From the ridiculous to the scary

Welsh politics was taken over a few weeks ago by the introduction of a new law. The default speed limit in urban areas was reduced from 30mph (miles per hour) to 20mph. Local councils were left with the power to exempt major wide major thoroughfares with good visibility to maintain as 30mph zones. The reason for the policy was to reduce road accidents and make urban centres more livible. Many small villages in Wales have a major arterial roads running through the middle of them, indeed many of these villages spread along these major thoroughfares, and modern fast noisy vehicles speed through these villages, not how things used to be at all.

The law was voted though parliament in April 2023 with support from all the major political parties, and 20mph zones had already been implemented in parts of major towns and cities and in other countries. There wasn’t really much fanfare about this law, until a week or so before implemetation day and the hard right Conservative party suddenly U-turned and started a major campaign seeking to overturn this law; a law they had voted for and senior members of the Conservative party had promoted pictures of themselves supporting the campaign of “20’s Plenty”.

Welsh Conservative Leader Andrew RT Davies [left]

This kicked off Welsh media into a frenzy. For many it seemed this was the issue of utmost importance. I was a little baffled. To me, a centre-left Social Democrat, it seemed like a sensible enough idea to reduce road accidents and make urban centres more livible with a relatively low inconvenience cost. If it works, great, if it doesn’t scrap it. I can understand centre-right folk being a bit more sceptical and as they value individual liberty a little more highly and social cohesion a little less highly and tend to be more averse to social change unless there is a very clear case fot it. However for those on the hard-right this was the number one issue, loudly proclaiming how ridiculous and somehow viscious an attack on individual liberty it was to drive slightly slower where there are children and the elderly people trying to live their lives. When the right to protest or human rights to be taken away, these people were not bothered about, iso it’s not freedom as such that they care about? It made me wonder what was going on. How has our political world become so emotive and divisive?

I believe it’s understanding the difference between centrists, whether they lean right or left and the hard right and the hard left. The left generally support the 20mph law, as it intention is to improve road safety, to improve society, so it ticks the boxes of the key principles of socialism. For the hard right it ticks the boxes of restricting individual liberty and and an overly-prescriptive “nanny state”.

This is perhaps the key difference between centrists and the extremists. For centrists the pragmatic solution, of what works, of policy where the benefits outweigh the costs and this can be tested by data. Centrists only support a law like this 20mph law if it actually reduces the cost of road accidents more than the cost of slightly increased journey times. Or at least to then modify the law so it targets where it does have advantages and leaves areas it doesn’t at 30mph. Whereas for the extremists, what actually works in the real world is of less importance than whether the policy aligns with key facets of their beliefs, whether the policy chimes with their worldview or not is mnore important than whether it is a policy with measurable benefits. That it is more important if something feels right rather than is demonstratably right. So to the hard-right this 20mph rule feels wrong and even if it actually saves many lives, or even improve traffic flow in congested urban centres.

The hard right don’t acrtually believe in liberty, freedom and democracy, just the parts that they like or the parts that affect them as a social group, it’s th enature of th eright to be selfish perhaps. In reality, freedom for us and not for everyone else, which to an expert or an academic is not a definition of freedom or liberty that stands up to scrutiny, as liberty only works if everyone in a society has freedom and liberty.

The difficulty of this ‘common sense’ approach, with ideas feeling right and a belief in principles that don’t actually hold up to close scrutiny that can be a real problem. I’ve used this example before, pre-Copernican people believed that the sun orbits around a flat Earth because that’s what you see in your everyday lives. Once you send cameras into space you can then see that the Earth is a sphere that spins around with a daily day night cycle. If humanity had never embraced abstract thought we’d still be banging flint together to make sharp stone edges to use on axes as the ultimate expression of human endeavour as we did for millenia

It was even pointed out that during the fuss they campaigned for 20mph zones only near schools and hospitals, the fact that most urban areas are near schools and hospitals and that it would cost far more and be less productive for towns to me a mess of 20mph and 30mph zones, that a default law was the cheapest, easiest and lkikely most effective way of making this change, with local democracy able to opt the roads out where it didn’t work. The objectors hadn’t thought it through, but that didn’t matter, the rabble rousing rhetoric was all of what was important.

Politics wasn’t always like it has been for the last 10 years or so. We used to kind of operate with a political consensus. Change didn’t happen unless a majority were convinced or that experts would be the ones making the case and the arguments for policy. This doesn’t happen as much now, particularly in the UK and the US. Centrists are now vilified as politics has moved to the extremes. We are now ruled by those who don’t trust expertise, don’t test ideas and rely on ideas and policy matching the dogma of political ideas from generations ago that were created to resolve particular problems of the time, that are not universal truths and simply damaging to the world we now live in. The politicians have worked out that reason and logic don’t get you very far, educated people have worked things out for themselves, of far greater political probity is rhetoric to appeal to the uneducated about politics, and this shift has proved successful for politicians. The UK and the US thus elected buffoons like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.

How does this rhetorical game work. You start off with a truth, somethind hard to dispute, but also something that chimes with people’s gut feelings or “common sense”. For Trump it was that the political class are corrupt and don’t represent ordinary people’s interests, For Putin that NATO and the Western Alliance are really not good guys. Truths that are hard to dispute and of course not mentioning that Trump, Johnson and Putin are all very much a part of the establishment they claim to despise.

The next stage is to pretend that your big idea follows logically from that truth, even if the logic falls down under scrutiny, but their target audience isn’t people interested in philosophy or abstract concepts, so it works. For example: Politicians are educated and corrupt, climate activists are educated and corrupt, therefore climate change doesn’t exist, it’s just suits these educated folk to make money out of it. This isn’t logical as it falls into the pattern of: Brian is a bad cat who likes sleeping , Megan is a bad cat who likes eating fish, therefore fish do not exist.

It’s also that pursuing the divisive policies of the extremes of the political spectrum, also divides society and creates social unrest. Turning society into an us and them, rather than a people with a common cause and this is dangerous. The Hard Right are playing these divisive culture wars, because it works to convince the socially conservative majority (and people are naturally socialy conservative I believe) that they need to support them because it feels right, that homosexuality is a sin, that war against Bongo Bongo land is fine as they are all bad people there, that children in poverty deserve to be in poverty because their parents are not exactly like us and don’t live in “our” neighbourhoods.

How did this become socially acceptable? My other thought recently was that is is due to the decline of the church in our lives. For me going to a church does a couple of things. It gives everyone a space to think. The material given to attendees to think about comes from an educated person, the priest, who has plenty of time to think and reflect on events affecting the members of their church, that they are too busy working or raising children to consider and find a way to present these ideas in a thoughtful way and join everyone together for a bit of a sing song. This is the Episcopal Church of Wales I grew up with and attend now. We don’t accept the dogma of a religious text written 2000 years ago as being literally true but is a path to guide us to God’s truth, wisdom and peace that we seek to understand. To accept science and other academic disciplines and use those truths to also inform how we understand the world.

