© Roger M Tagg 2011
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web". This website is under continuing development.
My apologies, but I have recently taken the full-length document off line. What's left is just some very short early parts. I plan to take a new look at some of the issues raised, and will hopefully put up some new 'related essays' in the future. If you are really keen to read it as it stood in 2010, please email me and I'll send it as an attachment.
This material was originally written between 1976 and 1979, and was revised in September 2009.
A retired army man explains his philosophy for living.
Provoked by arguments between two young relatives on opposing wings of the left-right divide, Uncle Reg tries to find a middle ground that is not just a compromise to keep the peace.
Originally written in an earlier period of economic uncertainty, this collection of mini-essays still has relevance today as we face periodic downturns, credit crunches, unemployment and general belt-tightening.
But be warned – Uncle Reg’s views do not mix well with fundamentalism or grand views of any sort, whether they be religious, political, philosophical, “alternative” or New Age.
The message is – be the best you can be, take responsibility for your life, don’t expect props – and don’t look for someone or something else to blame.
To all those people from whom I have learnt so much through discussion and example – business clients, work colleagues, students, my enlightened friends in Iran and the Middle East, my family and my wife.
Between 1973 and 1975, my wife and I spent 2 years living and working in the Middle East. We were exposed to a variety of different cultures there, including expatriates from a number of different countries, but more importantly the local co-workers – most of whom were Moslems but with some Zoroastrians and Baha’is. Although I had been brought up as a traditional Christian, it seemed to me that these other people were just as good, considerate and capable of quality as Christians. I could no longer believe that these men and women were somehow “outside salvation” – as one of our religious friends in fact suggested.
On my return, being not quite sure of my direction, I thought about starting a movement – which I was going to call the Brown Egg Society – devoted to advancing the cause of greater consideration of Quality in our life. This was partly motivated by the concept of Quality that was highlighted in Robert Pirsig’s book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, which first came out in 1974.
Somewhat later in the 1970s I started to write a book, based on the notes I had scribbled down in those days. My work as a computer consultant was in one of its frequent quieter periods, and there were signs of economic depression. (For older British readers, it was the days of the Lib-Lab pact and the “winter of discontent”). The book was provisionally entitled “The Instant Wisdom of Uncle Reg”. “Uncle Reg” was to be the leading character in a series of three-way dialogues. I had in mind Plato’s dialogues involving Socrates, but with three-way - rather than two-way - debates. In that way I could suggest an acceptable resolution rather than defeat for one of the parties in the argument.
Sadly – or happily for my bank balance - business picked up after I had only written two dialogues. However I had made a pile of notes on what Uncle Reg’s views might be, and these notes are what are presented here.
Once the treadmill of work was restored these ideas got shelved – but not forgotten. Only now, since I have reached retiring age myself, have I experienced enough de-cluttering of my own mind to take on the task of reviewing and formalising these “Uncle Reg” notes.
In this edited collection, I have not changed the fundamental drift of Uncle Reg’s views (which, of course, approximated to my own at that time!). But I hasten to say that I certainly don’t agree today with everything I wrote 30 years ago.
In the following pages, I have added introductions to each main section. Together with other comments written later, these appear in italics.
Quality, Value and Religion
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Education for Living
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Surviving in a Stuttering Economy
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Mental Fitness
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Fairness
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The Future of Work
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Human Relationships
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Anyone for a Red Revolution?
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Reading List |
I am a retired army major who somehow managed to rise from the ranks due to my supposed expertise at analysing intelligence information. I married the daughter of a fellow sergeant, but unfortunately she died before we could start a family. I retired to southern England where I bought and renovated a pair of old farm cottages. I have some orchards, and also some paddocks which I let out to local farmers for grazing. Although I live on my own, I have an active social life, and have been in high demand with local widows as a dancing partner. On wet days and quiet evenings I do a lot of reading, largely from books borrowed from the local library, especially on the subjects of philosophy, politics and economics.
I think it was around June 1979 when I had as house guests a niece and a nephew, she from my side of the family and he from my late wife’s. While they were staying with me they often got into arguments about what should be done to put right the troubled economy and social fragmentation that prevailed in Britain in the late 1970s. The nephew was a student at the University of Sussex and followed the popular ideas of the “Broad Left”. The niece was a nurse and preferred a more traditional approach to things. As someone who can rarely keep out of an argument myself, I often found myself in the role of arbitrator, always trying to find a middle ground. I tried to look for a viewpoint that would take the heat out of the argument, while trying to take some account of what each of the protagonists had said.
These essays are based on some notes that my nephew jotted down, usually on the morning after each evening discussion. It was he who first christened my pronouncements as “Instant Wisdom” – and maybe that name was a good one. At that time, he wanted to step back a bit from the rather “packaged” views of his fellow students and work towards a point of view that he had thought out himself, so that he could better keep his end up in arguments with his contemporaries at the university.
At the time of these discussions, I was being canvassed as a potential candidate for the Conservative party, which might surprise some readers of my views here. But given the coming to power that year of Margaret Thatcher, I think I would have been branded as an extreme “wet”. As it was, I limited myself to a stint as a local councillor, where confrontation was probably no less intense, but was at least less constrained to sterile party lines.
