The Naivety of the Intellectuals: Collini on Offence

There's a review of a book by Stefan Collini called That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect. He's discussing the way that people take offence at criticism and especially the way that western liberals ease off on minorities out of "respect".

Here's what the reviewer thinks is the central passage: “Where arguments are concerned—that is, matters that are pursued by means of reasons and evidence—the most important identity we can acknowledge in another person is the identity of being an intelligent reflective human being.”

This is not even wrong. People who get upset because you make a joke about their prophet or their product are not engaging in an argument - an exchange and mutual examination of views where both parties are prepared to alter those views if the criticisms are good enough. They are engaging in a dispute - which is about prevailing against the other side. You publish cartoons about my prophet, I claim offence and disrespect and threaten to kill you and burn down your offices. I have no intention of listening to arguments about free speech - I want you to back down, never do it again and I want all the publicity I can get to re-inforce my standing in my community. I can do all that and be an "intelligent, reflective human being" as well - my very grasp of PR and TV and my ability to use your liberal values to my advantage prove that. You're the dummy who can't see what I'm up to.

If I may paraphrase: the most important identity we can acknowledge in another person is the identity of being someone who wants something. If they are prepared to compromise, horse trade and dicker to get it, then we can do business, and if they are not, then we have to be prepared to call their bluff, tell them to go to hell, steer around them or call out the riot police.

The reviewer then summarises: "The related point, which Collini also touches upon, is that if one decides to criticize a culture or a tradition or a work of art, doing so is not an act of Western arrogance. Criticism is not Western or Eastern or Christian or Jewish, and those facing criticism—and those societies and cultures facing criticism—should respond in a spirit of openness about truth. To withhold criticism from certain communities or religions is, in Collini’s word, a form of condescension towards them. It denies these groups the ability to engage in constructive dialogue, and to fortify their own values. In the final analysis, everyone loses."

The actual position is this: if one decides to criticise a culture or a tradition or a work of art, one first needs to understand what one wishes to achieve by doing so and if one cares about the response from the spokesmen for that culture, tradition or artist. One then needs to decide if they are likely to exploit the criticism for publicity, ignore it or make death threats. It may be that your criticism will actually recruit for their side: there is, after all, no such thing as bad publicity (unless you are a badly-behaved corporate giant). Having decided it is worth doing, tailor your criticism for the best audience: to borrow from soccer, you will not going to win friends criticising the team, but you can never make enemies slagging off the manager. And bear in mind that there is a possibility that everyone from the man at the top to the woman who washes his cook's clothes, knows the whole thing is a scam.

To withhold criticism from certain communities or religions can be condescending, but it can also be a useful energy-saving tactic. We cut crazy, dangerous or dysfunctional beliefs so much slack because we don't want to get involved with a bunch of crazy, dangerous or dysfunctional people, and then only when we can insulate ourselves from them. This lets the crazy people identify and advertise themselves and so create their own ghetto, rather than us having to do it for them. Less competition for us, less competition for our children. And the crazy, dangerous or dysfunctional people don't really want to be the Responsible Adults – they want some feed from the trough and to be left alone in their fantasy worlds. When they get it, they go away.

An analysis of the concept of offence won't give newspaper editors, politicians, local government officials and university administrators a spine when it comes to threats from extremists. If you think you're going to be sued and lose, or dismissed, disciplined or sent to Siberia by management, you're not going to stand up. You're going to back down. A fish rots from the head, and an organisation collapses from the top.

The Intimate Relationship, The Hygiene Fallacy and Polite Lies

The idea of an Intimate Relationship ^(TM) pushed by therapists, counsellors and assorted mavens, is itself a fantasy of childhood dependence and security translated to the adult state. Children need their parents to do things like hug them when they come home hurt - they need hugs because hugs release Good Hormones that counter-act the Bad Hormones released by what the Mean Kids did. Lectures won't cut it. If this didn't happen to you as a child, you will be trying to fill the emptiness it leaves for a large chunk of the rest of your life. The Intimate Relationship ^(TM) is an attempt to do this impossible thing. It doesn't do it because it works on the wrong stuff. I don't need your sympathy and I don't need your understanding: I need to know that being around people can be fun and won't leave an empty taste when I take the train back home all on my own. I need to know those good times aren't just a one-off. If people aren't fun, what's the point? I can be miserable on my own and if I want hours of adult negotiation and compromise, I can get that at work.
The Intimate Relationship ^(TM) is an example of the Hygiene Fallacy. The Hygiene Fallacy is supposing that you will do Good Stuff by not doing doing Bad Stuff. There are managers who put not making mistakes first - as a result they never do anything valuable. Therapists and psychologists hear an endless stream of people moaning what's wrong with their lives, and assume that everything would be all right if those things weren't wrong. Unfortunately, you can be in a relationship with honesty, compassion, respect, understanding, trust, communication and compatibility, and it can be as dull as ditchwater.

