Margaret Thatcher. IMO

So. I came back from Austria (very nice indeed, thank you for asking) and stayed in London a bit with my mucker Jane. And it does make me laugh that, while I could get on-line easily in the back of beyond, up a mountain in Austria (when I was in a fit state to use it, of course), Jane doesn’t have any wifi so I was pretty much gagged.

But, before I was logged off I went on Twitter (as you do) and checked on a few people I like to RT from time to time and…what?  And old friend I was apparently no longer following? And he not following me? Twitter playing around again?  So I clicked Follow and it told me I’d been blocked.  Blocked?  Nobody has ever blocked me before.  Or maybe they have but I just never realized - in which case – ca ne fait rien. 

And, I freely confess, I felt hurt, very hurt.  I mean, this is someone I’ve known online for a fair few years now, and have supported pretty staunchly IMO.  But that's by the by - what surprised me was that he never seemed the blocking type.  It seemed a petty action to take and he'd not struck me as petty.  

And I puzzled…why?  And I thought back and remembered that our last exchange had been over Margaret bloody Thatcher. I’d tweeted that I was logging off for the night because my timeline was starting to sicken me.  That, while I might hate Thatcher’s policies, I could never feel delight at any human’s death. I could never dance on a grave. It’s not Thatcher per se. I felt the same about Osama bin Laden.  About Saddam Hussein. Would I feel the same about someone who had killed people I know personally and love?  I can’t say for sure but I suspect so.  I just can’t delight in death.  Anyone’s death.  And dancing on the grave of a senile 80-something?  It’s…infantile and petty. IMO.

Should we be spending 50 million on her funeral?  No.  IMO.  Should the BBC play Ding Dong the Witch is Dead?  Yes. IMO.  It’s called freedom of speech.  Should Thatcher be feted?  No.  IMO.

And that’s the thingy.  In MY opinion.  Your opinion could be very different and, hey, that’s fine.  What I don’t get is why people want everyone to think and feel exactly the same way they do.  How bloody boring is that?  I often see opinions I disagree with on social media – but do I race off and block the owners of those opinions?  Nope.  I just think, ah well, horses for courses. And I’ll look at what they’re saying and see if maybe my views are ripe for changing. Sometimes they are, sometimes not.  But the opportunity is there, which would never happen if I only followed people I agreed with 100 percent of the time. 

Then I ask myself – but what if you saw someone cheering at, for example, that poor girl who was raped and then lashed for adultery?  Well, okay, I might unfollow for that.  So, I guess, maybe for some people Thatcher arouses equally strong passions.  Hey, I don’t know.  It’s certainly sad that, even in death, she manages to divide people. And I do just wonder if there would be this depth of feeling if she had been a man. 

But, hey, gender aside, she’s a useful scapegoat. A place to pin feelings people don’t like to admit in themselves. I've written about scapegoating before -  here and here - and I still find it a fascinating topic.  There’s a seething undercurrent in the UK and Thatcher has provided a focus for it. You could argue that it’s actually healthy – that it allows an outpouring of frustration and anger which people feel unable to do in any other way – that it provides a focus for feelings of helplessness. 

What could be transforming would be if people looked at why she arouses quite such intense feelings in themselves?  Not because of what she did but for what she stood for.  What does she mean to you and how many of those qualities might you deny in yourself?  It’s a thought, huh?  But that’s a big ask – and for most people it will just be visceral, an animal instinct.

But still, it’s interesting, no?  

Regarding my erstwhile friend, I feel no ill-will.  The loss of friendship is always sad but some things run their course and then you must just bless them, let them go and move on.  Otherwise they just fester.  And festering – like immoderate sustained hatred - is seriously counter-productive because the only person it harms is you.  IMO.  :-)

We're all racists

‘We’re all racists,’ Bea Campbell said to me, way back in the day. At the time I was affronted.  ‘How can I be a racist?’ I spluttered defensively. ‘My adopted father is part aborigine and my foster sister is West Indian.’ I nearly went on to say, ‘and I have loads of black friends and if I don’t have a black boyfriend it’s not for want of serious trying’ (but, thankfully, I stopped myself).  Bea just looked at me and sighed. 

It took me nigh on twenty years to realise that she was absolutely right. We are all racists.

Of course, on a physiological level, racism is totally absurd, quite risible.  Peel away our skin and you’d have to be a forensic pathologist to tell the difference between us. Our rational, civilised, nice psyche baulks at it too - and quite rightly so. But on a deeper level, psychologically, it’s a very different story.

Of course you’re already spluttering; already planning your defensive/appalled/caustic comment.  Because that’s what we do. We make up our minds before we have even read something through to the end. We jump to conclusions.  We do what I did with Bea Campbell.  And, (particularly when it comes to racism) we tie ourselves in knots (I read Liz Jones’ piece on the Diane Abbott affair with a deeply furrowed brow – in fact I read it three times and still can’t make head nor tail of it).  


I've thought about writing this post several times but over the last few days I've watched the old game play out on the Authonomy forum and so I figured it was time.
 

Anyhow, let’s pull back a bit and look at why we make these boundaries, why we put ourselves in groups, why we have this urge to divide. In fact, let’s not even talk about black and white to begin with…let’s start with something a little less …emotive.

‘Why do you feel so strongly about being Welsh?’ I asked Adrian back during the rugby world cup or whatever when he was in full Cymru am byth (Wales Forever!) mode.  Again. 

