The internet is festooned with lists. There are lists of people’s top fifty favourite songs, top ten favourite films, top advertisement slogans of all time, etc. etc. You may also find lists of people’s one hundred most hated TV programmes, ten worst chat up lines, and even lists such as ‘my twenty best pasta dishes’.
In order not to fall behind in this cut-throat world of lists I have decided to compile my own ‘list of things’ It is not a random list, although for all the use that lists are, it might as well be, but a loosely gathered, relaxed, having a quiet night in, sort of list; cataloguing my prejudices and preferences in all sorts of areas. The value of my list is exactly the same as that of all other lists. It is as valuable as the Oscars or the Nobel Prize or any other celebrity or highbrow list. It is as valuable as somebody else’s shopping list. In other words it is worthless, yet at the same time priceless.
Reading my list, agreeing or disagreeing with the entries on my list, perusing, considering or consuming my list will neither bring you love and romance, nor make you untold riches. It will not enhance your spirituality or develop your intellect. It may amuse you; it could annoy you. Neither is my concern, because it is my list, not your list. If you really want a list, and I can see no discernible reason why you would, then make your own list. It is all the rage and you know you can.
My list begins with the things I don’t like. In reverse order the ten things I like least are:
10. Internet Marketers and other associated snake-oil salesmen that promise everything and deliver nothing. They would be higher up my list, but for their one saving grace. They are consistent. They fleece the unwary every time.
9. Cars and their drivers. Some people need motor cars (automobiles to our colonial friends) for their work. A good example of such people would be taxi drivers and racing drivers. In fact they are the only examples. All other cars are nasty indulgences that pollute the planet and hold back the development of sensible integrated public transport policies. Worst of all car drivers are those Nigels and Jocastas who claim ‘green’ credentials because they recycle all their tin cans and glass bottles and even compost their own faeces, yet still take their kids to school in a Chelsea Tractor.
8. New Labour. There is a quaint old phrase that states ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’, and an equally well known moral precept that states ‘Thou shalt not steal’ The ‘Granta Two’ violated both those by stealing a perfectly formed, unbroken, Labour Party from it rightful owners and then ‘fixing’ it.
7. Reality Television. First it is a complete misnomer. So-called reality television doesn’t reflect any kind of reality I have ever experienced. It generally seems to feature psychologically damaged half-wits doing and saying things that no one with even a tenuous grasp of reality would even consider. Look at Big Brother; could there be a more pointless thing to broadcast? Actually I have found one; read the next point.
6. Television Game Shows and similar ‘formats’. Who wants to be a Millionaire, Strictly Come Dancing, Deal or No Deal; the list is endless. They are complete and utter pap; disheartening and unentertaining. Awful!
5. TV chat shows. If you have ever seen Jerry, Oprah, Montel and their ilk go through their paces it is akin to a living death. The damaged and deranged people they have on and their superior attitude to them is truly sickening. The British clones are little better, saved only by their level of amateurishness.
4. Beetroot. This is surely the most horrible and evil vegetable in the world. It looks as if it ought to be nice. It is a rich shade of burgundy, and is shaped not unlike a swede, which is a more than acceptable thing to eat. But one taste and you want to vomit. It tastes like a turnip soaked in sweetened diesel oil. Disgusting!
3. The Tories. David Cameron has over the past two or three years tried to present himself as Tony Blair mark 2. Firstly, why anyone would model himself on a warmongering, bible-bashing, compulsive liar is beyond me, but each to their own. The problem is that the reality is actually much more sinister than that. Cameron’s New Tories are actually just Thatcher’s Old Tories in sharper suits. They brought Britain to her knees in the 1980s and given half a chance they would do it again. I thought about putting the Iron Tyrant herself on the list but as she is now so close to death why bother.
2. United States of America. The nation that brought us McDonalds, Coca-Cola, post world war two colonialism, the cold war, lynching parties, Charlton Heston, John Wayne, two George Bushes, the CIA, the destabilisation of Central America and the middle-east, and the credit crunch. What is there to like? Let us hope Obama can drag the US into respectability.
1. Text-messaging. I just can’t see the point. Phone someone or send an email. This may have something to do with my own inability to master the whole texting thing. After all I am an adult. My beef I suppose is really with mobile phones (cell phones to the colonials) that can take photos, surf the net, take movies. They are telephones for God’s sake. Has the world gone mad?
In order not to sound completely curmudgeonly, I also have some things that I like:
10. Scrambled Eggs. What could be nicer on a lazy Sunday morning than a nice plate of scrambled eggs on toast? Answer: A nice plate of scrambled eggs on toast accompanied by a nice strong cup of coffee.
