I cant believe it! Problems of today, Ideas for tomorrow

Time 2020-12-17 17:08:00

Web Name: I cant believe it! Problems of today, Ideas for tomorrow

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Over the years I ve listened to many of BBC Radio 4 s short talks entitled Thought for the Day. I always found one of the most profound speakers to be Jonathan Sacks, then Chief Rabbi, who died recently. I am indebted to David Lorimer s New Renaissance Newsletter, published by SciMed, for bringing to my attention the significant speech given by Sacks in his 2016 Acceptance Address for the Templeton Prize. The following extracts key points related to our current Western predicament. It could almost be his manifesto for a New Renaissance. Or you could just read the original at the above link. We have forgotten one of the most important lessons to have emerged from the wars of religion in 16/17C and the new birth of freedom that followed. A free society is a moral achievement. Without self-restraint, without the capacity to defer the gratification of instinct, and without the habits of heart and deed that we call virtues, we will eventually lose our freedom.At some point the West abandoned this belief. When I went to Cambridge in the late 60s, the philosophy course was then called Moral Sciences, meaning that just like the natural sciences, morality was objective, real, part of the external world. I soon discovered, though, that almost no one believed this anymore. Morality was no more than the expression of emotion, or subjective feeling, or private intuition, or autonomous choice. It was, within limits, whatever I chose it to be. In fact there was nothing left to study but the meaning of words. To me this seemed less like civilization than the breakdown of a civilization.It took me years to work out what had happened. Morality had been split in two and outsourced to other institutions. There were moral choices and there were the consequences of our moral choices. Morality itself was outsourced to the market. The market gives us choices, and morality itself is just a set of choices in which right or wrong have no meaning beyond the satisfaction or frustration of desire. The result is that we find it increasingly hard to understand why there might be things we want to do, can afford to do, and have a legal right to do, that nonetheless we should not do because they are unjust or dishonourable or disloyal or demeaning: in a word, unethical. Ethics was reduced to economics.The consequences of our choices were outsourced to the state. Bad choices lead to bad outcomes: failed relationships, neglected children, depressive illness, wasted lives. But the government would deal with it. Forget about marriage as a sacred bond between husband and wife. Forget about the need of children for a loving and secure human environment. Forget about the need for communities to give us support in times of need. Welfare was outsourced to the state. As for conscience, that once played so large a part in the moral life, that could be outsourced to regulatory bodies. So having reduced moral choice to economics, we transferred the consequences of our choices to politics.It seemed to work, at least for a generation or two. But by now problems have arisen that can’t be solved by the market or the state alone. To mention just a few: The structural unemployment that follows outsourcing. The further unemployment that will come when artificial intelligence increasingly replaces human judgment and skill. Artificially low interest rates that encourage borrowing and debt and discourage saving and investment. Wildly inflated CEO pay. The lowering of living standards, first of the working class, then of the middle class. The insecurity of employment. The inability of young families to afford a home. The collapse of marriage, leading to intractable problems of child poverty and depression. The collapse of birthrates throughout Europe, leading to unprecedented levels of immigration, and the systemic failure to integrate some of these groups. The loss of family, community and identity, that once gave us the strength to survive unstable times Why have they proved insoluble? First, because they are global, and governments are only national. Second, because they are long term while the market and liberal democratic politics are short term. Third, because they depend on changing habits of behaviour, which neither the market nor the liberal democratic state are mandated to do. Above all, though, because they can’t be solved by the market and the state alone. You can’t outsource conscience. You can’t delegate moral responsibility away.When you do, you raise expectations that cannot be met. And when, inevitably, they are not met, society becomes freighted with disappointment, anger, fear, resentment and blame. People start to take refuge in magical thinking, which today takes one of four forms: the far right, the far left, religious extremism and aggressive secularism. The far right seeks a return to a golden past that never was. The far left seeks a utopian future that will never be. Religious extremists believe you can bring salvation by terror. Aggressive secularists believe that if you get rid of religion there will be peace. Two historical phenomena have long fascinated me. One is the