Self-Censoring in 2019

It was a year and a half, maybe two years ago, that I stumbled into the debate about gender identity. I'd assumed, like a good progressive, that Amnesty was right when it said Self ID was a good thing and really only affected trans people.

I only started looking at the arguments more carefully because I felt I should defend Self ID against its detractors.

After listening carefully to the pro-Self ID side, I realised I didn't agree with it. Only then did I listen to speeches hosted by A Woman's Place UK. I remember the first time I visited their website, I felt nervous. Even in the privacy of my own home. And then - it was all so sensible, and reasonable. And I realised I was the modern equivalent of a heretic. I didn't believe. And I'd seen how heretics got treated. By people I knew.

I changed my mind gradually, but when I knew for certain that I was gender critical, I think I just thought fuck. Because I am no good at pretending I believe stuff I don't believe. I knew at some point, I'd come out and say it. And what then?

I'm an artist. I am involved in the crafty, arty side of the city I live in. Not socially, but for work. I'd seen what had happened to a similar business when the owner, citing his religion, wouldn't display cake toppings for gay couples. (To be clear, he had never refused service to gay couples). He'd been boycotted. He'd had to pass the business on to someone else. I am in favour of same sex marriage but the glee with which he was denounced disturbed me even when I had no inkling I could be headed the same way.

I also write short fiction as a hobby, and I submit these, again, to lefty, arty type online magazines.

A guy who I knew through Twitter would, if he saw someone say something gender critical, retweet them with the hashtag 'TERF'. It's like being branded a witch. On the left, it gives people the right to threaten you, harass you, even attack you.

The first time I liked a gender critical comment my hands shook. I got up in the middle of the night to unlike it.

Feeling unable to point out the sexism, misogyny and incoherence of gender theory reminded me of all the times I was made accept the sexism, misogyny and incoherence of Catholicism. Eventually, I just started tweeting openly. Before I did so, I muted men I knew who regularly 'called out' heretics. I also stopped logging into my business account, because I think it's likely I'd be targeted through that, and I feel better able to defend myself on my personal account. I no longer retweet people who might not want to be associated with me. I no longer bother submitting short stories.

I don't know how paranoid or realistic I'm being. I've seen women hounded and ostracised for believing that biological sex is real. I have always had bad anxiety, and the only way I can be open about my opinion is to shut down as many avenues I can think of through which I can be attacked.

Like other gender critical feminists I follow, I have been over and over these arguments, looking for a way in which I could be wrong. Because I don't want this. But I can't see a way to reach any conclusion other than the one I have. Politicians, organisations, publications, have abandoned their duty to critically engage with this, and to make sure debate can be had. Instead in many cases they have stoked the animosity that anyone risks by speaking up.

It hit me today how much this has affected me. An online magazine tweeted one of my stories, and I felt unable to retweet it, in case they get hassle for publishing something by a 'terf'. I've just swapped one form of self-censoring for another.

Gender, Gender, Gender, and Gender

I am going to do something unforgivable. I am going to ask the meaning of a word.

What does 'Gender' mean, when used in the context of 'gender identity'?

Before I started paying attention to the gender debate, I thought that what was being said was, more or less, that some people deeply felt that they should have been born the other sex, and that we should treat them as if they were that preferred sex. What's actually being said is that biological sex doesn't really exist and that whether you are male or female depends on your gender identity, not your physical body. So it seems kind of important that we know what this term, gender identity, means.

I've asked this of many people - politicians, people who work in civil rights organisations, people who agitate for the primacy of gender identity over sex. I've only ever got three kinds of answers:

Silence - the most frequent (non) response.
Circular definitions - eg., 'Gender identity is the gender you are', 'gender relates to your gender identity'.
and Negative definitions - 'Gender isn't biological sex, or stereotypes, or personality type'.

I have come across various uses of the word where it means something in particular:

1. It's often used as a synonym for biological sex.
2. People who hold that male and female people have distinct, innate patterns of psychological traits sometimes refer to that as 'gender'.
3. Second-wave feminists believe that 'gender' is the system by which female people are conditioned to be submissive and male people are conditioned to be dominant.

Second-wave feminists, among others, believe that the concept of gender identity actually does refer to the second and third meanings. That the idea of an innate gender identity suggests that men and women really do have distinct patterns of psychological traits, and that these traits are in line with the socially-prescribed roles of men and women. As second-wave feminists believe that those socially-prescribed roles are detrimental to women, they naturally reject the idea that female people are fundamentally suited to those roles.

