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My daughter, who is living in Paris, explained to me that since they dropped National service in France, many regret. We have seen of the recent riots, so we can make some comparisons. NS alone is not a solution, and I totally disagree with electrodes, but maybe something to draw from in building a solution.Quote:
Originally Posted by Grumbleguts
Did everyone think I was serious here? :confused:Quote:
Originally Posted by Grumbleguts
All future posts will be equipped with a high-visibility irony warning. :D
You mean, we can put the electrodes back in the box now, or you changed your mind because you have been a Saturday night yob, just never got caught????? <<----heheQuote:
Originally Posted by Grumbleguts
Well I understood.Quote:
Originally Posted by Grumbelguts
Hey! Sounds like you crossed paths with the wife and little 'un. (l'enfer c'est moi!)Quote:
Originally Posted by Unnamable
Seriously, though, Tarquin?! Doesn't calling a child this constitute some sort of abuse? And isn't feeding it mung beans a way of compounding the fellony? First yobs, then this. What a world.
I was being wordcheap, answering five posts in one. I must remember to quote in the references properly, my mistake.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
What I find interesting about this, XC, is that it’s the kind of thing I thought when I was living in the UK. One of the best things about being an ex-pat in a country so far away from ‘home’ is that you get a good sense of the way the rest of the world see Britain. It’s in a way that you would never assume they do. They consider us largely irrelevant to world politics (I’m not interested in whether or not this is so) and hardly worth mentioning. The mighty UK has no impact on the daily lives of vast numbers of people. I love that fact. The reason I mention this is because your view is very much of the British situation (bear with me, I know you weren’t making any claims to be talking about anywhere else). A lot of what you say just doesn’t fit with what happens here and in the other places I’ve lived. It was suggested somewhere above that poverty is a major cause of yobbish behaviour but I see far more extreme poverty here and almost no yobbish behaviour – In six years, our only experience of a violent fracas involved a pissed up Scot and two thugs from Yorkshire.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xamonas Chegwe
There is an area of Kowloon that is the most densely populated place on earth – everywhere you go it’s as if the rock festival has just ended - but there certainly isn’t the same aggression and violence that you see in any major UK city centre on a Friday and Saturday night. I see a far greater work ethic here in Asia than I ever saw in the UK. People here barely survive doing the most menial of jobs – jobs that people simply wouldn’t do in the UK. Obviously there are many, many other factors that are relevant to the issue but actually living in another culture does help defamiliarise your own and also makes you ask some interesting questions about your own assumptions.
I also find it interesting that you doubt there has been any fundamental change in social values (although I’m not sure who said that the change was ‘fundamental’ – it’s certainly alarming). Would you agree that values do in fact change ever or is it always just the lament of old farts like me? We no longer burn women believed to be witches as public spectacle. This suggests to me that values do change and, given your identification of the speed and capabilities of modern technology, perhaps they change far more quickly now than ever? You see, I think the views you express are a part of what’s angered me in the last two decades. You say, “there will always be a nostalgic view of bygone days taken by the old. Besides, we used to have a lot more wars in the good old days, so we could ship our scum off to foreign parts and let them run riot there.” This is a view I have seen many times, primarily from Guardian readers. Anyone who decries a fall in values must be an oldie befuddled with nostalgia. (It’s a shame the word has been appropriated in this way – etymologically it means the pain of going home.) It’s as if the fact that awful things existed in the past means that we should accept pitifully low standards now. Each generation has looked on the next with supposedly greater understanding – ‘we were no different’ – but we were. My world certainly was and I disagree that I simply look back and remember only the nice bits. If you refuse to be judgmental of modern youth because you think that we were no different, then you fail to give them any worthwhile sense of responsibility. For me, the most important lesson you can teach children is that they aren’t adults. That way they eventually make better adults. Whether intentionally or not, you are providing them with excuses and they will grab them as inalienable rights. They seem to learn quickly when it comes to rights. When I was teaching in the UK I remember one despicable student telling me, “You’re only saying that to me because I’m white.” He’d seen the benefits to be had by playing the race card and decided he was going to have some.
Despite Virgil identifying my argument as being primarily with political correctness (which I believe might have been mocked out of use as a phrase but not as a sentiment), I would say that my main gripe is with dumbing down and the attempt to accommodate rather than address poor behaviour. This of course means that I long for a time when you could leave your doors unlocked and we had National Service.
