The Art of Non-Conformity (1): The Review

Recently I read a book called The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebreau. You know how that happens. You're browsing, you pick up a book, it seems to have things to say on the pages you turn to, presto! Another pop-culture slip.

I grew up in an era when "conformity" was a grey, grey word to colour parents, teachers and people with clerical jobs. (Oddly, manual workers were neither conformist nor non-conformist: they were "the workers" and as such outside cultural judgement.) Back then we knew what it was people were conforming to: marriage, children, job-for-life working for a bank or one of the nationalised industries or in government, washing the car on Sunday and middle-brow culture. It meant fitting in with what other people said they expected you to do and believe.

An updated version of this is roughly what Chris Guillebreau means by "conformity". I think he makes two mistakes. The first is that post-modern capitalist economies don't want you to conform, except to your employers' dress and IT codes. Expecting you to conform to anything else would mean setting standards and training people and generally making commitments, and post-modern capitalism needs to be able to dump it, outsource it, price it out of your salary range and generally melt it into air at any time with minimum disruption and expense. The second mistake is that conforming is not about product choice and how we make the rent, and many of the choices we make are constrained by the numbers. Most of us have to work 9-5 because most jobs are 9-5, not freelance. Most of us have to work at what we're good at rather than at what we love, because what we're good at pays and what we love doesn't. Following your bliss is viable if it so happens that your bliss pays enough, or you are prepared to live very cheap.

Indeed, the book's title should be "Live Cheap and You Need Never Go Into The Office". He's a web developer and seemingly one of the few who are good enough to find enough clients prepared to let him work off-site, which not many clients are prepared to do. He only needs some telephony to do his job - sometimes, I'm gathering, sat phones so he can dial in to a client conference call in the middle of Africa. (That strikes him as cool, but I think it's a little... disjointed.) He travels a lot - not in a Tyler Brule style. He's not going to Biarritz for dinner at Restaurant Phillipe, but to Azerbaijan, Syria, Turkey and other Poor Countries. His idea of fine dining at lunchtime is Chipolte and he's a vegetarian, which keeps the costs down. He's also prepared to sit around airports for a day waiting for connecting flights, delays and the like, on cut-price airlines. Going to poor countries makes your income last a lot longer, and provides months of comparing your material circumstances with Poor People, which makes you feel a lot better about yourself than a few weeks in Manhattan or Kensington.

If I said that books like this were actually commissioned by corporations and western governments to convince you that it's your fault you're a wage-slave tied to a soul-crushing commute and job, which given your skill-set you can only change for a different soul-crushing commute and job, you would mutter something about "Corporations and governments aren't that smart". He may not know it, but he's blaming the victim, the favourite tactic of the oppressor and his lackeys. If only we had the gumption to Do What We Love And Find Someone To Pay Us For Doing It, we would be happy and unafraid of being replaced by someone in Mumbai. Good thing Chris likes web development, which he can do from a rooftop cafe in Syria, and not Java enterprise systems, which would mean he would have to be on-site right up to the day they at-will terminated him.

I felt cheated, because a book with this title should be about more than working freelance, which is a way of life that takes a particular character and mind-set that most of don't have - which is why we don't do it. Non-conformity is about just a lot more than how you make your pay-cheque and where you go on vacation, and there are moments he addresses that stuff, but not for long enough.

There are three posts in this series. The next one is the philosopher's analysis of the idea of non-conformity.

Audrey Runs In Paris

"Audrey runs in Paris" was the slogan on the back of a woman's black tee-shirt. We were boarding the 8 line metro at Bastille. It was so early, the only people out were going somewhere for their morning run.

"Audrey". It's an interesting girl's name: classic without having overtones of social class, rare but not unusual. You've heard the name more often than you've met girls called Audrey, because you've seen the poster for Breakfast At Tiffanies so many times. Audrey Hepburn was nothing like the characters she played but made you believe she was. It's a brave parent who christens their daughter Audrey. An Audrey is going to be good at her job and responsible without being serious, with a suggestion that she might just be a little more fun than the Fun Girl in the next booth.

"Runs". Not walk, stroll, daydream, swim, take taxis or buses. Not hide, work, play, party or get stoned. She might do all those things, but what she wants you to know about her is that she runs. Exercises, glides over the pavement in her Nikes, sweats lightly and politely, and she runs somewhere particular, that she needs to take the 8 line to get to.

