Happily Ever After...Until Death You Do Part

Marriage. Few words inspire such profound - and often violently different - reactions amongst those of my generation. In previous eras it was more or less regarded as a fact of life - a bit like queuing for the bus, eating fish on Fridays, or looking after your parents in their senility. And, like aforesaid activities, you could either moan about them or extol them when you met your friends to gossip over a cup of tea. Question them you did not.

Like many things in the modern world, however, that has changed dramatically. Sure, people - by and large - still go out and reproduce but the concept of pledging yourself, til death you do part, is, if anything, regarded as a touch anachronistic. Instead, our lives are complex webs related to our own self-image - and this informs much of what we think about marriage. Are we independent careerists, carefree creatives, the mothering type or too picky? Are we ready? Have we met the right person? Will our priorities change? And what about our biological clocks? Can medical science work wonders once we're forty? Who's willing to bet on the advances of the future to save their career today?

Negotiating what was once an unthought transition into a new phase of life is now fraught with philosophical difficulty. Rather than simply choosing someone and living with the consequences - or indeed simply dumping them when it got too much- many of us are anchored in a semi-permanent state of self-inflicted pyschological warfare. Confused by conflicting desires, social pressures and - if we're honest - the experience of an irresponsible yet liberating individualism which permeates our twenties and thirties, the idea of bringing other human beings into your sphere on a PERMANENT BASIS can seem a trifle terrifying. It is the psychological equivalent of being born again, with the same turnaround in lifestyle that religious conversion brings. At least once the kids come along.

Despite our reluctance to get legally involved with the opposite sex until well into our maturer years, we seem to understand, au fond, that there is a 'good age' to do these things, somewhere between 25 and 35, and it's then you have to decide if you're going to do them. Once you reach said age the existential process of banging out your stance on the issue becomes both normal and necessary. In case you haven't followed this rather garbled explanation up to now let me give you a concrete example. Twice this week I ate with a hoard of girlfriends, all aged between 26 and 32. Somehow, regardless of cultural and career differences, all these women had only one thing they wanted to talk about over dinner: marriage.

A year or two ago they were focussed on jobs, travel, degrees, political causes or their latest bedtime reading. Now, it seems, they were either defending their desire to commit - or, conversely, their determination not to. Only one girl was actually married, a fact which provoked a certain degree of incredulity from the others as if she were 16 years old when she walked down the aisle and not 30 years old already! Either way, for what post-modernists have dubbed the great non-issue of the twentyfirst century, the 'm' word has taken over our lives. as successfully as it did previous generations: the only difference being that it is in theory rather than practice.

As for me, not wishing to waste too much more time thinking about men - that's years of my life down the drain already, lost on a succession of suitors I no longer even talk to - I have decided that being single is simply too demanding on one's time. I would rather just make up my mind to be with someone and then think about something else...preferably food, philosophy, or both at the same time.

All joking aside, I am quite unconvinced by so called feminist libertarian arguments against marriage. It seems to me that most women's problems are caused by scoundrels not stepping up to their obligations. Absolving them of their responsibilities towards us completely (as per the 'laissez faire, do what you want' school of relationships) instead of reforming said institution, seems to have handed the more misogynistic variety of male success on a plate.

Why don't we want men to protect us, to care for us and our kids, to earn their keep, and ours too, while they're at it? Why is it preferable to work all the hours Gods sends, AND look after your children, and the house, simply to say you're independent? Why is it better never to commit, all in the name of some formless notion of choice, even though that could mean you never have children or a happy home? Isn't it about time feminists started suggesting more ways to balance our commitments and our careers instead of keeping men out of the picture completely? Isn't making women's lives easier a definition of what feminism should be about?

I understand why the first wave of feminists had a problem with marriage as a social phenomenon at that time. After all, women had barely been let into the workplace by the time Germaine Greer came along. And I do agree that when men felt they could control women financially, have full legal rights over her, or simply take her for granted, there were real problems.

Yet their valid critique of failed marriages in what were, frankly, quite different social conditions has caused us to throw the baby out with the bathwater for, what seems to me, few very good universal reasons. Both men and women are now used to the (concept, at least) of gender equality, human rights and equal ops at work. Why couldn't a better form of marriage now work in our favour?

