Judging by appearance (one way 2)

I do remember, vaguely, when the carpet was replaced, during a period of intense redecoration undertaken by my parents.


….My parents. Good people, on the whole, with, of course, plenty of flaws, as is the way with people. I remember my mother’s little toes, which I have inherited, at least as far as the toenail goes – a twisty, inconsequential little thing. But I digress (although you don’t know it yet). I was thinking that a sensible place to start is my relationship with Judaism, since it was such a major part of my early years, my family’s social world. Every Friday night, candles, challah, hand-washing, roast chicken and roast potatoes (oh, those roast potatoes, how we boys used to scramble for seconds of those!). Every Saturday morning, the walk to shul, the hours in shul, reading Hebrew prayers we did not really understand. That is a major flaw of ‘orthodox’ Judaism in England – praying without meaning – hardly likely to instill longevity of faith. And the dressing up – suits, always – we had to look our best for shul. And I think that this was the root of my earliest questioning of the faith I was born to, an uncertainty that has led to the questioning of all blindly-followed religions.
I must have been about five, and I had a brand new deep purple suit. I was walking to shul along the London Road, with my Dad, and next two brothers. I guess that the youngest of these was probably being carried, or pushed in a pram, since he could only have been a little over 1 year old. For some reason, mum had stayed at home – now I think of it, it’s possible that she was just pregnant with my youngest brother. Before we left home it was, I think, made very clear what a privilege it was to be sporting such a fine new suit, and yet, despite repeated warnings from my father, I was heedlessly running ahead, perhaps playing one of my favourite Saturday morning games of avoiding the cracks in the pavement. Anyway, I tripped, fell, and ripped open the knee of my smart new trousers. And Dad was livid. He turned about, and dragged me home in disgrace. And my mother flew into the first rage I can really recall. So mad. So mad that Dad had to hold her off from beating me too hard. And I was terrified, and innocent. An accidental trip, so much accusation and blame. I know that money was tight, and that the expense of buying a suit for their kids must have seriously stretched their resources, but the reaction remains one of my strongest, most fearful memories.
I can’t say that from that moment on I hated ‘dressing up’, or that at five years old I could see that so much wrong in the world arose from pretentious materialism, but this must have been the seed of later thoughts. So many shul-goers, church-goers, employers, socialites, so much of humanity so concerned about ‘looking their best’, so much judgment by appearance, in a horrifically materialist world. Fashion, make-up, ‘style’, accessories, accent, skin-colour. We live in a world where most people place so much importance on the way others look. And yet, judging someone by clothes, by appearance, is fundamentally no different from judging by race or skin-colour. The argument I’ve heard against this is that you can choose your clothes, but not your skin. That may be true, if one has enough money to make choices of clothes, but is really no reason to discriminate by appearance. I am certain that clothes are not a window to the soul. The other argument against is that it is somehow disrespectful not to dress well, not to dress ‘appropriately’, but where on earth does this perception of respect come from?
Is this discrimination innate, a part of the human genome? Possibly, but so is violence, and we, as ‘civilised’ people, claim to eschew violence. But try to get a job in a bank, for example, without the right clothes. It’s a disgrace the way we judge so, it really is. For years, I’ve considered dressing up a chore, and have avoided jobs that take appearance too seriously. I know that millions of people all over the world seem to take pleasure form the clothes they wear, which is fine, apart from the inevitable flipside that considers those who don’t dress well as somehow lesser. That is real insanity, and it seriously divides society. In my not very humble opinion, we should always dress only for comfort and protection from the elements. More than enough on that subject, for now.

One Way

So many paths, so many ways,
All ways, one way, the way of God.

God is one, the way is one, they are all. No paradox here. So many names for the unity of the universe, the sum of all things. Call it God, call it the way, call it the unified theory, or Buddha; call it what you will. The great tapestry web, so many threads, so many lives and streams of being. I am part of the whole, and the whole is part of me.

Does all this sound like religion, or faith, or blind belief? Or is it science, the sum of knowledge? The fundamental interconnectedness of all things?

