the weblog of jim bliss, writer and backstreet psychoanalyst
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It’s a nailed-on certainty that the Daily Mail is going to have an outrage-athon when it’s released (the premiere is tonight at The Sundance Festival). But if the first feature film from Chris Morris (Day Today, Blue Jam, Brass Eye, etc.) is half as funny as this clip implies, then it’s also a nailed-on certainty that it’ll be worth seeing. Four Lions is being described as “jihadist comedy”.
It’s not part of my brief to go, I’m quite satisfied with what I hear and what I see on video with the standards of the factories. It’s the job of the buyers and the ethical trade team to visit the factories.
That’s how we do it. How we keep it all going. A clothing retailer. A supermarket. A chain of petrol stations. A million other things. That chain of insulation. Our delegation of consequence and responsibility. The essential disconnect.
The Guardian has recently published a list of the 50 Greatest Television Dramas of all time. As I’ve written before, I don’t watch an awful lot of TV because almost all TV is awful. But I am a sucker for a well-written series containing genuine character development and unexpected plot lines. They only appear very occasionally, but when they do they can hold their own against a good novel or film.
The Guardian’s list contains a fair few shows that I’ve never seen and plenty that I have seen and don’t rate. For instance, the over-hyped Mad Men (No. 4 on their list) I found dull as dishwater and never made it past the third episode. Shows such as Prime Suspect (#19) and Inspector Morse (#30) seem flat, lifeless and formulaic to me. Especially if you’ve got something like The Wire (#14) on the list which demonstrates that you can make a show about the police without it being a hymn to law and order; a hagiography of The Cop… see, for example, Hill Street Blues (#33) or — in the words of Hakim Bey — the “most evil TV show ever”.
I was glad to see that Buffy The Vampire Slayer (#22) made the list, even if it’s a lot further down that I think it deserves to be. I noticed there was some controversy about that in the comments that followed the article (though you can stir up a hornets nest of dissent over at The Guardian by suggesting that the sky might be blue and rain a bit wet). I firmly believe that those who decry Buffy have either (a) never watched it beyond flicking into it for five minutes as they channel surf between Celebrity Big Brother and How Clean Is My House; or (b) been unable or unwilling to see beyond the 90210 with Monsters facade that covers this incredible piece of work.
There’s no way I could make a top 50 TV shows list as I don’t think there’s half that number that I’d consider even watchable, let alone worthy of recommendation. But as a brief response to The Guardian, here’s my Top 15 (I thought I’d only be able to produce a Top 10 and was surprised that there were as many as 13 that I consider genuinely worth recommending… the last two made it in as much to make up the numbers as anything else; fine shows but not essential).
Official second draft of the new Tory campaign poster
Make your own poster here (via Chicken Yoghurt).
The latest book from my friend and fellow traveller, Gyrus, is subtitled “A Critical Inquiry into Recent Accounts of Violence amongst Uncivilized Peoples”. Over the past few years a debate has been raging… quietly raging, but raging nonetheless… regarding the nature of pre-civilized human society. In this slim but incisive volume, Gyrus summarises the debate and adds to it. Signficantly, in my view.
There is a tendency within our culture (perhaps within humanity, though anthropology suggests that it’s not universal, merely rather prevalent) to reduce everything to a kind of oppositional dualism. To polarise every debate. The baddies and the goodies. Yin and Yang. Male and female. Left and Right. I find this tendency rather unsatisfactory as it often (usually!) ends up simplifying issues to the point of uselessness.
The debate regarding pre-civilized cultures; specifically regarding the questions of whether they are/were more or less violent than civilized cultures and whether they are/were more or less ecologically conscientious than civilized cultures; has followed that general tendency and become polarised. On the one hand there’s the view — generally attributed to Rousseau — that pre-civilized peoples were “Noble Savages”. On the other hand there’s the view expressed by Hobbes that primitive life was “nasty, brutish and short”.
These two positions (both of which appear to have started life as thought-experiments, rather than deeply held convictions) have led to various kinds of caricature. The post-Hobbesians paint a ridiculous Dances With Wolves-esque idyllic utopia — minus the inter-tribal warfare scenes — picture of the other side, and insist they are guilty of nostalgia and wishful thinking. This is of course compounded by New Age primitivists with their Back to Nature rhetoric. On the other hand, the post-Hobbesians are themselves painted as deluded apologists for progress; desperately trying to portray the past as hellish even as civilisation destroys the future.
Where Gyrus, characteristically, succeeds is by refusing to be taken in by the propaganda of either established camps and instead casting a genuinely critical eye over the claims of both. In doing so, I believe he likely comes as close to the truth of the matter as we’re going to get — given the difficulties involved in establishing facts when discussing prehistoric societies and/or modern indigenous societies prior to our contact with them.
