I’ve been away for a couple of days, so haven’t posted again on the aftermath of the night of looting that gripped various locations in London, and then spread to other cities in the UK. But in the mean time I’ve faced some criticism for my previous post for a) appearing to back away from the piracy ideas I’ve been explaining that I’m working on and b) for not being prepared to admit that these ‘riots’ are a genuine political act on the part of London’s poor.

I want to deal with the second part first. Some observers have wanted to put forward a thesis that these riots represent a rising up of a British underclass against a dominant culture that has grown in them material desires, while refusing to give them fair access to wealth to fulfil these desires. Actually, I do believe that a riot of this sort is possible in London, it’s just that I don’t accept that this was it. Why? Because a careful examination of the people involved in the disturbances and the places in which they occurred just doesn’t stack up to allow that. Yes, I’d love it to be really simple and to follow some historical precedent, or some careful theory about class violence, and yes, it is possible that there were pockets of this occurring, but the vast majority of people involved in these disturbances were not there to engage in political violence. As I’ve said before, they were there for the spectacle.

Now, it may be that the spectacle is itself something we need to analyse and think about, and that a society which has a large number of potentially bored and uninspired young people may be a tinderbox for this kind of looting, but if so we have to reject the idea that this is the poor of London rising up. It isn’t.

The Guardian have posted a map of London, coloured by degree of deprivation, and over-layed the areas of disturbance – asking the question if there is correlation between the two. It would be tempting to say that there is a strong correlation, but this is highly problematic, because we know that over 70% of those arrested were arrested in a different postcode from where they lived. People travelled to these places. The map also gives a false impression because it doesn’t grade the severity of incident in each place. Remember: some of the major centres of disturbance were Clapham Junction, Ealing Broadway, Croydon – none of which could be described as deprived areas.

Yes, poverty and alienation was and is a factor, but, as I said in the last post, it’s facile to suggest that this was a riotous uprising of the poor. It doesn’t add up.

Secondly, and connectedly, none of this has made me reconsider the work on piracy that I have been doing. If this were a riot with the poor rising up against a system that was blocking their access to the economic freedoms that others enjoy, I’d stand up and say that this could be interpreted as an act of orthodox piracy and understood in that context. But this isn’t that riot.  Of course, I am working with what we might call the ‘ideal pirate’ and constructing things around that – and no act will probably be seen as this ‘ideal’ act of piracy, except what we see in the crucifixion, but that’s for another day!

I’m currently reading Marcus Rediker’s excellent book Villains of all Nations – Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, in which he looks closely at why pirates emerged at that particular time. Much of his socio-economic analysis is highly relevant for today, but none of it suggests that what we saw in London could be raised from the level of common theft to a true act of piracy.

One (flawed) piece that may be worth reading is David Goodhart’s in Prospect:

A rapper called JaJa, interviewed by Sky TV, said if he was younger he would have been out with the kids. He then admitted that most of them were doing it for fun, to feel powerful, “for 15 minutes of fame.” The actual rioters I saw interviewed on television did complain about the Duggan case, but the real complaint seemed to be the police’s power to stop them committing crime.

I dislike Goodhart’s lazy assumption about the racial make-up of the rioters, but some of his analysis is correct. It’s too easy to label this as ‘the poor rioting against the rich.’ I don’t believe it will serve London well to pursue this idea as a way of getting to the root of what is a far more complex problem.

It’s perhaps too soon to work out what the hell really happened in London last night, or why. I stayed up til 2am following the news and the Twitter feeds, and I have to say it was one of the saddest nights I’ve ever spent in the capital.

There has already been some debate about the reasons for all of this, but I wanted to put a bit of a marker down on a couple of things that those on the outside may not have realised. I’ve lived in London for nearly 20 years, taught teenage Londoners for nearly 15 of those, and teenagers who I could well imagine getting involved in these ‘riots’ for nearly 10. I don’t claim some special knowledge, but I do feel I can tell the difference between one kind of fight and another.

1. This was not about race

Already people have been talking about ‘reclaiming London from the foreigners.’ Total nonsense. The looting and violence that took place was committed by blacks, whites and asians, and we mustn’t let idiots from the far right take advantage.

