Who is the real
Romney? We have
still to find out
Stalinism is alive
and well on the
Glasgow underground
SR anthology
Sit back, decide within five seconds that there’s nothing worth watching on the box, and relax instead with the Scottish Review, the new paperback anthology of pieces from Scotland’s online current affairs magazine.
Among the 42 selected gems:
Eileen Reid
My journey of love and loss
Anthony Silkoff
Kicked out of the mosque
Mike MacKenzie
The night I nearly drowned
Bill Jamieson
Grand Grossartia
Katie Grant
The age of disillusion
Gerry Hassan
The trouble with being a Scottish man
George Chalmers
First day in prison
Walter Humes
Tribal nation
Marian Pallister
The people crushers
Plus many other SR favourites, all neatly wrapped up in an elegant 144-page bedtime read, with photographs by Islay McLeod and an introduction by editor Kenneth Roy.
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Today’s banner
Spring lambs, Ayrshire
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
How many of us
are really
fit for purpose?
Robin Downie
He argues: ‘Iniquity in action is the very same as falsity or contradiction
in theory, and the very same that makes one absurd makes the other unreasonable’.
Of course, it is possible for a soldier to be able climb walls and swing on ropes but still to lack another sort of fitness for the job – summed up by the word equanimity or the ability to remain calm and in control in the face of danger or provocation. It may well be that Major Eric Joyce was physically fit – although he managed to punch only three Tories in the Strangers’ Bar – but equanimity was lacking. And there are many more worrying stories of soldiers who were physically fit – or perhaps because they were physically fit and exuding testosterone – abusing the weak and vulnerable.
The same applies to the police. Fitness for purpose in the police surely involves more than the ability to chase neds and yobs round corners. Self-control and equanimity are required in the face of often considerable provocation.
Some philosophers have even tried to depict other moral qualities in terms of fitness and unfitness. For example, Samuel Clarke, an 18th-century English philosopher and champion of Newton, claimed that moral judgements can be as certain as those in mathematics. Among many interesting examples he argued that gratitude is ‘fitting’ to the situation where someone has done us a favour, just as triangles can be shown to be congruent. He argues: ‘Iniquity in action is the very same as falsity or contradiction in theory, and the very same that makes one absurd makes the other unreasonable’. Clarke’s position was criticised by our own Francis Hutcheson. Basically Hutcheson points out that whereas a generous or kind action is fit to make someone happy, a cruel or selfish one is equally fit to make someone miserable. Fitness is relative to the purpose and is not an absolute term.
So too in the police there are many purposes. Chasing yobs and neds is one for which physical fitness might be required, but interviewing suspects is another purpose and controlling aggressive marchers yet another. There must be different kinds of fitness for different purposes. If Morse had been made to spend more time in the gym and less in the pub it would have been fit to end him.
