Unmaking Sense

Two takeaways from Darren McGarvey’s 2022 BBC Reith Lecture. 1: Don’t fall victim to the belief that you have to wait for the world to change before you can make headway in it. 2: Become an empowered individual and social voice that owns its agency by listening to what your local, distributed and global friends and neighbours suggest you can best say and do for them.

We need something better than the choices that we are currently presented between the left-wing and right-wing versions of human thriving. Darren McGarvey delivered the third of the 2022 BBC Reith lectures “Freedom from Want“ on Wednesday, December 14, 2022. There he speaks about a third way, which we pick up on in this episode.

There are two sides to taking offence. One is the person who deliberately or inadvertently gives rise to offensiveness. The other is the person who finds someone else’s behaviour, whether or not it is deliberate, offensive. Here we deal with the first - with occasioning offence - or some aspects of it.

Someone who doesn’t share our choices of goods and values is likely to behave in ways that we find strange, possibly even unacceptable. Typical responses are to describe them as one or more of mad, bad or sad, but is there really a difference between the three? If someone behaves according to a set of rational principles that we do not understand because the choices choices upon which that rationality are based are different from ours, when are they not likely to appear any one or more of mad bad or sad?

Moving towards a potential central theme for another series: the origins of cruelty, violence and human destructiveness.

Freedom of speech.

Rowan Williams’ Reith Lecture from December 22, 2022, and why I disagree with the central point he seems to be trying to make about Freedom of Worship (Wœrth-ship): we do not need permission from something beyond the world to fight our corner, oppose prevailing social views, or speak our minds. That right is ours absolutely - if anything is - with or without any external thing or person giving us permission to exercise it.

How should we spend this time? What is the proper relationship between work and life? Would we happily continue to spend our lives the way we do even if we were not being paid for it if we were able to afford it? What is the argument between left and right in politics really about if not about the quality of life of the workers, who generate all the wealth that the rich and powerful enjoy?

Then goods we choose are the aims or ends that guide our lives; the values we live by are the standards we think it acceptable and humane to deploy to achieve those goods. Choice defines both, even if our choices are often inherited at birth. But we can change our choices, and so become different kinds of human being who aspire to different things achievable by different means.

Plato’s Gorgias on why power does not guarantee happiness unless it can achieve its desired ends; and why only a socially-embedded concept of personal fulfilment can be deem to constitute real happiness.