The moral sugar high of the protest vote

We shouldn’t give politicians bloody noses over insurmountable single issues.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A winning candidate at an election address the audience from a lectern while the loosing candidates look on

The victorious candidate at the Rochdale by-election.

A cat was elected as a Member of Parliament. A cat. George Galloway - former Labour party MP and Rula Lenska’s former cat - has been elected as Member of Parliament for Rochdale. The unique circumstances of the by-election make this a less surprising result than one might think. The Labour Party disowned their candidate, the Tory Party hardly contested the seat, and the sheer number of inappropriate independents meant that a split-vote victory for Galloway was entirely foreseeable. One must also note Galloway’s many skills: as a campaigner, an orator, and a dirty-tactic by-election gadfly.

So…Rula Lenska’s cat did the unimaginable and won a seat in Parliament. How did the cat do this? He convinced people that they could vote for him to protest the current Parliamentary position on the Israel-Gaza War. In his victory speech, Galloway gave an ominous warning: “Keir Starmer…this is for Gaza.” He went on to intimate that his victory was due to the high proportion of Muslim voters in Rochdale; their disgust at the Labour Party’s response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza morphing into a wish to give Keir Starmer (‘one cheek of the same backside’ - Rishi Sunak being the other cheek) a bloody-nose. He warned that Starmer “…will pay a high price for…enabling, encouraging, and covering for the catastrophe presently going on in occupied Palestine, in the Gaza strip.”

My fellow voters are intelligent enough to recognise that the single addition of George Galloway to the green benches will do almost nothing to affect change. They have voted so, the general consensus goes, simply to register their fury at the plight of ‘fellow Muslims’. I simply want to respond with a question. Is this moral?

People vote for all sorts of reasons. If we believe political scientists and pollsters, voters might care about many things, but will end up voting on the basis of one thing. Normally the economy. One’s own economic interest is a perfectly rational reason to vote for one party’s promises than another. There is a potential immediate impact on our lives and those of our family and friends. But Gaza?

Sociologists have spilt a tremendous amount of ink describing how human communities tend towards ‘tribal’ affection. We tend to feel more connected to those who are like us - in terms of geographic location, in terms of obvious racial characteristics, in terms of language and culture, of course religion. The notion that the Gazan War is a war on Muslims would be a natural driver for the Muslim community of Rochdale to vote ‘for’ their fellow Muslims.

On the other hand, in the world of modern ethics there has been a move to recognise that such tribal allegiance is ultimately meaningless - a call to see all human beings as equally worthy of our care and attention, especially irrespective of geography. Peter Singer famously presented the thought experiment of a drowning child - if we are willing to get our shoes wet and muddy to save a drowning child we walk by a shallow pond, why aren’t we willing to give up some of our wealth to alleviate the war-stricken poverty of a Gazan child many miles away?

The people of Rochdale must vote as their conscience requires. I simply worry that their conscience has taken on an impossible burden of care that they will struggle to sustain.

The words of Jesus seem to support such an ethic, which is always global in its vision. We are not only to love our neighbour as ourselves, we are to go out into all the world, evangelising the nations. From its beginning the Christian faith has preached that loving our neighbour means loving everyone. Everyone is a beloved child of God. Everyone is our neighbour. Surely a vote for Galloway, a vote of rage against the occupation of Gaza, is fundamentally moral - either on grounds of tribe, or rejection of tribe. Surely its Christian!

I’m not so sure.

I’m not so sure we fallen humans actually have the capacity to ‘care’ about the horrors that go on many, many miles away. Jesus tells us to love our neighbour as ourselves, but we barely have the emotional energy to love ourselves. We live in a society of such activity and distraction - with a seemingly concomitant rise in the incidence of hopelessness and depression - that I don’t think we can really give our moral and emotional energy to an event as distant and overwhelming as the plight of Gazan civilians. We can barely give it to our families. We can barely give it to ourselves. C S Lewis once wrote that the best way of eradicating suffering was people working away quietly at limited objectives: “I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.”

