The politics of childhood

Apparently UK education minister Michael Gove thinks children should have much longer school days and much shorter holidays to bring us in line with Hong Kong. He’s also a fan of rote learning and filling children’s heads with ‘facts’ – names and dates from history and the such. Childhood can be a loaded political issue. I note how much this Gove policy resembles the attitude of early Maoist China to children. That stemmed from a deliberate intention to break family units and make everyone more engaged with the state. So, what’s Gove’s agenda, you have to wonder?

What is childhood for? Obviously children need to grow up into functional adults. They need life skills too. I would argue that developing the ability to learn, reason, analyse, research, create, innovate and the such is the best education a child can have. The world changes all the time. The young person who can flex, learn and adapt is the one who can do best for themselves and their communities. Knowing historical dates and spurious statistics won’t do you any good in the real world.

The Victorians romanticised childhood, and did away with labour for children, taking them out of the workplace and putting them into schools. But, what is education for? Is it simply to keep children out of the way while parents work? Is school there to train the employees of the future, or should learning be more about developing rounded, functional people who are capable of thinking? I don’t think the latter precludes going on to be economically successful. I’d say there’s a case that it makes for a better, smarter, more flexible country having people educated that way. It doesn’t give you cogs for your machine, or people trained to serve and obey. I have to ask, what is the Tory agenda here? I think it’s all about serving the minority at the expense of the majority.

As a Pagan, I feel strongly about creatures being able to live freely in their natural habitats. I include humans in this. Humans are not meant to be battery farmed any more than chickens or pigs are. We too need fresh air, freedom to move, time to rest. Adults and children alike should not be pushed towards ever longer work hours just to serve the corporate machine. It is a morally wrong approach. Humanity does not exist to serve GDP.

As a parent, I want to spend time with my child. I want to talk with him, play with him, share life with him. I did not become a parent with a view to handing over my child to the state and hardly ever seeing him. I suspect I’m not alone in this. Back at the last election, the Tories talked about championing family life. Well, if you want family life, you have to have time for it, and longer school hours, longer work hours doesn’t achieve that. Tired people falling into bed do not have a family life. This is not a move towards a better work life balance.

Stressed, overworked, overtired humans who lack for social and emotional contact are more likely to become sick, depressed and dysfunctional. School is tiring for young humans whose bodies are growing and changing all the time. They need periods of rest, they need unstructured time to learn and grow properly. If we go the Gove route, we will not beget success. Instead we’ll be saving for a long term crisis in mental health and social cohesion.

Hard work should only exist where it furthers human causes. We are not here to make other people wealthy. We should not sacrifice our lives to the insane, dysfunctional and wrongheaded dictats of a ruling ‘elite’ that seems to have no grip on reality whatsoever. It looks like children are the next targets or their insane and toxic policies. We have to fight.

The Druid balancing act

Which may (as a title) conjure mental images of stacking up Druids in humorous ways… but sadly no, I am not poised to offer amusing photographs. The idea of balance as a virtue is nothing new. The Greeks had it (forgive me, I am rubbish with names, can’t tell you who). The middle way, the median, avoiding excess on both sides – it crops up in all manner of traditions and philosophies. Generally speaking, balance gives you something more viable and sustainable than the absence of balance will. Sometimes there are issues around the scale of the balance as you consider it – what may seem out of balance close up may be part of a bigger and wholly balanced picture, after all.

I’ve become increasingly conscious of the need for balance in my own life. Right amount of sleep balanced against right amount of food and right amount of activity is critical. Get it right and I can do a great deal. Get it wrong, and I plunge into bodily pain, exhaustion, depression and become more vulnerable to anxiety. I got it wrong a bit over the last few days, and am rebalancing now, in a very deliberate sort of way. I need some time with no drama, to get re-centred. I also know that too much time with nothing exciting happening also drags me down. I need a balance between stimulation and reflection. I need social time and quiet time, active time and time to be still, and I need that in ongoing cycles from one day to the next.

