From sad to glad

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Coming to the South Hams last week, we passed Dartington Primary School again. This time it had some marquees up and I wondered what the event was; it turns out that owing to alleged design faults, the cutting-edge eco-architecture is leaking rainwater into the school buildings, so that they have had to be supplemented with temporary structures.

Rather than laugh at the Greens, let's just see this as merely a teething problem. I thought back in 2009 that the school was forward-looking and I could imagine the children enjoying the light-welcoming environment. The Mail article linked above says they're enjoying the enforced change in routine, too.

Natural light is not only helping the school run on a "carbon-neutral" basis, it's good for preventing seasonal depression (SAD), an issue raised in the Mail yesterday ("Workers who see no natural light all winter").

Energy is getting expensive already, and eventually fossil fuels will become scarce (will the next generation see the end of gas?). Other resources may last hundreds of years yet, but unless you're hoping the human race will die out soon, it makes sense to prepare for the long term.

And there are further reasons to consider localism and resilience: the world may not always be so interconnected and relatively peaceful and co-operative. Totnes ( only two miles away) bought into the "transition town" movement early.

There's been some attempt to do the same for Birmingham, but it seems largely to have fizzled out.

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Awakening

MotionElements Stock Footage

In a recent post, the billionaire Hugo Salinas Price considers how much time we spend in a world of illusions. What happens when the communal fictions break down?

When the money supply has broken free from limitation (such as precious metals - he advocates a return to silver-based currency), it will multiply until the dream breaks - and with it will go many of the other social constructs that keep us relatively safe and well-fed.

"... the National Debt of the US is entirely imaginary. It cannot and will not ever be repaid, and will grow numerically up to the point at which reality finally dissolves the bewitched imagination which holds the population in thrall...

"The storm will force the men and women of the world, who have lived so unquestioningly in their highly imaginary world, to wake up and find, to their astonishment dismay and anger, that they have lost their jobs, that they have no savings and that their pension funds are gone or have been confiscated. Their indignation will be forgotten as sheer terror sets in. The Department of Homeland Security has been given a supply of more than one billion hollow-point bullets for good reason."

We are connected to each other across the world and in abstract and technology-dependent ways that make the whole system increasingly liable to disruption. We have become detached from the resources and skills that would help us survive in our immediate environment.

This is why one of Charles Hugh Smith's major themes is the need to avoid debt and conventional forms of investment in the future (such as a college degree), and instead build up local connections and a wide stock of useful social and practical skills.

Sadly, I'm not sure how easily this (undoubtedly wise) scheme can be adopted by the urban masses, especially in overcrowded countries like the United Kingdom, whose ratio of arable land to population is one-fifth that of the USA's.

CHS is based in Hawaii, a fertile Pacific archipelago 2,500 miles west of mainland USA and almost 4,000 miles east of Japan. The majority of its food is imported, but official attention has now turned to the need for greater food security - see this 2012 Hawaii State planning document (pdf). Good luck, CHS - though you'll need it a bit less than we do.

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Know your place

For whatever a man imagines that he cannot do, he imagines it necessarily, and by that very imagination he is so disposed that in truth he cannot do what he imagines he cannot do.

For so long as he imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long is he determined not to do it: and consequently, so long it is impossible to him that he should do it.

However, if we pay attention to these things, which depend solely on opinion, we shall be able to conceive that a man should under-estimate himself.

Benedict Spinoza – Ethics

I’ve played around with this quote for years because it gets right to the heart of a key aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy.

By imagination, he means dubious notions and images we absorb from the outside world without having examined them effectively – or even without having examined them at all.

He wrote long before modern ideas of psychological conditioning, but here he is effectively saying that our abilities as well as our thinking can be conditioned by the outside world.

If we absorb the notion that we can’t do something without taking the trouble to analyse why not, then we simply can’t do it and that’s that. Not a particularly remarkable conclusion for our times, but remarkable enough for his I suspect.

Many of us do underestimate ourselves and I suspect we should always try to notice the fact and analyse why it may be so. Was the underestimate fed to us by external circumstances?

Do you know your place?

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Happy New Year!

We were in Army married quarters in a North German village, when this was first screened in June 1963. Since then, it's become a German New Year's Eve ritual. Drink, absent friends, defiant celebration.

Pic: Wikipedia

Although penned in the 1920s by a British author, Lauri Wylie, the skit is said to have been inspired by Prince Albert's step-grandmother, Duchess Sophie Caroline Amalie of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. From 1841 onward, the widowed Duchess celebrated her birthday in the Gotha Winter Palace, surrounded by her four long-dead friends – a publisher, an entrepreneur, a professor - and a colonel, whose part was played by her servant.

