The world of today:
I love words and I love the English language, but one of my
weaknesses is that I will always use a long word where an apposite
diminutive would suffice. This makes me a stranger in our modern
worlds where language seems to have suffered a reductio ad
absurdum. The reductio
arguments though are essentially fallacies and it is possible that
“reductio ad txt-speak” or
many of the other internet driven, often US inspired, changes in
language use are developing a more international form of the English
language, which is fine by me as long as I can still read Tolkien or
Conan Doyle. One example of this that irritates me far more than it
should is the now common-place use of the phrase (please excuse the
capitals here.) “Train Station.” It is a Railway Station, a
railway premises run by a railway undertaking for the purposes of
railway operation. The train is a transit medium! But language
moves on, as do the ideas that it describes. Today’s Transport for
London “Tube Map” now displays not just the undergound of Harry
Beck’s original 1931 idea, but the overgound and the south London
Tramways. This is progress as they all “transport” people. And
so to a sentence full of ludicrously long and complex words that
refer to the ideal of thought and belief that almost everyone
believes that they understand, but the more one examines this
concept, the more it becomes apparent that almost no-one can describe
it adequately, let alone demonstrate understanding.
I
have long pondered upon one of the ultimate philosophical or
metaphysical concepts surrounding epistemology, the concept that
underlies the simple English word “truth.” I do not wish to do
more than mention in passing the ecclesiastical concept of truth, for
I fear that has largely disappeared from contemporary life. I fear
that modern “devout” men, such as Jacob Rees Mogg will find the
eye of the proverbial needle forming the idealised gates of heaven
that they one day hope to pass. Nor am I concerned simply with the
factual truths of basic science or mathematics, they are largely
fixed and understood, except that the definitions tend to fray at the
edges when examined too closely. We also have concepts of legal
truth, but the ancient British concept that “Law” is the will of
God, by the hand of the Monarch through the power of Parliament
exercised by an impartial judiciary, has been hard strained recently
with a Prime Minister specifically suggesting that the law should not
apply to Parliament. That Parliament is
the law. Welcome to our new dictatorship. Will any repeat of the
“Cummings goings” of 2020 result in a 10-year prison sentence for
breaking lockdown rules? Or do “rules” only apply to the masses?
The hoi polloi, perhaps
including the
bourgeoisie?
They certainly do not appear to apply to our political elite.
In
2019 we lived in a state that we thought of as “normal.” The
etymology of this word would appeal to the Freemason as the Latin
origin
normālis
is from the carpenter’s square, the nōrma,
but
has
grown to be understood as conforming to a type, standard or pattern.
If examined, we might be surprised at just how unusual this perceived
normal of 2019 was.
A decade earlier, the first Android smart-phones were coming onto
the market a couple of years after the slightly earlier but highly
expensive iPhone. Today, virtually all active members of society
carry one everywhere. I am rather glad that in my youth one had to
obtain a camera and film to record activity, not pull a high
definition video camera out of your pocket. So where is the “normal”
there? The concept of “something accepted by custom and tradition”
has taken on a different meaning in the years of our current
century. I was a fairly early adopter of the internet, long before
Tim Berners-Lee had gifted us the World-Wide-Web,
I used Cix and Compuserve, I used IRC, or internet-relay-chat
regularly from the mid nineties. Windows 3 had begun in Seattle in
1988, but not until the 1992 release of Windows 3.1 did home
computers with networking become available. Not until 1994 did
Netscape release their web-browser,
Bill
Gates then responded a year later with Internet Explorer.
Our “world” is less than a generation old, a mere 25 years.
Granted that a mere fifteen years before I was born, England was
enjoying a warm summer that would end with “The Austrian Corporal
problem” one that changed, not only the world order, but the nature
of Britain when in 1945 our
illustrious war leader, without whom things might have been very
different, was given such a sound thrashing in
the
General Election that Atlee was able, between 1945 and 1951 to
implement the Welfare
State, including the National
Health Service, dramatically reform education, although that had been
passed into law in 1944, it was his administration that laid out the
free secondary education of all children up of the age of 15, to be
extended to 16 as soon as reasonably
practicable.
This, of course, removed the idea of a boy, for there was societal
sexism of a much more rigid kind universally in force, would leave
school at 14 to enter into an apprenticeship to come of age at 21 as
a journeyman worker. No-one really thought much about the girls,
although the Colleges of Commerce were given a new lease of life.