‘It’s my heritage,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘It’s what I am; it’s where I come from.’

‘But, see,’ I said.  ‘If you came from the borders, back in time, you would have been – alternatively – Welsh and English.’

‘Well…politically,’ he conceded. ‘But I’d still be Welsh.’  Is that racist?  In that the corollary is ‘and thank feck I’m not bastard English’ then yes, of course it is.  J

But what does it mean to be Welsh?  I looked up ethnicity online and it seems nobody really knows why we do this; there is no *real* reason for our tribalising.  It’s a societal thing. There are a whole bunch of views and, to be very honest, none of them really answered my question.  Take this…which probably came the closest.

"Constructivism" sees both primordialist and perennialist views as basically flawed, and rejects the notion of ethnicity as a basic human condition. It holds that ethnic groups are only products of human social interaction, maintained only in so far as they are maintained as valid social constructs in societies.”

So having tribes helps us hold together as societies. Really?  But it still doesn’t really answer my question.  And then, see, a few days later Adrian was at it again… ‘Bloody South Waleans…’ he muttered.  Not sure what they’d done this time, apart from existing and being south of Dolgellau. ‘Bloody Cardiff. ’  Yup, even the Welsh (a small nation for sure) can’t help dividing itself further – North v South.  And in Llandudno, Adrian’s home town, they do it too.  ‘Oh they’re from up the valley…’ said with a certain element of scorn. ‘Llanwyrst.’ With an eyeroll.

I see it here too – on Exmoor – within our tiny towns.  Dulverton v Bampton.  Within Dulverton itself – cliques, groups, sub-divisions.  If it’s not race, it’s class, or sexuality or politics or – shit knows – football teams, werewolves v vampires. 

So I started looking into sociology and social psychology and there aren’t really any definite answers there either.  We humans compete for material resources or for social rewards, I’m told.  We have a ‘natural inclination’ for aggression and if that aggression is not unleashed on an agreed ‘enemy’ it turns inwards onto our own societies. 

Rene Girard saw ‘collective violence as sacred’; as the ‘great remedy’ for communal life.  He talked about the scapegoat as ‘absorbing all the internal tensions, feuds, and rivalries pent up within the community…a deliberate act of collective substitution.’ Scapegoat?  Yes. We have lynched and burned and gassed the scapegoat many the time before.  Hold that thought – I’ll come back to it. 

But really, why is conflict latent at our core? 

Psychically, I think, it’s because we’re set up to divide things into two. Me and you; us and them.  Difference is part of the human condition. If we didn't feel different, we would be One. We wouldn’t be here.  We’d have moved on.  We see the world in twos so we can make choices; so we can say No.  Two is freedom.  Yet, paradoxically, it is also irresolvable conflict, standoffs, stalemates, obstinacy.  So One is impossible and Two is a pain in the arse. Is there a solution?  Think about that word and hold that thought. 

Meanwhile, back on the Authonomy forum a big brave knight jousted a dragon (I mean, a filthy racist).  Did he ask the dragon what it was doing? Did he seek to understand why the dragon said what it did? No.  Instead he chose to hit the ‘report abuse’ button and incited the mob (I mean, other members of the forum) to do likewise.  And, because racism is such an emotive word and we’re all so damn scared of it, people did just that and the government booted the dragon off the site. 

'Hurrah,’ yelled the crowd, waving their pitchforks.  ‘We killed the dragon.’ 

‘No,’ said the brave knight, polishing his spear. ‘I was the dragon slayer.’ 

And then it all got very messy indeed as, having made one scapegoat, they felt better for a bit but then a few people went, ‘Huh?’ and so they hunted around for another one and found another guy (this time he just happened to be black) and started all over again with him. 

But really.  Why do we scapegoat? Because it’s far more comfortable to point a finger at someone and go ‘Look! Filthy racist’ than to confront the racism, the separation within ourselves.  There was an opportunity, on that forum, for people to feel the discomfort in what they saw as racism and to explore that feeling; to try, maybe to understand its source rather than just push it under, squash it down…again.  This is contentious, I know, but truly – have our other ways of dealing with racism worked? 

I believe there was an opportunity to look at the ‘field’- what Arnold Mindell calls the unconscious, collective, polarised patterns that lie behind racism and collective conflict.  To engage in ‘worldwork’, working with the psychosocial fields that reach beyond boundaries of race. To use a little deep democracy (in which all voices are heard – both those around us and those inside us – often they’re the same!).  As Mindell puts it: ‘Deep democracy is based upon the realisation that everyone is needed to represent reality. A sense of justice arises only in connection with community, with inner peace of mind, sustainable ongoing relationships, and worldwork that processes the tensions between groups.’  

It’s interesting stuff – check out The Global Process Institute & Worldwork website at www.worldwork.org  I’m not sure I agree with all of what he says but it’s a bloody good start.

But people didn’t question; they didn’t look within. More correctly, they didn’t look between.  In alchemy, separation is the process of establishing Two.  You and me.  Us and them. The next stage is Conjunction.  People mistake this – they see it as the two becoming one. No. Conjunction is reaching Three – you, me and Between.  Yes, it’s subtle, I know. But just think about it.  I reckon it’s the saving grace.

Meanwhile, about that particular filthy dragon.  Is he a racist?  No more than you or I.  And, actually, if people knew his ancestry, they might be very very surprised. J

Okay, I've said my piece...over to you...