I have just listened to a radio programme called 'Baby Boomers on Trial'. It was mostly smug self-justificatory propaganda on behalf of the Baby Boomers, suggesting that they haven't been so selfish after all. So I'll address some of the arguments they presented.
When it comes to the housing boom, partly this is to do with all of them wanting housing, where once people apparently accepted renting. So they suddenly demanded it, houses were built, builders made a profit and new owners experienced positive equity as the demand stayed high after the change in culture. It was a one-off conversion of countryside into more monetary value, combined with population growth. That makes them a lucky generation, and one might suggest that this wealth could be shared.
The argument that house prices are now too high for new owners partly because of the intermediate generation between the Baby Boomers and the new one doesn't spoil the fact that whereas wealth was created for these previous generations, it's still in their hands. New generations can't access new houses because they're owned already and there are strict planning restrictions keeping what remains of Britain's countryside safe. So it was a one-off wealth grab for two generations, including the Baby Boomers. What was lost was countryside.
The solution offered in the programme is to allow others to do as they did: relax the planning restrictions. However, justifying injustice by allowing others to do the same is not a good argument. When it comes to sacrificing the future for current wealth, it's the same argument the Baby Boomers apply to environmental degradation and national debt.
From housing, the programme moved on to inheritance, explaining that despite David Willett's assertions, it looks like wealth is being passed from generation to generation: that people can inherit wealth from their parents, allowing them to get on the property ladder and sharing the wealth of the Baby Boomers. There was the decency to acknowledge that life spans are increasing even faster than predicted, and that Baby Boomers do seem to be finding ever more ways to fritter away that inheritance. However, I think that it's a more fundamental point that if society has a high 'entry threshold' for a prosperous life, the fact that this threshold can be passed by inheritance doesn't make a high threshold a decent or acceptable thing. Inheritance might be an indicator of more wealth mobility than if there were no inheritance at all, but it's appalling for social mobility.
If you must inherit wealth from your parents to have a hope of accelerating yourself into wealth, then only those with rich, caring parents will get anywhere. That is not a good thing.
Similarly, the fact that grandparents are caring for their children and grandchildren does not change the problem that this care is necessary, and that the grandparents' generation created it. Social mobility is highest, I think, when people are able to stand alone and cope by themselves. Society should be aiming to help every man be an island (except for his dependence on society), not ensuring that everyone needs friends, family and rich parents.
Good family bonds are, I have no doubt, a rich and wonderful thing, and that Baby Boomers are keeping them strong is very worthy of them, but it's not enough. Society should not rely on these things, and a process that has taken society from one in which a person can fend for himself to one in which support is necessary is a bad process.
The programme even brought up the argument that old people retiring and drawing pensions is a good thing, because it frees up their jobs for the new generation. If jobs were a finite resource, it might be a good argument. But since both the old and new generations should be working, it holds no weight at all. Jobs can be created, and should be. I don't know how long they searched for young people suggesting that old people should retire, but it's a stupid and entirely flawed argument, and to trot these people out as justification for the excessive pensions burden is not a real response to the sensible arguments being made. Pensions were introduced when people lived a year beyond the retirement age (on average). People now live 20 years beyond it. It's no wonder that this great pyramid scheme is looking unsavoury. Adjustment of the retirement age is vital to prevent this giant injustice from burdening the coming generations.
Finally, of course, we get to the spurious and specious arguments about quality of life. Let me summarise them: 'since they're going to have better lives anyway, we can't have done anything wrong'.
It's the same argument that would justify a thief stealing from a rich man, a drug addict burgling a house or a soldier deserting during the race to Berlin. The rich man will have a better life despite the thief. The home-owner will probably still be happier and wealthier than the addict, and the war will be won nonetheless.
However, those things are irrelevant to whether it's right or wrong to do the actions I've mentioned.
Living standards have risen each generation (probably with an exception or two) for hundreds of years. With each technology that's invented, more possibilities arise for how to spend one's free time, or how to fend off the mishaps of life. This is a normal process, and the fact that the newest generation will have better lives (in this respect) than the Baby Boomers does not justify the reckless squandering of the environmental and financial future. This is in addition to the consideration that GDP growth is hardly a useful measure of anything except environmental destruction. The Baby Boomers should probably be paying even more for raising GDP so high.
The march of technology is separate from a generation's duty to pay for itself; it is not collateral for the pile of debt and pensions obligations that the Baby Boomers have left the future. When they were enjoying the boom times, they voted for more spending, and now the recession has made the country borrow hugely, building debt that should have been paid off in the boom.