9. The Open University. Jennie Lee’s dream of a ‘university of the air’ became a reality and has gone on to become the largest academic institution in the world. It is socialism in action; higher education for all. It is the ultimate ‘second chance’ institution, and I will forever remain both grateful and very proud to one time have been an OU student. Thank you for giving me my chance.
8. Amsterdam. It is twee, petit-bourgeois, and a ludicrously popular tourist trap. It also has a seedy red-light area, too many British drunks, plenty of dodgy characters wandering about trying to deal in hard drugs, and its own fair share of over-priced tourist shops. But it also has the Anne Frank House, the Homo Monument, a brilliant zoo, and an atmosphere of liberalism and tolerance that is refreshing and uplifting. And it is Dutch. And that is quite a thing to be!
7. Email. I sent my first email on an intranet in 1988 and have been a devotee ever since. As a form of (almost) instant communication it cannot be bettered. It has the advantages of instant messaging in that it is relatively immediate, combined with the advantages of traditional; letter writing in that you can compose your mail at your leisure without interruption from the would-be recipient. The best of both worlds.
6. Germany. Although it’s relatively recent history is something Germany must remain deeply ashamed about, there is far more to Germany than that. The nation of Goethe and Schiller, the brothers Grimm and Beethoven, of beautiful 16th and 17th Century inns, the Black Forest (with or without the torte), and the magnificent Rhine valley, Germany is a wonderful place. The best thing about Germany is the people, The Germans, despite their much publicised inner angst, are friendly, fun-loving and welcoming. A great place for a holiday
5. The internet. The internet is the hunting ground of scammers and spivs, porn merchants and bigots, but it is also a wonderful meeting place in cyberspace of multiple different communities. It links families across continents, it connects businesses, and It is the spiritual home of some of the most generous and honest people one could wish to have contact with; the open source community. Not competition, but cooperation. What a fantastic model for the rest of us to follow. Well done Sir Tim, you deserve a medal.
4. Leonard Cohen. He is the singer of my life. He somehow gets to the gist of things in a way no one else can. He is funny, melancholy, sad, open and brave; a true artist in a world of illusionists and hacks.
3. Karl Marx. Marx opened up our eyes to the truth of human existence. Whether he was the sort of chap you want to have round to dinner is debatable, but he clarified the reasons for the inequalities we suffer without recourse to bogus moralising and religious flimflam,
2. Michel Foucault. Simply the greatest philosopher, archivist, archaeologist of knowledge and power we have yet had. He laid the way for a more realistic and sophisticated analytics of the constant ebb and flow of power relations. He revealed the world as it truly is.
1. The Dutch Football team of 1974. This extraordinary collection of ultra-talented footballers captured the imagination of a generation in a way that no football team (or anything else for that matter) ever had before or ever will. Managed by the genius, Rinus Michels, they played ‘totaal voetbal’. Football played in a way never seen before, with skill, strength, intelligence an artistry that went beyond the bounds of a mere game. The team that lined against West Germany on that fateful day in 1974 was without a shadow of a doubt the finest football team the world will ever know: They were:
• Jan Jongbloed,
• Wim Suurbier,
• Wim Rijsbergen,
• Arie Haan, Ruud
• Krol,
• Wim Jansen,
• Johan Neeskens,
• Wim van Hanegam,
• Johnny Rep,
• Johan Cruyff, and,
• Rob Rensenbrink.
Other key members of the squad were Theo de Jong, the van de Kerkhof brothers, and the great Piet Keizer (AKA the ‘starter’); one of the key players in the great Ajax team of 1969-1973. My heart goes out to those of you who are too young to have witnessed this wonderful, wonderful team. Simply the best!!!
There you have it; my list. I could say that I hope you like it, but I don’t really care. Read it and comment if you wish.
Tuesday 17 March 2009
Sunday 8 March 2009
Books that changed my life
There are many lists produced by people of the ten best films, hundred best songs, twenty best books etc. and these lists can be very engaging and interesting. However, even the compilers of these lists would generally admit that on a different day they would compile a different list.
My list is a little different. It is a short list of books I have read that have changed my world view and helped to shape the person I am and my hopes for the world and its future. None of these books is my current ‘flavour of the month’; indeed I first read all of them at least ten years ago.
