Polygamy

I watched a few minutes of a TV programme last night. The piece I saw was a series of interviews with Muslims who were in favour of polygamy. So I got to thinking about it and subsequently decided I didn’t have a problem with it. During one of the interviews a polygamist, a man, referred to men who engage in extra marital affairs and who father children. He suggested that it would be better if there was a legal basis to these relationships the man would have a responsibility to the women and kids involved. So I got to thinking some more about it and decided he was talking sense.

The problem is that the whole discussion of polygamy in general takes place against the background of an assumption that marriage is a sacred union. The assumption that marriage is in some way sacred is itself based on the assumption that God or some divine entity has an opinion on it one way or the other. This I am not so sure about. In the Christian tradition it stems from the reference in the bible that says “what God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Matthew 19.6). This too is used where it is based on the assumption that God has in fact joined together all the relationships that man says he has. That assumption is manifestly wrong and there is no basis for it at all. There are a whole bunch of marriages that no God in his right mind would ever give the OK to. The arrogance of religion is that just because the religion deems something to be sacred that it implicitly receives the support of the particular God in question.

Marriage is an arrangement. It has always been so. For many people it is a commitment made in public and with due ceremony (and expense) so as to signify its importance for those concerned. We make a big deal of those occasions which we consider to be a big deal for us. Because of this whole sacredness thing in a pluralist society it has become increasingly necessary to separate the legal relationship, the contract between two individuals which one hopes is freely entered into, from the emotional relationships. So it seems reasonable to me that if individuals want to enter into legal contracts they should be free to do so with all the consequences and responsibilities that flow from that. It is quite another thing for any children that result from such relationships as they have  not exercised any choice. We don’t choose our parents.

Of course there are implications in considering “marriage” in its religious connotations as being distinct from civil contracts. Once you do that it follows that any consenting adults must be free to enter into such civil contracts. Therefore same sex civil partnerships would be perfectly reasonable. I can conceive of civil contracts being enacted between people on the basis of a genuine lifelong friendship. It seems to me that once one lets go of the religious legacy the question becomes one of what the state is willing to support through its taxation and social welfare policies.

So much of what we call “normal” is a result of solutions found for problems that existed due to life conditions that no longer exist. Much of the work previously carried on by union activists is now the responsibility of government agencies and that, I believe, is how it should be. The state declares the standard that is to be adhered to based on the wishes of the population (allowing for ignorance and stupidity of course) just as FF did for the last number of years. People wanted light touch regulation and they got it. Given the technologies available to us and the level of sophistication of our legal system it is reasonable to suppose that we can determine questions of hereditary and ownership which marriage proposed to solve. We can resist the temptation to covet our neighbours land or goods without resorting to marrying his sister or fathering a child with his cousin. Richard the Lionheart offered his sister to Saladin during the Crusades. Such is the basis of the dowry which was once part and parcel of every culture and remains so in some.

Ultimately society will have to recognise the individual has having inalienable rights as a result of their existence and not as a result of their hereditary, their relationships or their position within society. This is not a position likely to gain the support of those seeking to maintain their power and status within society. Yet it would recognise that other declaration of the Catholic God that all men are created equal as far as he is concerned. Therefore children would have rights. This position is one being resisted by both church and state here in Ireland for to give the individual rights is to place a responsibility on those exercising power to treat all equally under law. The state does not want this because it involves taking from the rich and powerful in order to level the playing field of social history and of genetics. It becomes a massive insurance scheme against the vicissitudes of life. A spreading of the risks imposed by evolution as natural selection winds down from the human perspective. It is not supported by the religions because it removes the possibility of being one of the select group of those who have a special relationship with the divine. The special relationship so dismissed by A Course in Miracles is the basis of dogma. It removes the need for conscience in that one can simply refer to ones interpretation of the rules and lash all round you.

So all relationships, legally enacted or implied, become the subject of judicial process. That judicial process can be a mediation one or subject to judgement. We are all then free to add whatever layers of meaning or significance we choose to that relationship but rest assured we will be held accountable for it. That sense of accountability would be an advance on the current situation where relationships are entered into frivolously and with scant consideration of the longer term implications.

The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain DeBotton is an absolute joy to read. I love language and this is language at its best. The imagery is powerful and evocative. The photographs are really wonderful. And behind it all are stories of real peoples lives. People who live quiet ordinary but necessary lives upon which we all depend in one way or another. We live in a society that suggests that live must be in some way special and that each of us should be hankering after being the best that we can be. The reality is that this planet is populated by ordinary people doing ordinary things, day in and day out. And that is the way it is and that is OK. That we have been fooled into believing it should be otherwise is due to manipulation by those vested interests who seek to take advantage by creating dissatisfaction. They manipulate the genuine desire to improve the circumstances of our lives in order that such desires are distorted into their quest for wealth, status and power.