So second-wave feminists see gender identity as regressive and sexist. Given the understanding of the word 'gender' by second-wave feminists, it's unavoidable that they think this.

Meanwhile, people who promote gender identity see second-wave feminists as regressive and transphobic, because they object to the replacement of sex with gender identity.

I am a second-wave feminist, I think. I certainly don't want to be regressive, which is precisely why I currently have a problem with the concept of gender identity. It appears to me to be regressive. It doesn't matter how much hate I get for this position, I can't go along with something I believe is sexist and harmful to women. What would make me go along with it? It's simple - if I could see that it wasn't regressive, that it was, in fact, progressive.

For this to happen, I'd have to know what people mean when they use the word 'gender' in 'gender identity'.

Grief, the Stoics, The Flaming Lips and Fleabag

Recently I started listening to Daniel Kaufman's discussions with other philosophers, particularly Massimo Pigliucci. Pigliucci is a Stoic. They were talking about the Stoic way of dealing with grief. How I understood it (I'm not a philosopher) was this: the Stoics thought that, as death is outside your control, you shouldn't allow it to destroy your well-being. You have to accept the death of loved ones and recognise the futility of wishing that they hadn't died. This involves seeing your loved ones as "preferred indifferents"; you might strongly like to have them around, but your happiness doesn't depend on them.

Daniel Kaufman's objection to this was fairly natural. If our loved ones die, we are devastated, because we love them. It seems like the only way to avoid being devastated is not to invest emotionally in them, which doesn't seem like a good way to live. Pigliucci explained that it's more about being proportional in our grief - that is, that it is natural to grieve for a certain amount of time, but that eventually we have to get on with life.

Elsewhere Pigliucci says that as a Stoic you should focus on what you can affect, which boils down to your own thoughts and actions. Basically, you should do your best, and take comfort that you did your best, regardless of the outcome.

To me, together with the bit about grief, this sounds a lot like some lyrics from a Flaming Lips song:
Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes, let them know
You realize that life goes fast
It's hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun doesn't go down
It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

 

These went round and round my head in the weeks before and after my dog, Zuni, died. I'd dealt with my dog Pasha's death four and a half years ago by thinking of how much we cherished her when she was alive. I told myself that the time to love her was when she was alive, and now that she was dead, I had to focus on loving Zuni, who could still benefit from that, and Lily (aka Tess), the dog we took from the shelter after Pasha's death.

In a way, this was a good way to deal with it, although I think I pushed memories of Pasha away too much. It was painful to think of her, so I tried not to. I didn't look at photos of her and avoided talking about her. I think I was trying to do what the Stoics recommend, but I don't think I did it quite right.

Grief is, to some extent, proportional to love. We can't avoid grief without suppressing our capacity to love. But we don't only love one person (I include dogs in people). If our grief for one loved one, who is gone, stops us from being happy that we have other loved ones, it's stopping us from loving, to some extent. I think. If we take comfort from the fact that we cherished our departed loved one when they were alive, shouldn't we be cherishing those we still have? Because some day, they too will die. Can you do this, if you are eaten up with grief?

So I think that the imperative to overcome grief comes in part from what we owe our loved ones, rather than just from the pursuit of our own well-being or equanimity. But how do we overcome it?

After Zuni died, I didn't hide his pictures. We have a photo of him on our fridge and every time I see it I get a lump in my throat. But, as with Pasha, I do ease the pain by thinking of him being happy, and how much we loved him and cared for him. This time I am dealing with it by being aware that we can be happy and sad at the same time. I don't feel the need to try to align all my emotions into one. (I've written about that here).

I watched the TV series Fleabag a while ago. In it, there's a wonderful speech about love, and how love feels like hope. I think that's true - love makes you look forward to the day, it makes planning a pleasure. Grief is the opposite of love, I think. It feels like the lack of hope. Every day carries you further away from where you want to be, looking forward hurts.

So I think hope is a kind of antidote to grief. If you can find other things to feel hope about, then the grief is less sharp. The hope can be vicarious. Sometimes it's easier to be happy for other people. The fact that we are social empathic creatures is a great thing. It's like a sort of central treasury of happiness that we can draw on.

More of a chorus than a solo

After my dog Pasha died, four and a half years ago, I had some thoughts that helped me. The main one was a realisation that I was subconsciously thinking that she was able to suffer or feel sad about being dead. Of course, she couldn't. She was dead. Meeting that thought head-on and dispelling it was like finding a thorn or splinter and removing it - the grief was still very painful but it didn't sting so much.

