Positioning

Consistent with most of my internet usage, I'm a fairly lazy user of Twitter. I don't spend loads of time looking for new and interesting people to follow, I just tend to stick with what I know. Subsequently, one of the more heavily represented areas in my feed is the world of cricket. Interestingly, this is also the area from which I am most likely to unfollow someone. This is not entirely coincidental, cricket is the only sport I have much interest in, so the only sportsmen to appear in my Twitter feed are cricketers. Given the propensity of sportsmen to poorly articulate their really bad ideas, it is no real surprise that they are prime candidates for unfollowing. Kevin Pietersen was textbook: I followed him because I thought that the self-righteous claptrap he was bound to spout would be mildly entertaining and I wasn't disappointed for a while. Eventually however, the fact that his feed just painted a portrait of a total dick got the better of me and I unfollowed, more in disgust at myself for ever having got involved in the first place.
More recently the world of cricket presented me with a more complicated problem. One morning I happened to check my Twitter feed and noticed a tweet from genial cricket commentator and professional posh bloke Henry Blofeld. As a rule, he generally uses Twitter to promote his stage show or boast about where he had lunch. So far, so trivially entertaining. However, on that morning he felt the need to ask why people got so wound up about climate change when there were so many more important things to worry about. I challenged him on this, asking for an example of something more important. Not surprisingly, I got no direct response, but on checking my feed later that day it was apparent that I was not the only person to have reacted in this fashion. Blowers in his usual genial manner called us all losers and told us we needed to get a life and then spent the rest of the day retweeting messages from other selfish people or climate-change denying nutjobs saying things like "yeah, they're always trying to ruin our fun" or "yeah Blowers, that'll show the climate change Nazis". I am paraphrasing, but only just; the word 'fascist' was definitely used.
Eventually I got so bored of the braying of these dreadful people clogging up my feed I unfollowed their latest hero. I could happily spend a whole post venting at the selfishness and stupidity of people who, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, see the ramblings of a superannuated cricket commentator as justification for them to carry right on ignoring their moral responsibilities, but why bother. If you have read this far, you're either as enraged as me by the willful ignorance of a worrying number of people, or you're thinking "here we go again: more deranged ramblings from a climate change nut. Why can't they leave me alone to pollute the earth in whatever way entertains me most." If you're thinking the latter, I'm surprised and slightly impressed as you have exhibited behaviour that I failed to: you are willing to persevere with an opinion counter to your own. I always think I should be doing this sort of thing: reading the websites of the right wing press and engaging the people thereon in reasoned debate. I could have replied to all the people Blowers had forced onto my feed explaining to them (in 140 characters) why they were (in my opinion) in error. Of course such an action would have the opposite of its intended consequences, in that it would only serve to reinforce the opinion of the people I contacted that people concerned with climate change are obsessive fanatics. I am not a fanatic; I worry about our effect on the climate and I think a spot of individual responsibility wouldn't hurt in that regard. I think if you don't think about your impact on the lives of others then you are either a child or a bad person. Yes I am making a moral judgement. I guess I'd take a lot of persuading to pull back from that opinion and I think the argument would need to consist of more than the opinions of a handful of ill-informed celebrities.
Research into such things tells us that regardless of the substance of the arguments used in a debate, they will only serve to reinforce the opinions people had at the start of the debate. This depressing fact tends to make me think that if I can't change the minds of these people, then why on earth should I suffer having to listen to their idiotic opinions? At the press of a button, the unpleasant fact of their myopic views are removed from my life. I can retreat into my little liberal bubble and carry on with the charade that everyone is doing their bit, that everyone else cares about their fellows and worries about the consequences of their actions. But this is just as much a denial of the realities as anything else, just because some people are wrong, should we be happy to ignore them and allow them to remain so? How does a society progress without debate between these two sides? There appear to be two answers to this question: 'very well, thank you' and 'not at all'. The first can perhaps be seen as the traditional model, where groups with radically differing worldviews understand that in order for society to function, they must find common ground. Compromise is sought and reached because the parties involved accept that the functioning of society is a higher priority than the achievement of personal goals. Increasingly however, it seems that this is less likely to be the case, as across the established democracies, politicians of all stripes seem less inclined to negotiate with those on the other side of the argument. In the USA the Tea Party are barely willing to talk to others in the Republican Party, let alone Democrats. In the UK, the new cohort of Tory MPs have already rebelled against the party whip more than any other in history, keen to prove to the country that they will have their way even if they don't have a democratic mandate. Actually I imagine the Tory rebellions are more to do with MPs acting based on the only mandate they feel they have, i.e. as the party has no mandate, they act on the individual mandates that their constituents have handed them. However, the mandate they feel they've been given puts them an ideological pole apart from even the moderate wing of their party.
As I said before, extreme views are not a new occurrence in politics, but an inability to understand the fundaments of representative democracy appears to be. Regardless of the mandate you feel the people have handed you, unless 100% of them voted for you, you don't have a mandate to impose your will on the world in its entirety. Indeed you have an obligation to acknowledge the fact that you represent people with differing views and ensure that you seek at least a dialogue with those views.
We appear to have moved into a new era of belief politics, where politicians are driven not by ideology and pragmatism, but a belief in the absolute truth of their argument so fierce that it renders them intransigent. There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which is that people's beliefs seem to require more, well, belief these days. Whilst there is proof that the increase in the earth's temperature has accelerated rapidly since the industrial revolution, there is no way of proving the exact cause. Theories backed up by considerable experiment may illustrate the near certainty that certain manmade gasses are the cause of global warming, but there can be no absolute proof. We have to believe that 99% of the climate scientists on the planet are not wrong. Unfortunately, for many people it is just as easy to believe otherwise, because there is no absolute 'proof'. Equally, as there is no proof of the existence of a god, it is just as easy for people to believe that a book written by a bunch of Romans is to be interpreted literally as the word of God, that the world is 4000 years old, that we should stone each other to death for working on the Sabbath, etc. Perhaps because of the surge in the need for belief, religion has taken an increasingly direct role in politics, going from something that defines a person's moral compass to being the literal basis for a society people believe they should impose on their fellows. Such extremism begets extreme opposition, further polarising the world. The result is that people increasingly think that their beliefs are so right that they should overrule the democratic principal. I must confess that when I discover the thoughts of the climate change deniers, I am tempted to entertain the notion of some form of dictatorship of environmental responsibility. Like everyone else, I must resist such temptation; democracy must always have primacy, because once you let it go you have to fight hard to win it back.
Besides, I'd actually become the environmental fascist that the friends of Henry Blofeld dream up as their oppressors. And I'd hate to lose an argument in such a crap way.
Of course I don't follow Blofeld any more, so it's an argument I'm not going to have. Maybe it's time to get back into the fray...

