taviani brothers gave to this movie homage to the writings of Luigi Pirandello, partly because a corruption of the word is the name of the place where Pirandello was born, partly because chaos is what Pirandello feared: the void, the abyss, nothingness, desolation. The movie exudes nothingness in which the characters and actions exist. The nothingness is as tangible as the stones in the barren fields, and the rock on which the houses precariously perch. The roaring silence and blank canvas give a perspective that is almost intolerable in the twenty-first century. People are leaving for the United States every week because of the grinding poverty and the emptyness.

The movie is made up of several short stories, linked by landscape and culture. Reading some of Pirandello's short stories, it is easy to recognise that the Taviani brothers have translated them well from page to screen. The movie starts with a prologue that makes little cognitive sense, but introduces themes important to the movie, such as landscape, human purpose, narrative, the brutality of life, transcendence. The crow of this prologue, a bell round its neck, flies over the landscape between stories, providing a visual and auditory connection between episodes. The movie ends with a Pirandello short story about being called home to talk to his long-dead mother.

Little happens in any of the stories: Kaos is not an action movie. Neither is it a drama, or any other obvious and popular genre. However, tension does find resolution. Kaos reminds me of Tarkovsky's Stalker, and Kurosawa's Rashamon. The style of acting does not belong to Hollywood, it is much more theatrical (like Fiddler on the Roof), which seems fitting as Pirandello is best known as a playwright.

Kaos (1): in anticipation

Kaos, produced and directed by the Taviani brothers, was released onto the theatrical art-house movie circuit in 1984. It was screened at the Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, UK, in 1985, the single occasion when I watched the movie. It left such a deep and lasting impression that I have been searching for a copy of the movie since I bought my television and VCR in 1992. Over the years I have come across several copies of the VHS video for sale, but they have been in US television format (why does the US have to set every standard differently from the rest of the world? - for another posting) and extremely expensive. Being dogged, I have persisted in checking every few months (since about 1995) to discover whether any movie distribution companies had released Kaos for the British / European market, initially on VHS and more recently on DVD. Cliche warning: imagine my surprise a couple of weeks ago when a soon-to-be-released DVD suddenly appeared on the lists of several DVD suppliers. I was so taken aback that I wondered whether it was a scam. My copy was sent from White Rock, Arkansas, US. Excited to receive it as a child with a new toy, I shall watch it this evening.

In telling my story to people I know, few seem as surprised as I am not that the movie should be released on DVD, but that in the face of steadfast evidence to the contrary, I should continue to stand sentinel for the release of this movie on DVD. Thirteen years is a long time to wait. Only a few people know that I waited a long time for Godfrey Regio's Koyaanisqatsi trilogy to be released on DVD. Even fewer know that I am still waiting for Steppenwolf (based on the novel by Hermann Hesse) and Le Grandes Meulnes (based on the novel by Alain Fournier) to be released on DVD. In telling my story, I am saying something important about who I am.

Instead, what almost everyone I have told has focused on is how I shall react watching a movie for only the second time in 23 years, and in particular a movie I have built up in my mind as being so special that it was worth checking the listings of newly-released videos every few months. In part, I have felt mildly irritated that the focus of my story, about dogged, optimistic persistence, has been dismissed and replaced with a focus on whether the movie will live up to my expectations. In part, I have felt disappointed that the people who I have told (all British) assume that I may feel disappointed with the movie. I have also felt a little sad that no-one much has expressed any interest in watching the movie - I know only one or two people who come anywhere near matching my movie taste.

What will it be like? There are scenes and aspects from the movie that I recall vividly: bandits playing boules with the severed heads of their victims; a man howling at moon as he believes he is transformed into a werewolf; an urn-mender who realises that he is trapped in the urn he has just mended; the absence of someone who has recently died. The movie works at a visceral level that I would term expressionist. The issues addressed are profound and concern existence, and I would term this existentialist. The movies that I know which address such issues belong to such directors as Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and Peter Greenaway.

What will it be like? I shall watch the movie with a more experienced eye, mind and heart than before. Half my life has passed since I first watched the movie. I have changed in many ways, and expect that the movie, as though a mirror, will reflect an image of my young adult self. Will the middle-aged adult I have become respond to and appreciate the movie as fully as the young adult I was? Who knows? I shall have to find out, and accept what I experience.

What will it be like? I have written elsewhere about having an interest only in those movies that are worth watching at least several times. I trust that Kaos is a movie so rich in difficult ideas that I shall watch it many times. I already know that its initial heady flavours of wormwood and jasmine, citrus and woodsmoke, give way to a complex aftertaste that lingers for decades. I am looking forward to seeing masters of cinema at work.

That's another fine weblog you've got me into

A new weblog, Kind Vices, has been set up for me and my colleagues at work. Its address is:

http://myblogs.sunderland.ac.uk/blogs/kindvices/

Who knows what opportunities it will offer. I hope that my colleagues will be willing to use it, not least because I do not have experience of a team weblog (Sound Signs is for my family)

My first posting there, as usual, is about weblogs. This seems to have become a standard way for me to begin. ("I shall begin at the beginning" said Alice.) I am aware of how much I have come to understand since I first began weblogging: one of my initial purposes. I also enjoy the way in which I weblog.

Antibiotic resistance: culprit identified

A news story supplied by Reuters at:

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/47795/story.htm

highlights the danger to human health perpetrated by the dairy industry.

In a nutshell, the antibiotics that are fed to cows remain active in bovine manure. Germs and microbes in the soil become resistant to the antibiotics. As a result, the current array of antibiotics becomes progressively less effective. In the United States, during 2005, 19,000 people died of MRSA. In the UK, MRSA has been instrumental in testing to breaking point the effectiveness of the National Health Service and the credibility of the government.

Were the dairy industry to be wound down, the rate at which antibiotic-resistant germs evolve will slow down.

Geology versus new creationism

I recently received the following e-mail. The e-mail was unsolicited, from someone who does not know me and about whom I know nothing. No explanation was offered as to the reason why the e-mail was being sent to me, nor what prompted its dispatch.

***

Hello,

I wish to inform you that the so-called "biblical calculations" of the age of the Earth at 6009 years old is grossly inaccurate and compiled by dubious scholars. The bible's literal time frame allows perfectly for a very old world.

Very few people realize that the creation of the cosmos and the reordering of the world in seven days are two different events. Genesis 1:2 should actually be translated "the earth became formless and void," not "the earth was formless and void." The author of Genesis did not have all the different states of being in the past tense that we do today. English has evolved such that we have "was," "had been," "were being," "became," "had become," "were becoming." Moses (assuming his was the author) used the same word, sometimes rendered "was", sometimes rendered "became."

The creation of the world is Genesis 1:1. It was written very tersely and briefly; Moses, insprired by God, felt no need to get into detail about it. There was a fall in this created world, and it descended into chaos in 1:2 (we don't know exactly what caused the fall, but it may indeed have been Lucifer's (Satan's) rebellion against God). The seven days, which many people inproperly refer to as "the Creation," was God's restoration of the world into what we know it as, with plants and animals, periods of the Sun and Moon, humankind etc.

Thus there is an indefinite time specified between the Creation and the restoration of six days. The harmonists that try to argue that God may have created the world to appear old in every way against science to test our faith should stop wasting their time. The need look no further than Genesis 1:1-2 to see that God created the world an unspecified time before the six days of restoration. If today's science says the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, which they have to in order for Darwinian evolution to have had enough time, then that massive amount of time in human terms would be mostly before the 6 days of restoration.

