Fred Goodwin stripped of knighthood -the danger now is tokenism

I'm worried that a scapegoating dynamic will end up distracting us. As David Fleming of Unite said:

this will do nothing to bring job security to the staff across the banking sector who continue to work under a culture of excess and greed at the top. Action from the government is needed in banking reform, not simply empty rhetoric on knighthoods or shareholder activism

What we need to recall, furthermore, is that a big part of the problem was -and is- that our governments don't do something about the 'too big to fail' issue in banking. Scapegoating one guy who was taking advantage of it, admittedly, is scarcely going to allow our money to sleep easily in its mainframes.

Fred Goodwin stripped of knighthood | Business | The Guardian

Eichmann and his 'new conscience'

Reflecting further on the nature of the relationship between the individual and the corporate in the light of comments in this article on Hannah Arendt's reflections on Eichmann's trial. I've found myslef reflecting on the way that human beings usually doseem to have a sense of right and wrong which is born of empathy which is, in turn, probably hardwired in most. However, this innate conscience is not impregnable. It can be subverted by re-framing and habituated to woe and ill:

Having redefined executioners as heroic sufferers and having stifled his empathy for human suffering, including his own, Eichmann was numb enough to follow his new conscience

And this is why we need morality grounded in a transcendent: there are times when our msoral compass is recallibrated by rhetoric, habit or ideology. We need something disruptive and weighty to challenge the Powers' reprogramming of our malleable minds.

The capacity for evil can spread like an epidemic | Elisabeth Young-Bruehl | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Self Comes to Mind: framework for corporisational identity?

On the whole, as a Chiristain taking seriously the Hebraic heritage of affirmation of matter and body and of a holistic orientation, I'm sympathtic and not particularly threatened by Damasios's perspectives. So Im interested to read this review of his latest book. The reviewer makes a really helpful summary of the basic thesis:

consciousness emerges only when – to quote the book's title – self comes to mind, so that in key brain regions, the representational maps of sensory experience intersect with the encoded experiences of past that self provides. This, enabled by the evolution of language, makes possible autobiographical memory – the narrative of our lives that we humans all possess and which is the basis for consciousness. This, briefly summarised, is the latest version of Damasio's theory

If this is rough;y right with regard to humans and other animals and if I'm barking up the right tree in thinking about the Powers /corporisations by analogy with human persons, then reading the above description as a possble description of corporisations is helpful. 'Brain' may have to be though of as systems for processing information and keeping records in a corporisation. Language may be systems of communication and it is easier now to conceive of a corporisation having a sense of self borne of history, records, data, missiosn statements and the like.

Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio - review | Books | The Guardian

The Optimism Bias; Could turn into complacency, IMHO

Some time back I seem to recall reading a bit od research that seemed to indicate that people with mild depression are usually the mosat realistic.

both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic. On average, we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being. People hugely underestimate their chances of getting divorced, losing their job or being diagnosed with cancer; expect their children to be extraordinarily gifted; envision themselves achieving more than their peers; and overestimate their likely life span

The implication of this is that the rest of us are somewhat optimistic and unrealistically so. This article explores whay actually this may be a useful thing in human beings:

To make progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities – better ones – and we need to believe that we can achieve them. Such faith helps motivate us to pursue our goals. Optimists in general work longer hours and tend to earn more. Economists at Duke University found that optimists even save more. And although they are not less likely to divorce, they are more likely to remarry

Now it seems to me that it's worth noting another couple of implications -at least I think they are.
One is that another facet of over-optimism is what we call complacency: if we tend to assume things will be alright, that surely means that we're not disposed to actively do something towards changing things; we'll be fine; we can afford to be complacent. Perhaps it even relates to what appears to be widespread political apathy? This is why it takes such a lot of effort to change people's behaviour to avoid potential detriments: we have to shift the dead-weight of possibly misplaced hope and complacent expectation.

The other is if not an implication, then a cross reference: the Woman in Genesis 3 and then Adam:
is what we see the serpent doing in that story? Riding the temptation on the back of a hopeful implied future: the first couple are not disposed by human nature to think that there could be disastrous consequences to following the optimistic sugesstion...

