Ambition and Friendship

This is not some sort of new insight, but I think I have my own two pence worth to add. Ambitious people seem to find it hard to enjoy friendship, but perhaps not only for the usual cliche reasons we assume, namely, that ambition leads to greed, selfishness, megalomania, and betrayal, which all keep one away from friendship. Put it Biblically, it is more difficult for an ambitious man to have a true friend than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. While these reasons are undoubtedly valid, they are usually only applicable to people with more extreme forms of ambition, such as political and monetary ones.

However, for the less belligerently ambitious people, the above may not always apply. In fact, more positive forms of ambition, such as determination at self-improvement and self-refinement, may equally render one unsuitable for enduring friendships. The self-conscious and self-critical are trapped in a constant anxiety to improve his current state minute by minute, and thus suffers from a disturbing, sometimes suicidal, remorse regarding the stupidities that he has committed in the past, including yesterday, or perhaps several hours ago. Such a perverted form of ambition at self-improvement usually leads to a highly conscientious individual, who has no time to waste, because each second wasted is a chance lost for improving himself.

Herein lies his incapability for friendship, for the latter is a form of emotional attachment which implies certain duration. If one does not anticipate a friendship to last, one is not entering into one in the first place. That could be better termed as contingent companionship. Friends coming from one's past trouble one because they mercylessly remind the conscientious individual of his 'stupid' past, and his inability to shake off that dreaded past. When old friends appear, one is naturally required to reminisce, and to conjure up memories of the past, which, for that ambitious individual is a fetter to his constant self-transformation to greatness - however that is defined. There is something self-contradictory in the essential features of human condition and the emotional needs that human beings commonly perceive imperative or virtuous.

If sex can be had for ever, without the urge and longing before it and the contrasting disaffection and apathy (and for some even guilt) after it, will sex still be enjoyable?? All human relations in that regard are actually like sex. It is enjoyable, but it's going to end; it is enjoyable, because it's going to end. And in particular relation to friendship, a friendship that has outlived its expiry date becomes an encumbrance, a fetter to progress. This rule applies to in fact all people, but is naturally more acutely felt by the ambitious. To say friendships are like clothes, to be worn and indulged in for a period, but to be deserted after some time, is likely to cause repugnance in many; but there seems hardly a better metaphor. People grow, and their old clothes become no longer fit; or when people's taste changes, the clothes become no longer desirable. It is as apt as such.

From Food to Foot: Facebook and the Contemporary Individual

Despite the above title which sounds sonorous enough to make the title of a book critically assessing the complicated relations between facebook and individuals and what they say about contemporary culture and society (--what an ambitious topic!), what I will present below are just some observations and tendentious opinions.

It seems there are primarily two reasons why people join facebook and visit it frequently. The obvious and functional one is clearly to get to know and keep up with friends, as is indeed the original intention of this social networking site. The second, not unrelated to the first, seems to be psychological and emotional. Facebook provides a space in which one is able to peep into others' lives as well as to display that of one's own. It satisfies at one stroke both the pleasures of voyeurism and self-exhibitionism. People who indulge in these two kinds of pleasures are either lonely or un/under-occupied (either physically or intellectually, or both) or both. Which ever it is, the common feature of all Facebook frequenters must be a lack, a deficit of some sort, which does not seem to have been met in real social life. Such psychological or emotional deficits are to find addition and hopefully remedy in the virtual social space of Facebook.

However, the tricky point here is that once facebook has become a normal part of our way of life, it increases the needs of the individuals instead of meeting them. This is not dissimilar to, when someone draws a small circle and then a larger one to demonstrate that the more you know, the more you know you do not know, and therefore the more you want to know. The same logic applies to the use of cameras. More than a century ago when technologies were basic, taking photos was an event to happen only on festive or special occasions. Today, however, when the technology became easily available, people feel the need to take picture every now and then, almost endlessly. The same happens with facebook. In the pre-facebook historical era, people do things (such as travelling, or eat out at restaurant) and think about things (such as feeling sad, or wanting to buy certain things); today, they do not only do and think about things, they also have to SHOW, to LET OTHERS KNOW what they have done and what they are thinking. Doing and thinking are just not enough any more; they are not complete without also being published.

