28/05/2010 by Roshan.

If there was a single document that was the source of all our cultural assumptions, these three words (or something a little more eloquent, perhaps beginning, “We hold these truths…”), would be in the opening paragraph. Each word speaks volumes.

I

The locus of our culture is the individual. We rarely think of ourselves as intrinsically part of indissoluble collectives. Want to change country? All you have to do is find another willing to accept you as citizen. Want to change company? Hand in a letter of resignation. Want to change family? There are ways of making that happen. We are a culture used to thinking about ourselves primarily in the first person singular.

Own

We are a society of owners. We care very much for our things. We define ourselves by our stuff. Most of our work and much of our waking lives are spent in the acquisition and enjoyment of things that we own.

Me

Here the simple sentence becomes very meaningful. Our society ripples out from the core assertion that individuals have primary possession of their time, labour, intelligence and creativity. Because I am not a slave to a master, have no feudal duties to a lord, and no essential loyalty to a sovereign, I am the owner of my body, my time and the products of my mind and labour.

Much of our culture from sexual ethics to education policy is built on this assumption. Education becomes about the maximization of individual potential. Similarly, the only sexual taboos that can remain are those against non-consensual behaviour. Marriages can be reneged if the partners choose to part.

Extrapolated out, this assumption has become the framework of Capitalism. Billions of I own me’s trading the fruits of their work with each other in an attempt to increase the scope of their ownership.

What if the core assumption was wrong? What if fundamentally, I am much more complex than a package of self-ownership? What if you, by virtue of being human also, had important claims on me that I own me cannot acknowledge? And, with what words should we talk about we?

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09/01/2010 by Roshan.

Dig through the archives of literature, philosophy and art and you will find hundreds of phrases for it. Plato called it the good life, and Aristotle referred to human flourishing. The Bible talks about it as being blessed, and the Declaration of Independence refers to the pursuit of happiness.

Human beings have a unique problem. We do not know exactly how to be good human beings. We wake in the morning, and unlike animals that are driven by instinct, it’s not always immediately apparent what best to do with ourselves.

Into this void, every society in human history has offered one or more answers as to what constitutes the good life. We have venerated great warriors who defended their tribe or city from attack. We have celebrated thinkers and scientists who have discovered new truths about the world.

In the twenty-first century West, our cultural conversations about the good life are dominated by the quest for wealth and celebrity. As a general rule, we all aspire to be rich and famous, because of the many subtle and not-so-subtle ways that our culture reinforces the belief that wealth and celebrity are the ingredients of the good life. Most people spend the greater part of their working lives in the pursuit of money.

Yet there is scant evidence even in our own culture that wealth and fame bring happiness, let alone guaranteeing their possessors anything approaching human flourishing. A cursory reading of even non-sensational accounts of the lives of those that have achieved what our society holds out as the hope of human existence suggests that at best, the rich and famous are no happier than the rest of us, and possibly much less so. Likewise our societies, which have accumulated the greatest material wealth of any in history, do not seem to have achieved an equivalent rise in overall happiness. We are embarrassingly stressed, depressed and unhappy.

We need to acknowledge that this exposes a deep problem in our culture. It is possible that our belief is wrong – that in limiting our pursuit of happiness to the pursuit of material prosperity, for all its many benefits (disclosure: this article was typed on a computer), we have wandered down a dead end in the pursuit of what it means to be human.

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04/12/2009 by Roshan.

Christmas is possibly the most pervasive public festival in the world (or at least it’s a close run race between Christmas, the Chinese New Year, Eid al-Adhar and Diwali). Like any public celebration, it has come to represent the values that the people that celebrate it hold dearly.

Consider a typical celebration of Christmas. A family gathers around a tree, decorated with tinsel and lights. Under the tree are wrapped gifts, which many of the younger children believe are delivered by a magical man in a red and white suit. One by one, the presents are opened by their new owners. This ceremony is normally followed by a large meal.

Whatever its historical origins, Christmas must be understood as a rite of our popular religion: consumerism. Young children are inducted into the mystery of contemporary capitalism, where desirable goods appear with few clues as to their provenance, and where overconsumption is celebrated through good food and drink. Once a year, we gather together to teach our children and remind ourselves, that happiness can be found in material possessions acquired with minimal effort.

So important is Christmas to our consumerist calendar that many families max out their credit cards and struggle through January to ensure that gifts and good food are available for this one day.

Yet strangely, many of the people who celebrate Christmas in this way would denounce the understanding of human happiness that their actions communicate. Along with traditions of consumption, Christmas carries a rhetoric of selflessness, of giving not receiving, and of resting from work and shopping. Read the rest of this entry »

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