Jesus was the ultimate localist - God became incarnate as a unique individual, of a particular tribe, of a particular nation, in a particular time and place. Jesus taught an ethic of universal love and dignity and respect, but lived out in specific acts of service. He didn’t wash the feet of all Jerusalem - just his disciples. He didn’t heal all disease everywhere and forever - but he did restore sight to the few blind people he met. St Paul wrote individual letters to individual communities. Yes, he asked them to pray for him and each other, but otherwise told them to focus on their immediate needs and charity and holiness. The popularity of Jordan Peterson is largely based on the achievability of his slightly nebulous self-help worldview: make YOUR bed, keep YOUR back straight, look after YOUR family. Improve yourself first if you want to even begin improving the world. You’ll probably never manage to improve more than your village…maybe only your own household. That might be enough.

I don’t judge those who voted for Galloway as a Gaza-conflict protest. A new campaign, ‘The Muslim Vote’, has emerged to persuade Muslim voters to lend their support to candidates who commit to ‘Peace in Palestine’ – ceasefire, sanction Israel, and a state for the Palestinians. It is becoming clear that what appears to have happened in Rochdale may well happen in constituencies up and down the country. The idea of the ‘Muslim vote’, which Galloway was able to turn into electoral victory, is being given form and force. It is emotive and persuasive, and may well convince people who have no link to Gaza other than their Muslim faith. It is entirely possible that some of the voters have family and friends trapped in the siege. I empathise with their vote and weep for their sorrow.

I don’t judge those who voted for Galloway as a Gaza-conflict protest. I do, however, worry that many have taken upon themselves a fundamentally unwieldy ethic. Galloway is not a one-man parliamentary wrecking ball - whatever he says. The position of the Government will not be changed by his election. The resolve of the Israeli military is unlikely to be dinted by the UK Government, no matter what resolutions the House of Commons passes. The people of Rochdale must vote as their conscience requires. I simply worry that their conscience has taken on an impossible burden of care that they will struggle to sustain. Perhaps they would be more fulfilled and more effective if they cast their vote on the basis of what could be achieved for them in their community, in the immediate future.

We must pray for the people of Gaza, and we must not cease praying; but I would suggest that we must vote in the interests of the people of our own place, our own constituency. Giving the Labour Party a bloody nose over Gaza might be an immediate moral-sugar-high. Electing an MP who will actually work for the needs of the community in their particularity will certainly be less instantaneously thrilling - but maybe it is more moral.

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Holidays/vacations

Mental Health

Psychology

Time

12 July 2024

7 min read

How to get the best time out of your downtime

The joys and perils of taking time out for summer holidays.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

A pair of sunglasses beside a swimming pool.

Jakob Owens on Unsplash.

For the first few days of any summer holiday there seems to be something wrong with my brain. Having looked forward for months to the moment when I can finally down tools and get some rest, having yearned for weeks to be free of the relentless schedule of emails and meetings, the moment finally arrives and I, well… hate it. I’ve wanted to stop for ages and then when I get the chance, I don’t want to. The flywheel momentum of the to-do list somehow carries over into the holiday and turns the first few days into an obsessive nightmare of drivenness.

This usually manifests in the agitation of wanting to rest while being unable to do so. My schedule says stop but my mind hasn’t got the memo. Instead of gently sculling across the pool, I’m swimming time trials through an obstacle course of inflatable beds and dayglo sea creatures. My family is quick to remind me that the languid currents of the pool were designed for relaxation, not for achieving a personal best. ‘It’s called the lazy river, Dad, not Verstappen at the Nürburgring.’ It makes me laugh, but it doesn’t make me stop. Nor does it stop them shouting things like ‘He’s taking the apex’, and ‘Dad’s got DRS’ from their sun loungers every time I sluice past.

In the old days, psychiatrists used to call it the Sunday Neurosis, the mild state of agitated low mood that afflicted people on their day off. The inescapable feeling that we should be doing something on days when there is nothing to do. The realisation that we’re not quite sure who we are when we are freed from the daily demands we can easily resent. I don’t know what you have planned for the summer- a beach party in the Bahamas or an Airbnb in Bridlington or the classic post-Covid staycation- but if you’re planning to take a break of any kind there are a few things you should perhaps keep in mind to make the best of it.

If we must work full throttle to the final hour – we may have to accept that we’ll spend the first few days on holiday getting used to being on holiday.

First. Slow down slowly.

