History, violence and incubating prejudice…

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Durham cathedral

We are down in Durham this weekend for a cricket match between England and Sri Lanka (not looking good at the moment as it is raining. UPDATE- it did not rain and they lost badly) It gave us a chance to meet up with friends Graham and Victoria, and for our kids to play a game of car park cricket!

Last night we walked along the river in Durham, and up through the beautiful Cathedral close and the old streets full of university colleges. Durham (despite the hoards of drunken hen parties) is such a lovely place, but it has all sorts of violent history.

A lot of it concerns battles with Scottish armies coming down from the North. For example, this one. Then there was the Northern rebellion (involving Mary Queen of Scots,) then the fear of the Highlanders marauding down from the north which became every child’s nightmare for 200 years or more.

Will and I had a conversation about his history lessons, where they sat and watched Mel Gibson’s Braveheart- something which makes me very cross because to even vaguely suggest that this film is ‘history’ seems to me to be deeply concerning. The teacher did seem to point out some historical inaccuracies (check out the wikipedia entry) but this once again misses the point.

Last night the British public primarily elected the UK Independence Party to represent us at the European parliament. UKIP are a party based around two right wing simplistic ideas; ‘Europeans are not to be trusted’ and ‘we don’t want any more immigrants coming into our country taking our jobs/houses/benefits/hospital beds.’ It is a party that has learned nothing from history, and seems to have effectively engaged the British with cartoon versions of human interaction. Like Braveheart does. My fear is that in a time when minority extremist parties are holding sway in our minds, we need more than ever to remember the lessons of history…

The point I tried to convey to Will is that the greatest danger of these kinds of simplistic good-against-evil depictions of races and creeds is that it makes it possible for powerful people to manipulate one group against the other. If Johnny foreigner is evil; less than human; if he is the problem – the very cause of our difficulties – then we will focus on him and forget all sorts of other issues- inequality, imperialism, injustice, poverty, greed, narrow minded prejudice etc etc.

On a bridge just below the stunningly beautiful cathedral in Durham is an old stone tablet which makes this point in a few different ways. It is carved with these words;

Grey towers of Durham

Yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles

Half church of God, half castle against the Scot

And long to roam these venerable isles

With records stored of deeds long forgot

Inscription, bridge, durham

TFT is six years old…

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WordPress kindly informed me this morning that I have now been hammering away on this blog for six years.

Many times I have thought it was time to stop blogging and turn my energies to something else, but each time I have found myself returning. I no longer write each day, but I still find that the process of collecting my thoughts into some kind of external offering is a useful one for me- a way of shaping my experience to something deeper, something more deliberately spiritual. I strive to be as honest as I can be, and mostly I think I achieve this, albeit with the inevitably bias of human perspective.

I had a bit of a row with a manager in work a while or so ago over a piece that I wrote reflecting on a work issue. It highlighted the blurred lines between the person/public that blogs venture into. How much of myself is it OK to share in such a public way? How much of other people’s lives is it OK to mention? It is so easy to forget that people actually occasionally READ things that I write. The manager I mentioned was an intensely private person and it was clear that s/he had no comprehension as so why I would ever spill my soul on to the internet. The whole episode was quite upsetting at the time and it caused me to step back and review again my own motivations.

Back in 2011, I borrowed and revised a list of reasons for blogging from Tall Skinny Kiwi (Andrew Jones) who has been blogging since the stone age- most of us became imitators of his style really, unwittingly or not. He suggested this list, with Bible references and everything;

1. Praise (public acknowledgement) – “publish glad tidings daily”
2. Accountability. (Eph. 5: 21 “Submit yourselves to one another”, quote from Athanasias)
3. Vulnerability (Daniel’s window)
4, Given-ness (Freely you have received, gift economy, Prov 11:24)
5. Creative Naming (Adam, Neighbors in Ruth)
6. Repentance (editing/deleting/changing our mind in new media)
7. Fellowship (hypertext linking, Koinonia)
8. Evangelism (storytelling, blogging from our lives)
9. Integrity (writing matches our speaking, design reflects reality)
10. Posterity. (store/guard what has been entrusted, writing history)
There was also another one: Watchfulness (“watch and pray”).

