Elliptica

Goodbye, and Thank You

2009-03-08T12:18:00.000-07:00

It's time for me to end this blog -- I think for good. The flimsiness of its anonymity has always felt like a liability, and the truth is I simply don't feel like posting any more.

Stuff is happening in my life at the moment. A lot of the groundwork for that stuff was laid with some help from this blog, which was a sounding board, a creative outlet, and a means to connect with some wise and wonderful people. Not for the first time, I'd like to thank C. L. Hanson for some unconventional common sense on sex and feminism, and the Exterminator for some encouragingly useful poetry feedback. I thank L. L. Barkat for her open friendliness and a window into a different viewpoint, and the chaplain for commenting sometimes when no-one else did. And Ebonmuse -- dare I say that you enriched my life gratuitously? I didn't need your blog, I just happened upon it and couldn't stop drinking it up (I think I'm still responsible for a couple of hits per day, even though I don't comment as much). Then I must thank Joffan and Eshu, who I remember engaging with in the comment section, and of course all the Nonbelieving Literati contributors -- and I must thank and apologise to everyone else who I have neglected to mention. Although I've stopped writing, I haven't stopped reading, so you may find me commenting now and again.

Sorry, this is sounding like an Oscar acceptance speech, but it's heartfelt. I have gained so much from all of you.

Now, I always meant to blog about this clip from Doctor Who, and by luck the BBC have put it on Youtube almost exactly as I wanted it. Regrettably, it cannot be embedded, so if you wish to watch it, please disregard the youtube title. It is in fact the creation of the Earth, not the Universe, and it's a wonderful exposition of humanist philosophy, too.

No, but that's what you do, the human race. Make sense out of chaos! Marking it out with weddings and Christmas and calendars!

Yes. Yes, and blog posts. This blog has helped me to mark out a few things, but now its time is done. Goodbye, and thank you all.

Eliot, Woolf, Plath, Mitchell...

2009-02-21T13:04:00.000-08:00

I live and exist through art.

The older I get, and the further I get from my rebellious pre-teen years, the more it seems like my identity and existence are defined through my interactions with others. To be a thing, I must communicate, and no meaningful self can be communicated without artistry.

Further complications arise both from my liberal upbringing and from the near-proverbial "changing times" in which we live. In a conservative society, the basics of identity come from ideas which are well-known to all and easy to communicate: gender, religion, social class, familial relationships. By contrast, in a more liberal society, such things must always be in a state of flux.

Personally, I find that it's the changing status of women that affects me most. Partly this is due to being a woman in a male-dominated field, but mostly I would like to cantankerously blame it on the fact that nearly every notion of feminine sexuality out there either stinks or doesn't suit me. Creativity is clearly called for.

I look back gratefully to the strident feminists who fought for space, who took principled stands and rejected all that came before. Yet I must also bow before the artists who filled that space, borrowing from the culture that feminists repudiated even as they showed how it was flawed or how it might be changed. I'm thinking of George Eliot, whose women accepted the social order and yet you could always see how it was wrong for them. I'm thinking of Virginia Woolf, who could sneak female sexual desire in behind literary curtains. Sylvia Plath, whose self-absorption preserved a somewhat unconventional femininity that others might borrow from if they wished. All three of them had skills that took them far beyond the subject of femininity, yet all three of them could fold in their womanhood as they understood it. For all three of them, that womanhood was cutting edge.

In the past five decades, novelists and singer-songwriters have pasted cutting-edge pictures of womanhood all over the map. I admire Joni Mitchell, who has an unquestioned strength behind her self-questioning. Then there's k. d. lang, who was, I think, my first introduction to the way the queer movement completely redefined sex. The women in many of Anne McCaffrey's novels seem to be inhabiting a different universe (funnily enough...). Sometimes I wish I lived there.

None of what has gone before me is enough. I have a task to do; I believe that every woman does. Perhaps every man does, too. But I look on in awe at the creativity and courage of men and women, past and present. They are my inspiration and my light.

Letters

2009-01-17T18:10:00.000-08:00

Dear Orchid,

I didn't know what it was you needed. In fact, I still don't. Did I give you too much water, or too little? Is the controlled environment indoors too warm at night? Do you need sunlight on the windowsill rather than artificial light, or would the sunlight fry you? Was the statement on your packaging about fertilizer a command rather than a suggestion?

I realise, of course, that it's probably too late by now. I should not have kept thinking your remaining leaves would save you. I guess now all I can do is hope that you don't turn into a metaphor for something more important.

Sincerely,

Lynet.

***

Dear Blog,

We've been limping along for a while now, haven't we? I was considering just resurrecting you for the Nonbelieving Literati, but then LL made that cool suggestion, so I kind of had to do that, too.

I guess we're still friends, funny old blog.

Love,

Lynet.

***

Dear Readers,

This post from Ebonmuse made me feel really guilty, a while back. My blog is a shambles. I'm not going to tidy it, either. All I can say is this: I appreciate you dropping by, occasionally, and when I'm not here there's a fair chance I'm over at your place, reading very quietly and commenting if I've got something to say.

I wish you all a happy new year.

Lynet.

Lying

2009-01-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

Currently the Nonbelieving Literati are writing posts about, or in response to, The Postman by David Brin.

The Postman takes place in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. After wars and famines and the breakdown of civilisation, people have -- yes, I'll say the word -- they have lost faith. They don't believe in their fellow human beings any more. People band into groups whose attitude to outsiders varies from apathetic to completely ruthless. The social contract has broken down. There's no point in showing compassion to a stranger who might never be able to repay -- who might, in fact, be much more likely to simply take advantage of your weakness to steal the things that you need to survive and leave you to die. So Gordon Krantz struggles across America as a sort of wandering minstrel, trading scraps of half-remembered Shakespeare for small things where he can and trying to survive off food found in the wilderness and valuables salvaged from the shattered cities, and finds himself, as the book begins, just about to enter Oregon.

Perhaps because of its distance from the major trouble spots in the war, or perhaps just because enough time has passed since the destruction, Oregon is the most civilised place that Gordon has seen. It's a borderland. Times are harsh, but the potential for civilisation bubbles around the edges. It only takes one thing to make a big bubble of civilisation.

All it takes is a lie.

Gordon's lie is initially inadvertant. He's found an old postman's uniform and he needs the clothing. Stopping at a little village he finds that the people there are nice to him because of it. He offers a nice reminder of the old world they miss. They give him food, a soft bed, even sex. They also give him letters.

Gordon Krantz, in his small way, has been trying to peddle hope for a while now. Maybe that's why he's chosen to try to survive through a little one-man show, through art. He doesn't like lying, but hey, the next village is rougher and the people are nastier and he starts to feel like maybe lying to people like that would be justified. So he blazes right in as an official of the Restored United States. It's a scam. But he has the letters to prove it, and by life-saving luck, one of the ones from the previous village is to an old relative, now living in this village.

Soon Gordon has convinced others to become postal officials of this 'Restored United States' (It's too far off to communicate with us, just take the existence on faith. After all, I'm here, aren't I?). There's a whole chain of post offices, restoring communications between people who thought they'd lost each other and bringing the hope of civilisation wherever they go.

Then Gordon discovers that his lie is not the only one. There's a whole other civilisation further along, based on the hope of technology -- and on a big lie supporting that hope.

Partway through the book, Gordon starts to wonder if America was a lie to begin with. "We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . " Really? Are you sure about that?

Is justice a lie? Are we lying to ourselves when we think that there exists a true notion of justice? Mercy, charity, morality -- are these lies? If so, then they are lies which make all our lives better and happier and more worthwhile, and my commitment to the truth must be hampered by my love and respect for such notions. But perhaps they are not lies. Perhaps we can say that morality and charity and justice exist because we believe in them. They are ideas, and ideas exist only in the human mind as a matter of course.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is not that the Restored United States is a lie, but that the mere idea of such a thing can cause so many true and good things to spring up. It's a sort of stone soup. The real substance is given by the people themselves.

What will save us? We will. But do we need to be lied to in order for that to happen?

The Land of High Metaphor

2008-11-25T11:52:00.000-08:00

Plain-language poems are easiest. Say it honestly, say it in verse, say it without obvious contrivances of rhyme or style and you've done well. But once you enter metaphor-land, well, it's a bit like pulp science fiction. Anything is possible, but not everything is advisable. "You have eyes like vampire fangs," I once wrote of a man. It was true, but a bit lurid, and the poem it was part of had every pitfall of free verse, from ramblingness to, yes, metaphors shoved in purely for the purpose of reminding you that this is a poem rather than just some stuff I felt like getting off my chest.

In improv there's this idea known as the absurdity curve. Those new to improv -- the brave sort, rather than the ones who start off hiding in a corner -- occasionally enter a scene and jump straight off the wall:

"Hello, Jess."

"Hello, Joe. Here, help me move this crate."

"Okay."

"Oh, no! An octopus just fell on my head!"

Now don't get me wrong, this can be a great way to approach improv when you're new to it. Just jump out there and say whatever and don't be afraid to look silly. However, as you get slightly better at it, it's as well to develop a little more finesse. The idea of a 'rising absurdity curve' is that you start a scene with the small and ordinary. If you do introduce anything remarkable at the beginning, you take the time to establish it. But sudden dramatic events do not happen until later in the scene, as you reach the climax, at which point elements of the story that seemed normal earlier can and do blossom into full-blown absurdities.

Poetry doesn't have a set 'curve' of the sort that improvisers are taught to consider. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of a vivid metaphor really does depend on context. A poem might go with the improv curve, starting with the ordinary and deepening into metaphor as it draws you in. If you do start with a strong metaphor, you might need to broaden and establish it to make it seem at home. And, as I said at the beginning, sometimes you'd do just as well to leave the metaphors out altogether.

So anyway, I'm fiddling with a memory that I'd love to put into poetry. I write

I never saw a man so golden
as you were, lying by my side.

It's a shoddy approximation of what I felt, but the tone is right. I can't really go anywhere with it, though. I'm writing about something I don't understand. I don't have enough angles. Reluctantly, I give up on describing the exact feeling and decide perhaps I'll just put a little of that in a poem that includes some other stuff.

Late one night, when I'm supposed to be going to sleep, I hammer out a couple of lines that capture so much more of it.

The dawn that rose when I awoke tonight
was only in the halo of your hair.

I can't abandon those lines. They work. It's just that they set a level of metaphor that's going to be jolly hard to keep up with sensibly. This isn't going to be a plain-language poem. Look out, darlin', you're in the Land of High Metaphor. Whatcha gonna do to continue that? Bring out the octopi?

I've started in High Metaphor and now I need substance. Lots and lots of substance, because metaphor, if done well, can eat up substance like nothing else. It's a powerful and dense way of expressing things. One of the reasons I'm finding this so hard to write is that I'm expressing something remarkable that I haven't felt before. It's in the 'Whisky Tango Foxtrot' subgenre of love poetry. However, there have been several times in my life when I've felt something remarkable that I haven't felt before, so I have a better handle on that part of it than on the feeling itself. That helps. I might be able to use that in the poem, but, of course, this now means I'm negotiating two dangers. On the one hand we have Scylla the octopus. On the other hand we have Charybdis, the never ending whirlpool which consists of saying things in a poem like "I don't know how to say it" or "words cannot express this". If words can't express it, why are you trying, dude? Give up and start writing drippy pop songs instead.

It's been a few months, now, but so far I've been able to build this:

The dawn was rising when I woke, tonight,
but only in the halo of your hair,
and I, bemused, perceiving by its light
a whole horizon waiting for me there,
say nothing. I am waiting for a phrase
to catch some faithful gleam inside the haze.

If I could always have a minute more
to stay within the compass of your hand,
then by your touch and mine I could explore
the whole of you and I, and understand
the half-remembered dreams that shimmer through
this little world that takes its light from you.

Jumping the Broom

2008-11-05T19:42:00.000-08:00

In marriage, let communion of the mind
meet with your bodies on the earthy ground,
and as the ordinary days unwind,
embrace the roses where they may be found.
Together, let your understanding grow.
Have patience when you think you've grown apart.
I revel in the joy and love you show,
and give you my support with all my heart.
By lies and lucre, in a narrow race,
today we lost a battle in this land,
and you may think your love must hide its face.
Well, let me speak for those who understand.
For better, for worse, whatever may arise,
have hope. Lovers, be married in our eyes.

Grad Student Election Night

2008-11-05T16:45:00.000-08:00

Slightly altered excerpt from my most recent email home:

There were two tubes of paint: one red, one blue. The rule was, generally, that you couldn't paint the state on the map until CNN had called it. Occasionally, polls would close all at once and CNN would call several as soon as they closed -- I guess when their exit polling made them sure. Illinois, for instance, turned blue immediately. By contrast, North Carolina stayed yellow on the screen and white on our map for as long as I was there.

The plan was that we would start watching Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart on Comedy Central at 7pm. Perhaps that might have worked in previous years, when the outcome took forever, but I left to go make myself some dinner before it started, and when I got back the room was full of people and the grudging consensus seemed to be that it was better to be watching CNN. If nothing else, the information on CNN was visible despite the noise in there, but the election jokes on Comedy Central weren't. Besides, things were moving fast. Obama had more than two hundred electoral college votes. People were sharing their voting stories: when they voted, how long the lines were. The polls in California closed at 8pm, our time. CNN was counting down, and we counted down with it: "Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six! Five! Four! Three! . . ." CNN's screen suddenly whirled away from the countdown ". . . Two! One!" we shouted, and the room bubbled with applause and cheers, as CNN, having called California immediately, called the race for Obama, and someone stepped up to the map to paint California blue.

It was about then that the pizza arrived. Nobody was leaving yet. You could see a slight smugness on people's faces whenever we switched over to Fox News while CNN had advertisements.

We had a respectful silence for McCain's concession speech. There were nods and occasional slight applause. The only flicker of tension was after he had finished, as Sarah Palin walked past the microphone. "Don't let her speak!" someone yelled. She didn't.

Then we waited. The crowds in Chicago were going wild for I don't know how long as we chatted and wondered how Obama's speech would go. What's he like, now that he's won? We had silence again for the President Elect, but it wasn't the same silence. There was an edge of resistance. This speaker had newfound authority. We listened critically. We had a few smiles and applause through the thanks, especially as Obama's campaign manager was mentioned, and patient silence as Obama said that those who thought real change could never come were now proved wrong.

Then Obama's speech got Presidential, honest about the challenges as he asked for the support of the whole nation and pulled his central campaign message of hope into a faith that America would get through the financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He stepped boldly into the leadership vacuum and we listened. We listened without noticing or caring how we were listening until Obama got into the recitation of what one century-old woman had seen through her life, and the challenges she and the country had faced in that time. By the third 'Yes we can", some guy over to the right was repeating it back with a parodic edge: "yes-we-CAN!" Obama was losing us; we were still mostly quiet, but we shifted a bit, until Obama mentioned how science had connected the whole world, and someone at the back yelled "Science!" and we all grinned.

Yeah, we'll be there, Mr. President Elect. Just don't ask us to recite slogans.

Over and out.

Atheism

2008-10-29T21:38:00.001-07:00

Imagination suffers, being free.
The real world gets more curious with time.
So play with method. Study how you see,
and by a prism
unweave the rainbow

and do not fear to write in red on lime,
but if the colour scatters carelessly
then look for method, metre, even rhyme,
and by a prison
shape a poem.

Yes, this is rainbow--poem, take 2.

[Edit: I've edited the title, because, staring at it after it was up, I realised that my original title of 'Humanism' mostly just fogged things up by linking it to a whole slew of ideas that were only partially related. Atheism has a much sharper denotation.

I don't know what it is about this poem that makes me so impulsive in posting it.]

If you tag people, people tag back . . .

2008-10-25T07:06:00.000-07:00

. . . which is why I'm now doing this atheist meme, courtesy of Susan over at Intrinsically Knotted.

Can you remember the day that you officially became an atheist?

Nope! If I'd wanted to stop being an atheist, that would have required an official change.

Do you remember the day you officially became an agnostic?

I remember being quite taken by the notion of agnosticism when I was eleven years old or so. I knew the term referred to God-belief but frankly, I was going through an ultra-skeptical phase and I wanted to be agnostic about the existence of everything besides myself. You see, my mother explained to me about Descartes when I was ten, and whilst Descartes' argument about the existence of God never seemed very sensible to me, I did go through a stage where the fact that it was possible to doubt almost everything was just fascinating.

How about the last time you spoke or prayed to God with actual thought that someone was listening?

I've never prayed with the belief that someone was listening. On the other hand, eight years old is the earliest time that I can remember others' belief in God bothering me, and one of the things that bothered me was the whole "if you don't believe you'll go to hell" line. I'm very sensitive to disapproval from authority, and even an imaginary authority who disapproved of me badly enough to condemn me to the worst punishment anyone could dream up was a really painful thought. So around that time I prayed quite a lot of "Dear God, if you exist, I'm really sorry I don't believe in you but I care about what's actually true and I'm honestly not doing this out of malice or anything . . ."

The last time I prayed in that sense was three years ago when I was twenty. That story is here and I don't really want to go over it again.

Did anger towards God or religion help cause you to be an atheist or agnostic?

Well, no, because I've pretty much always been one! Critical thinking, a love of the truth, and the simple fact that my parents didn't believe were the major factors, not necessarily in that order.

Getting angry with God for being so unreasonable as to dole out infinite punishments for finite crimes never helped me much in the whole internal "Gosh, there's an imaginary authority who really, really disapproves of me" debate, either. That debate stopped once I had been through the mill on that issue -- once I knew that I had been in a situation where I had a strong reason for wanting to believe. It was much less credible after that for me to worry that I was just disbelieving because I didn't want to change my worldview.

Here is a good one: Were you agnostic towards ghosts, even after you became an atheist?

I read a book about skeptics when I was quite young. I thought skeptics were awesome, running around finding the truth behind the lies. The notion that there were people for whom 'skeptic' was a doubtful classification implying an unwillingness to believe the truth never occurred to me. Mind you, the first person I heard saying 'skeptic' in a tone of voice that implied that it was something bad was 'psychic' Sylvia Brown, and she's got a mercenary reason to make that implication!

I never believed in ghosts.

Do you want to be wrong?

Very much not.

Okay, this time I tag John Evo, Maria, and Eshu. If you feel like doing a meme, go ahead and pick this one up.

Meme: Five ways blogging changed my life.

2008-10-20T01:38:00.000-07:00

This meme was begun by L. L. Barkat. The rules are as follows:

1. Write about 5 specific ways blogging has affected you, either positively or negatively.
2. link back to the person who tagged you
3. link back to this parent post (LL says she's "not so much interested in generating links, but rather in tracking the meme so I can perhaps do a summary post later on that looks at patterns and interesting discoveries.")
4. tag a few friends or five, or none at all
5. post these rules— or just have fun breaking them

LL didn't originally tag me for this meme, but she asked me to take part after remarking in a comment on this blog that she "created the report after reading a truckload of blogs and today realized the responding group was rather homogenous (read Christian)." Broadening the sample? I approve! Here goes, then.

I don't know that blogging has actually changed my life dramatically. Blogging has reflected my life. Important parts of my development have drawn on blogging to help them along. But, at least with some of them, if I didn't have a blog, I'd have drawn on other things. Here, then, are a few small ways that blogging has changed me:

1. I have -- or at least had -- an alter ego. 'Lynet' was created to play with ideas that I didn't yet wish to include, or didn't yet feel capable of including, in my usual self. Where I was still playing by the 'rules' as laid down by my childhood, Lynet was able to go out and play at being more separate from her parents, more (I think) rambling and indeed unsure of her opinions, and less afraid that having a sexuality would automatically degrade her. Lynet was nice. I liked her. She's still here, it's just that around the time I wrote Penelope we sort of merged.

2. I have a small audience for my poetry. I think I would have written poetry in any case, and my foray into rhyme and metre and other strict forms was begun before I started blogging, but having an audience certainly does change the way I write. Thinking about whether I would post it changes my standard for whether a poem (or a draft of it) can be said to be 'finished'.

3. Even before I came to America, I knew a heck of a lot more about American politics than any outsider has reason to know! Actually that's not quite true. America affects all of us, so it's not like the information isn't interesting. Still, the blogosphere is skewed towards America, and my political knowledge has been skewed accordingly.

4. I've got a perpetual source of reading material. This also means I've got a perpetual source of procrastinatory material, of course. For example, I'm writing this late at night when I should be in bed and I have an assignment due tomorrow :-).

5. I've come to feel like my atheism is worthy of at least the same respect and courtesy that I would afford to a religion. I had sort of internalised the idea that atheists ought to keep their heads down for fear of offending people. These days, I still wouldn't go out to offend, but I find that simple honesty about my beliefs ought not to be offensive in the first place. That's a deep change with just a few subtle effects. For example, I wouldn't feel the need to be apologetic about not joining in when people say grace. And yes, Ebon Musings deserves most of the credit.

I tag, with no obligation:

C. L. Hanson
Susan
Ordinary Girl
JD2718
The Chaplain

Attack Highlights the Best of Atheist Blogging

2008-10-07T18:52:00.000-07:00

Now is not a good time to be a Republican politician. Way back in August, Republican Senator Elizabeth Dole found that defending her seat against Democratic challenger Kay Hagan might not be as easy as she thought. One of her ways of fighting back was to demonise Hagan for meeting with atheists and taking donations from them. The press release from her campaign said:

On September 15th, Kay Hagan is heading to Boston, Massachusetts to attend a fundraiser for her Senate campaign. What may surprise mainstream North Carolinians is that the fundraiser will be in the home of leading anti religion activists Wendy Kaminer and her lawyer husband Woody Kaplan -- who is an advisor to the "Godless Americans Political Action Committee."

. . .

"Kay Hagan is trying to run a campaign in North Carolina that casts her as a moderate but the money that's paying for it is coming from the left-wing fringe of political thought," said Dole Campaign Communications Director Dan McLagan. "You can tell a lot about a person by their friends and these are friends most North Carolinians would not be comfortable having over for dinner."

Got that? Atheists are people "most North Carolinians would not be comfortable having over for dinner." Note also that the Dole campaign's description of the Kaminers' activities suggests to me that the Kaminers are activists for church-state separation and for the civil rights of atheists rather than "anti religion activists" as labeled by the Dole campaign.

At the time, atheists in the blogosphere seized the opportunity to show support for the acceptability of atheist voices in the political process by donating to Hagan's campaign (see, for example, here) and writing to Elizabeth Dole to explain why.

For a variety of reasons, I'm sure, Hagan has now shifted ahead of Dole in the polls. The Dole campaign is fighting back -- and they haven't given up on the atheist connection! A recent mailout from the Dole Campaign, displayed on the blog of an understandably angry North Carolinian atheist blogger, attacks Hagan yet again for daring to accept support from atheists. The mailout includes two quotes from the atheist blogosphere. Fairly innocuous quotes, at that. One is from a comment on Friendly Atheist, and reads:

I don’t know that I’ve ever been to North Carolina besides driving through, but I just donated [to Hagan's campaign].

The other is from a post on Daylight Atheism:

Kay Hagan ought to be rewarded for inviting nonbelievers onto her platform . . .

I'm startled that the Dole campaign thinks this is a good move. Only voters with a truly overt prejudice against atheists are likely to find a website name like "FriendlyAtheist.com" threatening.

Whether or not Dole has helped her own campaign, she has certainly helped the atheist movement! She's promoting the atheist blogosphere at its best. Any North Carolinian who follows the attribution of those quotes will be led, not to some scary den of atheist supremacy, but to the open-minded affability of Friendly Atheist and the even-tempered eloquence of Daylight Atheism. American atheists couldn't choose a better pair of blogs to represent their cause.

[By the way, here are the respective reactions to this news on Daylight Atheism and Friendly Atheist].

This wasn't what I wanted

2008-10-02T21:47:00.000-07:00

I was worried by Paulson's initial bailout plan. Only three pages? No oversight? $700 billion?

Worse, Paulson didn't seem sure he knew what to do with the money. When Lehman Brothers went under and things suddenly got dramatic, well, quite frankly, it looked like nobody had any idea what to do (Certainly not John McCain or Barack Obama, and, unsurprisingly, not the current President either). It was as if Paulson had stepped into the vacuum and said, well, since we're not sure what to do about it, how about we throw lots of money at it and hope it works?

So I hoped that additions would be made to the plan. I was glad there was questioning and opposition. I hoped somebody would come up with some more specific suggestions!

What I was not hoping for was this. Now, I'm glad that the bill that passed the Senate includes more oversight. I approve of giving the money in installments. But I'm deeply disappointed that the critical eye of many Senate members, even at a time like this, seems to be mostly on the lookout for irrelevant but costly concessions.

I'm not even sure I approve of the suggestion that we help out "Main Street" by bailing out the small people who owe on their mortgages as well as the big companies. Not if it costs more money. I don't want to see lots of random spending. I don't necessarily want that spending to be based on who is more deserving. I want to see 'bailout' money used as wisely as possible. If this article is to be believed, the approach currently outlined is well short of shrewd.

There's a real, scary problem here that needs solving. Slacktivist points out this incredibly informative piece from NPR and This American Life detailing the problems faced by small businesses and areas of the market which had nothing to do with sub-prime mortgages. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with those areas of the economy, it's just that they need day-to-day credit to survive. They pay off that credit, and quickly. We're not looking at dodgy loans here. But the whole credit market is in danger of freezing because loans that looked secure before -- mixed packages of mortgages -- have been shown to be stupidly risky, so nobody really feels like lending money to anyone right now.

I am not an economist (IANAE). Still, here's a thought. What if, instead of trying to bail out the purveyors and packagers of dodgy mortgages and hoping that this will make everyone forget what happened, the government were to focus on finding a way to secure the rest of the market? Protect the innocent, so to speak. IANAE, and I've got no clear idea of what we could do with any amount of money, but what could we do with $700 billion focused directly at the problem of availability of credit in general? For example, could we find a direct way to make the commercial paper market more secure? After all, I get the impression (with many repetitions of IANAE) that it's not that insecure to begin with, it just feels that way. I would have thought propping up a system that is still mostly sound but with a lot of uncertainty might be easier than mopping up a system that is fundamentally unsound. What if the government proposed temporary insurance on certain kinds of lending that probably won't fail, just for a few months until the crisis eases?

IANAE. Is bailing out banks and investors the only way to make credit available out there, or is there another way?

rainbow -- poem

2008-09-22T22:51:00.000-07:00

When everything we see is bland and white
with platitudinous false prophecy
then look for method, study even light,
and by a prism
unweave the rainbow,

and do not fear to write in red on lime,
but if the colour scatters carelessly
then look for method, metre, even rhyme,
and by a prison
unlock a poem.

I should leave this for a day or two to see if I want to change it, but I can't resist showing it off. I've been trying to write the above as a blog post for ages, but there were too many interlinked ideas to be able to fit them all into a linear prose structure. Additionally, I've been thinking for ages that I should write a poem about atheism, but I kept finding that I didn't have any really good ideas. I suppose I ought to thank Maria for this post at Chromium Oxide Green, which made me realise that not having any good ideas for a poem about reality is kind of silly.

