The power of apocalyptic imaginations

Today I am writing about the apocalyptic visions that propel climate change discourse forward. In my usual random association kind of way, I decided to look up the Metallica song Enter Sandman to give me some background music that would inspire apocalyptic writings. I found on youtube video footage of what looks to be a truly EPIC concert in Moscow in 1991. There is something truly amazing about this and it is making me think of the influence of this music, this band, these performances on things as profound as international relations and domestic politics. The connections are made explicitly in some of the videos, the Russian police, protests, the quest for freedom, rebellion, and the love shown by the people at the concert not only for the band, but for America. I can't help but think how interesting it would be to do a project, interviewing people in places like Moscow about the influence this music had on them during this time period. I know from my own experience living in Iran in the 1990s that Metallica among others was one of the most influential bands. Though they couldn't come there to play, walls were graffittied with their name and privately people were rocking out to them, releasing all that pent up tension and feeling for a moment the sensation of being FREE, of being master of their own destiny, of indulging in the fantasies of breaking free from the oppressive control enacted by the state.

Watching these videos I find myself filled with energy, enthusiasm, joy! There is something so alive about this music, it's not sitting back and taking anything, it's standing up, jumping up! Expressing freedom and power and life in the face of difficulty and danger and threat and death. I wonder if that kind of power and life fire can only be expressed in the face of the threat of the opposite, powerlessness, apathy, disaster and depression. Listening to those guitar riffs I feel those feelings are being confronted full on, goaded out and fully destroyed. Wahaaaay!

Colour Palettes

I am sitting at my desk in the office that I share with other postgrads. It's a beautiful sunny day outside, though very icy and treacherous. In the morning, all the plants, leaves, blades of grass, twigs, were frosted, as though they had been lightly dusted with icing sugar. The sky is clear and if I turn my head I can see the deep blue sea. In front of me, behind my computer and my desk covered in papers and books, is my corkboard which I have decorated with photographs. My selection of pictures is colourful and quite simple, firey autumn leaves, a red sunset, a pink sky reflected on the wet sand of a beach, green trees, a yellow wall in front of which is a display of rustic food... Daubs of bright colour, simple, beautiful shapes, all outside. The photos lift my spirits and give me something to look at which I find inspiring and calming at the same time. My eyes seem to find the photo that reflects the colour I need an infusion of, bright red and orange for a little fireiness, soothing blues and greens for some calm...

I remember reading a book when I was a child about a man who had had a near death experience, and once he came out of it he decided to set up a centre for colour therapy, where people could come and go into different coloured rooms to achieve different states of mind. I think that would be a fun experiment, to see the effect that different colours had on people. I've heard that people's favourite colours say a lot about their personalities as well, even that people have different coloured souls :-) . I wonder how the same colour might influence different people differently.

Do you have a favourite colour? Why do you like it? Do you find you surround yourself with things of a particular colour? Like to dress in certain colours?

Momentum

I don't know what this blog post is going to be about yet because I'm trying something new. My normal process with this has been to have an idea about something, and then spend a little time constructing a post about it. To that effect, I have several unfinished posts in process. I have started writing about the idea of 'being authentic' or getting in touch with your authentic self. That was inspired by an article I read but I had so much to say about it that the post has never been finished. Then I started writing about food and drink, a series called 'Eat, Drink and Be Merry' about good food, bad food, too much food, too much drink, moderation and so on. Then I thought that sounded really preachy and pretentious so I decided not to post it. Then I started writing about women in the modern world and choices about whether to have a family or not, whether to pursue a full-time career and try to progress like men do or whether to seek out flexible or part-time working in order to fit it in with family life... That didn't get finished either.

There's a pretty clear pattern in other words, things I've started and not finished. The same thing could be seen in my academic work. I have folders full of documents that I have begun writing and never finished. And likewise with creative writing, I start writing stories, developing characters, and then just abandon them and move on to something else.

I've always envied people who throw themselves into things with full attention and focus, and keep going with that thing until it's done to the best of their ability. Instead I flit like a butterfly from one thing to the next, never fully paying attention to the thing at hand because my mind is all over the place. Yesterday in one of my tutorials (I teach small groups of first year undergraduates) we were discussing the research process. One of the things they have to do is interview a member of staff about their research. They were expressing surprise at how specific you have to get at the PhD level of research and saying that they'd have a hard time being that focused on something so specific. I was thinking: "no kidding!" I've often wondered if it actually takes that first kind of person, the really focused, detail-oriented type to do a PhD, or if there is in fact room for the dabbler type like me. One thing that I find heartening in this respect though is the pace at which I move. In other words, slowly (except when shooting down a zip line and busting up my knee). I think the effect of the fact that I move slowly is that things seem to go by really fast. Therefore, the initially interminable-seeming 3-4 years of a PhD actually will not seem that long to me. Especially since there are only two years left! I think it's going to go by really fast and in that respect, hopefully I won't significantly lose focus again over the course of that time (I've already done it once).

