The art of blogging

What makes a good blog? What makes a successful blog? What makes a worthwhile blog? I’ve no idea. (And – it’s worth noting – these are quite different questions.) I ask them because I am celebrating an anniversary today. Not ten years or even a year, but three months of happy blogging. This might seem a bit premature, but I said to myself when I began that I would keep going for six months come what may; so the halfway mark gives a small excuse to take stock.

Mostly, I’ve really enjoyed it. I’m posting about three or four times a week, and the rhythm of writing has forced me to think about the topics at hand, and made me reflect more generally on what is happening around me and in the press. I’m more curious, and a bit braver about trying to express (or at least trying to form) my own opinion. Usually an idea grabs me or annoys me and I scribble it down for an upcoming post. Now and then I’m feeling a bit blank or too busy to think, and I feel the pressure to write (‘what if I fall silent?!’). Then something catches my attention, or I put it off for a day.

Other unexpected effectsof starting to blog: I write quicker than three months ago; and once or twice a post has grown into an article that has been published – so the blogging has helped me risk stepping into a more public debate. Hopefully, some of the posts have got people thinking about something they might have missed, and reflecting a bit more deeply. This is the point! And that is what makes me feel as a priest that it is worth wasting a little bit of time on this.

The stats: I get about 100 page hits a day. WordPress doesn’t tell you how many unique visitors you get, and I don’t want to sign up to these statistics websites because with my love of detail I would get drawn into obsessing about the stats. Anyway, if there are a hundred page hits, and each person is clicking on each of the twenty-five posts displayed, then that means four people are reading the blog each day! (I know, it’s possibly slightly more than that…)

But I had one exceptional weekend, just ten days ago. For some reason my post about ‘best movies of the decade’ got picked up and put on the WordPress homepage (they choose a few every day) – this is like getting invited to the Oscars – and I had six thousand hits in three days. Suddenly I was ‘out there’ in this strange world of connections and clicking and commentators; and then, as quickly as the link was taken off the WordPress page, I was back in my office with my four friends… WordPress.com, by the way, has been a fantastic (and free) host.

I’m still not sure if the blog has any unity. Friends have called it ‘eclectic’ – I think they mean it is pretty random. This is my concern, that there is no focus or theme to the posts, so readers aren’t quite sure what they are coming to, or why they should come back. Perhaps it doesn’t matter too much. Or perhaps there is a theme developing: Even with all the random posts about film or technology or faith or morality, I feel an underlying thread is the question ‘what does it mean to be human?’ I teach a number of courses in philosophy and theology, and most of the posts here would provide food for thought in the course called ‘Philosophical Anthropology’ – the philosophy of the human person.

So another three months lie ahead. To any regular readers: Now is the time for feedback. I’m not fishing for compliments, just genuinely wanting to know how you are finding the blog. What have you enjoyed most? What isn’t working? What would make it more interesting for you? Any concrete advice about the topics that could be considered, the frequency of posts, the length of posts, the use of images, etc. In a nutshell, what has your experience been?! (As they say…)

Do post any of your thoughts in the comments box below. And that is another matter itself – how do you encourage people to comment and interact more?

Does the internet help political freedom?

Does the internet expand the possibilities for political freedom? Or does it actually allow oppressive regimes to take more and more control of the flow of information in society?

I learnt a new verb yesterday: to astroturf. This means, apparently, to add comments onto blogs and social networking sites, in the hope of influencing the discussions and the whole cultural environment – all the time disguising your real identity and subversive intentions. I presume the reference is to the inherent fakery of getting rid of your real mulchy soil and grass and replacing it with plastic turf.

Bryan Appleyard writes about all this in the Sunday Times. Here are the key passages that recount the progressive ways in which the internet can become hijacked by those in power:

There have been three phases of state control of the internet. First came the “great firewall” of China. You simply block access to sites regarded as sensitive. But everybody knows you’re doing it.

So phase two involves selective blocking — known as “just in time attacks”. A site may go down as a protest is being organised. It’s a network problem, claim your goons. Also in phase two are vague regulations that allow your police to press charges no one quite understands. And there’s the blackmailing of internet companies — basically you push them out of business unless they block sites or hand over information. More crudely, as in Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan, there is the threat of prison.

Now, it’s phase three, which is much more sinister. In China this phase is represented by the so-called 50 cent army — people who, for a tiny sum of money, go out and “astroturf” blogs or Twitter.

Astroturfing means placing comments while concealing who is behind them. So pro-Chinese comments and posts are frequently placed by government proxies. The freedom of the internet is used against itself. Even in liberal democracies this means internet content may turn out to be pure propaganda. It cannot be a replacement for old-fashioned politics.

Honesty in sport and society

What’s the difference between an outright cheat and someone who tries to push the boundaries without being caught? This is the moral debate raging after Thierry Henry’s handball gave France their win against Ireland in the world cut playoff game on Wednesday. [The photo is Henry playing for Barcelona.] The story has moved from the back pages to the news and editorial sections, with politicians and pundits weighing in. Perhaps this moral questioning is heightened by the MPs’ expenses scandal and the collapse of trust in the financial sector.

Is Henry a cheat? He has confessed to handling the ball, but claims it was an instinctive reaction in the heat of the moment. So if cheating means consciously breaking the rules and trying to get away with it, then it’s grey. We are into a debate about whether we are responsible for our instinctive reactions, and whether it is the job of the footballer to referee himself.

In some areas of life the fact of not being caught is enough to make something acceptable. The classic example is the card game ‘cheat’, where you have to put down as many cards as possible, telling your competitors which cards are in this hidden pile, and hoping that they won’t call your bluff and catch you out. The very point of the game is to get away with as much as possible.

But say you are playing poker, and you hide an extra ace up your sleeve and use it to your advantange. If this comes to light after the game you’ll be disgraced, have your winnings taken back, and be branded a cheat and a liar. No-one will think you clever or audacious. Poker, despite the deceptions and subterfuge, is an honest game. The same is true in golf, if you ‘accidentally’ kick your ball into a better position without anyone seeing it; or in cricket, if you tamper with the ball illegally.

Football is grey. Diving in the penalty area and deliberately handling the ball are generally considered immoral – like cheating at poker. But trying to edge past the defender against the offside trap and getting away with it is considered legitimate – if it goes unseen. No-one really expects a striker to put his hands up after a goal and say ’sorry ref, I was six inches behind the last defender, but unfortunately the linesman didn’t spot it’.

The problem in politics and business and finance, and in much of contemporary social life, is that more and more people think they are playing ‘cheat’ instead of poker or golf. There is no ‘inner accounting’ – to the idea of sportsmanship, or to the voice of conscience, or simply to one’s own integrity. There is only the ‘outer’ accountability of whether we get caught or not. There has always been dishonesty, but the question now is whether this dishonesty becomes so built into the culture that we become unaware of what we have lost. [See Henry Winter's article in the Telegraph for an example of righteous indignation at Henry's behaviour; and see the comments below the article for the view that he was just playing a tough game and doing all he could to bring his team to victory.]

The spiritual geography of the city

Does it matter which way a church faces? The scripture readings this weekend were about the end of the world, and the second coming of the Son of Man. I chose to speak about the physical orientation of Christian churches: how it is an ancient tradition to build them on an east-west axis, so that you enter through the west door and face the sanctuary/altar at the east end. In this way you have a double symbolism: of Christ coming to meet you, like the rising sun, in the liturgy that you are celebrating; and Christ coming to meet you (soon, but not quite yet), at the end of time. So the sanctuary is a threshold that allows us to meet the divine now and to await the divine in the future.

