Every Picture

This is of course the standard toff-bashing photo in many social documentaries so it is interesting to read the stories of the five boys in it. The 'toughs' look very much like my dad in photographs of only a few years later. Anything I try to write now just sounds like obvious truism which I suppose is what most sociology and social comment really is. Sociology is just being able to classify obvious facts about the world of people. It is the ultimate is cloaking common sense in dense language in order to make it sound important. It's only one step down from the meaningless application of non-numerical language to fields which require rigorous scientific application. Witness Richard Feynman's observation :

There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read -- something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing,and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn't read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until finally I said to myself, "I'm gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means."

So I stopped -- at random -- and read the next sentence very carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read."

Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: "Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio," and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn't understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.

All this gels with my view of recent months that the world cannot be further complexified without making more of us succumb to mental illness. Every facet of society is made increasingly more complicated by the division and subdivision of the things we have to pay attention to in order to exist in legal terms in this society. Apart from becoming a derelict and not having to worry about tax and insurance and how you relate to the state it is not possible to get away from this and go back to the simple life. And now even the drink of choice for such outsiders is taxed more.

In an attempt to offset some of this, I have decided to attempt some sourdough bread and so a new pet consisting of flour and water sits on our window sill gently bubbling and giving off pleasant beery smells (or a nasty pong if you are my wife). Not sure if it will work yet but looking forward to it being spread with a nice blob of Marmite XO.