Hospitality

Like everybody else, I tend to think I'm a nice person.

I've read Jesus on compassion, Gabriel Marcel on disponibilite, Carl Rogers on empathy, and I think it's all a great idea. Yet, as I recently discovered, I'm not so good at putting it into practice.

A few nights ago my neighbour knocked on my door. She had just been released from psychiatric hospital to find her mother had gone away and locked up their house, so she had nowhere to sleep. I let her into mine, gave her food and blankets and let her sleep on my couch. My actions were fine. But I surprised myself by how much I resented having to help her. All evening I was irritated by her comments as we watched movies, annoyed by her going through my cupboards, and angry with her for disrupting my privacy.

Alright, so she wasn't the greatest guest, but surely her not having a house to sleep in was more of a problem than me being slightly inconvenienced?

I realised that I was reacting to her more as I would an overly-needy friend than someone actually requiring help. Everything from self-help books to Satanism has warned me about 'psychic vampires' - the clingy, the draining, the emotionally dependent. Yes, I should be wary when someone wants to make me responsible for all their happiness and unhappiness, but if all they want from me is a couch for the night, I think I should relax a bit.

There are reasons to be wary - whether I could trust her, whether there were people or agencies who could help better than I could, etc. But it occurred to me that I haven't really been equipped to know how to help people who are actually in need. It amazes me how insular our lives are, living in an individualistic society. In 21 years of life, I've never really been asked to give much to someone else. I give change to the homeless, but only when it pleases me. I'm starting volunteer work with refugees, but that too is on my terms. I go to their houses; they don't come to mine.

I don't know what to make of it all. Where's the line between being selfish and being protective of my own private space? Should I be doing more to help people? Does charity still count if it's charity on my own terms?

The Post-post-post Post.

I just read a post-post-postmodern novel.

At least, that's what its author calls it. My Little Blue Dress, by Bruno Maddox, is the story of the autobiography of a hundred-year-old woman being forged by a young postmodern writer, also called Bruno Maddox. It's confusing, it's self-conscious, it's conscious of its self-consciousness...and so on. Basically, it's a satire on postmodern writing, and as such it's very funny. But it's also, maybe, on some level a serious "post-post-postmodern" book, whatever that means.

Culture is confusing now. Apparently irony is dead, and now we're into post-irony, where there are no jokes, or the jokes seem to be ironic, but actually they're not... In the sitcom Nathan Barley for example, the editor of an urban culture magazine defends his mag's "stupid" content by saying "stupid people think it's cool. Smart people think it's a joke - also cool." Which would seem to be ironic humour. But then you find critics saying that Nathan Barley only appears to be ironic, while actually the "stupid" jokes are meant at face value.

Some part of me finds all these convoluted games with art and meaning fun and interesting. But another part finds them utterly infuriating. While it might be intellectually stimulating, it's never emotionally satisfying to watch a sitcom with no jokes, or a film with no message, or look at an aesthetically unpleasing painting. However "clever" we might be now, we're still the same kind of animal we were thousands of years ago, and most of us still want emotion and authentic meaning in art, not mind games.

The Limits of Agnosticism

I'm a big fan of agnosticism, in T.H. Huxley's original sense:

In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you,
without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the
intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not
demonstrated or demonstrable,

but today I'm having a problem with it.

Robert Anton Wilson, one of my favourite writers, got me into agnosticism with "model agnosticism", which says that since everything we know about "reality" is filtered through our sensory systems, any model which describes reality really describes our experience of it, and so all of them ought to be taken with a pinch of salt. The scientific model seems the best so far, because it's the most internally consistent and successfully predictive.

In other words, the scientific method provides the most rational explanation for things, which implies that one has already accepted reason as the best way of knowing.

Which is what I've realised about agnosticism: at the level of "how do we know things?" it's useless.

If agnosticism is the refusal to pass any judgement on things we don't have good enough evidence for, then we must first specify what sort of evidence is good evidence. Some people think that experimental data is good evidence. Others think that their personal experience is good evidence. It makes no sense to accept both types of evidence as good evidence, because they conflict - rationally, the fact that I have seen pixies does not imply that pixies exist. I might be mad.

