Wendy Wood's Good Habits, Bad Habits

This book is about using the power of habit to change your lousy diet, infrequent exercise, your weight, and many other such things. The secret is said to be habit-formation: turning whatever it is you need to do into something that you do almost without thinking. By the psychologist's own definition, the essence of habit is thoughtlessness.(1)

It's Behavioural Science. Replication of experimental results is poor, and the experiments, often involving small groups of American college students, are, how does one say this? Lacking in gravitas?

A Behavioural Science experimental result typically sounds something like this: 60% of the people who tried The Hack did 10% less / more of Whatever, while the other 40% did the same amount. The conclusion of the writer of the best-selling book is that you should do The Hack, because it works.

Well, yes it does and no it doesn't.

It works for organisations with large customer / user bases (say, a hospital, or a retailer). Running a campaign featuring The Hack results in the equivalent of a 6% increase in customers when the campaign is running. If the campaign cost is low enough, that may well be worthwhile. There are plenty of parliamentary constituencies with a margin of less than 6%. The Hack could sway the result of the next election - if it's that kind of hack.

It is no use to you or me as individuals. We don't want something that works for just over half of us and then only 10% of the time. We need something that works for us, 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year (nothing's perfect). Alarm clocks, rather than putting the biscuits out of sight and leaving the fruit on view(2).

The assumption that what works on one scale (organisation dealing with a large population) will work on another scale (individuals) should have a name, maybe the Individuals-Are-Crowds Fallacy.

Hacks (bite-size bits of thought-lite behaviour suitable for habit-formation) can make it easier to achieve a goal: you can put your gym gear in the bag the previous day so you don't forget it in the morning rush. It's not going to lift the weights for us, though. We have to do that, and there are no hacks for making it easier. It's supposed to be difficult, or it isn't doing us any good.

Setting an alarm clock is a hack, and so is a To-Do List. You still need to follow-through: you could go back to sleep, and you could ignore the list.

How important are habits-and-hacks? The alternative is said to be willpower, which Behavioural Scientists say is a muscle that gets tired easily and recovers slowly. Except there never was any such psychological muscle.

One's will was an expression of a desired outcome (which is why legal Wills are called that) and by extension, one's will-power was one's constancy and determination to cause or achieve that outcome. Go too far with "willpower" and you wind up with "obsession", "stubborn-ness", and other Bad Things. Don't go far enough, and you're a quitter.

The important part is this: one is only expected to demonstrate it for something that matters, such as studying for and passing exams, defeating the Carthaginians, or losing enough weight so the insurance companies stop calling one "obese". No-one is expected to resist marshmallows, or keep their hand over a flame, except as a party trick.

Parents will go through years of sleepless night hell, sullen teenage hell, tired crying on the way home, hearing some Disney movie for the third time that week, and all sorts of other trials and tribulations, to raise their children. Because that matters. Excuse them if they put on a few pounds in the process.

People who are content with their lives and their physical, cultural, emotional and intellectual condition do not do things to change themselves(3). They do things they enjoy doing to enjoy being them.

People who do things to change their lives and themselves are in some degree ambitious or malcontent.(4) Maybe they noticed that all the senior female executives were blondes and decided to adopt the plumage. Maybe they looked at their gut in the mirror and thought "this can't go on". Maybe they just want to run the 10K a minute faster to be in the next class up. Maybe they saw their Saturday night drinking buddies from the outside that fateful evening, and realised what a bunch of losers they were. Maybe they thought that, at thirty, it was time to learn to drive. Or to stop with the late-night takeaways. Or whatever.

The Dirty Secret of making significant changes to ourselves and/or our lives is that it takes sustained effort, a sharp pair of social pruning shears, and motives that would scare the bejesus out of a therapist.

Somewhere in the margins of that is a place for hacky little habits: I like To-Do lists, but I don't get obsessive about completing them.

By all means flick through Behavioural Science best-sellers or even the academic research if you want to find suggestions for hacky little habits.

And if a Behavioural Scientist offers you a marshmallow now, or two in fifteen minutes' time... you're a busy grown-up: take the marshmallow now and keep the fifteen minutes for yourself.



(1) That's why "bad habit" is almost a tautology, and "good habit" is almost an oxymoron. 

(2) I've done that for years. Hasn't worked so far. Alarm clock works every time. 

(3) That doesn't mean they never move home, redecorate, or go to a different country on holiday each year. No matter where they are, they always take the weather with them. 

(4) There are also malcontents who don't do anything, also called whingers.

Calling Bullshit - Bergstrom and West

I read Bergstrom and West's book Calling Bullshit recently. It's the latest in a long line of books about how various people attempt to confuse, mislead, mis-direct and otherwise bullshit us for their own nefarious ends. The line started with Darrell Huff's immortal How To Lie With Statistics and Bergstrom and West do a good job of updating it. They still believe in p-scores, but at least they describe p-hacking well enough that you likely won't trust p-scores again.

My inner analytic philosopher feels they fold too much into the idea of BS. Lying, deception, manipulation, gas-lighting, mis-direction, and numerous others, are distinct types of mis-communication, and we lose some insight by treating them all as aspects of one underlying thing.

Harry Frankfurt wrote his famous little book On Bullshit because he felt that bullshit was something new. He realised that all the hitherto forms of mis-communication were attempts to conceal the truth, and were deliberate, insofar as the liar knew they were telling a lie. The BS-merchant does not care whether what they say is true or false. They don't even care if it makes sense. Nor do they care whether you know the truth already. Their concern is to block the communication channels with their noise. This was what Frankfurt wanted to highlight: that our BS-filled media consists mostly of noise intended to keep other noise out, and that process corrupts the media, since it becomes concerned only with whose noise they transmit.

Recently a doctor in America claimed that it was within the scope of her Hippocratic Oath not to treat people who would not get vaccinated. Her claim that the Hippocratic oath is very science-based and that the "science" said being unvaccinated was a threat... this is not bullshit. It is either deeply cynical or deeply deranged, and it needs to be treated as such. The deliberate attempts to create an atmosphere of fear in Spring 2020 by almost every Government's PR agencies, were not bullshit. It was propaganda intended to dupe the citizenry, and that is not on the same moral plane as a PR campaign for soap.

However responsible and measured what Bergstrom and West say is, you and I don't have the time, and we don't have the resources of a pair of academics, to fact-find, investigate and provide evidence for our claim that today's report about, say and, a hot topic in the UK at the time of writing, how it is essential that the Government allow Eastern European truck drivers into the country to fill the alleged 100,000 shortfall in the number of drivers.

This example is special pleading with a helping of BS on the side. The BS is a) the estimate of the shortfall, and b) that it can only be filled by Eastern Europeans. How do I know these things? Am I an expert on the Logistics industry in the UK? No, and I don't need to be. I am familiar, as anyone over the age of forty is, with the attitudes and behaviour of the people who run the UK's larger businesses. They don't want to train anyone, they don't want to have to pay a market-clearing wage, and they don't want permanent employees. They have shown these behaviours for decades. So of course they want to import ready-made drivers who will work for less for all sorts of reasons.

Those are the kind of rules-of-thumb that ordinary people need. Here are some more of mine.

Any subject with the word 'Science' in its title, most likely isn't, and nor are any of its claims. Hence, any research about the benefits or faults of lifestyle-choices can be ignored. (Bacon is bad for you, red wine is good for you, you only have to walk three times a week...)

Anyone who says 'The Science is In' does not understand how science works. Newtonian physics was "in" right up to the day in 1905 when it wasn't.

Projections, forecasts, models and other forms of computerised number-generation are mostly hokum. The Met Office has been trying to forecast the weather since before I was born, and it's still mostly wrong.

If the cui who bono's from saying it, says it, nobody should be surprised. Hence, you can ignore all those reports from charities, NGOs or professional bodies showing that whatever it is they are trying to stop has got worse and they need more money.

Never trust any process that generates revenue as long as it doesn't solve the problem.

Real experts know how little they really know, and how inadequate that is. As a result they will never work for or advise a) Governments, b) big business, c) International NGOs. Those "experts" being quoted in the Press? Mostly they aren't.

Insiders are not going to explain what really goes on to outsiders, and most journalists, academics, civil servants, politicians and regulators are outsiders, so none of them have a clue.

Governments listen to the advisors whose advice backs up the desired policy. When the desired policy changes, so do the advisors.

Scientists and experts have very, very narrow fields of expertise. Once they start talking outside that, say, about public policy, they are likely as ignorant as you or me.

Percentages and other comparisons are meaningless without context. That context is carefully with-held in the publication and press release.

Watch for odd phrases and metaphors, as well as stock phrases, cliches, suddenly fashionable phrases, dog-whistles and other oddities of language.

The graphics are probably there to create an impression, not provide information. Best not look at all.

Anything that sounds too good or too bad to be true, probably is. (Props to Bergstrom and West for that one.)

Faced with profit claims by a company, check how much tax they are paying. If they aren't, the Inland Revenue doesn't think they are making a profit. (Props to Terry Smith for that one.)

If a Government knows something is Bad, it bans, restricts or protects against it tout de suite. Or it makes you take precautions, like wearing seatbelts. If all it does is fine or tax you for doing it, then the Government knows it is actually pretty harmless.

Never trust anyone whose advice will result in job losses and inconvenience for other people.

Only believe it after it has been officially denied.

The majority of press articles are advertising or PR of one form or another. Journalists do not leave the office now. They work with what comes to them - it wasn't a journalist who found the Panama Papers, or the Great MPs Expenses Scandal. Journalists re-cycle press releases, official announcements, and the Press Agencies.

The media does not care about content. It cares about clicks. The purpose of the media, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the others, is to provide user / reader / viewer attention to advertisers. The "content" is there to draw in that attention, whether or not the content is true. So almost everything in the media is BS (that is, its truth or falsity is irrelevant to the editors). It was always a bit thus, but it is now almost all thus.

Finally, if you want to see a melt-down, ask Karl Popper's Question: "under what circumstances would you give up that belief / policy / law / judgement / theory / hypothesis?".