2. This was not about the shooting of Mark Duggen

The violence that sparked off in Tottenham at the end of last week was about the understandable anger that that community felt over the police’s handling of the Duggen case. The Metropolitan Police screwed up. They should have been open with the family, they should have listened to them and not left them outside for hours with empty promises of meetings with high level officers. And they certainly need to start telling the truth about what happened that night, and whether Duggen did fire his weapon, which is now doubted.

But the violence that kicked off in different areas of London last night was not about that. The people who were out looting were not out there expressing anger at their treatment by the police.

3. This is partly, but not wholly, about disenfranchisement

Mary Riddell has written a powerful piece in The Telegraph examining some of the reasons behind the violence, in which she says this:

The real causes are more insidious. It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall. The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance.

I do agree with this, but only in part. What I think Riddell has failed to factor in is the viral nature of the looting. I mean viral in every sense: this spread through social networks, but it also spread – as I’ve seen violent action spread in classrooms and playgrounds countless times – through the spirit of the mob.

In playground violence you do get those at the centre who will spark something, but the vast majority who get caught up in things would never, never do so without the mob. They get caught up and excited and act not from some anger or frustration of their own, but by proxy. Yes, they will use the excuses that they’ve heard and quote things about police attitudes and Mark Duggen and the rest, but the hard truth is that most of the people out on the streets were there for a bit of a laugh. They were there because other people were there, who were there because other people…

Without doubt we have to deal with inequality, with the bastards at the banks who have got away with a different kind of violent theft. But we must understand that much of this was far away from these triggers. People set fires because they saw that other people in other boroughs had. People turned over cars because they saw others had. There’s been lots of talk of these people being on benefits and having no jobs and all the rest. But I am absolutely certain that the demographic, if you really analysed it, would be kids from pretty decent homes, kids still in education, kids with parents in good trades. Yes, there will be those who see their futures as bleak, but I honestly don’t think that this is all about that.

The video above has rightly provoked complete disgust, but I think it’s significant because it goes some way to showing the complete lack of cause among people involved. There’s no sense of camaraderie, of a spirit of protest or some aims in mind. This was excitable people caught up in collective madness – in the sociological sense.

What do we do?

I think it may be too early to tell, but I feel that needs to be a careful response from parents, a thoughtful response from the media about how best to calm the situation and not further enflame it, and a community response (which I’ve already seen) to get out, clear up and stand up and be counted and show just how much the majority care for their community and one another. The political response – deep reflection on the nature of our inequitable capitalist system and our obsession with the banks – also needs to start right now.

Certainly, this should give the Labour party food for thought. Stop running to the middle, and let’s have decent policies to improve the lot of the poorest:

The failure of the markets goes hand in hand with human blight. Meanwhile, the view is gaining ground that social democracy, with its safety nets, its costly education and health care for all, is unsustainable in the bleak times ahead. The reality is that it is the only solution.

That, would you believe, is from Riddell in the Telegraph too. And if the Telegraph is saying that we need to divert more money into expensive public sector services, it’s time to sit up and listen, and lobby Cameron and Osbourne to think again on these deep cuts.

Update:
I’ve just been listening to the news, where teenagers who were involved in disturbances last night have been justifying their actions. ‘We just want to show these rich people who own these businesses that we can do what we like.’ ‘Yeah, we just want to show the police that we can do what we like.’ The response when asked if it will happen again tonight? ‘I hope so!’ I think this gets to the heart of the matter. There has been much talk of alienation from communities and how we’re in ‘Broken Britain’ – and I think there is a very serious political responsibility that Cameron has to take for talking this up into a self-fulfilling prophesy. Children will do what is of expected of them – good or bad. But I think the key alienation here is not from person to person, but from the self itself. The lack of self-knowledge and understanding shown by these responses is so very sad, and the core question must be how we can help our young people to discover who they are, and what their place is.

This, I think does boil back down to a capitalist problem. People are so busy having to work to make the money to buy the house to get the nice things because everyone says that this is where value lies… so there is no time to spend being with children, who are sat in front of TVs and games where they are told again and again that the way to be valued is a) to have loads of stuff and b) in GameWorld™, you just smash shit up without thought for the consequences to get what you want. And that, I’m afraid, is exactly what they did when they finally turned off the TV and did something.

