26 January 2006
Excerpts of an interview with Chris Pugh - retired Officer of the Royal British Navy, and his wife Shirley, about OLD FASHIONED VALUES and our modern day “McDonald-ized” worldviews…
CP = Chris Pugh
SP = Chris’s wife, Shirley
MC = Interviewer
CP: Britain is the oldest democracy in the world.
MC: It’s a monarchy, why do you say it’s a democracy?
CP: Well, it’s a monarchy but you still have the vote. Under the guise of terrorism, a lot of freedom has been lost and lots of acts of power are coming through. Many forms of freedom like freedom of speech are not the same. You can’t say everything you want to say. Nonetheless, Britain is a privileged society. We haven’t got problems like mass poverty and unemployment.
MC: Not anymore.
CP: Not anymore, but we used to have.
MC: You used to have, yes.
CP: We have lost old-fashioned virtues, like manners, politeness and respect.
MC: Mmmm, respect.
CP: And discipline, dare I say. So living now in a McDonalds society, it’s the impression you get that you aren’t meant to care about people anymore.
MC: That’s the thing about respect. If you think about what that term is; democracy goes against respect, in a very common way of looking at it. In a common denominator way of looking at it, if everyone is equal, which could not possibly be – then why should I respect you? You are the same as me, even though you are older and have more experience, I could just come in and say, “Hey I can buy that McDonald’s meal too, so why should I listen to you telling me not to. You’re standing in the line in front of me, but I have rights too.”
CP: I agree, I think Britain has been trying to work towards a classless society. That to me is ridiculous, I know it goes against a lot of the youngsters’ grates, but there has to be some sort of order. Call it a hierarchy, or order, I don’t know, but there has to be leaders. There has to be respect; you can be the Queen of England and you can be somebody sweeping the streets, but you should still have mutual respect.
MC: Yes, respect should be mutual.
CP: The Queen should get the same amount of respect as a street sweeper, and he could respect her. There has to be respect in society throughout levels of society and I think we’re losing it.
MC: People are not thinking a little bit deeper about it. Democracy is about Responsibility, and they are just thinking about Rights and Entitlements.
SP: Yes, the Right to do this, and the Right to do that, and you can’t touch me…
CP: Yes, that’s ridiculous and this is why I don’t really want to go back to Britain. Where people supposedly have all this freedom they don’t respect. They don’t seem to get that you can’t do ANYthing you like. They think they can get away with it, with doing anything they like, and not be punished. All in the name of the so-called ‘This is My Right’ and it just doesn’t work that way.
MC: How about a military perspective on this, about hierarchies and ranks?
CP: In the military, which has been taking a battering for last ten years, they tried to bring in their own sort of measures but ultimately, the military has to be a hierarchy society. You have to have a leader to follow. That’s not to say you can’t use your intelligence, be independent, or use your initiative, because you’re actually encouraged to do that.
But ultimately, someone has to take responsibility. Serving on the ship, for example, there has to be a captain on the ship. There can only be one, there cannot be 250 captains on the ship. If you apply that to your society, then that is the same. You can’t have everybody running the country. Somebody has to go out there, do the work and then get out whatever happens there. Somebody has to be in charge of a company. It’s like driving a bus, there can only be one bus driver, you can’t have 30 people driving the bus. You can’t just ignore the person and say you want to go another way. You all have to stick with it for the progress and the benefit at all. I’m sorry.
MC: No, no, why are you sorry?! It’s true.
Next question, what is it that could REALLY change the world?
You’ve seen so much of it, so what do you think might be able to make lasting changes?
It’s not money because money doesn’t make you smarter.
It’s not privilege – you could be born into royalty and still be pretty…
CP: That’s right. I’ve seen that with the Saudi’s that’s where they had problems.
MC: So, what could it be?
Education? You can have very educated people who have no morals.
CP: Education is powerful, and it obviously helps. The thing with education, maybe the problem with education or maybe it could be a little subtler or a broader perspective, is to try and not be sold into it.
I would say education is important, but it’s not just about education but other things. Personally I think that it’s too much in Britain, the government’s goal is to try to send everybody to university.
MC: Yes, but what does that mean? If everyone goes, that doesn’t make any difference, everybody’s getting a qualification. It’s like you’re born into a cookie cutter.
CP: The world still needs people, still needs plumbers, electricians, people like that. Why make it just like that? So education is important. I think the people who want go on, continue their education and try and to go university should be encouraged to do so.
