Season's greetings 
I'm afraid it's that time of year when I tend to lean towards sloth and hibernation. 
The looming spectre of full time employment in the new year has also made it even more difficult for me to pry myself from a smoky pile of blankets in front of the XBOX, but here I am.
Thing is, regardless of my lack of physical activity, my brain is always ticking away. Once an idea occurs I have to let it loose somehow to stop my head from bursting ala Fist Of The North Star 
and this blog is the perfect vent.
Read an interesting piece in the current issue of ADBUSTERS(1) the other day called, 'Drink Fresh Snow', predominantly concerned with the growing distance western society puts between nature and itself. It included a minor piece of historical trivia to illustrate the point but this particular nugget set me off down a totally different track of thought.
The author mentions how, in pre-industrial England, it was the norm for most couples not to marry, and therefore not have kids, until a house became vacant in their village. This situation provided a kind of natural birth control and restrained the growth of the local population.
What occurred to me was that we tend to see the progress we have made since then, in terms of personal freedoms and opportunities, as a 100% positive and the 'old life' as nothing but the tyranny of hardship. Turn on the TV or open a newspaper however, and you'll probably hear about 'the pensions crisis'. Our society is starting to struggle because there are increasingly too many of us.
This was a specific example of a more vague inkling I'd had for a while. Take manners for example, highly valuable and important as far as I'm concerned but seen as stuffy or outdated by many. Well, earlier this year there was a brief debate about the language used in parliament.
Some people suggested that the mandatory formal phrases used in both houses served only to mystify proceedings and further alienate an already apathetic electorate. Pondering this I watched some debate in the Commons and realised that these strange words are much more than empty tradition.
Being required to address your opponents respectfully (eg. the right honourable gentleman) and via an independent authority, (the speaker of the house,) makes it impossible to slip into the kind of quick worded arguments that can become violent.
General manners, it turns out, are a kind of unconscious imposition of a non-violent social structure. The 'magical power' of words can be quite astounding and yet is so often ignored. A personal example of 'feeling the magic' for me can quite often be found when driving a car.
If someone cuts me up for example I might find myself exceedingly angry. Should the cutter-upper make it clear that they recognise and regret their error by apologising however, all that rage instantly evaporates into nothing, as if by magic.
Anyway, there are millions of these examples so let's just get to the heart of this thing. The advances we've made in our society have, without any doubt, brought a great deal of good into our lives. It is clearly nonsense to suggest that we should return our society, and subsequently the average standard of living, to those of over a century ago.
This said however, the unpleasant situations or boring traditions we have so skilfully found our way past, still contain valuable aspects which we have also left behind. Is it really so crazy to think that instead of simply scrapping systems we don't like we should replace them? Apparently it is.
And this is the really strange thing, they're six billion of us each with a unique and, by our own highly vaunted technological standards, super powerful thinking machine. Imagine all the different things a single person can think, the volume and variety of ideas their mind can hold. Now scale that up and try to imagine the sheer capacity for myriad abstract conceptions of our entire race.
This being the case, why is it then that we behave as if we can only deal with one big idea at a time? Looking at how we've behaved over our short history the same situation occurs time and again. We don't like something so we get rid of it completely, losing all its benefits as well as drawbacks and thereby creating as many problems as we solve.
Well I think there is room for a little one, and a whole lot more. We don't have to choose this or that, we can take the best from both and leave the rest. So what the hell are we doing? Well it seems we're just still so obsessed with the whole 'conflict' idea we have to apply the one vs other mindset to everything.
For example, the government is under pressure at the moment over how much cod it should allow to be fished from British waters. Environmentalists insist that cod fishing must, ultimately, stop altogether if the species is to survive. Fishermen, of course, want to be able to feed their kids.
So what does the government do? Choose one side to support? Find a middle ground? No, these look like the only options but they're not, in fact neither of these options are acceptable. The problem here is that the arguments on both sides are absolute.
Sea life must be protected as it is a vital food source. If stopping cod fishing is necessary to do this then it has to happen. Any compromise means that the problem will still occur, it'll just take longer. At the same time the fishermen have to have livelihoods to support their families and communities. Any compromise will lower the standard of life for both.
The answer to this is one that I often wish I had had to hand a few years ago during a conversation about the miner's strike. A peer, and good mate, of mine claimed that the Thatcher government had had no choice in closing the pits as it simply couldn't justify buying British coal when foreign imports were so much cheaper.
The point here is, as I wish I had said at the time, that a government has a responsibility to maintain employment and protect communities as both these contribute so highly towards a stable and peaceful nation. Putting people out of work costs us all in benefits, higher crime and lower health in the inevitably devastated communities.
If for some reason outside circumstances mean that an industry has to be culled, as seems necessary in the current fishing case though perhaps debatable over the miners, the government must find, or create, another industry into which the workforce can move.
Sure this is easy to say but I'm not underestimating the difficulty of putting such principles into practice, the thing is it just seems worth the effort. All it takes is the right idea and we, supposedly, have a system that puts our brightest people in the positions to make these decisions.
If we could finally evolve out of the war bucket and into the sun we could appreciate the lessons of the past, find truly effective solutions to our problems and, best of all, stop perpetually shooting ourselves in the foot at every bastard opportunity!
PS
Just want to wish you all the very best over the holiday period and thank you all, particularly my good blogging friends 
, for spending your time here this year. 
footnote
(1) The current issue of ADBUSTERS is the annual 'Big Ideas' issue, if were only going to buy it once a year this would be the one to get as it's rammed to the gills with valuable info and insight.