I was able to use things like that this time, when Zuni died. I've been bumbling along, doing reasonably well, considering. Then I wondered where my period was. I'm pretty much clockwork but this month I was almost two weeks late. I had the bizarre thought - I really, really hope I'm not pregnant because if I am, I'll think it's Zuni being reincarnated. I mean - what? I don't believe in reincarnation, in any kind of spirit. So one interesting thing is that I have these thoughts flying under the radar that feel like they belong to another person, a person completely different to me. And then the other thing is that, while Me, the Me I'm aware of, is getting on with this, sad but coping, my body is obviously deciding to react in its own way - two week's silence.

I've also found myself remembering back. There were four and a half years when I'd lost Pasha and still had Zuni, and those years began with the empty ache over Pasha and somewhere eased into the rich, calm happiness of having Zuni and Lily. I reach back into memories of Zuni, find one and feel happy, only to realise that, at the time, I was very sad, still smarting from Pasha's death. But I think the happiness I feel did happen too. And now, while some thoughts are sad about Zuni, I know some are glad and grateful I have Lily and Paul. Maybe memories are made of strands - the different, conflicting or complementary feelings you had at the time. Depending on the strand you travel back on, you have a happy memory or a sad one, both of the same time and experience.

I've read various philosophers say that the idea of a single consciousness which is You (or Me) is an illusion. I've often felt that I am more a squabbling council. The last two weeks have made me feel that more. Different layers of me are grieving in different ways.

Why Am I Reading This?

My darling Zuni, my beautiful dog, died on Wednesday. I'm not going to go into it because I'm gutted. But the whole thing has brought back to me how much I rely on fiction. Medicine is amazing, wonderful, but when it can no longer help, fiction has always been a vital source of comfort.

I think it is good to have books of different kinds - books that stretch your mind, and books that comfort you. Sometimes a book ends up doing both those things. Many books do neither. I follow Alom Shaha on Twitter and a while back he said that he'd been so disappointed in so many books that he felt like he'd somehow lost the ability to enjoy novels. Various replies sympathized; one woman said that she tended to re-read old favourites just to feel what it was to love books again. It was a good thread to find, because I have been feeling this way and wondering what's wrong with me.

I know that there are good books out there. But, like Mr Shaha and the others, I keep finding myself a quarter of the way through a promising-looking novel, wondering where the joy is. I keep reading books that have no heart. Books that have a kind of bleakness to them, in which I feel like the writer is saying, We will not be lowering ourselves to the level of enjoyment. We are too sophisticated for that. I like a good plot, well-constructed, ingenious. Imagine a cat's cradle, taut. Instead plots are loose and sagging - but only Philistines hanker after plot. Characters are hollow and behave in nihilistic ways that human beings almost never do.

I can't help but suspect a kind of selfishness and egotism on the part of the writer when I read a book like this. The past week or two I had been reading Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans. I hadn't read any of his other books and my husband bought me this one partly because it was a sort of detective novel, and a good whodunit is something I relish. This is not a good whodunit - there is no ingenious plot, there are no clues or satisfying tying together of strands. Like several other reviewers on Goodreads, I assumed at some point the events would turn out to be a dream, because it made very little sense. The 'plot twist' when it happens involves, as so often is the case, the rape of a woman. It ends on a flat note and is the kind of book that would leave me depressed even on a normal day.

Yesterday was not a normal day. Ishiguro owes me nothing, of course, and the idea that books should avoid disturbing themes or scenes is a terrible one. I have no wish to wrap my mind in cotton wool. I've read books that have included very dark things, but I felt like they were an integral part of a story that ultimately gave me something. It's that, I think, that leaves me slightly resentful. I just find so many books ungenerous. They are caviar - not tasty, enjoyable or even nutritious, but the fact that you consume them tells you and others that you are the right sort of person.

Sacred Cow, Batman, that's some motivated reasoning!

I have been thinking, A LOT, about critical thinking. About how we as a species can work out what is most likely to be true, and also work out how best to minimise harm and facilitate good things (what even *are* good things?).

A most unnerving thing happened the day before yesterday, when I was scrolling through Twitter (wading through Twitter?). I'd returned to Twitter after a healthy break, like the weak-willed worm I am. Someone was saying how more people should learn Critical Thinking Skills, and a guy replied saying that he taught them. He had a diagram and everything. The thing is, I recognised that guy. I recognised him because a few months ago I read his tweets as he spouted the most flagrant nonsense.