Grumbleguts – you express a similar view to XC’s. No, I didn’t think you were serious but I do think you are avoiding the issue. It’s far easier to denounce views like mine as the intolerant conservatism of someone living in an imaginary Eden of the past. That way you don’t have to address the kind of appalling behaviour that made me, as a damn good teacher, get out of the UK. You see, when you are confronted with it every day for six years it appears more like a reality than the misunderstanding of a nostalgic old fart.
On the subject of National Service, I once taught an Israeli lad who told me that for his ‘gap-year’ he would be returning to Israel to do his bit for his country by enrolling for NS. I had nothing but admiration for him, although I could have satirised him as a gung-ho, brainwashed idiot who had no idea how he was being manipulated to risk his life for an abstract ideal. Had he been English he could have sung out, “England is mine, it owes me a living.”
You’ve let them in boys – you’ve allowed them to exploit democracy in the area where it is most vulnerable – its tolerance.
Sometimes I wish I didn't bother getting out of bed.
I am not advocating bringing back national service but neither am I saying that it would be altogether a bad thing. I am no woolly-headed liberal. The only views I expressed were that there was not such a step up between murder and genocide as was claimed by Robinhood3000, the rest of my post was intended as a piece of frivolous fluff.
If you want my opinion, I do feel that standards are slipping in the UK and that they have been fro many years. I do not feel that the blame lies as squarely with 60s liberalism as some but yes, I do think that they have a share in the burden of responsibility.
I taught myself (science), for many years in fact. I gave it up in 1990 because I could no longer bear the ever-increasing burden of bureaucracy coupled with an utter lack of discipline and respect. I never once caned a pupil in all my years of teaching, but by the time I left I truly wished I could. When a child of 11 turns to you and says, "I was too ****ing stoned to do the homework." there's no way to answer. It's just time to get out.
Heh, I think humans should all have there brains put in nutrient rich jars...and there bodies burned as fuel. Its the only lasting solution!
Seriously though, the problem with society, is the lax attitude, and the slipping standards. Whatever happened to punishments for bad behaviour. Our society has gotten to accepting and spineless, and the worst criminal of this degenerating society is the media. (newpapers, movies, video games) As a society we need to change, and shift to a more traditional lifestyle. City living has infact been the key elemnet in our downfall, and if we are not carefull, we will go the way of the romans, egyptians, greeks, babylonians, syrians, persians, vikings...and more. Our culture is slipping due to lax laws and controls. I think we could learn alot from traditional confuscian teachings.
I didn't.Quote:
Originally Posted by Grumbleguts
God, I love it when people focus soully on the one sentence of a post that doesn't have to do with my main point.Quote:
Originally Posted by Grumbleguts
Well, if you wanted to argue this point (which I don't, because I don't feel like getting the thread closed), no one started fighting Hitler until their own countries had been attacked. So, was it selfish? But let's let that remain rhetorical. There's "good selfish" and there's "bad selfish." Violence in self-defense is selfish, but in the "I don't wanna die," totally justifiable sense. Violence in defense of another has deeper evolutionary roots that belong in an entirely separate thread. By "violence" I meant armed robbery, gang wars, bar brawls... the sort of thing applicable to the subject of "the coarsening of our culture." I'll try to clarify myself better in the future.
Any sexual behavior is selfish from an evolutionary standpoint (propogation of your genes and whatnot). We could debate the relative merits/demerits of promiscuity in the context of declared monogamy (God knows that's a constant that doesn't vary with shifting cultural attitudes), but promiscuity as an alternative to any form of lifelong partnership is the least socially beneficial (and therefore the most selfish), because it doesn't result in the raising of a socially-contributing family unit. I referred to this in my post as an example of the different priorities held by people in cultures where the support and mutual labor of a large family unit is a key to survival; places where, if you live your life running from one childless relationship to another, you will die because you have no family to spend all day toiling in the fields with you or to care for you when you get sick. People in this situation make regular sacrifices of personal gratification out of necessity, including recreational sex with multiple partners. When you remove the element of necessity, as has been done in Western culture, it gets replaced by the moral dilemma we have now. I would argue that overt sexual displays became regarded as distasteful because recreational sex was frivolous and self-indulgent; sex within the context of marriage—and which resulted in children—was the only socially productive form. Raising kids was serious business, not just the by-product of a little fun. But when raising a family is no longer the top priority, is promiscuity still wrong? And if it isn't, then are overt sexual displays to become acceptable? The media seem to tell us "yes" on a daily basis, which is a message that teenagers seem to find especially palatable, but one which has concerned Virgil and others.