What do you do if someone pulls some egregious BS, gaslighting, manipulation or other such on you?

Friends don't BS friends. So whoever it is, they aren't a friend. Which means you act politely, change the subject, remember a pressing appointment, and otherwise leave. They won't miss you and you won't miss them. Fellow employees, however, BS each other all the time, but a lot of that is work, and you have to BS them back. It's expected. What you do when faced with a snowflake, I'm not sure, but the current consensus is: unplug your laptop and run to a safe space.

Bessel van deer Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score,

Bessel van deer Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score, which I read recently, has confirmed my long-held suspicion that almost all of the crazy, spiteful, selfish, erratic behaviour described by so many men in the Sphere is the result of 3D - dysfunctional development disorder(*). 3D can be caused by anything from lousy parenting to criminal neglect and sexual abuse, and no doubt has sub-categories. The result is the same: an unstable personality, braoken or damaged character, and behaviour which nobody would want around them once the sex was over. The exact details of the damage and behaviours aren’t important and can range from a full-fledged DSM-V personality disorder, through defensive obesity, substance abuse, control freakery, non-stop hypergamy, chronic dissatisfaction, inability to trust, promiscuity, low self-esteem, wilfulness and lack of accountability.

3D-behaviour is for life. It’s a persistent, functional disorder that can be managed, if at all, only by extensive therapy, possibly drugs, and constant watchfulness and management. If those last two sound like a Red Pill Marriage, well, that’s what a lot of Red Pill Marriages are.

One of the problems I’ve had with Rollo’s theories has been the feeling that he’s really just describing 3D-crazy and then saying but crazy survives evolution, so crazy must be sane, if only we look at it right . Surviving unto the second generation is not a reason to think a behaviour is somehow effective or adaptive, let alone desirable and to be expected. It means that behaviour is not sufficiently shunned. The reason for that is simple: even Normie teenagers are slightly crazy and 3D crazy doesn’t begin to stand out from the background until all the Normies start calming down in their twenties. By then, it’s too late sucker, you went and knocked up or married crazy.

This is one reason men should not get married until at least thirty: it gives them time to learn to recognise 3D-crazy and it gives the 3D-crazy of their generation the time to ripen.

Quite simply, crazy or damaged should be shunned. At least for reproduction. If you see a Red Flag, don’t go in the water.

An older man who has retired from the fray can say that. Younger men - and at my age, under forty-five is ‘younger’ - are faced with the dreadful fact that a high proportion of the women they will meet will have Red Flag behaviour. What do they do?

Well, some of us ain’t no saints neither. Decent folk didn’t have much to do with me, unless they were fooled by my smile for a while. Some of us are 3D as well, and as a social service we should stay with our own kind, so we don’t spoil the decent folk. If you’re a pig, get down in the mud with the other pigs.

But don’t marry them. Don’t have children with them. Don’t co-habit with them. If you’re in the USA, don’t do anything that a Family Court anywhere has decreed implies your intention to support her. (That can be as little as saying “Let me get that” about a cup of coffee.)

If you’re a regular man, you won’t want a lifetime of fooling around. Racking up a spectacular notch count is for dysfunctionals. You’ll want to have a bit of fun, and then pair up with a Good Woman. You may not be able to find one of those, and may not want to move from where the jobs are to where the Good Women are. Understandable.

Regular men who missed the Good Women train, or 3D-men who should not be on it, need to accept that they’re going to be living the Bachelor Life: intermittent affairs with women who as the years go by are increasingly crazy and decreasingly attractive, until you decide that your dignity is more important than getting your dick wet. (Some men never do, and I guess they’re happy.)

If you’re a regular man, you will regard the lack of your own family as you would never getting that job at an FTSE 100 company, but winding up at some random but reasonable employer instead. It will cause a sigh every now and again, but won’t spoil your life. That’s the way Normies roll: they adapt to circumstances, don’t see those circumstances as being about them in any way, and consequently nothing matters so much to them that they will have emotional hangovers about it. They are pretty much fully-assembled when they come into adulthood and don’t need anything to complete them.

Someone who thinks they need a family, or a partner, or a job in a particular company, or a fast car, or any other damn thing, to complete them, give their life meaning or otherwise make them feel better about themselves, well, that’s a Red Flag right there. For one thing, treating partners and especially children, as a kind of therapy is abuse. Literally. Ab-use. Improper use. Children are not therapeutic tools, and neither are partners. Child-raising is twenty-one years of work that causes sixty years of expense for the taxpayer if it’s done badly. For another, fixing doesn’t work: nothing makes it all better again.

Although I’ve used the ‘damaged / broken’ metaphor, and it is widely used, it’s misleading. 3D people aren’t damaged and they aren’t broke. To be damaged or broke, we have to have been made, assembled, more or less correctly in the first place. Like Normies are. Normies can be damaged or broke and can try to mend themselves, because Normies were made whole at some point. 3D people were never assembled in the first place. 3D people are a bunch of parts put together into some Heath Robinson machine. They need putting together properly. What’s misleading about the idea of 3D’s being ‘damaged’ is that it implies there is a ‘whole’ version in there somewhere. There isn’t. The main task of a 3D’s life is to assemble themselves into a viable person. Sadly, the therapists and pop-culture mavens are still telling the 3D’s that the answer lies in connecting to people, and finding friends and relationships, when in fact, neither of those things will work. The only people who will connect with 3D’s are other 3D’s, and more crazy is not what they need.

Instead of hearing women do this and that, I now hear 3D-women do this and that. Crazy people gonna crazy. Nasty people gonna nasty. Spoiled brats gonna be spoiled. People who can’t trust gonna throw shit tests and run surveillance. Unstable people gonna get bored and file for divorce. None of that is news.

The news is the dismaying prevalence of 3D people. You want one estimate? Forty percent of sixteen-year-olds in the UK are not living with both biological parents. I know, kids are ‘resilient’ and if they aren’t, they should be. So it’s not on the parents, but the damn snowflake kids who can’t take a few missing hugs and the odd temper tantrum. Which is a darn convenient belief parents, relatives and teachers. So there you are. Forty per cent of any generation are not suited to the eternal combat utter bliss of domestic relationships.

I think it explains a lot.



(*) Not in the DSM-V. But you know it’s real.

James Wallman's Time and How To Spend It

According to James Wallman, we Westerners have around five hours a day of spare time, but feel we rushed and don’t have any time for ourselves. He offers seven rules for richer, happier days.

Let’s establish just how silly the book is. This is an actual quote:

Or you could be seeking deeper change: attending the Hoffman course, going to Mecca for the Hajj, taking part in an ayahuasca ceremony, or walking the Camino de Santiago.

The Hoffman course is a week-long residential course in California or Connecticut. I’ll let you read their blurb. Or you may be able to guess the psychobabble just from those details.

The Hajj is a pilgrimage to Mecca. You can’t just walk the walk, you have to talk the talk. If you don’t believe you’re not making a pilgrimage, you’re just being a religious tourist. You can’t seek change on your way to Mecca: you have to be a pious Muslim already. The same applies to the Camino de Santiago, which is the pilgrimage across northern Spain to see the relics of St James of Compostella. Again, you can’t seek change on the Camino, you already have to be a practicing Catholic who believes in the power of relics. Or you’re just a sight-seer.

An Ayahuasca Ceremony involves taking a South American herbal hallucinogenic. You can read more here. It’s best done in South America, of course. The view out of a Newcastle tower block isn’t quite as conducive to spiritual reflection, and you probably couldn’t get the right guru to lead you.

So that gives you an idea of the level of depth of thought that has gone into this book.

Wallman’s book is full of hacks - tricks to make you feel better. As with all lists of hacks, some of these may work for you, others for me, and if we get a couple of useful hacks out of a book that costs £10, that’s good value for money. This is one reason these books sell: we know each one will have at least one thing we can use.

STORIES is Wallman's Big Hack.

According to STORIES, when we’re thinking of doing something, he says, we should ask:

Story - is this something I want the guys at the office or the next girlfriend to know I did? Transform - will this help me change in a way I want? Outside and Offline - pretty much self-explanatory Relationships - will it strengthen existing relationships or help me make new ones? Intense - will it be intense and memorable? Extraordinary - in some way? Status - will it connect me to others and be significant?

So, not chilling on the sofa watching Two or Three Things I Know About Her on DVD then.

But, if you’re seventeen, you’re with a bunch of other people from college, it’s your first trip to the Curzon Soho, and your generation has had the good sense to pronounce Nouvelle Vague movies cool, then watching Godard’s classic at a retrospective at the Curzon... that’s a Story.

It’s not so much the activity (aside from Outside and Offline) as the circumstances in which the activity is performed.

The giveaway sign of the inveterate hacker is that they dive straight for detailed, specific problems. There’s no overview, no stock-taking. Spend more time with your friends they say, whereas the correct question is Which of your friends are worth spending time with?

How much spare time do I really have? (Don’t count commuting, meal prep, morning and evening toilet, and all the hours between arriving and leaving work. Also don’t count shopping, washing, and other housework.)

What do I spend that spare time doing now? Which of those activities do I wish I could stop? Which are guilty pleasures? Which leave me feeling empty? Which leave me feeling tired in a bad way? In a good way?

Which of my friends and acquaintances are worth spending time with and why / why not? How can I spend more time with the worthy ones, and let the bad ones slide?

How much exercise am I getting? Is it the right kind? Does it wear me out or build me up?

What have I always wanted to do but haven’t yet done? Which can I afford to do? Which could I do on my next week off from work? Or at the next weekend?

What am I doing that I think I ‘ought’ to be doing, but I don’t really want to, and isn’t really giving me any benefits?

Those kinds of questions.

Walman forgets that everything we do can’t be funky intense and exceptional.

(Unless you’re Lee Dorsey)

Sometimes it just has to be not junk. The trick is to find something else to do rather than fall down the black holes of TV, You Tube or whatever else counts as junk for us. At the end of a long day, with a frazzled brain and no zip, settling down to a nice Alain Resnais movie, or even a Donald E Westlake thriller, can seem like too much effort. And after a day in the politically-correct and painfully polite environment of the modern workplace, having Jordan Peterson call things ‘despicable’ and ‘ridiculous’ can feel almost refreshing.

