It has become a cliché that Sondheim was a powerhouse of change for the contemporary musical in the last half of the twentieth century. He remade it anew, brought fresh possibilities, gave it a new prominence – and, not least, he gave it a wider credibility as an art form. There were many earlier people…
Earlier this year I was interviewed by two dynamic sociologists, Ashley Barnwell and Signe Ravn – both at the University of Melbourne (see picture below). They run a regular podcast series NARRATIVE NOW. These look at different approaches to narrative and‘how to employ them. For episode 4 they interviewed me about my engagement over the…
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)
We live the social electric
The air we breathe is social.
The tiny things and the major things.
The social haunting of life in vast time and space.
The social is natural and the natural is social.
We do things together, drenched with people,
attuned to others: there is always the other.
And the haunting of social things.
We make social life stuffed full of the possible
yet we dwell in our habits, the patterns and structures,
the predictable positions we trap ourselves in.
The prisons that engulf us, a daily haunting.
Pounding patterns of structure and wobbly worlds of meaning.
We are prisoners, puppets, and people. Always fragile.
World making actions, and resistance, rebellion-
in worlds not of our making that haunt till we die.
Ubiquitous differences, divisions,dominations: the inhumanities of people.
A haunting ‘matrix of inequalities’: generations at war,
gendered classed races, sexy nations disabled.
And the troubled pathways of excluding and exploiting, dehumanizing and disempowering.
At the brink of a change- a world seething with gushing movements.
Pasts, presents and futures collide in the moment.
Where did it come from and where is it headed?
Cyber capitalisms in global ferment haunting the world.
Standing amazed at this chaos and complexity
of the humanly produced social world;
and its joys and its sufferings,
we celebrate it and we critique these hauntings.
Yet the dreadful dullness of professional knowledge.
Its earnest desire for respectability and order,
abstractions to kill you. Standards to die for.
A dark cloak thrown over the mind.
We need ‘the tricks of the trade’ : practical questions with practical answers.
Rich descriptions and explanations of dense social life.
An intimate familiarity through all the senses.
Explore and respect the empirical world. And look for it hauntings.
We dwell in social tensions, conflicts and contradiction.
Observing schisms, thinking paradox,
and struggling with opposing paths: living with the contradictions.
The hard trick of dealing with them in our lives.
The vast multiplicities of social life: Contested. Contingent. Creative.
And thriving. Progressing. Regressing. Sometimes surviving.
Incorrigibly plural. Intransigently vast.
The complex tales how we order our past.
And the blindness of human beings?
The taken for granted need not be taken for granted.
Doubting the familiar;
living with radical doubt.
Yet all we know is incomplete and open,
Necessarily provisional, partial, perspectival.
Reality is inexhaustible, too complex and dense to be fully comprehended
No finality. Or closure.
The dream of a better world haunts sociology.
Empowering lives and imagining utopias.
More justice in each generation?
A flourishing life for all?
A dialogue: being personal, being political?
Passionate knowledge? A garden to cultivate?
A quiet catharsis of comprehension? With the other?
Haunted by doubt, love and hope.
There’s no other way
That’s what they say.
Economics must put money before people
And medicine must put profit before health.
Education must put management before wisdom
And religion must put war before love.
Technology must put machines before environments.
And politicians must put power before care.
We must follow the way things are done.
There’s no other way
That’s what they say.
But what if economics valued feelings
And medicine fostered dignity
Education aimed for all to flourish
And religion wanted better worlds for all
Technology looked out for justice
And politicians put people first.
If we would just be kind and care for each other.
Then we would have the road less travelled.
A much better way
Than the way they say.
There is never only one way.
This was my little contribution to Global Chorus: 365 Voices on the Future of the Planet which has just been published.