I interpret “Instant Wisdom” to mean an off the cuff opinion, distilled more or less unconsciously from a fairly wide range of reading, but not pretending expertise or watertight logic. It is usually somewhat thought provoking, and is the sort of thing that one would normally preface with a phrase such as “I don’t claim any great knowledge on this, but from what I have read it seems to me …”.
My general line of argument in these discussions was that, rather than blaming some anonymous “them”, or banking on some instant political and social cure-all, we all ought to take responsibility for thinking things out, so that we as humans can do things a bit better than we are doing currently.
Associated with this view is the idea that – in this and any other society – we need to seek a consensus of what makes for better quality and value. I do not subscribe to the view that everybody’s view of what is good or valuable is equally valid. I definitely do not want to discount the many good ideas on the topic of “what is good” that have been proposed over the course of history, but I feel that because humans still live in somewhat separated or isolated cultures, we do not always appreciate that another group may in fact have something we can learn from.
I have some faith that there is a common consensus of value that we should all live by, but I feel we are still searching for it.
[Uncle Reg sadly passed away in 1994 – RT]
Uncle Reg had spent many of his army years serving in Cyprus, where his intelligence work led him to become involved him in building relationships with local people, both Orthodox Greeks and Moslem Turks.
Having been brought up in the Church of England, and being accustomed to army padres justifying “Fight the Good Fight” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” he found it a surprise at first that there were good people in both religious camps in Cyprus. He began to look for what common understandings the different groups held, once the traditional religious practices were removed from the equation.
There were always fanatics who thought that violence and aggression against “the other lot” could be justified, but it seemed that this was more a matter of grabbing and maintaining power for a particular subsection of the population than genuine religious disagreement.
He came to the conclusion that there was probably no religious group in history that could really justify the claim that their revelation was the only good one out of so many. What is more, with all the changes in both technology and society, and the gradual breaking down of the barriers of distance and communication, it seemed to him untenable that one could maintain that all the truth we need has been revealed at one particular moment in history, and that no further interpretation or addition is possible.
So Uncle Reg’s starting point was what he called the “Once-off Revelation Fallacy”, which is the title of the first mini-essay.
I honestly believe that one aspect of the current immaturity of the human race is the hold of “book” religions, which claim that unique (maybe even sufficient) knowledge about the world, God and human life has been revealed once and for all in a certain set of books in earlier stages of history.
I have read that a certain committee of early Christian leaders decided which writings (some Jewish, some specifically Christian) should be in the Bible and which should not. Some books were sidelined into an Apocrypha, and others excluded altogether. But there is no chance of any later additions or updates (or removals!), even for ancient scripts, like the Dead Sea scrolls or the Gospel according to Thomas, that have been dug up in recent years, but which might have been considered for inclusion if they had been available at the time.
It seems that Islam has a similar situation, with several grades of “book”, ranging from the Koran (the original recitation) to the Hadith (reported sayings of the Prophet) and the Sunna (or tradition). Opinion is apparently split on whether or not the “door to Ijtihad” (or scope for interpretation of these writings) has been closed for many centuries or not.
Other religions and sects also have their holy books (e.g. The Book of Mormon, L Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics). Even non-religious movements have their “bibles” too (think of Marx’s Das Kapital, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Mao’s Little Red Book). But these holy books cannot all be literally true and perfect. As mythology and ethical advice, they may contain a lot that is of value. But as scientific fact, accurate history or unalterable law, they fall well short of what today’s human race needs.
I suspect that the primary motivation for maintaining such biblical-style authority of the written word is the desire by certain oligarchies and religious hierarchies (these are usually all older men) to retain their position of power over the rest of us (and sometimes their ability to extort money from us too!). Politicians with an authoritative streak are also keen to ride on the back of religious authority, in order to keep down the mutterings of dissent in the voters.
[Maybe a good example was Margaret Thatcher’s call in the 1980s for a return to Victorian values – RT]
I would admit that there have been times in history where a common authoritative mythology was needed to bind society together. In those days a high proportion of people were illiterate and/or lightly educated. This is no longer true in many countries. We can watch TV, listen to radio, read newspapers and books [and today, the worldwide web - RT] – and so find a different view and make up our own mind. We can travel, meet people from other cultures and gain a broader insight about what life is all about.
However many people still seem to prefer a simple model for life, one that they can pick up “off the shelf”. They may have been educated, but they may not have the time or resolve to think things out for themselves, or they may not yet have acquired the necessary thinking skills. Some say that if it was good enough for their parents, it’s good enough for them.
The Bible has in its early chapters the story of a naked couple, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden (as Oscar Wilde said, it ends with Revelations). Eve offered Adam an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, which he ate. As a result they covered their private parts with fig leaves, thus angering God who presumably wanted the human race to stay like the “lilies of the field” – or at least noble pre-civilization savages. Religious speakers talk about this as “The Fall” - as if that, too, was a one-off.