Besides, I’m not so sure that we should let an author get away with the claim that a week’s worth of expensive psychobabble is more valuable than a few well-chosen videos from Alux, Jordan Peterson and Jocko Willink. As for social pursuits, I don’t want to count the half-drunk hours I and some mates spent playing Risk or Trivial Pursuit in my twenties or even thirties, and I’m not sure that’s any worse than playing an online multi-player game.

Spare time should not be used for toxic and pointless behaviour, but every minute doesn’t have to be used for self-improvement either.

So like all hack-books, get a couple of things from it, and it's worth it. Take the whole thing seriously and you're being misled. Took. Bamboozled.

Marc Myers' Why Jazz Happened

Marc Myers writes about jazz for the Wall Street Journal, which must be a heck of gig, considering that there really isn’t that much to write about, and hasn’t been for a long time. His own book stops dead at 1972, with no mention of Wynton Marsalis or ECM Euro-jazz, or of Weather Report, the Jazz Crusaders, or the rise of ‘electric jazz’ or ‘smooth jazz’, or the disgraceful jazz education industry. But then, he’s a journalist, and hand-feed-don’t-bite. Being rude about Wynton Marsalis is still not good for anyone’s career.

For all the music industry history, including a fascinating chapter on the effect of Los Angeles on West Coast Jazz, and the political history, Myers can’t get a coherent story going. It slips out of his grasp every time a new chapter starts. One reason is that he doesn’t engage with jazz as music, and see it as something with its own internal logic of development. He’s writing a purely externalist history, and those often feel dis-jointed.

There’s a line of ideas to be traced from the simultaneous improvisations of Dixieland to the group improvisations of Ascension


and the avant-garde jazz groups working today. That line goes through small bands - trios to nonets - in which soloing is an intrinsic part of the music.

There’s another line to be traced from dance-orchestras playing composed waltzes to the jazz dance bands, to Basie's and Ellington’s bands, which comes to an end in the mid-1960’s. Though solos were played, and often had to be offered to retain good players, these were add-ons: the tune would work perfectly well without the solo.

A small-band piece starts by stating a theme or tune, maybe twice, proceeds to divert by way of three or four solos of varying length, which may or may not refer fleetingly to the opening theme, and finishes with a re-statement of the theme. Big-band pieces are all about the written tune and arrangement, and the solos are at most twelve bars, and only one, and that close to the one on the record.

The more composed more of it is, the less it’s jazz, but if there’s no theme, chord sequence, or mood, then it’s avant-garde. Flamenco Sketches is a mood created by a pace and a sequence of changes, some from one mode to another with the same notes, and some from one key to another. It’s jazz, and can only be played by instrumentalists who are also musicians and of the highest quality.

That’s why West Coast jazz, and the jazz-y music of film and TV soundtracks, is only marginally jazz. Myers explains that this music had to be made quickly and cheaply, and therefore by technically skilled, sight-reading players who could nail the tune first time round. A lot of those men had been through one music college or another on the GI Bill, and could sight-read fluently, transpose effortlessly, and knew their C#7/5dim9 from their Emaj7dim4add13, without having to think about it. Nerds, the lot of them. They could play solos, but it wasn’t what they spent their time doing, when they weren’t in the studios. When they weren’t in the studios, they were driving to another studio, playing golf with music producers, or playing softball with their kids in the gardens of their ranch houses in the LA suburbs. That where Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell found all those effortlessly competent studio musicians in the 1970’s.

And let’s not go near the jazz-fusion thing of the early 1970’s. (Myers does, for a whole chapter.) I was there in the audience. It was not a pretty sight. Only four bands ever did it well: Miles Davis, Weather Report, The Crusaders, and Steely Dan. (Steely Dan was seen as a hip rock band at the time: looking back it’s clear they were really jazz composers who could cut a rock tune now and again.) The rest were, for all the technical virtuosity of the players, a mess. Some of the worst music ever played by superb instrumentalists came out of the jazz-rock / fusion years of the early 1970’s. If the band didn’t have Joe Zawinul or Larry Carlton in it, it wasn’t going to work.

(Digression: Guitarists and post-1969 jazz have never gone well together. Miles Davis remains the only bandleader who ever got genuine feeling and music out of the young John McLaughlin. Most big-name jazz guitarists since have lacked finesse and musicality. Except Larry Carlton, who understood that the guitar is a slow instrument and its notes should be given time to make themselves felt. Listening to his solo on Chain Reaction


I wonder how much Larry Carlton learned from the legendary Steve Cropper?)

So core-jazz is a chamber music based on recognisable tunes, themes or changes, in which extemporised soloing is an integral part, and which has a tinge of the blues, a hint or more of swing in the rhythm, and uses four-note seventh-chord based harmonies, as opposed to classical music, which uses three-note fifth-chord based harmonies. That last bit of music nerdery is suggestive rather than definitive: the point is that hard-core jazz has a distinctive style of harmony which when played anywhere else sounds ‘jazzy’.

Now add in the Romantic artistic ideal of creativity as novelty and genre-busting, rather than creative ingenuity within a genre (at which the Baroque composers excelled, for instance), and a certain amount of good old-fashioned manly competition - in other words, the twentieth-century artistic temperament - and we have a motive for continuous change. It took Jean-Luc Godard less than eight years to go from Breathless to the fin du cinema of Week-end. It’s not surprising that John Coltrane could go from bebop, through the reductio ad absurdum of bebop that is Giant Steps, and one of the most popular albums in jazz, A Love Supreme, to the free jazz of Ascension, in a mere ten years. And what the hey did anyone do after that? Miles Davis provided one answer, with time-no-changes, and then with the `electric’ period, but that was after he had tried to figure out what the rock bands were doing.

In my version of the story, jazz killed itself by using John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and others to work itself to its logical conclusion (Hegel would be so proud). The economic and social changes didn’t help, but weren’t the main reason.

In the usual version, the changing economics and demographics of American towns reduced the audience for jazz. The blatant racism of many American policemen didn’t help. And then the British invaded America in 1963 and the Beatles killed jazz.

Well, not quite.

Any form of art grows and develops with an audience, often mostly from one birth cohort, and when that cohort dies, the music vanishes, to be re-discovered a hundred years later (as happened to Bach. And Shakespeare, for that matter). Lesser talents may have to wait for the development of an entire industry devoted to re-discovering them (as has happened with the `early / period music’ movement).

Jazz always did have a small audience. White women just don’t like chamber jazz, though your grandmother might have liked Bing Crosby. (Everybody likes Bing Crosby.) From bebop onwards jazz has been adopted by people who don’t feel part of the mainstream of society. The easiest way for a white boy to show he was hipper than the average square, and could put some effortless effort into his entertainment, was to listen to hard-core jazz.

Out there somewhere was a huge audience of mainstream squares, just waiting for something that spoke to them, and that they could adopt without marking themselves as outsiders. Or worse, in America, as intellectuals.

They found it in The Beatles rather than in Chuck Berry and Bill Haley, because Lennon and McCartney simply wrote better music than almost everyone else, including Burt Bacharach. Bacharach and David wrote clever, complicated and sad music.


All the time.

Lennon and McCartney wrote songs that were more memorable-emotional-danceable-repeat-listenable and all-round entertaining. What music is after all supposed to be. And often showing a little flash of high-grade sophistication, like the incomprehensible opening chord of Hard Day’s Night, or the Palestrina-like harmonies in If I Needed Someone. Not enough to be difficult, but enough to re-assure everyone that this was not disposable Teen Pan Alley stuff.


That mainstream audience descended on pop and rock music. Record companies exist to make money, and the returns on capital from pop / rock were way higher than on jazz. When the kids who wanted to be dissenters found Bob Dylan and the `protest’ singers, jazz was robbed of most of its second-generation-dissenter audience.

Then it turned out that the Beatles and The Who and quite a few others really were pop-artists who worked in music rather than painting, and so the intellectual and the cultured could get on the pop / rock bandwagon as well. So the only young white boys digging jazz were those who came into it through the electric music of Miles Davis, or an interest in the avant-garde, or through their father's record collection.

But. But most of it was recorded, and most of those recordings were digitised, and so can be stored at a very low cost. Streaming music services create a huge demand for all sorts of sounds, and a lot of hard-core 1950’s and early 1960’s jazz is used to replace the dreaded ‘muzak’ in public places. To modern ears, it is pleasant, has a good but not obtrusive rhythm, and the solos provide a more textured background. Starbucks is never going to programme Ascension. Or even A Love Supreme. There are limits.

Jazz did what so many art forms do: it ran itself out and was replaced by something else. Now it exists in an archive, to be played when the mood is right.

One thing I do agree with Myers about: jazz played itself out in or around 1972. Take the release of On The Corner as the symbolic date. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that gets filed in the ‘jazz’ section in the record stores, but it ain’t jazz. It’s something else. Though his job may depend on him not saying so, I suspect Myers agrees with me.

Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Late Twentieth-Century Music

Recently I read Richard Taruskin’s Music in the Late Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music. Now, I get that the Oxford History of Music will have a bias towards ACM (Acoustic Composed Music). That’s what has survived, because it was written down. There was no Now That’s What I Call A Drinking Song! double-CD in the seventeenth century. Nobody wrote down the popular tunes. We know there were popular tunes because the Church composers used to get told off for adapting them, and other composers swiped them for their written work. We just don’t know how many others there were. Or what the Top Ten sounded like.

The point is, that for the majority of the Twentieth Century, we do. The traditional excuse for only covering the music of the church, aristocracy and popular opera - because we don’t know what else there was - does not apply after, say, 1920. There’s no excuse for not covering it.