strange fact that, having lagged behind China for a thousand years, the West overtook it in 17C, creating science, industry, technology, the free market and the free society. The second is the no less strange fact that Jews and Judaism survived for two thousand years after the destruction of the Second Temple, having lost everything on which their existence was predicated in the Bible: their land, their home, their freedom, their Temple, their kings, their prophets and priests.The explanation in both cases, is the same. It is the precise opposite of outsourcing: namely the internalization of what had once been external. Wherever in the world Jews prayed, there was the Temple. Every prayer was a sacrifice, every Jew a priest, and every community a fragment of Jerusalem. Something similar happened in those strands of Islam that interpreted jihad not as a physical war on the battlefield but as a spiritual struggle within the soul.A parallel phenomenon occurred in Christianity after the Reformation, especially in the Calvinism that in 16/17C transformed Holland, Scotland, England of the Revolution and America of the Pilgrim Fathers. It was this to which Max Weber famously attributed the spirit of capitalism. The external authority of the Church was replaced by the internal voice of conscience. This made possible the widely distributed networks of trust on which the smooth functioning of the market depends. We are so used to contrasting the material and the spiritual that we sometimes forget that the word credit comes from the Latin credo, I believe, and confidence, that requisite of investment and economic growth, comes from fidentia meaning faith or trust.What emerged in Judaism and post-Reformation Christianity was the rarest of character-types: the inner-directed personality. Most societies, for most of history, have been either tradition-directed or other-directed. People do what they do, either because that is how they have always been done, or because that’s what other people do.Inner-directed types are different. They become pioneers, innovators, survivors. They have an internalized navigation system, so aren’t fazed by uncharted territory. They have a strong sense of duty to others. They try to have secure marriages. They hand on their values to their children. They belong to strong communities. They take daring but carefully calculated risks. When they fail, they have rapid recovery times.They have discipline. They enjoy tough challenges and hard work. They play it long. They are more interested in sustainability than quick profits. They know they have to be responsible to customers, employees and shareholders, as well as to the wider public, because only thus will they survive in the long run. They don’t do foolish things like creative accounting, subprime mortgages, and falsified emissions data, because they know you can’t fake it forever. They don’t consume the present at the cost of the future, because they have a sense of responsibility for the future. They have the capacity to defer the gratification of instinct. They do all this because they have an inner moral voice. Some call it conscience. Some call it the voice of God.Cultures like that stay young. They defeat the entropy, the loss of energy, that has spelled the decline and fall of every other empire and superpower in history. But the West has let it go. It’s externalized what it once internalized. It has outsourced responsibility. It’s reduced ethics to economics and politics. Which means we are dependent on the market and the state, forces we can do little to control. One day our descendants will look back and ask, How did the West lose what once made it great?Every observer of the grand sweep of history has said essentially the same thing: civilizations begin to die when they lose the moral passion that brought them into being. It happened to Greece and Rome, and it can happen to the West. Sure signs are: falling birthrate, moral decay, growing inequalities, loss of trust in social institutions, self-indulgence of the rich, hopelessness of the poor, unintegrated minorities, failure to make sacrifices for the sake of the future, loss of faith in old beliefs and no new vision to take their place. These danger signals are flashing now.There is an alternative: to become inner-directed again. This means recovering the moral dimension that links our welfare to the welfare of others, making us collectively responsible for the common good. It means recovering the spiritual dimension that helps us tell the difference between the value of things and their price. We are more than consumers and voters; our dignity transcends what we earn and own. It means remembering that what’s important is not just satisfying our desires but also knowing which desires to satisfy. It means restraining ourselves in the present so that our children may have a viable future. It means reclaiming collective memory and identity so that society becomes less of a hotel and more of a home. It means learning that there are some things we cannot or should not outsource, some responsibilities we cannot or should not delegate away.We owe it to our children and grandchildren not to throw away what once made the West great, not for the sake of some idealized past, but for the sake of a demanding and deeply challenging