Life hangs by a thread, but while it's still dangling there, and at the risk of sounding pious:

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL

Principally, friends. With the powers available to us through language, we can express our reactions to the world in a way that others can understand and respond to. Over a period of years. To me, nothing compares with this hum of sympathetic communication between two spirits.

A (temporarily, but long-term) fully operational multi-sense mechanism, worth more than any amount of money. If we had to rent or buy this apparatus, it'd be priced at least as much as a house, and probably more.

Light, the sky, clouds, season change.

Piping hot water that gushes out of a showerhead, even though it’s the depth of winter. (What was life like before? What's it like now for street-sleepers? As well as sparing some change, you have to imaginatively enter into that bitterly cold world to appreciate just how great it is to wake up and have a hot shower.)

The availability of a huge variety of food from all round the world only a few minutes’ walk away from where you live. Including fresh fruit juice all year round: another reason to get out of bed.

Free downloads, blogs, and the whole circus of the internet at your fingertips.

Books, books, books to lose yourself in.

All the years left to experience these things.

This might just sound smug. Of course I realise the impossibly large numbers of people who do not have access to some, or all, of these things. If thinking about that prevents you from enjoying your own life, you have the privilege to go out and do something about it.

Life's beautiful. If Nietzsche's little eternal recurrence devil came to me, I'd say "Yes - every moment again!"

MANNERS

The other day, I was standing waiting for my bus to depart in a morning daze. Two teenage boys were standing next to me, on their way to school. They must have been about 14 or 15. Their friend saw them from the street and also stepped on, said “servusz” (hi) while pulling off his mitten and offering his hand. The others did the same, and it was handshakes all round. I was taken aback at this show of calm, mature camaraderie. Was it some kind of ritual they’d evolved in their group? Surely, even in Hungary, teenage boys must jostle each other and say things like “How’s it going, dickhead?” In Scotland, we used to call each other names as a bonding device. The whole basis of my experience of friendship in adolescence was learning that a good slagging meant the other person really cared. Anyway, in terms of manners, this is evidence that Hungary hasn’t really caught up with the 21st Century world.

RESPECT



Laughably, Tony Blair seems to think he can legislate to bring back “respect” among the young. While transferring the burden of proof on to people suspected of committing petty crimes may well be a good idea, no amount of sticks, carrots or political speeches will make the slightest difference in promoting a real culture of respect for others while every micro-message pouring out of the entertainment media exhorts contempt for authority, pure individualism, success at any price – all the modern virtues.

There are two kinds of respect: the philosophical theory and the everyday practical kind demanded by your elders and betters, or some guy pointing a gun at you in a gang fight. “Respect”. Born of fear.

The first, respect for human beings merely by virtue of their being human was always more an aspiration than a reality, a supremely admirable enlightenment project that was dead in the water by the time Nietzsche had finished with it, though echoes of it are still heard from time to time in well-intentioned international proclamations from the Charter of Human Rights to the G8 summit. Meanwhile, corporations and the militaristic junta in command of US foreign policy continue to wreak havoc regardless, aided and abetted by guess who?

A government with any guts would commit to this philosophy of mutual respect. For example, by facing up collectively to the impending ecological disaster and helping to inculcate a new value system based on environmental responsibility. That would demonstrate, and probably command, respect. It’s not going to happen. Standing up for human rights against international capitalism and its enslavement of millions in the developing world. That might promote a culture of respect. It’s not going to happen. Standing up for the dispossessed against greedy landlords extorting people’s wages from them would show a commitment to a “respect agenda”! But, surprise surprise, that’s not on this agenda either.

It’s the other watered-down kind of “respect” that Blair & co are now promoting, something that shouldn't involve too many difficult decisions! It was shown by most schoolchildren to their parents, teachers and to policemen in the post-war years, and went into irreversible decline after the advent of the Rolling Stones. So the story goes. Now, I know nothing of the mysteries of parenting, but I do know something about teaching. If you want to get respect from a class of kids in September, you have to first make sure they’re a bit afraid of you, then you have to build up a relationship with them by showing an interest in them, and showing that you’re even-handed in the way that you distribute attention, rewards and punishments. Since the fear factor is no longer present in our schools, teachers are going to have to work all the harder to earn respect. And they do. (This will not have been helped by the inexplicable decision by some irresponsible official at OFSTED to write to schoolchildren at a failing school, over the heads of their teachers, telling them that the teachers “could do better”!)

