An awful lot of hot air. Not much light.

Half listening to Start The Week earlier today I heard someone ranting on about how silly people are to 'believe in' Global Warming. I assumed it must be Nigel Lawson but when I checked the website it turned out it was Peter Hitchens. I then went and had a look at what Hitchens has been saying on the blog he writes for the Mail on Sunday and found that - Lord above,  I agree with him. He's raging against the 'cult' of Global Warming and he's irate at being shouted down by 'fanatics' and being called a 'climate change denier' as he should be (irate that is). He lambasts the purveyors of sensationalist stories of polar bears on melting ice flows. He makes a big deal of his 'doubts' about climate change and being a sceptic, faced with so called scientific 'truths'. All of which is fair enough. Fanatical adherence to any belief system, especially if it means shouting down and insulting people who disagree with you is never an acceptable way to conduct a debate. Journalists shouldn't use misleading or distorted material just to sell papers. And he's right - any scientist who claims to have no doubts about 'The Truth', not just on this subject but on any area of research is an idiot. Of course there is doubt. There is always uncertainty. There is always disagreement. There is always more evidence and new ways to analyse it. That's why science, properly carried out, is not a cult, or even I would argue, a belief system.
I expect you can tell where this is going. To me, his disbelief in Global Warming seems to constitute something of a fanaticism in its own right, and if anyone is shouting anyone down here it's Hitchens, albeit in print. It's hard to imagine him treating any kind of uncertainty on anyone else's part as anything other than a contemptible capitulation. And as for complaining that journalists use misleading and overly-emotive pictures and stories to further a cause - he works for The Mail for Christ's sake!
Let's lay my cards on the table - I think he's wrong. There are a few 'facts' he quotes that I think are just plain wrong. For example, if I understand it correctly, the world was not warmer during medieval times than it is now. Europe was warmer, but not the whole world, and it's the global average that matters of course, not the regional variations, which is why our current spell of cold winters don't necessarily mean anything. Still - I claim no particular authority on the subject. I raise this canard simply to get the climate change believers and unbelievers going:
"But what about this study?"
"That study was flawed..."
"But Smith & Jones 1996 said..."
"Their sample size wasn't big enough."
"That was allowed for in a later model"
"which failed to incorporate the Kwrptzki effect"
"the Kwrptzki effect was minimal in the 1990s"
and so on and so forth.
But the fact is - I'm not sure I do understand it correctly. I'm not an expert and I am not in a position to assess the evidence, and without some years of single-minded study I am not ever likely to be. But neither is Hitchens. Neither are most of us. Most of us perhaps have at best a science A level or perhaps a BSc but that doesn't count for much. It's not the sort of thing you can work out from personal experience or 'common sense' or by applying your A level physics . It's a lot more complicated than that. So how are we supposed to form an opinion? Ultimately we have to take someone's word for it - someone who does know what they're talking about, assuming of course that it's possible to identify such people. With that in mind I'd like to take the unlikely step of putting in a word for Climate Scientists.

The thing that probably got me most about Hitchens this morning was his derision of us silly climate change 'believers'. How stupid are we to think that perhaps all these climate scientists might be onto something. Ok, there's not total agreement among them - it's science, as I said above. There's always doubt - as there should be. There are uncertainties, mistakes and even downright lies, but another thing that Hitchens is wrong about is that there is any serious disagreement among the majority of climate scientists about whether the earth will warm as a result of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions (and other pollutants). There are disagreements about all sorts of parts of this idea (not to mention the ramifications) but the basic idea seems pretty much accepted. Truth though is not a matter of democracy. The truth is true even if no one knows it. Its perfectly possible that the majority of scientists is wrong. It is, I suppose, just about conceivable that a few renegade climatologists are being silenced by the scientific establishment. Indeed a conspiracy theorist friend of mine pretty much takes it as read that a scientist being ignored by the majority makes him all the more worth listening to. The idea that he might be being ignored because he's incompetent or nuts is inadmissible (Another unfalsifiable for my list.) The fact is, I hope they are wrong, because the way things are going we're unlikely to get it together to limit carbon emissions in any meaningful way so let's hope they're wrong. But I doubt it.

