The purple fence

At the edge of the village an izba stood out because it had been modernised. It had plastic windows and an ideal-fence-like purple fence around it.

I mentioned the purple fence to my friend Andrei and he smirked. It seemed we both had the same attitude to it. But I found out later it meant quite different things to each of us.

For me it represented the first symptom of a kind of breakdown, of a state where people start to look at each other and compare, and decide they want to be different and show it. To express their difference.

It’s also the first step up in the hierarchy of objects. This hierarchy is like a bizarre pyramid where value is ascribed to objects not because of their ability to perform a function or because of their quality but because of their associations with what is seen as an ideal lifestyle. At the bottom of this pyramid lies the purely functional and the improvised. Those who’s mind is tuned to the hierarchy of objects feel repulsed when they see objects designated for certain functions being used for others. In the hierarchy of objects newness is preferable to oldness. New you can be proud of, old, ashamed of.

The shapes, colours etc of these products correspond to an ideal, but it is a temporary one: conceived by people in an office half way around the world, and will soon be replaced by another, rather than being the result of a native ergonomy. The quality is not great and, for reasons of economies of scale, there always needs to be a tendency towards homogeneity. So that purple fence is a member of a family of purple fences from around the world instead of having any relation to the place where it is planted.

To me the owner has been co-opted, lifted out of the mindset that surrounds them and out of a mindset that responds positively to what surrounds them and become a member of all the purple fence-minded people everywhere who are in fact responding defensively to what surrounds them.

From my point of view, through the owner of the fence, the forces of mediocrity had encroached in this most traditional of places. The reasoning once had been “how do I make this well and make it last?” and now it is “why don’t I try this because it will demonstrate what I aspire to be”.

Anyway there’s something about the purple fence that’s incompatible with just being natural and sitting having a neighbourly chat. You can’t imagine the owner of the purple fence doing that. She was a stout blonde in early middle age who, I learnt, looked down on the others in the village, but was happy to invite them over for drinks and nibbles to reinforce her status amongst them. She'd clearly staked her differences into the ground. They couldn't be momentarily cast aside.

During my stay in the village it was with thoughts like that that I filled the void caused by not understanding much of what anyone was saying.

For Andrei it was something different. The purple fence was just an accident of chance: like what happens when you develop a photograph and through the magnifying glass you see that a few of the pixels are completely the wrong colour. If you take a big enough cross-section of people, there’s no reason, just aberrations happen. Some people have bad taste.

Seeing freedom differently

The effect of the mortgage crisis has been to expose a distorted interpretation of freedom upheld by powerful dogma.

A dogma insists that matters are far too complicated for you to grasp and your only responsibility, to prevent chaos, is to surrender personal judgement. "Serve x with all your might and all will be for the best" is its principal demand.  This time x was the Economy , while in the past it's been the Pope (papal infallibility), the King (divine right) etc. 

When everything appears to be headed in the right direction, the effect on people's minds is total. The dogma seems to cover everything, like the sky. Until suddenly, what was thought to be the sky turns out to be just a painted décor, a trompe l'oeuil. A small crack and the illusion shatters. Through this crack we're seeing hints of a much wider more unpredictable sky. The new air rushing through feels very different to the clammy air of certainty we breathed before.

There's a gradual realisation that the axioms setting the direction in which society moves are not immutable, that there are many other possibilities - that the economy itself is not the measure of all things. It is remarkable how critics of faith often seem to miss the major and most problematic one: the faith in the Invisible Hand - now long hard-coded in our social behaviour.

The problem is more profound even than the "do as thy wilt" (the thought that some kind of common good emerges from the sum of all selfish actions) embedded in the Faith. The very idea that the world is composed of separate individual minds making rational choices is fundamentally flawed and upon it the whole sorry edifice of economics is based.

“We interpret a dependence, in our civilisation, upon economic competition, as proof that this is the prime motivation that human nature can rely upon”. Ruth Benedict

One of the Faith's most nefarious offshoots has been to make an idol of the values of competition. This has created a raft of ills we are now going to be spending the next century divesting ourselves of. Deeply embedded social Darwinism, the notion of 'just deserts' in the distrubution of wealth, reductive thinking invading every sphere of life, even the most intimate, the obsession with growth rather than finding a balance, the tacit acceptance that creating a "necessary stupidity" in society is worth it because it's good for business, the redemptive power of money and therefore the ends justifying the means in any way that's not overtly criminal (i.e. lack of responsibility) - creating terrible lesions in the body of society.

What we have taken for freedom is an efficient organisational framework that provides opportunities for acquiring wealth. A kind of vast opportunity machine. It gives certain people a measure of freedom by virtue of allowing them to exist within this framework in more favourable terms than others.

There may be some freedom in all this, but not quite in the way we imagine. We imagine there’s a much fuller freedom, at least just round the corner. But as awareness of the millions serving at the lower rims of the vast pyramid increases, when the correlation between one person’s freedom and another having less becomes clearer - then it all becomes less appealing.