Announcements

2008-09-17T14:01:00.000-07:00

1. I've arrived in California and am too busy to post at the moment. Sorry.

2. If you want to read other people's posts, the latest Humanist Symposium is up at Freethought Fort Wayne.

The Sea-Child

2008-09-07T05:18:00.000-07:00

I'm too distracted for a proper post, sorry. Here's a poem -- not one of mine!

Into the world you sent her, mother,
Fashioned her body of coral and foam,
Combed a wave in her hair's warm smother,
And drove her away from home

In the dark of the night she crept to the town
And under a doorway she laid her down,
The little blue child in the foam-fringed gown.

And never a sister and never a brother
To hear her call, to answer her cry.
Her face shone out from her hair's warm smother
Like a moonkin up in the sky.

She sold her corals; she sold her foam;
Her rainbow heart like a singing shell
Broke in her body: she crept back home.

Peace, go back to the world, my daughter,
Daughter, go back to the darkling land;
There is nothing here but sad sea water,
And a handful of sifting sand.

We sang a rather lovely arrangement of that when I was in high school. It's by Katherine Mansfield, better known for her short stories. She was, and I will be, in a week, an expat Kiwi.

Plain Language

2008-09-02T00:32:00.000-07:00

I fear that the embrace we shared back then
has lost its meaning in your mind today.
It's waiting for some other moment when
we're once again together. When I play
with memories in verse, do I disturb
the balance of our delicate regard?
Relationships are precious, and to curb
my muse is only wise. It's not so hard.
But, ah, the things you've given me! They sing,
seductive as the call of distant lands.
My fingers, clumsy with such substance, bring
no talent, but I shuffle with the strands
of silken colour, soft and light as air,
and beg forgiveness for my lingering care.

Compassion

2008-08-29T23:18:00.000-07:00

L. L. Barkat doesn't usually post about political happenings. She's more interested in personal growth and morality and how to live well; in spirituality, I guess I may freely say, since LL is a Christian blogger.

"I don't claim to understand it." In a recent post on Senator John Edwards' recently-revealed affair, LL quotes this response and then looks more deeply at the matter at hand. Do we really not understand how an illicit love affair could start? LL is willing to try, and I say brava!

"I don't claim to understand it" is the easiest response to an action or a viewpoint that you disagree with. It stops you from having to confront your own fallibility. To 'understand' in this sense is to identify the impulses that you, too, have which could in other circumstances prompt you to act that way. Claiming not to understand how someone could, say, have an extramarital affair is a way of claiming that you are innocent of all such deplorable impulses.

Having established that whatever prompted this action could not have been anything that you feel leaves you free to make the imagined motives as unpleasant as you like. LL herself notes that the picture she can imagine "is a radically different frame than that of the 'lurid affair' that the media loves to paint". Yes, it is. Similarly, the motivations of most atheists are radically different to the picture sometimes painted by apologists of people who simply don't want to obey God, being an anti-abortion activist doesn't actually mean that you hate women, and some "family" activists really need to learn that the sexual feelings of homosexuals do not consist entirely of 'lurid affairs' either.

Atheists are as guilty as anyone of painting an unrealistic picture of their opponents. I wince, sometimes, at the swiftness with which certain sections of the online atheist community will give up the attempt to explain religion in terms of anything that we feel and instead impute it to stupidity and smallmindedness, to greed and fear. Stupidity, smallmindedness, greed and fear are real phenomena, it's true, but if you choose to see those motives at the expense of others, you are showing a smallmindedness of your own.

The truth is, there are reasons to show compassion to others that even extend beyond the way it can help us to get along. If you truly want to understand the world, and if you truly want to understand yourself, then showing humility about your own motives and compassion about the motives of others is the only way to reach a semblance of truth.

Physics and Poetry

2008-08-11T03:52:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's another Nonbelieving Literati post [Edit: This one's about Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. How could I forget to say that?] . I'm late again, but, as I posted on the Exterminator's contribution, this one did sort of look like one that I should make the effort on. John Evo, responding to the comment, was kind enough to characterise me as a poet, specifically by saying "I'd definitely like to hear what a poet has to say about this". But did I read this book as a poet?

I started out reading as a physicist. What can I say? When I was younger I used to love the slide and switch of reference frames, the pure and perfect mechanics of Galileo, Newton, Einstein. The characters' names in this book even sort of look like arcane mathematical expressions with symbols incomprehensibly juxtaposed: Qfwfq, (k)yK, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk_o. So when I read Qfwfq babbling away like an old man about how the Moon used to be closer to the Earth in those days, I started mentally checking the details. "She rolled around the sky like an umbrella chased by the wind". Well, the Moon would have to go fast. To be in orbit is to cross the horizon before you can fall to the ground. If the ground is closer, the Moon must reach the horizon more quickly! Indeed, the necessary speed bothered me a little.

This is how we did the job: in the boat we had a ladder: one of us held it, another climbed to the top, and a third, at the oars, rowed until we were right under the Moon . . .

What's wrong with this picture? I kept finding myself imagining the Moon falling until I realised that, at the distance I was imagining it, the Moon would probably have to be travelling a lot faster than the average rowboat. Ah, but isn't it fun to imagine that you could climb to the Moon on a ladder? Poetic license. Never mind.

Yes, the Moon was so strong that she pulled you up; you realised this the moment you passed from one to the other: you had to swing up abruptly, with a kind of somersault, grabbing the scales, throwin your legs over your head, until your feet were on the Moon's surface. Seen from the Earth, you looked as if you were hanging there with your head down, but for you, it was the normal position, and the only odd thing was that when you raised your eyes you saw the sea above you, glistening, with the boat and the others upside down, hanging like a bunch of grapes from the vine.

I was skeptical of this one at first. It is, however, true that the closer you get to the Moon, the stronger the Moon's pull. The question is, how close do you have to be? If the Moon is that close to the Earth, might not the point at which the Moon's attraction becomes stronger actually be inside the Moon?

A quick calculation informs me that I was wrong, however. As the distance between the Earth and the Moon increases, the point of equal gravitational pull becomes outside the Moon before the distance becomes greater than the Earth's radius! So that's all good.

"Cling together! Idiots! Cling together!" the Captain yelled. At this command, the sailors tried to form a group, a mass, to push all together until they reached the zone of the Earth's attraction: all of a sudden a cascade of bodies plunged into the sea with a loud splash.

Okay, this is not poetic licence. It's not my fault for being picky either. This isn't something I could fail to notice. It's blatantly wrong. In fact, there's a nice thought experiment due to Galileo that tries to disprove the above using basically that example. You see, bigger things do not fall faster than smaller ones. Not unless the smaller one is a feather, in which case the key phrase is air resistance. Without air resistance, all objects would fall at the same speed. With air resistance, well, the air resistance does not have to be as big in order to affect the fall of a small thing as it would need to be in order to affect the fall of a large thing. This is what creates the disparity. However, I can assure you that tying the lace of one shoe to the lace of the other will not make your shoes fall faster; it affects neither the air resistance nor the gravitational pull on each shoe. Similarly, coming together in a group will not make each person fall faster. Gravity does not check whether you are holding hands before deciding how hard to pull each of you!

Thus began an uneasy balance between science and poetry. The delight of these stories is in the way that they take a snippet of science and build around it an absurd flight of fancy, an almost narcissistic reflection of human foibles created around a simple detached fact. Moreover, although the science may sometimes be bent or broken, the humanity never is. Who cannot sympathise with the narrator of 'The Light Years', suddenly realising that the inhabitants of other galaxies have been watching him and worrying desperately about what they must think of him, but knowing that they are so distant that they will not see any improvement he makes to his behaviour for millions of years?

As with all stories that have an allegorical component, there is always a temptation to try to find the more commonplace 'meaning' behind the fantastical description. I suspect that, having begun my reading thinking like a scientist, I was slightly more prone to this than I might otherwise have been, and spent a certain amount of time reminding myself not to try to decode. The stories are sympathetic in their own right, and their meaning is in their sympathy. A reader should not need more.

Ah, but I loved the final story! I had settled down into poetry far enough that I could dispense with the science by means of a mere 'of course evolution couldn't really have this sort of purpose' and enjoy the pretty story of how we create beauty -- the beauty of a spiral, no less! How very mathematical. This book is not all true, but it is clearly truthful.

". . . secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects . . ."

2008-08-02T17:05:00.000-07:00

A laptop is among the most personal of objects. Sometimes just having somebody look over my shoulder when I'm on it gives me a not entirely comfortable prickle across my shoulder-blades. It's so terribly revealing: my list of Google contacts, the things I choose to have shortcuts for on my desktop, the fact that I play FreeCell often enough that it's currently got higher listing on my 'start' menu than iTunes -- to say nothing of my list of Firefox bookmarks (that's 'favorites' for all you people still stuck on Internet Explorer), which happens to include a favourite Doctor Who screencap of mine (this one, if you must know) just because I like to look at it occasionally.

So I really want to know why it is that this does not seem to violate any laws (Tip of the hat to Pharyngula):

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed. . . .

DHS officials said the newly disclosed policies -- which apply to anyone entering the country, including U.S. citizens -- are reasonable and necessary to prevent terrorism. Officials said such procedures have long been in place but were disclosed last month because of public interest in the matter.

You can view the policy here, which does contain partial exceptions for business information and attorney-client privileged material, and which does state that most of the information gathered (unless it relates to a crime) needs to be destroyed afterwards.

Now, I am not silly enough to let Firefox remember the password to my internet bank account, but anyone with access to my laptop could find their way into my email. Theoretically, when I enter the United States next month, immigration officials are allowed to look at every silly story or diary-like ramble in my 'documents' folder.

For some reason it doesn't bother me half so much that they're probably also allowed to read my paper diary if they wish. Electronic information is easily searched, easily copied, easily secreted, easily sent. Sure, you're supposed to destroy it all, but I bet that's unenforceable in practice. So I have to rely on the disinterest of customs officials and anyone else deemed necessary to decode my data. In my case, maybe that's not so bad. I'm not doing anything terribly secret or interesting, don't own any pornographic material of myself that could accidentally find its way onto the internet, and if all else fails, I'm white and I speak English and I bet that counts for more than it should in avoiding being searched in the first place. Travellers shouldn't have to rely on luck like that, though!

The Fourth Amendment, which I quoted in the post title, does not apply with the same force to border searches (see Wikipedia). Although they need reasonable suspicion to search me bodily, currently thay can search me mentally (via my laptop) for any reason or none. Frankly, I think I'd rather be searched bodily.

Although it will be to late to protect me, I hope Russ Feingold's plan to introduce legislation to stop this sort of thing is successful. Squick. Seriously, this is what I call an invasive search!

For ---

2008-07-23T04:58:00.000-07:00

Here’s fourteen lines on impulse – like the way

we hide beneath your jacket in the rain

and find that, since we have the chance today,

I might as well be kissing you again.

This one’s for friendship; this, for pleasant lust.

This one’s for luck, and this one is for trust.

We tell each other secrets, you and I,

and still can look each other in the eye.

So sit down here beside me on the grass,

and never mind the mud, and take my hand,

and kiss me on the mouth, for time will pass

and things won’t always go the way we planned,

but sometimes we find serendipity –

I hope, for now, you find it here with me.

(You are reading this, aren't you? Hope you don't mind.)

Orlando

2008-07-07T17:06:00.000-07:00

Our last book but one for the Nonbelieving Literati was A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. Having read that and rather liked it, I pulled Orlando off the library shelves a while back, took it into a cafe and began to read.

I loved it, I swooned over it, I laughed with delight. It's one of my favourite books ever, I think, particularly the first half, where the title character is male. Orlando is known, among other things, for the unabashed lesbianism in the second half. That's all very well, and I appreciated it for the ground-breaking daring that it was, but to me, it was passages like this that really stood out:

The King was walking in Whitehall. Nell Gwyn was on his arm. She was pelting him with hazel nuts. ‘Twas a thousand pities, that amorous lady sighed, that such a pair of legs should leave the country.
Howbeit, the Fates were hard; she could do no more than toss one kiss over her shoulder before Orlando sailed.

Now, really! Oh, some may say that Orlando's legs may only be sighed over because he is somehow androgynous. Some may call the fact that Orlando is an object of desire a mere foreshadowing of his eventual femininity. Not I.

There is no denying it. I'm afraid I'm heterosexual.

***

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate . . .

There's many a fictional version of Shakespeare who has written that poem to some beautiful leading lady of the story; we love to wonder who could inspire such verse. In truth, however, it's probable that this famous sonnet was written to a young man -- and to me, this is a lovely thought. I've seen a few men I'd love to apply it to, men with sunshine in their smiles and a sloppy grace to their form. Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet is more than just a superlative love poem. It's a rare literary glimpse of the beauty than men can have.

I'm not sure that I love men in the way that men want to be loved. I wouldn't mind loving women. It might be as much easier in some ways as it would be harder in others. It's just that when it comes down to it, I'd much rather compare a man to a summer's day than a woman. Not every man wants to hear that.

Hush, now, don't say it too loud, but men are beautiful. It's one of the best-kept secrets of all time.

He really should have had a blog.

2008-07-02T03:17:00.000-07:00

This post is for the Nonbelieving Literati and refers to Voltaire's Zadig.

Voltaire should have had a blog. Look at him, right there on the page, Mister Magpie Mind himself in fits and starts and 'and thens', in conceits and delights slopped messily onto the page with very little editing. Make that no editing at all. He'd have been right at home in the blogging world, being witty and sarcastic and off-the-cuff with the best of them. I'd love to read Voltaire's blog. Wouldn't you?

I laugh, almost, at the way that nothing that happens is Zadig's fault. It seems disingenuous to me, almost tongue-in-cheek. "Oh please, good sirs, I acted with the purest of intentions!" I can't shake off the feeling that Voltaire is sitting inside the page laughing at us, protesting his own innocence when he knows his own tongue was downright wicked at times! It's conceit, I tell you, pure careless conceit, and I don't think Voltaire cares who knows it. There is a liberation in it, a sort of permission to love yourself with wry honesty and accept that, deep down, you're rather partial to yourself. Now, aren't you? Admit it.

Zadig might be the character Voltaire would like to be, cheerful and rational in the face of adversity, penetrating but still diplomatic, conveniently following a course of events that demonstrates everything Voltaire feels like demonstrating. Time and again, science and rationality triumph in the hands of Zadig -- as does the notion of a more abstract Supreme Being, a Creator that does not depend on petty religious details.

It's not an easy story to follow; basically one thing happens after another and that is very nearly it. You could break it up into small pieces and maybe enjoy it more. Indeed, while reading it, I found the best way to enjoy it was simply to enjoy the moment and not care about the mess it made as a whole. No doubt it would also be easier to understand if you were reading it at the time it was written, because there are plenty of references that no longer make sense.

So, yes. It would have been better as a blog. Oh, but I thought it was fun for all that.

***

Apologies for my long absence. The closer I get to leaving, the more urgent this real world over here feels. I've found my passport. I've told the guy I like that I like him (He does not quite return the same sentiment, alas, but at least I've said it). I'm supposed to visit my dear old gran, and buy my sisters birthday presents, and I still have paperwork to fill out, and -- well. It's not for a couple of months, yet, but it feels awfully close.

Girlishness

2008-06-06T18:58:00.001-07:00

Kick up your heels, and wear
Pink flowers in your hair
And stop to feel the echoed kiss upon the air

Stand on the brink, and be
Catch breath in brevity
And string each fleeting note into a melody

Live from the heart, and know
Your mind works even so
For sometimes all of life is in the letting go

I like this one. I know it's sappy and I don't care. Pink flowers! Gotta love it.

On the other hand, I'm alternating between thinking the title is perfect and thinking it's a flimsy attempt to lower expectations. Maybe I'll come up with something else, who knows?

I may be wrong, but I believe that . . .

2008-05-31T01:23:00.000-07:00

Well, I picked this meme up off the Exterminator. And yes, I know I owe at least two of you a meme from way back that I may or may not ever get around to giving you (sorry about that), but this one just sort of looked like fun. The rules are:

Think of some things you believe that may be wrong. Write them on your blog. Don’t tag anyone, but drop the hint that if your friends really care about your feelings, they’ll follow through with their own lists.

1. My passport has vanished off the face of the Earth and if I'm going to get a visa in time I'll need to apply for a new one pronto. Pity. That passport was an old friend.

2. String theory is not an accurate description of reality on the small scale. Oh, and we're stuck with quantum weirdness. The sensible way to react to quantum mechanics is simply to accept that many things that we would consider basic truisms are actually merely the product of having evolved at a level where quantum effects are not perceptible.

3. Death is the end. When you die, you cease to exist.

4. It's not quite so evil to download Series Four of Doctor Who off the internet if you've already paid the show quite a lot of money by buying the whole of Series Three.

5. Philosophy is not a waste of time.

6. If I turn up to this cute, witty short guy's show on Thursday, I've got half a chance of kissing him if I can get him alone. Hope my cold has cleared up by then.

7. Nobody reading this really cares whether I end on a 'lucky' number like seven or a perfect number like six.

Wonderfully mad.

2008-05-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

It's been a while. Sorry. I have been somewhat busy -- notably with the wonderfully mad 48 Hour Filmmaking Competition last weekend. I know so many great crazy people here. Why did I want to leave, again?

(It's not till September, mind, but I've made my choice now. I'm going to be in California, that's as much as I've decided to say on this blog. Perhaps wonderfully mad people won't be so difficult to find over there, either.)

Speaking of wonderfully mad people, last night I had the absolute privilege of taking part in a public reading of an unfinished play written by a friend of mine. It's the first proper creative interaction I've had with her since I got back from the UK, actually. I walked into the auditorium where the reading was taking place and the first thing I noticed was the smell of incense. The second thing I noticed was that -- well, of course -- she'd had the sense to eschew the separation between stage and seats in favour of setting up cushions and a few benches on the stage itself. She had candles and nibbles, and a few friends along to help her out, and when she asked me how I was, I felt the uncomfortableness in my simple 'fine' (who is ever simply 'fine'?) -- but she said nothing of it and I knew I'd loosen up. It's been too long since I've entered one of her spaces, carefully and fearlessly imagined with absolute openness. She was playing the Beatles over the sound system while she set up and I had the odd urge to dance. The last character I played for her loved to dance. It was my character's central metaphor (she was a poetic type). I think my character would have liked to be a dancer, actually, but she worked in a craft shop, which she liked, too, because it was fun to play a small part in helping people make stuff. And yes, that's mostly just back-story which only made it to the stage in little things like having her knitting in one scene.

My playwright friend believes in a hundred things that ought to be anathema to my skeptical self. She believes in astral projection and yoga whatnot and in a sort of global consciousness and I don't know what else. If it wasn't her, maybe I'd say more often that I don't believe a word of it, maybe I'd make more firm statements like I do when my best friend from high school starts talking like she thinks Tarot cards could actually tell you something. But it is her. This is her space and I worship her space with its free-flying creativity. Cutting takes place elsewhere; this is where things grow. I just can't say 'Don't think that'.

She almost never asks anyone else to believe along with her. She asks people to imagine. I think she prefers imagination. She believes in the power of the mind to subtly influence the world, and for that purpose an imagined thing might even be stronger and more organic than a believed thing. And so, in her space, I leave behind the truth of the world and accept the truth of myself. This is subjective space. Objective space is important, too, but it can wait.

'Oxbridge'

2008-05-01T02:24:00.000-07:00

This post is for the Nonbelieving Literati; I'm afraid it may be less comprehensible if you haven't read the book. We've been reading 'A Room of One's Own' by Virginia Woolf.

I have been there.

I have been there, and they did not refuse me entrance to the library but bade me enter and write my name in a red book, as Newton once did. They gave me a room of my own with a desk and a bed and filled my mind to bursting six mornings a week.

Once a week I'd make my way to formal dinners, to sit with gowned humanities students getting drunk on nearly-free alcohol and discussing everything from politics to philosophy to pornography. We'd stay out late and optimistically propose meeting in Hall for breakfast the next morning.

They never did meet me, of course. Breakfast closes at 9am, no matter what day of the week it is. Nobody gets up for breakfast before 9am when they've been out drinking the night before. Nobody but me, innocently without a hangover, gazing out the window after the alarm had gone off and getting fired up on morningness like a child who has never seen the world before. I'd walk, run, dance through the garden, across the road, down the Avenue. I'd step with carefree possessiveness through those arches, into the nearly deserted Hall at breakfast on Saturday morning, and eat my fried eggs across from whichever portrait on the wall took my fancy.

There are no women on the walls.

I swapped Emmy Noether stories with another young woman one night. Did you know her father tried to stop her? And have you heard the quote about "Emmy is the centre of co-ordinates . . ."? And of course you know what Hilbert said, gosh but that was a good one.

We cling to Emmy Noether, just a little, we young algebraists and theoretical physicists. There are no women on the walls, but once upon a time in another place there was Emmy Noether . . .

Yet when I see the shallow layers worn away on the steps, worn down by the shoes of students -- those shoes are mine. Though they were all men, or most of them, their shoes are mine and my feet step in their footprints and they belong to me and I to them. Once this place was barred to us but we have found our way inside and the men who once lived here belong to us now, too. Their legacy is ours.

Our legacy will be yours, some day.

EDIT: The next book is my choice, and will be 'Zadig', by Voltaire. You can get it from Amazon or from a library, of course -- or if you don't mind reading it off a screen you can get it here for free.

This is just to say that I have been converted . . .

2008-04-29T02:30:00.000-07:00

. . . into a Doctor Who fan.

In my defence, however, the Doctor is clearly a humanist. I mean, he's not human himself, of course, but he likes human beings in a very humanist sort of way, and it's not as if he has any religious beliefs that might disqualify him.

At any rate, having made it to the end of Series 2 (which is very much an ending), I'm sort of hoping that I'll be able to stop watching every Doctor Who DVD I can get my hands on and start doing, you know, stuff. Like the Nonbelieving Literati, for example. Which reminds me, have I misread the pattern or is it my turn to choose the next book after this one?

With thanks to my atheist mother

2008-04-18T02:47:00.000-07:00

It always interests me when the subject of 'atheist parenting' comes up in the blogosphere. I find it slightly strange the way it is sometimes approached as a new phenomenon. For many deconverts, of course, it is a new idea, one that they have to work out for themselves as they anticipate having children. If I ever have children, however, raising them as atheists will hardly be new territory. I've seen it done. I've been on the receiving end of it!

This post is for some of the things I owe my mother; specifically, for some atheist things I owe her. I say my 'mother' because, well, Dad has always been the one with the full time job. He's around, and very loving when he is around, but it's my mother who had the greatest effect on the crucial things. So, with apologies to Dad, he's only going to appear in this post in the form of various side notes.

Not all of these things are confined to atheists. In fact, now I think of it, nearly all of them could have at least some applicability to a religious upbringing, depending on your level of liberalism. Nonetheless, they relate strongly to values associated with freethought. I have three subheadings.

1. Science

One of my earliest memories is -- well, it's fragmentary these days, tied to a single picture and a dimly remembered feeling of fascination. The story goes like this.

You know how kids go through a stage where they're trying to distinguish between male and female? It takes a while to learn the little clues (Genuine memory that just flashed into my head: "Most of the time, long haired people are women. Some men have long hair, too, though." That's my mother, trying to explain some of the clues that might help. "Only men have beards" would have been a useful one; pity it's of such limited use. And so on.). Anyway, the way my mother tells it, I was about three and had developed an annoying habit of pointing to people in the supermarket saying "Mummy, mummy, that one there! Is that a man or a woman?"

Questions like that, spoken loudly in a public place, can be embarrassing. "Why, Mummy? Why is that a man?" I suspect the main reason my mother came up with this plan was as a way of shutting me up. "Wait until we get home and I'll explain," she told me, and I can't tell you if the impatience I remember is a real memory or a superimposed one; it was twenty years ago, after all. If it is a real memory, though, then I can tell you that it all sounded very mysterious and that I didn't like having to wait.

So we got home, and she went upstairs and got the book she'd used to tell me about where babies come from when she was expecting my little sister. It's a good book, full of actual scientific photographs. I know I have some memory of this book, because when I saw it, more than a decade later, I recognised the page that she had turned to for this explanation.

"These are chromosomes," she told me (I thought of them as 'krome-zomes' for years afterwards). "Boys have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome. Girls have two X chromosomes. The egg always has an X chromosome from the mother, but the sperm can have an X chromosome or a Y chromosome . . . "

What's the moral of this story? Tell your kids stuff. Encourage them to ask questions by giving them answers -- "I'll tell you when we get home" is a much better response than "Just be quiet and don't be rude." If they're listening and not bored, don't be scared of overloading them with information -- it took me a while to realise my mother was only referring to one out of twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, even though I'm sure she explained that at the time, but that was okay. I just filled in the details when I got older.

Oh, and if you're lucky, they'll make cute precocious statements. My father loves to tell the story of the man who came to visit when I was four who said to me "You're a very clever little girl, aren't you?" and received the response "That's because I have two X krome-zomes." My mother used to scoff at that story. "Of course she knew what chromosomes were. I told her."

2. Sexuality

Another one of my earliest memories is being given a small hand mirror by my mother so I could look at my vulva. As memories go, it pairs nicely with the previous one, both because I was about the same age and because I was at least as fascinated if not more so. If you're a girl, you can't necessarily see your genitals easily without a mirror. It's nice to know what's there.

When I mentioned this memory to my mother, she said she spent the whole time feeling terribly uncomfortable. If that's true, all I can say is that I owe her doubly for not communicating that to me at the time. This memory is only one small part of what it takes to build comfort with your own body, of course, but I'm sure it's crucial -- why else would I remember it so clearly?

Think about it. Generations of children were told at that age not to touch that part, and don't look at that part or think too much about it, and those are your secret parts, and whatever. And my mother? She gave me a mirror. I love her so much.

When I get into my teens, my mother also told me how to masturbate. Is that odd? It was a serviceable explanation, spoken in the rather factual but otherwise ordinary tone my mother usually retreats to when one of us brings up sexuality. My own feelings about sex are mixed and murky. (So are my mother's. Her early experiences of sex were rather unpleasant. Do I blame her? Yes and no.) I can't be ashamed of masturbation, though. It has no disadvantages. There's nothing for the shame to stick to.

Then there are the various books she supplied me with -- Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the one by Sheila Kitzinger with 'sex' in the title that I shelved spine-backwards at age sixteen when she gave it to me and then pulled out at age eighteen and read with fascination and occasional arousal. I quite like the idea of non-fiction as erotica, actually. I looked for that book when I was twenty-one and couldn't find it. I think my eldest little sister took it. The enlightenment goes on!