This is all well-known, and doesn’t need blogging about. (See, for example, Part II, Chapter 3, of Joseph Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy.) What was interesting though was preaching about this in a church in Clerkenwell in the centre of London, with two medieval examples just a stone’s throw away. Today’s St Paul’s Cathedral is of course not medieval, but I assume (please correct me) that it roughly follows the floor plan of the previous cathedral. It’s like an arrow on a huge compass at the centre of London, running perfectly east-west. Yes, it happens to sit tidily on the line of the river Thames at that point too; but it illustrates the way the geography of a Christian city can reflect the spiritual longings of the human soul – for a saviour, for God’s final Word to greet us at the end of our lives, and at the end of time.

The second example, just down the road from Clerkenwell, is St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place, in Holburn. This church does not sit at all tidily into its present environment. The east end faces the street, so there is no easy access, and you have to enter the church through a warren of corridors and steps. But once you are there, the same spiritual/geographical truth is apparent, that you enter from the west, from the darkness, and look towards the east, towards the hope of Christ’s coming - in this case represented by a glorious wall of stained-glass above the altar.

There will be hundreds of other examples. It was good to have these at hand on Sunday.

Immortality and the ‘lifelog’

The quest for immortality can now take a digital form, with a gadget that takes a photo of the world as you see it every thirty seconds, and so has the ability to create an unbroken log of your life from start to finish. Kurt Kleiner reports for the New Scientist:

A camera you can wear as a pendant to record every moment of your life will soon be launched by a UK-based firm.

Originally invented to help jog the memories of people with Alzheimer’s disease, it might one day be used by consumers to create “lifelogs” that archive their entire lives.

Worn on a cord around the neck, the camera takes pictures automatically as often as once every 30 seconds. It also uses an accelerometer and light sensors to snap an image when a person enters a new environment, and an infrared sensor to take one when it detects the body heat of a person in front of the wearer. It can fit 30,000 images onto its 1-gigabyte memory.

The ViconRevue was originally developed as the SenseCam by Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK, for researchers studying Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Studies showed that reviewing the events of the day using SenseCam photos could help some people improve long-term recall.

It’s just about memory. But the beauty and genius of the human memory is in fact the way it allows us to forget – selectively. We all dream of having a photographic memory, but this would only create information overload. And we’d have to sift through the same stuff all over again in order to see what was significant, what was actually worth remembering in the first place – and worth forgetting. We create the person we are in the present by what we choose (consciously and subconsciously) to remember and what to forget.

This gadget reminds me of the lovely central idea from the 1995 film Smoke. Harvey Keitel plays a tobacconist around whose shop the main characters revolve.

He has an unusual habit: every morning, at the same time of the day, he photographs the same street corner, and puts the pictures together in a series of albums. It’s time-lapse photography on an enormous scale. He can’t explain why he does it. He just needs to do it. And it’s a really marvelous device for delivering the movie’s main theme: everything that matters, all the meaning in the world that can be condensed from holy books and vows and catechisms and poems, is right there before us. We just need to have the eyes to see it. [Imbd]

Yes, there is a longing in the human heart to hold onto the past. But the real question is how we take it into the future. And no amount of digital technology is going to help us answer that.

Politics and power

I’m a great fan of the novelist Robert Harris. I got hooked when I read the first three pages of Archangel, and then devoured Fatherland and Pompeii. I’ve only just got round to reading his magnificent Imperium. It’s the story of Marcus Cicero, set in the last years of the Roman Republic, told by his secretary Tiro. And – for the most part – it is true.

Even though I lived in the city for five years, when I was training for the priesthood, I can honestly say that this is the first time ancient Rome has ever come alive for me. Cicero leaps out of the page – a brilliant, ambitious lawyer, full of insecurities and foibles, who longs to climb to the top of Roman politics. There are sublime moments when he comes to the defence of the weaker man against some monstrous injustice. And there are other times when it is clear he will sell almost his soul in order to gain his heart’s desire.

The political campaigns feel as contemporary as the debates in an episode of The West Wing. And all the while – this is a thriller, remember – you are desperate to know what happens next. I had coffee with a friend just after I had finished the book, and he started to tell me what happens in Part II (in the recently published Lustrum), casually recounting a bit of supposedly well-known history. I cut him off quickly, grateful for my ignorance, in case he spoiled the pleasure of reading the next installment.

It’s about power, as it’s title proclaims. And how political power – even with all the idealism and public-spiritedness - will always be inseparable from ambition, money, friendship, vanity, jealousy, favours given, favours expected. This is not cynical – just realistic. The question is how to make this messy and ambiguous reality work – as far as possible – for the common good, and not against it; how to make it serve the cause of justice even as it serves the inevitable ambitions of those involved. There are so many contemporary parallels.

It’s also about writing and making speeches and the agony of facing a deadline with a blank sheet of paper before you. Here is one lovely quotation to end with:

No-one can really claim to know politics properly until he has stayed up all night, writing a speech for delivery the following day. While the world sleeps, the orator paces around by lamplight, wondering what madness ever brought him to this occupation in the first place. Arguments are prepared and discarded. Versions of openings and middle sections and perorations lie in drifts across the floor. The exhausted mind ceases to have any coherent grip upon the purpose of the enterprise, so that often – usually an hour or two after midnight – there comes a point where failing to turn up, feigning illness and hiding at home seem the only realistic options. And then, somehow, under pressure of panic, just as humiliation beckons, the parts cohere, and there it is: a speech. A second-rate orator now retires gratefully to bed. A Cicero stays up and commits it to memory. [Arrow Books, 2007, p. 132]

Is the world becoming less religious and more secular?

John Allen – always worth listening to – thinks that Christians in Europe overemphasize the global significance of secularization [Go to the final section of the article - 'I was in Spain this week...'].

He agrees that Europe is becoming increasingly secular, but argues that this can hide a more important truth: that the primary challenge facing the Catholic Church outside the West is the diversity and vibrancy of the religious alternatives. It’s worth a long quotation:

Seen exclusively through a European prism, it could perhaps seem as if secularism is the chief, if not the only, pastoral and cultural challenge facing the faith. The truth, however, is that Europe is really the only zone of the world where secularism has an especially large sociological footprint. In the United States, there are influential pockets of secularism among our cultural elites — in the faculty lounges of our universities, for example, and on our newspaper editorial boards — but at the grassroots we remain an intensely religious society. Outside the West, one has to look long and hard to find real secularists.

In most of the rest of the world, the primary pastoral challenge facing Catholicism isn’t secularism but the competitive dynamics of a bustling religious marketplace. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, the main competitors to Catholicism are Christian Pentecostalism, or Islam, or revived forms of indigenous religion. As a result, to craft future strategies for Catholicism based largely on defending ourselves against secularization risks misreading the social situation. Most people in the world, most of the time, aren’t seriously tempted by secular agnosticism, but rather by one or another option on the contemporary spiritual smorgasbord – and that smorgasbord is, therefore, where at least some share of your energy and imagination ought to be directed, not just pondering secularism.

Let me offer one practical implication. To the extent we define secularism as our main problem, Catholicism inevitably ends up looking defensive, forever building walls around a tradition we believe to be under assault. When the term of comparison is no longer secularism, however, but rather some forms of Pentecostalism or Islam, or quasi-magical currents in indigenous belief, that change of context positions Catholicism differently, as an alternative to religious movements that at times veer toward fundamentalism, extremism, or thaumaturgy. The capacity of Catholicism to integrate reason and faith, to uphold tradition while at the same time engaging modernity, emerges with greater clarity.

In other words, given what’s actually on offer in today’s religious marketplace, Catholicism often seems a balanced, moderate, and sophisticated option. For the record, this is how most people on the planet right now actually see the Catholic church, in light of what else they see around them.

That realization ought to have consequences not only for our missionary and pastoral strategies, but also for our own attitudes about the church.

