Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Monbiot and the Space Telescope
I find this story humiliating. Yookay made a few bits for the Kepler Telescope. What is humiliating is that this is even mentioned. Once we would have been angry that we didn't make the whole damned Kepler. It's like that Australian news angle on the inauguration - Michelle was wearing Aussie mascara or some such. But that's Britain now, a mildly irritating entity with a few good engineers and an unusually high proportion of terrible bankers. When Obama looks east, I suppose he sees the electoral necessity of Ireland, then Germany and France and then, well, Gordon Brown. This reminds me I was going to post on George Monbiot's complaint about the lack of an English parliament - if we'd had one, he says reasonably enough, there would never have been a vote in favour of the third runway at Heathrow. The Scots are more than happy to send more planes flying low over West London. I don't know if I care about an English parliament or not. But what struck me was Monbiot's insistence that he is a global citizen and that he is indifferent to England. (His ensuing point that he doesn't know what England means is unconvincing.) How can one be indifferent to the land of one's birth? One may hate it or love it but indifference hardly seems to be an option. The term 'global citizen' indicates the problem; it is a familiar trick of contemporary, secular thinking is at work. This is the trick of the atomised self. One can be indifferent to one's country if one thinks of oneself as an abstract unit that could have been born anywhere. Monbiot born in Peru would still be Monbiot. But, of course, he wouldn't. Like it or not, the human self is made, in large part, by the context in which it is born. Monbiot is very English as am I. And neither of us makes space telescopes.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
I witnessed the death throes of the British optical telescope industry, aka Grubb Parsons, once a major player on the world stage. I dealt with the company and new a number of its people very well, this during manufacturing's herding into the cattle trucks during the early eighties. The catastrophe brought on by senior management incompetence (it ain't just bankers who are thick), union stupidly and an establishment who thought engineers were of less worth than Zulus.
ReplyDeleteParsons had a full complement of highly skilled engineers at least on a par with those in Germany, now scattered shell shocked to the four winds. One of the best ending his career as a supervisor in a chicken processing plant, RIP.
In the final week before closure an incident occured that sort of, well, summed it all up really. Sitting in on a meeting I gazed out of the window as three supervisors changed a light bulb in an exterior light fitting. A fitting requiem for British manufacturing PLC.
The Thatcher government put manufacturing into the cattle trucks, it had little choice, the Blair-Brown axis stuffed the Zyclon B down the ventilator shaft.
About 10 years ago I met a young chap, Jorge I think he was called, lived in London and Belgium at various points, wanted to work for the EU, spoke beautiful but odd-accented English.
ReplyDeleteWhen I asked him where he was from, natural conversational opener, he said he was a "European citizen". First time I'd ever heard anyone say that, so it was: "Ok, but where are you from originally?"
He refused to retract his original answer. Had to press him for ages before he finally relented and admitted he was born in Spain.
Later I realised the reason it became so important for me to find out where he was 'really' from. A "European citizen" is a nothing man, a ghost. The idea is queasy: the only context I could place him in was a vague imagined backdrop of airport lounges, EuroStar platforms and blue-carpeted conference centres.
Brilliant stuff, Mystic and Brit, and, my god, Brit, you didn't actually have to listen to that radio show
ReplyDeleteWell I had nothing better to do, the wife is having very early nights at the moment. But jeez, I regretted it very soon into those commercials.
ReplyDeletei can sympathise with the idea of being a wanderer who makes his home in books or his head, an academic of no academy as i think Giordano Bruno (not to be confused with Gordon Brown) said of himself, a philosopher of no community. But even in such an extreme case i think one would retain much that one isn't aware of...and i think people who leave their home early and end up wandering the earth often come to realise just how English or whatever they are the older they get. We never really leave our origins behind.
ReplyDeletehttp://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/retailing/article5757842.ece
ReplyDeleteI don't think the world ever lets us escape. I once met a merchant seaman who had got off a boat in Lima in the 1940s and never got back on again. He'd gone completely native and when I met him, several decades later, he was living in one room in a small town by Lake Titicaca - battered stable door, one tiny window, earthen floor and half a dozen chickens (to which he was devoted - they slept under his bed). Very hard to tell he wasn't a local. Even so, he was still known all over the whole region and far beyond as El Ingles, and that's how I found him.
ReplyDeleteI have lived in various countries and I agree with what you say completely Brian - no matter how much of a "self-facilitating global media node" you think you are, you will still react to certain situations within the atavistic programming of your original cultural framework - For instance, when I lived in Germany I became acutely aware of my 'crazee britisch humour' (ie sarcasm and self deprecation) which I had never noticed to myself whilst in Britain, but which I came to realise as uniquely and incontrovertably British. And obviously the same must apply to any stranger in a strange land.
ReplyDeleteI am from Yorkshire, English is my second language, we still think in Norse around these parts, thats why we set up HBOS to plunder the rest of the country.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Bryan's comments on George Monbiot and his attitude to England. But I believe the issues go pretty deep. Andrew Motion was pointing out yesterday how many English Literature students lack knowledge of the Bible and classical mythology - and that of course makes a substantial difference to how far you can teach the subject. Englishness is in effect always changing in meaning. The positive implication is that there are many ways in which any of us can help change it for the better.
ReplyDeleteI live in Scotland but don't really understand what my culture, or Britain's culture is...I only really start identifying with Scotland once I go abroad and start getting sentimental and patriotic. Once I'm home though I kind of hate the place.
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