Delivering the world from its exhausting boredom

I've been slowing down a bit with the posting over the last week, but partly because I've been having so many interesting conversations. This seems to be turning into an interesting project, with lots of potential.

To try and make more sense of it all I feel I need to keep some kind of 'clinical' and 'methodological' diary. In other words, I need to break down the different elements and find the links between them (in a clinical way); and develop a practice and an ethic that will propel the project and give it a sense of consistency and direction (a methodology). I've already started in a small way, for example clinical: the April summary, What's this blog about, links and refereces in the text and the sidebar, etc.; and methodological: the advantage of ignorance, the space not enclosed by words, and in a practical if not objective sense in protecting vulnerable people from objectivity, etc.]

You don't need to understand the jargon to understand the situation. Some people have already suggested that I need to be careful about the contents of my blog. This would be a simple truism if they clearly hadn't meant a whole variety of other things behind these plain words. Even my mother is concerned that I might get myself into trouble, and many of my friends have urged caution.

At the same time, most of the same people are very positive about the blog and its contents, which are important to them too. Also many of these people see me as quite cautious and responsible really, and it is true that I've spent a lot of time and thought and caution on my words so far.

OK, so I need to work out what we mean by caution, and what I need to be cautious of.

I think the key to my response lies in the idea of the 'greying society'. I'm sure loads of people have written about this, but I don't know where. The greying society sits around in meetings, often without clear agendas, or without a clear vision of how they are going to act on their decisions. They often struggle against the constant chaos around them, or they sail obliviously through it (they're managed by Scylla and Charybdis). They're exhausted by a constant demand to do more work, to fill in forms, to be assessed and reviewed. They can be stressed and irritable, although usually they manage to put on a brave and professional face. They have to spend lots of time doing admin work. Their task is Herculean, and their performance heroic, but they achieve about as much as Sisyphus. And finally, amongst other things, they do a funny little dance between trying hard not to upset each other on the one side and occasionally flaring up into threats and retribution on the other. We could find similar images in people's experiences of education and in the general lives of the many and various adults that cannot or are not 'working' (earning money in the system).

I use caricatures like this to briefly summarise various aspects, to make a general picture of a society that may be developing. I think this way of characterising ideas is a useful way to go about thinking - in an important way, it is a subjective thinking. [I think I'll have to come back to this in another post as there's no space here, but one claim I want to boldly make is that you cannot accuse someone of a subjective crime, which is also to say you should not be offended by a subjective statement. N.B. There are important scholia to this.]

I suppose people like John Major or GW Bush are probably up there too as prominent examples of the greying society (as in, 'thou shall not be seen to have had a life in the past...'). I don't know; I'm happier talking about people I do know (with their permission of course) and I get the feeling from lots of different people that they recognise this grey world but they can't see what to do about it. But I think you can see what to do about it. I think you have seen many times and you can see again, and many of us have made a difference and we all can in the future.

So all of this blog will be approached from the perspective of what I will call a positive ethics, an ethics that will help us to recognise and move out of this grey society. I am looking for an ethics that will help us do more and to recognise our own and others achievements. I do think that this goal is realised on many levels in good advocacy practice, and I will continue to explore this idea in the blog.

How cautious can I be? Such an ethics will inevitably challenge the greying society, however it manifests itself, and it will also challenge real individuals, communities and organisations. It's inevitable that any ethical stance, any action, is going to encourage equal and opposite reactions. It also seems clear, contrary to the objective laws of physics, that sometimes apparently small actions or events can become multiplied out of all proportion and have serious implications.

I will vigorously act to minimise conflict, within the context of the ethics that I am trying to set out. This is my promise to caution and to my interlocutors (electronic or otherwise).

At the end of this post I must quote my friend Georges Bataille, who made a significant impact on work around positive ethics in the last century. At the same time as I make this promise I can't escape the fact that life is challenge, and avoiding challenge is greyness and death. In Bataille's immortal words,

the future will belong not to those for who action is a demand for morose and disagreeable work, but to those who, on the contrary, will deliver the world from its exhausting boredom

I hope you're looking forward to that future with me.