I mention this as when I was a teenager a lot of people left the church behind, I did too, Wales is now a very secular country, because it didn’t seem relevant, we could work this stuff out for ourselves and make our own decisions as confident young people without the church. Yet we’ve grown up into a society that doesn’t reflect, that just accepts dogma whether religious or political without thinking things through, without scrutiny and the decline of attending religious services in the UK may not be such a good thing.

All this is scary. Most of the time whether we drive at 30mph or 20mph doesn’t matter as we rarely knock over other people and many of us have never hit someone with our vehicles. Whether the staistics for next year show a percentage decrease in road accidents or not isn’t all that important (well unless the numbers are huge!).

However this media frenzy was overtaken by events, by the tragic escalation of the conflict in Israel-Palestine. I was deeply saddened as the reports came in daily of the mounting thousands of deaths that have been part of this escalation by extemists. We pray in church every week for the victims of war, whether Israeli, Palestinian or in wars that are ongoing elsewhere. It is such a human tragedy that we should reflect on that in 2023 there are still people firing bullets and flying drones and missiles at other people, killing children, destroying hospitals, destroying lives.

Yet it seems that not everyone shares this view of these events as human tragedy. My social media feeds are full of people condeming Israelies and sharing the tragic tales of Palestinian families. Others share the stories of the Israeli families who have sufferent and condemn the Palestinians. I don’t get this need to pick sides, this isn’t football, it’s human life and death. I also don’t get why the Hard Right side with Israel and the Hard Left with Palestine. or indeed that the Hard Right are more sympathic to Putin’s war on Ukraine and everyone else solidly backs Ukraine, it just feeds into more extremism. In Wales people have been so incensed that they are taking things out on the Jewish and Muslim communities in Wales. This just makes the conflict worse for everybody. I know decent Russian, Jewish and people from the Levant, it’s not these people’s that are to blame for this, but people don’t think it through.

Extemism isn’t helpful, it doesn’t resolve conflict. You need to instead work on solutions, because they exist or can be found. To do that you need to understand why there is a conflict and what will end that conflict and those answers don’t come from a gut feeling, a political principle or “common sense” they are complicated.

Imperial Measures

I think there was some sort of annoucement this week about Imperial measures by the UK government as one of them so-called ‘Brexit benefits’ and there has been the usual fuss on Social Media. ‘Brexit benefits’ like blue passports or crown symbols on pint glasses, changes that have zero effect on the economy or our everyday lives. They further stoke the division between the hard right empire nostalgia Nationalists and the younger generation scorning another weird set of odd peculiarities of the white old Gammons. The really bizarre bit of all this is that all these things could have been done whilst the UK was an EU member, the UK simply chose not to, they are not Brexit benefits at all, but things the UK could have done anyway without leaving the Single Market.

Yet, in a way it isn’t in this case. I am actually an advocate of Imperial Measurements, I grew up with them, I still cook using Imperial Measures and still think in Imperial in domestic matters. However I can quite see the point that Imperial isn’t of any use until that is you learn it and I understand why it is lumped in with criticism of blue passports, crown symbols, deporting black people, or whatever it is these right wing nutters actually want.

I was very privileged to have grown up with the Imperial system and also to be taught the Metric system at school (albeit using old Maths books written in Imperial) and we had a mathematician as Headmaster who thought it useful for us to learn maths using different base systems and so not restricted in our thinking to only using base 10. I’m a dual system perosn. To me the two systems are just that, two different systems. One works better for some things and vice versa. My generation learned both well, as we had to convert everything back into Imperial for when we talked with our uncles and nans.

The issue really comes down to trade, trade requires regulation, for both parties to accept a common weights and measures system, so traded goods can be verified to be the length or weight that the seller claims tham to be. The Metric system works really well for this as it is really easy as everything can be split into thousands, hundreds and tens. It is used in Science as science looks at tiny picolitre samples and then oceans at the ecosystem scale. The Metric system is great for this, no conversions are necessary.

However, once a product reaches a shop and an individual consumer wants to buy a piece of say, cheese, it becomes clumsy. One gram of cheese is a tiny mouthful and a kilogram is a huge piece of cheese, neither useful quantities for buying cheese for a family, pounds and ounces come into their own, whether you buy 6 or 7 ounces of cheese makes a difference. one ounce is 28.3495 grams and far too precise for domestic recipes, so you often see 25g or 30g used in recipes, which is a little fussy. In older recipe books you will see things like ‘a good ounce of butter’ or just over an ounce, or measure an ounce but be generous. For baking this makes much more sense, it is numbers at a more human scale.

This is how the Imperial system developed over centuries of human existence, horses height is measured in hands (4″, 4 inches, about 10cm) because a human hand is roughly 4″ wide. This measure is just used for horses. Fathoms measure depth, One fathom is 6′, 6 feet (180cm) because depth was measured by dropping a weighted rope off the side of the boat and rope was gathered by men who when gathering rope around outstreched arms is roughly 6′ or a fathom, so you could guesstimate depth if you didn’t have a specially knotted rope to hand. Basically in imperial you use the measuring system specifically designed for the job you do, you don’t have to learn all the obscure units at once, just the ones you use. A mile (1.6km) is comprised of 1760 yards (the distance you walk in a leisurely 20 minutes) A yard (just under a metre) is comprised of 6 feet (30cm) each made up of 12 inches (2.5cm). “A metre measures 3 foot 3 [inches], it’s longer than a yard you see” I remember hearing older members of my family uttering this under their breaths as they tried to understand Metric labelling!

So if you are looking at small things all you need be concerned with is inches, things in your room, you think about feet, then when you leave the house you start with yards but then move onto miles. You use the scale that fits the job. You never have to think about how much fuel it would take to drive your car across your kitchen. Well you could convert miles per gallon into inches per gallon, but now we’re talking about comparing big things with small things and no longer at a human scale and Metric is so better for that, well provided you are careful to count your zeros carefully.

Dual systems, having a choice of tool is to me a good thing. It’s the same with languages, being able to speak two languages is better than one. I speak Welsh and English and bi-lingual speakers will often say things like ‘Ymddiheuro fydd o’n hawddach i esbonio yn yr Saesneg’ [Apologies it will be easier to explain in English] , and sometimes the other way around. Two systems are better than one, they make life easier, but and it is a big but, if and only if both parties have learned to speak the language of both systems.

However I think almost everyone a few years younger than I will only have been taught the Metric system at school and they live perfectally fine lives with it and are not really prevented from doing anything. The UK government chose amost sole use of the Metric system some generations ago now (although blamed the EC for it at the time), all the EC said was that machines need to display Metric quantities and prices must be displayed in Metric, they never said the UK couldn’t continue to dual system, the UK chose that. It is personally annoying, when I pop into the cheese shop, I still ask for “8oz [ounces] of your lovely Swaledale please” [Swaledale is possibly my favourite cheese] and in recent years younger staff have been clueless “No problem, just over 200 grams” and we’ve been fine. For me I can look at a piece of cheese and see how many ounces it is, I can’t do that with grams, they are not at a human scale.