So before we can begin thinking about whether we have good enough reasons for believing something, we have to choose whether we're rationalists or 'experientialists.' Which, I suppose, is why so many people, theists and atheists alike, think agnosticism is a weak option.

The agnostic answer, I suppose, would be that the question of how to know things is an unknowable thing, and so we shouldn't conclude either way. Which means that we can't know anything at all, because we have no basis for it.

So agnosticism boils down to either solipsism or rationalism?

Amendment

I have to admit that the picture choice yesterday was my own, so here are a couple of decidedly un-camp blokes to make up for it...

I'm sure the media do prefer to show the more outrageous parts of these parades, but equally, the participants dress for attention.

This was actually one of the things I liked about the Pride march. Whenever I see environmental or political rallies, the activists seem to adhere to a uniform of old hippy rags, which always strikes me as a bad move. It gives the impression that only dreadlocked stoners care about these issues. The Gay Pride folks might have camped it up a bit, but they did it in a tongue-in-cheek way and were clearly ordinary people with a serious message, trying to engage us with humour rather than anger.

Pride

Do you know the Pedigree Chum adverts that say "We're for dogs"? Well, I have a friend who says that she's "for humans," and I am too.

Given all the doom and gloom going around, I particularly like it when we humans take the time to simply celebrate ourselves, our differences and our unitedness. After all, if we don't feel good about ourselves, we're not going to do much to help our world. So I was overjoyed by the huge Gay Pride festival yesterday. Plenty of environmental and political rallies come and go in Brisbane, but never have I seen a group make their point with such enthusiam, humour and peacefulness, and in such force!

Regardless of sexuality, it made me feel proud to be human.

Why I am not a Satanist.

I'm having a bad day.

I've come across almost nothing intelligent in the last 24 hours, and much that is infuriatingly stupid.

I was first infuriated last night, when I was reminded of this wonderful man, James Randi. Randi has been offering a substantial cash prize since 1964 to anyone who can experimentally prove paranormal abilities. For many years now, the prize has been $1million U.S., and still no-one has passed even the preliminary tests. Here is a log of correspondence between Randi's institute and the most recent applicants. The key point to note is that they are all completely insane. They cannot produce coherent sentences, let alone a conclusive experimental proof. Obviously, the sane, intelligent "psychics" are sane, intelligent con-men and -women, who stay well away from this prize. The only people it attracts are those who actually believe in their own abilities, who are all insane. Surely the mere existence of this annually unclaimed prize should prove to any reasonable person that there are no people with genuine paranormal abilities?

My second gripe is with academia. I came across a well-written journal article yesterday. I've lost the link, and besides, it was some obscure piece of sociology about the "Ur-myth of revolution." The content may well have been drivel, but man, it had style! Every word was faultlessly chosen and impeccably placed. It was deliciously well-written. Which alerted me to fact that, out of every twenty-five journal articles I read, only one of them is likely to be even fairly well-written. I've come to accept that in most articles I'll have to read many of the sentences over twice or thrice before I get their meaning, and that there will be mistakes in the spelling or grammar. Science student friends assure me it's even worse outside of the Arts. Why? The people who write these things are the people we're paying to be well-educated. They're the appointed thinkers of our society. Why should we accept that the average newspaper article 100 years ago was better written than a modern doctoral thesis?

Maybe the declining standard of academic writing has something to do with the declining standard of students? I picked up the latest copy of my uni's student magazine today, and I found:
3 pages of "best procrastination websites" (myspace, youtube, stuffonmycat....)
2 pages of spoilers for American TV shows
2 pages about how funny goats are
5 pages of CD reviews
2 pages of "campus fashions"
and 3 pages of ads.
And this in a 32 page magazine. Thank god I didn't pay my union fees, if this is what they're being spent on.

Oddly enough, one of the least benightedly unintelligent (to quote Marvin the Paranoid Android) things I've encountered is the Satanic Bible. I like it. It's full of good solid humanism, and a sensible rejection of Christian self-hatred. What I don't like is the religious aspect. Posing himself the question "why call it Satanism? Why not just Humanism?" Anton LaVey responds that humanism is not a religion. While we might have intellectually outgrown Christianity, he says we still emotionally need the ritual and dogma of religion.