3. Rules and Morality

I like this one best of all. My mother is determinedly, thoughtfully moral. Indeed, her approach to teaching us morality was rather like her approach to teaching us science. Just as we were always allowed to ask questions of fact, so also we were always allowed to ask questions about the rules. "Because I said so" was a banned phrase; "argument from authority," she'd have called it. Maybe if she was really tired and exasperated she'd resort to "Oh, please, just behave, I don't have time to argue this right now." Most of the time she'd have the discussion and give us the explanation, though, because she believed in the principle of open debate, and she believed in not claiming to be infallible. If she was wrong, we should argue with her, and she'd change if we could make her see it. Basic principles like fairness and not hurting people were taken for granted, I admit; we never thought to question those. Perhaps they were partially built into us; more likely, I think, we learned what sorts of arguments were acceptable by example.

Interesting, isn't it? She taught us morality and critical thinking at the same time. If you're logical to begin with, having morality presented to you in the form of reasoned argument is a great way to embed it as deeply as it will go. I respect reasons.

There's more I could say on this subject. I'm particularly lucky in that I had educated parents -- my mother left school at sixteen, actually, but she still knew enough biology to tell me about chromosomes. I guess the most important thing was that she knew how to share her knowledge with a small child! Later, she went to university, studied philosophy, and ended up introducing me to all manner of theories of ethics. There's nothing like having a list of counterexamples to make the notion that you can't have a theory of morality without God seem particularly silly. As for my Dad, he's a forest scientist with a crazy love for astronomy -- when they taught me in school to say "my very elegant mother just sat upon nine porcupines" I couldn't help thinking that "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto" would be a more obvious way of listing those letters in that order. It took me a moment to realise that wasn't the point.

So, yeah, I'm lucky. I won't say there were no disadvantages to my parents' way of bringing me up. I have a long list of things I'd do differently. Atheism isn't one of them, though. In bringing me up as an atheist, my parents gave me an incredible head start.

My letter to Monique Davis

2008-04-12T17:36:00.000-07:00

Rep. Monique Davis of the state legislature in Illinois caught the attention of the atheist blogosphere recently with her startling outburst (reported here) to atheist Rob Sherman, who was testifying against the allocation of state funds to rebuild a historic (but still operating) church:

Davis: I don’t know what you have against God, but some of us don’t have much against him. We look forward to him and his blessings. And it’s really a tragedy -- it’s tragic -- when a person who is engaged in anything related to God, they want to fight. They want to fight prayer in school.

I don’t see you (Sherman) fighting guns in school. You know?

I’m trying to understand the philosophy that you want to spread in the state of Illinois. This is the Land of Lincoln. This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children.… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it’s dangerous--

Sherman: What’s dangerous, ma’am?

Davis: It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! Now you will go to court to fight kids to have the opportunity to be quiet for a minute. But damn if you’ll go to [court] to fight for them to keep guns out of their hands. I am fed up! Get out of that seat!

Sherman: Thank you for sharing your perspective with me, and I’m sure that if this matter does go to court---

Davis: You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.

Unbelievable stuff. Since then, the Council for Secular Humanism has called for Monique Davis to resign, and there have been several calls for an apology. Davis has responded by apologising to Sherman, as reported here.

Maybe I'm just being influenced by Alonzo Fyfe's take, but really, Davis' apology disturbs me more than the reports on her initial comment did. We don't know exactly what she said, because it wasn't a public apology, it was a personal one to the person she blew up at. It's nice to know that she understands that it's polite to apologise to someone you yell at, but does she even understand that what she said about atheists -- all atheists -- was wrong? What's with that reference to school shootings? Does she blame atheists for those?

I can't know for sure what Monique Davis believes or was trying to say. I have, however, sent her a letter asking for clarification. I have no idea what she'll think to receive a letter from New Zealand that won't reach her for a week on a subject that most closely concerns the atheist citizens in her own state, but I find I can't keep silent. The text of my letter is given below.

***

Flat _
_ _______ Street
Christchurch
New Zealand

11 April, 2008

Dear Ms Davis,

I am writing with regard to the remarks you made to Rob Sherman, stating that atheists ‘believe in destroying’ and that it is ‘dangerous for children to even know that [atheism] exists’. I wish to commend you for apologizing to Mr Sherman for your remarks. However, you do not merely owe an apology to Mr Sherman. You owe an apology to all atheists.

I myself am an atheist and secular humanist. My atheist mother, who is currently doing a PhD in ethics, brought me up to think as carefully about what is morally good as I do about what is objectively true. I believe in showing compassion to others. I believe in justice. I believe in being open to new evidence. I believe in not pre-judging people by their religion or lack thereof.

In stating that atheists ‘believe in destroying’, you have shown incredible bigotry to all people who, for whatever reason, come to believe that God probably does not exist. I urge you to consider your atheist constituents and apologize to them, too, as a lawmaker who publicly stated that they did not have a right to be heard by the state government. I realize your comments were spoken in the heat of the moment. Please take the opportunity to put them right!

I am also concerned to hear that, in your apology to Sherman, you explained that you were upset that day because you heard that two Chicago students had been shot to death. I hope this does not mean that you succumb to the bigotry that blames atheists for school shootings. No good reason for such blame exists. When we hear that children have died, we grieve, too. We cannot even comfort ourselves with the thought that the children will live on in heaven. I have nothing but contempt for the people who use such tragedies to try to inspire hatred of unrelated groups. I would be grateful for clarification of what you meant when you referred to school shootings in your apology to Mr Sherman.

I am a New Zealander, not an American. I do not have to face the anti-atheist sentiment that some unlucky American atheists put up with on a regular basis. However, as a member of the international atheist community, I hope that more Americans will come to understand that atheists generally do not believe in destroying. Indeed, atheism is all the more reason to try to do good in the world. Since there is no God, if we do not build the world we wish to see, no-one will.

Yours sincerely,

***

I even Americanized my spelling for her. I'd like to say it was politeness; I'm sorry to say it may have been an indication of my opinion of her openmindedness. Not that American spelling izn't uzually more sensible when you think about it.

Introducing Odo Hirsch

2008-04-03T02:28:00.000-07:00

I read children's books. A lot of children's books. I never really stopped, because there was no way I was going to give up my favourite authors just because I was entering my teens. I do not think I have ever had enough favourite authors.

My pseudonym is taken from a children's book -- specifically this children's book entitled The Savage Damsel and the Dwarf, by Gerald Morris; Lynet is the eponymous Savage Damsel. The series of which it is a part is delightful despite being shabby in places: sweet and good and humble and humourous. It's also written by a Christian minister. Not, perhaps, the most apt pseudonym for an atheist blogger, but then, I never expected to blog about atheism!

Sometimes you can pick the books written by authors who take their Christianity seriously. I don't mean the ones who throw it in your face, I mean the ones for whom it shows up naturally, because Christianity is such a large part of their lives that they can't leave it out of what they write. I'm thinking, for example, of Madeleine L'Engle, who makes love the central empowering force for the side of good in A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels. There's also Sherryl Jordan, a New Zealander like me, who pulled off a (halfway convincing!) World Peace ending in Time of the Eagle, achieved through the work of a character who survives by having faith in the purpose she believes has been laid down for her. You can see the Christian belief structure. Does it bother me? A little. Am I skeptical of it? Yes. Do I learn from it? Definitely. Do I like these authors? Oh, so much!

At the very least, I needn't be ashamed of liking Katherine Paterson -- she's another author who belongs in this category, perhaps the best writer of them all. She writes with such incredible sympathy for her characters (the same is true of Orson Scott Card). Moreover, we atheists owe her a vote of thanks. In Leslie (from Bridge to Terabithia) we have a sympathetic atheist character that we can be proud to be represented by: imaginative, intelligent, non-conforming, courageous. Paterson even goes so far as to take the cruelty of eternal damnation and slam it in the reader's face! Yet she herself is Christian. Her other Newbery-Award-winning book is Jacob Have I Loved, which deals with the problem of feeling that God might hate you. And yes, when I read her, or Card, or Gerald Morris, or Sherryl Jordan, or Madeleine L'Engle, sometimes I can't help thinking 'How can we duplicate this?' How can we duplicate that sympathy? How can we duplicate the good aspects that come (I assume) from having a community which encourages you to think about others and love them just as they are? More complicatedly, this emphasis on love, faith, God's plan and whatever isn't precisely the angle I would want to take! It has good aspects, and regular focus on those things as part of being actively religious can have a nice effect, but I wouldn't want to buy the whole thing. What do I want?

I have some answers. Daylight Atheism. A little familiarity with philosophy. Book clubs. Meditation without the surrounding mysticism? Humanist groups? Humanism, certainly. Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett, various other authors who present a rich and complex worldview that deals with the atheist perspective . . .

. . . and one Odo Hirsch, who somehow captures the simple half.

I don't know that Hirsch is an atheist. He's notoriously shy with all personal data. This is an amusing example. This article is in fact the most detailed information I've been able to find about him on the internet (notably, he's worked as a doctor and as a business consultant, studied political thought at Cambridge, and did some work for Amnesty International). Let me say, then, that I would intuit that Hirsch is a non-believer in the same way that I might intuit that an author is Christian. Hirsch obviously has a deep philosophy, it permeates his work -- and God never shows up. Reading him is like reading one of my favourite Christian authors, except that I'm not looking at some fuzzy other-person's-worldview that I have to sift through, I'm looking at something that often hits me clear as day.

If I had to name some authors who can make me see simple goodness and light in the world when I'm tired and stressed and don't feel like reading something complicated, I'd name Gerald Morris and Odo Hirsch. Morris writes light Arthurian retellings that can laugh at themselves. Hirsch is something else entirely. When Hirsch writes one of his happy books, it's as if he's done the usual thing by writing a book for children in which all distress is minor and happiness prevails in the end -- but done it with an incredibly sophisticated notion of happiness. No pasted-on smiles, here. There are reasons why Hirsch's characters are happy. You can learn something about happiness by reading one of his simple little children's books. You can see the happiness in the world from having had it sketched out for you.

Frankel Mouse has perhaps the most obvious moral. I once read a review that described Frankel, his brother Berrell and the small, frightened mouse Michael that Frankel has taken in as a 'dysfunctional mouse family' and bridled. They're not dysfunctional! Berrell is dysfunctional. Frankel is about as functional as you can get. You might worry, I suppose, about the way Berrell stays at home all day and makes Frankel look for the cheese. Of the two, though, Frankel is much happier, and you can see that Berrell's unhappiness is entirely his own fault. Frankel's work gives him a purpose and an identity. "We are the cheese-stealers!" he explains to Michael. If Berrell is grumpy, it's because he sits in a corner all day and never does anything. No wonder he almost seems to welcome the arrival of daredevil Cousin Ruthie. Frankel, by contrast, dreads Cousin Ruthie's arrival -- but I think he does admit at one point that her fun-loving, adventurous ways do make life more exciting . . .

Other lighthearted works from Odo Hirsch include the ones about Bartlett the Explorer ("Inventiveness, Desperation, Perseverance!"), and the ones about Hazel Green, an inquisitive extrovert who has multiple friendships with the adults who run the various stores on the ground floor of the skyscraper in which she lives, and who is forever asking them questions about what they do. Hazel Green is in fact my favourite Odo Hirsch book -- central to the book is her developing friendship with the local math geek.

Hirsch can write characters whose lives are full of meaning, but he is also capable of writing characters who look for meaning. Antonio S and the Mystery of Theodore Guzman has a bittersweet tone, as does Pincus Corbett's Strange Adventure. The latter describes a simple, reliable tailor who is tired of making boring things and starts a project of his own -- a colourful coat that can give him a new identity. Does it make him happier? Well, yes, it's better than nothing, but somehow I remember the story as being a little sad, all the same.

Writing for young adults, Hirsch seems to go in the opposite direction: Yoss is remarkably dark, as is Slaughterboy according to all the reviews (though I haven't read the latter). They're both coming-of-age novels, and they both deal with finding independence in a harsh world. Yoss is deep, to be sure, but it wasn't an easy read. Still, it showed me a side of Odo Hirsch that I hadn't seen before. He's capable of more than just sweetness and light. I was thrilled to see that Will Buster and the Gelmet Helmet includes some of the stronger themes of Yoss in a less dark, livelier fashion. Still, I think he's capable of taking that further. I'm waiting for the next step, the next book that blends happiness and darkness. Right now, I think he's still on his way up.

Against Preferring Fundamentalists

2008-03-20T14:37:00.001-07:00

There are atheists who say they have more respect for fundamentalist believers than for liberals. At least the fundamentalists follow their own logic, even if it is horrible -- so the reasoning goes. Fundamentalists, supposedly, are consistent within their own worldview, they don't "pick and choose", they don't rely on fuzzy, feel-good reasoning. They have their picture and they stick with it, whereas the liberal Christian picture doesn't even make sense.

I want to speak up for the liberal Christians.

There's a sonnet by John Donne that begins "At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow / Your trumpets, angels . . . ". At the round Earth's imagin'd corners. You see, Revelations 7:1 says "I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth." The Earth has no corners, but we may imagine them, let our religion in this one aspect be an element only of the life of the mind, a flight of the imagination that makes sense on an emotional, poetic level.

I get that. And you'll note that it's hardly a new idea! Fred Clark the Slacktivist has a certain liking for John Donne. That quote below his blog title about "knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend" is from another of Donne's "Holy Sonnets". And yes, I like that poem, too. For me the whole thing is mere flight of the imagination -- a view which the author would not approve of, I'm sure! Worse still, I don't necessarily agree with the poem's stance, even as metaphor, for it views human nature as sinful and speaks of help only as coming from without, and its call to be completely overthown is too similar to calls made by Christians for their reason to be overthrown for me to be able to be comfortable with it. Nevertheless, it is such a powerful, visceral cry for goodness that I can't help but be caught by it. Thus I can understand religious humanists, and the others who do not liberalise themselves quite so far, who blend truth and tradition by means of metaphor, retaining the structure of belief as an aspect of their lives, and retaining the belief itself to various degrees.

Some Christians, of course, are afraid that they or others will go this far. They would read what I have written above and say "See? This is why we can't go around taking stuff metaphorically all the time." Many of them would then go on to explain that not taking the Bible literally might let you support abortion or (gasp) homosexuality. Of course, the abortion thing is ridiculous, because there isn't a single verse in the Bible that guarantees either that abortion is wrong or that the soul is implanted at conception. In fact, there's at least one passage (Exodus 21:22-23) that sort of implies otherwise. Moreover, if anyone's 'picking and choosing' with no obvious justification, it's the people who pick the invisible verse condemning abortion along with "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination" (Lev:20:13) and Paul's statement in 1 Romans referring to "women [who] exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural" and "men . . . [who] were consumed with passion for one another" as "errors" and "degrading passions", while completely ignoring some or all of the following:

Deut 22:5 A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does such things is abhorrent to the Lord your God.

How many of the people who speak against homosexuality also speak against women wearing trousers? I bet some of them are women wearing trousers.

Deut 22:11 You shall not wear clothes made of wool and linen woven together.

Enough said. Nobody is demanding laws against wool/linen garments.

Lev 25:44 As for the male and female slaves whom you may have, it is from the nations around you [and not from the Israelites] that you may acquire male and female slaves.
Eph 6:5-6 Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.
(and many more from both Old and New Testaments)

People used to care about those ones, but people who liked those verses usually preferred to ignore this verse:

Deut 23:15-16 Slaves who have escaped to you from their owners shall not be given back to them. They shall reside with you, in your midst, in any place they choose in any one of your towns, wherever they please; you shall not oppress them.

Small mitigation, I think.

I could go on until everybody is bored, but I won't (go to the Skeptic's Annotated Bible and you'll be able to pull out hundreds of verses that most of those who deride homosexuality don't follow, I'm sure). People over the centuries have used the Bible for their purposes and derided as "pickers and choosers" those who didn't come to the conclusions mandated by the verses they chose. Such people always ignore plenty of other verses. The reason those people -- whether railing against homosexuality, miscegenation, women's rights or the abolition of slavery -- seem to refer to the Bible more often than their opponents is very simple. It's because they don't have anything else to refer to. It doesn't mean that they actually take the Bible any more literally.

If you're going to pick and choose, by all means pick "love your neighbour as yourself"! Yes, to do so requires an extra-Biblical value judgement (oh, no!), but at least there is some justification! Unlike fundamentalists, people who pick "love your neighbour" aren't picking and choosing for no good reason. They have a reason. It's quite a good one. It's the common human sense of morality, not mandated by the universe, but felt by nearly all human beings in some form. To be sure, morality of this type can get fuzzy around the edges, but the Golden Rule has arisen independently in many, many cultures, and it's always considered crucial. It's not arbitrary, merely relative to humanity. Humanity in general, that is.

Don't feed the fundamentalists. Don't tell them they actually take the Bible more seriously. They'll just say "Yes, that's right, the Bible forbids abortion!" (It doesn't. Remember?)

Nonbelieving Literati: Not the End of the World

2008-03-16T01:13:00.000-07:00

'I don't like affectation. That doesn't mean I try and make everyone look like they just got up in the morning -- that would be a form of affectation too. I like to try and get behind the screens folks put up, get an image of the person they are when they think no-one's looking. Far easier said than done, right enough. Soon as you point a camera at somebody, they perform. Some do it more subtly than others, but they all play a part.'

'Dave made your pictures sound like, I don't know, psychological X-rays.'

'Nah. Nothing quite so wanky and sophisticated. But you can usually tell what I think of the subject without much in the way of in-depth analysis.'

Steff got back to his plate, oddly relieved to have headed off the discussion.

Many of his pictures were psychological X-rays. Fortunately, most people didn't recognise who of.

Thus do we hear the photographer Steff Kennedy's view of his own art in Not the End of the World. I can't help but wonder if author Christopher Brookmyre's view of his own writing is similar: self-conscious, with a hint of self-congratulation for the self-deprecation he allows himself in thinking of this work, coupled with an insecure, and justified, fear of wankiness.

The book is very quotable in places, witty and sometimes even profound for brief moments that don't quite string together properly. I was touched by Larry Freeman's thought that there are orphans, and there are widows, but there's no word for a parent who loses a child. Quite why Larry Freeman has to have lost a child is less obvious. It's irrelevant to the story, and it's not an aspect of his character that actually develops; it seems to be a bauble that figuratively hangs around his character's neck, something to make him seem more interesting, I don't know.

Indeed, Christopher Brookmyre's ability to develop or even convincingly describe character is -- I can put this no more simply -- terrible. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his stereotyped view of fundamentalist Christians, who conveniently justify Steff Kennedy's oh-so-hip contempt for them in every way possible. I'm sorry, but I don't buy that final scene where evil preacher ("Lex") Luther St John isn't willing to die for what he says he believes in. One of the scary things about fundamentalists is that many of them would just love to be persecuted and die for what they believe, and, whatever else you can say about Luther's character, he is portrayed as a true believer, and a terribly messed up true believer at that. You're telling me he wouldn't play to a martyr's script if you strung him up on a cross? Don't be silly.

Ah, but the fundamentalists are nothing compared with Madeleine. So let me just warn you, I'm about to get frank about some of my views on sex -- and, ahem, somewhat impolite about our author's apparent opinions thereof.

Madeleine, Madeleine, Madeleine. Maddy. Magdalene. Where to start? Our dear Maddy used to be a porn actress. She's one of the good guys, naturally, not like those evil fundamentalists who oppose pornography for prurient reasons, or those odd Dworkinites who think pornography demeans women in some way. Indeed, Maddy watched some pornography for a psychology class at university and understood immediately what the ramifications were and were not:

As she had quickly come to learn, there is no such thing as an 'experiment' in academic psychology, because that would suggest the prof was in some doubt as to what the results would be. He knew all along that sustained exposure to this material would make the depicted behaviour seem more natural, commonplace and perfectly ordinary; the effect was 'demystification' rather than desensitization. So a blow-job neither elevated the recipient male to a position of dominance and supremacy any more than it made the woman a debased slattern deserving of all contempt: it was just a blow-job. A pussy wasn't any kind of mystic portal to the sexual dimension: it was a pussy. The men were neither perverts nor superstuds for doing what they were doing; the women neither whores nor goddesses. They were all just people fucking. And it was no big deal.

Alas! I am not in a position to comment directly on this. However, the wonderful Greta Christina, who is resolutely pro-porn and does know what she is talking about, has written this about people assuming that the stuff that happens in porn is normal sex (when in fact most of the time the details are dictated by what looks good, not by what feels good). She has also written this about the complexities involved in supporting porn:

I also think that pro-porn advocates -- myself included -- need to stop pretending that there isn't a problem. We need to recognize that the overwhelming majority of porn -- or rather, the overwhelming majority of video porn, which is the overwhelming majority of porn -- is sexist, is patriarchal, does perpetuate body fascism, does create unrealistic sexual expectations for both women and men, does depict sex in ways that are not only overwhelmingly focused on male pleasure, but are rigid and formulaic and mind-numbingly tedious to boot. And we need to be trying to do something about it.

Christopher Brookmyre is having Maddy say a load of rubbish here. Pornography is fine. Fine! Nothing wrong with it at all! No possible objections! Any fool can see that!

So why, oh please, why was our dear former porn actress only doing it because her Daddy abused her when she was little? How does that fit into Brookmyre's script? Sure, porn is fine -- but nice girls only do it because they were abused as children. Madeleine is a nice girl, you know. Not one of those -- sluts!

You think it couldn't get worse, don't you? It gets worse. Having created this slimy contradiction in values, Brookmyre can think of nothing better to do than to have sex with it in the form of his Mary Sue, Steff Kennedy. Steff Kennedy is interestingly tall and blond. Steff Kennedy takes no bullshit and commits heresy on a regular basis (coool . . .). Steff Kennedy has watched one of Madeleine's porn videos, but it is only when he sees the real her that he becomes suddenly transported to the daft world of the desperately in love, where he feels cutely awkward and humbly oblivious to the obvious fact that -- of course -- she likes him too.

His stomach was churning. His bloody stomach was churning. He hadn't felt like this since he was about fifteen, and the worst of it was that it was for all the same reasons as back then. Thinking about what she looked like, what she smelt like, her smile, the sound of her voice. Excited by the very thought of seeing her, worried by the thought that she wouldn't show, nervousness multiplied with every unfeasibly long minute that passed.

There's more like that. A whole lot more. Remembering the patronising way the author had endowed the object of this stereotypical worship with a pity-inducing excuse for being a porn star, I wanted to spew. But I'd have settled for the author taking his hand off his you-know-what for long enough to write something that didn't reek of sugar and semen.

Instead, I had to watch as the evil fundamentalist Christians tried to use Maddy as a pawn, a tool to promote their ideology by forcing her to repent. Luckily, Steff comes up with the idea that saves the day! Then he head-butts her evil, abusing father so hard that the father is thrown to the wall, all while making cute sarcastic remarks with his hard-to-fathom (but very coool) sense of humour. It was nice to see Maddy take the stage and turn the tables on the moralising pundits who believed her dead, but I wished I could have seen her turn the tables on her author. He, too, is using her to promote his ideology, and he, too, does not respect her.

I know it can be hard for the best of liberals to entirely shake off the complex, powerful memes that surround sex for long enough to perceive the best way for people to enjoy their lives. Heck, I, for one, have had to concede with regard to my own feelings that sexual repression is not just a weird disease they had in the fifties. Finding the best way to view a sexual issue can take time and thought, and even then you won't always be sure you're right. I'd be more inclined to cut Christopher Brookmyre some slack if he wasn't so obviously wanking to the messed-up ideas that he blithely subscribes to.

What if I didn't find Meaning meaningful?

2008-03-10T21:36:00.000-07:00

How do we find meaning in life? Theists -- even open-minded ones -- often speak of a sort of meaning that I really don't understand. Here's Quixote, who is ever-thoughtful in both senses of the word, opining quite honestly on the subject of meaning:

"Atheists have purpose in their lives. They find meaning. They stare at the heavens just like theists. If purpose and meaning are illusions, they are darn good ones. We are all fools. Atheists themselves are only slightly less deluded than theists in this area.
...
"Again, we do not seem to get meaning from matter. Meaning is more consistent with an intelligence behind the universe."

It's not just theists, either. I met an atheist guy at a party once who said that as far as he was concerned, the meaning of life was looking for it -- not creating it, but looking for it. "Maybe there's meaning out there," he said.

How the heck can there be meaning out there? The only meaning I've ever seen was very definitely in here. In my mind!

Seriously, I don't get this. When I say 'meaning', I'm not talking about a property of the universe. I'm talking about my mental state, or perhaps another person's mental state. When I say something means something, I mean that it means something to me, or to you, or to us as part of a shared understanding. There is no echo of some bigger concept. There is no sense in which I am using 'meaning' as a flawed substitute for Meaning with a capital M. This is the only meaning I know and as far as I can tell in my youthful state it is the only meaning I'll ever need.

Apparently, not all atheists agree. John Evo speaks of "trying to play that via rationality I can create meaning". Evidently, for him, (human-)created meaning is not quite enough. I note this with all sympathy and have no desire to pathologise it. It fascinates me. Why do I not feel this way? Authors Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett both surely have to take some credit. The fact that I adopted this notion of meaning prior to my teens may also contribute to my inability to conceive of other possibilities. Whatever the reason, for me 'meaning' is the easy question. Before reading John Evo's post I honestly thought theists just brought that one up because they were deluded and brainwashed.

So I have some questions. If you do believe in, or wish for, or are able to imagine some idea of Meaning beyond the ordinary meaning which simply refers to a state of mind, how would it interact with little-m meaning? What if I didn't find Meaning meaningful? Would that be possible, in your opinion?

Is Meaning just an extra thing that some people find meaningful?

This is much too appropriate.

2008-03-08T13:21:00.000-08:00

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

The Sloppy Art of Improv

2008-03-01T22:32:00.000-08:00

I haven't been posting much recently. This is because I volunteered to take part in an improvised comedy show at the local university, and the performances have been taking up most of my evenings. It's good fun. The last time I did improv was years ago. I'd had a crazy crush on this guy, in part because he was brilliant at improvisation, which was something I'd always wished I could do myself but never felt up to. So after he dumped me I decided that the sensible thing to do would be to take the plunge and learn how to do it myself rather than trying to obtain it vicariously.

It was one of the best decisions I've ever made. It's not just that I removed one of my reasons for being so crazily in love with a guy who didn't love me back. Learning to do something I hadn't been sure I could do was also a brilliant way to salve my wounded self-esteem.

The hardest thing about improv is coming up with stuff. But there are tricks to that. Think of something. Anything. Can you? Suppose you're playing the classic improv warm-up game "What are you doing?"

B (to A): "What are you doing?"
A: "Climbing a tree."
(B mimes climbing a tree.)
C (to B): "What are you doing?"
B: "Brushing my teeth"
(C mimes brushing her teeth.)
D (to C): "What are you doing?"
...

When it comes to your turn, all the stuff that's based on the objects in the room, the things you were talking about in the prior conversation, the picture on A's T-shirt and so on have already been said. You're not allowed to repeat things. What do you say you are doing?

Think of something!

Okay, try this. Think of a letter. Now think of something that begins with that letter.

