April, Education, Mice And Men

April

I’ve always loved April, the month that for me means spring, puts a spring in my step and a song in my heart. It’s the time when gardening in earnest can really begin and, here, when locally grown asparagus and strawberries abound in the shops and markets. Cantaloupe melons are appearing in the shops too, from Spain at the moment but locally grown ones will appear within a couple of weeks also. It’s the start of a local fruit bonanza that will last into September. And I’m a fruit-aholic.

I’ve not yet done any planting of summer flowers in front of my house but the allotment has kept me quite busy. White onions, lettuces, potatoes and radishes are all in and sprouting as well as the sunflowers with which I want to completely surround my plot. The rest will be planted in the next couple of weeks. As no one has claimed the fence bordering one side of the plot I’ve planted eight forsythia cuttings and three honeysuckle cuttings alongside it. I’ll take more cuttings in the next few weeks which hopefully can be planted in the autumn. It’s go, go, go.

Education

So what do you think education is about, what is part of it, what negates it? I think that tick boxes, as part of any evaluation negates it. Think about that. Tick boxes are antithetical to education and yet they are widely used to evaluate it. How can that be?

Just consider this. How many times have you seen the virtue of thinking “outside the box” as having produced a new insight, a breakthrough on a problem, an advance in knowledge? I think it has has happened quite frequently. Just as one instance, Einstein’s theory of relativity couldn’t have happened without it. Einstein couldn’t have had that insight without thinking outside the box. But, educated today, Einstein wouldn’t have been allowed that insight, he would have been marked down, as less intelligent, because of it.

So why are tick boxes used to evaluate education? It seems fairly obvious to me that it is because they make education (and teachers) esay to evaluate, which happens to be very important to politicians, particularly useful in fooling the public into believing that education levels are maintained or increased while budgets are cut.

Of Mice And Men

My French friends are puzzled about the English; they think we have changed in personality. The French have for long regarded the English as “bagareurs”, always ready for an argument, a, fight, stubborn, perfidious. Isn’t that what saved Britain in WW2?S o they look at what has been happening in England and scratch their heads and think “Why isn’t London burning? We know the English can be taciturn but have they all become mice?”. If the same had been happening in France the guillotines would already have been dusted off and wagon loads of MPs would be on their way to meet their maker. The price of electricity is soaring in England; here the price rise is capped at 15%, raised from 4%. Inflation of food prices isreported as 17% in Britain, here it is just above the general inflation level of 5.7%. And the French are up in arms about the price rises. A proposal to raise the retirement age to 3 years lower than the British retirement age has already seen Paris burning in parts. Why isn’t this happening in London?

So the French ask:what has happened to the English?Mice or men? Was Macron right when he called Brexit the vassalisation of the English?

 

Brexit Revisited

Brexit Revisited

At the risk of revisiting territory already covered in the past, provoked by issues I am still discussing with friends and acquaintances, I want to provide a definitive statement of my attitude to Brexit.

Referenda are a legitimate democratic mechanism, used by many countries as a part of their democratic constitution, with a specific purpose and rules to achieve that purpose. The purpose is to get a direct reading of opinion/desires from the electorate unfiltered by intermediaries such as elected representatives. To this end two of the rules are that the electorate must be properly informed and the result must be decisive: the government is looking for a directive. Thus any misinformation in referenda campaigns must be heavily penalised and may invalidate the result and a threshold is imposed on the winning result margin, often 60% but which may be less. A result of 2-3% either way is interpreted as the electorate being more or less evenly split, unable to make up its mind and therefore offering no clear direction to the government. The referendum result is thus null. Other normal electoral regulations apply.

None of this applied to the UK EU referendum; all the normal referenda and electoral rules were broken and what ensued was akin to a rugby scrum without even rugby rules. Any country that uses referenda responsibly would have declared the result invalid. I therefore regard the UK EU referendum as having no legitimacy at all and very far from having any kind of binding commitment on the government.

So what was it all about? Here I think we have to separate the promoters and the voters. What the promoters had in common was that they were all rich and powerful or represented those who were. And they were faced with a stated EU intention to bring in legislation to crack down on tax avoidance. For the promoters there was the incentive to avoid this legislation and also to repeal many EU laws, such as on food, environmental standards and worker rights, that inhibited profits. Easy money and low tax were the goals, I think. What do current events suggest?