The industries, often heavily war damaged, were nationalised, the
railways, the coal-mines, the energy and water services and much,
much more. Rationing was to remain in force until after I was born
by a week or two, but malnutrition became much rarer, milk was served
in school, cod-liver oil and orange-juice distributed to mothers and
young children. We gradually recovered the British spirit and got
our industries going, but in retrospect, the Germans built new
industry, we struggled on with the pre-war factories and practices.
This
was simply because the Nazi Luftewaffe bombed London and other cities
with bombs ranging from 25kg to 250kg or
500kg,
a heavy raid dropping just over 5,000 tonnes of ordnance. This
caused widespread damage.
By
1944 we had thousand bomber raids raining 10,000 tonnes of ordnance
onto the city of
Berlin every
night and the USAF continuing through the daylight hours. This
caused almost total destruction. Then,
come the mid-sixties, the post-war world became the “swinging
sixties” and
Britain’s black and white post-war existence became full-colour
modernity in a social revolution that
lasted from roughly 1967 to 1972, by which time one Margaret Hilda
Thatcher was Secretary of State for Education and soon to become
leader of the Conservative party. Moving
into the seventies, the
country had also joined the Common Market and for many life was at
least tolerable, although inflation rates in the teens of percent per
annum was no joke. It was not decimalisation that doubled
prices, this piece was penned on the fiftieth anniversary of decimal
coinage, it was inflation, accompanied by devaluation of the pound,
that brought us kicking and screaming into the Thatcher eighties
where, although industry was forced to modernise, fiscal stability
improved. It
was now economics that drove the country not production. So
how many “normals” have you lived through? How different will
our post-pandemic world be? Will it be a “new normal” or will it
be a new different, just as the post-war welfare state was?
I have a great
empathy with a Welsh word and concept of “hiraeth.”
It
is a concept of loss and memory, homesickness and nostalgia, but is,
at the same time much more than any and all of those emotions.
However, the current situation in Britain, I’ll leave the Republic
and the Province out of this ramble, requires something a little more
forward thinking, something less reflective. The Danes, who are
quite private about their language, apparently, most speak English
and German but dislike people trying to learn Danish, have a complex
word relating to the concern for society being greater than
individual concerns. Samfundssind appears to be the antonym for
whatever moral framework drives most British politicians of the
current era. They would no doubt twist the translation to suggest
that the party comes before the people, which, I suspect, is far from
the meaning most Danes would understand in the word. In Britain’s
new and less than splendid isolation, it may be that we require a
different Scandinavian concept, the Finnish idea of “sisu.” To
those familiar with the web-comic “Scandinavia and the World”
this is instantly recognisable in the stern and insular personality
of the Finland character. To quote Urpu Strellman, a literary agent
from Helsinki, as Finland became independent from Sweden, whose
language was used by the state, the legal profession and the elite,
and from Russia, the not-so-friendly bear that it shares important
borders with, it represents the creation of a Finnish stereotype as
“stern, modest, hard-working, God-obeying people who get through
difficult times, taking upon them whatever [fate] throws their way.
These are features that relate to honesty very closely.” Finns are
too honest for the minds of many countries, especially the British
who have been quoted, by Johannes Kananen of the Swedish School of
Science at the University of Helsinki, as saying that “In English
there is a saying that the truth is so valuable, it should be used
sparingly. But in Finland, people speak the truth all the time.”
I need to add a couple of riders to the preceding ideas. Firstly,
the God that the Finns “obey” is unlikely to be the one that the
Archbishop of Canterbury follows and secondly, a truly truthful Finn
would probably question any information given by a Swede! “Sisu”
describes the concept of grit, resilence and hardiness, probably
reinforced by the vast rural landscape
and the dark Arctic winters that control the lives of those outside
of Helsinki and the handful of cities with population upwards of
100,000, cities the size of Aberdeen, Canterbury or Chelmsford.
So
while I try not to lose myself in a hiraeth relating to our lost
European neighbours, I suspect that a British, or possibly, quite
soon, a little England, version of sisu will be required to steady
our course across the dim windblown uplands as we try to construct a
new type of society post-pandemic. Hopefully, one that contains some
of the ethos of of the Danish samfundssind. A society where the
well-being of all comes before personal glory and hopefully one where
politicians will encompass at least a little of the Finnish respect
for simple truth born
of sisu.
I’ll
get my coat.
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