MC: Don’t you think you need to want it now? For example, even if you wanted to support your brothers and sisters to go into the military, it might not be right for them, some may actually hate that life.
CP: Yes, I think that’s right because I don’t think everybody wants to do it, as I say it is government policy. It’s now perceived as the norm. Fifteen years ago, if you said to a seventeen or eighteen-year-old kid, they would have said, ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.’ Now it has become a commonly accepted fact that you will go to university, we’ve talked to people who don’t know what to do if you don’t go to the university. That’s what you’re supposed to do and they have come up with all these crazy U courses that have no use in the real world.
MC: Such as? Give me an example.
CP: Media Studies?
MC: (Laughs) That’s the wrong thing to say to me!
CP: No, I didn’t mean it that way. People want to be pop stars or they think they’re going to be a TV presenter.
SP: Thing is, not everybody can do that.
MC: Exactly, if everyone did that, who is going to be sitting in audience, buying the tickets?
CP: Yes, society is missing out on a lot of skilled people who could become plumbers and electricians, filling them with pipe dreams that everyone must go to university.
MC: And be really good ones too.
CP: A lot of people who go to university end up in McDonald’s. So …
SP: The other thing that’s missing is education in the practical things. When I was at school, I used have to take domestic studies like sewing, cooking and how to clean house. With my kids, I did a lot for them but they have no clue how to do anything. They still don’t. If they want a button sewn on a dress, they have to ask mummy to do it because they haven’t got a clue about how to do it themselves and they’re not interested. So as with a lot of practical things in life, most don’t know how to sew.
MC: That’s a good point. These are everyday things that everyone should know; instead, nobody knows it now.
CP: So what is education about?
MC: Everyone’s thinking, but not everyone is operating intellectually.
CP: Also, the other thing about modern life that I think has changed is that religion is of less importance in the world. When we were young kids, we had to go to church. Our generation, you still had to go to church. That’s gone now; religion seems to be the major source of conflict in the world, but most sorts of people living in the West, sees religion as not that at all. Instead, we’ve become celebrity-obsessed.
MC: Yes, that’s ridiculous.
CP: It’s a celebrity driven society where everybody wants to be David Beckham.
MC: Well, who wouldn’t dream of an “easy” life and lots of money. Nobody wants to do things like engineering; they said that in the US, the rate of students applying for engineering degrees has just completely fallen. It’s very frightening for the US because the US is a high tech society. So if nobody’s going to go for engineering degrees, who will be the future leaders and tech innovators?
In fact, this celebrity-driven culture is one of the reasons I built up this site, because that’s all that is out there now and the kids don’t see anything except THAT, because that whole celebrity world eclipses everything else. It’s hard for serious subjects like Engineering and Mathematics to compete with the dreams of fast, easy money that comes with a celebrity life.
CP: Yes, because everybody, or most people nowadays, have 24-hour TV and everything is instant. They don’t watch cultural programs or good drama anymore; they watch MTV. Again this is a McDonald’s-stroke-MTV society that they accept because family traditions and family life is breaking down. All they see is the celebrity-driven TV type society and that’s what they think is normal. What they see on TV and films, they think is real life and they find it difficult to detach themselves from that. It’s unfair to just label all youngsters, and there are people out there that have done some good work. Again, when I was in the navy, we never had computer games and TV. I read a lot, so I’m a great believer in reading. I certainly still read a lot today and that’s where I picked up a lot about education. I read a lot of good books.
MC: Do you have any top ten favorite books or what are your top three books you think everyone should read? Or that’s really impacted your life? Military books?
CP: I like History, not military history. History of the world, I also like history about famous people, biographies.
MC: Which one? Which three biographies?
CP: Three biographies…one book would be, Churchill?
MC: From two Christmases ago? It was the big biography that was released by Churchill. Is it that one?
CP: No, I’ve read a few, but not that one. Then the one with the rise and fall of the third Reich about Germany and a guy called William Shyra. This is a huge book, it tells you how the Nazis started and stuff like that. One more? It would probably be a sporting one, about that cricket bowler. He was a famous English cricketer, from a few years ago…
MC: A lot of people were talking about this, what is so special about this book?
CP: He was just this fantastic cricketer, along those 11 players on a cricket team, he was one player who would come in and he could win the game on this own. Always in a team environment. As an individual he could, and did win matches for England almost single-handedly. So to read about him, I think that’s very ___.
MC: You said something about the money and materialism, so I’d like you to describe money. What is money?