future. If we do simply let it go, if we continue to forget that a free society is a moral achievement that depends on habits of responsibility and restraint, then what will come next – be it Russia, China, ISIS or Iran – will be neither liberal nor democratic, and it will certainly not be free. We need to restate the moral and spiritual dimensions in the language of the twenty-first century, using the media of the twenty-first century, and in ways that are uniting rather than divisive. This well-argued post by Eric Wayne puts the case for free speech and against censorship. The logic is impeccable. Censorship is a slippery slope to all kinds of ills.Yet, is this not a polarity free speech-censorship ? Can any society sit right at the free speech end of this polarity? I think not. Are there not acts and images that are just too heinous to entertain in a civilised society, particularly when exposed to impressionable minds? Does society not need to protect itself against such things? I think it does, but always with suitable checks and balances.Anyway, read on. I like his passion!Art Crit by Eric Wayne[This is a re-post of an article I wrote 3 years ago, and which sadly has become increasingly relevant, so much so that one can’t even articulate why it is relevant today without risking being censored for doing so. Censorship is no longer the bad word it used to be, or something liberals oppose on principle. Au contraire! Today, censorship is embraced as an uncontroversial tool benevolent institutions wield in order to protect the rest of us from the influence of darker forces. In the last several days, for example, major social media platforms blithely announced plans to implement sweeping censorship campaigns in the name of the righteous good. But If the presumed good includes plans to silence content that contradicts its own stances, some might question just how wholesome that goodness really is.There’s that thing where our ends justify our means when fighting the evil opposition, hence the…View original post 1,631 more wordsFollowing their previous encounter, the grey heron and the mute swan stayed around awhile at the same distance from each other, each studiously ignoring the other. This was from a vantage point further around the lake.Do you sometimes wonder at the larger number of do-gooding organisations in the world? How come there are so many, many people willing to dedicate part of their lives to improving the lot of others and our connection with nature. Their name is legion.Of course, many of us despair at the dark forces of personality and greed that apparently lead many major governments and businesses. But behind this there are so many forces moving in a more enlightened direction, and changing the nature of political debate, slowly but surely.I believe that we see here the symptoms of genuine progress of humanity, away from the strong attraction of charismatic and fear-driven personality/ego forces, towards a deeper and genuine connection with, for want of a better phrase, spiritual values such as truth, beauty, goodness, compassion. Humanity is evolving, not least because of the demands being placed on us as a result of recent materialistic blindness, I was much struck by the words of Simon Marlow in the recent Arcane School full moon talk for the sign of Sagittarius: Let us be clear in our assertion of the reality that over the course of history humanity has displayed a real trajectory of spiritual progress and development. This view causes not a few eyebrows to be raised, especially these days, when there is so much apparent evidence to the contrary. The conventional scientific and sociological view is that humanity has not really changed at all for thousands of years; that the great civilisations are but superficial veneers which temporarily paper over the permanently present and serious cracks or flaws in the character of humanity; that humanity is in fact fatally flawed. All apparent progress is only notional, to use Stephen J Gould’s striking phrase.If we just existed as the form, as separate selfish personalities, as forever warring nations and competing power blocs, I think we would be quite justified in holding this view. But the point is we are not just personalities. The personality is, if you like, only the tip of the iceberg, the visible bit. Deeper than that, perhaps hidden to many but always present, are far more extensive, holistic and loving dimensions of our being. These dimensions are now demanding a widespread recognition. And did we but know it, the very flaws and deficiencies within humanity are forcing us all to become discoverers of these dimensions of conscious living that lie hidden within us all. And the guarantee of their existence is their revelation in the lives of the increasing number of spiritual giants and geniuses who have emerged from the womb of humanity over time.We do not perhaps hold sufficiently in our minds the reality that it is our recognitionof these problems that is so encouraging. The fact is that millions of people all over the world are facing up to this reality and are now working and serving to heal, to remedy injustice, to resolve the urgent environmental and climate problems, to hold new images of beauty before the eyes of everyone, to penetrate ever more deeply into the mysteries