As with the housing boom, this programme tries to present it as perfectly natural that instead of leaving none of one generation's debt for the next, the one-off change of rules is fine and decent. The generations before them kept (or at least believed that it was right to keep) their debts as their own, and left technological progress as a legacy that they had enjoyed and others could enjoy.
The Baby Boomers built new houses and enjoyed a housing boom, unlike the previous generation or the subsequent ones. This was a one-off shift from restraint, protecting the countryside, that benefitted one generation, and now that the boomers have enjoyed this one-off use of the country's potential, they are justifying the new generation's housing problems by looking back at previous ones.
Previous generations tried to leave a good financial system; the boomers are leaving a mess and a lot of debt, and are now justifying it by suggesting that new generations can leave debt to their children, by pointing to the economic growth that they achieved and from which they hugely benefitted, and to the technology that has been created in this time.
The shift from all previous generations' attitude that economic growth and technological progress are things to enjoy and pass on, to the boomer's suggestion that they are things to enjoy, and take payment from the future for, in exchange for having produced them, benefits only one generation; the one that successfully gets given progress for free and yet does not give it for free. Curiously enough, it is these people who are justifying it. If they really think that technological, financial and social progress is good collateral for debt, then they owe so much to the generations before them (especially the generation immediately preceding them, that fought in two wars!) that they should probably give away all their wealth at once.
They didn't get on to denying climate change, as a justification for burning all the fossil fuels, or to addressing other environmental problems, like over-fishing or intensive agriculture. It wouldn't justify it, even then, since the utility future generations might be able to get out of fossil fuels is enormous, given that we anticipate continuing technological progress. Therefore the use of fossil fuels for immediate, quantifiable benefit must be weighed against the vast benefits that the future might get.
I suppose that the radio programme could have been alright, if only it had been billed as the feel-good programming it was, not as an episode in the objective and factual 'analysis' series.
Friday, 25 June 2010
Saturday, 19 June 2010
Mother
My dear mother has her heart set on going to the family gathering, after she was in intensive care when my cousin got married. She knows she's getting old, and she has found a new lease of life since she got a computer and an internet connection. Her small world of telephone calls and coping with my father opened up. She still doesn't lead the sort of sociable life that most people do, but the gregarious woman was no longer so alone.
My sister visits her regularly, driving up from London for a flying weekend visit, although my sister does let her frustrations with visiting show in the form of stroppiness and unco-operativeness, and also by spending much of her visits on her laptop.
My mother means the world to me, and I visit her much less. I know foreigners who fly home more often that I get the coach, so travel clearly isn't enough of an excuse, despite the coach having the nickname 'Vomit Comet'. It's a sickening 4-hour drive each way, with no reading to do (unless I want to feel even more ill), and no laptop or podcasts (I own neither laptop nor mp3 player).
When I get home there's always washing up and cleaning to do, even before I start cooking proper meals and making more mess. It's one of the rare occasions my mother gets to eat properly cooked food, so it's not something I could omit in the name of rest. Cooking and cleaning for 3 is tiresome, though. As is my father's smoke, even before we get on to the stress of simply having him around, never knowing what interruption he's going to dream up next. I think I put it best when I explained that although he's no violent, and too incompetent to be manipulative, he's stressful because of his timing. Half-way through a television programme, or an interesting conversation, we'll hear his tramp on the stairs and I can feel the stress response starting. In he'll walk, oblivious (or unaware) of the climactic moment he's interrupting, and ask something inane like "How's it going?" Then he'll dump himself down, mostly in his armchair, but sometimes moving things you've left for a reason, and say something stupid about whatever is occurring. "Who is thta and why is he running?"
"Well, if you were really watching, you'd have just heard his name, and if you bothered to watch for another 40 seconds you'd notice the police behind him and the smoking gun in his hand!"
Or maybe he picks up my glass of water, from which I'm drinking, getting a nice layer of tar around the rim from his fingers, and then step in front of my mother to get her collection of empty tea mugs. Not to wash up, of course: just to get in the way and take them through to the kitchen so that I can wash them up later.
This leads me onto why he's so annoying: it's when he tries to be helpful or sociable that is worst. A dead weight on the household is bad enough, but he gets these things wrong. His conversations range from the racist to the misogynist, are always provocative (stupidly, such as "If I can't see it it's not there" when arguing over whether a refrigerator drawer that had just been emptied of putrescent vegetables needed cleaning to remove the mould) and never get anywhere, since he repeats arguments that have just been demolished like a broken record. So socialising is out because he's either offensive, a waste of time, or usually both. His cleaning is worse. Glasses that he 'cleans' he rinses, leaving them dirtier (c.f tar stains) than they were. When he hoovers, he can never work the machine. When he tidies, he puts things in the wrong place or presents them to the owner for immediate disposal, rather than piling them up for the owner to deal with at the right time.
