IRISC

Slings and Arrows - 

Foot and Mouth Part 2.

by John Reader

Only in the last week the Prince of Wales has launched his campaign to re-direct his Business in the Community project towards rural areas. Phrases such as ‘the Pub is the Hub’ have been appropriated in order to highlight the limited prospects for many rural communities and the need for both inward investment and community regeneration. For those of us who have been working in more remote rural areas over a period of time there must be a degree of scepticism. There is nothing new here and the deep-seated problems of the rural economy and the constraints of rural living for the less well-off are hardly a state secret. The frustration is that, despite the fact that issues such as lack of affordable housing for young people wishing to remain in their own communities are given an airing once every three years or so, nothing substantial changes. The best efforts of those involved are never more than a vain attempt to alleviate the worst effects of the juggernaut of market forces. Now this process has hit the farming community with full force and nobody is immune from the winds of change.

So what are the questions that should be exercising our minds and hearts?

In my first attempt to reflect I suggested that the main question was what we could learn about ourselves from our reactions to what was happening. In particular I was concerned that what are seen as emotional or even sentimental responses to the destruction of other life forms had no way of being fed into the decision making process and that this is the result of a cultural dysfunction that places too great an emphasis upon the supposedly rational and objective. Politics, economics and even practical morality are too closely identified with an instrumental reason that cannot take account of the affective dimension of human subjectivity thus leading to a divorce between pragmatic action and genuine moral consideration. I still believe that this issue is ‘at the heart’ of what is happening and that we lack a convincing discourse through which to articulate the lack that many are vaguely aware of. Out of interest I faxed such a suggestion through to 10 Downing Street in March and have received a reply from a DEFRA official in mid-July. It is good to receive a response as I had long since given up hope of getting a reply, but, inevitably, there is no reaction in this two page document to what I actually said. Rather I have been given the standard response on the government’s policy towards the outbreak in a technical format and some thoughts about the future of agriculture in this country. ‘Work to help farmers emerge from the crisis has begun, and will form part of the Government’s longer term strategy for helping U.K. farming to restructure in sustainable, market orientated and environmentally responsible ways; and taking forward our policy for bringing about CAP reform’. What else could I have reasonably expected from an official government source? My whole point is that this pragmatic and soul -less approach is itself at the root of the problem and not a solution to it. However, I am not a professional politician having to make difficult judgements and decisions.

So I now want to move on to consider another dimension of this response that offers ‘food for thought’. The second major question that I believe emerges from this crisis is that of how we make our judgements and decisions. How is it that as individuals or as groups we decide to follow or to believe course of action A rather than B? What lies at the basis of our decision-making? Are our powers of reasoning, our objectivity and rationality quite what they seem to be or are there other hidden factors at work behind the scenes? For those familiar with what the philosophers term ‘The Hermeneutics of Suspicion’ - not exactly common parlance in DEFRA to be sure - there will be a clear link with the ideas of Nietzsche, Freud, Durkheim and Marx from an earlier generation, and the work of Foucault and Derrida from more recent years.

Put simply, our view of ourselves supposedly derived from the Enlightenment, that we are rational creatures, is undermined once we become aware of the ‘non-rational’ factors that actually drive and determine our decisions. So our unconscious, the structures of power in society, economic factors and the inescapable ambiguities of meaning that deconstruct our chosen interpretations all serve to question the notion that rationality can be divorced from subjective and contingent influences. This may seem a long way from Foot and Mouth, but once one begins to scratch the surface of the debates it is precisely such suspicions and the failure at an official level to address this dimension that create much of the confusion and pain. How do farmers interpret the motives behind the policies and decisions that are being made and how is the concerned non-farming community meant to reach any reasoned judgement about what is really going on? It will be useful to rehearse the range of issues over which judgements and decisions need to be made before considering some of the responses. I shall list these without further comment, acknowledging that some of them shade into the realms of morality and spirituality.

a) vaccination or mass cull as the appropriate means of containing the outbreak?

b) should we continue on the path of mass meat production as a response to consumer demand for cheap meat, or go for more specialised higher quality production?

c) should one abandon meat consumption per se and become vegetarian?

d) how far can one trust the policy statements or public views of the government and its agents, MAFF and now DEFRA? Is there any credibility in the various conspiracy theories that abound in the farming community?

e) if the farming community has itself been infected by a collective paranoia over this issue, what are the explanations for that let alone the solutions?