I can work off-balance for a while, and there are times when that is necessary, productive or interesting. Living there isn’t viable. It’s so easy though, to be sucked in to a mind-set that accepts excess. From surfeits of food and alcohol, to overwhelming noise, and excessive consumption, the opportunities for gluttony are many. The pressures towards sleep deprivation, starving yourself, not getting enough exercise, and other forms of damaging insufficiency are also many. With more people finding themselves pushed under the bread line on a daily basis, the scope for not enough is huge. People who are overweight from too much carb and cannot afford fresh fruit, veg and good proteins, who are both starving and swelling at the same time. Such is our modern culture.

Balance is so much more important than growth. Balancing the economy, balancing the personal chequebook – matters. Getting the money straight is good, but in that balancing act things like health and well-being need to be given a value and added to the scales. We are too quick to place no value on that which cannot be converted directly into cash. Mental health. Happiness. Quality of life. These are not cash issues and often cannot be sorted out by throwing money at them.

Balance is not about avoiding excess, it’s about not having too much of one kind of excess all the time. Some fasting for spiritual work is fine. Fasting all the time, isn’t viable. Some staying up all night dancing and drumming is fine. Doing it all the time takes you out of other aspects of life. Some pain, some rapture, some madness, some office banality… in balance with other things, a great many extremes are visitable. We can have wide and wild experience without burning out. It’s just a matter of knowing when to stop for a while, when to step away, when to do the other thing instead. Today, a little quietness and drawing breath, a little domestic work, a lot of resting. Tomorrow, some other thing…

Theories of reincarnation

Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism all emerged from the same roots, bringing into the world a hierarchical concept of reincarnation that has been absorbed somewhat into New Age thinking. We know the ancient Celts believed something along the lines of reincarnation but we don’t have much detail. It’s easy, and therefore tempting, to import the ideas of other cultures to fill in the gaps.

While I like the idea of reincarnation (matter, after all, gets reused, why not spirit?) I don’t like all of the baggage. Far too many New Age folk are willing to accept superficial wealth and material success as proof of good karma and blame misfortune on bad karma, even going as far as to suggest disability is a consequence of bad karma. That’s hideous, illogical and a way of abdicating responsibility. Why would material wealth be a reflection of your spiritual condition anyway? If we think about the majority of spiritual teachings, there are plenty of reasons to argue that poverty is a spiritual advantage (easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, and all that). Material wealth, in every seriously spiritual context, is a trap and a distraction from real life. The only people who seem to advocate it as a spiritual good, also seem more interested in material wealth than anything else and I’m prepared to bet that’s not a coincidence.

Another problem I have with this system of reincarnation is that it suggests something or someone is keeping score for all of us, to decide who to punish and who to reward, and that starts to sound like all the things I dislike in monotheism. I’ve been reading about Jainism this week, and they understand karma as a substance that attaches itself to your soul and by its presence, dictates what you are capable of doing. Good karma gives you auspicious opportunities to grow and develop, bad karma can ultimately reduce you to being a hell-bound type creature, but what you suffer is precisely the hell you have created. There’s something very pleasing about that idea, I think.

Then there’s this whole business of what constitutes a ‘better’ incarnation. The widespread understanding is that being a human represents a pinnacle in earthly achievement and from human state you can ascend to something even better. I can’t help but feel this opinion has everything to do with us, as a species, thinking rather too well of ourselves. As a Druid, it doesn’t chime with me at all. Everything has spirit. Why should our manifestation be considered ‘superior’?

Consider the number of other creatures who clearly devote a lot of time to quiet contemplation. By the looks of it, my cat meditates far more than I do. Dolphins strike a lot of people as being very spiritual creatures. How about elephants? Wouldn’t it be progress to reincarnate as an elephant? Although this rather assumes the existence of progress or that one form is better than another, and really we have no idea.
With the Druid hat pulled down firmly over my ears last night, I came to a conclusion. A longer lived entity has more lifetime over which to develop spiritually. All Eastern reincarnation traditions seem to have aspects of renouncing the world, becoming still, quiet, sometimes inactive as the last step before transcending. This does not sound like people to me. This sounds like trees. Then I went on to think about the spirits of mountains, and other very old things that have had time to become, and are no doubt still becoming. You’d need a lot of human incarnations to keep up with that.