Lastly, this doesn't mean that from restoration onward there have been 6009 years. (By the way, the 6009 years was counted many years ago, so it should be several decades higher now.) This time frame was mostly derived from adding the years of Adam to Abraham, Abraham to Jacob, Jacob to Jesus to attain the years of the ancient world. As recorded by Matthew, often unimportant generations are skipped. He wrote in three sets of 14 generations. However, comparing it to Luke's astonishingly historically accurate gospel, we realize that Matthew indeed skipped generations unimportant to achieve his literary form of 3 times 14 (Luke skipped one or two from Matthew's as well). This is fine, because "son of" actually is considered to be "descendant of," as in Jesus the Son of Adam or Jesus the Son of David. In sum, don't use archeaology's established views of 10000 years of human civilization to disprove the 6000 years in the bible that some oddball scholars decided to enumerate.

Thanks.

***

I can only imagine that the person, whose e-mail address suggested that the author is based in western Canada (a gorgeous part of the world that I look forward to returning to some day), has read some of my weblog postings in which I include minor geological references.

I studied geology for three years at university, and recently read the history of the drawing of the first geological map of Great Britain. I live on the site of a Victorian coal mine. I take an interest in geology wherever I go, including examining the stone facias of buildings, and (much to the resigned boredom of my wife and daughter) watch every geology programme that is broadcast on UK television (including the repeats). I am fascinated with the European, Russian, Japanese and American space programmes, closely following each mission on the internet (and for recreation, using Google Earth, I sometimes locate the International Space Station), because I have an interest in lunar and planetary geology.

The Big Bang occurred 13,700 million years ago, creating the universe and all matter within it. Red shift in the spectra of the most distant objects, and residual microwave cosmic radiation shows us the age of the universe (since the Big Bang). Many galaxies and stars are much younger than the age of the universe. Our solar system, the Sun, its planets and dwarf planets, their moons, the asteroids and comets, were all formed out of stellar dust only 4,600 million years ago. Radioactive decay paths and rates show us (for example the half-life of uranium-238 decaying to thorium-234 is 4,500 million years) that many of the rocks in orbit around the Sun date from the time of formation of the solar system: some of them have landed on Earth and on the Moon as meteorites and can be seen on display in museums.

Planet Earth initially coalesced from the solar cloud of stellar dust and debris 4,540 million years ago. Early in its life, when only 10 million years old, proto-Earth, the planet that became Earth, was struck by another small planet (often called Theia). The result was the Earth we know today, made of the two previous planets, and the separation of Earth and the Moon. The Moon, being significantly smaller, cooled rapidly and lost its geological processes, so the Moon we know today has remained utterly unchanged in most respects for billions of years. Earth, on the other hand, being so larger, cooled more slowly, and thermal processes in the core and mantle keep the surface of the Earth geologically active - witness the Boxing Day tsunami. When I studied geology at university in the 1970s, plate tectonics was still new, and still being discovered and proved. I could have applied to work a stint on one of the ships that was still mapping the mid-Atlantic Ridge (the constructive boundary between the European and North American sides of the Atlantic Ocean).

Also back in the 1970s, it was generally held that life really got going on Earth about 500 million years ago, everything before that being termed Pre-Cambrian. I recall being taken to see the Durness Limestone, a rock formation in northern Scotland where there is evidence of Pre-Cambrian unicelluar organisms. At the time this was interesting, and slightly worrying. However, it is now recognised that unicellular life actually got going about 3,500 million years ago, that is, only a billion years or so after the formation of the solar system, and possibly only half a billion years after the planetary collision that formed the Earth and Moon. It was in fact multi-cellular life that got going 500 million years ago, including, for example, the fascinating trilobites. The animals that are everyone's favourite, the dinosaurs, appeared about 135 million years ago, flourished for 60 million years, and then progressively disappeared until finally vanishing altogether (other than those that evolved into birds) with the Yucatan asteroid 65 million years ago. Whilst mammals existed before the dinosaurs, they did not flourish until the dinosaurs had left the stage.

The primate pre-cursor to humankind diverged from ancestral gorillas about 8 million years ago, and from ancestral chimpanzees, about 5 million years ago. Several different human species evolved, including Neanderthal humans who existed from 350,000 years ago to 30,000 years ago. Over the past 100 thousand years modern humans (like ourselves) and Neanderthal humans coexisted for a while, of which there is recently-discovered evidence in southern Spain / Gibraltar. However, the most recent ice age finished off the Neanderthal humans, leaving us to piece together the story, and sadly to vandalise the Earth.

The astronomical and geological story of the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, our home planet, and life, is one of surprising twists and turns, full of wonder and seeming miracle. I find it fascinating and deeply inspiring. What is more, I am not required to suspend my disbelief, nor to believe any person or text, neither am I required to hold articles of faith. The evidence is in the rock, and I can search it out for myself. The proof of the geological history of Earth, and of the development of life, is not in words, in a book, but beneath my feet.

I recognise the poetry of Genesis 1, and resonate with the reverence for Earth and life that it evokes. I wish that many more people shared that reverence. However, there is little value to be gained in attempting to wring scientific precision from the passage, for that would be to mistake Genesis 1 for scientific reality. It would be like wondering whether the toilets on the starship Enterprise are water flush or vacuum and disinfectant: Star Trek is a fine drama but it is not a documentary.

I do not know why the author of the unsolicited e-mail chooses to fret about misunderstandings, mistranslations and misreadings of Genesis 1; and to be insistent that creation happened in more than a single period of six days; and was concerned to let me know. I imagine that they wish to promote a marginally more credible Creation story. As far as I am concerned, the astronomical, geological, palaeontological and archaeological stories that I have come to know are far more awe-inspiring that any text. In this context, what the books of the Pentateuch teaches us is how Iron Age people in the Middle East conceptualised the natural world in which they lived. The value of scriptural texts is not in the realms of science, but as a dialogue about human values and spirituality. Asteroids and granite are unable to speak to me about meaning, mercy or compassion, whereas with the Bible, Koran and the Tao Teh Ching, I am able to have a conversation about how I might live my life, the choices I make, and how I might interact with other people. Ecclesiastes 3 says little of geological value (the reference to gathering and scattering stones relates to home-making and moving on), but says much about accepting the just-is-ness of existence. Job 28 does address geology, and whilst the purpose of the passage is to emphasise the unfathomableness of the wisdom of God, the value of the passage lies in the awe that it inspires for our planet, not because the passage is of scientific value. Genesis 1 belongs in this latter category.

Thoughts about a comment

I received the following e-mail from Blogger:

earnest has left a new comment on your post "The Death Clock is ticking":

your fuckin retarted, death clock .com is not real,

Posted by earnest to Digitation at 26 March, 2008 22:25


I found the comment in response to my posting about the Death Clock (which I have since reread, and found straightforward) unhelpful and unenlightening. Apart from intending to be offensive and insulting, I was and remain puzzled about the purpose of the comment. Why go to the trouble of posting a comment that is neither supportive, nor constructive, nor positional?

I am also unclear how the commenter came to be reading the weblog posting. The time stamp says 22:25, which suggests recreational browsing. (I also note from the time stamp that program writers in the US find it nearly impossible to set out the time and date in a rational fashion. What is wrong with logical, rational, well-punctuated, elegant and unambiguous European time and date format: 22:25 Wednesday 26 March 2008?)

I checked the identity of the person who made the comment, 'earnest', but they have made their profile invisible, a practice discouraged but not forbidden by Blogger. Interesting choice of name: not Ernest, but earnest, and with the e.e.cummings lower case initial 'e'. For someone with that choice of screen name, the comment itself seemed incongruent: my posting about the Death Clock is quite earnest.

The facts that the comment starts with a lower case 'y'; the first three words are misspelled, the name Death Clock or deathclock.com is handled uncomfortably, and the comment ends with a comma, all point to someone whose first language is not English, or else whose English is limited to a vernacular restricted code.

I am perplexed by the idea that the Death Clock "is not real". In context, it is quite complex to identify what is meant by the term "real". Of course, the most obvious answer is that the Death Clock does not possess some kind of supernatural prescience, but as I acknowledge and explore the issue in my posting, that answer makes little sense.