What has to be covered? In no special order: flamenco and its revival in the 1980’s; the development of jazz from be-bop to free jazz, perhaps told through the careers of Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, and the rise of chord-scale Euro-jazz; the continued use of orchestral music in film; the Beatles and Bob Dylan (a Nobel Prize winner, for heaven’s sake), Jam and Lewis, and Stock, Aiken and Waterman; the Hollywood and Broadway musical; ambient and electronic dance music; the evolution of rock music from Chuck Berry to Nirvana; and finally, to the factory-like output of modern chart music. On the composed side: serialism, minimalism, electronic music, and a chunk on the Period Performance movement and its re-discovery and re-habilitation of dozens of composers. If I was commissioning such a history, I would ask the writer(s) to show, with examples in score, the links between the Minimalists and ambient music; or between the harmonies and chord changes of the Beatles and earlier composers; and I will happily contribute an essay on rock musicians’ plundering of the avant-garde for technical and musical devices.

There would not be much about the academic music to which Taruskin devotes much of his book. First because there was very little of it. Second, because only the same one hundred people ever listened to it once, and fewer a second time. Taruskin makes this seem like a virtue: here is music so pure, nobody can actually stand it. It’s true that only a handful of people ever listened to a Hayden string quartet, at the time, and wanted something new afterwards, but now those string quartets sell in the thousands every year and are listened to again and again in people’s homes. That’s going to be true in a hundred years’ time. In a hundred years’ time, no-one will listen to Boulez’ first piano composition, except out of sheer curiosity for a couple of minutes on You Tube, and they will agree with the first comment: there is a cat on the piano?

The court composers wrote music for a wealthy economic and political elite, but it was written to entertain and delight the audience, and in some cases, show off the playing skills of its sponsors. It was popular in intent, for all that it was aristocratic in audience. When it was made available to larger audiences, they took to it. When a larger bourgeois audience appeared in concert halls, they took to the earlier aristocratic music, and to the music written especially for them. When that music was made available on recorded media, it was and still is bought and enjoyed by people from all walks of life.

The career challenge for young composers in the twentieth century, who were being turned out in ever larger numbers by an expanding music education industry, was finding a way of making an impact, of being shocking and surprising without turning away the audiences. Stravinsky more or less sealed that off. Where do you go after the Sacre du Printemps, the fin de musique for the twentieth century? All twentieth-century string quartets sound like one or other of the six Bartok quartets. The options seem to be that you either write perfectly competent stuff that might have been written in the middle of the nineteenth century (with the addition of a couple of bracing twentieth-century harmonies), or you write stuff that very few people will ever listen to.

Read Taruskin and you may imagine that every music department in the Western world turned serialist. You might imagine the same about mathematics departments and category theory as well. The truth is that music departments went on teaching common practice, regular ol’ triads, inversions and all the other stuff available in Hindemith or Piston, in the same way that mathematics departments carried on teaching real analysis the epsilon-delta way. Serialism was confined to a handful of academics in a handful of elite colleges, the journalists that hyped them, and the foundations and clients that backed them. Electronic music and musique concrete, by contrast, was rapidly taken up by broadcasting companies to accompany dramas. How it came to be regarded as the signature "serious music" of the last half of the twentieth-century is the subject for a book on history, hype, personalities, and politics.

Taruskin calls the academic music he’s writing about, literate, as if to separate it from popular music, which is not written. Except it is. Jazz musicians pride themselves on their ability to play at sight, and most popular music session musicians read fluently. The prolific pop producers of the 1980’s all wrote music, and the virtuoso soloists of rock and jazz both extemporised and read the charts. The only significant musical tradition that does not use written music is flamenco. The legend is that Joni Mitchell had no background in music theory and composed entirely by ear, but she is remarkable exactly because almost no-one else could produce music of that quality without the theory and the staves.

So should you devote the many hours needed to read this volume of Taruskin’s History? I don’t regret it: I do after all have Varese, Xenakis, Berio and Boulez in my collection. I understand more about serialism than I did, and appreciated the coverage Taruskin gave to some research that concluded that serialism was, in fact, profoundly unmusical. I don’t mind his coverage of that period: I do mind reducing the entire history of Miles Davis’ music to a few quotes from critics about the politics of his later adoption of ‘rock music’. Taruskin doesn’t even discuss the well-known suggestion that On The Corner was influenced in part by Stockhausen. Taruskin’s book is also very heavy on the politics - but then to understand Russian music in the twentieth century we do have to be reminded of life under Stalin. So, no, you don’t need to read it. It’s not a history of later-twentieth century music.

Ben Judah's This Is London

I bought this book a while ago, but wasn’t in the mood to read what I thought it was until a couple of weeks ago. It isn’t a series of bleeding-heart tales of how bad life is for illegal immigrants to London. It is a kind of psycho-sociology. Judah says he wrote the book to understand this new London of the early 2010’s, full of Africans and Eastern Europeans, that has appeared in the last twenty years and that he doesn’t really understand.

Judah’s book avoids the bleeding heart. He lets his people speak, even when, like the rich kids, they are total jerks. He describes the quality of the light, the smells, the chicken shops, the smell, the damp, the bodies pressed together in the subways and the doss-houses. The description of the bus stop on the Old Kent Road at four in the morning, and the ride in to the City of London, is masterful. He shows us the strange London of the early 2010’s, that will be a distant memory by 2030 (“Daddy, were there really African witch-doctors in south London?”) because in the end, the best way to drive away the poor is to import the well-off, to gentrify, to build high-rise apartments in the Elephant and Castle. Then the doss-houses get converted to middle-class accommodation again. Look at what happened in Notting Hill, or Brooklyn today. And Judah sees that as well.

Invisible in his book are the middle-class immigrants, with their university degrees, knowledge-economy jobs, and reasonably stable family backgrounds, who are already integrated into the world-wide Westernised middle-class that exists in Egypt as much as Australia. This is a clue. It isn’t the foreign-ness of the people that strikes him, it’s the sheer poverty. Why would anyone come from Albania to some doss-house in East Zone Three?

Immigration is manifold. There is a constant, small flow of people from one country to another that has been going on forever: these are the hard-working, skilled, risk-takers of myth, the ‘Brain Drainers’ who went from the UK to the US in the 1960’s, the professionals who seem to happier in a different country than the one they were born and raised in, and in the 1980’s and 1990’s the children of the elites in politically unstable countries, sent to The USA or Europe for safety. To all intents and purposes they assimilate, even if they don’t eat British food and prefer to worship the Gods they brought with them. This is Good Immigration.

Then there are people who are imported to fill a specific need. The Irish who built the UK’s roads and railways in the nineteenth-century. The West Indians brought over on the SS Windrush to drive the buses and trains because London Transport would not or could not compete with the salaries being offered by the reviving post-war British manufacturing industry. The Poles who came over to fill the skilled-worker shortage caused by the abandonment of apprenticeship schemes in the 1970’s. And the nurses poached by agencies from every third-world country for an NHS that cannot or will not compete with the salaries that men and women who would have been nurses are now offered by banks and other service industries. This is Employer-Pull Migration: there are jobs waiting for the immigrants.

Then there is Push-Migration. The immigrants are more or less thrown out of their countries. Castro’s boat-lifts of the 1980’s and 1990’s are the paradigm: he emptied his jails and hospitals, added a few old people and children for press photos, and packed them off to Florida, seventy-five miles away. All those people who passed through Ellis Island? They were the weak men and obstreperous women who were going to pull the village or the small town down in the next bad winter after the last bad harvest: the people who could not (the men) or would not (the women) pull their weight when the going got tough. Don’t forget all those criminals the UK exported to Australia and to the US for about a hundred years. I’m sure other European countries did the same. Nobody now doubts that the million-strong Angela’s Army of 2016, mostly young men of military age, were the misfits, petty criminals, mentally-unstable and generally useless, carefully selected by the village elders, and shoved onto the NGO lorries, and told not to come back.

Pushed-Migrants are the unskilled, the weak, the mentally-ill, the criminal, the gullible and a horde of naive dreamers exploited by con-men telling them how easy it is to set up an International Business in London, where the money grows on trees. Polish builders brought over by dodgy agencies aside, these are the people Judah is writing about.

The third wave of immigration is driven by, populated by, and produces profits for, criminals, from drug-suppliers, through crooked landlords packing in four-on-the-floor and three-in-the-shed, to families who don’t pay their Filipina maid’s national insurance for years. (Judah blushingly notes that these are almost always Jewish employers: the French and the Germans and the British pay fairly and on time.) Criminal too are the agencies breaking UK employment law by only hiring Eastern Europeans, and only advertising the jobs in foreign countries, and then shielding employers from their full obligations to the workers with zero hours contracts and pseudo-self-employment. He sees it as exploitation, but actually it is crime.

The UN’s and EU’s ideal of Free Movement of People is not supposed to mean Free Movement for gangsters, drug barons, pimps and their prostitutes, and endless numbers of gulled low-skill workers. Yet it means that far, far more than it means Free Movement for decent middle-class graduates from Poland to get jobs as data analysts in market research firms in London. What we’ve learned is that the first people through newly-opened borders are not doctors and research physicists, but the advance guard of the gangs, looking for drug markets to take over, and flats for their prostitutes.

Judah notices how the poor immigrants bring their institutions, food, religions, social structures, crime, and beliefs with them. The woman who lives in Lithuania E16, shopping at a Lithuanian supermarket, speaking Lithuanian at home, watching Lithuanian television; the Africans with their witch-doctors and exorcisms. Everyone eating their home food and drinking their home beers - especially the Poles.

Which brings us to the idea of ‘integration’. We think that the integrated immigrant should ‘behave like us’. Who are the poor immigrants expected to behave like? They can’t afford the middle-class life, and who would want to behave like the English poor? Why watch awful British TV soap-operas when you can watch awful Lithuanian soap-operas whose characters you already know? In many cases, the immigrant poor sense they have better moral and social standards and practices than the English poor. The poor never live like the middle classes, as the middle classes never live like the rich. Who isn’t integrated with whom?

