Fathers and Daughters

  Fathers and Daughters    

      I know many cases where there seems to be a special relationship between daughters and their fathers (as contrasted with their relationship with their mothers).  Whose hand does a daughter want to hold? Whose attention does she want to catch? It may be that I exaggerate the number by noticing them, and that it is my problem (as it were); but I think I am detecting a tendency, a natural bias in the female child towards the male parent. 

     I have gone on to wonder whether this tendency is innate, a hardwired sexual orientation, even in a very young child. Or, whether the relationship builds up by itself over the first 2 to 3 years of a girl's life, resulting from her interactions with her two parents. Perhaps she turns to her mother for food and security but to her father for his approval. It seems to be highly likely that the two parents will respond differently to demands; mother with a sigh or a cuddle; father, flattered into an attitude of heightened interest.

     Here is a case in point. A couple with an eight-year-old daughter came into the pub, the girl in front, the man at the rear, wearing a slightly odd sunhat (perhaps of leather).

      "Dad, what would you like?, asked the girl. "Dad. Dad, what would you like?" She was on the edge of sounding precocious; as though she was going the buy the round. But her parents ignored her. They bought drinks and settled on the table next to mine, the parents on opposite sides, the girl floating.

      "Dad, you are my best friend." 

Whereupon the father (continuing his exposition):     

      "It just needs enough of the high energy particles coming from the sun to be bent by the earth's magnetic field by just the right amount ."

      " I have never seen the aurora borealis", said mum. 

      "Nor have I ever seen it" admitted dad. He put his hat on his daughter's head just in time for the European barman to say "That's a nice hat!"

      "Daddy".

      "Georgina must have known if they really were living together" said mum.

      "Daddy".

      " Yes?"

      "Hmmmm," all of a sudden the little girl had forgotten what she wanted to say.

      "I don't think they would go that far" continued the mum, at which point the girl went round and snuggled up to her, and received a reflex cuddle. 

  

     It was very different as I approached the bus stop four hours later. A seven-year-old boy, shouting over his shoulder at a thirty-something-year-old man who was rather grimly pursuing the boy down the tow-path: "Get away from me. Get away from me. I know what you are going to do, you bully." This carried on in front of a crowd of waiting passengers. The boy seemed considerably 'het-up', but not so distracted as to miss the opportunity of playing to his audience. 

     However, I was worried and felt that I ought to do something. I converged on the man as we both walked after the boy; spoke a few soothing words and urged him not to go too far. I think I must have pitched it about right, as he did not shout at me to "mind my own - - business"; but carried on round a corner. He came back a minute later, with the boy, having established (it would seem) a temporary truce. 

     Daughters and sons! Two adjacent episodes, at random, but head-to-tail as though deliberately pointing the contrast.

  Darwin, Freud, or Lorenzian-imprinting? Or all of these schools?

(See also "Kicking" (https://occidentis.blogspot.com/2023/05/kicking.html))

The Pebble-Sellers

I rounded the corner from Main Road into the deserted Bull Baulk. It was mid-afternoon on one of the hottest days in the year. I could see a couple of children on the pavement some 50 yards away. At a guess, a boy of 7 and a girl of 5. As I got nearer I could see that the boy was holding up a sign; well, a piece of cardboard on which he had written the word "Please". 

I wondered if they had something they hoped they could sell me; home-made scones perhaps, or books they no longer needed. Sure enough! On a nearly empty tray they had 4 or 5 pebbles each of which, as  they pointed out, had been 'decorated' with a black felt-tip marker. 

"Fifty pence each" said the little girl, optimistically. "We have sold all those already". She gestured to the tray's emptiness.

Fifty pence seemed quite a high price to my ancient brain, but my eye was taken by a smooth, flattened, stone on which the boy, or the girl, had written in uneven black letters: 

Have

a

Good

Day

I picked it up. It fitted snugly in the palm of my hand. It felt nice. The sentiment seemed genuine. A wave of generosity welled up inside me and I decided I would buy. The girl jumped a little two-footed jump of excitement. But "Oh!" I had no money; only my Debit Card. 

"Never mind" I said, "It is not too far to my house. I shall come back in a quarter of an hour and if you are still here and it is still for sale I shall buy it then. But why don't you wait in the shade." For the sun was still hot at four in the afternoon. 

