The Universality of Christmas.

Last year, on behalf of Thinking, I wrote a seasonal greeting and reflection on the approach to Christmas (https://bit.ly/Thinking17). Christmas is of course a religious festival for many, but it also has a mood that reaches if not universally at least to billions more people than the religiously affiliated. Businesses and people around the world send each other warm greetings and best wishes. Gestures of well-being and even affection.

As businesses interact with their customers, suppliers, and each other, what is there (apart from profit) that belongs essentially to Christmas in such a universal way?

I suggest innocence and what it brings to experienced knowledge. (I have not forgotten the wonderful sets of poems by William Blake.) And I think these speak to powerful human desires in our time.

The Christmas story presents in fact two stories that seem like the endpoints of innocence and knowledge. It begins on the 25thDecember with the simplicity of a stable, shepherds, animals, a virginal mother and a loving father, with a pure baby. As an image of the purity of innocence, it is lovely.

The experience of an innocence is close to a universal memory for the billions of people on the planet.

Innocence 

Innocence is not to be confused with na?veté. Na?veté is a kind of ignorance while innocence has a kind of knowledge. In review of our world today, I think that this counterpoint of innocence and knowledgeable experience can be set against na?veté and division. Today (when Prime Minister May is already facing votes of no confidence, when social media brands seem to have contaminated the innocence of their first promise, when physical and other walls are being built between nations, when financial markets are in trouble, when disabled children are being expatriated and trafficked women being mistreated by a government), it seems important.

Consider your own experience or memory of innocence. Everyone has some.

This will probably have been in your own childhood or the childhood of others but is not a necessity. It's not unusual for people who truly call innocence to mind to then weep with a sense of loss. 

Innocence I think has three qualities. There is a kind of native security, all is well with the world. This gives in the adult the possibility of choosing the ethical good and offering respect. There is a feeling of purity, which in fact gives the possibility of the freedom of imagination and pure thinking where a new kind of innocence is discovered. (Very little ordinary thinking and imagination is pure and original — it is mostly the repetition of ideas and memories and prejudices and associations all mixed up with personal feelings about them.) And thirdly there is a simple unity between love and loveliness. They come together in play. Together, they give the possibility of imagination and ideals in treatment of each other and in designs for a better participated life.

Experience (& the Internet)

The Christmas story of the shepherds is separated by “12 holy nights” from the endpoint on 6th January, much emphasised in Eastern Europe. Now come the Magi to celebrate, the wise experienced men (probably) who know the signs of the times; and the mood turns dark (there will follow the "murder of the innocents.") 

When the Internet began and the first chat rooms appeared, followed in due course by Facebook, there was both a na?veté and an innocence. It was a na?veté to believe that a global industry running on an electrical computing network could be free of commercial pressures and distortions. There would be intrusions of advertising and propaganda and there would be manipulation of truth, as well as the quest to gobble up profits and power amongst those who find that palatable.

But there was also a kind of justified innocence. Why shouldn't friends and interested people interact with each other pleasantly? Deep down, such things as friendship, warmth, and social participation, feel like they ought to be innocent possibilities. So does collaboration. I imagine a group of friends going down to the pub to have a chat, and maybe play some games together, and being told by the landlord that the drinks are free. How kind, they say (na?vely), order their drinks and go to a table. Shortly after, they find that whatever they are talking about a salesperson pops his or her head into the group to say, I couldn't help hearing you say… I wonder if I can interest you in? I guess that as long as those friends preserve ordinary humanity, they are likely to leave and go to a pub where they have to buy their drinks, but they have to be convivial together.

Freedom

My people in the pub first of all want freedom from interference, manipulation, commoditisation, inequality (#MeToo). But freedom from exists because we perceive the possibility of freedom to… A German philosopher, Johannes Kreyenbuehle, showed that the understanding of a 'negative idea' of freedom (the absence of imposed necessity) already means recognition of a positive free-activity (freiheit), being free and therefore an individual. 

Innocence is a foundation of this recognition.

Without such freedom, there is no real possibility of creativity, of individuality, and of genuine moral or ethical choice. Perhaps these are what people (“Remainers” and “Leavers”, “Populists” and “Democrats”, businesses and their customers) want deep down?

Please take this as my and our wish for you.