I’ve long had troubles with my digestive tract and focussed mostly on FODMAPs as the key driver for them, with varying degrees of success. The worst “delivery units” of oligo-fructans for me are onions and garlic, which poses limits on our cooking at home, and makes eating out a real minefield.

Yesterday we attended a German-Sri Lankan wedding, which was a lot of fun. Some Sri Lankan cousins of the groom provided the meal, and it was time for me to simply say “right, that’s it” and simply eat the food, which was delicious.

I suffered in the night, but not all that much more than I have been recently whilst trying to be careful and it made me think: alcohol is also bad for us, but drinking together has real social benefits that shouldn’t be underplayed. It was the same for me yesterday with the curries: I enjoyed them so much, and we all suffered the spiciness (the Sri Lankans primarily because it was all so mild for them) together that I realised:

Some “enjoyable sacrifices” are worth making.

Following my previous, football-inspired post on team and tribe, I plucked up the courage to read a distantly related Guardian article entitled Now comes the ‘womanosphere’: the anti-feminist media telling women to be thin, fertile and Republican which sent me back to my own very conservative, Catholic (pretty tribal!) upbringing, with all the pre-marital sexual guardrails and constraints that came along with that. There, too, the default expectation was that mothers would be housewives, to manage the large family* and support the breadwinner. That sense was bolstered by a feeling of us being an embattled, absolutely correct minority, cast unwillingly but cohesively into the wild and sinful wider world. That feeling accompanied me through university and my earliest working days, to thankfully be sloughed off over decades of ‘normal’ life, helped I think by a slow-to-awaken core of suspicion that “all of” right wasn’t necessarily on our side, that helped loosen that armour from the inside.

Yet another related Guardian article cropped up on the American (where elsican?) natalist movement What is America’s pro-natalism movement really about? m highlighting a (for now) relatively small, embattled, inherently correct minority turning inwards to battle and protect itself against a wrong-headed wider world.

Then, finally, there was another article, entitled Please, yell at my kids! Five lessons I’ve learned about good parenting from around the world (I have to say, though: ‘five or ten things’ are the worst articles, but still…) about ways of raising families around the world, with the common, positive thread being that of community. The author also points out that

parenting is hard everywhere, but nowhere is it as lonely as it is in the US

The message for me from all of these links has to be that of plurality as a good. Communities can be too closed and insular, becoming cells focussed on their own people and messages: with the availability of self-reinforcing but unreflective, non-selfcritical media (print media does the job well enough, too), these cells can grow to become a danger to society - from thread to theat, as it were. Communities can also potentially become too loose and incoherent to retain that identity.

If we can gain a plural sense of community, that is, openness to the idea of interwoven groups and communities, then we have a stronger society. For societies are interwoven, interlocking communities. If too many communities cut the threads and build walls rather than bridges, convince themselves that everybody else is the enemy, then societies suffer. Communities need to be challenged with the fundamental questions: who is this good for, and where do our goods come from?

And society needs to monitor and promote the health of its communities. We don’t need to convert everybody from Catholicism; housewives make a valuable (if undervalued) contribution to society; football fans bring cohesion and dynamism to a town; positive birth rates can be a sign of healthy communities. “Just” keep everybody respectful, and things will be better for all.

No doubt that’s a rich Western point of view - but even here, in strong Europe, we need that reinforcement. But before things become too earnest…

*: an early draft had me writing

… housewives being there to cook and manage the family

which, thanks to English grammar, came across as rather gruesomely funny when I mentally parsed it in that way…)

I enjoyed reading this article on Wired the other day on the downsides to that apparent silicon valley cult of Effective Altruism. EA (or Alt-Eff, as I like to shorten it, for no particular reason) is on the surface of it an attractive proposition: a well-informed and clever organisation finds the technical metrics for clearly stating the most effective ways of supporting humanity around the globe, and focusses its spending on those.

The trouble is that the whole culture of rationality and programmability pervading silicon valley, added to the lack of time individuals (can) take to analyse the situation for themselves, means that metrics tend towards the overly technical, rational and clear - and thereby susceptible to omission of the humanity behind the sheer number of humans that they purport to aid.

It reminds me of the Aristotelian modes of knowledge of techne and phronesis, which relate to crafting and making (techne) and to inter-relational politics (phronesis). If you are by nature and training a technical person revelling in programming or financial analysis, you are at great risk of missing the interpersonal, or even the overall human aspect of your undertaking.

Tipping already barely stable relationships amongst societies and governments, providing targets for capture by the powerful and unscrupulous, misuse and even environmental pollution are all possible dangers that don’t appear to have been covered in the same way by Alt-Eff as the traditional on-the-ground aid agencies try to deal with.

Better than doing nothing? I’m not even so sure of that - perhaps better that the hugely rich tech bros (and their finance cousins) actually pay fair taxes to their own governments to support funding for inter-governmental overseas aid… Aid and charity are tricky, and that article goes to great depths to show why: worth a read!

I went swimming today with my daughter, happy to be back home after a week-long training course (which I should write about) near Stuttgart, to spend time with her. I am not a good swimmer, but, with the pool being fairly empty today, I managed to snatch 30 minutes in the “Schnellschwimmerbahn” (the lane reserved for fast swimmers) to work on my… OK, to try to create even the slightest bit of a semblance of endurance.

After those 30 minutes I went to the bathroom and, on the way back, I encountered one of those extremely trim gentlemen who, so utterly focussed on their sport, seem to forget about mere bobbers like me: he scowled past me twice in and out of the showers, and then found a lane to his liking. In the pool, he was indeed fast, a swimmer of such speed, apparent endurance and efficiency that I can only dream of. But with that totally understandable focus on technique and power, on his own body, he seemed to consider other bodies as hinderances. It’s how he made me feel, anyway.

That stance (floating pose?), I will admit, is something I can be accused of, too, since there really are swimmers slower and older than me, who do seem to take up room and enter into my swum furrow. It’s a sense of irritation and entitlement that feels justified but, upon inspection, isn’t really. So when I do feel that sense of irritation about the slow swimmers, I should take it upon myself to see their position to me as being in the same relation as mine to that über-swimmer (who, just as is always the case on the Autobahn, will find himself the “hunted” by other, younger, fitter, faster swimmers) - to recognise their efforts, to embrace the obstacle as a swimming challenge, and to smile.

And the best way to forget about all of that? Splashing and diving with my daughter, totally annoying other “proper” swimmers, whilst we’re at it. We don’t mean it that way, honest!