Truth, stardust and comfort blankies

We should be able to do it now. We should be able rise above superstition, supposition and woolly thinking. We have arrived at the once-in-a-species chance to combine wisdom with knowledge and transcend both.

For the first time in our history we have the data. We really do know things. We have researchers and academics finding things out and publishing them as if their jobs depended on it.

We are also joining the gaps between these pieces of knowledge to some extent. Climatologists train as mathematicians and physicists first, but climatology also draws on the skills of botanists and archaeologists and palaeontologists and zoologists and lepidopterists and… well you get the idea. Not just climatology. Bristol University provides a taught Masters in Archaeology for the Screen Media. The list of connected specialities is huge.

And finally, we have methodologies. There were many seminal innovations in the 20th century: the internal combustion engine, flight, digital computing, penicillin, genocide, but the one without which none of the others would have had any effect is the development of methodologies. It was the development and application of manufacturing processes which enabled the Model T to roll out of the factories in Detroit in its hundreds of thousands. It was the development of a methodology for genocide which meant that six in every eight European Jews were killed in the 1940s.

The relevant methodologies though are the ones for generating information, for finding hard data and separating it out from theory, hypothesis and speculation. So, not only do we know stuff, we have reliable ways of sorting out true stuff and sifting out the plausible stuff, putative stuff, speculative stuff and down right wishful thing.

The ostrich-eye view

However we have not outgrown our comfort blankie. We prefer the warm cosiness of superstition and woolly thinking to the hard realities which face us and - and this is the really unforgivable thing - we tell ourselves we are looking at the evidence and drawing our own conclusions. We are doing nothing of the sort. We lie.

There are examples of this all the time. I once heard a taxi driver saying “75% of all cars on the road are red: if you think about it, it’s true”. The fact that he had failed to look through his windscreen and see that three in four cars are not in fact red was worrying enough. But the fact that he thought he had gone through a verification step pushed me off my mental cliff. What on earth did he think he was doing when he ‘thought about it’? What did ‘thinking about it’ mean to him?

This happens in commercial environments too. I recently distracted a meeting for five minutes by trying to understand if the statement “20% of balls are blue” meant “20 balls in every 100 are blue”, or if it meant “each ball is pie-bald and has a blue patch covering 20% of it”. Eventually the person I was asking the question of snarled “it’s just an expression” and I had to bite my tongue not to reply “no it’s not an expression, it’s a number”. I paraphrase, but I still say he was talking bollocks.

It is this intellectual laziness and moral cowardice that enables intelligent, educated and otherwise thoughtful people to believe in medieavalisms such as astrology or crystal healing or spiritualism or tarot cards. It’s incredibly simple to demonstrate astrology - just run the thing backwards. Collect data on people’s personalities and the events of their lives, and get an astrologer to tell you where the stars were when each person was born. You could limit them to a specific year if you felt generous. If astrology works, you should be able to run it backwards as well as forwards. You could take the same approach for tarot readings. If homoeopathy has more than just the placebo effect, then it should be demonstrable. It isn’t, and one has to conclude that it doesn’t.

Actually, homoeopathy is a case in point. The less a person engages with the methods and concepts of evidence based-medicine, or experimental and evidence-based science for that matter, the more likely they are to accept homoeopathy on trust. (Mind you, the only evidence I have for this is anecdotal and my argument is deductive - but this proves my point - we can now validate and categorise both the data we use and the conclusions we draw from it). What is worrying though is that the reasonably well-educated and predominantly middle class patients of homoeopaths believe that their faith in homoeopathy is worth as much or more than the evidence-based practice of medicine, despite the fact that medical science actually is curing more people year on year and this information is readily available. There’s none so blind as those who won’t see.

Stepping up to the line

By contrast, one of the most fascinating programmes on British radio at the moment is In our Time with Melvyn Bragg. Lord Bragg made his name in literature, humanities and the arts; he is nobody’s fool and no kind of intellectual slouch. However, he struggles with some pretty simple mathematical and scientific concepts whenever the subject is outside his own cultured fields. Fair play to him, he tackles the subjects and tackles them well. But it is astonishing to hear someone as polymathic as Bragg flounder in the midst of really very simple science. And then one realises just how innumerate and scientifically illiterate even the most educated and cultured of us are and - even more worryingly - that this is not seen as any kind of problem.