War & The Noble Savage is accessible, educational and well-written enough to be described as entertaining. It serves as a fine rebuttal to the recent tendency to view the past through a Hobbesian lens while never succumbing to the seduction of nostalgia or primitivism. I’m pretty much going to insist that my few regular readers (and the rest of you too!) buy it (think of it as returning the favour for the excellent service I’ve been providing here for several years, ahem). It’s privately published and costs a paltry four pounds (including P&P… people outside the UK add a quid for postage). Even if this isn’t a subject that traditionally you’d be interested in (though you’ll be surprised at how relevant it is to all manner of other areas of debate), you should still buy it in order to support the kind of independent research and publishing that the author, and others, undertake.
Overall, War & The Noble Savage is an important contribution to an important debate. For those interested in an introduction to the subject (while you’re waiting for the book to be delievered) Gyrus has given some talks on this subject, one of which was recently turned into a Slidecast which you can listen to on his website for free.
Official first draft of the new Tory campaign poster
Make your own poster here (via Chicken Yoghurt).
Everyone who knows me is aware that I can be rather evangelical about the work of Gregory Bateson, and in particular about his collected essays, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. There are two reasons for this unabashed proselytizing.
Firstly, from a purely personal standpoint, when I first began to get my head around his work it was an incredibly satisfying experience. While I was certainly learning plenty of new ideas, much of it felt more like I was having long-held suspicions confirmed. A thousand things I’d been thinking about and grappling with — for the best part of 20 years — up until Bateson, they’d been like so many fragments of paper… each hinting at something beyond it, but something still unconscious and inaccessible. Steps to an Ecology of Mind didn’t tell me what it was. It just showed me that I didn’t have a random bunch of paper fragments; I had an unsolved jigsaw.
Gregory BatesonThe picture is almost always a little bigger than you imagine.
The second reason I spend so much time banging on about Bateson’s ideas is because I think they are incredibly important. I believe we are facing an imminent crisis arising from the unsustainable nature of our civilisation. Not only does Bateson offer us an incisive explanation of this crisis, he provides a perspective on it that I believe is invaluable should we wish to deal with it effectively.
Having said that, I often suspect I detect a tone in some of Bateson’s work that suggests he didn’t think we had a hope in hell of dealing with this crisis effectively. Not because we don’t have the necessary tools or wherewithal. But because we don’t have the vision. Our epistemology is savagely flawed.
I think my, shall we say… “Batesonian proselytizing” is an attempt to share that realisation. Or at least suggest to others that it’s there to be shared. Of course, when I thrust a copy of Steps to an Ecology of Mind into someone’s hand, I’m immediately forced to launch into a lengthy explanation of how to read the book. It’s not Finnegans Wake or anything, but nor is it the easiest text to get into. And it’s very easy to get discouraged. I started reading it three times before it finally clicked with me. Though it’s worth pointing out that I never once considered not reading it after that first abortive attempt. You only need to spend an hour or so browsing Steps to an Ecology of Mind to know that there’s something valuable there.
Earlier today, I was listening to a talk Bateson gave in 1971 on the subject of The Sacred. It’s labelled “a lecture on Consciousness and Psychopathology” though his rambling, conversational style definitely puts it under the category “talk” rather than “lecture”. About halfway through, he muses:
There are things, you know, that people do… that just give one the shivers. They will put the potted plants on the radiator… and this is just bad biology. And I guess “bad biology” is, in the end, bad Buddhism… bad Zen… and an assault on The Sacred. And that, really, is what we’re trying to do; defend The Sacred from being put on the radiator in this sort of way.
Gregory Bateson | 1971 lecture on consciousness and psychopathology
This simple metaphor (much of the talk is about the necessity of bridging the gap between the metaphorical and the literal) sums up the challenge facing humanity today. It’s the very heart of Colin Tudge’s argument in the essential So Shall We Reap, for instance. It’s at the heart of the Climate Change debate and almost all environmental activism.
If you’ve got an hour and a half to spare, why not download and listen to the talk. It barely scratches the surface of Bateson’s work, and like his books can be a little opaque in places (in the sense that he’s discussing complex subjects that are by their nature rather difficult to discuss and often inhabit that fuzzy area where language has trouble finding a firm grip). Nonetheless it’s filled with wisdom, warmth, humour and genuine insight. And there’s not much about which that can be said.
Gregory Bateson: 1971 lecture on consciousness and psychopathology (Part 1) | (Part 2)
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Email: blog 'at' numero57 'dot' net
