Monday, January 11, 2021

A Clear Table

 I started this year with the task of clearing up my office. Most of the time so far devoted to this job has been spent standing in the middle of the room, staring at a jumble of stuff, in a kind of paralysis of indecision. About one-eighth of the time is spent actively sorting items. A glorious, free-feeling tenth has involved throwing things in the bin. About a quarter of it has been existential despair.

Questions that have arisen:

- Why do I have a shelf full of beads, when I don't make jewellery and indeed do not wear it?

- Will I ever finish half the projects that I started, and given the finiteness of life, should I?

One major reason I don't finish projects is that so much of my time is spent sorting through the crap that I've collected for other projects.

I've come to the conclusion that having too many craft materials is worse than having none. You have no idea what materials you do have, so they may as well not be there, apart from the clutter they create and the nagging guilt that you're not using them.

Hoarding is a kind of procrastination. I remember a Radio 4 programme about procrastination, and they were saying that procrastination isn't at all simply not doing something, it's an active, agonising avoidance of doing something. Because procrastinators are afraid that when they carry out the task, the result will not be good enough. Keeping projects and tasks in that perfect state of ideas is our (ultimately doomed) way of protecting ourselves from disappointment.

Just as the procrastinator collects years of unused, wasted hours around him, the hoarder-procrastinator sits surrounded by fabrics and beads and half-finished stories.

Every year I press cherry leaves between sheets of sugar paper, and then forget I've done this. Cherry leaves in Autumn demand some kind of response, they are so beautifully bright. I think I have a notion that I'm not enjoying them as much as I should do, so I collect them and try to preserve them so I can enjoy them later. They never retain that brightness when dried - they are often still red or yellow or soft green, but they've lost that cheery interestingness. And then I feel bad throwing them out. The best thing I could do would be to catch one still alive, as it were, and paint or draw it then and there.

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Beware Geeks Bearing False Pretences

The last ten years has seen a polarisation of political views on many issues. Social media emphasizes that divide. On Twitter, it is so much easier and more satisfying to signal your allegiance to your tribe, instead of discussing disagreements and trying to understand the opposite viewpoint. Glib, over-simplified tweets which misrepresent your opponent will gain likes and retweets galore. Nuanced defence of those in the other camp will get you unfollowed, ostracised, or maybe harassed.

But is it any wonder? Yes, in many ways humans are much, much better off these days than we ever have been. Global infant mortality has plummeted, for example. But our gaze takes in more, so we see more of what's wrong with the world. And some of the problems we face really are huge, and seem intractable. Anyone losing sleep over climate change is, I think, not over-reacting.

If there were easy, obvious answers to any of the political problems we squabble over, we wouldn't be squabbling over them. I think Brexit was a terrible idea, but the European Union does have serious flaws. We need to drastically cut GHG emissions, but poor countries desperately need development and that will necessarily push theirs up.

So maybe we can't expect (and maybe we shouldn't want) to agree on the best policies, but we should be able to agree on facts. After all, if we can't agree on facts, on what basis can we discuss policies? To avoid serious global warming, some will want to focus on technologies and some on consumption, but those who don't accept that it's happening at all - well, what constructive dialogue can happen there?

Science should be common ground between people on the right and the left (and the centre, which funnily enough is not the common ground). We need this, we need trustworthy scientists whose duty is to discovering the truth. Of course nothing in science is the last word, of course everything should be open to question and further testing. But scientific consensus should be our best bet when looking for the most accurate account of reality. And experts who choose to be public communicators should communicate this consensus, honestly, which means putting it in fair context so that they have done their best to avoid misleading the public.

On Twitter I regularly see scientists doing the opposite. Presenting biology, for example, in a skewed and cherry-picked way, because that account better supports their political views. I think that when scientists and other experts do this, they are helping to destroy any hope we have of constructive, amicable politics. Because they are taking away the common ground of science, and fact.