I say the last thing we need is comforting fictions. If we're going to make any progress, we need to be serious and ruthless with our faculty of reason. So much time and effort are being wasted by accepting low standards and continuing to debate what should be long-dead issues. I wrote a letter last month objecting that one of my uni courses "lacked intellectual rigour." Recently, it seems it might just be that most of the things we do lack intellectual rigour.

God and dieting, knitting and feminism.

Uni holidays have just begun, which means I now have time to tackle that list of "stuff to do." Yesterday I started (arbitrarily) with items 3 and 8:

"Take up knitting."

and

"Learn about feminism."

(Remind me to write a blog one day about my thoughts on self-consistency...)

Having been born only recently (21 years ago), and living in Australia, I've never thought much about sex discrimination. Schools and universities have judged me by academic ability, and the various menial jobs I've had have all been pretty indifferent to my gender, so long as I could count change. To be honest, feminism has seemed like a distant, dead issue. Sure, there are feminists on campus, but they tend to be the ones with shaved heads and Che Guevara T-shirts smelling vaguely of pot. They're just too stereotypical to take seriously. But I'm reminded every now and then that the worlds my mother and grandmother were born into were unimaginably different from the one I take for granted now. For example, just fifty years ago airline stewardesses were compulsorily fired when they reached the age of 32, or got married, or gained too much weight, or appeared "frumpy"...

So I thought it was about time that I introduced myself to proper feminist theory. I have the Female Eunuch waiting on my bookshelf, but I decided to ease my way in with the Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.

Written in 1991, the thesis of the book is that while the political and economic oppression of women has mostly ended, there is a new, subtler, psychological oppression. Namely, the myth that a woman's worth is dependent on how closely she conforms to this culture's idea of beauty. It's a persuasive argument, because the media do seem bent on encouraging an almost insane obsession with appearance, and it seems to be working, too. By being so neurotic about beauty, Wolf's argument goes, women harmlessly fritter away energy that would otherwise be spent challenging the male power structure.

She also addresses my usual unease with feminism - that I don't find it possible to believe that men are "bad", or are deliberately conspiring against women. No, she says, they don't have to be. Just as an individual or a family can prefer illusions to facing truths which threaten their way of life, so too can a society. True equality, Wolf thinks, would destablise the whole structure of society. The beauty myth is the result of "a collective panic reaction on the part of both sexes."

I particularly like her chapter on how the dieting and beauty industries have appropriated Christian notions of guilt, self-punishment, purity, sin and so on. One of the things which motivated me to study religion was a sign in a Subway outlet advertising some new sandwich as having "half the fat, none of the guilt." Perhaps if you slipped up on your diet you might feel annoyed or frustrated, but guilty? Guilt seemed like a peculiarly religious response - as though you were letting down not only yourself, but God as well. Or, as I suppose Wolf would suggest, sinning against the rules that women must be concerned at all times with their appearance.

I'm not sure I agree with everything in the book (and I don't like how it's written, but I'll let that one slide...), but it's showing me interesting new perspectives. I can look back on gender roles 100 years ago and see them as wrong and ridiculous, but the women of the time, mostly, accepted and agreed with them. What makes me think that imbalances nowadays would be obvious? Just as a person should never stop analysing themself, neither should a society.

In search of the first scientific empirical experimental theology in history!

Ahem. Yes.

I've had this curious phrase, "the world's first scientific empirical experimental theology in history," written on my whiteboard for some weeks now. Partly because the excess of adjectives makes it so endearingly enthusiastic, but mostly because I'm trying to figure out exactly what it means.

It's a phrase of Timothy Leary's, from an obscure early book called NeuroLogic, describing his ambition for his eight-circuit model of consciousness. But what on Earth is a scientific theology, and why would anyone want one?

Abraham Maslow, with his more restrained phrasing, sheds some light on it: "we may be able to accept the basic religious questions as a proper part of the jurisdiction of science once science is broadened and redefined." That is, neither of them accepts that "spirituality," whatever that might be, should be exclusively in the hands of the theologians. It's an aspect of human experience, and so it belongs to the psychologists. But where Maslow seems, tactfully, to be suggesting that we take God out of religion and do away with Him entirely, Leary seems to want to put Him into science. Both are about equally prone to saying either that religion is obsolete, or that everything is religious.