As the US battles with itself over the debt crisis, and Europe struggles to get to grips with economically weaker nations threatening the Euro, I’ve been mulling over a conversation I had with Tom Sine and another significant leader who’ll I’ll call B at Wild Goose a month or so ago (I won’t name him, as I feel it might be unfair to put his name to a conversation he didn’t know I might share). Tom Sine has long worked in ‘futures’ – helping community groups to think about the sort of future that they want, and how they might achieve it, and is essentially an optimist. B, who’d I’d not met before, but with whom I enjoyed a number of very interesting conversations, lives and works in a very poor city in the US, and is pretty pessimistic about where things are going.

To summarise his position: there are a number of ‘triggers’ – economic, environmental, political – which could pull the US and other parts of the world into a scenario where the normal societal structures collapse. Food distribution, welfare payments, fuel networks, healthcare and policing – all of these could effectively cease functioning (and with some US cities close to bankruptcy, how far off is that?).

The problem that B sees is that the US has developed a new type of poor person: one who is not simply economically poor, but seemingly incapable of existing independently of state welfare. Unlike the poor of, say, Malawi, the unemployed urban poor of the US have no knowledge of agriculture nor any ability to innovate with basic tools and technology. They simply await their welfare payment, and that’s it, and the huge amount of charitable money that has been put into this demographic group has done little to really change the core problem of zero positive engagement with education or labour. What this means is that if these state systems do collapse, these people will be totally incapable of supporting themselves, other than by looting.

Some people in the community B is part of run a community garden, from which they harvest vegetables etc. B’s point was this: what happens when the hungry urban poor march on the garden, demanding food from it? The garden cannot sustain everyone in the area, and if the garden is ravaged by a mob it will cease to sustain anyone in the area. So he’s foresees a scenario where he would have to train Christian people to take aim and fire on the poor – in order to survive themselves.

Both Tom and I were pretty shocked by his analysis. But on reflection, I’m not sure quite how far off he is. For those of you who have read or seen The Road, any major collapse is going to throw up terrible ethical questions. And what I like about what B is doing is that he’s not afraid to get people thinking about them now.

There’s a call to arms here: whether you are going to start making swords or ploughshares, it’s going to pay to be ready.

Interesting piece yesterday looking at why kids might play their crappy, tinny music through their stupid phones when on buses on trains. And why good, responsible adults might find their blood boiling when it happens.

With mobile phones in many a teenager’s pocket, the rise of sodcasting – best described as playing music through a phone in public – has created a noisy problem for a lot of commuters.

“All you can hear is ‘dush, dush, dush, dush’. It’s irritating. So many times I end up with a headache,” says Tracey King, who has signed up to the Shhh! Scheme set up by bus company Arriva Yorkshire to stop the noise on their services.

While I sympathise with Tracey, I would think it highly unlikely that the noise is actually going to give her a headache. Irritating it might be, but the volume that phones pump out is hardly going to damage eardrums.

“As teenagers, they don’t seem to have the capability to think about others. I have heard older women turning round and saying ‘will you turn that down?’ and sometimes they will… and other times I’ve heard them with abuse and swearing at other people.”

This is a classic case of having to deal with ‘the other’ – and is therefore something that my thoughts in the book should be applicable to. So what’s going on here? Why do people play music like this, and why do other people find it so irritating?

Firstly, the music. Some students who were interviewed for the piece didn’t think that playing music was antisocial, just that the bus was too quiet and they wanted something to listen to. However, a sociologist sees it being more about marking out ownership of space. This can be done physically – by lolling out and taking up a number of seats. It could also be done graphically by ‘tagging’ around various places. But the most immediate and obvious way of stating that you have control over a space is aurally because it flows so widely.

Clearly this is not about a need to hear music. The sound quality on a phone is terrible (though improving, and, horribly, music companies are now mixing music to sound better on these devices by boosting the treble) and wearing headphones would clearly lead to better sound for them and silence for everyone else. But it’s not about the music – it’s about trying to own a space.

Why then does this lead to such intense irritation? Again, it is not really about the sort of music being played. Would people complain less if someone boarded a bus and was playing Beethoven? I think that would depend on the person who was doing it. Because this is the thing: it’s not the music that is threatening, it’s the people playing it.

The anxiety and irritation that comes from music played like this is about the sort of people who are challenging to take control of a space. People find it irritating because they see it as a threat.