The first life-changing book I ever read was the authorised version of The Bible (not cover to cover but in an ordered fashion at Bible classes). What I took from The Bible was not the distorted message that is the watchword of many so called fundamentalists, but the humanity and sheer goodness that comes from the Sermon on the Mount, the concept of the glory of sacrifice, and the central tenet of The New Testament, to love thy neighbour, when all men are my neighbours. As a teenager the profound effect of The New Testament caused me to ‘get religion’ and I became a Methodist Lay Preacher for a short while. However, as time went on my scepticism grew as I observed so many pious and religious people who clearly defined their neighbours in a much more circumscribed manner. This led me to increasing secularism, but the concept of worldwide brotherly love never left me.
The second of these life-changing books I read was Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Robert Tressell was actually Robert Noonan, an Irish housepainter, who arrived in Hastings via South Africa, and wrote a thinly veiled story of the lives of himself, his workmates and their families in the fictional town of Mugsborough. The book revolves around the central character of Frank Owen, a housepainter who believes the capitalist system is the cause of all the poverty and degradation of himself and his workmates. The book is a brilliant analysis of the hypocrisy of religion and the contradictions of capitalism, written in a style that is easy to understand and exceptionally moving. It advocates a socialist society in which work is performed to satisfy the needs of all rather than to generate profit for a few. Although he completed the manuscript in 1910, the book wasn’t published until 1914, by which time Noonan had died. It is a truly remarkable book, written by a non-professional writer that remains in print to this day. It has been said by senior Labour politicians of the 1970s as diverse as Denis Healy and Tony Benn, that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, available to servicemen in abridged form, was the book that won the 1945 General Election, and thus brought into being the greatest government that the United Kingdom has ever known.
It is difficult to put a measure on the influence and power of this book. In the end it shows not only hope but anticipation of the better days to come:
The gloomy shadows enshrouding the streets, concealing for the time their grey and mournful air of poverty and hidden suffering, and the black masses of cloud gathering so menacingly in the tempestuous sky, seemed typical of the Nemesis which was overtaking the Capitalist System. That atrocious system which, having attained to the fullest measure of detestable injustice and cruelty, was now fast crumbling into ruin, inevitably doomed to be overwhelmed because it was all so wicked and abominable, inevitably doomed to sink under the blight and curse of senseless and unprofitable selfishness out of existence for ever, its memory universally execrated and abhorred.
But from these ruins was surely growing the glorious fabric of the Co-operative Commonwealth. Mankind, awaking from the long night of bondage and mourning and arising from the dust wherein they had lain prone so long, were at last looking upward to the light that was riving asunder and dissolving the dark clouds which had so long concealed from them the face of heaven. The light that will shine upon the world wide Fatherland and illumine the gilded domes and glittering pinnacles of the beautiful cities of the future, where men shall dwell together in true brotherhood and goodwill and joy. The Golden Light that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism. (Tressell, R. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists)
Anyone who cannot be moved by such hope and a burning desire to awaken from our “long night of bondage”, must be a very odd person indeed.
At this point in my life, my early twenties I was active in Labour Politics and had a clear view that the Co-operative Commonwealth was the world I wanted to live in. I knew I was a socialist and that capitalism was an abominable evil, but I lacked any robust skills of analysing and fully understanding capitalism. In my mid thirties I was lucky enough to get a place at university and at this point two more books came into my life. These were Karl Marx’s The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and The German Ideology, also by Marx. These early Marxian works; one a collection of assorted notes, the other a philosophical treatise, made several things clear to me. Firstly, and most importantly, everything in our capitalist world is essentially upside down. Most importantly they make clear that God didn’t create Man; Man created God, and that capital is stored up labour and that any profit made by the capitalist beyond what is paid in wages is the theft of that stored up labour from the worker. Suddenly, things are beginning to become clear to me, and I am beginning to understand why there are different classes, and why I am destined to be forever poor: I am routinely being robbed and simultaneously being lied to.
University also opened my eyes to the fact that not only was I oppressed and exploited, but as a white European man I was also an exploiter. Yet more books changed my view of the world. The first of these was Robert Miles’ Racism, which laid bare the oppressive nature of Eurocentricism and the routine positing of the Black or the Jew as the other. This was particularly challenging to me as someone proud of his home town to realise that it was the first place of the first recorded instance of racial cleansing. I am from York and on the night of 16th March 1190, the feast of Shabbat ha-Gadol, the small Jewish community of 150 in York took refuge in Clifford’s Tower, to take refuge from the rampaging mob outside. Rather than face the mob, many took their own lives, others died in the flames they themselves had lit for warmth and light, and the rest eventually surrendered to the mob. All of those who surrendered were massacred. Miles takes issue with those who take sophistry too far in trying to determine how one should analyse racism, stating that it is tantamount to “fiddling whilst the gas ovens burn”.