Consequently, we see various forms of self publishing on facebook. Indeed, my writing this article is not any different. However, self publishing can also be of different characters, ranging from the salubrious, to the meaningless, and to the revolting and ridiculous. I'd like to think those who publish news, disseminate useful information or intellectual opinions belong to the first category. 'Food' as mentioned in the title belongs to the second. People constantly show where they have visited and what they have eaten. I am pretty sure for many people, even before they start to travel or eat out, they already anticipate the pleasures of putting up those pictures. Facebooking is now integral to the pleasures of eating or traveling, and things alike. One more perverted form of exhibition however, involves showing more intimate things. I have many months ago seen a friend of mine showing a picture of her slightly injured foot, with some bleeding. Today, I saw another person displaying her bleeding hand, perhaps after an office accident involving stationery. One has to ask, what is the point of showing these literally bloody stuff? The fact that both exhibitioners were ladies encourages the speculation that this is a form of appeal for sympathy and emotional support. However, have they really become so desolate that they must show these pictures for every 'friend'--and indeed how many facebook friends are really friends--to see? Is there nobody to care for them in real life? Or is there nothing they care enough in real life so that they can forget about these minor injuries? The same applies to expressing intimate feelings in the 'what's in your mind' box. If one is sad enough to have to publish their intimate emotions or desires on facebook to seek support, they will not get any. In fact, my criticisms here also extend to the second category of publishing, namely, the meaningless category. Is not eating food, visiting places of interests, or holidaying with partner already enjoyable enough? If so, why the need to show those pictures for everybody to know?

There can be two possible explanations to this. First, they are really not enjoying those activities enough, and they need every 'friend' to know that they have done those. This is rather sad, imagine that food cannot be enjoyed by just eating them, places cannot be enjoyed by just visiting/viewing them, partner(s) cannot be enjoyed by just being with them. If I were the food, places of interests, and partners to the exhibitioners, I'd feel sad, for myself and him/her as well. People who refuses to find enough pleasure in originally pleasurable things will never find enough pleasure. Alternatively, maybe they have enjoyed, but they just want to show off a little, so that the facebook display of one's enjoyment becomes a 'cheery on the cake', enhancing the original enjoyment. But this really reminds me of one of my erstwhile housemates, who, after a night of raucous sex with his girlfriend, asked me the next day whether I heard them, and apologised for the noise.

From Pre-Facebook civilisation, to food, and then to foot, we mankind have traveled a long way. And now I realise why I feel such an attraction to conservative philosophies.

'A Single Man'

The film 'A Single Man'(2009) directed by Tom Ford has left me more puzzled than disappointed. There has been many reviews of the film on the Internet, but none of these seem to be critical enough, at least not in the way I'd like to critique it. The way Zizek critiques cinema through psychoanalytical, sociological and cultural lens is what would suit my taste, but sadly Zizek doesn't seem to have written anything on it - and why should he? The fact that I feel more connections with the film doesn't mean he has to. He has more important films to review, and for the moment, let me attempt to say a few words of my own about this film.

I haven't read the original novel on which the film is based and am not going to. But while watching the film I could not help thinking how restrictive cinematic adaptations of literature usually are. As various critics point out, the film is a surreally beautiful one, not surprising that it came from Ford. But the way everyone in the film is so beautiful and everything in the film so elegant and expensive makes me uncomfortable. Imagine how ugly and unfit actors will spoil the whole film. Ugly ordinary people not only have no place in glamour or romance, they don't even have a place in sorrow and misery, which also need to be glamorous, romantic, and after all, SEXY, to be desirable. This reading, of course, is made from my privileged epistemological position of being an ordinary, unattractive, unsexy person. Depiction of the suppression of gay, and more generally the sadness and plight of human condition/experience, in Ford's way, through beautiful actors and expensive props, is in fact an insult on the people with which the film is supposed to create empathy and connection. Your sorrow is only worthy of attention when you are beautiful and sexually desirable. This underlying message makes this film one of the most regressionary that there can be, but this is not surprising that it has come from a world renowned fashion designer himself shrouded in glamour and riches. This also makes this film unforgivably boring and backward looking. Nothing new is there in the film. The original novel, however, will at least give readers some space of imagination, and more ways of interpretation, something Ford's film has obliterated.

Not unrelatedly, the film has also been puzzling at several points. I do not know how closely the script has followed the original story, but the message conveyed through the film is somewhat ambiguous. This is not to pass the normative judgment that all story has to be coherent and convey a clear message, but even incoherence should make a point, make sense. The feeling that I got after watching this film is that the message is neither naively unequivocal (like most Hollywood films are) though nearly so, nor incoherent or ambiguous in a sophisticated way.