I’m not that convinced by the idea of reincarnating into some higher, unearthly state of being any time soon. I’m not so troubled by the woes and wonders of this world that I feel a need to transcend them. I’m interested in learning how to do as good a job as I can at being alive. That may mean I am simply a very long way from being able to transcend, but that doesn’t trouble me much either. Give me a few thousand more runs round the wheel and maybe I will know differently. In the meantime, I rather like the idea of coming back as a tree.

Whose universe is it?

In the last week or so, a collision of two books has got me thinking about the nature of reality and how we relate to it. (Jack Barrow’s The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil, Jo van der Hoeven’s Zen Druidry, if you were wondering). For the magician, the self is the centre of the universe, and the will / imagination can direct said. I’m a long way from being an expert, but as I understand it, holding that belief is rather necessary if you want to go about doing magic. Now, on the Zen side, Jo points out there is one universe and we’re not the centre of it and if we can learn to see ourselves as part of the flow we’ll be able to get along a lot better.

I find both ideas compelling, and after some serious pondering I have come to the conclusion that these things are probably both true. One universe where you are not the centre, another where each of us the centre of his or her own universe and able to shape it by force of will. The life we live, the way we experience things, the choices we make – come down so often to our perceptions and beliefs. If I believe the universe is out to get me, I’ll see proof of that in every setback, and will resolutely ignore the opportunities that came with the setbacks, potentially to my own detriment. If I believe that I am divinely inspired with a special job to do, I’ll look around me and see proof of that in every rainbow and cupcake that comes my way. We see what we want to see.

What’s probably least helpful is bumbling through life without any deliberate choice about how to engage with the world. I don’t mean a ‘go with the flow’ attitude here, I mean a total lack of engagement with anything. The kind of blinkered view that makes it impossible to connect outcomes to actions, to predict how what we do today might shape our options for tomorrow, and to be able to see how other people’s motives might affect things. I’ve encountered that kind of wilful blindness, that refusal to see how what we do influences what we get, often coupled with an inability to imagine that other people are different from us, want different things and react in different ways.

I’m not sure it entirely matters what your relationship with the universe is. I am utterly convinced of the importance of having a considered approach to living and being. Even if that doesn’t fit into an existing idea about how to do things. But then, I’ve also seen so many human relationships conducted with no consciousness of cause and effect, or the implications of difference, too. Things work better when we pay attention to them, think about them, and do not take them for granted.

I am the centre of my own little universe. I am also aware that everyone around me is the centre of their own little universe too, no one of these any more important than any other, all of them able to influence how my bit of reality functions for me, all of them potentially influenced by what I do. Perhaps it could be a lot simpler than that, but I find this perspective works enough for me, so it’ll do for now.

Taking a side

Collaboration has undoubtedly delivered more human success than anything else. None of us have all the skills, or all the knowledge. People who work in teams get something that is usually more than the sum of its parts. And yet, the idea of competition, or winners and losers is so much a part of our culture. The whole way in which capitalism works pretty much depends on exploitation, (I shall resist the urge to get all Marxist about this one). Business is all about win and lose, and competition drives the market place. We are told that competition is healthy and delivers the best outcomes to consumers. Frankly I’m sceptical about that one, not least because the definition of ‘best’ tends to be ‘cheapest and most widely available’.

The moment you set up sides, and decide that there’s an us, and a them, then its not long before we have to win and they have to lose. Once we’re looking at a win-lose setup, then ideas about compromise or consensus are right off the table. We aren’t looking to agree, we want to win, score more points, get more things, come out on top. Our culture tells us that when we win in this way, we have achieved something. We are superior to the losers. Cleverer. We deserve our success and can take pride in it. The losers deserve to have lost and deserve the humiliation and practical consequences of failure.

