Swiss couple’s reality check in the Maldives

 
Caveat emptor!

If you were from, oh I don't know, let's say Switzerland, and you wanted to renew your marriage vows, why would you go to a palm covered island and have them renewed in a hotel that offers karaoke nights and rides on an inflatable banana as part of its suite of experiences?

Of course, most of the western press are on the side of the couple - falling for the irresistible combo of self-righteous indignation, fundamentalism and consumer rights - so I’m going to skip all the crap-du-jour that the papers are trying to whip up about this. I mean, there may well be hatred, but I would doubt it has religious fervour at its heart. If I was serving cocktails that cost more than my weekly wage, I would probably harbour some lingering resentment of those who lazed by the pool. 

What I wonder is how far removed folks like the Swiss couple are from their sense of place: their sense of home, of where they are in relation to everything and everyone else. Their sense of reality. How can they have thought that going somewhere far away from their homes, friends and family to renew their sense of their place in the world was a good idea? What are they lacking that they need some mystic mumbo-jumbo intoned over them in a language they don’t even understand on a private hotel beach in front of a bunch of people they don't even know? 

It seems as though one of the things that we most want wealth to do is remove us from our fellows. In regeneration projects, if you want to find out about a place you ask the poorest and most vulnerable members of the community as they tend to be the ones spending most time out on the streets, and have the keenest eyes and ears. As you climb the socio-economic ladder you find people more and more removed from their immediate surroundings with less and less knowledge of and engagement with their communities.

For folks like the Swiss couple, it seems the ultimate expression of wealth is the privately-owned island. Those who can’t afford an island go for two weeks in the Maldives, Seychelles or some other self-styled paradise and play make-believe. Make-believe millionaires, make-believe ceremonies, make-believe vows.

Don’t they have a favourite place within walking distance of their house where they could celebrate with friends and relatives? If not, why not? Find one. Get real.

Vilu Reef Beach and Spa Resort

The video - if you really need to see it. You will also get access to the comments... considered opinion from folks who spell Islam with a 'z'.

Regeneration Nightmares Volume 2

Another piece about how our public spaces are formed. Made for the Sensory Trust.

Children, Violence and Pigs

I read recently that, according to the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychological Association, American Academy of Family Physicians and American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, media violence affects children’s behaviour, attitudes and values.

Well, I guess it does. All these heavyweight associations for our well-being agree that our children are exposed to images of violence more than at any time in our history. Apparently it makes them desensitized… but desensitized to what?

I was involved in a project to bring urban children out to farms to learn about where food comes from. These were exactly the sort of desensitized kids everyone imagines: vacant-eyed teenage skells straight out of a Porcupine Tree video, permanently hooked into their iPhones, iPods and X-Boxes. My experience was that when you put one of these desensitized fourteen year olds in front of a pig - in all its aromatic, hairy, snorty, slobbery, muscley, random, inquisitive pigginess – you see just how sensitive they really are. Pretty damn sensitive in my experience.

So, media violence may well desensitize our children to media violence, but certainly not to real live farm animals in search of an apple.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that media violence does “affect children’s behaviour, attitudes and values” in a way that is permanent and undesirable. What should we do? The answer that we should somehow ban these images or prevent children from being exposed to them seems obvious. But here’s my argument: children today are not over-stimulated and desensitized. Children today are not more sophisticated than in the past. Compared to previous generations, children today - and I’m talking about western-urban children - live a thin, beige, flavourless existence where most of what they experience is vicarious and pre-packaged by media companies, global restaurant chains, and indoor leisure facilities. Their experience of the world outside their homes begins with the ballroom at Ikea and ends with the bus shelter opposite McDonalds. Their desensitization is not due to over-stimulation but to the terminal blandness of their immediate environment.

Children live an imprisoned life because of the fears their parents acquire from sensationalist media reportage. Perhaps desensitization to media violence is some sort of reaction to their parent’s fear. Perhaps it’s a preparation for going out into the world that they believe is just like the one the media report.

Creating communities and environments where children are free to roam outdoors, to experience things for themselves, to fall out of trees, to ride bikes, make mud pies, encounter strangers (shock!) and be home for dinner is the best antidote to media images of violence. And, because these images occur through television and the internet, if kids are outdoors finding out what the world is really like, they aren’t indoors watching them.

When I hear the word culture…

The sky is falling! The oceans are rising! We're doomed Captain Mannering! We urgently need to either:

1. Change our light bulbs

or

2. Give up everything and buy a goat and a gun

None of the visions offered by climate change enthusiasts is compelling because none of them offers us anything inspirational. I like goats, but even so there's just not enough va-va-voom to get me going. The goals are survivalist and the messages are the sort of apocalyptic ones that so many people get off on... the frisson of excitement that we're all stuffed.

What we need is an inspirational goal to work towards.

Culture is the only mechanism by which we can envision the future in any sort of positive way. It is also the glue which holds our society together. Cultural philosopher and writer Roger Scruton argues that absence of culture results in dysfunctional societies, citing as an example the collapse of Islamic culture and the corresponding rise of fundamentalism to fill the void.

In my experience folks sometimes bristle at the word “culture” ("when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun"*), and usually in those cases the word seems synonymous with “the ballet and the opera”, with its attendant whiff of elitism and pretention. Luckily we now avoid the issue by using the phrase “cultural capital” instead which gives culture the free-market seal of approval as something that can be weighed, measured, valued and sold.

It’s fashionable to dismiss high culture – Dead White Male culture – as irrelevant, as of no further use, as somehow anti-democratic. But works of culture can give us a collective insight into the sublime, the beautiful, the utopian. They imagine other ways of being and lay them out for us in stories, pictures and music. Culture presents alternatives; neither as something to vote for, nor as something to go to war for, but as something we’re free to take to our hearts or dismiss. Of course, the truth is that our reactions are usually somewhere in between, and culture accommodates this too. It is rarely black or white, and you can put an X in every box if you like. Culture understands and embraces duality.

Culture helps us ask the right questions. Tolstoy’s question, “what shall we do and how shall we live?” has been the touchstone for Russian literature for decades and remains the fundamental question for us all. At its best, culture strips away the flim-flam that obscures the basic questions we need to ask. One of the criticisms often levelled at culture is that it’s not part of the so-called real world. Far from being a weakness, this is its central strength. Culture dispenses with budgetary constraints and political policy, skips over contemporary mores, dodges fashion and gets to the heart of the matter.

The ability of cultural activity to illuminate fundamental questions and to propose answers might well be the sole measure of its value. Using this measure we can see that the community art project that asks questions about the future of our village and illuminates the past is of value. War and Peace is of value. Elegy to the Spanish Republic is of value. The open mic night at the local pub is of value. The latest Europop song, Strictly Come Dancing or CSI, while entertaining, are less so.

We cannot envision any sort of sustainable, enjoyable future for ourselves without understanding and supporting cultural activity. The great thing about culture is that it is a dialogue that has been going on for millennia. We are each free to make our own contributions to the dialogue, in whatever form we choose (even if we’re not old enough to vote, or live in a country where we can't vote). If we fail to acknowledge culture as central to how we move into the future then we will be forced to rely, as we have been in the past, on the reactionary visions of politicians, religious leaders, multinational corporations, and prophets of doom. Pick one.

*often wrongly (but compellingly) attributed to Goebbels. The actual quote is a line from the 1933 play Schlageter by Hanns Johst, a Nazi propagandist and Poet Laureat. "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" "Whenever I hear of culture... I release the safety catch of my Browning!" Not quite as snappy, but then brevity is the soul of wit.