We have a tendency to think that life can change at the speed of thought. Just because our diaries say holiday, doesn’t mean that our bodies are working to the same schedule. The autonomic nervous system that governs our state of physiological arousal largely operates automatically. It isn’t synched to our Outlook calendar and can’t deliver relaxation on demand, no matter how much we would like it to. Psychotherapist Deb Dana likens changing our state of physiological arousal to taking a lift down a few floors. It takes time to move from a highly active state, to a more relaxed and connected way of being. It doesn’t happen at the flick of a switch and we only agitate ourselves more thinking it should. She says we should befriend our nervous system. Instead of impatiently asking ourselves why we aren’t more relaxed, we should simply ask whether we need to be this agitated right now. And if we don’t, accept that it may take us some time to adapt to a less demanding environment.

When it comes to holidays, this suggests we should allow ourselves some time to acclimatise. Our bodies don’t automatically relax the moment they hit the beach, or hike the mountains, or lie under canvas - they need some time. We can do this before the holiday starts, by slowly decelerating as time off approaches. Like a car approaching a junction, if we want to stop smoothly, we might want to hit the brakes long before we reach the stop sign. And if we can’t do that – if we must work full throttle to the final hour – we may have to accept that we’ll spend the first few days on holiday getting used to being on holiday. It may not make us a pleasure to be with, but we can at least understand that it’s just how our bodies work. We are not droids, there isn’t an off switch on the back of our heads.

On holiday, we can take time to savour the experience of living- to be in our bodies, not just use them.

Second, get into your body (and out of your mind).

There’s a reason people spend so much time on holiday exercising their bodies: surfing, climbing, walking, riding. And weird stuff too, that you’d never dream of doing at home. One time in Normandy we booked a hand-pumped locomotive and huffed/puffed our way up and down a railway line for an afternoon. If I didn’t have the blisters to prove it, I’d think I’d dreamed that. Why do we do these things? Because it feels good to be aware of our bodies. Even my laps around the lazy river had a certain logic to them.

Many of us spend most of our time in disembodied thought. We can sometimes feel like the involuntary participants in a workplace time and motion study, in which worth is measured by output. It doesn’t matter where you work – home, school, office, a boat, the woods – sooner or later a spreadsheet will find you. You can run, but you cannot hide your data. And the impact this has on us is that we tend to be more aware of whether we have hit our targets than we are of the toll these targets take on our bodily wellbeing. Just recently I was asked to support a management team going through a stressful restructuring. One guy claimed he didn’t feel the stress of it- he just got on with the job. But when I sympathetically suggested he might be paying for it with his body, the litany of physical ailments he produced sounded like the list of side effects in a 1980s pharmaceutical commercial. He didn’t think he was stressed, but his body kept the score.

Let’s face it, going on holiday itself is stressful. It’s ranked 42 on the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory, just above ‘minor violations of the law’. Apparently packing for Marbella is more stressful than being pulled over by the cops. But it’s worth it if it creates a space in which we can de-stress, a space in which we can remember that we have a body, a body that needs to be looked after. Of all the benefits of bodily awareness – the positive sense of how our body feels, not the crippling consciousness of how it looks – perhaps the greatest is its capacity to turn off the hyperactive judgement of our minds. On holiday, we can take time to savour the experience of living- to be in our bodies, not just use them.

If we are defined by our output, who do we become when our output drops to zero?

Third. Make time to connect.

What happens when we slow down and learn to live in our bodies again? We become open to connection: socially, emotionally, even spiritually. Back to Deb Dana. She notes that when we take that slow elevator down from the souped-up state of busyness to a more relaxed and open state of mind, we activate the ventral vagal nervous system. She calls it our ‘home away from home’- which seems especially apt for being on holiday. In this state we are happier to be seen by others and therefore to be in relationship with them. Whether it’s a conversation while walking, or an evening card-game, or a meal together, all of them offer a chance for us to dwell in our home away from home in connection with others.

One of the things that can keep us so obsessively busy, is that we are not always sure who we would be if we stopped. We’re not certain we have a right to exist when we’re not being productive. If we are defined by our output, who do we become when our output drops to zero? This is why for thousands of years the practice of rest has been enshrined in spiritual practices. Without space to detach ourselves from the hectic pace of life we will inevitably confuse who we are with what we do. The Judeo-Christian tradition called it sabbath, not just a day of rest, but a way of being in which there is nothing left to prove. Holidays can offer us that opportunity, if we are willing to take it. Because after all what do we call someone who becomes more relaxed and embodied and connected? I think: more human.