Simple vows for singletons

Today I found out something interesting about individuality, which seems a useful thing to explore a couple of weeks before I marry.

My fiance and I spent this morning sitting outside a cafe working out what wedding vows we want to use. We are having a humanist ceremony and are enjoyong the freedom that gives us. However, many of the people who suggest vows and readings for weddings combine a tin ear for language and a sweetly romantic view of love, producing the verbal equivalent of a Thomas Kinkaid painting. (Look for the positive in each other? For sure, but not in those terms). We’ve had to trim and shape much of what we found.

It’s a truism that the newer the word, the more weasily it will be. Shakespeare and Chaucer could handle the big stuff like love and life and death and taxes so we were pruning out jargon, psychobabble and bullcrap.

However, we struggled with one idea.  We respect each others’ individuality and are pretty good at not projecting our own nuroses on to each other and we do at least know we shouldn’t burden each other with expectations. But could we find simple language for it?  Could we ever.

In the end we realised that it’s because the idea of the individual, in particular the rights of the individual, comes from the Reformation and the Enlightenment.  It’s not an idea that is easy to express in simple non-latinate English.

Interesting, huh?

Today I confirmed something about individuality, which is that it hasn’t been around that long.  An interesting thing to remind myself of less than three weeks before I marry.

My fiancé and I sat outside a cafe this morning working out what wedding vows we want. (It will be a humanist ceremony and we are enjoying the freedom it gives us). However, many of the suggested vows and readings were written by people who combine a tin ear for language and a sweetly romantic view of love, producing the verbal equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade painting. (Look for the positive in each other? For sure, but not in those terms). We had to trim and shape much of what we found.

It’s a truism that the newer the word, the more weasily it is. Shakespeare and Chaucer handled the big stuff like love and life and death and taxes just fine, so words that were good enough for them were good enough for us.  We happily pruned away the jargon, psychobabble and bullcrap, drank tea and coffee and watched the world go by.

However, we struggled with one idea.  We value each others’ individuality and are pretty good at not projecting our own neuroses on to each other, and we do at least know we shouldn’t lay expectations on each other. But could we find simple language for it?  Could we ever.

In the end we realised that it’s because the idea of the individual, in particular respecting the rights of the individual, comes from the Reformation and the Enlightenment.  Chaucer and Shakespeare lived in a world where people were subjects not citizens, where god was in his heaven and every now and again divinely appointed a king.  So respecting the individual is not an idea that is easy to express in simple non-latinate English.  Before Luther, no-one needed or used the words.

Interesting, huh?

Not a number

Executive Leadership - Jaques and Clement

Some years ago I was in a meeting where someone said the equivalent of: “We aim to have 80% of the balls being blue” .

Me, I like to understand things, so I said:

“Do you mean that each ball will be two colours, 4/5ths blue and 1/5th white, or do you mean that 80 balls in a hundred will be entirely blue and 20 balls in a hundred will be entirely white?”

Actually I wasn’t as articulate as that, but that was the question I was asking.

He missed the point the first time, so I rephrased it.

He missed the point the second time, and when I drew breath for the third time, he cut me off and snarled at me “It’s just an expression”.

I can only assume he was referring to the 80/20 rule.

I took a deep breath, and said … nothing.  Nothing at all.  What was there to say?  What I wanted to say was “it’s not a bleeping expression, it’s a number” but I was so astonished by his remark that I couldn’t think of a way to phrase it without swearing.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this is an example of what Jaques and Clement call ‘hollow language’ in their book Executive Leadership.  By this they mean the language used by people who don’t really understand what they are saying.  They can barely talk the talk, let alone walk the walk.  Me, I just call it being a tosser.

What’s in a name

In four weeks time I have to decide whether or not to change my name.

It would be a lot less awkward if I’d reverted to my maiden name after my divorce, but I really could not be bothered. My maiden name is not spelled the way it is pronounced and my first name has its own difficulties, so one of the pleasures of early matrimony was no longer having to spell out both names letter by letter every single time.