I agree with most of this. But I’d add a few comments: (1) Yes, secularization might be a predominantly Western ‘problem’, but as the influence of Western culture increases (and it seems to be doing so), then so will the global challenge of secularization.

(2) Despite my appreciation of the deep faith of many Americans, I think that secularism has spread well beyond the cultural elites of university faculties and newspaper editorial boards and at least into the suburbs.

(3) Allen concludes that the ‘defensive’ form of Catholicism that emerges in opposition to secularism is not an appropriate response to the challenge of fundamentalist religious movements. So globally, as an alternative to these competing forms of religion, the Church needs to show an engagement with modernity and an ability to integrate faith and reason. But in my view, both secularism and religious fundamentalism require a similar response: the call to reason, the invitation to faith, the presentation of the transforming beauty of the tradition, and of the continuing newness of revelation. So I’m not sure if this is the wedge issue that Allen thinks it is.

The 100 best movies of the decade

I can’t resist linking to this provocative list of ’the best movies’ of the Noughties. There will be thousands of such lists over the next seven weeks as we see the decade out, but anyone who knows me just a little bit will know that I would rather argue about films than most other things.

It’s great to see first place taken by Austrian auteur Michael Haneke (for Hidden), and second place by Paul Greengrass (for his two populist Bourne thrillers) – as if to say that both Hollywood and the arthouse can achieve cinematic greatness.

But it’s hard to take the list seriously when one of the worst films of the decade – Bond’s relaunch in Casino Royale – comes in at number eight…

The inner conflicts of working mothers

Gaby Hinsliff writes about her decision to resign as political editor of the Observer in order to spend more time with her two-year-old son. It’s a long, soul searching article about the inner conflicts experienced by her and other mothers as they try to juggle full-time work with parenting and family life:

For two crazed but fantastic years, I did – in that loaded cliche – have it all: terrific job, plus small child. Thanks largely to a brilliant nanny and a hands-on partner, I don’t honestly believe either suffered from the other. But what got lost in the rush was a life, if a life means having time for the people you love, engaging with the world around you, making a home rather than just running a household.

What makes the article so poignant (and painful) is that she’s not a strident campaigner for stay-at-home motherhood. The realisation that something needed to change came very slowly:

Surrender steals up on the working mother like hypothermia takes a stranded climber: the chill deepens day by day, disorientation sets in, and before you know it you are gone. In the sleepless blur of the last three years, I can barely even remember now how it started.

But perhaps it was back this spring, when I took my son to be measured for new shoes: the woman asked what size he took, and to my embarrassment I couldn’t remember. I felt like an imposter. Or perhaps it was the summer morning when our nanny had to peel my howling son off me: he had a fever and wanted his mother, but I had a cabinet minister to interview. I shot out of the door, hot with shame.

What surprised her, and surprises me, was the evidence (both anecdotal and statistical) of how many working mothers feel the same:

But I never expected the emotional outpouring that followed. “Wish I had the guts to do the same,” texted a junior minister, when I announced my resignation. A seemingly unflappable PR confessed secretly agonising over “not being the kind of mother my son deserves”: a colleague whose slick work-life balance I had always envied admitted she was “at the end of my tether”, dying to quit.

Confessions tumbled compulsively from people I barely knew: tales of stricken marriages, miscarriages, only children who were meant to have siblings but then a career got in the way. “Too many of us once had relationships that we haven’t got now because of this job,” said a veteran male reporter, now divorced.

“I can’t afford regrets,” mused a cabinet minister, “because I’ve had this fantastic career, but…” Politics had, he said, dominated his children’s lives.

Not everyone sympathised. “Fine if your husband can afford to keep you,” sniffed a Tory frontbencher. But the shock was how widespread the fantasy of leaving work, even among parents in gripping careers, seemed to be.

Survey after survey suggests a deep-seated, buried misery over the eternal battle between work and family. Half of working mothers with children under 15 would stay at home full-time in an ideal world, according to a 2001 survey for the then Department for Education. Eight years on, this month’s She magazine reports nearly three-quarters of its readers want to cut their hours: the journalist Cristina Odone’s recent think-tank pamphlet, What Women Want, claimed if money were no object only 12% of mothers would work full-time.

I don’t know what conclusions to draw. Perhaps, simply, that as a society we should do all we can to help those mothers who do hope to spend more time with their children to fulfil that hope. This would not, then, be a reactionary campaign to force mothers back into the kitchen; it would be a libertarian call to help individuals achieve their goals in whatever way seemed best to them – including, if this were the case, to have more time for their children.

The power of print and the mainstream media

As you know by now, I try to avoid reading the plot summaries in film reviews. So it was a delight, as a novice blogger, to discover that Julie & Julia is about someone who starts a blog.

We jump back and forward between two lives. We see Julia Child discovering the wonders of French cooking in 1950s Paris, longing to publish her own account of these recipes in English for the American market – an account that was eventually published as the hugely influential Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And two generations later we see Julie Powell, who vows in August 2002 to create all 524 of Child’s recipes in one year, and blogs about her efforts. The blog is still online, and here is her first post.

In the dramatic structure of the film – two parallel lives, mirroring each other, full of connections and echoes – we are meant to see Julie’s blogging as the contemporary equivalent of Julia’s writing. Communication and self-expression have now taken a digital form. But what’s so interesting is that the ‘contemporary’ blog is really a means to a much more traditional goal: a book deal. Julie’s dream (in the framework of a romantic comedy), is not to get her man – she is already married; it’s not even to be a successful blogger – the hits start coming in pretty quickly. It’s simply to be recognised by the journals and published as an author.

So the film, based on a true story, has its own take on that continuing discussion of whether the internet and the blogosphere have more significance in contemporary culture than the traditional mainstream media. It shows that however successful someone is in the virtual world, there is a continuing allure in the printed word – newspapers, magazines, books. You could even call it a romance – at least for those old enough to have grown up enchanted by books, like Julie. But this was five or six years ago already; and I wonder how differently the story would play out today.

[As a film, it was patchy. Funny and moving in parts, but much of it feeling like a well produced sit-com. If you want someone to persuade you to see it, there is a glowing review of the film here.]

Learning to depend on others

Sunday was the feast of All Saints. I gave a talk about the meaning of devotion to the saints at Farm Street, the Jesuit church in central London. You can listen to it [click OPEN] or download it [click SAVE] from here; and read the handout here.

I spoke about the obvious things: how we learn from their example; how we enjoy their friendship; how we are helped by their prayers. But I added another point: that our dependence on the prayers of the saints teaches us a deeper truth about our identity as human beings [Go to 45:23 in the download].

In the story of the Garden of Eden, there are two tragedies that unfold. One is the Fall, the Original Sin when Eve and then Adam took the forbidden fruit and ate from it. But this depends on the tragedy that comes before: that when Eve is tempted, when she is faced with this moment of monumental crisis, she faces it alone, she doesn’t ask for help or advice or support from God or from her husband. And I don’t mean this in a sexist way as if to say that the woman should have sought help from the man; I mean it in a way that would apply to Adam as much as to Eve. Neither of them was meant to face the serpent alone; and how different it could have been if they had turned to each other and to God. When she looked at the fruit, with the serpent whispering in her ear, and took that decision on her own, it was – perhaps – already too late.

The same is true with Cain and Abel. It’s a difficult passage to interpret, but it reflects the scene between Adam and Eve. Cain is tempted, and struggles with the Lord. But instead of seeking God’s help, or seeking the help of his brother Abel – he kills him. When the Lord asks him “Where is your brother Abel?” and Cain replies “Am I my brother’s keeper?!” – the answer is, “Yes, you should have been”. But even more importantly, he should have allowed Abel to be his keeper when he was facing his own demons; Cain should have turned to his brother, leant on him, and shared his concerns with him.

