Rediscovering civic bonds?

I missed the Romanian Book Fair of November but there is currently a small Christmas book fair for a week in the Peasant Museum nearby - where I picked up a copy of Alain De Botton’s most recent book – Religion for Atheists (2012) - also Orhan Pamuk’s early Silent House; and 2 translations into Romanian (Louis de Bernieres’s Captain’s Corot’s Mandolin; and de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy) (2000)

Critics tend to take a condescending view of de Botton (inasmuch as they bother with him at all) which says a lot about them. I’m half way into his book and find it one of the most interesting non-fiction books I’ve read this year ...And what a charming and well-written book compared with the hard, unforgiving stuff which comes from atheists (I've always counted myself an agnostic). 
Parts of it remind me of Theodor Zeldin’s Intimate History of Humanity (copies of which I used to give to people); and other parts of The CharacterStrengths and Virtues Handbook edited a decade ago by Martin Seligman

The first link to the book gives a positive review which captures the appeal of the book rather nicely -

....throughout the book he identifies areas where he believes secular society fails to provide community or help people cope with challenges in their lives, and points to religious practices and institutions which nonreligious people might wish to appropriate to fill the gap. Indeed, de Botton’s approach to religion seems fueled by a profound disenchantment with modern secular society, which he views as impoverished by the loss of practices and modes of thought that religion colonized.

“The challenge facing atheists,” de Botton claims, “is how to reverse the process of religious colonization: how to separate ideas and rituals from the religious institutions which have laid claim to them but don’t truly own them.” Religion offers “well-structured advice on how to lead our lives,” which de Botton contends the secular world often fails to provide. The challenge for modern atheists is to offer such structure (and rituals) in a non-religious way.

De Botton examines ten areas in which valuable insights may be derived from religious practices, and gives numerous creative suggestions as to how the secular world might reclaim them eg

• Noting how religions use food to bring strangers together in a structured way, he offers the “Agape Restaurant,” in which diners will be encouraged to meet new people and share aspects of their inner lives.

• He notices that religious values and even consumer products, harnessing the arts and music, are branded and promoted far more passionately and effectively than secular values, which raises powerful questions regarding how well humanists are spreading their ideas.

• He proposes that university lecturers might be trained to present their ideas as passionately and dramatically as Pentecostal preachers — a proposal that this graduate student (and veteran of countless dreary lectures) finds delightfully provocative (if somewhat absurd).

The very format of the book is an example of the approach De Botton is trying to encourage - at least every fourth page consists of a black and white photograph (here it reminds me of the wonderful A Fortunate Man (1967) by John Berger and Jean Mohr). 
In combination with the clarity and beauty of the text and the double spacing, this makes the book highly accessible!
And this more extended assessment also summarises the argument well -

We are seldom encouraged officially to be nice to one another. It offends our libertarian beliefs and risks paternalism. JS Mill said the only grounds for state interference in people’s lives is to prevent them harming others – not for their own good. Religions however have never held back. Libertarians doubt we can know what virtue is, or how to instil it in others – they have no moral bedrock. The only exception is childrearing, where parents do favour intervention over neutrality in their desire to bring up their children. And yet the results are not good – freedom does not always bring only good things; ‘our deepest wish may be that someone would come along and save us from ourselves.’

Religions however do offer guidance on how to live. They know that to sustain goodness we need an audience – it helps to know someone is watching (most marriages would work better if we thought that!). Clergy may tend to speak as if they alone were in possession of maturity and moral authority – but Christianity acknowledges that we are actually all infantile, incomplete and unfinished – and calls it Original Sin. It creates a moral atmosphere in which people point out their flaws to one another and look for improvement in their behaviour. Fresco painters put up virtues and vices as models and warnings – eg Scrovegni Chapel.

 What would it be like if we had similar images on advertising hoardings – eg advocating Forgiveness?Atheists tend to pity the inhabitants of religiously dominated societies for the extent of the propaganda they have to endure, but this is to overlook secular societies' equally powerful and continuous calls to prayer.

A libertarian state truly worthy of the name would try to redress the balance of messages that reach its citizens away from the merely commercial and towards a holistic conception of flourishing.

True to the ambitions of Giotto's frescoes, these new messages would render vivid to us the many noble ways of behaving that we currently admire so much and so blithely ignore… We don't only need reminders of the advantages of savoury snacks. p88 

This post about the "10 essential virtues" gives a good summary of what "secular" as distinct from "religious" or "commercial" values mean. In my next post I will give excerpts about the book's key chapter on Education... 

