Thinking about value

I have been thinking a lot about value over the past couple of weeks.  I keep getting angry about the way culture is so entrenched.  I started reading Raymond Williams the long revolution again  and was taken by the way culture is used to divide rather than connect people.

In the children's oxford dictionary they use in schools culture is defined as "everything that makes us who we are"  I quoted this at a conference in Canada and someone said "That's not much use when you are trying to put a funding bid together"  I suppose he was meaning that it wasn't very specific but the sentiment seems at least a good start.

I'm not very religous although as I get older I do find myself becoming a little more spiritual, maybe looking for things that cannot be explained with empirical scientific method.  In the beginning of Ruskin's Unto this last he talks about how science reduces the world - he says that people are interested in reducing things down to flesh and skeletons, he says he is happy for people to do this but that he is not personally interested and thinks that people are more than skin and bones , he does't say what more - in 1865, in the last days of wonder it was probably easier to get away with just sayiong things.

Religion then in terms of Culture I was going to write about the Church of Culture having a Schism As Williams suggests the cultural revolution is a long one and the splitting of "Everything that makes us who we are" took place over a century of change.  I think that the reason schism is a good way to talk about the divide between culture is that people have forgotten the reasons for the difference they just know that difference is important.

In the end this comes to embedded views about quality and value.  Some of these are questioned others run very deep. I think Bourdieu would call it "Tracing the epistemological unconscious which is a posh way of saying that you need to work out the things you take for granted within your everyday practice - he calls it Habitus. 

So this week I've mostly been tracing why I think a certain way about things and questioning as it says in our manifesto "What I think I know.'  but enough of that for now.  My favorite Ruskin quote at the moment is "A man that wraps himself up in himself ends up with a very small parcel." so I'm going to do some stuff - I quite like the GIF of a peacock butterfly I found in Toms room this morning but it's not really a days work