Our judicial systems are adversarial, and that sets up not just assumptions about the kind of outcome that’s desirable, but a structure in which the win/lose arrangement is pretty much the only thing you can get. When it comes to situations of human error and tragedy, this means that people fight to win, which means fighting not to be blamed, and therefore not taking responsibility, and therefore vital lessons can be easily not learned. As with what so often happens when medicine or infrastructure goes wrong and kills people. This is not my definition of a good win at all.

When you get into a conflict situation and you get that conventional ‘win’ and watch the other person lose, you have the option to be smug and self righteous. You have all the cultural support imaginable to kick the person who is now down. Or perhaps you get the hollow feeling that you were playing the wrong game all along and that what you have is really another form of lose.

In a win/lose scenario, the more that’s at stake, the more important it becomes to seem right. Being right is a secondary consideration. Winning comes first. In war, the first casualty is often said to be truth. It’s just as probable in other forms of human conflict. Where we want to win, and where winning is more important than how we get there, honour doesn’t get much of a look in. Truth is likely to be further hidden beneath piles of obfuscation and perhaps even self delusion. We want to believe in ourselves as righteous winners, after all. That’s what it’s all about, allegedly. Except that way lies a mire of mistakes and emotional self harming, a total lack of scope to make good changes, and a whole range of methods to entrench and escalate hostility. Again, I have to say this is not my definition of what ’win’ ought to look like.

What I think is this. When people draw lines and take sides, rally round flags and declare enmity, there is only one available outcome. To some degree, everybody is going to lose. Often not just the people involved, either. We lose in our humanity and understanding, in our capacity for making something better. I want a win that takes everyone forward in a good way. Or failing that, as many people as possible. I want wins that are about truth, compassion and best outcomes for everyone.

Nameless Dread

One of the things I both love and am frustrated by in Lovecraft’s work is that tendency towards ‘things too terrible to describe’. I know from my own experience that he’s right, in that the nameless dreads are always the scariest ones, but as a reader, I want to know a bit more about how dreadful it is, because I want to be entertained, not driven mad with terror.

The craziest forms of terror have so much to do with uncertainty, for me. Give me a problem, a challenge, a wound, anything, and I will endeavour to deal with it. Give me the possibility that in a week’s time I’m going to be put through something awful, and then I really suffer. In face of the uncertainty, I can imagine all kinds of terrible things, and I have a really good imagination. One really terrible thing that I actually have to go through is often less bad than all the imaginary things I am capable of doing to myself.

Name the dread and it’s not quite so scary.

Humans like to be able to name and quantify things. I think it gives us an illusion of control. Once we know what it’s called, or where it came from, a thing feels a bit more manageable. Having terrible weather events? Well, that’s climate change, isn’t it, so we’re all sorted, know what that means. Only we don’t. Calling the nameless dread in the cellar ‘Bob’ does not do much to reduce the chances that it’s going to open a portal to hell and eat your soul. But ‘Bob’ is labelled and feels like it’s under our control, and not really a nameless dread at all.

We stick little labels on the kinds of human behaviour that destroys and defiles. The labels don’t actually do anything, and only come into play after the event. Yes, it’s all well and good calling someone a psychopath after they’ve been out to play with an axe, but it doesn’t change what they’ve done. I think we’re prone to creating illusions of control and influence in this way, and it doesn’t help.

There are a lot of nameless dreads out there. The unknown, unimaginable things that might be waiting to tear your life apart. You don’t need Lovecraft’s Ancient Ones to drive yourself mad with fear. An hour or two of listening to and thinking about news broadcasting really should be sufficient.

What scares me most about people is how complacent we get. We name our nameless dreads and then we just assume they’re going to play nicely. Climate change. Global warming. Extinction. Deforestation. Pollution. They are bigger than we like to think. Nastier. Less understood, less known than we like to believe. We might be better off imagining that we have indeed unleashed a horde of ravening elder gods upon the world, at least that way we might be frightened into action rather than doing our best impression of a zombie apocalypse.