It seems discourteous to marry one man and use another man’s name, but I’ve got used to it. It trips off my tongue and spells itself easily and if you google it, it’s mostly me that you find.

To my shame, this last may be the deciding factor.

Oh, the patriarchy… Decisions decisions. Perhaps I should just choose another one altogether and be done with it.

Maybe I’ll call myself Ms Rose.  That way I’ll still smell sweet.

Hobnob’s choice

There is altogether too much choice in this world and it induces stress. Stress is bad. Limited choice is good. Let me show and tell.

The first thing to acknowledge is if you’ve made a choice and aren’t allowed to have it, then that induces far worse stress. But that’s limited freedom, not limited choice. What I am complaining about is being forced to make a choice when I don’t have, want or need to.

I am talking about:

• Supermarkets that have 15 kinds of extra-virgin olive oil.
  • I just want to choose between olive, sunflower, vegetable and lard, thanks. Oh, fuckkit, I’ll go to Morrisons, ta.
• Doctors making me choose between a dozen indistinguisable triptanes to treat migraine.
  • You’re the one with the medical degree, pal, you choose.
• The restaurant that says “oh, you want a vegetarian meal, tell us what you’d like and the chef will make it”.
  • Yeah, but how do I know what veg you’ve got in fresh today?

Consumer choice

There is a difference between variety and product range. Variety is something new once in a while. A wide product range is a whole aisle of shampoo. That is one of the many reasons I like Aldi – they maintain a limited core product base and introduce wierd shit every now and again. (The other three reasons are antipasti for a quid, their chocolate brioche which is dangerous, and their tribute brands which deserve a post of their own).   The supermarket problem’s easy enough to deal with – I only go to Sainsburys for prescriptions, petrol and clothes. (I go to Tesco local instead, so there is no health in me. Oh, and the veg and cheese stalls in the market, so maybe there is a bit.)

The situation with professionals is harder because the government insists that the people want a fully informed choice. There are three words that are the problem, “choice”, “informed” and “fully”. How often do people suffer from nocebo side-effects? How much better to say “if anything changes that you don’t like, let me know”. You see, you pay a professional NOT to tell you stuff: you don’t pay for an hour of their time. You pay them to shut the fuckup about the 9,999 hours they have spent leading up to your appointment.

Ritual

Let’s admit it: choice in our consumer society (or what used to be our consumer society) is a ritual. The purpose of the menu is to give you something to talk about in the embarrasing time before the wine kicks in. It’s not there to give you choice. If it were, then there’d be more than one vegetarian option for a start.  These days I let the one I’m with do the choosing for me while I sit back and look at the other diners and the wallpaper.  (Wallpaper in restaurants, now there’s a topic).

Choice is about giving us something to do while we wait for the waiter, or making us feel special when we are just another punter, or persuading us that we’ve had customer service.

So let’s hear it for smaller shops which you can nip in to and nip out of, advisors who give advice rather than explaining options, and doctors who prescribe and proscribe but don’t bloody well describe.

Keep the Libel Laws out of Science

Keep the Libel Laws out of Science

I’ve just added my name to the campaign launched by  Sense about Science to keep the libel laws out of science and bunged them some cash too.

Sense about Science are raising the profile of the libel case against author Simon Singh.  Singh manages to make science accessable with honour and skill. However he is being sued for libel by the decidedly non-scientific Society of Chiropractors. With libel laws, you are guilty unless proven innocent, which is fair enough when you have to prove that, yes indeedie such-and-such MP committed acts of criminal fraud on their expenses claims. But a libel court is not an appropriate place to evaluate the effectiveness of a medical treatment. (Singh is financing his own defence but Sense about Science support other journalists sued in the same way. It happens too: Ben Goldacre was supported by the Guardian, but not all publishers are that honourable.)

The question is not whether or not you ‘believe in’ Chiropractic, which is a bit of a category error anyway: it isn’t a religion.

The question is about appropriate methods of finding the truth.

