Talking about the emergence of so many social networks on the internet, a 35 year old said to me that he was ‘ a creature of a previous age …’ Do we admire his maturity? I do. But I am his father.

But the internet is good for enthusiasms, surely (though my beekeeper brother was for a time in danger of getting into an unproductive dialogue with U.S. creationists). On the eve of the OPUS annual conference, I have been noting how many people describe themselves – with greater or lesser accuracy – as ‘members of OPUS’.

Identity and community are linked: where I belong helps to determine who I am – including how I think, which religion I relate to, accepting or rejecting it, what science I believe, what career I follow in accordance with a certain set of values, etc.

It is getting complicated, when community is experienced as virtual, as made up by me as part of my presentation of self.

A website itself is a kind of manifestation of community.

But the community I make up is a projection of my own desires. It does not have to suffer any of the irritating controls of a reality check. It is easy then to be at home with my own delusions without having to pay any respect to what others make of that. This is serious. It may be the issue about those who behave in violent and terrible ways acting out the futures they have rehearsed in their virtual communities, which bring into the light the dark thoughts in their heads.

In what sense is this different from a child’s play – which Melanie Klein famously observed to gain access into a child’s community in the mind.

I used to try and distinguish an OPUS listening post from a pub discussion – I knew they were different, though both were opinionated, but how, exactly? One answer would be that a different version of community is presented, and therefore also of role – social companion or fellow citizen.

So I am saying that my identity has to do with the community to which I belong: and therefore also that my struggle for identity is to do with my struggle to belong - and shame is what I feel when I feel a failure in that community.

I add that comment about shame, because I sometimes think that shame has become a redundant concept in public life. And of course if people live in virtual communities of their own making they don’t have to feel shame? To ensure a moral sense community has to be more than a construct of my own.

Bear with me in what may sound at first like an anarchist rant.
A democratic election is also a coup. After all we talk about Bush and Blair as if they have absolute power and can’t be stopped. (I write this before the mid-term elections, which may disrupt the balance of power between the executive and legislative, famously separated in the American constitution, and the day after the vote in the House of Commons, where the Blair argument was that it would be unfair on the troops that he has put into Iraq to ask questions about why they are there, and he won the vote – the rebels stop short again and again.)
Democratic elections are a process for creating a dictatorship – a civilised way of organising a coup – and while it puts an unwelcome time limit on the absolutism of the political leader, it gives him the reassurance also that his overthrow will also be bloodless. (Not always of course. India is an example of a democratic country where three of its leaders have been assassinated in the last fifty years. And there were the Kennedy brothers. Democratic processes also throw up traditional dynasties, which have to be dealt with in traditional ways?)
The point I make is that Bush and Blair are political leaders, who make the claim that the people put them there. Of course no-one is saying that they are passive in this. Their strength is that they get themselves elected – a combination of media friendly charisma and powerful friends controlling the media, and lots of dosh provided by key stakeholders. The electorate are instruments in their pursuit of power, not the main players – or only in a statistical sense (if that – Blair has been elected on a declining number of votes, fewer than his predecessor Kinnock who was vilified for his premature triumphalism, and Bush elected even on a minority of the votes cast, which is technically problematic in a two party state. ) But we have to accept that the people did elect them, in the sense that they did not stop them getting elected. And the trouble is that they are then so arrogant with the power so flimsily arrived at. How Bush got a second term and Blair a third term must be on the conscience of two nations.
So what are we supposed to think of our relationship to them? We may think that they are free targets for our projections – or we can think how we may take some responsibility for ourselves.
I remember and still want to learn from the time in a Conference at the University of East London – Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere – (year???) – when Olya Khaleelee, then director of OPUS, said infamously – We elected Thatcher. To a literal minded left wing audience, this was anathema. But the sense that we were all members of a society that contributed to the conditions for Thatcherism is not so easily denied.
I got an email today from a younger member of my family encouraging us to unplug our electricity on Saturday: look at http://www.workface-limited.co.uk/html/blackout.html
This is an attempt at direct action protest about global warming. Did they deliberately chose the day that there will be a huge public firework display on the hill above our house - a joyous waste of energy celebrating the attempt to blow up parliament in 1605? (Officially it is celebrating the thwarting of the plot, but who believes that? Guy Faulkes night is a cheeky way of exposing the terrorist in our hearts while following health and safety regulations.)
Perhaps the future is in such new protests, organised on the internet, rather than the parliamentary process, which is like Big Brother in exaggerated slow motion – who will be next to be thrown out of the House? Voting every four or five years is a big yawn.
In 1968 in London there was a famous demonstration against the Vietnam War. In 2004 there was an even bigger demonstration against the Iraq War. 2-0 for the mob against the leadership. This has me asking how a very recognisable large group dynamic – eg a mob looking for a common purpose on the dodgy grounds of an external threat – has my confidence in its wisdom more than the high-powered hot-house of intelligence-driven experts feeding the instinctual judgement of our leaders.
I am aware that I am setting up a polarisation here between a Rousseau-like innocence of the crowd as noble savage against a Machiavellian realpolitic. Neither on its own offers much confidence for the future in a world that we keep repeating is complex beyond our imaginings.
Gordon Lawrence is putting forward an argument that would put us outside of the inadequacies of rational dialogue – social dreaming is an exemplar – for what he calls symbiont thinking: see symbiontatwork.typepad.com
I am not sure what I will do on Saturday. Turn off the lights in support of a cause to save the world. Meditate on the nature of self (or not-self). Shop at Tescos. But whatever, it will help if I don’t just think it is the fault of Bush and Blair.

It is hard to find someone who does not have an opinion on the veil. It is the sort of question for which it is seemingly obligatory to have a view, and to be sure of it. The don’t knows disappear from the screen.
I was on a late night bus at the weekend – I had forgotten how drunks are very sure of their opinions on just about everything and think you would like to hear about them.
I want to extend this idea of the drunken citizen to suggest that there is a kind of social drunkenness that is not about alcohol but is about being opinionated in a non-negotiable way.
The liberal position seeing two sides of the argument is overtaken by a neo-liberal and much more aggressive approach to difference. This is necessary of course if you are going to get into a fight.
So the observation that people are taking a definite stand one way or another about the veil suggests that they/we are doing just that, getting ready for a fight – as I saw on Saturday night, first the genial explanation on the bus of why we need a free transport policy for all, no argument, and then, in the street outside, grown men beating the shit out of each other. As if we could make a utopia that allowed schisms.
Which is why I would like to recover some respect for the don’t knows in our society. They have no obvious place to go in war torn societies like Iraq or Israel. But we are still at peace. Aren’t we? I don’t know.