All for One and One for All

The idea of community, so entrenched in the legend of the Three Musketeers, is globally appealing and may be the reason for so many film adaptations of Alexandre Dumas' novel. Like all good narratives the baddie is rich and powerful, a bit sleazy and has some great, teeth grinding lines - 'All for one and more for me'. Cardinal Richelieu gets his comeuppance in the end at the hands of the young King with heroic support from his handsome Musketeers. Of course according to the book and the films, every one lives happily ever-after.

If only our problems were so easy to recognise and finish off in real life. 

The big news in Australia this week was the death of Hazel Hawke.  Damien Murphy wrote a piece for The Sydney Morning Herald that demonstrated how a woman who had chosen abortion to allow her boyfriend the freedom of overseas study and multiple cosmetic surgery to maintain an acceptable appearance for the wife of a Rhodes scholar climbing the political ladder to its zenith, was steely in her resolve to do the right thing by the people in her mostly absent husband's electorate. 

Order of Australia 2001
Image from abc.net.au

This biography was new to me, the divorce for a younger woman blasted across the front pages of greedy magazines and the onset of dementia were all I had been previously aware of.  I am fascinated by the juxtaposition that this woman's life became. Her appeasing choices and lack of self esteem in her early years is in total contrast with the strong family ties she held together through humiliating headlines, and the amount of plaques bearing her name chosen by everyday people in everyday places because of their respect for her hard work and dedication to their improved communities.  It is inspiring how such strength developed from such meekness. 

I am assuming that her early decisions were the result of pressure from an ambitious partner but it is possible that she was just as ambitious and chose for herself; what's the old saying about behind every good man?  Perhaps she always had the steely resolve to do what 'needed' to be done. Or perhaps she was bullied into it and hindsight drove her to fight for others in later years.

Also in the news this week are the results of a study about rising numbers of Aboriginal deaths in custody. It was announced and quickly passed over for the next headline in the TV news I watched. The article in the SMH was hard to find and didn't tout the name of a reporter or even the name of the lead researcher.  The report was cloaked in anonymity, AAP was listed as the source and the Australian Institute of Criminology as the researcher. Why does no one want to stand up and be noticed about this sick and sad issue in our community?

Death in Custody
Trevor Nicholls 1990
treatyrepublic.net

The study showed that these deaths are not caused by police brutality where bad cops can be sacked, they are not caused by hangings where cells can be changed but by 'natural' causes: the effects of poverty and alcohol abuse. Ultimately they result from lifestyle choices but what lack of community makes these choices so common?

In the same week the lead vocalist of 'Power and the Passion' and 'Dead Heart' is desperately trying to drum up support from the states who have not signed up to the Gonski report driven changes for needs based funding of Aussie schools. "Education is the passport out of poverty for many indigenous students, yet we are still leaving thousands of kids behind,'' Mr Garrett said. "NSW has shown the way by signing up to our plan and delivering a better deal for almost 54,000 Aboriginal students in that state." in smh.com.au by Michael Gordon.  Isolation, loss of culture, substance abuse, poor nutrition and financial ignorance could be reduced by education which in turn will reduce the numbers of indigenous criminals and deaths in their communities whether behind bars or not.

photo:Glenn Campbell in theage.com.au

Why do some individuals in our community appear to be worth so much more than hundreds of others.  Why do we want to read and talk about one but strive to ignore many?

 At least  Dumas gives us food for thought and a little hope with the words "The merit of all things lies through their difficulty."  Perhaps he meant that the worth of something may be measured in how hard we are prepared to fight for it.  

Swords out - protect the defenseless and honour those with the strength to hold to what is true.

Reading:
Peace at Last - article from The Age by Lindsay Murdoch 2007
"TWO years ago gang violence made the Aboriginal community of Wadeye look like a Third World refugee camp.

"My tears are never dry," indigenous elder Theodora Narndu said at the time.

Elders say few solutions proposed for Wadeye addressed the complex problems that arose from having 23 combative clan groups brought together in one community, when a Catholic mission was set up in the then Port Keats in the 1930s.
"Things are pretty good here at the moment … there's not the trouble like before, the kids are going to school, there's less problems with drinking. Buildings are going up. Looking out from here, I feel as if I know more and am ready to deal with the issues," Mrs Narndu said."

Unseen

Two of my nieces were in their school's biannual musical over the last week. My eldest niece(who is now my work colleague - on the payroll at the ELC) accompanied my daughters and I to watch it. I think I must have missed bits of the show because the girls were in the chorus and usually on opposite sides of the stage which meant my focus was constantly flickering across the leads to keep an eye on their perfectly timed moves.  Well that is my excuse for missing the huge visual metaphor of the staging design!