I think I would add a couple more-

11. Creativity- most writers would say that words shape us as we shape them.

12. Discipline and long term commitment- blogging output varies, but it demands mostly daily commitment over a long time to develop a voice.

But I think blogging should come with a little warning for introspective folk like me- it can be addictive, and it is not the only spiritual discipline- and should never become dominant in our lives above other things that carry us towards ‘the other.’

There is also physical community. Having said that, I recently had the pleasure of sharing a tiny island with several friends, all of whom I would never have the pleasure of knowing but for blogging… It is a strange new world we find ourselves in, with connections sparked by cyberspace as much (if not more than) locality, but in the end, it is still all about seeking the depth in ourselves, and the seeing the beauty in the other.

Phantom Limb…

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We have been spending a lot of time in the car lately, which is always good for two things- conversation, and listening to lots of music.

Michaela has this thing with music- it takes her about two three years to find her way into something new, and then something will grab her and she will play it over and over. It says something about our disparate personalities that I like something on the first time of listening, or probably will never like it at all (with a few notable exceptions, revisited as musical taste evolves.)

The soundtrack to our recent journeys has often been a band called Phantom Limb. Will and I discovered them a few years ago at Greenbelt Festival- we stood in a more or less empty field during the mid afternoon graveyard slot and were stunned by the sounds hitting us from the stage. Waves of complex harmonies, and a fusion of country, gospel and soul that did something to my innards.

Phantom limb are (or where- I think they are sadly no more?) made up of session musicians who escaped the slavery of playing ‘down’ to other peoples requirements into the freedom of playing what they wanted to play.

The lead singer in particular has a voice that comes along once in a blue moon. She sounds like an overdriven guitar solo at times.

Here are some acoustic versions of some of their songs;

Leadership in small missional groups, reviewed…

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We took a trip up to Aberdeen yesterday to meet up with friends from Gairioch Church. As part of their planning/organisation, they have a bi-annual ‘sounding board’, where they invite some outsiders like us to come and be part of a conversation about where they are up to, where they are heading and to discuss challenges they are working through. Michaela and I always feel like frauds as what they have achieved is special, and the thought that we might have some expertise to offer seems to us a little silly- however, it all seems to come out in the conversation.

Yesterday a lot of conversation was caught up around the issue of leadership; particularly the kind of leadership that might be the best way to work with small groups of families and individuals engaged in what we have called ‘missional’ groups. It is an old theme for all of us involved in the essentially fragile practice of community. Some questions never quite go away;

  • How do we lead without becoming oppressive? How is power shared, or at least mitigated?
  • How do we lead in a way that does not create passivity and dependency on the part of those we journey with?
  • How do we lead in a way that creates safety, warmth and stability?
  • Who looks after whom?
  • How are specific responsibilities shared and encouraged?
  • Where does the buck stop?

Within my own community, these questions are still largely unanswered. We find temporary solutions only, which is a weakness but paradoxically also sometimes a strength.

My rough conclusions from conversation yesterday where that three things are vital in trying to deal with leadership in small groups; Context, purpose and developmental stage.

Context might mean the place where people meet, the nature of the group in terms of comfort with one another, experience of individuals within it etc. Leadership has to emerge from what the group is comfortable with. Our context is a small town in which most of our members have done with ‘religion’- we have been inoculated against the formality and rigidity of leadership structures, at least in part because of our own and others failure. Leadership for us had to be small. It had to be shared.

The purpose of small missional groups will of course have some variability. At times we work together on specific tasks- food banks, art installations, kids events, worship services, community projects. Some tasks clearly benefit from a leader, an organiser, an agitator. Someone needs to see the big picture and hold everyone else to account for delivering what they said they would deliver. This probably does not need to be the SAME person each time, as we all have different skills and experiences.