of the unknown, and to attain to new heights of achievement in every single field of human activity without exception. Full Moon Talk Sagittarius, November 2020, London,  Simon MarlowHumanity is rising to new heights of being, to more conscious living. Each of us has a part to play Featured image shows hidden dimensions of an iceberg in Svalbard, its underwater surface structures. from Andreas Weith, via Wikimedia CommonsIt is in the nature of humanity for there to be conflict and wars. If you doubt this, see the list of wars that have raged throughout history, or see how even now a large portion of the earth is engulfed in some form of conflict. So conflict is inevitable. Yet there is a spiritual principle, call Harmony through Conflict (also known as 4th Ray), which indicates that harmony can indeed result from conflict.So political conflict does not necessarily result in wars. In this context, agonism is a very useful word, as you can see from its definition in Wikipedia. Agonism emphasizes the potentially positive aspects of certain forms of political conflict [and] seeks to show how people might accept and channel this positively .The recent World Goodwill Newsletter points at the deeper meaning of an agonistic approach as described by political theorist Samuel A. Chambers: “Agonism implies a deep respect and concern for the other; indeed, the Greek agon refers most directly to an athletic contest oriented not merely toward victory or defeat, but emphasizing the importance of the struggle itself—a struggle that cannot exist without the opponent. Victory through forfeit or default, or over an unworthy opponent, comes up short compared to a defeat at the hands of a worthy opponent—a defeat that still brings honour. An agonistic discourse will therefore be one marked not merely by conflict but just as importantly, by mutual admiration…”So agonism is the ideal in any conflict a respect for the other side, some sort of struggle, and a result that brings honour to both sides. This is of course the original ideal behind sports, which still prevailed in the cricket of the unpaid gentlemen in my youth, but was soon superseded by the professionalism of paid players .The important underlying concepts are respect for the other, and dealing with honour. Are the protagonists in the current Brexit negotiations behaving with respect for the other and with honour? One suspects that the problem in reaching a final agreement lies in a certain lack of trust that they are dealing with people with these fine qualities? Which sounds like agony rather than agonism.Featured image shows world conflict map from Statista.The idea for this post came from World Goodwill Newsletter.Britannica suggests that agonism is a biological term meaning survivalist animal behaviour that includes aggression, defense, and avoidance . In human societies, agonistic behaviour can serve as a tool to bring about constructive activity as well as distinct antisocial, destructive acts. It s easy to ignore lichen, those vaguely mossy patches on twigs, branches, stones, walls, Yet lit up by a low November sun they prove to be rather attractive.Now don t they look like some sort of vegetation? Certainly the following looks rather akin to a moss.But they are not. Moss is a plant; lichen is not. Lichen is actually type of fungus, but one that can only exist in symbiotic relationship with algae or cyanobacteria. The algae/cynobacteria provide the lichen with photosynthetic energy, while the lichen provides a protective environment.According to Wiki, there are over 20,000 species of lichen, covering 6-8% of the surface of the earth. How easily we ignore such an incredibly successful life form. Branches are mostly bare now at Anderton Country Park, although the younger and more sheltered oaks and beeches still sport plenty of brown and yellow. But here in a Hawthorn hedge is a mass of colour, which on closer inspection turns out to be not haws, but some sort of Malus / Crab Apple, embedded in the hedge. A wonderful sight on a sunny day!Steve Taylor writes some wonderful poems that really strike a chord. This one is from his latest newsletter, and his latest book The Clear Light. It brings the universal down to the personal.Make as many connections as you can so that this broken world can become whole again.   It’s your responsibility to radiate benevolence to everyone you meetto be reckless with your friendlinessand surprise strangers with your openness on behalf of the whole human race.   It’s your responsibility to turn suspicion to trust, hostility to sympathy to expose the absurdity of prejudiceto return hatred with implacable good willuntil your enemies have no choice but to love youon behalf of the whole human race.   It’s your responsibility to free yourself from bitternessand harness the healing power of forgivenessto repair connections and re-establish bonds that were broken by resentment years agoon behalf of the whole human race.   It’s your responsibility to make as many connections as you canto open up channels of empathy through which compassion can flow until there are so many connectionsacross so many different networksthat finally, like the cells of a body, billions of human beings will fuse together, sensing their common sources and their common core.   