 However, those goals were hardly likely to appeal to the electorate at large What was needed for an effective referendum campaign were populist slogans, appeals to nationalism and a false idea of sovereignty. This was exactly the problem faced by Goebbels in Germany prior to 1933 and may explain why analogies to him and Nazi measures are sometimes applied to the current UK government. The Leave campaign adopted very similar arguments to those of Goebbels, slogans and superficially attractive sound bites, denial of reality and appeals to wish fulfilment, albeit without the overt racism. The jews as a target were simply replaced by the EU.

 Finally there was the UK’ endemic xenophobia. Foreigners and what is foreign are widely regarded with suspicion and distaste and the Leave campaign ramped up the xenophobia., particularly over the issue of immigration: immigration=foreigners=bad. In fact the UK needs immigrants because of its ageing population, in common with most developed western countries, and is in reality in competition with those other countries for the most needed immigrant skills. So ùmaking immigrants unwelcome is a clear own goal.

Economically Brexit makes no sense since it reversed the economic reasons for the original decision to join the EU when the same economic consitions applied as in 1972. The decision to join was because the economy was in poor shape and the UK was doing much more business with the EU with tariff barriers against it than it was with the Commonwealth countries with no such barriers. Joining the EU removed those barriers and boosted trade. Trade requires a correspondence of interests and the UK thaan had more with the EU than with the Commonwealth, as it still does today The UK joined the EU for economic reasons, not political ones, and has left for political reasons,no wonder trade is now suffering.

So how did it work? From subsequent anecdotal evidence the appeal to a distorted understanding of sovereignty worked best, the idea that the UK alone could not just control but impose its destiny on the world: take back cpntrol was the slogan. There was also the appeal to funds for the NHS which many people apparently believed; from an overtly rich, right-wing group traditionally opposed to spending on public services? And appeal to many in small but significant professions who felt undervalued by their allotment in the EU, such as fishermen and farmers. EU allotments in other areas, such as economically deprived areas, were simply countered by empty promises, empty as has proved to be the case.

So the campaign worked. Should I therefore regard it bas binding? I can’t for the life of me regard it as in any way legitimate, as anything other than a travesty of democracy and a farce. It would seem to have resulted in a mountain of problems, of chaos; and that is what, if we had given it real informed thought, we should reasonably have expected.

Reason, however, is not the order of the day, emotions that have been evoked are still alive and it seems that the major political parties in the Uk are wary of them. By far the largest and most influential part of the media in the UK is determined to keep the Brexit fantasy alive; even that national institution, globally respected hitherto as independent, the BBC, is apparently willing to compromise, to compromise not only its independence but also its global reputation.

So what of the future? Reality has already bitten, and bitten bitterly for many. Will Britain, and its political parties, face up to reality or continue to pander to fantasy?

 

Think

Think

Think was apparently at one time the watch word within IBM when that company was the dominant force in the IT world. I don’t know how well that worked for the company but I believe it should be the watch word for everybody today.

I recently had an article published in a reputable English IT journal but had difficulty trying to access the published article. There had been recurring problems, the journal admitted, over access for new subscribers (not financial, subscription is free). I took a look and the soution became immediately clear and my problem was resolved. I passed the problem resolution on to the journal. So, no problem?

Well, my background is in IT and when I retired many ears ago one of the great benefits I felt was that I no longer had to try to keep up to date with new software releases. It used to take me at least half a day a week to do that when I was working. So I am well out of date on new software and quite generally on new developments in IT. Yet I easily found the problem with this website when their own IT personnel, who must have been much more up to date than I was and much more familiar with their website , apparently couldn’t. How can that happen?

I believe it’s to do with thinking, not rocket science, just ordinary but rigourous thinking. The article I wrote focussed on the importance of what I knew as the ELSE clause, part of a logical construction used in programs of my day: IF, THEN, ELSE. IF (whatever) occurred/applied, THEN all possible reactions, ELSE because you are not God and may have overlooked some possibilities. As I understood it, even if you were totally, absolutely sure you had covered all possibilities in your THEN clause, thinking as hard as you could, you still had to include an ELSE. And it’s the ELSE clause that is so often missing today.

