Conflation and Hyperbole

“The subject-matter of philosophy is, then, necessarily obscure, and this obscurity philosophy necessarily reflects and expresses. But besides the expression of obscurity of expression, and, while the former is pardonable, the latter is not, being when all is said and done, nothing but bad craftsmanship.

The object of words is to express meaning, and he who has learnt to use them well, will express his meaning with the greatest ease and clarity. Hence, a writer should make it his first duty to be clear and intelligible, not only in justice to himself, but also out of compliment to his readers. Few philosophers have observed this elementary rule.”

('Philosophy' p.9 by CEM Joad)

A great many words in popular usage in the communication spheres of politics, business and popular commentary have become ‘buzzwords’. There are few terms I like less than ‘U-turn’ (I picture politicians running madly in circles). It appears that any genuine consideration of events and change of opinion by a politician is now equated with losing face. Constant reinforcement of this idea by the media is as childish as it is irresponsible and is partly why so many politicians now resemble stilted robots.

The general issue of the conflation of terms, in an atmosphere of general confusion and obfuscation over their meaning, can be applied to a range of subjects. In political discourse such language can have very stark real world consequences as competing sets of vested interests dance a sort of demented waltz on the backs of the populace as they vie for influence.

There are some excellent investigative journalists, such as Ben Goldacre, who make it their business to blast pseudoscience out of the water in particular subjects. To cover a comprehensive analysis of the range of subjects in which these issues arise would take several books. Though even within one subject you could spend several weeks typing; I shall just illustrate one example that borders between the social and the biological:

Sex and Gender

Two of the most conflated terms in popular usage are ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ and it appears abundantly clear that the majority of commentators have absolutely no understanding of the difference between the two terms. Not only is this sloppy journalism it is also unhelpful, not least because it leads to an overly simplistic and problematic view of human beings but also because the true complexity of the situation is genuinely fascinating. For example, the ‘I’ newspaper recently discussed the ‘gender’ of foetuses in an issue related to the illegal selective termination of pregnancies based on sex in the UK (such phrasing is at the very least unhelpful).

So, definitions, what is all the fuss about?

Sex

The definition of sex is, at its most basic level, simply the categories of male and female. The defining characteristics to fit individuals into these categories are, however, more complex and composite in nature than they might initially seem. A person can be defined genetically as being male or female by having XX or XY sex chromosomes (though there are genetic variations of this with XO, XXY, and XXX individuals). In turn by a person’s ‘gonads’, organs that produce gametes (a testes in a males, an ovary in females). This too can be subject to complexities with a variety of developmental variations that can result in people with vaginas with testes, people with penises having ovaries, and people can be born with both ovaries and testes. The external genitalia, a penis or a vagina, (again you can see where complexities start to arise and we haven’t even got to gender yet!). Secondary sexual characteristics and hormone patterns,  can be even more variable than the previously mentioned characteristics.

(Taken from Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto-Sterling, )  

In mentioning all of these details what I am attempting to illustrate is the complexity even inherent in biological sex. This is not to say that sexes do not exist, or that the everyday reality of being a member of a two sexed species is a fiction. 

What it should be a good warning against are intuitive sounding ideas such as many arguments in evolutionary psychology which draw explanations of the social from the biological in a crude and reductive way– ideas may appear intuitive but correlation does not imply causation.

Gender

Gender can generally be defined as “the collection of psychological [mental and behavioural] traits that differ between males and females” (Levay and Valente, p.188). 

                               
The term 'gender' is often, incorrectly, used interchangeably with 'sex'. However, it has a much more complex, and specifically human, definition.
All animals have two biological sexes, but only the human race has gender.
What makes this definition unique to the human species, is that we are the only truly cultural animal. Many other species of animal show behavioural differences between the biological sexes, but only humans have ideas of what being a 'man' or a 'woman' mean, which varies between cultures and within cultures over time. This is where biological explanations of the differences between men and women are potentially very destructive.

For example, only extremely limited inferences can be made between the nature of human sexes by comparing us to other species, even our closest relatives. To confuse sex and gender as the same thing is to miss out what makes us human and rely on negative, clumsy thinking with little to no explanatory value.

Human social existence is greatly variable and is manifested in an almost endless variety around the world. Not only are the norms expected of men in women socially in different societies around the world wildly variable but the idea of only two immutable, distinct sexes is a very culturally specific idea. Whilst the recognition that some individuals are transgender in the Western world has incrementally been gaining recognition there are a variety of gender identities around the world.

In spite of the real world complexities of both terms and their general conflation in popular discourse you do not need a PhD to understand the difference between the two terms. 

Even relatively innocuous confusion of the terms is at best misleading. For example, the science editor of the Independent confusing the terms when talking about the idea that the Y chromosome may one day disappear:

"Reports of the demise of the male Y chromosome have been greatly exaggerated according to scientists who believe that the “end of men” is a gender apocalypse too far."

"This would suggest that medical treatments should in future be tailored more towards a patient’s gender, and that doctors may have more reason to treat men and women differently according to their sex, said Professor David Page, director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts."

He clearly has no idea of the distinction between the two terms, and he is supposed to be a science editor!
Mixing them up is not only factually wrong but deeply unhelpful when it comes to propagating unhelpful social stereotypes and inaccurate societal myths about how people are composed and the relations between men and women.
The reality is far more interesting and can even improve a nation's football skills...

Its all good: America – A Requiem?

As Bob Dylan says during the last song of his album 'Together through life';

“Cold blooded killer stomp into town,

Cop car's blinkin', somethin' bad goin' down,

Buildings are crumblin' in the neighbourhood,

But there's nothin' to worry about 'cause it's all good,

It's all good, I say its all good”

Bob Dylan is an artist that is hard to encapsulate, on one level he can quite rightly be regarded as a cultural icon and a visionary lyricist and on another he could be argued to be a vein fraud. Is one description correct and the other false? I would argue that there is an element of truth to both, and that the arc of his life in many ways is an interesting metaphor for the rise and decline of that bizarre beast that is the United States of America.

Born in a rural backwater of an industrial powerhouse booming its way to global domination after the worst conflict which the world has ever seen. Rising in its aftermath as the undoubted ‘master of the world’ the United States had an unprecedented global reach and hegemony which no other nation has ever surpassed. Both brilliant and hollow the shining mirage of the American Dream dazzled a globe both with alluring lights of plenty and the light of white phosphorus on those who happened to get in the way.

Like the artist, the beast is now old, too many cigarettes and a binge of fossil fuel economic hedonism have left a rising empire languishing in its own entropic decay.

Whether or not it has a sane retirement after a booming heyday, who can say?

The Green Okapi

I need to write you down before you escape from me into oblivion. Your fantastical colours and your casual backwards glance as you gently walk off down an emerging street from the jungle never to be seen again. The very fact that I ever witness your existence is only made possible by the very fact that that you are about to disappear for ever. My very being in an emerging urban humanscape that was your home is what consigns you to oblivion. Your out of placeness, otherworldly beauty and fusion of naive trust and human familiarity condemn you.

You are a fantastical beast that can only be of a dream; vivid parrot green hind-quarters with white fleck stripe zebra stockings pulled up neatly round your ankles. A crimson torso seamlessly slides from the green as russet shoulders ponderously swing your careful feet. A dark blue head sways round just one time to look me in the eye, there is no blame, no malice, an almost Buddhist serenity in that unknowable gaze. With that, a flick of the ear, and you turn and lope away.

This vivid description is part of a seamless dream I had after reading “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe. A concise, beautiful novel that is as powerful as it is important. It speaks of a world and a time that I know very little of, and yet poignantly brings to my attention a collision of worlds. I do not mean to speak of any demeaning ‘noble savage’ gibberish, there are human frailties amongst the society under duress in the novel as in any other. Human societies interact and change constantly, both internally and externally, with a fluid complexity that is surely staggering.

What is so sad in this tale, to me, is not just the personal dramas of the individuals involved but the particularly tragic nature of this inter-societal interaction. The combination of arrogance and paternalistic pseudo-benevolence of the colonisers is as heart breaking as it is nauseating. How can they think so little of another group of human beings so as to have the delusional self-assuredness and disturbing certainty of the correctness of their actions that leads them to unravel whole societies?

There are of course a variety of answers to such questions and those being subjected to exploitation don’t exactly just sit there passively and accept their fate! An interplay of personal human interactions is taking place in such a context with a complex interplay of prior social obligations, differing cultural attitudes and wider socio-economic forces at play.

My dream then led me from this visage of a semi-mythic wild nature to an emerging ‘modernising’, or at the very least, rapidly changing landscape; forests being felled, railways set forth into ‘mysterious’ forests and great beasts transported as curios to be gawked at by curious creeps in distant lands..

I found myself on a train, a buzz was in the air, beer was available from the train bar at astonishingly low prices, a sensation of excitement and new possibilities permeated everything. A new land of endless bounty and riches lay out forever on a leafy green horizon.

Such colonial myths of course hide the fact that such places were only ‘new’ to incomers and were not virgin wildernesses. They were, and are, full of people who are often viewed in the same way as the green okapi. Like the beast, they, ‘the noble savages’, are supposed to conveniently lope away nobly into the mist of oblivion, according to the colonial narrative.

Places are not destroyed by change, in the sense that some sort of primeval nature is being lost by the arrival of ‘civilisation’. Such myths conveniently omit the history, agency and rights of the people living in such places. The ‘large-scale socio-economic forces’ I refer to are of course those of colonialism; which at its base was the attempted mass theft of resources and exploitation of human beings from another part of the world. 

I must shamefully admit that I had not heard of Chinua Achebe until he passed away recently, and on cue I assume his book sales rose and I found myself in possession of a copy of his highly lauded work. I am, as I should state, white, middle-class and from the UK – one of the societies that so hideously exploited others around the world for self-aggrandisement.

The economic and social forces that led to the tragedy that is ‘Things Fall Apart’ are still very much at work. No such situation is of course one-dimensional or simple but I have never come across a work that better illustrates the tragic effect of these forces and can only hope that any increased reading of Achebe’s work after his passing can engage more people in those societies with a legacy of exploiting to dismantle these destructive forces as best as possible, irrespective as to if there ever was a green okapi.

Dreams can certainly be more inspiring than facts: In defence of decent atheists

I had a dream recently where I found myself in a church; in some sort of general, relatively secular meeting. The vicar was an earnest man of substantial yet indeterminate age with surprisingly youthful vigour and a powerful sense of religious conviction. Though certain of his own opinions and attempting to persuade others of the correctness of his thinking it was not a faith borne of unquestioning adherence to dogma, more in the vein of a self-assuredness of his own self knowledge.

As is often the case with dreams my recollections are of a vague, almost shifting nature, though something left an impression upon me. The subject under discussion blurs away, the vicar encouraging me to attend his church on non-secular occasions and to engage in religious conversation with a likely hope of conversion.

I politely, but with a hint of condescension, deflect his invitations and enquiries and make my leave. What I am struck by is, for want of a better phrasing, his faith. I personally hold a number of ideas to be true that have led me to become an irreconcilable (but polite!) atheist. Such ideas on their own, used in trains of evidence-based argumentation can be as empirically and logically convincing as any argument but they can lack the dream that shone from that vicars’ eyes to make them truly compelling.

At present there is a vigorous ‘New Atheist’ movement making its voice heard in public discourse which I think suffers from a deficiency in persuasiveness as well as other flaws. Such names as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins spring to mind. The flaws in their approach lie not in the arguments they make for the non-existence of deities but the personal prejudices they conflate such arguments with and their lack of understanding of the need for facts to inspire new dreams.

For example, Christopher Hitchens, whist a fine raconteur with an encyclopaedic knowledge of religion that could blast any religious apologist out of the water was also excruciatingly blunt to the point of plain rudeness. In his later years he also appeared to focus all critiques of religion at one in particular whilst getting rather too cosy with some rather ‘hawkish’ neocons who were more than happy to utilise his influence to promote a rather questionable political agenda. As far as I am aware he also never appears to have debated with a woman which is something I would also allege of many of the other New Atheist crowd which is very much a boys’ club; and a white, straight, upper-class one at that.

Having been inspired by some of Hitchens’ works and his dry wit to discover much of his hypocrisy and slow decline into incoherent alcoholism I found particularly sad. Another prominent New Atheist, Richard Dawkins, is, I would argue, an excellent biologist but a poor philosopher and a terrible anthropologist. In the heady world of academia removed from the everyday experiences of human beings it is very easy to play intellectual football with ideas and poor scorn on those with which you disagree. It is quite something else when you put yourself forward as an ambassador for biology and atheism and then proceed to act like a total jackass!

I call Dawkins a poor philosopher because he often falls on crude socio-biological explanations of human behaviour. This matters; how human beings are viewed percolates through to political discourse and affects the nature of society. Self-aggrandising, rude comments about people’s religious beliefs can serve to act as a sounding board for existing prejudices and scapegoating.

On a purely pragmatic level viewing human beings as hard-wired shaven apes using overly reductionist sciences such as evolutionary psychology to explain our behaviour provides an inaccurate and incomplete picture of our nature, public policy derived from which is likely to create greater harm than good. 
You can, after all, no more describe a human being as ‘simply an ape’ than you can describe a Monet as some dried paint.

Dawkins' poor anthropological skills relate partly to the points above and also to his lack of understanding as to what religion actually is and what purpose it serves in human experience. It is one thing to argue that deities do not exist and quite another to be able to engage with the religious and open up a discussion about what future dreams we would like to weave for human societies that might indeed be preferable to the current mythologies that constitute much of their functioning apparatus.

I use the term 'dream' as the best definition as to what religion actually is I have come across is by the 20^th Century anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard:

“A system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, persuasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men [ed. and women] by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.”

The points I make above are of course allegations and my own opinions, but there are wider issues at stake than the conduct of such individuals: I regard atheism [in the sense of a lack of belief in supernatural entities of any description and the conviction, based on evidence, that such entities are the products of human culture] to be of profound philosophical and moral importance. For clear discussion about such ideas a move needs to be made away from vitriolic shouting matches and the cult of personality to veins of enquiry much more of the vein of thinkers such as Raymond Tallis who wittily and humanely analyses arguments with the goal of seeking out truth.

If we do truly live in an atheist universe and religion in its many incarnations is a product of human cultural life (which fulfills genuine needs but much of which is potentially harmful to the individuals involved and surrounding society) it is quite reasonable that a debate be launched, or rather developed, about such issues and the promotion, potentially, of secular atheism. 
Currently there is nothing revolutionary about the ‘New’ Atheists and they offer no dreams with which we can work, we all deserve much better.

Oh Joss...

This week I thought I would cover an issue that has been somewhat irking me, the uncritical adulation of a certain well meaning bald guy..

I thought I would remain silent on this issue for a while until the hype around the idea had subsided. Late last year, Joss Whedon, with some ceremony, as if some great revolutionary, said that he prefers the term ‘genderist’ to ‘feminist’. Now I like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Joss is clearly no misogynist but there are definitely some problems here:

White, heterosexual, middle-class men have a relatively limited contribution to make to discourses about feminism. I generally would call myself a feminist, or supportive of it if the person I was talking to was uncomfortable with the idea of me being one. Joss, likewise, could quite reasonably do something similar. However, to stand up at some sort of televised address and redefine feminism on behalf of everyone is at best illegitimate or even just plain silly!

I write articles about things that interest me, Joss writes about things that interest him and turns them into TV shows and movies. We both lack any legitimacy to make such statements or to say we can redefine the issues.

To use the term ‘genderist’ is also to miss a vital point; gender-equality is not an inevitable state of affairs. Mr Whedon has an almost endearingly naive view of the nature of history; he talks in sweeping terms that we have now moved beyond racism, that it is of course abhorrent and that we now in turn need to do the same with gender relations. He dislikes the term feminism because it implies that "the idea of equality is just an idea and that it's an agenda". My response to that would be that of course it is an agenda, as was the movement to ban the trans-Atlantic slave trade, something about which many people were perfectly okay with at the time in many Western countries. It took a morality expanding effort on the part of the conscientious to achieve what was by no means an inevitable historical process. 

Feminism was and is a politically active social movement for equality and to put an end to various forms of subjugation. It has some problems such as the lack of consideration of many middle class white feminists to consider women of different ethnic backgrounds, class relations and cultures. There are also nuances and complexities such as the issue of intersectionality; a concept used to describe the ways in which different forms of social oppression  i.e. racism, sexism, homophobia etc. are interconnected and cannot be viewed in isolation from one another. The treatment of minority groups who are some of those most in need of representation within feminism such as trans women and sex workers illustrate well the need for greater reflexivity on such issues by some activists.

What is clear, however, is that Joss understands none of this and should politely be asked to sit down. 

I cannot absolve myself of the need to write (and nor should you)!

An article from earlier this year finally got round to publishing, following on from my last post wishing you all a Happy New Year and my thudding reality:

I have been wondering of late whether people have more time to be creative in the present day than they were in the past and to what extent any greater creative potential available in the age of digital media communications is mitigated by the technologically induced attention deficit disorder it appears to induce.

My own creative urge is to write, though my skill at the craft [if it can be called that] varies wildly! I have at times lacked any inclination to do so, often for months, and when I have tried during these periods what results is stilted and hardly consequential. There are of course different types or forms of writing; I do not mean the ability to produce i.e. a technical article on request about a specific subject and this may just be a personal creative flaw of my own. However, if I am to write something interesting, which in my case are essays of one sort or another, I must first have been inspired. The difficulty is that I cannot choose when and how often I am inspired and by what.  Thought provoking ideas come in many forms; from a song I have heard for the first time, or indeed a thousand times, a work of art, a new place I have visited or fresh insights I have from a book, play or film.

None of the above are exactly revolutionary points but I can’t help but make them for there is something wonderfully strange about the process of, and the urge, to write creatively. If I find that I am inspired to put pen to paper I don’t have much time for the idea will dissolve unless I start to give it concrete form and develop it. I also do not know what overall point I am making, if any, until I have at least captured the initial spark in ink.

What has put some wind in my sails lately is that I have had more time to stop and think about things and to read/see a feast of literary and cultural delights. In my case this has been due to being unable to do a great deal due to a fractured vertebrae but whatever catalyst gets you started treat it as a silver lining and seize it with both hands!

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to see an exhibition of Leonardo Da Vinci’s anatomical drawings and notes; his artistry was extraordinary but nowhere near as much as his insights. Using only pen,  paper, his eyes, and I assume some very sharp implements, he was able to map the human body with extraordinary accuracy making insights about the function and mechanics of organs hundreds of years before anyone else. Some of his work could still be regarded as cutting edge in modern science. For example, he ingeniously took a wax cast of an ox heart and made a glass replica from it. He then poured water containing grape seeds through it and observed the swirling patterns, or eddies, the sand made as it passed through.  Somehow, he worked out that these currents play a role in closing the valves of certain parts of the heart to enable it to pass on to the next part, something scientists only worked out very recently. Tragically, this incredible work was only published in 1900 as it would have utterly transformed the study of anatomy in Europe centuries earlier than it has actually developed. That being said it is a small miracle we know of it at all, the only copy sat in a vault for centuries and could easily have been lost, only to be published centuries later.

It seems to be a tradition that older people think the world is somehow “going to pot” and that people are less well informed that they used to be, that journalism is dead and politics is corrupt. There have of course always been corrupt politicians, rubbish journalists or political propagandists who seek to destroy language (the phrase ‘U-turn’ appears to be their favourite missile at the moment) and there will always be some things wrong with the world. What is certainly not the case is that we are less well informed than any previous generation.

The internet, along with the rest of IT, has increased the ability of people to find out about new ideas dramatically. It has also democratised the forming and expression of opinion on any subject imaginable hugely. This has meant that a substantial proportion of the internet is dedicated to subject matters of debates which are not necessarily interesting or important; who after all in their right mind (over the age of 12) really cares what Justin Beiber is doing!

I think that we get a rather stratified and distorted view of the past. Though far fewer people were able to be creative in a way that could be recorded; aside from no internet, most people were too busy just surviving to write a sonnet and may well have been ignored or even persecuted had they managed to do so. For every Milton and Keats we know of there may well have been dozens more whose work has simply not survived or who have been marginalised to the point of being forgotten, as many we do remember i.e. Keats very nearly were. There will also of course have been a great many more writers, poets, musicians, scientists and other creative types who were simply not very good!

This is the point I think people miss,  that no one will know or care who Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus are in 20 years. In 20 years there will be just as many new, unmemorable and talentless people who will in turn be forgotten. We will of course be left with a permanent digital reminder of Bieber et al. thanks to modern technology. However, there is vastly greater opportunity for talented people not to be missed, or even just to have the chance to be creative in the first place and I think that is a price well worth paying. 

Reality came crashing down with a thud

Happy New Year!

An indeterminate period of time ago I wrote an introductory piece to revamp and reboot a little project of mine, this blog. Unfortunately, as ever, life gets in the way of living bit after my call to “down your coffee, grab a pen and join me on a whirlwind tour of intellectual possibilities!” I somewhat petered out. 

I have, however, for not all too positive reasons, been able to get my nose back to the grindstone and get some [hopefully] interesting writing done for my readers, some of whom, fingers crossed, may exist outside of my imagination. What stalled my regular life and reinvigorated my creative impulse was an unfortunate altercation I had with a spiral staircase with a handy pillar at the bottom. Unsurprisingly I came second and managed to fracture one of my neck vertebrae. Needless to say I have in fact been very lucky, no permanent damage was done and I am able to write this, neither of which were inevitable outcomes. I am extremely grateful to everyone for the help I have received and have tried to negotiate the difficulties such a situation presents with a good sense of humour, a healthy dose of bloody mindedness and ample patience.

A couple of days prior to my altercation I was writing some whimsical poetry in the mad coffeehouse atmosphere that is the Edinburgh Fringe during which I found myself asking that basic philosophical question, ‘is reality actually happening?’. I have often found that need to pinch myself to check that the incredible cacophony of experience known as reality is actually occurring and is not just some sort of dream. I would argue that such musings are made a great deal easier by having the necessities of existence readily provided by one’s circumstances i.e. knowing where your next meal is coming from. It seems that things most often seem to take on more of an air of sublime unreality when life’s essentials, at least temporarily, are satiated.

The answer to this type of question seems a lot clearer since losing my footing and receiving a thorough slapping from the combined effort of stairs, gravity and a pillar when reality came crashing down with a thud. There is of course the very small possibility that we are all living in the Matrix, that we are brains in jars in some alien’s experiment or that certain aspects of reality may be unknowable to us. Personally, I am content to accept the empirical pillar shaped reality in front of my eyes and leave such thoughts to better philosophers [i.e. A.J. Ayr in ‘the problem of being’].

What I am quite sure of, aliens and existentialist thoughts aside is, that with one slip, my easy happy little life could have escaped me and this has very much brought my intellectual lenses into focus.

With this in mind, and my enforced extra reading time, I can hopefully produce some thought provoking, relevant and above all interesting articles for you to read. I do hope you enjoy and feel free to comment!