I don’t know what Boris Johnson’s mad crazy government intends exactly with the Imperial system change. Teaching the system isn’t such a bad idea: Learn that there are more than one way of measuring things, the history of weights and measures (including why we have months and why we find bones marked 30 times, think about it if you don’t know the answer), Doing sums not in base 10 [I suspect not many computer programmers use binary these days, but useful nonetheless]. A couple of fun interesting valuable lessons I would imagine, but please, please not what I had to do at school: Convert the quantities in the textbook into Metric [which was often the hard bit], now do the sum that you’ve been taught how to do today, then to check you’ve done it right, convert the answer back into Imperial, so you can check it against the answers in the back of the book; I think I had a fairly unique experience with maths at school and yes we did wonder if it wouldn’t have just been easier to do the whole sum in Imperial!

Sorry for the rant, I just see so much criticism of the Imperial system by people who don’t understand it or have ever used it. It’s annoying as this is exactly the same argument they often use against the Brexiteers. I also get criticism of the Welsh language from monoglot English speakers who don’t understand the advantages of speaking two languages. Basically I just despise people expressing strong opinions on things people don’t understand. It is perhaps the disease of the 21st century.

Wales and Ukraine

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is now in it’s third month and Putin’s forces have switched focus to the Donbas. Yet this horrific war continues and Putin’s propaganda machine keeps belting out it’s misinformation on Russian media. I had a look at what is being said last night and the narrative that Russian speakers have been subject to a vicious ethnic campaign authorised by the Ukraine regime and that this terrible war is justified on the basis on this supposed persecution. It’s scarcely credible, after the annexation of Crimea, ethnic tensions appeared in the Donbas, supported and perhaps fomented by Putin. It is far more credible that Putin created this situation to breate the justification for this war. i.e That Putin had to invade Ukraine to resolve the problem created by Putin himself. It seems Putin really doesn’t like Ukraine.

Back in February a Welsh politician was expressing solidarity with the people of Ukraine. In short he was saying that Wales and Ukraine have a lot in common and as such our hearts go out to the people of Ukraine. However he was then attacked by members of the current UK regime, trying to make some political point scoring out of how it is crass to compare a nation at peace with one at war, all part of the UK regimes muscular unionism agenda.

Whilst war rages in Europe tensions within the UK should not be at the forefront of our minds. However I think this is worth exploring as an attempt to understand the mindset of Putin and how his propoganda is being successful with those Russians who do not actively seek alternative media and get all their news via state broadcasters in Russia as indeed most Britons do.

If you take a look back into Welsh history over the last thousand years or so you will find a Wales largely dominated and exploited by it’s vastly bigger neighbour, England, militarily, cultually, economically and linguistically. Yet as in the words of Dafydd Iwan’s most famous song: “Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth, Rwy ni’n yma o hyd” [In spite of everyone and everything, we are still here]: Wales is still proud of itself, of it’s culture, it’s heritage, it’s language and having a red dragon on it’s flag.

When the Welsh see on our screens another culture being dominated and attacked by it’s bigger neighbour, we almost instinctively reach out to the people of Ukraine, we just get it, we know what being ignored and devalued feels like. Wales and Ukraine both have rich traditions of folk choirs for example. I’ve recently discovered the beauty of Banduka choirs, which stir the soul much like Cerdd Dant does here in Wales.

Cerdd Dant

A Banduka Choir

Throughout our history there have been those in England, especially those with hard right views, that view Welsh culture and it’s language as having no value, which has similarities to suppression of cultural traditions in the Soviet Union. Keeping such traditions alive has and continues to be a struggle and they would benefit hugely without intereference from outside from people who don’t understand the culture and interfere first rather than take an interest in it. The issue is really with the right wing UK ruling class, the Tories, because there worldview is all about being on the winning side. To them it is absurd to support something like Welsh culture when it has clearly lost the battle across history with the Anglo-Saxon culture, the English, so why would the Welsh seek to be themselves when they could simply join the winning side. It’s a fundamentally different worldview, that clashes with a more inclusive sense of Welshness.

Cultures become integrated over time, for most of us in the UK we have at least two identities, a Welshness and a Britishness, or an Englishness and a Britishness. Many Welsh people find lives for themselves living in England and many English people come to Wales to live, we work together, sing songs together, marry each other and other wise are two nations at peace who are not bothered by any cultural quirks of the other country and are generally supportive because we share things in common. People adopt their own personal identity forged by their personal and family history, England, or the UK ruling class has long stopped trying to eradicate our language yet largely remains dismisive of the Welsh language. Perhaps very much like the situation was between Ukraine and Russia, where Ukraine has it’s own language that is closely related to the Russian language. Why would anyone hate their neighbours when they are our brothers and sisters?

It is surprisingly easy to break this freindly relationship. There is a whole rhetorical technique for doing so. You focus attention on and magnify any discord. In Wales on an almost daily basis face trolling by those who say that teaching the children of Wales both our languages, Welsh and English is somehow wrong or that the Welsh are very rude because ‘they all switched to speaking Welsh when we came into the pub’. There is no logic to these arguments, they are and have been long refuted, yet those on the far right keep bringing them up amd we keep trying to ignore such trolling. Yet we’ve also seen how the media has allowed refuted arguments and downright lies to be repeated on our screens until they are believed. Hitler acheived it in Germany in the 1930s and we saw it again in the UK’s Brexit campaign and in the election of Trump in the USA. Truth and freindship towards our fellow human beings is quite easily undone.

Is it a credible idea that a regime in England could decide to start a campaign suggesting that there is a percieved bias against English only speakers in Wales [there are those who tout this idea frequently], leading to perhaps an annexation of a part of Wales which has come to have a significantly ‘English’ population, say Monmouthshire, which then leads on to a full blown invasion of Wales citing tensions created in Wales by the UK regimes anti-Welsh policy, leading to a ban on use of the Welsh langauge and Welsh cultural traditions again and install a pro right wing, pro-England regime to administer Wales. A few months ago this idea would have been laughable, but this is exactly what we’ve seen happening in Ukraine.

The idea that something like hatred exists from one culture to another is largely completely non-existent aside from perhaps soem light-hearted jokes on match days in the football or rugby: Canada does not hate the US, the English do not hate the French, New Zealanders do not hate Australians, the Welsh do not hate the English and Ukrainians do not hate Russians. However there is always a tiny tiny minority of nutty ethno-nationalists who desperately find some grievance, perhaps based on a misinterpretation of something that happened say 700 years ago that is focussed upon. This is then fed into the media until it is believed as it is all everyone is talking about, all they see in their screens. It may simply the case that one regrettable murder from one of these deluded nutters can make people believe that those of another culture actually hate them can then be a justification for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. We had all hoped that such things were consigned to European history books and not played out in Europe in 2022.

A Trip to Planet Antiwoke

Let me take you on a trip to the Anti-Woke world. It’s a world I don’t really understand and one I’d like to explore. What strange beasties live there, how does their soceity work? What do they do for work? What are their value systems?