Perhaps the time has come - with more than 50% of kids born outside wedlock - to rethink the patterns of our behaviour. Whether that means shelving or accepting marriage remains to be seen. But we should at least step back and reflect on our reasons for dumping one of society's main building blocks, lest it should come back to haunt us all in our (potentially lonely) later lives. To be continued...

Who Needs Love?

Who needs love? So asked Razorlight. As do millions of singletons as they opt for individualism over responsibility and the sheer interference of another life embroilled with their own.

Relationships in the post-modern west are a complex thing. On the one hand romantic love has been elevated to a sacred status. Having killed God and political ideology, the only aspect of life ruled by earnestness remains matters of the heart. Not for everyone of course. The cogniscenti see this too as a Derridean game to be endlessly deconstructed and played with.

However, for your average person love still counts for something. The more pertinent question, however, is what love actually means. On the one hand it is the repository of lost hopes for postmodern humanity. On the other a slightly sniffling Hallmark card of a sensation, to be scoffed and derided in all its sentimental glory. Love is no more than a lost love, a nostalgia for the land of fiction which died with God and fairies somewhere around the demise of Nietszche.

Yeah I know, religion is making a comeback. At dinner parties across our continent faith is standing up once again to be counted as a marker of identity. However, in my opinion, our new fixation with faith has rather more to do with our fear of faithlessness. In a world where everything is portrayed as relative, with relations more about power and desire than fidelity and honesty, people are reverting back to this time-honored response. I detect more than a little desperation in the action though. Confronted with the ultimate unpleasantness of rampant consumerism and individualism - and lacking coherent modern responses thereto - people are falling back into old moulds. But with the inevitable whiff of scepticism that accompanies tradition for traditions' sake.

People are lost. And they are lonely. Of this there is no doubt. But they are not firm believers either. The cult of romance, the cult of Christianity. Both are clutching at straws. Not because they are obviously false (I am personally inclined to believe in a merciful God, and in the improvement in humanity that selfless love brings out in us). The problem, if you like, lies in the packaging. Both have yet to be scripted for the twentifirst century. Both exist in paradigms that the world has now outlived. But for lack of alternatives still craves.

Which brings me back to my initial question. Who needs love? The answer, of course, is all of us. Bot not in the form in which we believe it exists. Love in the modern age is little more than an emotional high. For as long as we are floating on a chemical cloud-nine with our beloved the world is wonderful. Like a cheap ecstasy pill, once the feeling wears off we have to take another one (often a different brand) or suffer the realisation of its fictional happiness. That is not love to me.

Love is that thing that develops when people's lives are interminably intertwined. Love is learning to live together, to survive the moments you despair of each other, you are bored of each other, in short, the moments where emotions rule your heart. Only the day-by-day predictability of other human lives enmeshed with our own can bring true love. Which is why childhood friends so often endure. Not only because they are close. But because they were, and are, there with us all through our lives.

Loving another human being should not always be a choice. Rather an attitude, a survival mechanism if you will, that grows between people who would rather work with, rather than against, each other. And that requires qualities which today's definition of love abjures: the ability to survive boredom, antagonism, fall outs, inequalities. In short, that which binds us together despite difference.

For further evidence look no further than your own family.

Auto-Critique

Re-reading the post on India's economic issues , I felt inclined to follow it up with a few thoughts. I referred in that piece to the 'superior standard of living' enjoyed by the West. I also mentioned how life in the villages, however poor materially, seemed superior to a life lived, poor, in city squalor. My point, I think, was that it was better to live a different sort of life than strive in vain in pursuit of Western economic standards.

Romanticising the poor? Maybe, but that's not what I had intended. Rather, that quality of life and economic gain are not necessarily commensurate. It is possible to have less and live better than a slum dweller on a dollar a day. Unfortunately that is not how statistics encourage us to view the world. Their definition of 'standard of living' is fairly rigid. It consists of biens materiels, of economic measures, of GDP, Of GNP, of percentage annual national growth. It's enshrined in laws and parliamentary resolutions around the world. In UN declarations, even.

