Sunday, 12 May 2013

Education, segregation, and social damage

Gated4Here's Will Hutton in today's Observer, summarising the social damage wrought by elitist educational and economic policies:

"Societies are built on multiple interdependencies. Trust, the foundation of human relationships, is created around reciprocity. An elite that segregates itself is declaring it does not want to be part of reciprocal relationships of trust. All that matters is its own betterment. Entrepreneurship and innovation, as entrepreneurs and innovators know full well, happen best in a climate of openness, access and high trust, not in societies managed to deliver economic rent and advantage to a self-perpetuating oligarchy of the privately educated."

And at the local level, the gated community is an increasingly powerful symbol of all this comtemptible ideology promoted by this government and its largely conniving press.


12 May 2013 10:29:11 | Social exclusion, Social policy

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Recovered possessions I have recently finished a short booklet on a theme familiar to readers of this blog – lost possessions. It comprises a light-touch essay, illustrated with a range of photos, exploring the curious tradition whereby people pick up items that others have dropped in public places, and place them somewhere to optimise the chances of rediscovery by the owner. I’ve long been fascinated by these acts of anonymous consideration. Co-editor Martin Dudley and I had an absorbing time selecting the images for the final cut: they include examples of sundry gloves, hats and scarves, but also a necktie, a vehicle registration plate, some shopping items and a notice about a lost i-Pod. We’re considering setting up a page somewhere to accommodate those images we could not include, and for people to add their own. In the meantime, here’s one of those that got away… I was rushing home from the station one evening, burdened with luggage, when I saw this child’s hoodie draped over a bollard. I failed to take the time to take a proper image, and have regretted it since. I promise you the photos in the booklet are of better quality, if not necessarily all quite so striking. We’ve edited and designed it using the Bookleteer process, and I’ll post here again when it becomes available in a week or so.
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Don’t start blaming the neighbours Now things have quietened down a bit, what can we say about the questioning of neighbourliness around 2207 Seymour Ave in Cleveland Ohio? Don’t blame the neighbours; avoid knee-jerk conjuring of halcyon historic community; and take mental health more seriously. Exhibit A is the cliché of American ‘community’ life, half-heartedly examined by Rupert Cornwell in the Indy for instance: ‘Cleveland has somehow given the lie to all this. If communities are supposed to look after their own, this particular one failed.’ I think it must be a bewildering, deeply disturbing experience for the neighbours concerned and I don’t see that it helps to clobber them with a sense of having let the side down. As I wrote a year ago with reference to such contexts, the experience of local people may be complicated by a sense of guilt mixed with cruel deception: ‘Can we understand how it felt in retrospect to have been a neighbour of Josef Fritzl, and to have respected his privacy? I imagine people saying simply, We knew nothing, what should we have done? – and never really recovering. An anti-social or deranged individual determined to use privacy as a smokescreen will do so, unless as a society we were to dismantle the structures and culture of privacy… ‘How close could the best of good neighbourliness have got to an Anders Breivik or a Josef Fritzl? No closer than they’d let you, through a street rep scheme perhaps, and no closer. You cannot see what he brings home from the stores in boxes or the magazines going through the letterbox, or what he views online.’ So far I don’t see that the case of Ariel Castro is particularly different. And it doesn’t help to refer to more halcyon days or localities, mythical or not, unless we are also going to offer analyses which suggest how we can reduce the likelihood of deranged behaviour having brutal and lasting impact on the lives of others. With that in mind, there’s one social imperative which seems to be missed every time: the need to create a culture in which the disorder of the individual in question is self-recognised as treatable by an available, confidential, caring system. Castro is said to have prepared a ‘suicide’ note in which he speaks of a sex addiction and said he needed help. What realistically were his chances of getting it, of taking it? Maybe we need to put more effort into pre-emptive services for all kinds of mental ill-health; and to normalise or de-stigmatise the idea of consulting them. Implementing the recommendations of the Independent Commission on Mental Health and Policing would be a start: ‘mental health is core business’ it says. Today we tend to find the treatment of people with mental illness, in previous centuries, distasteful or even barbaric. Unless we learn how to learn from tragedies like Seymour Avenue, I think that future societies may reflect in the same way about our own primitive disinterest in mental health.

Kevin Harris

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