Firstly some definitions. what is this concept of ‘Woke’ we hear so much about these days. The simple definition is “Awake to the injustices of society”. So to be Anti-Woke is to want to sleep, to be ignorant to the injustices of society. Why would anyone want to be Anti-Woke?

Perhaps simply asking this question defines me as being a ‘Woke’ person. To be a member of the liberal educated section of society. Maybe it’s those of us that like asking questions: How does this work? Why are things like this? What would happen if we changed this or took that away? We are the kids who wanted to go away to university, to learn new things to gain new experiences to explore for the sake of exploration. We are the kids who kept pestering our mams and dads with questions, long past their ability to answer them.

Maybe it’s how we deal with unknowns. When we encounter an unknown, we almost straight away want to understand it. When we first hear about thinsg like racism, modern monetary theory, transsexuality, climate change, our response is to want to find out more about it, to ask questions, find out what the alternatives and solutions are, Even feel pangs of guilt for being ignorant about something.

As a teenager I was obsessed with Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy”, the title suggested help in understanding the crazy world I was growing up in. Which is kind of what the book does, which is why I liked it. In this book there is something called ‘The Total Perspective Vortex’ a machine which you enter and are suddenly presented with the entire sum of knowledge of the universe and you and your importance as an individual within it, as an infinitely small dot within another infinitely small insignificant dot. It leaves everyone who leaves it mad… apart from one Zaphod Beeblebrox, because ‘I’m President of the Galaxy, baby”. Maybe Zaphod is simply President of the Antiwoke world.

The thing about being curious and having a limited life span is that it is not possible to know everything, to have read every book, to find every answer. Eventually it’s time for bed or you won’t be able to concentrate on anything tomorrow. You have to go about life, getting food, paying your bills, doing what your body needs to stay healthy enough to find the time to read more books, to find more answers. What happens if you don’t want to do that, to not be endlessly asking questions, to relax, chill out, to not be bothered about not knowing the answer? Arguable this is the function of religion, to help us find peace in a confusing bewildering world. The sense of, ‘We can deal with some of these things and leave the rest to God’. Except now religion is playing no part in it, there is no philosophical guidance to ‘How to be ignorant’. Welcome to the world of Antiwoke.

I was a vegetarian for fifteen years and am now fussy about what meat I eat. I have thought a lot about where my food comes from and done some research. I was in the pub and we were talking about eating fish and a friend said to me “I love eating fish, but I hate it when they leave the heads on, I can’t eat it then” The why was because it reminded him that this was an animal that was once alive, killed just so he could eat it. So rather than understand where the fish came from, make agonising decisions about whether I am happy to eat this particular fish knowing exactly where it came from, he simply chose to be ignorant of all that, so he could just enjoy eating fish in a temporary bubble of ignorance.

So, really, there does seem to be some justification for being ignorant. Moral qualms can be eased by being in the majority, most people do eat fish. Questions can be left for the experts to work out. We live in a complex society where it’s impossible for individuals to know everything. It’s why societies have specialists. We have doctors to spend years strudying medicine to help us when we get ill. We have lawyers who spend years studying our legal system. We have scientists working out how the universe works. Really, we have an option to accept that there is no point thinking about a specialist subject as there are people who are already way ahead of us in studying it. So why not spend out free time doing things we enjoy, helping other people, doing things that make us happy and not worry about the questions?

I have a postgraduate degree. Whilst I was studying for that I had the strangest sensation. I was asking questions and suddenly there were no answers, no books or research articles with those answers in. I spoke to my professor, he said something like ‘Well done, you have reached the limit of human knowledge in this area, you are now a scientist… it’s just our lab and a few others around the world. so maybe 20-30 people”. So soon? No-one has worked this bit out yet? The dawning of understanding of actually how little science actually knows and understands about the world is kind of scary and that we then provide expert advice based on what little we know, that humanity carries on wrecking the planet whilst knowing so little about it.

I was in a Zoom Webinar this afternoon with some distinguished scientists we were putting questions to. The most common answers were ‘I don’t know’ or ‘My hunch is X but no-one has done the work on this yet”. I have worked in some “real world” jobs, but there it seems ‘I don’t know’ is not an acceptable answer, you need to have an answer of some sort. As human beings we kind of don’t like not knowing the answers to things, yet in science it is something we have all learned to do and accept. Having access to a scientific lab and to be able to answer your own questions is fantastic, but also tinged with the frustration of having to ignore some lines of enquiry as you have to restrict yourself to sticking to what your funding is for. We know we cannot answer all our questions or know everything, we have to accept ignorance, that we ‘don’t know’. I suppose scientists accept this state of affairs through the priviledge of being the world experts in some tiny bit of science, that most people don’t even think about. Like the fish eater, we embrace ignorance as part of the job.

Yet, this is not the world of Anti-woke, this is merely the Big Bang Burger Chef we’ve pulled into for light refreshments on the way. Antiwoke is a world of choosing ignorance seemingly without a reason for doing so. A world of England football supporters booing their own players for expressing solidarity for those who suffer racism. A world of ‘I’m not racist and deplore those who are, but there is just too much focus on anti-racism these days, that is what I’m objecting to” It’s ignorance as a cultural identity. A reaction against those clever sods who like finding the answers to things. a reaction against being told what to do and what to think.

And I do get that. I’m quite happy to be told I’m wrong, because being wrong is scientifically very useful and maybe non scientists haven’t got used to being wrong so much. A thousand dead ends have to be explored until the path to a solution can be found. However being told that how I think is wrong is much deeper. It’s a criticism that draws on our deepest most primeval fears, of monsters under the bed. Perhaps because the gap between experts and your average chap on the street is so large that a genuine resentment has sunk in. We live in a world where disparity in incomes and education has grown and grown and perhaps a backlash is forming. Expertise, specialism, even science itself is percieved as part of this “do-gooders telling adults how to behave”.

During Brexit we had government ministers saying “We’ve had enough of experts”. During the Covid pandemic scientific advice has been ignored by politicians. Perhaps the difference is the scientists know they are ignorant and the those on Antiwoke don’t know what they don’t know? I think it’s also Social Conservatism, valuing tradition, anything new is by default rejected. A world where value is placed on opposite sex relationships, so when same sex marriage comes out into general society it supposedly diminishes that special status of heterosexual relationships. People convince themselves that their holy books tells them this, it’s not actually there in the text, people just believe someone interpretastion of the text. It seem to take away a pillar that holds up the society of Antiwoke, the traditions that bind us together, so we don’t all go mad from not knowing enough about the world.

As scientists, we’d love to cure cancer, stop climate change, find a way to get rid of taxes, build spaceships to travel beyond the solar system, but we can’t do that in one go. We have to take lots of tiny little steps and sometimes a few paces backwards. Science is kind of telling people, ‘Look there is no magic lozenge we can produce in our lab, you lot just have to stop flying in aeroplanes, eat less meat, shut up and respect footballers kneeling, accept that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are oafish egotists who should not be even near a position of authority, wash your hands, wear a mask’. The perception that liberal educated people are treating everyone else like spoilt children is real and as if we were a single all-powerful being.