"In Paris". She's an American in Paris. She runs in Paris, and you are just visiting. She runs here, so she works and lives here. She's on the metro in the east, so she lives in one of the arondissements, not in the banlieues. Maybe she works in banking, or fashion, or perhaps as for one of the French companies that own the bits of the UK that the Spanish don't own.

"Runs in Paris". She runs in Paris - and Paris is not where people go to run. They go to shop, to look at the art, to bathe in the atmosphere, to listen to the organ recital Sunday at Saint Sulpice, to walk by the Seine, to walk in the parks and stroll round the markets, to sit in the sidewalk cafes and eat in the restaurants. But Audrey runs in Paris. Audrey does unconventional things, and running Paris is one of them. Perhaps she dances to drum-and-bass, and is into Wittgenstein, and white fish recipies, and plays Earl Hines and Art Tatum CD's in her flat, and only watches Jacques Rivette movies on her iPad.

One day she will know it's time to go back to the States, and then Audrey will run in Central Park when she does, but until then, "Audrey runs in Paris".

How Bureaucrats Make The World Uglier: Example 13,258 of 100,000,000

Those of you who cross Hungerford Bridge, which takes the Southern South-Eastern railways north of the river to Charing Cross, on foot will recognise this sight.

The bureaucrats will say that the spikes are there to stop people trying to jump across either for the thrill or to put graffiti there. And you just nodded along. Whereas I say, it's not the bureaucrats' business whether someone wants to jump across. But it is their business to give us a pleasant public space. Which this ghastly scene is not. They will say they could be sued by the relatives of someone who jumped, if they didn't put discouraging spikes up: I say that the legislation should make it clear that Railtrack, or Westminster Council, or whoever, are not responsible for the stupidity, drunkenness, desperation or foolhardiness of the public. Which means you and me.

You may say that this is a fine line: between guard rails to stop us falling into the river and spikes to stop us jumping.

The real point is this. Every time you pass that scene, or one of the thousands like it, you are reminded that the this country is not managed for your benefit, but for the mitigation of financial risk to the State and companies, and to this end, the servants of both will do what they want, when they want, with as little thought for the effect on your world as they can be bothered to show. You are the victim, and they are the bully.

Except here's the funny thing. One of you works there. In the Department For Putting Up Ugly Spikes. And when you decided to do that, you forgot you were one of us, and thought like one of Them. You left behind your citizenship when you swiped in the door and became a lackey. Millions of people do it every single day: in fact, I think the British go to work specifically so that they can mis-treat and abuse each other, and make each other's world a nastier, more ugly place.

What Darwin Got Wrong: What Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini Got Wrong

I've recently finished reading What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. I was pre-disposed to its central thesis because I've always thought the Theory of Evolution, especially in its (very) Vulgar forms, such as Evolutionary Psychology, is just a tad on the weak side. By being for instance totally ad-hoc in all its meanings (see any paper by Imre Lakatos for explanations of the various forms of ad-hoc-ness.)

So let's understand one thing: God did not design the cockroach, though He may have had a hand in creating Eva Mendes. If Intelligent Design is the Conspiracy theory ("it's all God's doing"), then Evolution is the Cock-Up theory. Looked at as heuristics, Creation suggests we need to understand why purpose God put the hippopotamus on the planet, whereas Evolution suggests that we need to understand how a particular feature of the hippopotamus helps it flourish in its habitat, and how other hippo-like animals without that feature might have thereby been at a disadvantage. This is the "Africans have dark skin to protect them from the sun, while Swedes have white skin because they need what little sunlight they get to make Vitamin D really quickly" line of thinking. Darwin may or may not have been a gradualist: who believe the genome is subject to random variations which, if they give rise to advantageous features, will cause that version of the species to be preferred by females (or to be better at forcing itself on females, but Evolutionists tend to  be very PC, so they don't mention that bit) and so breed more than others.

That's the Vulgar view of Evolution. The obvious question is: who or what is doing the selecting? And how? What can't be happening is that species breed for fitness - otherwise no-one would marry anyone who didn't look (and behave) like Eva Mendes. People, let alone elephants, aren't smart enough selectively to breed their own species: and only a small number of humans have ever successfully bred other species. So what might be happening is not that this or that species thrives but that the others starve: evolution proceeds by elimination. This is the usual story about what happened to the dinosaurs: they couldn't take the global freezing after the meteor. On this account, evolution isn't about the most fit, but the least vulnerable, or most adaptable. That would explain cockroaches and Rupert Murdoch. But it's nowhere near as nice a story, not very flattering for alpha male academics and justifies the wrong sort of free-market capitalism. Not that any of that has to do with the attraction of a scientific theory to the layman.