CP: Money, to me, is having enough to be relatively comfortable. I’m not a great one for material wealth or anything like that, but I’d like to have just enough money to do my own endeavors. I’ve always been one, who’s worked for my life. I’ve never been out of work; and just have enough money to be able to have a relatively comfortable and happy life. That’s all that it is to me. I don’t want to have big fast cars or anything like that. I’m just probably quite a down-to-earth, practical person, who just needs enough to do what I have to do. Then of course, I play golf, occasionally, and of course, some golf clubs. That’s about the only material thing sort of extravagance, something like buying some golf clubs. So although money is important, it’s not a big element for me. I just want enough to go out and have a meal, have a drink, have a game of golf and go places occasionally; I’m quite content with life really.
MC: OK. Can you tell me stories about fame, or someone famous, you know, something that you equate with fame.
CP: Fame to me, you’re probably going to laugh again. Fame to me is somebody who has done something important to help or to change the society. I’m not celebrity-driven. I like sport, I love sport, I look sporty, but a hero to me is not somebody who plays cricket or football. A lot of young people, these days look up to Tiger Woods. Which is fine, you can. I do believe sporting people have a role to play as role models. There are going to be bad role models and good role models. Somebody like Tiger Woods would probably be considered a good role model. I wouldn’t call him a sporting hero, to me heroes are people who actually change lives or help people. It doesn’t have to be somebody particularly famous. You look at what happened a year ago in the tsunami, I watched something on TV a couple of days ago, and it was in Indonesia. There’s an Australian guy who gave out clothes, I think he’s American actually. He has been there a year now, working in Indonesia, just gave up his own time for a year. The village he was in was a fishing village that was devastated by the tsunami, and he’d actually built twelve fishing boats for them. The villagers can get their life back on track and the village now had an income. So then they could go back to work fishing and they could support their families. People like that are heroes to me, unsung heroes I’d call them. And there is fame, we all like singers and we all like entertainers, but I don’t call them heroes. I personally admire them if they have talent but I don’t particularly hero-worship them. I prefer to look at people who achieved fame through more practical methods, people who helped society. Some politicians are like that, although I don’t have a lot of time for politics or politicians, but there are the odd one or two politicians who you think are genuine.
MC: Can you give me one example?
CP: A modern-day politician?
MC: Any. Well, one modern day and one, any period in time.
CP: Let me go through some history. I’m not saying these people actually were fantastic people; they were same as you in the world. I’m not saying that they were necessarily nice, good people but you have to admit some politicians did help shape the modern world in the twentieth century and I suppose three people that sit in my mind who were probably most responsible for shaping post-war Europe would be the three in the Second World War; Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt, because so much happened in that particular time and they drew the shape of the world as they like in 1945, east against west. So those three politicians stand out the worst in the twentieth century. As regards to a politician today, probably I would say I admired – I get tingles down my back when I think of this, is Nelson Mandela.
MC: Really? Why?
CP: He inspires people. Whatever happened, he was in prison for 30 years. He never held a grudge, he came out and he preached forgiveness and peace. I admire him for that, he could have come out extremely bitter and twisted and he didn’t, he was quite a righteous bloke. I don’t think he’s an active politician but I think he touched the world. One thing, I think he touched everybody’s heart. So probably Nelson Mandela. I’m a hard-touched guy; it takes a lot for me to say things like that. I don’t normally look at things too deep. A lot of people use fame with an ulterior motive behind it, not everybody’s genuine, so for me to actually say something really positive takes a lot.
MC: OK, since we’re dealing with teenagers, the thing that I want to hear some thoughts on is about sex.
CP: Well, it’s there, isn’t it? I think sex has become just another commodity, like a lot of other things such as fast food, celebrity, fame or whatever. I think sex now has become almost a hurry. When I was a young kid, even as a young boy, I was brought up to respect women. We were brought up in the so-called sexual revolution in the Sixties. Don’t forget I came from an ok-to-do Welsh background that was quite conservative. Looking back now, we were brought up minding traditions, I’m of that age and I still do it now, alone, not so much now but I was brought up to respect women, to open doors, to be polite to women and almost put women on a pedestal. That’s it.
MC: But is there a reverse side to this, that if you put them on a pedestal you…
CP: You can be knocked down, disappointed or whatever.
MC: Chauvinism has another side… Where on the one hand it seems women are being treated as the fairer sex, but on the other hand, it restrains women from reaching their own potentials, which comes from working hard and pushing your own limits.
