Tag: Giles Fraser

  • A crushingly distressing indignity

    Some of the people ratio-ing Giles Fraser on Twitter are making the same point about people not necessarily wanting their children or other loved ones wiping their bums, and preferring strangers to do it.

    https://twitter.com/jkfecke/status/1098930369720668161

  • Make Helen do it

    Giles Fraser wishes everything were more like the good old days when everybody stayed home except rich men.

    Last week the Evening Standard – now, of course, a propaganda rag for George Osborne’s Remain-inspired end-of-the-world fearmongering – led with the following front-page headline: “Who’ll look after our elderly post Brexit, ask care chiefs”.

    I’m still spitting blood at the arrogance and callousness of that question. It summed up all that I have against the Osborne neoliberal (yes, that’s what it is) world-view. And why I am longing for a full-on Brexit – No Deal, please – to come along and smash the living daylights out of the assumptions behind that question.

    Is he standing up for exploited workers? Haha no, that’s not what he’s raging about at all.

    First, let me answer the question. Children have a responsibility to look after their parents. Even better, care should be embedded within the context of the wider family and community. It is the daughter of the elderly gentleman that should be wiping his bottom. This sort of thing is not something to subcontract.

    Of course; the daughter. She has nothing else to do, the lazy bitch – don’t talk to me about her job and the kids and dinner, she still has to wipe her father’s bottom, and her husband’s father’s bottom too if he needs it wiped. That’s what she’s for, god damn it.

    Ideally, then, people should live close to their parents and also have some time availability to care for them.

    Not people; women. It’s not men’s responsibility to look after their parents, it’s women’s. It’s important to keep that straight.

    But, to drop the sarcasm for the moment, what of his first, less sexist version of the claim? What of “Children have a responsibility to look after their parents”? Do they?

    I would say no. There may be other ways of saying they should, other things being equal, but I think “responsibility” is the wrong word since they never at any time had a chance to agree (or not) to take on the responsibility. The responsibility is in the other direction: parents owe it to their children. It doesn’t flow in the same way in both directions.

    To a considerable extent, parents don’t want to be their children’s responsibility, if they can help it. It feels like being a burden and many people recoil at it. I suspect Fraser would say that’s because we all grow up in this atomistic greedy individualistic society, but then we can reply that the obverse is societies with a rigidly hierarchical view of age such that parents are always in a position to exploit their children (especially daughters) if they want to. At any rate I think his flat assertion that children have a responsibility to look after their parents claims way too much.

    Back to his drivel about what a bad thing freedom of movement is:

    Social mobility is very much a young person’s value, of course. Get on. Get out of your community. Find a job anywhere you please. Undo the ties that bind you. The world is your oyster.

    This is the philosophy that preaches freedom of movement, the Remainers’ golden cow. And it is this same philosophy that encourages bright working-class children to leave their communities to become rootless Rōnin, loyal to nothing but the capitalist dream of individual acquisition and self-advancement.

    Well, it’s perfectly possible to change one’s address without becoming loyal to nothing but the capitalist dream of individual acquisition and self-advancement. People can leave the home city to do idealistic things, useful things, generous things; people can grow up and make their own choices about where to live. It’s not becoming for Giles Fraser to say they mustn’t.

    Always on the move, always hot desking. Short-term contracts. Laptops and mobiles – even the tools of modern workplace remind us that work no longer has any need of place. All this is a philosophy that could not have been better designed to spread misery and unhappiness. Human beings need roots for their emotional and psychological flourishing. They need long-term, face-to-face relationships; they need chatting in the local post office; they need a sense of shared identity, shared values, mutual commitment. No amount of economic growth is worth sacrificing all this for.

    What garbage. Freedom of movement does not mean mandatory constant movement, it means freedom of it. Maybe some people do need to live in the same place all their lives, but if they do it’s for them to find that out, not Giles Fraser to impose it on them as a rule.

    My GP friend is Muslim, and a fairly conservative one I think it’s fair to say. We were eating in a Pakistani restaurant in Tooting. All around us extended Muslim families were sitting together, children and the elderly, aunts and uncles. It was a buzzy hub of a homogeneous society – the sort of society that the West sometimes criticises for being inward looking. “They must integrate!” comes the familiar line, which, in effect, means they should disperse, learn the values of progressive individualism.

    From where I was sitting it is these people – and not George Osborne swanning off to his new £3 million chalet in Verbier – that have got it right.

    He seems to have forgotten something – a rather large and obvious something. At some point some of those people moved, or their elders did. Pakistani restaurants have not been in Tooting since the Domesday book, now have they.

    He’s being badly ratioed. 740 likes, 2800 replies. He’s sulking.

  • Always confused

    Giles Fraser sees part of the mistake.

    The problem with the person who drove a lorry into a crowded market of Christmas shoppers wasn’t that he was too religious, but that he wasn’t religious enough. It was the action of a half-believer, the sort of thing done by someone who doesn’t so much believe in God – but rather believes in the efficacy of human power exercised on God’s behalf, as if God needed his help.

    Of course. Obviously. I’ve said it many times, and I’m sure so have most talkative atheists. It’s absurd that humans who profess to believe in an omnipotent omniscient god think that god needs their help.

    It’s a very basic point. The truth of God’s existence does not depend on me. It does not depend on me filling my church with believers at midnight mass. Nor does it depend on me (or anyone else) winning or losing arguments about God’s existence on Twitter. God is not like a political party that lives or dies on its support or lack of it.