However, the starting point of most small missional groups is community. Our hope and conviction is that our activism will grow out of our connectedness, our common place of becoming. We are a constant experiment of turning an inside outside; of practising the art of love so we can learn to be deliberate in our love of others outside the group (an easy thing to write but an extremely difficult thing to achieve.)  If this is the ultimate purpose of our group then leadership is probably much more akin to facilitation. The role of the leader is to create safe space for others to adventure in, not necessarily to direct what happens within it.

Interestingly enough, the skill set required to create (or curate) this safe space is not one that many of we pioneering far-horizon kind of folk find easy to operate within. Safety and predictability bores us. Our pushing at the edges frightens others. This tension is very real to any of us who have been in these groups. Currently I am sweating within mine as most people are content with what is but I am wanting more…

Which brings me to the issue of developmental stages. Groups like ours have a trajectory that typically involves something like this;

dreaming – gathering – planning – forming – conflict – reforming (repeat last two stages several times) – ending.  

Leadership at different parts of the groups life may need to be very different. I think there is also a need for EXTERNAL leadership (or at least facilitation) at times to bring new perspectives and refreshment.

I have great hopes for Garioch church. They are a lovely bunch of folk who are asking all the right questions. The model of church – deliberately small enough to be around a table, but networked with bigger relationships – is one that really appeals to me.

If you are interested in this issue, you might be also find some use in a few previous ramblings on the subject;

Leadership, networking and the trajectory of pioneering groups.

Leadership in small missional communities.

Church in the margins- gender and leadership.

Rollins on leadership.

Leadership in the new context, lessons for post-charismatics.

Leaderless organisations.

Reflecting on the life of small ‘missional’ groups.

What the hell is so wrong with trying to be politically correct?

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You hear it all the time; “It is political correctness gone MAD”, or “I am not very politically correct, but…” It is almost as if this thing called political correctness is a social evil alongside farting or slapping an old lady.

People love to trot out examples of political correctness ‘gone mad’, particularly the right wing media, who seem to regard it as some kind of insidious communist attack from within- perpetrated by a 5th column of Trotsky loving social workers. Here are some of the stories that have been doing the rounds;

Blackboards in school being renamed “chalkboards” to avoid offending black people.
Some schools having a “holiday tree” rather than a Christmas tree every “Winter Holiday Season.”
City councils banning Christmas to avoid offending Jews, Muslims, neopagans, and other non-Christian folk.
Manholes being renamed “Personnel Access Units” to avoid offending women.

“Baa baa black sheep” banned as having racist conotations.

Crowbars being renamed as they may have been called after ‘Jim Crow’ racist stereotype.

The problem is with these stories is that they are mostly celebrated separate from any verifiable evidence that they ever happened, but even when some evidence does exist, shawn of all context it is impossible to engage with any kind of dialogue about what was behind decisions that some poor bureaucrat was struggling with.

Reaction to what is perceived to be ‘political correctness’ sometimes seems rather hysterical- you could even say that it has ‘gone mad.’

But language does matter. How we talk about issues and words we describe people with shapes both the we see them, and the way others around us see them.

Language is a moving target however. I was reminded of this recently by a discussion about words like ‘cretin’, ‘lunatic’, ‘spastic’, ‘moron’; you still see them in old medical files where I work. They used to be diagnostic categories, but they became words of abuse. To be given labels like this was to wear a curse on a badge.

If it is ‘political correctness’ to seek speak of people who have been broken and marginalised with dignity and respect- then I am all for political correctness. I would much rather err on the side of the small people than worry about what the right wing tabloids think.

Who wants to be a billionaire?