So part of our salvation, part of our healing, is the restoration of human relationships. The Fall involved a pride, a false notion of independence, a distorted idea of autonomy, of self-reliance. And in the healing process that Christ brings we learn – in certain respects – to become more dependent on others; we learn that we are not alone; we learn that we are not meant to cope on our own. It’s OK to need others, it’s OK to ask for their help.

This is one reason why devotion to the saints is so important. In praying for others, and in asking others to pray for us, we learn to depend on their help – and our proper identity as children of God and as brothers and sisters is restored.

Religious fundamentalism or the fundamentals of religion

A series of lectures starts in central London this week called “Faith Matters: The Fundamentals of Faith”. It tackles some of the big questions that come up for Christians, and for many others: How do conscience and authority relate? What is the meaning of prayer? Is the Bible inspired? How can we find true happiness? How do we understand the created world? What relevance does the Church’s social teaching have for contemporary society?

The first lecture is this Wednesday, 4^th November, at 7pm, taking place at Vaughan House, 46 Francis St, London SW1P 1QN. See the poster here; and further information about the speakers and topics here. The overarching question, I think, is about whether Christ has any relevance for the contemporary world.

The title of the series is quite provocative: ‘Fundamentals of Faith’. At first glance, it makes me think of the word ‘fundamentalism’, with all its negative associations – a belief system that is unthinking, unreflective, arrogant, closed to the truths of history and science, of philosophy and psychology. But perhaps that is intentional. The purpose of each lecture is to show that Christians can explore the fundamentals of their faith without being fundamentalist. The root meaning of the word ‘fundamental’, of course, is something that acts as a foundation. Thinking deeply about the fundamentals of faith should actually make you less ‘fundamentalist’ and more reflective, more open, and yes – more faithful.

I’m giving the fourth talk on 25^th November: ‘The Catholic moral vision: a guide to finding true happiness’. Do come along – and if you follow this blog, then come and say hello and introduce yourself.

Our words betray our thoughts

You have probably seen plenty of ‘word-clouds’ before. But just in case you haven’t yet discovered the addictive Wordle website, here it is: http://www.wordle.net/  You go to the ‘create’ page, paste some text into the box, and out comes your own cloud. The programme analyses your text, counts the number of times you use any word, takes out the ordinary words that everyone uses (‘the’, ‘and’, ‘but’, etc.), and then makes the size of the word in the cloud dependent on the number of times you have used it relative to the other words. So you can see in a flash what thoughts are coming up again and again, what ideas obsess you, and what verbal ticks you have picked up.

I’ve been blogging for just over two months now, so I copied the text from all my posts into Wordle (15,881 words so far!), and this is what came out. I’m not sure what to make of my own thoughts:

It’s a poor person’s form of psychoanalysis: You just speak, or write, and the computer tells you what is really in your heart – or at least what buzzes around in your head. Or you could just be lying…

You can then spend hours pressing the ‘randomize’ button, which gives you a new cloud with the same words:

Or you can manually adjust the settings and choose your own font, colours, alignment, etc.:

Try it yourself – with those poems you wrote as a teenager, with that half-finished novel under your bed, or simply with the last few emails you have sent. You can also paste in a web address and have it analyse the text on that webpage.

Hours of fun, and wasted time, together with a tiny gain in self-knowledge.

Is TV bad for children?

The debate continues about whether allowing young children to watch TV harms their cognitive development or not. It flared up a couple of weeks ago when a report commissioned by the Australian government recommended that children under 2 should be banned from watching TV and electronic media such as computer games. So this is about freedom, censorship, the relationship between the personal and the political, the nanny state, etc., as much as it is about child development.

An article by Patrick Barkham looks at some of the scientific and political issues involved. At the centre of everything is the extraordinary way in which the human brain develops. (I prefer the word ‘mind’ to ‘brain’, because ‘mind’ allows us to appreciate that our cognitive relationship with the world is dependent on much more than the neurological condition of the brain. But the brain certainly plays its part.) Barkham reports the findings of Dr Michael Rich, director of the influential Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children’s Hospital:

Humans have the most sophisticated brain on the planet because it is relatively unformed when we are born. Our brains triple in volume in the first 24 months. We build our brains ourselves, by responding to the environment around us. The biggest part of this is a process called pruning, says Rich, whereby we learn what is significant – our mother’s voice, for instance – and what is not. “TV killing off neurons and the synaptic connections that are made in order to discriminate signals from ‘noise’,” he says.

Experts in child development have found that three things optimise brain development: face-to-face interaction with parents or carers; learning to interact with or manipulate the physical world; and creative problem-solving play. Electronic screens do not provide any of this. At the most basic level, then, time spent watching TV has a displacement effect and stops children spending time on other, more valuable brain-building activities.

Scientists concede that they do not yet know precisely how TV affects the cognitive development, not just in terms of understanding the inner workings of the brain but because the way we use television and other electronic screens is changing so rapidly that we do not know how it will affect people by the time their brains stop developing in their mid-20s. But the weight of evidence about the deleterious impact of TV on child’s ability to learn is alarming…

A more recent article by Helen Rumbelow steps back and looks at the way theories of child development have changed over the last couple of generations. The 1990s was the decade in which we discovered the importance of the first 24 months, and the idea that the right stimulation could boost your child’s chances. This led to playing Mozart to the child in the womb, flashcards as soon as they popped out, and Baby Einstein videos when they could sit up. Now the tide has turned.

I’m not taking sides here – I don’t know enough, and I don’t have children, and I’ve seen plenty of happy and healthy children grow up with a bit of TV. But for all those anxious parents tortured with guilt and uncertainty, Rumbelow provides some consolation with a quote from Dr Martin Ward-Platt. The evidence, he says, is still too equivocal:

 The farther you get away from deprived populations, the less TV gets watched, and the more parental controls there are, so it is hard to disentangle this stuff.

Of course, the thing that really makes the difference for a baby is interaction with a caregiver and there is nothing we can invent as a people substitute. But if a child watches some TV and is exposed to people for the rest of the time, they will do fine. What we don’t know is where the limit is, where you start to hold children back.

If there is no strong evidence either way, we think it’s much better to say we don’t know, and what’s right for you is probably the best thing for your family.

The art of good writing

Writing is hard – for most of us. I remember reading a biography of the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. Whenever he went on holiday he would take a huge pile of books with him to review. Most days he would get through one of these substantial works and dash off an article of two or three thousand words without notes or pause for thought.

At the other end of the scale is Don DeLillo, one of my favourite novelists. He is so meticulous in the process of writing that he gives every paragraph its own sheet of paper, as if to say: You are important; I’m going to take you seriously; I’m going to give you space to breathe. I’ve always wanted to try it…

I mention all this because I’ve just come across Hugh Trevor-Roper’s ‘Ten Commandments of Good Writing’, a summary of some of the advice the renowned historian would give to his young students to foster their clarity of expression. I’m not sure if it is in copyright or not – the printed copy I have says that it had formerly been circulated only in samizdat. You can see the whole version online here. Here are the first four commandments – and the ones I need to remember most often:

(1) Thou shalt know thine own argument and cleave fast to it, and shalt not digress nor deviate from it without the knowledge and consent of the reader, whom at all times thou shalt lead at a pace which he can follow and by a route which is made clear to him as he goeth.

(2) Thou shalt respect the autonomy of the paragraph, as commanded by the authority and example of the prophet Edward Gibbon, for it is the essential unit in the chain of argument. Therefore thou shalt keep it pure and self-contained, each paragraph having within it a single central point to which all other observations in it shall be exactly subordinated by the proper use of the particles and inflections given to us for this purpose.

