The importance of checking

When I was at school, my teachers had a way of cutting down their workload – we would swap with the boy at the next desk and score each other’s test papers. I am thinking about the importance of checking in our everyday life. We check our clothes as we go out, and perhaps a friendly hand adjusts our collar for us. I remember a concept, the double-boundary of the self, I don’t know if this s a commonplace of psychological theory, but it is a simple idea: an inner boundary of the self as determined by what we understand of ourselves; an outer boundary is set by how others think of us. This is a negotiating model of the self, leading to a kind of border control, which may be more or less friendly or hostile in our relations with others. If there is too much of a discrepancy between the inner and the outer boundary, a disputed territory, we are said to be mad, bad, dangerous to know. I have returned to this image of negotiation over disputed territory in thinking about the difficulties of dialogue in a polarised society. It is a common observation at this time to think of our society in the UK and that of the US as particularly polarised. This may be true, or – in line with all such observations – was it not always so? The difference now may be experienced in part, because of a growing underlying assumption that we should not be so polarised: a desire to explore, challenge, understand and ultimately overcome the difference represented by race, class, gender and other markers of an identity which may be fixed or fluid in our own perceptions. We may seek a different passport to get away from a too constricting national identity. We are invited to score ourselves in tickboxes: white British, or several other categories, or Other if we think none apply? The list is extended, while well-meaning attempts to cluster difference (BAME?) are challenged. The GBTQIA community is also increasingly diverse. There is a hot debate whether we can assign ourselves to the gender of our choice. It can look like a free-for-all but there are countervailing forces: the accusation of cultural appropriation, no platforming and a cancel culture. As a student I blagged my way into Ronnie Scotts to hear Lenny Bruce. The comedians – for a liberal the licenced fools of our society, like Shakespeare’s Fool - are increasingly on the defensive about their freedom to offend. Remember ‘Je suis Charlie.’ In my work we think of the licensed stupidity of the Tavistock consultant, using our ignorance to ask questions that it is assumed have already been answered. I am not always calm and wise. This may be a disappointment to myself and others. But it is an aspect of group psychology that we know about, that at any given moment individuals in the group may be mobilised according to their valency for positions that have a temporary attraction to them. We react, needing to express that part of ourselves that is not being represented in the dominant affect in the group at that time. This is not a question of right and wrong- but the working out of an unconscious balance. You may see it in a case discussion – the need to challenge the emerging consensus that may determine the outcome for a vulnerable child, and the reason why courts rather than child protection workers make the final decision. I suggest that this unconscious balance helps to explain why in a large societal context we see that democratic elections are so often won and lost by small margins. In seeking to represent what we think is missing in the other, we contribute to an almost universal feeling of being misunderstood and marginal. The marginality of both the left and the right in conventional politics but also the marginality (and the covert extremism) of the so-called centre. White privilege feels marginalised by the assertiveness of Black Lives Matter. Male heterosexuality is challenged by the new orthodoxy of Gay Pride. We adopt the syntax of difference. I am liberal. You are mistaken. He she or it is a bigot. (Correction: they are a bigot. It is becoming unacceptable to assign an identity to the other without their agreement, but we still want to give them a kicking.] The reality of significant differences is obscured by the narcissism of small difference, identified by Freud, from an anthropological observation of 'the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other'. This brings me back to the image of the double boundary and the negotiations that take place over disputed borders. In a process of desocialisation, as I have described it, we stay behind our bunkers. The danger in negotiations is that we then risk too much – or too little when we come out into the open.

A Greek Chorus

I think of us as a kind of Greek chorus, as in an ancient play, lamenting the saga – as witnesses to the acts of our leaders and the histories and beliefs that orchestrate these actions, and our own part as chorus from scene to scene – and all the time I think we miss the gods, who in ancient times would have intervened on one side or another, or on all sides, to further their own causes and self-interest. Are the gods now those mega rich who fund the think tanks and the politicians, with their mega rich fantasies of power over all things temporal. This is the stuff of conspiracy theories, of theories of QAnon and the Deep State. This is world of the fundamentalist Right. But not only the Right. As Christopher Bollas says, when reality gets too complicated, we turn to conspiracy. Perhaps we all pray to our own gods, whether we know it or not. These are the beliefs and values that are our identity, and we defend with a passion. Reed George Monbiot – from a position of not believing him – and you will think that he is fanatical. Read Peter Hitchins and you may think he is speaking falsely and dangerously from a position of prejudice. But we have to make a decision, who we think speaks for us. We murmur and dispute among ourselves. And we each have our own tragedies to face, as those close to us get sick and die. (I have just had a message from a friend (Italian!), whose family (living in Brussels!), is sick with Covid.) We shuffle and shift our positions to get a better view. My Jewish friends with German parentage apply for new passports, still to be European, and to continue the slow recovery from the horrors of the Holocaust, when civilised Europeans whose passports we now covet committed and colluded with atrocities in the pursuit of progress built on identity. We fear a relapse as far right groups become more vocal. We may think that the Left has science on its side. Economic arguments for the Green Hew Deal, for a universal wage, are persuasive. As always through history of the human project, we need to cooperate to survive. But we can only understand ourselves by othering the other, and so we struggle with our racism, sexism, nationalism, our identification with what makes us different. We take offence when we feel excluded from the group. We take strength from our sense of exclusion. As we know, there are two kinds of people in the world. Those that believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those that don’t. We should understand also that moment by moment we change sides in that argument. We are the same/ we are different. On/off: it is as binary as any computer programme. Even the best of causes are full of schisms. We know that but we don’t know what to do about it. I get interested in the thoughts of a scientist on dialogue: David Bohm: whenever any mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. In my dreams, I wish that could be true. I argue for robust debate, but this get quickly corrupted to a shouting match, to reactions of hurt and withdrawal. As our world becomes more conflicted, our culture becomes more intolerant of difference, the so called cancel culture, which emerged like a spoilt child from the well-meaning political correctness movement, and the trolling and death threats on social media, as anonymous egos look for their identity. As a Greek Chorus, we have time to think. Perhaps that is why we are in disarray. One of the most effective defences againt thinking is to keep busy. ‘How are you?’ ‘Busy.’ This had become the near-universal greeting in my world before lockdown earlier this year. We try to keep this defence, or pretence, going. We still keep busy as best we can, but we have found ourselves in a huge social experiment in self-reflection, as the response to Covid, social distancing, working from home, not working, relating exclusively through technology, living in a bubble, has stripped away many of the distractions of the bread and circuses culture of capitalist societies, including shopping malls, bars and restaurants, all the places we go to forget our mortality. We have time to think and we don’t like it. I say ‘we’, because I think no-one is exempt. Bob Dylan said, reality has too many heads. Psychoanalysts have taught us about the hatred of thinking. Scientists ask us to be open to new thoughts. Apart from bringing to mind the squabbling gods of Olympus, I have been enquiring how philosophy, specifically Stoicism offers any practical guidance at this time in maintaining a connection between reflection and action, and also religion, or spiritual practice , specifically Buddhism, itself more a philosophy than a religion of faith. Buddhists describe four virtues: kindness, the kindness of kin, the love of a mother for her child; empathy or compassion, an appreciation of how what we see may look different if you are in another place; joy, an appreciation of the good that is outside ourselves; and equanimity, the capacity to stay calm in the face of what Stoics might call Fortuna, fate, - or as Shakespeare said, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Other religions serve similar purposes, as do other philosophies – and also political beliefs. Some look for a better resolution of our trials and tribulations on earth, other that we have to wait - death, where is thy victory, so bring it on. I don’t want to break the connection between reflection and action. There were always a few brave souls who went for reflection full-time, the desert fathers in early Christianity, the anchorites, monastic traditions of different kinds – in secular academia, All Souls College perhaps. But in secular Buddhism in the West, there is a hot debate about activism, a rejection of a mistaken perception of passive acceptance, a questioning of the pretension that anger is always ‘unwholesome’. They have become active in response to the climate emergency. Anger is problematic but despair is worse, it seems to me. This is our dilemma (one of our dilemmas) as we sit in our post-modern caves or cells, self-isolating – to what purpose? To save our lives for a few more years, to save the NHS, to save our society from its self-destructive capacities, to save the world from ecological disasters that threaten to foreshorten all life…? Anger allows the possibility of hope. If I say I am an angry old man, perhaps not so different from Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s play, blowing his trumpet and inflicting pain on those he loves, I want to rephrase that – an old man who is capable of anger when it matters. Look Forward in Anger. At this time, I am holding my breath. I hope still that the realpolitik of Brexit will result in a trade deal that will alleviate the stresses on our economy and that of the EU – and not simply make it possible still to go through the fast track green channel at airport terminals. But whatever happens - like all the other worker ant bureaucrats my daughter in law is working on it from her bedroom in south London - as a no-alternative British Citizen I intend still to think of myself as European, along with the citizen of EU and other not-EU countries. As we have been discovering, there is a lost identity, Englishness, that led in part to the original Brexit vote, and for the time being regional identities are emerging as important, London, Manchester, other identities becoming reinforced by the boundaries freshly painted by Tier Three Covid restrictions. We envy the capacity of political leaders in Scotland and Wales to think more clearly and retain some trust from those they are commissioned to represent. Andy Burnham is more convincing at this time as a leader than the national leadership of the Labour Party. Of course, I could be proved wrong on that, as on so many things. I think about age and leadership. Throughout history, there has been a certain respect for elders. I often quote the example of the old man in the movies, The Seven Samurai/the Magnificent Seven, who advises the villagers how to take up arms against their oppressors. From the 1960s on, we seemed to be in an era when youth could have its head, as Gates and Jobs created a brave new world out of the mess of hippy dreams, but as the rock stars, those who survived their initial excesses, grew older and continued to strut their stuff, so did that generation hold on to its positions of privilege. We have done away with the requirement of obligatory retirement in many areas of public life. The old want to keep busy, to escape what we have done. We live with the examples of monarchy, of the papacy (though a pope retired), of the Dalai Lama, (though he gave up his secular authority), of the Supreme Court in the US, the latest appointment with a tenure of potentially forty or more years. And most of all we have the example of world leaders, the openly autocratic leaders in the east, and in the US, once called the New World, the spectacle of two septuagenarians energized by the monkey glands of money, dodging the Covid virus and competing for the position of POTUS, an implied potency as The Most Powerful Man in the World. As Shakespeare said again, now is the winter of our discontent … but how may it be made glorious summer, what son of York is going to rule our lives? Another play: in Britain, there were those who though they had got Prince Hal, a raffish leader who would lead us to victory, Get Brexit Done. Instead, it seems we have Falstaff dressed up as Hal. One aspect of my faith is shattered – my faith in the importance and safety of role. When Henry II appointed his friend Thomas Becket as archbishop, he expected him to stay his friend, but Becket, although very newly ordained, took seriously the role as head of the Church. The Queen, God bless her,also understands the importance of role, although her family has struggled to keep up with her. This is what we will mourn, when she dies. President Trump has comprehensively and dramatically trashed any liberal concept of the importance of role. His creed is that you can get away with anything. The peasants cower in the shadows, or shout enthusiastically in the hope of stale bread. I write this in the week before we learn exactly how followership still has a role in shaping the world, as the American electorate, constrained and impacted by intrigue and subterfuge, takes what opportunity it has to show us its collective conflicted mind. We know the rules, we know the rules include bending the rules. (My four year old granddaughter, downstairs from her mother advising on the Brexit negotiations, knows that instinctively, as she looks to beat me in a game of cards. You can’t do that, I say as she places the card of her choice. Yes, I can, she says. And she does, proving her point.) We are, as I said, like a Greek chorus. We are witnesses to what is happening in our world, to our world, and if there is devastation, we may still be alive a little longer to lament the losses, and continue to think how to pick up the pieces.

