I have just seen an email from someone who missed a meeting. ‘I did not have it down in my electronic diary for some reason.’ He did not write what would have been understandable and forgivable – ‘I forgot to put it in my diary.’ My beef about electronic diaries is that people lose control of their lives, QED.
This was a very small example of the distancing from responsibility that electronic communication allows. In the meeting we discussed parallel worlds, and the phenomenon of Second Life, where some people spend all the time they can and currently inhabited by over a million people. A woman asked, can you have a baby there? I would think that you can, without all the usual consequences. The phrase ‘get a life’ takes on a new and I think perverse meeting.
In the meeting, held in an NHS Trust, we tried to book a conference room for a later date. They have a click and book system up and running, presumably a spin off from the click and book system that is to be introduced for patients wanting an appointment.
If we as citizens get into the habit of clicking and booking our lives, as we are now doing in all kinds of ways, this has implications for our idea of the self. Negotiations take on a digital all-or-nothing quality – 010101 – enter password, password not recognised … or, if we are in some virtual god's good books, click to continue ….
I suggest that we write blogs to feel more real. How weird that is. And how many of us look ourselves up on Google to see who we are these days?

Is identity linked to age? After all our experience is etched in our faces and there is a lot we are responsible for. Grumpy old people like us are sometimes surprised to find that a younger generation has also a fierce sense of morality – while according to a recent survey we are supposed to envy their sexual freedom.
What is confusing about personal morality is the blurring of a distinction between a technical offence – equivalent say to parking in a resident’s bay, or being late with tax returns - that has no shame attached, though the penalties are unavoidable and disproportionately severe, and an act that is not as ethic-free as some people would like to think - sleeping with a stranger, perhaps, or insider trading, or lying in public, where the penalties are unlikely and uncertain.
Identity is linked to shame, if we define shame as to do with an attack on our identity, our sense of ourselves being compromised.
Am I right that people don’t apologise as much as they used to? In public life the example at the moment has to be Blair, who has yet to admit he was wrong about invading Iraq. But I don’t remember other politicians doing much apologising. Blunkett writes his memoirs, when you might think it more appropriate to be contritely silent for a good long while. Whatever happened to the Profumo effect?
Those that are caught out now use their disgrace to enhance their celebrity status.
The political apology when it comes is to do with the faults of a previous generation – it’s like getting the Pope to apologise for the crusades - so it is not really an apology about oneself.
So we look at what is going on – I want to share the puzzlement of Freddie Truman, when he retired as a player and became a cricket commentator - I don’t understand what’s going off out there. Public life seems at times to be verging on anarchy, with blatant individualism at large in the land, corporate greed and celebrities demanding respect with seven figure contracts.
We could even feel some sympathy with Muslims wanting to distance themselves from the secular extravagances of our society. Wearing a niqab could be maintaining an appropriate modesty – or a way of symbolically holding your nose against the smell. But if we also want to distance ourselves from religious certainties, we have then to defend a liberal sensibility, in part Sermon on the Mount and in part the paradox of an unfounded rationalism and belief in progress.
My son, a Christian, has no sympathy with the air hostess, who wants to wear her crucifix. As he says, the airlines have a very strict dress code. This reminds me of the deep acting that Arli Hochschild described in air hostesses, where you have to play the part so well that it becomes part of your self. Blair is like that. (Paul Hoggett talked about this at last year’s OPUS conference.)
The state morality is not very helpful – a mix of performance targets and health and safety legislation, with an exaggerated respect for money as an indicator of social value.
This leaves the liberal sensibility struggling, I suspect, which may be why the account of OPUS global listening posts earlier in the year seemed to verge from commentary to self-parody in its repetitious cries of existential despair.
What other position can we take? A second marriage is supposed to be a triumph of hope over experience. Perhaps that has to be the approach that we take, as we look at Blair’s faded smile How else can we engage with the unapologetic failures of political leadership at the moment?
Why won’t Blair be impeached? (Discussed by Henry Porter in today’s Observer.) I suggest, because he only exists in his own deep acting, apparently – and a virtual identity is of its nature unaccountable. We can all do it, apparently. Construct our identity, and put it on YouTube, or a blog – like this.

There is a well-worn joke about the distinguished visitor to a nursing home, saying, ‘Do you know who I am?’ ‘No dear, but if you go to the office, I’m sure matron will tell you.’
I also like the current joke about Jack Straw – ‘how dare he show his face round here?’
We are programmed generally – in evolutionary selection this must always have been a good skill to have – to be very good at recognising faces. In early childhood we lose the capacity to distinguish the faces of animals with the same clarity, but continue to build up a lifetime library of human mug shots – ‘I know the face.’ And then sometimes we don’t.

I experience myself as having an identity and others confirm that in their relations with me. We get occasional hints of this. I bought a four-wheel drive car and several friends were surprised. They did not think it was my sort of car, obviously. Upset your friends’ perceptions too much and they will worry about you. When I am underperforming, I say I am not myself today. Old friends may say, he is not the man he was. I could say of my wife, that she is not the woman I married.
We believe strongly then in this continuity of identity and take note of any deviations. There was a time, which peaked with Harold Wilson, I think, when politicians obsessively declared the consistency of their view of every matter of policy. This despite the fact that what we need in reality are politicians who are capable of changing their minds. ‘Changing their minds’, that is the clue. To have a new thought is to change your mind? It is as if you become a different person. No wonder Bion said that we have a hatred of thinking.
It is not quite the same now. We have now the phenomenon of the makeover, where one shamelessly constructs a new image of oneself. Older people look younger, puffing out their wrinkles like toads. So politicians now are always having to come up with new and younger policies, like adolescents who restlessly have to be uniquely different while slavishly following the conventions of their social group.

It is in our nature – at least it is from a Judeo-Christian perspective - to make this separation of what is I and not-I, what belongs and what does not, and like the babies we were in our cots, to hold close what is at that moment loveable and to throw out what is to be despised, destroyed, the hated objects to which we have ascribed such awesome power that we are fearful of their revenge.
This is the western idea of self, which we then want to put on a good face. For we have our ideas of morality and in particular in Christian mythology the idea of a loving God who gave his son to save us from ourselves. This Christian God wants to help us with our human nature, the management of ourselves in role as man, woman, child, adult, daughter, father, bricklayer, surgeon, citizen, whatever.
The emphasis is first on our individuality and hence on our interdependence with others. Love thy neighbour as thyself. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. The trouble is, there is little evidence on the ground to support these assertions.

Eric Miller wrote about the ‘politics of identity.’
‘Every interpersonal relationship is a political relationship, involving continual negotiation of the boundary between me and not me, of inline and outline.’
He was referring to processes of projection and introjection, which he translated into open systems language; ‘the individual exports chaos from inside and imports order from outside.’ He was also referring to Andrew Szmidla’s formulation of boundary transactions between systems, where what A thinks of itself (the inline) has to be broadly congruent with what B or C or D thinks of A (the outline), a shared reference without which communication is difficult.
See: E.J. Miller. (1979) The Politics of Involvement. Reprinted in Group Relations Reader 2, pp 383-398. 1985: A.K. Rice Institute.
This seems a good starting point for thinking about identity.