Why? Is it because people (and specifically IT employeees today) are not encouraged to think for themselves? That’s a possibility, though a damning one if it is true.

The other more general possibility lies in education. If you want to judge levels of education by numbers, as governments increasingly seem to want to do, geerally for political purposes, you use tick boxes. They are easy to mark, right or wrong and you can count the numbers. Tick boxes force a limited number of possible responses. So how can anyone think outside the (tick) box?

If you are not allowed/educated to do so you don’t. So how do we bring up people to think independently, out of the box?

There’s an awful corollary. Could it be that governments don’t want people to think out of the box but only within the constraints that they have decided? If that is true we need revolutionaries as never before.

 

A Conjecture On Human Development

A Conjecture On Human Evolution

The weather lately has been dry and sunny but most often with the cold Mistral blowing. When it stops we have 14-15 degrees but the Mistral cuts that in half. So I’ve not been doing a lot outside, more reading and writing indoors. So here’s a conjecture on human evolution.

A friend of mine here has spent a large part of his life in the East, which means there is at least one person here I can enjoy a chilli-laden curry with, and he has acquainted me with some eastern thinking; which leads to the following conjecture.

Hindous believe that human development has not been linearly progressive, as is thought in the West, but cyclic: cycles of development ending in catastrophe followed by renewed development. I find the possibility intriguing.

The first evidence of Homo Sapiens is about 300,000 years ago, humans with intelligence if not a lot of education. Agriculture, on currently available evidence, is estimated to have started around 14,000 years ago. So it took humans with intelligence, even very basic intelligence, 286,000 years to think that planting a few seeds might be a good idea? It’s possible of course but is it probable? Hindous don’t think so.

There’s another interesting calculation. If a global catastrophe were to happen today, a global nuclear war, a large asteroid hitting the Earth or some such, it is estimated that it would take only about 300 years for all evidence of our current civilisation other than that in stone or pottery to disappear, except perhaps for a few chance exceptions.

So…..let’s allow for some margin of error on the estimates. Suppose agriculture started 1000 years earlier than estimated and suppose it takes 1000 years for evidence (other than stone, pottery) to disappear, that gives a possible cycle of around 18,000 years. Eighteen thousand goes into 300,000 rather a lot of times.

All this is just conjecture of course and there is one overriding problem: one of scale.

When discussing the distant past it is common to talk in terms of estimates of “within a few thousand years, ten or twenty thousand years” because we know so little about it. But it is quite possible for a hell of a lot to happen in a few thousand years, as we do know today and, as I hope I have shown. Did it, in the distant past? The possible eradication of all evidence within a thousand years doesn’t help.We’ll probably never know but you could think about it if the Mistral or other factor is keeping you indoors.

 

Religion

 Here is another of my letters on the French

 Religion

Voltaire said that while in France, because there were only two religions, they fought one another, in England there were 20 so people of all religions co-rxisted happily side by side. This, as with many of Voltaire’s observations, was somewhat of a simplification although there was some truth in it. It is true that in England in the 18^th century there was no longer any official antagonism between catholics and protestants but it is also true that antagonism still exists to the present day, certainly in Northern Ireland. Elsewhere in Britain old antagonisms are evident mostly just in insults hurled by football supporters at one another. Several big towns in England and Scotland have two big football teams, one with catholic origins and the other with protestant ones.

Protestantism, as a rebuttal of catholicism, didn’t really arise in Europe until the 18^th century, the century of philosophers and rethinking of previously held beliefs. It was the century in which logic was first widely applied to fundamental questions. The sacred cows of superstition were milked mercilessly and religion relegated to the position of faith rather than absolute truth.