This recognition that as a White European I was an oppressor was quickly followed by another book that showed me that as a man I was also an oppressor. Close to Home by Christine Delphy is an analysis of the patriarchal relations within the household, demonstrating that the household is an arena for the organisation of labour, in which the means of production are owned by the man and the labour of the woman is expropriated.
At this point I am in my mid-thirties and have begun to get a clear grasp of the trajectories of inequality in this world, but still have problems wondering why others can’t see it. At this point I encounter a number of books that one would best describe as social psychology. Many speak volumes in explaining why people are as they are. Erving Goffman (Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Asylums etc.) even explains why people appear different to different audiences. However the social psychological writings that impact on me most are the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. I still believe that much of Freud’s theorising is based on paper-thin evidence and amounts to little, but he does make a very powerful argument for the internalisation of cultural norms. He shows us that our psyche is an internalisation of our world; thus middle-class families beget middle –class children both in terms of status and in terms of outlook. So I now know why so many apparently intelligent people cannot see what is so plain and obvious.
At this point I have more knowledge but I still have no idea how the Co-operative Commonwealth can be brought into being. Although Marx tells me it will, he does not say how. Everything then falls into disarray. I read Michel Foucault. In The History of Sexuality Volume 1 and in Discipline and Punish, Foucault not only shows the relationship between power and knowledge, but also theorises power in what seems for me a completely novel way. For Foucault, power is not a ‘given’, unchanging entity to be won or lost, but a constant ebb and flow of knowledge and social interactions. He also shows how power can be exercised in absentia through his brilliant analysis of panopticism. Reading Foucault is one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life. I suddenly really see the world as it is. This, however, would not have been the case without the books that had gone before. I now am more convinced than ever that the Co-operative Commonwealth will come to pass, that the world will become a greener and more loving place, but it won’t come through a great revolution as in the meta-narratives of Marxism, but through constant vigilance and innumerable small victories, as we, slowly but surely, change the world. At last I know. We can make a difference.
So there you have it; a short, and rather poorly written, essay on the books that have changed my life.
My list is a little different. It is a short list of books I have read that have changed my world view and helped to shape the person I am and my hopes for the world and its future. None of these books is my current ‘flavour of the month’; indeed I first read all of them at least ten years ago.
The first life-changing book I ever read was the authorised version of The Bible (not cover to cover but in an ordered fashion at Bible classes). What I took from The Bible was not the distorted message that is the watchword of many so called fundamentalists, but the humanity and sheer goodness that comes from the Sermon on the Mount, the concept of the glory of sacrifice, and the central tenet of The New Testament, to love thy neighbour, when all men are my neighbours. As a teenager the profound effect of The New Testament caused me to ‘get religion’ and I became a Methodist Lay Preacher for a short while. However, as time went on my scepticism grew as I observed so many pious and religious people who clearly defined their neighbours in a much more circumscribed manner. This led me to increasing secularism, but the concept of worldwide brotherly love never left me.
The second of these life-changing books I read was Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Robert Tressell was actually Robert Noonan, an Irish housepainter, who arrived in Hastings via South Africa, and wrote a thinly veiled story of the lives of himself, his workmates and their families in the fictional town of Mugsborough. The book revolves around the central character of Frank Owen, a housepainter who believes the capitalist system is the cause of all the poverty and degradation of himself and his workmates. The book is a brilliant analysis of the hypocrisy of religion and the contradictions of capitalism, written in a style that is easy to understand and exceptionally moving. It advocates a socialist society in which work is performed to satisfy the needs of all rather than to generate profit for a few. Although he completed the manuscript in 1910, the book wasn’t published until 1914, by which time Noonan had died. It is a truly remarkable book, written by a non-professional writer that remains in print to this day. It has been said by senior Labour politicians of the 1970s as diverse as Denis Healy and Tony Benn, that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, available to servicemen in abridged form, was the book that won the 1945 General Election, and thus brought into being the greatest government that the United Kingdom has ever known.
It is difficult to put a measure on the influence and power of this book. In the end it shows not only hope but anticipation of the better days to come:
The gloomy shadows enshrouding the streets, concealing for the time their grey and mournful air of poverty and hidden suffering, and the black masses of cloud gathering so menacingly in the tempestuous sky, seemed typical of the Nemesis which was overtaking the Capitalist System. That atrocious system which, having attained to the fullest measure of detestable injustice and cruelty, was now fast crumbling into ruin, inevitably doomed to be overwhelmed because it was all so wicked and abominable, inevitably doomed to sink under the blight and curse of senseless and unprofitable selfishness out of existence for ever, its memory universally execrated and abhorred.
