What We Take For Granted

 I chuckled over a post by Library Matters on Facebook the other day, which showed a young woman searching through a drawer in a card catalogue with the caption, "Prehistoric Googling" and couldn't resist sharing it, saying, "Oh yes, I remember it well, and contributed to many card catalogues."

For people under a certain age, here is an image of a card catalogue, from Wikimedia Commons:

Depending on the purpose of the library, there would usually be at least two sequences of cards: one arranged in subject order (classified), the other alphabetical by author. During the late seventies and for most of the eighties, I spent many happy hours producing catalogue cards and then filing them, so that my library's users could find the information they needed. The one I remember best was the card catalogue I maintained at the Library of the Chartered Institute of Transport. Not only did it contain details about books, but also a detailed index of journal articles, for all the journals to which CIT subscribed. Most of the morning during each working day was spent indexing, because if the subject of the article was a complex one, which they often were, each article would require several catalogue cards to index it adequately.

Well over thirty years have passed since I last contributed to a card catalogue. Since then, the information revolution has happened and they are redundant. (And it was already taking place during the eighties, when I stubbornly stuck to manual input, because computers scared me so much). Looking back from the vantage point of today, when almost everything is available online, it's hard to believe I spent so much time on them. These days, only one entry is required and the cross-references (all the extra "catalogue cards") are generated automatically.  Far less time consuming.

Yet I do not begrudge the hours I spent writing catalogue cards. In their time, they were invaluable to the Library's users and were, in their way, an efficient information retrieval system. Of course, online searching is far easier and can be done remotely, given access to any online catalogue. Whereas, in the old days, you had to be physically present in the library to find the information. 

It is too easy for organisations (including branches of government) to take it for granted that *everyone* has a smartphone these days and can therefore interact with the online world. But it ain't necessarily so. This was brilliantly illustrated by the film, I, Daniel Blake, which I blogged about here. I do sometimes worry about the minority of people who are unable to access online resources. Those who do not have a computer, or are unable to get to grips with using one. This is a problem which will become more and more rare as time passes, but at present, there is still a substantial minority of folk who don't have the IT skills to embrace our Information Age. They are excluded from so much because of this. To give just one example, our local GP practice now requires patients to complete an online form before accessing their services. And I do wonder how intimidating that is for some...

So I think we need to remember that not everyone is au fait with the online world and take the trouble to provide non-computerised alternatives.

Self Deception

Last Sunday evening, my husband and I attended a screening of a live performance of Good, a play about the Holocaust by British playwright, C.P. Taylor. It was both astonishing and disturbing. There were only three actors – David Tennant, who played the protagonist, Professor John Halder, who gradually turns from a liberal minded man in 1933, whose best friend was a Jew, into a high-ranking member of Hitler’s SS. The other two actors were Elliot Levey and Sharon Small, who both played multiple characters, without changing their clothes or leaving the stage. It was a tour de force of brilliant acting, against one, very minimalist set. And, like I said, very disturbing. It demonstrated superbly how the slow drip, drip of evil propaganda can change someone’s opinions, while still enabling them to justify their actions to themselves as “one of the good guys”.

I don't believe in evil as an independent power in the world. No-one is born evil - there is no such thing as original sin. I believe that every human being has the power to choose between good and evil. However, the choices that each person makes will set them on a path towards a life filled with good deeds or evil ones, and the farther one walks along the chosen path, the harder it is to turn aside. As the Native Americans believe, "it depends which wolf you feed." C.P. Taylor’s play was a brilliant and chilling illustration of this in action.

I have to believe that there is a divine spark "that of God" in everyone, but perhaps those people we call evil choose to ignore its promptings. There are many degrees of evil; for example, I do not believe that the majority of German people during Hitler's Reich chose evil consciously, although the dyed in the wool Nazis certainly seem to have done. But the Nazi propaganda machine awakened the latent anti-Semitism in many German hearts, giving them someone to blame for their hard lives, and enabling them to believe its lies, and close their eyes to what was going on.

The Nazis were obsessed by an ideal: the supremacy of the Herrenvolk, the German race, and the elimination of all others. And this ideal led to death and destruction on a large scale. It seems that if we allow ourselves to become obsessed by an ideal, it skews our judgement and corrupts our reason. If we idealise something or somebody, we don't see it / them straight. Examples of this are littered throughout history.

I believe that it is only by the exercise of compassion, by being open to the hearts and minds of others, by recognising that each of us is "unique, precious, a child of God", that the closed mind and consequent intolerance can be avoided. Because the problem has not gone away. Intolerance is alive and well in our society. If we are not careful, we can fall into judgement and “othering”, seeing other people as somehow less than we are ourselves. It can lead to all sorts of -isms: sexism, racism, homophobia.

Why do we do this to ourselves, to each other? We are all human beings, each one unique, each one worthy of love and justice and respect, each one with unique gifts to offer the world. Or that is what I believe...