What does ‘integration’ mean in a post-modern economy and society? Immigrants must enter the country legally, else their first act on its land it to break its laws. Then they must do the same as any child born there: they must abide by its laws, earn a living, pay their due taxes, and behave in public as the locals do. How they behave in private is their business, as long as the taxpayer does not end up picking up the costs. These are the same requirements placed on the children of the citizens of that country. (The children must learn to speak and read the language, the adult immigrants should learn to speak and read ‘enough’. Some languages are almost deliberately withheld from non-natives, as the natives prefer to practice their English / French / other colonial language.) ‘Integration’ is not watching Eastenders instead of the Nigerian equivalent, it is letting daughters go to university, not using counterfeit train tickets to get to the building site, and not running a heroin distribution operation from the back of a dingy corner-shop, just as for the native children it is not disrupting classrooms and for the native businessmen it is not running Ponzi schemes. Native-born people can be as un-integrated as any Romanian sent by his debt collectors to beg on the streets of London.

I read the title of Judah’s book as This Is London (As Well). The Other London, where people have jobs, functional lives, friends, families, and don’t break the law. That London has no glamour, almost no piquancy, and little colour. After all, most of those people, on the trains into Waterloo and on the District Line, earn well into the top salary decile. And they have no secrets and no stories. At least, no stories that the reader will want to read.

Mod

Recently I read Richard Weight’s best-selling book on the Mod Movement. I assume it was best-selling, since it was out on the tables at Waterstone’s Piccadilly. It’s one of those social history books that makes sense while you are reading it, but doesn’t quite hang together in the memory. Weight includes as 'Mod' a number of groups I don’t think belong there. Skinheads: nothing sharp, ironic or racially-tolerant about them. And Northern Soul Baggies are as non-Mod as anything that could be imagined. A lot of the cultural content he ascribes to the movement comes from a group of people who called themselves “Modernists” and went for jazz, continental cooking and design. I have a feeling those guys weren't grooving to Stax and popping uppers in Ham Yard Friday night. I have no idea what Neville Brody and Post-Modernism are doing in there either, even if Brody was a young Mod back in the day. Len Deighton’s creation Harry Palmer just about belongs, although I see Palmer as closer to the Nouvelle Vague and Godard’s louche anti-heroes.


However, this isn't the point. Weight's book is a good guide to some of the fringe groups of post 1960’s British Cultural History.

It leaves you with the sense there was and is a sensibility called Mod, and that it had to do with dressing sharp, liking black music, being racially-tolerant, with Vespa-riding as an option, rejecting mainstream ideas of career and jobs, and with a sprinkle of irony thrown in. But not much more. Misogyny. But then Weight has to say that, because he’s a Visiting Professor at Boston University, so he has to throw some ideological chum to the feminists.

The phrase everyone quotes to define Mod is from Peter Meadon: “clean living under difficult circumstances”. You may feel that since this was said by someone in the middle of drug use and nervous breakdowns, this is possibly a little rich, but let’s go with the words of the prophet and not his actions.

At the very least “clean living” means self-respect, or at least its outward show. Hence the sharp dressing, which is always good for outward show.

Here are some things that weren’t options in the 1960’s: junk food, super-sizing, sugar and soya in everything, snacking; couch-potato living, playing computer games for hours, sitting in office chairs for hours on end; staying up late watching television; central heating keeping your house at near-summer temperatures; wearing sports clothes on the high street; two hundred channels and nothing’s on; around one hundred and fifty genres of dance music; terraced houses in working-class areas that cost ten times median earnings; sending jobs to foreign countries; easy divorce; hours of soap operas on television; effective birth control for women; social media. More people did manual work, and all work was more manual. The entire country was closed on Wednesday afternoon and all day Sunday. Except for cinemas.

What would “clean living” mean now? It would mean resisting all those ways to turn into a slob. It would mean keeping fit, eating well, staying in shape, and not being distracted by social media or slouching in front of the TV. Add being informed about the new in whatever interests them. It would mean focussing on having a good time, getting done what needs to be done and not being drawn into random drama and outrage. Sound familiar? Exactly. Mod was a Man’s Movement. Girls were welcome, but they weren’t the point of all the sharp dressing, Vespa-decorating and dancing to Wilson Pickett.

That’s the insight Weight’s academic political correctness blinds him to. Throughout history, I suspect, there have always been men who simply have not seen the point of family life and producing offspring - though they probably produced offspring, since birth control was pretty haphazard. These men chose to live better than the family man. Whatever “better” meant back then. Mods were the post WW2 working-class take on that. That's why the skinheads and their offspring really don't belong in Mod. When the Mods faded away, leaving only Paul Weller and Paul Smith behind, there was nothing for over three decades until the internet-based self-improvement movement evolved from PUA. That's the real story.

Self-improvers are not Mods. Sharp dressing, and a particular style of it, is the core part of Mod identity. I never dressed that sharp, but I did prefer Stax and Tamla Motown when I was at school. My lot were too late for Mod. Or for Hippies. But I am, however late in life, a self-improver.

The book has a comment from a Mod girl about the Mod-Rocker fights. She recognised some of the Mods in the photographs. They were not the Faces she knew. The rioters were the boys in the lower streams and secondary moderns. The Mods she hung out with were much smarter and were going to pass their exams and have careers. (You could have a better career with five good O-levels then than you can with a junk degree now.) Weight half-absorbs the lesson of this. Mod was an elite, as self-improvement is now. Elite means elite, not hundreds of teenagers in parkas having a riot. Since he's not allowed to like elites, Weight has to conflate the rioters and the Faces, and that's what spoils the coherence of his story. In the end, the art-and-design Modernists just cannot be tied in with the Vespa-riding, pill-popping Mods. Every time he did it, I kept wanting it to work, but it doesn't. Paul Weller and Pete Townsend weren't Mods, for all the parkas, rounders and sharp suits. They were from the start, professional, dedicated and hugely talented musicians, who found in Mod a framework for their ideas. There's a difference between being the thing and being inspired by the thing. The caustic song "Substuitute" is at once man anthem and a critique. It depends how the listener reacts.


On the other hand it does give him something to write about the thirty year wasteland between the death of Mod and the growth of self-improvement.

If you really want to know what Mod was and how it felt, read the first two chapters of Tony Parsons' Limelight Blues. In fact, read the novel: it's Parsons’ best, and one of the best novels of the last quarter of the twentieth-century. Yes. Really. Here’s his protagonist David Lazar in full Mod righteousness:

They thought they were so special, the creeps on the team [at the advertising agency where Lazar works], but they reminded him of commuters. The suits of the men in the Tube made him smile. What was the point in wearing a suit if you looked like a sack of potatoes in it? They stared at him…and they hated him, because he wore a suit beautifully and for pleasure, and they wore a suit as a convict wears a fetter.

Why Grow Up? Susan Neiman Doesn’t Quite Explain Why.

Susan Neiman is an American academic who may still be suffering the trauma of having both John Rawls and Stanley Cavell supervise her PhD. She’s pretty darn highbrow, as many well-published American philosophers are. She says she read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason right the way through, unlike Lord Bertrand Russell OM FRS who fell asleep before the end. (I’ve had a crack at it and usually went away to read Hegel instead. Hegel is much more fun. I’m personally fairly sure that Lord Russell had the right idea.)

Neiman’s book is in a long tradition of American philosophising in which problems are discussed not in their own right, as a legal thinker, policy-maker, economist or other practical type might do, but through the lens of the thoughts of one or other of the Big Names. A praxis-oriented thinker would state the problem, throw some facts and concepts at it, and propose a solution. In a footnote they might then say that they swiped much of the proposal from a) Immanuel Kant, b) Jean-Jaques Rousseau, c) David Hume, just to ward off the cheap shots along the lines of “there’s nothing here that wasn’t already in Plato”. The praxis-oriented thinker takes inspiration from the past to understand a present problem. The American academic takes a current problem and uses it to understand the Great Works. It’s kinda bass-ackward.

And when anyone starts on about “the Enlightenment”, as Neiman does, we can be fairly sure they are not addressing the real world, but some part of academia and a few mavens who can’t find meaning in their lives without God or Gaia to put it there for them. Moving on...

I’m going to be pedantic: to answer Neiman’s question, we must first know what it is to grow up, how it might be possible to avoid doing so, and why we should not avoid it.

So what do we mean by “Grow Up”? Susan Neiman can mean anything she likes, and does, once she’s introduced Rousseau, Hume, Kant and the Enlightenment. She means that one should learn to think for oneself and to "balance the is and the ought”, to accept that the world is imperfect, but not to fall into cynicism and carry on with one’s attempts to improve it, nor to fall into an urbane “It is what it is” resignation of any effort to change. That’s a balancing act, and it’s not for adolescents or people who have to focus on getting the next promotion so they can start to save for Alice and Ewan's school fees. But it doesn’t really mean much in terms of the weekly round of mundane activity. Does it mean I have to get married or have children or what? Though Neiman quotes Rousseau’s denunciation of people who don’t earn their own livings as rogues, it’s not actually clear she’s much on the side of having a job, especially since, she says, so many are pointless, boring, morally compromised and concerned with providing goods and services that distract people from a Meaningful Engagement With Others and with the ssues of their time. Yep. Neiman believes in the Good Old Days.

In The Good Old Days, people wore suits all the time, unless they were farmers, when they wore dungarees. In the Good Old Days, everyone had Meaningful Jobs in Communities to which people Belonged. Men and Women Got Married, and Toughed It Out when things got bad, and they had children, who were not indulged, were set to work as soon as they could toddle, and called everyone about a foot taller than them “Sir” or “Ma’am”. Unless the kids were Scamps, of course. There was Religion and Church Attendance and Sin. And then Bill Bernbach came along with his genius advertisements and lead all these Serious People away like the Pied Piper.

Utter tosh. The Good Old Days were horrible. Racism. Sexism. Child abuse everyone knew about but nobody spoke of. Spotty hygiene. Ghastly coffee and painful dentistry. Everyone smoked so the world was covered by a thin layer of nicotine. Smog that killed people, rigid border controls and nobody could take more than £50 out of the UK per holiday. That had to pay for the hotel, since there were no credit cards and cheques didn’t work. Yea the 1950's. Not.

The marriage-mortgage-children idea of “Growing Up” has vanished. It’s too expensive (house prices, school fees), too risky (divorce), and the world is too unstable. You can’t pay a thirty-year mortgage with a thirty-day job.

We have Grown Ups today, but they aren’t your great grandfather. A Grown-Up is someone who thinks through and accepts the consequences of their actions. Grown-Ups can choose the least-worst option in a situation we should never have got into and from which there is no right way out. Grown ups drive the kids home at the end of the day (metaphor alert). Grown-ups make decisions for themselves. Grown-ups take care of business. Grown-ups are practical, operate in the real world, and don’t always respect the delicate sensibilities of those with professionally-delicate sensibilities. Grown-up Do Deals and Get Stuff Done. Grown-Ups know how to use the system when it suits them, and how to dodge it when it doesn’t. Grown Ups know that circumstances trump principles. Most of all, Grown Ups can deal with the BS and not get disheartened or feel themselves compromised by doing so.

Who would not want to be this kind of grown-up? Someone whose profession requires them to pretend to delicate sensibilities; or who expects to be able to act on impulse and be excused for any awkward consequences; or who has to believe there is always a right way of doing things; or who can’t trust themselves to be able to drive the metaphorical kids home; someone who doesn’t trust themselves; or who welshes on a deal when they get their side of it; someone who doesn’t know the difference between a reason and an excuse. Someone who is not really suited to the rough-and-tumble of the political or commercial worlds, or any kind of competition. Someone who feels, for whatever reason, that they are entitled to be protected.

Today’s idea of a Grown Up abstracts from any particular economic or social organisation. Anyone in China or Tanzania would recognise this characterisation. Nieman couldn’t quite let go of the idea that being grown-up should have specific cultural requirements, but when she goes looking for some - jobs, travel - what she’s looking for isn’t there. Wisely, she stays away from making marriage and children compulsory. Which given that she’s the mother of three children is restraint beyond all expectation.

It’s possible you may want to have a go at reading Kant after reading Nieman’s book. Lie down and let the feeling pass.

Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men

Jack Donovan is famous for the idea that men should operate in gangs, and for being gay while saying so. He should be famous for the distinction between "being a good man” and “being good at being a man”, because that is worthy of J L Austin himself, and for his identification of the four tactical virtues: strength, courage, mastery and honour.

Being a good man has to do with ideas about morality, ethics, religion, and behaving productively within a given civilisational structure… Being good at being a man is about…showing other men that you are the kind of guy they’d want on their team if the shit hits the fan… [demonstrating] strength, courage, mastery [and] commitment… A man who is more concerned with being a good man than with being good at being a man makes a very well-behaved slave.

What Donovan gets is that men want the good opinion and recognition of other men because only other men know what was involved, intellectually, personally and physically, in our achievement. Women’s opinions don’t count because women don’t care about the things that men care about: strength, courage, mastery and honour. Men don’t really care about their supervisor’s opinion of them because their supervisor doesn’t give a damn about anything but how well we fit in to the machine. (Tactically the opinions of supervisors and women matter, because life is easier if neither are bitching all the time, but one wouldn’t want to base one’s entire life around keeping the wife and boss happy. Would you?)

What makes Donovan’s book refreshing is that he doesn’t blame feminism. Women only appear as sirens inviting men to wreck themselves on the rocks of all things soft and compromised. There’s a reason for that we’ve already mentioned.

His villain is modern technology and the post-industrial economy and society that it creates. This has removed most of the chances that men have to acquire and exercise the four tactical virtues: strength, courage, mastery and honour. Processes and mechanisation has removed the need for Mastery from all but a handful of mostly intellectual roles. Power steering means women can drive buses, so that Strength isn’t needed. An astonishing level of public safety and policing means that we can withdraw large sums of money from machines in the middle of the night on busy roads without a thought of being mugged - there goes Courage. The whole idea of Honour from one’s fellow man is a joke when equal opportunity legislation means he turns out to be a woman.

However, while this is the right criminal, it’s the wrong crime. Being good at being a man can’t depend on a particular mode of the economy or the exact arrangements in society. A man can have strength, courage, mastery and honour in most economies and societies - but it will look different in each one, and perhaps each may regard the others’ as un-manly.

Men aren’t compromised by feminism, or post-industrial society, or the Health and Safety at Work Act. Some are compromised by marriage, children and the need to earn a living. They may not always have been physically soft. Modern entertainment technology, plus the commuting that scatters workers to the four quarters at the end of the day, has probably lead to fewer chances for men to spend time with each other socially. But some men have always skived and tried to cheat each other: that’s why we have all the commercial law we have now. If bakers had never adulterated flour with chalk, I might have believed in a Golden Age of Manly Virtue, but they did and I don’t. There is no “crisis of manhood”, it’s always been this way, only the costumes change.

Acquiring and living the four tactical virtues is a personal project that a man pursues despite the economy he works in, the society he lives in, and the men he knows. He cannot suppose that the men around him want to be virtuous, nor that the society values virtue, nor that it will be rewarded. A man chooses to work towards being good at being a man because he cannot live as a compromised person. And it has always been this way.

Donovan does not think that men in post-modern Capitalism will ever act as a united political force. I agree. That leaves personal action, which always feels a little bathetic after some high-grade, wide-ranging social analysis.

What does a man do when he wants to become better at being a man? Donovan’s answer is to “start a gang”. Not as in the Sons of Anarchy, but as in a bunch of like-minded guys to do stuff with.

You need to learn how to read each other and work together as a group. Go to the shooting range. Go hunting. Play paintball. Go to the gym. Take martial arts classes. Join a sports team. Take a workshop. Learn a useful skill. Get off your asses and do something. In harder times, the men that you do these kinds of things with are going to be the first men you call. They will be your gang. They will be your us.

Errr, no. That’s not quite enough.

When you are on the end of a wrongful dismissal, you need a union or an employment lawyer, preferably one who knows some journalists. You need a criminal lawyer with a flair for publicity to handle that false rape accusation. When the pipes burst, you need a plumber, and when you break a bone, you need a surgeon. Your gang is unlikely to include one, and certainly won’t include all, of the specialists you need. You need huge amounts of personal fortitude to sustain the campaign, and your buddies can’t help you with that, beyond a few platitudes. Because you’re going to need a lot of cash or the ability to live on very little - and your buddies won’t help you with that. They are regular guys with regular jobs like you. Dealing with misfortune in post-modern capitalism isn’t like defending the village from raiders or saving the animals from a flood. When bad things happen in post-modern capitalism, you have to get to Krasnoyarsk with the kindness of strangers. And once you get back from Krasnoyarsk, you might hang out with the guys again, but they won’t be your gang. They will be a bunch of guys you shoot the breeze (or the paintball) with, but who, when the shit hit your fan, were no more help than some guy on the pavement last week.

That’s the difference between the mythical life of the savannah tribe and post-modern capitalism. In post-modern capitalism, each man needs his own Rolodex of useful contacts, from plumbers to employment lawyers, electricians to employment agents. He needs the time and skills to keep these contacts fresh, and any businessman will tell you that doing that can take a week or more from your month. He needs to have something useful to trade with these contacts: he needs to be in their Rolodexes. The principle is the same - he needs to demonstrate he can be useful to those other men - but the camaraderie will be missing.

Few people have those social skills. Which is why we had the Yellow Pages, and have Google now. Building that kind of Rolodex takes a long time the moment you live in a town much larger than about five thousand people. So let’s add “the social skills needed to build and maintain a rolodex” (I’m trying to avoid the n-word) to the list of tactical virtues, though it’s not one Aristotle would have recognised. His towns were small enough that “everyone” knew each other.

The Way of Men is one of the better books on masculinity today. But it still doesn’t understand just how corrosive post-modern capitalism is, and how it turns everything to its advantage.

Heck. Even Jack’s selling merchandise.

The Scarfolk book really is weird, and it’s the illustrations that are most weird.

I am alive really, it’s just that I’m not taking any photographs and the stuff I’m thinking about is stuff I’ve thought about before and I don’t want to go on about the same things in public.

So instead… read this...

I saw it a while ago in Foyles, found it intriguing, bought it and only now have been in the mood to read it.

It took me a long time to realise that you should always buy a book you want to read, even if you can’t read it right away, because it might not be available in six month’s time when you’re in the mood again. This is especially applies to art books that accompany exhibitions, and art books generally. The really good ones don’t get remaindered, though you may be able to get them cheaper on Amazon. Support your local bookstore however (in my case, that’s Foyles).

The Scarfolk book really is weird, and it’s the illustrations that are most weird. Someone went to a ton of trouble to do those and there are lot of them.

Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, his book about his early years in Paris, which seemed to be on every counter and table in Waterstone's Piccadilly branch last week.

We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescape. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Cafe des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside.

That is on the opening page of the stories in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, his book about his early years in Paris, which seemed to be on every counter and table in Waterstone's Piccadilly branch last week.

I discovered Hemingway very late. And when I did I nearly gave up writing anything in English again except for business writing because that has to be bad and clumsy to be effective. I thought, based on rumour and hearsay, that Hemingway was merely a stylist. He isn't: he is simply one of the best experimental writers of English there has ever been. Those two sentences pick out maybe a dozen images from a winter evening and knit them together like one smooth Vincente Minelli crane shot.

Masterly.

Robert Glover's Nice Guys Finish Last

(This mini-series was inspired by reading Robert Glover's Nice Guys Finish Last, which you don't have to pay to read if you know where to look. This is Part One.)

Robert Glover’s book is one of the underground references for the Sphere, along with Deida’s The Way of the Superior Man, Mystery’s The Mystery Method and Warren Farrell’s Why Men Are The Way They Are (or you can choose another of his). Glover is a therapist and while the book was published in 2000, he says it was written over a period of six years, and so is based on therapeutic ideas from the early 1990’s.

The Nice Guys you think he’s talking about are regular Joes who always finish last and don’t get the girl. You would be wrong. Judging by the examples, the Nice Guys he’s really talking about are men from chronically dysfunctional families: alcoholic parents, extreme religiosity, absent and demanding fathers, emotionally exploitative mothers. These kinds of dysfunctions have a number of effects, from pre-teen drug use to adaptive behaviours (controlling, rescuing, people-pleasing, retreating into fantasy, or focussing on study or sports training) that help the young man manage his life. As a result, he will have no idea how to deal with regular people, who will feel uncomfortable with the way he handles them, even if they don’t know why, and he will have acting-out or compulsive behaviours. These aren’t regular Joes at all, but they do tend to finish towards the back of the field and certainly don’t get the girls they want, and they do tend to come across as manipulative and unsympathetic.

Very few people are going to pick up a book about those people. But tell them it’s the fault of feminism, absent fathers, 9-5 commuting from suburbs and a truly awful lack of male teachers (this is an American book), nod to Robert “The Drummer” Bly and initiation ceremonies, and you can make it seem that it’s about people who might not be going to Anonymous meetings. Well, it isn’t.

Glover is a married therapist (who therefore doesn’t have the armour of an MD or PhD) who practices in the USA. He must therefore impose upon his patients a highly vanilla flavour of the ideal life.

Discussing his idea of the Integrated Man he promises that you won’t be ashamed of your wants, needs, desires, faults, prejudices, bad skin and tendency to fart after eating broccoli. Much more than this, he promises that people will respond more favourably to your open presentation of yourself, than to the fearful, managed and bowdlerised version you are currently presenting. Ah. Except. When he said “wants, needs and desires” he didn’t mean the cocaine, pornography, booze, promiscuity, over-eating and debt-financed consumer status purchases… you understood that, right? He meant the natural needs and wants and desires. And you should probably keep your anti-Diversity and other non-PC opinions to yourself in working hours and around minorities (like women) at any time. Also could you not eat broccoli anymore? Because, you know, farting? Gross? So when you read it that way, of course everyone likes your Integrated Man - because there’s nothing to dislike about it.

The Protestant Work Ethic gets in via the idea of living a Meaningful Life, in which you Follow Your Passions and do something interesting. As a job, of course. The idea that you might just take a day job to pay some minimal bills and then go live your life afterwards? No. You will be a productive member of the economy and society and work hard in your dream industry or with your dream skills. That is, after all, what it means to have a meaningful life. Right?

The second most lunatic moment (the most lunatic moment involves something called “healthy masturbation” and is a real hoot) is the Pop Quiz about sexual guilt, where he wants us to believe that there are people who: a) had a “joyous" first sexual experience which they could share with family and friends; b) talk openly and comfortably with their partner about masturbation; c) are comfortable revealing everything about their sexual experiences, thoughts or impulses with their partner. Failure to agree with any of this means you have sexual guilt. Seriously? How about the idea that for the men he’s talking about, it would be incredibly unwise to reveal anything that could be used as ammunition against them, because that’s what frakked-up partners do to each other. Nope, in Glover’s world, all partners are trustworthy, broad-minded, experienced, and generally all-round cool. Yeah, right. And who, in the name of all that's realistic, ever had a "joyous" first sexual experience? Nobody. Ah, which means we all need to buy his book or be his clients. Badabob badabpoom, all the way to the bank. Listen, a guy has to make a living.

He is right to point out that Frakked-Up Guys do tend to believe that If I can hide my flaws and become what I think others want me to be, then I will be loved, get my needs met, and have a problem-free life. It doesn’t work like that. But then, neither do his suggestions. At best, his advice will help some men shake off their false assumptions. But Glover doesn’t really have anything but the usual inspirational fantasies to put in their place, and I'll discuss what those are and what should go in their place later.

50 Great Myths of of Popular Psychology

Reading 50 Great Myths of of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconception about Human Behaviour, I came away with the feeling that the authors were a tad smug and unaware of the exact grinding banality of the human condition in the precise circumstances of Really Existing Capitalism of this exact time, despite the copious references to papers in journals nobody knew existed. In the end, I had to review their stance on each one of the 50 myths. I agreed with most of them. Here’s the list in their order.

(Abbreviations: V = Verdit; YAMT = Yet Another Movie Trope)

1. Most people only use 10% of their brain power. V: utter twaddle.

2. Some people are left-brained, some people are right-brained. V: utter twaddle

3. ESP is a well-established scientific phenomenon. Me: Was there anyone who believed this?

4. Visual perceptions are accompanies by emissions from the eyes. Me: Jeez, things are really bad in the USA.

5. Subliminal messages can persuade people to buy things. V: urban myth

6. Playing Mozart’s music to infants helps them develop. V: sheer marketing

7. Adolescence is invariably a time of psychological turmoil. Verdict: YAMT. Most kids are well-adjusted and love Mom and Dad.

8. Most people experience a mid-life crisis in their 40’s or 50’s. V: YAMT. (*)

9. Old age is typically associated with senility and crankiness. V: YAMT 10. When dying, you will pass through Anger-Denial-Bargaining-Depresson-Acceptance. V: No, you won’t.

11. Human memory works like a movie camera and forgets nothing. V: YAMT. Me: did anyone believe this?

12. Hypnosis can bring back memories. V: No, it can’t.

13. We repress the memory of traumatic events. V: YAMT. We remember that shit just fine.

14. People with amnesia forget the details of their previous life. V: YAMT. In fact, amnesiacs have trouble forming new memories, not recalling old ones.

15. IQ tests are biased against certain groups. V: No, but I get you want to dispute that.

16. If you don’t know the answer, stick with your first hunch. V: Not really.

17. Dyslexia is about switching letters. V: YAMT. It’s not actually clear why some people have problems processing written words.

18. Teaching styles should be matched to learning styles. V: utter twaddle.

19. Hypnosis is an unique state different from being awake. V: YAMT. Nope.

20. Dreams have symbolic meaning. V: Not systematically.

21. You can learn in your sleep. V: In your dreams.

22. There are “out of body” experiences. V: No, but there are times when your senses get real scrambled.

23. The polygraph is reliable. Me: is there anyone left alive who believes this?

24: Happiness is mostly determined by our external circumstances. V: Keep your hand on your wallet. It isn’t (*)

25. Ulcers are cause almost entirely by stress. V: Ah heliobactor pylori! Stress plays a role, but it’s not clear what.

26. A positive attitude can stave off cancer. V: No, it can’t.

27: Opposites attract. V: YAMT. No, they don’t (*)

28. The more people at an emergency, the more will help. V: famously, no. But someone will.

29. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. V: No. (*)

30. It’s better to express anger than hold it in. V: No. 31: Raising children similarly makes them similar adults. V: A little, but not much.

32: We can’t change heritable traits. V: Yes we can. But no-one said it would be easy.

33. Low self-esteem is the cause of psychological problems. V: No, it isn’t.

34. Sexually abused children develop severe personality problems as adults. V: YAMT. No, they don’t. (*)

35. The Rorschach inkblot test works. V: No. Me: Shouldn’t people be disbarred for using this?

36: Graphology works. V: No.

37. Psychiatric labels stigmatises people. V: Only if you’re an a-hole.

38. Only depressed people commit suicide. V: Nope. They commit suicide when they start to get better and realise how messed-up they are.

39. People with schizophrenia have multiple personalities. V: YAMT. These are two different things.

40. Adult Children of Alcoholics display a distinctive profile of symptoms. V: No. This is the Barnum effect. (*)

41. There’s been a recent epidemic of infant autism. V: No there hasn’t (*)

42. Psychiatric admissions increase at the full moon. V: No they don’t.

43. Most mentally ill people are violent. V: YAMT. No more so than ordinary people.

44. Criminal profiling helps solve cases. V: It helps profilers make money.

45. The insanity defence really works. V: Not very well.

46. Anyone who confesses to a crime is guilty of it. V: No. False confessions are common.

47. Expert judgement and intuition are the best ways of making decisions. V: No. (*)

48. Abstinence is the only realistic treatment for alcoholics. V: No (*)

49. Effective psychotherapy forces people to confront some episode in their childhood. V: YAMT. No. Me: Wait. There’s “effective psychotherapy”?

50. ECT is brutal and ineffective. V: not if used sensibly.

The only issue I have with 41 is that they don’t mention that in the USA, doctors often diagnose Autism because that way the parents get funding that they wouldn’t get if the doctor diagnosed Asperger’s. So there’s an epidemic of diagnoses caused by the healthcare system. I have serious issues with...

8. Mid-life crisis: the authors are right to say that this isn’t well-defined, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real, for some people. If there is a man over 60 out there who didn’t at least once have a sustained doubt about the value of the life he was leading… he’s either terminally self-satisfied, utterly lacks self-awareness or is lying. Otherwise, “mid-life crisis” is what happens to a man who wakes up one morning and realises that he’s still in shape, but his wife has turned into a shapeless lump.

24. I quote the authors: “…our life circumstances can…affect our happiness in the short run, much of our happiness in the long run is…independent of what happens to us…[it] is a function of what we make of our lives.” How convenient for Wal-Mart that their staff wouldn’t be any happier they were paid enough not to need to claim welfare benefits plus a couple of extra bucks an hour. Capitalism turns everything to its advantage.

29. The authors do say there are slight differences in male and female communication styles, but not so much that you’d notice. The studies they quote are measuring all the wrong things. Type A communication is managerial and supervisory: it’s done to persuade and influence. Type B communication is used to convey facts, suggestions and instructions. Male managers often communicate in a Type A manner, and women at work sometimes communicate in a Type B manner. For all sorts of reasons, women need to persuade and influence more than men, and that’s why you immediately knew that “Type A” really meant “feminine”.

34. The author’s argument is two-fold. First, they say that therapists have a distorted view of the world, so they don’t see the people who were abused as children and turned out okay (the authors don’t tell us where to find those adults). Second they quote Rind’s paper which showed that there was only a weak correlation between self-reported childhood sexual abuse and eighteen fairly severe psycho-pathologies. Coming from a conflict-ridden home was a much better predictor of these pathologies. I would have preferred that this one was presented as “It takes something as harsh as sexual abuse to induce adult psycho-pathologies”. To which the answer seems to be: “No. Mummy and daddy throwing things at each other all the time, and having arguments and taking it out on the children, will work even better.”

