Rioting as ecstatic experience

A dimension that is often missing from discussions and accounts of violence and other forms of crime, is the way that involvement in such activities, especially where crowds or large groups are concerned, is actually a desirable experience in some way. From a Guardian report on a recent CofE report on the 2011 riots:

Austin Smith, a Passionist Catholic priest from Liverpool who died in 2011, who said such rioting could be "literally an ecstatic experience" after the Toxteth trouble in the 1980s.
"Something is released in the participants which takes them out of themselves as a kind of spiritual escape," Price said. "The tragedy of our times is that, once again, we have a large population of young people who are desperate to escape from the constrained lives to which they seem to be condemned.
"Where hope has been killed off, is it surprising that their energies erupt in antisocial and violent actions?"

Especially where such actions have this "ecstatic" quality where there is a joy in shared enterprise and in breaking boundaries and in the physical activity -not to mention in getting some 'goodies'. And then there may be the sense of 'sticking it' to a society that has been excluding and 'screwing' you. A potent and heady mixture indeed. And if we don't recognise this joy (I think Nietzsche did), we may be less able to deal with it.
Church report on riots warns about effects of cuts | UK news | The Guardian:

Could this be the next data privacy threat?

I'm all for doing sensible things in government, especially where they result in better stewardship of resources and promote the welfare of people generally. This proposal is that government 'works smarter' with regard to its collection and use of data:

"Across the public sector, extraordinary quantities of data are amassed in the course of running public services," said Chris Yiu, author of the report. "Finding ways to share or link this data together has the potential to save time for citizens and money for taxpayers. The government will need the capability to conduct analytics effectively, and the courage to pursue this agenda with integrity."

And part of me says 'amen'. However, another part of my puts up red flags, blows a whistle and cries 'big brother'. And I'm not sure which voice is right or how right each voice is. What I do know is that there is potentially an issue, depending on what data and the way that it is used.

So, an apparently acceptable idea is this

... suggestions from the Policy Exchange is to axe the 10-yearly census and instead gather data from the electoral roll, council tax registers and other sources to estimate the total population of the UK and its breakdown according to types and sizes of household, occupations, religion and other factors. Done this way, the government could save £500m for each census, and the information could be "acceptable quality and more up to date," says the thinktank.

This seems to be almost self-evidently a good idea -and I seem to recall that the like has already been suggested in the sense that some have pointed out that our census data are often out of date before they are published and that data that could tell us similar things are available by harvesting other sources.


Where I get a bit concerned is when I read:

Tax officers could also look at how much tax people pay to company accounts and other data to highlight individuals who are paying less than expected.

Now, I don't know what this means in practice, so it may be innocuous, but then again ... so is there devil in that detail? Certainly the report recognises that there could be an issue.

It also acknowledges the risk of angering individuals who feel – or fear – their privacy is being invaded, and suggests the government adopt a code of conduct called the Code for Responsible Analytics.

I'm a bit worried that there is a slightly dismissive tone about that and whether a Code is enough -unless it is tied firmly into legislation about data protection and does not, in effect, remove protections and rights we already have -which the which the Identity Card database threatened to do.


Better use of public data could save government �33bn | Politics | guardian.co.uk:

Matching meditation technique to people...

I'm thenking about now about how best to offer opportunities to learn meditation into the life of Northumbria University. So it was interesting to see this report Finding right meditation technique key to user satisfaction. The main thrust of it is this: "Because of the increase in both general and clinical use of meditation, you want to make sure you're finding the right method for each person,"

Basically, the research found that people stuck with it if they took to it. There's going to be more research needed to fine tune what's involved in preferences. Those us involved in spiritual direction and prayer guiding are -many of us- used to encouraging people to consider what works for them. I'm wondering whether patterns could be discerned that might work with different personality types or whether it would be cultural backgrounds ore something else that would prove to be the key factor in what 'works' for different people.


In the mean time, I'm thinking that it may be good to flag up to learners that there are a handful of different approaches and they might need to experiment a bit. I'd already been considering that there should be a short 'course' in which different things could be tried out. But if anyone would like to leave a comment about research or even informal observations of what kind of people take to which kind of approach, I'd be most interested.


I have suspicions or hunches in terms of MBTI types: S may prefer mindfulness as it involves giving attention to sensory experience; becoming immersed in it. I'm less sure, but I think that perhaps mantra-style approaches might work better for Ts. ... I've seen these things worked out in termss of prayer, but meditation is something that overlaps with prayer but not isomorphically. So I'm not quite sure how F and N types would relate.