This is frustrating because you never get to choose what to do. You might think that you're settled down for a film, but if Papa wants to hoover then either you do it yourself in 5 minutes, or you put up with an ostentatious racket for 15 minutes before he bursts in demanding that we summon the repair men (late in the evening) because the blasted thing is bust. So you get up, throw out the old hoover bag, put a new one in, sweep up the mess whilst choking on the dust from the breaking of the old one and go back to your film ten minutes later.
You might think that you're relaxing with a book, but if you hear that tread on the stairs, you might find someone snatching your drink, peering at your book ("Can I have a look at that?" Yoink) and then peppering you with questions such as "Why do you read this tripe? You should read only Dickens or Trollope." or "Why have there been no black symphonies?" If you're lucky, you might merely be presented with a book you finished earlier and hadn't yet put away. Putting it away himself is not an option, and nor is waiting for you to do it, although it's sometimes possible to have him agree to put things off until later. You've still been interrupted.
I sleep on the dining room floor becase my father's lair is next to my bedroom, and the smoke stops me breathing. It's not quite as relaxing as a bed. My bed's broken anyway: the removal men broke it when my parents shifted down a size and my father never got round to claiming any of the insurance.
My mother doesn't get out much, so she's always excited when I visit. Finally she can have nice conversations, go out with someone and do interesting things. She wants to go shopping (bright and early to avoid the rush, which I wouldn't normally bother with, although I will admit that crowds and wheelchairs don't mix, since people assume that we're as agile as a cat, not the ponderous mass of mother and metal that we are), go out to eat, get things she hasn't managed to get for a while and see the big wide world. She wants little jobs done around the house that have built up: get this from the garage, shift that, put this picture up, re-arrange that, re-pot some house plants and so on. It's all very understandable, very sweet and I can't possibly refuse.
All the to-ing and fro-ing, dealing with my father and helping my mother (even heaving myself up to make cups of tea when we're all settled is annoying) makes a visit a stressfulm tiring and busy event. And that's my weekend! I have to go back to work afterwards, not recover.
Meanwhile I've not had any contact with my friends, not done any exercise (I love running, and I go to the gym a lot), probably not eaten enough because my mother (innocently) and my father (belligerently) don't understand how much I eat, and not done any extra work, nor any of my housework. So the following week I have to work hard to catch up: I must keep up with work, do the washing and cleaning in my own home and see friends who I missed in the evenings I was away.
It's hard to summon enthusiasm to see the person I love most, and that hurts. The hurdles are so high. I can 'waste' a week when I'm here doing nothing much, by sleeping in, working late, having quick meals and going out or cooking properly, perhaps with friends, and still not only relax and have a good time but also get more work done than a week when I go to my parents.
I know that some people who visit their parents are pampered at each visit. They might be picked up from a train station (there's no train to my parents, unless I want to take as long as the coach and pay over three times as much), fed and watered, contribute only mildly to housework and sleep soundly. But I still feel guilty for not emulating the frequency of their visits. My mother means at least as much to me as theirs to them.
But can I let any of this show with her? Of course I can't! It would hurt her to think that visiting her was a chore as well as a joy. I have enough self-control not to snap as my sister does, and I'm aided in paying attention to my mother by not owning a laptop to distract me when I visit. The whole house is enervating in a way that is hard to describe. I can make a drink for a friend visiting me here, but when I'm slobbing with my mother in the evening of a visit just hauling myself out of the seat again seems burdensome. It's partly the smell; I remember when my father was away for 6 months when I was a boy and he had a job the old house suddenly became light and airy, and all seemed good in the world. My mother and I had a great time. I'm not sure I can describe the atmosphere my father creates other than as a 'pall of gloom'. It affects everything in the house, all the time, niggling at your nose, throat and mind. Always stuffy, always worrying about what will happen next.
And she wants to go to the family picnic. My sister can't make it, despite us both being told months and months ago to keep the day free. I think she forgot and agreed to go on Scout camp (she's a leader). So my mother didn't lose all hope, after missing the wedding and shifting all her hopes of seeing her family this year onto the picnic. I can rent a car and drive her there. Only I've got to let her down.
My job, which I need not to go bankrupt, starts soon. And I need to be there at lunchtime on the next day after the family picnic, with an 8-hour train journey from St. Pancras. Do the trains go overnight? Will I have time to drive a car from here to my mother, to the picnic and back round the circuit again before going to London? If both answers are 'yes' then I won't sleep that night, which will make my first day or two in my job difficult.