If you ever feel like you have to misrepresent scientific fact, perhaps by carefully showing part of the story but not all, or placing it out of context, or bamboozling people with obfuscating detail so they don't notice when you finish with a non-sequitur, stop. Ask yourself why. If you know and understand the science, and yet hold the opinion you have, why don't you explain *your* reason for holding that opinion, despite the science you think undermines it? Who knows, maybe that reason will sway your audience. They are of course entitled to make up their own minds, based on the evidence. And if you are an expert, you have no right, at all, to abuse that position by tricking them into agreeing with you on false pretences.

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Boy Oh Boycott

I've long been convinced of the importance of a robust defence of free speech. It should be needless to say, but that includes speech I personally find offensive. (I find, for example, election speeches that explain how free speech is only the freedom to say things with which the speaker agrees, not things she finds unkind, particularly offensive, but it is that person's right to make such a speech, and the right of those taken in by it to vote for her.)

Free speech is curtailed if we can lose our livelihoods because of thoughts we have expressed in a personal capacity. Kenan Malik has discussed that here.

Given all that, something quite funny happened today. I pay a number of small subscriptions to various newspapers, writers and websites. One website to which I contribute via Patreon runs an Arts account on Twitter, and hosts an interesting hashtag each week. I used to contribute to the hashtag conversation, and in doing so met a guy who at first seemed very pleasant (and indeed has pleasant traits mixed in with everything else, as have we all).

But this guy gradually began to behave in a bullying manner on Twitter. I agreed with his politics - I think Brexit is a bad idea, for example - but not his way of attacking people who disagreed with him. If someone supported Brexit it was because they were racist and a bad person. It was dangerous to listen to opponents' views (presumably because they might trick you into agreeing with them, but also, it seemed, because treating them like human beings was somehow equivalent to being a collaborator).

He emphatically was not a free speech advocate. He liked the idea of writers who had been found 'problematic' automatically losing their publishing contracts, for example. I'd considered talking to him privately, because we got on very well, and explaining how this kind of censorship can have the opposite effect of the one he wanted - because I don't doubt he wants a kind and fair society, as I do. I was going to point out how the liberal left's abandonment of free speech meant that women were unable to freely discuss how trans rights were conflicting with our sex based rights, and how detransitioners were silenced and left without support.

Then he quote-tweeted (he liked quote-tweeting - it's a way of summoning your followers so they can abuse a wrong-doer) a tweet timidly supporting gender critical lesbians with the hashtag 'TERF'. For those unfamiliar with the connotations, here is Helen Lewis explaining the misogyny. On Twitter, it is like being branded as a witch - you are henceforth considered fair game for death and rape threats. Putting it with the hashtag meant that those looking for women to harrass would easily find the person. And the woman in question? Was the guy's sister-in-law.

Anyway, at that point I stopped interacting with him. Not because I disagreed with him about trans rights, but because he was incapable and uninterested in having a discussion about it, and because when he strongly disagreed with you, he was a vindictive, nasty, closed-minded bully on Twitter (he's probably pleasanter in real life, most people are).

Back to the Arts website I support via Patreon, who are good friends with Quote-Tweet Guy. I knew they were vaguely of the pro-censorship side of the left (sadly, I think that's the norm now), in fact they also agreed with authors losing their contracts if they were deemed bad people, but the work they do is valuable and I'm happy to support it. Today, somewhat strangely, I got a message from Patreon to say that the Arts website was now a Patreon supporter of the Quote-Tweet Guy. I've never gotten an email like this before, so I don't know whether it happens automatically or whether they decided to send it out. Anyway, here I am, giving money to an Arts site, and that Arts site is giving money to someone who at this point probably thinks I'm the devil, and who actively storms around Twitter bullying women who believe humans are sexually dimorphic. What to do?

Well, nothing, of course. I'm supporting the Arts site, and even if they were taking my money and giving it directly to him, it is for his creative work, not for his Twitter rages. How he behaves in his personal life is just that. I do agree with boycotting where a company is making its products in an unethical way, but that's not what's happening here. In a way, I kind of hope that they did send me the email deliberately to get me to cancel my subscription. I quite like the idea of that fiver a month giving them convulsions.