The emotional power packed into the comment suggests extreme contempt. I had two thoughts about this. First, that 'earnest' had seen the Death Clock and been seriously spooked by it. By rejecting my posting about the Death Clock, he was attempting to regain a sense of control. Second, as 'earnest' is obviously a Blogger member, he has read my Profile and disliked what he saw. I am aware from having read material placed by the British National Party (a largely English extreme right-wing, ultra-nationalist political movement) on their own website, that as an educated, liberal, middle-class pluralist, I could be seen as a traitor to white-skinned people, and undoubtedly represent the values they most detest. I am not trying to suggest that 'earnest' is sympathetic to the aims of any particular political movement. Instead, I am suggesting that some people do take offence to who I am, and maybe 'earnest' is one such.

A final, and perhaps the most important, point. I find it hard to understand why so many people use as terms of abuse language relating to learning disability. At the end of 101 Dalmatians, Cruella de Vil calls her henchmen, Jasper and Horace, morons and imbeciles. What makes is acceptable to use these terms, along with the terms 'retard' and 'retarded', as insults. Surely the people to whom they should correctly refer deserve our respect and compassion. For many people with a learning disability life is already hard enough without people stigmatising their disability.

I have no way of knowing whether my musings about 'earnest's' comment approached any truths. However, I have done what I can with the comment. I might write another Death Clock posting, as it is a while since I wrote the first one.

Book Review: The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell, Abacus, London, 2001
(ppb., 279 pp., 11 pp. endnotes/references, indexed, first published by Little, Brown, 2000)

It is not often that book titles manage to raise themselves out of the dust thrown up by the noise of everyday life: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. The term used by Gladwell in the title to his first book The Tipping Point has now achieved common currency. The relevance to climate change and global warming could lead one to wonder, in all seriousness, whether the concept of the 'tipping point' was itself at a tipping point, ready to tip. For many years we had been either 'on the threshold' (in control) or 'teetering on the brink' (not in control). Tipping points may be less obvious, and inferred only by subsequent analysis. Why did crime in New York City plummet in the 1980s? This is one of the examples Gladwell considers in detail, identifying that a particular set of circumstances were at a sensitive 'tipping point', and a small, highly targetted effort was able to make a massive difference. An example Gladwell does not consider concerns marine clathrates - methane hydrate held in huge volumes in ocean sediments. A small rise in global temperatures currently will do little to these clathrates. However, with global temperatures predicted to rise by four or five degrees over the next forty years, even a miniscule temperature elevation could then release vast quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, setting off a rapid escalation of further, potentially catastrophic, global warming. The ocean temperature at which methane is released from clathrates is a tipping point in terms of climate change.
Most of Gladwell's examples of tipping points are focused around human behaviour. It is easy to see why the same term is used both for physical and social processes. When a transmissible disease starts to spread, the rate of social transmission is likely to change in response to a variety of social factors, such as changes in seasonal behaviour. A viral epidemic, such as seasonal 'flu, may well pass through a tipping point, both on its way up and on its way down. At the time of writing, the much-expected pandemic 'flu epidemic based on the H5N1 bird 'flu virus has not reached a tipping point, although it is understood what that tipping point would be: the point at which the virus mutates to permit efficient human-human transmission. Gladwell considers the fashion industry and how there are tipping points in the sale of particular fashion items. He also considers Paul Revere's ride that led to the American War of Independence, analysing what what made the ride a tipping point.
Gladwell identifies both that the context must be right and that the 'contagion' is contagious, 'sticky'. He also considers that three roles are necessary for a social tipping point: connectors, mavens and salesmen. The designations are supeficially attractive and may contain more than simply a kernel of truth. However, in my view, Gladwell fails to take account of the effectiveness of the vested interests of international commerce and national politics in controlling what we buy, what we watch/read, and what we think. Indeed, his message looks as though it will be attractive to a popular culture that prizes individualism: if you are smart in some way, you can make a difference. Maybe you know lots of people (connectors), maybe you are obsessed with footware or gizmos or supermarket prices (mavens), maybe you can sell beachwear to people living in Greenland (salesmen). I thought time and again: Gladwell knows the culture for which he is writing. A society in which intellect is not fully trusted, but in which people dream of escaping both from the vista of complexity revealed by science, and from the daily tedium of humdrum graft to 'stars in their eyes' silver-bullet breakthroughs.
It is valuable that Gladwell offers plenty of evidence to support his assertions. In popular social science style, the text is made up of one anecdote after another, and includes several well-worked-through examples, albeit largely from the United States. The text is well-supported (11 pages of endnotes and references) with many references to academic books and academic papers, as well as newspaper and magazine articles, albeit largely written by Americans in the United States. This US focus should be surprising as Gladwell was born in the UK and raised in Ontario. The parochialism started to irritate me, not because I hold any anti-American prejudices, but because I started to doubt that his thesis would hold as true for other societies around the world. He does offer a Polynesian example of teenage suicide. However, by this point in the book I had started to become suspicious. How much does Gladwell know about Polynesian society? How much does he understand about suicidal ideation and pyschotherapy? Again, this should be surprising because Gladwell's mother was a Jamaican psychotherapist. Although the precise example of Polynesian teenage suicide may well be valid, I was equally sure that Gladwell was well beyond his home turf.
Academic writing does not make claims beyond those that it can defend. Academic writing considers short-comings, objections and alternative interpretations. Gladwell should be familiar with academic writing because his father, Graham, is emeritus professor of civil engineering at Canada's leading University of Waterloo, Ontario. What is absent from Gladwell's book is anything critical of his thesis, anything that may refute his ideas. At two points (crime reduction in New York City, and the spread of syphilis in Baltimore) Gladwell does rehearse alternative suggestions for what took place, but only as a rhetorical backdrop for his 'white knight' tipping point solution. It is as though, for Gladwell, there is a silver bullet to be found, a tipping point that will make all the difference. The Tipping Point is a text written to persuade and convince. Gladwell is acting as maven and salesman for his own ideas. The example he cites at which he appears to me to be weakest is when considering tobacco smoking reduction behaviour. He fails to acknowledge the emotional complexity of smoking, its multitude of meanings, the meanings associated with quitting, and the fact that much smoking reduction advertising is aimed at adults. Having a degree in history, it is far from obvious that issues of suicide and addictions are areas of Gladwell's strength. Happily, however, his text appears to be much more persuasive when it comes to the commercial advertising of fashion items to a segmented US market. About this he writes well. Indeed, his entire text is written in a style that justifiably belongs to a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine.
It would seem that Gladwell applied to his book, the sub-title of which is How little things can make a big difference, the lessons that constitute his chapters. I bought the book because I had heard of it many times and was interested to learn. The book's advertising puff reads: "The International No. 1 Bestseller", a message advertising how contagious the book is.
The concept of tipping points is important, and deserves to be explored, understood and explained more fully, and above all more rigorously. Maybe is is me who at fault in hoping for a modicum of academic scepticism and balance in a popular social science text. When all is said and done, Gladwell's book is an enthusiastic and encouraging introduction to tipping points.

***

Gladwell biographical information drawn from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Gladwell accessed 24 March 2008

Green: traffic speed and climate change

When a motor vehicle (car, van, lorry) is travelling steadily at its optimum speed for minimising fuel consumption (usually between 25 mph and 50 mph), its fuel consumption is very much lower than when it is travelling fast or changing speed. I now know this for sure because my replacement car has a fuel consumption computer. I am able to see in numerical terms, the effect on my car's fuel consumption of driving style choices that I make.

During the mid-1970s, in response to massive increases in the price of crude oil imposed by the OPEC countries (and therefore causing a significant shift in the balance of trade), the UK national speed limit was reduced in order to reduce national fuel consumption. From Wikipedia: "It was reduced to 50 mph (80 km/h) in response to the 1973 oil crisis, and restored to 70 mph (112 km/h) in 1974."