This is because hygiene factors are things that people give as a reason for dissatisfaction: the staff toilets don't work, the pay is too low, he keeps lying to me, she plays all these games, we can't talk, I feel invisible. These things may be wrong, and one may be the final straw. Get them right and you won't make the staff productive or the relationship zing. To do that, you have to do Good Stuff. It turns out that if you do enough Good Stuff, a lot of the hygiene irritations fade away. Now go find a guru to tell you about the Good Stuff in a good relationship. You won't find much, and that's for a reason.

What makes a good relationship is: sex, having fun and doing off-beat things together, or not doing anything together because, well, who cares because you're together. In-jokes are good, as is a generally up-beat attitude. Compatible energy levels and cycles are good as well, so you slump together and are zippy together. The bit where she walks in the room and you feel better? That's important.

You knew all that. And you know as well as I do that the Daily Grind (work-eat-sleep-commute) grinds it down after about a year. Children kill it. Even without kids, your energy cycles get out of sync, you stop having sex, and that's it. The rest of your life is all about housekeeping, time management and damage limitation. I see very few up-beat couples these days - mostly they look irritated and tired. Why would I want to join them? I've been cooking my own food and ironing my own shirts ever since I left home, I don't need help with daily life, and if I did, I'd hire a cleaner. Of course, if you have a lot of money and don't have to work six days a week to get it, if you have a lot of useful connections, if you have nearby family to baby-sit the kids, if you have a lot of friends and places to go at the weekends - then it can be different. But back in our real lives...

So if you stay for the Good Stuff, you'll be gone in a couple of years and you won't have children. When people didn't really have a choice about marriage and children, the mavens could afford to be honest. Now we have a choice, they can't. So the importance of fun is either passed over in silence or translated into empty new-age jargon like "passion" or "joy", and the life management stuff is played up as "adult" and "mature" and bringing the rewards of "intimacy".

Let me be blunt. "Intimacy" is a crock, like "happiness". It's the consolation prize, and while it's better than being in an abusive, indifferent or mis-matched relationship, so is living on your own.

What do I want from a relationship? Good conversation. Sex. A fellow-conspirator. Someone to do stuff with, from movies to cooking to holidays to hanging out. Someone who is going to make my life more fun or interesting when they are in it, and who is under no obligation to stay when the moment is over.

And if your inner therapist is itching to ask "why are you so frightened of intimacy, of sharing yourself" the real answer is this: because I have a short attention span, because I get bored real quick, and because the chances of you and I having anything much in common to have fun over are, to a first approximation, zero. It's not that I'm frightened of sharing myself with you, it's that I'm frightened you'll bore me, and I won't be able to get away fast enough. But I'm too polite to tell you that, so I make self-deprecating noises that you and the therapists interpret as low self-esteem or far of intimacy.

Free-Will vs Determinism: The Hidden Trap

There's an article about some work by experimental philosophers in the New York Times on 3QuarksDaily. It's one of the usual suspects: do we have moral responsibility in a deterministic universe? Apparently if you ask a lot of people, they will say 'no' if it's about the abstract question, 'no' if it's about cheating on taxes, but seventy per cent will say 'yes' if you're going to kill your wife so you can live with your secretary. I'm not sure what this proves, except that a lot of people aren't very good at conceptual thinking, which we already kinda knew.

Anyway, I found myself muttering, the trick is in the question. If it's a determinist universe, it can't have human beings in it. Because human beings have free will. It's not up to me to prove that free will or moral responsibility makes sense in a determinist universe, because they don't, but then neither does the concept of human being make sense in a determinist universe. It's for the determinist to construct a concept of a human being without free will that we recognise as human.

Because what does anyone mean by "determinist"? What it can't mean is that "living beings have no free will" because then the whole thing dissolves into a tautology. However, I think that's exactly what ordinary people and a lot of philosophers do mean. There's Laplace's idea of the Universe as a giant clockwork mechanism, which amounts to saying that the solutions to the equations of motion of any given ensemble of particles are given by analytic functions (which are identical with their Taylor series and therefore can be calculated at any point when it is known at one). You can only prove that if the True Equations of Motion only have solutions in analytic functions, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you can't do that for a set of equations of motion consistent with the current known laws of physics.

I'm going to say this: the determinist can't provide a coherent account of what a morality-negating, free-will removing "determinism" might be, without making free will depend on ghosts, spirits and immaterial consciousness to provide free will. In other words, they can't equate "determinist" with "material" and then claim free will is ruled out by the material bit. They have to explain how there can be free will in a material universe (or how even spooky stuff is determined) and then how that kind of universe is ruled out.