I think there are certain time biases built into our society. For instance, if you are an early riser and get to work early in the morning, that gets respect. Sleeping late is seen to be lazy, even if the person is more of a night person and likes to work late into the quiet of the night. There are also certain paces at which we are meant to do things, which are also affected by culture, social class etc. Like having children for instance, recently there was a girl of 10 who had a baby much to the shock of the British middle class, to which 30 is probably a pretty average age for procreating, which would be seen as shocking to the Roma people to which the 10-year-old girl belonged.

On the subject of socio-cultural perceptions of time, RSA has made a nice little video of a book written about this:

One of the articles I was going to post regarding women was about women in the Netherlands and their attitude towards work. In short, rather than wishing to compete at a level with men, and to relentlessly climb the career ladder, they valued being able to work, but in a more casual way, so that they could still invest much of their time into their lives outside work, with friends and family. The article compared this attitude with a more North American attitude wherein women are in fierce competition with their male counterparts and wish to be treated in the same way and climb the career ladder in the same way too. This modern expression of feminism as it were has the flipside of being potentially really hard on women to the extent that many may not wish to participate in careers to this level and would prefer a more flexible and balanced, or slower-paced life. There is so much pressure to be the superwoman with a high-flying career as well as a perfect homelife, perfect body, perfect children, perfect everything...

I think this TV ad sums up the attitude pretty well:

We are being told all kinds of things by society all the time. Not just by advertising on TV, but also through our peer groups, our families, through our work colleagues, through products that are created (ready meals for busy families anyone?), through the options that are offered to us... We internalize so many of these messages without even noticing them, and start to think we have to be certain ways. In many cases, there are good reasons for the messages society gives us, like the general social norm that you do not hurt other people. Such norms mean that society functions reasonably well and that people who don't conform can be punished. However, many of the messages we get are much more arbitrary, perhaps unnecessary, and serving the aims of particular sectors or members of society. Is it possible to decipher all the messages we get from society and then make critical choices about them? Is it necessary? And, how do we know how many of the messages we've received have been internalised so that we now think they are ours, part of ourselves? Indeed, do we have selves outside of the messages we've absorbed? What does it mean to be 'authentic'? Does it mean that we've confronted some of these societal norms and decided to fight back against them? Or are we authentic regardless, simply through having either accepted or rejected various societal norms?

Eat, Drink and Be Merry... (Part I: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)

Let's kick off with a little music shall we?

I've been thinking a lot lately about what we put into our bodies, and why, and to what effect. I guess I've always had a bit of an interest in food and nutrition. My mother was a stay-at-home parent when I was growing up and that along with the way she was brought up meant that everything we ate was made from scratch, often using vegetables and fruit from our own garden. Having veg and fruit growing in the garden also meant we ate a lot of it. There was also a wholesale produce shop pretty much across the road from where we lived, so we'd buy boxes of oranges in the winter and so on. In short, we ate a lot of whole foods, freshly prepared and home cooked. We would have a Sunday roast without fail every Sunday, often followed by an apple, rhurbarb, blackcurrant or gooseberry crumble. (If you aren't jealous by now you don't know what you're missing!). We did used to eat out occasionally, if we were in town for shopping or something, and I used to enjoy the donuts at our local fast food restaurant (Wimpy). We'd have icecream, chocolates and sweets in moderation. For example, we'd often go for a walk on the weekend, and we would stop at the sweet shop on the way home and could buy one kind of sweet. Or after a swim we were allowed something out of the vending machine. I don't recall ever being told I couldn't have something, and I don't ever recall over-indulging in anything either.

My mother also grew up making everything from scratch from whole foods, in a culture that uses a lot of herbs, vegetables, fruit and legumes. She is also reasonably nutritionally aware and would tell us about the various vitamins and minerals in various things we were eating. I always found this very interesting. I think watching her eat fruits and vegetables with relish is also an early memory of mine that encouraged my own love of these things. Perhaps at the time I didn't fully realize it, but I think our tastes were being shaped through all these things. We grew up with a healthy appreciation for good, largely unprocessed food, which has carried on through my life. As for less healthy processed foods, being allowed to have them but in moderation meant that I did not develop any kind of excessive desire for them (which I might have done had they been forbidden), and neither was I overly exposed to their effects.

