I pledge allegiance to us all
I’m reading a book at the moment by Daniel Dennett called Breaking the spell and in one section he discusses people who enjoy the freedoms granted by their nation state but place their allegiance to religion higher than the state that gives them the liberty to voice their beliefs. This got me thinking, not about religion, but about the nature of allegiance.
What I wonder is: is it possible to hold allegiance in the face of zero opposition?
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands…
The United States is very much a country set up within an environment that did not hold its ideals. To give allegiance to the United States is also, implicitly, declaring yourself allayed against those who do not hold those ideals.
The same is true in Britain. While we don’t have a specific pledge, and probably wouldn’t recite it if we did, there is at the heart of being British a knowledge that it is different from the French, Germans, Italians, and even the USA. I name these because, while being British, like being any other nationality, means being different by default, part of being British is to identify ourselves as being specifically different from those national identities. Rarely are Australia, Canada, or Belgium thought of as something being British is not.
Although I have no experience of this I imagine that to ally yourself with God is to ally against the godless. Not necessarily in a confrontational way, but certainly in a philosophical one.
Given this, I wonder whether it would be possible, assuming either one single religion or no religion, one single nation state or no nation states, whether it would be possible to pledge allegiance to humanity without knowing whether there was anything else out there to form an allegiance against. Would a common goal, for example, the eradication of all disease, famine, suffering, etc, be enough? What then?
Does pledging allegiance to one group mean you must pledge allegiance against another?
England’s Day
It was St. George’s day yesterday and a lot of people, including the London Mayor decided that it was high time we started to celebrate England’s day without the self-concious restraint, embarrassment, and assumption that celebrating England is to turn our backs on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This is a good thing, but actually I am still confused. What does our country really have to do with our patron saint?
St. George was (assuming he ever existed) a nobleman born in Turkey, who volunteered to serve in the Roman army. He proceeded to get carried away with this new fangled Christianity business*, denounced the emperor’s pagan gods and got his head chopped off for the pleasure. He certainly wasn’t English and the thing with the dragon is not only a myth but one that has been applied plenty of times over to all manner of historical figures.
Saint George is the patron saint of Aragon, Catalonia, England, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal, and Russia, as well as the cities of Amersfoort, Beirut, Bteghrine, Cáceres, Spain, Ferrara, Freiburg, Genoa, Ljubljana, Gozo, Pomorie, Qormi, Lod, and Moscow, as well as a wide range of professions, organizations, and disease sufferers.
Given all this what on earth are we doing celebrating England and Englishness on a day when we really ought to be begging our protective saint to rid us of our ills?
It seems to me that Britain would be much better off with five new days: England Day, Scotland Day, Wales Day, Northern Ireland Day, and Union Day. On these days we all get a day off, buy traditional foods (I like scotch pies and Welsh cakes the most) listen to some traditional music (Chas n’ Dave, Donald where’s your trousers, and so on) and genuinely reflect on the bad and celebrate the good of our home nations.
If we are going to cling on to outdated religious concepts then do them properly and leave me out of it, otherwise decide what we are really celebrating and lets get on with it.
*April 23rd 303 AD, 10 years before Emperor Constantine forced everyone to become Christian and really kick-started the whole thing.
Football: a game for all nations
I’ve been entertained by a blog post on the evils of football today. How soccer is ruining America is as entertaining as it wrong, so I feel the need to defend football against this tirade.
FIrst things first, I am not a true football fan. I follow Liverpool, but not religiously. Formula 1 is my sport of choice. Having said that I can see the things that are good about football and I feel that some balance is needed. It is, after all, the national game if my home land. I won’t comment on whether football is destroying ruining America or not; it is not for me to judge.
I want to start by addressing a key question in this piece: What other game, to put it bluntly, is so boring to watch?
Well, let’s see. We have American Football, a game where the action stops every 20-30 seconds or so for a discussion on what to do next. A game that is so dull that people switch on the national championship final just to watch the adverts.
How about basketball? A game where a group of players can run the length of the court in very few strides, where one score follows another, and another, almost equally, until someone misses and we start again with a minor difference. Yawn.
How about baseball? A game that is only more exciting than cricket because the players run slightly further and have a penchant for sliding in the dirt. Interestingly enough in Britain we call it rounders and only children play it, but that is a matter of interest rather than a comment on the sport itself.
Are there any others, Cricket of course is realllly dull, heavyweight boxing isn’t always too hot, and the less said about driving fast in a straight line the better.
So to answer the question fairly simply, almost every other game is less interesting then football.