The moral depravity of the Romanian political class - continued

The political class in Romania surpassed itself last week. Without any warning or discussion they passed a draft law to protect themselves against prosecution for corruption. Under the proposed law, the president, members of parliament, and lawyers would no longer be classed as public officials, thus protecting them from charges of abuse of office, bribe-taking, conflict of interest, and other corruption crimes, Officials who have been convicted of such crimes may be exonerated if the bill becomes law.

 The bill has not yet been sent for President Basescu’s signature. He can return the bill for revision only once.

Prime Minister Victor Ponta – on his return from Nelson Mandela’s funeral -  seemed to accept on 12 December that the law needed to be discussed again, and if it is endorsed by legal experts, that Romania should ask the European Commission to say whether it breaks any of the country’s international obligations.

The anti-corruption agency DNA says 28 parliamentarians are on trial or serving prison sentences for corruption and more than 100 mayors and deputy mayors are on trial for financial crimes. The bill sharply contradicts Romania’s obligations under European and UN anti-corruption agreements, the DNA said.

One frequent blogger on things Romanian sets the scene and gives further detail here

Honouring Evil in Hungary

I lived in Hungary for almost 2 years – in 1995/96 – and then spent another couple of years across its border in the area between Nitra and Bratislava. Frankly I felt uneasy in the country. I lived in Miskolc and Nyrghhazy which also borders the Ukraine and Romania. 

I wondered why EU money was going into the area since so many of the houses were more substantial than those I was used to in, for example, Scotland. 

And there was an arrogance about the officials I worked with in local and regional government systems which worried me – I will never forget what a youngish official wrote in the brief report he supplied after his study-visit to an EU member country – “The one thing I have learned is that there is nothing to learn from this country”!   

Last month in Budapest a new statue was unveiled to a dangerous man. Right in the heart of the city – in Szabadság Tér (Freedom Place) – there now stands a monument to one of Hitler's closest allies: Admiral Miklós Horthy, the "regent" who ruled Hungary from 1920 to 1944. My thanks to the amazing blog by Hungarian Spectrum for this story -

The bust stands in the church of the notorious Calvinist minister Lóránt Hegedüs Jr, an incurable antisemite and admirer of the British historian and Holocaust denier David Irving. Hegedüs was the first person to bless the Horthy statue; then Márton Gyöngyösi, an MP of the extreme-right Jobbik party, addressed the congregation, declaring Horthy to be "the greatest statesman of the 20th century".The mind boggles. Historians have taught us that the Horthy era was one of the darkest chapters of Hungarian history; this is common knowledge. His present-day glorification is scandalous. The disgraceful anti-Jewish laws, the deportation of more than half a million Jews to the death camps, sending the entire Hungarian second army to be annihilated by the Russians – all these and many other crimes are connected to him. He was one of Hitler's closest associates and stayed loyal till the bitter end. Neither God nor the radical right can ever whitewash his name.How shocking it is that a large proportion of Hungarians ignore and deny these facts. To them it's simply an issue of freedom of speech and thought: if someone wishes to erect a monument to Horthy or to Ferenc Szálasi (the leader of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross party, and head of state from 1944 to 1945) in their church, vegetable garden or shed, it is considered his or her private affair. Some people claim that the bust of Horthy – at the top of the stairs leading to the Hegedüs church – is, in fact, on private property.

Antal Rogán – a spokesman for the governing Fidesz party – is worried about Hungary's negative reputation abroad. He has every reason to be troubled, because the country is responsible for some of the worst news within the European Union. Let's face it, there are no Hitler statues in Germany, and in Austria they are constitutionally forbidden. The same is true of Mussolini in Italy, Pétain in France, Ion Antonescu in Romania orJosef Tiso in Slovakia. None of them is being commemorated and extolled.True, there were a few hundred demonstrators in Szabadság Tér who protested against the ceremony, many wearing the yellow star. They deserve our gratitude and admiration for their courage. If only there were more. Members of the congregation and the mob told them to go to Israel, Brussels or the Danube, referring to the events of 1944-45 when Szálasi's Arrow Cross thugs shot several thousand Jews so that they fell into the freezing river.

History cannot be erased, nor forgotten. Discovering and understanding the past is the duty not only of governments and political parties, but also of the people, the whole nation. We must face it together – even when it is not pleasant – and try to learn from the consequences. Hungarians have not yet been through this process.

Last month in the city of Miskolc, in north-east Hungary, a group of fascist youngsters participated in a spectacular book-burning ritual. Among the works consigned to the flames were the collected poems of Miklós Radnóti.Radnóti was a wonderful lyric poet, one of the giants of Hungarian literature. On a forced march to the Nazi death camps in 1944, he was brutally murdered. His killers' successors are now murdering his works. Why? Because he was a Jew.And the police were standing by, doing nothing.