Or was it nonsense? I'm not going to go into it, because either he asserts utter nonsense even though he teaches critical thinking, or I believe a logical and true position is utter nonsense even though I've read books like Stuart Sutherland's Irrationality and listened to Steven Novella's Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills (I know, I'd bet on that Twitter guy too. Those are both great books though). Either way, it's possible to learn about critical thinking skills, genuinely want to think critically, and be very, very wrong.

But here is what I think trips up even the most sceptical of sceptics: motivated reasoning. I think that if we want to think something, it is incredibly difficult for us to fairly weigh the arguments for an against. At the moment, I believe it may be the single biggest stumbling-block to clear thinking.

I now have a few tricks I use to try and side-step my biases. The first and most important of these is to admit to myself what I want to be true, and list the reasons why I want it to be true. In other words, identify my sacred cows. Once I have them identified, I can tie bells round their necks. The jingling of the bell - bear with me, this is one tortuous metaphor - will alert me that I am being led astray by the bias of a sacred cow, instead of following the... elk? The Elk of Truth.

Next time, I will discuss what to do if the Elk of Truth leads you into the Valley of Despair. (Involves Tents of Wine).

Do You Need a Montage?

Recently I've rediscovered Deodato's wonderful, trippy Also Sprach Zarathustra and I have it on my MP3 player as the first song in a progrock-ish mix. I put it on when I go for a walk. There's a thing I do a lot when I'm listening to good music, which is that I imagine a video for it. For this one, I imagine a montage of me doing all the stuff I want to do - the illustration project I'm working on, DIY around the house, running, etc. It is the perfect musical accompaniment - very cheesy with dramatic flourishes where I zoom in on my imagined achievements (drawings, curtains, shelves).

It's put me in such a good mood lately that I want other people to do it too. Of course you might need to find a different song if Deodato doesn't work for you. Mason Williams' Classical Gas is similar in cheese-factor fantasticness, but for me that's reserved as the theme tune to a 1970s-style detective drama featuring my dog, who drives a blue Triumph Dolomite.

No Pain, More Progress

Dr Yoni Freedhof is an obesity expert. I can't find the quote now, but I know that he has said something along the lines of People aren't designed to suffer, and any diet that requires them to suffer will fail because they'll give it up. I think this has wider applicability.

The Puritans didn't last very long in power in England. They made cursing illegal and cancelled Christmas. Rather than put up with the utter joylessness of the cronies of Cromwell, when he died, the English took back Charles II, dodgy with Catholicism as he was. And who can blame them?

I'm left-wing. I'm pretty certain that socialism is the best economic system, *if* we can get it right. I used to think I was liberal - I'm staunchly pro-free speech, pro-freedom of thought and religion, I believe that people share a universal humanity - the ability to reason and empathise - and that this dwarfs our differences. I believe in the principle of due process and the possibility of rehabilitation, and that punishment for punishment's sake is hideous. I mean, all these things now throw my liberal credentials into doubt, but once, these were liberal values.

And I think they will be again.

Because we're not designed for suffering. We're not designed to embrace the joylessness, the bitterness, and the lack of humanity that has currently beset the liberal left. The ones who enjoy punishing people for the sake of punishing people, the ones who censor instead of debating, the ones who believe that our differences define us, and can never be surmounted by empathy - these are the New Puritans. And they'll go the way of the old.

We'll shrug you off, like the bad dream you are. We'll explore ideas and talk to each other, and gain understanding. We'll inch forward, hopefully making the world better. We'll engage our opponents and win them over if we can, not bull-doze over them and try to get them fired. All this engagement and debate will give us the chance to know when we're the ones who are wrong. And most of the people currently acting as Puritans will cop on, as people do, when the feverish zeal passes. Some of them will write about how they got caught up in something unpleasant, and warn other people of the pitfalls that we all, all being human, have to be wary of. Some of them will forget it ever happened.

Happy Ever After Rots Your Teeth

There's a thing that often happens in fiction, and I don't like it. We'll be presented with a dilemma: for example, John loves Mary, but Mary is happily married to Tom, who is John's best friend and a really nice bloke. How can this end happily?

It turns out that Tom is not a nice bloke - he's awful! And he doesn't love Mary, in fact, he's been having flings behind her back. And Mary doesn't love him. So she ends up with John. The end.

Someone happily munching along might not notice that the dilemma was never resolved, rather, the original terms of the dilemma were shown to be false. Which isn't the same thing at all. You can exchange the above for other plots: an unattractive girl falls in love with a popular boy, but then it turns out actually she is attractive, she just needed to tidy herself up a bit.