So what’s next? Well, we need to consider why a sport is more, or less interesting really. I could, and will, explain my thoughts, but something more scientific would be grand. Here’s a news report from way back in old 06. The gist of this is that what makes a sport exciting is not the tempo (perhaps American football is saved after all?), the high score, the total number of points scored, but the potential for upset. the potential for the underdog to take it. It is the nervous, edge-of-the-seat, moments where you just don’t know who will win. Far from being a wasteland, bereft of scoring, football is a tangle of excitement where you are often kept waiting till the dying moments to discover who can get the crucial goal. Football is a series of rises and falls, or near chances, or what ifs and almosts which is enhanced by the low scores, and far from being random and pointless, penalty shoot-outs, when they even happen these days, can be the most buttock clenching, heart stopping moments of a season or championship.
As importantly, the low scores mean that those high scoring games are truly exceptional. You can wait a lifetime to watch England beat Germany 5-0. It will probably never happen again, and for that reason I will never forget it.
So on to the next point, what’s with restricting play to the feet?
It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability.
Well that is certainly one way of looking at it, but let me put it another way: Any fool can pick up a ball and run with it. In fact, it is so easy that new rules need to be created to make it less easy. In rugby you aren’t even allowed to throw the ball forwards as that would be far too easy; where’s the sport in that? In basketball they make you bounce it for some reason.
It is true that our hands are a defining characteristic of being human, it is also true that the thing that is good about hands is that they can hold things without dropping them. They are for holding. I can feel the excitement oozing out of that very concept. Feet on the other hand are for movement, for running, for play, for excitement, for the chase.
To control something with your feet is to open up the potential for mistakes, it requires great skill, practice, and dexterity. It isn’t easy, but it is powerful, and can be astounding when it all comes together.
Compare a pitcher throwing a particularly fast, or indeed swervy ball. Under a second in flight, the whack of the catchers mitt, and and a dejected batter. Gosh. Now consider Gazza’s beautiful flick over the head of Colin Hendry in Euro 96. Running at the defender as the ball bounces, appearing to be out of reach, a flick in to the air, Colin watches, helpless, as it sails over his head only to connect with Gazza’s foot, magically appearing on the other side and thundering the ball into the net as the keeper dives toward the ball in vain. The crowd roars, the team go mad and celebrate.
If only Gazza could have used his hands. What thrills we could have seen!
You may see football as a game for girls, but that says more about you than football. Football is war. Not the mindless ‘masculine business of destroying your opponent with insurmountable power’, not 100,000 peasants with pitchforks, but highly trained, intelligent, specialists, following a carefully crafted yet fluid battle plan where the individual must make decisions as to his own role in the plan on a minute to minute basis. The don’t get to stop and debate, they get to do their job, fight their place, and collectively out-think and out-manoeuvre the enemy with superior will, confidence, quality, and skill. It is a game of attack and counter-attack, where offence and defence interact and are mediated as one and the closest equivalent to chess outside an actual battlefield you will find.
Football also teaches us to come together around a common goal. Whether you are from south America, Russia, Isreal, Ireland, Africa, or Holland, you are welcome compete on equal terms with equal rules. You are welcome. I for one am glad that the United States is choosing to join the rest of the world. Perhaps now we can all just get along.
You offend me
Everyone seems to be offended these days and actually that quite offends me. I hesitate, albeit for the briefest of moments, to add to the whinging mess that is our society but, as the saying goes, when in rome…
Case 1 – The Gollywog
Carol Thatcher is said to have described a half-French mixed race tennis player as, amongst other things, a gollywog. I don’t really care, but I do care that she was fired for doing so.
The problem is that everyone is so caught up with appearances that they feel they must take action, but firing someone is not taking action is it? It is washing your hands of the whole matter. It is deleting the e-mail and hoping the sender forgets about it. It is the very antithesis of good management and absolutely not the way to deal with an employee (or self employed contractor) that does something wrong.
Boris got it spot on for me:
“The way to deal with it is if someone says something a bit offensive in a green room and you’re the producer of the show and everybody else has taken umbrage and feels uncomfortable … you take that person on one side and say: ‘Listen, you’ve got to understand we’ve got to work together and you’ve got watch what you say and you’ve got to be sensitive,’ but I don’t think you fire someone. I really don’t.”
Of course, now that Boris has said that other people now need to criticise him. Opposition politicians will use this to try and paint him as a racist and try their best to be appalled on behalf of as many people as they can, because that is what politicians do these days: pander to ignorant reactionaries.
Case 2 – Jeremy Clarkson
This one is more funny than anything. Adam Wilcox wrote a post on the Clarkson debacle this that pretty much ticks all the boxes.
Clarkson called the Prime Minister a “one-eyed Scottish Idiot” and the Blind Association took offence. It is obvious that disability is not a cause of incompetence, but it certainly is no barrier to it, that’s for sure. I’m just glad the Jeremy opted to apologise only for referring to the Prime Ministers appearance, but made no mention in his apology of, quite rightly, branding Gordon an idiot, which of course is entirely accurate.
