Skip to main content

Mobile decay

Sitting on the train, the man beside me answers his mobile and explains that he is on the train and apologizes that he may lose his signal. He continues to explain the particular business problem in detail until mercifully his signal is severed. There is no consciousness of an apology to the person who he is sitting next to, for carrying out a 'noisy conversation' and disturbing his reading. It is an apparently trivial act of 'social violence'.

Ironically his neighbour (me) is reading an essay by the American social critic, Morris Berman, on a meeting he attended at the Independent Institute in Washington to discuss how America could withdraw from Iraq. A meeting (one Saturday afternoon) at which, Berman observes, half the audience were disengaged from the speakers, occupying their own space, and texting or answering e-mail! It would never have occurred to them that this disregard for others' space in pursuit of self-enclosed interest was mimicking at a micro-level the very attitude that America was exhibiting in Iraq, an exhibition to which they were (given the particular audience) vehemently opposed!

It is for this kind of observation - that our values (often seen in the minute particulars of our lives) are precisely the building blocks out of which we construct our wider actions - for which I value Berman. It was Blake who said that the good is done in minute particulars but the converse is equally true the bad is the consequence of a wide path made of micro-decisions.

I am sure that the man sitting next me would be affronted by the thought he was, in truth, being strikingly rude (given how acceptable such behaviour has become - technology always has consequences that require (and rarely receive) moral assessment) and I too find myself noticing moments of creeping moral decay in my own behaviours that will need attention!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more