Edward Said, Orientalism and Failure-Conspiracies

Recently there was an Edward Said-related anniversary. I thought it for forty years of the publication of his book Orientalism in the UK, but I could have been wrong. Said’s career-defining book argued that the Western view of Oriental, and especially Arabic and Muslim, cultures served an imperialist agenda, creating inaccurate images of the mysterious East that justified the Western treatment of those cultures: Here’s a quote from Said:

Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world, presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

(Said was talking about Palestine, not Iraq.)

To the contrary. While the artists, writers and historians may have created the myth that Said describes, the politicians had an altogether more practical view. Western foreign policy up to the disastrous First Iraqi War showed a shrewd understanding that Arab countries, with their simmering religious feuds, corruption and gangsterism, were best left to dictators or despots maintaining order with varying and regrettable levels of brutality. The events since then have only confirmed this. It has nothing to do with culture, religion or the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life (Said’s phrase), and everything to do with the underlying gangsterism, and, of course, who gets the kickbacks from the oil supply.

In the previous decades, Europeans were forced into this situation time and time again. People complained and protested about Imperial rule, the Europeans walked away, and after the first independent government, the country promptly fell apart. Quick, name any country that has done better since their Imperial rulers walked away(*). What happened to farming in Zimbabwe and is happening in South Africa should make anyone who "cares about the planet" weep. For that matter, name any country that lost its dictator and didn’t sink into gangsterism (**).

The process is something like this:

1) Group A complains that they are not getting as much of the good stuff they could if they weren’t oppressed, discriminated against; or otherwise disadvantaged by Group B

2) Group B stops doing whatever it is or at least passes a law to make it illegal...

3) … and it all goes well until there’s a change of leadership, or the torch passes to another generation, when...

4) ...the whole show falls into the chaos of internecine strife, or someone notices that only a small proportion of Group A’s are getting the ‘good stuff’...

5) …when academics and activists create conspiracy theories to explain the failure, e.g. the patriarchy, white privilege, Group A’s specific culture and values, years of oppression, cultural hegemony, toxic culture, and on and on.

The purpose of the conspiracy theory is not to help redress whatever wrong continues to be done to Group A. It is to provide the leaders of the failed movement with an excuse, and to help their useful-idiot western sympathisers deal with the horrendous cognitive dissonance created by their adoption of, and continued support for, a spectacularly failed policy(***).

Said’s book was one of the first that blamed Western cultural theories for the behaviour of a non-Western government (the Palestinian Authority). Behind a smoke-screen that Said contributed to, Yassir Araft diverted hundreds of millions of external aid into what was euphemistically called the Chairman’s Fund and away from improving the lives of Palestinians. Did Said realise he was being played?

So, contra Said, the Orient is not the victim of some nefarious myth-making by obscure academics - they aren’t that important or influential. The Orient is how it is because it is hot, has poor agriculture, and is ruled by corrupt theocratic governments which insist that the population learns nothing except one book, and that by rote. Some of it is geography, and a lot of it is a political decision. A decision Said's own book helped disguise.

(*) Vietnam. But not until the North Vietnamese lost their Imperial backers as well.

(**) Estonia, Lithuania and Poland don’t count, since they never had dictators like Albania and Romania did. The Czechs and Slovaks sorted themselves out eventually. What the Serbs and Bosnians did to each other was appalling. If you think Russia isn’t a gangster state, you aren’t paying attention.

(***) Any time it occurs to you that feminism fits this pattern...

Papa Hegel He Say: Lift Weights, Eat Right, Feel Free

Between the mind and its own body there is naturally an even more intimate connection than between the rest of the external world and mind. Just because of this necessary connection of my body with my soul, the activity immediately exerted on the soul by the body is not a finite [that is, limited and contained], not a merely negative, activity. First of all, then, I have to maintain myself in this immediate harmony of my soul and my body; true, I do not have to make my body an end in itself as athletes and tightrope walkers do, but I must give my body its due, must take care of it, keep it healthy and strong, and must not therefore treat it with contempt or hostility. It is just by disregard or even maltreatment of my physical body that I would make my relationship to it as one of dependence and externally necessary connection; for in this way I would make it into something - despite its identity with me - negative towards me and consequently hostile, and would compel it to rise up against me, to take revenge on my mind. If, by contrast, I conduct myself in accordance with the laws of my bodily organism, then my soul is free in its physical body.