In relation to the US, I found the following paragraph here:

"In the midst of an energy crisis touched off by conflict in the Middle East (see October 17, 1973), President Richard Nixon signs the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, establishing a maximum national speed limit. No highway projects may be approved in any State having a maximum speed limit over 55 m.p.h. The Act, part of a nationwide effort to save oil, is a result of an oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries that forced Americans into long lines at gas stations. President Nixon estimates the new speed limit can save nearly 200,000 barrels of fuel a day."

Were the UK national speed limit to be reduced again to 50 mph, the consequence would be a significant reduction in greenhouse gases produced by motor vehicles. Additionally, motorists would save money because they would need to buy less fuel. Lower road speeds would permit roads to carry denser traffic, thus, perhaps counter-intuitively, reducing some congestion. Further, according to the police, excessive speed is indicated in a majority of road traffic accidents. Limiting speed to 50 mph has the chance, therefore, of reducing the number of accidents, their severity and the number of casualties. (I read somewhere that reduction in the number of casualties of road traffic accidents had plateaued, and that further measures were going to be required if the numbers were to be reduced further.) Longer journey times for lengthy journeys might mean that more journeys would be undertaken using public transport, and there might be a long-overdue increase in the use of video-conferencing, and thus a reduction in the number of journeys undertaken.

To my knowledge, no-one is talking about this proposal as an option to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transport. Is there a reason for this? Am I missing something? As a first step, it would seem like an obvious and relatively cheap and pain-free adjustment that could be made.

Some further thoughts:

1. The speedometer in most UK cars runs up to 160 mph. This is bizarre because the national speed limit in the UK is 70 mph, and (with the exception of Lower Saxony) nowhere else in Europe exceeds 130 kph. The unnecessary range of the speedometer dial achieves two things: I am less clear about my precise speed because the reading is always limited to a small proportion of the speedometer dial; I am always given the sense that I am driving slowly compared with the apparent potential of the car.

2. My car has the potential to travel much faster than I shall ever be legally allowed to drive it.

3. Every morning when I commute to work, an overwhelming majority of the traffic noticeably exceeds the speed limit for substantial portions of the journey.

4. Despite huge negative attention devoted by UK motorists and news media to speed cameras on UK roads, the reality is that the number of speed cameras relative to the extent of roads on which speeding takes place is pitiful.

5. Few UK cars are fitted with cruise control. The price for retrofitting cruise control is prohibitively high. Cruise control could help motorists to observe speed limits.

6. The overwhelming majority of car advertisements in the UK emphasise using cars for fun and excitement. This is not a message that is compatible with attempting to reduce CO2 emissions and traffic. Resolving issues related to climate change requires that people stop seeing their car as a form of recreation.

7. The points I have made above impact on the daily lives of ordinary people. I suspect that many people are willing to make token efforts to mitigate climate change, provided that they are not required to change how they live their life. I believe that climate change is orders of magnitude bigger than the majority of people are appreciating. Token efforts sound to me like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. Until people realise that real change needs to take place, across a range of lifestyle issues, such as the speed at which they drive their cars, CO2 emissions are not going to fall.

Beatrice 16 May, 2008 15:11 commented...

Yes, you're absolutely right about deckcahairs on the Titanic. I think people just cannot cope with the enormity of the implications of runaway climate change and so refuse to accept it is real. There are some interesting articles about on the psychology of climate change denial eg this one by George Marshall:http://www.ecoglobe.ch/motivation/e/clim2922.htm

Postscript
Whilst what I have written above sounds a little like pious polemic, I believe it sufficiently both to have reduced my driving speed to 50 mph where the speed limit is 70 mph, and to have changed my driving style so that I accelerate only slowly and, within the limits of safety, brake as little as possible. It has taken a while to drive more sedately, detaching myself from the frantic impatience of other motorists. I sometimes resort to singing "I feel pretty" - it helps.

Why I do not call myself a conservative

I describe myself as a liberal person. I am happy to be described as very liberal. I was recently challenged to be clear about what I mean by liberal in contrast with conservative.

Phenomenology
As a counsellor, I recognise that everyone constructs their world, the world, in their own, unique way. I do not believe that there is a correct way to understand the world. I am happy to admit that there are more and less functional ways to understand the world. For example, to believe that the moon is made of cheese may be imaginative, but is probably inaccurate. If, like Wallace and Grommit, one were to visit the moon in the hope of finding hunks of Wensleydale cheese lying around, the chances of coming away disappointed are high. I believe that many people are ignorant about many aspects of the world about which they hold views, and just as many people make only pitiable attempts (if any) to find out the facts. In this sense, therefore, the uniqueness of their construct is based on ignorance and prejudice. However, even were this not the case, every person would still have a different life story, a different set of experiences, a different collection of interests, giving them a different way of describing the world: a childless couple who are career-focused is likely to describe the world differently from a single-mother with five children; a white, male, middle-aged Surrey stockbroker is likely to describe the world differently from a young North African woman living in the banlieux of Paris; a dairy farmer in New Hampshire is likely to describe the world differently from a personal escort in Tokyo. As a counsellor, I would be unable to make a value judgment about the relative superiority of any description of the world. I believe that this position marks me out as liberal. To me, a conservative person is someone who considers either that there is a correct view of the world, or considers that their own view of the world has greater validity than the views of other people.

Family
In the UK, the Conservative Party identifies itself as party that upholds family values. What this position refers to, however, is a narrow view of family: a man, married to a woman, with a number of children born within that marriage. Ideally there will also be grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins and nieces in an extended family. There is something very 'blood' about this. There is also an 'ideal', from which many depart.

I am not an uncritical fan of the family. My family of origin fitted this narrow, 'ideal', view, and was dysfunctional and abusive. Dysfunctionality and abuse are also significant aspects of the family experience of many people who I have counselled. I have a preference for a Lilo and Stitch view of family: "Family means nobody gets left behind" even when the family consists of two sisters and an alien. For me, family consists of the people we live amongst, the people who frequent (albeit 'virtually' in some cases) our lives, the people we choose. Within my own extended family there are half-people, step-people, adopted people. There are marriages, divorces, second marriages, and cohabitees. There are 'aunties' and 'uncles'. There are straight people and gay people. There are Canadian, French, Monagesque, German and English/Welsh people. I celebrate this diversity, and reject the notion of an 'ideal'. I guess that on a significant plank of Conservative Party policy, I fall well outside the boundaries of their core support.

Nationalism
It is usually the case that conservative people feel and express a sense of national pride. In the context of a world of nation states, this national pride often expresses itself as nationalism (pledging allegiance to the flag, singing Rule Britannia or La Marseillaise) or nationalistic aspirations (the separatist/secessionist agendas of the Scottish National Party [Scotland], the Vlaams Blok/Belang [Flanders], Lega Nord [northern Italy]).

More liberal people, on the other hand, appear typically at least more skeptical about, and often even hostile towards, expressions of nationalism. In the UK at least, liberal views and politics are more likely to be associated with internationalism and expressions of support for supranational organisations such as the United Nations, the European Union, the European Court of Justice, the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights. In Israel, as I understand it, the conservative people are keen to strengthen the borders they have delineated, whereas the more liberal people tend to look towards dialogue with the Palestinians and neighbouring states (although I am sure that the situation is much more complex than I am suggesting here). In the United States, as presented on news and current affairs programmes on television and the radio in the UK, the 'Neo-Cons' do not trust the United Nations, dislike the idea of US military personnel being tried in an international court, and appear to be indifferent about the effect of the US economy on global warming and climate change (that is impacting on the entire world); whereas "Since leaving office, Clinton has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work. He created the William J. Clinton Foundation to promote and address international causes, such as treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS and global warming." (Wikipedia: Bill Clinton), and Al Gore has become internationally famous for the high profile movie he presented against cavalier industrialisation at the expense of the world's climate An Inconvenient Truth.
... (to be continued)

Immigration
Conservative people typically have such a strong sense of belonging to a land that they usually appear to believe they have a right to exclude others. It is not hard to find conservative people talking about 'foreigners' who 'take our jobs and houses', and call for elected representatives to enact exclusionist immigration policies. Although at the extreme end of conservatism racist and xenophobic sentiments are easy to encounter, such attitudes do not characterise conservatism, which instead typically prefers that people 'live where they belong'. When conservative people have gone to live in a different country it has traditionally been as colonial superiors. Of the 270,000 'Brits' (hideous term) who live in Spain (as of January 2006), many make little attempt to integrate far into Spanish culture, perhaps not even learning more than the basics of the language, but instead choose to live in British enclaves in Alicante, Malaga, Murcia and Almeria, with their shops retailing British brands.