CP: I don’t agree with that, I don’t think I’m a chauvinist. I like a laugh and a joke and I think one of the things about modern society now is we all try to make society out that men and women are almost the same. You look at films now and the girl beating the man and stuff like that. I think a lot of that has created chauvinism because society is making men more insecure. I think in the old days, men knew their role; I’m not saying it was right. But if there was a man in the old days, the man was the breadwinner, the man would go to work, the woman stayed at home.
MC: (laughs)
CP: I might get beat up here! However, modern society has eroded those rules and we’ve all become the same! Honestly, I don’t personally think I’m a chauvinist; I’ve worked with a lot of women in my life. I’ve been told, I know how to have a laugh and a joke, I make up too fast sometimes, but I don’t mind being told off. I don’t think I’m a chauvinist, I don’t think it makes me a chauvinist because I want to talk, to be polite. Unless we count sex, I think sex is too prevalent. Look at the diseases all around the world through sex, HIV, and all sorts of things. So sex, has not been good to the world.
MC: (laughs)
CP: I do think there is too much emphasis put on sex and relationships.
SP: TV and films have made youngsters think they’ve got to have sex instantly, because they see it so much on the TV these days.
They tend to go into it far younger, they just do it because they think they have to. There’s no waiting and there’s a lot again from schools and things. Teenage girls and boys feel like they have to do it, to be accepted as cool. They think being a virgin at a certain age is the same as being a loser. It’s wrong, really wrong, you shouldn’t do it for the sake of doing it; you ought to be a bit more selective about it.
CP: We’re coming from another point of view, we’re 50 years old. So we’re coming from a different age group altogether, where we did have to wait. It wasn’t just the case of going out there. I came from a pub society, where men used to go to the pub drinking.
When I was eighteen, nearly twenty, you very rarely got a woman in there, you know women probably came out during weekends and things like that. Now, everything goes. I do occasionally read up on some youngsters’ magazines, and I’ve seen news and a lot of information about sex and what you should be up to, what you shouldn’t. It wasn’t available to me, when I was a youngster.
MC: So, for example, if a condom company came along and said to us, ‘We want to sponsor your site but you have to put my condom advertisement all over it.’ Do you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing?
CP: I think, in this environment, it’s probably a good thing.
MC: But is that encouraging sex?
CP: I think it’s the ‘chicken or the egg’ argument, isn’t it? We’ve gone past that because there are so many diseases, and obviously condoms prevent some of them, particularly HIV so I think probably and possibly, it will be a good thing.
SP: Young kids are going to do it anyway, so they need to be informed of the dangers of unwanted pregnancies and make sure they know about diseases and contraception all things like that.
MC: Okay, put all that aside which already happened. If you could rewrite history, how do you deal with sex in the teenage population? What is the right way to do it?
CP: I think there should be some form of sex education in schools. I think that would probably be a good idea, but taken into context, not to glamorize the fact that it’s the ultimate thing, like having sex at thirteen or fourteen. So long as it is in context, that sex should be described as something else. So the education is where you should learn about practical skills, for example.
SP: And the consequences of having sex like becoming pregnant and having diseases.
CP: I think it is important that kids know where babies come from. I remember, asking my mum, when I was a very young lad, where babies come from. She just told me somewhere, like the pub, and I was more confused than ever! But then you do learn things through school; we never had any age gap. I think it would’ve been better, at a certain age to be told about it. Maybe you’re too embarrassed to ask your parents to do it. I’d understand that, but maybe school.
Proper sex education, I’m not against it, but I do think sex has become too glamorous. I think the way they treat it in the magazines, just sells things. I pick up those magazines, when we’re shopping, and I’m bored in the bookshop, I do pick them up. I’m amazed at some of the things they do have in them. I do think they’ve gone too far on TV, you look at the way they train kids on adverts like how they make up ten or eleven-year-old girls almost into sex stars or sex models. I’m not particularly fond of that; they do it to them too young. Everyone’s been bombarded.
SP: They are not young kids or teenagers anymore, they go straight into adulthood. The dressing is…I’m talking about 12 year olds!
MC: Mentally? I don’t think some of them are very mature. Physically, they’re very mature.
SP: That’s the problem, they’re going out looking like adults, but up there in their heads, they’re not.
CP: That goes back to the education. Their minds are bombarded with all this glamorization of pop fame. But there’s very little up there, they think they’re a lot older and more worldly wise than they actually are. They’re really not; a lot of them are very naïve.
SP: They’re missing out on a big part of life because they’re just growing up too fast. They’re not having that innocent teenage bit before they get into the latter part. They’re going from little girls to instant teen models.
[…]
Posted 26 JULY 2006
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