A clearer exhortation to lift weights or do HIIT won’t be found in the pages of any other philosopher. G W F Hegel, it turns out, was a Bro. He understood that when we eat crap, drink too much, take drugs, leave the iron un-lifted and generally treat our bodies badly, we end up feeling bad and our judgement and thoughts will be clouded if not turned off. Think hangover. By eating well, exercising, not drinking too much and leaving the drugs alone, we not only prevent the bad stuff, but also, and this is important, feel free in [our] physical body, that is, our body is no longer an obstruction, as it is with a hangover, but a resource for us. We are not constrained by its sickness or poor condition, but free within it.

In plain English experience: I get one of my darn colds, I feel trapped inside it. When it goes, and I recover, I feel free again.

Notice also that Hegel takes for granted that, not only are the body and mind intimately connected, but also the external world and mind are connected. He was the first philosopher to reject the idea that all we can know of the world is what gets to us through our failing senses, and that the mind rattles around, unconnected to the world, even to the body of the person whose mind it is.

The quote is from Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, part of his Encyclopedia of Philosophy, translated by Wallace and Miller. Lots of goodness in there - check it out.

First-Draft Cliches in Changing Your Life

All of us need some kind of creed by which we live: stay sober, work a job, pay taxes, exercise mind and body, eat right, save, don’t buy things you can’t afford, stay single, avoid vexatious people and things, and seek out only that which is uplifting and beautiful might be mine. Anyone who wants to know why I would do those things is invited to explain why they want to be a hungover, indebted, unemployed, welfare-claiming, dumb, soft-bodied overweight married man with an unpleasant wife and surrounded by ugliness. Kinda answers itself really. Since a lot of people are some of those things, I can only suggest how much their lives would improve if they were all of them, and that the improvement they will feel is its own answer.

You may also want to ask is that all? There must be more to life than that. If this thought has occurred to you, I have two replies. First, I’ll thank you not to be so rude about my life choices. Apology accepted. Second, if you feel that way about your life, you don’t need God, or a pilgrimage, or for that matter, a couple of weeks' holiday somewhere exotic. And you don’t need to find-your-purpose or discover-your-passion. Stop reading those self-help books.

What the more-to-life-than-this and the find-your-passion brigades want is a purpose that smacks them upside the head and takes them over, without them needing to decide. Kinda like getting married and having children. His wife smacks him upside the head and his kids take him over. Have I sold you on making your own damn decision?

How does a man live? Any damn way he chooses: bear in mind the time before you do the crime. You decide. You might swipe an idea from someone else - you probably will - but you decide to adopt it. If you feel sour doing whatever it is, stop, dummy - though it may takes some time to change whatever it is. Only you can give your life meaning. No-one and nothing else can. That’s the curse of free will.

When I start feeling a little sour about my life, that tells me it’s time for a change. The trick is recognising what that change might be. I don’t know how to do that, but I do know that the first thoughts I will have are all the cliches. Kinda like the first draft of a blog post or a BBC TV drama. The difference is that the BBC broadcasts the first draft, and I take the time to take away as many of the cliches as I can. The first thought is almost never the best thought. The third or fourth thought is usually pretty good.

One thing for sure: religion is a first-draft cliche. You could listen to the massed ranks of priests, imams, mullahs, and other assorted pundits, or you can use the free will and rationality that God - the Christian one anyway - gave you to figure out how best to use the gifts you have, both for the benefit of others and yourself.

These thoughts were prompted by Krauser’s comment a while back that he was thinking about converting to Christianity and that if he did, he would withdraw his Daygame manuals and videos. It never occurred to him that he might have been doing God’s work in writing and producing his Daygame content. Oh ye of little faith in yourselves. And a very TradCon conception of what behaviour pleases the Almighty.

I've Lost That Righteous Feeling

A life needs an underlying feeling or attitude to hold it together and make sense of it.

It might be a mid-90’s Morrissey miserabalism, or an upbeat Instagram life-is-fabulous-ism, or the ups-and-downs of the man who follows football, or a constant level of outrage driven by everything from the Today programme to Twitter, or perhaps deep invovlement with one’s work - but that only applies to a handful of artists, mathematicians and other creatives. SQL-bashing doesn’t cut it.

For the last few years, for me, that making-sense feeling has been that I’ve been living a righteous life. Work, exercise, sobriety, reading, keeping the act together against the forces of ageing, maintaining an interest in aspects of what’s happening, though that’s more about new restaurants than new bands.

Recently I realised have lost my sense of righteousness. It’s all become toned-down enough to make a ho-hum weekly routine.

A vicious two-week cold with a lingering recovery period doesn’t help either.

I used to feel righteous because I kept up with the arts and movies, but neither are now worth keeping up with. Read Art Monthly for a few issues and you’ll see what I mean: the art is so mediocre it can’t stand without being politicised.

I used to feel righteous because I trained regularly. I still do, colds permitting, but the intensity has gone. And training without intensity is just humping crates of Coca-Cola.

I used to feel righteous because I kept up with the movies, at least, with the art movies, but now I don’t give a hoot. Half of what I’ve streamed recently is playing catch-up with movie history. My utter lack of desire to look at the new galleries in the Tate Modern is because they are mostly full of sculpture, not an art I care for much, and modern sculptures are, uh, well, you know.

I used to feel righteous because I was holding down a job, at an age when a lot of my contemporaries are out of work.

And of course, because I had almost zero contact with junk culture and junk food.

I can live without feeling righteous, I would prefer to have a feeling that is immanent and pervasive and colours the rest of my life. At the moment that’s all a bit grey.

I’m not going to speculate about why, nor guess what I’m going to do about it. For the moment, it’s enough to recognise it.

Loneliness Is A Symptom, Not A State

The feeling of loneliness is your soul’s way of telling you that you’re keeping the wrong company. Maybe they’re just too square, man, maybe they are just too hip, maybe they talk about their stupid jobs and petty careers, maybe they talk about football, or maybe you want to be with people who talk about their promotions and how they sold a piece of crap to some dumb client.

The point is, whoever you’re with, if you’re feeling lonely, it’s not someone you want to be with.

It’s not about the quality of the connection. I knew a lot about some of the people I didn’t really want to be with. We had similar problems, because we were at the same stages of our lives. There were plenty of similarities, and really, not that many differences. The only real turn-off then was what it is now: holding and expressing a certain kind of pop-culture idea. Show me a mother who believes that the triple-shoot will harm her child, and I’ll be polite, make my excuses and leave.

So I didn’t feel lonely because I didn’t have deep, meaningful, intimate connections with other people. Given my frakked-up emotional state at the time, that was never going to happen. Other people can’t have a relationship with a walking, talking neurosis. I felt lonely with other people because I didn’t want to be with myself, and being with other people stopped me distracting myself with books or movies or whatever else. Hence the neuroses were raw. It took sobriety, the Steps and a lot of other stuff before I got more comfortable with myself.

In the movies, that recovery would be a story about how I learned to love and trust, and learn the true value of friends. However my life isn’t a movie, so it doesn’t end like that. It ends with me reaching peace through acceptance.

What they don’t tell you about any kind of therapy or recovery is that, when the patient succeeds, whatever that means, they are still where they are: they don’t get the time back, and they don’t get the life they would have had if they hadn’t had whatever it was. It’s not an episode of Buffy, where killing the witch makes all the spells reverse and undoes all the damage. They are still where they are, they just don’t feel the same way, and they know how not to make it any worse.

So there the patient is, at some point in middle-age, and try re-building a life at that point. Everyone is married, divorced and spending Saturdays with their children. They have their social circle, and they have their stories and memories and loyalties and secrets and that is a lot of doors to open and hurdles to jump. His challenge is not to try to build the-life-he-would-have-had-if… because that is impossible. It is to find a way of living that satisfies him and avoids raising feelings of regret, self-pity and loneliness.

Contrary to every pop-therapist ever, one very effective way of avoiding loneliness is not to hang out with random people who have no idea what he has been through. Before you ask, work does not count as ‘hanging out’.

Part of the cure for loneliness is not more people. It’s less people. Anyone who tells you to find some like-minded people knows nothing and is repeating empty advice they heard once.

The other part is not faking for too much of your life. If you know you're putting on an act for the people you are with, because that act is all they will take, you're going to feel lonely. Or resentful. The fewer people you have in your life you have to be fake around, the less bad you're going to feel. The therapists can suggest you find someone you can be honest with, who will accept the real you. Sure. Any idea where? In the house where the rainbow ends in the garden?


I was caused to think about these things by a remark someone made in a You Tube video, about how, though he had had quiet the time with girls when younger, it began to feel lonely. That’s what happens when you have to sustain being someone you’re not, and that seems to be common among PUAs. He didn’t really want to be with those girls, however easy it was to get them to bed, and much more, he didn’t want to be with the man he had to be to get them to bed. That’s loneliness.

Lessons from 2018

In 2018 I went on doing what had worked in 2016, and was okay in 2017, but stopped working for me in 2018. Why? Because I’m not a youngster anymore, and at my age, apparently, changes can be step-like, not gradual. Or I passed a tipping-point. Or switched regimes on a catastrophic surface, or whatever metaphor you want.

It was so bad I even watched this Sunday Motivational video from Alux. Don’t be put off by the crassness of their Instagram, the video has a lot of sensible advice.

It occurred to me I should consider changing anything I’ve been doing consistently for the last couple of years.

Except the waking-up-and-going-to-work bit. I would love to stay in bed until 07:00, but the commute would be horrible. And leaving work at 17:00 would throw me into the gym at nearly peak time. Retiring is not negotiable until at least summer 2020. When I will be 66.

Weight-training leaves me feeling tired, not just on the day, but on the day after as well. I’m taking longer to recover during sets, and doing fewer sets. Not the way it’s supposed to work.

I switched to body-weight exercises. I’ve already got a Spin class in my schedule, and as I write this, I’m on my way to the second Extreme class of the year. Saturday morning 09:30 to 10:15. They must think I’m some weird old man, humping it through those routines. The next youngest kid in the class is half my age. You did when you were nineteen and it damn near wasted you. (*)

The only way I can lose weight is by eating almost or actually nothing in the evening. I’m already on week two of intermittent fasting: I’m eating between 06:00 and 14:00, and not afterwards. As part of that, I have to get a decent, preferably hot, lunch. With meat. The trick is to drink water or Jasmine tea in the evening. Don’t even think of eating.

Between these two changes, I’m already waking up feeling more active.

I’m getting a sports massage every week until the knots are out of my legs: the first one was a world of ouch. It made me realise that for the last year I’ve been fighting the muscular mess in my legs just to walk upstairs.

A while back I made a decision to take on a commitment at an AA meeting, and I’m keeping that up. My attendance at meetings had been erratic for a long time. I don’t know if it’s doing me any good, but I’m still sober.

I have to cut right down on most the websites and You Tube channels I’ve been reading and watching. Most are not suited for me. Been working on that.

I have to look at blogging as well. I’ve been at that for nearly nine years, with over 1,100 posts. It’s always been a diary for me, and just how little sense many of the posts make outside my inner monologue was brought home to me when I thought about putting together a compilation (ah that alcoholic grandiosity!). I’ve found it harder to produce pieces, or even photographs, at the rate of two a week recently. Many pieces have started off, and then I’ve rightly abandoned them.

I wanted to get to the end of January before posting this, so that I was on the way to forming the new habits.

(Added two weeks later: and then at the end of January, I got a cold and it all skidded off the road. I’m just about back on form now.)

(*) Spot the movie quote.

I Have The Two-Part Cold

That's the one where I get the cold over one weekend, and miss my Saturday class, and then feel better the next week, book the Saturday class on Thursday evening, and on Friday I relapse with an even worse version of the previous weekend. In fact, on Sunday morning, I thought my life might actually be over. Because I'm not being melodramatic.

A cold is good for an instant half-kilo weight gain. Overnight. It puts my weight loss / body fat reduction program on hold. It puts my life on hold. I am reduced to watching Lord of the Rings.

So this week I am going to take it eas(ier).

In the meantime, I have been getting into restoration videos on You Tube. This one is simply breath-taking...



And this one is one of many that reminds me I have no manual skills at all because I would have cut myself to shreds doing what this guy does. Craftsmanship is a real thing.