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capitalism3 It is official. The UK has more Billionaires per head of population than any other country. London alone has 72. Makes you proud to be British doesn’t it? The nation where the rich get richer (because they deserve it) and the poor get poorer (serves them right; lazy scroungers that they are.) More locally, to me at least, Scotland has 7 Billionaires, up from 6 last year. This from the BBC;

The Grant-Gordon whisky family tops the Scottish element of the list with a fortune of £1.9bn.

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There are now 104 billionaires based in the UK with a combined wealth of more than £301bn, the list says.

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The Grant-Gordon Banffshire distilling family have ousted Mahdi-Al Tajir from the top spot in Scotland. Al-Tajir, whose interests include a development of luxury homes at Gleneagles, is worth £1.67bn, according to the list.

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Sir Brian Souter and Ann Gloag, the siblings who founded the Stagecoach transport empire, have become members of the billionaire club for the first time. They share a fortune of £1bn – an increase of £270m on last year.

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Other Scots on the super-rich list are Sir Ian Wood and family whose £1.32bn fortune comes from oil services and fishing, and the Thomson family, owners of publisher DC Thomson, who are worth £1.2bn.

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Former Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed, who owns an estate in the Highlands, is estimated to be worth £1.3bn, while Jim McColl, of engineering business Clyde Blowers has an estimated fortune of £1bn.

Setting aside the morality of concentrating so much wealth in the hands of individuals, two questions seem important-

  1. Do these people create prosperity for the nation- for working people- commensurate with the position their own assets gives them?
  2. Does their wealth produce anything of worth?

As you look down the short list of Scottish Billionaires, the arguments supporting positive answers to these questions seem weak. Whisky, posh flats, posh shops, mega profits from former privatised industry (transport) paid for by subsidies from the tax payer. There are a couple of industrialists there however. It is impossible to look at this list and not feel that Piketty’s analysis of how wealth rises exponentially, like some kind of run away greed machine, in capitalist economies. I quoted this previously;

Anyone with the capacity to own in an era when the returns exceed those of wages and output will quickly become disproportionately and progressively richer.

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The incentive is to be a rentier rather than a risk-taker: witness the explosion of buy-to-let. Our companies and our rich don’t need to back frontier innovation or even invest to produce: they just need to harvest their returns and tax breaks, tax shelters and compound interest will do the rest. Capitalist dynamism is undermined, but other forces join to wreck the system.

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Piketty notes that the rich are effective at protecting their wealth from taxation and that progressively the proportion of the total tax burden shouldered by those on middle incomes has risen. In Britain, it may be true that the top 1% pays a third of all income tax, but income tax constitutes only 25% of all tax revenue: 45% comes from VAT, excise duties and national insurance paid by the mass of the population. As a result, the burden of paying for public goods such as education, health and housing is increasingly shouldered by average taxpayers, who don’t have the wherewithal to sustain them.

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Wealth inequality thus becomes a recipe for slowing, innovation-averse, rentier economies, tougher working conditions and degraded public services. Meanwhile, the rich get ever richer and more detached from the societies of which they are part: not by merit or hard work, but simply because they are lucky enough to be in command of capital receiving higher returns than wages over time. Our collective sense of justice is outraged.

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The lesson of the past is that societies try to protect themselves: they close their borders or have revolutions – or end up going to war.

Piketty fears a repeat.

Perhaps then we need to watch carefully for those who tell you that the poor and broken are the problem- they are not, they are the consequences of unsustainable wealth creation by the few. Watch too for the convenient scapegoat-makers, the border-closers, the nationalists. They tend to play right into the hands of the super rich. It is a distraction from the real operation of capital, and a convenient way to wall wealth away from taxation. It also pretends that the problem of austerity is caused by the poor outsider, come to steal our jobs, our houses, our NHS facilities. Blessed are the poor, but who wants to be poor? We all want to be Billionaires…

It’s all about poverty, stupid!