Indeed, it was a stiflingly hot day, in spite of two ferocious claps of thunder. The first had startled me into rushing out to the street to see if a crane had fallen off a low-loader; the second a synchronous flash-bang exploded right in my face. But little rain had fallen. 

My cool, well-curtained, house welcomed me in from the heat. Fortunately I found a fifty-pence piece. I also picked from my own collection of pebbles a small piece of mid-jurassic limestone for I though the children might enjoy the 180-million-year-old fossils. "Older than the dinosaurs" as my little grand-daughter had told her astonished schoolmates in Brookline, Massachusetts. And out I went again, into the heat.

My two little pebble-sellers were still there, still out in the sun. They were delighted with my coin which they put in a small box, already containing two others. And I gave them my lump of fossilised shell-fish, explaining its age. "Gosh! Older than me!" said the boy. 

Back home I put my little 'wishing-stone' in the pebble bowl on the kitchen windowsill. I felt pleased with my purchase. It smiled back at me: "Have a Good Day".

Literary Success

Literary Success 

The desire, the felt need, to talk is surely the need to be heard; and the desire to write is surely the desire to be read.

We seldom talk to ourselves, aloud, and appear odd when we do. (The unceasing chatter of internal monologue is something different.) Yet we write page after page of unread prose, sustained (I suppose) by the thought that those pages may be read by someone, sometime. 

I am reading Virginia Woolf's "Diary", volume three, 1925-1930. It is clear that she minds extremely whether or not her work is being read; and will be read by posterity. Then, following the admiring reception in 1925 of "Mrs. Dalloway" by certain critics, she relaxes. She then claims, with T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster, that it is the writing alone that matters; the capturing of a thought; the moulding of a sentence. 

I propose the thesis that we do, absolutely, need to be read, by at least some people, the discerning few; perhaps only by family, perhaps only by one person. But, once we are granted that minimal audience, we can then concentrate on, and relish, the power and the beauty of our prose. 

It rankles, somewhat, that for some people the words flow from their pens straight into the best-seller list. Are those best-selling novices blest with a natural felicity, or the accident of a good plot; or are they perhaps great mimics, following a formula? For others, there are years of apprenticeship. For Virgina Woolf, for example, there were ten years and three unread novels before her two masterpieces. 

It must matter what we write as well as how we write it, but right now I am worrying about writing style and will wonder on another day about hooking the interest of the reader. 

How can we improve our writing style? Can we self-improve? Can we read our own prose with a sufficiently critical eye to see where we are being boring, or ambiguous, or trite, or illogical, or wrong. One problem is that we know already what we mean to write, and may not even read our own text accurately. A further and more insidious problem is the narcissus-trap, of so liking the thoughts we believe we are successfully expressing, that we accept our own work too readily.

It would be a great help if we could obtain outside help, offered so sensitively as to be emotionally acceptable; perhaps doing no more than encouraging us (as writers) to criticise ourselves; perhaps using bland key-words to flag, not actual objections, but categories of problems; like logic, rhythm, spelling, clichés;  so bland as to be unarguable.

This would not guarantee that our prose becomes compelling, accessible, or even readable; but it would surely guarantee that it improve.

Virginia Woolf, in her "Diary", often asks herself what she is doing in that exercise, in her case; perhaps honing her skill, capturing observations to feed into future novels, and recording conversations. In 1926, after 10 years of sporadic but persistent diary-keeping, she even raises the possibility that her diaries might eventually be published. I find them (and Anne Bell's foot-notes) fascinating, and read steadily on, two pages at a stretch. 

My own blogging started as an attempt to understand a topic (banking, debt, Ash die-back, COVID, the origin of morals, international law, etc).  As a result my blog lacks focus. It is unlikely that any single reader will find adjacent posts interesting. Yet, I think they are being read, a  little. (And not just by robots, though those undoubtedly dominate. Perhaps 1% of the 140,000 visits recorded by the blog are real people; perhaps 0.1%.).

(Comments direct to cawstein@gmail.com are welcomed.)

Decisions

Decisions

I hate making decisions. 