Easier, isn't it? Improvisation is always easier when you have something to work with. You can work with a random letter that you've picked yourself. You can work with the rules of a theatre sports game. But the main thing you should be working with is the things the other people on the stage are putting into the scene. If two characters are talking about the weather and they say it's raining, find a way to make the rain part of the story. If somebody mimes handing you something, name it based on how big or heavy it seems to be. If someone accidentally trips over while walking into the scene, there had better be a reason why they tripped, and someone had better supply it. "Sorry about that -- forgot to warn you about the electrical wires," you say, or "Oh, that's my mouse! I've been looking for him for ages!" or "Yes, watch out for the elaborate contraption, won't you?" That last one will require you or someone else to then elucidate exactly what the "elaborate contraption" was supposed to do, and what the potential effects of somebody tripping over it are. If you don't already have a story-line in place, the elaborate contraption will probably take over the whole scene. Possibly it was designed by an evil genius. Possibly it was designed by a bored kid to do his homework for him. Either way, the fact that this new character has tripped over it may well have created the central problem that needs to be solved.

So, yes, that's what I've been doing for the past four nights, and that's what I'll be doing for four nights of next week. It's odd, how right it feels. When I first started to get the hang of improv, I remarked to a friend that it was strange, because I'm not normally the sort of person who likes to come up with strange, random stuff to do out of thin air.

She just looked at me with a slight smile, and said "Yes, you are."

Confession

2008-02-23T23:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday both my flatmates were away and I knew I was safely alone in the house for the night, and somehow as I was mucking around on the internet I realised there were lots of clips from Wicked on youtube. I saw said musical at the West End while I was in the UK last year, and while the story flags a bit in the second half, it's got an utterly superb central character -- gutsy and admirable, and requiring a powerful voice. It's brilliant, the way you end up totally gunning for her even as you can see her scary wicked witch image growing before your eyes (There's also an interesting commentary inherent in the storyline about the differing roles of activists and politicians in creating political change). So anyway, seeing as there was nobody else to mind the noise or think me silly, I sang along at full belt (with the proper technique to try to safeguard my throat, naturally) with a whole lot of videos like this one:

Damn, it was fun.

Humanist Symposium 15

2008-02-18T00:30:00.000-08:00

Now up at Cafe Philos, and containing my post Stopping to Think. Yes, that's right, I figured out a way to get the Literati into the Symposium after all.

Stopping to Think

2008-02-13T22:03:00.000-08:00

The Nonbelieving Literati -- the atheist book club started by the Exterminator -- had a striking success of sorts this last round. John Evo, choosing the next book for the Literati to read, decided to pick a classic that would be completely new to him, and we loosely associated literate atheists settled down, each in our own corner, to read The Plague by Albert Camus.

The results were stunning -- see the Spanish Inquisitor for an overview. Pick a Nobel prizewinner and you get posts all over the show, some thoughtful, some critical, some on smaller themes, some on larger ones, and nearly all of them making powerful points. I was particularly impressed by the Lifeguard's post, which took some of the scariest ideas in the book and faced them head on, starting with the disconnect between the way we live our lives day to day and the moments when we actually stop to think about the meaning of it all:

Think about it. Every day you wake up. You wonder what you’ll have for breakfast. Should I just stop at Dunkin Donuts? No, I’m trying to lose some weight for the beach season. . . . All of these things cease to matter ten minutes later when a car comes crashing across three lanes, skidding 360 degrees on a rainy parkway just twenty feet in front of you on the way to work.

Life, it appears, has a funny way of reminding us just how irrelevant our everyday lives are.

Sometimes it seems like nobody bothers to ask the real questions. But the truth is, I think most of us do. We don't question our foundations all the time, but every so often, we all have to face the broader questions about where we find our motivation and what we want from life. Philosophy is more common than you think.

Art is more common than you think. When I was a child, for some reason I thought painting and music and dancing and the like were for kids. For kids, because they just might grow up to be good at them, and for the lucky few adults who actually did grow up to be real artists and musicians and dancers. But you know what? A few years back, I found my grandmother pulling out her set of pastels and carefully drawing a vase of yellow flowers. It wasn't much better than the good end of kids' drawings, and I thought it was a little weird for an old woman to be picking up a new hobby, but I figured it was kind of nice, really. Maybe you didn't have to give up that stuff when you got older after all.

A few months ago, I was getting into Nana's car and I had to shift a picture off the passenger seat. It was a wave, in glorious colourful blues and greens, the richness of the pastels in full display. I was impressed. And my grandmother? She smiled in that slightly shy, proud sort of way, as I might smile if you were kind enough to compliment one of my poems, and said "Actually, I'm particularly proud of that landscape on the back seat, there, the one with the red-roofed house. I think it's my best one so far."

If you put the work in, you really can get well beyond what your average mildly talented kid can produce. She might never sell a picture. I might never publish a poem. But we're both doing something worthwhile. Art is not just for those who might earn a living from it. Art is for those who might gain a little life from it.

Religion sometimes sells itself as a source of meaning. The alpha course is a good example. And whilst I don't advocate using your desire for meaning as a measure of the truth of a story, I think there's a lot to be said for organisations that give people the opportunity to explore these sorts of questions together. Here's one interesting example calling itself the School of Philosophy. I only have my brief exploration of their website to go by, but they appear to be refreshingly broad. Looking at this flyer advertising their Cultural Day, I conclude that they're not entirely free of what we skeptics refer to as 'woo', but nor does their entire programme rest on nonscientific mumbo-jumbo. Rather, they appear to be taking inspiration from all manner of thinkers from all times and places. Lack of dogma -- I approve. This sort of inclusive participation in the search for meaning and joy in life is a really good idea.

An atheist who seeks meaning or self-expression might take a course like this, or study poetry, or become fascinated by astronomy as a source of awe in the universe. The sort of philosophy that you learn in a university can be very mind-expanding, too.

If you're thinking of creating an atheist group in your region to discuss these sorts of things, though, might I suggest a book club?

Shoreline

2008-02-10T00:39:00.000-08:00

This is the way it ought to be.
Far from the deepest current rushing
to tug my feet caressingly,
far from the dull dry sand, just brushing
the richly salty laps of sea.

The salt was wept by poets, here,
who knew the waves were unforgiving,
who felt the rush and held it dear,
but still they fought to go on living
in joy, in hope, in quiet fear.

Notes

(Feel free to ignore these if you want to just comment on the poem. Edit: I recommend just reading the first one.)

1. I've borrowed a metrical trick from the Onegin Stanza. I mean, it's just so brilliant -- by using feminine endings, you break up the tetrameter so it doesn't jingle too much, but it's still more musical than pentameter. I've always been frustrated by the way iambic pentameter can be so, well, invisible. There are advantages to that, of course -- it can be an unobtrusive scaffolding -- but there's still a part of me that insists that metre ought to be felt as more than a vague regularity in the back of your mind. Heck, sometimes pentameter just feels stodgy. As far as I'm concerned, Alexander Pushkin was a genius to come up with this alternative, so naturally I had to experiment to see if I could use it in a different setting.

2. Boy, this one took a long time! Alterations all over the place. If you're interested, here are some of my variations.

First stanza:

This is the way it ought to be.
Far from the danger of the rushing
tide of creativity.
Far from the dull dry sand, just brushing
the richly salty laps of sea.

That first line was the bit that started me off -- an unexpectedly iambic line in a definite conceptual context. The last line of that stanza was the main thing that made me sure I couldn't give up on this poem.

Second stanza:

We can't quite help but wander here.
We know the waves are unforgiving,
we know we mustn't go too near,
yet still we wish to go on living
in joy, in hope, in quiet fear.

Pretentious as heck, right? This is actually a later version than the one I went with, setting aside the changes I made once I reverted to my original version. I had a go at changing this second idea into first person with more natural language, which made it much less pretentious, but a little dull:

I can't quite help but wander here
I know the waves are unforgiving,
I know I mustn't go too near,
but still I want to go on living
in joy, in hope, in quiet fear.

See, this is better, but it's just not as dramatic as my first sketch (It has a nice bit of wander/wonder wordplay, but wordplay is not a reason to keep something that isn't working. Anyone who has ever groaned at a bad joke knows that wordplay just can't carry things on its own. Besides, I still have shore/sure. I'm not sure if that one works for anyone else besides me, but I like the soft reference I find in it anyway).

To be honest, I think the reason I was able to revert to my original idea on the second stanza is because I'd changed the first stanza. The original first stanza was too weak in comparison with the original second stanza, and the ideas conveyed weren't strong enough to carry the (perhaps overly romantic) lyricism of the second stanza, either.

Anyone who thinks I shouldn't have made the changes I did is welcome to speak up; I'd be interested to hear your reasoning. I think I've made the right choices, but I'm not certain.

3. I agonised over saying 'poets' in the second stanza. I'd've liked to have said 'mathematicians' (or maybe 'philosophers', as the exact meaning of the poem shifted) but they both have a few too many syllables. And face it, 'thinkers' just sounds stupid. But the truth is, poetry actually doesn't feel like it's going to eat me. If anything, it's freedom -- a creative release that my parents don't know about and that therefore belongs entirely to me, to use or abuse as I wish.

I sure other people have felt like poetry might eat them, though. Maybe I just haven't been doing it for long enough. In any case, since anyone who reads this knows it was written by someone who writes poetry, referring to 'poets' has an intimacy that wouldn't be there otherwise. And, heck, poetry can have philosophy in it -- the deep kind of philosophy that can save or submerge you.

In other words, referring to poetry in this context can actually feel right, after all.

On Using Feminine Cultural Advantage

2008-02-06T23:39:00.000-08:00

Via Echidne, we find a superb piece of wrong-headedness -- or quite possibly concern-trolling, as Echidne points out -- from Andrew Sullivan:

There were also, of course, the now famous New Hampshire tears - to evoke sympathy. And the blunt appeal on gender grounds alone. And the refusal to disavow the use of her husband for her own political purposes, even as he told lies and cast racist aspersions about her opponent. And, on the eve of Super Tuesday, the tears again. Can you imagine a male politician breaking down in public the day before a crucial vote - and expecting it to help?
It's time feminists realized that Clinton is a dream gone sour.

I find it hard to choose between the two big democratic candidates, but my innermost leanings are probably for Obama. So you should not consider this a specifically pro-Clinton post. Rather, I'd like to weigh in on the feminist questions raised by Sullivan's piece. There are lots of things wrong with the view that Sullivan puts across, but I want to focus on just one particularly silly bit:

Can you imagine a male politician breaking down in public the day before a crucial vote - and expecting it to help?

Excuse me? The main reason a male politician can't do that is because we have this construct known as masculinity. What it means is that men are restricted in the sorts of emotions they can show while still having people's respect. This aspect of masculinity is not sensible. It is not helpful. Women should not be aiming to be restricted by it! Is Sullivan trying to complain because women have this advantage in that we can use emotion in ways that men can't?

Well, it's true. The ability to show emotion and have people react sympathetically rather than scornfully is a cultural advantage that women have over men. And Clinton should have no more qualms over using it than a male politician should over using, say, a tough-guy image to try to attract votes. That is to say, it's silly image politics, but it happens all the time. Why should it be more wrong to use a feminine cultural advantage? Masculine ones are used every day and nobody blinks. And if the aim is to try to even the playing field, that doesn't mean that women should always try to conform to masculine methods of gaining respect.

In actual fact, a tough-guy male politician is helping to restrict men far more than Clinton's willingness to use the occasional sniffle could restrict women. Clinton cannot afford to be feminine all the time -- hence the 'robot' accusations prior to her show of emotion -- so she can't really be said to be subscribing to a narrow view of what women should be allowed to do just because she shows emotion occasionally. Whereas the tough-guy male politician is reinforcing a restrictive gender construct down the line.

If Clinton was always playing feminine and implying that her worth depended thereon, or if she were obviously implying that her husband's skill matters more than hers, well, that would be anti-feminist. But she isn't. She's blending masculinity and femininity in what I consider to be a rather impressive fashion, actually. This is the way we ought to go, being willing to claim the traditionally masculine without subscribing to the notion that anything we gain from femininity is worthless. The ability to give emotion -- not in an uncontrolled fashion but in a calculatedly honest fashion when the situation requires it -- strikes me as a worthy part of a politician's skill set.

And if men want in on the softer emotions, you should jolly well organise your own damn movement. Because until then, we're going to go on aiming to have it all right under your noses, and if you're not brave enough to stand up for your own, similar right, that's your fault.

Nonbelieving Literati: The Plague

2008-02-02T17:47:00.000-08:00

For details of the Nonbelieving Literati, see here.

I have to write this post, because I don't want to read everyone else's until I've written mine, which currently means I'm avoiding some very interesting-looking posts on other people's blogs. It's not going to be easy. I read this book really early, and in the intervening six weeks or so, there have been lots of minor points that I might have liked to use The Plague as an illustration to. Instead, I am forced to write a big post that tries to get something across that relates to the whole book. Well, no matter. I shall make a start, and see how much of the important stuff I can end up fitting in.

Camus wrote this book in 1947, after the end of the second world war. He was writing in part from his own experience as part of the French Resistance, and also more fundamentally about crisis and how we deal with it. Thus we get this description quite early in the book:

[T]hey were humanists; they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. . . . Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others, they forgot to be modest -- that was all -- and thought that everything was still possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible.

Camus isn't using 'humanist' in the sense of, say, the Humanist Symposium. I suspect he is referring to something closer to Renaissance humanism, and more specifically to the notion that men and women are, or should be, free to control their own destinies. We think we're free, he says, and we go on making plans, but in fact we are not free; certainly not so long as there are pestilences or invading fascists. The use of a plague -- a natural phenomenon -- as an allegory for an occupation -- a human phenomenon -- is interesting here. Whatever he thinks of the moral issues surrounding the behaviour of the German government and army, they are not the focus of this book. This book is not arguing that we should create a world which does operate the way we want it to. This book takes it for granted that there are pestilences of all types, at looks at how we deal with them.

It's most definitely an atheist book. The sole proponent of religious solutions to crisis is Father Paneloux, who suggests that we deserve crisis. The plague is God's punishment, says Father Paneloux, and we must submit willingly to die if that be our destiny -- and indeed take joy from the notion that what is happening is God's will. To this, the good Doctor Bernard Rieux (one of three main atheist characters) remarks with deliberate forgiveness that "As you know, Christians sometimes say that sort of thing without really thinking it. They're better than they seem." Indeed, Paneloux is better than he seems, for he does join in with the volunteers who risk their lives caring for the sick rather than leaving the plague victims to their divine punishment. However, consistent with his views, he refuses treatment for himself, preferring to submit to God's will. One gets the impression that the sole saving grace of Paneloux's position is that he allows it to hurt only himself and any others who might be swayed to believe it.

The more interesting viewpoints are those of the atheists [or, at least, the viewpoints that discount or disbelieve in God - edit]. As an interesting pair, we have Doctor Rieux, whom I have already mentioned, and Jacques Tarrou, a traveler and philosopher. Rieux is the simpler of the two. He is a doctor, and the impulse to fight against the plague comes naturally to him. He cannot necessarily justify it, except insofar as he finds it impossible to do otherwise. Tarrou is both more complex and more confident in his viewpoint. It is Tarrou who goes to Rieux and suggests that teams of volunteers be set up to care for the sick, in full confidence that willing people will be found, despite the risk.

Rieux has a simple and uncertain theory of morality; Tarrou has one that he has given a lot of thought to. Both men, however, agree that the right thing to do is to care for the sick and attempt to minimise the hurt and damage as best they may, no matter that they must face the fact that there will be an awful run of tragedy before them that they are powerless to completely halt. By contrast, the journalist Raymond Rambert represents a different viewpoint. Rambert is not interested in the fate of those in the town -- "I don't belong here!" he protests, pointing out that he was only there to write a short article and now he is stuck, separated from his beloved wife because of the quarantine. One should not think of Rambert as an immoral character; he is portrayed sympathetically. Perhaps Rambert's strongest statement is this one:

"[P]ersonally, I've seen enough of people who can die for an idea. I don't believe in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learnt it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves."

Rieux's reaction is very interesting: he agrees with Rambert, and tells him that Rambert's impending attempt to escape the quarantine is right and proper; his only protest is that "there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency." Rieux has a wife of his own who is sick (though not of the plague) and who was sent out of the town before the plague began. He, too, is missing somebody he loves. And, more deeply perhaps, I think if you were someone who was sacrificing and taking risks in order to try to save the lives of others, you might not object to there being those who grasp happiness with both hands. Then, at least, you might know that even if you lose out, others will still have the chance to be happy because of what you did.

Both Tarrou and Rieux are in general forgiving of those who think differently. Indeed, these words of the narrator (who is unnamed until the end) might conceivably convey something of the views of both men:

[I]t is not the narrator's intention to ascribe to these sanitary groups [of volunteers to care for the sick] more importance than their due. . . . [T]he narrator is inclined to think that by attributing over-importance to praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worst side of human nature. For this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule. The narrator does not share that view. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance . . . on the whole men are more good than bad.

Bearing in mind the allegorical nature of the book, this is a modest (but entirely serious) utterance on the part of Camus. For, of course, the sanitary groups represent the Resistance, in which Camus played a significant role, and in this passage he may be seen to be disavowing to some extent the hero status that was given to members of the Resistance after the war. I find myself admiring him -- not just for modesty in this aspect of the book, but also for the way he has chosen to tackle a harder question when there was an easy one standing by. The evils of the Nazi regime would have been on everyone's lips, and the heroism of all those who stood up to it would have been being lauded at every turn. In such a situation, to refuse the simple heroic story in favour of a forgiving, nuanced view of human behaviour that faces up to some of the most difficult questions that human beings can ask is an achievement indeed.

As regards the broader theme of the book, the most important analogy between the Resistance and the sanitary groups is that they are those who inspire everyone else not to give up:

These groups enabled our townsfolk to come to grips with the disease, and convinced them that, now that plague was amongst us, it was up to them to do whatever could be done to fight it.

This is, I think, a central message of the book. Fight back at the universe. Do not submit. Yet it is a bittersweet message. At the end of the book we are with Rieux, and he is alone. The friends he made during the plague have died or gone back to their loved ones. His own wife has died of her separate illness. He has no-one. And he reflects that it is certain that, some time in the future, the plague will strike again. The victory is never complete.

I told Rieux not to kill himself. I knew he probably wouldn't. And he doesn't even seem to think of it. That, too, is heroism. Rieux is strong enough and hopeful enough to keep going, even when the plague is over and he has nothing to fight for any more.

Trochaic Substitutions in Iambic Verse

2008-01-26T14:46:00.000-08:00

I fear I am about to give you a lecture. Blame Alon, he asked for it (In the comments of this post. Sort of).

First things first. When we speak English, some syllables have stronger emphasis placed on them than others. By this I do not mean the same sort of emphasis that we would denote by italics. I mean the natural variations in stress that create the rhythm of our speech. Following Stephen Fry's convention in this lovely book, when I want to show you which syllables are stressed I shall write the stressed syllables in bold, like this:

The natural variations in stress that create the rhythm of our speech.

An iamb is a weak (unstressed) syllable followed by a strong (stressed) syllable. In ordinary speech I might be likely to pronounce it iamb -- but don't. As a way of remembering it, stress the second syllable: iamb. Iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb. That's the rhythm of iambic verse.

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal -- yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

(Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn)

It is worth noting that if you merely read a poem in your head, you are less likely to take note of which syllables are strong and which ones are weak. This is one reason (and not the only one) for getting into the habit of always reading poems aloud. Even just whispering the poem makes a real difference to what you can get out of it. So, please, when I quote lines of poetry in this post, read them aloud to yourself. And if you will do me the courtesy of reading my humble poems aloud when I post them, I shall bless you as a considerate and thoughtful reader.

The excerpt from Ode on a Grecian Urn that I gave above is written in iambic pentameter. That is to say, there are five iambic 'feet' in each line; five sets of 'weak-strong'. Iambic tetrameter, with four iambs per line, is also quite common:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And make some extra, just for you.

(Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse)

A trochee is sort of the opposite of an iamb: 'strong-weak' rather than 'weak-strong'. Trochaic verse is less common than iambic verse, but there are certainly examples out there. Longfellow's Hiawatha, for example, is written in trochaic tetrameter (the name of the title character may have had something to do with that).

And the smoke rose slowly, slowly,
Through the tranquil air of morning,
First a single line of darkness,
Then a denser, bluer vapor,
Then a snow-white cloud unfolding,
Like the tree-tops of the forest,
Ever rising, rising, rising,
Till it touched the top of heaven . . . (link)

Longfellow wrote Hiawatha in huge sentences; they kind of drag on, sometimes, in my opinion. However, if I was writing trochaic verse I think I would have a hard time not doing that, myself. Trochees are not very, well, conclusive; they end weakly. Iambic verse, by contrast, ends on a strong syllable and, as a result, tends to sound stronger as a whole.

Within iambic verse, a trochaic substitution occurs when you substitute a trochee for one of your iambic feet. It can occur at the beginning of a line, like this:

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough . . .

(Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam)

It can also occur in the middle of a line, at the beginning of a new phrase, like this:

To be or not to be: that is the question.

(Don't get confused by the extra syllable at the end, there; it's called a feminine ending, and it's another perfectly common variation)

A trochaic substitution in the middle of a line forces us to have two stressed syllables next to each other. This naturally creates a tendency to pause between the two strong syllables. As a result, it's generally bad form to use a trochaic substitution in the middle of a line in a situation where the pause would not be natural. This rule about where trochaic substitutions are allowed to go is nearly universal. However, the effects that can be produced by trochaic substitutions within those limits are startlingly varied.

A trochaic substitution can be a way to start things with a bang:

Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.

(Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott)

Trochaic substitutions can fit nicely into a strong, purposeful rhythm, as in the conclusion of this poem by Wilfred Owen where he explains why he isn't writing jolly little poems about the ways in which war isn't so bad after all:

You shall not hear their mirth:
You shall not come to think them well content
By any jest of mine. These men are worth
Your tears. You are not worth their merriment.

(Wilfred Owen, Apologia Pro Poemate Meo)

Trochaic substitutions can be used in dramatic verse to break the rhythm of a character's speech to show agitation. There are several good examples in Macbeth, Act I, Scene VII. Here's Lady Macbeth, berating her husband with trochaic substitutions all over the place:

Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time
Such I account thy love.

My favourite trochaic substitution, though, is nearly invisible. It's a lilt, a beauty mark, at the beginning of the fourth line of the following poem. Since the metre flows naturally on its own, I won't spoil the elegance of it by crudely marking it out.

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes:

(Byron, She Walks In Beauty)

Would you rather be a good enough poet to write that, or would you rather be pretty enough to have that written about you? I can't decide. Not that I would be foolish enough to have anything to do with mister 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' if he was still alive, but he did write awfully sexy poetry.

If Emily Dickinson is writing it, a trochaic substitution can even be soft and lingering:

Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul . . . (link)

It's startling, but entirely typical of poetry, that the rules can be so strict, and the results so varied. I find that knowing something of the ways in which metre can vary makes a big difference to the way I read poetry. In Shakespeare, the metre can sometimes amount to a stage direction to say a line in a particular way. In Wilfred Owen's most famous poem, Dulce et Decorum Est, I read it again after I'd learned to read metre and couldn't believe I had never noticed before the way the metre sputters and dies in the final line. When Ebonmuse posted some excerpts from Wallace Stevens' Sunday Morning, I knew full well I wouldn't have read them in the same even, powerful way if I wasn't sorting each pentametric line into iambic beats (with the occasional trochaic one).

It's worth knowing.

'Streetcar' and Censorship.

2008-01-19T01:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I finally cracked. I was on my way home from work and I passed the DVD rental place, wandered in and, well, somehow A Streetcar Named Desire was just what I felt like seeing. I’d been holding off for a while. I had my reasons.

I saw a stage production of The Glass Menagerie a few months ago. It was incredible. We don’t study Tennessee Williams in high school over here. Shakespeare, sure, every year at least once, and if you don’t hit Steinbeck there’s a good chance someone’ll hand you To Kill A Mockingbird, but Tennessee Williams isn’t on anybody’s radar for exam fodder. So I think it was somewhere around the point in Tom’s opening speech where he refers to the fiddler in the wings that I became aware of -- became awed by -- the autheticity of the voice. It was intimate. It was elegantly constructed. It had a rough edge. It was incontrovertibly American. This was poetry created from the surrounding voice. It couldn’t rely on literary conventions to mark it out as art. It was the real deal.

I was so glad I had never had to write English assignments on it.

Of course I wanted more. Still, I was wary of watching Tennessee Williams on film. Having seen The Glass Menagerie in the theatre, I honestly couldn’t imagine how you could possibly make a film out of it. The way it uses the stage setting is too beautiful, the way it doesn’t entirely pretend to be real. It’s nostalgic -- it’s a stage, an illusion -- it’s intimate, but it doesn’t pretend to be entirely real. How could you possibly capture that on film? Why would you want to?

I didn’t know if his later plays had anything of the same effect. But I couldn’t help worrying that film really couldn’t capture Tennessee Williams, and that I might be spoiling a future opportunity to see the real thing on stage. When it came to Streetcar, there was the plus side that Tennessee Williams had had a hand in the screenplay. If he thought it was okay, maybe it would be! On the other hand, though, there was the censorship issue. Did I really want to see a version that might have had its teeth pulled by prudish fifties industry watchdogs?

(Spoilers follow because I can’t shut up about important plot details.)

Well, I’ve seen it, no going back now, and I think it was probably worth it. The censorship does pose problems, but the actors are brilliant. It’s the film that made Marlon Brando’s name, of course, and Vivien Leigh is as good as you’d expect, but I was actually particularly impressed by Kim Hunter as Stella. She deserved that Oscar. She was a great contrast to Leigh’s pale waif-like Blanche, and I loved the complexity of emotion in her sulky mouth. I was watching the director’s cut, which meant we had the nice close-up in that scene where she goes back down to Stanley after he has hit her -- really, it’s a crying shame the League of Decency forced them to change that scene at the last minute. It was one of the most impressive sequences in the whole film, central to portraying Stella and Stanley’s relationship.

I’m glad I knew already that Blanche’s husband was homosexual. You could see perfectly well how the stuff she said about him applied to that situation (“He came to me for help, but I didn’t know that”). I’d have hated to be confused into thinking he was just oversensitive enough to kill himself over nothing.

It’s the end that I regret. When I saw Stella say to Stanley “Don’t you touch me,” I thought Yeah, right, how long is that going to last? Then she goes to her baby and says “We’re not going back in there, not ever,” and I thought Oh. Really? That’s nice. Gosh. So it’s a proper tragic ending, huh? Everyone loses, but at least that includes the bad guy. Not so terrible, really!

They suckered me. I am ashamed of myself.

Those stuffy, long-dead bastards! See what they’ve done? I’ll never get that moment back. For, of course, in the original play, Stella doesn’t leave Stanley. She never would. She’s dependent on him emotionally and financially. There were no battered women’s shelters in those days, but even if there were, believing Blanche’s story would have required the courage to see her world fall apart. She wasn’t going to do that. And I knew it, I could see it, right up to the point where she did differently, and I was desperately afraid of my own reaction -- afraid that I’d think that Stella and Stanley’s love, such as it was, was the only good thing still standing, despite its rottenness -- afraid that I’d have to see in it a bitter hope that I couldn’t reject because it was the only thing left.