The Optimism Bias by Tali Sharot: extract | Science | The Observer

Headphones linked to pedestrian deaths, injuries

About 3 years ago, the crossing of the rail track at the bottom of the lane we then lived near was the scene of a fatal accident. The young man concerned apparently didn't notice the train that hit him. He was wearing headphones. It is thought the two facts are connected. This would seem more likely in view of this research:

Headphones linked to pedestrian deaths, injuries:

Researchers reviewed 116 accident cases from 2004 to 2011 in which injured pedestrians were documented to be using headphones. Seventy percent of the 116 accidents resulted in death to the pedestrian. More than two-thirds of victims were male (68 percent) and under the age of 30 (67 percent). More than half of the moving vehicles involved in the accidents were trains (55 percent), and nearly a third (29 percent) of the vehicles reported sounding some type of warning horn prior to the crash. The increased incidence of accidents over the years closely corresponds to documented rising popularity of auditory technologies with headphones.

The piece of work I think that needs doing now, on this theme, is correlating use of headphones with muggings and (attempted) sexual assaults. I would hypothesise that headphone users are less vigilant than they might otherwise be and so don't take elementary precautions or even notice potentially dangerous situations developing.

On the quiescence of travelling toddlers

My grandchild often gets me thinking. Today, for instance, she woke up early, full of beans and a constant source of activity and attention. And we decided to take her into town. We decided to walk in and that she would therefore be in her pushchair (it did seem to us that asking her to walk 2 miles was a bit much for a 3 year-old). But then the everyday 'miracle' occurs, as it does so often and with so many toddlers: she was quiet and simply sat there for the walk down, for the walk around town in various shops and the walk back. Ne'ery an attempt towards active play. It was like she'd reached an altered state of consciousness.

And, on reflection, that's what I suspect it was: a quasi-trance state. Then my further question occurs: how come? Why is it that toddlers and babies tend to go quiet when travelling in these sorts of ways? Well, to me an evolutionary psychological hypothesis seems plausible. The children (and their parents, probably) who survived predation on the savannah would be the ones who stayed quiet when travelling. Then that begs the question: how would kids who cannot yet consistently form the kind of complex concepts we often express as 'if ... then ...' based on an abstract conditional ('if I make a noise /remain quiet') and a hard-to-conceptualise consequent ('we will/not attract the attentions of leopards') know to stay quiet and still? This is a question about what would cue them, presumably at something like an instinctual level. I would hypothesise that the rhythm (of walking or similar) and sight of of moving scenery cues/primes a transformation of consciousness to one that doesn't' need entertaining and is able to damp down the felt need for food or 'grooming'/interaction.

If this were so, then a further question-complex arises: does this instinct survive childhood, and if so, how does it show itself? This is even more speculative, of course, but I'm going to hazard a -hopefully- educated guess.

When I go for a walk I tend to find that my state of mind is not quite the same as 'normal'. In fact I often find that going for a walk enables my mind to produce ideas and solutions to problems that I've not achieved with conscious and focused attention to them in an office or meeting. So is this the same or a derived state of mind to that I think that our toddler grandchild seems to go into when in her pushchair? And if it is is it a good state for more discursive and creative way of thinking? Does it help meditative practice? (Seems to).

A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network

I keep banging on about the importance of the fundamental insights in Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh. Well here's a nice brief article with an introduction to why I may not be wrong:

our rationality is greatly influenced by our bodies in large part via an extensive system of metaphorical thought.

A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network:

Before the Ending of the Day by Andii Bowsher in Religion & Spirituality

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Before the Ending of the Day by Andii Bowsher in Religion & Spirituality

Mental Complexity, corporisations and The Powers

I found myself with one of those moments of recognition -someone else has articulated something I've been thinking about albeit in a different arena. The recognition was in a couple of sentences here:

Mental Complexity and ‘The Astonishing Naivety of Policymakers’ : RSA blogs:

a growth in social productivity requires people to be able to disembed themselves from certain social and psychological influences that undermine autonomy, responsibility and solidarity, so that they can relate to those influences more flexibly and constructively.