Global Chorus is a groundbreaking collection of over 365 perspectives on our environmental future. As a global roundtable for our times, in the format of a daily reader, this book is a trove of insight, guidance, passion and wisdom that has poured in from all over the Earth. Its message is enormously inspiring, and ominous in its warnings. And yet, united in a thread of hope, its contents are capable of helping even the most faithless global citizen to believe that we have the capacity to bring about lasting positive change in our world. Places at this roundtable are occupied by writers, environmentalists, spiritual leaders, politicians, professors, doctors, athletes, businesspeople, farmers, chefs, yogis, painters, actors, architects, musicians, TV personalities, humanitarians, adventurers, concerned youth, concerned senior citizens, civil servants, carpenters, bus drivers, activists, CEO’s, scientists, and essentially those who have something thoughtful and visionary to say about humanity’s place upon Earth. Compiled for your reading as a set of 365 pieces, Global Chorus presents to you a different person’s point of view for each day of your year.
Contributors to Global Chorus have provided one-page responses to the following line of questioning:
“Do you think that humanity can find a way past the current global environmental and social crises? Will we be able to create the conditions necessary for our own survival, as well as that of other species on the planet? What would these conditions look like? In summary, then, and in the plainest of terms, do we have hope, and can we do it?”
(this can be cheerily sung along with Peggy Lee to the song by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller and inspired by a short story by Thomas Mann: Disillusionment).
When I was fifteen, I discovered homosexuality.
They said it was a crime.
And a sickness, a sin, a shame and a sadness.
And I said to myself: is that all there is?
When I was twenty-five, I discovered liberation.
It was GLF; we were out and proud; we made demands.
We were modern homosexuals out to change the world.
And I said to myself: is that all there is?
When I was thirty, I discovered research.
Transvestites and paedophiles and sado-masochists and more:
The conflicting meanings of the whole damn thing!
And I said to myself: is that all there is?
When I was thirty-five, I discovered AIDS and feminism.
I knew the tragedy of AIDS: twenty five millions dead and still counting
And the tragedy of feminism: its interminable divides.
And I said to myself: is that all there is?
When I was forty-five, I went global and postmodern.
Queer had come around again;
And rights was on the world agenda.
And I said to myself: is that all there is?
When I was sixty, I nearly died: but I didn’t.
Starry starry nights and the incorrigible plurality of snow.
The multiplicities of life, of death, of suffering.
And I said to myself: is that all there is?
So life goes on as I look to seventy.
The inevitability of disappointment and the importance of hope.
And I say to myself: is that all there is? So let’s keep dancing.
Meeting Men: A Little Poetic for Henning Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers? Walt Whitman This is a little poetic for Henning Bech on the occasion of his retirement, composed mainly of his own words. I first met Henning Bech together with Jeffrey Weeks in the…
look at your hands
your beautiful useful hands
you’re not an ape
you’re not a parrot
you’re not a slow loris
or a smart missile
you’re human
not british
not american
not israeli
not palestinian
you’re human
not catholic
not protestant
not muslim
not hindu
you’re human
we all start human
we end up human
human first
human last
we’re human
or we’re nothing
nothing but bombs
and poison gas
nothing but guns
and torturers
nothing but slaves
of Greed and War
if we’re not human
look at your body
with its amazing systems
of nerve-wires and blood canals
think about your mind
which can think about itself
and the whole universe
look at your face
which can freeze into horror
or melt into love
look at all that life
all that beauty
you’re human
they are human
we are human
let’s try to be human
dance!
There’s no other way.
That’s what they say.
Economics must put money before people,
And medicine must put profit before health.
Education must put management before wisdom,
And religion must put war before love.
Technology must put machines before environments,
And politicians must put power before care.
We must follow the way things are done.
There’s no other way.
That’s what they say.
But what if economics valued feelings,
And medicine always pursued dignity.
If education aimed for the flourishing of humanity,
And religion wanted better worlds for all.
If technology looked out for justice,
And politicians put people first.
If we all just tried to be kind to each other?
There surely is a much better way
Than the one that they preach to us everyday.
IN
ON QUESTIONING THE HUMAN SOCIAL WORLD
Ken Plummer
(Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Essex, U.K.)
This was First Presented at the VI Congreso Andaluz de Sociologiá, University of Cadiz, November 2012
In June it was published in
This is the first edition; it is now under revision for a 2nd version. Comments are welcome
Contact Ken Plummer at plumk@essex.ac.uk
_________________________________________________
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science
– W.H. Auden ‘Under Which Lyre’. 1946
We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom. Leo Tolstoy War and Peace, 1869
These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact. William James: The Will to Believe. 1896
SUMMARY