But this definition - however widespread - is not without its flaws. Its economic take on human existence can only allow materialist conclusions. However it has nothing to say about the other great sustaining factors in our lives: family, love, beauty, society, belonging, fulfillment. Such definitions cannot promote these except by economic means. Therein lies the flaw.

We need something else. Or just as well. And that demands the economic system adapt and learn from other considerations. Particularly human ones. As the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko once said "The West has maybe contributed a great deal in giving the world a more industrial face. But the real task still has to come from Africa: to give the world a more human face.” Indeed, this is the face of most radical political and religious critiques of western 'values', boosting both anti-capitalism and Islamism, to name but a few.

I can't speak for Africa. But I did visit a village in Uttarranchal where the Van Gujjar people - recently evicted nomads from the national park, rehoused to let the animals roam in front of tourist lenses) - eked out an existence selling buffalo milk. They were happier in the forest, they said. There, their primary considerations were not to survive making (bad) money and live on the fringes of society but to be at the centre of their own priorities and pursue them at will. How could their new life compare to that freedom?

The West is blind at times. It sees everything through the economic microscope that our thought has become. As such, we often fail to see our own shortcomings. I am always interested to hear others' views on the West, as a result. So if you have any comments in this regard, please do put pen to paper.

Where is the work and family balance that characterises other cultures? Where is the emphasis on balancing the different aspects of our lives? We, who work 12 hour days at times, enclosed in our offices, stressed, with strained relationships and fatigue and cynicism. We who want more 'time to ourselves', with our families, or just relaxing rather than trapped behind a desk. But who won't do anything about it.

The truth is that these are futile dreams, dreams whose reality we have already renounced. We have become deaf to ways of rebalancing our situation. Worse, we have accepted negative aspects of our modern capitalist culture, passively, as natural without sufficiently interrogating their cause. This is an age where all thought, even that which is technically anti-establishment, takes place within the parameters late capitalist culture has set out. There is no real challenge to its hegemony. And that, more than anything else, is what should worry us.

Perhaps rapid globalisation and urbanisation will shake this anomie. Two major truths are emerging: that there will always be losers from the global market (however many people are pulled out of poverty, the gap between haves and have-nots is still increasing) and that we cannot all consume at the same rate. They say that if everyone in China owned a car the human race would expire from lack of oxygen immediately. Current patters of development are killing the environment. As such, all of us (starting from the developed world) will have to change our patterns of consumption and invest in greener alternatives. That may hurt. But it may also be the push we have been waiting for, to reprioritise and reorder our collective consciousness.

Inverting the Impossible

Call it synchronicity or coincidence but I have a theory about books. They come to you at the right time. Sometimes a volume can lie on my shelf, forgotten or neglected, for years on end. Then, when I finally get round to reading it, I realise that if I had opened it even a month beforehand I could not have understood its message with the same profundity.

You might argue that people just leave things until they are interested in reading them. Then, lo and behold, they find their views magically reflected in the pages. But in many cases I simply have no idea - or even the wrong idea - about what a book is really going to be about before I've read it. How often do we buy something because of the back-page blurb only to discover that it bears little or no ressemblence to the content?

Anyway, to preface the remarks that follow I'd like to say I'm not religious in any orthodox way. I don't even have 'a' religion, per se. But I am fascinated by the search for truths, however unpleasant they may happen to be (I'm not afraid of the idea that God doesn't exist, like some agnostics, for example: I would just like to know one way or the other so I can live accordingly).

On a related note, I'm appalled by the relativist idea that all choice, in the end, is arbitrary. It is this idea, I think, that makes atheism so difficult to live with conceptually. Because it implies that nothing we do, say, think, or feel in this life has any intrinsic value. And when life loses its value then human beings find it very difficult to get out of bed. Just ask manic depressives.

Some people think that is nonsense. Indeed, they argue that arbitrary choice is actually liberating since it frees them from guilt, responsibility, and the burden of choosing well. For me, by contrast, free choice of this kind is no choice at all, since it merges into preference which is often no more than a physical response to one's environment. Which is fine, except that it makes me wonder what human beings have such heightened intelligence and emotions for, if they cannot be used for anything greater than improving our personal comfort.