My sister visits her regularly, driving up from London for a flying weekend visit, although my sister does let her frustrations with visiting show in the form of stroppiness and unco-operativeness, and also by spending much of her visits on her laptop.
My mother means the world to me, and I visit her much less. I know foreigners who fly home more often that I get the coach, so travel clearly isn't enough of an excuse, despite the coach having the nickname 'Vomit Comet'. It's a sickening 4-hour drive each way, with no reading to do (unless I want to feel even more ill), and no laptop or podcasts (I own neither laptop nor mp3 player).
When I get home there's always washing up and cleaning to do, even before I start cooking proper meals and making more mess. It's one of the rare occasions my mother gets to eat properly cooked food, so it's not something I could omit in the name of rest. Cooking and cleaning for 3 is tiresome, though. As is my father's smoke, even before we get on to the stress of simply having him around, never knowing what interruption he's going to dream up next. I think I put it best when I explained that although he's no violent, and too incompetent to be manipulative, he's stressful because of his timing. Half-way through a television programme, or an interesting conversation, we'll hear his tramp on the stairs and I can feel the stress response starting. In he'll walk, oblivious (or unaware) of the climactic moment he's interrupting, and ask something inane like "How's it going?" Then he'll dump himself down, mostly in his armchair, but sometimes moving things you've left for a reason, and say something stupid about whatever is occurring. "Who is thta and why is he running?"
"Well, if you were really watching, you'd have just heard his name, and if you bothered to watch for another 40 seconds you'd notice the police behind him and the smoking gun in his hand!"
Or maybe he picks up my glass of water, from which I'm drinking, getting a nice layer of tar around the rim from his fingers, and then step in front of my mother to get her collection of empty tea mugs. Not to wash up, of course: just to get in the way and take them through to the kitchen so that I can wash them up later.
This leads me onto why he's so annoying: it's when he tries to be helpful or sociable that is worst. A dead weight on the household is bad enough, but he gets these things wrong. His conversations range from the racist to the misogynist, are always provocative (stupidly, such as "If I can't see it it's not there" when arguing over whether a refrigerator drawer that had just been emptied of putrescent vegetables needed cleaning to remove the mould) and never get anywhere, since he repeats arguments that have just been demolished like a broken record. So socialising is out because he's either offensive, a waste of time, or usually both. His cleaning is worse. Glasses that he 'cleans' he rinses, leaving them dirtier (c.f tar stains) than they were. When he hoovers, he can never work the machine. When he tidies, he puts things in the wrong place or presents them to the owner for immediate disposal, rather than piling them up for the owner to deal with at the right time.
This is frustrating because you never get to choose what to do. You might think that you're settled down for a film, but if Papa wants to hoover then either you do it yourself in 5 minutes, or you put up with an ostentatious racket for 15 minutes before he bursts in demanding that we summon the repair men (late in the evening) because the blasted thing is bust. So you get up, throw out the old hoover bag, put a new one in, sweep up the mess whilst choking on the dust from the breaking of the old one and go back to your film ten minutes later.
You might think that you're relaxing with a book, but if you hear that tread on the stairs, you might find someone snatching your drink, peering at your book ("Can I have a look at that?" Yoink) and then peppering you with questions such as "Why do you read this tripe? You should read only Dickens or Trollope." or "Why have there been no black symphonies?" If you're lucky, you might merely be presented with a book you finished earlier and hadn't yet put away. Putting it away himself is not an option, and nor is waiting for you to do it, although it's sometimes possible to have him agree to put things off until later. You've still been interrupted.
I sleep on the dining room floor becase my father's lair is next to my bedroom, and the smoke stops me breathing. It's not quite as relaxing as a bed. My bed's broken anyway: the removal men broke it when my parents shifted down a size and my father never got round to claiming any of the insurance.
My mother doesn't get out much, so she's always excited when I visit. Finally she can have nice conversations, go out with someone and do interesting things. She wants to go shopping (bright and early to avoid the rush, which I wouldn't normally bother with, although I will admit that crowds and wheelchairs don't mix, since people assume that we're as agile as a cat, not the ponderous mass of mother and metal that we are), go out to eat, get things she hasn't managed to get for a while and see the big wide world. She wants little jobs done around the house that have built up: get this from the garage, shift that, put this picture up, re-arrange that, re-pot some house plants and so on. It's all very understandable, very sweet and I can't possibly refuse.
