I have this down as still reading as I have yet to explore the referenced website which develops the book's analysis. The search for the 'Glasgow factI have this down as still reading as I have yet to explore the referenced website which develops the book's analysis. The search for the 'Glasgow factor': what is that, after all factors are accounted for, all comparisons made, all statistical profiles taken into account, make Glasgow's health and well-being so much poorer than other comparable cities. Craig's approach is what marks the book out. Whereas many, so many, different groups and academics take their own angle on one or a cluster of related problems, the author's take is to first go back in history and begin introducing cultural and political dimensions as the port grew from a beautiful riverside place of meditation into a hellhole. Clearly economic and employment issues have been crucial: the reliance on relatively few heavy industrial bases subject to global cyclical demands; the very small Glasgow middle class population which meant there were few service industries; mass immigration from Ireland and rural areas, coupled with mass emigration; atrocious housing, health and poverty; the victimisaton of poverty; blaming the poor; a careless and strident mercantile and bourgeois market-driven class; Thatcherism; alcohol and oblivion-seeking; the harshness of relationships reflected in the language of put-downs; dreadful man-woman relationships; male selfishness; and the list goes on. Although her main purpose is to try and isolate Glasgow's (and the west of Scotland's generally) particularly poor state of health, the book's approach is valuable to anybody seeking to understand their own city better, particularly the contradictions and complexities of working class history.
Craig has a background in positive psychology, confidence building and so forth, and I'm not personally enthralled by some of the initiatives I've seen in these aras - and, as Craig points out, in any case whatever positive initiatives are introduced they tend to be short-term funded, or pilot studies, and most of all piece-meal and unintegrated. She calls, after Ken Wilbur, for an integral approach. As I said, she says she has much more detail on practical initiatives on the website which I have yet to see. Still, overall, despite my not being totally in sympathy with a certain emphasis (I think unintended) on academia, authorities and professionals with concomitant reduction of emphasis on the necessary enhancement of representation by the population at large, and attention to the attritious evils of the broader economic, market-driven powers, this is still a highly recommended read....more
I wish I’d picked up another strand in my review of The Last Gentleman. In it, the engineer, accompanied by a telescope, maps, a firkin and an knowledI wish I’d picked up another strand in my review of The Last Gentleman. In it, the engineer, accompanied by a telescope, maps, a firkin and an knowledge of air conditioning represents to some degree measurement, exactitude, reasoning itself; in the novel this is contrasted against the fleshy immanences of existence, the messy viscera of humanity, and also the limits of abstract reasoning. Yet there’s a dissolution (not a compromise, not a resolution) of the dialectic or contrast â€� perhaps because they are, as Wittgenstein may have claimed, not really ‘problemsâ€� at all. There is, demonstrated rather than ‘argued forâ€�, in the novel (and demonstration is an entirely different kind of thing that writers and artists do where philosophers cannot) an unproblematical living with reason, body, feeling as a possibility. ²Ñ²¹²Ô²Ô³ó±ð¾±³¾â€™s Ideology and Utopia is an Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge which is not philosophy nor art but deals with the same issues: that between the abstract, transcendental world views of metaphysical and logical positivisms, and the actual lived experience of an individual or group (for the latter include cultural history of an idea, a nation etc) a lived history of experience involving a dialectic of oppression and resistance, inheritance by osmosis of values and their modifications, and ultimately an epistemology which must eschew philosophy but concentrate upon psychology, sociology and an intellectual near-pragmatism which is aware of its own perspectives and constructions as much as it is aware of current histories and the possibilities of change. Written in 1936 within shooting range of Hitler, this book is extremely pertinent today when aside from the obvious ‘fundamentalismsâ€�, the return to dogma and unacknowledged dredging of the irrational to produce modern progressive myths to live by are startlingly apparent to the analysis Mannheim suggests. That the irrational is the foundation of the rational Mannheim emphasises, but the implications of this for self knowledge and understandings of group cohesion are crucial. ...more
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