Back to Harvester?

Until 4:00 this morning, I’d never heard of David Harvey, an “eminent Marxist geographer” from the US. As I was whiling away my nightly bout of insomnia, I followed a link in this post by Don Arthur at Club Troppo, commenting on this post by Kim at Larvatus Prodeo and found  this interview with  Harvey and then this one. Both the Harvey interviews make interesting reading, particularly this section of the second:

I was part of, or very close to, one of the first living wage movements in Baltimore back in the early 90's. They now have become quite wide spread through many jurisdictions of the United States and I think there is a push going on at the grassroots level that says you cannot have people employed at something that is below a living wage. Therefore we have to pay very close attention to that locally, and I think that local movements are likely to push more and more into the national consciousness.

Ars Moriendi My You Know What

I’ve just been looking over the ABC’s “Religion and Ethics” site which, today at least, features a hell of a lot about religion and very little about ethics. What drew me to the site was this article by Scott Stephens, the Religion and Ethics (but Mostly Religion) Editor for ABC Online. It’s a shocker - short on fact, long on unsubstantiated claims and portentous moralising. 

After noting the release of the Productivity Commission’s draft report on aged care, Stephens declares:

There is an ... important moral or personal dimension to the ongoing catastrophe of aged-care in Australia that demands a reform of our moral imaginations as well.

What sort of reform of our moral imaginations does the ongoing catastrophe of aged care demand? Read on and you’ll discover that we need to recover the forgotten ars moriendi - the art of dying - which was such a prominent part of the medieval Christian tradition:

We forget that the ars moriendi or the "art of dying" - of which Langland's Piers Plowman is perhaps the best literary example - was cultivated in the mediaeval Christian tradition as an indispensable part of living well. But it was never understood as an individual virtue. It was instead a communal effort, whereby the community gathers to listen with patient gratitude to lives that have finally learned to tell the truth about themselves.

Dying, in other words, was deemed the last theatre of virtue and courage, the manifestation of the bond between the living and the dead whereby what it might mean to die well is exemplified.

I’ve read a fair bit on mediaeval history and the one and only mention of ars moriendi I’ve ever come across was in Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror - The Calamitous 14th Century. So my first reaction to Stephens’s claim that mediaeval Christianity cultivated the art of dying as an indispensible part of living well was complete disbelief. With the help of Google I found that my disbelief was quite justified :

Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying). A late medieval compilation of texts (prayers, maxims, exhortations, and so on), intended as a guide for the comforting and counselling of the dying; it was issued as a block book c.1460–5 and subsequently in various editions, including an English translation by Caxton (1491), made from an abridged French version. [Oxford Dictionary of Art]

As for the idea that Langland’s Piers Plowman is the best literary example of ars moriendi, that’s looking pretty nonsensical. How can a 14th century  poem be an example of either a social practice or a 15th century book? Finally, Stephens’s claim that dying was “was deemed the last theatre of virtue and courage” just doesn’t sit well with the muddle-headed reality of the mediaeval period. Most of the population of mediaeval Europe - the much put upon Third Estate - were, by mediaeval definition, irredeemable cowards.

Stephens doesn’t limit himself to specious historical claims that any adept Googler can debunk within ten minutes plus extra time for writing and editing. Earlier in the article he makes some pretty scurrilous claims about the current state of nursing home care:

Anyone who has had any experience of working or volunteering in aged-care facilities knows the conditions in which our elderly so often live: their clothes drenched with either excrement or the property-less mush served to them as food; cavernous hallways echoing with howls and plaintive cries for assistance; under-resourced, overworked and frequently untrained staff rushing frenetically from task to task; the ambient disdain for these frail, barely existing hominoids who are not treated as though they were alive, but simply "not yet dead".

Really? You’d think that if nursing homes were really that sordid some of those workers and volunteers would be speaking out about it. Particularly the volunteers. But never mind that - why provide the extraordinary evidence to support this extraordinary claim when you can make your case by quoting poetry and ruminating on it:

[In her poem “Old People’s Nursing Home” Elizabeth] Jennings captured the unreality - and indeed, the hellish immorality - of the nursing home as a place where past and future, memory and hope, are somehow eradicated and all that is left is the nightmare of an immutable, insipid present in which not even cups can break.

Putting our aged relations in these living hells, Stephens argues, is a moral failure equivalent to our failure to fulfil our obligations to the unborn: a moral failure born of our desire for “a kind of lived immortality sustained by unlimited choice, a freedom from obligation to others, and the delusion that we can somehow indefinitely defer our deaths.”