But from these ruins was surely growing the glorious fabric of the Co-operative Commonwealth. Mankind, awaking from the long night of bondage and mourning and arising from the dust wherein they had lain prone so long, were at last looking upward to the light that was riving asunder and dissolving the dark clouds which had so long concealed from them the face of heaven. The light that will shine upon the world wide Fatherland and illumine the gilded domes and glittering pinnacles of the beautiful cities of the future, where men shall dwell together in true brotherhood and goodwill and joy. The Golden Light that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism. (Tressell, R. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists)
Anyone who cannot be moved by such hope and a burning desire to awaken from our “long night of bondage”, must be a very odd person indeed.
At this point in my life, my early twenties I was active in Labour Politics and had a clear view that the Co-operative Commonwealth was the world I wanted to live in. I knew I was a socialist and that capitalism was an abominable evil, but I lacked any robust skills of analysing and fully understanding capitalism. In my mid thirties I was lucky enough to get a place at university and at this point two more books came into my life. These were Karl Marx’s The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and The German Ideology, also by Marx. These early Marxian works; one a collection of assorted notes, the other a philosophical treatise, made several things clear to me. Firstly, and most importantly, everything in our capitalist world is essentially upside down. Most importantly they make clear that God didn’t create Man; Man created God, and that capital is stored up labour and that any profit made by the capitalist beyond what is paid in wages is the theft of that stored up labour from the worker. Suddenly, things are beginning to become clear to me, and I am beginning to understand why there are different classes, and why I am destined to be forever poor: I am routinely being robbed and simultaneously being lied to.
University also opened my eyes to the fact that not only was I oppressed and exploited, but as a white European man I was also an exploiter. Yet more books changed my view of the world. The first of these was Robert Miles’ Racism, which laid bare the oppressive nature of Eurocentricism and the routine positing of the Black or the Jew as the other. This was particularly challenging to me as someone proud of his home town to realise that it was the first place of the first recorded instance of racial cleansing. I am from York and on the night of 16th March 1190, the feast of Shabbat ha-Gadol, the small Jewish community of 150 in York took refuge in Clifford’s Tower, to take refuge from the rampaging mob outside. Rather than face the mob, many took their own lives, others died in the flames they themselves had lit for warmth and light, and the rest eventually surrendered to the mob. All of those who surrendered were massacred. Miles takes issue with those who take sophistry too far in trying to determine how one should analyse racism, stating that it is tantamount to “fiddling whilst the gas ovens burn”.
This recognition that as a White European I was an oppressor was quickly followed by another book that showed me that as a man I was also an oppressor. Close to Home by Christine Delphy is an analysis of the patriarchal relations within the household, demonstrating that the household is an arena for the organisation of labour, in which the means of production are owned by the man and the labour of the woman is expropriated.
At this point I am in my mid-thirties and have begun to get a clear grasp of the trajectories of inequality in this world, but still have problems wondering why others can’t see it. At this point I encounter a number of books that one would best describe as social psychology. Many speak volumes in explaining why people are as they are. Erving Goffman (Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Asylums etc.) even explains why people appear different to different audiences. However the social psychological writings that impact on me most are the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. I still believe that much of Freud’s theorising is based on paper-thin evidence and amounts to little, but he does make a very powerful argument for the internalisation of cultural norms. He shows us that our psyche is an internalisation of our world; thus middle-class families beget middle –class children both in terms of status and in terms of outlook. So I now know why so many apparently intelligent people cannot see what is so plain and obvious.
At this point I have more knowledge but I still have no idea how the Co-operative Commonwealth can be brought into being. Although Marx tells me it will, he does not say how. Everything then falls into disarray. I read Michel Foucault. In The History of Sexuality Volume 1 and in Discipline and Punish, Foucault not only shows the relationship between power and knowledge, but also theorises power in what seems for me a completely novel way. For Foucault, power is not a ‘given’, unchanging entity to be won or lost, but a constant ebb and flow of knowledge and social interactions. He also shows how power can be exercised in absentia through his brilliant analysis of panopticism. Reading Foucault is one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life. I suddenly really see the world as it is. This, however, would not have been the case without the books that had gone before. I now am more convinced than ever that the Co-operative Commonwealth will come to pass, that the world will become a greener and more loving place, but it won’t come through a great revolution as in the meta-narratives of Marxism, but through constant vigilance and innumerable small victories, as we, slowly but surely, change the world. At last I know. We can make a difference.
So there you have it; a short, and rather poorly written, essay on the books that have changed my life.
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