The Grand Homecoming

When you go traveling you're supposed to find out new things about yourself. I've just been traveling for about a year, and I found out nothing til I got back. I discovered how much I love home.

There's nothing like being in other countries to make you realise how wonderful England is. Disembarking from my aircraft was like surfaceing from an eternity spent under water. Everything was back as it should be:

The t-less accent
The obscenely lush grass and general foliage
The oppressive, grey, chilly August sky
The heaps of "dismal suburbia", as my dad put it
Nice old doddery ladies with curly white hair
Hairless middle-aged men wearing five layers and muttering soft obsenities at the tube train
The creepy ooze that finds its way into the cracks of everything, especially bus windows
Ridiculous teenage girls with scarves and "ug" boots
Steaming cups of perfect -perfect!- tea
Kkkkrazzzy Kebab Shops
Cars that indicate more than half a second before turning
The usual apocalypse blaring out from three-inch high shock-horror headlines (Even the Economist welcomed me with a front page proclaiming Britiain would be electicityless within weeks)

The whole country seems - always has and always will - plunged into a nation-wide psychosis. Everyone is completely delusional. But the reason I love it more than anything in the world is that no matter how insane everything here is, it's so full of soul. The place is palpably deep, heaving with depth. It gives one life force, like a drug.

I swore that I would never be nationalistic enough to love a country, but I LOVE England. Ach bah humbug.

We all love to Dance!! -or------Human Objectivity?

When I was studying for something important, I remember coming across some sociologist or philosopher or someone, I can't remember his name, it might have been a chap called Habermas, but it might have been someone else, who had this trippy theory about how if everyone alive and who had ever been alive were brought together in one big discussion room and were somehow able to have enough time etc to talk about things, without any external pressure or predetermined irrational mindsets or anything, we would all eventually come to a solid agreement about what was beautiful and true and good etc etc.

In other words, he thought that everything was ultimately objective, and that subjectivity is just a peculiar human phenomenon resulting from social factors such as upbringing, social norms etc etc.

What's cool about this theory is not that he thought that quality is objective, which is what lots of people think but cannot prove, but that he thought that quality is humanly objective, i.e. the quality of, say, beauty, does not lie inherently in a rose, but rather all of humanity could theoretically be in total agreement that the rose possesses beauty.

I often think that the music I listen to is undeniably, irrefutably, brilliant, and that everyone would agree with me if they were only free of the burden of having been brought up listening to S-Club Seven and the Bee Gees. A few weeks ago I met someone who didn't like the Beatles. I was astonished. I hadn't even realised not liking the Beatles was an option.

But have you ever actually met someone that didn't think, say, that a sunset is beautiful? There are certain natural things like night skies, oceans and butterflies, that everyone, no matter the culture, age, upbringing, gender, etc etc etc agrees are aesthetically agreeable. The extent to which they are agreeable may differ, but nobody is actually repulsed by the thought of, for example, the bluey hue of a cloudless summer sky.

There is also nobody who doesn't like all forms of music. Almost no one is not a sucker for a good story well told. We love art, whatever the form. Aesthetics obsesses us, be they the shape of a car, the voice of an opera singer, the tale of Odysseus or the grandeur of the Taj Mahal.

It's clear therefore that mankind's affinity with what we have dubbed "quality" (perhaps just a product of some quirky twist of brain evolution) is just that: a species-wide phenomenon. No one is exempt from our irrational love of what art.

Whether this translates to the potential of full-blown human objectivity is another question, but it's worth pondering.

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Side note: One thing I know Habermas DID talk about is communication. Adequate communication may be the one thing preventing us from reaching agreements on this kind of thing. Worth more research, me thinks.