It seems clear to me that our childhood experiences with food have such a profound shaping effect on our tastes and ultimate food habits. I feel lucky that I happened to have had the experiences I did with food growing up, but recognize that in today's world where in many cases both parents work and time (as well as space) are of a premium, that perhaps most people do not get the kind of benefits I had the luxury of in terms of home-grown and home-cooked foods. In fact, there are many pressures to eat in a much different way to this.

The other night we were talking about the way that the state tries to influence people's eating and activity habits through various types of marketing. A recent book titled 'Nudge' talks about how the placement of foods in different places in cafeterias for example has the effect of promoting either healthy or unhealthy eating. Many people find this controversial, as though the state were trying to control people and that has to be bad. Personally, I find it heartening. The thing is that whether we like it or not, we are being subjected to nudges all the time, but most of them come from the marketers of products. Junk food especially, with bright colours and loads of artificial colours, flavours, massive amounts of sugar and very little nutritional value is often marketed almost exclusively at children. See this assessment of common breakfast cereals for instance. The effects of these pushes towards such eating patterns are manifold. They have the effect of shaping the tastes of people for one thing, tastes that may continue for the rest of their lives. On top of that, in such cases, what is being promoted is something like a drug. The massive amounts of refined sugar, and the lack of fibre or anything else that may take longer to digest causes a sudden high, a temporary elevation of mood... followed by a crash which is often only remedied by another dose of sugar.

And that is besides all the artificial flavourings, colourings, preservatives, sweeteners, etc. All of which I have to admit I find a bit suspect. Several colourings have been linked for instance to various disorders in children as well as increased cancer risk. At one point, in an effort to slim down I was using artificial sweeteners (Sweet n Low and Equal) in my tea and coffee. I found I started getting headaches with a frequency and severity that didn't seem to correspond to anything else. This stopped when I stopped using them. The evidence on the potential dangerous effects of sweeteners is currently lacking, and in the UK at least, almost all drinks contain such sweeteners, regardless of whether they are diet drinks or not. I think it's only a matter of time before studies start to emerge showing the long-term effects of consuming such things.

My point of this post is that sometimes identifying the goods and the bads in terms of food options is really hard work. And while various governmental bodies do exist to try and keep obviously harmful things out of reach, it's still possible to do a lot of harm to ourselves through what we eat and drink, particularly if we do so in excess. What's the solution? I guess that people like Jamie Oliver, and other celebrity chefs focusing on school food and the connection between the raw ingredients and what we end up eating are trying to take the place of the parent in encouraging healthy food consumption. This is probably one good way forwards, but better still it will start inside the families, with parents making healthy choices for themselves as well as their children.

On Owning It, or Dancing like No One's Watching

In my last post, I considered the reaction we have to people who are "morbidly obese" as it is now termed. I figured that the reaction we sometimes have to watching someone who is so fat that they have difficulty moving is something like pity and stems from the fact that we are sort of programmed to enjoy seeing people happy and healthy, and people who are morbidly obese are often neither. Overeating is often a symptom of psychological distress. And besides that, being so large that most every day activities are very difficult cannot be pleasant. Now, I'm not saying it is right that we feel uncomfortable about this. I'm also NOT saying that people who are of a healthy weight are necessarily either happy or in control of their lives, indeed many are not. There are thin people and even very fit people who are unhappy or in other ways psychologically disturbed. So being of a healthy weight is only a start, but size is one of the first things we see when we look at someone, along with a myriad of other clues about them, their posture, their clothing, how they carry themselves (is it with pride? with confidence? with apology and shame?). We all read people like books, without even being aware of it much of the time. Likewise we are being read as well, and sometimes people like what they read and other times they don't.

Just like books, the types of physical appearances that we find pleasing are often based on our culture and on what the art forms, and in our era, media such as television, films, advertising, magazines and so on tell us about what is considered to be beautiful. Many people speak against these forms of beauty that are presented to us, realizing that these are limited and limiting ideas, and ones which can often be harmful. When we are told again and again that thin is beautiful (regardless of health), we start to believe it. We only have to look back to artists such as Renoir to see that this idea of beauty is neither timeless nor universal. Nevertheless they are powerful and pervasive ideas. For all of us, not just those who are overweight, such images can be damaging to our self-esteem, and in another ironic vicious cycle, by being self-conscious and ashamed of how we look, we don the most unattractive look of all, that of apologetic shame, a stooped posture, a body hidden behind baggy unflattering clothes, a walk which is more a shuffle than a stride... I would argue that there is little that is more attractive than confidence, and little that is less attractive than its opposite. So whatever size and shape, whatever story you are, if you own that story it will be attractive. And on the other hand, no matter how naturally beautiful you may be, if you don't love yourself it will be hard for others to see your beauty because it will be hiding behind cringing self-denigration.