40. Read the ACoA “Laundry List”. This bears no resemblance to the psycho-babble questions the authors quote from the studies. Wotiz and others diluted the List to the point where it does get a bit Barnum. Read the original List carefully. Ordinary people, for instance, are not “frightened” of angry people. “Frightened” speaks to a paralysis and loss of control that ordinary people don’t usually experience. And ordinary people are not “addicted” to excitement. And as for confusing love and pity and tending to "love" people they can "pity" and “rescue”, that is the exact opposite of the behaviour of ordinary people. However, two siblings may turn out differently despite the common background. But almost no-one from the fabled “good enough” home ever ticks many items on the Laundry List.

47. The authors cite studies where rule-based diagnoses do as well as the experts. What they miss is that rules work where they work and don’t otherwise. And the best AI systems don’t use "rules” but replicate an expert learning process. As for “intuition”, psychology isn’t one of the areas where expertise become behavioural, so they would never experience “just knowing”.

48. The keyword is “only”. Abstinence works for a minority of alcoholics. For the others, anything else is better than waking up with another hangover in a part of town they’ve never seen before. Some of those others can handle controlled drinking. Some of them can’t. You want to be sure you’re not going to wake up again, three hundred miles from home wearing lipstick and a dress? Quit. Full time.

Most of the myths are pop-culture nonsense. Much smaller, but very valuable, are discussions on myths about clinical and medical techniques. Some of the myths are not myths at all, but moments that don’t happen to everybody, and it’s those I took taken exception to. Polygraphs are always random, mid-life crises happen to a certain kind of man.

I think there’s a reason the authors made this mistake, and it’s pretty much at the heart of psychology. Psychiatrists deal with the serious cases needing unpleasant drugs with nasty side-effects; therapists, 12-Step and self-help groups deal with dysfunctional people, and have varying degrees of success. This leaves psychologists studying regular folk. Regular folk are largely untroubled by everyday insults and inconvenience, recover with appropriate speed from the serious upsets and tragedies, and most of all, regular folk keep what little inner life they have to themselves and also from themselves. People lie "all the time" when they answer those psychologist’s quizzes, and it takes a lot of questions to reveal this cheating: the latest MMPI tests for nine different kinds of ‘cheating’ and takes about fifty or so dedicated questions to do so, as well as duplicating many others to test for consistency. Asking people to describe and assess themselves is no way to discover what they are feeling or what is happening in their lives. (Unless it’s a study about the many delusions of regular people, which the Kahneman crowd do so well.) As a profession, psychologists seem to be here to tell us that a) whatever it is, we will get over it, b) therapy, drugs and chanting won’t get us through it any faster, c) it will have no lasting effects. This is a nice message, and it may be what emerges from enough studies of self-satisfied regular people with almost zero self-awareness (ah! accountants! how I envy them their smug self-satisfaction), but it’s not what the taxpayer needs.

What the taxpayer needs is some advice for coping and dealing when life hits hard and they are down on resilience. It’s not enough to say “Lost your job? Well, our studies say that you’re overdoing it. Most people said that they eventually overcame the shock of losing their jobs and made happy new lives for themselves earning half of what they were for working twice as many hours for an insecure bully of a supervisor. Because happiness is all in the mind, not the external world.” I’m exaggerating slightly, but read this book, and you will find out just how slightly.

Will Anyone Actually Buy This Book?

Here's the book...

Which looks interesting. Then I turned it over to look at the price...

£163.99? One hundred freaking sixty fracking how much?

Statistics books are peculiarly over-priced compared with mathematics texts, which are still cheaper than physics or engineering texts. Maybe maths books are cheaper than regular academic books. But along with food technology texts, statistics books do seem to be pricey. 

I don't know if it contains £163.99's worth of useful techniques and insight, but if it does, it's an exception.

Intuition, Imagination and Philosophical Methodology by Tamar Szabo Gendler

(I’m commenting on this book because it took two weeks out of my reading time and was painful. It turned out to be one of those books with which I disagreed on so many levels that I had to set out how and why.)

Perhaps the single most interesting thing Professor Gendler says is about his inability to process the following sentence from an imaginary novel: “In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing: after all, it was a girl”. The poor guy blows a fuse at this. Exhibiting a phenomenon he calls “imaginative resistance”, he refuses to imagine a world where killing a girl baby would be the right thing to do. Which is kinda odd, because that would be this one. Killing baby girls because they are girls is standard operating procedure in many cultures, some of which have colonies in the UK and the USA. And a sentence like that is to be found in many feminist dystopias. Most of J G Ballard’s mid-period novels open with a shocker like that. Its function is exactly to push you out of your imaginative rut and accept the imaginative world they going to set up. (He has a similar problem with Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden” he can imagine that there are or were white men who felt like that, but not that that’s the way they should have felt. He’s very PC is our good Professor.)

In one approach to explaining what knowledge is, we take knowledge to be what people know, and knowing to be the primary epistemological act and state. Knowing is believing things for which we have evidence and which are true. It is definitive and certain - because it is true. Knowledge is something people have (though that may be species-ist, of course), and dies with them.

In another approach, knowledge is something that people can have, but exists in some sense independently of knowers. Knowledge can be forgotten, and re-discovered. It is held in books, photographs, academic papers and other media, and also in people’s memories. It can be learned and understood. It does not have to be true, but it does have to be our current best attempt at the truth.

In the first approach, the key mental act is believing. Knowing is an honorific term for those believings that are of true things. Believing is so fundamental that all propositional attitudes are taken to be shades of believing. Which of course gives us a problem when dealing with counterfactuals such as thought-experiments and imaginative fiction. Do we “believe” a thought-experiment, and if not, what are we doing? These are the questions Gendler sets out to examine some answers to.

There are two little problems with the project. The first is that those answers are irrelevant to an epistemologist. Epistemology is a normative discipline, as is Logic. It’s only a philosopher’s job to tell us how we do think, so they can tell us to stop thinking like that as it will only get us into trouble.

The second is that mental states have no relevance to understanding how we think. That may seem odd, but consider that mental states are exactly like the states of a computer while it does something. Two computers may be in very different states and be doing the same thing (because they have different operating systems, hardware architectures and so on). It’s what the computers are doing that matters, not the exact disposition of 0’s and 1’s inside them while they are doing it.

The emphasis on ‘belief’ is a hangover from religious and tribal law and society. The priests and witch-doctors didn’t give a hoot what went on in your grandfather’ head, but they did care that he acted in such-a-way and said specific things on specific occasions. If they said that he did not ‘believe’ they were talking about his behaviour, not his mental state. At some point, probably when someone invented souls, belief-as-behaviour was associated to belief-as-state-of-soul and thence to the “mind". The point of ‘believing’ was and is commitment. You were going to fight for the tribe and the church, you were going to trust the tribal elders and your relatives, and of course, you’re going to wave the flag of whatever political causes have insinuated themselves into your chosen academic pursuit. (cough *Climate science* cough)

(The real reason so many Anglo academics have a problem with Popper? Popperians don’t commit, as the core of his approach is the demand that you specify in advance the conditions under which you would abandon your theory / belief. But if you’re going to get an academic gravy train running, everyone must commit.)

If you are a believer in belief, then thought-experiments and fiction, make-believe generally, is difficult to describe and incorporate into your theory of knowledge. If you believe that belief about the world must be at heart rational, then instincts are even harder to incorporate. Or you banish instinct and make-believe to a nether world of irrationality, and accept that, at times the irrational can guide us despite itself.

One example Gendler takes is Galileo’s famous thought experiment whereby a light and a heavy weight are tied together by a strap and dropped. According to Aristotle, heavier weights fall faster. How fast does our assembly fall? Try working out some of the alternatives: as fast as the maximum, the average, the sum. None quite hold together.

The argument is a rhetorical trick. His audience were a handful of literate Florentines and the scholars of the Catholic Church. These were ingenious, practical, commercially-minded and for all intents and purposes, atheist, men. Faced with Galileo’s argument, they knew very well Aristotle’s ideas could be saved. But at the cost of ever-mounting complexity. The only assumption that sounds neat is that, in fact, all objects fall at the same speed, mod air resistance. It’s not a physical argument at all, but a methodological one.

Gendler thinks the argument is about physics, and wonders how can an argument about an imaginary situation affect our beliefs about the real world. How can that even be legitimate? This drags him into horrible problems, which can all be avoided the moment we accept that we don’t believe a darn thing, but use the assumptions that work best for us. Until they don’t. Then we try some different stuff until we find something that works. (That attitude, of course, suits people with a knack for problem-solving, extemporisation and generally winging-it. That’s a minority and getting smaller.)

If this was phenomenology, I wouldn’t mind. I’m partial to a bit of phenomenology. But it isn’t. It’s an attempt to systematise stuff that really isn’t. In the final chapters he discusses a mental state he calls “alief”. These are propensities to behave in such a way that is automatic, arational, action-generating, affect-laden and prior to anything else we learned. He says that he hasn’t run across this idea anywhere before, which is odd, because regular people call these, “instincts”. Aliefs are, however, a translation of instincts into the language of belief, a kind of “propositionalisation” of instinct, if you will. The trick can be turned, and Gendler turns it, but should we coo and applaud?

Some things make sense. Usually because they have been designed by men to make sense. The rest may not be random, but it sure was a mess cobbled together in a hurry. Thus the human mind. It does the job, but how it does, is, like the making of laws and sausages, something we would sleep better for not knowing.

Trying to habilitate instinct as a belief-related process, and hence a quasi-cognative one, is right up there with ego-psycho explanations of promiscuity. Not because it’s post-hoc, but because it is trying to find pattern and sense where there isn’t any. Galileo’s argument was a trick, and a good one, not an attempt to exploit some subtle state of mind which validly allows reasoning about imaginary situations to influence our beliefs about real situations. Heck, most people don’t allow reasoning about real situations to influence their beliefs about real situations. The process Gendler wants to describe would happen, if it happens at all, in a very small number of minds, mostly, one suspects, minds with tenure.