The trouble with animism

This is a history of ideas thing, I have nothing negative to say about animism at all, just to be clear. The trouble with animism is the way it seems to be classified in a particular kind of story about human progress. Druidry and the Ancestors has a lot of material in it about the kinds of stories we invent about history. This isn’t in the book, but is an example of how problematic those stories can be.

I’m currently reading K.M Sen’s book on Hinduism – which is fascinating, but includes as a statement of fact the idea that primitive people have primitive, animist beliefs and that advancing civilization goes with more sophisticated polytheism, moving towards monotheism. It’s not a new theory, I have seen it other places. I’m pretty sure it’s in The Golden Bough, and that it goes with more 19^th century attitudes to ‘primitive’ people and ‘primitive’ belief. (Pile in if you know more than me or have your sources to hand, please!)

This is in essence a story about progress, in which moving towards ever more complicated ways of living is seen as a good thing. It’s a whole line of thinking that exists to prop up the status quo, to let us tell ourselves how much better we are than people of ages past, and of course ‘primitive’ people whose land we would like to appropriate. Progress theory is pretty much inherent in colonial attitudes and is underpinned by ideas about economic growth being an unquestionable good, industrialisation being an unquestionable good, and monotheism being also an unquestionable good.

Except that nothing works like that anyway. Hinduism seems to be a fine example of a complex dance between polytheism and monotheism, including turns with agnosticism and materialism. Once you get to a great big monotheistic belief then it’s very easy to go pantheistic. The one big all powerful all present God, is everywhere! So God is in everything. So everything has spirit, and suddenly you’ve gone round a great big loop and come back to animism again. It’s not a line of progress, it’s a circle, or a spiral, or a big mush of interconnected things, depending on who you are and how you do it. The only way you get a line is if you take atheism as some sort of exit trajectory. Then what you get is the idea that we only have what exists materially. At which point treasuring and honouring those material realities can start to make a lot of sense. At which point…yes… you’ve spotted the punch line.

The trouble with animism is what happens when you try and talk about it using the outmoded language of people with bloody stupid ideas and a very narrow view of the world. If you engage with people who use the language of separation and difference, mind body dualism, matter and spirit, us and them, the object and the subject, and you talk on their terms, you talk about animism in a language that by its nature, deconstructs animism and makes a nonsense of it. It can be tempting to want those mainstream languages of science, reason and philosophy, except that they make you fit. Which for animism, means make you into small, dysfunctional pieces of wrong.

Which leaves me wondering quite what we do with that.

Druidry and western philosophy

I find myself once again thinking about the relationship between philosophy and Druidry.

Modern philosophy grew out of a tradition that goes right back to the ancient Greeks. Not the ancient Celts. Most of what we know about ancient Celtic philosophy comes from what we can extrapolate from Roman writing and mediaeval texts. At best, it’s an inexact science, but I think it would be entirely fair to say that whatever Celtic (and therefore ancient Druidic) philosophy looked like, it did not look like the history of philosophy that we now have. There’s plenty of Roman writing to suggest that the Celts had their own philosophers, and that the Druids were the thinking classes. But what did they think?

As a modern Druid, I felt pretty much obliged to poke around in philosophy. I did not enjoy the experience. To me, what I encountered felt too sterile, too abstract. That which pre-dates science is in many ways proto-science, trying to make sense of reality. In many ways the models we have now, based on empiricism, research and observation, are better models than the random guesswork of the ancients. So, while there’s an element of academic interest, it does feel a bit pointless to me getting bogged down in the history of human guesswork and confusion. I would rather turn to psychology research to ponder the workings of the human mind, than to philosophy, which depends almost exclusively on introspection and self reporting to try and make sense of mental phenomena. Again, philosophy was the proto-science for psychology. I am not at all fascinated by all the debates spawned by Christianity. I am sad about the history of fear that goes with how the church responded to thinking, I feel it’s useful to know the gist, but I have finite time, and learning the ins and outs of who burned whom when and for what bit of heresy, does not inspire me.