In a restaurant, I clutch the menu, dithering between the candidate dishes till the waiter comes to me. Even then I dawdle, till I plump for one (or the other) of my favoured two. I then look around the table, with relief, and a faint glow of triumph, as though I had just completed an exam. And I watch with surprise as the remaining diners grapple so easily with their own dilemmas. 

Why do I so hate decisions?

I have often thought it might be because I have what Lewis Carroll called "the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind". That sounds a lot better than admitting to being hopelessly indecisive. But then I fear I am flattering myself; indecision is after all a handicap and not a super-power. 

Another explanation with which I have often toyed, is to suggest that instinctively and habitually I have guided my life by reason, rather than by emotion, or will. Which, I ask myself, is better: Shepherd's pie or Lasagne? Of course, I realise that I do not know; I lack any relevant data. It does not occurs to me that I could simply shut my eyes and imagine putting a forkful of each into my mouth.

My standard recourse is to toss a coin. Not an actual coin. That would be altogether too geeky! But I have evolved a random-number generator in a corner of my brain which I can spin. And as it slows towards its resting place, I point out to myself, that if I cannot detect a preference, then it cannot matter – much. 

Furthermore, if I find that I do not like the decision of the spinning coin, I can over-rule its choice. I remain boss.  After all, dammit, it is I, not the coin, that has to eat the dish. And thereby I have finally tricked myself into imagining eating that rather bland potato topping. Ugh!

– = – ≡ – = – 

Some decisions are more important than others. For example, choosing a wife. I do not remember floundering around that fateful, life-determining, decision in my case. Perhaps it was she, not I, that decided. But I do remember chatting with a younger friend just after I had married. "I know", I said, "you have practically none of the relevant information! You have simply to shut your eyes and jump, and hope for the best."  So, I suppose there must have been elements of that in my own case. 

Was it good advice? I sometimes wonder. It was fifty years ago. He is still married, while I have had thirty five years of a second bachelordom. Mind you. I have never regretted my decision to marry that girl, and we have three successful children to love and admire as they grow up; and learn, somehow, to make their own decisions. 

                     The Psychology of Terrorism

Under the series heading 'Just the Facts' Gerald Posner posted on 5th May 2024 a reasoned plea titled 'Words Matter: Why Not Call A Terrorist a Terrorist?'. 

He detected, in parts of the main-stream press,  a reluctance to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. Apparently Associated Press says that "the terms terrorism and terrorist have become too politicized and [are] often applied inconsistently."  Likewise the world affairs editor for the BBC, John Simpson, said last October that terrorism "is a loaded word," and that "it's simply not the BBC's job to tell people who to support and who to condemn......".

Gerald Posner thinks otherwise. He wants to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. He thinks that calling Hamas 'militant' is not strong enough; that it 'normalizes' their 'horrific acts of terrorism'.

I do not think the terms 'terrorist' and 'terrorism' are useful in this situation. They are ill-defined, and tend to obscure the issues. When an angry many loses his temper, he loses the argument; vilifying the enemy is similar; it does not help. 

Calling Hamas a terrorist organisation adds nothing except an unnecessary and unfocussed implication of disapproval. It points to the scary nature of their criminal actions, and hints at a deliberate use of fear to enhance the military and political effectiveness of their crimes. As though such a strategy was not used by large and disciplined armies; nor allowed by the laws of war; because it breaks the rules, like hitting below the belt. Yet, as normally used, the term "terrorist" describes the attitude of the onlooker more than the nature of the crimes. It sheds little light on the psychological motivation of the perpetrator.

Hamas is certainly 'militant'. From the level of support given to Hamas, it seems that many of the 2 million people of Gaza feel desperate. With inadequate weapons, a bunch of brave zealots, maddened by decades of frustration, rush out and attack a powerful, ever-encroaching and inexorable enemy, which is supported and equipped by a superpower. What use is that? 

But what else could they do? Their protests were not heard, and their rockets proved useless. They had only their fists and kitchen knives. 

Who said Palestine belongs to the Jewish people; was it God or Mr. Balfour? And, whoever made the declaration, were they right to do so? 

Is there no grown-up person in the room to explain how mixed races and mixed religions can live together? It worked, more-or-less, under the Babylonians, and the Romans, and perhaps best of all under the Turks. 

Inequality: good or bad?