Almost half a century ago C P Snow argued that someone who does not understand the second law of thermodynamics is as uneducated and uncultured as someone who hasn’t read Shakespeare. He also says “if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.”

The madness of crowds

On top of that, we don’t get it. We all feel entitled to an opinion in this democratic age. Like the taxi driver, we do not realise that we cannot think. We all feel that our opinion on - for example - evolution is as valid as the next person, even if the next person is a geneticist or an anthropologist or a palaeontologist and we aren’t. In fairness, the failure is in our education system where people are encouraged to ‘think for themselves’ without being taught how to think critically or being given the basic tools of analysis. This is the downside of democracy. We dumb down to our lowest common denominator. I am not going to argue against democracy: as Amyarta Sen points out, it is the only demonstrable safeguard against famine for a start.

Looking further up the slippery pole, we glimpse our leaders, chosen by us mainly from graduates who studied humanities or social science or business or law. It is not just that they are ignorant. The thing that gives me the great big hairy heebee-jeebies is that they believe that they are ‘informed’ and that being intelligent is enough. They do not accept that some subjects are too technical, too specialised or just plain too hard for the lay person, no matter how intelligent, to grasp, and that some things simply cannot be paraphrased. We are being led by people who just don’t get it, and who don’t actually know that there is stuff to get.

However, I do believe that responsible government requires our winsome elected leaders take and act on the professional advice of specialists even if we don’t like it. Interestingly Thatcher was the political leader in the 1980s most alert to the challenges of climate change. She was a scientist and understood the methodology, even if it had been decades since she’d actually done any chemistry.

Our bad

We are failing the great moral test of our times and retreating into the comfort of a new mediaevalism, surrounding ourselves with ideology and doctrine and the warm and righteous certainties of fundamentalism. We have the chance to rise above all this, to step into reality and claim our inheritance as intelligent and wise children of the stars.

Instead we are sitting in the dust, looking for comfort by casting runes, and that will bring about the ruin us all.

Last word

I had an epiphany
the other day
about your motives.

Like most of my epiphanies
about you
it took poetic form.

It still needs work to find
perfect words
to match my feelings.

And do you know something?
This time
I really can’t be arsed.

Once daily, thrice weekly

Newspaper columnists always fascinated me. In the dim and distant days of the 1970s there was one columnist per Sunday broadsheet - about four all told - and by and large the essays they wrote were interesting and some of them even bore re-publication. Then in the 1980s onwards, print media exploded and every paper had three or four columnists - the political one, the motherhood-is-wonderful-no-no-really-it-is one, the single-female one, and the barking mad one. And now, of course, with 2.0 we are all columnists because the attraction of writing a column, surely, must be the sound of one’s own voice.

I’ll make no bones that what I am doing here is trying my arm at think-pieces to see at what point I run out of subjects which interest me about which I have some degree of coherent thinking. I don’t aspire to daily originality. Daily coherence is hard enough.

Daily blogging has changed how I think about what I think. My attention is no longer drawn to a subject on the radio or in my reading or in daily events so that I can while away time musing aimlessly on it. Now I muse with attention and purpose. Which is in itself quite interesting from this side of my cranial cavity.

However, daily blogging is time consuming, and I am about to enter 10 week period when I must focus on more Serious Real Life efforts. I feel a mixture of relief and guilt at cutting my blogging back to three times a week. I feel like I am sneaking myself off the hook and masking it with falsely superior motives. But I could displace for my country, and blogging is the most entertaining displacement activity I currently have available. It beats doing the ironing hands down. But, since blogging will neither buy the baby a new bonnett nor get the days work done, I have to blog less.

Besides which, if I reduce the quantity, maybe I can improve the quality.

Word-envy

There’s a particular kind of sickening and envious delight I feel when I come across words, phrases or even entire poems, which I wish I had written myself. One couplet - written by a South African woman whose name I don’t know but who lives in Stroud - is a good example of this:

Mr Language-man,
let me lick your words…

I would have been shivering with delight if I had written that in my first language. She wrote it in her second.

Another example comes from Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s new album Living with War:

Sister has her headphones on
She hears the music blasting
She sees her brother marchin’ by
Their bond is everlasting
Listening to Bob Dylan singin’ in 1963
Watching the flags of freedom flyin’

Now why couldn’t I think of placing a 21st century teenager in a situation where she’s “Listening to Bob Dylan singin’ in 1963″?

Because I’m not Neil Young, I suppose.

Football fever

It seems fairly clear that one of the underlying attractions of football is that it enables men to express emotions. But I also wonder if there’s a deeper purpose of enabling men to feel emotions in the first place. I remember a Geordie explaining to me once that choosing your team was more important than choosing your wife because, after all, you can divorce your wife. He meant it, too. In the Radio 4 Programme The Choice, Michael Buerk interviewed a man who had decided to give up his Manchester United Season Ticket. It was an odd and fascinating radio programme, because Buerk quite clearly did not understand the magnitude of the moral and ethical choice facing this man. (Interestingly, that is one of only two episodes of The Choice not described in detail on the BBC website.)

Then of course there’s Bill Shankly who once infamously said that football was not a matter of life and death, but that it was more important than that.

So - it doesn’t take great powers of observation to see that men get really worked up about football.

What I find myself wondering, now that the New Man of the 1990s is old hat, is whether or not the appeal of football is that men can feel emotions about it.

Aborting girls - India’s missing million

More than 10m female births in India may have been lost to abortion and sex selection in the past 20 years, according to medical research.
BBC News, 9th January 2006

Abortion, feminism and post-imperialism - let’s not waste time with easy subjects, eh?

For the record, I believe in a woman’s right to choose. I believe that abortion below a certain time limit is neither murder nor infanticide, that it is the killing of a potential human being. (Read Carl Sagan’s astonishingly good essay in Billions and Billions for the most lucid discussion on when that time limit should be, and why it should be set at that point). I believe that every human being has the right to have been wanted by its mother - that every child should be a wanted child.

I respect the rights of others to hold different opinions, but to be honest, that debate is circular, unilluminating and stale.

What I am finding challenging is the fact that my mildly feminist pro-choice stance leads, it seems, to an estimated million female foetuses being aborted in India over the last 20 years.

That really challenges my feminist sensibilities. How can my logic be right if it selects against the eventual birth of women in that way?

I’ve debated this with a couple of people, one of whom has pointed out that the decision is not necessarily a sexist one, it may be an economic one. In India’s society girls are more expensive than boys. But ultimately that raises my feminist concerns as well.

It’s a circle I find hard to square: on an individual basis I believe considered, controlled, safe and legal abortion to be every woman’s right, but then I look at the demographic in India (and presumably in China too) and find my thinking to be profoundly challenged.

I desperately want it to be wrong that so many women are missing from India’s population. I want an easy answer, that puts me in a nice warm spot on the moral high ground. Hell, it might even be nice to pontificate smugly about baby-killing.

Instead I sit with one of my inner-feminists saying “every woman should have the right to choose” in one ear, and another inner-feminist wailing “but 1,000,000 missing women can’t be right” in the other ear. They do it in a caring way, with sisterly solidarity, vegan ice-cream and synchronised menstrual cycles, of course. Every now and again I give them a copy of Diva to go away and read by themselves, and I get some peace for a while.

But, flippancy aside, it is a challenge I find deeply troubling.

Primaeval

Green ferns and fir trees.
Murmuring woods remember
ghosts of dinosaurs.

Oh to be a linguist, now two point zero’s here….

Don’t you find what’s happening to the written language compelling? It is changing before our eyes, even faster than spoken languages change, and it is impossible to tell what written English will look like in a couple of decades time.

I am not convinced that standards are falling which is the easy and elitist assumption to make. Sure, printed English used to be grammatically correct and impeccably spelled, (unless it was printed by the Gruniad). But this was not because of the journalists’ English teachers. Newspaper offices had shelves of books on correct English to guide their journalists, and even then their writing would go through the ruthless filter of the sub-editor and the compositor, who had books of their own to guide them on the presentation of written English.

