Don’t join anything

Make of this chap what you will, but it's an interesting video. For example, Sir Keir Starmer is a member of the Law Society and the Labour Party, we are told he's a member of the Fabian Society, we know he's a fan of Davos, and he clearly possesses a range of ideological talismans.

What is left of the man?

Oikophobia

 

Falling Into Pluto (Simulation)

An interesting simulation of falling into Pluto. To my mind it captures both the eerie remoteness of Pluto and something of the cold, indifferent vastness of the universe. We project our romantic notions across the universe but they aren't reflected back. Beyond our Earthly smear of warmth and moisture there is only physics.

A language of our own

I suppose you know how we philosophers talk. We have almost a language of our own. Sometimes I think it is largely nonsense.

Sherwood Anderson - Death in the Woods and Other Stories (1933)


Yet Baruch Spinoza gave us a philosophy which is easily adapted to avoid language where assertions about the real world don't really assert anything - as in any thing. To distil his guide into the modern world, suppose we see ourselves as living in a reality of language and physical things. Map the language to the things and we may be on the right lines, because things includes the behaviour of things.

Play around with the language and forget the things – then we have the potential for all kinds of mischief and twaddle. As Confucius knew and many others did too.


"What a rustic you are, Tsz-lu!" rejoined the Master. "A gentleman would be a little reserved and reticent in matters which he does not understand. If terms be incorrect, language will be incongruous; and if language be incongruous, deeds will be imperfect.”

Analects of Confucius


We have always been familiar with those who play around with language which asserts but doesn’t map accurately to things, such as Scott Fitzgerald’s college slang strung together into an intrinsic whole –


She thought of what she would say to-night at this revel, faintly prestiged already by the sounds of high and low laughter and slippered footsteps, and movements of couples up and down the stairs. She would talk the language she had talked for many years — her line — made up of the current expressions, bits of journalese and college slang strung together into an intrinsic whole, careless, faintly provocative, delicately sentimental.

F. Scott Fitzgerald – May Day (1920)


Or those who mix language with sentimental behaviour which asserts but mainly maps back to the speaker. Edith Wharton’s certain sweet inflections of Mrs Talkett for example –


Allusions to “the Talketts,” picked up now and again at Adele Anthony’s, led him to conjecture an invisible husband in the background; but all he knew of Mrs. Talkett was what she had told him of her “artistic” yearnings, and what he had been able to divine from her empty questioning eyes, from certain sweet inflections when she spoke of her wounded soldiers, and from the precise and finished language with which she clothed her unfinished and imprecise thoughts.

Edith Wharton – A Son at the Front (1923)

It's a philosophy which is too restrictive for many purposes, especially abstractions, generalisations, symbols and so on, but it has its uses when it clarifies why political assertions about the real world are usually twaddle. We may apply it to a quote from an earlier post where a Rachel Reeves' assertion only maps back to Rachel Reeves. 

"Now we are going to deliver growth through investment and reform to create more jobs and more money in people's pockets, get the NHS back on its feet, rebuild Britain and secure our borders in a decade of national renewal," Ms Reeves added.

This assertion doesn't really map to jobs, money, people, pockets or feet, although it is supposed to appear that way via analogy and a vague evasion of practical realities. Yet for many, it is easily recognised as twaddle which is best mapped back to Rachel Reeves as an emitter of twaddle. All she is saying is "I emit twaddle, here is some twaddle I prepared earlier." 

The point to be made is that she is telling us about herself, the world inside her head, not the world outside it. As well as twaddle, it is a narcissist's language.

Guardian-reading with added joss sticks

Jacob Phillips has an interesting piece on personal authenticity in The Critic. Sounds rather lofty but it isn't - the problems he describes are common enough.

The authenticity illusion

We all have a little LARPer inside us


On a December night, sometime between the life I used to lead and the life I lead now, whilst a friend and I were cutting through some backstreets off Oxford Street, we noticed an open church door. She suggested we go in and have a look. It made an intense impression on me. The interior was covered in deeply coloured mosaic tilework, interlaced black and white patterning. Scenes from Scripture were portrayed in dignified, pre-Raphaelite style by friezes on the walls. Incense hung in misty clouds gathered about the pillars in the nave. Around the High Altar was a seamless array of icons of saints, set against deep purple, rich crimson and darkly starlit blues. I desired to know more about this place, and resolved to come back for Midnight Mass.

The whole piece is well worth reading, not only as an interesting story of personal religious conversion, but as a wider comment on the modern search for personal authenticity. For example -

I sometimes encountered people from the old days who were treading a similar path. With one it began because his girlfriend’s uncle was a priest. He told me, in hushed tones, that open conversations with this uncle made him think that this priest was a true free-thinker, compared to so many people we knew who’d started policing pronouns and so on. Another had got involved with a cultish group and gone to live in an Ashram, before realising the values therein were not so much about spiritual wisdom as just Guardian-reading with added joss sticks. I was recently interested to see another old acquaintance write about her own experience of seeking refuge in a church.

Absolute Indifference

A few days ago, I idled away a few minutes in a local leisure centre car park waiting for Grandson. A slight breeze rustled the leaves of trees planted around the car park. I tried to imagine how a similar breeze had rustled through similar leaves a million years ago and will still do so a million years from now.

A familiar enough notion, but perhaps not something we often dwell on apart from quiet moments. In a sense, we can’t really dwell on it because it is well out of the range of human experience. A million years is too vast to contemplate. Yet we live in a universe which is so vast, so indifferent to our concerns, that perhaps it is best avoided except in moments of quiet contemplation.

The universe is too vast to be anything but indifferent, something many have realised for a long time. Vast and vastly indifferent. Almost as if vast indifference is some kind of universal absolute, a necessary feature of the universe without which it would make no sense. 

And maybe there are times when we catch a glimpse of it, even in the breeze, in the rustling of leaves. Absolute Indifference.

The unsavoury moral implications of relativism

Alan S. Rome has written a refreshing essay in Quillette about modern relativism and absolute truth.

In Defence of Absolute Truth

We live in a time of great anxiety over the role of truth in public life. Media and popular culture are saturated with concerns over “fake news,” alternative facts and conspiracy theories. There is widespread concern over the breakdown of integrity and trust in public figures and experts, the increasing difficulty of distinguishing between true and false claims, and the increasing willingness of predators to prey upon this difficulty. Passions flare, political sides polarise, and neither side seems capable of talking or listening to the other.

It is therefore a great irony that many of those most worried about these developments also deny the possibility of absolute truth, without recognising any connection between the two. Certain assumptions about the relative nature of truth are represented, for instance, by the increasing public focus on “perspective” or “social privilege,” with the assumption that identity or experience drastically limits or determines understanding. Under this assumption, each group possesses its own, or perhaps the whole, truth about matters relating to their lives: “You cannot truly know this because you have not lived it.” Others can accept or reject this truth but they cannot critically engage with it. Analogous attitudes are found in many arenas of social life, especially in the academy. With such attitudes, disagreements cannot be rationally resolved and compromise becomes unlikely.

It is well worth reading the whole thing, not so much because it provides new insights but because it refreshes old ones. We are in considerable danger of being catastrophically damaged by relativism, but as Rome points out -

Apart from the unsavoury moral implications of relativism, it also just cannot be true philosophically. It is perhaps in bad taste to point out that the claim that “all truth is relative” is itself a non-relativist, dogmatic claim. It is self-contradictory and hypocritically exempts itself from its own claim. Indeed, how can one demonstrate that there is no absolute truth? Only through a rational demonstration which presupposes that there are absolute standards of logic and argument that transcend that particular context. Reason would have to destroy itself.

Turning down the static

Ages ago, commenter Sam Vega was kind enough to suggest I could write a book gathering together some of the more serious themes in this blog. As yet there is no book, so to explain why I have a story to tell, but first here is the key to the problem.

In the ebb and flow of human affairs absolutely nothing ever happens twice.

Now the story.

A couple of decades ago I began to hammer out a book about the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. My idea was to weave Spinoza’s philosophy into the fabric of modern life, drawing lessons from his work which could be applied today. After several hundred hours of effort I finished the book but kept it to myself. I didn’t even try it out on Kindle.

I'd enjoyed writing it anyway, but there was a problem – the evolution of ideas. A worthwhile personal philosophy evolves too quickly to be written down in a satisfactory way because nothing ever happens twice. We do not even have the same idea twice. This sounds odd because we have a powerful sense of an enduring self, coupled with an enduring set of ideas - as Spinoza certainly had. Yet suppose we consider a fairly common event such as a political scandal.

Any political scandal is likely to stimulate familiar ideas about more general political failings, as we know too well. Yet the latest political scandal is never exactly the same as any previous scandal nor will it be identical to any subsequent scandal. Even political scandals evolve with the times. However familiar a scandal may be, in some respects it will always be new and therefore unique.

In other words the fabric of our lives does evolve and there is no going back to square one without losing something important – the unceasing dynamism of real life. A personal philosophy undergoes subtle adjustments whenever we encounter anything even slightly new and every event is new in some respect. It may introduce new insights, new phrases or yet another sentimental appeal to be scorned, but some aspect of the event will make it unique.

As I wrote my book I came to realise what I should have known in the first place. A personal philosophy has to evolve, otherwise it becomes a matrix of doctrines and that was not what I intended to write. The dynamic nature of real life can be ignored, but if it is ignored so is real life.

A worthwhile personal philosophy is an evolving aptitude which never ceases to evolve with surprising rapidity. In the age of the internet it may evolve on a daily basis. It may evolve between the beginning and end of a piece of writing, a lecture, a book or a video. Or a blog post. We are shallow and adaptive because we need to be. Pretend to be deep and it doesn’t work – we end up with narrow rather than deep. It is better to stay in the shallow end and evolve.

Take blogging for example. Your comments change any blog post I might choose to write, extending it into other areas from a joke to a disagreement to an aspect not covered by the post. Should you choose to add a comment to this post it will alter it but here’s the interesting aspect – it will alter me as I read the comment. Writing my Spinoza book changed me, reading and editing it changed me again. In the end I didn’t want to take the book any further – I preferred to absorb the lessons of writing it and move on. I realised that I enjoy the dynamism of moving on.

A blog post is not as dynamic as a debate but less static than a book and for me that is the core problem. Turning old blog posts into a book would lose the dynamic aspect of blogging. Maybe one day I’ll do it, but as yet - no book.

To boldly go

 

Mars as seen by Nasa's Perseverance rover

Imagine you have acquired a spaceship capable of taking you across the universe at a speed far greater than the speed of light. Anything is possible in this imaginary spaceship. You can go anywhere in the universe and your spaceship has the capability to sustain and entertain you for the rest of your natural life.

The spaceship would have all kinds of instruments and data systems to tell you what was out there and resolve most cosmological mysteries. Apart from the philosophical mysteries perhaps – such as what am I doing here staring at Alpha Centauri?

Putting the doubts to one side you could first zip off to explore the Moon, then perhaps the hellish atmosphere of Venus, the derelict geology of Mars followed by the icy majesty of Jupiter. On past Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and maybe a brief landing on Pluto to admire the landscape of frozen nitrogen. Then hit warp drive and off into interstellar space, the stars then the galaxies.

The only drawback is that you cannot come back for reasons not mentioned in the sales brochure. However, knowing this would you still go?

I wouldn’t. Not only for the obvious reasons, but the entire universe is too narrow an interest. Almost all of what interests me, sustains the old grey matter, the enthusiasms and the needful social interactions is back here on Earth. I’d need to be an obsessive to climb into that spaceship. I don’t think I’m that.

There is another reason though. Out there in that unimaginable vastness which is indeed unimaginable, even as an atheist I think I may well encounter the terrible face of God. Such an imaginary encounter is possibly where belief and unbelief could meet but hardly ever do. Perhaps I’d find out why. I don’t fancy that either.

A Vast Indifference

Sometimes the natural world tells us it doesn’t care. It offers a powerful, daunting yet fascinating impression of vast indifference. The open sea can do this if there are only a few people around. Or the huge bowl of a clear night sky, or a wide and lonely view of rolling hills where hardly anything stirs but a high buzzard circling silently over its hunting grounds.

Cities, towns shopping centres, offices, houses, pubs, cafes, busy streets. None of them create this effect, although there may be hints of it in the still silence of an ancient country church.

It’s a spiritual thing lying just beyond the easy assurance of familiar language, a reminder that one day we will be gone and the natural world doesn’t care and never did care. And maybe this is a good thing. It leaves open a reminder that we should pay attention to own cares and make sure they are at least worthy of the limited time we have.

In my experience this vast indifference can be found quite easily. Others may find it in different ways, but one or two of our walks offer huge views with hardly any people and often this is all it takes. It cannot be experienced indirectly though – certainly not through the media. Even thinking about the media in such a context seems to pollute something important, something we’ll never capture except personally.

Are there downsides to such an experience? Yes there are – the ceaseless wittering of political obsessives come across as infantile. That isn’t necessarily good because people who could do great harm have to be taken seriously. Sometimes it isn’t easy.

A game we can all play

It's a game we can all play. It is easy enough to embrace everything only to find we have embraced nothing of real consequence.

When old is new and new is old

source

An interesting post from Aeon by Nick Romeo draws parallels between Plato's ideas and modern behavioural psychology and economics.

In his essay ‘On Being Modern-Minded’ (1950), Bertrand Russell describes a particularly seductive illusion about history and intellectual progress. Because every age tends to exaggerate its uniqueness and imagine itself as a culmination of progress, continuities with previous historical periods are easily overlooked: ‘new catchwords hide from us the thoughts and feelings of our ancestors, even when they differed little from our own.’

Behavioural economics is one of the major intellectual developments of the past 50 years. The work of the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in particular is justly celebrated for identifying and analysing many of the core biases in human cognition. Russell’s insight, in fact, bears a strong resemblance to what Kahneman calls the availability bias. Because the catchwords and achievements of contemporary culture are most readily called to mind – most available – they tend to dominate our assessments. The fact that Russell’s articulation of this idea is much less familiar than Kahneman’s is itself a confirmation of Russell’s point.

Changes in language and social emphasis tend to obscure the lessons of history, so much so that even common sense has to be relearned under the endless pressure of events. If it ever is relearned of course. There are reasons to doubt that. Romeo continues -

But the richest precedent for behavioural economics is in the works of ancient Greek philosophers. Almost 2,500 years before the current vogue for behavioural economics, Plato was identifying and seeking to understand the predictable irrationalities of the human mind. He did not verify them with the techniques of modern experimental psychology, but many of his insights are remarkably similar to the descriptions of the cognitive biases found by Kahneman and Tversky. Seminal papers in behavioural economics are highly cited everywhere from business and medical schools to the social sciences and the corporate world. But the earlier explorations of the same phenomenon by Greek philosophy are rarely appreciated. Noticing this continuity is both an interesting point of intellectual history and a potentially useful resource: Plato not only identified various specific weaknesses in human cognition, he also offered powerful proposals for how to overcome these biases and improve our reasoning and behaviour.

The whole essay is well worth reading. For example, the paragraph below impinges on a particularly corrosive modern problem where we seem to be losing sight of the personal element in ethical behaviour, where we pay attention to what our minds are doing or not doing when we go with the flow.

It’s rare that contemporary discussions of cognitive biases flow directly into conversations on ethics, pleasure and pain, and the best way to live one’s life. But ancient philosophy did not compartmentalise what are now cloistered academic fields. Plato understood that susceptibility to distorted reasoning was a matter of ethics as well as psychology. This does not mean anything as simple as ‘bad people are more vulnerable to cognitive biases’. But consider his diagnosis of misanthropy and other sampling errors, which stem from ‘the too great confidence of inexperience’. In the Apology, Socrates claims to be wiser than other men only because he knows that which he does not know. When Kahneman writes that we are ‘blind to our blindness’, he is reviving the Socratic idea that wisdom consists in seeing one’s blindness: knowing what you do not know.

Spoofing for fun

I love this kind of thing, it sets so many hares running. Via Retraction Watch we have yet another delightful parody of academic pretensions. This one is a spoof philosophy paper which supposedly passed peer review. Almost worthy of the Guardian I thought.

Abstract: 

Since “gender” has been continually the name of a dialectics of the continued institution of gender into an ontological difference and the failure of gendering, it is worth addressing the prospects of any gender-neutral discourse through the tools of Badiousian ontology. As established by Badiou in Being and Event, mathematics – as set theory – is the ultimate ontology. Sets are what gendering processes by reactionary institutions intend to hold, in contradiction to the status of the multiplicities proper to each subject qua subject. This tension between subjectivity and gender comes to the fore through the lens of the ‘count-as-one’, the ontological operator identified by Badiou as the fluid mediator between set-belonging and set-existence. After having specified these ontological preliminaries, this paper will show that the genuine subject of feminism is the “many” that is negatively referred to through the “count-as-one” posited by the gendering of “the” woman. Maintaining the openness of this “many” is an interweaving philosophical endeavour. It is also a political task for any theory receptive to the oppressive load proper to the institutions of sexuation, as deployed through modern capitalism – that is, any queer theory. In its second step, the paper will therefore expose the adequacy of the Badiousian ontology to provide theoretical resources for articulating the field of a genuine queer nomination. It will finally appear that “non-gender” structurally corresponds in the field of a post-capitalist politics of the body to what Francois Laruelle (1984) designated as non-philosophie within the field of metaphysics.

Belief and wild orchids

source

I'm no great shakes at chemistry, but for some reason I’ve always found it interesting, easy to understand and the exams easy to pass. Hence my career in chemistry no doubt, but why do I find the subject comparatively easy? Why do you find your areas of expertise easy?

In my case I’d love to put it down to intelligence, but a far more convincing clue is in the words interesting and easy to understand. There is a significant similarity here because we are not usually interested in anything we find difficult, where the learning effort just doesn't yield the hoped for return. So perhaps interesting and easy to understand are much the same.

If we think in terms of conditioning then the similarity also becomes easy to understand. And therefore interesting of course. So I found it easy to imitate the things chemists are expected to do, say and write. I was easily conditioned by these things. 

In other words I absorbed the approved behaviour easily, acquired the correct expectations for mixing copper sulphate with sodium hydroxide or spilling concentrated sulphuric acid on my shoe plus a host of other expectations, both practical and verbal.  

Yet remembering the names of wild flowers is an entirely different matter. Daisy, buttercup and dandelion I know, plus one or two others, but even though I encounter many wild flowers while out walking, their names mostly go in one ear and out the other. So when it comes to the names of wild flowers I am stupid, not intelligent at all.

Yet I do recognise wild orchids such as the Early Purple Orchid because there is something memorable about them. Even though fairly common, people ooh and aah over them, take photos and generally raise their status in the pecking order of local flora. So in spite of my wild flower stupidity I’m conditioned to remember wild orchids because they are associated with a different, more forceful type of conditioning.

So what has this to do with belief?

Belief is also a symptom of a person’s susceptibility to conditioning. It is an indicator of education, upbringing social and economic status and possibly genes. It is evidence that a person is conditioned to respond to certain situations in a certain way, evidence that they were easily conditioned and in consequence they find their beliefs easy to understand, explain and elaborate. As we know, beliefs can be extremely stable, commonly lasting a lifetime.

All belief is conditioning while unbelief or scepticism could indicate some kind of contrary conditioning or simply a lack of conditioning. Or aspects of both. Life is complex.

Does it matter? Of course it does. If we see belief as some kind of rational structure inside our heads then we cannot analyse it adequately. We are controlled by it, unable to think our way round it, unable to see alternatives. The alternatives remain difficult and uninteresting, in stark contrast to the overwhelming clarity of our beliefs.

The ugliest moron in Nottingham

Suppose you visit Nottingham city centre, pick out any well-built young chap who is also a stranger and say to him:-

Strewth you must be the ugliest moron in Nottingham, why don’t you piss off and get some plastic surgery?

I’m guessing here, but I think the response would be an example of what philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine called the interanimation of sentences. In other words your sentence would animate another sentence from that well-built young chap, probably quite a short one. Your sentence would be a stimulus to his response.

Of course the response may also be physical, so nothing said here should be construed as advice.

Willard Van Orman Quine was one of the most interesting philosophers of the twentieth century. His phrase, interanimation of sentences is typically neat and easy to understand. It reflects how sentences generate other sentences, as if they stick together, one drawing out another, often in a fairly predictable sequence. It’s a common feature of Guardian comments.

So as well as responding to the physical world we respond to sentences too, which we all know but tend to forget as we pretend to be rational. We are animated by sentences and our animation is a matter of previous conditioning - or learning as we tend to call it.

We have the ability to write, say and think all kinds of things which we’d never actually come out with except in a context where their use is socially permitted or encouraged. Not even in Nottingham.

In other words, we have a vast repertoire of things we could say and a much more limited repertoire of things we are ever likely to say in any realistic context. Context, social pressures and previous conditioning decide which is which.

So most of what we could say remains unsaid forever.

Political correctness aims to keep things that way.

It’s the philosophy, stupid...

...but with apologies for the snowclone.

Science is a philosophy – natural philosophy. As such it is in permanent conflict with older doctrinal philosophies – the conceptual swamps where religion and politics ply their trades.

To my mind it is unfortunate that the terms natural philosophy and natural philosopher were sidelined in favour of science and scientist in the nineteenth century because the essential philosophical basis of science is apt to be forgotten.

As a result, too many scientists come across as poor philosophers, not seeming to understand clearly enough why effective science cannot have the same philosophical outlook as politics or religion. They seem to know that natural philosophy works but do not explicitly link its practical success to its non-doctrinal approach. 

For example, Baruch pinoza was an early natural philosopher, although he is now classed as a philosopher not a scientist. Yet I doubt if Spinoza would have accepted the distinction. He was a lens-grinder by trade, with a keen interest in the rapidly growing field of scientific optics. He also carried out experiments such as the hydrostatics experiment he illustrated in a letter to his friend Jarig Jelles. He was a natural philosopher.

From Spinoza’s letter to Jarig Jelles, September 1669

The distinction between science and philosophy seems to have led us into a situation where too many people confuse, mingle and otherwise conflate doctrinal philosophies with natural philosophy. They seek to bolster their scientific ideas with doctrinal authority even though scientific success obviously requires a non-doctrinal approach.

In my view this is why CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming) seems so similar to religion or politics. Why the science seems so weak and disjointed when set against its confidently catastrophic claims. The similarity arises because CAGW is a doctrinal philosophy - not natural philosophy.

Again this is why official climate change doctrine is virtually immune to the observed complexities of climate behaviour and and the failure of climate phenomena to occur as predicted. The issue is one of authority, not natural philosophy. So the public domain is dominated by doctrinal quotes, often repeated verbatim by the faithful:-

Peer review...

97% of scientists...

The Royal Society...

The vast majority of scientific papers...

The latest computer models...

Journalists, CAGW activists and too many professional scientists understand doctrinal philosophies rather better than they understand natural philosophy. They understand authority and power. They see the world through the presumed authority of their sources, not the non-doctrinal uncertainties of natural philosophy.

Certainly it is clear to me after reading too many sterile reams of CAGW text that the binding climate change rationale is a doctrinal philosophy, a search for authority rather than non-doctrinal natural philosophy.

Of course science uses doctrinal authority for well-established theories and for educational purposes, but institutions such as the Royal Society seem to have imbibed the trappings of authority too well. Awarding Nobel Prizes is well-meaning no doubt, but is it a good idea to confer doctrinal authority on natural philosophers in this way? I’m not sure that it is.

I suppose the status of natural philosophy as a successful and prestigious knowledge culture was bound to attract those with an authoritarian bent. As soon as it became conspicuously successful, it was probably doomed as a philosophy of knowledge. Political exigencies insinuated a kind of mission creep which has been going on for decades – possibly longer.

So maybe it should have come as no surprise that scientific wings are being clipped by global authoritarians of which CAGW is a major exemplar.

We are not speaking of rational versus irrational here, but of different philosophies of what constitutes rational behaviour. 

A bow to power or a bow to nature.

I like ice cream

From Wikipedia

Back in the seventies when Big Questions were generally sorted out at the pub over a game of darts, a philosophically-minded friend said something to me I’ve always remembered.

“In the end you have to say I like ice cream.”

What he meant was obvious enough – we have our preferences and allegiances and in end we have to admit that’s all they are. We usually pad it out with reasoned argument but may as well admit what’s behind it all – a liking for our own conclusions.

Most of us are not open to verbal persuasion and although the arts of argument can be good for the soul, it is worth remembering why we like ice cream. Or whatever else takes your fancy.

I like that cheap synthetic swirly stuff with a chocolate flake shoved in. I’m not so keen on proper ice cream full of genuine dairy products.

No satnav for Lalaland

But there is really no scientific or other method by which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing too little or of believing too much. To face such dangers is apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the measure of our wisdom as men.

William James - The Will to Believe

One of my ideals is believe nothing. I could have called it a belief rather than an ideal, but even I can see the pitfall in that. 

Yet as James implies in the above quote, it isn’t actually possible to believe nothing. We need beliefs as conceptual frameworks to communicate socially – to live even. It is possible try putting the brain into neutral and merely observe, but we observe via language and that's something we have to borrow.

So what’s the point of trying to believe nothing? I think it reminds us to be wary of generalisations, sentiment, cultural norms and especially language. Yet as Wittgenstein showed, we can’t become intellectual hermits and invent a  private language to solve the problem.

One difficulty with a cautious attitude to belief is how we delve into matters too complex for data or logic to flash up convenient answers. Political discourse for example is easy enough to engage in but not so easy to analyse in a neutral way. Political arguments veer off so quickly into Lalaland.

This presents few problems for anyone who enjoys the fun of debate, because Lalaland is easily navigated via a host of special aids – political ideas framed by an allegiance to one’s favoured Lalaland region and written in the regional dialect.

However these regional allegiances are only clearly visible to those who don’t share them. Those with no wish to settle in Lalaland – those who are not prepared to adopt one of its seductive cultures or learn one of its many languages. Therein lies the real difficulty doesn’t it?

To see any political allegiance for what it is, we cannot share it.

We can’t easily engage in political debates as a neutral critic either, because almost any criticism is seen as an enemy allegiance. Debate grinds to a halt or becomes lost again in the endless highways and byways of Lalaland.

Of course, politically ambitious cynics often profess undying allegiance to a Lalaland region without ever going there in person. Their sights are set far beyond its borders even though they find the inhabitants useful. 

Nick Clegg is an example.

In love with policing

Environmental crime – what does the phrase mean to you? During my years as an environmental scientist, one of the most interesting trends was a cultural shift from protecting the natural world towards detecting and punishing environmental crime.

The trend was a nuanced shift in vocabulary and attitude, but far from complete by the time I left. I came across one or two members of environmental crime units and they seemed to like the idea of being part of a crime unit, even if what they actually did was nothing new. A few years on it comes as not surprise to see environmental crime units springing up all over the place.

Interpol and environmental crime

Waste crime in Northern Ireland

The Stoke-on-Trent environmental crime unit

The Salford environmental crime unit

The District of Columbia environmental crimes unit

And in a similar vein:-

The UK National Wildlife Crime Unit

And so on and so on. I think a vast number of us love the idea of policing each other. After all, those who are policed are less of a threat than those free to do as they wish. It feels like a powerful survival trait to me. Do you want boring neighbours? Of course you do – it’s safer and doesn’t threaten house prices.

In a wider cultural sense, a great deal of modern human activity is akin to policing. Regulating, managing, setting targets, a host of licensing requirements, central planning - it’s all connected with policing human behaviour and most of us appear to accept it.

Do schools educate or do they police the evolving behaviour of children? Do children use what they learn to police their parents – just a little? It all depends on how we frame our ideas doesn’t it? How keen we are to tread that razor-fine line between analytical and conventional allegiances. 

It's not a nice, comfortable word though is it - policing?

Yet it seems to me that universal policing has been smoothing over political conflicts for decades. Yes I know there are many unresolved conflicts in the world, but after the horrors of the twentieth century there are numerous indications that global policing is seen as the only real alternative. Not just policing, but micro-policing at that.

A vast number of public sector jobs have some kind of policing function even if not acknowledged. Schools, planning, trading standards, HMRC, DECC, the EU, the UN - on and on into our brave new world. Even your new central heating boiler has to be registered with the local authority.

We have evolved a policing culture, in many ways epitomised by the dear old BBC. Because the preferred role of the BBC is cultural policing - it always was. We like policing each other because of the security it engenders and I’m not so sure we’d be particularly concerned if we knew how far it could go.

Orwell was wrong with his vision of 1984. What some of us have to fear is not so much brutal universal repression as benign universal policing which simply doesn’t need to be brutal. It’s cheaper for one thing.

Discard the brutality and most people will accept with equanimity the prospect universal policing as a secure background to their lives. Dull lives maybe, but dull is safe and in any event we have celebrities to provide a whole range of vicarious excitements.

Political differences are fading away as politicians of all persuasions fall in love with policing. Voters accept it as long as the velvet glove is thick and fluffy.

The traditional left has always been fond of policing and now the right has joined in too, because it works. It stifles dissatisfaction, limits horizons and provides guidance. Above all it offers that universal panacea for a basic animal need for which there is no possible substitute – it offers safety.

So if voters don’t want freedom, why offer it?

The weirdness of unreason II

Another World - M C Escher - from Wikipedia

Have you ever tangled with the vexed problem of obviousness? Are some things so glaringly obvious as to leave you baffled when someone transcends the bounds of reason by taking a view contrary to your own? 

Do you occasionally find this kind of thing a little odd – even weird? We are after all, the same species. One might think we'd respond to reality in much the same way.

So in true Hollywood style, this is the second post of my weirdness of unreason franchise. By the way, why is a cinematic rehash called a franchise?

Anyhow, the first post was a kind of write-it-and-see test to see if reasons, concepts, ideas, explanations and arguments can be equated to allegiances. I think they can is the sense that something useful emerges from the idea even though our allegiances are bound to get in the way of knowing that useful something.

I suspect we cannot form ideas without framing them within some kind of validating allegiance.

Take politics for example. Those people with no particular allegiance to political abstractions will find it difficult to frame political opinions. Their vote will be dictated by other allegiances, however frustrating that may be for those who happen to have political allegiances.

Similarly with climate change. It isn’t so much a technical or scientific issue, as an issue about allegiance to abstractions within which the debate is always framed. Those who don’t share those allegiances tend to sit on the fence and see the issue as too complex for them to resolve. Maybe they merely lack framing allegiances.

So let us keep the focus on our allegiance to abstractions because they already have a well-known framing role.

We obviously have allegiances to numerous abstractions such as science, logic, equality, honesty, justice, peace, politics, beauty, reason, education, style, fashion, social mores, religion, what Mum always said, politeness, aesthetics, the rule of law and so on.

Unfortunately many claimed allegiances are false as we all know too well. Ideas supposedly bolstered by some authoritative allegiance but framed within in a different, covert allegiance designed to hide our endless primary allegiances to the usual suspects.

Me.

My career.

My inner circle.

My outer circle ...these are a few of my favourite things!

A good example is David Cameron’s strikingly crude offer of an EU referendum after the next election. His idea is far too obviously framed by allegiance to his future career while claiming a false allegiance to democratic ideals.

Claimed allegiance to abstractions is where the prim, prissy, supercilious, devious, dishonest and shamelessly unworthy frameworks of so many manipulative debates come from. Those we have to cope with every day of our lives.

As ever, behaviour highlights the deceit. As ever it isn’t enough if the deceit has powerful backing as we so often know to our cost.

A life not dominated by allegiances is an ideal never realised in the grit and grind of the real world. Maybe a life without allegiance would be akin to nirvana. Or maybe it would offer a glimpse of the eternal as Spinoza envisaged a blessed state of purely disinterested knowledge.

Unfortunately, in daily life every idea we have is framed by some allegiance or other. Including this one.