Prior to this both catholics and protestants had indulged in the universal religious sport of killing those who thought differently. Both those in England and those in France had greatly indulged in this sport up until almost the 18^th century. In france there had notably been the Albigenses but also other non-catholic (hence heretic) groups. These groups were defeated at this time in France as a power of influence but persisted in the background. Prior to that “heretics” and catholics had committed outrages on each other possibly in equal measure. In the Baronnies where I live, Mollans was a catholic viilage sandwiched between protestant enclaves. In one attack Mollans lost over 100 men, about a fifth of its then population. And a neighbouring village, Pierrelongue, was completely wiped out and remained uninhabited until a plea for inhabitants resulted in an influx of people from the Auvergne to repopulate it. Subsequently Napoleon 1er sought some kind of understanding with the catholic church which lasted, with increasing unease, through the 19^th century until Aristide Briand, managed to negotiate an agreement in which France became officially a lay country with church property becoming state owned. The officially lay status of the country is of great importance to the French;

England indulged in the same sport for many centuries but king HenryVIII came up with a game changer. Refused, for good catholic reasons, a divorce he wanted, he created a new religion, the Church of Ebgland. This new religion wasn’t catholic in that it did not accept the authority of the pope but wasn’t necessarily protestant either. It was some kind of hybrid unorthodox religion whose dictates seem designed to encompass as many attitudes to faith as possible. Catholic/protestant antagonisms persisted after Henry VIII but so did the Church of England.

The English tendency to conformity, though frequently attacked by renegades, has ensured its presence as the major religion in the UK. I’m not sure what you have to do to be excommunicated by the Church of England, other than declaring yourself an atheist or of another specific faith, but it is that flexibility that has ensured not only its survival but its pre-eminence in England.

A friend of mine, on joinng the British navy at age 15, was asked to state his religion. He said he had none so the interviewing officer put him down as Church of England. A friend in France, when I among a group of others, proposed singing carols in the village at Christmas, wanted to join in but refused on the grounds that carols were religious and she did not want to be associated with religion. In France the lay ethic is fiercely defended.

For these reasons and no doubt many others, attitudes to religion between people in France and England differ markedly. In France, people tend to be very religious or not at all. In England the distinction between those who are religious and those who are not tends to be much more vague. The Church of England tends to sweep up those in the middle.

I have made no mention of Muslims or jews and should probably explain why. With respect to muslims the reason is that neither had noticeable influence on religious thinking in either Britain or France until recent times. True the so- called Saracens invaded parts of southern France in the Middle Ages but they didn’t stay for long and had little influence at the time. They didn’t get as far as England. Subsequentltly France’s annexation of of northern Africa has seen an influx of Muslims and a much more significant role for them today. Similarly in England there was no muslim influence until an influx of Pakistanis after that sub-continent obtained its independence in 1948. Islam is now strongly associated with terrorism in both countries and has for that and other less easily identifiable reasons made muslims the subject of a great deal of prejudice. As for the jews, they were always the fall guys in any dispute that didn’t involve any immediately identifiable other groups and have from time to time been persecuted in both countries when no other scapegoat was readily available.

Christmas

Christmas

I feel I should record my Christmas, although it was uneventful; but it was enjoyable. On Christmas eve I was invited by Martina, a gardening friend, to share her Christmas meal with some other gardeners. Martina is German so used to having her Christmas meal on Christmas eve. I left late. and all the street lighting had been switched off, one of the energy saving measures here, so I ad to navigate my way home in complete darkness, which I somehow managed without falling over or knocking into anything.There was no moonlight and complete ptch-black darkness is something I haven' experienced since I remember having to cross an orchard in it at Summerhill school some sixty years ago. At leastt there were no trees to avoid this time.

On the day itself I got up, made myself some coffee ad toast and Messengered my daughter and family before going off to lunch with friends Steve and Jo, picking up Jean-Claude along the way. Jo had cooked a traditional Christmas meal which we all enjoyed and she and Steve gave me a portable greenhouse kit as a present. I think it will be very useful when I start gardening again, probably in March. I gave Steve and jo a print from artist neighbour Florence; I thought that as they will be leaving before long they should have a memento of Florence’s work to take with them. When I returned home late in the afternoon, dropping off Jean-Claude on the way, I phoned my son to see how his meal had been; I hadn’t phoned earlier because I knew he was cooking it.

On Boxing Day I had invited Steve and Jo and eight others but only five of them turned up so there was a lot of food left over. I decided the best way to use it up was to invite some of the gardening crowd over and that provided another enjoyable evening.

So, all inall, a very enjoyable if uneventful time.

