Yesterday
I drank coffee with someone who simply does not care for the judgement of
others. That is how I once lived. I cultivated at university the persona of
someone who disdained the marked trappings of popular opinion. I travelled solo.
I read my own syllabus. What changed?
Immediately
leaving university was a traumatic experience. Occupationally, life in Hull was
tough. Spiritually, I found the people I knew drank heavily and read little. I
struggled with the intensity of inner-city schooling but I stayed a year. That
was a tough time.
It is
now that I have some of the words to recognise this. My family suffers from low
social capital. My father took to heart the attitudes of higher-class boys against
a scholarship lad. He cultivated an ire and self-absorption that affects him even
now. My grandparents were not rich or especially educated. My mother was
effectively abandoned by her parents, an experience that necessitated a survival
mentality.
My childhood
town is deprived. Poor culturally and poor occupationally. It shaped me with the
experience of the provinces. The recent success of the football team makes that
past interesting and meaningful – that life can be reduced to sporting
ambitions. But that is a game.
Very little
of my extended family enjoys occupational success. That is somewhat dramatic – some
do, but not in the sense that they can support with creative internships. That operates
for so few people.
So it
was surprising to me yesterday to meet someone whose narrative spoke of rejecting
expected roles and instead forging her own. Her background was religiously and
culturally dominant. She was expected to follow a marriage and to subvert all occupational
expectancy within that. Her subversion of that role was met with opposition
from her family – they wondered what others would think of them.
There
is something peculiar about religious expectation. It is tremendously hard to
oppose. It holds an authority that is hard to usurp. It is the authority of the
inner-life. We do not want a inner-life more damaged or unhealthy than we must
suffer. Yet this is more complex than simply aiming to remain untouched and innocent.
Living in a cult might create that experience. Instead, the desire to be ‘good’
or to be ‘pure’ is actually one that Boris Johnson et al do not appear to need.
That upper echelon of British society provide seemingly very little example of
decorum or virtue.
How
good could life be if things were in order? That is Peterson. Is that
disingenuous statement? He seems a disingenuous person. Move beyond ‘good’ and ‘pure’
I think. How about finding ‘order’ and ‘chaos’? When should we understand and accept
the chaos that the human spirit craves so much? And when and how to accept the
chaos that other people desire too? Maybe allowing other people that desire to
establish their own fields of order and chaos… although not always at work?
I
cannot always operate within a Wunderlist and a calendar. Only when I establish
that order onto others…
My current
job in the Middle East is one in which the opinion of others is more than a
passing consideration - it is one frames survival. My place only has 84 days
left, 24 until Ramadan. But even now I feel vulnerable. That is an echo of how
others have been treated. Firing and bullying and the repression of ambition
and thought. I am being treated remarkably well in that I am not under threat
from the top in my work. But I find those nearest to me scrabbling for position.
And key people in high places hold a philosophy of education far different to
mine. I prefer mine. I see our tension as one of external order vs internal
chaos. Of bagging peas vs growing people. Of crushing procedure vs rude
vitality. It is one where the order established is tedious and naïve and far
beyond the ambitions of a humanist education.
A
humanist education – to be a humanist educator – is an identity that I can live
with. To live as a cosmopolitan. To realise where I have come from and to
educate myself beyond that. The truth of such a life is that it will annoy a
number of people. But what kind of annoyance? And what kind of people? I order
my life too much and in a narrow fashion. When I was in Canada I lived better. Here
I have suffered some social ire from others that seems to affect me even now. I
am tended to think in some dark moments that I want to speak to one man about his
comments to me and others. To challenge a ludic dick with a dark past. Yet a cosmopolitan
response is what I desire: direct my attention towards a different future.
To be
as belligerently self-determined as this woman appears involves sacrifice. It
does not indulge the kind of privileged self-consciousness or vacillation that
my position has allowed. This woman has achieved some excellent things in
theatre. She started a production company and educated herself. Theatre gave
her a mode and space of expression beyond the obvious limits of work and family
and money. But there is no security in what she does. I have enough security
that will be recognised in the new place I will soon visit.
I need
to think more about this. And I need to do more within this. And I need to negotiate
some order and nourish the necessary chaos of a liberal humanist mind.