(3) Thou shalt aim always at clarity of exposition, to which all other literary aims shall be subordinated, remembering the words of the prophet commandant Black, “clarté prime, longueur secondaire.” To this end thou shalt strive that no sentence be syntactically capable of any unintended meaning, and that no reader be obliged to read any sentence twice to be sure of its true meaning. To this end also thou shalt not fear to repeat thyself, if clarity require it, nor to state facts which thou thinkest as well known to others as to thyself, for it is better to remind the learned than to leave the unlearned in perplexity.

(4) Thou shalt keep the structure of thy sentences clear, preferring short sentences to long and simple structures to complex, lest the reader lose his way in a labyrinth of subordinate clauses; and, in particular, thou shalt not enclose one relative clause in another, for this both betrays crudity of expression and is a fertile source of ambiguity.

And the last one can’t be left out:

(10) Thou shalt carefully expunge from thy writing all consciously written purple passages, lest they rise up to shame thee in thine old age.

The internet turns 40

This coming week, the internet turns 40. On 29th October 1969 Leonard Kleinrock and some colleagues crowded round a computer terminal somewhere in California and logged into another one several hundred miles away. It was the particular type of remote connection that proved significant. It was only partially successful. The system crashed two letters into the first word – which was meant to be ‘LOGIN’; and so the first utterance sent across the net was the biblical ‘Lo…’

To choose a moment like this is somewhat arbitrary. There are many other technological shifts of huge significance that could be noted. But this is the one Oliver Burkeman opts for in his fascinating article about the history and implications of the internet. Arpanet, as this first system was called, was funded by US government money that had been released by Eisenhower in the panic after Sputnik. So it was, indirectly, a result of the space race.

Burkeman takes us through the first academic net, early email, the world wide web, search, the generativity of Web 2.0, and then speculates about where it will be in 4 years. He doesn’t dare to go further than that time frame, because change (not just growth) has been exponential, and you would be a fool to imagine you could see much further. It’s fun to reminisce, but it provokes deeper thoughts about how radically the world has changed, together with our ideas about knowledge, community, the self etc…

One nice quotation is from a science fiction story by Murray Leinster, written in 1946. Everyone has a tabletop box called a ‘logic’  that links them to the rest of the world. Look at how prescient it is:

You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it’s got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get . . . you punch ‘Sally Hancock’s Phone’ an’ the screen blinks an’ sputters an’ you’re hooked up with the logic in her house an’ if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast [or] who was mistress of the White House durin’ Garfield’s administration . . . that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin’ full of all the facts in creation . . . hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country . . . The only thing it won’t do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, ‘Oh, you think so, do you?’ in that peculiar kinda voice.

Another article by Tom Meltzer and Sarah Phillips gives a nostalgia trip through various internet firsts: first browser, smiley, search engine, item sold on eBay, youtube video etc. My favourite entry is the well-known first webcam, which was primed on a coffee machine in Cambridge University’s computer lab so that people at the end of the corridor could get live updates on whether it was worth making the journey away from the desk or not.

Conservatism and tradition

I didn’t know much about Michael Oakeshott before reading this short piece by Timothy Fuller. The subject is conservatism with a small ‘c’, and its influence on politics, lawmaking, social theory, etc. 

He thought that to be of a conservative disposition was to enjoy the possibilities of the present moment without excessive anxiety for what we had been or what we imagined we were going to be. He thought that maturity meant to live in the present, neither in a state of guilt nor of heroic aspiration. Heroic aspiration he thought was proper to the individual striking out on his own to seek his fortune, but was not an attitude for governments to impose on the polity as a whole. 

We should, he said, “attend to” the arrangements that had brought us together by chance or choice. Living in the present did not mean to him living self-indulgently, but rather living to the highest possible degree without the distraction of an endlessly regretted past or a wished-for but illusory future liberation from all our problems. He understood that many of our “problems” were recurrent predicaments that we had to manage but from which there would be no permanent liberation.

It can sound complacent. But in this way of thinking, the conservative disposition is to affirm the values and traditions that have guided a concrete society, instead of trying to re-build a society on the foundation of abstract ideals. It doesn’t mean that everything from the past is necessarily good and beyond questioning. Nor does it mean that new ideals are incapable of provoking radical transformations. It just means that the instinct, the default position, is to trust first in that framework of habits and institutions and values that have made a particular way of life possible – however imperfect. And then to wonder how these could be built upon. This might sound dull; it’s certainly pragmatic. But it’s not without ideals - it just requires that these ideals are rooted in contemporary realities. You could say that they have to grow ‘organically’ out of the present.

Oakeshott’s conservatism is a fear that revolution, or even an apparently purifying return to the sources, might do more harm than good. It’s a suspicion of ideology, encapsulated in the adage ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’. This connects with contemporary discussions in theology about the importance of preserving a ‘hermeneutic of continuity’ whenever you are assessing a doctrinal or liturgical development.

I’ve no idea whether I agree with Oakeshott’s philosophy – I need to read some of his own writings! But I do believe, to put it in a slightly different way, that any worthwhile reform needs to be accompanied by some sense of gratitude for who you are and what you have received from the tradition to which you belong.

Solitude and silence

Do the ideas of ’solitude’ and ’silence’ have any meaning for those of us who live in the madness of the city, who are haunted by the endless demands of modern life? 

I’m just back from a talk about Catherine de Hueck Doherty, the foundress of Madonna House, and the woman who introduced the concept of ‘poustinia’ to the West. Here is just one paragraph from a wonderful website about her life and works:

In response to the deepening dilemmas of the Western world, Catherine offered the spirituality of her Russian past. She introduced the concept of poustinia, which was totally unknown in the West in the 1960’s, but has since become recognized in much of the world. Poustinia is the Russian word for “desert,” which in its spiritual context is a place where a person meets God through solitude, prayer and fasting. Catherine’s vision and practical way of living the Gospel in ordinary life became recognized as a remedy to the depersonalizing effects of modern technology. In response to the rampant individualism of our century, she called Madonna House to sobornost, a Russian word meaning deep unity of heart and mind in the Holy Trinity—a unity beyond purely human capacity.

And here are her own words from the seminal book Poustinia, Chapter XV: “The Poustinia of the Heart”:

Well, we have arrived at the end of this book on the poustinia. I myself have always been attracted to the silence and solitude of God. When it became obvious that my vocation was not to be physical silence and solitude, when I was thrown into the noisiest marketplaces in the world, God showed me how to live out the poustinia ideal. The heart of it is that the poustinia is not a place at all—and yet it is. It is a state, a vocation, belonging to all Christians by baptism. It is the vocation to be a contemplative.

The essence of the poustinia is that it is a place within oneself, a result of baptism, where each of us contemplates the Trinity. Within my heart, within me, I am constantly in the presence of God. The poustinia is this inner solitude, this inner immersion in the silence of God.

“This is the poustinia I have been trying to talk about. This is the poustinia I so passionately want to give to everyone. I know that in the poustinia lies the answer that the world is seeking today. If we lived in the poustinia of our hearts then love would enter the world through us. We could speak God’s word to the world. It is the poustinia of the heart that I believe is the answer for the modern world.

And finally, the distillation of the Gospel that Catherine put together in her ‘Little Mandate’, which forms the heart of the spirituality of Madonna House today:

Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.

Little — be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

Preach the Gospel with your life — without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

Love… love… love, never counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.

Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.

Pray always. I will be your rest.

The madness, magic and mysticism of Anish Kapoor

I don’t like the concrete worms and the piles of pigment, but it’s worth paying the entrance fee at the Royal Academy just to see four of the installations at the Anish Kapoor exhibition.