Mainly two scenes in the film have contributed to my puzzlement. The first is when George got back home in the evening and was about to shoot himself. He tried various positions to rest his body in bed before he would shoot himself in the mouth but could not find a satisfactory position. In fact, the scene is a bit funny, where he repositions the pillow for many times and even tried a sleeping bag. It is not necessary to shoot oneself in the mouth to kill oneself - one can achieve just the same by putting the gun against the temples. The scene, in my reading, insinuates the act of fellatio. The way George constantly changes his position and could not find a comfortable one is the most convincing evidence. The second puzzling scene is when George passed in front of the little boy of the neighbouring family. The boy was holding a watergun and threatened to shoot George. George brooded a bit, before in his imagination he used the watergun to shoot the boy in his face. A stream of water shoots at the middle of the boy's face, and the boy spitted out those that got into his mouth. I have NO DOUBT that this is a thinly disguised (though perhaps more thickly for straight audience) reference to the fetish 'water game' or 'water sports' some gay men play by peeing on the sexual partner's face and/or body. The verisimilitude was so striking that for a moment I thought that was what it was in the film. For Tom Ford who is gay, he could not have produced the above two scenes innocently. I am very sure, but slightly more so about the second one than the first, that my readings above are the hidden references intended by Ford.

But what are these two references supposed to mean in the context of the whole film?? This I cannot fathom. Are they expressions of the suppressed sexual desires of George? But the film has made other more direct references to that. If the film is intended to a great extent to be a vivid description of a single gay man's emotional and sensual frustrations, as it is, what is water gaming a little boy supposed to add to it, given that this is a transgression that is unlikely to be permitted by even those most liberal/tolerant towards gay sex? Or are these two well camouflaged innuendos simply mischievous tricks that Ford created for his own secret pleasure? - like royal artisans in imperial China who secretly left their own personal marks (like signatures) on products they made for the imperial court, on which personal marks were strictly forbidden. If so, Ford has certainly succeeded, for I believe very few people would have made the interpretation that I have done of the two scenes, and I am not sure many of those who read this will buy them either.

Indeed, to me, these two scenes are the only sparks of brilliance in an otherwise unremarkable boring film.

Will food content labelling save you from obesity?

My unequivocal answer is NO. It is nice to realise that even in programmes such as Any Questions - one of the concentration spots of the politically correct, progressive and non-cynical chattering class of this country - there are people decent enough to debunk the futility in labelling supermarket food products in the hope of tackling obesity. (ref: 'Any Question' 10/7/10)

Food products are not labelled (regarding fat/energy contents) in Chinese or Japanese supermarkets - not as far as I know - yet I am sure that the obesity rates are far lower in such countries than in here or America. The root of obesity lies in the dietary culture, and even more deeply, general life styles and philosophies of people. In the UK, where I have now lived for almost two years (I have previously lived in China, Japan, Singapore), the problem seems to be that it is very difficult to find healthy food in the first place. There are Fish and Chips, curry rice, and the most sinful of all, the good old English breakfast...what more is to be said? I am a student lazy enough not to cook at all, and daily I scour between the aisles of supermarkets for something to fill my tank in order to have enough energy to pursue bogus scholarship, and the difficulty to find anything tasty yet healthy is one that I struggle with perennially. Labelling the energy contents is not going to help when your stomach screams for delicious in-fill. The significant consumption of meat and dairy products may have been historically due to the geographic and climate conditions of European countries, but when ways of life change and more and more modern comforts become available, things go out of kilter.

Consumption of food is primarily a matter of personal choice and life style, and then why such intense public interest? The simple reason is that in welfare states such as the UK, personal problems such as obesity have become public issues, because the state is responsible for the health care of its citizens. The funny fact is that when you take you on one responsibility, you take on a whole chain of others as well. So, once you are responsible for providing health care, you also need to monitor obesity, alcohol abuse and smoking, because the consequences of these habits are a state liability, not personal ones - well, not any more. I know this is a cliche Thatcherite argument, but if people are responsible for their own medical bills, perhaps they might take a bit more care of what they eat, drink and smoke. But Thatcher didn't even scrap the NHS, nor should she have done. From the way this coalition government has ring-fenced health spending, we can see that NHS is at least one of the most fundamental backbones of this society. If a government wants a revolution against it, the easiest way is perhaps to propose to scrap NHS.

I am not in favour of further neoliberalisation, but I just wonder (and I really 'wonder', that is to say I really don't have an answer or firm opinion - not like when most poeple say they wonder they actually mean disagreement) whether the welfare state itself has been responsible for many of the problems that the country faces now. The over-consumption based on credit is at least partially responsible for the current financial difficult in this country, and that was precisely because a welfare state has meant that people didn't need to save money for rainy days and can spend all what they earn. I have always been bewildered when people say that they are skint and have to wait until payday in order to go to pub again or to buy some small items. Spending all what one earns seems to be the way of life here, and one that I, despite my staunch opposition to Modoodian multiculturalism and approval of an assimilationist approach (I don't say assimilation as such as that is of course impossible) to living in another country, will never subscribe to.