Then a new identity will emerge, an overriding oneness,a human race that is truly whole, at last.I seem to have come across a few black fungi recently, so tried to identify them.This one was in grassland on a cliff in Devon in the summer, 1-2 inches across. I m not sure about this, but it could be indigo pinkgill. This one was on a dead birch log in the autumn in Cheshire, a few centimetres across, part of a group of varying sizes. I think this is King Alfred s Cake fungus, so named because it looks like burnt cake. Surprisingly, it can be used as tinder.The final one is a much larger bracket fungus (6-8 inches) in Derbyshire in the autumn, on a dead beech stump. A common name is willow bracket, but it is found on other broad leaved trees. This is another fungus that was used for kindling.I used to play club and county chess regularly every season from autumn to spring, with a break at summer. It s so long ago that I had forgotten what it was like, until I just came across this poem, written for my own pleasure and insight, and then hidden away in a filing cabinet for nearly 40 years.As summer fades away, thoughts returnto pastimes of many a winter s day.Has enthusiasm been rekindledby the long break away,or will the waned passion of the springremain spent?Pure thought concentrated on an inner worldsafely enclosed in a wall of rulesAn escape from reality?Emotional excitement, the dread anticipation,the tension of time trouble, the thrill of winning.An outlet for passion?The long drawn out playing for a team,week after week, in League and Cup.The belonging, the glory?The pleasure of good moves, the unexpected sacrifice,a well played realisation of advantage.Aesthetically satisfying?The horror of mistakes, the letdown of losing,repetition of patterns in game after game.A vehicle for self discovery?The meeting of old anatagonists, the five minute game,discussion of chess politics, analysis with friends.The social side?The long drawn-out struggle, as both playerstake issue, advantage swinging from side to side.The thrill of battle?The tiredness, energy spent, stale moves, no ideas,loss of excitement, no motivation in game after game.The negative side?Enough of this introspection.A new season s dawning.Let s leap forth again to the battle,Renewed and invigorated. Insane?Featured image is from the World Championship match Euwe-Alekhine, 1935, via Wikimedia Commons.We just completed watching the popular Netflix miniseries Queen s Gambit, the fictional story of a female chess prodigy Beth Harmon, based on a novel by Walter Tevis. The story is well told, in such a way as to make it interesting to non-chessplayers. As an ex-chessplayer, to county standard, I can say that it does get over quite well the reality of playing chess at the time the fictional period is round about the time I was regularly playing chess. You really get the feel of the excitement of playing the games, but without need to understand precisely what is going on at the board. Indeed, the chessplayer cannot easily tell what is happening. But the drama is excellent.It does give an idea of the misogyny that was prevalent in the game at the time, which reflected the wider society. Boys just did not believe that girls could really play chess as well. Although in the USSR things were different. Women s world champion Nona Gaprindashvili was a very strong player, as I discovered when drawing with her in a simultaneous diplay in Cambridge in the 1960s.This is also a deep psychological story, of how Beth copes with a deep trauma from childhood and how this affects her chess and relationships, again well done.When she goes to Moscow (funnily enough around the time when I was involved in a real chess trip to Moscow), the film also only hints at the extreme measures taken by the USSR to ensure its hegemony at chess. The shenanigins of the matches between Bobby Fisher and Boris Spassky and between Anatoly Karpov and Victor Korchnoi are notorious. She would have needed seconds along with her to survive.And finally, when she has beat a Russian opponent, he hugs her a modern sexism for effect in the film, but no, it would not have happened then.For less than a minute this grey heron and mute swan faced off on Shakerley Mere. They were perhaps in each other s way. I managed to pull compact camera out of pocket and take this before the confrontation ended, the heron backing off. The heron seemed to be hissing at the swan, but I couldn t capture that moment.the interconnectedness of all things and the implications of that for the modern world, andthe need for development and growth of the individual psyche, from both psychological and spiritual perspectives.These themes come together in a subject called astrological psychology, which I will briefly consider by describing their basic models of the human being.Psychosynthesis is a transpersonal or spiritual psychology, which considers not only the personality or ego, but the higher spiritual faculties. Psychosynthesis was developed by Italian psychoanalyst Roberto Assagioli, a contemporary of Carl Jung. Both built on the work of Freud and developed psychologies with a spiritual dimension. Assagioli s view of human nature is encapsulated in his Egg model . The psychological ego lies within the dotted egg shape, in its conscious and unconscious guises. The transpersonal (spiritual or