Madness: A huge, fetishistic cannon, like something out of a Terry Gilliam film, fires twenty pound shells of red wax across an exhibition space into the next room. The wax gloops down the wall and creates its own work of art below. The crowd waits in anticipation for the next explosion – the hiss of compressed air reminds us of roadworks and operating theatres. Then the bang; the brief moment of after-silence; and the gasps and giggles and conversations. It is just great, mad fun. It feels slightly anarchic, teenage. Then you realise that the antique-looking door-frame through which the pellets fly is a false one put in to protect the real one behind; they couldn’t take the risk of blowing up the real Royal Academy. The disappointment and the simultaneous delight in discovering that it is all a sham. The same as realising that Doris Salcedo’s crack in Tate Modern’s concrete floor was really a construction in an artificial platform.

Magic: A mirror – nothing more. 20 feet long, 8 feet high, slightly curved. But curved so cleverly, and polished so lovingly. If you stand 12 feet away, you are upside down; but you can see all those at 8 feet, who are the right way up. Walk closer, and you invert. If you stand 20 feet away, and look at someone just 3 feet from the surface, their face is so large and clear you feel you could reach out and touch it. Every shift in posture or position brings a new image, a new perspective. Everyone is looking at everyone else, without self-consciousness. Smiling. Frowning. Shuffling along to get the effect, even dancing. Where else do you dance with strangers in the clear light of day?

Mysticism: A wall, hollowed out and painted yellow – nothing more. But the precise curves and pigments, and the lack of definition, make it impossible to focus on anything properly. It’s not just the uncertainty of whether it is concave or convex. It’s the fact that you seem to be looking, at one and the same time, into a place of infinite distance, and into a presence that is just before your eyes, even a part of you. It suggests the mystery of knowledge, of what it is to know anything - which brings into your own experience what is really apart from you. It hints at a deeper mystery, a mysticism, of how something or someone Absolutely Other can remain other and still approach us in our physicality, our humanity.

Something of all three: And the showpiece and central folly manages to combine some madness, some magic, and also something of the mystical. A vast block of red wax, thirty tonnes, the size of a railway carriage, moves almost imperceptibly along a track laid across five rooms; gets to the end; and then turns around. Of course it’s mad. There is a lot of magic too. Not just in the questions raised (how does it move? is anyone controlling it? will it collapse?), but also in the visual experience of trying to track the movement of an object that seems not to be moving – like the Millennium Wheel. The mysticism took me by surprise – and it was in the attitude of others rather than my own personal response. As the wax got near the final room, scores of people were there waiting. The innocent excitement of the hall of mirrors had disappeared, and there was a solemnity in the air. It was like waiting for a God to arrive. A sense of religious awe – even homage. As if we were investing an event with meaning even though we had no understanding of what it meant. Fascinating and disconcerting.

Yes, you should go and see the exhibition. And if you don’t want to pay just go for the reflective spheres in the courtyard.

The edge of religion

When I was thinking about starting this blog, I wanted to call it Borderlands and Bridges. I’d just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s Borderlands trilogy – which had blown me away. I liked the image of the threshold – a place between other places. Not just somewhere you pass through, or pass over, but a place where unexpected things happen; where you get lost or even trapped; where worlds collide; where your identity is in question. In the end, the blog title was simply too long for a manageable web-address, so I went off at a tangent instead…

There was an experience of the ‘borderland’ this week in central London. The relics of St Thérèse were in Westminster Cathedral for four days. It was an extraordinary experience for all those who came – many with a deep faith hoping that it would be renewed, some hardly knowing why they were there. But what made it so interesting was the threshold between the religious space of the Cathedral and the secular space of the city.

The queuing took place in the piazza in front of the Cathedral. Thousands of people winding their way patiently through the labyrinth of metal barriers. A huge screen broadcasting the services from inside. A fish and chips kiosk set up on the street by the Cathedral authorities. McDonalds on one corner. Clarke’s shoe shop on the other. And many more thousands of people passing along Victoria Street – shopping, working, drifting – wondering what it was all about.

It wasn’t just the carnival atmosphere (which is felt at any street party or sporting event). It was the fact that this witness of faith flowed out from the confines of the religious building into the streets, and this allowed people to wonder, to show a natural human interest, and even to ask deeper questions about life that might not come to the surface otherwise. The public expression of faith in the piazza gave people permission to reflect on the place of faith in their lives – not just the committed and the devout, but those who were full of doubts or simply passing by.

Not everyone wants to visit relics or stand around in Victoria Street for two hours. But there is a public aspect to Christian faith that was expressed here in a particularly powerful way. Catholics were happy to show that they were Catholics, to talk about what was important to them. Not in a showy or arrogant way, but in a way that was simple, natural, honest, uninhibited.

It doesn’t mean that Christianity wants to impose itself on a pluralistic culture. But it hopes to have a place in that culture. Why? Above all, so that the culture is set free to discover human and spiritual depths that might otherwise be forgotten.

[To get a glimpse of what has been happening with the tour of the relics over the last five weeks see the excellent official blog of the visit.]

Perfect parenting

Marianne Kavanagh writes about the perils of modern parenting, and the particular pressure there is on parents today to obsess about whether they are making the correct choices as they bring their children up. The art of muddling through has been replaced by the science of seeking perfection.

Should you let your eight year-old out to play, risking abduction and getting run over, or should you keep him safely at home and worry instead about square eyes and obesity? Should you rush your daughter from violin to ballet, exposing her to a wealth of opportunity, or should you stop being so pushy and let her daydream?

Breastfeeding versus bottle-feeding, staying at home versus going out to work – there’s argument and counter-argument and a feeling that you’re going around in circles. “The only thing you know for certain,” says one mother gloomily, “is that whatever you’re doing is wrong.”

There is a wonderful photo with the original article [not the photo now on the Telegraph web article] of an innocent toddler crouching beside a huge pile of parenting books. She is reaching for a book entitled What every parent needs to know, with the suggestion that she wants to invert the roles and educate her parents in the knowledge they need to bring her up well. But the real message is that she is about to be crushed under the weight of books when the tottering pile falls over. 

Where has all this anxiety come from? “I always clean the lavatory before the health visitor comes,” says my friend Jane, “in case she thinks we’re slovenly.” We compare ourselves to other parents and find ourselves wanting. We see pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and really, really hope that they too feed their children rubbish food. We panic in case our actions harm our children for life – “I hate football,” says the father of three small boys, “but I have to pretend I like it in case I’m being a pathetic role model” – and spend all our time worrying about additives, knife crime and omega 3. As Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the university of Kent, points out in his book Paranoid Parenting (Continuum, £10.99), we seem to have lost our nerve completely.

Maybe it is a big, bad world out there. But you have to wonder why our anxiety has reached such mammoth proportions. Perhaps it’s because we tend to have our children later in life these days – since 2004, women in Britain have been more likely to have babies in their thirties than their twenties – and so treat child-rearing like a job, with targets, multiskilling and 360-degree reviews. Or perhaps, with the pressure for both parents to work long hours, we’ve lost the art of muddling through. You could argue, after all, that routinely spending all your waking hours with a three year-old induces the kind of benign boredom that knocks anxiety on the head. Others believe that our growing insecurity comes from isolation. Few of us these days have aunts, cousins and grandmothers living nearby.

It doesn’t mean all the advice is unwelcome or unhelpful. I know parents who have found real wisdom in some of these books. But it makes you wish that all parents had the human support of friends and family to say to them: “You are doing OK! More than that – what you are doing is amazing!”

I remember a talk when I was studying at seminary about all the psychological problems that you can inherit from your parents. But at the end the speaker said: “But don’t worry. Most of our parents did good enough. And good enough is pretty good”.