And who created climate change and racism in the first place. It was the educated elite of earlier generations, developing technologies they expected would be replaced by something better long before they started causing damage to the planet. On the world of Antiwoke is a perception that the ‘elite’ are ordering the citizens of Antiwoke to fix the problems created by another elite. “Sort your own problems out” as if todays scientists are somehow responsible for the choices of the long dead.

The people of Antiwoke see a world of them and us, as the Woke world as one speaking with one voice, through a Giant loud-hailer suspended by Art in the atmosphere. They accept ignorance as an integral part of their culture to be defended and do not see that science is not one thing, but lots of different people all working on completely separate little problems, all hoping to persuade the decision making people that their problem is a little bit more desereving of funding than something else. A world where those decision makers are concerned about keeping their university going, even if it means investigating the wrong things or reducing research output to reduce costs.

On Antiwoke it all comes across as one thing, Simply it feels like one voice saying you should be doing this, a list of thousands and thousands of rules, just to keep going, just to survive. The people of Antiwoke just want their freedom to keep their traditions going, to not to be told what to do all the time.

At the very core of the planet AntiWoke, is a desire to just get on with getting along, to ignore the endless rules for this and that which seem to stop people being able to earn enough to get by.

Slartibartfast: On this new Earth they’ve given me Africa to do. So I’m doing it with all fjords again, I think it gives a nice Baroque feel to a continent, but ‘oh no they say, not equatorial enough’. Science has achieved some wonderful things. But I’d far rather be happy than right anyday

Arthur Dent: That’s a terrible philosophy.

Slartibartfast: Is it? I’m sorry I’m a bit out of touch, I have been asleep for 5 million years you know

[Remembered from ‘Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ by Douglas Adams]

English Nationalism: A Tale of Two Nations

On Twitter today I saw a tweet which went like this:

Scottish Nationalism Good, Welsh Nationalism Good, Irish Nationalism Good, English Nationalism Bad, Why is England the exception?

The answer is that it isn’t. If we re-frame the question:

Scottish Nationalism Good, Welsh Nationalism Good, Irish Nationalism Good, English Nationalism Good, British Nationalism Bad.

There is then a clear difference, in that the first four are not really nationalism whereas the last is, if we define Nationalism as the belief that a nation is superior to other nations and thus is justified in exploited other inferior nations.

The difference is that these first four national movements include everyone in that nation, whether they identify with that nation or not. They seek fairness and a better political arrangement to allow innovation, investment  and economic development of infrastructure and for their nations to not be ignored. Whereas the true nationalism only serves the elite that identify as British Nationalists to the detriment of everyone else in Britain, allowing policies of repression towards those that don’t fit this narrow definition of “British”.

I think that English Nationalism struggles for it’s voice to be heard, because people find it challenging to differentiate itself from British Nationalism, which is racist and often the Nationalists have adopted both the English and British flags and some identify as English Nationalists. I should point out here that this splitting is in itself complicated, as you can identify as British and not be a British Nationalist, it’s this issue which makes the differentiation unclear.

I grew up in rural Powys, in British Wales and whilst most people from there identify as Welsh, they often share the views of British Nationalists, this certainly doesn’t make them bad people, but they are those that divide the people of Britain (the Britons) into them and us. An issue for the Welsh national movement is that we need the support of these people, but their British Nationalism holds them back from embracing the national movement. It is these people who value conformism and that is a very difficult habit to break, which I talked about in my last weblog.

I feel I could have very easily been one of these British Nationalists as it was part of the culture I grew up in. I just didn’t fit in and in being so kind of picked out the bits that made sense and discarded the rest. It was only through being different and an outsider that made me ask lots of questions, rather than accept what was around me as gospel.

What are these specific things you need to be a member of the British Nationalists beyond valuing conformity. You need to be white, you need to be from a Christian background (actual belief in Christianity isn’t important), you need to be a monolingual English speaker, you must have a distrust of intellectuals, you must not value the arts, you must regard those not in the club as inferior, you must not question authority. Essentially it isn’t merely valuing conformity, it’s being sceptical of questioning or exploring of issues.

When I was at school in a history lesson we were looking at the Cuban missile crisis. One of our activities was to have a mock debate, the class was split between pretending to be representatives of the USA and the USSR. I ended up on the USSR side and made that case as part of the activity. I was pretty much the only one who seemed to understand the logic of the USSR position, indeed a friend of mine admitted they they could not have done what I had just done, I think because it was somehow unpatriotic as the British position was to support the USA, even to the point of not trying to at least understand the other side. So, if you are unable to look at both sides of an issue, how on Earth are you supposed to get to the truth?

It’s ridiculous, how some people are now wary of talking about the Welsh language to me, now that I am a speaker of it. I’ve crossed that divide, there is no problem and it’s quite a nice place to be thanks.

I think it is this lack of questioning that is the mark of the British Nationalists, it explains how such awful politicians as Boris Johnson could have “won” the 2019 UK general election. For example, if you point out how awful it is that food bank use has risen so much in the UK, when there had been no need for such things relatively recently as a terrible development, you get the reply along the lines of “These people whilst perhaps deserving our pity are at fault for getting themselves into that position as people like us wouldn’t” When you point out examples of people who got there by bad luck or being made redundant, they can be dismissed as exceptions!

It is frightening, because when I was young I read the history books there were around and they very heavily promote the idea of British history as glorious and entirely ignore the damage that British policy has done to parts of the world. That accepting that interpretation is patriotic and any questioning makes you instantly ‘the enemy’. The idea that you base your belief system on a lie and adopt a position of not questioning anything is very scary indeed.

How can we bring across people from British Nationalism to the national movements of the nations of Britain? The UK has the highest  inequality in Europe, some of the most expensive housing and transport and is an unproductive and innovation averse economy that is falling behind, when there is no need for it to be.

Wales is not a poor country that couldn’t stand on it’s own two feet without the “help” of the “British elite”, we can afford a National Health Service, free education, affordable decent housing and a coordinated transport infrastructure. The UK is just wedded to the Tory party of not questioning why things are not going well and must, as always lay the blame on others, those who are not British Nationalists.

Brexit as framed as a perverse patriotism is causing unnecessary damage. Only yesterday there were anti-Semitic activity in London. In general there seem to be increases in racism, homophobia and even attacks on people for speaking Welsh.

The portents for 2020 in the UK are not good. Brexit seems to have allowed the nasty Nationalists to feel legitimised by the Brexit votes and all these repressed concerns about our society come out not directed at the useless Tories in charge, but at those who do not share this frankly bizarre adherence to not questioning authority, be they Welsh, Scottish, Irish, English, Black, Catholic, LGBTQ+, Jewish, Muslim, from Mainland Europe, Africa, or Outer Space. Why value being in this British Nationalist minority and ignore the great potential of all the people of Britain? It’s just very disturbing and there seems no clear way of getting people to come together as our nations for the greater good, to open minds and get people to think about these things.