Stephens finishes on an admonitory note:

...if we don't allow our lives to be formed by our obligations, it is not simply our elderly that will continue to suffer. We will find ourselves, and our moral imaginations, immeasurably poorer.

I think it would have been perfectly appropriate if he had used the pronouns “you” and “your” instead of “we” and “our” in those concluding remarks. The article shows that Stephens is by no means lacking in “moral imagination”.

Not Even Dinosaurs

Last year, while Australians were reeling from the impact of the defeat of the Australian Cricket Team at the MCG - a national crisis more devastating than the Queensland floods - British actor Colin Firth made news elsewhere in the world by commissioning a study of brain differences between conservatives and liberals. In response to a light-hearted request from Firth, neurologist Geraint Rees scanned the brains of ninety students and found significant differences in brain structure between conservatives and progressives in the group.

According to Rees' study, conservatives have larger amygdalae than progressives; in progressives there is more grey matter in an area of the cortex known as the anterior cingulate cortex. The amygdala is a very ancient area of the brain, involved in learning primitive fight or flight responses. Even frogs have them. The anterior cingulate is newer, and does some interesting stuff - a typical task used to test its function is to ask someone to identify the color used to print a word, for example:

RED

The anterior cingulate is very active when we're making a conscious effort to understand things or learn new stuff.

On the down-under parts of the internet, Rees' study hasn't had much attention. According to Piers Akerman it helps us understand why conservative voters have more common sense than left-wingers - they're more in touch with the ancient amphibian wisdom of the amygdala. And it's thanks to those same left-wingers, voting with them new-fangled cortical parts of the brain that we still have - by a small margin - an ALP government. Then there's this piece of ancient amphibian wisdom at Quadrant which is where I learnt about the study inthe first place.

If the study shows one thing, it's that it's completely inappropriate to refer to conservatives as dinosaurs. The evolutionary origins of conservative thinking are much more ancient than that..

Oh, the Bureaucracy!

Yesterday, I came across this little item in the Sunday Age:

UNEMPLOYED people are $342 worse off a year on average than they were when federal Labor came to power because their living costs have been rising faster than the dole...

An analysis of Bureau of Statistics figures by Canberra-based think tank the Australia Institute shows living costs of people on government benefits leapt by 12.8 per cent between June 2007 and September 2010.

Yet, in that time, the government raised the Newstart allowance by 10 per cent to take into account general price increases. That leaves the unemployed 2.8 per cent - $342 a year - worse off in real terms since 2007.

The institute's senior researcher David Richardson said Newstart was inadequate, creating incentives for people to claim the more generous disability support pension just to survive...

A report released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development this month warned Newstart has fallen so far behind living costs that there were "concerns about its adequacy" to support people and help them find jobs...

But a spokeswoman for Jobs Minister Chris Evans said unemployment allowances could be only "at a basic level". "Otherwise it will be unaffordable and act as a disincentive to work."

Yeah right. Maybe it's time that "spokeswoman for Jobs Minister Chris Evans" had a taste of those unaffordable "disincentives to work". Her and Chris Evans.

Hello, I'm From the Government and I'm Here to Give You a Colonoscopy

Recently the Australian Government has developed a keen - even morbid - interest in the contents of my bowels. This week I received a letter inviting me to “take part in the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program (the Program).” With it, I received a free test kit which I can use in the privacy of my own lavatory to collect a sample of the aforementioned bowel contents to see if I might have bowel cancer. According to the letter (signed by Professor Jim Bishop AO, MD MMed MBBS FRACP FRCPA APSOABN*, probably using bitmap graphics) “A positive result does not mean that you have bowel cancer”. In fact, “Most people with a positive test result” (i.e. blood in their poos) “do not have bowel cancer.”

Obligatory Melbourne Cup Tip

Expect horse meat futures to dip slightly on Wednesday with a full recovery by Friday.

That's all.

Bringing Back Sectarianism

There seems to be a bit of nostalgia for the good old days of religious sectarianism, or at the very least anti-clericalism, among a small minority of the Victorian population. I'm talking, of course, about the senior clergy of the Catholic Church.

In a move vaguely reminiscent of the 1950s, the church is distributing pamphlets through churches and Catholic schools outlining 25 questions Catholics should ask candidates before they give them their vote. Two of the issues covered in the pamphlet are, naturally enough, abortion and voluntary euthanasia. Here's a snippet from Friday night's Stateline, where Archbishop Dennis Hart was interviewed by Josephine Cafagna: