Mayfly Ten
Eating my own tail ~ Deo volente ~ Introducing Ananke ~ Charity starts at home ~ Oh, to disagree in good faith ~ Shorts & followups ~ Amusement arcade
Eating my own tail
Two weeks ago I wrote about meritocracy, the bent casino, and the agency trap. I argued that an over-emphasis on the impossible task of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps places blame on the individual when something structural might be at fault, and inhibits attempts to change those structures, sucking the wind out of the sails of progress.
Last week I argued that any such progress is a myth, anyway. Hume tells us misery will outgun pleasure over a lifetime. John Gray tells us we are not marching inexorably towards the sunlit uplands; our history is not one thing, and it is not teleological; things ebb and flow. And Henry George tells us our economy guarantees deprivation even in the face of whatever productive progress there is.
I promised to eat my own tail this week. So having already decried the agency trap, I return circuitously to personal responsibility.
Deo volente
An acquaintance of mine once finished an email with D.V. I had to look it up. It stands for Deo Volente, or God willing. Strangely, considering my heritage, I’m more used to the phrase Inshallah.
When talking about the agency trap I neglected to mention fatalism. Fatalism is the idea that the future is inevitable, what will happen will happen, and we have little control in the face of the whims of the gods or the vicissitudes of nature.
This way of thinking, regardless of any belief in a divinity, leaves me ambivalent.
On the one hand, there’s an acknowledgement of the limits of our agency and the huge importance of luck and circumstance (or excuses, for those of a certain mindset) in determining the course of one’s life. I think that’s undeniable, even if it’s easily forgotten. Attributing this to fate, and personifying hazard, and tying it to the mysterious ways of a divine plan, can provide solace (even if in my opinion this is a false solace). It is also a natural extension of our understanding of causality. If a current event can be explained by causes, then those causes can be explained, and those, all the way back to the very beginning; and so if we flip into fast forward the current event will cause future events, and everything is already determined by the starting conditions.
“From the effects the causes will punctually arise” — Italo Calvino, T Zero.
On the other hand, if everything is already determined, do we have free will? Is there chance? Can we take pride in our successes? Should we feel shame in our failures? If it is all pre-determined, are we not just flotsam on the ocean? And rather than angrily shouting at clouds is our best outlook not simply one of resignation?
This is not the time to get into these questions. For our purposes now it is enough to say that, while resignation may be good advice for those in the most intractable situations, for most of us fortunate enough to have some semblance of choice, it’s a terrible idea.
Introducing Ananke
Our lives are constrained. Even if free will exists, our choices and possibilities are still bound by cords. Some are invisible. Some can be loosened. Some can be cut. Some cannot.
For the sake of brevity I refer to these psycho-bio-socio-cultural-historical-contingent cords as Ananke. Ananke is the Greek personification of inevitability, compulsion and necessity, and sometime mother of the fates.
I want to explore the cords of Ananke in more detail over time, but to whet your appetite…
Cognition - how do we make decisions, and what is making those decisions? Our arm is triggered to reach for a glass of water before we’re consciously aware we are going to do so. Jonathan Haidt writes of the elephant and the rider, Henry Corbin writes of the unos ambo, Charles Stang of the oua ouōt, and WH Auden writes “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand”. Is our loquacious consciousness - the bit of our mind that uses words to consider and make decisions - bound to something unknown? Is it actually in charge? Or is it an epiphenomenon, the noisy byproduct of some other machine?
Senses - Our understanding of the world is an inaccurate model of assumptions built from our senses and our prior experiences. Increasingly it becomes clear that the universe looks the way we think it looks. How can we optimise our model to make sure we don’t set traps for ourselves that tie those cords ever tighter?
Genetics - Our understanding of genetics has come a long way since I read Dawkins’s Selfish Gene. Our genes still circumscribe and mediate what’s possible physically, metabolically, and psychologically, but we’re discovering they act in more complicated ways. In a kind of neoLamarkianism, epigenetics show us the lived experience of our ancestors can influence our lives in ways beyond natural selection. For example women may be more likely to suffer heart disease if their grandmothers endured famine. Hologenetics consider how ‘we’ are an ecosystem made up from multiple organisms. Our gut biome, for example, can influence our mood. As we better understand how this works does it still make sense to think of ourselves as individual (something whole or undivided) or do we need to invent a new discipline: the ecology of the self?
Embryology - what happens to us in the womb has lifelong effects. For example, children of mothers abused during pregnancy appear to have a higher susceptibility to anxiety, mediated by methylated glucocorticoid-receptor genes.
Development & parenting - early trauma resounds and children exposed to danger can grow brains ‘wired’ for fear. For example, the children of Europe’s Holocaust survivors, suffer higher risk of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder than their generational peers.
I could go on (and I will in future weeks). Culture, environment, hazard, contingency, history, accidents…
Charity starts at home
Carved above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi is the maxim “gnōthi seauton”, know thyself.
In the verse of Teddy Pendergrass’s 1977 hit is the advice “Make peace with yourself before you can love another. Understand who and what you are before you can go any further.”
Or you might say “charity starts at home”, where, at least as I take it, charity is esteem and affection and home is the self.
Our lives are fuller if we understand the cords binding us, or the forces acting upon us. Bringing them out of the darkness reduces their power, or, at least, helps us mitigate or embrace their effects.
Notwithstanding these countless constraints I believe we have a personal responsibility to get our own house in order, do the Work, to individuate.