The musical was Godspell and the characters were mostly dressed in construction worker get up, with hard hats and tools. A collection of parables are sung and spoken with Judas eventually betraying the overalled Jesus to the suited up architects(Pharisees & Sadduchees). The orchestra, lighting and sound were great, the staff and students should be very proud of their work but it wasn't until the next morning that I suddenly realised that the set was a metaphor for the plot.  The chorus spent all non singing and dancing time bringing in prefabricated walls, windows and doors which they clipped together as they sung their harmonies until the interior of a church was obvious. The stories and musical numbers were Christ building His church.  The architects who were focused on the buildings also missed the plot, for church is people not walls. The distraction of what made the who unseen.

After Godspell with our stars!

How often do we miss the plot because we don't notice what? How often do we miss opportunities to build people up because we don't notice who? 

As a child I was taught to pray my own prayers in private.  This form of meditation I think encouraged self reflection and often bought solutions to the tricksty social dilemmas that a nosy child worries about. I always prayed for what suited me but living on a farm soon taught me that different people would be praying for different weather at the same time - eventually I decided that God set His natural laws at creation and they ran their course. 

As a teen, watching the starving Ethiopians on the news every night, I lost any belief in an interventionist, personal God and struggled for years to reconcile the idea of people attributing a needed car space becoming available to answered prayer and innocents suffering. I felt that I needed to choose between being part of an experiment in free choice that was going horribly wrong observed by an uncaring God or the possibility that God didn't exist. Science saved me. The constant patterns and beauty from under the microscope in my biology classes to radio telescope visions of space, spoke of a designer. 

Going back into the Gospels I eventually saw the parallel between Judas and those disappointed in unanswered prayer on their terms. Judas believed by forcing a confrontation between Christ and the Pharisees he was going to see the Messiah he had always believed in, the general of an unstoppable army that would conqueror the world and return the promised land to God's people.  His limited concrete view of his world stopped him seeing the much bigger battle that Christ had come to fight.  In Hebrews 11 faith is named as the conviction of things not seen yet as concrete beings we need to see to believe.  How often does our infantile faith waver when it rains on days we plead for sunshine? How many have cut God from their lives because their pain and suffering have not been relieved? How many of us delight in the abstract but demand personal physical proof of God?

Nick's DVD

At school this week our Chaplain showed a clip from Nick Vujici's testimony. He said that through his battle of reconciling his birth with no arms or legs, his hardship and the idea of a loving God he came to the conclusion that "God changes me not my circumstance". Since Jesus' ascension and Pentecost, God has been present on Earth as the unseen Spirit. If invited the Holy Spirit will intervene in us.  I believe that He will guide our thoughts, motivations and responses.  He is the ultimate cognitive therapist.  

How do we see the unseen? Our kindness, our integrity, our involvement and  perception will not heal the ravages of our genes or alter natural laws or remove the consequences of our and other's choices but it will bring a little bit of heaven to those that our life impacts. Your face can show God to those you see everyday.

2 Corinthians 4:18 - ... look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen, for the things that are seen are transient but the things that are unseen are eternal.

Reading Now: 
Sylvester by Georgette Heyer, Assumptions we make about what is happening in other people's heads cause such stressful social interactions.
Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome 

Barbara A. Wilson, Nick Alderman, Paul W. Burgess, Hazel Emslie and Jonathan J. Evans

Predict everyday problems associated with the Dysexcutive Syndrome - a new to me diagnostic tool of the unseen cause of debilitating symptoms in a couple of students at school.

Genes vs Ideas

One of the most common shapes to appear in History textbooks is the pyramid. I'm not referring to the mud or limestone monuments from Mesopotamia or Egypt but the social hierarchy diagrams that consistently appear in the introductory pages about each culture.  This constant social pattern followed by humans over time is more likely why real Communism has never succeeded, the ideal of equality in economy and status just doesn't suit the majority.  Perhaps this is also the reason humans have always sought God. In modern times celebrity takes the place for those who worship at the mall. We seem to need someone on top.

An evolutionary biologist, Mark Pagel, has suggested that this tendency for the majority of humans (base of the pyramid) to be followers and copiers rather than innovators and creators has most likely contributed to the survival and development of our race. Perhaps the Tall Poppy syndrome so abhorred by Gifted and Talented educators is really a societal trigger to ensure that the only 'big ideas' that get through are those that society needs in spite of the nerd that proposes it.  Could TED Talks be the gong sounding the end of our species by giving a world wide stage to too many innovators and creators? Will scattered groups following many different intellectual enthusiasts destroy the cohesion of the masses by eating away at the base of the human pyramid? Nazis and Witch hunters certainly thought so.