Hobbes and Rousseau

After months of living with my thoughts with fewer than usual interruptions, where I have lingered in a depressive position of more or less accepting this and that with a minimum of judgement, as we lurch forward into an increasingly uncertain future, one that is not so easily predicted from the past, I am recognising a new sense that there really is a struggle going on between our capacity to draw on our strengths for compassion and cooperation, for kindness to strangers, and our undoubted ability to turn our rejecting violent and murderous thoughts against what we may think of at any particular time as the other. We may put the argument to two referees, Hobbes and Rousseau, as Rutger Bregman has done in his book, Humankind. There is the old self-interest of neoliberalism, the corruption that comes as part of the package with power, the capacity for gratuitous cruelty that defies theological explanations –and evil has often been cloaked in religious fervour. But it feels like we continue to battle with ourselves. (Excuse me, if you have worked this or knew this all along. But I come from a different place, still lost in enquiry.) So I indulge some magical thinking about the virus – that it is teaching us a lesson, offering us an opportunity, a 21st century equivalent of Noah’s Flood. We abuse nature, we know that but we still do it. Nature fights back. We - those of us who live comfortably – know that our way of life is unsustainable. The political process makes our doubts irrelevant – who votes for the Greens, even now? In our politics we still vote for self interest, not our actual literal economic self interest, as the neoliberal ethic dictates, but something more dangerous, the confirmation of our unconscious prejudices. It is said that political rainmakers, those who seed the clouds of discontent to support their way of life, propping up politicians to do their will, do not trust the people. And that this is the threat that may lead to the fatal weakening of democratic processes. Well, we cannot altogether blame them for their mistrust, when they have discovered how easy it is to manipulate the so-called will of the people. There are movements that make a difference. I think that #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have shifted the balance of public opinion and put chauvinist and racist prejudices on the defensive. But I am not yet convinced that Occupy, while it was a defiant celebration of anti-capitalist sentiment, has changed anything. Nor – as yet – has Extinction Rebellion. Leftish commentators talk about a low level swell of resistance against the complicit exploitation of resources. I don’t know as yet if they are right. The attempt to mobilise some of that questioning resistance in the recruitment to Labour Party membership has not worked out well. I saw uplifted faces on a protest march, as if they were going to the Sermon on the Mount, but the political leadership failed in its first duty to be an effective opposition to the Government in power, and allowed its own prejudices to contaminate the movement. I am sitting by a reflective pool in my garden. In a pandemic we are aware of our interdependence with all humankind – or we bunker down in survival mode. Which way do we jump? So asks the frog as the pond gets hotter. On that question depends our future.