Anyway, in the course of my reflections, I stumbled across a book called Shantaram: the real-life tale of an Australian convict and heroin addict who escapes from his high security prison to Bombay, where he acts in Bollywood, joins the mafia and ends up fighting for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. (I know, it doesn't sound like a real story but just check out this guy's bio). I only decided to read it because I am going to India in a few weeks and someone I know recommended it.

I was expecting something like a memoir-version of The Beach. What I got was very different.

Some passages, in particular, I found highly persuasive and reminded me of conversations and experiences I had in the past with a vaguely sufistic friend at university. Here they are for your edification and critical commentary:

"The truth is found more often in music than it is in books of philosophy...the truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone - the noblest man alive or the most wicked - has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, moving toward God...There is no believing in God. We either know God, or we do not". .

Sound like inane spiritual gak of the type Westerners typically go to India to absorb? Read on.

Abdel Khader Khan, the mafia lord and slum baron, notes that certain things are knowable and real without being tangible. And that the opposite holds true for the facts and objects we consider concrete and verifiable.

He says, "the energy that actually animates the matter and the life that we think we see around us cannot be measured or weighed or even put into time, as we know it. In one form, that energy is photons of light. The smallest object is a universe of open space to them, and the entire universe is but a speck of dust . What we call the world is just an idea . and not a very good one, yet . From the point of view of the light, the photon of light that animates it, the universe that we know (ie the things that human beings perceive) is not real. Nothing is."

By contrast, "We can know God, for example, and we can know sadness. We can know dreams, and we can know love. But none of these are real, in our usual sense of things that exist in the world and seem real. W cannot weigh them, or measure their length, or find their basic parts in an atom smasher....there is another reality, beyond what we see with our eyues. You have to feel your way into that reality with your heart. There is no other way":

I share this sentiment. Sometimes, a feeling takes you - I guess love for a person is one example - and transforms your heart, your actions, and your state of mind. It differs qualitively from your everyday understanding of the world, and is so intangible it is easy to believe that - when it drifts far away from you, or fades into your memory - that it did not, could not, exist. And yet when you experience it, it is overwhelmingly and completely real. More real, even, than the world that habitually surrounds us.

Views?

To Starve or Not to Starve?

To Starve or Not to Starve? That is the question. It is also a matter of sexual politics. For as Naomi Wolf says, "A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty. It is an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history". It doesn't just make women fret continually about how they appear to the opposite sex. But - as any anorexic will tell you - leads to low self-esteem, passivity, anxiety and emotionality: all the characteristics, indeed, of Freud's hysterical, unreasonable female psyche.

Is it true that supposedly free Western women are in fact locked into a spiral of submission as strong, if not stronger, than that exhibited by other, more explicitly misogynist cultures? Fatema Mernissi - a Moroccan feminist and sociologist - gives an interesting exposition of this thesis in her book 'Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems', in which she compares the differening tactics employed in the West and the East to ensure female obedience to male standards.

Now Mernissi is rather controversial, in so far as she views the hijab as a symbol of masculine control of women, rather than a religious duty per se. However, setting that issue aside, she may be right in observing that '"size 6 is a more violent restriction imposed on women" than the segregation (and potential anonymisation) of women in the public sphere imposed by the veil.

At this point most 'women of the free world' would probably throw up their hands and accuse her of talking nonsense. Yet she makes quite a convincing case that most Westerners are caught in a system of 'magic entrancement' where we spontaneously accept subservient positions in relation to men. This is manifested not through rhetoric (which tends towards an empty feminism) but in our subsconscious assumptions which are shaped by a tacit acceptance of 'woman' as the object, rather than subject.

This is evidenced, she notes, by our choice of fashion (determined for, and by, the male gaze), partner (who, in order to be conventionally attractive, should be older, physically stronger, and better paid or educated than we are), or reluctance to age which we combat with cosmetic surgery or increasingly costly cosmetics.