The music is an aural declaration of ownership of a space, and the anxiety is about not wanting those people to have that ownership. Why? Partly because we find it annoying that what is meant to be a democratically shared space – a bus – has been turned into a dictatorship. But partly because we find teenagers threatening per se – especially noisy ones, especially noisy ones from another culture.

This is what I look at in the book, drawing on Levinas and Zizek. Levinas is more of an optimist. ‘Look into the eyes of the other,’ he says, ‘and you’ll find goodness there.’ His challenge is to get to know these people, to overcome our fears about them. In other words, these teenagers are good people really, it’s just that we don’t know them yet, and so are afraid.

Zizek is critical of this. He sees that our anxiety comes not from our own unresolved feelings about the other, but from our concern that they have not resolved their own feelings within themselves.

In other words, the fear that we have of teenagers is that they are fearful and insecure themselves. This, I think is far more insightful. People play music on buses because they want to mark out space. But why do they feel the need to mark out space? Because they feel insecure, feel the need to proactively grab space and make it theirs.

What then would this suggest about how best to deal with the problem? Firstly, I’d say that we need to look into ourselves first and think carefully about where our irritation is seated. Perhaps we have an insecure sense of self too? Perhaps we are worried about being attacked? Or perhaps, as older people have always done, we feel threatened by the young.

Secondly, I think addressing the root of the problem will be about helping young people to feel secure in themselves. It is tough being a young person in a big city, and the need for safe spaces is huge. Playing your music on a bus is one way of creating some control over a space, and making it feel like home.

Teenagers are treated pretty badly by society in many ways. Not allowed into shops more than 2 at a time. Moved on by the police. Given tougher and tougher educational targets to meet – and then told that the exams were just easier when they meet them. So this problem needs to be faced by schools, and by parents and local councils and authorities too, who need to make young people feel welcomed and involved.

But more immediately, a smile can help. I regularly ask people to turn their music down, or off, when on a bus. And I’ve very rarely been refused. Why? Because I’ve tended to do so by trying to be polite and positive about it, rather than snapping and grimacing. Young people are not bad or totally lacking empathy. They just need to work out what their place is in the world. And it’s our job to make room for them and help them find that, not immediately snipe when they threaten our peace and quiet.

You can buy ‘Other’ here.

Other Other [1] |  Other Other [2]

In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to tease out some of the issues being engaging ‘the other’ – especially the problem of there being ‘other others’ who we may not have considered when we act.

One response to the exponentially expanding series of others is to do nothing – the other, as I outlined in the last post – is to throw ourselves into things so completely that we just end up burning out.

What I try to do in Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures is find a third way between inaction and burnout, which I call the ‘symbolic life’ and explain in terms of an interesting problem in Mathematics:

In the face of such huge global problems like climate change, international terrorism, religious extremism, poverty, obesity, racism, mass immigration, urban blight, gang warfare, teenage alcoholism, alienation, addiction and depression, one wonders if it is ever worth acting at all. With such a list of problems ranging from the world-wide through to the national, provincial, local and personal, would it not simply be better to blinker our eyes, stupefy our minds, log on and tune out?

There will be those who claim that nothing can be done in the face of such a multi-faceted crisis: there is no society, there are only feint shadows of community left in our towns, fading traces of once-deep relationships and deeply-rooted families. One might as well live for the moment, and live for oneself. I believe we must ignore those voices, though it is true that the situation we face is complex.

There is a well-known question in Mathematics called the Three Body Problem. The trajectory of one body, the future path of one particle with a given mass and initial velocity, can be calculated easily. The interaction of two bodies – a hypothetical moon orbiting a hypothetical earth – can also be calculated without much difficulty, and the paths that they will follow be predicted with some certainty. But the simple addition of a third body causes the problem to spin into total incalculability. Given just an earth, a moon and a sun, each with a mass and initial position and velocity, the future trajectory of these three interacting bodies cannot be calculated. There are simplifications and special cases, statistical analyses and algorithms that allow us to guess the tides and seasons with some confidence. But there can be no solution.

Love God, love your neighbour, as you love yourself. God as sun, me as ground and you as just one, orbiting other… Just the three of us form a system so complex that not even all man’s mathematics, nor the machines he has built can calculate with certainty if we will collapse into one another, spin endlessly apart or settle into some periodic stability.