What made me really think about this was a recent experience at the university sports center. Every Wednesday at lunch time I play an energetic hour of badminton with a girlfriend. The uni sports center is a slightly different environment than the community center where my partner and I sometimes play in the evening, but as I've been enjoying my Wednesday games, on Friday last week I suggested to my partner that we play at uni instead. On the same day in the evening I also went to a "Zumba" class at the same place. Being academics, my partner and I ended up analyzing the gym environment and how various characteristics of it were geared towards a kind of exclusivity that could deter unfit people from partaking. Firstly, almost everyone in there is already very fit. Secondly, wherever you are in the gym, you are in full view of many other people. So much so that people can kind of lazily watch you from a number of different vantage points (even outside!). Thirdly, the showers are communal (though gender-segregated), and only in the women's shower room are there curtains you can pull across if you don't want to be totally on display. The end result of this is that if you are not already reasonably confident with your body, this is not exactly an inviting environment. During the Zumba class for example, in which all manner of strange moves were performed, there was an audience behind me, and one above. I was painfully conscious of my top hiking up and my belly rolls hanging over the top of my pants. A guy sitting on the floor behind me also had his mobile phone out for a very long time and I was having nightmares of a video emerging showing me in all my uncoordinated, flabby glory. I felt very uncomfortable, and though I was enjoying the music and the class, I felt so awkward that I couldn't fully get into it, until that is, I convinced myself through some mental exercise to let go and enjoy it, and to OWN the flab and be defiant about it. To just be myself and be unapologetic that I do not look like all the fitness fanatics that spend all their free time in the gym. Eventually, I managed to stop obsessing about my belly, and I let go and enjoyed myself, and it was great. I'll be going again this week.

The point of all this is simple. In my view, the number one first step towards making any kind of change in life (like losing weight and/or getting healthy) is to tell yourself to love yourself, just the way you are, and to keep repeating it to yourself, keep bolstering your own confidence, telling yourself to walk tall, to be proud, to OWN it, and to dance like no one's watching. Doing so gives you the courage that is necessary for getting through all the other steps, like the exercise classes! And all the many other steps on the path towards your ultimate goals, whatever they may be.

All shapes and sizes?

Since I've rejoined the blogosphere, I re-visited an old blog of mine and harvested the links I had on there. One in particular is http://www.lojomanifesto.com/. Lojo's most recent post was a response to a very insensitive blog post about obesity by someone who writes for Marie Claire (a women's magazine).

Reading through both the original blog post and the response was a thought-provoking experience. I guess on one hand it did confront me about my own biases. Maura Kelly, the author of the blog post which suggests that looking at very overweight people is as disturbing as watching someone stumbling around drunk, using heroin or in other words, abusing a substance and/or themselves - a type of self-harming. Reading her post, offensive though it is, I do find myself understanding where she is coming from. As a survivor of an eating disorder (anorexia) herself, she clearly has severe body issues to begin with. But besides that, there is a degree validity to her argument. Let me tell a story to illustrate.

When I was living in Cardiff, an extremely overweight woman used to shop at my local supermarket. She had difficulty moving, so she would waddle to the baked goods aisle and fill her trolley with boxes of cupcakes, family-sized packages of chocolate bars, and various boxes of prepared frozen foods and the like. She used to take ages in the checkout line, and she always seemed (or acted) shocked by how much money her bill came up to. I gathered from her conversation with the cashiers that she had kids as well. Looking at what was in her cart made my stomach churn a bit, and I'll admit I felt a mixture of pity and something like irritation, even anger, because of what she was doing to herself and her family. I couldn't really understand it. In my mind, it is like an illness. If I consider it as an illness I guess it is easier for me to swallow (pardon the pun). But then I am imposing a category of 'ill' on people who may not consider themselves as such. Nevertheless, I can't seem to shake the idea that this is self-harming behaviour, and in order to continue it, that person would have to be somehow not well.