So, yeah, promiscuity is human nature, but what is human nature but selfishness? Human nature is the evolutionary drive to get what you want. It's up to society to decide which parts of human nature are considered socially acceptable (i.e. "good selfish" versus "bad selfish"). Human nature is what's in your pants when you're dancing closely with an attractive person at the bus stop. Society is what says those pants have got to stay on. This debate is about if and why society has changed its opinion over the years of just how close you can get to taking them off without breaking the rules.
Hope I've clarified myself.
Who are "they"?Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
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EDIT: P.S., Grumbleguts, among the promiscuous men I've met (which are surprisingly few, if we go by your statement), monogamy is a male ideal, provided that it applies only to their sexual partners. Promiscuity seems to lose its appeal when one's girlfriend decides to practice it.
The barely educated scum who steal all of our moments with their brash, aggressive encroachments. I suggest that if they don’t want to take part in contributing to society, they shouldn’t be allowed to avail themselves of its benefits. Turn off their water, gas and electricity and let them finance their own anti-social outlook.Quote:
Originally Posted by emily655321
Oh yeah them. Thanks for clearing that up. Yeah, hanging's too good for 'em. Whoever they are.Quote:
Originally Posted by The Unnamable
I'm not sure, but I think I started the yob strand of this discussion. It's a shame really because I was never convinced it was a new phenomenon and it's not precisely the thing I'd say could be put down to economic factors. All I said was I thought I perceived a new intensity of anger, but I immediately added that I couldn't be sure of that either. From what I can gather, the English, maybe the Brits, have had a yob element for centuries. I couldn't claim to know why. At any rate, you're quite right to remind us how localised that problem is, Unnamable. It points up the main flaw in this thread: the word 'our'. Some necessary defining of terms has yet to take place here: whose culture exactly, and what period of time is implied by 'coarsening'?
I'm solipsistically interested in what I've experienced - the period of history from 1970 to now - and what led up to it, specifically in Europe and America. I'll pre-empt any jokes you might want to make about this, Unnamable, about unpardonable liberal sins of eurocentrism or whatever. I was never a gap year hippy and my interest in the rest of the world is mostly down to the way it wrongfoots a rather blinkered western sense of progress in the 20thC.
I grew up with a belief in progress that, in a very broad way, could be described as modernist. Too bad this dream had already started unravelling at around the time of my birth. At the same time, it didn't unravel completely. There are things from the sixties - notably feminism and civil rights - that I would never want to take back. But at bottom, the decade seems to me to be based on an infantile and totally erroneous idea of the fundamental goodness of people, resulting in a basically misguided liberal idealism, to whit, give people total freedom and they will do what's right. Yeah right. Bring on the cults and drug casualties, the blood spattered on the walls of Sharon Tate's house. And while you're about it, bring on the kids who never learned basic grammar because some groovy educationalist decided it would inhibit their ability to express themselves, man.
A particularly unpleasant side effect of all this, though, is the way it opens the door to equally dimwitted 'bring back the birch' authoritarians. And concurrently, a great irony of it is the fact that the sixties was also, in the shape of the work of Milton Friedman, the birth of economic liberalism, a credo whose proponents generally get lumped in culturally not with humanist liberals but the 'bring back the birch' school. And yet, the term liberal fits because so much of its rhetoric is the same. Humanist liberals believe in the fundamental goodness of humanity. Economic liberals believe in the fundamental goodness of markets. At times, notably in the work of Francis Fukuyama, they even resort to the same Hegelian dialectical underpinning as Marxism uses to posit the dictatorship of the proletariat to argue for the millenarian inevitability of the free market system. At the bottom of all this may be legislation in the US and England that gave corporations the same rights as individuals. But in practice, often as proponents of 'bring back the birch', liberal economic types often seem to believe more in the rights of corporations and the goodness of markets than of people.
I don't believe in either. I don't believe in any fundamental goodness anywhere and I think the facts bear me out. Depravity is as old as the hills, power always seems to corrupt and power and absolute freedom are barely distinguishable phenomena. It's kind of amazing to me that there are still any free marketeers left after what the rapid liberalisation of Russia's markets did to it (to give just one example - the wrecking of the Thai currency would be another), but that's faith for you - if you love an idea enough, you can learn to ignore any amount of unpleasant reality.
