A Free Left Blog

I wrote the title ‘A Great British Institution’ in part to shock and surprise, but also to tell a truth. The institution I am talking about is the Royal Marines Band. As a lefty, I’ve been naturally suspicious of militarism, pomp and pageantry and all the rest. But checking out the the Royal Marines Band online has helped to shift my thinking, and I think what they do is worth highlighting. I would like to blather on about why, but it’s probably best to let you judge for yourself. I've got three videos to check out. They are: 1) The Massed Bands of H.M. Royal Marines on Birdcage Walk in London on 4 th June 2014. This shows how good they are: a stunning look and sound, helped by a little birdsong on the way (9 mins long) 2) A wonderful street parade in Basel , Switzerland, on 27 th July 2013 - massed crowds, in blazing heat; they put on a terrific show (18 mins long) 3) In the same Basel Tattoo: the day performance in the arena on 25 th July 2013; ...

What is society? It isn’t a thing or an object like other things or objects are. In that sense, Margaret Thatcher was broadly right in saying: “There is no such thing as society”. But we do use the word widely to refer to an ‘it’ – society – so though we cannot pin it down in the physical real world, society undoubtedly has a reality in consciousness, for us. We might for example think of it as a ‘subjective object’, albeit something which is not so much thought as felt. The philosopher Martin Heidegger never wrote directly about society as far as I am aware, but his reflections on the nature of ‘being’ – of human beings and other beings, including the inanimate objects of our world – show how we are each connected into the world of other people and objects. As such he sketches out how what we might call the architecture or internal wiring of society works, and thereby provides us with a powerful way of conceiving what it is that makes ‘us’ us. One of the few examples He...