This, I think, relates to one of the things I've been thinking in relation to the Powers or 'corporisations' as I've been labelling them. You see, one of my issues consequential on seeing corporisations as emergent beings arising from human (plus other 'stuff' -taking on board the insights of Actor-Network Theory) bounded complex interaction is whether humans or corporisations should be seen as more ultimate. The issue arises because if we recognise the dignity and agency of corporisations, then the question must arise as to whether they subsume individual human rights and dignities. A model for this would be the way that a brain or a human body takes priority over individual neurons or cells, or perhaps the way that the nest or the hive seems to with social ants and bees.

My reading of scripture, informed by Walter Wink, is that in God's economy humans are to be served by corporisations rather than the other way round. If that is the case, then the quote above captures also the ethical imperative in relation to the corporisations (that is the Powers). Indeed this seems to be part of what Paul is claiming for the gospel: that it enables human agents to do this -recognising that we are all to prone to ceding our agency and responsibility before God to the corporisations /Powers.

Of course, part of the issue (not really touched on by Paul) is that unlike neurons or other cells, we can 'belong to' or form part of more than one corporisation. I sense I need to consider this more fully too...

Composers As Gardeners

For me this was a deja vu article in the sense that I recognised in it themes from elsewhere, particularly theological, despite the fact that it's Brian Eno in an interview piece on Edge. First a quote that probably sets the scene best.

Composers As Gardeners | Conversation | Edge:

for me, this was really a new paradigm of composing. Changing the idea of the composer from somebody who stood at the top of a process and dictated precisely how it was carried out, to somebody who stood at the bottom of a process who carefully planted some rather well-selected seeds, hopefully, and watched them turn into something.

As those readers alert to the paradigm shifts in science over the last 30 years or so will realise, this has something to do with chaos, complexity and emergence. But let's put it together with John Polkinhorne's line about God making things make themselves and the metaphor that Eno uses is ripe to be crossed-over into theological thinking about creation. Two things theological then occur to me: one is to recommend engagement with Fretheim's work on God, creation reflecting on passages and themes from the Hebrew Bible. Fretheim does an inspiring job of reading passages on creation and showing how they really do support ways of thinking about creation which includes the chaotic, the unpredictable and the self-assembling and so relativistic and chaordic insights.

The other thing that it links with is one of the themes in Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense where a major metaphor for God that Vanstone develops is of God as artist working with materials that have a certain recalcitrance and how the artistry lies in how the dialogue between artist and materials is worked through. This would certainly play well with the complexity science insights.

Another thing I bring to this is a conversation a few months back with an older artist who clearly didn't resonate with Vanstone's reading of the artistic task; defining good artists as being in total control of their materials and distinguished by the greatness of their vision.

Of course an artist must be capable of crafting their vision, but I still think that Vanstone has a fundamentally right insight. In actual fact, no artist can entirely reckon without some recalcitrance in materials and I think that there is a greatness in a redemptive approach which explores with the materials rather than over or simply through the materials. Therefore their vision, however implicitly and perhaps unreflectingly, is already in dialogue with the materials, the media (as Andy Crouch notes, even architects have to 'compromise' because builders rarely manage to realise the artistic vision).

And, it seems to me, Eno's reflection on what he has been trying to achieve with his generative music, tips the balance away from the modernistic 'mastery' vision of art (and theologies of creation -dare one mention Calvin here?) to the emergent, chaordic art where distinctions between artist and audience or 'public' are eroded and the event/ed-ness of art is played with and the sensuousness of materiality is often foregrounded. Eno's picking up of the gardner metaphor does a really nice job of capturing this.

Part of what is going on is also a reappraisal of what form of art gets to be thought of as paradigmatic of art. I'd like to put in a plea for drama too ... or live music: in both of these forms the trialogue between audience and performers and between author/composer and performers and directors is crucial. And who is the 'artist' in a play? The playwright? The actors? The director? There's a real issue of synergy and community in this. And this, I and others, would argue, is the important thing to capture when thinking theologically about creation and creating. Meticulous sovereignty/providence is out; it is untrue to what we experience and what we genuinely know about the way things are through scientific enterprise.

Creation and creating are actually communal, social and synergistic. We need to get away from the myth of the solitary artist and their brave vision and recognise, even celebrate, the embeddedness of art production and appreciation in human, indeed, creational community.