My feeling, undereducated in this area as I am, is that philosophy as a subject rapidly gets bogged down in its own language and habits of thought. To someone who is not an initiate of the mysteries, encountering it is often bewildering and frustrating. I ask this, what does it achieve? Are the dominant thought forms of our times driven by academic philosophy? Or by the mentality of the marketplace? Are we driven by a desire for truth, or political expediency? There seems to me to be a horrible gap between where academic philosophy goes, and where the unconsciously held philosophies that guide us all, get their power from.  I guess that makes me more interested in social science, some kind of anthropology of the here and now.

Being able to think, question and reason are liberating, powerful tools that can help us fight superstition, stupidity, short term thinking and self destructive behaviours. Most people will not turn to Plato or Spinoza for that.

I confess that I’m not that interested in who exactly came up with what about where ideas come from when pondering the issue thousands of years ago. I care about how people here, and now, think, and don’t think. I don’t see any place for Druidry, modern or historical, in the tradition we’ve got, and I wonder about the potential for new lines of philosophy. What happens if we take what we know, and start asking all the basic questions about how and why again, looking at now, looking at the future not the past, looking at need, and what would help rather than throwing energy into pondering impossible intangibles that do not help us to be better people, live richer lives or take better care of what is around us. I don’t give a shit about Kant. I don’t think he can tell me how to turn public thinking away from short term profit towards long term survival.

We need a Druid philosophy stream that is not about mainstream academic philosophy, but is about us, here and now. Maybe all that means is that we need to keep asking awkward questions in public places and challenging each other to come up with something resembling answers.

Making peace

For me, the quest for peace, both within and without is a significant part of what Druidry is for. It’s not what we do, it should be where what we do takes us. Harmony in any aspect of life, creates peace. Resolution, restorative justice, understanding and compassion all lead the way to peace as well. The deep contemplative work that has become intrinsic to my daily life enables me to develop understanding, to cultivate inner calm, make my peace with experiences. I’ve learned when to get on the soap-box and shout, as well. The ‘peace’ that comes from ignoring problems, turning a blind eye to injustice and pretending all is well, is no true peace, just a fragile illusion that can be stripped from us at any time. Real inner peace and resilience are realistic things to be cultivating. Peace in the external world is a project that will require everyone to participate. As such, we won’t get there any time soon, but every contribution matters.

I’ve been pondering a lot what to do in the aftermath of conflict. Unconditional forgiveness can be a way of giving people permission to re-offend, so I’m not keen on that. Holding on to anger is not good for the cultivation of inner peace though. I’ve been working on adopting attitudes of pity and compassion that allow me to feel sorry for the other person, where there is unresolved conflict. Functionally, it allows me to be gentle and patient with them, without offering the kind of acceptance that says ‘oh sure, kick me like that any time.’ Tacitly allowing people to mistreat me does no one any good. I suffer, and they do not learn to do any better.

Where the mistake is owned, it’s always a lot easier to move forward. It can be painful, daunting, even humiliating to admit a mistake, and the bigger the error, the more uncomfortable it gets. But, in owning it, it becomes possible to make changes, to ask for guidance and to explore what might have worked better. Of course there are people who will take an apology and use it as a stick to beat you with, but this is not honourable behaviour, it’s aggressive, abusive behaviour. The person who confesses, apologises and is trying to fix things, always deserves the space in which to try and do just that.