 Inequality: good or bad?

       This post has been revised. Please see the new version at:

https://occidentis.blogspot.com/2025/02/how-bad-is-social-inequality.html 

Pacifism: exploring non-violence.

 Pacifism: exploring non-violence.
(See Notes and Comments below)

Introduction.

Quakers are known for their consistent repudiation of war. But times change. Wars change. Our understanding of heaven and hell changes. Do we need to re-think our readiness to fight (in defence of self, or others, or in defence of our commercial interests)? Not all Quakers affirm the peace testimony; some fought in the second world war. What follow are some of the thoughts that occurred to me.

Quaker Pacifism.

A principled refusal to fight under any circumstances, is the best known feature of Quakerism. The 'Quaker Peace Testimony' is clearly and forcefully expressed in many places, and by many witnesses. 

Thus, William Dewsbury wrote (in 1655) "And the word of the Lord came up to me and said, "put up thy sword into thy scabbard; if my kingdom were of this world, then would my children fight", which word enlightened my heart and discovered the mystery of iniquity, and that the kingdom of Christ was within, and the enem[y] was within, and was spiritual, and my weapons against them must be spiritual, the power of God." [Note1]

In 1693, William Penn wrote "A good end cannot justify evil means, nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it". [Note 2]

Robert Barclay, in 1678, underlined the consistency of this pacifist stance with the direct teaching of Jesus in such gospel passages as: "Resist not evil", "Give also thy other cheek", "Love thine enemies" and  "Pray for those that persecute you and those that calumniate you". He could have added "Blessed are the peacemakers".  Yet many people who profess, as Christians, to follow the teachings of the "Prince of Peace", find themselves going to war, and praying to God for victory. 

However, Nietzsche scoffed at these teachings of Jesus, calling it slave morality by which meekness is elevated and nobility downgraded. I think many fellow Britons would agree with Nietzsche and would rather chance a fight than concede defeat without a struggle.

The refusal to fight with 'outward' weapons therefore runs right to the heart of what it is to be a Quaker. Do we respond to violence with violence, like the dominant type of savage human? Or do we avoid all (unnecessary) killing? Is war even good, for the species?

The two great wars of the 20th century brought home to millions of perfectly ordinary Europeans  these questions about the morality of war. The first World War seems to have been the devastating result of imperial pride. It quickly became obvious that the foot-soldiers on either side were being tricked  by their leaders into sacrificing their own lives and murdering their neighbouring brothers. Compulsory conscription was introduced in 1916. Some 16,000 (predominantly Quakers) sought exemption on conscientious grounds (political or religious). The majority were refused and were sent to prison. It took  courage, but the State did eventually recognise that there could be a conscientious refusal to fight. 

The second World War emerged from the nineteen thirties in much the same way as the first – as an imperial war. It was only at the end of the war that the moral depravity of the Nazi regime was unambiguously documented. Then (in retrospect) one might conclude that standing up to Hitler might have been the right thing to do.

In the present century, there have been, and still are, a surprising number of small wars in various parts of the world that do not demand, and largely escape, our notice: Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Sudan. Perhaps racial or religious wars, exacerbated by scarcity and population pressure.

However, several other wars of the present century are presented to us by our media as just wars.  We are encouraged to consider the crimes of the enemy regimes (whether of Saddam Hussain, Bashar al-Assad, or Vladimir Putin) sufficient to justify war. Or a sufficient threat to our own peace. We pay for shells and drones to kill Russians and Palestinians, thereby  stimulating those to kill Israelis and Ukrainians. Sincere moralists might still believe that there is such a thing as a just war; e.g. when the enemy is undeniably wicked, and the only way to stop his terror is by fighting him (and winning). Note, however, that we are only presented the case for our own side of the dispute, and a brief reflection will suggest that many of our 'enemies' appear to be equally convinced of the justice of their war aims. 

But what if there were an undeniably bad man with a bomb, or a delusional maniac with millions of brainwashed followers? How would we stop him? Would it really be wrong to fight him and his armies? Is the principle of non-violence absolute?

Is pacifism a survival strategy, or an admission of inferiority, or a claim to superiority? There seems to be a case for testing, and continually re-testing, the Quaker Peace Testimony.

Grounds for a policy of non-violence.