The Economist had a brief article last year which said -

Even young thinkers on the right are critical of the growing nostalgia for the 1930s and the Horthy cult. Tamas Novak, writing in mandiner.hu, an influential conservative blog, said that statues should not be erected to either Miklós Horthy or János Kádár, Hungary's long-serving communist leader, and squares should not be renamed in their honour. "Both deserve contempt, and their main goal was their political survival."Horthy era-writers are also being rehabilitated. Three far-right novelists will be reintroduced into the national curriculum this autumn, including József Nyírő, who was an open admirer of the Nazis. A commemoration was recently held in Nyírő's honour at a Budapest cultural centre. The centre is named after Miklós Radnóti, a Jewish writer and one of Hungary's greatest poets, who was killed by Hungarian Nazis.

And last month The Economist updated its comments 

What We Leave Behind

On this day, the anniversary of my father’s birth (in 1907 I think), it is appropriate that I offer a book today for “slow reading” which has the subtitle “exploring workplace issues from a Christian perspective”  and a main title  Questions of Business Life. It’s by Richard Higginson (2002) who is Director of Studies at the Ridley Hall Foundation in Cambridge and who will hopefully forgive me for taking the liberty of uploading it to scribd - since it is a fairly rare assessment of the ethical implications of issues such as global capitalism, corruption, marketing, sustainable development, E-commerce and the purpose of the company.

Its opening story makes an amusing use of typologies -

Fascism: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them and sells you the milk. 

Communism: You have two cows. You must take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.

Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

Enron Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then create a debt equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred through an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The Enron annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more!

How people remember us was the subject of a recent post – although obituaries are not quite the same thing. My father was so loved that his church was packed out for his memorial service. I delivered a short address at it – all of 25 or 26 years ago - and spoke about his love of books and of travel. 

I pity those who think that they will be honoured for the goods and possessions they have amassed eg, according to a cutting portrait, Jeff Bezos the founder of Amazon who relentlessly has removed anything and anyone who has stood in his way. 

We are honoured and respected for the intangible things we give others – in my father’s case, pastoral care which knew no bounds. Down and outs would beat a path to his door and would generally leave with some coins which we could ill afford. He was not only a Minister (ultimately of two churches (or congregations as we call them in Scotland) but (very unusually then for a Minister) also a Town Councillor and magistrate and, for quite a few years, a Prison Chaplain. 
It was he who gave me my love of books and travel (which I see also in my daughters). 

In a famous line, TS Eliot wrote that “old men should be explorers” and my father was exploring until almost the end. He died when that light of curiosity faded from his eyes.

This is an oil painting of my father which a Bulgarian painter, Yuliana Sotirova, did a few years ago from a black and white photo I gave her. It's an extraordinary likeness. 

Slow Books?

The title of my last post was tantalising – but perhaps a bit opaque. Clearly it was an allusion to the slow-food movement which is not only a fun-way of making a protest against globalisation but one which

strives to preserve traditional and regional cuisine and encourages farming of plants, seeds and livestock characteristic of the local ecosystem. It was the first established part of the broader Slow Movement in protest against “fast food”. Its goals of sustainable foods and promotion of local small businesses are paralleled by a political agenda directed against globalization of agricultural products. The movement has since expanded globally to over 100,000 members in 150 countries. 

I wasn’t aware of the phrase “slow books” – it just came to me in a creative flash. I was not really surprised, however, to learn that the phrase has already been coined – although fairly recently as I see from this March 2012 article in The Atlantic and this (rather local) 2009 website. In 2009 there was even a small book entitled Slow Reading 

The Atlantic article, however, seems to take a fairly restrictive definition of a “slow book” namely a literary classic and actually discounts non-literary books – on the argument that stories are better for one’s brain -

Why the emphasis on literature? By playing with language, plot structure, and images, it challenges us cognitively even as it entertains. It invites us to see the world in a different way, demands that we interpret unusual descriptions, and pushes our memories to recall characters and plot details. In fact, as Annie Murphy Paul noted in a March 17 New York Times op-ed, neuroscientists have found plenty of proof that reading fiction stimulates all sorts of cognitive areas—not just language regions but also those responsible for coordinating movement and interpreting smells. Because literary books are so mentally invigorating, and require such engagement, they make us smarter than other kinds of reading material, as a 2009 University of Santa Barbara indicated. Researchers found that subjects who read Kafka's "The Country Doctor"—which includes feverish hallucinations from the narrator and surreal elements—performed better on a subsequent learning task than a control group that read a straightforward summary of the story. (They probably enjoyed themselves a lot more while reading, too.)