Home

I’ve just finished the novel Home by Marilynne Robinson. It’s about the simplest of relationships – being a son, a daughter, a father – and all the heartbreaking complexities that arise within them. It’s about not understanding someone, and still loving them. It’s about not understanding oneself.

I nearly gave up halfway. The atmosphere of sadness almost overwhelmed me. And it’s so slow, clocking the hours as Jack Boughton tries to connect with his family after a twenty year absence. But this is the point. That in the monotony of domestic life, as people circle round each other – wary, uncertain – the small moments of tenderness and self-revelation are startling.

Grace is almost tangible. A natural grace that dignifies even those human hearts that seem most broken. And by the end, without any tidy resolutions, it makes you believe that hope is possible even when there is no sense of how that hope might be fulfilled.

I can’t recommend this novel, together with Robinson’s Gilead, highly enough.

Islam, Christianity: Global statistics

Two out of three Muslims are Asian, reports Peter Beaumont (witness the Chinese mosque above). A new survey – Mapping the Global Muslim Population - reminds us that Islam is not to be identified with the Arab world, and the Arab world is not to be identified with Islam. Fifty demographers and social scientists have analysed thousands of sources and given the most accurate picture to date of Islam’s global distribution.

The world’s Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly one in four people practise Islam, according to the US Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which published the survey. This compares to 2.25 billion Christians.

The top five Muslim countries in the world include only one in the Middle East ‑ Egypt ‑ behind Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, in that order. Russia, the survey shows, has more Muslims than the populations of Libya and Jordan combined. Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon. China has a bigger Muslim population than Syria…

Brian Grim, one of the researchers, said: “We started on this work because the estimates for the number of the world’s Muslims ranged so widely, from 1 billion to 1.8 billion. For people who do this kind of work, perhaps the figures are not surprising but there are a lot of highly educated people who do not know that one in four are Muslim.”

A similar survey is planned by the Pew Forum on the distribution of Christians.

Living a surrogate life

You wire yourself up. You switch the computer on. You lie back in your leather recliner. And then your ’surrogate’ steps out of the closet and steps into the world. This is a sophisticated robot that looks and sounds like you – without the wrinkles. Everything the surrogate experiences you also experience. Everything you choose to ‘do’ in your own mind is actually done through the surrogate in the real world. You have all of the experience without any of the risks: no disease, no knife crime, no car crashes; or rather, when the crashes happen you just get another surrogate.

This is the premise of the latest Bruce Willis film Surrogates, which is far more entertaining and intriguing than most reviews let on. The special effects are unimpressive; the production values are not very high; the acting is almost non-existent. But it’s a very tightly constructed plot that keeps you thinking through every scene; and the twist at the end brings a kind of epiphany about what it is to be human that moved me far more than I expected.

The idea of living through a surrogate is a clever one. We hear so much today about the attractions and dangers of living in a ‘virtual’ world – when we ‘leave’ our physical environment and get lost in a digital reality that seems quite divorced from the real world. But this film is about something more subtle: living ‘virtually’ in the real world.

Of course we do this all the time. We show a certain face, we project a certain image. We choose our clothes, our hairstyle, the frames for our glasses. We walk and talk in a certain way. I choose a title and a banner photo for my blog! These are all good things. And we would be naive to think that people become more truly themselves if they are simply stripped of the external expressions of their personality. The very word ‘person’ means ‘mask’ in Greek – as if our innermost being is inseparable from the outward expressions of who we are.

But there is always the question of how much this mask helps someone to know me, and how much it hides me; whether it allows authenticity or stifles it. Bruce Willis faces a crisis when he realises that he and his wife are only capable of communicating with each other through their surrogates (I won’t give any more plot away…). I don’t think we should just abandon all the social habits we have adopted over the years – it’s these concrete aspects of culture that make us human. But it would be good to ask more often what is really helping us to communicate with others, and what is getting in the way.

Gifts and responsibilities

Every week or two in London you come across a band of bright young things in matching T-shirts, usually clustered round a van or a portable kiosk, giving out freebies. I tend to arc around them full of suspicion, wondering what the catch is. Do I have to sign something? Or take part in a poll? It’s usually a health bar or an energy drink. My most recent catch (I think it was at Victoria Station) was a mini-deodorant. This was one of the few times I’ve hovered around innocently in order to get a second gift – I was so delighted to get my hands on a spray-can small enough to take through airport security in the hand-luggage.

Free gifts. With no strings attached.

I went to a talk about the sacraments yesterday by Dr Clare Watkins, and halfway through she spent five minutes going through a Latin dictionary. Pretty boring, you might think. The reason, however, was to show that in Latin there is a single word, munus, that can mean both “gift/present” and “responsibility/duty”. One word; both meanings. She went on to explain that every gift we receive brings with it a call to responsibility. She said we should reflect more on the gifts that God has given us, and the gifts that others share with us, and see whether we are aware of the huge responsibilities that go with them.

I don’t think this means, in a cynical way, that every gift is really a bribe in disguise. Not at all. And in fact the duty to respond in some way, to appreciate and honour the gift in some way, is not about paying something back to the one who gave it. When a gift is freely given, out of a pure love and an unfeigned generosity – it’s exactly then that we realise how unworthy we are to receive anything at all, and how privileged we are to be able to put that gift at the service of others.

This is even more true when the gift is the gift of oneself – when I give myself to another in friendship or love, in marriage or family life. Then, if the gift is freely given (“without reservation” as the marriage vows go), the sense of responsibility is of another order. It’s not about obligation or paying back a debt; it’s the sheer wonder of standing before another human being, unguarded, knowing that they have given their own heart, and the desire to care for them as much as one cares for oneself.

Lie detectors and the gift of friendship

A new generation of lie detectors is being developed (see Prospect, Oct 09, Lie Detection by Ian Leslie, p66). Remember the scene in Meet the Parents when Robert De Niro wires up his future son-in-law in the basement and interrogates him. This was the old-fashioned polygraph, which works by monitoring stress levels – blood pressure, heart-rate, etc.

The new models work by scanning the brain. When we tell a lie, even if we keep the stress levels down, an extra burst of mental energy is required. This energy is released in the areas of the brain responsible for reasoning and self-control. So if the scanner suddenly spots us thinking hard and carefully as we answer a progression of simple yes or no questions, then we are probably lying.

It could be bunkum. Many neuroscientists question its effectiveness. And a woman in India who was convicted of murder on the basis of evidence from such a lie detection test had her case overturned because there was no material evidence connecting her to the crime.

Why is the thought of an infallible lie detector so unsettling? It’s not because we are all inveterate liars terrified of being exposed. It’s because it makes us appreciate that the truth of another person is not just something that can be ripped out of them and put on display for all to see. Knowledge, when it has to do with another human being, can’t be separated from a relationship.

In ordinary friendships, it is the journey of coming to know someone that is more important than the actual knowledge we come to possess. As I heard in a recent film, the words ‘I’ve never told anyone that before’ are even more important than what was actually told. 

We let someone in gradually. We choose how much to share, and when to share it; and this depends on how much we trust someone, and how much they trust us, and how far along the road we have come together. It’s not that anyone has a right to lie. But we do all have a right to disclose ourselves gradually, on our own terms. Discretion and reticence are the background virtues that allow intimacy and friendship to have any meaning.

The decline of religion?

I had a bit of a media day yesterday, so to save me blogging, here are some links, just in case you are interested.

You are probably sick of discussions about the relics of St Thérèse by now. Simon Jenkins wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago that was very dismissive of the custom of venerating relics, and even more dismissive of the rationality of Christian belief. You can read my response here.