All the to-ing and fro-ing, dealing with my father and helping my mother (even heaving myself up to make cups of tea when we're all settled is annoying) makes a visit a stressfulm tiring and busy event. And that's my weekend! I have to go back to work afterwards, not recover.
Meanwhile I've not had any contact with my friends, not done any exercise (I love running, and I go to the gym a lot), probably not eaten enough because my mother (innocently) and my father (belligerently) don't understand how much I eat, and not done any extra work, nor any of my housework. So the following week I have to work hard to catch up: I must keep up with work, do the washing and cleaning in my own home and see friends who I missed in the evenings I was away.
It's hard to summon enthusiasm to see the person I love most, and that hurts. The hurdles are so high. I can 'waste' a week when I'm here doing nothing much, by sleeping in, working late, having quick meals and going out or cooking properly, perhaps with friends, and still not only relax and have a good time but also get more work done than a week when I go to my parents.
I know that some people who visit their parents are pampered at each visit. They might be picked up from a train station (there's no train to my parents, unless I want to take as long as the coach and pay over three times as much), fed and watered, contribute only mildly to housework and sleep soundly. But I still feel guilty for not emulating the frequency of their visits. My mother means at least as much to me as theirs to them.
But can I let any of this show with her? Of course I can't! It would hurt her to think that visiting her was a chore as well as a joy. I have enough self-control not to snap as my sister does, and I'm aided in paying attention to my mother by not owning a laptop to distract me when I visit. The whole house is enervating in a way that is hard to describe. I can make a drink for a friend visiting me here, but when I'm slobbing with my mother in the evening of a visit just hauling myself out of the seat again seems burdensome. It's partly the smell; I remember when my father was away for 6 months when I was a boy and he had a job the old house suddenly became light and airy, and all seemed good in the world. My mother and I had a great time. I'm not sure I can describe the atmosphere my father creates other than as a 'pall of gloom'. It affects everything in the house, all the time, niggling at your nose, throat and mind. Always stuffy, always worrying about what will happen next.
And she wants to go to the family picnic. My sister can't make it, despite us both being told months and months ago to keep the day free. I think she forgot and agreed to go on Scout camp (she's a leader). So my mother didn't lose all hope, after missing the wedding and shifting all her hopes of seeing her family this year onto the picnic. I can rent a car and drive her there. Only I've got to let her down.
My job, which I need not to go bankrupt, starts soon. And I need to be there at lunchtime on the next day after the family picnic, with an 8-hour train journey from St. Pancras. Do the trains go overnight? Will I have time to drive a car from here to my mother, to the picnic and back round the circuit again before going to London? If both answers are 'yes' then I won't sleep that night, which will make my first day or two in my job difficult.
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
How to devise moral principles
Why choose 'death of a conscious, pain-feeling life-form' as your arbitrary distinction?
My quibble is with the link between harm and morality. I see no reason to base morality on causing harm. I chose to lead into this by pointing out that you have already qualified 'harm' as 'harm to pain-feeling, conscious animals'. The more qualifications one introduces, the closer one might come to your opinions, but these qualifications really need some sort of justification. Since the whole argument rests on this proposition, I think that discussing it further is worthwhile.
I think that the further qualifications come not through any set of fundamental principles that lead to them, but in an attempt to rationalise moral beliefs that are already held. This sort of 'post hoc justification' is common (as far as I know) in philosophy and science, but is really not good enough.
I suggest that we start with looking at why we do not cause harm to others and defining very clearly a moral principle there before we start trying to apply it to practical cases.
If we always think of the practical cases as we're devising a principle we might bias our ideas of what is logical by trying to make the principle's conclusions fit our preconceived notions rather than finding a sound principle and applying it in order to decide what our notions should be.
Do you think this defintion holds up for the purposes of defining meat-eating as harmful?
My quibble is with the link between harm and morality. I see no reason to base morality on causing harm. I chose to lead into this by pointing out that you have already qualified 'harm' as 'harm to pain-feeling, conscious animals'. The more qualifications one introduces, the closer one might come to your opinions, but these qualifications really need some sort of justification. Since the whole argument rests on this proposition, I think that discussing it further is worthwhile.
I think that the further qualifications come not through any set of fundamental principles that lead to them, but in an attempt to rationalise moral beliefs that are already held. This sort of 'post hoc justification' is common (as far as I know) in philosophy and science, but is really not good enough.
I suggest that we start with looking at why we do not cause harm to others and defining very clearly a moral principle there before we start trying to apply it to practical cases.
If we always think of the practical cases as we're devising a principle we might bias our ideas of what is logical by trying to make the principle's conclusions fit our preconceived notions rather than finding a sound principle and applying it in order to decide what our notions should be.
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