In the bad old days  our only tool was human rationality, which is deeply flawed in the first place. So there was only one racecourse in town whatever horse you wanted to run with.  The only tools you had were logic and rhetoric:  whether you wanted to discover the length of the hypotenuse (Euclid), who dunnit (Aristotle), how eyes work (Plato), all you could do was ask questions, drink wine with your mates and think beautiful thoughts until you arrived at an answer. And most of the answers were barking: think of Zeno’s paradox, where Achilles never ever outruns the tortoise. Yeah, right.

These days we have more racecourses and we have a duty to use them wisely. We know instinctively that the legal system has its limits: and Luigi Cascioli‘s suit against the Catholic Church for misrepresentation made international headlines because it was mischievious.

Even in Galileo’s day it was unreasonable for the court to use judicial inquiry t o evaluate scientific facts. Had the Inquisition chosen to follow Galileo’s experiments they would have been forced to conclude that the earth does indeed go round the sun. It was a profound injustice that Galileo’s scientific horse was forced to run on a quasi-judicial course.

The courts have case law and precedent to guide them about human behaviours, and a woeful track record of messing it up when they bring in expert witnesses and worry their pretty little wigs about things they haven’t been trained to understand. Let’s face it, science IS difficult. It’s complicated, counter-intuitive and tells us truths that are frequently unpalatable. Which is why we have experimental methodologies, complex rules about selecting valid samples and correcting for chance, and peer review.  And as a result we have the internet, anti-viral medication, infant mortality rates of 20 in 1000, and the ability to fly to the ends of the earth.

So let’s be clear about it:  if we wish to assess whether or not using a particular treatment on a particular condition is more or less effective than doing nothing, then we do have a course for that particular horse, and it ain’t the libel laws.

Hopefully this explains why the Campaign to Keep Libel out of Science has my wholehearted support. It is important we fight medievalism wherever it creeps up on us.

For the record, I’ve never been to a chiropracter. However I’ve found osteopathy superb for muscle spasm but an expensive waste of time for migraine.

Is this ‘engaged’ in some FaceBook meaning of the term?

Forgive me for not blogging – I have been busy. In part, I have been performing a little social experiment, seeing how the news has spread about my recent engagement. Six degrees of ripples in a pond, and all that, and it has been particularly interesting because our friends and family range from digital natives to the entirely analogue.

We told one or two people by phone and email before announcing it on the creative writing and social site we’d been rattling around for years. The congratulations came in from people who knew us both. Our FaceBook worlds overlap less, though, and only only the eagle-eyed spotted my change of status there because I had disabled my outgoing feed a while back. Despite that, one friend rang me that night to express his startlement at the news.

“Is this ‘engaged’ in some FaceBook meaning of the term?” he asked.

No not at all.  

I delayed telling my colleagues partly because I decided to use it in one of those awful icebreakers about “something no-one here knows about me”. But then I got an instant message from a colleague asking if he’d failed some kind of FaceBook test. Far from it – either he is my colleague most on the ball, or he’s the one stalking me most closely.

And finally I’ve been working my way round the people I only know in real life, like my neighbours and my friends from way-back. These are the ones who regard the Internet as something irrelevant and lacking in fresh air and exercise and only used by people who have too much time on their hands.

And what do I deduce from this experiment?

Well, announcements of marriage are only of local interest, so one way of defining “local” for a person or a group of people is to look at where their marriages are announced. For centuries, “local” was the parish you lived in. These days “local” means the diaspora of friends who keep in touch via FaceBook. Though of course, this is not the first time that local has not meant “geographically near”, as evidenced by the posh nuptials announced in small circulation London-based newspapers, whether they were British Aristos or the officers and gentlemen of the far flung reaches of the Empire.  

What else? Well, it’s confirmed that we are both members of a lot of bounded communities, only some of which overlap.  Online communities disseminate news effectively within their own boundaries (doh!) and FaceBook crosses the boundary between online and real life. But I also have friends who really do only conduct their lives in the analogue world of phone calls or even letters.

That said, news can still leap from neuron to neuron within a family, entirely unconstrained by timezones and space.