Liberal people, in contrast, tend to thrive in diverse, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic environments, grasp the necessity, for themselves and others, of economic transhumance, migration and emigration, recognise the necessity of accepting refugees and asylum seekers into more stable society, and value the resulting infusion of cultural energy.

Law and Order
Conservative people typically believe that there has been a decline in moral values leading to tensions in society - views expressed eloquently in the UK during the 18th (e.g. Hogarth), 19th (Victorians), 20th (the courtroom trial of Lady Chatterly's Lover, Mary Whitehouse, 'Back to Basics' [a Conservative Party campaign]) and now 21st centuries. A decline over the past three centuries should now have us in hell! Which, of course, is the picture that the conservative UK press would have us believe. For conservative people, the remedy is that there should be more police officers to enforce civil order and that punishment for transgression of civil order should be more severe (e.g. Conservative Party 'Short Sharp Shock' policy).

Liberal people tend to desire the liberalisation of society and its values so that fewer people are seen as being close to, at, or beyond the margins. The Liberal reforms of the early 20th century, under Campbell-Bannerman and Lloyd George (the foundations of the welfare state in the UK), and the introduction by Leo Abse (Labour) in 1967 of legislation to decriminalise homosexual acts between consenting men, are examples of this liberalisation. During the 1992 Labour Party conference, Tony Blair attempted to appeal to both the liberal and conservative wings of potential Labour Party voters by using the slogan "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" Liberal people are more likely to be interested in restorative, rather than retributive, justice, and are more likely to recognise the faults of imprisonment.

Money, wealth and property
That there is a divide between conservative and liberal people regarding attitudes towards money, wealth and property appears to be both self-evident and complex. The much misquoted biblical aphorism that the love of money is the root of all evil might offer a signpost. It is hard to imagine that many of the people who work in the upper levels of the banking, insurance and finance sectors of the City of London, or hew at the rockface of the Manhattan "goldmines", celebrate the same socio-economic analysis as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Examining the Times 'rich list' for 2006 regarding personal donations to political parties, of the top 31 most generous donors, 24 donated to the Conservative Party (approximately £7,000,000), 5 donated to the Labour Party (£1,455,000), 1 donated to the Liberal Democrats (£129,798), and 1 donated to the Scottish National Party (£100,000). The list also shows loans to political parties - Conservatives: £12,650,000; Labour £7,800,000. From these figures it is easy to conclude that the people with a considerable amount of money are more likely to donate some of it in support of Conservative/conservative values.

Monarchy, aristocracy, nobility, honours and hierarchy
Conservative people in the UK tend to be in favour of the British monarchy, whereas liberal people are less predictable about the extent to which they take an interest in and support the British monarchy. I have been a lifelong republican (not in the US sense of Republican), and dislike any attention being given to the Windsor family or the ceremonial roles carried out by an hereditary head of state. Several countries (Ireland, Germany, Greece and Israel) manage to elect a non-executive head of state, just as all UK universities manage to appoint a Chancellor.

Titles and hereditary peerages belong to a world of long ago. Although still important in the seventeenth century, the world of being born into a social station in life was already starting to dissolve, in part hurried along by the Civil War, but also ironically by the enclosures, which moved farm hands off the traditional pastures, and into the more egalitarian towns and cities. Whilst it is still required that commoners bow/curtsy to the aristocracy, about which conservative people are likely to be happy, compared to 350 years ago, Britain is a much more egalitarian country, about which liberal people are likely to be happy.

Relation to land

... (to be continued)

Gambling and share trading

I do not own company shares. I have never owned company shares. I have no wish to own company shares.

During my teenage years I was enthusiastic for all commerce to be managed by the people for the benefit of the people. I applauded when companies were taken into state ownership, and felt betrayed when state-owned industries were thrown into the ravening maws of fat-cat capitalists: British Gas ("Tell Sid") and British Telecom ("It's good to talk") ("Phone home" was from E.T.). During my twenties I realised a) that state-owned businesses were not as wonderful for their workforce as I had imagined (television images of grateful coal miners in 1947 when the National Coal Board took over the running of coal mines in the UK; of beaming nurses and relieved patients when in 1948 the National Health Service took over the running of hospitals, clinics and surgeries in the UK); b) that some companies could be ethical in their practice, for example Anita Roddick's The Body Shop; c) that there were better, less-hierarchical models for the structure of a business, such as charities, trusts (for example, The Guardian newspaper), collectives and co-operatives (such as Scott-Bader). I liked the idea of businesses being run by the workers for the benefit of the workers. I became a member of a co-operative (Earthcare, in Durham, UK), and was instrumental in forming a collective (Dragon Wholefoods Collective). I was also heavily involved with all manner of charitable / not-for-profit activities, projects and ventures (such as Durham City Centre Youth Project, outreach, chaplaincy). My CV from that time runs to pages. However, it was often my experience that I wanted to give greater commitment to these activities than many of the other people involved. In my late twenties, therefore, with many misgivings, I set up my own small business: Alpha Word Power. After a while, I began to employ people, initially part-time, and then full-time as well. It seemed that I was betraying my teenage roots. However, I never owned any company shares. While Margaret Thatcher's cellphone-toting, greed-motivated yuppies made their millions on the London stock exchange, I believed that share-ownership was immoral, that it was wrong. What I objected to fundamentally, and I also had further objections, was the idea that owning sufficient company shares gave someone the right dictate strategic policy. I have, to a small extent mellowed from this position. For example, I recognise the all-round benefit of John Lewis staff owning shares in the company for which they work [note to myself: this is not accurate - the business is technically a co-operative that is held in trust, all employees are Partners, have a substantive voice in the running of the business, and receive an annual bonus proportionate to their salary]. I believe that Google does the same. I am still on board, although rather less comfortable, with the idea of buying and owning shares in small, ecological ventures, for example building wind turbines and the like. To my way of thinking this really amounts to giving money to a cause in which one believes, with little expectation of the money being returned. The line gets crossed where the money is invested to make a profit. I can understand why it needs to happen: why businesses need capital, and people (and other businesses) with money are willing to buy shares. When I think of the money as a loan, then I can cope. However, when I think about people buying shares in order to profit from riding on the backs of the people who do the work (shop floor workers and managers) then I know that share ownership is immoral. However, it gets worse. As I understand it, much share trading is speculative about the price of the shares. When profiting from changes to the value of shares becomes the main purpose of share trading then it seems obvious to me that the plot has been lost. To me, this kind of financial speculation is little, if at all, different from gambling, and is therefore immoral.

Gaming and gambling

Gaming gambling, like buying sex, is immoral. Since childhood, I have believed gaming gambling to be immoral. In the early 1980s I formally opposed the Betting, Gaming and Lotteries (Amendment) Act 1984 that was enacted by the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher to liberalise laws around gambling in the UK. I wrote to each member of the parliamentary Committee, chaired by Sir Ian Gilmour, expressing my unhappiness with the proposed legislation. Clement Freud, a Liberal MP who was a member of the committee, referred to me and people like me as "killjoys" (see Hansard).