Even if progress is a myth in global or historical terms, it need not be in personal terms; and with a clearer view we can better enjoy, nourish, and sustain the good times as fleeting and local as they may be. While the journey may be hard and neverending, the results, I believe, are only positive: confidence, energy, creativity, gratitude, compassion, love, equanimity.
We can desire these for purely selfish reasons. But I think, in the spirit of these three pieces on meritocracy and progress, they are also our only chance of improving society as a whole. If each of us does the Work, the better our world will be.
There, I’ve concluded this round of thoughts with a plea for personal responsibility. I’ve eaten my own tail.
Oh, to disagree in good faith
The Darkenment is the opposite of The Enlightenment. It is a retreat from reason, experiment, and debate, into the arms of reflex and dogma. A feature of The Darkenment is censoriousness, ‘cancellation’ and blacklisting.
Don’t be an arsehole, and you’ll be fine. Or so you would think. I’ve already written what I thought about Gina Carano’s blacklisting. This article in the Atlantic reminded me of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain from 2000, which seems really quite prescient: After wondering where two of his students are, a professor asks if they are spooks. When this is taken as a racial slur, he loses his career.
The article catalogues a number of cases in which apparently reasonable comments have landed people in hot water, often to the detriment of their careers. Its author, Conor Friedersdorf, was writing specifically about anti-racism, but I would like to echo his conclusion more broadly:
“Unanimity is neither possible nor necessary…On the contrary, attempts to secure unanimity can undermine the fight: They…weaken everyone’s ability to grasp reality. When demands for consensus are intense, people may clam up or falsify their own beliefs. When truth-seeking can get you fired, some people stop seeking the truth. Granted, unfettered liberal deliberation is not sufficient to solve problems as difficult as reining in police abuses or ending systemic racism. But it is necessary no matter how just or urgent the cause. America can achieve more good and harm fewer people with more frank debate, less aversion to dissent, and fewer appeals to moral clarity at the expense of analytic rigor.”
Last summer, in a similar vein, an open letter to Harpers declared:
“The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away...As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.”
This had dozens of signatories and, had I been asked, I would have been one of them.
Even while I say all this, I must make clear that I do not believe the culture wars are the battle. I believe they are only the weapon. I maintain that, for example, the much-lambasted Race Report was political strategy.
Where there’s muck there’s brass. I was amused to read about the rise of a host of companies that charge vast sums to manage your online profile to protect you from having your past words used against you, and to hide them under an avalanche of more SEO-friendly good news if necessary.
You can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.
In some respects this all seems ludicrous, but you may note that I prefer to keep this newsletter anonymous.
Shorts & follow ups
Borrow now to sell later
UK borrowing is at its highest since WW2, although as a percentage of GDP it is only its highest since the ‘60s. We know why it is so high, and we should be glad that it is. However I would bet that this debt will be used after the next Tory election victory as an excuse for austerity, firesale of public assets, and further privatisation of the public sector.
Something’s up with online advertising, cont.
More reason to doubt online advertising as: “Carolyn Everson, one of Facebook’s most senior advertising executives, said the company had to ‘prepare for the worst’ over claims that it overstated the potential reach of its advertisements, according to newly released court filings”.
Corruption to the moon! Hahahahaha
Since I wrote my piece last week, Eddie Lister has resigned, a senior Tory said Johnson had a ‘vacuum of integrity’, squirrel wrangler Cummings has put the knife in, Dyson’s tax breaks for ventilators were revealed, and the Daily Mail has turned on the PM…
…and with Peter Stefanovic’s video bubbling in the background…
…Dominic Raab has displayed splendid comic timing.
Thefty nifties, cont.
Artnet reports a curious episode that is a natural follow up to my previous piece arguing that NFTs are not investible. A provocoteur has found a way to mint NFTs by other artists without their knowledge, and then transfer them to himself, thereby falsely asserting both the provenance of the art and his ownership of it.
Amusement arcade
Links
Did you know about the London Necropolis Railway and its dedicated station at Waterloo?
Don’t believe everything you read.
Audio
I love this song by Odyssey. I thought about it being a soundtrack to the Ananke piece above, but it didn’t quite fit. As I found a version to share, I saw there was a writing credit for CLR James, which piqued my curiosity. Could it be true? A rogue comment from 2014 here, suggests the song was in fact written by CLR James’s son. I like these snippets from the past, buried in comments on minor websites, that have the ring of truth because why else would they be there? These are real ephemera vulgata.
Visual
From a reader: the entirety of the film Aliens in a beautiful 60 seconds of line-drawn animation. All your film favourites are there if you look.
It is the ten year anniversary of one of the greatest ever pieces of unintentional comedy…if you don’t know it you must watch, and if you do, you must watch again. The expressive range is a joy to behold.
Food
Things have opened up, the weather’s been good and I’ve been able to eat out some. Highlights were a piled on chili burger, labneh with zaatar and confit garlic, charred cabbage with black sesame tahini, and tarama, beetroot, souvlaki, bream, moussaka, kleftiko at my favourite Greek. At home, frittata with grilled veg and smoked paprika, plus I’ve mastered chole.
Thank you for staying with me. If you think anyone else might enjoy reading this do share it with them, although please keep it anonymous.
When getting to the pub is harder, I love the conversations these thoughts stimulate. If you feel like it, why not make them public in the comments?