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Some sobering news for education systems in Scotland, via the Joseph Rowntree Foundation;

  • The gap between children from low-income and high-income households starts early. By age 5, it is 10–13 months. Lower attainment in literacy and numeracy is linked to deprivation throughout primary school. By age 12–14 (S2), pupils from better-off areas are more than twice as likely as those from the most deprived areas to do well in numeracy. Attainment at 16 (the end of S4) has risen overall, but a significant and persistent gap remains between groups.
  • Parental socio-economic background has more influence than the school attended.
  • Children from deprived households leave school earlier. Low attainment is strongly linked to destinations after school, with long-term effects on job prospects.

We have been attempting to tout education as the means by which we make societies more equal for generations now. We tried a tri-partite education system, with children streamed by ability, then we switched to comprehensive education. We tried experimental community schools for a while (I went to one) then sort of gave up and said that the problem was caused by bad schools, bad teaching.

You could argue that the politicians employed the old divide and rule trick- they made schooling all about choice, individuality and parent power – none of these things bad in their own right, but they were sold to us using league tables (which masked the inequality by making inner city schools look like they were under performing.) The end result is that we as parents increasingly looked after our own. Those that could afford to send our kids to private education felt under even more pressure to do so.

What the Rowntree report makes clear is what we have always known- inequalities in educational attainment are not about bad schools or bad teaching, they are about one thing- poverty. It is not as if every piece of research in this areas has not told us this.

Equality is not something that can be promised to the next generation, no matter how much we hot house our kids through exams. Blair famously said that his three priorities in government were “Education, Education and Education.” The fool forgot that you can not treat a problem be focusing only on one of the symptoms.

The report mentioned above lists a whole set of things that it thinks government can do to narrow the attainment gap between rich and poor, but the reality is that the only guarantee of any kind of change is to bring greater equality of income into our society and lift poor people out of poverty.

social class

 

Reflections on going backwards…

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William walks the sands

Most of us measure our lives by the progression of a career.

We start out with dreams; spaceman, nurse, vet, train driver, deep sea diver. These dreams are fed or squashed by teachers, parents, careers officers. They tell us it is all so serious, so crucial; we have to find the right path.

So we stumble forwards through school exams, college courses, university. The pressure is intense. Each threshold contains the possibility of complete failure.

But most of us make it through to some kind of job. The bottom rung. The starting block in the race of life.

About a quarter of a century ago I started my first job as a social worker. I was 23, naive and desperate to do something that mattered- to mask my own brokenness behind (often futile) attempts to mend others. I worked hard in a small team under intense pressure from inner city problems that most people would never believe existed. Most of my colleagues buckled under the strain- none of them are still working in social work.

As I too began to come apart at the seams, I also progressed my career. I became a specialist, then a therapist. Later I became a team leader, then an area manager. I was climbing.

Except that when you climb higher into the machine, what you find is not a more finely honed sense of what social work is all about. The idealism that took us into the profession is gone. The value base that we espouse (person centredness, an identification with the poor and those in need) has largely been forgotten. These things are not measurable, have no performance targets, so have no worth in this new world.

You also find that power attracts a certain kind of personality. Some people seem born to trample on the fingers of others and call it good management. The games that we play to win pointless hollow victories. The damage we do to each other (and to ourselves.) Often, quiet competence is punished, whilst those who can play the power game advance. It came to a point where I felt myself neither competent nor able to raise myself to scratch for power, so I got out.

But I still need to make a living, so eventually I find myself doing agency work, back at the bottom of the rung. From one perspective, the last 25 years never existed. I have gone no where, done nothing.

Meanwhile I am looking at applying for permanent jobs with salaries that are less than I have earned for more than a decade. And it is all rather sobering.

winding road

However, I am still having to learn over and over that life is NOT about rising up, succeeding, earning ever more money. This kind of life is one that is killing the planet and making us all unhappy.

What I am learning again are the simple pleasures of doing something because it is good. Listening to people’s stories with ears wide open. Meeting people on the edge and encouraging them to shuffle back a bit.

Life is not lived in straight lines. Thank God.