So much depended on an "aversion of the gaze" that may have been maintained were it not for the combined effects of the banking crisis, the growth of the Web and ecological movements, making it unavoidable to dwell on the interconnectedness of things.

Limits of photography

Every art has its limits. It's easy to forget that when an artform is as seductive and predominant in daily life as photography.
Something about it lowers our guard: enticed, we forget how the surface of things can be deceitful.

Imagine the faces of people at a classical music concert. Serious, impassive. Inside each person there's so much going on but none of it is visible on the surface. Much of reality is happening at a level not visible on the surface of things. When we peer into the world through photos every day, we forget this.

Images are silent and cunning if one does not take into account their limitations. Photographers themselves would do well to keep reminding us what they are.

Cynicism

The cynic thinks he has seen through something. So he sniggers and in so doing feels warm inside and at one with other sniggerers. In reality he has not seen far enough. Cynicism is a sort of surrender.

Era of personal responsibility

The web could lead to less government, less politics, less corporate control and usher in a new era of freedom and personal responsibility.

There's a growing realisation that people are able to self-organise without leadership (something inconcievable a few years ago!) and create powerful waves of ad-hoc consensus to tackle concrete problems without politics or ideology to provide the impetus.

The terribly destructive big guiding ideas and solutions for humanity, -isms etc that raged through the last 2 centuries could start to disolve and give way to far more practical, common sense approaches at very local right up to global levels.

There is an opportunity to collectively regain control over much of what is handled by intermediaries who are locked (perhaps quite naturally) in a dynamic of forever increasing their grip on us. Over the decades they have stripped society of self-reliance and created huge structures of dependency, whether government or corporate.

Through the web we can increasingly both make "small government" a reality and restrict the entaglement of corporations in all aspects of our lives by bypassing alot of what they offer. The result could start to look a lot more like freedom than anything Western society has seen in a long time.

Less government means less taxes and bureaucracy and less corporate intervention means a better quality of life and a more balanced more local economy, with more inventiveness and resourcefulness. In sum, less of the tedious uniformity and manipulation that characterises the output of both sides who are notionally pitted against each other in false opposition.

This practical apolitical way forward would also hopefully finally kill off the outdated concepts of left and right, this other absurd dialectic that to this day continues to paralyse the political imagination.

The idea that people in large modern societies could finally, to a far greater extent, be able to collectivedly assume responsibilities and take charge of their own destiny unmediated is tremendously exciting. Of course it creates the problem of a new dependency - on the internet itself. That malfunctions, or becomes too controlled and it ruins everything. If the internet is the only means for this to be conducted, it will get hijacked. There is no sinecure. Most people in the world have no internet access and its hardly desirable that the precondition for being an active citizen is being connected to the internet. It is more a question of the internet enabling new structures of organisation and disintermediation that can evolve in the real world after incubation, as it were, on the web.

Electorates feel a powerful sense of entitlement coupled with effective powerlessness, two contradictory forces that tend to keep people locked in a permanent state of indignation and makes democracy seem absurd. This may disolve when there is no longer anyone for people to point a finger at but themselves - a new era of personal responsibility.

Follow the link before to get a sense of the steps being taken in this direction: http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/gov-20-week-in-review-1.html?

update 15.05.10: saw this today - and amazed by how it echoes the ideas in this piece!
"perhaps the next political movement is a practical rather than an ideological one"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2010/may/12/ethical-living-real-big-society-two?

Ways of seeing

You cannot make the same deductions from what you see in images of Russia as you might from images taken in the West.

To Western eyes decaying surfaces often mean degradation and smooth renovated surfaces are a sign of confidence and well-being. Colours, symmetry, state of repair to us are important indicators of people's internal condition.

Conversely, an object's distance from an ideal of completion can be unsettling and sometimes shameful.

Here these things often matter less. There's a more detached, utilitarian approach, a different relationship to the material world. Not the same urgency for things to conform to an ideal.

In Russia men often mix dark or muted colours with relatively little attention to personal grooming or awareness of the image they project. The absence of a ready smile or desire to use external appearance as a channel for "personality" seems to outsiders like an abandonment of self respect that can only be equated with depression and resignation.

There's a tendency in the West to "put all one's attributes to the front of the store", to burden ourselves (and consequently others) with our aspirations, to identify with what we own, which one now finds in ludicrously parodied form in Moscow but is not a characteristic of people in Russia.

There's still a tradition here of giving away little publicly, of not externalising things unless in trusted company. It's still very much about human relations and personal character rather than extensions here, which is hard to capture in an image.

In Russia you take away someone's extensions (house, car, furniture etc) they still remain roughly themselves (except they might be a little pissed off!), in the West you remove the extensions and in quite a profound sense, you have an entirely different person than before.

As people here gradually become more taken over by their extensions and in some cases, like in the West, become little more than the sum of these, what seems like a gain is in fact an immeasurable loss. But there is no place for acknowledging that in the way of seeing that dominates today's world - with its undue emphasis on the visible, the measurable and a hierarchy of things.