Go On, Be Fickle. Well, You Can If You Want, It's Up To You. Unless....

As is often the case, I recently got embroiled in a conversation which ended up turning into a rather spiky argument (I think it was about the question of porn on the internet). I became over-involved, took everything personally and ended up shouting loudly in the pub, much to the sympathetic disdain of other people in the vicinity (I might add that despite often shouting and gesticulating like a drunkard, I had only had one pint, it's just my way).


Why am I telling you this?  What do you care about my porn views?


I am telling you because I realised, after the intensity of the conversation reached a level of awkwardness that even I could perceive, and piped down a bit, that the line of argument I had taken bore almost no resemblance to my true views.  Yet I had been arguing for them with such ferocity that I had, for that moment at least, truly believed that that was my reality.

I realised that I am a Pathological Devil's Advocate.

I wrote recently that the truest form of love that I could describe was where you and your partner attempted to carve out a worldview together.  I reasoned that it was perhaps easier to have a bounceback boy - someone to check and iron out your responses to the world, in order to better understand it.  This is typically expressed (particularly in my house) in the form of outrageously overwordy arguments.  When we emerge, blinking, from the Argument Tunnel, I often become aware of how far I have strayed from the bounds of my own perceived opinion.  Having berated myself for a long time for my lack of commitment, my slutty morals if you will, I have come to realise that complete fluidity of opinion is much truer to the nature of Reality than we give it credit for.

Welcome to Diesel Island - Land of the Stupid and Home of the Brave

Our society is geared to the individual, to the self.  We are our lifework.  We are our greatest achievements.  (Luckily there is a whole panoply of consumer durables available Right Now at Half Price with a Red Sticker On to aid us in our odyssey, but this isn't a blog about the hypocrisy of capitalism, however this article in Bloomsberg Businessweek both supports and posits a fantastic alternative use for this profit-driven selfishness.)  We are all to strive to better ourselves, and we do this by whittling a personality out of the lumpen mass of our childhood.  How could you possible engage as a socialised, educated, worldly individual unless you have an arsenal of Opinions at your disposal?  Why don't you care about Issues?  Come on, look at them - we will Clockwork Orange you in front of Newsnight if you don't Form Some Opinions About Current Events Right Now!

I believe that we are entirely mistaken in this.

If you have paid attention to the world for anything up to one minute, it becomes very clear that nothing is certain at all.  (Yes, yes, uncertainty and death, fine, you can have those.)

Famous old hag/hot lady picture to demonstrate visual paradoxes

Everything which is true is almost always feasibly untrue at the same time.  The colossal ball-ache of politics is that it tries to separate and create distinction in the infinite gloopy cloud of our reality.  You can literally pick an arbitrary startpoint on any Big Topic - immigration, healthcare, education, foreign policy, warfare - the list is endless - and immediately the opposite is also conceivably true.  Perhaps the opposite view feels uncomfortable, wrong, even, but someone out there thinks that, there will be reasoning behind that view, and therefore the concept can legitimately stand.  (This is where Kantian ethics, in particular his Categorical Imperative - Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law - i.e. if you cannot justify murder as a universal law for all, then you must not murder in any circumstances - sounds reasonable, but the current brouhaha surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden, for example, shows clearly that this kind of dichotomy falls away pretty rapidly in the face of Reality.  There are very few Universals.)


Hold on! you cry, that can't be right! The Nazis had a well-argued manifesto but we have universally condemned them as wrong!  What are you talking about?  Why aren't I entitled to my opinions?


Well, hush your beak, for a start, I haven't finished.  The trick of living as a Devil's Advocate is that, if you truly embody a point of view, any point of view, outside of judgement, even for ten minutes, then you have a sense of the other side, a frame of reference from which to sketch out something which feels relevant for you.  Opinion-forming is a personal and malleable thing - what is true for me today is not necessarily going to be true for me tomorrow, but that doesn't make me a shallow, unprincipled person.  Indeed, as Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) said:

Each man calls barbarism what is not his own practice, for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in. 

It is infinitely easier to condemn what is unknown rather than try to understand.  Even "evil" has a rationale.  

Perhaps it isn't so strange that it is so difficult to form views, to cement opinions.  If, as I have said before, the value and clout of science often comes from its being upheld consensually by many, then the closest form of "Truth" we can admit is one which has been proven, calculated and agreed upon by many separate experts, each in their turn having tried to disprove it before acquiescing.  One of the most controversial but niggling "truths" that the 20th century coughed up was Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, explained here by Professor Jim Al-Khalili (whose Everything and Nothing you should watch to see quantum mechanics explained with the flair and cinematography of a Darren Aronofsky film).

If, at the very heart of existence there exists an infinity of uncertainty, then it seems somewhat naive to doggedly be chasing certainty throughout our lives, because it doesn't exist.

The Zen Buddhists' famous paradoxes or koans (the tree falling in the forest guys) thought that the acceptance of the inherent unknowableness of the Universe was the quickest, truest and most profound way to Enlightenment - these simple and enigmatic statements cannot be understood by using conventional logic or the part of the brain that seeks certainty - it can only come about through letting go of our reliance on certainty, a deep questioning of all that we take to be real.  


