County Court Judgment Day - The Revenge of a Bankrupt Middle Class?

Today's papers were leading with some good strong negative worry pieces on the slowdown (read, meltdown) of housing prices outside London and the rise in County Court Judgments
as up to 1 million UK households face court action over debts, lured by the siren call of easy credit to the tune of a whopping £1.3 trillion.

The piece states that

figures showed that many ordinary families are now affected by serious financial problems - even though they may not be on the brink of insolvency.

The truth of the matter is that most households have no idea how to manage without living on the never never. With the only solution to the intractable supply and demand of housing in areas of the country people wish to live in being the long slow demographic slide a la Russe, awaiting expectantly the demise of the baby-boomer generation for whom home ownership was another nice smug adornment to life rather than the be all and end all it is now, the question of why suffer this increasingly law of diminishing returns for human happiness must be posed.

What force of ingrained middle class rectitude keeps the coping classes (read Alice Thompson's excellent Torygraph piece on the bulging ranks of middling managers who keep the rich truly rich and the poor truly poor to the life conditions they expect)
beset as they are from increasing taxes without any growth in quality of public services, incessantly rising interest rates and cost of living, driven into less salubrious affordable habitations (non white Russian flight from Chelsea to Putney) from abandoning their serfdom and embracing, well, embracing a life of freedom and possibilities?

JG Ballard's recent works 'Millennium People and 'Kingdom Come' again shed that remarkable author's compassionate gaze on that aberrant and unhappy breed of men, the English middle and lower middle classes. In the former book, residents of a gated community in West London decide to strike out against their oppressors, the smothering inanities of middling England, bombing Tate Modern, sabotaging Cat of the Year show in Olympia, storming Broadcasting House before the authorities cow them to return to their bourgeois burdens of finding money to pay school fees and change to pay the meter for the privilege of parking outside the front door. Kingdom Come is a retread of this millenerian theme, with the spiritually dispossessed hinterlands of the Thames Valley beyond Heathrow finding solace and sense of an English identity in the twin passions of organised hooliganism and consumerism.

It could well be that having your IVA and it or going boldly bankrupt it is the only practical way for the English middle classes to raise two fingers to a society whose outlines grow less familiar and with which it seems less wise or rewarding to seek engagement. Whilst this is clearly not a case of turning the poisons of society into medicine, this loosening of the hitherto tightly bonded helixes of personal responsibility, propriety and ownership that had twisted the English propertied classes into shape and structure could be far reaching.

In chapter two of Joyce's 'Ulysses', the Ulster born headmaster Mr Deasy asks Stephen Dedalus what the proudest boast of an Englishman might be. The Empire, asserts Stephen which Deasy corrects as being able to state 'I paid for this myself' is. Over a century on from that snapshot of Dublin on June 16 1904, the proudest boast of an Englishman is 'I went broke and bust on my own terms'

Can happiness be taught??

I found happiness in the Daily Telegraph comment section earlier in the week and not just because Simon Heffer is abdicating responsibility therein.

Blair biographer Anthony Seddon proposed that the teaching of how to find happiness should be on the curriculum at school. As Mr Seddon is also Master of Wellington College this deserves to be taken with due consideration.

Unless blessed with a home environment and a sense of self capable of growing in harmony with various other teenage growth spurts and transformations, school days aren't necessarily the happiest days of our lives.

In my own case, I was merrily permitted through GCSE and A levels to nurture an alarming neurosis that left me ill equipped for university and life beyond. This isn't to deny my responsibility for my actions, I was an intensely intense sullen wretch and refused to take any of the positive courses available to me from taking up extra tuition for History or Latin at Oxford to playing ping pong instead of bunking off behind Bathwick hill to smoke and idle PE lessons away.

The nurturing of a sense of responsibility at these difficult ages is vital. As Seddon explains:

Lessons are centred on the development of personal responsibility by each child. Pupils learn how to manage their own bodies, minds and emotions, and how to rely on themselves, rather than on other people or drugs, including alcohol.

The aim is to embed lessons and habits that will last for life. Children are taught how to relax when they are worried, how to make the right decision when a variety of courses is presented to them, and how to manage themselves when they feel lonely or low without resorting to pills.

Relationships with others, the greatest cause of both happiness and unhappiness in life, are also studied in detail. The pupils learn how to identify and treasure true friends, and how to avoid relationships which are damaging and destructive. The aim is for pupils to emerge aged 18 not only with excellent academic results, but also as rounded human beings.

It all depends ultimately on what kind of society we want to build. We need a new education debate about the purpose of schooling. For too long, we have been debating the structure of schools rather than their aim. While the politicians have fiddled, schools have descended towards exam factories.

For me at least, the only teacher at school who was able to listen and at least acknowledge that within my self alienated persona was somebody capable of loving thhemselves and others but refusing to show it was Dr Frank Thorn, head of sixth form and Latin, beardy weirdy, the 70s suit and kipper tie wearing Francophile powerhouse of sharp intellect and soft good humour who for me has embodied what humanistic education should be.

The pioneer for this approach to teaching happiness is Dr Martin Seligman when he was president of the American Psychological Association. He asked why so much psychology was devoted to examining illness and aberration, rather than looking at the factors that lead to a healthy and happy life. From his questioning came "positive psychology" and the teaching of wellbeing at his own university, Pennsylvania, and at Harvard, where it has been the most popular elective course among undergraduates.

SGI President Daisaku Ikeda writes from an active buddhist humanistic perspective on the purpose of happiness in an increasingly stress filled society.

His belief is that we need to fight the smaller self and develop a broader conern for the lives of others.

He cites the well known buddhist parable....

One day, Shakyamuni was approached by a woman wracked by grief at the loss of her child. She begged him to bring her baby back to life. Shakyamuni comforted her and offered to prepare a medicine that would revive her child. To make this he would need a mustard seed, which he instructed her to find in a nearby village. This mustard seed, however, would have to come from a home that had never experienced the death of a family member. The woman set out from house to house, asking each for a mustard seed. But nowhere could she find a home that had never known death. As she continued her quest, the woman began to realize her suffering was something shared by all people. She returned to Shakyamuni determined not to be overwhelmed by grief.

According to Ikeda,

Hans Selye, who pioneered the field of stress research, offered the following advice based on his own experience of battling cancer: First, establish and maintain your own goals in life. Second, live so that you are necessary to others--such a way of life is ultimately beneficial to yourself.

Now, more than ever, we need to develop the qualities of strength, wisdom and hope as we forge expanding networks of mutual support.

In the end, the key to living in a stress-filled society lies in feeling the suffering of others as our own--in unleashing the universal human capacity for empathy. There is no need to carry the burden of a heavy heart alone.

So let's see if we can't embed the lessons for living strong lives based on a sense of an indestructible sense of self!

It had to begin somewhere

hello blogosphere, hello flowers, hello trees

well it had to begin somewhere so here goes