There is a balance to be struck and this book examines where that balance might be. For example:

Yet in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all those with a take on the future of the potato crisp, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

Our era is perverse in passing off an exception as a rule. The statistical probabilities of successfully rerouting commercial reality were laid bare for me by a wry venture capitalist who had come to the fair with few expectations, save for having the opportunity to spend a day away from his office. Of the two thousand business plans he received a year, he said, he immediately threw out 1,950, scrutinised fifty more closely and ended up investing in ten. Within five years, out of those ten enterprises, four would be bankrupt, another four would be stuck in what was termed a ‘graveyard cycle’ of low profits and a mere two would be generating the significant returns which keep his industry afloat. Here was a vision of success guaranteed to disappoint 99.9 percent of its subscribers.

Then again, there was a certain heroic beauty in the exuberant destruction of both capital and hope entailed by the entrepreneurs’ activities. Money patiently accumulated through decades of unreemarkable work would, in a rush of optimism inspired by a flattering business plan, be handed over to a momentarily convincing chief executive, who would hasten to set the pyre alight in a brief, brilliant and largely inconsequential blaze.

Don’t you just love it? The current financial crisis epitomises this idea so completely when today we hear talk of reducing the minimum wage. What is not spoken of is the reality that many of the jobs created during the Celtic Tiger were unsustainable even when they were created. They were subsidised by borrowed money which will ultimately be repaid by the state. They were job schemes designed to shorten dole queues rather than invest in education. What price the €2.95 latte now when you ad in the interest we will have to repay over the next ten or twenty years? Tens of thousands left school with probably a Junior Cert and many without basic literary and numeracy skills because FF could not see the big picture. And now they want us to look to them to provide the SMART economy. Stupid people cannot deliver SMART.

Another wonderfully expressed image from DeBotton during a visit to a firm of accountants:

The employees proceed upstairs without looking around them. To feel at home in the office is not to notice the strange silver statue in the lobby and to forget how alien the place felt on the first day. The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires. The accountant’s ten thousand possibilities have been reduced to an agreeable handful. She has a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other  people – and, more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her – that she is a Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe. How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate, in the loneliness of the early hours, all that one might have been and now never will be. She has a meeting scheduled with a team from an insurance brokerage in half an hour, leaving her time to buy a muffin and coffee from the cafeteria. The start of the day in the office has burnt off nostalgia as the sun evaporates a coat of dew. Life is no longer mysterious, sad, haunting, touching, confusing 0r melancholy; it is a practical stage for clear-eyed action.

This image is particularly apt to me as I face into returning to full time education after some thirty years and to what could be loosely termed a “job” with it’s nine to five routine. I admit I did feel a sense of relief when I received the CAO offer a few weeks back. At least now I had a label. I was more then “a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe”. I could now nestle secure in  “the assumptions of colleagues”. I could now answer that “What do you do” question with “I am a student”. Safe from the barely suppressed moral outrage of the working classes for a few years at least. Except for the fact that one should really only study at night while holding down a day job. Otherwise you’re just lazy.

And the ultimate question:

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has’ the edge over even the finest biscuit.

But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good and it seems that making a perfectly formed stripey chocolate circle which helps to fill an impatient stomach in the long morning hours between nine o’clock and noon may deserve its own secure, if microscopic, place in the pantheon of innovations designed to alleviate the burdens of existence.’

The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningfull, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives and half a dozen different manufacturing sites. An endeavour endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.

It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children’s books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. They are shopkeepers, builders, cooks or farmers – people whose labour can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life. As creatures innately aware of balance and proportion, we cannot help but sense that something is awry in a job title like ‘Brand Supervision Coordinator, Sweet Biscuits’ and that whatever the logic and perspicacity of Vilfredo Pareto’s arguments, another principle to which no one has yet given a convincing name has here been ignored and subtler human laws violated.

Tell it like it is. Oh and by the way “perspicacity” means Acuteness of perception, discernment, or understanding. I looked it up. Don’t you just love it?

Truely inspirational stuff

Do yourself a favour and watch these two lectures on http://fora.tv/

The first talk is given by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newson and he is certainly one of the most inspirational speakers I have heard in a long time. His talk is entitled  Cities and Time and focuses on the issue of sustainability in urban environments. If you had any doubt about what is possible in terms of dealing with the major issues facing countries like Ireland listen to this man talk about what his city IS doing and HAS already done. Try not to be depressed by any comparisons with our own government or that we probably get the politicians we deserve but try and accept that if we change our thinking, our expectations as individuals, things can and will change. Really uplifting stuff.

Toastmasters should just marvel at the delivery.

Unfortunately, as the poster of a goat on the back of my kitchen door says we are so far behind we think we’re in front. This is what being in front looks like on sustainability, on energy conservation, on green tech, on transport, on housing, almost everything.

The second is a lecture titled A Theory of History with an Application and is given by economist Paul Romer. These are the issues we need to be thinking about as we face into another Lisbon referendum.

Anyway do something with your mind that stretches it a bit and watch these lecture. Then move on to the rest of the stuff that Fora.tv has to offer.