If what women strive to be (thin, beautiful, desired, and yet independent and successful) is the product of the male imagination then there is little intellectual space left to argue for alternatives. The fact that feminism itself is seen by many women today as a dirty word (despite evidence that we continue to be discriminated against, in everything from pay to promotion structures) is surely significant in this regard.

By contrast, she argues that male domination in the East has traditionally taken a physical rather than mental form. Rather than constructing women in their own image, she argues that the act of imprisoning women in a harem or forcing veiled anonymity onto them is less psychologically damaging and offers more hope for revolution, than its Western counterpart - despite the fact that women's rights in much of the Muslim world are so frequently violated.

That is because, in her opinion, Eastern men based their domination on a fear of women and their potential - whereas Western men need not fear a creature of their own creation. Indeed, she says, it is precisely because spiritual equality is underlined in the Qu'ran that men have needed to find ways of forcibly repressing women.

I don't know how true this all is. But I certainly feel that many Western women believe what men fundamentally want is a partner who will 'Soit Belle et Tais Toi', as the saying goes. An intelligent, healthy and successful woman in our society is seen as a threat, and therefore, as ugly - because she is violating male norms of femininity. Just think - Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Cheri Blair. All vilified and mocked in the press for their 'manly' ways. It's as if, when a woman no longer ressembles a fourteen year old virgin she must become invisible - or suffer the consequences.

Something to think about at least.

MIrror Image

In the same way that children imitate adults, our codes of behaviour are intimately linked to our surroundings. I know this is stating the obvious but it has serious implications for what we might term the integrity of the self. Nowhere is this paradox more striking than in the political environment.

Theoretically, at least, parliaments are a forum in which people of opposing, or certainly varied, lives and inclinations are brought together as representative samples of the population. Given that citizens of the modern industrial state cannot participate in democratic decision making at all times (unlike, say, the ideal of the Athenian demos), our elected representatives - in the true sense of the term, which suggests the mirroring of social pluralism - are delegated much of the responsibilty for exercising public reason.

One might expect, therefore, that the political environment would be one in which individualism, or certainly tribalism, triumphed over shared culture. Politics, after all, thrives off difference. Yet regardless of their outward rhetorical opposition Socialists, Greens, Liberals, Conservatives and the rest interact in a way determined by the institutional culture they share. Which leads me to the conclusion that either the political world moulds individuals in its own image or it simply attracts individuals with similar qualities, however incommensurable their ideologies may appear to be.

Further, staff learn from their 'masters'. The strategy, the double-dealing, the thrill of the chase, and the love of winning which characterise the modern political process (and led Alisdair MacIntyre to conclude that it is no more than civil war carried on by other means) are also present in relations between employees. Not only because the barrier between private and public life is blurred in the aquarium atmosphere of politics, or because when people spend so long in the office that they call it 'home', the outside world gradually fails to penetrate. The issue at hand is often one of mutual inteligibility - people speak in the language, and within the cultural practices, that they all understand.

However pragmatic it may be for people to relate according to these shared cultural norms, the result is often that other aspects of our personalities are massively under-emphasised (and in certain cases, I sometimes think, extinguished completely - particularly among workaholics). In time, the part can take on the appearance of a whole and the world shrinks accordingly.

That is why work-life balance is so important. And so is having a little time to reflect. Otherwise, the selves we inhabit prove no more than reflections - or projections . of the environment we inhabit. And what integrity is there in that?

I'm bisy, backson

I have discovered that I have a new genus. I am, as it turns out, a bisy backson, as defined by the 'Tao of Pooh' which I have been reading on my shifts on the till at the Oxfam bookshop (weekday customers, about 3 per hour).

Unfortunately, this turns out to be a malignant pedigree of person whose alumni includes the Pilgrim Fathers, city bankers and extreme sports enthusiasts - people who flog themselves to death with vauntless ambition, challenges and guilt without getting much for their efforts in return.

What unites this motley crew, according to the author, is an inability or incapacity (the two are quite different) to enjoy the world around them as it simply is. Instead of appreciating day to day life, we are 'desperately active', questing after some sort of Great Reward which is always around the next corner and requires us to work like lunatics to keep it in sight.