f) how much trust can one place in the media interpretations of what is happening or the views expounded on the various Web Sites, including those of other interested parties such as the N.F.U?

g) how much trust can one put in the views of the ‘experts’ involved in the discussions, remembering both that many of them are employed by interested parties and that there is a wider cultural question about trust in science and its guardians anyway?

h) is the future of agriculture in this country to be dominated by the mega agri-businesses who are always going to be large enough to survive such crises and even thrive as a result, with the rest becoming small scale niche-marketed units specialising in high quality production, organic farming, environmental management or tourism? This would seem to be the direction suggested by the DEFRA response to my Fax. Is this acceptable as the path determined by market forces, or should one be arguing for yet another subsidy for the farming community to keep it alive in another form? Who would benefit from this?

i) should farming in this country be seen as a ‘special case’ and continue to be protected from the market forces that determine the fate of most other enterprises? On what basis could this be justified? Are farmers the guardians of our rural heritage or part of our pastoral identity as a nation, or is this just a case of special pleading in order to protect a comfortable life-style?

j) what do we learn from all of this about the operation of democracy in this country? Do we now see the severe limits of our two-party - or even one-party system - or it is time to investigate once again the possibilities of proportional representation?

k) what about our relationship with Europe and issues of devolution and regional government?

l) for those who choose to take an ethical or religious stance on such matters, what value system is appropriate and how could this influence policy decisions? Is Creation a resource to be exploited for human benefit, with humans as separate from Creation, or are we part of a Creation that requires due respect and reverence?

m) do we understand history as the result of conspiracies or of ‘cock-ups’, the contingent weaving together of chance circumstances and encounters? How does this affect our judgements and policy debates?

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but merely illustrates the sort of question that has been raised so far. As one colleague recently said, the whole debate could take us anywhere within the field of crucial ethical, practical and political decisions. In that sense Foot and Mouth is a symptom of where we are now as a society and a test of our true values - should there be any!

What interests me now then is the question of how any of us decides where to stand on any or all of these key issues. For instance, do I believe the conspiracy theories that are around or do I place my faith in the ‘scientific experts’ and government officials driving the process, let alone the politicians themselves? How do I know who to believe? The trouble is that I don’t know and - even worse - I cannot decide on what basis I should make that decision. The ‘Hermeneutics of Suspicion’ would suggest that I mistrust everybody in the process because everybody has a vested interest to protect and cannot be relied upon to offer ‘objective’ judgements. The problem then is that I have no means of making any judgement at all. I believe and trust nobody and end up abandoning the attempt to think it through altogether. There has to be some level of trust and confidence at a collective level for a society to function at all. Should I trust the ‘experts’ until or unless someone proves clearly and convincingly that they have got it wrong? But then I don’t know or understand enough about the technical debate to be able to make that sort of judgement. And so on. I end up feeling at a loss, confused and paralysed into indecision. If I could gain an understanding of how I normally do make my judgements and decisions would that at least help me to know what to do and would I gain some sort of purchase upon the judgements that others make?

Rather than just making decisions on ‘gut instinct’, intuition or the basis of existing prejudice or class location or uncritical adherence to a particular tradition ( e.g. scientific or religious), would I begin to know myself well enough to think again before I simply cast my vote in whichever direction? Perhaps this is a counsel of perfection peddled by counsellors and the constructors of spirituality workshops who do of course have their own corner to protect, or is it time to put my trust in somebody somewhere before the whole edifice collapses into nihilism and anarchy? Well, lets give it a try and see if I can come up with some convincing interpretations of what is happening.

The conspiracy theories are a good place to start. Which ones have I heard? Well I have heard the version which says that the government knew back in the autumn of 2000 that Foot and Mouth was in the country and deliberately suppressed the information for its own purposes. MAFF as it then was began to stockpile the wooden railway sleepers that would be required for the funeral fires and to put in place the means for the destruction of thousands, or millions of animals. The true scale of the outbreak was suppressed particularly with a General Election looming and has been consistently down-played ever since June to make it appear that everything is under control and that this is a crisis only affecting a small proportion of the countryside. The reason for all this? Tony Blair has struck a deal behind the scenes with other European partners to scale down livestock production in this country to allow other countries to dominate the market in this area, presumably in return for some unknown favour probably unrelated to agriculture. So the Labour government has deliberately and knowingly exploited the outbreak in order to achieve a covert political goal. Hence its reluctance to consider vaccination as a realistic option as it wants to see the numbers of livestock drastically reduced. It has also used the outbreak as the opportunity to scrap MAFF and replace it with its emasculated cousin DEFRA as this reflects the general shift in policy towards rural areas. One could almost read this out of the response that I have received from DEFRA. A further twist on this is the issue of Welsh hill farmers. It has been said for some time that the Welsh hills have been overstocked with sheep, but nobody has come up with a solution. Is it not strange that the way in which the outbreak is being handled in North Wales and around the Brecon Beacons is about to result in the widespread destruction of these flocks? One way or another, the end result appears to be precisely what the conspiracy theories predict the government have planned. How is one to assess all of this? Is there a conspiracy, or is this merely the result