Let me push, however, for a wider definition of a “slow book” . 
"Slow food" is an entire process - it is the preparation, production and consumption. And abhors the formulaes, specialisation and slave labour which the logic of modern production and ownership systems require eg in MacDonald's and Amazon 
I would therefore suggest three elements define "slow books" 

• a certain sharing of the reading experience, whether through book clubs, reading groups or blog sites. 
• Non-literary  books eg history, the arts and the social sciences should certainly be included - if written clearly and showing originality. We are talking intellectual sustenance here! We should, as a result of the digestion, feel better and see the world in a different way!
• And slow books are those which have emerged from a process which includes small publishers; independent and second-hand bookshops; and which honours and sustains the actual crafts involved in making a book including book design, typeface and binding skills. 

"Slow books" (like slow food) stand against marketing and "commodification" (sorry about the word!) and are about the relationships of real authentic people - whether as writers, readers, craftsmen or suppliers. 

update; a review of a new book - Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

Slow Books

Those of us searching for some clarity about the current global mess of the world are inflicted with a great deal of noise. How do we filter out the loud and simplistic messages and verbiage with which we are battered every day - and find the voices which really help us as human beings get a handle on this mess?

In addition to turning the television to the wall; cancelling all newspapers (living in the Balkans helps!) and unhooking yourself from the drug of “best-sellers”, I would suggest you try to find the more humble voices who pay proper respect to others ("standing on the shoulders of others") - who have posed good questions; who have patiently sifted the appropriate books (of various disciplines) to find answers; summarised them and – best of all – classified them into typologies…….

One such typology is grid-group theory - otherwise (and rather clumsily) known as "cultural theory"

Grid-group theory claims that viable modes of social patterns can be traced in the grid (action) and group (identity) dimensions. The answers to the two crucial questions: ‘who am I?’ (group) and ‘what shall I do?’ (grid) have vast consequences for most of the major decisions people make. The basic structure of the theory used here is presented in Figure 1 here 

The model generates four main types of societies.  At the far end of the continuum lies the highly individualist "weak group, weak grid". A "strong group, weak grid" society, on the other hand, is one of "enclaves", strongly−bounded groups impermeable to outsiders, but characterised by informal, highly personalised relationships within. The weak group, strong grid constitutes the "isolate" social form. 

Matthew Taylor has summarised the 4 quadrants in the following way -

The egalitarian paradigm; This sees benign change as being driven bottom up through collective action by those who are united by shared values and status. The idealism of egalitarians (emphasising the possibility of equality and the power of shared values) tends to leads them to feel that nature (including human nature) is vulnerable and has been corrupted. Egalitarians see individualists as selfish and irresponsible and hierarchists as out of touch and overbearing.

 The hierarchist paradigm

This sees benign change relying on leadership, authority, expertise and rules. As long as these things are in place then the potentially dangerous cycles and vagaries of nature can be managed.

Hierarchists see the other paradigms as naïve and unbalanced, but may accept each has its place as long as the hierarchy allots and regulates those places. 

The individualist paradigm    
This sees benign change as the result of individual initiative and competition. The aggregate sum of individual actions is collective good.  It’s OK to take risks because nature is resilient to change.

While individualists recognise the need for some hierarchy (more in theory than practice), they see the other paradigms as self-serving; hierarchists and egalitarians are hiding their own interests behind their paternalism and collectivism, while fatalists are simply excusing their laziness or lack of talent.

 The fatalist paradigm        

This sees successful change as unlikely and, in as much as it is possible, random in its causes and consequences. The world is unpredictable and unmanageable.

Fatalists view the other paradigms with indifference or scepticism, although they will tolerate them for the sake of a quiet life, or to help justify their own inaction.  

Life's Brief Span

I’m clearly getting morbid in my old age! A book in the underground shop at the University got me thinking at the weekend – it was the New York Times Obituaries of 2011-12! I failed to buy it simply because it was (of course) too heavily dominated by Americans – and I can access the archives here. Odd that no one has yet thought of getting European Commission funds to compile a set of obituaries of Europeans – drawn from such European “heavies” as Die Zeit and le Monde perhaps!

I was reminded of how readable and quirky the Daily Telegraph books of obituaries had been (as are the weekly Economist obits) and led then to The Guardian series of “other lives” which honours those less celebrated perhaps but whose lives were marked by dedication and thoughtfulness.

Elizabeth David was Britain’s most celebrated food writer – and her hundredth anniversary was nicely marked in this piece. And here's a lovely piece about the Irish poet Seamus Heaney who died recently - in a highly readable journal.