I wasn’t so much glad that Stella had left Stanley as I was glad that I wasn’t sorry for it. And I won’t get that moment back. I won’t know how I would have dealt with it if the stupid Hollywood Production Code hadn’t insisted that rape couldn’t go unpunished. Seriously, what did they think Tennessee Williams was writing? A play about the way we’d like the world to be? Did they think he was endorsing a world where sensitive homosexual boys could be driven to suicide, and where Blanche’s sexual behaviour could deny her the only possibility of happiness she had?

Perhaps they did endorse that. Stupid bastards.

Fry & Laurie on Patriotism

2008-01-15T00:33:00.000-08:00

Since our English friend Tobe (sadly only intermittently posting these days) last posted a piece called "On Patriotism", I couldn't help thinking of him when I saw this sketch:

And yes, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie are atheists. But of course they are.

(I know, I know, danger zone: not posting for ages and then coming up with random YouTube videos. I've got ideas -- on this eclectic blog, who wouldn't -- but I keep second-guessing myself. I have been a little busy this week. I'll blame that.)

Monday

2008-01-07T00:57:00.000-08:00

It's 6am. Rather be early this morning.
I think I'm in the wrong time zone. Last week I
well it's probably fine but I can't be sure she didn't
take it the wrong way completely. And yes I
forgot to shower yesterday and the day before I
spent the day in bed. Why didn't I
get out more? Bloody stupid! Spent too much
time on the internet. Should have called a friend.
Tense, relax. Don't try to smile.
Nothing to do but rise, and have a shower,
grab some food and take a bite
and step out hopefully. Let the world forgive
this wilted, weary woman; let me
return to reality, just a little bruised.

One of my favourite questions

2008-01-05T19:21:00.000-08:00

(On the off chance that you don't understand a word of this but would quite like to, I've got half an explanation in the post below).

I always rather liked tutoring. It's definitely one of the better privileges of being a good maths student: small job, decent pay, not bad on a CV, and, best of all, regular opportunities to talk about mathematics. The best part of tutoring is definitely the questions people ask. One year, I had the lecturer's son in my tutorial group and he'd have a different question every week, guaranteed to be perceptive and usually quite hard to answer. That was fun. But you don't have to be a brilliant student to ask the question I'm about to explain here. You just have to be halfway interested and struggling with one of the trickier aspects of multivariate calculus.

The chain rule in the univariate case is fairly simple:

Because of the notation, it looks like a simple fraction cancellation, is easy to remember, and quickly becomes second nature. Moreover, you don't have too many variables to keep track of. You have y=f(x), x=g(t), and if you want to get really complicated you could note that y as a function of t would be written y=f(g(t)), and define f(g(t)) as being equal to some other, single function h(t), and that would be about it.

In the multivariate case, you have z=f(x,y), and then sooner or later you're going to be dealing with one of those 'change of variables' problems where you look at what z would be in terms of some other variables u and v instead. You have a problem like

and you'll be asked to figure out by first calculating , , and and then using the multivariate chain rule. So you look up the multivariate chain rule (or maybe you've got used to it by this stage) and it tells you nice and obviously that

and now you've got to work out and , which is a bummer, because you have u and v written as expressions in x and y, but what you need, in order to work out those partial derivatives, is the opposite. You're going to have to solve a simultaneous equation problem to get expressions that tell you x and y in terms of u and v.

Not everybody likes simultaneous equations, you know, especially when you have pesky 'u's and 'v's floating around instead of comfortable obvious numbers. At some point -- it always happens -- somebody is going to try to short cut.

"Look," they'll say...
"
"so
"
"and now I'll differentiate to get
".
"We're taking a partial derivative with respect to u so we hold everything else constant so we just treat x like a constant, right?"

Wrong.

The simplest way to point this out is to say "Look, x depends on u. It's equal to some function of u and v. So it's not constant as u changes and you can't take the partial derivative with respect to u and expect it to behave like a constant."

The conversation usually continues like this:

"So what do I have to do then?"
"Solve a simultaneous equation for x and y in terms of u and v. Get an expression for y that is only in terms of u and v, with no x terms, and then work out the derivative."
"Sigh."

Sometimes that's the end of it. Sometimes the student will probe further. It happens when you're talking to a student who bothers to think about things. Maybe it's the guy who discusses the problems he's working on with his friends and tries to work the tricky stuff out together. Or it'll be the young woman who always does her homework (all of it), and makes you feel embarrassed because you were never that dutiful, who abandons her usual meekness and asks, with a note of frustration in her voice,

"But why? Why can't I just do it the other way? I mean, I've got u, right, and I differentiate with respect to y holding the other stuff constant. Why does it matter whether the other stuff in the equation is x or v or whatever? I'm still basically taking the derivative of u in the y direction, right?"

I really like this question. I never asked it when I took that course and then I got really confused by basically the same issue when I started learning how to solve partial differential equations.

Remember, back in our univariate case, we had a function f that took you from x to y, a function g that took you from t to x, and a function h (equal to taking g, then f) that would take you straight from t to y. Now, it doesn't make sense to just talk about the derivative of y. There's a derivative of y with respect to x, and a derivative of y with respect to t. More to the point, though, the derivative basically depends on whether we are getting to y via the function f or via the function h.

It's the function we're using that counts. The derivative of y isn't a number associated with some numerical value of y, it's a number associated with how we pass through some point (x,y). We get that information about how we're passing through a particular point from the overall form of the function around that point. We call it "the derivative of y", but actually we're taking the derivative of a function that happens to be equal to y.

So, back up there, if you're taking "the derivative of y with respect to u", it matters whether the function that takes you from u to y includes x terms or if it's all in terms of u and v. It matters because you're changing the form of the function, and it's really the function that you take the derivative of.

You can also look at it this way. We say we're taking the derivative "in the u direction". In actual fact, though, the "u direction" really depends more on v that it does on u. The u direction is "the direction of increasing u", right? But there are lots of directions that increase u.

We could travel along any of those red lines and u would be increasing. But "the u direction" is the direction along which u increases without affecting v. And if the other variable that we're holding constant isn't v, if it's some other weird variable x that depends on a combination of u and v, then "the u direction" isn't "the direction of constant v" any more. It's "the direction of constant x". And that's different, so we get a different answer.

Make sense?

Lightning-Run Calculus: The Derivative

2008-01-05T19:06:00.000-08:00

Bad news, oh ye who tremble in the presence of mathematical symbols! I had this cool idea for a maths post. And then I realised it involved multivariate calculus. And I didn't want to leave anybody out, so I thought I'd make a lightning-run post so that those who don't know any calculus and want to sort of have an idea of what I'm talking about should at least be able to get some of the ideas into your head.

I know that nobody who knows nothing of calculus is going to be able to pick up all the ideas presented in this post, all at once. I also know I'm not quite telling you everything you need to know to understand my post above. However, I figure that if you thought you vaguely understood something in the post I'm about to make after this one, you might be able to check in this post to see if you were thinking along the right lines.

At the bottom line, I just like having this stuff here for completeness.

I'm not quite sure if I can help anyone who is too afraid of algebra to understand the following:

Let m be the number of biscuits Mary ate. Let n be the number of biscuits Nathan ate. Between then, Mary and Nathan ate 12 biscuits in total. Therefore, m + n = 12.

You don't have to be able to figure out whan m and n are. In fact, in case you haven't noticed, you can't, because I haven't given you enough information. But I'm going to be working on the level of "getting the basic idea" rather than actually being able to calculate things, and I'm going to assume that you get the basic idea of how letters substitute for numbers in algebra. I'm also going to assume that you sort of get how we make a graph of a function like, say, . I mean, you might not be able to draw it off the top of your head, but I'm hoping you'd have a rough idea of what sort of a picture we're talking about, and you'd know that points on the curvy line drawn by the graph correspond to values of y, as calculated by that function, for given values of x.

Ready?

Derivatives

The derivative of a function at a point is the slope of the tangent line at that point. Here's a nice picture:

Picture created with the help of a piece of open-source software available here.

The red line is the function; the green line is the tangent line for the point x=1.8 . It just touches the graph of the function at that point without actually crossing it. As a result, at that point x=1.8, the function and the tangent line seem to be travelling in the same direction momentarily. By contrast, further to the right at x = roughly 7.2ish, the lines touch and cross each other. The green line is not a tangent to the red line at that point.

For the sake of accuracy, I'm forced to inform you that the tangent line at a particular point can cross the function at that very point. However, when that happens, it looks nothing like the right hand touching point above where the two lines cross at an angle. It looks like this:

The basic idea is that the tangent line shows you what the function would do if it stopped bending at that point and just carried on in a straight line in the direction it was pointing at the time. It tells you what direction the function is going at that particular point. There's a perfectly specific and accurate way of defining it, but I'm not going to go there. That's not because it's all that terribly hard; I just don't want to overload you with too many concepts. If you want to understand more fully, find a calculus textbook and/or ask me enough questions in the comments section to convince me you're enthusiastic.

The slope of the tangent line is a number that measures how steep it is. A vertical line would have infinite slope; a horizontal line would have zero slope. If the slope of the tangent line is a big number (i.e. if the derivative is large) then both the function and its tangent line are travelling upwards very fast at that point. If the slope of the tangent line (= the derivative) is close to zero, then the function is nearly horizontal at that point. If it's a negative number, the function is travelling downwards. Got it? Don't worry, I won't be testing you later. You should still go through and check that you understand the idea here, though.

We write the derivative like this:

By which we mean:
"The derivative of y with respect to x"
or,
"What we get when we differentiate y with respect to x"
(Differentiation is the process that takes a function and gives you its derivative)
or, equivalently,
"How fast y changes as we increase x"

There is an explanation for this seemingly strange notation, but it would require me to go into the subject in greater depth than I intended for this post.

Why do we care about this? Well, any time we want to talk mathematically about how something is changing, derivatives are relevant. For example, if the exchange rate is rising fast, then the tangent line to the exchange rate will have a big slope. We can use the derivative of the exchange rate as a way of factoring changes in the exchange rate into an economic model. If we want to talk about how fast the position of an object is changing -- that is, if we want to talk about an object's speed -- then we need to look at the derivative of a graph of the object's position. If we want to talk about how fast the speed is changing -- that is, if we want to talk about acceleration -- we look at the derivative of the speed. That is, the derivative of the derivative of the position.

It's no coincidence that physics took off after Newton discovered calculus. There was a direct causal relationship (more than one causal relationship in more than one direction, perhaps). This is very useful maths. It's about as useful as mathematics could possibly get.

Partial derivatives

Sometimes, in multivariate calculus, you have a function that depends on more than one variable. For example, you might want a function that can tell you how much petrol a car will use based on how fast it is going and how much weight it is carrying. Or you might want to make a graph of altitude based on latitude and longitude. If you want some three-dimensional pictures of functions (graphed along the vertical z axis) that depend on two variables (graphed on the x and y axes), you can go here and type in some expressions in x and y into the box on the upper right that has 'z = ' to the left of it. Try looking at, you know, z = x^2+y^2+3*x^3 or something (That's computer keyboard speak for , in case you didn't know -- you use the * instead of an x for multiplication. I know I'm being really pedantic here but I'm trying to be cautious).

There are several ways of finding a derivative in this situation. The simplest way, or at least the one you learn first, is to introduce the idea of partial derivatives. First you ignore the fact that you can travel in the y direction and just try traveling in the x direction. The slope in that direction gives you the partial derivative of z with respect to x:

We use a curly 'd' so we know there are other things that could also cause the z value to vary, not just x.

You can also find the slope in the y direction, pretending x doesn't change and just seeing how fast z changes as you increase y. The two partial derivatives together can be used to give you general information about the slope of the function at that point in any given direction.

In the specific example of the car, we could see how the amount of petrol being used changes as the speed is varied, for a given weight carried, by taking the partial derivative of the amount of petrol being used with respect to changes in speed. Or if we wanted to know how fast the amount of petrol being used would change as we changed the weight carried, for a given speed, we'd take the partial derivative of petrol with respect to weight.

The Chain Rule

One last thing. The chain rule. In the ordinary case where you just have a function y that depends on a single variable x, it goes like this. Suppose x is also a function of some variable t. So for any given value of t, we can put that into a function to work out the value of x, and then we can put that x value into a different function to give us y.

t --> x --> y

The chain rule exists to deal with the following question. Suppose we know how fast x changes as t changes, and suppose we know how fast y changes as x changes. How fast does y change as t changes? The chain rule can tell us.

In the case where you have a function depending on two variables, it gets more complicated. You can have z depending on x and y, which both depend on t -- so for any given t value there will be x and y values which will then give you a specific value of z for that t value -- so there's a 'chain rule' to work out the derivative of z with respect to t based on the partial derivative of z with respect to x and y, and the derivatives of x and y with respect to t. Or it's not uncommon to have x and y both depending on the same pair of variables u and v. In that case, you might want to work out the partial derivative of z with respect to u or to v. The chain rule is easily adapted to let us use the partial derivatives of x and y with respect to u or v to tell us.

I haven't told you how to actually calculate any of this. (In keeping with that, I haven't told you in this post what the chain rule actually is!) Largely, I haven't told you that part of things because becoming proficient at the calculational side takes practice. This means you won't be able to understand the calculations in my post above. You might get an inkling of the concepts, though.

Subjectivity

2008-01-04T17:48:00.000-08:00

If there's a God, or any kind of justice under the sky,
If there's a point, if there's a reason to live or die,
If there's an answer to the questions we feel bound to ask,
Show yourself! Destroy our fears! Release your mask!

Oh, yes, we'll keep on trying . . .

-- Queen, Innuendo (Despite the title, that song contains little or no sexual content, and, indeed, no content more offensive than the above.)

I understand why theists use the "if that was true life wouldn't be worth living" argument. Sure, it doesn't actually have any effect on the facts of the case. Maybe life just isn't worth living. But I know full well that if I thought believing something would make me want to kill myself, I would hesitate on the objectivity a little. More, I've got a moral sense as strong and passionate as any and if I thought believing something would make me do something seriously morally wrong, well, I might allow myself a little self-deception. Of course, you'd be a fool to expect something you believe because you can't live without believing it to be a reliable indicator of the sorts of conclusions you'd come to based on actual evidence. No doubt that's where the 'non-overlapping magisteria' rule comes from. It makes sense, when you think about it. Go ahead and believe in God if you need to, says that rule, but don't come whining when the fossil evidence contradicts the petty details of the structure you've taken on in an attempt to find purpose. There's no reason to expect agreement.

In atheist attempts to avoid making statements about the world which are not supported by evidence, I suspect some believers occasionally hear us as saying "Question everything, and discard anything that doesn't correspond to an objective phenomenon of the world outside our minds". That's not what we're saying. Indeed, that would be nihilism. Love is not an objective phenomenon of the world outside our minds, and nor is happiness.

At other times, while they understand atheism might not ask us to stop caring per se, believers might be afraid that they would stop caring if they didn't have the justification.

Does it scare you to consider the possibility that the care you feel is only in your mind, not justified by any certain logic of the world outside you? Then take yourself to the brink. Go there because it is a rite of passage, go there by reciting truths. The universe doesn't care if you live or die. You could kill yourself now, and the effect on the world in two hundred years might be large, but only by chaos theory, not by any effect that a historian could trace. You don't have to care. It would be just as logical not to. Say it and feel it and go to the brink and watch the nothingness bubble. It burns a little; maybe a lot; maybe it takes genuine care for the truth to force you to risk it. And it bubbles. You can't help it bubbling. Little bits of reality or imagination will insist on popping up, no matter how hard you try. So no-one will care in two hundred years. But people care now, don't they? It's a reflex, I think, you find yourself resurfacing for the sake of survival. Squash it. I dare you. But you're only allowed to use true statements. How about "But they don't have to care"? How about "But there's no reason to care if they care"? I bet you still do care. Can you make yourself stop? I can't. On this count, and on several others, the bubble just won't pop. The truth is not enough to sever you from your ability to care. It never could be.

You can go to the brink, but you take your humanity with you.

Now, here's the big question. Do you have to stop? Does caring about anything mean that you've abandoned the principles of truth that atheists claim to value? Are you believing anything false by caring? Well, if you ask me, the process of caring is not logically connected to the process of believing at all. Sure, there's a connection between what you believe and what you care about. If you believe your sister cares about you, for example, you might be more likely to care about her. But that's not a logical connection. It might perhaps be "little-'o' objective"[1]; that's about the best you can do. There's really no logical connection either way. You don't logically have to care. You don't logically have to not care.

The rule isn't "Discard anything that can't be shown to correspond to an objective phenomenon of the world outside our minds". In my opinion, the rule is actually "Don't call anything an objective phenomenon without some evidence that it actually is one". That doesn't mean you're not allowed to care about the subjective or, indeed, to care subjectively.

You can't leave your subjectivity behind. And you don't have to. Aren't you glad?

Continued, because I've thought again and I don't like this post as it is:

I'm aware that there's another issue here. Can you be satisfied with the truths you have? Is it enough to know that you're here now, even if you don't have eternity? Is it enough for you that there are people you love and who love you -- is it enough to know that you may have to work to keep the real things in your life because you won't necessarily have God -- is it enough for you to care, well, just because you do?

I think, for most people, it is enough. I think there are far more people who think they can't do this than people who really can't. They haven't ever had to build a life based on things that a skeptical atheist can accept, and they just don't know how much there is to work with. But I've seen the nothingness and felt it burn and if running from it makes you run from atheism, well, I'm not going to shout at you and call you stupid. I'd rather just offer my hand.

[1] I borrow this terminology from Steve Novella here; thanks are due to Ordinary Girl in the comments of this post here on Elliptica for pointing me towards it. By "little-'o' objective" I mean based not on some objective fact of the world outside our minds but rather on some aspect that is near-universal within our minds.

20 Albums Meme

2007-12-31T16:12:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, everybody! I've been tagged by the chaplain of the Apostate's Chapel to reveal my twenty favourite albums. Oh deary me. Here are some things you should know:

1. I don't rip music off the internet.
2. I'm too much of a skinflint to buy music all the time.
3. I spent most of my childhood listening to classical music, and didn't start paying attention to more modern stuff until I was well into my teens. And yes, I can include classical music in this list, but the stuff I actually listen to these days with any regularity is still a short list.
4. Any attention given by me to (recorded) music -- or movies, for that matter -- has to fit in between the great chunks of time I spend reading fiction.

So, can I come up with as many as twenty albums that I'd like to call favourites? I'm not sure. Let's see . . .

1. Joni Mitchell - Blue
2. & 3. Queen - Greatest Hits I & II
4. k. d. lang - All You Can Eat
5. Crowded House - Recurring Dream (best of)
6. Bic Runga - Drive
7. Madeleine Peyroux - Careless Love
8. Tchaikovsky - Romeo and Juliet Overture (followed by his 5th Symphony, which I usually listen to as well)
9. Dvorak - The New World Symphony
10. Carole King - Tapestry
11. Beatles - Greatest Hits 1967-1970 (and I'd listen to their earlier hits if I had them, of course; see note above about being a skinflint)
12. Alison Moyet - Singles
13. Sting - Fields of Gold (best of)
14. Santana - Supernatural
15. Aretha Franklin - The Very Best Of

No, these aren't in any deliberate order, but I see I've put the four that are closest to my heart first. There are, of course, all manner of albums I'd listen to if I had them. Some of them would even be my favourites. The thing is, though, going out and buying them would entail deliberately setting out to spend money. And I have this rule which states that you mustn't buy anything you don't need unless you really feel like it. It works very well for me. Currently it doesn't allow buying music much. Sure, I'd like to have more stuff, but would I really be that much happier than I already am?

Given that Christmas has been and gone, there's really only one thing for it. I shall have to compile a list of music I'd like to have in time for my birthday. How's that for a flimsy New Year's resolution?

I tag nobody, because this meme has already been all over the place, since I'm late doing it myself. But if you haven't done it, and you want to, feel free.

I take my leave . . .

2007-12-22T22:03:00.000-08:00

. . . and shall return in about a week. I'm off down (further) South for Christmas, and I don't expect to be blogging during that time. So, Merry Christmas, everyone, and I'll see you when I return.

Objectivity

2007-12-22T17:58:00.000-08:00

I think it was sometime last year that I had a Christian, in the course of a friendly but challenging conversation, pull the 'everything is subjective' argument on me. I gather the argument is basically "All of our experience is subjective to some extent, framed by our human minds, and none of our experience is absolutely certain, so I can believe whatever I want." It's an inventive defence; I shall not accuse it of being borrowed from postmodernists (atheist or otherwise), for postmodernists owe something to Soren Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard was a devout Christian who did use this argument in a fashion at least vaguely similar, albeit with much more depth and the insertion of several other fascinating ideas that I don't quite agree with but which expand my mind nevertheless. At the time, I simply conceded that arguing against that idea might take a little more thought than being able to simply point to the evidence. But I've thought further on the subject, and by now I think I can offer a defence.

Let me start by conceding outright that of course we are trapped in our own minds; we do filter what we see through a subjective lens. Yet objectivity makes its way in, nevertheless. Suppose we're wandering along in our subjective experience, dum de dum, subjective subjective subjective, and we notice categories, yes? For example, some of the things we experience are experienced as being 'black' (whatever that means), some are 'white', some are 'coloured'. The edges of those categories might be blurred, but we can generally say that some things definitely fall more into one category than another. The boundaries between categories can also shift depending on time and place. Some things feel cold to the touch, some things feel hot, but which way such things are felt depends heavily on what we have been touching previously.

Now, as we're wandering along in our subjective experience, we might notice a category of perceptions which do not tend to shift depending on time and place and the experiencer and the method of experiencing. For example, temperature as measured by a column of mercury doesn't shift in the same way that subjective perception of heat does. To take a more interesting example, we can measure the structure of a crystal with X-ray diffraction, and we can measure it with an electron microscope, and when we do, we find a strong overlap between the two different methods of perception -- things which don't shift depending on the method of measurement. Or, yet another example, working from the hypothesis that all animals have a common ancestry, we might guess their relationships by looking at them, and we might guess their relationships from similar structures in their DNA. If the guesses tend to agree, well that's an indication that this 'distance of relationships' property really is measuring something that belongs somewhat to the category of perceptions which do not depend heavily on the method of perception.

So tell me, what name do we give to this category of things which remain constant depending on the method of perception? Why, 'objective', of course! The word 'objective', like most words, has some variations in meaning, but this is at least one definition which seems to me to be well thought out, and worth keeping. The observation that there is some subjectivity in all of our experience does not negate the usefulness of this category. Moreover, if we wish to know what things we can rely on to remain constant and predictable, it is in the category of objective perceptions that we should be looking.

Science is an attempt to identify members of this 'objective' category. Given this fact, I am inclined to consider the notion of consilience as being science's central point. Consilience refers precisely to the sort of situation I have described above -- to situations where several different types of measuring, of guessing, of perceiving all come to the same conclusion. If my characterisation of objectivity is allowed to stand, consilience is by definition objectivity's hallmark. As such, any idea which wishes to attain the status of 'objective' must pass a scientific test -- a test which varies the conditions and/or the method of perception, and still gets the result which our earlier generalisations would have predicted. The bigger the variation in circumstances of the test, the stronger an indication of objectivity it is.

Ideas that do not show this sort of consilience cannot be said to be 'objective' in this sense. People's ideas of God, for instance, depend heavily on the culture in which they were brought up. If there is any consilience to be found here, it will certainly not be found in the extraneous trappings and extra details which vary from place to place. Yet the variations are so large, encompassing even differing ideas about how many gods there are, that it is difficult to see how any objectivity in this matter may be found. Perhaps someday somebody will show an idea of God which does stand up to scientific tests, which does display consilience. Until then, though, I remain an atheist.

A Liberty

2007-12-15T19:09:00.000-08:00

Americans! Of rights and freedoms famed
(Famed often by yourselves, it's true, but still)
Why do I see your once-proud country named
In lists of those who torture when they will?

Why are Iraq's reporters held uncharged?
Why does your leader flout the rule of law?
Look to your homeland, see what is presaged
Consider what you should be fighting for.

Although I know that it might seem a liberty
To say the threat is to your life, and small
There is no power in terrorist activity
To force your strong democracy to fall.

When fears both real and fictional abound,
If you would keep your freedom, stand your ground.

Note:

There's a metric device known as a trochaic substitution. Essentially, instead of an iamb (weak-strong), you substitute a trochee (strong-weak). It's usually only done at the beginning of a line, or after a pause mid-line, at the beginning of a new sentence or new idea. There are lots of them in this poem. Please don't mangle them by saying, for example, "Why do . . . " instead of "Why do . . . " in a misguided attempt to stick to the metre. Oh, and you can put one at the beginning of the final line, if you like, even though it's maybe not quite so obviously needed there. I would.

Nonbelieving Literati: The Sparrow

2007-12-15T15:46:00.000-08:00

It all started here, when the Exterminator began a little atheist book club over the web on grounds that

[S]cientists shouldn’t feel that they’ve cornered the market on nonbelief. There are plenty of us folks in the humanities who also have no faith in faith.
The list of great and near-great freethinking authors, for example, is a long one. It contains, among others, such non-scientists as: Ambrose Bierce, Pearl S. Buck, Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, H.L. Mencken, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, the above-mentioned Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, and H.G. Wells.

I think it’s time we atheists draw some inspiration from literature as well as science.

Well said! I held off joining initially, but really, this is right up my street in some ways. So here I am, and, before I read what anyone else has written on the subject, here's my post on Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow.

'So God just leaves?' John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. 'Abandons creation? You're on your own, apes. Good luck!'

'No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.'

'Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine,' Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. ' "Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your father knowing it." '

'But the sparrow still falls,' Felipe said.

It's hard to tell where the author of this book stands on religious issues. She knows a lot about Catholics, but it's hard to say whether she writes from the inside or as an apostate. I know the Nonbelieving Literati have had more liberal, irreverent Christian authors before, so the choice of this book isn't necessarily a sign that the author doesn't believe in God. I suppose a web search or something might turn up more information, but if you ask me, that's cheating. I'll take the book as is and never mind the author, and I'll say this. The fact that you can't tell where the author stands is at least in part because this is a good book, a realistic book, a book that doesn't paint ideology into the storyline half so much as it allows the characters to be believeable. Many of the characters hold views I don't agree with. Many of them espouse reasoning that I consider to be highly questionable, and large parts of my viewpoint don't even make it into the conversation. But that's life. That's believeable. And I can't help but admire the author for being able to write with such sympathy for her characters, and yet such coldness when it comes to the pain she'll put them through and the problems she'll hand them that challenge the views they hold dear.

The book alternates between two timescales. One is an action-packed story of humanity's first contact with sentient alien life, a dare-devil trip to outer space to meet the inhabitants of a distant planet, propelled by faith and doomed to disaster. The other is the story of what the sole survivor has to deal with when he gets back to Earth, a tense emotional drama of misunderstanding interacting with deep trauma. Both on this re-reading and when I first read the book a few years ago, it was this latter story that was the page-turner for me. Action is all very well, but it's nothing compared to human interaction, and while there were many parts of both storylines that kept my attention, I found myself checking ahead to see when the next section of unpacking and unravelling the survivor's persective would be, waiting for the moment when they'd understand, and being fascinated by the developments in perception and misperception between the characters.

One of the major things that consoled me when the story went into flashback mode was the conversations. The relationship between the central characters is so obviously tightly knit, and their dialogue is witty and frank. It's also worth noting how psychologically interesting the alien culture is. The author is an anthropologist, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. While she has taken small liberties with the realism of the story line in having the aliens be so close (Alpha centauri? Could you be more obviously choosing stars for closeness?), and while it's hard to be sure how realistic her representation of possible alien biology might be, there's no doubt that when it comes to culture she has put some thought in. I can forgive her for small liberties in exchange for the tightly-imagined story she tells in that regard.

It gives to think that I am not more disturbed by this story. I know my mother found it pretty traumatic. Peculiarly, I think I read it like some detached, emotive God, feeling along with the characters in a limited sense but blaming no-one. Or perhaps I was a parasite, feeding off the emotion no matter how it hurt the characters who felt it. I cannot say I enjoyed the painful end, but I accepted it as a gift nevertheless, taking the emotional understanding that it gave. I don't know what that says about me.

Euthyphro: The Ins and Outs of Morality With God

2007-12-08T21:55:00.000-08:00

The Euthyphro dilemma -- so called, because an early version is related in Plato's dialogue between Euthyphro and Socrates -- amounts to the observation that, if we believe that some universal notion of goodness or morality is imposed on the universe by God (or by the gods, in the case of the ancient Greeks), then we seem to be forced into one of two options. On the one hand, it is possible that God chose to set up a particular morality because He knew it was the morality. God, in this picture, is generally considered to be (non-tautologically) good, conforming to the true morality precisely, and showing us right from wrong in a way that is in line with this true morality. In this picture, morality is actually separate from God, and God, being good, follows it and also enforces it to some extent.

When theists defend God on grounds that He knows better than us, and always has a good purpose in mind, they seem to be working within this first framework: God is aiming for something (objectively) good, so trust Him on that.

The other possibility is that goodness is just whatever God says it is. In that case, if God says it's right to kill babies, then it's right to kill babies. In fact, if you believe God did, as in the Bible, say to kill babies, then killing babies was at that point the right thing to do. To say that 'God is good' is pretty meaningless in this picture -- all it says is that God does what God wants God to do.

There are also 'mixture' versions. For example, some Christians say that since God made this world, God has the right to do whatever He wants with this world, and we ought to follow along with that. If we take this as referring to an objective moral statement along the lines of "if you make something, you have total control over it and it ought to obey you", then essentially these Christians are saying that there is some outside -- even potentially outside of God -- objective morality, it's just that that morality means, firstly, that we should do what God wants, and secondly, that since no-one created God, God can do whatever He wants. Frankly, I think this idea gives you the worst of both worlds and I have no idea why it is so popular.

Then there are those who say that God can do whatever He wants -- but aren't we lucky that He wants what is good for us? Such people distinguish between one sort of 'good' which is defined as 'whatever God wants', and another sort of 'good', which is defined in an almost utilitarian fashion, in terms of what makes us human beings happy and fulfilled and all the rest of it, and which God happens to like, isn't that nice? If you believe that, I guess I can understand why you praise God's goodness despite defining 'good' in terms of God -- presumably you're praising the fact that God's notion of goodness happens to coincide with your own.

I think it says something, however, that it is this coincidence with what we believe to be good that so often provides the clincher with respect to how God's goodness is viewed. It's quite rare (and, in my case, almost always nauseating) to find someone who embraces the second option of the Euthyphro dilemma without pause, excusing any and every aspect of the 'Problem of Evil' with the idea that morality is just whatever God says it is. A tsunami killed millions of people, and orphaned a whole lot of innocent kids? That's not evil, it's good, because it's what God wanted, and good is whatever God wants. No, you don't hear that very often.

I'll keep my human notions of what is good, and never mind that there appears to be no God. And if I ever discover God, then yes, I'll dare to measure Him against that notion. Unlike my fellow human beings, an all-powerful God doesn't need my sympathy or my compassion, and if God causes evil in the lives of human beings, I'll dare resist and be not resigned to a universe ruled by an amoral or immoral God. I won't give up without a fight.

Of Grief in Dusty Corners, Take 2

2007-12-08T16:54:00.000-08:00

The abstract halls of mathematics rise
in cool, high-ceilinged arches, every line
a segment of infinity, which lies
precariously, perfectly inclined.

Yet once it was a garden made for lovers,
a cornucopia of odds and ends
and evens, where unsteadiness recovers,
secure between co-operating friends.

And when I step through theorems again,
I fear that, in this subtle space, the scent
of grief in dusty corners will remain
to catch me where I thought to be content.

It's still not as good as Penelope, but who cares? I'm a lot happier with this version.

Challenging the Paramounce of Happiness

2007-12-06T21:12:00.000-08:00

In my last post on morality, I mentioned that I am approximately utilitarian, and promised to explain how my viewpoint differs from utilitarianism at a later stage. So, while there are further responses to some of the points LL brings up that I could mention, and a whole host of related subjects that might keep me blogging for weeks if I wanted to stick to a single subject, for now I shall give you the post that I have actually promised.

I quite like to break utilitarianism down into two propositions:

(1) We should act in that manner that produces the greatest good.

(2) Happiness is (the only thing that is) intrinsically good.

Do you agree that happiness is intrinsically good? Do you agree that it is the only intrinsic good? I'm not going to give you my answer just yet. Still, I will tell you that just about any utilitarian will agree that 'happiness' is meant in a very broad sense here, encompassing anything from sensory pleasure to refined artistic taste and even spiritual fulfilment (although those of us who are atheists might have a slightly different definition of the word 'spiritual', of course, and some of us, mindful of the connotations, prefer to avoid it entirely). Some, notably John Stuart Mill, have argued that 'higher' notions of happiness should be given greater weight than mere pleasure. Personally, at least insofar as it only affects the person having the experience, I think it ought to be a matter of taste.

Proposition (1) has been challenged on the grounds that you can use it to justify nasty trade-offs. Ursula K. LeGuin's quite marvellous short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (PDF) illustrates this problem almost as an abstraction, describing a beautiful city where everyone lives good and happy and fulfilling lives -- but the reason they are happy is because of a single, frightened child kept in a cellar, spending its life in confusion and misery and self-hate. Is the happiness of others worth unbroken pain and despair for a single person? LeGuin doesn't seem to think so.

We might answer LeGuin's problem by requiring a rule in our utilitarian calculus which states that unhappiness is generally better shared around; a week's unhappiness for a hundred people is better then a hundred weeks' unhappiness for a single person. We might justify it with the idea that happiness can actually be appreciated better when you have been through a small amount of pain, and spreading the pain around in small bits thus maximises the trade-off in the resulting appreciation of the happiness that follows (but if you agree with that justification, then of course the rule is actually not inserted into utilitarianism but rather derived from it -- just a note). Other answers are also possible, of course; if you'd have preferred me to bring up some other answer, please do write it in the comments so we can all see it. For now, however, I am mostly interested in challenges to the idea that what is good is defined by what makes us happy.

I once attended a philosophy seminar (been to a few of those in my time) where the speaker was defending the Aristotelian notion that the purpose of human beings is to reason. Aristotle thought that everything had a purpose (telos, final cause). The purpose of a pen is to write. The purpose of rain is to water the fields so that plants can grow. And the purpose of human beings? Human beings exist so that they can reason, says Aristotle. That is what human beings are for.

Somewhere in the course of a very informal discussion after the seminar, the speaker challenged the notion that we should be aiming for happiness, with reason only as a method of getting there, using the following interesting illustration:

Look, orgasm is the highest form of happiness, right? Are we agreed on that? So suppose you had this machine -- call it the Orgasmatron -- and you could sit in it, and you'd have an IV drip or something, your life wouldn't be shortened at all, and you could just sit in it for the rest of your life and be continuously and orgasmically happy. Think seriously about this. Can you honestly tell me that you would just give up everything in your life to go sit in the Orgasmatron?

Well, would you?

I wouldn't. It would be like dying. Even with heaven included, I don't want to die.

So here is the answer I gave at the time, after I had thought for a bit. Part of what makes us happy in this life (outside the Orgasmatron) is being engaged with the world. We have to have things we care about in order to make life worth living. But then, because we have things we care about -- goals, hopes, caring for other people -- we don't want to give those things up. Not even to be continuously, orgasmically happy.

Now that's a good answer, but it's not necessarily a utilitarian one. Should we want to be continuously, orgasmically happy, over and above other purposes? If everyone already has the option of the Orgasmatron, I suspect the utilitarian answer is yes (but, please, feel free to argue). Still, I have to say, that's not my answer. Here and now, outside the Orgasmatron, I would fight to be excused the fate of being continuously, orgasmically happy for the rest of my life.

Still, I don't agree that the purpose of human beings is to reason. I think we make our own purposes. I think we should make our own purposes, weaving ourselves into the world with tireless urgency (sometimes I suspect this makes me diametrically opposed to the Buddhist notion of detachment from the world; on the other hand, trying to be detached is a purpose, so maybe not).

I think that purpose is an intrinsic good. That's not to say that there are not evil purposes, purposes which aim to destroy the happiness and purpose of others. But purpose is an essential part of what it takes to live a fulfilled, happy, successful life. And so, I think our view of morality ought to respect that, placing purpose and story right up there with happiness in the things we try to aim for -- indeed, aim with, in the case of purpose!

Thus is my utilitarianism diluted.

Of Grief in Dusty Corners

2007-12-04T01:26:00.000-08:00

With slow and steady patterning we grew
into each other's thinking. When the blade
tore bluntly through us twain, we fell askew
in senseless silence, feeling but the shade,
the phantom limb of conversations played,
remembrances continuously rent
in echoes that interminably fade.
Although both hope and agony are spent
for always and for ever, still the scent
of grief in dusty corners can surprise
my desecrating entrance, innocent
on murmured thoughts where yet a memory lies.

Notes:

1. It's not as good as Penelope. That's going to be true of pretty well every poem I write for a while now. Sigh.

2. It's almost a Spenserian sonnet (thank you, Exterminator, for the link to a whole lot of sonnet forms which sent me along that line). I left off the final couplet, though, because it would have been absurdly extraneous. Instead, we just have twelve lines, deeply interlaced. I like that, at least for this poem.

3. The backstory is my post here. If you want to know.

"But I care about it anyway"

2007-11-30T23:46:00.001-08:00

L.L. Barkat wanted me to expand on the conclusion of my post The Raft, where I said "Good and evil only exist in our minds. But I care about them anyway." She says:

I wonder about good and evil only existing in the mind. I think it opens up sticky issues like, if evil is just a construct, then what's to stop me from choosing evil ways (because if it exists in the mind only, then I get to define it)... or what's to make me listen to someone who feels I've worked evil against her (because if evil only exists in her mind, then she is defining it and I can disagree with the definition and be done with it).

I'm about to start arguing like a theologian and I know it and I hate the fact! A while back I found a book in the library called Belief or Nonbelief: A Confrontation. It's an excellent book, in many ways: a respectful dialogue between the atheist novelist Umberto Eco and the Catholic Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini. Eco asks all sorts of questions of Martini; Martini gets only one in reply. Martini's question, though, is the question, the one that always comes up: How is it that nonbelievers can still believe in some sort of morality?

Eco answers well, but nevertheless he certainly relies to some extent on his own ability to write in order to give his answer the force and seeming reasonableness that it does have, and frankly, while reading, I couldn't help feeling the similarity in tone to the Cardinal's responses on earlier issues. Yes, I think it's true: while atheists can defend their view of the world with the shining strength of reason and logic on almost every count, when it comes to morality, there are times when we're just arguing so as to make the question go away. We argue emotively. We argue from consequences. We argue in circles. We do everything we get mad at theologians for doing.

When I was first facing this problem of the lack of absolute morality built into the universe, I did consider belief in God as a solution. But it just really seemed like overkill. Accepting an even bigger uncertain proposition so as to get rid of the uncertainty in a proposition I really wanted to believe? Not on your life. If I'm going to believe something out of thin air in order to justify some notion of morality, then I'm not going to believe in God. Simple belief in morality will suffice. Why go further?

So that's my excuse. I'm about to give you some explanations of how atheists can be content to simply believe in morality and not in God. In theological fashion, I'm not going to face the issue on blank, even terms. Instead, to begin with, I'm going to deliberately choose the starting point that works most easily for me. This is LL's comment that:

And here's the other thing... as a person who has experienced the deep evil wrought by others (during my childhood), it is hard for me to let them off the hook with a thought of... well, it was, after all, only in my mind.

Let me tell you some other things that are only in your mind, LL. Love is only in your mind. Happiness is only in your mind. Hope is only in your mind. And guess what? Those things are all real anyway. So maybe morality is like love, and hope, and happiness. It's only in our minds, but life would be nothing without it.

It helps that my notion of morality is very directly predicated on happiness and hope. I'm approximately utilitarian. Explanation of where I vary from utilitarianism is too complicated for this post and will have to wait for another one, because I have yet to fully articulate it and so cannot yet summarise it neatly. Maybe after I write that post I've just unwisely promised you, quick and easy summary will be possible in future. But for now, let's stick with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism states that we should act in that fashion that produces the greatest total happiness for all people concerned. So, you see, I sneak the idea of the importance of happiness in with the perfectly certain proposition that happiness is real (I find it particularly beautiful that we can be more certain of the existence of happiness than we can of the existence of the external world. We experience happiness directly; the world is only observed through our senses, which might deceive us). For that matter, what is importance? Something is important if we think it is; 'importance' is an expression of value, and value is another one of those things that only exist in the human mind, but which it would be utterly stupid to discard.

So, you see, happiness is important in an almost universal sense because we all think it is important, pretty well every one of us. And since we're likely to be more happy if we band together and support each others' happiness, why not do so? Because, hey, if we act to promote happiness in general, there will be more happiness to go around.

(See the circular reasoning? We should act for maximum happiness, because if we did, there would be maximum happiness.

It's quite convincing even with the circles visible, isn't it?)

More to come, but please, give me some feedback now. How am I doing? Be honest.

I'm not angry -- or am I?

2007-11-30T16:05:00.000-08:00

Greta Christina, that sex-positive darling who writes such illuminating atheist reflections, had a startling smash hit a while back when she stepped oh-so-slightly out of character to write a post on atheists and anger (and yes, you can safely read that post without being in danger of encountering explicit sexual content, just so you know):

This has been a hard piece to write, and it may be a hard one to read. I'm not going to be as polite and good-tempered as I usually am in this blog; this piece is about anger, and for once I'm going to fucking well let myself be angry.

When I first read the post, it had eight comments. It was very much Greta Christina, anger and all: clearly written, honest, comprehensive in its examination of the surrounding issues. I got a bit bored by the end, though. It's a very long list of things to be angry about. Don't get me wrong. I thought then and I still think now that Greta Christina has a perfect right to be angry about all those things and the many more that she says she has only scratched the surface of. After all, she has been personally damaged by several of them, what with being bisexual and living in a horribly theistic place like America, where the safeguards of democracy are under threat in part due to faith-based voting. I, too, have been damaged by religion, but not to the same extent. I am angry for my own sake about one thing, and one thing only, and that thing is deep and painful. To hold on to the anger would be to hold on to the pain, and so I do not use that anger, do not weave it into my reasons for acting; I let it sit out there on the edge and exist for as long as it needs to.

So, you see, I'm not angry. I got to the end of Greta's post and wondered if I could explain my position, but I needed to think about things, so I decided to let it sit for a bit and maybe join the discussion later.

Well, everyone in the atheist blogosphere knows what happened not much later. By the time I saw the post again, it had three hundred comments. Today, it has 862 comments and counting. It was linked to by Pharyngula, by Friendly Atheist, and many others. And a huge proportion of those comments amounted to "Right on"! Greta Christina had struck a nerve. Many atheists were angry, and were heartened and energised by Greta Christina's eloquent, even defence.

This was clearly not my party, but now that things have died down a little, perhaps it is not so improper for me to speak.

I'm not angry at religion as a whole, but there are some things that do make me angry. Sometimes when I'm walking into town, I take the wrong route by accident. It's fine to go down Exeter Street if I'm heading to the mall or over to my parents' place, but if I'm turning left, I have to pass the Christian Science Reading Room. It's got this big sign on the window saying "Prayer Works". Works how, exactly? You know, just by context, that this isn't going to be one of those serene theological answers like "God answers every prayer, it's just that sometimes the answer is 'no'/'maybe'/'ask again later'". No, what it means is that they're peddling dodgy science. But of course they are. "Christian Science" is a contradiction in terms, for it refers to science that will only accept conclusions that seem to support religious dogma, and that is not science at all. It makes me furious. How dare they mock the sincere attempts of scientists to be even-handed by claiming that their own biased propaganda is of equal worth? Don't they understand the love, the sacrifice, the effort that scientists put into the search for truth? And yet they pollute the term 'science'! They dare to use it for efforts that are neither courageous nor intellectually sincere, feeble obfuscations by which they hide from reality. It makes me sick.

Other things make me angry, too. Christians in my own country don't play the "atheists are nihilists who can't be moral" game very much, at least not where I and other atheists can see them, but every so often, especially on the internet, I read something that reminds me that the view is alive and barely-challenged in some quarters (no, LL, I'm not looking at you -- your questions are fair and I will answer them in another post). Just yesterday I found this page linked to by a Wikipedia post.

The atheist who poses the problem [of evil] is left in the end with the conclusion that evil was really not worth worrying about in the first place. That is bad faith, and what seemed to be the moral force of his position is exposed as a mere self-serving indignation.

Now, look. It's one thing to claim that atheists are deluded, or irrational, when we apply moral notions to the world around us, or to a hypothetical God, claiming that the notion of morality is still important whether there are gods or not. It's quite another thing to accuse us of deliberate deception. I can assure you that we do not argue in bad faith, and yes, I am angered by the implication that we all do.

Oh, but that is nothing. After all, the author of that piece might be honestly deluded himself. Perhaps he really does believe that all atheists are nihilists who are out to get other people to join us by reason of our total lack of moral feeling. Others do not have this defence. A few months back, a friendly Christian who I met over the internet suggested that I listen to Ravi Zacharias' speech "Why I Am Not An Atheist". Regrettably I have been unable to find a transcript, but the MP3 is here. I myself didn't get past Part 1. After trotting out the "I am absolutely sure there is no God" definition of atheism, making the uncertainty of agnosticism sound weak and open to conversion, and completely ignoring the strong but sensible position taken by most self-described atheists on the existence of God, Zacharias really gets underway in the second half of that first MP3. First he explains -- no, he doesn't explain, he claims -- that atheism cannot support any idea of morality that is not "utilitarian, pragmatic, subjective or emotive". Don't you love the way he exploits the ambiguity in that term 'utilitarian'? It could refer to utilitarianism (which, whatever justification you give for it, is pretty darn absolute, actually, and popular among atheists, thereby raising difficulties with his point which he does not bother to address), or it could refer to the selfish pushing of morality in others for personal gain onesself. Then he decides to quote Nietzsche. At length. At loving, loving length, just to make atheism sound scary:

God is dead, and we have killed him. . . . Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not more night coming on us all the time? . . . That which was the holiest and mightiest of all the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives. . . . Is not this the greatest of deeds to great for us to handle? Must not we ourselves become God simply to seem worthy of it?

Got that, people? Don't kill God, it's too scary, and you'll turn us all into -- what was Dawkins' description? -- "jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

Let me break here to point out that I myself actually didn't kill God. Others have done that for me. Nietzsche's incredibly evocative description of what it might be like to lose God has nothing to do with what it is like never to have had God in the first place; his evocation of the empty nihilism that comes when a worldview collapses has nothing to do with the calm knowledge that atheistic worldviews can still find meaning and beauty in the world. However, Zacharias does not expand on the idea of frightening emptiness, so obvious in the passage he quotes (which was, I must add, much longer than the little excerpt I have given you above). I'm sure he likes having it there, but ostensibly he is only introducing Nietzsche so that he can segue into "Any time I hear a man lambasting or criticising a religion for having caused bloodshed..."

The same people often forget of the bloodshed that has been shed in the name of atheism. Stalin was an avowed atheist. . . . He read Nietzsche. Adolf Hitler personally presented a copy of Nietzsche's writings to Benito Mussolini. . . .

See that? See that?

Zacharias isn't mistaken. He knows there's no evidence that Hitler was an atheist. He probably knows that Hitler said, many times, that he believed in God. He probably knows that the Nazis promoted "Nazi Christianity". How do I know Zacharias knows this? Because he never once actually claims that Hitler was an atheist. But he is content to give his listeners that impression. Furthermore, he is content to smear atheists by allowing us to be represented by a thinker like Nietzsche, rather than, say, John Stuart Mill, whose work On Liberty expounds ideas considered by many to be the foundation of a free and open society -- the very sort of society that fascism and communism threaten. Minority though we have been for most of history, atheists have nevertheless been disproportionately responsible for new ideas, and it is irresponsible for Zacharias to point out the more damaging ones while failing to acknowledge the work of atheists in finding the good ideas.

Oh, one last thing about Nietzsche's influence on Hitler. Martin Luther's influence on Hitler, particularly as regards the hatred of Jews, has also been extensively documented. Need I say more?

Zacharias is far too smart and well read for me to let him off the hook. He's smearing us deliberately. And yes, in case you haven't noticed, that makes me angry. Really angry. Not necessarily angry at religion as a whole, just angry at apologists who blatantly smear a whole group of perfectly good people, obviously knowing they're doing it, but doing it anyway.

I was going to finish up by saying that I'm not angry at religion, and that most of the time the things that really annoy me are lies -- lies and deliberate obfuscations. I was going to say that when I hear about the bad consequences of religion: war, torture, death by exorcism, ostracism of those outside, credulity and vulnerability to charlatans, slavery and the oppression of women and homosexuals . . . well, most of the time, while I pity the religious who are caught in their false worldviews, and wholeheartedly support efforts to abolish the suffering caused by religious fundamentalism, really I find it very difficult to be angry at anything other than the lies people tell. I'll blame them. I know there are other factors that lead to the evils of religion, and the injustice of this disproportionate assignation of blame might bother me if I had any sympathy for lies, but I don't.

I was going to say all that, and most of the time it would probably be true, but I seem to have worked myself into a right fury here. I guess maybe I am an angry atheist after all.

The Raft

2007-11-25T21:08:00.000-08:00

When I was ten, I believed in Absolute Morality, derived from reason and incontrovertible. My mother, she of the part-time philosophy degree, subscribed not so surprisingly to the idea that morality should come from and be subject to reason and, childlike, I took the notion to extremes. I wasn't quite sure of the whole rationale, but I was jolly well going to learn more about philosophy and then I'd be able to understand exactly how to pinpoint morality perfectly. In the mean time, I was going to be consistent. There were to be no logical contradictions in my viewpoint!

Morality had been a concern of mine for a while if I remember correctly; a practical concern rather than a theoretical one. I applied myself to the problem of playground bullying. Standing by while somebody else was being bullied was unacceptable; so was even the mildest form of unkindness to those who seemed outcast. This latter principle had me patiently listening to the class geek quite regularly, although I confess I mostly tuned out his Star Wars trivia and then tried to pretend I'd been listening (he grew up to be quite hot, actually, but he was a year ahead of me so we never spoke much in high school and I doubt he remembered the girl who used to say 'Mm-hm' to him in primary school).

The fact that I considered myself required to intervene when anyone else was in trouble was actually less problematic than you might think. I know that in movies, the way it goes is that the cute little girl stands up for the little boy, who then defiantly rejects her in an attempt to regain his manly pride from the ignominy of having needed defence. However, I stood up for other people so regularly that, at least as far as I can remember, it seemed to be a generally accepted occurrence. I also never waited for thanks. I wasn't in it for thanks, I was in it for the joy of the argument -- which, regretfully, never lasted long. I used to plant my feet slightly wider than my shoulders (second position in ballet, if you must know), glare at my offending classmate and shout "How dare you? What reason did you have to do that? Go on, argue! What's your reason?" Usually by the time I got that far, they'd have given up. Satisfying though it was to hear 'Don't argue with [Lynet]' as a generally accepted maxim, I often used to wish they'd put up more of a fight.

When I was eleven, I read Sophie's World. Thus, over a year or so, as things sank in and I re-read the technical parts I had skipped the first time around, I became acquainted with a rough outline of the ideas of history's great philosophers. I knew what utilitarianism was and had a go at understanding Immanuel Kant. I knew of Hume's dictum that 'ought' cannot follow from 'is', and his notion that morality was purely emotional. At the same time, I was dealing with some major snags in my anti-bullying crusade, to wit:

(a) As kids get older, they're less likely to be intimidated by mere shouting.

(b) As kids get older, their bullying gets more subtle, and their relationships with each other start to change. My peers were entering the "groups" phase (I skipped that one at the time because it seemed ludicrous to me to blindly follow the crowd, and had to go back and learn the necessary lessons when I was older). All of a sudden, I had to deal with the fact that most of the people I might have defended were more interested in becoming accepted as part of the group than in avoiding being bullied -- in fact, they'd take all kinds of crap as long as they were still even slightly "in".

There was no way for me to properly defend people. I wasn't really needed any more.

I was also really, really lonely. Rejecting the idea of the group can do that to you.

Somewhere towards the end of the year I was twelve, I had two quiet crises. One involved me realising that I was going to have to compromise my ideals, my reason, my personality in order to get the basic human interaction I needed in order to stop me from going insane. Here, however, I'd like to talk about the other change.

My standpoint on morality had been shifting slowly, the more I learned, and it was with sincere regret that I came to the conclusion that reason alone was not enough. Indeed, at twelve years old, with too much time alone to reflect, I didn't really have a definite position on morality at all. It was at around this time that I realised that I might have to allow some of my principles to be inconsistent with each other, taking my worldview as a work in progress rather than something that had to have finished perfection at all times. That was an important step. I also decided I rather liked the idea of a sort of dialogue between logic and moral intuition, starting with intuitions, then attempting to generalise in a consistent fashion, then going back to moral intuition as a way of seeing how the generalisation might need to be modified (I forget which philosopher I got that from -- it was ten years ago, after all -- but I know I didn't come up with it myself). Still, on some inner level, I had to concede that I was sidestepping the point. Why trust moral intuition at all? Is there any 'real' morality?

I confess freely that the idea that morality wasn't built into the universe really frightened me. Indeed, when I finally allowed myself to reason and let my thoughts go as they would, I came up with this:

Well, okay, so maybe there's no morality. But if there's no morality, then it isn't morally wrong for me to pretend there is morality. So I'm just going to act like there is morality anyway. Can I stop thinking about this now?

