A Few Lessons

Management-speak seems to find that the noun ‘lesson’ is inadequate and has replaced it with a new bastardisation of the verb ‘to learn’, as in ‘What learnings can we take from this meeting?’ It drives me mental and I have previously felt very superior to such office gimps – but then I caught myself almost titling this blog ‘A Few Learnings’ and then felt suicidal. How quickly it seeps in…

I’ve had an interesting few days and feel like I’m on a strange new path. In a good way. On Saturday I went to The Institute of Ideas’ third annual Battle of Ideas – a weekend of talks with a broadly liberal theme. Assuming you didn’t fork out £45 to attend, I’ll give you the choicest nuggets from each of the four talks I attended.

Talk 1 was ‘Demonising Parents’ about how mummy and daddy are on the receiving end of a lot of blame, from lunchbox contents to story time, and how crippling this can be. My favourite comment from this session was on a grammatical issue when one speaker pointed out that ‘parent’ is a noun. The verb form (ie. ‘parenting’) is a relatively recent development; the verb used to be ‘child-rearing’ and the speaker made the point that the focus has largely shifted from the child to the parent – a lexical example of how language echoes our culture. Gripping?

Talk 2 was Eat, Drink and Be Merry: Banned, all about how everything is too regulated and we’re victims of a nanny state who won’t let us smoke or have any fun. The arguments usually run that healthy, clean living types shouldn’t have to pay their taxes so that irresponsible libertines can go to the NHS to have their problems solved. But really, where do you draw the line between self-inflicted illness and the other? The ‘learning’ here was that, before any new legislation is passed, we need to ask ourselves, ‘Is this law worth the loss of freedom that will occur as a result?’ – the implicit answer being, of course, ‘No.’ What was interesting was looking throughout British history and seeing that there were clearly defined periods of libertinism versus periods of dramatic self-flagellation and we’re obviously firmly in one of the latter. Can’t wait for the tide to turn – hopefully I’ll still be able to walk.

Talk 3 was The Resurrection of Religion: Moving Beyond Secularism or Losing Faith in Politics? And weirdly, even though this is probably more my ‘area’, I slightly flagged at this point. I think the highlight for me was the discussion of faith schools – one speaker made the point that if one were to insert the word ‘politics’ in place of ‘faith’ and imagine an institution where one political leaning was espoused and all others were demonised at worst, barely tolerated at best and where certain texts were banned while others were held up as unassailably true – well, we’d never allow it. Religious followers on the panel held that religion and politics could not be equated but I’m not so sure… Ooh, the other gripping thing was that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in blood transfusions – and don’t allow their children to have them. As a liberal atheist, that’s pretty hard to take – but should we step in or is it their right to make such decisions on the part of their children? Surely the latter – if only because legislating on such an issue would open a vast can of worms that could only end in Big Brother disaster.

Talk 4 was my favourite. Rethinking Immigration: The Unheard Debate covered a huge and persuasive area – kicking off with a statistic that surprised me: apparently only 3% of the world’s population live outside their birth country. One of the speakers put a convincing case for opening all borders and allowing totally free immigration worldwide, something that, in my ignorance, I’d never even considered before. They also argued comprehensively against using a points system to predict who will be a useful addition to a country, citing the examples that Barack Obama’s father was a goatherd and that Sergei Brin, the founder of Google, was a first generation migrant to the US from Russia.

As a bonus, I also caught the tail end of Age of the Metropolis: What is the Future of Cities? and heard this gem: ‘If you would dare to know, live in a city. If you would rather be known, but not know, live in a village.’ Brilliant.

I had planned to go to a triple bill of French films at Riverside Studios last night but felt so virtuous after Saturday’s knowledge-fest that I ended up watching a video of the X Factor and eating Skippy peanut butter off a knife. You win some, you lose some.