Yet, even more than this, we live in a universe of near infinite bodies. The complexities of the three-body problem pale into insignificance as more than 6 billion of us interact in this worldwide asteroid belt of varying gravities, weights and velocities. So in this sense the sceptics are right: there can be no calculation. The system is too complex. My movements, me, a single body in a swirling crowd of billions, are too small to matter, to crowded with complexities to compute.

To the materialist eye, this is all that can be said. But for those of us who refuse to collapse the paradox of our existence into simple material facticity, or inflate it with vain hope of total transcendence, there exists an in between place, a temporary, generous, heretical, artistic, loving, transforming place where the differential calculus does not reign, and where five loaves and two small fish just might equal a meal for thousands. It is a place away from the hard and calculating cartography of the empire, a place beneath the maps where the normal laws do not apply, and a where a merry life of piracy and risk can be enjoyed, if only for a short while.

What this means is to live a ‘symbolic life’ – not pretending that my great actions will save the world, but neither rejecting the possibility that actions can change things:

We should not to fool ourselves that we will be heroes, whose great actions will save many. Rather, we must aim to be simple heirs, working with symbols that speak of a greater reality to come.

In fact, offering symbols is sometimes all we can do in this vastly complex world. Signs point towards one thing. Symbols do not point, but rather act as conductors between two spaces, between the transcendent and the imminent, the possible and the impossible, the material and the immaterial. When Jesus lifted the bread above his head and gave thanks for it, he moved it into symbol, into a liminal space between the physicality of the bread he was touching, and the meta-physical of the bread he was becoming.

As the body of Christ in a complex world, this should continue to be our model. As the community of the now-and-not-yet, the Pirates of the Charism, we should seek to live in the risky place of mystery, in the imaginative space of symbols. This is what the role of the priest should always have been – to stand symbolically in the space between the immanent and the transcendent, and conduct.

It is to this symbol life that students throw themselves when they protest. Some will say that marching is futile, but we have to believe that to march, to be seen to be present and in solidarity, is to present a powerful symbol that the status quo is not satisfactory, and even if we can’t change it easily, nor will we give the powers that be the satisfaction of getting away with things without voices of dissent being heard.

Do go buy the book – so many people have said so many kind things about it, and I strongly believe it’s an important message in these weird time. It’s provocative, stirring…and the perfect Christmas gift!

I came across this poster advertising ‘Black History Month‘ at a local school. Black History Month now lasts… 5 days.

I don’t think the school have it wrong actually. As a teacher I can see that Black History Month has become a distortion which can actually serve to perpetuate the white Euro-centric view of history. ‘Because we do Black History Month, we can forget about black history for the rest of the year’ is the underlying danger.

If we really want to get to grips with black history, we need to forget Black History Month. In the highly diverse city we live in an integrated approach to history should be taken as given, and courses should reflect the interdependent nature of our back-stories. The problem with an annual event like this – good though the motivation may be – is that it can become very cheapened as people do the token things, pulling out the same stock figures from black history like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and others. Black history, like all history, is highly complex, with heroes and villains and – in the quiet majority – ordinary people caught up in the day to day of an ordinary, evolving world.

The enclosing of this part of history into one month actually may strengthen the separation people feel between black history and ‘normal’ western history, and it’s my view that in order to give it the place it deserves, Black History Month needs to… become history. For the very same reasons I recently wrote to Time Out, asking how long they planned to run a separate Gay and Lesbian section of their listings magazine. Having that section surely serves to denominate gay and lesbian people as ‘special’ with separate needs. In a world where we should be trying to integrate, not separate, it seems counterproductive to persist in having listings which, frankly, serve to caricature gay and lesbian people as carnival-burlesque-fisting types, and make it easier for those who still fail to see gay people as ‘normal’ to demonise them. I received no reply.

Really good time last night at St John’s College in Durham, where I was taking part in the ‘Senior Tutors’ Forum’ – a space for all members of the St John’s community, from academics to freshers to post grads and ordinands to come together in a relaxed setting and chew over some issues.

Last night was all about the nature of belonging, which produced a fascinating discussion into the nature of what it meant to belong. Two things that struck me as the evening progressed: firstly that we are all the product of a wide range of belongings, and secondly, given the increasingly fractured sense of belonging, our belongings – the things that we consume – have become more important.