Which brings me back to a problem I keep encountering: that "God" is getting more and more vaguely defined by the day. Everybody from physicists to theologians uses "God" as a metaphor - but what is it a metaphor for?

There's a feeling amongst the religious that the subtlety of modern theology isn't understood by their critics. The criticism I keep hearing of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion is that "he obviously doesn't know anything about modern theology." So what is modern theology? Paul Tillich, of whom I hear so much in lectures and debates, has this to say about God: "God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence." And he refuses to define religion any more specifically than "concern with ultimate concerns." On the subject of why someone would choose to express this concern in organised religion, he says that "symbols open up something in us." Similarly, John Hick sees religion as "our human response to a transcendent reality, the reality that we call 'God'," and advocates Christianity only insofar as it is the "best fit" for somebody raised in a Christian culture. In other words, religion is a set of useful metaphors, and God is some impersonal universal force.

Which, funnily enough, sounds exactly like the kind of God-as-metaphor that Dawkins discusses in the very first chapter of his book - the God of Einstein and Spinoza, of which he says:

The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

But if nobody now claims to believe in the God of ordinary language, where do we stand? What's the difference between Leary's and Maslow's and Tillich's and Einstein's and Dawkins' religions?

Practically, though, the answer to this is the answer Dawkins gives - that whatever the philosophers believe is irrelevant, because there are about 3 billion people out there who do believe in a miracle-wreaking, sin-punishing personal God.

Blog for the lazy.

As somebody kindly pointed out, I should be writing university assignments, and have no right at all to be starting blogs.

So, today it's a blog for the lazy. I'll post a couple of pictures, you can have a look at them, and there'll be no pressure on either of us.


OK?


This came to mind because it's been a wonderful 24 hours for randomly-beautiful things. Like these photographs I took last night - of drips of candle-wax, formed by falling into cold water.

And these, which are by-products of a program I made for a statistics assignment.

It works by laying down three functions on top of each other, each with lots of random variables, so that every time you hit the key, you get a completely different random 'landscape.' Alright, a somewhat different random 'landscape,' at least.

This program has been very distracting. I've been sitting with it for hours like some kind of aesthete- -pigeon, compulsively pressing the button for a new pretty picture.

It's certainly much more fun than the rather tedious unbeatable noughts-and-crosses machine I made a few years ago (misguidely thinking, I suppose, that what we need in our everyday lives is a really efficient way of losing at noughts and crosses..?).

In retrospect, it would have been much improved by some random element which unexpectedly let you win, just as you'd concluded that it was mathematically impossible... or another which unexpectedly starting playing backgammon or telling rude jokes, after consistently playing noughts and crosses a couple of hundred times.

I obviously had no imagination in those days!

dronf

OK, dronf is a rather silly word.

It's even sillier than fnord, which is so silly that Merriam Webster refuses to define it, while Wikipedia calls it a "nonsensical term."

But, like all the best silly things, it has hidden depths.

A fnord is supposedly a subliminal message, found in newspapers, textbooks, TV, radio and so on, to which we've all been conditioned to respond with a feeling of vague, unfocussed anxiety, and an inclination not to think about it. The only place you don't find fnords is advertisements.

It's a metaphor for the chronic, low-grade sense of emergency we live with. The water shortage, global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorism, anti-terrorism - it seems we're witnessing the planetary endgame. With one hand, the media sustains the hum of crisis, while with the other it offers us comfort food, mindless TV, pleasant minor worries. Despair or distraction.

So a dronf is a metaphor for the third way. It's whatever can create in us a chronic, low-grade sense of optimism. It's whatever can induce us not to ignore or despair at our problems, but to confront them.

Everybody else is doing it, so why can't I?

Hello, and welcome to yet another blog!

There's something off-puttingly self-indulgent about blogs, which usually, well, puts me off them. But I've decided to give in to the temptation to make one. After all, my own Dad has been blogging shamelessly for months now with no ill effects, and as a person who believes in communities, it seems odd not to be a part of the global community.

So this blog will be about whatever I have to contribute to the "global conversation" - the things I know, the things I'm trying to figure out, and the things I just want to share. I'm a student, interested in religion, mathematics and psychology, so these are probably what I'll talk about most.

And tomorrow, I'll explain what a "dronf" is...