st_ouennais

A cultural council eh?  Would that be the Hedley Le Maistre appreciation society meeting at the Farmers?  Actually it is a States event at Hautlieu School on June 14th.  Having such an event does prompt the tricky question of what is culture.  I think of it as something like: The stuff we chose to engage with when we aren't going about just surviving.  The word engagement is critical.  You can't have culture on your own.  Its interactive.  You may be on your own creating or contributing to it, but it is only culture when it has a feedback or resonance to the way we collectively do things.  That means someone can be involved in several disparate cultures.

Now I happen to think it is important, and that States have a crucial role in culture for two specific reasons.   Have you noticed how our society is becoming progressively segmented, typically by age?  Too often our old folks are stuck in homes and don't get much at all.  Our children are all herded for long hours into schools where the only adults are people in authority.  Young adults can't go into pubs or many clubs so congregate together in public places in a manner that then puts off other people going there.  In the  workplace it is common for the older employees (managers) to be in their offices or meetings much of the time while the younger are in open plan sites. 

Even the terminology we use emphasises this segregation.  Youth and Community Centre immediately says to me that youth is not considered part of the community.  How very wrong. This is in contrast to what the anthropologists tell us about natural human societies.  Our natural structure is small mixed age groups of around 2 dozen people doing most everything together.  Now that is where my first role for culture comes in.  I want to see it used  to overcome this segmented effect on our society and to actively encourage mixing and interaction, particularly across the generations.  I certainly don't want to see a series of special events aimed at particular age groups that perpetuate the disassociation already apparent in society.

The second requirement is more long term, but possibly more critical.  If you've read anything else on my blog you will know I see life getting tougher in the next decade or so.  Continued oil and food shortages suggest we are heading for a world with less material 'stuff' around, and much more time, effort and resources directed simply to keeping the real necessities of life in place.  I subscribe to the transition culture approach, believing we will adapt to this future by living simpler more localised lives.  Without the material stuff that fills so much of our lives now there will be a big hole. Lets plan to fill it with culture.

For more information on the conference go to :
http://www.gov.je/ESC/Lifelong+Learning/FirstCulturalCouncilConference.htm

Ryan Morrison has some interesting observations on culture on his blog:
http://www.upyourego.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/28/what-is-culture/


À bé

 That question was posed on one of local forum groups recently - and I think needs an answer.

To answer that question we have to have an idea of what is the finance industry.  How about a human scheme to store up treasure on earth. Thats the simplest outline I can offer that covers banking , trust companies, investment holdings and even inheritance tax. All of which are significant parts of the financial services set up in Jersey. While that definition does allow for physical assets like land and gold, in reality today we are talking money. 

Money is strange stuff. It has no intrinsic value. Its an abstract construct albeit one sometimes represented by physical tokens, but more often these days by digital storage on a computer somewhere. It represents exchange or interchange.  When you have a reasonable free supply of goods and services money is a useful mechanism of trust between the parties to expedite those exchanges over an extended time period. That is it gets over the immediate problem of barter - where we both have to have items to exchange today.  I can exchange my good/services today and expect to be able to get goods/services back in the future using money.  Some people like to have lots of potential for future goods/services (eg a pension or similar) so aim to acquire money to provide for this.  

Money is useful, so useful in fact that it has become something of a swiss army knife for life.  However it is just a tool.  Like any tool there are some craftsmen who can do amazing work with it, that might not be possibile otherwise.  Thats how we end up with bankers and fund managers etc. In fact the tool has become ubiquitous and so useful has led us to forget what it is for. More importantly we have forgotten what are its limitations. We have become so accostomed to it we don't really think about doing things with any other tool.

However there are limitations to money.  Read the previous paragraph carefully and you will see the caveat is that you have reasonably free supply of goods and services.  There are plenty of examples where this free flow has been absent, and it pretty much follows money is of little use in those cases for example Zimbabawe currently, communist states in previous times. This is very relevant to us now.  We have world wheat reserves at an all time low, and food riots round the world. Oil production is barely able to meet demand, and we are only discovering 1/5th of the amount we are using at best.  We are at a point where fundamental resources for industy and living are both about to become hard to source. Put another way goods and food are about to start not being in free supply. We may be looking at 5 to 10 years for things to get seriously bad, but bad to catastrophic they will get.

In a theoretical economic world that would lead to an increase in production . Except here we are talking about primary resources they are physically limited by land, water supply, climate changes and the reserves of oil in the ground. These are hard constraints that no economics can bypass. Initially shortages like this will result in inflation -people want more money for the same goods and services.  But with something as fundamental as drinking water or food or oil, once supplies get significantly short producers will use it to feed and support themselves and their family and countrymen before selling it on.  Thats just human nature. Suddenly your money can't buy the stuff you really need. And Jersey wont be in a position to feed everyone here, at least not without massive upheaval. So how are we going to import essentials like food?  If money is no longer a token of exchange, its value is minimal.  Once you have devalued money you have undermined any need for a finance industry much beyond basic banking. 

I am not saying the finance industry per se will necessarily destroy the island (though it could), but I am saying the finance industry will not be its saviour. Far from it  the finance industry will struggle to exist.  What will put a severe strain, perhaps even a breaking strain, on the island will be masses of unemployed ex-finance industry employees holding out their begging bowls offering useless money to those who do have something of real value. The greater we rely on the finance industry now the worse will be the problem when it is gone. I don't hold out much hope of all those non-finance people who have struggled to cope in these boom times rushing to set up soup kitchens for the impoverished bankers and fund managers of tomorrow.