Why should this bother me or anyone else though? If someone else wants to eat or drink themself to death, at their own expense, then why should anyone else be bothered about it? I think this ties into my last post, about empathy. We feel a desire to see other people being healthy and happy (which ties into my post about sadness as well). Seeing other people being sick and miserable makes us feel sick and miserable too, so we don't like it. We want to shake them, and make them treat themselves better, and feel better, and spread joy through being an example of health and happiness. This is why watching really obese people doing various things, like eating huge portions of food, or buying loads of cupcakes, is disturbing.

However, there are many obese people out there, and I would think that not many of them are obese out of choice. Instead, I would imagine that many, if not most of them would rather be of a more average size, if only for practical reasons such as health and mobility. Yet as anyone who has tried to lose weight will tell you, it is not easy! Not even when you are perfectly healthy, fit, exercise several times a week and only need to lose a little bit of weight. So if you've become overweight already and are facing health problems, the challenge is even greater, and often requires a full life change, massive willpower, and the help and support of other people. The other thing that irks me is that many people become obese not even due to having chosen an unhealthy path out of more healthy ones. Many people, especially in America are stuck with long commutes, massive portion sizes and junk food every where, and very little time and opportunity to dedicate to healthy lifestyle choices. Cities are not always walkable, jobs and homes are often far away from each other, in families often both parents have to work, often at sedentary jobs. That means little time for cooking healthy, balanced meals, or taking the time to sit and relax with food, instead of just shovelling fuel in to get through the day....

In other words, there are a multitude of societal factors that result in people becoming and staying obese. Just as there are a multitude of societal factors that result in people becoming and staying unemployed (see this BBC Radio 4 broadcast regarding people on state benefits). I think as members of a society what we need to be able to do is recognize the problems that are being caused and perpetuated by various societal factors and direct our dissatisfaction towards those factors, rather than the people who become victims of them. If various aspects of the physical, social, political and economic environment produce particular problems, such as poverty or obesity, we need to be looking for the causes, and part of doing so is to try to understand, and empathise with, people in those situations, which may involve acknowledging and suppressing reactions such as distaste and annoyance as well as any pre-conceived ideas and prejudices. In other words, truly trying to understand the situation in order to be able to consider how to help and promote better alternatives.

The Empathic Civilization

I went to an environmental politics reading group today in which we discussed Jeremy Rifkin's idea that the human animal is actually becoming more empathic. A nutshell animation of the argument can be watched here:



I had been planning on going to the reading group, but what with being away for the weekend, last week working on something else, and this morning running a tutorial (before which I was marking essays), I didn't get around to doing the reading until half an hour before the meeting. Nevertheless I managed to read it all (it was just one chapter), and discovered how strangely appropriate it was to yesterday's blog post.

I think when you start to talk about the spiritual/psychological positives that arise out of a feeling of connection with nature, you run the risk of making people think you are some kind of fruity new age spiritualist hippie. There probably is a little bit of that in me actually. But when you are batting in an intellectual arena there often isn't room for that sort of thing. So it's interesting and sort of appropriate that what I thought was Rifkin's weakness of argument was actually a strength. That is, he argues in a way that suggests some kind of scientific rationale to the argument, using a real variety of examples from many different disciplines, and puts forth the argument as though the things he is mentioning actually do suggest what he's reading into it. The problem is that what he's arguing is actually sort of a spiritual or psychological emotional response, whereas his style of argument is one of rationalism. You'd think it would be contradictory in many ways, but I can see the value in it. There are plenty of deep ecology and other environmental philosophy works out there which suggest a different evaluation of our environment, of nature, as something we are a part of rather than something we stand apart from and utilize. In the academic world, as with most work, these tend to be read only by other like-minded environmentalists. But something like Rifkin could in fact impact upon the more 'sciency' social sciences, such as political science, and even policy discourse because of the way it is presented.

Perhaps the best thing about his argument is that it endorses the idea of feeling a bond with, an empathy for, and a desire to be a part of a wider community that includes not only humans of all sorts, but also other creatures, frogs even! Though we found many ways to dissect his argument, I think we all enjoyed the positive message he implies, and I feel heartened that such thoughts are emerging from the academic community which is so often dedicated to pulling things apart and being critical and negative about everything. The positive message is that through encouraging our empathetic natures, and by following our instincts to do things in the interests of others (human and otherwise), we in fact fulfill a desire in ourselves and make ourselves feel more connected, more part of something bigger, and perhaps just more good. The irony in how I translated that is that it still has to do with being selfish. We are empathetic because it makes ourselves feel good, once again centering the focus upon ourselves. Still, if the product is good for all involved, does it matter if it is done out of a selfish desire to feel good?