Monday, June 1, 2020

Hamsters

I've been feeling good as a result of staying away from Twitter. I have more concentration and I feel like I'm spending more time reading about things that are expansive and constructive. In a way, reading books or listening to online talks is like following a path on a pleasant and interesting walk - afterwards I feel calm, energised, I feel like I've spent my time well. Reading Twitter on the other hand often felt like being a hamster on a wheel, on some nasty drug, maybe ketamine [It's been pointed out to me that ketamine is a sedative and that what I had in mind was actually a nasty dirty mixture of ketamine, speed and acid]. Little paws scrabbling furiously, jaw grinding, and afterwards feeling sticky and guilty, and that it was all a waste of time.

Anyway despite all that I do find myself taking peeks at social media, because while one part of my brain might be a sensible hill-walker, the other definitely is a hamster on ketamine [see above].

Social media furores tend to have a particular feature: a screenshot of a single tweet or post will be presented as if it sums up a person's entire personality, the balance of good and bad in them.

But people often aren't consistent. Our personalities are more a symphony than a Sine wave. (I'd just like to point out that symphonies can be awful). We'll have an overall trend, certain things will be 'in character' or 'out of character', we might have motifs. We'll change too, over years or maybe, sometimes, over weeks. But to freeze us in one snapshot, or screenshot, doesn't really show who we are. And sometimes we are two things in a tug of war - a hillwalker and a hamster - and that pulling-in-opposite-directions will happen in lots of different dimensions.

Two people can describe a third person and both be speaking the truth, and yet the two descriptions will be entirely at odds. Sometimes, when we read things we wrote, we don't recognise ourselves.

I find it's good to recognise this consciously, about myself and about other people. Seeing it in myself, I know that if I want to achieve some goal that takes willpower, I have to plan ahead to thwart the hamster. Hence I got my husband to block Twitter so I literally cannot log on even if I wanted to.

It's possible to train the hamster in some things. It takes sheer brute willpower to do sit-ups for the first while, because they are awful, but at some point they stop feeling like flaming swords being thrust into your stomach and the hamster cops on that afterwards there's a nice feeling of having done them. And the hamster should be listened to, at times - its deep melancholy when confronted with wheatgrass shakes or chia burgers is a wise melancholy, insusceptible to faff about superfoods. I suspect that, if something really is a good idea, the hamster will eventually be brought round to it, but if it is never won over, that might mean that the hillwalker got it wrong.

I wonder if hamsters ever truly fall for that joyless Art that usually takes the form of installations. I bet they don't. There's good in hamsters, as well as bad.

Anyway in making sense of or just not losing my mind with other people, the hamster theory again helps. Sometimes, people just do stuff that they shouldn't do. Trying to make sense of it is, sometimes, a waste of time. Asking why will lead either to fruitless quarrels or the person who is questioned imagining some reason that isn't actually correct. Homing in on that one thing, trying to wrestle it into a narrative that makes it consistent with other aspects of that person, or somehow making that one thing representative of the whole person, is not going to lead to a better understanding.

The unfiltered aspect of social media means that we see that disparate, inconsistent side to people more these days. Once we'd only have seen it in family or close friends, those we hold in familial contempt and familial forgiveness. Now we see it in people we don't know personally or well, and I think that makes it more likely we'll misinterpret what that inconsistency means. Arguments with a spouse are inevitable and unless they're very bad, don't make us think less of them. Arguments with a stranger feel very different, and can colour our whole opinion of them. But social media lulls us into an intimacy where we do say things unguardedly, make jokes we wouldn't make at a formal gathering, venture opinions we'd never think to share with strangers that were in the room with us.

So I think we need to stop trying to squeeze people into screenshots. Maybe it's the hamster that tries to do that, but it's up to the hillwalker to say no, we're going for a walk instead. To take the hamster out of the social media treadmill, and lift it up high to see the view. And the hamster will bask in the sunshine like a happy animal, and make the hillwalker enjoy the view even more. Because there's good in hamsters, if only they're brought up right.