higher) self lies at the top and just outside the egg itself. The boundary of the egg is dotted, to illustrate the permeable nature of this relationship, i.e. that this higher self can be connected with.It is easy to see that the stronger the ego becomes, the more materialistic the person becomes, the less she is open to the higher self, the less permeable is the shell of the egg. In the extreme case the habitual ego is effectively encased within a hard shell. The possibility of higher connection has all but disappeared. It is not difficult to identify individuals in the world where this is apparently the case. Their name is legion.For most of us the shell is permeable, but the layer of habit is quite strong. Some effort and perseverance is required to connect to our higher faculties. This is where the addition of astrology can help.Now consider the fact that all is interconnected. We are each part of the one whole, which includes the heavens. Not surprising then, that the configuration of the heavens at the moment we are born tells us something about ourselves. The connection is brought alive by astrology.Swiss astrologer/psychologist Bruno Huber studied this connection while working with Assagioli, and eventually came up with a workable synthesis of the two disciplines. He identified correlations between the psychology of the individual and the astrological chart of their birth time, in the process creating an entirely new form of birth chart, which is beyond the scope of this brief article. His system was termed astrological psychology.Huber developed his model of the Amphora, which takes Assagioli s Egg and extends it into an astrological model of the psyche.The Amphora relates the Egg to astrology, and shows a way upward towards our spiritual nature. The ego lies, as before, within the Egg, reflected by the personality planets [Sun, Moon, Saturn glyphs in red] supported by the tool planets [Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter lower white glyphs]. The Egg has been opened out at the top, where lie the top three transpersonal planets the lowest, Uranus is the planet which helps break through the shell of the ego, the middle one Neptune represents the universal love at the neck of the Amphora, through which we must pass before the spiritual transformation with Pluto at the top.Of course this is a symbolic representation, whose meaning in the context of any given individual and their birth chart can be teased out by the seasoned astrological psychologist.This is just a taste of the rich astrological psychology that was developed by Bruno Huber with his wife Louise. The fascinating story of how this came about and the enormous dedication and effort of these two remarkable human beings is told in the recently published biography Piercing the Eggshell, edited by myself and Joyce Hopewell.Featured image shows Roberto Assagioli and Bruno Huber.Amphora diagram is an extract from the cover of Piercing the Eggshell.I am standing on the steps of Knutsford s new civic centre. It is ten minutes to eight in the evening, in the mid 1990s. I peer anxiously at the traffic coming from the south, the direction of the railway station at Crewe. Where is he? His lecture was due to begin at half past seven. There is a full house of nearly 200 people waiting. Each of our organising committee for these Knutsford Lectures on Visions of a New Renaissance is quietly panicking. How long should we wait?A taxi appears. Thank God, it appears to contain well known environmentalist and former Green Party Leader Jonathon Porritt. He sweeps into the building without a concern; the train was delayed. He s ready to go on immediately. Panic over!I don t recall much of what Jonathon said that evening, but I do recall that it was well received, and he made a major theme of people dancing in the streets , with a social healing as well as an environmental healing as part of his New Renaissance vision.All this was very much brought to mind as I recently tuned in to catch up on a Zoom talk recently given by Jonathon in a series organised by the Scientific Medical Network, chaired by the indefatigable David Lorimer. Unsurprisingly looking somewhat older, Jonathon was speaking on the ideas in his latest book Hope in Hell.It was interesting to hear Jonathon s reflections on events over his lifetime and the current world situation. I picked out just a few key points, many of which have appeared in various guises on this blog over the years:At one time UK was a leader in addressing climate change, not now.It is good that UK was the first country to commit to net zero emissions by 2050, but current actions do not match this ambition, e.g. far more spent on HS2 than on a green revolution. This is a sort of institutional mendacity.There is a huge gap between what the science says on climate and the institutional response (c.f. covid situation where the gap is relatively small), despite its being an existential threat to humanity. The current incrementalism is not an adequate response.The dominant ideology of indefinite economic growth prevents effective action on climate. Only the Green Party has challenged this dogma over the last 50 years.The other key driver of climate change is population. Because of historic situations it is impossible to have a sensible conversation on