I’ve yet to find a conflict situation in which I couldn’t have handled it better. So, even when I feel that on the whole I’m in the right, I’m always looking to see where I could have done a better job, and what I can learn. Just because I think my behaviour isn’t troubling, doesn’t mean, for example, that I can’t push other people’s buttons by accident and cause pain unknowingly. Those lessons I want to learn and those situations need catching, and dealing with. A mistake, based on error or lack of insight is one of those human things, we all do it. The person who won’t look and repeats, is deliberately careless and that’s a whole other thing. There’s always scope to do better. My main area of weakness comes from misunderstanding. I’m sensitive to the nuances of language, and I get into a lot of difficulty with people who use language carelessly and imprecisely, who say what they do not mean, speak ‘off the cuff’. If I could get the hang of spotting those as they happen, I wouldn’t have to mop up after the event, and that would be definite progress.

It’s impossible to make, or hold peace with someone who is always right. Good relationship depends on negotiation, listening, a willingness to compromise and a willingness to seek the solution that works best for everyone. If one person is always right, and everyone else is always wrong, there’s just no space in which to do the essential relationship things. What you have then is tyranny. We all see things differently, have different needs, respond in our own ways and so forth. There is no one right way of being human. Negotiation enables us to find peaceful ways of co-existing. Being right all the time does not.

Just because a thing looks right from my perspective does not make it right for anyone else. If I refuse to consider that I could be wrong, or just not right from another angle, I pass up an opportunity to learn, and grow. To be human is to be less than perfect. Working with a recognition of that can build peace, within and without, but the more right, justified and entitled you think you are, the harder that is to achieve.

Honour and deserving

Every now and then I run across someone who justifies their behaviour in terms of the action of another person. She did this thing that irritated me and therefore she deserved to be shouted at. He annoyed me and I had to… It’s a curious process, that puts power over your actions into the hands of another person, arguably. If someone irritating you means that you have to shout at them, you have no self control and can only react to what you experience. I’m suspicious that in a lot of cases, this isn’t it at all and that it’s just an excuse for acting out.
I think there are also some very interesting issues to ask around questions of honour and deserving. What happens if we treat people in the manner they deserve? Well, firstly we have to define ‘deserve’. Does that mean ‘do unto others as others do unto you’? If it does then we respond to violence with violence and anger with anger. We can only be nice to people who are nice to us first, but if they’re working to the same rules, and have already seen our angry and violent responses giving other people what they ‘deserve’ then are they going to be nice? Or are they going to get in the first blow, just to be on the safe side?

Honourable behaviour has very little to do with what the other person has, or has not done.

Now, I’m entirely in favour of self defence, and restorative justice. If someone punches me in the face, what do I restore by punching them back? Nothing. If I allow my anger to rule me, shouting when I am irritated, punching when I am offended, what I am doing is being ruled by my anger. Pain, fear and grief reactions can be immediate, as can the feeling of anger, but what we experience emotionally and how we express it always involves a degree of choice, and the more time is involved, the more choice we tend to have.

I think the first requirement for honourable behaviour, is that it is considered behaviour, not just a knee-jerk reaction. If you are behaving without thinking, you aren’t considering the rights and wrongs of a situation, your own emotional state, the reasons for what is happening or anything else that may have a bearing. Allowing the first rush of emotional response to direct behaviour pretty much precludes doing anything more complex. Perhaps there are people who are so innately right, wise and good that their spur of the moment reaction is bound to be superb, but we lesser mortals cannot afford to be quite so self assured. A moment or two to think and question is surely the better way to go.

Honourable behaviour is, more than anything, what we do for ourselves. It is an expression of self and integrity. It is therefore, behaviour that we own. If I act, I’m going to do so for a reason, not as some kind of reflex action, if I can possibly help it. Any action or word that has to be justified in terms of what the other person did, is an action that needs a good, hard look. Honourable behaviour of course depends on the situation. What is called for in face of a mugger is not what is required when dealing with an angry child, and so forth.

Ask not what the other person deserves. Ask what you deserve, and how you wish to treat yourself, because every off the cuff, out of control, ill considered word or deed, is ultimately a manifestation of our failure to respect and value ourselves. The person who cannot control themselves enough to choose their own behaviour, arguably doesn’t have a very high opinion of themselves at all.