EM Forster once wrote that ‘no one has possessions any more, only luggage‘ and this strikes me as a prescient quote. Our lives are less described by a deepening connection to one place as a journey through many places, and so our ‘luggage’ becomes increasingly important to us. A student’s room is a good example of this: what are the things that we take with us to furnish our rooms with? What are the most important items to help us transition from one space of belonging to another?

One of the ways that people find belonging in a new place is through the ritual and routine that they can immerse themselves in. In discussion last night we looked at how educational institutions are still very much built on an Industrial Revolution mode of organisation. Many schools and universities are not dissimilar to factories – running to strict timetables governed by bells, with production lines of student being processed and graded each year. As well as emerging Capitalism, the church has to take some of the blame for this clockwork attitude to time, where the maximum amount is extracted out of each day. The monasteries were very keen to see ‘the hours’ divided up accurately, and many of the early innovations in time-keeping came out of this world.

Belonging is a series of complex interactions, and one of the things I wanted to leave students in Durham with was advice to not worry too greatly about the permanence of ‘belonging’ at the start of their studies – to not become too enmeshed in ritual and routine too quickly, and not seek to ‘belong’ in more permanent ways until they had got the lie of the land.

The announcement that there will be no cap on tuition fees for English universities made me very sad today. Granted, our country’s finances are in dire straits. But it seems hugely short-sighted to try to claw back that money by raising costs for students, and setting them off in life with huge amounts of debt.

One of the key themes of the first section of Other (seriously, you should read it!) is that of the importance of the time between leaving parents and beginning work. Reflecting on Jesus’ time in the desert in light of this, I explore how our language still has that monastic feel to it. One ‘goes up’ to University to ‘read’ a subject, before ‘coming down’ at graduation to begin a ministry.

University, as Prof Mark Edmundson puts it in a wonderful article I quote, is a place where one is supposed to ‘meet one’s antagonists’ – which fits in with Jesus’ temptation narrative too.

I was fortunate to go to university pretty much for free. I came out with a shocking overdraft of £500. I paid no tuition fees and got a grant. In my first summer holidays I was even allowed to sign on. I don’t doubt it would be impossible to return to those days given the wider access agenda that is important too. But I do feel very worried that the saddling of students with all this debt is going to be very very bad for us. Why?

Because part of the importance of university is the fact that much of the time is… wasted. Just as an accountant’s view would see Jesus’ 40 day desert sojourn as a waste of time (and wasn’t that part of the temptation – to start commodifying and turn those rocks to bread?) The danger is – as a colleague put it to me today – is that people will simply not bother to study subjects like the classics or history, literature even – because they are not going to lead to highly paid jobs. Degrees that are not vocational could die out. ‘History,’ one applicant was told, ‘is something you can do in your spare time.’

But it is precisely in the arts and other research subjects that uncommodified time can lead to extraordinary fruit. New inventions, new music, new directions in writing and art… All this could go. Brought up without child benefit… saddled with £40,000 of debt for a degree, and working til you’re 75… All of this points to a society completely enmeshed in capitalist consumerism, in debt and commodification. Money is all that talks. And that is utterly depressing.

I hope we see an ignition of proper student anger and indignation at this. We’ve already seen philosophy departments shutting, and many many other ‘useless’ faculties will go. Leaving us with… accountants and marketing men. A totally monetized world, devoid of beauty, of history, of the joy of wasted time. A sad day indeed.

I’ve said it many times here before, but if you haven’t already tuned in to Radio 4′s ‘In Our Time‘ archive on your iTunes, then you’re seriously missing out. Listening to it I’m always reminded of the great quote in Good Will Hunting where Will quips to a Harvard student:

you wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.

Where else can you find in one programme serious discussion of science, philosophy, religion, mathematics, history and the arts? It’s brilliant.

If you don’t know where to start, you could do worse than the recent programme discussing William James’ book ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’:

For the first time, here was a close-up examination of religion not as a body of beliefs, but as an intimate personal experience. The book laid the ground for a whole new area of study – the psychology of religion – and influenced figures from the psychiatrist Carl Jung to the novelist Aldous Huxley.

I’ll be blogging some thoughts from the programme concerning the roots of happiness. In the mean time, point your podcaster of choice right there, and get a brilliant education for free.