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?