Outside the school gates, it is futile to try and reinstate some version of old-fashioned values without the fear factor, and Blair knows it. Society has changed irrevocably and, it’s true, we don’t “know our place”. (Wouldn’t it be great for politicians if we did?) So it’s fitting that he has chosen as the principal weapon in this campaign the one thing that can really motivate people, the only thing that still counts: a fine! In doing so, he reveals the bankruptcy of ideas at the heart of government, and of a socio-economic system that’s on its last shaky legs. If financial incentives are the only social glue left, the minute there is less money sloshing round the economy (in the next oil crisis, say) there is going to be some very bad behaviour indeed.

Pictured: scene from the Paris riots, 2005

ICE MENAGERIE

It's minus 15 now in Budapest, or thereabouts. I've been dogged by a cold which found it hard to develop fully in the stew of Vitamin pills and echinacea that's my January blood, and then exploded for a day. Every morning I get into my thermals to go to work. (And quick change out of them as soon as I arrive in the overheated interiors.) The sky is clear and there's always some trick of the morning light that makes the Parliament building pink or peach-coloured. No matter how much of a hurry I'm in, I try to walk the slightly longer but far more scenic river way and watch the cloudpour of vapour from all the heating systems. From the tram today, I caught a glimpse of the ice sculptures for a second time. They're giant versions of the kind of glass animals that might grace some old lady's mantelpiece. They remind me of the plastic ones I collected in a tub when I was a child. They're kitsch, I know - I can tell from a distance. The mammoth, the hummingbird, the gryphon are all a bit cute. But they're ice. And the coloured lights shining through them from behind, playing on the edges, make them look as if they've got Christmas tree lights inside. I make a mental note - which becomes a physical note - to return later.

When I do, after a good day when I could feel the cold retreat, the animals are surrounded by people and digital cameras. They're illuminated. The lights look as if they're coming from the inside. They pick out patches of haze and some thick veins in the crystalline structure of the ice. Small children wander round, dying to touch, but too well behaved. Would their hands stick to them, perhaps? Nightlit, the creatures are redeemed from their kitschiness - a parade of ambassadors from the ice kingdom - fantastic, rough-hewn, gleaming, perfect.

Ice Art: the artist's site

WHO LIVES IN A POSTMODERN WORLD?



I'm writing this following the recent debate on Puskas's blog (see sidebar) on truth v happiness, and the nature of truth.

I've always been curious about postmodernism, and never quite grasped what it is, probably because there's nothing concrete to grasp. It mostly to do with fragmentation, perspectivism and flux: the intellectual result of millions of trans-cultural interactions on a global scale. The most lucid explanation of postmodernism I've read is towards the end of Richard Tarnas's The Passion of the Western Mind. His style involves endless reformulation of the same idea, which, in the case of such an elusive phenomenon as this one, proves incredibly useful.

Here are some extracts:

"The mind is not the passive reflector of an external world and its intrinsic order, but is active and creative in the process of perception and cognition." "There is no empirical 'fact' that is not already theory-laden." These ideas seem to me to be uncontroversial.

What follows, however, is a real bombshell: "Reality is in some sense constructed by the mind, not simply perceived by it, and many such constructions are possible, none necessarily sovereign." "All human understanding is interpretation, and no interpretation is final." "Every object of knowledge is already part of a preinterpreted context, and beyond that are only other preinterpreted contexts. All human knowledge is mediated by signs and symbols of uncertain provenance, constituted by historically and culturally variable predispositions... Hence the nature of truth and reality, in science no less than in philosophy, religion, or art, is radically ambiguous." (italics mine) You get the idea. And through this chink in the city wall of Scientopolis marches the whole magical, mystical New Age carnival parade - beliefs become a kind of lifestyle choice, and no longer have to submit to the rigour of scientific testing. Why should they? They are all equally valid. There are no meta-narratives.

Is the (clearly stunning) success of science in predicting everyday occurrences the only philosophical reply to this radical perspectivism? This is a genuine question. Could the success of science be merely a huge coincidence, and end tomorrow?