Because of post-WWI anti-German sentiment, the scene was transposed to an English country house, but in Wylie’s original script, the names of the protagonists and the food and drinks on the menu remained Germanic.

Thanks to Prince Albert, we now celebrate Christmas German-style, so why not New Year's as well? Prosit Neujahr!

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Internet links accessed 22 September 2013. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy.

Society is like the air

This is an interesting quote expressed with Santayana’s inimitable lucidity. He says there is more to social life than gregarious socialising which he sees as an essentially passive activity akin to breathing.

Gregarious sentiment is passive, watchful, expectant, at once powerful and indistinct, troubled and fascinated by things merely possible. It renders solitude terrible without making society particularly delightful.

A dull feeling of familiarity and comfort is all we can reasonably attribute to uninterrupted trooping together. Yet banishment from an accustomed society is often unbearable.

A creature separated from his group finds all his social instincts bereft of objects and of possible exercise; the sexual, if by chance the sexual be at the time active; the parental, with all its extensions; and the combative, with all its supports.

He is helpless and idle, deprived of all resource and employment. Yet when restored to his tribe, he merely resumes a normal existence. All particular feats and opportunities are still to seek.

Company is not occupation. Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

George Santayana - The Life of Reason

I’m sure we’ve all come across highly gregarious people who only appear to want superficial social contact. They may be good company in the right surroundings, but somehow don’t relish anything deeper than good humoured chit-chat.

Perhaps this is where the emptiness of modern politics comes from. The ghastly charade of social empathy which seems so shallow. If Santayana is right, the shallowness may result from a doomed attempt to substitute the forms of gregarious behaviour for the warmth of genuine engagement.

After all, striding to the political lectern in shirt sleeves doesn’t convince anyone. Simply telling it as it is would probably work better. Not only because the shirt sleeves are unconvincing, but as Santayana says - in itself gregarious behaviour is insufficient to live on.

A dull feeling of familiarity and comfort is all we can reasonably attribute to uninterrupted trooping together. Yet banishment from an accustomed society is often unbearable.

Sounds like a political party conference to me. It isn’t surprising that the vast majority of us seek more genuine social engagement while party membership inevitably declines to a squabbling, anti-social core.

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Oxford: the first coffee house

When you're in Oxford, walking down the High towards Magdalen Bridge, you'll pass Queen's College on your left, then the Queen's Lane Coffee House. Stop, and glance to your right at a four-storey building next to the Examination Schools. There's a blue plaque on it, to mark the place where Frank Cooper first sold the famous Oxford Marmalade made by his wife Susan.

But it may have a greater claim to fame, because here, or near here, was England's first recorded coffee house. In his 1691 book about Oxford-educated writers and bishops, Anthony à Wood noted*:

(1650 – p. xix) This yeare Jacob a Jew opened a coffey house at the Angel in the parish of S. Peter in the East, Oxon. and there it was by some, who delighted in noveltie, drank. When he left Oxon. he sold it in Old Southampton buildings in Holborne neare London, and was living there 1671.

(1654 – p. xxiii) Cirques Jobson, a Jew and Jacobite, borne neare Mount-Libanus, sold coffey in Oxon. in an house between Edmund hall and Queen coll. corner.

St Peter's was later deconsecrated and turned into the library of St Edmund Hall (aka "Teddy Hall") Facing it on the south side of the High was a fourteenth-century inn, originally called the Tabard but renamed the Angel when Magdalen College developed it in 1510, and again in the 1660s.The larger left-hand-side part was eventually demolished to build the Examination Schools. The engraving below is from the early nineteenth century, when the licensee was Thomas Gellett.

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One wonders whether the two coffee purveyors were the same person, and whether the enterprise started in a side room of the tavern (which may have been glad of extra revenue during the Puritan Interregnum) and shifted over the road when business took off. If so, then maybe, as the Oxford History site also suggests, the modern Queen's Lane Coffee House is the site of the first dedicated cafe premises in the country.

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* “ATHENAE OXONIENSES. AN EXACT HISTORY OF ALL THE WRITERS AND BISHOPS WHO HAVE HAD THEIR EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD” (1813 edition, Vol. I – with additions by Philip Bliss). Accessed from https://archive.org/details/athenaeoxoniense01wooduoft on 26.12.2013

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Referism: gives you the hit without the tar

Pic source

By Sackerson

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