of a set of contingent factors, or even of gross incompetence on the part of government and its officials? Was all of this just waiting to happen and might it not be the painful but essential beginning of changes that were bound to occur?

We need to look behind conspiracy theories for a start. Communities that perceive themselves to be under threat or to be marginalised in some way are more prone to seeing enemies ‘out there’ determined to destroy them. This is also true of individuals. There is no doubt that certain sections of the farming community see themselves in this way. Labour governments are not noted for being sympathetic towards rural communities and issues as these areas are traditionally conservative strongholds. New Labour has made no attempt to court rural voters, nor has it much to gain by so doing. So hostility and suspicion between the agricultural community and the present administration hardly come as a surprise. However, there is a wider dimension to this. It can be argued that many people within the older institutions and medium scale enterprises across Europe, if not globally, perceive their ways of life to be under threat from the forces of globalization and particularly global capitalism (Castells 2000, Touraine 2000). So there are many current examples of embattled communities and of the defensive and insular identities that develop within this context. This is also a way

of interpreting some religious groups and their reaction to globalization. Such groups are inclined to see conspiracies where there are merely the inexorable movements of global market forces. It all depends whether you see yourself as a winner or a loser in this process. The losers will always require somebody to blame for what is happening to them. Part of this wider process is the diminishing in significance of many medium size institutions and businesses. This is not to say that they will not continue to exist, although some may not, but that they will be increasingly overshadowed by international or mega business. Agriculture is just a part of this - other examples are financial institutions and the motor car firms - and there is no real reason why any one sector should be sheltered from these forces. In fact national governments are another example of such mid-range institutions that will decrease in influence so may be less able to protect their national interests in any case.

If there is truth in all of this - and I am inclined to believe that something like this is going on around me - then one can interpret the conspiracy theories as a symptom of a deeper uncertainty. In which case one needs to penetrate beyond the immediate reaction to help people identify what is really going on for them. When under threat most of us tend to retreat and project hostility onto ‘others’ who can be held responsible for one’s own predicament. We need to be able to see our own part in what is going on wherever we happen to be located in the process. Very few of us - even within the churches - can escape the processes of change and reorganisation that threaten to disturb and disrupt previous patterns of living and thinking. The objective should surely be to help ourselves and others respond to these changes, not necessarily in the sense of an uncritical acceptance, but in ways that offer insight and the possibility of a humanising response. My deep concern with the way in which Foot and Mouth is being handled in this country so far is that it is based on a dehumanising response for the reasons already stated. The connection between spirituality and change is crucial to our learning in this.

So what is my judgement on the conspiracy theories? I would tend not to accept them although I can understand only too clearly where they are coming from. From within my own experience I can identify times when I believed that somebody ‘out there’ was out to get me and to force me into a course of action I did not want to take. However, I also know that this interpretation of events prevented me from coming to grips with the real issues. It stood in the way of growth, both my own as a person, and the development of the situation in a way that was positive and realistic. Simply to project a certain set of motives onto somebody else that I could never substantiate acted as an inhibiting factor when what was required was a critical openness to a changing situation. It does not get you very far. So with the farming community at the moment, although one can see how these suspicions arise and indeed share the anxiety about the motives of the government, it will not do any good to construct complex theories that can never be proved or disproved. The fears and suspicions are a block to growth and to change that act to deflect energy from the real task in hand which is to begin to work out together where to go from here. Perhaps it is not possible ever to establish whether the current situation has come about by design or default and it is not productive to continue to speculate when the truth cannot be convincingly established. The idea that a group of politicians sat down one day and devised a cunning plan to rid the U.K. of a major proportion of its livestock seems far-fetched. It is easier to believe that circumstances were allowed to develop in a particular way once they had emerged, but whether this was through incompetence or lack of resources rather than deliberate strategy may never become clear. It is not always possible to answer these questions about our own individual lives and decisions in any case. Degrees of undecidability, contingency and indeterminacy are always present in the ways our lives develop. Were this not so there would be no concept of freedom and no real decisions to be made. Once we can recognise this then we need to think ourselves into the position of those others making decisions that affect our lives and understand how it is for all of us. This is not to excuse mistakes and misjudgements but to acknowledge our fallibility. As I make my judgements about what is going on I need to know myself better so that I can see why I might feel the things that I do and be able to recognise that other interpretations of events might also be credible. Reflexiveness or greater self-awareness may contribute to more considered judgements.