Perhaps though another explanation for the pyramid is the cooperative nature of humanity, the ability to work together, to specialise and to share.  The plight of consumerism and greedy financiers certainly appear as if our society has become self gratifying to the point of destruction but the steady growth in the amount of charities listed for tax benefits could be looked at with an optimistic eye.  'Mark Pagel and his team's study into the proto-Eurasiatic language, as the mother for over 700 living languages, have identified a group of words in use today that have survived from this ancestral language. "I was really delighted to see 'to give' there," Pagel said. "Human society is characterised by a degree of co-operation and reciprocity that you simply don't see in any other animal. Verbs tend to change fairly quickly but that one hasn't." '(Read in David Brown, Washington Post article in smh.com.au, May 7 2013) 

The day after Human's arrived in God's creative application of His natural laws (Day 6, as Moses recorded for a society that had to be given a book of health laws because they didn't have enough science to stop dying from trichinosis and dysentery) He rested. This act introduced the cultural evolution to Earth. The Sabbath was designed for relationships and contemplation. In Genesis 2 the world's first language lesson is recorded, like all good language teachers God started with nouns. This gift of language gave power to the cultural evolution because thinking is useless without communication. This was given within an environment of free choice and stuff happened. Genes had done their job and now ideas flourished. Some good and many so bad that God had to ensure humanity's future opportunities with a flood. Generations later the idea to beat an imagined wrathful God, with all remembrance of the rainbow and its promise laughed at, a mighty tower was built.  

This earliest pyramid recorded in the Bible was accomplished  by a large group of cooperative humans, specialised in a variety of skills and lead by a charismatic innovator at Babel.  Humans had been told to go forth and multiply but had only fulfilled the second part so God scrambled their tongues, the original language perhaps lost. As those who understood each other formed new tribes and dispersed to look for their own place, the ideas of flood, God and language went with them.

Truly new ideas are rare and precious.  Hopefully these gems by scientists, philosophers and artists add beauty and strength to the cultural evolution began by the one who's laws guide natural selection.

Jesus about his disciples in Matthew 26:41 'The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak'
Paul talks of a similar battle between ideas and selfish disposition in Romans 7.

Hoping to read:
.

Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind by Mark Pagel.

A fascinating, far-reaching study of how our species' innate capacity for culture altered the course of our social and evolutionary history.  A unique trait of the human species is that our personalities, lifestyles, and worldviews are shaped by an accident of birth—namely, the culture into which we are born. It is our cultures and not our genes that determine which foods we eat, which languages we speak, which people we love and marry, and which people we kill in war. But how did our species develop a mind that is hardwired for culture—and why?

Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel tracks this intriguing question through the last 80,000 years of human evolution, revealing how an innate propensity to contribute and conform to the culture of our birth not only enabled human survival and progress in the past but also continues to influence our behavior today. Shedding light on our species’ defining attributes—from art, morality, and altruism to self-interest, deception, and prejudice—Wired for Culture offers surprising new insights into what it means to be human.

Sociologist's Field Day

Someone somewhere must have done a study on how many people it takes to spill a secret.  The complication being how invested the people told are in the secret I would assume.
To tell or not to tell?
Really this wasn't the question, it was more who to tell and when.
In my mind an international move is a big deal.  It costs heaps, forces change for people who are not part of the decision making process and is a constant swirl of 'what an opportunity' with regret for what is being left behind.
When the relocation is also dependent on Her Majesties Government in the form of the British High Commission it feels a little dishonest to say 'We're going' when you know very well that the Visas may not be approved.
We decided to accept the offer of relocation in March, my wonderful boss and closest collegues were told of the decision immediately.  As teachers we decided that it would be a happier day if my classes were told when my excellent replacement had accepted the job.  However the group announcement had to be made to parents a week or so early because the secret spread and eventually a Year 7 was told - it took 1/2 an  hour for all Yr7s to find out and an explanation was required. It is May.
Maybe 7 weeks of secret keeping in a school is a miracle?  What a missed opportunity for a sociologist!
Have a look at the fabulous community we are leaving.    http://www.hills.adventist.edu.au/

Reading Now:
Simmel on Secrecy, Marx and Muschert http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/marx-muschert-simmel.pdf

"Individuals need to guard information about their private lives (whether this involves the solitary person or a family group). Yet friendship, intimacy and trust are premised on significant disclosure and discretion indeciding what information to offer. Closeness in interpersonal relationships exists on a continuum of discretion and disclosure."