Like CJ Craig says: deny the assumption in the question.

As for "experimental philosophy" - stayed tuned

Gone In Six Seconds - I Hope They Enjoyed My Money

I've been taking cash out of cashpoints (cashpoints are run by banks, ATM's are run by other companies) since, oh, the first one was introduced. Which is a good few years. The other week, I became That Guy. I went up to a cashpoint run by the Nat West on Shaftesbury Avenue at Piccadilly Circus, keyed in my PIN, took the card, and apparently I walked away without taking the money. I have no memory of it. I didn't notice I hadn't taken the money until I came to pay for a magazine in a newsagent on Berwick Street. So back I went, not to see if the money was there, because the machine takes it back after a not very long time. Five or six seconds, according to the bank teller in the branch.

You don't get your money back. What I didn't do was cuss at myself for being an idiot and tell myself that I was useless and my life is a total fuck-up. I used to do that, and over stuff way less costly. I did wonder exactly how a) pre-occupied I was or b) just how badly the pollen is affecting me. I'm not going to starve because of it. I can shrug at it now.

Someone took the money, and they saw it and took it in less than about ten seconds. I hope they enjoyed it.

The Need for Civil Unrest

Sunday morning I drove up to Piccadilly and went to my gym - just because I have a guilty conscience about doing nothing all day. What I saw as I walked along Piccadilly was some paint spattered on the pavements and a few broken windows. These had been targeted: Lloyds Bank had broken windows and paint, Barclays' plate glass was untouched. Of the two banks, Barclays, home of multi-millionaire tax evasion experts Barclays Capital, is by far the worse corporate citizen, but Lloyds is the one that got conned into buying Halifax / Bank of Scotland and taking billions of pounds of "government support" aka "Chinese savings". (There are a handful of countries with net savings - all borrowing is ultimately from them - and China is the largest.) Actually, they should have broken the windows of Sir Victor Blank's and Eric Daniels' mansions - they were the Lloyds senior managers who decided with their egos rather than their brains.

The British establishment is all over the place. How dare a few "anarchists" defile property? Read the reports in the press: the outrage descends into bathos as you look at the targets: John Lewis, the Ritz, Fortnum and Mason. Not hospitals, not fire stations, not surgeries, but some retailers. That isn't "property" - it's a plate glass window, shop fittings and some signage. It's insured. It gets torn out and replaced every eighteen months anyway. The cost of cleaning up the damage is about one millisecond's profits for the owners.

For the French, of course, a few broken windows is nothing. The French don't even blink when they tear up roads or dump cowshit all over motorways. They know how to give a protest in France. In this country, we've only had one French-scale political riot - the Poll Tax riots of 1990 - and something truly terrible happened: it worked. Governments of both colors have lived in fear of a riot like that happening again. Because in a British democracy, the people must never be allowed directly to change political policy. Control of the process must be in the hands of the political class and the process must only respond those who are committed to its continued existence. This is elementary stuff. It means a million people can march and as long as they don't actually make the headlines, it doesn't matter. Let one of them break the windows of a corporate behemoth and that's news. Popular, organised protest must therefore be neutered (peaceful, not newsworthy) or marginalised (newsworthy but the work of "anarchists").

I'm all for violent protest - if that violence is directed towards the property and senior management of the guilty parties. Not the employees. Not your pet-hate coffee shop chain. Not a looting expedition. The actual guilty parties: tax dodgers, bribers, outsourcers, debt-laden utilities who can't even fix water pipes, and so on. Read an issue of Private Eye or look at the Coalition of Resistance or UK Uncut. I don't take part because I'm too old and I can't do the time.

Violent civil unrest is also a tit-for-tat. Because when the government takes money from your income to pay for bail-outs or wars you didn't vote for, it's mugging you. That's violence. It might be by Direct Debit, but it's still violence - the use of force to achieve an aim.

Janet Woititz' Relationship Questions (And My Answers)

Janet Woititz wrote the standard book on ACoA's. I read it about every six months and find something different or react differently to something every time - which is how it should be. These questions were in the section about dealing with the difficulty ACoA's have with "intimate relationships". The questions are in italics, my comments aren't.

Vulnerability: to what degree am I willing to let down my barriers? To what degree am I willing to let the other person affect my feelings? What you're seeing are the barriers I put around my time: I have a short attention span and a really low boredom threshold. And I used to let other people get to me far too much: now I'm much better at not obsessing.

Understanding. Do I understand the other person? Do I understand what they mean by what they say and do? Being a man, I don't read minds and I don't do girl-games - which explains a lot about my failed sex life. So if you speak plainly, then yes. And if you speak in riddles and allusions, then no. Do I want a relationship with someone who speaks in riddles and allusions? Sounds cute, could get tiresome really quickly.