One thing I can speak about with some authority here is scientists. I may not be a climate scientist but I know scientists. I was one for a bit as a Phd student. I lived in the belly of the beast (and did not fare well) and one thing I do know is that it is not possible for all these hundreds of scientists around the world to be corralled into claiming that something is true when they know it's not. It's even less possible for someone to have fooled them all into believing that something is true when it's not. Science doesn't work that way, or at least, non commercial science doesn't. Labs in private industry are a different matter. Who knows what goes on there? And of course, in order to get funding university labs and other independent research institutions are not immune to corruption, but they all have to publish. That's the important thing here - publication.

This is the thing I think a lot of non-scientists don't get. In most industries, publishing an article in a professional journal is something you do alongside your job, if you have time and have something interesting to say, or want the publicity, or whatever. In science, publishing is your job. Every piece of research you undertake as a scientist is about getting an article published in a learned journal. This is not about getting media attention or raising your profile or getting funding (although it's that too) - it's about getting your work out there into the hands of other scientists. Commercial research (into the latest cancer drug, or motor technology or shampoo) has maybe lead us to imagine that it's all about secrecy - intellectual property rights and commercial espionage, but real science is the opposite. Scientists might not want to publish until they are sure they know what they're talking about but then everything has to be published, or everything relevant. Everything that was done as a part of the study has to be laid out in full. Any other information that the study depends upon has to be cited from other equally learned articles in other journals. Anything that is not fully accounted for is not allowable in a scientific article. In other words, you can't just say what you like, or what you'd like to believe. Every claim you make has to be either demonstrated in your study or you have to be able to say where you got it from.
How is this enforced? Lay-people speak laughingly of 'peer review'. It sounds like the old boy network nodding stuff through on a wink and a brown envelope, but it's not. Peer review in any case is just the preliminary checking - to make sure you haven't said anything you can't back up, or made some other stupid mistake. Then there's proof reading and further checking by the publisher of course. Obviously this is a fallible process but those involved take it extremely seriously because of the next part of the process, where the article goes out and is read by every other scientist in the world who has any interest whatsoever in the subject, and they are not your friends. In fact they're up against you. If they can discredit or call into question anything you've said you can be sure they will, and if it's bad enough your career is more or less crippled, and likewise that of the publishers and peer-reviewers, your supervisors and co-workers, and last but not least, your funding.
I'm not saying it's perfect but as systems go it's about as hard to fiddle as is humanly possible. (You can perhaps see now why I'm so sceptical about commercial research*) The idea that all those hundreds of climate scientists, not mention the thousands of associated mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, computer technicians, oceanographers, ecologists, palaeontologists, and all the rest are somehow either being kept quiet or in the dark is just... I have no words. It would take a conspiracy so vast, so powerful...

All I'm saying then, Peter Hitchens (and Nigel Lawson), in an entirely sceptical, non-fanatical way, is that, yes, you might be right. I sincerely hope you are, for all our sakes. I'm not a climate scientist and they might have got something wrong and everything will turn out ok, but it seems unlikely. In the mean time, just in case, wouldn't it make sense to try and be a bit careful? Modify our behaviour? Rein ourselves in a bit? Oh I see - that's the bit you don't like. You just don't like being told what to do, do you. Well none of us do, but sometimes you just have to stop shouting and put up with it.

*But wait - all these climate scientists are in effect doing commercial research for the vastly powerful multi billion dollar renewable energy corporations aren't they? Not like those poor impoverished researchers into fossil fuels, always struggling for funding, always having to bang on about sustainability and sacrifice, being ignored by the US government...
Oh no, hang on...

Good Fortune

A while back, a friend suggested I write something about Fruition - something about clarifying the purpose of the book, or my intentions, or something. Anyway, here goes.