Football on TV began again on Boxing Day and I have been watching a lot of it. While watching I’ve been tearing into small pieces all the cardboard and paper that I have accumulated over the period. The soil in my allotment is sandy and I’m hoping the bits of papre and cardboard will help it absorb water better. I’m assuming we will have several heatwaves again this year. I plan to dump that and garden refuse bit by bit on the allotment over the coming months and dig it in. I’ve already scattered considerable guano over the soil which should compensate for any nitrogen lost as the debris breaks down.

I’m already reflecting on what I want to grow this year and avoiding last years mistakes. Land cress and onions were clear omissions last year and I shan’t bother with potatoes this year. All vegetables are available here quite cheaply in season and I can’t grow them out of season so it’s a question of what I can and want to consume and what I can store easily. Steve and Jo have given me their gooseberry bushes so that will be an addition to which I may add further and I want to add some more lavender also. And I want to completely surround the allotment with sunflowers. Other than that I shll continue to reflect.

There is one sad aspect of Christmas to me, a function of my age and that of most of my friends: it is the exchange of cards and greetings. Every year I have to cross the names of friends who I know have died and wonder about those I do not hear from.. 

 

Love, Sex, Marriage And Morals

 Here is anther of my letters on the French

Love, Sex, Marriage And Morals

Love, sex and marriage are three different words and, for the French, three separable concepts. In England the three go together, or at least they are supposed to. In France this may also happen, indeed does increasingly so in recent times, but that has been less the case than in England. A result of the more liberal view of the French is that the English tend to regard the French and France as inherently romantic and sexy. The French view of the English in such matters is much less flattering, words such as staid and inhibited that come to mind, but perhaps reliable and loyal do too. Certainly French women seem very sexy to most English eyes, the more so that their sexiness seems often to be unconscious rather than contrived.

Marriage as primarily a practical rather than romantic arrangement has been and still is prevalent in many parts of the world, particularly the muslim world but the muslim world does not concern us here. In England it has been largely contained within high society, the powerful and wealthy combining their power and wealth. Less well-off people generally didn’t have much that could be combined for economic strength so there was less basis for economic arrangements. In France the practice seems to have extended much further down among the classes, particularly among peasants with small-holdings: adjacent small-holdings could make a sizeable farm or vineyard.

In England transgression often caused scandals in high society that were relished by the lower classes but accepted as part of high society, good for headlines in scandal sheets but a matter for them, not, us. The prevailing quasi Calvinist morality made the consequences of transgression much more onerous for the middle and lower classes. George Bernard Shaw remarked that only the middle classes have morals: the rich don’t need them and the poor can’t afford them. In France a practically arranged marriage was not to be allowed to preclude a good love and sex life, so if the marriage did not provide these they could legitimately be sought elsewhere. If that meant transgression then so be it. The Catholic church in France had a role in this. With divorce not possible, there had to be a way to re-arrange a bad arrangement. Sex might be something of a problem as sex was the means by which the church sought to control people, but there was always confession. This attitude is epitomised in the French “, 5 to 7”, the hours when bourgeois French businessmen stereotypically visited their mistresses after leaving work and before returning home for dinner with the family. The French could/would not be denied be denied their “right” to enjoy life, their whole reason for living.

Family is considered important in both French and English cultures but, I think, possibly more emphatically so in France. When my children were young France was always a favourite holiday destination a child-friendly country. Children seemed to be welcomed everywhere and included in all activities. This was sometimes the case in England but not always so. And French couples, if they divorce, seem to do so less often than their English counterparts when their children are young. Providing the children with a stable and happy upbringing is considered more important than resolving marital issues, which can be left to when the children have become adults and are better able to deal with the consequences.

Within all this in France the most important watchword is discretion. Privacy laws in France are much stricter than in England. Much of the contents of English scandal sheets would immediately provoke legal action in France. Even so, and despite more liberal attitudes to marriage and sex, relationships are expected to be carried out with discretion. Mistresses are not flaunted and the French are quite as able as the English to see what is thrust under their noses. But in France relationships are rarely subjected to public investigation and speculative prudery as they can often be in England. Discretion is the word.

Prudery exists in both countries but Calvinism primarily in England. In France, if two people get together and have sex that is their affair (literally) and should not concern anybody else. In England, if the affair becomes known, it is almost certain to be subjected to moral judgements, public or private. To he English, sex is a matter of morals. To the French it is simply a fact of life and may have little moral significance..