Approaching the New Year

My quote for the end of the year: "I have learned that keeping relationships and friendships in good repair is the best defence against trouble; and that planning and organising fun is the best antidote to regret, discontent, and boredom" (John Milnes, my best man).


My quote for the beginning of next year: "Can it be that there is not enough space for man in this beautiful world, under those immeasurable, starry heavens? Is it possible that man's heart can harbour, amid such ravishing natural beauty, feelings of hatred, vengeance, or the desire to destroy his fellows? All the evil in man, one would think, should disappear in contact with Nature, the most spontaneous expression of beauty and goodness" (Leo Tolstoy, The Raid, 1853).


Over the past few days I finished the book of Tolstoy short stories given me by my favourite journalist. It gave rise to a fascinating exchange among the family about the realism of Christian anarchism as a way of life. He probably is over-optimistic about the possibility of goodness without redemption and inspiration, but I think he's right about the inherent sinfulness of human hierarchies, of which the tower of Babel is the archetype, to be reborn as Babylon. I liked the parable-like stories, especially The Two Old Men. His theme often seems to be "Faith without works is dead". 


What I like about my first quotation is John's positivity, which I shall try to emulate. And I agree with Tolstoy's view of the dissonance between the beauty of the natural world and the ugliness of much human behaviour. So I am going to try to avoid adding to that ugliness in my 2011 blogging. It seems to me that the blogosphere is where "feelings of hatred, vengeance and the desire to destroy one's fellow" run rampant. Although the results may not be physically so bloody as in The Raid, there's no doubt they are at least equally pernicious. And so I will avoid commenting on the so-called Top Gear Christmas Special, and try gratefully to recollect instead the number of good and helpful programmes the BBC put on specially for Christmas.


http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780140445060,00.html#

Premature celebrations

Well, I don't like to say I warned you, but I did (see "Losers...and Winners"). We've not yet won the Ashes after all. Saturday morning and England have lost 5 wickets and are a couple of hundred runs adrift. The commentators have already admitted defeat. Oh dear!

I suspect the celebration at the release on bail of Wikileaks' founder, Julian Assange, may also prove to be premature and short-lived. Could it have really been £200,000 bond for an alleged sexual assault case? I don't suppose we'll ever know the truth about the whole tangled web surrounding the leak of 3 million US diplomatic files through Wikileaks. To be honest, I don't think I buy the highly confidential and highly damaging claims - if it's true that they were unencrypted and circulated to tens of thousands of American civil servants. I listened to Assange's British lawyer last week and found his account very coherent - but then it would be, wouldn't it?

I have no doubt that various governments, and in particular our American friends, will be very annoyed and worried by the apparent ease with which the files were obtained, and their extent. It sounds as though the most sensitive information was redacted before publication, but even so, somewhere out there, someone has the unredacted files. I suppose there are some lessons for everyone. One is that the world wide web is, as Tim Berners Lee intended, a free flowing medium of information and is not really secure. I suspect that governments will tighten up their computer security, but, as Gary MacKinnon proved, a techy computer geek can hack even into the Pentagon computer system. So how about paper and pigeon post?

Another, which shouldn't surprise us, is that what governments tell us is what they want us to hear. The published extracts from the files give quite a different version of events from what's normally released via the media.

In November my favourite journalist sent me a  copy of Tolstoy's How much land does a man need? and other stories. She said she was interested in my reaction to his form of Christian anarchism. I've not yet finished it, but I'm enjoying it. I loved this sentence from Where Love is, God is: "You are in such  despair because you only want to live for your own happiness!"