In my quick post yesterday I touched on the trade-offs between self-interest and ethical living, and the middle-class pull to buy the best environment for one’s family. The modern Western lifestyle throws up anxieties like this all the time, because it turns out that pretty much everything we do is (on some level) unethical or hypocritical. Travelling to the shop in a car certainly harms the enivronment. Buying food when you get there will create landfill. Organic food is not Fair Trade, and vice-versa. Continue reading
Category: Diary (Page 77 of 301)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
Over the weekend I went to see Invincble at the Orange Tree in Richmond, a new play by Torben Betts. Its the kind of theatre I prefer: intimiate scenes in-the-round, teasing apart something relevant about contemporary life.
This one centres on an upper middle-class couple, Oliver and Emily, with a tragedy in their past and an warped sense of social responsibility. They have chosen to live among ‘ordinary’ people in the North of England. Rather than live in a middle-class ghetto and contribute to the extortionate London housing bubble, they profess a desire to improve this community. Emily plans to become a school governor and says she is setting up an Amnesty group and an artists’ collective. Continue reading
Fraser Nelson has written a much celebrated article for the Daily Telegraph about British Muslims, and how they have integrated into British life.
British Muslims don’t really feel a sense of otherness. In fact, polls show they’re much more likely to identify with Britishness than the general population. The Citizenship Survey found that most Muslims agree with two propositions: that Islam is the most important thing in their life, and that their primary loyalty lies with the British state. Most are baffled by the idea of a tension between the two.
Too often, Islam is in the news because of some sort of culture clash (for example, the row over the Mohammed cartoons or veils). But Nelson points out that this is often a media cliche and unrepresentative of most British Muslims. He lists several examples where Muslims have collaborated with Jewish groups and churches to ensure that diversity of faith is maintained. Continue reading
In the Daily Telegraph, Tom Chivers lovingly traces his son’s family tree, back through grandparents, to distant ancestors, to the origins of life. It’s a nice, secular take on the beauty of creation.
Happy four billionth birthday, son.
The piece puts me in the mind of the opening to W. Somerset Maugham’s short story ‘Virtue,’ which traces the origins of a good cigar, a plate of oysters, a cut of lamb:
Continue readingFor these are animals and there is something that inspires awe in the thought that since the surface of the earth became capable of supporting life from generation to generation for millions upon millions of years creatures have come into existence to end at last upon a plate of crushed ice or silver grill. It may be that a sluggish fancy cannot grasp the dreadful solemnity of eating an oyster and evolution has taught us that the bivalve has through the ages kept itself to itself in a manner that inevitably alienates sympathy. There is an aloofness in it that is offensive to the aspiring spirit of man and a self complacency that is obnoxious to its vanity. But I do not know how anyone can look upon a lamb cutlet without thoughts too deep for tears : here man himself has taken a hand and the history of the race is bound up with the tender morsel on your plate.
It seems to be a cast iron rule of politics that our leaders will become more authoritarian when they take office. The standard explanation for this is that they simply become drunk on power. But at the Time for A Digital Bill of Rights? parliamentary meeting yesterday, Liberal Democrat MP Tim Farron gave a more nuanced explanation:
No-one will assent to rules that imply that they may abuse their power.
There is a tendency in the debate around mass surveillance to attribute malign motives to everyone in government and the security services. This in turn alienates those in power, and promotes the belief that civil liberties campaigners are shrill, paranoid exaggerators! So this alternative formulation, which avoids the cod-psychological explanations about power, corruption, and malign motives, is very welcome.
Farron went on to point out that this does not absolve those politicians of blame for neglecting civil liberties. What they forget, he said, is that our laws need to be constructed so as to protect citizens from future corrupt governments. This rather obvious point is often lost on Ministers who are concerned with the here-and-now.