I was aware at the time of the parallels between such thinking and religious faith as held by many people. As an illustration, consider this comment:

To me, it either is all true and He is God and totally in control [. . .] or He isn't - and if He isn't, none of this really would matter, would it?

Obviously there's a slight flaw in the assumption that nothing would matter without God, and yes, we could construct an argument that favours a secular humanist view over a theist one with exactly that flaw in mind, contending that it does matter, and that in view of the things that matter (truth, human happiness and so forth), atheism is the better position. Oh, but I have given the end of the story away! Now, where was I?

Oh, yes. If I was disturbed by the notion that there might be no absolute morality, I was almost equally disturbed to find myself engaging in such faith-type reasoning. Was I as bad as Christians after all? In the end, I found my starting point by answering no to the question 'Can I stop thinking about this now?' No, you cannot stop thinking. If your reasoning is shaky, you must face the fact. By the moral principles which you defiantly continue to use, the truth matters, so stick as close to it as possible.

If the swamp where there were no rules lay just beneath my feet, and the platform above it on which I had stood was breaking apart, then I determined to myself to build no more than a raft. Dangerous as it might be, I determined to build no edifices of dubious foundation, no vast opaque temples to block out the sight of the unsteady ground. No catechism, no false authority of tradition, no pretense that there might be epistemological safety in numbers. Only a raft.

In the Sophie's World digested version of Sartre, I found the notion that human beings, having faced the terror of meaninglessness, are free to give their own meaning to their existence. I liked it and absorbed it, but it was many a year before I learned that the ideas I was groping towards had a name and a history already in their own right, and came to realise that I was quite simply and precisely a humanist. Indeed, meaning isn't hard to find in this universe; there is meaning as long as somebody means it. Morality is harder. I wanted it to be fundamental to the universe as a whole; I had to accept that it was confined perhaps to a single species on this tiny Earth. Good and evil only exist in our minds. But I care about them anyway.

Humanist Symposium #11

2007-11-25T21:00:00.000-08:00

As usual, allow me to plug my favourite blog carnival.

Penelope

2007-11-19T20:39:00.000-08:00

Since you have introduced me to the Onegin stanza, Alon:

While her husband's in the water
the coxcombs crowd like butterflies.
She weaves the way her mother taught her.
If they hope that with their lies
they can persuade, they're wrong! She'll never
make her choice, for she is clever.
Although she knows her husband strays,
she'll keep within her faithful ways.
With pride she views her work, while hating
the way that she has used her mind
with independence, just to find
herself obediently waiting,
unravelling so craftily
the shroud that could have set her free.

A Breath of Air (Sonnet)

2007-11-15T20:26:00.000-08:00

I throw my head back! Life is in me yet
My heart can still skip beats and laugh, oh, yeah!
So jump! Rejoice that deathly blank despair
Can never be interminably set.
He'd just become an adult when we met
No longer awkward, slackly debonair
He smiles at me with such a friendly flair
I too must smile, releasing my regret.
I cannot say I've felt a love's embrace
Nor shall I ever find it here, I know
Another woman smiles to see his face
And day by day I see their comfort grow.
To her he gives his lively warmth and care;
To me, he's just a precious breath of air.

Notes:
1. In many ways this is an old poem. I didn't dare write it at the time, and I started writing it about a year ago if I remember correctly. But I only finished it recently, and yes, it is possible that new ideas have made their way in.
2. There are two main types of sonnet. A Petrarchan sonnet starts with an octet that has the rhyme scheme abbaabba, and then goes on to a sextet, usually rhymed cdecde or cdcdcd. A Shakespearean sonnet has three quatrains and a couplet: ababcdcdefefgg. Frankly, I find the Shakespearean sonnet unbelievably bitsy -- fragmentary, that is; my quatrains have a tendency to stand stolidly alone with no flow*. By contrast, a Pertrarchan sonnet has a well-defined shape, since you are supposed to have a volta -- a turn, a change of mood, a new idea -- between the octet and the sextet. But let's face it, quatrains aside, that final couplet at the end of the Shakespearean can be wonderful. So I have cheerfully attempted to get the best of both worlds; my rhyme scheme is abbaabbacdcdbb. This gives me an octet, a quatrain and a couplet, which is certainly a departure from the usual Petrarchan shape; the couplet is a conclusory thing that brings together both prior sections.
3. Yes, and I rhymed the couplet using the b rhyme of the octet. Again, this is an attempt to make my rhyme begin the 'cohesion' thing for me. It's also not very hard, because the word 'air' has an awful lot of rhymes. I could have fitted 'chair', 'hair' or 'compare' in quite easily. 'Bear', 'mare' and 'stare' would have been less useful, I think. I'm a little sorry I didn't include 'swear' or 'dare', because they're both lively words. On the other hand, I'm sure a line ending in 'there' would have been dreadfully bland. And at one point I did include 'repair'. But you get the point. Oh, and if being American means things don't rhyme as well for you as for me, then I apologise -- but I'm not particularly contrite ;-)

*Which is why I interlocked my ruba'iyat. So that they'd flow. I mean, if I'd wanted to imitate Khayyam or FitzGerald as accurately as possible, I really shouldn't have done that.

Religious and anti-religious themes in 'His Dark Materials'

2007-11-14T21:01:00.000-08:00

I have to confess, when I heard they were making a movie out of The Golden Compass -- the first novel in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials sequence -- the anti-religious themes in the book were the first thing I thought of. The comments on this post on Friendly Atheist feature a few comments that suggest that the Christian response is an over-reaction. If so, it was an entirely predictable one, for Pullman is an atheist, and he did write these books with criticism of religion in mind. On the other hand, this post on Beliefnet by Donna Freitas, a defence of His Dark Materials from a Christian perspective, speaks of the way Pullman's story can be read as affirming the religious principles on which some people build their lives. That I did not predict -- but it does not surprise me so very much.

The atheism of His Dark Materials is actually somewhat equivocal. In the fictional multiverse of the books, the Authority known as 'God' is an imposter who did not create the universe, and who is destroyed almost incidentally in the third book by the main characters without their even knowing it. It's almost a throw-away scene, one which, if the third book made it to the screen, might be cut simply for reasons of time. Unlike the depiction of the Fall from Eden as a very good thing (which, certainly, some Christians might find hard to swallow) the death of 'God' is actually not that major. However, while the books reject this authoritarian imposter of a God, they do also have an overarching notion of destiny and purpose, embodied in a mysterious substance known as 'Dust'.

What is 'Dust'? The book gives several possible answers: original sin, the human spirit, a substance attracted to an adult's conscious mind and engagement in life. For an atheist, giving this somewhat humanist idea a supernatural tilt is hardly terrible because this is a
fantasy book. A Christian, however, might see a hint of some true God in this idea, a God who affirms human beings in contrast to the authoritarian religion which crushes them. His Dark Materials reads to me like a humanist freedom cry, a blazing beacon of joy in experience, a command to live life richly and fully, unstifled by repressive religious notions. There are more than a few Christians who value some of the same things as humanists, so we should not be surprised that they also find value in these books.

I'll say this outright: Pullman's His Dark Materials sequence definitely strengthened my atheism. It made me much more likely to see certain types of religious notions (such as giving all control over to God, or such as the repression of sexuality) as antithetical to a life well lived. But if you do believe in God, Pullman's books won't necessarily seem to be fighting that notion overmuch. It really depends what sort of God you have.

My theory on Flew

2007-11-07T20:16:00.000-08:00

Okay, now that I've got my own theory of events, I'm writing a proper post, adapted from my comment on Daylight Atheism here.

Some background, as best I can summarise: Antony Flew was a relatively well known atheist -- not "the world's most notorious", by any stretch, but well known as a philosopher due at least in part to a paper he published in the 1950s on the question of whether God is a scientifically verifiable claim. More recently, however, in his eighties, he has changed his mind on the existence of God.

In 2004, Biola University awarded Flew the "Philip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth". (I am tempted to request that you shoot me if I ever receive an award named for someone thus famed for the distortion of science. In so doing, I reveal my own bias, of course! Still, I really am trying to be fair here). Flew said in his acceptance speech:

In speaking to, or writing for, my fellow professional philosophers I write or speak only about Aristotle's God, who was not concerned with or about human beliefs or behavior. But in speaking to an audience in the United States I cannot do better than to say that I have become, like the young Mr. Jefferson who drafted the Declaration of Independence, a Deist.

There has been more than one insinuation that Flew would have to be senile to accept the arguments for God that he has done. This is too typical of the way some atheists feel about religion in general to be entirely credible. We cannot always understand why any sensible person would believe it, but many otherwise sensible people do. In Flew's case, shifting to Deism shows at least some sign of rigour. Many, indeed perhaps most, of the standard arguments for God will take you little further.

Recently, a book has come out, with authorship credited to Flew and to the evangelical Roy Varghese. A New York Times article questions the book's authorship:

As [Flew] himself conceded, he had not written his book.
“This is really Roy’s doing,” he said, before I had even figured out a polite way to ask. “He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I’m too old for this kind of work!”
When I asked Varghese, he freely admitted that the book was his idea and that he had done all the original writing for it. But he made the book sound like more of a joint effort — slightly more, anyway. “There was stuff he had written before, and some of that was adapted to this,” Varghese said. “There is stuff he’d written to me in correspondence, and I organized a lot of it. And I had interviews with him. So those three elements went into it. Oh, and I exposed him to certain authors and got his views on them. We pulled it together. And then to make it more reader-friendly, HarperCollins had a more popular author go through it.”
So even the ghostwriter had a ghostwriter: Bob Hostetler, an evangelical pastor and author from Ohio, rewrote many passages, especially in the section that narrates Flew’s childhood. With three authors, how much Flew was left in the book? “He went through everything, was happy with everything,” Varghese said.
Cynthia DiTiberio, the editor who acquired “There Is a God” for HarperOne, told me that Hostetler’s work was limited; she called him “an extensive copy editor.” “He did the kind of thing I would have done if I had the time,” DiTiberio said, “but editors don’t get any editing done in the office; we have to do that in our own time.”
I then asked DiTiberio if it was ethical to publish a book under Flew’s name that cites sources Flew doesn’t know well enough to discuss. “I see your struggle and confusion,” she said, but she maintained that the book is an accurate presentation of Flew’s views. “I don’t think Tony would have allowed us to put in anything he was not comfortable with or familiar with,” she said. “I mean, it is hard to tell at this point how much is him getting older. In my communications with him, there are times you have to say things a couple times. I’m not sure what that is. I wish I could tell you more. . . We were hindered by the fact that he is older, but it would do the world a disservice not to have the book out there, regardless of how it was made.”

Richard Carrier, an atheist who corresponded with Flew over his change of mind, has posted his own version of events, along with a theory of his own about the book's authorship:

In my opinion the book's arguments are so fallacious and cheaply composed I doubt Flew would have signed off on it in sound mind, and [the reporter] Oppenheimer comes to much the same conclusion. It seems Flew simply trusted Varghese and didn't even read the book being published in his name. And even if he had, he is clearly incapable now of even remembering what it said. The book's actual author turns out to be an evangelical preacher named Bob Hostetler (who has also written several books with Josh McDowell), with considerable assistance from this book's co-author, evangelical promoter and businessman Roy Abraham Varghese.

However, I don't completely believe the story they told Oppenheimer. The style of the chapters attributed to Flew differs so much from the portions explicitly written by Varghese (such as a lengthy preface), that I suspect Hostetler was responsible for much more than the publisher claims. Whether that's so or not, this is a hack Christian tract, not formal or competent philosophy, nor anything from the mind of Antony Flew.

Carrier's post is interesting but he's biased as heck -- possibly biased as to his own influence on Flew's change of mind (Flew seems to have flip-flopped a bit) and the extent to which Flew would remember it, and definitely biased towards atheism; we can't help that. He does, however, give some interesting details on Flew's book. And apart from the speculation, much of what Carrier says is so entirely consistent with Varghese's statement on the matter, as quoted above, that I'm inclined to believe both.

Here's is Varghese, repeated from above:

“There was stuff he had written before, and some of that was adapted to this,” Varghese said. “There is stuff he’d written to me in correspondence, and I organized a lot of it. And I had interviews with him. So those three elements went into it. Oh, and I exposed him to certain authors and got his views on them. We pulled it together. And then to make it more reader-friendly, HarperCollins had a more popular author go through it.”

Here is Carrier on the book:

Curiously absent from the entire book is any discussion of Deism...
...this book is filled with the typical concerns and methods of contemporary Christian apologetics...
Finally, chapters provided by Varghese (actually written in Varghese's name) vent a fireball of rage and calumny against the renowned, popular, and bestselling atheists Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris.

These are strong indications that the overall shape and content of the book aren't Flew's doing -- which they wouldn't be, if Varghese's statement is accurate! It's not at all far-fetched to suppose that Varghese et al are using Flew to promote a worldview that doesn't precisely align with his. It would be possible to do this without actually lying, per se -- just omitting inconvenient qualifiers that Flew might have placed on his position had he been putting the book together himself, and adding in some (credited) bits from other authors that push people towards Christianity particularly.

I can imagine them rationalising it this way, putting it together so carefully from things Flew actually did say, choosing the bits that made the story they wanted. They may well have even used statements from Flew that he later retracted, as Carrier claims. I can imagine Flew agreeing to let them write the book after a bit of pressure, thinking they had the right to the 'data' of his personal story, not paying attention to the way they were writing as if he agreed to the worldview they were promoting with that 'data', and feeling as if he had to go along with it once he'd said yes.

I can even imagine Varghese and possibly Hostetler rationalising that Flew probably would agree with such-and-such an argument, because it makes so much sense... but, though I can imagine them thinking that, I am inclined to withhold belief that they actually did include arguments that Flew didn't agree with. I really don't think they would have needed to. I could have done it without resorting to that.

In short, Flew may simply have decided that he doesn't have the energy to fight the war over subtext in the way his views are being presented by others. Varghese is being somewhat dishonest in presenting the view of the book as Flew's when it is really being pulled towards Varghese's own as a result of the fact that he did most of the work, but that's it.

And yes, Flew's old age may make him less inclined to expend the energy to argue over subtleties. He may also be in decline somewhat intellectually -- we know he's suffering from an inability to remember some things. That probably exacerbates the situation. It doesn't mean that Varghese and Hostetler made the whole thing up, though. With my imperfect knowledge, my current guess is that they merely took a real change of opinion and dressed it up to support their position as much as possible, but probably without lying outright.

Antony Flew

2007-11-06T19:52:00.000-08:00

Okay, this is disturbing. Be sure to read the journalist's account on Page 5 of his conversation with Flew.

(Via Pharyngula and Daylight Atheism)

Bwahahahaha! LaTeX on Blogger.

2007-11-05T23:21:00.000-08:00

I learned about two weeks after I started blogging that you can get LaTeX to work on WordPress. It was the first time (but certainly not the last) that I thought to myself why, oh why the heck did I not blog on WordPress?

Well, I'll probably still think that from time to time, but I've found a way to use LaTeX on Blogger. So let's see if I can get it to work:

Hey! Magic.

For those of you who are wondering what the heck is going on, LaTeX is a typesetting program that you can use to produce mathematical formulae. For example, that integral on the left of the above expression is produced by putting the following into LaTeX:

\int_a^b f(x) e^{\mathrm{i}\omega g(x)} \mathrm{d} x

I'm told it works better on a white background. So if, by the time you see this, I've changed my blog template, that will be why.

Humanist Symposium #10

2007-11-04T01:43:00.000-07:00

The tenth Humanist Symposium is up! It's at Letters from a Broad this time, with a sweet little illustration, sort of like an illuminated border. My post on tragedy is included.

Conservative think tank recommends fathers give higher priority to their children.

2007-11-02T16:32:00.000-07:00

Yes, you read that correctly. The Maxim Institute, a New Zealand based conservative think tank, has come out with a report which says that:

Fathers should
* Take their share of responsibility for their children's wellbeing and development.
* Spend time with them, be supportive and involved.
Families should
* Reconsider factors that drive fathers to work long hours, such as the desire for higher living standards.
Employers should
* Accept and support their employees' commitments outside work.
* Allow flexible working hours and working from home where possible.
Social services should
* Communicate with fathers as well as mothers because both affect the child's development.
Society should
* Encourage fathers' involvement with their children from infancy.
* Give higher priority to marriage and committed relationships.

There are many criticisms that could be made regarding the way this compares with other statements from the Maxim Institute. We could point out that longer working hours are in many respects a result of the free-market economics that the Maxim Institute unequivocally champions. We could point out that they're recommending that parents put off buying a house, when home ownership is a standard level of independence and security in New Zealand, and that social programs which could make it easier to have the house and spend time with the kids would probably be opposed by the Maxim Institute. We could point out that some people can't afford a house or time with the kids, and that the Maxim Institute isn't likely to support helping those people, either.

But I just want to point out that this is a conservative think tank, here, looking at the research and deciding, not that mothers should go back to the home, but that fathers should meet them there. I just want to savour how far we've come.

The Proscenium Arch

2007-10-27T23:28:00.000-07:00

I had a sweet singing voice as a kid -- the sort of accurate tunefulness that you don't necessarily expect to hear from a child, and a cute, wistful sense of feeling, you know the type. Oh, my pleased, proud parents! When Mum was a kid, she always wished she could sing. Her father (not a particularly nice man) told her not to be stupid, she couldn't possibly be any good at anything like that. As for my father, he loves to sing. Unfortunately he can't sing for too long without his voice getting hoarse, because he damaged his throat when I was still a baby with a few too many late nights of singing at his regular restaurant slot.

My father in particular was always very keen for me to sing with him. If he couldn't sing as much as he'd like, at least he could play the guitar for me. And thus it was that I ended up singing for grandmothers, aunts, uncles, godparents, family friends, the occasional work colleague or graduate student of my father's, and, really, all and sundry who passed through our house.

The first time my father suggested I sing for some family members, I balked. Squirming, I got up and tried to sing, only to duck away shyly. I didn't dare thus set myself up as worth listening to, and leave myself exposed to evaluation of the implicit claim. I didn't want to have to watch their real-time reaction, right there in front of me. I just ... didn't want to sing.

But I am not, and have never been, a shrinking violet. I hate that girly shyness modesty stuff. So the second time, I steeled myself, and sang. The response was positive, naturally. I do not think I really expected anything else. Responding without seeming proud was definitely one of the more uncomfortable parts of the stomach-churning experience. But it didn't put me off. Most of the time, when my father suggested I sing, I sang.

When it came to solos with the school choir, I quickly became blasé. But with small audiences, in the living room, there's always that core of fear in your gut. You can learn to set it aside to let the song through, but it never really leaves you. It was always there, from the sweet little performances as an eight year old until the day when I was sixteen and finally made enough of a fuss that my father had to stop telling me to "oh, come on, they're expecting it". On stage, it's different. On stage, you have the proscenium arch. It separates you and the audience. It frames what you are doing. It says "this isn't real", and under that cover you can be as real as you like.

Poetry is a proscenium arch. If it's a poem, you're allowed to speak floridly. If you want to exaggerate, it's merely hyperbole. If you want to spill your guts, well, nobody really has to respond to it as anything but a poem, do they? Verse is a particularly good proscenium arch: pay your dues to the gods of rhyme and metre, and you are officially excused the accusation of complete talentlessness and lack of effort.

The separation provided by my pseudonym 'Lynet' can act like a proscenium arch, too.

Nearly all forms of art have a proscenium arch of sorts. The effort to transcend that separation can sometimes mark a piece of art as particularly good, but at other times it's the cover provided by the form that allows the brilliance of honest expression. "I give to you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion," says Tennessee Williams. Well, that's what the proscenium arch is for.

I am not resigned: A meditation on tragedy.

2007-10-27T19:47:00.000-07:00

The last Poetry Sunday at Daylight Atheism was Edna St. Vincent Millay's Dirge Without Music. The poem itself is a beautiful, sensitive, defiant meditation on death. Yet it is not of death that I wish to speak, or not death alone. Sublime though the poem is in its entirety, in the process of responding to Ebonmuse's particular emphasis on its quiet refusal to succumb to perfect acceptance of the inevitable I have been caught, caught entirely, by the final line alone.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. It's a small, simple idea that might have meant very little to another person, or to myself at another time. Knowing this, I cannot be sure that I am able to explain what it meant to me. Nor can I be sure that it will mean anything to you, if I do succeed in such an explanation. I offer my attempt at explanation nevertheless.

Ebonmuse writes, almost coincidentally, in that same thread that "Paradoxically, there can be true beauty in tragedy, for all that I would end it in a second if I had the power." Let this be my starting point, for, friends, if I had in front of me the magic wand that would end tragedy forever, I could never pick it up. No, never! The sweetest moments of my life have been those when tragedy fell away. How many lines of flaccid free verse have I wasted on the taste of tears? On the way despair becomes a lens through which the simple details of the world seem unimaginably good in their detachment from your pain? The simple fact is that I am not sure my life would be worth living if it had no tragedy in it.

The beauty that is in despair was an observation on which I built my view of the world. It was how I dealt with the reality of despair. Let me put this in a broader context. Human beings in general have a need to find ways to deal with the reality of pain and suffering. I do not speak here of the 'Problem of Evil' which plagues so many versions of conventional theism but rather the more simple part of us that cannot help but cry out at the unfairness and pain in the world: our own pain; the pain of those we love; all pain. Compassion can only exacerbate such a feeling. How do we deal with the incredible weight of suffering in the world? How do we deal with times when we ourselves are not sure that our own suffering will ever cease?

Religions have several different types of answers that they can give to these questions*. For example, we have the idea that we suffer because we deserve it. The notion of karma in Hinduism is the most extreme and obvious version of this. Those who suffer deserve to suffer; if you would avoid suffering, behave yourself. Believing in the ultimate fairness of the universe in this way may perhaps allow people to be psychologically reconciled to the suffering that inevitably occurs. It explains what people must do to avoid it, and gives people an excuse for not worrying too much about the pain of others. As freethinkers, of course, we may well be concerned about the consequences of people choosing not to worry about the pain of others! More importantly, however, we simply have no reason to suppose that there is any such karmic justice in place. The notion cannot be of use to us, even if we wanted it to be.

Another very common religious answer is to pull in the notion of a heavenly afterlife. Never mind that you are suffering now. Some day, you will live happily ever after, and so will those you love -- at least, they will as long as they belong to the same religion you do. This answer seems to rely on a willingness to be cold towards outsiders, but that is hardly a quality that human beings generally lack. Believing in heaven, people can struggle through, even if they believe their lives will never get better, by hoping for paradise at the end. Among atheists, the question sometimes arises whether (and when) we have the right to try to take this hope from people. I shall not try to answer that question completely, but perhaps I can shed some light on the extent to which there are atheist alternatives.

I confess I once naively placed a lot of confidence in the beauty that tragedy can produce. It's almost... karmic. Certainly it is at least a shift towards balance. After the storm, after the rain, the air is still and the grass is clean, and the shaft of sunlight coming down from the clouds can be a blessing beyond belief, even beyond belief in any God. I still do think that happiness arises in part by contrasts. I do not think I have ever thought that contrast was the only contributor to happiness, but nevertheless, my experience led me to play up this aspect of things. I had known the pain that comes when your world falls apart because you built it on false premises -- a healing pain from which you emerge somewhat subdued, but wiser and stronger. I had known small failures and deep loneliness, and found the small sweetnesses in each (I still have a radiant smile left over from when getting a smile back from a stranger really meant something). And out of this I could reflect that surely the world cannot be so bad when it gives you the soft rush of small joys in compensation for hardship.

Ah, but even Pollyanna had her moment when the 'glad game' just wouldn't work any more. And in real life the world is not required to miraculously restore to you the dearly beloved things it so coldly destroys. It is these moments when the narrative fails that are the hardest. How many deus ex machinas have I screamed at in the last few years? How dare George Eliot end The Mill on the Floss with a dubiously engineered death? (I expected better, having read Middlemarch). She's not allowed to die, she has to live. Live and suffer, Maggie. Live and suffer and show me how.

The worst tragedies are off the map. Jane Austen never wrote about what it was like when the man she loved died before they could marry. Think of it! This, at a time when marriage was the dearest ambition of every woman of Austen's age and class, to have the promise of that dreamed-of home, adulthood, security, love replaced with what might be (and, indeed, turned out to be) a lifetime of spinsterhood.

Knowing you are not alone can almost seem to make this sort of thing worse. Pick yourself up. Hearts are broken every day, Lynet, even worse than your so-narratively-wrong case. Oh, don't remind me of the sheer weight of broken hearts!

Of course, we know how Jane Austen dealt with her situation. Mansfield Park has a somewhat insipid streak precisely because our poor Jane, having given up hope in this world, was resolutely focused on the next. And since her novels improved after that low point, we may assume that she did, too, somehow. That option for making it through the rough patch is not open to me. What is?

Ah, well, I have options Jane Austen did not have. My life need not revolve around a relationship (hey, hers didn't either and she still managed a lot!). I can have a career. While away the hours until I die. I know I ought not to go gentle, but the imperative to take a hold of life seems hard, sometimes. If I keep working, will life stop feeling so flat?

And so I read Dirge Without Music, and, being asked to fully comprehend "I am not resigned", realised that I had pushed away that part of it the first time I read through. It hurts, not being resigned. How many times have I told myself that I'll just have to lump it?

Oh, help me, for I am not resigned. I am not resigned, and if I were resigned, not all the calm precautions and shaky rebuilding would ever be enough to restore the shine to my broken world.

Take me back, world of narratives and dreams. I know that beautiful things can die worthlessly. I know that many dreams disappear from our lives abruptly without so much as a 'goodbye'. I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

When I finished crying and went outside, the sunshine seemed less incongruous. The grass was clean, the air was still, and my remembered loss still wasn't worth it, but I -- I wandered down the street with my radiant smile just a little bit easier than it was.

*I do not mean to imply that the non-religious ways of dealing with pain that I give later are not just as deeply felt by those with religion, too, of course -- L.L. Barkat's recent post would be proof against that assumption.

Blog Evolution Meme...

2007-10-18T18:09:00.000-07:00

... with a digression into how I came to like strict poetic forms.

Tobe tagged me, so here we go. I'm supposed to pick five posts from my archives that display how my blog has evolved over time, and then tag five more people to do the same. Like Tobe, I'm going to take the opportunity to go over some history.

I started blogging in February, but I'd been reading blogs for months before that -- my usual starting point was the Carnival of Feminists. Then I found a link to Alon Levy's Abstract Nonsense somewhere in the archives of Alas, A Blog. Abstract Nonsense was the first blog I started reading regularly. Alon's a sharp guy, it's a pity he's not blogging any more. At any rate, reading even one blog regularly makes you somewhat anchored to the blogosphere, and I decided I wanted a place of my own.

Elliptica has always been a bit hodge-podge, usually with several different subjects evolving at the same time. It serves as my presence on the blogosphere, my home base from which to visit other blogs, my space to voice my opinions or explore different lines of thought. It was originally going to be called Parabolica, but there's already a blog of that name (it's in Portugese, though, so I can't tell you what on Earth it's talking about). As noted on my About Me page, I like conic sections. They're pretty.