So, here begins a story, a story that I hesitate to write. After all, so much has been said, written, published, can there really be anything to add? Is it ethical to claim to have something new to tell the world, when everything has been said before? Is it arrogance to claim insight, or new understanding? Can there really be a new story?
I doubt that there is really much left to say, but then again, it may be an arrogance of a different sort to claim that I know that everything mankind needs to know has already been said. And so, I tell my story. Readers can judge for themselves if there is anything of value here.
I shall attempt some kind of biographical sketch, largely chronological, a story of a life lived, warts and all. If I can offer some insight, some wisdom for others to follow, well, then, all well and good. Of course, the chronology may need to be shuffled about a bit: after all, recall is not perfect, and when a thought occurs, it is probably best to place where it occurred in the present, rather than force it into a place on some half-remembered timeline of a past. Perhaps the occurrence of a thought at a chronologically inappropriate place is a drawing together of threads, a hyperlink of the mind that integrates the disparate paths and segments of a life. And so I write on.


In the beginning… a pompously biblical start, perhaps, yet this is certainly not a biblical story… so start again…

In my beginning, well, of course I don’t remember it, my beginning. Nevertheless, I’ve been told that I was born in Rochford hospital, on Christmas Eve, 1965, to a devoutly Jewish mother, and a rather less devoutly Jewish father. My birth certificate claims to confirm this, and I have no real reason to believe otherwise. So there it is, I was born, and I can’t honestly say I remember much else from my earliest years.
There was a carpet, full of angular patterns of colour, background in black, with concentric squares flecked with orange, red, green and blue, on which I used to crawl around. Perhaps my first memory. I was reminded of this when my son was learning to crawl – together we followed the patterns on the white tiles in our house in Hualien. This was one of those special moments, when you lose yourself in intricate details of apparently so little consequence, and yet so pleasurable…

But of course, if I try to record every memory I have, it will take more than another lifetime to write this little piece. So I’ll try to skip the less interesting parts. This raises another problem for me. How can I tell what is more interesting and what is less? My experience tells me that both detail and big picture are equally important, and I cannot really know to which of these words any particular reader will accord value. The flapping of a butterfly’s wings, or the dropping of a nuclear bomb: which really has the greatest effect on our world, our history? Without a God’s eye view of the world, it is extremely hard for any of us to judge the relative importance of things, of anything.

Ross Wiki

So, this week I've launched 2 wikis at Ross, one for semester 3 studnets, and one for students repeating semester 1. Looking forward to seeing if they really make use of it, and how. I'm hoping (and have suggested) they'll create collaborative study products using the wiki.

We shall see.

Nature of collaboration

A good day. Just finished my final piece of work for an M.Ed.
Had to comment on the statement: e-leanring and associated technolgies have changed the nature of collaboration in learning.
I think that's a bit strong - collaboration depends on people, and only the hardest technological determinist would claim e-learning can change human nature, surely?

Information Explosion

So much has been written about the exponential growth of human knowledge in this "information age" - more books published, massive numbers of websites, etc. We talk about the new skills needed by the internet generation, the "digital natives", skills such as finding information, search skills, evaluating resources, the need to use the worldwide web.

And yet, how is this rise in human knowledge measured? What counts as new information? I've searched, and have yet to find a source that describes any real evidence that humans need to know more now than ever before, or that there is actually more new information than before. It seems that so much of what is published is rehash, remix, mashup, or simply plain old repetition.

I have no doubt that we are learning new things all the time. But hasn't this always been the case? And don't individuals simply have different knowledge than their ancestors? We replace old ideas with new ones, local knowledge with global information. Our brains are much the same size as they've been for millenia, so presumably they are unlikely to process or remember more than ever before. Digital Natives may know the names and hobbies of a bunch of people from Facebook, but is this "new knowledge"?

Has anyone out there got any evidence that the actual quantity of new information is increasing exponentially? Can anyone cite a study that explains clearly what counts as new?

Muisng, musing

First Blog In My Life

Bound to get more interesting than this.