Mutinying against Pirates

I've read the whole of the book and I've delayed writing a further post because two of the chapters, five and six, presented me with things I needed to think through further because I wasn't sure whether I could wholeheartedly affirm the arguments they make. I still like what I take to be the overall message about being aware of the reasons for piracy particularly in contexts of injustice, hypocrisy and cruelty which piracy may often be, in effect, an understandable and often justifiable protest.

But then we come to chapter 5, and I think it gets a bit murkier.
In chapter 5 we turn our attention to fiction and psychology: cue a consideration of Peter Pan. The Pan story is interpreted for its psychological dynamics of growing up: Wendy, on the cusp of the transition from girl to woman, temporarily 'abandoned' by her parents, especially her father, decides to take up the chance to prolong childhood with Pan though ironically she ends up being 'mother' to the lost boys. She has become "blocked". The  solution to this is piratical:  pirates unblock things when they have become jammed and stultifying. Kester encourages us to see the enclosures of the commons as a blocking process and the monopolising and slaving of 17th century maritime merchants similarly.


So the pirates come along and force a change, even though they are defeated by Pan. This allows Wendy to see that she needs to move forward. So far okay. Though I have a difficulty with the role of the pirates in Peter Pan which I will come to a bit later.


Kester then relates this to Jungian psychology. I have to say that this is where I really got lost, not because there isn't a logic to the argument, but simply because I don't find Jungian psychology convincing particularly when it comes to archetypal stuff. I just don't think that there's evidence in scientifically respectable terms for it, so I found myself wanting to go along but not quite able to. And that, combined with my difficulty relating to the way that the role of the pirates in Peter Pan is construed, made this an unsatisfying chapter for me.


So, what is the difficulty with the pirates? I think it is the sudden change from heroic pirates who could even be thought of as 'goodies' in disguise, to the Never-Neverland Pirates who quite clearly are baddies. In respect of this latter point, I kept finding myself thinking of the film Hook, (Dustin Hoffman playing the eponymous anti-hero). Where the pirates quite clearly are baddies -though Hook proves to be brutally honest at times.

Early in the film we learn that the character Peter Panning (played by Robin Williams) is actually Peter Pan grown up -after generations of wooing Darling girls away, he finally decided to settle down with one. His career is some kind of corporate whizz-kid in mergers and acquisitions. His roughly 8-year-old son describes his job in terms that make granny Wendy (guess who?!) exclaim "You've become a pirate, Peter".

It's that scene that keeps running through my head: clearly in this film, 'pirate' is more aligned with the kind of people that Kester is concerned about as . And to be frank, I don't see anything about them in the original story that draws me to consider them a good thing. They are self-absorbed, greedy and cruel. I think the film-Hook characterisation is a true trajectory from the original story.

So I find it hard to think of the Peter Pan pirates in the kind of way that Kester wants to employ them. In fact, I think that they would better serve an examination of the dark side of piracy where it has simply become villainous and bullying. So if Captain Hook is to serve the argument, it is in a more 'making the best of' way: they serve the good despite their own intentions and despite their malevolence. But then, if you're seeing them redemptively like that (that is that the ill they intend and do is somehow transformed to serve the good) then it is the agent or process of the conversion that is the real interest, not the pirates (in this case Wendy's own growth in insight, however inchoate). To pat these pirates on the back for "unblocking" seems to me to be dangerously close to proposing that we sin so 'that grace may abound'. It seems to me in the end that Barrie's pirates don't well serve Kester's main thesis, rather they muddy the waters.

I think it may have been better rather to have used Barrie's pirates -perhaps partly through the lens of the film Hook- to examine the difference between 'healthy' (or at least somewhat justifiable) piracy and mere criminal mafiosism which is actually the stark reproduction of the attitudes and actions of the predatory elites within oppressed communities: the abused become the abusers.  That's quite an important discussion which the book doesn't really get into, though I know that many of Kester's interlocutors have been keen to consider.

Kester sees Barrie's pirates as "more playful", yet it seems to me they are precisely not that: Hook has it right, I think: they are bullies and braggarts intent on their own satisfaction represent repression and blockage. As such they may stand for the adult world which chooses the way of 'childish' tantrums and egotism as against the childlikeness of supportive playfulness, loyalty and hopeful daring which Panning has to rediscover to win back his own (alienated) children: he has to de-pirate himself.