During my teens I became aware that some poor, working class men would gamble away their wages, further impoverishing wife and children, sometimes condemning the entire family to a life of destitution. More recently I learned that some poor, working class women (for example in Sunderland) would feed the entire week's housekeeping money into gambling machines, getting themselves into debt and becoming prey to loan sharks. In using the word 'some', I do not know how many people, nor how widespread these behaviours are. However, I do know that gambling in the UK is so widespread that it is practically universal, and debt (resulting from consumption and gambling) in the UK currently exceeds GDP. (One of the features of writing weblog postings about issues that concern me is that I confront myself to produce evidence that supports or refutes my beliefs.) Online gambling (poker, for example) appears to be huge. In June 2005: "According to research group Forrester, 76% of the UK's 29 million adult internet users admit to regularly placing a bet either online or offline."

I have always considered succumbing to gaming gambling as evidence of personal weakness, making innocent people vulnerable to scams (the medieval 'three-cup trick'), confidence tricks ('get-rich-quick' schemes)and dishonesty (The Sting). When I was a child I felt disgusted when I learned that gambling machines and casinos pay out less than they receive. I considered their behaviour unfair, because I did not understand that they are businesses. When I was a child, I became gently enthralled both by the idea of 'breaking the bank' (restorative justice) and by the masculine courage of James Bond at the roulette wheel. (On a recent flight from Narita to Schipol I watched the Daniel Craig outing of a James Bond movie, and could not resolve the conflict for me that a character who is supposed to be the ultimate in 'cool' should behave in so pathetic a manner as to have to gamble on the gaming tables.)

In full respect of confidentiality, I can state clearly that there are many people in the UK who have a gambling addiction, and that this addiction, effectively indistinguishable from a chemical addiction, has been extremely problematic in their lives. I have met such people.

Of course gaming is business: it is part of the entertainment industry, as evidenced by the plethora of gaming shows on television. The gambling aspect of gaming has also attracted organised crime (e.g. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) and shows gaming, like drugs- and people-trafficking, to be a lucrative, but also unsavoury and seedy business. I do not know what proportion of gaming / gambling in the UK is infected with organised crime, and I may well be guilty of watching too many movies. I imagine that only a small proportion is significantly criminal; that a somewhat larger proportion, whilst legal, has criminal links / associations; and that much of what remains is legal, but may either be tainted or at risk. I believe that most people in the UK who gamble fail to, or refuse to, consider and address this issue; whereas for some the possibility of links to organised crime may add an attractive frisson.

I do not respect the motivation or activity of seeking to acquire wealth without earning it. This places gambling very close to robbery and theft, although in the case of gambling, each party is trying to rob the other. I confess to a strong Protestant work ethic. (When my father died it did not concern me that he left me nothing in his will. In contrast, I am challenged by the fact that my daughter will have little if any opportunity to earn her way through life, and will be dependent on whatever my wife and I can leave her when we die.)

Gaming positions itself within the entertainment industry, and I find it hard to respect resources being spent on activities that make no attempt to improve the world. I also find it challenging to respect money being spent on activities that make no attempt to improve the sum total of happiness in the world, and gaming creates many more losers than winners. This sets gambling in the same category as the military-industrial complex. Gaming is far from the worthy activities of education, scientific exploration, health research, health (physical, mental, emotional) support, charitable giving, economic development (whether in the the economically-developed or -developing world), environmental improvement, and artisitic and cultural expression.

I do not respect games of chance. The UK national obsession with horse racing, and the local enthusiasm for greyhound racing, are not only perversions in their exploitation of animals, but socially-accepted excuses for people to avoid working, looking after their families, and helping to improve the world. When I was a child, millions of people in the UK gambled every week on the outcomes of football (soccer) matches. The national lottery (begun under the Thatcher government) has to a significant extent replaced the 'football pools'. An effect of this has been that charitable giving by individuals in the UK has declined. (I shall check the figures.)

In 1979/80 I lived in Coxhoe, County Durham, UK. I was told by local people about how, during the 1920s and 1930s, large gatherings would be held for illegal gambling in West Cornforth woods, only a handful of miles from where I now live. Children would be posted at the edge of the wood to warn of any approach by the police ('polliss'). Only a mile from where I live are the remains of a grandstand that was built in the 1920s for a horse-racing track. The racing track was closed at the outbreak of the second world war, and the grandstand fell into disrepair. In the local pubs it used to be, and still is for all I know, a commonplace that a large platter of uncooked cuts of dead animals would be raffled. In Quarrington Hill, a village close to Coxhoe, the police raided a regular dog-fighting match. Every village around here has at least a little brick bookmaker's cabin. I have met local people (men) who are private bookmakers - taking bets on all manner of events. A short series of formal presentations, exploring some serious staff-focused activities at the university where I work, had to have a raffle that was drawn at the close of the event. At my daughter's school open day they have a tombola. How many times have I heard "I like to have a little flutter" - on the Derby, on the Grand National, on the pools, on the lottery, on the Thunderball - as though provided they do only a little bit of gambling it is respectable. Like some sap-poison in a tree, gambling seems to infect every vein of British society. However, the poison spreads far beyond the UK. News programmes often report match-fixing allegations in relation to one sport or another around the world. In Tokyo and Kyoto, I saw huge, barn-like shops, 'pachinko parlours', with seried ranks of glaze-faced men and women feeding ball bearings into machines, as though characters from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. When I eventually get to holiday in Arizona, in order to see the Grand Canyon, I shall fly in to Phoenix even though it would be cheaper and easier to fly in to Las Vegas, where, as CSI shows, there are gaming tables and gambling machines as far as the eye can see: a vision of hell that so many delude themselves into believing is a vision of heaven.

Why do people gamble? As evidenced by what I have written above, the answer I see most obviously is that a person hopes to gain from a gambling transaction. However, there are also many other answers. For some, the gambling in which they indulge is about the social activity, whether being seen in their flamboyant hats at Ascot horse-racing track, or dibbing numbers with their sisters and aunties at the local bingo hall. For others, it is about self-indulgence, and they will put five pounds, or fifty euros, or five hundred dollars, in their pocket for an evening's entertainment at the casino, amusement arcade or pachinko parlour - they hope that the money does not run out too quickly. For yet others it is about distraction, either from a demanding job or from problems that are difficult to resolve. For some it is about seeking self-esteem by trouncing other people - the so-called 'competitive spirit'. For others it is about thrill seeking - they enjoy the risk: it is almost that they enjoy losing a game because it heightens the tension for the next game. Perhaps these latter are the people who are also at risk of developing a gambling addiction. For many, their engagement in gambling is probably a response to some combination of each of the above. For each, however, gambling has meaning in their life. Remove gambling from the lives of most people, and their lives become impoverished to the extent of the meaning of gambling to them. This is why it can be so hard for a person with a gambling addiction, for whom gambling has come to mean more than almost anything else in their life, to relinquish the activity.

The Fragile Encounter

I have been developing material about fragile encounter. This material can be found on my Subceptions weblog at:

http://myblogs.sunderland.ac.uk/blogs/blog-259/2007/11/the_fragile_encounter.html

Green: my new website

For some months I was writing about green issues in my weblog postings: articles that attempted to define my position. In wishing to make more of what I have written, I have moved the postings onto a sole-issue website called Green. The material remains at an early stage of development, and awaits further editing and extending.

31 December 2007: My weight 

My weight, now 89 kg, has remained fixed in the high eighties (84-90 kg). Since my detox nearly three years ago I have abstained from alcohol, and from snacks. I have also taken to walking longer distances more frequently: five or six miles three of four times each week, as well as shorter distances on most other days. I find it demoralising that, with one exception period, my weight did not continue to fall. Over two and a half weeks in Japan, my weight fell by six kilos. Due to extreme difficulty in locating vegan food, I was close to fasting for several days at a time, mostly eating only a little fruit, grabbing a meal only every couple of days. I went to Japan with high expectations of eating well: noodles, tofu, miso soup, seaweed, and sushi brushed with wasabi. Although my intention had not been to lose weight, my weight fell to 84 kg. However, the ratio of gain to pain was appalling. We were walking for miles through the streets of Tokyo, Kyoto and Nara. The heat was terrific: 38 degrees Celsius most days. By the time we arrived home I was physically run down. It was not a good way to lose weight. To add insult to injury, most of the weight came back quickly.