As a person whose code words must surely be 'I ought to', 'I must' and 'Shit, I've singularly failed to do what I should have' (that applies to my attempt at lenten alcohol abstinence, incidentally, which has taken a sorry turn for the worse) this made me sit up and listen. But the worrying thing about this analysis is that it reveals the extent to which modern society in general has taken on the characteristics of the Backson.

We live in a world where we are tricked into valuing productivity, efficiency, added value, or whatever, as ends in themselves. We rarely question whether working ever harder and ever longer in order to get the promotion to buy the objects that will help us recover from the trauma of living to work is a reasonable thing to do (as if a week long holiday in the Seychelles, or a new iPod could make up for a 16 hour working day as an office drone).

As the author perceptively points out, this can be extremely self-defeating as a philosophy of life, since it "makes it so difficult to be happy and good that only a few get to where they would naturally have been in the first place - Happy and Good - and the rest give up and fall by the side of the road, cursing the world, which is not to blame but which is there to help show the way".

Perhaps if we accept that our Backson society is just too hard on itself, too hard on others, and too hard on the world that heroically attempts to carry on in spite of what we are doing to it (to paraphrase) we might start to enjoy life and realise we don't need to live like that. Because the bottom line is, it's just not much fun to over-complicate things.

Which is why, instead of reading about the costs involved in freedom of expression as defined by the first amendment of the US constitution, I am dawdling over this (overlong) post and about to make a cup of fresh coffee. I'm not that busy, but I won't be back soon. I'm hanging up my Backson coat for once. I'm going to enjoy the day.

The Power of Positive Thinking

Clearly my reputation as a miserable old sod has caught up with me since this arrived in my inbox this morning. However, after the initial 'glass-is-always-half-empty, who-are-these-new-agers-trying-to-kid' moment I had a good look at the list and thought how different the world would be if we all applied its principles. So I decided to share it on here in the hope it might counterbalance some of the negative karma floating around the internet...

May I present the Optimist's Charter, penned by Christian D. Larson in 1912 and adopted by Optimist International in 1922. And as they say in Kelly's Heroes - don't give me those negative waves....

Promise Yourself:

To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.

To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.

To make all your friends feel that there is something in them.

To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.

To think only of the best, to work only for the best, and to expect only the best.To be just as
enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own

To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.

To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile.

To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.

To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.

Don't worry though, I'm sure by tomorrow I'll have found some suitably cynical way to undermine all this.

Raisins, anyone?

Think of a food. Think of a heavenly food. For me, this is indisputedly cheese in all its many and varied forms. I know that because when I was living in China dairy products were in short supply. In fact, the only contact between my lips and cheese (substitute) came on the rare occasions that I ran across a McDonalds and was able to 'savour' a double cheeseburger. I dreamed of the stuff, for heaven's sake. We went to Hong Kong to get our visas renewed and what did I bring back but two packs of New Zealand cheddar and some proper coffee which was carefully rationed throughout the summer.

But would I kill for cheese? And if I wouldn't kill for cheese would I kill for raisins?? This isn't as daft as it seems. For our Islamic brothers are dying in their dozens for the sake of 70 white raisins. I came across this astonishing contention in Irshad Manji's book 'The Problem With Islam Today'. In it, she claims that "according to new research, what martyrs can anticipate for their sacrifices aren't virgins but raisins! The word that Quranic scholars have for centuries read as 'dark-eyed virgins' - hur - might be more accurately understood as white raisins" - pricey goods in seventh-century Arabia....Thanks to Dry Bones for his memorable sketch on the misunderstanding. But is it correct? Virgins or raisins, what's your vote?

Autonomy, Choice, Self-Respect

"The idea of seeing the value in our activities is very important. It's crucial to what [John] Rawls calls self-respect, the 'sense that one's plan of life is worth carrying out'. Self-respect, as Rawls says, isn't so much a part of any rational plan of life, but rather a precondition of it. If we thought that our goals in life weren't worth pursuing, then there would be no point to our activities. To ensure that we have this self-respect, we need the freedom to examine our beliefs, to confirm their worth. This is why liberty is so important to Rawls, and why he gives it precedence over material benefits and the prerogatives of office. Once material security is ensured, so that the conditions necessary for the effective exercise of liberty exist, it is irrational to trade off liberty for more wealth.

