The short version of this story tells of an eccentric rambler who, attempting to walk from Land’s End in the far south-west of England to John O’ Groats in the far north-west of Scotland, keeps getting jailed in Scotland for refusing to wear clothes.

The slightly longer version illuminates the story of Stephen Gough, or the ‘Naked Rambler’ as he has come to be known – a former Royal Marine whose conviction has gradually made him into something of a ‘career nudist’. Gough had already successfully completed the 1,200 mile (1,900km) route twice wearing nothing but socks, boots and a rucksack: in 2003-4, when he was arrested multiple times but each time released almost immediately; and again in 2005-6 accompanied by his then girlfriend Melanie Roberts when he was arrested in Scotland and spent 3 months in prison in Edinburgh before being released to complete the walk (naked of course).

In May 2006 Gough was arrested at Edinburgh airport after undressing on a flight from Southampton to Edinburgh and in August 2006 he was given a 7 month jail sentence. On 18 December 2008 he was convicted of breach of the peace and jailed for 12 months. In July 2009, standing in the dock naked, Gough was jailed for another 12 months for breach of the peace, plus 4 months for refusing to dress for the trial. On 8th February 2010 he was convicted of breach of the peace and contempt of court again and sentenced to 21 months imprisonment. Having served half his sentence, on 25th November 2010 he was found guilty of breach of the peace, having been arrested less than a minute after his release, trying to walk naked from the gates of Perth Prison and sentenced to 15 months and 26 days. On 24th August 2011, Gough received his sternest sentence yet: 657 days in prison after having been arrested again on being released from Perth Prison.

At the time of writing, Steve Gough has spent most of the past five years in prison, much of it reportedly in solitary confinement. Gough can be said to have been the architect of his own misery – he’s had no shortage of opportunities to put on a pair of pants and walk free from court or prison. However, in light of the fact that a man has spent five years in solitary confinement for nothing more than refusing to cover up, some reflection might be in order. The role of the judiciary is presumably to ‘protect’ conservative or vulnerable elements of society who might find Gough’s appearance on footpaths and roadsides disturbing… Yes, ‘disturbing’. Gough has never threatened anyone, nor does he flaunt his nakedness in order to shock or upset. Neither his motives nor appearance are sexual, and for every person who finds Gough’s appearance ‘disturbing’, there are surely many more who find it thought-provoking and refreshing (as well as amusing).

When on 9th April 2007 Gough was cleared of charges related to his refusal to dress upon being released from prison in Edinburgh, the ruling judge, Isobel Poole, found that there was no evidence of “actual alarm or disturbance”, adding “I can understand this conduct could be considered unpleasant to passers-by had there been any but there is a lack of evidence to that effect.” He was however still jailed for contempt of court.

At his trial in July 2009, Gough was castigated for having cost the taxpayer “many hundreds of thousands of pounds”, though for him the costs seem far greater. He’s reportedly spent much of his five years of incarceration in solitary confinement. A photograph taken of Steven Gough as he was released from Perth prison last month (seconds before being re-arrested by police) is of a harrowed, gaunt man who bears little resemblance to those taken in 2005 of a healthy and determined Gough has he walked the trail in 2005.

This isn’t a plea to ‘raise awareness’ of the plight of the Naked Rambler. Steven Gough is stubborn, most probably benign, definitely determined, and probably saying something very important. While Gough – a man with distinctive beliefs about walking in the open air – refuses to ‘cover up’, Muslim women in France find themselves banned from doing just that. While neither Gough nor French Muslim women are a danger to anyone by virtue of their mode of dress (or lack thereof), social climates of intolerance towards them are justified and fuelled by governments who seek their erasure from ‘free’ society through the use of violence in the form of threatened and real incarceration. For continuing to contest this intolerance and violence at the expense of the freedom he so obviously enjoys, the Naked Rambler demands our attention.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Gough
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-14649394

The Guardian’s release today of ostensibly new footage of the World Trade Center collapse provides us with yet another impotent reminder that the earth shattering, potentially paradigm shifting spectacle we witnessed almost 10 years ago still lingers.  Two major wars in the interim have created their own horrors, and elicited ‘appropriate’ media and wider social responses, yet they have not succeeded in quelling the many questions that remain unanswered from that uncannily strange day in early September, 2001.  Sadly though, the event historicised simply as ’9/11′ has receded from the critical gaze of many of us, even those of us who know deep down that something incommensurable happened that day – something that has not yet been reconciled.