31 December 2007: Weblog Review

31 December 2007: Weblog Review

With only six weeks before this weblog is thee years old, I have many observations. Most obviously, I have maintained writing the weblog. Sometimes I have written only once in a few months. On other occasions I have written more than one posting each day. This accords with writing my personal journal. I imagined that writing this weblog would reduce the frequency at which I wrote personal journal entries. However, the reverse seems to be true, the more I write, the more there is to write. To be precise, the more I write, the more things I notice that I consider to be worth writing about. This dated postscript also points to some processes I have chosen to adopt: to add postscripts to existing postings; to amend and augment existing postings, improving and enriching them conceptually and in terms of their language; to publish unfinished postings, leaving them in the public domain until I am ready to finish them; the dates of publication do not necessarily reflect the dates of entries. I recognise that these processes move this weblog towards being a website, about which I feel reasonably comfortable. I am also comfortable about moving particular postings, once they are sufficiently complete, onto my website, for example regarding the use of politically correct language. A much larger topic that I have been developing in this weblog, about Green issues, is in the slow process of being moved onto a website of its own. This point also highlights that I have started three other weblogs: a family weblog (Sound Signs) to which Janet and Jemima also make occasional contributions; a University-based professional counselling weblog (Subceptions); and a much more edgy scratchpad for nascent ideas, a weblog that I keep private. The project, involving four weblogs and three websites (I also manage a sizable website about counselling for the University) is, in all probability, about creating an essay base. (I am a Commonwealth pamphleteer three and a half centuries too late.) Unlike in my personal journal, in which I write carefully but not self-consciously, here in these weblogs I am aware of how my writing may be understood or misunderstood. I do not value having to be online to make a posting, not only because getting online is not always easy, but also preferring the spontaneity of pen and paper. On the other hand, I like that what I write is saved in electronic format, and consequently is available to all the advantages open to electronic text.

When I started this weblog I had already rejected the abbreviation 'blog'. My dislike for the abbreviation has deepened: whoever coined the word would appear to have an undeveloped auditory appreciation of the English language: block, bloke, blob, blot, bodge, bog, log, hog, blubber, plug, plod. These are not words that I would choose as auditory neighbours to a medium as versatile and dynamic as online journalling. Further, the word 'blog', as distinct from the abbreviation (it seems that few people realise that the word is an abbreviation), has no obvious relationship with anything to do with writing. I thought of several alternatives, but each already has a bona fide claim made by an alternative meaning.

A Twentieth Century man

I have several dictionaries. Working as a counsellor, words and language mean much to me. William Shakespeare is my hero: I watched my first Shakespeare play (Twelfth Night) when I was ten years old. I have four generations of Chambers dictionaries: from the 1950s (Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, recently acquired second hand), 1972 (Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, a Christmas present), 1988 (Chambers English Dictionary, my own choice) and 2003 (Chambers Dictionary, also my own choice). I prefer Chambers because its definitions tend to be more liberal-minded, less conservative, less reactionary than other dictionaries. However, I have an extreme objection to Chambers' progressive acceptance and incorporation of the '-ize' suffix, an appendage that, in spite of my Classical education (I studied Latin for five years, Classical Greek for two years, and some years ago made a serious attempt to teach myself Biblical Greek), I consider to be affected (as in an affectation, used by someone who wishes to puff up their language, making themselves sound clever and important, like people using the word 'whilst' when they mean 'while') and/or elitist (its 'correct' use - to use it incorrectly flagrantly demonstrates 'ignorance' - is only when the word's root is from Classical Greek, and who but a Classics scholar is likely to remember which English words have a Classical Greek root?), and gratuitously unnecessary. Use of the '-ize' suffix sneers at both ignorance and dyslexia: it is anti-language. In contrast, use of the '-ise' suffix is universally applicable, and to be favoured by the proles, the hoi poloi, the sans culottes - the people who make a reality of democracy and democratic language.

I have a reverse dictionary that has been useful only very occasionally. I have a dictionary of words first used in the twentieth century. This latter, although of little practical use, is interesting. I have a much-used Roget's thesaurus, and much-less used Brewer's dictionary of phrase and fable, Brewer's concise dictionary of phrase and fable, and Brewer's twentieth century dictionary of phrase and fable. There are also the Oxford dictionary of quotations, and Oxford companions to both the English language and English literature. Beyond English alone, there are dictionaries of signing (BSL) and of other European languages. Were I to be required to shelve all these dictionaries in an attic, I should probably guess that they weighed in at about 50 kg. So why is my first port of call always the internet? Reading The Wisdom of Crowds, recently, I came across the word 'fungible'. The context in which the word was being used offered few clues about its meaning. I checked it out on the internet. As well as definitions, I read the Wikipedia entry. I felt enlightened. I then checked Chambers. The definition was clear and concise, just as I should expect. Yet had I not also read more widely, including the Wikipedia entry, my understanding would have been as thin as gravy made only with a vegetable stock cube.

The words and phrases that I use, and the thoughts that inspire my articulations, belong to the twentieth century. I was born in the middle, the heart, of the twentieth century, the century that provided the context and backdrop for everything I thought and said and did. I learned to speak and think twentieth century, and I have twentieth century preoccupations, such as a concern for technology, for communication, for identity, for democracy, for equality, for spirituality freed from the shackles of traditional religion. Whilst it could easily be shown that none of these is unique to the twentieth century, their assemblage certainly is. It is true that being born and raised in Western Europe, and in Britain in particular, I also became, and continue to become, progressively more aware of previous centuries; but this itself is the root and relativism of post-modernism, a philosophical framework that belongs to the second half of the twentieth century. Simply by being brought up in the second half of the twentieth century, without the requirement of an elite education, I have the capacity to identify with the industrial entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century, the enlightened free-thinkers of the eighteenth century, the radical Commonwealth republicans of the seventeenth century, and so on.

What of the twenty-first century? I am not sure. If the twentieth century could be characterised as a battle between the old and the new, between empire and new democracy, between generations, between the sexes, between enforced adherence to stereotype and searching for new identities, then to a large extent we won. At the start of the twenty-first century, Britain is much closer to France than to Britain at the start of the twentieth century. However, now those battles are over, apathy appears to have set in. Politicians bemoan the public's lack of interest in politics, whereas people vote in their millions for ghastly television trash such as Big Brother and the X-Factor. (Whilst Marx's aphorism about religion is widely misunderstood as a criticism of religion, when he was observing the solace that drown-trodden workers were able to find in it, his 'misquotation' could more aptly be applied to the early twenty-first century addiction to television soap operas.) People no longer appear to have much interest in raw spirituality, and the church pews tend to be occupied by people who have chosen to leave elsewhere and make Britain their home. Concern by adults and children alike for technology seems to focus on games consoles, and battles and wars that are fought look increasingly like computer games and disaster movies. Royal Mail, the UK postal delivery organisation is close to collapse because no-one writes letters any more - it is not that I am knocking e-mail, it is my sadness that the text-message culture hardly favours deep and careful thought.

What of the twenty-first century? The battles having been fought, apathy and lethargy won. I think that ordinary, everyday, twenty-first century Britain lacks a sense of direction, purpose and aspiration. Maybe that is one of the reasons I remain a twentieth century man.