The problem that this outlines is that it depends what form of pirate is being employed. It makes a big difference whether the pirate figure stands for uncaring self-serving violent scary-ness or jolly freedom-loving adventure. I think that the problem in this chapter is that the two sorts are confused. And as cultural archetypes it makes some difference whether what emerges is someone like the godfather or someone like Han Solo. Both types of pirate exist in the cultural repertoire. One is emancipatory the other is far from it. Kester does (p104) contrast 'brutal juvenile villains' with 'bold and mature radicals'; but it seems to me that Pan's pirates are the former not the latter.

Next post on this book, I want to look at chapter 6 where we delve into 'playing pirate with the gods'.

'Man-sheep-dog': inter-species social skills

I started a tagline 'dog-ma' for posts (which have been few, as it happens) reflecting on the experience of having a dog in the household. In relation to that line of reflection I recently came across this interesting article about sheep-dogs and humans. Part of the article points out that this is not just about 2 but 3 species. And the dog seems to be able to 'mind read' sheep to some extent -and perhaps the sheep the dog?
'Man-sheep-dog': inter-species social skills | Neuroanthropology:

The dog was not simply a tool, or merely obedient to a guiding human intelligence; on some level, Whiskey grasped what needed to be done, and Damian had come to count on the dog’s ability to herd, including the dog’s perception of how stressed and liable to flight the sheep were. The key to being an expert dog trialer, then, included the ability, not just to train a dog to herd, but to perceive the dog’s intentions and perceptions, and to anticipate the animal’s next move (as well as those of the sheep).

What interests me in this is not so much the apparent fact that dogs and sheep can anticipate -'read'- the other species and change behaviour accordingly but that the degree of intersubjectivity involved seems to indicate creation is quite deeply community-oriented. This we need to keep in mind beside the 'red in tooth and claw' reading of nature. When we are in 'spacious places' where the stresses of fight, flight and hunger are at bay, there arises a spirit of co-operation and even play. Shades of Maslow's hierarchy? It may be that the right insight about Maslow's idea is actually more fundamentally about the way that creation is ... ?

A visual meditation on structured chaos

Also on at the Baltic is this exhibition by Mark Wallinger: 10000000000000000 2012
it "catalogues and compares 65,536 stones, each occupying its own square on a gargantuan checkerboard — the simplest binary device for implying order."

I went to see this with a friend and we had a conversation covering the nature of chance and the random in relation to chaos and the way that we tend to impose order and meaning on our experience. Alan is interested in science fiction as well and mentioned HP Lovecraft's universe where randomness is a keynote in a universe which is indifferent to our existence which gives rise to horror. This was far from horror though: ordered randomness. One of the interesting visual effects was the patches of shadow -was this a lighting effect of areas where the light from the spots was weaker or a kind of cumulative effect of an area of larger stones casting more shadow -or both? But again an illustration of the way that random can accumulate 'lumpiness' where things can accrete together rather than a randomly even distribution.

It was interesting to view the pebbles with a video in the background of men constructing what appeared to be a grid through which one could view the (North?) sea. This seemed resonant of the idea that the relative chaos of the see was being 'ordered' for the viewer into nine squares; contained and yet not contained; ordered yet not really. The nice thing about this, too, was that we see the construction. Of course, often, we don't realise the constructedness of the grids through which we view the world.

immersive music -this is the way to hear choral music

I experienced this at the Baltic today: really loved it. ...
Janet Cardiff ‹ Detail ‹ Exhibitions ‹ What's On ‹ BALTIC: A reworking of the renaissance choral work for forty voices Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui 1573 by Thomas Tallis, The Forty Part Motet consists of forty separately recorded voices played back through forty individual speakers grouped in eight choirs of five singers. The work allows the audience to get inside the music and experience it almost tangibly as the voices weave in and out of each other.�

The thing is I love Tallis' music; so that was a first 'good'. Then, I like to sing choral music; second good. But then this way to hear it is brilliant. Normally, I hear choral music either from a fixed point within the choir I'm singing in or from in front of a choir (or a speaker or two). But this is great: to be able to be in the middle of the 'choir' and to be able to wander around and to move towards or to move the head to listen more closely to a particular voice or group of voices -lovely.

I even like the way that the sequence starts with the clearing throats and small talk of the members of the choir before they are called together to sing together.

I think that music is often a more immersive art form anyway -but this ups that by allowing the listener to be 'inside' a ring of sound. I liked, too, the opportunity to tune into more particular parts and the greater sense that could give of closing in on a performer in a way that would be embarrassing or offputting if it were a live performance similarly arranged.

Nice.