The new footage made me think to check the page of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a movement of people who still dispute the official line on 9/11 – namely that the twin towers collapsed as a result of being struck by aircraft.  In a nutshell, the argument of the movement centres on the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Center site, which went down some hours after the twin towers, despite not having been hit by any aircraft, and having sustained only superficial damage from the fallout of the collapses of buildings 1 and 2.  Of course, there’s no shortage of conspiracy theories surrounding ’9/11′, many of which are as outlandish and misguided as they are purported to be.  What makes this movement stand out, however, is that it espouses the critical and rigorous views of literally thousands of experts in fields of architecture, engineering, building design, demolition, and many other professionalisms where a rigorous scientific approach is demanded.  Nevertheless, an open mind is needed to consider the possibility that 9/11 is not what we commonly accept it to be; even those of us with a normally critical take on states and governments find such a proposition uncomfortable and disturbing.  However, sufficient evidence exists to suggest that all three WTC buildings were brought down using carefully planned and controlled demolition techniques, though adherents to such ideas are still routinely branded as conspiracy theorists and nut jobs.  As a human geographer operating very much within the ‘mainstream’ I have read and thought widely about how societies are put together, how accepted doctrine takes hold, how facts are defined as such, and I am interested in why, given such persuasive evidence, so few people are prepared to question the official line on 9/11.

To understand why, we need to acknowledge that our personal and social identities, and the wider social norms that we inhabit in our everyday lives are neither as immutable nor stable as we often like to think.  Everything we think we know about the world comes about as a result of a continuous process of flux and conflict; structure and fixity.  It is within these negotiations, within these processes that rights and wrongs, facts and fictions, and everything else we think of as ‘knowledge’ is forged.  The same is true of the practice of science – an institution we turn to for certainty, stability and immutability.  In his seminal 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn developed a wide ranging theory to explain how and why scientific revolutions take place.  He noticed that besides the commonly accepted idea that scientific knowledge is developed by building upon the theories of past scientific studies in a scientific paradigm (meaning an era, and the ideas and knowledge that characterises it), once in a while scientific discovery undergoes a crisis – typically when a new discovery is not supported by, or contradicts, the body of knowledge that precedes it:-

A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. The paradigm, in Kuhn’s view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it. (Wikipedia article)

The important part of this proposition is that it indicates that scientific progress is made not against an external backdrop of cold, hard facts, but rather upon the need to maintain an internal logic, in accordance with a ‘world view’ or paradigm.  There is nothing heretical or outlandish about these ideas; they are widely accepted by scientists (apart from a few zealots).  Although Kuhn was writing about scientific discovery there is nothing in his ideas that makes them the exclusive domain of formal or professional scientific endeavour – this is not how science works, per se, but how society works.  Society undergoes paradigm shifts all of the time, though these are usually very minor and relatively inconsequential by their nature.  Think of fashions that change year on year in clothing, consumer goods and social customs, and the way in which we shun or poke fun at those which no longer conform or ‘make sense’ at the present time, in the present paradigm.  Throughout history however, much bigger events have happened, though less frequently, such as the twin discoveries that led to the acceptance of the knowledge that the earth is neither flat, nor the centre of the universe.

What all this indicates is that the likelihood of a paradigm shift is inversely proportional to the sum (roughly speaking) of the weight of accepted doctrine and magnitude of the disruption or anomaly.  In other words, small anomalies against a relatively flexible body of knowledge, or world view, is likely to result in a fairly swift and undisruptive paradigm shift, whereas a big anomaly, especially if it occurs against a backdrop of a highly accepted world view is less likely to happen.  So it is with the event we know of as ’9/11′.  It’s big, because it calls into question so much of our iterative, layered knowledge – knowledge of essential (though flawed) goodness and honesty of the governments of the developed, free world – upon which we build meaning in our individual lives.  Despite the healthy distain most of us have for our governments and their processes, the possibility that these authorities are so starkly at odds with our espoused moralities is difficult to comprehend, and deeply frightening.

The key question for me is whether 9/11 will ever cause a paradigm shift.  Nine years on, it seems the overwhelming consensus is still denial, and acceptance.  If the event ever is seriously reappraised, it seems to me that this is likely to take place safely in a historical frame some time in the future; when historians will be enthralled and fascinated by the fact that two of the tallest buildings on this earth, complete with their occupants, were felled for political reasons, and that very few people took any notice.