The Oxymoron of 'Inclusive Welshness'

In one recent conference held at Cardiff University, the concept of 'inclusive Welshness' was mentioned, which is said to be integral to the social policy of the Welsh Assembly Government. In another conference under the theme of multiculturalism, I expressed my disagreement with the language policy in Wales, predictably, to everybody's shock. How can someone who clearly needs to be included (they looked at my oriental face and became sensitised to my non-native sounding English) be against the idea of inclusivity, and how dare a foreigner comment on the policy of the host government were probably the thoughts hidden behind their bemusement and funny exchanges of eye contact among themselves.

I do not doubt the Welsh policy makers' good intentions at including minorities -indeed, they are the most socialist and progressive people I have seen - but I find the idea of Inclusive Welshness a bit of a contradiction of terms. Behind the devolution of Wales and the Assembly government's policies at promoting Welshness is undoubtedly a nationalist sentiment, one which is indisputably based on the ethnic identity of the Welsh people. This is also why in recent years, ever more efforts have been put into promoting the Welsh language, making it compulsory in state education system. Thus, the assertion of a Welsh identity is necessarily a narrow identity politics which does not include people of other ethnic origin such as the blacks and the Asians who are living in Wales. It is very difficult to imagine how migrants and second or third generation migrants could have much to identify with the Welsh language. To propose a national identity tightly linked to the indigenous language hence is instinctively exclusive but not inclusive.

Of course, the Welsh policy makers may argue that Welshness need not be defined the way I did it, and that I am giving it an exclusivist interpretation. Speakers at the conferences suggested that the Welsh identity can be widened to include the black, the Asian and all. However, if so, then they are in fact modelling the Inclusive Welshness on how Britishness is currently intended to work in the context of UK. It is perfectly alright for black or Asian people to say that they are British, but I think they might find it somewhat problematic to say they are English, Scottish or Welsh, just because they happen to live there. The reason, obviously, is because that Britain or Britishness is more of a political/civic concept, whereas English, Welsh and Scottish are essentially labels for ethnicity. I am not so dumb as not being able to realise that all identity labels are necessarily constructs, but even so when labels such as English, Scottish and Welsh are invoked, distinct sets of relatively internally coherent cultural and linguistic patterns are recognised, and accepted. The concept of Britain or Britishness is crucial for an inclusive society because this is, at the moment, the only concept that seems to be capable of the kind of inclusion that we desire. Imagine one day when the idea of Britain was thrown into oblivion, and the UK broke into the Republics of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Kingdom of England, how are the non-whites in these islands going to call themselves? Of course, by the time this scenario becomes truth, those new identities will be created. I am not suggesting that the non-whites will have no places in these islands, but the tumultuous remaking of identity, both at political and personal levels have to be involved. Therefore, only the concept of Britain is currently in a position to dispense civic inclusivity and indeed identity while avoiding the thorny issue of ethnicity and indigenousness; and this is precisely because Britain is a sovereign state, whereas the rest are not. To the extent that Wales is not yet a sovereign state in its own right, it would be impossible, indeed conceptually confused to propose an inclusive Welshness modelled on Britishness.

The Welsh language policy is another key problematic at the core of this oxymoron. Pushing the Welsh language to an equal status to that of English and make Wales an genuinely bilingual nation is in fact a narrow nationalist move, which is effectively hegemonic. The simple reason for this is that English is no longer the exclusive language of the English (indeed not even the British), but a language of the world, whereas the Welsh language is exclusively the language of a minor portion (roughly 20%) of Welsh people. Requiring the immigrants or immigrant descendents in Wales to learn the Welsh languge is thus a de facto imposition of a national identity which they do not necessarily associate with. Imposition is unavoidable and happens all the time, but imposing something so useless and impractical such as Welsh leads to the question to be asked whether this is the best way of spending public money, let alone creating more inclusivity. Furthermore, in a globalised world where prosperity hinges on an economy's connectedness with the world, it is very hard to see what the promotion of a parochial langauge is going to add to the Welsh economy. In the higher education sector which I am more familiar with, I can safely say that international students do not come to Wales to learn Welsh or gain a Welsh univerity degree - they come here to earn degrees awarded by (hopefully) internationally renowned English-mediumed universities.

I write this article not because I have anything against the Welsh language or culture, or people. Instead, I simply wish to point out what I see as some inherent contradictions behind the policies pursued by the Welsh Assembly Government, seem to be elephants in the room that nobody cares to see. Nationalist sentiment is not a sin, and given the 'oppression' that the Welsh feel they have suffered historically in the hands of the British/English, it is understandable that they now vigorously pursue the assertion of their identity. However, emotion must never be conflated with rationality, which should be the ultimate guide for government policy making, which after all, affects the lives of millions of people.