However, if it is legitimate to require this of ourselves as individuals as we engage in this process, it is also worth pointing out to organisations, institutions, officials and their masters that no less can be demanded of them. An openness, transparency and institutional reflexivity are prerequisites for operating in the public arena. MAFF and perhaps DEFRA in turn do not have a good track record in this respect and this makes them more vulnerable to the conspiracy theories. If we cannot see clearly how decisions are reached and vital judgements made then we are more likely to imagine plots and plans even though none exist. An obvious shortcoming in this department has proved a block to the process of reconstruction that is one of the stated aims of the government. There is a view that of all government departments MAFF had a reputation for secrecy. How and why this should be so I could not know, but, if it is true and, if it is carried on under its successor, it needs to be challenged and changed. Working groups need to know and understand themselves as much as individuals and the processes of self-awareness and insight can and are being developed in this collective arena, whether under the guise of personal development or spirituality. Once again change and spirituality can go hand-in-hand.

As already noted a further dimension to the problem of knowing how to make judgements when one has only a limited experience of the issues involved revolves around the scientific arguments being presented. The public perception of science is that it is neutral, objective and value-free and that therefore scientists can be relied upon to provide trustworthy interpretations of what is happening and to come up with reliable solutions. Or, at least, the way that governments parade their scientific experts for popular consumption when it comes to such crises as Foot and Mouth suggests that politicians believe and hope that the public perception of science is as just described. Unfortunately, the reality is not so clear cut. Most people will now have grasped that different scientists hold different views and offer a range of interpretations, some of them conflicting. Which ‘expert’ does one place one’s faith in? In addition, it is clear that scientists are themselves on somebody’s payroll, even if they are employed by an academic institution. The game of financial support and sponsorship let alone the competition for research funding opens scientists to the corrupting influence of market forces. Claims to neutrality are now seen for what they are, bids for power and an attempt to gain immunity from critique. At the very worst one wheels in a scientist to legitimate a particular course of action already chosen for other reasons, much as one used to produce a priest or witchdoctor for the same reasons. When this happens it further debases and undermines public trust in scientific ‘solutions’.

This is to paint an extreme scenario, but it does illustrate the problem of knowing how to decide who to believe when everybody involved brings their own agenda. I want to discover my own ‘pet scientist’ who will give me enough trustworthy information on which I can then base my judgements, but this is probably as naive as friends who look for a ‘pet theologian’ to offer them the definitive answers to moral problems from within the Christian tradition. One imagines that there is a difference between science and theology and that the former can deliver definitive interpretations, but it is more likely that this is to misunderstand the nature of scientific research. Science can only deliver within certain constraints as it too rests on assumptions that must always remain open to challenge. In the case of Foot and Mouth, one of the problems has been that the theoretical models being used by the scientists trusted by the government have been devised without any direct contact with or knowledge of farming practice. They are distant and remote from the varied realities of agriculture. The universalizing practiced by theoretical science will always be difficult to relate to the individual or singular practices of local farming culture. A parallel problem has emerged as MAFF and then DEFRA attempted to apply its general and national criteria to individual circumstances. Real life farms, farmers and their livestock do not conform neatly to theoretical models nor to generalized criteria and regulations. The underlying question is how much one should realistically expect of experts, bureaucrats, civil servants and government policy makers.