Spreading germs

I am in bed with a cold. Nothing more than a cold, but a miserable cold: sore throat, coughing, sneezing, headache, aching joints, lethargy, dyspraxia, poor concentration and a profound loss of charitable sentiment. It is not 'flu, and I have not been in bed all day. I have, however, felt lousy all day, and for the past few days. I have been unproductive in terms of my paid work, and have done none of the household jobs I had lined up for the Christmas / New Year break. Plans to take my family out on a trip have had to be cancelled. This cold has been 'expensive'.

I was 'given' the cold. It was passed on to me by someone who had been suffering a heavy cold. They knew they were infectious, and they did little to avoid infecting me.

On the streets of Tokyo, we saw people wearing cotton face masks. From a UK perspective one could easily assume that these people were fearful about catching an infection. However, these were people with respiratory infections who wished to avoid spreading their germs. I find their considerate behaviour easy to respect. In Britain it is not acceptable to wear a cotton face mask except in hospital. If I were to wear one to the supermarket tomorrow, I would be stared at, and it would be assumed that I was unhappy about the hygiene of the shop, its staff or its customers. At work, several weeks ago, I asked whether I might discourage counselling clients who were suffering from a heavy cold or seasonal 'flu from attending counselling, risking the counsellor being off work sick for a few days and thereby denying counselling to other clients. I was informed that it was not policy to discourage clients, infectious or otherwise, from attending counselling. I have never contracted mumps. Being the age I am, the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccination was way after my time. I am, therefore, at risk of being infected with mumps by anyone who, wittingly or otherwise, exposes me to the disease. I do not understand why it is permissible for my health to be put at risk by people who are unwilling to take responsibility for not spreading infection. (In the spring of 2007, students at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, irresponsibly spread mumps across the breadth of Canada because they knowingly ignored quarantine restrictions.) For some reason, spreading germs in the UK is not something about which one takes personal responsibility. As my counselling supervisor recently said about contracting diseases carried by clients: "It's just one of those things." I am permitted to spread almost any germs, including STDs, I wish with impunity. Although there may be some exceptions, such as typhoid and its celebrated carrier, Mary Mallon, according to a Wikipedia article on quarantine: "The last federal order of involuntary quarantine, prior to the 2007 tuberculosis scare, was issued in 1963." Of course, the one virus of which so many people in Britain are fearful to the point of discriminatory prejudice is HIV, transmission of which is largely limited to sexual contact, blood transfusions and needle-stick injuries. In contrast, earlier in the year I read the statistics about food poisoning from ready-prepared food, such as in cafes, restaurants and the chiller cabinets of shops and supermarkets: they are horrific. Many of these infections are personal hygiene related, are easily preventable, and can be fatal. The term 'caveat emptor' (let the buyer beware: the buyer takes all the risks) appears to be applied in Britain a good deal more widely than simply buying things.

Although the threat of an H5N1-based 'flu pandemic seems to have passed, at least for the time being, the level of personal danger posed by the virus would have driven many people in Britain to the extremity of wearing cotton face masks. It goes without saying that it would be the healthy who would be wearing them.

Were the situation to be different, I should prefer the social ethic to be that anyone who was infectious did, as a matter of course, whatever was necessary to prevent the spread of their infection, isolating themselves if necessary. This would inevitably involve hand-washing, and the widespread use of disinfectant hand gels. It may involve the public use of cotton face masks, like in Japan.

Nationhood (1): Fiddler on the Roof

I recently watched a television broadcast of Norman Jewison's 1971 movie Fiddler on the Roof. I have the VHS video, which I have watched several times, and I am wondering whether to buy the DVD. I often watch on television movies that I have on video. Not only is the quality of the broadcast picture superior - we have a Freeview digibox (digital television signal) box - but the inability to pause and rewind, which I do a lot in order to reflect on what I am watching, much to the mounting annoyance of my wife and daughter - we do not have TiVo - gives the viewing experience an edginess that whilst usually less intellectually satisfying, with the inevitable risk of disengagement between awareness and an integrated cognitive/conative/affective and imaginal response, can be emotionally more gratifying.

I was concerned, having watched the movie for the nth time, to discover what some of the critics have written about it. Roger Ebert was mildly scathing, whereas others have been more generous, although generous is probably what they intended. I find it helpful to read critics' reviews because they inevitably confirm some of my own thoughts and responses, and suggest others that had not occurred to me. I do not fully trust my own judgment. Most obviously for me, a good movie is one that I wish to watch many times. I feel cheated if the movie is not worth watching more than once. For this reason I rarely watch made-for-television movies. I am also likely to feel cheated if the only differences between the first and second viewings are that I know the plot twists and the denouement. On this basis I have learned that I have little interest in watching Ocean's Xteen. I was intrigued to find out whether I would find watching Memento as satisfying for the second time. The jury is still out on whether I should buy the DVD (the issue of memory is important to me). At the other end of the spectrum, the movies I like best are one's that, every time, take me on a journey, if I am up for it, into an even deeper understanding of what it is for me to be human in this world. This is what makes the movies of Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Peter Greenaway and Godfrey Regio so compelling for me, and also why I have a fascination for dystopias. In a 'good movie' there will always be the opportunity to discover more. Sometimes this involves seeing/hearing more clearly. My best analogue for this concerns a CD of music by Peter Maxwell Davies. I did not 'understand' what I was listening to the first time I heard it. The dissonances sounded like a cacophony, and the broken rhythms sounded like chaos. Only from many repeated playings have I come to hear the beauty and poise, accompanied by a progressive appreciation of his music. I care what critics write about Peter Maxwell Davies, or about Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, Greenaway or Regio, because I wish to 'understand' more. I am not required to agree with the evaluations of critics. A case in point is the movie I Heart Huckabees. I took the movie at face value albeit on three levels: 1) the level of plot / story / entertainment, etc.; 2) the movie-making level - script, acting, characterisation, filming, editing, etc.; 3) a philosophical level. On the first two of these levels the movie is terrible, and nothing on earth would induce me to watch it again. However, on the philosophical level the movie has something to say, and I shall watch it again. Naturally the critics slammed the movie. I also discovered from the reviews is that the movie is considered to be a spoof, the director intentionally mocking intellectual movies. Maybe, therefore, unlike the Peter Maxwell Davies CD, the movie has little so say - a second viewing and I shall be done with it - maybe. The idea of an existential detective agency interests me, even if the director intended it as a joke.

What does Fiddler on the Roof offer me in repeated viewings? There are major issues of personal, social and national identity, of cultural tradition ("Tradition"), and of spirituality. During the most recent viewing I felt challenged by the concept of personal, cultural and spiritual identity determining national identity. I like the globalised world in which we now live, and the breakdown of a one-to-one mapping between cultural and spiritual identity on the one hand and nationality (whether it be where I live or what is written in my passport) on the other. Whilst I understand something about Israel and about Kosovo, I also understand something about early twentieth century Japan, about Nazi Germany, about Afghanistan's Taleban, about aspects of Putin's Russia. I applaud the European Union both for its programme of smudging the statehood of nations, and for its support of cultural and spiritual diversity. These kinds of articulated insights are gold dust. I wonder what Fiddler on the Roof will offer me next time.

My Tripadvisor travel map

1. Tokyo, Japan
   
2. Brugge, Belgium
   
3. Avebury, United Kingdom
   
4. Bath, United Kingdom
   
5. Bourton-on-the-Water, United Kingdom
   
6. Cambridge, United Kingdom
   
7. Chester, United Kingdom
   
8. Durham, United Kingdom
   
9. Holy Island, United Kingdom
   
10. Isle of Wight, United Kingdom
    
11. London, United Kingdom
    
12. Lulworth Cove, United Kingdom
    
13. Ludlow, United Kingdom
    
14. Lyme Regis, United Kingdom
    
15. North York Moors National Park, United Kingdom
    
16. Peak District National Park, United Kingdom
    
17. Northumberland National Park, United Kingdom
    
18. Oxford, United Kingdom
    
19. Windermere, United Kingdom
    
20. York, United Kingdom
    
21. Yorkshire Dales National Park, United Kingdom
    

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