Vulgar Evolution is what's not known in the trade (but should be) as a Monet theory: looks good at a distance, but a real mess close up. Ask it a sensible question, like why there are still so many ugly and dumb people in the world, if smarts and looks are advantageous, and they are likely to come back with an answer like "fitness is about reproducing, not being successful or cool, and smart cool people reproduce less because they have other things to do at night." Which suggests that evolutionary fit people can be unemployable nail-biters with bad skin, and only survive because the evolutionary less fit don't let them starve. In other words, smart people are dumb people's way of staying alive. The pop literature is full of stuff like this, and it's entertaining in the way that an episode of CSI Vegas is: but just as no-one confuses CSI Vegas with real forensic work, they aren't likely to confuse pop evolutionary theory with real science either. (Except a lot of people do, and that's a problem.)

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini choose to take the philosophical high-road. There's rather forbidding talk of "nomological laws", "natural kinds", agency, intentionality, counterfactuals and the distinction between generalisations and actual Laws of Nature. For one thing, they tell us, laws of Nature "support counterfactuals", but I had to guess what that means, because they didn't explain it. These ideas are very, very far from being "common ground" (another signature phrase) amongst philosophers, and to base a critique of a thriving Pop Science industry on them is, well, like saying Natalie Portman isn't a "real" ballerina because she didn't hold her arms as well as the girls in the corps. Who cares about details like that? She did a lot of her own moves, and besides, they needed a talented actress who could dance competently, not a talented dancer who could act competently. I'm not going to discuss the ideas of natural kinds and nomological laws because, well, I thought those ideas were extinct (so Carl G Hempel, so 1945).

As a good Lakatosian, I can ask: who cares if the detailed logical structure of Evolution is a little shaky? Does it have heuristic power? Have people working with it suggested and neatly solved a whole bunch of interesting problems? To which the answer is: Yes, and No. Has it solved at whole bunch of scientific problems? No. Of course not. The serious work in understanding why animals and plants are how they are comes from genetics - and here is something very important to understand: you can be a creationist and support genetic research. After all, if God created the universe, She created the genome as well. Understanding how the genome works, how it interacts with its environment, is part of the worthy task of understanding and celebrating the work of God. The study of DNA comes from the Mendelian programme, not from Darwin: DNA was the answer to "what's a gene?". Post-DNA evolutionary theories have had to bolt genetics on: it doesn't fit in naturally.

Has it solved a whole bunch of political and employment problems for intellectuals? By Darwin and Freud, yes. Writing an Evo pot-boiler is a terrific way for a cute-looking alpha academic male to make a quick buck: even writing a not-so-best-seller can get you into some hip soirees. While Evolution is not the "universal acid" for genuine theories, it is the litmus test for dangerous religious cranks: they can hide, but unfailingly they turn purple when you suggest that great-grand-daddy was an ape.

What's wrong with Evolution is not that it is, as Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini point out, a species of history, and therefore a tale of One Damn Thing After Another. It is that Evolution makes no novel predictions and it does not generate technology (to repeat: all the technology comes from genetics, and genetics is not intrinsically evolutionary). What it does, and why it is so popular, is to provide an interpretation of the world. People love an interpretation: it tells a story, or it can be used to tell a story, about all sorts of human behaviour, no matter what that behaviour is. Why do girls sleep around? To get the best alpha sperm for their babies. Why do girls not sleep around? To keep the provider father faithful and happy. Why do men sleep around? To make sure their genes survive. Why are men faithful? To make sure that their babies grow up and survive. You can have it blue, black, any colour you want, and with raspberry stripes.

The technology of the human genome, heck, the technology of the fruit-fly genome, is probably going to turn out to be an even bigger mess than the codebase of Windows Vista. In the end we will need good, old-fashioned stories. The reason that there are a great many natural blondes in Newcastle has nothing to do with nightclubs and evolution. It has to do with genes and marauding Nordics back in the day. That's a story we can understand. Evolution will vanish like a puff of smoke the moment we have a decent understanding of the gene and the latest crop of alpha academics can popularise it (which will mean all those silly names for genes will have to go) with a few nifty diagrams.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini recognise the very different attitudes between the hard-core scientists working around genetics and inheritance, and the pop science authors of the potboilers. What they miss is a decent structure: starting the essay with a whole mass of sound bites from the Pop Guys to convince us that there really were people who think like that. Then they could have explained the difference between the Pop Guys and the Real Scientists, not least the fact that the two work in very different disciplines, only one of which requires lots of specialised knowledge, and run through the fascinating stuff that the real scientists have done. (You can make a fruit fly grow a stubby set of wings by exposing it to ether when young. Do this for a few generations and the stubby-wing gene stays put. Last time I learned genetics, the genotype had to be inviolable by the outside world, or you had Lamarkianism, which was like Gnosticism but more serious.) The reader will then be on board with the idea that genetic change is way more complicated than simple random variation. Instead of burdening us all with the idea of "intentional agency", they could have just pointed out but less flippantly, that if we are "selecting for fitness", we're doing it very badly, or "fitness" has nothing to do with what it takes to get ahead in any man-made environment. Explain that the real attraction of Evolution is that it is conventional history, and helps us make sense of a very diverse world in a way that we're used to. There will be very few left on the Pop Train by this point.

It hurts anyone's case to be rude about the opposition. At this point they need to explain what's good in the Pop books, and what is rhapsody. Merely to list the sales figures of the top Evo potboilers would make the point: everyone would instantly understand that it couldn't be real science, because that many people don't understand that much science. A brief tour round the sociology of the Evo community: the superstars, the sales, the institutions and their funding, the numbers of academics, and therefore wives and families, supported by the Pop stuff, and we're done. That gets them into trouble with their mates, sorry, peers, but the general reader knows it's all about the money, it's just that in academia, it's hard to see where the money is.

All that's lurking is the readers fear that if we abandon Evolution we will all have to go to Church on Sunday. Wearing black suits. In buggies. They could deal with that by pointing out that there is a perfectly acceptable non-Creationist alternative to Evolution, which is genetics + inheritance + falling in love and having babies. They will have laid the foundations for that in the earlier chapters. And they can point out, and rightly, that there is no need for a universal mechanism to explain species change, any more than there is a need for an universal mechanism to explain regime change throughout history.

Which then leaves the final chapter, which makes them hot sellers: that's the one called "Evo Porn". This is where they quote some juicy passages where Evo is used to "explain" human behaviour, and then have some fun explaining why this has nothing to do with Darwin, Dawkins or even Cronin. The general reader will be left both titillated and with the impression that the Pop writers are really a bit ridiculous.

And having thought it through like that, I can think of another sub-title: never send an epistemologist to do a methodologist's job.

Spinning With Clarissa

All of us have been on our bikes for at least five minutes, often ten. The bike needs setting-up: saddle and handlebar height, seat position and pedal straps. When you've done that, you put your towel over the handlebars and do something else until it's time for the class. Very few people turn up at the last minute: even the warm-up needs a warm-up.
Hello everybody,
Clarissa is almost invisible by the electronics as she calls us to attention.
light gear, fast pace....
The music gets turned up. Loud. The gym has its own DJ. Clarissa doesn't shout over the music, as most of the others do. She's found a way of mixing her voice in, so it sounds like she's part of the music.
Medium gear. On the top. (beat) Warming up. When Clarissa says "on the top" we all rise as one to pedal standing up. During the hour, we follow her body language almost more closely than her words.
Take a seat, light gear.
Resistance is changed with a knob on the frame just behind the handlebars. Our right hands swoop down from the handlebars, turn the knob, and grasp the handlebars again. There are four settings: light, medium, medium-to-heavy and heavy. Light means as little resistance as necessary to stop your legs rotating out of control; medium is enough to take your weight when your standing on the pedals; medium-to-heavy hurts your thighs when you sit down; heavy needs body-weight to move it when you're standing up.
Lots of leg rotation.
I look round and I'm surrounded by energiser bunnies. The women who do the class regularly pump their legs up and down fast. Maybe it's easier if your legs are half the size of mine. And you're half my age.
On the top, medium gear, warming up.
I haven't timed how long we warm up. Once the class starts, you can't look at the clock, or you may lose heart. Warming-up slides into the class proper.
Micro-turn to the right.
To the right is more resistance; to the left is less.
And a little more.
Building up for a climbing section: perhaps ten minutes of solid medium-to-heavy on the top.
A little faster...
Prepare for take off...
Doors to manual,
and cross-check.
Clarissa chuckles at her own improvisation. She even paces the phrases like the pilots do.
Faster than this.
She means: than she is pedalling. I watch and have no idea if I'm going slower or faster.
Your pace is so regular, it's sending me to sleep.
We've been "climbing": medium-to-heavy, on the top, for the last five minutes.
A little more gear for some of you.
Clarissa looks round the class with sharp eyes: who is going too slowly, who may have not turned up the gear. It's like a ticket inspector yelling "Hey": the guilty person turns round.
Rhythm in the ride.
Oh yes. Miss a beat, miss a downstroke, slow down, and you might be lost forever.
Let the music help you.
The DJ is on form tonight. I have no idea what genre this is: I'm guessing it's some kind of house, and it fills up my head and keeps me moving. If anyone had come back to the 1970's with this stuff, we would have wondered what the heck we were hearing. We had no idea music could sound like this. No-one did.
Take a seat. Don't touch the gear.
I don't like this bit. When the resistance is medium and above, it hurts more when I sit down because I have less body-weight to bring to moving the pedals.
If you don't turn it up, you will regret it tomorrow.
Yeah. Right. I laugh out loud and Clarissa gives us a mischievous smile.
No regrets. More gear. 
Three, two, on the top.
Light to medium. No more, no less.
Three, two, take a seat. Double!
No-one can double their rotation speed, but we speed up anyway.
Speed on demand.
Is that something competition cyclists need to be able to do? Suddenly speed up no matter if they are slogging up a hill or pushing along a level section?
Three, two, on the top. Triple!
No, I can't do three times the pace I was, and anyway, I know what's coming...
Now, as fast as you can!
There's a countdown, and since it's less than a minute and my feet are solidly in the pedals, I go all-out. I really am doing twice the rotations of the people around me. For thirty seconds, I know I can.
From start to finish... stay strong.
Hallelujah.

Six Days In France: An Afternoon in the Parc du Buttes-Chaumont

Cineastes will know this as the park where Eric Rohmer sets the second act of The Aviator's Wife, when Anne-Laure Meury upstages everyone, on- or off-screen in the film. I've wanted to go there since forever but never got round to it.

You can take the 7 line to Botzaris and appear right at the corner, but I took the 11 line and got off at Place des Fetes. Take the escalator to street level and, on a Sunday, you will emerge into a busy local market. The area is working-class and the market fits it: I had a goat's cheese and salmon crepe from a stand there and didn't feel hungry for the rest of the day. Walk down the Rue du Crimee to the park.

I think there's a loi de 25 juillet 1856 that requires all the residents of the nineteenth to spend at least an hour in the Parc when the temperature is above 70F - I imagine town hall employees banging on apartment doors saying "Au Parc Messieur, Medames!. The last shot is outside the park, it's the Petite Ceinture, an abandoned equivalent of the Circle Line.

And so my time in fairy-land ended. The difference between this and the train out to Charles de Gaulle could not be greater. Or the cab ride from Terminal Four to my house. Or the next day at work. People wisely left me alone.

Six Days in France: On The Rue des Archives I Stopped and Wept

There are four places in the world I want to live: the Centrum in Amsterdam, the East Village in Manhatten, Soho in London and the Marais in Paris. Don't misunderstand me: if you would like to give me the keys to your flat in St Germain, or Kensington, or the Upper East Side, I'll move my books and CD's in tomorrow. But those are the places where I would spend my own money to live.

And when I am where I want to be and brought back to myself, I am brought face-to-face with the truth that I am not living the life I would like to lead in any of the places I would like to lead it. This is something I know, but rarely feel. Walking through the Marais that Sunday, I felt it. And I did what any decent, feeling person would do: I cried for the things that I have missed, and not been brave enough, or hard-working enough, or lucky enough, or talented enough, or courageous enough, or connected enough, or wealthy enough, or foolhardy enough, or sober enough, or clear-headed enough, to have tried for.

The rules changed during my lifetime. It turns out that to be my age and employed in a proper full-time job is not, after all, to be taken for granted. I have survived five or so years of unemployment in the last two decades, sunk into alcoholism in my thirties and spent eighteen years in recovery, have had and lost a long-term relationship, gained enough weight to have been diagnosed with so-called "type two diabetes" and then lost enough and become fit enough to be passed more or less flawless in my medicals, and I am still learning abstract mathematics and reading philosophy. It is also a life with little rest or ease. Even my sleep is filled with detailed, busy dreams. Sometimes tears are a relief. A relief from the endless effort of pretence, of being thankful for what I've got, of living in the moment, of resisting the temptation to turn round and quit everything, of showing up every freaking day.

And that's why, on the Rue des Archives, I stopped and wept. Because it was beautiful, because I was tired, and because I could afford for a few moments to feel honestly.