Perhaps the question now is what do we want Britain to be? The Britain of national movements to unite everyone together to make things better or the Brexit if British Nationalism that divides us into us and them. Do we want to go down the path of 1930s Germany that my grandfather took up arms against or be nations progressing together to make a better world? Remember that only 36% of Wales voted for Boris Johnson’s Brexit, or 44% of the UK as a whole. We are the 56%, we can do this.

 

 

 

A March in Cardiff

On the 11th of May 2019, a bright spring day, there was a march for independence for Wales in the centre of Cardiff, Wales capital city, organised by All Under One Banner and I was part of some two thousand people calling for independence for Wales.

For me it was the most surreal march I’ve ever been on because Welsh independence is a cause I’ve believed ever since I came to understand politics and where I stood within it. I’ve been an outsider, in a small minority in so many things and there had never been quite enough people passionate enough to get this thing going, but it happened and it was so life affirming, to be surrounded by a huge crowd of people who felt pretty much the same way on positive solution to a political issue, rather than most political demonstrations being against particular things.

Having always been in the Welsh Indy bubble has been a fairly lonely place. Most of the time, over the years I’ve been called upon to defend this idea and  to make the arguments for it and no-one has yet offered a better solution. I’ve always been pretty flummoxed as to why there wasn’t more support for this principle. However in recent times support for independence has been growing, particularly in the context of Scotland narrowly losing their 1st independence referendum. and I’ve felt less alone

I went to the march on my own as I was sure of seeing many familiar faces, which I did: I am culturally ‘middle class’ and been learning to speak Welsh for the past three years. However there were other sorts of people there, from all across Wales, from Cardiff and the Valleys but also bus loads of people from all across Wales. That is what is wonderful about going on protest marches to meet people who are different to you, yet have come to share some of the same conclusions. How has this happened in recent times?

I grew up under Thatcherism, I’ve lived under it all my adult life. I don’t like things getting worse, not doing anything about the problems in our society and tolerating decline. Yet after every UK election we’ve had Thatcherite governments, it has seemed inevitable and that there is a paucity of ambition in the UK that keeps voting them in. Now there does seem to be a pivotal moment of real change from the economic crash of 2008 and the subsequent years of austerity where more and more people have seen the cracks in the UK state and then Brexit has highlighted to so many people on the need for a change of direction and how much of a mess UK democracy is. The Brexiteers (establishment [London] City Fat Cats who’ve sold off the UK’s silver to create wealth for themselves and safely placed it off-shore) and their nationalism have used that desire for change to push their Brexit, to divide and rule in exactly the same way the Tories have done.

Perhaps, we can hope that genuine change is coming. To me independence for Wales has always been the solution because my core political belief is in democracy and more importantly bottom-up democracy, from the individual voter not from the political party. Some more people have woken up to this and if this movement keeps growing a new shiny democracy will emerge in Wales and hopefully spread throughout Britain and beyond.

Brexit is not the biggest issue facing Wales. whatever your views on the UK’s relationship with the EU, just changing that relationship is not going to deliver prosperity to Wales or anywhere else, Independence can deliver that, we don’t have to keep exporting the wealth of Wales to the towers of London as has happened down the centuries, we can keep it in Wales to do things like make sure we eliminate poverty at home.

It was just a few hours of singing and talking to new people on a pleasant afternoon in Cardiff, but it can be like each and every day, if only everyone in Wales comes together for a better future. Cymru Rhydd, Ymlaen!

Idea Loyalty

When we are young we cling to safe comforting ideas, in a favourite teddy bear perhaps, where a simple love is a soft cocoon away from the confusing ideas of the wider world. We know that teddy will always love us because we have total control over that relationship as it exists in our imaginations, created by us. That relationship progresses, it grows more complex, we deepen those ties within our own heads.

Such idea loyalty is later found in other areas of life. The things that we like, that give us comfort are found in various aspects of our lives, but unlike the teddy bear these relationships exist with entities outside of ourselves, we decide to be loyal or to trust things outside of ourselves. That we do this so readily when those things may not be so trustworthy is really quite remarkable. Yet that loyalty persists.

For example, when we hear a piece of music for the first time, we know that we like that particular piece of music, but may not be entirely sure why, yet we know we like it. It is only with subsequent listenings that we delve deeper and discover why we like that piece of music, we have a relationship with that piece of music.

It’s the same type of thing with attraction. Sometimes we meet people and just instantly like them. As we get to know them we learn why we like them and have a sense of loyalty towards them. Even if we lose contact with that person, or don’t listen to a piece of music anymore, when their name crops up we instantly have warm feelings of fondness, even to sometimes awful pieces of trashy pop music that formed part of our lives when we were young.

We develop idea loyalty. I believe it is partly that we see something of ourselves in that piece of music or that other person that resonates with how we think. Such things engage our interest because whilst they are like us they are also different. The interest is perhaps partly why they are different, what is that subtle difference in worldview.

Politics is another example of this phenomena. Those of us who go through the whole internal debate of working out what our own political philosophy and position is, often tends to resonate with that first encounter with politics. We instantly have a reaction in support of or against something which lick starts that journey. Once this process is complete, we don’t have to think about the politics anymore we know our own position. We have idea loyalty to a particular set of beliefs. It is kind of self-affirming to spend time socialising with people who think the same way, to share a common bond with, it gives us self-confidence.

Of course if we spend too much time on the familiar, with things that are close to who we are, we get bored. It is the things that are different than we enjoy exploring. Yet those familiar things don’t change, we always like the same music, the same people, the same ideas. I sometimes think this is strange, how I don’t come to dislike things I once liked and find that I now like completely different things. Perhaps what we seek as human beings is the right balance of centring ourselves with things that confirm ourselves as valid individuals with the desire to explore the new and unfamiliar. And of course we are all different and have different cravings for adventure into the unknown. This sense is perhaps summed up by how we yearn to go and visit new places and do new things, yet at whilst we are there we crave coming home, there is no perfect point to be at.

However, often we struggle to find this balance, the world often doesn’t allow us to make this process easy. I have suffered from anxiety and perhaps I was partly that way as I didn’t fit in, I didn’t get enough of the comfort of the familiar. Indeed it is those who are different, who don’t fit in who tend to suffer more from anxiety. Such people struggle to find enough people like them, they don’t get enough of the home time to develop confidence to go out and explore as they constantly seek the comfort blanket where none surrounds them.

When I was growing up I had this sense from being in a family and friends who had very different political ideals to my own, different tastes in music and worldview in general. I left home and found some people who were a lot more like me, yet to be with them i had to live in an unfamiliar environment of big cities outside of Wales. In such a situation I could only grasp hold of some of my roots and never all of them at the same time. I’ve also never lived long enough somewhere that felt like home long enough for those roots to deepen and grow to give me the confidence to fly further from home to satisfy my cravings to explore.

I do believe that there are higher rates of mental illness because our society fails top provide opportunities for people to find the balance they need. Most of humanity’s history was spent living in small villages. Where the diverse people of the village enabled people to find their place within that society and it’s economy. The great pushes of modern capitalism seem to force a particular way of ding things upon people, to compete to be at the centre of very large groupings of people. It seems like a society based on certain type of people who like conforming. whereas those people who are different who don’t conform struggle with the abnegation such large societies seem to demand and there seem to be fewer opportunities to find places on the fringes in a globalised world. The stress seems to be on rewarding those with the ability to be central to the one prevalent worldview and that doesn’t suit everybody, whom have idea loyalty to a different set of beliefs.