Weirdly, this is an even stronger trope in politics. There will be a dilemma: animal testing, say. On one hand, we need to test new medicines. On the other, animals are sentient and suffer. Groups opposed will claim that animal testing isn't necessary or helpful, thus disappearing the dilemma that way. Groups supportive will refuse to acknowledge that animal suffering is similar to our own, and disappear it that way.

Economic growth is still tied to CO2 emissions increases. People who believe we need to abandon economic growth rarely acknowledge the social and political implications of doing so; and likewise, promoters of growth won't acknowledge that there is currently no reason to believe we can decouple it from emissions.

The best debate programme I've ever listened to has to be Agree to Differ, from BBC Radio 4. Because, rather than stoke up dramatic, polarizing rows, Matthew Taylor got his guests to simply acknowledge each other's true positions.

I think, unsatisfying as it is, admitting conflicts of interest, or real dilemmas, is the only way to make the best of them. The only real solution to animal testing - I think - is biomedical engineering, like the creation of lab-grown skin. Animal Free Research UK (formerly the Dr Hadwen Trust) focus on funding research in this area. Other ways of minimising the need for testing exist - the All Trials campaign, that seeks to get all trials registered, has the side effect of allowing researchers to identify dead-ends, experiments that have been tried without yielding benefits, avoiding pointless replication. You can support the campaign here by signing the petition or donating.

 Acknowledging the problems of both degrowth and growth would allow us to try and find ways to deal with them or, more realistically, minimise them. Kate Raworth's book, Doughnut Economics, is a great exploration of this.

Sometimes, there's no perfect answer to dilemmas. But we still need to admit they exist. Unlike in fiction, we can't rewrite the facts.

Naming Your Shadow

I think people can behave better or worse depending on pressures they're under, the company they're keeping, points of view they've heard, information they've received, lies they've been told, and experiences they've had. Probably lots of other things too.

In The Once and Future King, T.H. White wrote Lancelot as a fallible but generally nice man, who makes the fatal mistake of thinking that to be good he should test himself by putting himself in the way of temptation. But White seems to believe, and so do I, that to be good you have to recognise your weaknesses and avoid situations in which you are likely to let yourself down, or hurt others.

One corollary of this idea is that if we are fallible and liable to mistakes, then others who make mistakes likely to do so as a result of this same fallibility, not inherent badness. If we seek to understand people's objectionable actions or beliefs in this way, doesn't it make it more likely that we'll avoid those same mistakes? Because we'll see how they came about? Whereas if we just say to ourselves "Those people are monsters, there is no point in trying to understand them" we miss the opportunity to identify the traps they fell into.

Sometimes good impulses can lead us dark places. It is good to be upset when we see harm being done. I'll take a concrete example: animal abuse. A lot of people react very viscerally when they see the result of cruelty or neglect on pets. They're upset for the animal - good. They're angry at the perpetrator - understandable and I think, pretty unavoidable. Some people take the action of donating to an animal charity, or asking for legislation that protects animals - mandatory chipping, pet care as a mandatory module in school, a change to licensing laws, free neutering. This is good and constructive. Some people want other legislation - heavier fines, jail for offenders. Whether this is good or not is more complicated - deterrence is questionable as a strategy, and it will face more opposition, so is it the best way to effect better animal welfare? What about if you circulate the person's photo on social media? Are you really doing this because it's the most effective way, or even an effective way, to help animals? Or are you perhaps doing it out of a sense of justice, or to put another word on it, punishment? How do you feel when you are carrying out this punishment? A little excited? Is this a good thing? Does it really come from a good impulse? Or did the original good impulse lead to something darker, and are you now indulging in a kind of cruelty of your own?

I doubt whether anyone is really entirely free of this urge. I've no doubt it had its uses, maybe it still does. But I'm pretty sure it's an urge that we need to recognise and avoid.

This is from Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, because all the best philosophy comes from fantasy.

“Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.”

An Online Club for Twits

I've been off Twitter since last Sunday morning.

I'm one of those people who quickly become addicted to social media and check it compulsively. On balance, it's bad for me. But this is a shame because I think there are a lot of good things to be got out of Twitter and similar platforms.

Twitter allows me to chat directly to interesting people I'd never meet in real life - scientists, writers, people in politics. I've met people I just really like talking with, and I've followed conversations that have changed my mind or given me a better understanding of people with whom I disagree.