Point of View

So after about 5 minutes watching from my window I got bored of the Shard opening ceremonies. I guess there are only so many exciting things you can do with a building: make it change colour and fire lasers into the sky whilst searchlights and helicopters circle it. I imagine it was pretty exciting if you were an invited guest, what with the LSO playing and all. However I wasn't invited and neither were most Londoners, which seems to be the thrust of the one of the arguments of the anti-Shard lobby. It is elitist they say, a giant monument to money and greed. No argument from me there, but why single out the Shard for this criticism, why not the Heron Tower for example which is a much less graceful building and nearly as tall.
Of course the Heron Tower is built within the main city cluster, which exempts it from the major gripe of the anti-Shard lobby: that the Shard, by virtue of of its location dramatically changes the London skyline. Yes it does, so what? The London skyline is not some kind of perfectly realised, perfectly organised picture; it is a muddle, like the city itself, a conversation between thousands of different ideas. When London was burnt to the ground in 1666, Sir Christopher Wren wanted to build an entirely new city on a beautiful radial design, in much the same way as the French subsequently did in Paris. Unfortunately, he instantly ran into disputes with landowners, whose properties were bounded by the pre-fire roads. Ultimately, the only part of that design that survived was St Paul's Cathedral, and whilst the immediate area around that building retains some the order that Wren wished for, the London that sprang up beyond it had none of the discipline of a well designed cityscape. This set a precedent that survives today: when it comes to planning in London, the ultimate result stems from an argument between the architects, the developers, the authorities and the neighbors. The London skyline is not a homogeneous vista, it is a messy assortment of architecture both good and bad, and opinions on each of these buildings will vary wildly. As they should do in one of the world's oldest democracies.
In his piece on the Shard, Simon Jenkins complained that it didn't belong in this country, but in a desert state (such as the one from which much of its funding came). Apart from the apparent racism inherent in this statement, it fundamentally fails to understand the nature of London's architectural heritage. St Paul's itself was controversial, as Wren had decided to build it in what was then an Italian style. Would all the skyline preservationists been so concerned if it was just another classical English style cathedral? St Paul's is so evocative of England because like all Englishmen, it is an immigrant. To accuse a new building in London of being alien is to fundamentally misunderstand the city. Also, associating the Shard aesthetically with its major funders is a bit lame when they only committed funding after building had commenced.
Simon Jenkins is right to get exercised about big developers and famous architects steamrolling planning law, but surely he should have done that about the Gherkin rather than the Shard. The site of the Gherkin contained the grade I listed Baltic Exchange, and before Sir Norman Foster got involved, all development plans involved the retention of the badly bomb damaged building. As soon as Sir Norman broke out the plans for the most phallic building in London, all and sundry got weak at the knees and quickly forgot about listings. The Shard is different though: it is built on the site of some pretty ugly modernist rejects that no one will ever miss ever, but because you can see it poking up behind St Paul's if you're rich enough to live on Primrose Hill, but not connected enough to get invited to the opening party then it is an abomination. Brilliantly, people like Simon Jenkins say that this will open the floodgates to legions of super skyscrapers lining the Thames and ruining the skyline, and brilliantly by saying such things they prove themselves wrong. Yes, unfortunately there are a small number of other less well imagined supertowers springing up in the wake of John Prescott's hubris, but they will become a natural antedote to themselves. They will become new Euston Stations. The destruction of the original Victorian Euston Station in the 60s lead to the introduction of grading and protection of historic buildings that is both a wonderful thing for posterity and a massive headache for anyone associated with listed buildings. Planning in a city like London will always be complicated because everyone wants to be involved, it will ebb and flow, the developers and the conservationists will each have their day. Neither will ever win and neither should they.
I have issues with aspects of the Shard's construction; the fact that they ditched the energy saving aspects of the building's original design should have resulted in fines, re-submission of the planning application or a commitment to offset the additional energy usage. I'm sure there are many other complaints that can be levelled at it, but to complain that it ruins a skyline as jumbled as London's is surely to miss the point entirely. If you're worried about rich people doing what they like with your heritage, you should look to parliament. Now there is a blot on the skyline.