this subject. There have been decades of visionaries and good works that have not fundamentally changed the direction of travel. The problem is political and the answers will only come by telling the truth about climate and effectively challenging politicians to do better active political engagement for those who can. The establishment may not like it, but Extinction Rebellion did achieve political change.At heart, what is needed is a change from self-based thinking to humanitarian-based thinking, from head only to head and heart. [Rather contradicts the previous point the problem is not just political, but lies in all of us.]This and many other issues related to a New Renaissance are covered by the wide ranging activities of SciMed, which has embraced the Zoom age with impressive energy. It is well worth joining if you want to become more informed. They even now publish a regular newletter entitled Towards a New Renaissance.Many of the leaves have now fallen in Cheshire. Here s a recall of just some of the magnificent autumn spectacle.This damp autumn has seen many fungi in Britain. These shaggy ink cap mushrooms were at Shakerley Mere, Cheshire.These are said to be edible for just a few hours after picking, they rapidly turn black (hence ink cap ) and decompose. According to Wikipedia they can sometimes be confused with the magpie ink cap which is poisonous . The usual rule applies don t eat wild fungi unless you know what you are doing.Compare also the recently posted similar but prettier glistening inkcap same family, obviously.These glistening inkcap mushrooms were at Goyt s Valley, Derbyshire, on rotting tree stumps. Identification of these things seems to be rather difficult, despite having to hand a fungi guide .According to Wikipedia, these delicate mushrooms are edible for an hour or two, when they begin to slowly dissolve into a black, inky liquid. No thank you.Fly agaric is a remarkably striking bright coloured toadstool, of which we ve seen several specimens in this damp English autumn.According to Wikipedia this fungus is not edible unless suitably treated. It also contains psychoactive substances, historically used for this effect in some cultures.It is said that this fungus was used, mixed with milk, for getting rid of flies, which were attracted to the psychoactive chemicals, hence the name. Or alternatively the fly came from the psychedelic effects of eating it.An agaric is a type of fungus characterized by a cap that is clearly differentiated from the stalk, with gills on the underside of the cap.A rather cloudy afternoon turned out quite nicely as the sun began to descend below the surrounding hills mid-afternoon. The effect on the calmish surface of the Errwood Reservoir was quite striking.The reservoir is in the scenic Goyt Valley, near the Derbyshire-Cheshire border.I was a techie once, helping to produce mainframe software probably still am in many ways. Techies understand the intricate workings of the modern world, the technology, the apps, the website mechanics The job of techies is to produce products that help life in the real world, that society increasingly relies upon. Even WordPress is evidently powered by techies.The problem with techies, particularly the cleverest of them, is arrogance. I remember many of them. They know their field better than almost anyone else, and do not suffer fools gladly. They know they are right. Even when they are wrong.And that s the problem. Their expertise is technical, and does not necessarily relate well to real life. The early software systems learnt the hard way that so-called usability is of vital importance, and that includes carrying your customers forward with you as you develop the technology. Woe betide a mainframe supplier who did not allow for his customers applications to continue to work when a new release of software came out.So techies have to be well managed, by managers who understand end users and the usability of their products. They need to be reined in to ensure the result is acceptable to users.Now, the IT revolution has meant that it is increasingly the techies who are in a position to call the shots they head the companies. The list is too familiar Facebook, Google, Apple, and so many more. The results of their arrogance are plain to see in the modern world: rip-offs, tax avoidance and undermining of governments and established businesses on a grand scale, but without apparent ethical compass. Far too much to cover in a quick blog post.Which brings me back to WordPress and the case of the block editor. This editor is clearly a wonderful techie solution for those who wish to use the WordPress platform to do really clever things. Who could argue with that? The ony problem is that the arrogant techies decided that this should be forced upon the simple wordpress.com blogger who has no interest in this advanced functionality (why make blogging more difficult?).Simple common sense says that the blogger should continue to see the simple classic editor presentation, so long as that satisfies the functionality he needs. If something can only be done with blocks, then blocks should be switchable on. WordPress management has failed to rein in the techies, with the result that they are losing bloggers, even the dogs.

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