This is a time of year when we hear of New Year Resolutions and Change. This reminds me of working with government officials to design programmes for helping industry to change, and when the Committee Chairman was a top civil servant, and most members were younger colleagues.
They had razor-sharp minds and so once he had explained the purpose of the gathering, these young chaps were off like greyhounds from traps racing after the rabbit. In no time at all, the subject was dissected into bite sized chunks; analysed and solutions posited. Positives and negatives were then listed and the meeting adjourned. They went away to draft and cost a programme of work for each identified solution prior to the next meeting.
This memory was prompted as I read that, “The Government has announced a ten-point plan to deal with illegal immigrant crisis’, to which my immediately thought was that they had a as much chance of achieving that plan than a greyhound has of catching a rabbit which can be tuned to outpace the hounds.
It is not that the plan itself is inadequate as in theory the government can allocate sufficient resources to give equal priority to every element of the plan even though some elements are more important than others. It is rather, that funds are not allocated all at once. Pressure for results then forces managers to tackle the least complex items before the tricky ones and so the programme becomes piecemeal, and easy for opponents to claim it has lost focus and failed. In the meantime, the original civil servants, and the ministers, have moved on
Not so in China, which has built a city for twenty million people in three years, whereas we can’t build a third runway at Heathrow in twenty. Of course, China has different politics and vast surpluses of cash from making and selling things we used to make.
However, we are not governed by the Chinese Communist Party and so may think our bumbling governments and sclerotic civil service are better at other things. But is change in the air?
During the winter of 1947/8 I walked on the roof of a double decker bus totally buried under snow for twelve weeks. Our water froze underground, and we had to take buckets to a bowser at the bottom of the hill . We had non-flushing outdoor lavatories in the garden and so had also to carry those buckets down the same hill to the corporation muck cart which came fortnightly. Everyone regarded the conditions as ‘something to be worked around and simply ‘Carried on.’ The local coal mines kept digging coal as best they could, factories and farms. adapted hours as necessary and, although there were disruptions to food supplies nothing was unsurmountable. School teachers went to work, and the older children shovelled snow to make paths. As far as I was aware, snow was just another hurdle to be dealt with. This was life!
If the idea that folks could choose a lifestyle did exist; it could only have been in the minds of a miniscule number of European aristocracy and upper middle-classes in London and Edinburgh. It did not exist in the minds of those who did not have electricity.
I often wonder what my Great Grandfather who was born in 1860 and who died when I was thirteen would have thought about today’s Britain. He would be amazed with the technology, the ease of personal travel and communication around the world. Evenso, I know that, even then, he was alert to the dangers of assuming that tomorrow can take for granted today’s conditions. This scepticism made him wary of ideas then being promoted about, ‘Scientific Socialism’ as expressed by Russia and the Communist party of Britain.
I know there have always been utopian dreams and, although the Marxist one lost popularity when the Berlin Wall fell, it was soon replaced in parts of the world by a type of militant Islam and, amongst the western intelligentsia, by the personification of the earth as Gaia.
I see the major problem with any Utopian plan being that, at some point they can all be seen as justifying the sacrifice of an individual. Especially one who apparently stands in the way of the attainment of the vision. Within each visionary group are always those whose principles are regarded as being high enough as to all them to justify any action of their own. A classic example of the saying, “The higher the principle the lower the scruple.”
Principles can also used to justify denying people a right to speak or write freely or by denying them a choice of language or thought.
In Judaic/Christian belief God has created individuals with free-will and a portion of his immortality which we call this the Soul.
As January is the start of a New Year we may begin by of the ultimate utopian idea of life with someone who loves us for ourselves and is already an indwelling presence and not one of the external substitutes
think of starting to think
and we think of it as a a bring us closer to what God thinks is best for us, and think less about what others think. The utopia that matters is the Kingdom of God within us rather than some nebulous man-made conceptual utopia outside.
View from the Pew 