Patronising

A while ago, the concept of personal responsibility came up in conversation with my most entertaining colleague when it comes to political discussion (we'll call him Lewes Leftie). When I said that I thought people were responsible for their own actions, he only just managed to stop himself from saying that was a very 'Tory' viewpoint. Fortunately for the conversation he said enough for me to realise what he was about to say and I pulled him up on it. Essentially his argument boiled down to the fact that because we are not responsible for our circumstances, we cannot be responsible for our actions. I pursued this line of reasoning and discovered that he seemed to view it as an absolute, that he was a pure determinist. We didn't get a chance to go further, but I'm sure that he saw this as an inherent part of his 'socialist' philosophy.
I forget who it was, but recently a Labour politician argued against the policy of London boroughs buying social housing outside London on the basis that it would disrupt children's lives. Both Ms P and I poo pooed this in unison: we both moved towns in the middle of our childhoods and it did neither of us any harm. Sure, at the time it felt like quite an upheaval, but in the grand scheme of things it was of no consequence. What the politician should have pointed out is that the policy of moving the poor out of London is just another step on the road to London becoming a ghetto of rich people entirely separate from the rest of the country; a state of affairs that no one should be encouraging.
Conservatives often paint progressive policy as patronising, as the nanny state interfering in people's lives because it thinks they're too stupid to look after themselves. From the rhetoric of many politicians, this appears to be the case, which is unfortunate because no one likes to be patronised. However, the attitude of conservatives is that the poor are poor because they are too stupid to get rich, which really isn't much better, yet somehow appears more acceptable because it is a form of honesty.
This is a genuine problem that is faced by all those who wish to help their fellow humans, or at least that's the way I see it. The desire to extend compassion to others is a good thing, yet can easily appear patronising, which in many senses it is. The words 'patron' and 'patronising' are based around the same concept, but the latter has gained negative connotations whilst the former hasn't and with good reason.
A society should be capable of helping those who require help, but it should not assme that those who need help are helpless or incapable. Circumstance can place a person in a situation where they need help, but that does not mean that they are eternally condemned to the whim of circumstance. People can help themselves if they have the means and the belief. Of course some people are constrained by ability, but that doesn't mean we should assume that those constrained by circumstance lack ability. To look at this another way, you cannot simply say only help those who cannot help themselves, as that requires us to decree from on high that certain people need help, stigmatising them and potentially convincing them that they are beyond self-help.
When I was a teenager and people told me that I was acting like a child, I usually felt that my action was merely a response to being treated like a child. My argument was that we act up to expectations. It was perhaps a slightly childish argument, but is nevertheless probably at least partially true. If we tell people that we are helping them because their circumstance renders them incapable of self help, we should not be surprised if they conclude that they are incapable of influencing their circumstances.
I am not saying at all that we should leave the helpless to help themselves. What sort of society would we be if we did that? We just need to take more care over how we view that help and how we present it.

Peripatetic

There was a laughable section on BBC Radio 4's PM program a while ago discussing the Radio 2 poll to determine their listeners' most popular album. Not only did Eddie Mayer get the title of Coldplay's 2003 sophomore album wrong (what's a rush of blood to the heart Eddie?), but a senior music journalist got very angry about the poll, saying that it proved people who listen to Radio 2 don't like music. My guess is that the journalist in question comes from the punk tradition that anything popular must, by dint of being popular, be rubbish. For some of us it's a familiar sense: the feeling that the world is wrong because the world doesn't agree with us. It is familiar from our youth, from the comfort of collective alienation.
This sense of identity in opposition was something that many of us had as a result of dressing differently or listening to certain types of music: a tribe mentality. Much has been made in recent times about the loss of youth tribes, as instant access to so much music and cheap fashion - not to mention contact with a whole world of other people - allows today's youth to change their identity weekly if not daily. Solidarity comes not from a select group of friends who share your passion for a certain band of musical genre, but from millions of online 'friends' who may be as diverse as they are mono-sympathetic (i.e. with so many friends, one may only need to have one thing in common with each). One can be niche, but with a global community each niche is almost a nation of its own. The flip side of the always-on community is that there is nowhere for freaks and geeks to hide. The old youth tribes were a place of safety, a place where those who felt detached from society could be surrounded by those they liked and avoid those they feared, protected by the cloak of collective difference. Social networks mean that there is no respite for the different, so you may as well at least pretend to fit in. The homogenisation of youth culture is at least partly a result of fear. The bullies, who have always been the sentinels of normal, appear to have won. Except it's not quite that bad: in many ways kids are able to be more individual and creative* without having to conform to the dictats of a single group aesthetic.
Of course such a situation is scary to a music journalist, whose role it has traditionally been to tell the youth tribes what is and isn't acceptable. In this community, there is clearly fear at the loss of control that the new society brings and such fear can cause people to lash out. For these people, the enemy is the mainstream and everything associated with it: if people like anything mainstream then they are fools who didn't listen to enough music journalists.
I am perhaps being harsh to music journalists, but I think this peculiarly British form of judgement will not be missed. The idea that for anything to be popular it must be bad is a ridiculous one, especially for a journalist whose job is to make things popular. In the digital assumptive generations** there is even a strand of subculture based around an appreciation of cultural artefacts (mainly films) that have been rejected by the mainstream as not very good. It is not the sort of subculture that exists as a visually identifiable tribe, it's not that sort of subculture. It is just one of the many strands of subculture that weave itself through and inbetween the current cultural landscape. Of course as the digital natives take over, it is an identification of subculture that will disappear, as such concepts of bad and good culture become replaced by personal associations of liked and disliked.
The danger, as the music journalists justifiably see it, is that this will result in a cultural race to the bottom, with the bottom being a homogeneous mass of cheap cultural gunk churned out by big business. The reality would seem to go a considerable way to banishing that fear, in that the new cultural reality allows, if anything, more variation. If we wish to worry about the fact that many of these microstrands of culture are not financially viable for their practitioners, that we are possibly moving into a hobbyist culture, then go ahead: that is a valid debate. However, regardless of its source, some subculture is still going to become popular (and therefore mainstream), possibly through more numerous and varied routes than before. Becoming popular is not going to invalidate any subculture or subcultural artefact, as its 'validity' will no longer be measured, or cared about. Then music journalists will be able promote the things that they like AND feel good when they go mainstream.

*although far too often this appears to involve putting ears on things.

**i.e. pre-digital native