Time to Think

Covid19, with its reminders of mortality, and the opportunities created to get to know ourselves better during lockdown, has given us TIME TO THINK – even if only in FRAGMENTS. For example: I am more deliberately taking up a life of being an elder, where it is possible to practice wise reflection and face the challenge of our mortality, our impermanence in this world. There is a letting go of personal ambition. Of economic striving. Of sexual competition and possession. There is a forgiving acceptance of declining capacities, of physical and mental frailty and vulnerability. There is an encouragement of the virtues of the young. We are at the mercy of the mob, which can never be safe. We have to be stoical in the face of the possibility of violent rage. Attempts by the elderly to hold onto power, as heads of state or corporate magnates are inevitably doomed to failure, and are obstacles to our capacity to adapt to the changing priorities the human project. A wrinkly and emotionally incontinent oligarchy does not prove the leadership that we need in this world. Our role is to be advisers and supporters of an emerging leadership. The Queen and the Dalai Lama are example of wise elders, privileged but not exercising power. The executive power of their historical roles has been stripped away. A gerontology of political leaders, which we have seen in African states, and in the superpowers of the USA and China, does not bode well. Everywhere I look, stress is very high. Different circumstances for each person, and different reactions. Misunderstanding and furious argument. I have had discussions online break up in out of control ways – people who are usually wise and helpful. We get nervous of conversations of any kind. I am struggling with the increasing realisation of the mess we are in and wanting to make a useful response. In no way privileging my position – only the urgency of my enquiry. So I appreciate the different discourses I find I am in, which are increasingly irritable and adversarial, as we have difficulty in finding any dry land of certainty and flounder about instead. My current preoccupation has been with the way that those I work with, those I talk with, and myself – when I talk to myself – seem to be able to hold two incompatible positions at the same time – so that we complain bitterly about the lack of direction from government, from advisers, from senior management in our organisations – those who ‘should know’ – and at the same time complain about such direction that we are given and lay claim instead to personal authority, believing whatever we choose to believe. Sometimes I can hear both in the same sentence. I hear it in my consultations with front line teams in the NHS. I want to keep thinking – being curious while recognising the tendency to rant. I am interested in the Buddhist teaching on wise speech, which are strikingly austere – only speak, if it is true, useful, unlikely to cause harm. The alternative of noble silence can seem the easier option. How to understand silence? Bion felt justified in interpreting the words of one or two members what the group thinks – if these words have not been challenged by other. In a zoom meeting there is an increasingly likelihood that objections remain silent and are not seen. I am influenced by what David Bohm had to say on dialogue. ‘In a dialogue, nobody is trying to win. Everybody wins if anyone wins. … There is no attempt to gain points, or to make your particular view prevail. Rather, when a mistake is discovered on the part of anybody, everybody gains. It’s a situation called win-win, in which we are not playing a game against each other but with each other. In a dialogue, everybody wins.’ Imaginative empathy is important for our capacity for dialogue. We have to listen to the other to imagine how reality looks to the other, different from the reality we are familiar with. The alternative is that we outshout each other from defended positions of certainty. We live in gated communities of the mind. There are processes of voluntary segregation. It is dangerous to wander from post code to post code in exploration of a diverse landscape. ‘The Earth just sent us to our rooms to think about what we’ve done.’ (Who said that?)