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*The British Isles being the whole damn cotton picking geographical lot, ''including'' the Republic of Ireland. | *The British Isles being the whole damn cotton picking geographical lot, ''including'' the Republic of Ireland. | ||
===Continental drift=== | |||
What are the continents of the world? A fairly fundamental geopolitical one, you might think, but there is no settled answer. Is Oceania one? What is its boundary with Asia, Melanesia, Australia, or Australasia? Are the boundaries of even these units settled. | |||
The answer is very clearly no. Not only are our ideas about each not aligned now, but they are constantly changing. It is a dancing landscape, a [[complex system]]. | |||
===As a metaphor=== | |||
This serves as a suitable metaphor for the fundamental irreducibility of larger organisations into smaller ones, notwithstanding the modernist urge to force them into alignment. When we speak of, for example, Britain, we do so loosely: we could be referring to any of these current configurations, of historical ones, and we may even be mistaken (as [[salespeople]] often are when — cue eagle chortle — they talk about “U.K. law”). This looseness isn’t a transient error, in need of correction, but rather a genius flexibility. We can leave construction to the [[infinite game]] we are playing, in which the only rule is to be imaginative in understanding what each other mean to keep the game going, and even where that fails, it is a matter of stopping, checking, clarifying, and putting the ball back into play. | |||
Hence the folly of ''trying'' to correct this looseness — to tighten the language up, to [[for the avoidance of doubt|avoid doubt]], to ''crystallise the rules’’, and constrain the game with boundaries, thereby consigning it to finitude — is to rob the game of its flexibility, resilience: its ''[[antifragile|antifragility]]''. | |||
Inevitably, here we also run into our old friend the battle between form and substance. ''Substance has no form''. | |||
Therein the basic conceptual problem with grand unifying political projects. Being, as they are, necessarily collections of millions of differing opinions, the harder edged a political project, the less fundamentally stable it is. It's apparent convergence on federation — you are either in, as a serf, or out, as an exile is what did for UK’s membership European Union. The embrace of one ultimate political authority involves sacrificing the other. The penumbra of Europe has always been complicated: Europhiles have tolerated this; there are signs they may be embracing it with the idea of tiered memberships, or affiliations, to that central organisation. If it is true, this is a smart idea, as it allows individual states — who wage their own internal battles of form and substance — to hold onto their own views of preferred sovereignty. The idea that one should be “in” or “out” of as monolithic a political idea as “Europe” is fantastical when you think about it. | |||
{{sa}} | {{sa}} | ||
*[[Brexit means Brexit]] | L*[[Brexit means Brexit]] | ||