It's often said that we're in a post-ideological moment. If only. The fractious twin factions of economic and humanist liberalism have defined a great deal of what we've lived through in the last 30 to 40 years. Suggestions of curbing freedoms on either side are generally met with outrage. Freedom is god, worshipped in only slightly different ways, and always with some contradiction and hypocrisy. This isn't a new thing to say, but what I think we're living through is the fallout of an absolutely seismic collapse of hope - a collapse that was always inevitable because the hope was naive and utopian. Unfortunately, but equaly inevitably, it makes space for equally blinkered dogmas of authoritarianism - whether PCness or good old 'old fashioned values or Muslim fundamentalism or jerks like Alan Dershowitz arguing openly in favour of torture - and the nihilism of Ice Cube's: 'Is that kid lookin' up to me? Yo, life ain't nothin' but b itches and money'.
First ten year old: My friend has two mommies.
Second ten year old: How many is two?
Okay I was exaggerating because I expected to be lampooned for calling scum scum. I don’t want to bring back the birch and have never advocated corporal punishment in schools, not even when I was told by a fourteen year old boy, “I’m gonna stick a ****ing broken glass in your face if I see you out.”Quote:
Originally Posted by “blp”
But I did leave the UK because I couldn’t stand living there any longer. There was one too many late night train journeys through the detritus of southern England (when the train wasn't cancelled).
I found your outlook interesting and it’s good to see a bit of snarling but I think the perspective needs to be wider. History is broader in scope than the last forty-odd years. And History is coming for us, as it always does to those who fail to learn from it.
I see political correctness and dumbing down as linked. The former has necessitated the latter. The insistence that everyone is equal and every opinion valid has resulted in what someone called ‘the culture of narcissism’. Students learn by studying themselves – so gay students want to study the virtues of being gay, black students want to study black history and female students want to search the white western male canon and beyond for further examples of how marginalized they have been. They may well end up knowing more about their own culture/gender/sexual orientation, but nothing else.
I’ve mentioned this before on the Forum but I think it’s relevant here:
Recently, I read “A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945”. He was at the siege of Stalingrad. The Russians fought literally to the last bullet. When German soldiers were captured, sometimes wounded, sometimes not, the Russians simply had to kill them. They couldn’t keep them as prisoners because that would mean feeding them and there was not enough food for the Russians themselves. However, how do you kill a man? You shoot him in the head. But that uses a bullet and every one is needed to defend the city. So it was the job of the fittest and healthiest young women to despatch the equally young Germans with, usually, shovels or hammers. Seventeen-year-old girls cracking the skulls of eighteen-year-old boys. Just because it’s ‘wrong’ doesn’t mean it doesn’t or won’t happen. And a sense of this, the perspective of ourselves that it gives us is what’s missing today. Why study human behaviour when you can celebrate your own worth by studying yourself? You see this attitude time and again on this forum. The biggest lie of all is the one that pretends there isn’t a price to pay for all this. Consider me rabidly reactionary if you wish but, as I said above, if Liberalism fails to address the concerns of the electorate, there are darker forces waiting. I’m not going to start birching people but there are plenty who will. The more you reinforce the idea that the choice is primarily between ‘'bring back the birch' authoritarians’ and misguided liberalism, the more the situation will go unaddressed. I’m aware of the problems I face in allying myself in the Telegraph camp – I really don’t like the company – If you were serious about your contempt for the decision to dispense with grammar teaching, then you must understand this – who is in your camp over this issue?
The number of applications to study History at university in the UK has fallen. 'No bad thing in itself' to quote the Junior Minister for Higher Education. (Not if it means the cretins have gone for Sports Science or Golf Course Management). Please let History come for these people. I will take my chances if it means living in what the Chinese curse calls 'interesting times'. fayefaye once called me ‘dark’ for saying this but it’s often all that remains, what with the louts themselves and those who prop them up.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish. (Proverbs 29:18)”
Let them.
I don't have much problem with most of what you're saying here, Unnamable. Glad to hear you're not entirely at peace with Telegraph readership and re your departure from England, I'm even trying to work out my own escape route from this silly country, if only because, if I ever do get round to having a family, I wouldn't want my kids to grow up here.
I'm very serious about the grammar thing. The real life version of your opening joke above is an intelligent friend of mine saying 'Sorry, what's a noun again?' More to the point, I've seen from the work I did as an editor a few years ago how directly poor grammar usage links to poor thinking. I was editing financial training material and knew nothing about the subject matter (a ridiculous situation, I grant you) and yet I spotted numerous errors, inconsistencies and outright lacunae in the texts just by trying to give the sentences proper structure.