So. Post number one: Matters of Identity. Definitely one of my better early posts. I think it's appropriate that I start by quoting a feminist post. The central useful idea here is the way statements about gender have a hard time not being normative. I like being a girl (though I really ought to start thinking of myself of as more like a woman than a girl, I suppose) but as a feminist I naturally worry about the ways in which that can confine me.

I started off blogging quite a lot about mathematics. However, mathematics posts are always more work than the other stuff I toss off. If I'm explaining something I understand well, I spend ages figuring out how to explain it interestingly to someone who knows less than I do. If I'm trying to explain something I don't understand so well, I have to keep looking things up. Nevertheless, I really ought to go to the effort of putting more maths up here -- heck, it's on my subtitle, isn't it? And I really do love the stuff. "But if you can't picture it..." was a bit of a gift, really -- a subject coming up in coversation that many non-mathematicians might want to know about, and about which I do have some breadth of understanding.

My blogging about feminism took something of a downturn after my post on Celebration of Female Desire Week. Why? Well, there's one central question that every young woman who cares about feminism has to answer. It kind of split feminism down the middle in the eighties, and it's still going strong. The point is this. On the one hand, increasing freedom of and openness about sexual expression means that women have the chance to ask for more equality (and more of what they would like) in their sexual relations. That's a good thing. But on the other hand, the sexual revolution hasn't precisely got rid of the idea that women who have sex outside of wedlock might be deserving of less respect. When it comes to the virgin/whore dichotomy, there are parts of our culture that seem to interpret the sexual revolution as simply placing all women in the latter category. And thus, within feminism, we have the Sex Wars. Should women avoid sex, or certain types of sex, for so long as many people view it as degrading to the woman involved? Are there other ways to deal with this? The early posts on my blog have several takes on this issue, some heartfelt, some tentative, but this was the final post that wrapped it all up for me. And after that, I just wasn't thinking about feminism quite so much any more, and the topic of feminism went quiet for a while.

I never expected to blog much about atheism. God doesn't exist, already. Big deal. But then I wandered onto Daylight Atheism on one of Ebonmuse's sure-fire eloquent days. My somewhat clumsy response, overflowing with enthusiasm, would end up requiring two follow-up posts as I thought, and re-thought, clarifying my exact position over time (go down to the very bottom of the comments each time to find the 'links to this post' if you want to follow the fallout, there).

On my birthday, in March last year, my sister got me a copy of The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry. Witty and informative throughout, the book had one section called What is Form and Why Bother with It? (subtitle: Stephen gets all cross), which completely overturned my view of strict poetic forms. I know I was told by more than one primary school teacher not to bother with rhyme -- understandable perhaps, given that bad rhyme really is terrible. But then, oh, how terrible, how self-indulgent is the bad free verse that you can end up producing by just 'writing what comes' and expecting it to be deep philosophy. It's a simple fact that in both cases, a little understanding can go a long way. And in my case, after reading Stephen Fry, I realised that I had really only ever written one poem that stood up to much scrutiny.

One poem. A modified haiku. Not just any modified haiku, but one written with some understanding of the traditions of the haiku form, because my mother, many years before, was briefly very interested in haikus. In fact, when I did my first ever Google name search, I found I'd written a haiku of my own back then that was very much a precursor to this one. Oh, the new haiku broke almost every rule in the book -- it had two verses, it involved the poet rather than confining itself to a description of nature, and, hey, forget 5-7-5! It was still a haiku, though. If you're interested, it went like this:

Sitting
In warm grass
Fascinating water swirls

Wishing
Thinking of you
Still made me feel like this

That, my friends, is a poem with form.

So, armed with a new knowledge of rhyme and metre, I struck out into the world of villanelles, sestinas, and sonnets. And you know what? Rhyme gives you ideas. Metre distracts your mind and leaves your subconscious free to work. And any form will very quickly force you to learn the all-important task of editing your thoughts to fit, which leads you naturally into the elusive skill of re-writing without losing the good stuff you already have.

So I had a blog, and I had some rapidly-rising poetic skills. Poems, blog, blog, poems... inevitably, I ended up posting some. The first one I posted was a villanelle, and I'm not at all sure that a single line of that poem would pass muster if I was writing it now. It was still a lot better than anything I'd written previously. However, for my fifth and (regrettably) final choice of archived post, I'm going to give my sestina. It is difficult to be ashamed of a sestina, because they are fairly hard to write in the first place. The only real restriction is on the final word of each line. You have six lines per stanza, and six words with which lines are allowed to end. The exact order of these words varies according to a strict pattern which ensures that each word will occupy each placing in the order exactly once (nice mathematical connection, there). For example, you will see that the final word of the first line of one stanza is always the final word of the last line of the previous stanza. The second line of the stanza ends with the same word as the first line of the previous stanza. Confused?

Let me put it this way. If the ordering of final words in the first stanza is ABCDEF, the next stanza will have the final word of each line in the order FAEBDC. The next stanza is CFDABE. Continue for six stanzas and, trust me, each word will have occupied each position exactly once. Then you end the poem with a three-line stanza in which you include two of your chosen words per line, and you're done.

The six words I chose are "words","fear","mother","lost","daughter", and "well". That last one has a nice variety of meanings to cycle through. So if you're really confused, here it is without further ado: Daughter's Sestina. Oh, and do me a favour? Read it out loud. I don't care if you feel silly. Whisper it, if you must. Because, though I say it myself, the poem has some rather cool metrical effects that found their way in by accident while I was trying very hard not to write in iambic pentameter. You don't have to be consciously aware of them, but if you're just skimming over it with your eyes, you probably won't be aware of them at all. So, please...

And that's all I have space for! A pity, but when your blog is evolving on several tracks at once, it's difficult to get the whole story across. Now, who to tag? L.L. Barkat has been blogging about blogging for a while already, so I'm not sure if this meme would feel too much like more of the same; JD2718 might be a decent bet, but Kelly says she's been tagged already, C.L. Hanson has already done it, um... oh, heck. I'll take the easy way out. Open tag. If you want it, take it.

Humanist Symposium #9: Illustrated Edition

2007-10-15T00:20:00.000-07:00

The party has moved to Greta Christina's place. She's done a lovely job, with readable, informative summaries -- and her always-handy pictures (which are a staple for her, and one of the things that makes her blog stand out). See you there!

I am not a fan of beauty standards for vaginas.

2007-10-08T19:38:00.000-07:00

Marty Klein, a sex therapist, writes a forthright and often very likeable blog on the politics of sex at Sexual Intelligence. His latest post, however, seems to me to miss an important point:

Unfortunately, a rising chorus of so-called feminists and gender theorists are dissing women who make the “wrong” choices about these things. Claiming they know women better than they know themselves, they decry women who shave, wax, implant, bleach, pierce, or otherwise change their sexual bodies.

These body-modification fascists say all those activities are a response to “cultural pressure” (especially from selfish, obsessed, insecure boyfriends and husbands), and that no adult woman could possibly decide to do these things on her own. They say that any woman who pierces her labia or gets breast implants has been “manipulated.” Oh, you know women—unable to think for themselves. Unable to think, period.

Well, I’m tired of it.

Klein is attacking the most extreme form of feminist distrust of body modification. I think he's correct, as far as it goes, to say that some women do make these choices for their own good reasons and for their own enjoyment. But that's not the point. I'm not going to decry the choices of individual women. Try to be confident in your own body, and then have fun with it however you like. The real issue here isn't individual choices, though. It's overall beauty standards. And I am not a fan of beauty standards for vaginas. Full stop (that means 'period', if you're American).

I am not a body-hating kind of girl. When my mother, a couple of centimetres shorter and a few kilos lighter than me, says that she needs to lose weight, I collect up the sense she taught me, remember that I have a BMI of twenty, and believe it neither of her nor of me. When I read in a magazine that "cellulite is a problem that affects many women, causing unsightly bumps on the upper thighs", I chuckle at the thought of what the writer of the article would say about my stretch marks, left over from when my bum had its growth spurt, and then reflect that I actually rather like my barely-visible tiger stripes, souvenirs from of the year I got a waist. When I went to the mall on a horrible rainy day in my grandfather's baggy old anorak that makes me look twice as big as I am, and a couple of pimply awkward scarecrows of teenage boys started making pig noises at me, I walked on by and paid no attention. And I have hairy armpits. They're not very hairy. You wouldn't mistake them for a man's armpits. But the hair is there, and it's easily visible if I raise my arms. I even have the gall to wear sleeveless tops when I go out dancing.

I am not a body-hating kind of girl, but if we're going to have beauty standards on my vulva, then I despair for myself. Here, of all places, I feel vulnerable. Face it, my vulva is fundamentally messy. I can make it clean (for all of two minutes if cervical fluid counts as 'dirty', which it probably shouldn't), but tidyness just isn't an option. And I don't want some beautician or cosmetic surgeon out to make a buck to make me feel like I ought to try to change that. I want to be able to like it the way it is.

Carnival of Mathematics #18

2007-10-06T23:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to JD2718 for including my post 'A Sequence' in the 18th Carnival of Mathematics.

EDIT: Okay, now I'm actually reading the stuff that's up. There are so many funny ones! Did you know there's a whole blog called Rigorous Trivialities? Parallel parking in terms of Lie Groups is rather pretty, actually. Or look at this post ("and before long, you’ve learned the first few weeks’ material of a course in real analysis and all confusion has departed" ... actually, now I'm worried that might not have been a joke. Are there people for whom all confusion has departed after the first few weeks' material of a course in real analysis?).

A Sequence

2007-10-05T00:33:00.000-07:00

Start with the number 1.

To get the next number in the sequence:
(1) Go to the nearest integer strictly greater than the number you're on.
(2) Subtract the fractional part of your original number. The fractional part is the part that would be a fraction if you wrote the number in the standard 'composite' fashion (rather than an 'improper fraction'). For example, the fractional part of three and a half is a half; the fractional part of one and seven eighths is seven eighths.
(3)Take the reciprocal. (The easiest way to do that, as anyone with any mathematical fluency will tell you, is to write it as an improper fraction and then 'flip' the fraction -- put the bottom number on the top and the top number on the bottom. For example, three and a half is equivalent to 7/2; the reciprocal is 2/7. If you don't know why three and a half is 7/2 then, um, I'll be happy to explain in the comments...)

There are several ways of writing this as a mathematical formula. If x is the current number, then one way of writing the next number is

1/[_x_ + 1 - frac(x)]

where frac(x) is the fractional part of x, and I'm using the underscore for a floor function, which takes the nearest integer less than or equal to the number (floor function plus one gives the nearest integer strictly greater than the number, as required by the description above). If you're trying to follow without much mathematical experience, I'll give you for free that one over a number is always the reciprocal.

That's not necessarily the neatest formula; tidy it as desired, if you like that sort of thing.

Now go play.

No, seriously. If you're an experienced mathsy type, try to prove that the sequence contains every possible positive fraction exactly once (yes, people, sequences like that are possible). I did it in four hours -- working with a friend who was obsessed with Fibonacci numbers :-). Another friend of mine got it by himself in three, but our proof was nicer. And the Fibonacci numbers may or may not be a clue.

If you need a reason to go play, look at the sequence:

1

1/2

2

1/3

3/2

2/3

3

1/4

4/3

3/5

5/2

2/5

5/3

3/4

4

...

It's just kinda cool. Any and all patterns may or may not be useful for proving you've got every fraction in there....

Womanhood, masculinity, and books thereon.

2007-10-01T23:56:00.000-07:00

When I was sixteen, my mother got me a copy of 'Woman's Experience of Sex' by Sheila Kitzinger. I was slightly embarrassed, shelved it spine-backwards and didn't touch it until two years later when I suddenly realised that I was probably old enough to have sex and really ought to know more about it. Kitzinger's fascinating, sensitive and only slightly dated look at how women feel and behave sexually was exactly what I needed, and when I finished it I jumped enthusiastically into any sexual parts of 'Our Bodies, Ourselves' that I could find. Alas, the latter was just a little too clinical. New Zealand has perfectly good sex education and I've already had the details of every sort of contraception enumerated to me a few times over. It was the emotion that I wanted to understand.

I was aware, though, that there was also another side to the story. Kitzinger sifted through statements from hundreds of women on what sex meant to them and presented them in a book, allowing some sort of validity to the whole broad range in true liberal fashion (for all that her own middle class status -- and, indeed, her feminism -- definitely acted as a lens). The book she ended up creating was, for me, almost a map of the possibilities of womanhood. It was invaluable. But if that is woman's experience of sex, what is a man's? Books like Kitzinger's, like 'Our Bodies, Ourselves', like Natalie Angier's 'Woman: An Intimate Geography' (which is also excellent) are frequently touted as essential reading not only for women but for lovers of women. As a heterosexual woman, naturally I am interested in finding the male equivalent.

Gee, but you men got short-changed! Well, okay, you still have a bit more money, more political power, dramatically less chance of being labelled a slut -- but I think you're missing out on this particular point. I did find one halfway decent book for men: 'Secret Men's Business' by John Marsden. Secret, huh? I read it anyway. Sorry, but I considered my curiosity to be an entirely benevolent impulse to understand what you guys feel like in bed (and outside of it). It was quite good (not actually all that sexist, either) but it seemed to feel the need to cloak any and all advice with the authority of the Great (And Somewhat Mysterious) Notion of True Masculinity. Which is a pity, because the freedom to deconstruct or discard the Acknowledgedly Silly Notion of Femininity whenever we feel like it is one of the best aspects of the liberal feminist tradition.

Perhaps I'm just holding every book on masculinity I find up to feminist standards. Celia Lashlie's book 'He'll be OK' about bringing up teenage boys was also very good, but Lashlie is a feminist. And it would be better if men were speaking for themselves. (Lashlie recounts an amusing exchange with the principal of an all-boys school. After the two had agreed that men need a movement of their own, the principal remarked slightly wistfully "I don't suppose we could get you to do it for us?" No, says Lashlie, no, we couldn't. Nice try, though.)

I am aware, of course, that the sensible thing to do would be to find a nice man to have sex with and then ask him how he feels about it. Indeed, relying on books rather than reality would be a sorry way to live. Ah, well. I'll get there.

Humanist Symposium #8: Interlocking Ruba'iyat

2007-09-23T22:22:00.000-07:00

Within this godless universe, we find
A purpose and a reason to be kind.
So gather round, and read the posts here, sent
To warm the heart and educate the mind.

When Daylight Atheism shines, ascent
For humanists seems quite hard to prevent.
With optimism, what a voice have we!
Look: Atheists at twenty-five percent.

We need a secular community.
So argues vjack. Solidarity
Will take us all significantly far
-- And help our growth as humans, usefully!

Imagine (Is that Lennon, there? Aha!)
Explores the way we show our character
In trouble, we go weak, or bright, or stroppy...
So ask yourself, Do You Know What You Are?

So countries that have atheists are happy?
As skeptics, we've a duty. Don't get sappy.
Greta Christina warns, it would be flawed
To just assume causation, fast and sloppy.

A middle path at Letters from a broad...
There's room for pens that aren't quite like the sword.
But still, we need to make our presence plain.
I read this, and I cannot but applaud.

And Greta's back with more words in this vein.
Let's go with Good Cop, Bad Cop. Do not strain
To silence other atheists. We'll keep
Both types of activism: shine and rain.

Shamanic Visions of Selective Sweep
Explains how schizophrenia can reap
Rewards in partial doses. Read, and see
An interesting speculative leap.*

At evanescent, with simplicity,
We ruminate upon morality.
We do not need a Scripture to invoke
For 'wrongness' to exist objectively.

If someone says "Come on, it's just a joke,"
Can we excuse them from offending folk?
The Atheist Ethicist, with balanced sight,
Compares two statements to dispel the smoke.

"With Paradise swamped in darkness, where's the light?"
An Atheist's Sonnet at A Load of Bright
Evokes a shattered landscape, and then shows
The humble hand that leads us from our plight.

Allow me to explain the form I chose
In echo of the Nightingale and Rose
Built, and re-built, by better hands than mine
The ruba'iyat which every poet knows.

Greta Christina's Blog is next in line.
If to our next Symposium you incline,
October the fourteenth we meet again.
Till then, fare well! Let hope and reason shine.

*I wasn't quite able to include that this post is at The Primate Diaries. Here, for completeness, is the list of blogs and post titles:

Atheists at 25% posted at Daylight Atheism
We need a secular community posted at Atheist Revolution
Do You Know What You Are? posted at Imagine
Is Atheism What Makes Happy Atheists Happy? posted at Greta Christina's Blog
My passionate secularism posted at Letters from a broad...
Good Cop, Bad Cop: Atheist Activism posted at Greta Christina's Blog
Shamanic Visions of Selective Sweep posted at The Primate Diaries
My Morality Rumination posted at evanescent
Kathy Griffin and The Comic Defense posted at Atheist Ethicist
An Atheist’s Sonnett posted at A Load of Bright
The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam posted at Elliptica

The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam

2007-09-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

Here with a little Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse -- and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness --
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

A pretty quatrain, isn't it? It's from Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald's Rubaiyat can just barely be called a translation of a large collection of four-line poems attributed to the eleventh century Persian mathematician and philosopher Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald, in his own words, "mashed together" many quatrains, and given still further that FitzGerald put his translated quatrains in deliberate order and even had them run into each other sometimes, despite the fact that the originals were all stand-alone, it might almost be sensible to call FitzGerald's translation a separate work of art, inspired by and heavily based upon the original. Notwithstanding the looseness of the translation, it is undisputably the most popular one, perhaps because FitzGerald allows his more modern (Victorian) viewpoint to change the original somewhat, thereby creating something that resonates more strongly with us as an audience.

The word ruba'i, plural ruba'iyat, actually means 'quatrain', literally speaking; it's derived from the Persian word for 'four'. Traditionally, the first, second and fourth lines rhyme; sometimes (especially in earlier Persian poems) all four lines end in the same rhyme. Modern poems which continue the form for several stanzas occasionally use a form known as interlocking ruba'iyat in which the third line of one stanza rhymes with the first, second and fourth of the next.

You might think the final line of the verse I quoted above is hyperbole. However, FitzGerald continues:

Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Promise go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!

Were it not Folly, Spider-like to spin
The Thread of present Life away to win --
What? for ourselves, who know not if we shall
Breathe out the very Breath we now breathe in!

How much of FitzGerald's translation is in the originals? I found this literal translation by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs quite useful. There is one, for example, that runs as follows:

I need a jug of wine and a book of poetry,
Half a loaf for a bite to eat,
Then you and I, seated in a deserted spot,
Will have more wealth than a Sultan's realm

Or this one:

They say houris make the gardens of Paradise delicious,
I say that the juice of the vine is delicious,
Take this cash and reject that credit --
The sound of a distant drum, brother, is sweet

The literal translations can be quite beautiful in their own right. I particularly like this one:

The good and evil that are in man's heart,
The joy and sorrow that are our fortune and destiny,
Do not impute them to the wheel of heaven because, in the light of reason,
The wheel is a thousand times more helpless than you.

Exactly what we'd expect from a brilliant astronomer. Mind you, distinguishing which poems were actually written by Omar Khayyam himself is perhaps just somewhat less difficult than figuring out which fables were originally spoken by Aesop. To be sure, we have the apparent advantage of several works known to have been written by Khayyam. However, Khayyam's own writings on mathematics and philosophy say little of the sort of thinking given in the ruba'iyat. Indeed, his contemporaries speak of him as religiously orthodox -- and we could have predicted that from the simple fact that he died of old age. It is only after his death that we find writings which speak of him as heretical or dangerous, attributing poems to him such as this one:

Since the Upholder embellishes the material of things,
For what reason does He cast it into diminution and decay?
If it turned out good, why break it?
If the form turned out bad, whose fault was it?

FitzGerald saw Khayyam as a nonbeliever and hedonist with whom he could identify, but some have argued that Khayyam was a doubting believer. There is also a tradition among followers of Sufism that Khayyam was one of their own, and that the references to wine and such in his poetry are entirely metaphorical. The contradictions are strong enough that some have suggested that the poems were written by a different Khayyam who was then confused with the famed mathematician.

So it's partly FitzGerald's translation that makes these verses seem to cry across the centuries:

Ah, with the Grape my fading Life provide,
And wash my Body whence the Life has died,
And in a Windingsheet of Vine-leaf wrapt,
So bury me by some sweet Garden-side.

That ev'n my buried Ashes such a Snare
Of Perfume shall fling up into the Air,
As not a True Believer passing by
But shall be overtaken unaware.

Pretty, and more than pretty, aren't they?

On this day six years ago...

2007-09-11T21:11:00.000-07:00

Knowing the time difference, it would have been September 12 for me already when I found out. At the time I was cold, I admit. The tragedy was far away, people die halfway around the world from you all the time, and I was busy absorbing the political implications.

They had the TV on in our music classroom, CNN I think it was, with the class sort of crowded around it, and I caught the view of the tower with its cloud of smoke over many people's shoulders before retreating from the crowd as is typical for me in times of stress. Weeks later, I heard a newsreader say "You've seen all those pictures, too many times ... " I hadn't. Just that one glimpse. We don't have a TV at home.

My history teacher from the year before was a wry, sharp-witted man, full of stories and opinions and off-hand comments. We had studied the origins of World War II. "The Japanese made a big mistake, bombing Pearl Harbour," he had said. "It was all very well expanding into the Pacific, but Pearl Harbour was American territory. And the Americans, well, if you hit them, they hit back. You mark my words, they'll take an eye for an eye, and then some."

Pearl Harbour is way out in the middle of the Pacific. The World Trade Center is in the middle of New York. Compare psychological magnitude. I had a sudden vision of the Americans thumping around desperately in their desire for revenge, trying to figure out who to hit. It would take a president with leadership skills of incredible magnitude to reign in that impulse, I thought. Then I remembered the president of the United States was George W. Bush. "This is an act of war," he declared. "Figures," I thought, and held my breath. For a while I thought they might be able to take it all out on Afghanistan.

Ah, well.

And then a few months ago I saw this clip here and realised how cold, how cold I was. And I wished I'd seen and felt the grief of New Yorkers at the time. But better late than never.

Higgaion (in which I become enamoured of another theistic blog)

2007-09-11T00:44:00.000-07:00

There are several reasons why this blog has been swinging sharply towards atheism recently. The first is Daylight Atheism and its parent site Ebon Musings. An inspiring post on the former, an addiction to the atheist meditations on the latter... it has an effect on my interactions with the blogosphere. But then add Seedlings in Stone into the mix and we have a Christian source of similarly addictive meditative thinking which pulls my mind back to religion.

I am sorry to say that this state of affairs may have just got worse. Via Pharyngula I have wandered onto Higgaion, a blog written by one seriously sharp-thinking theologian who writes with the kind of clarity that can provide welcome organisation to your thoughts even when you disagree. This site is proof that 'theological sophistication' is not merely 'obfuscation so that we won't have to face the actual issues'. The author's thorough, even sweeping, understanding of the content and context of some biblical texts is beautiful to behold and provides an incredibly necessary perspective on religious issues. Consider, for example, the easy way he is able to draw on his expert knowledge if the Hebrew Bible in a minor point in this post (one of several) of Dawkins' The God Delusion:

Similarly, at the beginning of the section of chapter 2 subtitled “Monotheism,” Dawkins begins with a quotation from Gore Vidal that labels the Old Testament “a barbaric Bronze Age text.” “Barbaric” I can buy, at least for parts of the Tanakh, but Bronze Age? Only the most conservative of biblical scholars assigns any part of the Tanakh to the Bronze Age...

But it was towards the end of a critique of Pastor Wiley Drake's call to imprecatory prayer that I felt my strongest reaction.

As much as the faulty exegesis noted above annoys me, I think the stakes are bigger when it comes to hermeneutics and “application.” Drake seems to think that if a biblical writer spoke in a particular manner (e.g., imprecatory prayer), that’s a divine endorsement command for Christians today to speak in like manner. ... [In] The End of Faith, [Sam] Harris seems to operate on the same supposition as Drake: that imitation is the only faithful way to respond to biblical statements. This reminds me of my own denominational heritage, with its inordinate attachment to the song “Trust and Obey”:

Trust and obey,
for there’s no other way
to be happy in Jesus
than to trust and obey.
To which I say, “Baloney.” (That’s too mild, but I try to keep the blog family-friendly.)

Oh, boy, did I love that. It gets better.

In sum, even if every single word of scripture was indeed dictated by God (which I don’t believe for a second, based on the bald statements of the biblical writers themselves), then it still would not be the case that the “only way” to respond faithfully to scripture is to “trust and obey.” Resistance can be a form of faithfulness, and indeed, sometimes it may be the only appropriate form of faithfulness. When the psalmists ask God to curse their enemies, we may rightly and faithfully say, “No.” When Ezra tries to break up marriages because of the ethnicities (or merely citizenship) of the husband and wife, we may rightly and faithfully say, “No.” And were we to think that God had said to us, “Go kill all your neighbors and live in their houses,” we might rightly and faithfully say, “No.”

Now don't ask me why, but when I read that part, I could have screamed in triumph. Yes, yes, yes, oh, sweet reason, yes! The author can argue Biblically for this! (Go look).

Look, I'm not a theist. I think there probably isn't a God and in this I disagree with Christopher Heard, whose blog has so impressed me. But the sheer scholarship of it all -- the sheer sense -- it's beautiful. It really is.

'High Country Weather' by James K. Baxter

2007-09-04T01:59:00.000-07:00

I cannot let mention of James K. Baxter pass without bringing up my favourite poem. For a New Zealander, it is a very conventional choice. What can I say? This poem is well-known and beloved for a reason.

High Country Weather

Alone we are born
And die alone;
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
Over snow mountain shine.

Along the upland road
Ride easy, stranger:
Surrender to the sky
Your heart of anger.

I brought this poem up in the first blush of my aching discussions with my former darling love about religion, as an explanation of how my worldview differed fom his. In some ways this was almost a misstep. Archibald Baxter was an unchurched Christian who never mentions praying and barely mentions God. James K, though, was a Catholic convert. How the heck did he write a poem that had such a marked influence on my secular humanism? 'Alone we are born, and die alone' -- famous phrase -- is not the statement of a person who believes himself to be perpetually in the presence of God. But then, 'to be or not to be' is still the question despite the fact that most people, of most religions, believe that not being is not an option!

My point, though, was this. I don't live in a happy manufactured world overseen by a benevolent deity. And I don't need to. As my worldview stands, I have so much invested in seeing-the-red-gold-cirrus-over-snow-mountain-shine! I like it that way. The first line is worth it for the second one. (I have some sympathy as a result for the idea that the best of all possible worlds -- without altering human nature -- might involve suffering. But I'm still pretty sure that this world isn't the best possible one).

And remember, the snow mountain in question is one of those Lord of the Rings New Zealand vistas. Mmkay?

Ride easy, strangers :-)