Saturday, May 16, 2020

Beliefs

Lately I've become interested in Jung. I'd been only vaguely aware of him as the salt cellar to Freud's pepperpot until I listened to a Radio 4 programme about the two of them. After that I figured he was about as nutty as a squirrel's symbolic dream, and left it at that.

But within gender critical circles there are a lot of Jungians. And I've heard some surprisingly good stuff from them. So I thought I'd have another look. I listened to a Jungian podcast, the latest episode of which was about astrology and Jung's belief in it and use of it in therapy. I say listened, I listened to about half an hour of it. I didn't mean to turn it off but my brain appeared to have melted and I felt unable to endure the pain. I hate to say it but the same thing happened when I took another run at it with a different episode.

The curious thing to me is that anyone who is enthusiastic about Jung is gender critical. Jungianism just reminds me so much of transgender theory. Both are mystical, both wrap themselves in big, impenetrable woolly blankets of obfuscatory language, both are very much invested in ideas of masculinity and femininity being profound essences. If I believed Jungianism, I would have no problem believing in gender identity. Pile it on my plate, I'd say. I've got an appetite for this stuff.

I've been rereading a book on the history of alchemy, by the excellent science historian and chemist Lawrence Principe. He mentions Jung in the introduction (as an example of someone who misrepresented the history of alchemy) which was one of the things that prompted me to read a bit more about Jung this week.

Principe charts the history of alchemy from 4th century Egyptian trade secrets of how to counterfeit gold and other precious items, to its eventual separation into chemistry and alchemy in the 18th century. There's an intriguing bit about 9th century Arabic alchemists who were trying to analyse metals - they were working on Aristotle's conception of matter as having the properties cold, hot, wet and dry, so they wanted to know exactly how much of each property was in different metals. To do this, they relied on certain sacred numbers, and the fact that Arabic was believed to be the literal language of Allah, and so had significance beyond a means of communication. The Arabic word for a thing could be used to discover hitherto undiscovered properties about it.

I was wondering to myself why I found this so enjoyable and interesting a read, whereas the website I read the other day by a Jungian explaining anima and animus just made me feel very tired and cross. After all, both are systems I do not personally find credible, but which I would like to understand better. And the reason is this: Principe is explaining, as clearly as he can, what 9th century Arabic alchemists believed and why they believed it. While he never scoffs at their beliefs (it would be absurdly anachronistic to do so, I think) he doesn't share them and is not afraid of discussing them robustly and honestly. When I read, listen to, or have conversations with Jungians (so far) this is not what happens. Instead of getting a bare and honest description of the system, I get long-winded, prevaricating impressions of it. Because in this case I am listening to or reading believers, and believers who are packaging up their beliefs to protect them from the hard cold light of reason.

Believers do this to themselves too, and I would say we are all believers of something or other. There will be topics on which I will catch myself doing the same thing. But why is it so annoying to be on the receiving end?

I used to know a person who irritated me very much. And it was because I always felt like they were trying to write a script for me. As in, they wanted me to say X, so they could respond with Y, and then I would hopefully respond with Z, and they'd say... A? Maybe you know someone similar. They sigh dramatically and say something mysterious like 'Well, I suppose I should have expected as much', and gaze silently at the horizon waiting for you to cough and say, 'Oh. What happened?' After this becomes the norm you feel like you're just turning up at a bad play and being given your lines.

Well when someone tries to sell me a belief by concealing the dodgy bits under vast thickets of jargon, I feel the same. They've written me in as someone who shares the belief, or at least is too flummoxed to question it. Why? Because believers need fellow believers. Because believers need to protect the belief.  So the dishonesty (even if it's often unconscious dishonesty) and the manipulation (again, unconscious) is extremely off-putting to me.

Beliefs are fascinating things, and often they really do have some nuggets of truth in them, along with profound insights into human nature. But you only get to the interesting stuff if you can examine them properly, and you can hardly ever do that with a believer standing in your way, draping a lacy cloth over it.