    Well actually that’s exactly what “God” is like – but not in the terms of the God-belief itself. That’s the tricky part. In reality “God” is indeed dependent on humans and their beliefs and actions, but according to the believers, “God” is not dependent on anything. They would omit the scare-quotes, you see, and the scare-quoteless God is independent of humans. But the fly in the ointment is that there’s no reason to think there is any such god, or that we know anything about it if there is. The “truth” of that god’s existence does depend on the prowess of Giles Fraser and others at filling churches with humans.

    “The great aim of all true religion,” wrote William Temple, “is to transfer the centre of interest from self to God.” Religious terrorists don’t get this because they still think it’s all about them, and what they can achieve. That’s the heresy.

    It may be the heresy, but it’s not the real mistake. The real mistake is to transfer the center of interest from self to God instead of transferring it from self to others. “God” doesn’t need us; others do.

    Indeed, what Allahu Akbar surely means (and Arabic speaking Christians use the phrase too) is that God needs nothing from me in order to be God. And when this is recognised, I can (sometimes with quite considerable relief) drop all my desperate schemes and arguments that try and keep him going in the face of opposition and disbelief. Indeed, in order to seek to transfer the centre of interest from self to God, to achieve other-centredness, you can’t make it all about you, your spiritual struggle, your religious heroism.

    But achieving other-centeredness in the form of God-centeredness achieves nothing. It’s pointless. It’s pointless if “God” doesn’t exist and it’s pointless if it does. There are excellent, compelling reasons for not focusing all one’s care and concern on one’s precious self, but they’re to do with other people (and animals and the planet we depend on), not a speculated god.

  • Die in your bed full of shit, says Giles Fraser

    Giles Fraser notes that choice in dying has a lot of public support. He bravely dissents from this public support. He says why.

    These days, people say they want to die quickly, painlessly in their sleep and without becoming a burden. Apparently, this is what a good death now looks like. Well, I want to offer a minority report.

    I do want to be a burden on my loved ones just as I want them to be a burden on me – it’s called looking after each other. Obviously, I know people are terrified of the indignity of dying and of being ill generally. Having someone wipe our bums, clean up our mess, put up with our incoherent ramblings and mood swings is a threat to our cherished sense of personal autonomy.

    But this is where the liberal model of individual self-determination breaks down. For it is when we are this vulnerable that we have little choice but to allow ourselves to be loved and looked after. Lying in a bed full of our own faeces, unable to do anything about it, is when we break with the idea of René Descartes’ pernicious “I think therefore I am”.

    Stupid, stupid, stupid man. I know he can’t be stupid really, but my god what a stupid thing to say. If he wants to be helpless and let loved ones care for him, then he can choose that (provided the loved ones exist and agree). The issue is not mandatory help in dying, it’s the ability to choose it if you choose it. If and only if. Where does he get the fucking arrogance to think that because he thinks a slow painful helpless shit-the-bed death is the way to go, therefore the choice to say no to that should remain illegal for everyone?

    I know where he gets it, I suppose; he gets it from being a priest, which brings with it a mental certificate of moral rightness. He thinks that what he thinks must be a law for everyone.

    No, we are not brains in vats. We are not solitary self-defining intellectual identities who form temporary alliances with each other for short-term mutual advantage. My existence is fundamentally bound up with yours. Of course, I will clean you up. Of course, I will hold your hand in the long hours of the night. Shut up about being a burden. I love you. This is what it means to love you. Surely, there is something extraordinarily beautiful about all of this.

    Stupid. Of course it’s beautiful if it’s what you want. But equally of course it’s not beautiful if it’s what you don’t want. It’s not any kind of denial or betrayal of love, either. Don’t try that on for one second. That’s just moral blackmail of a peculiarly disgusting kind. We all need to be able to decide what we can stand and when we want to end it when we can’t stand it any more. We do not need unctuously bullying clerics telling us we have to keep on standing it because “I will hold your hand in the long hours of the night.” (Oh really? Giles Fraser is going to hold the hand of all of us? No of course he’s not, and he shouldn’t say he is. His existence is not bound up with mine, either. I know that was rhetoric, and it’s a generic “you” and a generic “I” – but it also isn’t. It’s manipulative that way.)

    But it is also right to push back against the general assumption that pain reduction is unproblematic. For pain is so much a part of life that its suppression can also be a suppression of a great deal of that which is valuable. Constantly anaesthetising ourselves against pain is also a way to reduce our exposure to so much that is wonderful about life.

    Yet too many of us make a Faustian pact with pharmacology, welcoming its obvious benefits, but ignoring the fact that drugs also can demand your soul. That’s perhaps why we speak of the overly drugged-up as zombies.

    The same damn problem still. If you want pain, Mr Fraser, you can choose pain. That does not mean you get to force anyone else to choose it. It doesn’t even mean that anyone else should choose it.

    Finally, the contemporary “good death” is one that happens without the dying person knowing all that much about it. But what about the need for time to say goodbye and sorry and thank you? It is as if we want to die without actually knowing we are dying.

    Is he kidding? Who has the better chance of saying goodbye and sorry and thank you, people who don’t know when the end is or people who schedule it?

    My problem with euthanasia is not that it is a immoral way to die, but that it has its roots in a fearful way to live.

    That’s insulting. What a horrible, self-centered, sentimental yet ruthless article.