[this is an incomplete article written in a hurry. Comments and suggestions are always welcome]

Two articles appeared in the British media this week that compliment each other in interesting, and chilling ways.  The first, published in The Independent is written by Dr. Michael Mosely to advertise his new documentary on Stanley Milgram; a psychologist who carried out a particular type of experiment from the 1960s to 1980s designed to explore social responses to authority – the findings of which remain both fascinating and shocking today.  In summary, Milgram found that in a structured environment, and given a structured exercise to carry out, two thirds of ordinary people would push a button that they were duped into believing would administer a painful electric shock to another ordinary member of the public sitting in a nearby room – out of sight but within earshot.  Nobody was actually physically harmed in the experiments, but the results indicated that two thirds of ordinary members of the general public would follow the rules of the experiment even though they were knowingly and repeatedly causing extreme suffering to someone in the next room whose screams they could hear; some went as far as to administer a shock which they then believed had killed that person.

Much has been written about Milgram’s test in the interim, and on related work that tries to explain relationships between individual agency and social/institutional structures.  I am familiar with a tiny fraction of this material.  An important piece of related work was Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust.  In it, Bauman tries to answer a question many have struggled with since the second world war – how could the mass exterminations of the holocaust have happened?  In short, Bauman argued that the holocaust was systematic – that it was made possible by the ways in which ‘big picture’ knowledge (i.e. Of extermination) was divided into smaller, seemingly innocuous tasks; exemplified repeatedly in the Nuremberg Trials by Nazi facilitators accused of genocide, who overwhelmingly were ‘just doing their job’.

A second article in the British media this week relates to government responses to the fallout from ongoing releases of ‘whistleblower’ information by WikiLeaks.  The BBC reported (here and here) that the White House has ordered the creation of ‘Insider Threat Programmes’ in a variety of government departments, aimed at spotting and ‘weeding out’ potential whistleblowers to ‘prevent future embarrassment’.  The approach of the programmes is to look out for behaviours that point to a “certain type of person”, says Dawn Capelli, technical manager of the Cert Insider Threat Centre, and that these types of people are often identifiable from certain signs; for example with “relative happiness” being a sign of a ‘trustworthy’ employee, and “despondence and grumpiness” pointing to a propensity to blow the whistle: “Sometimes they deliberately start sabotaging someone else’s work,” says Capelli.

Of course, “sabotaging someone else’s work” is pretty much what one-third of Stanley Milgram’s subjects did.  Having decided that what they were doing was causing pain and suffering to others they refused to continue the experiment, regardless of the rules they would be breaking, and despite the pressure from the experimenters and technicians to continue the experiment.  This pressure for people to conform, and to carry out the systematic requirements of their role is extremely powerful.  For Milgram’s subjects it would have taken a significant amount of resolve to walk out of the experiment, and yet for these people their role was relatively simple: as voluntary participants, any of them could ostensibly walk out at any time.  For others it isn’t so easy to walk out; the pressures, and stakes, are far higher.

Thus seems to have been the case for a 23-year old former intelligence officer, Pte Bradley Manning, who today remains in solitary confinement and in deteriorating physical and mental health as he awaits court martial this year for the suspected release of classified information to WikiLeaks relating to atrocities committed by American troops in Iraq.  An American citizen, Manning was brought up here in Wales before he joined the U.S. Army and was sent to fight in Iraq.  He is said to have been increasingly troubled by the intelligence information he saw while in Iraq, and allegedly leaked some of this data to WikiLeaks, data which included the infamous and shocking video of a helicopter gunship attack which killed 12 civilians including 2 Reuters journalists in Baghdad in 2007.

If Manning did indeed leak this information, he would have been largely aware that the consequences of his being found out would be extremely serious, but he (allegedly) did it anyway, and in doing so joined the same minority group of conscientious Nazi saboteurs who helped to break the social and institutional structures that enabled the kind of systematic genocide of millions of innocent people that Bauman identified.  Yet, in the present day, the governmental response is to ‘weed out’ conscientious objectors, to replace them with “happy” people less likely to blow the whistle when they encounter war crimes, or genocide.  The result will be increasingly Orwellian governments populated by people content to be scrutinised and ‘just do their jobs’, ‘happy’ to press the button, regardless of the suffering it will cause.