Well, that sounds to me a pretty bad model of how things are. In practice, we are still chomping away on those apples as our experiences and contacts widen and our means of communication improve. We now have language, writing, trade, philosophy, logic, telescopes and microscopes, accurate measuring devices, science, electricity, television and computers. Whether we like or not, and to mix several metaphors, Pandora’s box is now well and truly open, the cat is out of the bag, and the apple of the tree of knowledge is being eaten enthusiastically all the time.
As a final thought – I read recently that a banner outside Tehran after the Ayatollahs’ 1979 revolution in Iran proudly stated “The Government here today is the same as that in the days of the Prophet”.
[An extract from the original text went as follows:
Most of the trouble caused by religion arises because each sect claims to have some unique revelation of the Truth, which is valid for all time; and that the revelation for that sect is the only really valid one. This helps to fuel the fires of exclusiveness and sectarianism, which in recent history have caused about as many wars as other disputes have done.
Getting away from this fallacy is easier said than done. The sects and factions all have a vested interest in maintaining the trappings of their own traditions.
This would not happen in the world of commerce. If a businessman kept trying to sell a completely fixed product indefinitely, he would go out of business. Better solutions keep getting developed, and new needs are always arising. If the businessman doesn’t address these facts, someone else will.]
[As Editor, I would make the following two comments on the original text:
Note also that the topics of ethics and morality are not being discussed here; just the business of once-off revelation. - RT]
I think one can distinguish organised religion (churches, institutions, doctrines etc) and personal religion (what you believe and how it affects your life). Organised religion contains a lot that is not just about following the religion’s principles; the religion is partly a hierarchy, a bit like the management of a company, which tries to preserve its position – and, sometimes, a hold over its followers.
I also think there is a distinction between traditional religion (i.e. what people before us in our culture have believed) and the religion that we work out for ourselves. We can also distinguish, for each religion or sect (though not as completely independent aspects):
It’s almost normal that, for each of us, some of these things make more sense than others.
Traditional and organised religions have a long record of both success and failure. I’ve personally seen both sides of the coin in Christianity and Islam. Overall, I’d say that the net effect has usually been for the good of their followers - but not always for the outsiders. Just like governments though, they are constrained by the fact that they don’t want to spend too much time admitting their failures; otherwise people will lose confidence in them. Unfortunately, this often means that they cannot move with the times and reflect the needs of people in more modern times. This might explain why religions – especially Christianity – have had so many breakaway groups and new sects; meanwhile the older sects don’t go away because they are preferred by older people who may be nostalgic for their traditions.
If you ask where I stand personally, I’d say that religion is the search for whatever is “good” in life, and attempting to follow it. Many mainstream religions do seem to offer a path for this. However I am not so sure that this is how the “high priests” who control the religions see it.
[At the time in 1973 that we left England for the Middle East, I was attending a church but felt the need to opt out of normal practices and instead attend an “Encounter Group” chaired by the minister at which free discussion was encouraged. I never returned to regular churchgoing, especially after the two years working with mainly Moslems. However I would never say I became anti-religious – just unwilling to plump for any one prescribed path, especially if that path seems over-concerned with the mythological stories, the established hierarchies and traditional “thou shalt nots”. – RT]
What do people aim for in life? Is it a better standard of living, happiness, fulfilment, wealth – or a ticket to the right place after death?
Happiness may not be our lot – and it may be short-lived even if we do achieve it. Wealth is well-known to be of little value in itself – it is only when you can make use of the money that you see any benefit. Going to the right place in the hereafter may be a useful goal for those who can accept the religious package, but not everyone can.
A “better standard of living” is often taken only in the material sense – nice house, labour saving gadgets, smart clothes, good food and drink, and other status symbols. But even if we are lucky enough to achieve these, we can still lack fulfilment and feel isolated or frustrated.
But “standard of living” also has a “quality of life” meaning. This can take us further than just meeting any specific goals or milestones. It means that we can find fulfilment by following a path of good things. I like to equate this search for the “good” as something near the God of our traditional religions, but stripped of all the myths, hierarchies, dogma and artificial restrictions.
Some objectors may say that without following a traditional religion (presumably the one they personally subscribe to) we remain in the dark about what the “good”, “value” and “quality” really are, and that any morality is purely subjective. The danger implied is that we will develop rationalisations – or hire smart lawyers – to say that the wrong things we do are not really wrong at all.
However I don’t agree. I think that as we live our life, as well as reading the many good books that have been written, we can also observe examples from peoples’ lives, and we can often see what works well or less well. The aspects of life in which many cultures agree will, I believe, be the more important ones, whereas the points on which they disagree will be the less important traditional practices and attitudes. That is why I think we are all better off if we can observe different cultures as well as our own.
Finally, just as with science, I don’t think we should ever rest and say “that’s it, now I know the truth”. We should keep searching for quality until we die.
[Quality is a main theme of Robert Pirsig’s book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” which Uncle Reg had on his shelf. It doesn’t really define Quality in terms that the “Church of Reason” with its subjects and objects would accept as a definition. It appears to represent whatever there is prior to our intellectualising our observations, and even prior to our emotional reaction – in fact before any separation of observer and observed. In practical terms, Pirsig says that structured knowledge is not enough, and “you have to have some feeling for the quality of the work”.]
Index to more of these diatribes
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 20th June 2011
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .