Ups and Downs

So this weekend was a bit of a roller coaster. Or rather a very nice walk in the woods, except for falling in the pits with spikes in. Basically, had my sister visiting, which was in itself amazing. But also we had a really good time touristing it up around Oxford and seeing the bits I haven't seen yet, including the unbelievably cool museums that are scattered around. Old scientific instruments and dinosaurs aplenty. The less good part was the me hurting myself with sports (my knee and then just a particularly nasty bit of overexertion). I learned, to my detriment, that the lasting legacy of my quasi-Nietzschean sports schooling is an ability to push myself that radically exceeds my current level of physical fitness. Oh, but I forgot some more of the good bits, which included more time with new friends and seeing another play - King John, a lesser-known and less-performed Shakespeare. 

Anyway, the last few days in general have made me put a lot of thought into relationships, and my role in them, and what that means to the other parties...there is such a diversity of relationships, and I could probably do a lot better by a lot of other people if I just thought a little more about how I impacted them. From the trivial and mundane - I had a nice chat with the lady at Sainsbury's today, for instance, that seemed to brighten both our mornings - to the very important, like the role I play in my sister's life. Anyway, no particularly profound thoughts yet - mostly just I think its something I should think about more with everyone, rather than the few people I do spend a lot of time thinking about how I relate to. 

A thought and a question

I had an interesting point made to me today about my educational heritage. I think of myself as coming from an academic family - both parents with PhDs, an older sister already finished a masters, book around all the time and so forth. But it was pointed out to me that I also have aunts and uncles who dropped out of high school and university, a grandmother who only finished grade 8, and a great-grandmother with only one year of formal education. And I'm at Oxford. I'm not sure what that does to my feelings about the responsibility that comes with being here. It was supposed to calm me, by pointing out that just being here is an achievement. I think it only makes me feel more like its a responsibility - I feel like the accomplishment in being here belongs to them, not me, and that I need to take the next step. I'm just not sure what the equivalent step is, starting from this point...

The question then - if you had two groups of people, living in complete separation - if there was no contact or possible causal relationship between the two - and one group was a lot better off than the other, is that unfair? Or rather, can you speak of it as unjust in any meaningful sense? Are differences between people morally relevant when there can be no relationship of any kind between those people? 

And yes, political philosophy does seem to involve these crazy hypothetical questions. Seemingly (and hopefully) for good reasons, although that remains to be seen for sure. 

Quick Notes

A couple of quick notes:

1) I've realised I'm actually quite, quite bad at the seminar discussion format. It's fine when it operates at a relatively simplistic level - then it's easy to be concise and constructive with what you want to say. But if, for instance, you want to express to a bunch of Oxford students why exactly you think that lottery voting has no independent fairness value because its an unjustified reification of probability applied to a series of different one-off decisions, well it takes forever and nobody really understands what you're saying. And ends up more confrontational than necessary. I shall have to work on this.

2) re: last post, figuring out what you want to do, etc...I think this is a good place to be doing that. Went to another interesting lecture (on Rwanda, by a functionary in the current government) that got me thinking again and then had a really good, long conversation with a friend about things in the world we either feel strongly about or should do...I think part of the key to actually getting stuff done is to make sure you talk to other people about it, and then push each other/hold each other to it. 

An Inauspicious Start

     So I've decided to begin a blog. Motivated primarily, like most people, by lack of productivity in other areas. But no matter - I think the idea is, at present, just to jot down some of my impressions of this place before I forget about them entirely.

     The thing that has made the greatest impression on me today is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Hamid Karzai's speech at the Oxford Union. The whole thing was impressive, of course, but a couple of  things struck me in particular. 

    First, that I found that I regard Karzai as much more of a genuine leader than I would my own prime minister or the leaders of many states - perhaps because of what he personally has to face down or the challenges his country faces, but perhaps also because of his bearing. He explicitly recognised that he was under constraints as President in terms of what he could and could not say, and that he wished he could speak as freely as a student. And yet he seemed to attempt to say as much as possible within those constraints; there were several times that I thought he was (quite successfully) dodging tricky questions, but invariably he was simply making preferatory remarks before confronting the tough issue head-on. He also seemed to construct his remarks within the constraints so that we could guess at how he genuinely felt, rather than the all-too-familiar obfuscation practiced by those who could be far freer with what they say. 

    Second, one of the questions was about the role of the Canadian troops in rebuilding Afghanistan, and his response touched me deeply. He was asked if the Afghan people wanted the Canadians there. I think recent poll data support his response, but the way he said it expressed something sharper than numbers can. He said that Canada's contribution was beyond generous, and the willingness of Canada to sacrifice her daughters and sons to help Afghanistan was something they were very grateful for. And then he paused a bit to search for words before saying that human language has not yet evolved to be able to express the kind of gratitude he means - which is why when he spoke at the Canadian parliament he said it in the simplest form possible: thank you. Something about the way he said this - about the feeling he could put into expressing it, really cut me to the core. I cried a bit (three tears). And it really made me upset about the level of debate over Canada's involvement in Afghanistan at home - the maneuvering, the jockeying for position, the inability of anyone, it seems, to give us a really good explanation of their stand. 

    I don't want to make it out like I think Karzai is the ideal leader or anything - but I was deeply impressed. And I certainly have a lot to think about. Not least the guilt I currently feel. Karzai prefaced his remarks by saying how great a pleasure it was to speak at Oxford. He said that all students, wherever they are, dream of going to Oxford (or Cambridge) - and that he had been one of them. It drove home again the ridiculous life of privilege I enjoy here. And so I'm not feeling good that knowing that, and thinking about it, all I have achieved since I got home is cooking lunch, washing dishes, doing a quarter of a reading and starting a blog. I need to figure out exactly what it is I am doing, and what it is I want to do, and how to bring the two closer together. Hopefully this whole writing things down thing will help. 

That's it for this post - except for a closing thought (not mine) that sort of sums up what I'm trying to say:

"You are all busy. It's important to be busy, 

but if you don't find the time to change the world, 

then you're busy keeping it the way it is."

- Albert Jones, Boston janitor & volunteer bus driver