It seems to me that we must return to the issue of the transparency, or lack of it, with which policy is formed and then implemented. Attempts to hide behind structures and a veiled authority of expertise cannot in the end succeed. Even institutional religion is beginning to get the scent of this one although it has yet to work out how to respond. Public expectation of the way in which it requires to be informed and consulted has risen in recent years, hence perhaps the growing calls for a Public Inquiry into the handling of the Foot and Mouth crisis, although whether this is really the appropriate and acceptable method for true public accountability is somewhat doubtful. There needs to be a way in which what has happened can be openly explored and reflected upon, not just for the sake of farming, but for the cause of democracy. Such a process would benefit from a deeper understanding of the role of science in public life and from a grasp of how we make our judgements more generally. Without this, blame and recrimination, bitterness and unresolved tensions will continue to haunt both individual relationships within the farming community let alone relationships between that community and government. Projecting one’s fears and suspicions onto others, whether it is farmers seeing political conspiracies, government officials accusing farmers of deliberately spreading the infection, or farmers suspicious of how some escaped having their animals culled while they did not, will only deepen the wounds already opened up by what has happened. Generalizing on the basis of single examples of bad practice is as destructive as trying to apply universal rules and criteria without consideration of individual circumstances. A better balance between universal and singular, the general and the local, plus a greater degree of self-awareness could each contribute to a positive response to what has happened.

Finally then, let us return to the subject of how we actually make our judgements. How is it that we are inclined towards one particular solution rather than towards another? What internal and external resources might help us reflect upon this subject and maybe to make our decisions more thoughtfully? I am increasingly of the view that the sharp distinction that we tend to draw between reason and emotion rests upon a flawed interpretation of human subjectivity. It is not that there are not different dimensions of ourselves at work when we talk like this, but rather that there are connections between reason and emotion that are not being taken into account. As stated in the previous article, once reason is compartmentalized as dealing exclusively with the universal, general and objective, then all those aspects of the human subject seen as different from or even opposed to reason, i.e. The unconscious, the emotional and affective, faith and an aesthetic sensibility, creativity and imagination are immediately categorized as singular, incapable of being effectively articulated, subjective and therefore unreliable bases on which to ground our decisions. To the extent that the human subject is described in this way, we are effectively depriving ourselves of open access to the deepest sources of our being. Furthermore, we are misunderstanding how we operate in practice and limiting what reason could contribute given a more holistic view. In a historical perspective, this clearly relates to the long-running battle between the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment reaction associated with romanticism. However, my argument is that it is not about an ‘either-or’ relationship, either reason or emotion, but that the two aspects are always already intimately related in ways that our culture and discourses find it difficult to articulate. Building upon an insight of Derrida, it is possible to see that both reason and all the ‘others’ of reason rely upon what he calls an ‘acquiescence to the testimony of the other’ (Derrida & Vattimo,1998). In other words, there has to be a trust or confidence in a source external to oneself, an encounter with an other, be that a person or a tradition, before either reason or its ‘others’ come into operation. The particular form of reason associated with science and technology, for instance, is already a tradition in its own right, and the grounds for adopting it cannot be discovered from within its own resources. One has to make a ‘leap of faith’ in order to adhere to its particular precepts and interpretations. There is a prior stage to the process of adopting any tradition that can be described as pre-autonomous. Hence the judgement that we make to abide by a specific manner of making all successive judgements cannot itself be justified internally, but is made by reference to another source in which we have already placed our trust. Hence, ‘acquiescing to the testimony of the Other’.

There is support for this view from another source. The neurologist Antonio.R.Damasio in his publication ‘Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain’, suggests the idea of somatic markers as the initial guiding source for our judgements (Damasio, 1994). Put simply, the way that our brains function is that we feel an initial inclination in one direction or another when faced with decisions, go along with that general orientation and only subsequently use what we have come to call our powers of reasoning to provide justifications and arguments for that decision and to work out its more detailed implications. If the parts of our brain that are associated with feeling and emotion are damaged, then our reasoning is also impaired. It is not that the two are the same thing, or can be reduced to one another, but that they operate in a related and intimate way in order for us to function effectively. This is not to say that these general orientations that emerge prior to our ‘reasoning’ are necessarily correct or appropriate though. These ‘inclinations’ are themselves based upon earlier life experiences and can just as easily lead us into mistaken responses or addictive behaviour. So although we may trust them, they are not necessarily trustworthy. Similarly with Derrida’s idea of acquiescing to the testimony of the other, there is no guarantee that the other we are acquiescing to is in fact worthy of our trust. Knowing that we operate in this way when we make our judgements - if this is accurate - does not absolve us of the responsibility for our actions. What is surely required is a greater understanding of ourselves as individuals in order to grasp where our particular somatic markers are derived from, learning to reflect upon them and then beginning to question and challenge these basic ‘inclinations’ so that we may make future judgements more knowingly and thoughtfully.

