Who's the Mummy?

“I am not a biological parent, but I am a parent. I have young actors and actresses that I mentor, I have nieces and nephews that I am very close to,” she tells host Jane Garvey.

“There is a way to become a mother in this day and age which doesn’t include your name on the child’s birth certificate. You can express that maternal side, very clearly, very strongly. It feels very satisfying.

“I didn’t change nappies, which is okay with me, but I did help my niece get through medical school. I did sit down with my nephew when he was [going through] a very tough time to join the army. And those are very motherly things to do, very nurturing things to do.”

Thus spake Kim Cattrall on Womens Hour. Is anyone else reminded of Rachel Dolezal, the white American woman who 'self-identified as black'? Kim, you are a mentor, and an aunt, and I'm sure you're very good at both. That doesn't make you a mother, just because you don't like being described as 'childless'.

At what point do words cease to mean anything, because the arbiter of meaning becomes our emotional response to them, rather than their factual content? If I self-identify as thin, because despite the fact that my BMI is 26.9, telling me I'm fat upsets me, then am I thin, or fat? Do I describe my body as thin, my parenting status as a mother, my relationship as a marriage and my tax dealings as honest, because that's how I like to think about myself? Or is there an actual measure outside of my narcissistic little world that gives either an agreed meaning, or an objective standard, to these words? If not, then we may as well go back to grunting at each other, because that would carry about the same amount of shared meaning.  

Does this mean anything to you, or only to me?

Something to Believe In

Whilst I can still do so for free, here's a piece from the Times earlier this week. Maurice Saatchi calls for the new government to give us a Big Idea to believe in.

One by one, our most basic beliefs have turned into myths.

We used to believe in caring socialism, until it reminded us of the Russian station masters who sent out empty trains in the middle of the night to meet their state targets. We used to believe in capitalism, until we were introduced to the “free market” called banking, where five companies control 80 per cent of all transactions and two of them went bust. We used to believe in proud nationalism, until we recognised that the combination of globalisation, devolution, and immigration make it seem an uncomfortable anachronism. In Britain today, the great Hollywood law that “nobody knows anything” should be “nobody believes anything”.

You could add God to the list of faiths/big ideas no longer held or believed in by a significant number. This is postmodernism in all its glory. Or perhaps, postmodernism Part 2. In Part 1, there were still enough people who held to 'metanarratives', big explanations/stories of the events of history, big philosophies which explained everything, whether it was God, capital, The People, or Progress.

In Postmodernism Part 2, the Big Stories have gone. They're held as articles of faith by a diminishing remnant, but are no longer mainstream. Saatchi notes Camerons well-documented pragmatism, and lack of a single, overriding philosophy:

Our new leader has the intellect, the charisma and the courage for history to judge him “a great prime minister”. To deserve the title, he will have to ignore the Conservative press officer who replied to a query about his party’s philosophy: “If you want philosophy, read Descartes”, and the Conservative candidate who agreed: “We don’t want philosophy and fluff”.

Now it might be that the age of ideology was just that, an age which has been and gone. But there has always been a big story somewhere, whether it was the medieval Catholic worldview, the Enlightenment, the British Empire etc. Nowadays 'believe' is an advertising slogan for Guiness, or football, I forget which. It's something very short term, a brief exertion of will and wishful thinking, packaged as entertainment.

Saatchis prescription is to reread Marx, the Declaration of Independence, and the Sermon on the Mount: To read them afresh is to understand the power of belief. They are all cries against the injustice of the established order. Like our Prime Minister, these authors all wanted “power to the people!” Their aim was revolution. Their effect was revelation. Um, yeeeeeeesssss, as Jeremy Paxman might say. Not the most accurate summary of the Sermon on the Mount I've ever read, but it's still an intriguing choice. The USA still has a couple of Big Ideas on the go, one is its own self-belief as a global agent of righteousness, the other (connected) one is in God. Apart from blind faith in Fabio Capello, you'd be hard pushed to find any left in England.

So what happens post-postmodernism? Is part 3 that the world is recolonised by those who do believe in a Big Story (China, Islam)? Can we manage, as a society and as individuals, without a big picture of how the world fits together? If there is nothing to be sceptical of, would we have to create something? And how does belief in Jesus as the agent of God's kingdom, a big story which covers all of creation and all of history, work in this context?

And politically, how long can a party survive if it doesn't have a philosophy? If everything is pragmatism, then all politics comes down to personality - do I trust the pragmatic instincts of Polician C over Policitian L or Politician LD. If there's no philosophy guiding those instincts, then ultimately there's no other way of judging which is better or worse.