The Sunday evening drama, Line of Duty, is causing nationwide consternation – because it deliberately confuses the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies’. Much of our cultural formation, cinema, novels, drama etc rehearses this central conflict between moral forces; it’s essential to know who the good guys are – whose side we’re on.
An insight into this dynamic arises from studying the psychology of new babies – our deepest and earliest perceptions. We think the thoughts of a suckling, are sharply divided between what’s ‘marvellous’ (good feeding) and what’s ‘awful’ (bad feeding) – which they instinctively separate into definitive categories. Melanie Klein (1882 – 1960) famously called this process ‘splitting’. As we mature, we come to realise that our parents can be both pleasing and infuriating – and that this strange duality is part of everyone – including ourselves. But this ambivalence is uncomfortable – much simpler to stick to goodies and baddies.
Andy Cooke, retiring chief constable of Merseyside police, said that if he was given £5bn to cut crime, he would put £1bn into law enforcement, and £4bn into reducing poverty and inequality; linking bad behaviour with adversity is rare from our senior police – who tend to promote the goodies/baddies version. Elderly now, I see no paragons or monsters, only people somewhere in the middle – trying to act well – making mistakes – full of regrets. This mature acceptance that the world has nothing entirely pure to offer us, comes with a certain melancholy. But there are few utterly horrible things as well.
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My dad was a Hibs supporter and so am I – the Easter Road club is an embedded part of who I am. The true wealth of a football club is ‘the commons’ of its fan base; it is deeply regrettable that the legal ownership of many clubs has passed to indifferent ‘money machines’. The recent outrageous proposal for a European Super League’ was of benefit – because it triggered a volcanic reaction from ordinary football fans, who may now confront this festering problem. I quote Michael Sandel: “What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and money cannot buy”. This Tribune article calls for a grassroots movement to take football back.
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‘The United Kingdom is an old ice floe and the climate is warming fast’. These are the closing words of a Guardian piece by Neal Ascherson – one of my most trusted commentators on Scotland’s future. He points out that among Scottish 16-35 year olds, support for independence stands at 72%. Tick tock.
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Important piece by Lesley Riddoch about the potential of ‘community wealth building’ – the Cleveland and Preston model; is its reference in the SNP manifesto one of their ‘trendy mentions; – or a serious intention. Like Riddoch, I believe that targeting procurement away from the Sercos to create local jobs could transform the real economy.
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Richer countries, like the UK, are stockpiling Covid vaccines, sufficient to immunise our population several times over – but to protect profit, Big Pharma is refusing to share its patents and technology with poorer countries. There would be natural justice in humankind being overrun by a virus – because we are too stupid to immunise poor people. Unsurprisingly, this study shows that most of us want to share.
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Since he wrote Winners Take All in 2018, I’ve been aware of the journalism of Anand Giridharadas; here, on his new blogsite, The Ink, Anand interviews Alec MacGillis, who has just written an ‘expose’ of Amazon. Between them, they examine the tactics and power of Amazon – and speculate on how it is changing our world for the worse.
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In the millennium year, 2000, Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall published a book called ‘Spiritual Intelligence: the Ultimate Intelligence’. The opening chapter contains the following statement:
‘‘The full picture of human intelligence can be completed with a discussion of our spiritual intelligence – SQ for short. By SQ, I mean the intelligence with which we address and solve problems of meaning and value, the intelligence with which we can place our actions and our lives in a wider, richer, meaning-giving context, the intelligence with which we can assess that one course of action or one life-path is more meaningful than another. SQ is the necessary foundation for the effective functioning of both IQ and EQ (emotional intelligence). It is our ultimate intelligence.”