Empathy: to what extent am I able to allow myself to feel what they feel? Empathy is one of those ancient Greek ideas that hasn't travelled well. I cannot feel what you are feeling any more than I can taste what you are tasting: the closest we can get is to eat the same fish. If you're ever seen one person walk away from a redundancy interview cheerful (lots of money and they're out of there) while the next was shattered (who cares about the money, where am I going to go?) you will know this to be true. And if what you're feeling is a gross over-reaction and toxic waste, why do I want to feel it?

Compassion: do I have a genuine concern for the issues that cause the other person concern? Actually, that isn't compassion - which is about reacting with sympathy to other people's bad luck and suffering, in which case see previous paragraph. I'm a co-dependent, I used to love doing that - to an unhealthy extent. I stop myself before I get more than a couple of steps down that line, and I'm better for it. Again, it depends on what the issue is: it would be totally messed-up to share their concern with immanent nuclear war, and who would want a relationship with someone like that?

Respect: do I treat the other person as if they are of value? We may have different ideas of what "respect" is. If I argue with you, that means I think you're worth bothering with. If I'm polite to you, that means I don't think you're worth the effort. A lot of people think that "respect" means I nod along while they talk crap.

Trust: to what degree and on what levels am I willing to let the other person gain access to the things about me that I don't want everyone to know? If I think you can be trusted to keep your mouth shut, yes. Trust like that has to be earned, not given. This answer is the only correct one. 

Acceptance: am I okay the way I am? Is my partner? If "okay" means "I don't need to get fitter / smarter / better dressed / more polite / lighter / more informed / more charming company / whatever" then I am proud to say I am not okay and I wouldn't want a partner who thought they were either. If this question really means is: "am I a hyper-critical, picky, never-satisfied, moaning bitch?" then the answer is no.

Honesty: is this relationship built on truth, or are there games involved? I was a Nine, so everyone's relationships with me were built on their instantaneous expectations, which were entirely of their own invention. And when they found out I wasn't what they wanted me to be, they walked away, and there was no relationship. 

Communication: are we able to talk freely about issues that are important in the relationship? Do we know how to do it so we are understood and the relationship goes forward as a result of the sharing?  Part one: as much as anybody else is. Part two: only a charlatan pushing a magical communication cure would guarantee that a "relationship goes forward" after every revelation, unless you count divorce as "forward". 

Compatibility: to what degree do we like and dislike the same things? To what degree does it matter if we differ in certain attitudes and beliefs? I have minority tastes in everything. I can guarantee we have almost nothing in common.

Personal integrity: to what degree am I able to maintain myself as well as offer to the other person? You mean, do I wind up doing things I don't want to do and hating myself afterwards? Not very often. 

Consideration: Am I mindful of the the other person's needs as well as my own? What needs? For endless support and re-assurance? For a captive to go drinking with? It tells you something about my experience and life that I'm not sure I've run across anyone with a need that wasn't "needy".  Unless they just needed to know the way to Leicester Square.

And On The Seventh Day I Rest... It Seems

Every Friday I make plans for the weekend, which usually include watching a movie and doing something on Sunday, and every Sunday I do absolutely nothing. I wake up, sometimes at a silly hour like 06:30, and potter around, and at no time do I experience any desire to leave my front door. Not even to go to the local Cineworld.

I listen to CD's on my wonderful Marantz PM / CD 6003 set-up: today I went through a bunch of John Taverner CD's: The Protecting Veil, Song for Athene, and the Choral Works. I read, browse the web or work on some blog posts. I don't even do e-mails. I cook lunch, which I eat while watching an episode or two on my equally wonderful Sony Blu-Ray + Bravia TV set-up. Today it was four episodes of series two of Lie To Me, during which I did Windows updates on the netbook. This merges into afternoon tea, or in this case hot chocolate with toast and jam. I'm currently listening to a bunch of Wagner highlights on CD while ripping some CD's to go on the Nano I use at work.

It's been like this for quite a while. The grey skies do not make me want to leave the front door. Yesterday was a sunny-blue Saturday and I went for a walk in Virginia Water, some shopping, sat in the sun-trap reading Art and Text and saw The Lincoln Lawyer at the local Cineworld. Not today.

I used to do quite a bit more, but then I wasn't working in central London, so it was a treat to see and art show, watch a movie, browse round Foyles and have tea in Soho. Now that's where I work and what I do in the evening. Maybe I need the Day of Rest. And maybe what I need it from isn't so much central London as trains and crowds, and all those housework-y, life-managing things. Which would make sense. I do wake up on Monday feeling, let's say, more ready for the fight than I was Saturday evening.