[1] "Peter: Put up again thy sword into its place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword". Matthew's text rather argues that violence is dangerous to the perpetrator, particularly if he is outnumbered.

[2] There is a visceral, unthinking, reluctance to spill blood, and to take a life. This could be seen as a squeamish or vegetarian objection to war. 

[3] One is loath to harm family, and friends, and by extension anybody with whom one can empathise, and who we can see as a friend. (This thought doubtless occurred to many soldiers in no-man's-land, on Christmas Eve 1914.)

[4] The 'Gandhi tactic': take possession of the moral high ground. Passive resistance, in a very public but harmless way, can show strength of feeling against a powerful minority. (This method of winning requires the foe to have some awareness of morality, which doubtless covers most cases, but maybe not all. )

[5] The 'Margaret Fell' position which might be paraphrased as 'We Quakers do not pose a threat. We combat, but not with outward weapons.'

[6] The 'Ranyard West' position. We shall always misjudge the rights and wrongs of a dispute if we are a party to it. Force may often be necessary but that can only be decided by an independent entity like the United Nations.) By this standard, the Kuwait war of 1990, was legal; the Iraq war of 2003, criminal. 

[7] The 'William Penn' position: that the 'collateral death' of a single innocent non-combatant is an unacceptable, criminal, action.  [Note 2]

[8] The position of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: to teach a new morality he took possession of the high ground at the expense of his own life. Did he choose to die and be remembered rather than to live and be forgotten?

By what principles do we wish to be judged?

Are we trying to be intelligent, sympathetic, modern citizens? 

Or are we building a new Jerusalem, accepting the whole prescription that Jesus laid out for us: a community of equals, based on love, co-operation, sharing of goods, caring for the needy, binding up the wounded, forgiving and being forgiven; trying to persuade others that we have found The Truth and are in the process of creating for ourselves heaven on earth?

Or are we going to listen more to our feelings, as guidance from our true nature, eschewing what make us feel guilty and embracing what warms and gladdens us? 

By whom do we wish to be judged?  By ourselves, our families, our friends?   Who are our friends?

Conclusions.

I endorse grounds [1] to [7] above. I fully support the aim of creating the sort of world I would like to live in; i.e. 'heaven on earth'.  But I do not, for myself, feel called on to follow Jesus the whole way. I think that survival is our ultimate duty 

My father (Ranyard West) taught that, inside a civilised country, a police force is necessary to control rebel elements; so also in a civilised world to control strife between nations. But I wish to point out that even that force need not involve killing. Note that civilised countries no longer exact the death penalty of their criminal citizens.

To postulate a rogue state with no moral sense is merely to hypothesise; such a state may not exist.

Try first the route of friendship and understanding. Try also the route of arbitration. Retain the 'moral high ground', by avoiding that which make one feel guilty. Make sure that others know your moral preferences. Avoid being misled by your own leaders into actions that are both criminal, and damaging to millions of innocent bystanders. Make sure your leaders know your position in good time, so that their policy is not decided in haste and in error. 

An attempt to accept passive defeat and affirm the absolute rejection of violence may be to attempt to leap an impossible, but also an imaginary, hurdle.  

Can this be called a Peace Testimony?

NOTES AND COMMENTS

[Note 1] Was Dewsbury aiming to conquer the sword with the spirit, hoping that the assailant, bristling with intent to cause pain or death, would grow sheepish in the face of his calm indifference? Or is he saying that he is indifferent to being pushed around by the forces of 'this world'?  I think the latter.

[Note 2] The William Penn position – collateral deaths are murder, and on a large scale are a war crime. Mankind may be inching forwards towards civilisation, over the centuries. Many countries have denied themselves capital punishment even for capital crimes like murder. Yet, in some advance societies the standard response to an armed assailant seems to be to shoot to kill, rather than to disable. And some armies seem to condone the bombing of non-combatants as 'unfortunate collateral damage', where the bombing of inanimate targets might work just as well. 

[Note 3]  A friend warned against hugging oneself for pietistic purity while actually enjoying the protection afforded by a well prepared military umbrella. He argues that 'man' (Homo sapiens) is still a flawed creation, of body and soul, the world a 'fallen' world; and that armament has proved to be a better way to peace than disarmament.