(I feel like I should repeat that I have heard some surprisingly good stuff from some Jungians. And I will continue to try to get a better idea of what it is they believe, and why they believe it.)

Saturday, May 2, 2020

The Meaning of Life

"The Meaning of Life" is a strange phrase, and I for one find it difficult to pinpoint exactly what people mean when they use it. Maybe to ask what is the meaning of life is to ask
- What makes life feel worthwhile?
- What makes life enjoyable?
- What makes me feel like I am worthwhile?

But often it seems to go beyond these questions.

I remember once someone saying that there must be an afterlife, because otherwise, what's the point of life? Which is something similar to saying that there's no point in a holiday if it ever finishes. It's not exactly the same, because you can enjoy memories of a holiday after you go home, whereas you can't enjoy memories of life if you no longer exist. Other people can remember you, though, although one day they'll be gone too.

But I think it's possible that what that person meant, even if they weren't aware that they meant it, was, 'What's the point of the universe if I don't exist anymore?'
What's the point of a TV series if the protagonist has been killed off? Or a TV series if the TV has been switched off? We experience the world by existing, if we stop existing, what's the point of a universe that we can't experience? If a universe falls in a wood...yeah there's no way I can wrench that into a workable metaphor...

The irony of the question is that it arises out of the fact that our existence is important to us. So important that we reel from the idea that it can ever end, and we look for reasons to believe that it will persist. The yearning for the meaning of life comes from the fact that life already does have meaning - a meaning that goes beyond joy or satisfaction or a feeling of being worthwhile. We care that we exist. Life means something to us.

Monday, April 27, 2020

This Little Piggy Took Gardening Leave

As I began this morning by finishing the first draft of a short story and am feeling overwhelmed by my own productivity, I'm indulging in a little hedonistic blogging.

Every time I give up social media I feel the benefit - tasks get done that otherwise would languish in guilt-inducing purgatory, I exercise more, I pay attention when my husband's talking to me instead of nodding and going 'Uh huh' while scrolling through Twitter memes. And yet, in the last week I've relied several times on the fact that I got said husband to block Twitter on my phone, laptop and the communal computer. I literally typed 'Twitter.com' into the navigation bar, knowing that I would get a notice saying... something or other, basically that it couldn't connect.

I feel like the internet expanded the amount of bad news that we get to a scale that we just didn't evolve to cope with. Many times Twitter reminds me of the bit in The Happy Prince, when he gets moved to a high plinth where he can see all the poverty and suffering in the city that he used to be blissfully ignorant of. The internet brings hundreds of injustices and tragedies to the time-line that has taken the place of our village street, and then it gives us, as tools, the tweet button and the Facebook post.

I think a lot of the time when I posted stuff on Twitter or Facebook I was doing it in a blind urge to change things. Which of course was futile. But it didn't feel futile, because the feedback that should have come from seeing change, came instead from likes and retweets. Little kicks of endorphin, detached from anything meaningful. Imagine if you were using a console to control something important - a power or food supply - and when you hit certain buttons, you saw gauges giving you positive feedback. But it turned out the gauges weren't connected to anything, they were just random lights.

There's an experiment that's related about a pig who received random gifts of food as it moved about its stall. The pig started associating particular movements with the food, believing that it could somehow cause the food to appear if it made certain steps. I think you're meant to laugh at the pig for being superstitious or something but really it was just working on the information available to it. A kind person would sit the pig down and explain to it that it has no way of influencing the supply of food. The pig would then sigh and talk about the days when pigs did control their own fortunes to a slightly greater degree, foraging in the forest for acorns and beech-mast, and perhaps both person and pig would agree that some kind of happiness and usefulness is only to be attained when aspirations and abilities are more or less matched. Maybe to be happy we need to search for the place where our activities can have effect.

Maybe it's just cynicism to think that arguing on Twitter about politics and the environment is the equivalent of headbutting an indifferent food-chute, but I don't feel cynical planting nursery plants for moths in the garden. It feels a bit sad, because I genuinely care about all those bigger things. But it feels good to do small things that I actually can do.