This, ultimately, is at the heart of all scientific enquiry - we cannot rest on our laurels (as the religious do, because it is written) of our description of reality, we have to keep imagining what might be, what is not, what is unlikely, what is not yet proven, in order to keep pushing forward what we know about the Universe.  Here is the almighty Richard Feynman speaking in 1983 about the need for a creative imagination in order to test the limits of theory (which in some cases have subsequently been proven - for example his speculation on the origins of quasars, which we have now discovered and proven) - this is the first part of two on Youtube, but for a clearer and more comprehensive archive of his most inspirational lectures please visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/feynman/10704.shtml.

So, by playing Devil's Advocate, by loosening your attachments to your opinions and choosing to stand on the other side from what you take to be true, even just for the duration of an argument, is most important indeed, both in terms of reflecting the true nature of the world, and also in terms of its future, for unless we make wild imaginative leaps from time to time, criss-crossing from Right to Left and everywhere in between, we may never grow and we will never learn to tolerate those who differ from us.  As Feynman says: "You can sort of stand in the middle and enjoy everything both ways."


That sounds like much more fun, after all...

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.
Voltaire 1694 - 1778

Your Soul Is Made of Money

I was musing over the state of my life the other night while trying to get to sleep, and I realised something quite profound.  I realised that every single regret I have, every missed opportunity and moment I wish I could have extended, is at heart down to a lack of money.  Money is the thing which enables life to happen in so many more ways than we like to admit to.  You have money and you are a successful citizen, you can pay your bills, improve your education and that of your children, you will dress well, eat well, travel well, experience much more of life than those without money.  I would very much like to be able to talk about the wealth of experience, spritual and otherwise, which is afforded outside of the magnetic pulse of cashflow, but I fear it is pretty much impossible in the society we have built for ourselves.  Even those who meditate can afford to take time out to stop working for enough time to transcend themselves. 

Is this right?  What are we to infer, for example, from new government policy  - that millionaire overseas businesspeople can enter the country and have normal visa requirements streteched to accommodate them, and, it seems, essentially act with impunity, simply because they have a shitload of cash - other than the clear notion that one's value is inextricable from one's wealth. 

Niall Ferguson (the most smouldering of Historian Bonfires) is currently on Channel 4 fronting a show called "Civilisation: The West vs The Rest", in which he expounds his at times bone-crunchingly honest views about the nature of empire, with the cold yet inexpressibly hot arrogance of a man of complete objectivity (so far as such a thing is possible).  This Sunday's episode, Work, discussed the Protestant Work Ethic as the driving force behind economic growth and modernisation - potentially over 30 million Chinese have moved away from Confucianism and Buddhism (less kerching! more I Ching) towards Protestantism since Mao died, for example, which, Ferguson argues, is one of the main reasons why Chinese ecomonic growth has been so consolidated and so fast, as it once was in Europe and America. 

Once you kill God then what do you have left?  You have man. 
Once you kill the primacy of the Pope, then what do you have left?  You have man as an individual. 

Damien Hirst's The Death of God - Towards a Better Understanding of Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools, a collection of 28 sculptures and paintings first presented at Hilario Galguera, Mexico in 2006.

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125

When every moment of your life is no longer controlled by edicts from On High, you must introduce a system of self-regulation, which was actually already very neatly done by the twin Protestant towers of hard work and renunciation of material wealth in order to glorify God.  Whereas Europeans used the scientific and philosophical freedoms this world eventually afforded them to experience an almighty existential crisis, the Americans kept the faith but inadvertently fell either into abject greed, or else religious extremism (see last week's post), yet China (so far at least) seems to have maintained some modicum of self-control, saving and investing and building and, subsequently, terrifying the West with its shimmering potential. 

The largest Christian church in Beijing, China http://bit.ly/g9ZhIu

So the question is this: are we content to only take the death of God so far?  I have spoken before about the beauty and ubiquity of myth, story, advernture and legend until very very recently.  The vacuousness and stale, dried-up sick on a Sunday morning vibe of modern Western Europe is such that we end up going through the motions of worship, exhausted as we all are by the compunction to work, but devoid of the glory that working for a God brings.  Guess we're all our own Gods now.

Jonny Depp as Jesus at http://www.magazine13.com/if-celebrities-were-gods/

Can we come up with something which can unite and inspire us, drive us forward into a future, rather than allow ourselves to get so far and give up?  I had a conversation with a Professor of Philospophy the other day who expounded the ontological argument - look at how complex this watch is, we musty infer a maker, look at how complex the universe is, there must also be a maker - genuinely thought we had gotten over that idea at least 250 years ago - and he represented what is true about all religion which falsely purports to belong to the Waking World.  This is what we know, they say, here is what is proved.  Here is what we do not know, they say, and this is what is God.  They pay no mind to the fact that their mentality, if shared by everyone, would have meant a complete and utter lack of scientific, humanitarian, techonological and intellectual growth.  It is only by the constant reduction of God's power (i.e. finding out that which we do not yet know) that we move forwards.  As I have said before, progress in civilisation is not a one way ticket - we can Decline and Fall just like everyone else.  We have gone so far as to realise some truths which do not necessarily make us feel comforted and cherished - the lack of specialness, the loss of the Holy Parent, whatever this may be - but it seems that we are now those embarrassing teenagers who still get into bed with mommy and daddy after a bad dream.  We should be brave enough not to regress into ever more fervent religiosity, or a rejection of the merits of science, and stand on the plateau, shaking our fists into the sky and fucking daring ourselves to be scared in the face of the truth. 

If we don't work out how to do that, then we have died in the water, like so many dead sardines or birds fallen from the sky.