I started using Twitter in a very careful, curated way. I mostly followed museums, entomologists, that kind of thing. But politics always filters through and I can't ignore it when it does. After all, politics is, in the end, about how we treat each other and the planet. How do you ignore that?

I have my doubts that Twitter is a force for good in politics, or in society. I think it could be, but I don't think that it is. Debate on Twitter tends to be, often, about winning the argument, rather than coming to a better understanding, or exploring different viewpoints. It is very, very common to see people on Twitter say that debate itself is a bad thing. Twitter is for affirming your existing position, and for seeking out wrongthinkers. It is not for understanding your opponent, for grappling with their points, or for formulating logical counter-arguments.

Why is there this fear of debate? How have we got to the point where someone with a different viewpoint must be marked as utterly and totally bad, with no hope of redemption?

I have a theory. In the past, we had arguments in physical locations. The pub, or someone's house. You could end up disagreeing very heatedly about something. But in two major ways, it was different from social media. Firstly, you usually knew the person you argued with. You may disagree with Bill about Brexit, for example, but you know lots of other things about Bill, good and bad things, and his views on Brexit have to jostle along with those other things to make up your opinion of him. It's harder to say about someone you know, that he only supports/opposes Brexit because he's the devil incarnate.

The other thing that is different - and I think this is perhaps even more important - is that you go home from the pub, or Bill finally leaves your house. And the conversation ends. Maybe you'll take it up again but it will be when you meet Bill again, which will be in a week or so at the earliest. But nobody goes home from Twitter. Hours later, you can still be bombarded by angry responses. Or maybe you're just watching from the sidelines as people say hateful things. If you're a heavy Twitter user, you see it last thing at night, first thing in the morning. Does this make us feel always vulnerable?

Maybe we can deal with disagreement when it's contained - to a few hours in the pub, for example. But when it's constant, and it follows us to bed and wakes us up in the morning, maybe it's too much. So we start seeing disagreement not as an inevitable part of living alongside other human beings - something that's actually helpful, in that it encourages us to explore our own reasoning - but instead we see it as an attack. We've developed an allergy to it. We can't handle it, so we try to banish it, to blot out those who disagree with us.

I wonder if a platform for debate would work better if it were more limited. So when you sign up, you can specify a time of day you receive notifications - 7pm-8pm, say. You cannot change it or lengthen the time past an hour. If you need to change it, you have to send a letter to the company. So all discussions would either take place within that hour, or it would be like having a discussion via post. No checking all times of day, no rows lasting half the night. Maybe we'd get our courage back, and start to listen to each other.

Boyle's Second Law

Robert Boyle is often called 'the Father of Chemistry'. He discovered Boyle's Law, which we all know vaguely from school. His book, The Sceptical Chymist (1661), is generally thought of as the point at which Chemistry diverged properly from its dodgier sibling, Alchemy.

In fact, Boyle was devoted to alchemy, seeing it as a bridge between science and religion. Boyle was deeply religious and wrote many religious pamphlets. He did not see science and religion as antagonistic: on the contrary, he saw them as natural allies. He believed that the world around us was the most direct expression of God, and that to truly understand it was the nearest we would ever get to understanding its creator.

Atheism was growing in the circles Boyle frequented, but Boyle thought that pursuing knowledge would, in the end, prove that God existed.

Whether he turns out to be right is impossible to say for sure. I may be an atheist in practice because on balance that, to me, is what makes sense, but of course God is a possibility (as is Russell's teapot).

What I admire about Boyle is his honesty and integrity. And, in a way, his faith. He believed in God properly, which meant he was unafraid of considering the proof and the arguments. What kind of faith seeks to cover up counter-arguments, or limit exploration? A faith that is afraid of what it will find. A faith that isn't much of a faith at all.

This un-faith is by no means limited to religion. Any idea we hold very dear can become its focus. I lean towards degrowth socialism, because I think it is the best way to ensure the best living standards for everyone while living within the ecological limits of this planet. It is tempting to ignore the problems this throws up - how to ensure individual liberty within that framework, for example. It is tempting to ignore examples of capitalist mechanisms effecting sustainability. But my aim is not to have degrowth socialism, my aim is to have a world where everyone has decent living standards and we aren't wrecking the planet. My faith in degrowth socialism is not Boyle's faith in God - it's hardly a faith, really, more a hope. But it's only worth anything at all if I submit it to the same rigours as Boyle's faith.

So I'm proposing the recognition of Boyle's Second Law: We should only say we believe something, if we believe that argument and evidence will prove we are right.