Web 2.0 axiomatically provides you with unedited and unfiltered access to what people want to say to you but, as I’ve said, it exposes their illiteracy.

The proportion of literate to illiterate texts we see has changed. We have returned to the Medieval directness of communication not seen since Caxton and the printing press. Now, what you see is what I wrote.

It is going to be interesting to see whether literacy is more valued because it is more needed, and if the written language will take on variances similar to those in the spoken language. There is a doctoral thesis waiting for funding on the subject of txtspk and l33t as dialects.

People already have different voices and standards for instant messaging (where speed is of the essence), for discussion forums (where language is informal and urgent), and for blogs (which are more like show-case pieces). But the written language is changing in other ways, <example purpose=”to illustrate the point”> the use of pseudo-tags in emails, posts or other text </example>. This crosses over. I know of several people who include stage directions in their conversations. *smiles whimsically*

I am trying really hard not to use the word “meme” here.

I guess I am curious about three things:

• Will literacy be more highly valued by cyber-skiving kids?
• Will the general standard of literacy be driven down by the sheer volume of illiterate texts we expose ourselves to?
• To what extent will the written language take on features previously exclusive to spoken languages such as dialect and voice?

Oh to be a linguist now 2.0’s here.

In the midst of life we are in death

We were called into a meeting room the other day - the whole team - at no notice. Solemn faces all round and the manager saying “there’s no easy way to say this, but for those of you who knew him….”

One of the young men had been found dead at the foot of his staircase the day before. He’d not turned up for work on Monday, HR had called his father, and it was his father who found him. He was 29.

I’d only exchanged a few words with him - he seemed like a nice lad and he was well-liked by those who worked with him.

What I found disturbing was the need for friends and colleagues to speculate: it seems his relationship had ended recently and there has been a lot of speculation that he committed suicide.

We all need an explanation, a justification, for young death. We look for an answer to the question “why?” We live in a state of secular denial, and so that answer has to be physical or psychological.

However, I’m shocked by how many people cannot accept the idea of an accident or natural causes. My family background, which includes medics and clergymen, means I know that there is no special age before which people do not die.

Shit does happen. Ulcers and appendixes burst. So do blood vessels in the head. People slip on stair-cases, fall through windows, electrocute themselves, choke on food, knock themselves out in the shower and drown.

This lack of acceptance of the brutal unfairness of fate is behind the desperate need of the Diana conspiracy theorists to believe that her mortality was a human betrayal, not a slip of the steering wheel. The idea that the universe could be that random, unfair and cruel is frightening. It could be you.

It is difficult to know what to hope for - to hope that he died of an accident is to hope that his life was stolen from him. To hope that he died of his own volition is to hope that he was so lost, lonely and desperate that he could not see how much the future can hold when you are 29.

Either way, my heart went out to his father, and I am glad that the person who has my spare key is not a member of my family.

Catflaps

I’ve finally given in and agreed to fit a cat-flap. This is not so much to let the cats out, as to let them in again. The weather has been so fine recently that I let them out at 8.00am and I’ve had to call them in after midnight. They come in occasionally and demand food, though why they cannot feed themselves on rabbit-flavoured rabbit and mouse-flavoured mouse is beyond me. They require tuna-and-cod-flavoured horse, it seems.

Who would have thought buying a catflap took so much time? The door is varnished wood. It is too nice to cut up to install a cat-flap, but see above. So I need a brown cat-flap. The weather is benign now, but the wind wuthers around in the lane in the winter, so I need one which is weather-proof, possibly with magnetic strips to hold it shut in the wind. The panel I’ll be installing it in is half and inch thick, so I need one which has a tunnel or a sleeve which I can adjust to fit.

Three catflaps later, I finally found one in the market which purports to be what I need. So I will be making-it with the drill, the pencil, the saw, and the screw-driver.

And then the demanding little bastards can come and go as they please.

Ahhhh…. Bless…..