As I mentioned in my previous blog I have a long term family connection to the US through my cousin Arthur and his wife Jodie, the part of my family who live in New York and were born in America. That has led, through most of my life, to me being very curious about the US and making comparisons with the country and culture I know as home, the UK. Thankfully, some might say miraculously, Arthur and I share this curiosity for each others worlds and what it might mean in terms of how this world and our cultures/societies work.
When I was in my teens, I am now in my 70th year, I felt very out of sync with the world around me, not exactly unusual for a teenager. But I thought that the world I was experiencing was run on a set of rules I just did not understand, and so tried to take it upon myself to find out what that set of rules was so that I could better get on in those times. This perception was greatly enhanced by so many around me in those days talking about rules of behaviour, the right and wrong things to do, the way politics, religion, society was portrayed, etc. But the older I got and the more I tried to rationalise what I saw of this unfolding story of life, the less I understood what this set of rules might be.
Then of course it dawned on me that I was likely on a fools errand. What my observations told me was that life as we humans know it does not have natural and inherent rules of engagement. Whatever rules there are are imposed by humans upon themselves the better to tackle the vicissitudes that life can throw at you. By that I mean that we can essentially do anything we like, it is the social norms, laws, personal moral codes, that we have established and evolved by trial and error, that are the rules we chose to live by and so get on better with each other. They are not a fundamental part of our make-up as the DNA coding is, they are not established by an omniscient law maker, they are not policed by a all seeing all controlling set of guardians. They are what we chose to make them and of course politics, religions, wars, social and family strife is all part of us making a good or bad fist of it all.
For those who know me well they will know I am an atheist, have been ever since I realised it was the only outlook that made sense. So you can imagine that I view religions as curious phenomena and religious fundamentalism with barely concealed contempt. Life can be hard enough without getting hung up about how some non existent God type figure might expect us to behave, especially as mankind has a nasty habit of determining what they think their version of this god might want/expect and then go on to try and impose this often to the great detriment, if not death, of those around them.
So how does this interface with Arthur and I and our curiosity for each others countries? Well although both countries are defined as rich, both countries are going through, by their standards, hard economic times and for the worst off in both countries those hard times have been going on a lot longer that the current economic woes. We have both seen substantial swings in the politics of our countries, the growth of so called "grass roots - let the people talk" political parties, and we are both trying to make sense of these trends to try and work out what the future holds for us, our families and the future generations in our families. Personally I think these sorts of political parties are just an expression of our discomfort with inevitable change and a doomed attempt to stop any form of necessary evolution of ideas and progress.
No conclusions yet, but oh how I would love to see the growth of rational thought and action. It may already be here and will be clearly seen in hindsight, but it does not feel much like it at the coal face.
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