 

Homes and Homelessness

I am continually torn in doing this blog. One the one hand I feel I write too much about politics, when I could be writing about much more interesting things and on the other I just feel continual rage about how inept UK politics is and perhaps need somewhere to vent my spleen quite regularly.

I have written quite a lot about Brexit, largely as I feel it is symptomatic of the core problem at the heart of Britain, our failed political establishment. For it is not only Brexit. The thing that gets me more upset and angry is the issue of homelessness. Yesterday some Tory twerp talked about how 19th century ‘vagrancy’ laws should be revived to move away the homeless from the streets of Windsor so the UK doesn’t reveal to the world how, well, rubbish we are to the world, in not having a decent society, when people  tune in to watch the Royal Wedding from Windsor this summer.

What particularly incensed me was the suggestion that Windsor has ‘attracted’ lots of homeless people due to the higher number of tourists. Obviously, this twerp doesn’t get out much. Every town and city in Britain has a lot more homeless people on the streets than there were. Every day walking through any British town you are repeatedly asked for help. I’ll wager Windsor is a long way from being a special case. Anyway, if there is money to put on anything more than a simple church ceremony for Meghan and Prince Harry, then that money should be spent on housing people. It’s a much bigger issue than Brexit, if only the government would eradicate homelessness we would all be much better off than any possible gains from Brexit. It is simply embarrassing, that homelessness isn’t the number one issue when there is such a crisis and ever increasing numbers of people have to rely on food banks when there are many with plenty of wealth in the UK. And then, even then, the idea is trotted out that people ‘choose’ to be homeless, like sitting in the cold and damp with no money and nothing to do all day is seen as a viable option.  We could all so easily be homeless in Britain: you are unlucky to lose your job, you miss the next months rent payment as the costs of living is so high, few can actually save money for a rainy day, let alone invest and then unless you are lucky enough to have family and friends with a floor for you then you are out on the street. It’s all so unnecessary.

I have tasked myself with trying to understand right wing people and more importantly what possesses people to ever vote for the Tories. Sometimes I appreciate that arguing doesn’t often work. People get set in their thinking and can’t listen to argument. So it is important that we use stories, to make things personal, to establish an emotional revelation. I am a deep thinker, I will have argued to the point of accepting an idea many many times before I believe in it. Yet, one emotional event that makes me feel as though an idea is right, will make a belief stick. It is those moments that have changed my thinking. What worries me is that people perhaps have the emotional resonance without the solidity of the rational arguments first. Or at least not feeling that it is important to check that the emotion has some basis in coherent argument.

Socialism is easy to understand, as it’s a movement to create a better more efficient society. For your home to be more secure, allowing you more time to be creative and give you time and energy to improve things. We all need homes and the better our homes are the better and more productive we are.v Yet now, most of us work away from teh communities we live, we waste time travelling, rather than doing. Okay, think about extreme possibilities, eventually, a socialist society would get to the point where society could regress as too many people take the easy comfortable options and the economy would falter. Surely we should create that society first, no-where in the world or in history has got to that point yet. In any case there are always people who don’t like comfortable options. Too much of anything  is simply a theoretical possibility and one that will generally get dealt with, before it is approached; especially if you have a functional democracy. Pragmatism, and opening eyes to what is going on in the world around you trumps looking for a far off theoretical possibility.

Toryism to me seems to be simply giving up on society, saying that nothing can be done and all we can do is do whatever we can to look after ourselves and immediate family. It’s saying that we would love to help, but all the other people wouldn’t help so it would be somehow morally wrong to help. Somehow these Tories claim to love their country and the people within it, yet they don’t feel they should do their bit too and they pretend to look down upon others. Perhaps the idea is that those who are lucky enough to end up with capital will spend enough of it to help their communities, but this has been shown not to happen, the rich give less proportionally of their disposable income than the poor to help others. To me Toryism is such a self-defeating doctrine. Forcing yourself to subscribe to their odd sets of rules to succeed in their games, to not be yourself to keep a hold of a comfortable income and find a weak excuse for why other people somehow actually choose to be poor. The Tory home is a castle for keeping everyone else out and all the energy is spent on fortifications, rather than building new things. In the 1980s the Tories sold off the council housing, to fund bigger walls for themselves, rather than the good of the economy as a whole. I don’t understand how Tories can justify this.

I am a Welsh nationalist, because I believe in society and the family of communities that makes up Wales, Britain and the world. To make a start improving society again I believe we have to get back to basics; making sure everyone has a home and enough to eat is surely possible in a world that has the technology we now have. To get to the point of things getting better we have to change the way politics is done, because the current system isn’t working; there are homeless people on our streets. So we need genuine democracy. Nation States, like the UK are too big to be governed as a single entity from a centralised establishment. It allows an establishment class to be cut off from ordinary people. The very last thing you want is the decision makers not understanding everyday life and the real economy; we could do with less career politicians who know how to do PR, rather than win arguments. So government needs to be smaller and more accountable. Hence Welsh independence, because Wales isn’t too big, it would be difficult to live in Wales and not have some idea of the issues effecting all the different regions of Wales, whereas in the UK we see decisions made that make things harder for Wales and then Wales get blamed for something it has no control over. Lets awaken the baby Dragon from her slumber, awaiting a home fit for her.

Which brings me to this whole Brexit con. Yes the UK leaving the EU, potentially, theoretically, gives the UK the chance for greater democratic accountability and more opportunities to improve. Yet, that isn’t happening anytime soon, until we get rid of the Tories and embark on genuine reform of democracy. i see Brexit as a wolf in the clothes of democracy. So, why are so many Tories so keen on Brexit, whilst denying any possibility of giving back control to the people of Britain? [where is the clamour for political reform?] It’s a power grab, from the very people who already have too much power. They can divide and rule and run the UK economy into the sewer to further amass capital for themselves. But eventually, all emperors fall. We need to start preparing for when they do fall, rather than wait whilst society crumbles, to start building the homes for a future democracy to live in now. We need to take back control, to re-build politics and our society. We need to re-build Wales, Britain and the world. Eventually we all get sick, our company goes bankrupt or some natural disaster happens. That is why we need society, we need those who were fortunate to have escaped the bad times to be able to help the unlucky, because next time it’s likely be the other way around and you or your kids will need someone able to help.

 

 

Believing in Evolution

There is a substantial difference between knowing something and believing it. Belief is much more powerful as it goes beyond logic and connects with peoples sense of self.

This idea helps make  clear why there is a stigma about mental illness. The anxious person or the depressed person can know that they are ill, that it is possible to not be ill, often the problem is that they don’t believe that they can be well. I suffered from anxiety, there were brief times when I wasn’t anxious, instead of knowing I was well, I believed it was merely a temporary respite. It was when I believed that there was nothing wrong with me, when I believed what I already knew rationally, did I become well. so the mental illness stigma is perhaps because healthy people don’t recognise the difference between knowing something to be true and believing it. Perhaps for the healthy, they believe they are well before they have developed an explanation for why they are well, belief comes before knowledge in this instance.