I'm not quit sure why you think I'm snarling - the line about no fundamental goodness I suppose. I could add basic stupidity as a constant in human history to the equasion for the full misanthropy effect. Oops - more to say, but out of time. Back later.
Indeed. I was taught ‘clause analysis’, which involved working through decontextualised sentences and applying labels to different sections – ‘adverbial clause of time’, ‘adjectival phrase’ and so on. It was not easy at the time and was hardly thrilling. This means that it no longer gets taught – we wouldn’t want students thinking that they aren’t all wonderful; that might hurt their self-esteem. They are no longer people who need to learn things but consumers with preferences. If they don’t like your goods, they’ll take their custom elsewhere and justify it on the basis of freedom of choice. Yet, when one day my father, completely perplexed, gave me a three-page tax document riddled with subordinate clauses to see if I could understand it, I realised that I could. It was the first of many occasions when I realised the extent to which language is power.Quote:
Originally Posted by “blp”
What happened to Tarquin and that lovely woman in Sainsbury’s? :DQuote:
Originally Posted by “blp”
Yes, there's nothing quite like the experience of learning something difficult - humbling, befuddling, but finally vivifying. I think to give someone something they don't want, but actually need is probably the best, most difficult and most generous thing a teacher can do. It's a good ambition for an artist too.
So, as you may already have gathered, polar opposites or not, I think our views on education are pretty damn close. Private Eye recently ran the diary of a young teacher and it was shocking stuff. He was utterly, utterly hamstrung in trying to impose discipline his students by the various bits of legislation that had been brought in to protect their rights. Said students, who were abysmal at learning the stuff he was actually supposed to be teaching them, knew these rights inside out and perpetually taunted him with them.
A less serious, but still perhaps interesting example of the same tendency is my time at art school: three years of learning sweet fanny adams except for a few handy hints from tutors (thin your paints a bit more, have a look at Robert Ryman's work - that sort of thing) and what I found out myself. Students without a previously instilled sense of the value of didacticism were basically left to stagnate. In the first year, a popular theory of learning (to describe it very generously) went that we should all 'just play', whatever that meant. The worst of it, and the thing I relate most to what you're saying, is that what teaching I did get so often took the form of attempts to identify some hypothetical a priori artistic identity for me, as if that could be the basis for all future learning, rather than the learning itself slowly, perhaps even painfully, forming an identity. In the second year, I had roughly half the tutors dropping by to tell me I was 'basically a traditional painter' and the rest telling me I was 'basically a conceptual artist' to no beneficial effect in either instance. When I remarked to one younger tutor that I could have done with a bit more help with theory (I'm talking about wading, unaided, through Derrida, Kristeva and Deleuze and Guattari and not even realising that I would probably have been better of starting with Plato), she averred blandly that it was just sort of something some people were 'suited to' and some weren't. It was all so ridiculous. Artists bloody love to go on about making 'challenging' work, but everything in that place seemed to be geared to ensuring none of the aspirant artists had to be challenged for a second.
Well, I guess I'm snarling now, if I wasn't before. Who's in my camp? I'm really not sure. And other than that, a great deal of whatever it was I meant to say before has gone out of my head. But to go back to the two forms of liberalism I described earlier and your beef about golf course management courses, what's interesting to me about this is that it seems like this bland vocationalism could be the place where, weirdly and quite unexpectedly, the two apparently antithetical liberalisms meet. I find this very interesting.
I'm sorry, but at that time in my life fatherhood completely stifled my need to explore the infantile aspects of my personality. And I would ask that you respect that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Unnamable
Generational expectation has been declining since the 70s. The current youth are expected to be crass, rude, visceral, violent, profane, and depraved adolescents who will never develope healthy relationships or incomes and wouldn't know a conversation if it gave them a swirly and took their lunch money. Kids who excell and are excellent are by definition rare, but fulfilling expectations comes naturally. It is the parents of this generation who have been the most foolish of any. The parents either believe that trying to prevent their children to fullfill the foresaid stereotype is futile, or they expect their children to be born, learn to eat food, walk, and then psychoanalyze themselves to the point where they can decide what will be best for their future well-being and, therefore, be teaching their peers why marijuana is not a solution by the time they enter preschool. Children may have a large capacity from the time that they are born, but this is something of a ridiculous expectation. There's my two cents.