It's Actually Not That Bad

Climate Change is happening, and we're not doing anything significant to avoid it. Is avoid the right word? Not really. It is already happening, after all. A more accurate word would be 'minimise'. We need to minimise the damage.

It's not an on/off switch. When people say 'Look, it'll happen no matter what we do", that is, to put it bluntly, pants. There is a whole range of severity of climate change. The Paris Agreement was supposed to aim to keep us well below 2 degrees warming. Particularly vulnerable countries, like Pacific islands, argued to keep it below 1.5C warming. NASA's data for 2018 shows 0.8C warming so far. This has already had terrible effects. We're currently on track for somewhere between 3 and 5C warming by 2100.

Numbers, numbers. What do they mean?

They mean people dying, when otherwise they wouldn't have died, and suffering terribly. A huge increase, for example, in babies and very young children dying from malaria, which is a disease I don't think we in malaria-free countries, with access to vaccines, really fully appreciate the horror of. At +2C an additional 40 to 60 million people could be exposed to malaria. At +2C 1.5 billion people each year will live in areas without access to usable water. This is the temperature increase we are pretending to aim at. In fact, even the measures laid out in the Paris Agreement don't leave us anywhere near +2C. If we followed them (and we aren't), we'd end up with warming of at least +3C.

But Elon Musk.

Technology is not going to save us. We need technology, we need people developing solar, wind, tidal; we need people looking at fusion; we need to stop closing down nuclear plants when they're much the better option to the coal and gas that often ends up replacing them; we need to be exploring negative emissions technology and we need to be studying and debating the merits of geo-engineering. We need bio-tech. We need all the tools we can get our hands on. It's still not going to be enough, because we have to make massive changes immediately, and most of the possible tech solutions are still decades away.

We need to change our lifestyles.

We need to stop flying, because it is, far and away, the most flagrant waste of the CO2 budget that someone can do. We need to stop driving one to a car, in fact, we need to stop using private cars. We need to have diets that are mainly vegetarian. We need to stop buying things we don't need.

But this is - this is crazy-talk, isn't it? Give up flying? How could anyone possibly do that? Take the bus? Walk? Not buy something unless I actually need it? It would be like living back in the Olden Days, with mud floors and hair shirts and nothing to do but weave and watch hangings.

Except that it's not. Some stuff in that list you might not be able to give up. You may have a small kid who you need to drop off at creche on your way to work, and the only way to do that is to drive. Or you might live on the opposite side of the planet from your relatives. But if your flying is just for holidays, maybe you can give it up. You can try it out, and see how long you stick it. If it's for work, you might find that your boss is actually ok with you having online meetings instead - you could see if that's the case. It's something they can brag about and put in environmental statements. Deciding not to buy stuff unless you really need it is actually great. In the end, it saves you money and saves you tidying. Here's the late David McKay:

About 50% of current CO2e emissions are due to the activities of the top 10% emitters, so a change in the lifestyle of the wealthiest has the capacity to make significant changes, fast. And on a global scale, 'wealthy' includes a lot of people who think of themselves as fairly average or maybe even a bit broke. In 2013 Ireland had the third-highest per capita emissions in the EU. As the CSO said, "At 12.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per capita in 2013, Ireland’s emissions were 45% higher than the EU average of 8.8 tonnes."

We can make a difference. Climate change is not an on/off switch, it's a sliding scale - it does matter if you add to it or not. And we're social creatures, habits spread among us. Already some of my friends have given up flying because I did and I told them why. If you find blocks to low-CO2 choices, and there's something the government can do to enable you to make better choices, then tell your TD or local councillor. Because if they make that change - make a cycle-path safer, for example - that will not only enable you, it will enable other people.

Climate change is bad. It's devastating, what is happening and what will happen. But giving up flying, going vegetarian (or mostly), waiting for the bus, not buying some gadget - that's actually not that bad.

This isn't what I ordered, though.

I do not like green eggs and ham. It's nothing personal, I just prefer French toast. Sam knows this, we've spoken about it at some length. I have to say he was really pushy about the whole green eggs and ham thing, but eventually, he accepted my right to eschew that dish, and enjoy French toast.

So this morning when I headed over to his little restaurant for my usual Sunday brunch, I was understandably dismayed when he removed the cover with a flourish to reveal his signature porcine and poultry recipe.

"Sam," I said, "We've talked about this. It doesn't matter what you do, I will never like green eggs and ham."

"But this is French toast," he said beaming at me.

"No it's not, it's fucking ham and eggs."

"No, it's not," he repeated. "Words change," he added. "Language is continually evolving."