As a scientist I both know and believe in the theory of evolution. I know, because I have studied, read and observed the evidence and accept evolution as a rational, empirically produced explanation for the diversity of life on Earth. I believe,  because I also accept the scientific process for discovering the laws of the physical universe, I accept the process as a valid way of generating truth.

Many scientists have difficulty understanding why those of religious faith lack a belief in evolution, indeed some of faith have difficulty believing in evolutionary theory. Religious faith is different to simple belief. Belief in God is different to beliefs about the physical universe, because belief perhaps comes before knowledge, rather than coming after knowledge. Religious belief connects to the self, before any empirical process of gathering knowledge. Faith concerns something beyond understanding of relationships in the physical observable universe. As a scientist I believe that it is possible for science to explain what God is, but that humanity may never establish a theory of everything. Sometimes, it is perhaps dangerous or less open to truth if belief comes before knowledge.

It is accepted that such theories as evolution or gravity are true. such truths can be established from raw data acquired from the physical universe. I believed these truths before I became a Christian and I know that there is no conflict between holding these beliefs in addition to religious beliefs, such as God having a role in the creation of the universe. The issue is perhaps that for some people the religious belief is more powerful to themselves than a mere rational piece of knowledge. To the atheist scientist, belief in scientific theory is more powerful than mere knowledge or understanding of religion, often atheists struggle looking beyond mere empirical understanding of the physical universe. To someone of faith, these powerful ideas can make the concept of evolution seem less important and hence less true. Yet people are not robots, they all harbour non-rational thoughts and ideas, the belief of humanists that there is perhaps, simply, that there is a physical explanation for these mental phenomena, but their belief may not be as strong as these less easy to break down logically ideas are not as fully explored, perhaps mentally acknowledged or as strongly believed. No individual person has a fully coherent explanation of themselves or the wider universe, yet every individual is on a journey to discovering truths.

I think I should point out, that I am in no way declaring any superiority for religious faith over atheism. What I am saying is that faith is worthwhile exploring. It is a question of balance, people choose what to invest our mental energies upon, there should be space for rational scientific inquiry as well as reflection on the question of faith.

Fear of Ideas

All people fear new ideas to some extent, a fear of change and the unfamiliar.  Such fears are natural, but often embracing new ideas or ways of thinking can be immensely positive. The familiar, the status quo, seems safe, so why even consider change? Well, sometimes the status quo is bad for people as individuals and wider society. sometimes it is easy to forget that everything is a journey, we can take small cautious steps, we can always turn and go back or in a different direction. Such a steady cautious approach is safe, rather than leaping crazily across to another place, a place that is strange and unknown. Accepting new ideas doesn’t change who you are but can make you a better person, just take small firm steps.

I have written much on this blog about my overcoming anxiety. Making such a change was scary, there was a fear of my personality changing, a change in my values, a change in how I think. I think this was why I rejected, like many other anxious people, the calls of people to just let go of yourself or to just not be anxious, this is taking that giant leap into the unknown. Better advice to the anxious is to take cautious steps, allow people to reflect that the direction they are going in is one they are happy with.

This process of change, of alleviating fear, occurs in many areas of life and realising this, has helped me understand why other people are cautious of other ideas. For example, my becoming a Christian.  When I was young, I lived in a traditional Christian community in rural Wales. My generation were highly sceptical of religion, we regarded it as a load of nonsense. We regarded religion as scary irrationality. Growing up there seemed to be this maniacal street preachers, evangelicals waving their arms around as if possessed by spirit, a seemingly very conservative culture that stifled innovative ideas. Then one day i was exposed to the joy and wonderful music of renaissance polyphony and the choral works of J.S. Bach, this music helped me understand some of the core ideas of Christianity, that they were good, open ideas, that the complexity and suffering of human existence, could be understood as a whole, that it was okay to accept this and that doing things to make the world a better place was a righteous thing to do.. This music led me onto a journey of discovery of the Christian faith and along the way I became a Christian. Becoming a Christian was not scary, it didn’t change how I am, or my other beliefs, it simply helped me become a better person. It has helped me appreciate that there are no easy answers, no single mantra to base your life on, that faith, like anything else is a journey.

Another issue, I am passionate about and  often write about is food. I became a vegetarian at the age of 15 because I became aware that many animals reared for the meat I ate were kept in inside with restricted space, this seemed cruel and wrong on animal welfare grounds. I now ethically source meat, I don’t believe it is wrong to rear animals for meat, but in rearing animals there is a contract that the animals should have a reasonable quality of life and be able to express natural behaviours. What I have come to realise is that there is a wonderful synergy that can be achieved with animals welfare, sustainably looking after agricultural land and the wider environment, sound economics, healthy food and a greater enjoyment in eating. Though it seems there is a fear of changing diet and shopping habits, even with such positive outcomes. Though i appreciate I arrived at this synergy by taking slow steps and consideration of each step. I used to fear that having high animal welfare standards may mean that it was not possible to feed all the humans on the planet by farming in such a way and may cause environmental damage. I was so pleased to realise that this isn’t the case, positive change benefits other areas. My message on food is that only eating meat as a treat and not everyday is healthier, cheaper, more sustainable and maintains animal welfare. Meat from animals that can range freely and are fed in a sustainable way, develops muscle, which makes the meat tastier and increases nutrients in the meat, making it healthier for the animals and the consumers. Rearing animals, working with nature, rather than against it, not only seems better, it is also better economically. So, I would encourage people to ethically source meat and save money by cutting out eating low quality meat in every meal, ultimately it’s cheaper and more enjoyable.

I think the idea of being open to new ideas and ways of being is so important, to better ourselves individually and wider society. However it is important to journey slowly and carefully, keeping our feet firmly on the ground as we do so.

This is why I was upset by the words of Donald Trump this week. Often politicians and other orators need to be regarded cautiously, they appeal to core conventional beliefs of a culture, then can take great leaps into the unknown, without questioning, without scrutiny. using Trump as an example, he states that there is a fear in Western societies of terrorism and in this most people will agree. However then Trump leaps onto blaming Muslims moving into the US as part of the problem, when there is no rational basis for this belief, it simply plays on fear and encourages fear, when fear is the actually the enemy. If Trump was a great expert on the history and politics of the Middle-East, then he may be worth listening to, however Trump himself has stated that he knows little of the history or politics of the Muslim world, thus he is not qualified to make meaningful comment. We are perhaps fortunate in Wales to have a significant Muslim population, there are a part of our communities, our workplaces, so it is clear that they are as decent people as any other sub group. The knowledge that the family down the street are ordinary decent people and are not secretly plotting the overthrow of civilisation, to think that they were would be extreme paranoia. However where there isn’t a normal family living in your locale it is much easier to play on the fears of the unknown.