So far that seems unobjectionable. But we need to look more closely at those beliefs about value which are said to give meaning and purpose to our lives. Where do they come from? Liberals say that we should be free to accept or reject particular options presented to us, so that, ultimately, the beliefs we continue to hold are the ones that we've chosen to accept. But the range of options can't be chosen. In deciding how we live our lives, we do not accept, de novo, but rather we examine 'definite ideals and forms of life that have been developed and tested by innumerable individuals, sometimes for generations [Rawls, 1971 pp563-4]. The decision about how to live our lives must ultimately be ours alone, but this decision is always a matter of selecting what we believe to be most valuable from the various options available, selecting from a context of choice which provides us with different ways of life.

This is important because our range of options is determined by our cultural heritage...From childhood on, we become aware both that we are already participants in certain forms of life (familial, religious, sexual, educational etc) adn that there are other ways of life which offer alternative models and roles that we may, in time, come to endorse....we make judgments precisesly by examining the cultural structure, by coming to an awareness of the possibilities it has, the different activities it identifies as significant."

Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture Ch 8

Liberal Malaise

Hmm...is it possible that the reason people in wealthy, healthy, liberal democracies tend to be so hooked on anti-depressants is that they have no idea who they actually are?

To expand, I was reading on multicultural citizenship when I chanced upon this comment by Margalit and Raz.

"Identification is more secure, less liable to be threatened, if it does not depend on accomplishment. Although accomplishments play their role in people's sense of their own identity, it would seem that at the most fundamental level our sense of our own identity depends on criteria of belonging rather than on those of accomplishment. Secure identification at this level is particularly important to one's well-being" (Multicultural Citizenship, Kymlicka, p89)

This interests me because it explains why our society's obsession with ambition, status and competition has caused individuals to become so stressed out. Once we conceive of competing to climb the social ladder as the necessary precondition for self-worth, we must also be aware that the threat of decline and fall is always present and demands constant vigilance. When value is entirely dependent on such outside factors it creates a situation where nobody and nothing is permanent. And adult human beings, as we well know, desire security and predictability as much as children. In the words of Isaiah Berlin: “the very desire for guarantees that our values are eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past”

However, fulfilling that desire for a stable conception of identity and the good life is extremely problematic in the modern age, both from a societal and an intellectual perspective. Those within an insulated culture (though such a thing may be no less than hypothetical) may find security and fulfillment through its tenets or alternatively, develop internal methods for criticising it that leaves the epistemogical foundations of their thought intact. Either way, the coherence of their modes of thought or identity remains secure since it has been developed from within a closed, though potentially expanding, circle.

However, in plural societies, rejection or critique of the individualist liberal credo is likely to be based on reference to the diverse range of visions of the good life with which we are familiar, coming from a range of traditions whose premises may all be different. The problem is that it is not always possible to weigh these choices in any rational manner. They may in fact be incommensurable.

That fact does not, as such, preclude as from making choices, though it does mean that a choice between incomparables is equivalent to simply 'plumping' for one option over another on the basis of those traditions of thought and experience which we, as individuals located in a particular time and space, have accumulated throughout our lives. As Berlin goes on to say:
“In the end, men choose between ultimate values; they choose as they do because their life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories and concepts that are as much a part of their own being and conscious thought and sense of their own identity as their basic physical structure” (Two Concepts of Liberty, p57)

So we can only choose within a framework that makes sense to us whilst remaining aware that the nodes that form and link our thoughts together are highly historically contingent and therefore lack universality. As such “To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet to stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian”. To demand more is perhaps a metaphysical human need but it would be immature to allow this to guide our collective practices.

So choice can be based only on what we know at any one time - and must therefore be open to revision depending on the kind of lives we lead, who we encounter, what we read, and in which societies we live.

Doesn't sound so bad as long as our nostalgia for the grand narrative doesn't override this tentative, though ethical, conclusion.