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?
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, July 1, 2007
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?
Monday, June 18, 2007
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.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
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.
Friday, June 15, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
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.
"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.
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