And at lunchtime I was involved in a debate on Radio 4 (You and Yours) about the apparent decline of religious practice in the UK, and particularly about the place of institutional religion in peoples lives. It was a live phone-in, with input from panelists representing various religions, and an atheist who edits a popular philosophy magazine. It’s long – an hour. If you have the time you can listen here. [But the link will die after a week - I presume on Tuesday 6th October.]

When it is well chaired and well sieved, I like the phone-in format for this kind of discussion. You get a real feel for the cross-section of opinions out there. It wasn’t just people giving out about their beliefs; they were talking about how their religious practice or non-practice had influenced their lives, what it meant to them, how they had come to faith, or why they had left it. And especially about this question of whether faith can just be a personal, private conviction, or whether it needs expression and support in a community, in an institution.

There wasn’t much conversation about the content of what people believe – more about the human satisfactions or not of belonging to a religious community. But it was worthwhile nevertheless. See what you think.

Buried treasure and the magic of discovery

The two longest queues in Britain last week were outside Liverpool Catholic Cathedral, and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Both sets of people were waiting to see relics: in one case, the bones of St Thérèse of Lisieux; in the other, the priceless collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and jewellery just found in a Staffordshire field. It shows that the urge to connect with the past in tangible ways is not just confined to religious devotees.

The breathtaking scale of the discovery has stunned archaeologists and historians – almost 1500 gold and silver items thought to date from the 7th or 8th century. We know so little about ‘the Dark Ages’, and this find promises to open up and transform the way we understand a civilisation that is still largely unknown. You can read more here and here.

The real story for me, however, is Terry Herbert.

Britain also has the world’s most fanatical treasure hunters, who, immune to the ill-concealed scoffing of professional archaeologists, now account for almost all the worthwhile artefacts found around the country. Last week’s disclosure that Terry Herbert, a 55-year-old, unemployed metal-detecting enthusiast from Staffordshire, had discovered a priceless trove of Anglo-Saxon gold and jewellery put the treasure hunters in the national spotlight. But most of them, frankly, would prefer to be quietly tramping the fields.

“Hardly any of these characters are in it for money or glory,” says Julian Evan-Hart, one of Britain’s foremost treasure hunters and author of The Beginner’s Guide to Metal Detecting. “There’s something in their psyches, a sort of acquisitive impulse that make them go out and look for things. When you talk to them you’ll find a lot of them collected eggs or stamps when they were kids. They’ve never quite lost the urge.”

In the hierarchy of despised pastimes, metal detecting must come just a couple of notches below train spotting and stamp collecting. Yet this window onto a vast unknown world was opened not by an expert, not by a team of trained archeologists, not by an American funded research institute, but by a man who wandered around fields on his own looking for buried treasure.

It is the attraction of the lottery – that you are an ordinary person, that you have no more right to win than anyone else, but there is the slim possibility that in your ordinariness you can achieve greatness. It’s the lure of all forms of gambling. It’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – with the famished little boy tearing open the chocolate bar in the sweet shop and discovering that it contains the Last Golden Ticket. It’s Lucy falling into the wardrobe and finding a passage to the magical world of Narnia.

It’s also, by a strange coincidence, the spirituality of St Thérèse: Ordinary people doing ordinary things with great love and great care, in the full knowledge that this kind of love is what transforms the world and makes a new one possible. Without a trace of sentimentality. The same ruggedness, resilience, and sense of purpose that sent Terry Herbert across the fields each morning.

On knowing and not knowing those we love

A simple story quoted in a book I’m reading: Fr Victor Galeone was working as a priest in Baltimore, and this is how he described one pastoral encounter in his journal:

Yesterday, after an emergency call at the nursing home, I was about to exit when I noticed a man in the hallway. He was sitting next to a woman in a wheelchair, tenderly holding her hands. Not a word was spoken. He just sat there, looking intently into her eyes. I walked over and engaged him in conversation:

“Your wife, I take it?”

“That’s right, of forty-seven years.”

“Do you visit her often?”

“Every single day. Haven’t missed a day in four years, except for that blizzard last year.”

“She’s not saying anything.”

“That’s right. Hasn’t been able to for the last eighteen months – ever since her stroke. She has Alzheimer’s too.”

“Alzheimer’s! Does she know who you are?”

“Not really. But that doesn’t matter. I now who she is.”

[From Stephen Rossetti's Born of the Eucharist: A Spirituality for Priests pp. 101-102]

It made me think about all the different relationships we have where the knowledge is not always equal – and how that doesn’t always matter. Sometimes we know someone better than they know us; sometimes someone knows us better than we know them; sometimes someone knows us better than we know ourselves.

Husbands and wives talk about how there are hidden depths (or shallows!) to their spouse that they realise will always remain a mystery. Parents know things about their children that the children won’t discover for years. A child, even a baby at the breast, knows something about his or her parents – as parents - that no-one else will ever know. In friendship, the relationship often shuffles along, a moment of discovery on one side, and then on the other, building into something that is definitely mutual, but not necessarily equal or stabilised.

And in this beautiful example of an elderly couple, one lost in dementia, the “being-known” becomes more than the knowing itself; the lost memory of once-having-loved is absorbed into an ever present reality of being-loved. This can be true of those at the end of life, of the unborn, of the estranged, and of all those who cannot or will not let the love they receive from others grow into a personal response.

Love – and indeed being human, being a person – is not just about your capacity to love or think or act, it is also about the fact that you are loved, by someone, somewhere. And even where that someone seems almost completely absent, it is the fact that you could be loved – that you are loveable. Our dignity is not conferred by others; but we need others to make explicit what is too often hidden and unacknowledged.

Fashion

London Fashion Week has just wrapped up. You get a taste of what it’s all about in this “behind the scenes” article. And if you are feeling a bit left-behind you can research the big “25 trends” here.

I’ve not idea whether it was a success or not. The only real piece of non-fashion news that leaked out into the mainstream press was the stir caused by Mark Fast’s decision to use size 14 models. These normal looking women are called ‘curvy’ in the fashion industry.

Fashion and architecture are probably the two art forms that impinge on our everyday lives more than any others – whether we notice it or not.  There was a lovely scene in the film Coco Before Chanel where the famous designer walks into a crowd of people wearing one of her revolutionary new outfits. She looks simple, elegant, alive; and everyone else around her is trapped in the musty formality of their grandparents. It’s uncritical and overstaged. But in that scene you have the sense that through the creative genius of one individual the world was pulled from one century into the next in just a few dazzling hours.

Some people try, but I doubt it’s possible to opt out completely and escape the influence of contemporary fashion. Our culture, our social imagination, is formed by fashion – it’s the air we breathe. For many, the overriding concern is not to be fashionable but to avoid being unfashionable. For some, the decision to be unfashionable, the commitment to uncommitment, is a way of avoiding the pressures.

I can’t help thinking of the Carmelite nuns that I visit every few weeks. They live in an enclosed monastery in West London, giving their lives to prayer, silence, and contemplation. Part of their commitment to poverty and to simplicity of life is wearing a religious habit. Now, it has its own style and elegance – and its interesting that in the film Chanel’s radical vision of simplicity is partly influenced by her observation of the dress of religious sisters. But the point is that the Carmelite sisters renounce their own stylistic preferences and commit to wearing whatever is given to them. This little act of detachment is not a form of repression, it doesn’t depersonalise them. Quite the opposite: It allows the heart to be free, and the person to shine forth.

This doesn’t mean that we would all be happier and more truly ourselves if we burnt our wardrobes and all adopted Maoist suits. Clothes can quite rightly be an expression of our deepest personality; they can bring flashes of beauty into the ordinary world. But it does point to an inner peace and intangible joy that can only be found with a certain detachment of heart. If we are free from the need to hold and possess, then we will be more free to give ourselves to what is truly important.