"Right," I said. "But my taste in breakfast isn't. If you have decided," I said, "that now, green eggs and ham is called French toast (and by the way, 'evolving' is not the same as 'changing by decree') that means that all previous statements regarding French toast are now off the table. Let me elaborate," I said. "Words do not have the power to magically transform matter. If you now refer to what was formerly known as green eggs and ham as French toast, it does not make it that thing which was formerly known as French toast. When I said I liked French toast, I meant I liked that thing which was at that time called French toast, I did not mean that I liked it because it was called French toast." We regarded each other, and then we regarded the dish. "What are you now calling French toast?" I asked.

He looked at me levelly. "French toast," he said.

"Oh my god, Sam," I yelled. "Enough with the fucking green eggs and ham. I don't like them, I will never like them. Can you not just fucking leave it?"

"But this is French toast," he said. "Made to the recipe of colonial France."

Which is why I am having breakfast at home.

I am not a believer

You'll know, if you know me, that I was raised Catholic and am now atheist. I do bang on about it a bit. Sorry. The propensity to believe in things which are not true, or to ignore things that are true, is something I find profoundly frightening.

I am now going to commit the social crime of telling you about a dream I had.

When I was a kid - somewhere in my early teens, I think - I had a nightmare. I woke up covered in sweat. I've never forgotten it. In my dream, I was sitting with my family and other faceless people watching the TV. There was some kind of political procession or parade being shown. One of the people in the parade was a teenage boy who was balancing on rotating blades - those things you see on the front of tractors, like giant lawnmower blades. As each blade moved forward, he'd step back onto the next one, like an acrobat. The tractor juddered and the boy fell into the blades, but everyone else in the parade pretended it wasn't happening, and so did everyone in the room with me.

Anyway, that was the worst nightmare I ever had. I may possibly have had it because that was around the time I read about Lenin and the famine in the Volga valley. What I got from it was that this man, who I think had set out with good intentions, had ignored the reality of the famine because it undermined his ideology, and in doing so, he made a terrible situation much worse, and people who could have been helped and saved, instead died horribly.

So from my early teens I had this scent in my nostrils, the bad smell of choosing to believe what you want to be true, rather than dealing with messy reality. It never seems to end well, even when, sometimes, the lies seem to be told with the best intentions.

I found that there were things I was wrong about. Lots of things. So I learnt that no matter how little I wanted to listen to the other side of an argument, I had to listen to it. I had to be brutally honest with myself and lay out my own reasoning and examine it and test it.

I find the alternative to this - to blindly accept things, even when they seem to contradict reality - I find this nothing short of terrifying. I am sure that this is not the way we should be heading. And yet, it is. People I believed to be progressive, who were proud of the fact they had shrugged off religion, now attack the very idea of asking questions, of thinking critically, of saying that messy reality matters. And honestly, I do not think that this can end well.

Coding & Ethics: Where Do Our Views Come From?

My husband was telling me about a problem in website coding. Rather than writing code from scratch, people use little packages of code that already exist. This obviously has benefits. Then someone will package up *those* packages, and other people will use that package-of-packages. You'll end up with some code you really need in there, and a lot that you don't.

Someone visits your site. Often, websites don't hold all that code themselves. When you see the website, a lot of what you're seeing is created by those packages of code, but they're being sent to you not from the website, but from the webpage (git-hub page) of the many people who created the original bits of code. Time passes. The creator of one bit of code loses interest in maintaining it, and it is no longer compatible and starts causing problems in the packages that include it. Someone tracks the problem and asks the creator to fix it, but they're busy. So then another person volunteers kindly to take over maintenance of that code. Very few people notice. The kind volunteer is not really all that kind. They fix the bug so it works, but they now have access to code that's being called up by thousands of websites. They incorporate malware into it.

I think this is an instance of something that happens commonly throughout society. The great thing about society - the reason we can live such great lives, unlike other animals - is that we specialise, and cooperate. There's a certain amount of trust involved. If we tried to do everything ourselves, we wouldn't get very far. Every so often it turns out that something we trusted was flawed, accidentally or maliciously. So it's a vulnerability, but one that's not going away.

The problem is that I think we are doing this more and more with ethics. Tribalism can cause it, but it can happen anyway, because few of us have the time or energy to really get to grips with all ethical questions. So we see that groups of people we like hold a view, and we think 'that must be the right view, I'll think that too'. We usually don't think that consciously, we just adopt views. And as with coding, this has benefits. But also vulnerabilities. Do you really know why you hold the views you have?