Using this as a way into the Foot and Mouth debate, such an insight may assist certain individuals reflect upon why they are inclined to espouse a conspiracy theory. What has happened for them in the past that inclines them to believe this interpretation of events more readily than any other? Just because this was their reaction to something that has happened earlier in their lives, does not mean that it is an appropriate reaction now. The individual may be generalizing on the basis of one bad experience and allowing this to colour their judgement now. They may be projecting onto somebody else a set of motives that are really a reflection of their own fears about what may happen again. How often do we say inside ourselves ‘Here we go again’ or ‘I have been here before’, assuming that what we are experiencing now is simply a repeat of a previous bad experience. I think of this as turning a singularity into a closed universal - making a hasty judgement without really understanding why - when what is called for is to keep the possibilities open and to resist the temptation to draw general conclusions. It is in this domain that what I would call a spiritual reflexivity,a degree of self-awareness that allows us to reflect upon why we make the judgements that we do, can enable us to respond more effectively and appropriately to what is going on for us at a particular time.

To close I will just mention some of the factors that I believe create an environment within which such a spiritual reflexivity becomes more likely to develop.

First a safe space within which we can reflect upon ourselves. This may or may not be a physical space. It may be internal, or it may well rest upon a relationship with a significant other person in whom we can place our trust. Such a relationship in itself may stem from a ‘pre-autonomous encounter’, a moment of encounter when one ‘knows’ that the other person is to be trusted.

Second, there may well be a growing awareness that one is ‘waiting for something to happen’, that there is something wrong or missing from one’s life that one cannot quite put one’s finger on. Perhaps one has an inarticulate hope that things could be different or better in some way, but without knowing what that is or how to get there. A religious way of describing this would be ‘waiting for the Messiah’.

Third, it often takes a crisis of some sort to trigger the process of reflection at this level. However distressing or unwelcome the crisis if one can welcome it as the precipitating factor in a process of growth and development then positive things may come out of it.

Fourth, there may be an inner awareness of unresolved tensions in one’s life, this feeling that things are not as they should be, and one’s reactions may be determined by unconscious motives that betray that inner tension. There must be a point at which a breakthrough can be made and the tensions allowed to emerge. It is often the role of a counsellor - or a good friend - to know when this moment can be triggered by an appropriate intervention.

Fifth, there needs to be a discourse or language within which what is happening can be articulated. As I have already said, I believe that this is one of the major blocks we face as a culture at the moment. The major religious traditions that have often been the carriers of such discourses have lost a great deal of public credibility. If people search for such a discourse they are just as likely to go outside or beyond their own tradition to try to locate it as to hunt for it internally. This is certainly a problem for main-line Christianity in this country. It is not that there are no resources available but that they have become frozen or locked into codified and remote practices and theories that tend to close access rather than open it up. Either that or the tradition narrows itself into a marketable commodity that offers only a superficial reading of its deeper resources and that therefore fails to engage those who rightly require a more open reflection. Perhaps the key factor in all of these is the quality of the encounter with the ‘other’, be that another person, a tradition, or a deeper awareness of a spiritual dimension. It must surely be a task of the religious traditions to focus upon that ‘quality’ rather than to put their energies into minor points of order or organisation.

If these are indeed some of the factors that can enable a greater spiritual reflexivity then it is equally clear that there are blocks to this process. Briefly, a fear of change; a lack of trust; the illusion that one has ‘made it’ and got all one needs to have, often meaning status or material possessions; a refusal to acknowledge that things are not as they should be; the lack of an appropriate discourse and an unwillingness to open up to the inner tensions that are there will all of them inhibit the process of growth. Self-neglect, invariably compounded by neglect by significant others is a common component of such blocks to awakening. What has yet to become clear is the way in which our manner of relating to one another, through for instance the Internet and a much freer and more open and flexible pattern of social interaction, will either inhibit or enable greater spiritual reflexivity. Spirituality is not a constant and cannot be taken for granted, but must itself change as humans themselves continue to do. If the human project is now focussed upon learning to become the subjects that we could be rather than upon constructing political or religious edifices that are more to do with power than growth, then the conditions for spiritual reflexivity will also mutate and the task will become one of identifying the resources necessary for that process. If our judgements are to take us beyond the view that our lives are simply determined by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, then they require a deeper understanding of how we function and how our ‘reason’ and our ‘non-reason’ relate to one another within those judgements.

Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: Second Edition, (Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford 2000).

Antonio.R.Damasio, Descartes_ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, (Macmillan Publishers, 1996).

Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, Religion, (Polity Press, 1998).

John Reader, Our Green and Pleasant Land, (Milton Keynes and Malvern Papers, 2001).