First up - Fruition is all about that classic question –
'If you could live your life over again, knowing what you know now, what would you change?'
I've thought about that a lot. Unlike Piaf I think I can honestly say I regret almost everything. One period in my life especially that I've wished and wished I could go back to and do again is my late teens and early twenties. What a mess!
It’s a period that still haunts me. I could so easily have become one of those sad individuals in his thirties, still living with his parents, with his fish tanks or his model soldiers, unemployable and spurned by women. But I am aware that, under slightly different circumstances, with a less tolerant family, things could have been much worse. I don't think I would ever have killed myself (I didn't have the will and I was always oddly hopeful) but events could have spiralled. I was never into dangerous behaviour, drink or drugs, but I could have just let things fall apart. I could have had an accident, or, without a home to go back to, I could have simply failed to hold down a job, to make friends, to pay the rent. I could imagine that happening to me. In Fruition, this is where Gabriel Fortune’s story starts.
One thing I didn't want the book to be was autobiographical. If I found myself trying to faithfully describe something that actually happened, or a place or person that actually existed, I'd have to chuck in some occurrence or characteristic from somewhere else, just to force myself to create something new. Trying to describe what actually happened to me sounds like an awful chore and what I've written above about it is as far as I want to go with that here. The themes though - of how a person can get into such a mess without resorting to the predictable narrative devices of violence or addiction interests me. It happens all the time - people simply fail to thrive. Without any dramatic gestures they simply fall away and hardly anyone even notices they’re gone. I was very influenced in this by a book called Stuart: A Life Backwards - not so much because of the character (who's life included plenty of violence and addiction) but because its reverse narrative put his earliest experiences (and hence the explanations for what happened) at the end of the book and hence provide a thrilling conclusion. I'm not sure how well I've achieved it, but a question I'd like the reader to be asking almost from the beginning is How on earth does a person end up like this? What has happened to him? The usual suspects - childhood neglect and abuse are hinted at from early on but again I wanted to avoid the usual. Sometimes it is something far less obvious - something that seems ordinary, or at least unexceptional, but which, under certain circumstances can contaminate everything. The full explanation, in as far as there ever is such a thing, is not revealed until book 4.

Books 1 and 2 are basically alternative versions of the same lost life. Books 3 and 4 are about how he changes that. The overall story is not about perfectibility but about the possibility of change. In many ways it is a long meditation on another classic question – ‘What is The Good Life?’ This inevitably (to me) raises all sorts of exciting philosophical and political questions and I give Gabriel plenty of opportunity to debate with the various characters he meets, especially on the boat. On the other hand I’ve (perhaps surprisingly) hardly touched on questions of God and spirituality. The fact that when they die everyone suddenly discovers that the afterlife is nothing like what they expected makes the whole subject somewhat moot and that’s quite subversive enough in my opinion. Ultimately though, Gabriel’s real preoccupations are far less cerebral. Mainly he wants to know how to make a living without selling out (the quaint old 20th Century notion that doing as well as possible and making as much money as possible aren't the same thing), and in particular he wants to find a woman to love. Fruition is very much a love story, although this doesn’t become obvious until book 2 and it is not resolved until the very end. Childhood and parenting are also major themes throughout the book. Remaining anti-autobiographical though, the events in his early life - the descriptions of his family and home, are completely different to mine. I wanted to see what it would be like to have sisters instead of a brother, and to be much younger than everybody else in the family (an unplanned late pregnancy) as my mother was in her family. I couldn't resist using the house we lived in though because it was just such an amazingly ugly old place. Gabriel wants to become a painter where I wanted to be an ecologist. We both like gardening though.

My warped idea of reincarnation is of course just a narrative device, not a belief system of mine (although it seems no less plausible than the alternatives. Who's to tell?) I'm always intrigued by the things people come to believe in and I made this system up partly as a sort of mischievous 'See? I can play that game too'. I also wanted The Afterlife to be a whole huge other world – one that would involve an immense journey overland, alone or with just a few companions. This had two purposes - one was to provide a place where Gabriel could think about and talk about his lives through a sort of quasi-therapeutic conversation. (I like books that use therapy as a device to tell us what our hero thinks is going on.) The other purpose was to give Gabriel an enormous and extraordinary landscape to travel through – and one that doesn't work by the usual rules. Having this apparently limitless new world to play with meant I could set my characters in the landscapes I'd had swimming about in my brain for decades - places I'd been to and stories I'd told myself to stop the 'real world' colonising my mind completely. As Gabriel says in book 1:
“Everybody said I ... was always ‘off in my own little world’, but they were wrong. It wasn’t a little world at all. It was enormous. There were landscapes and characters they wouldn’t even have come across in their weirdest dreams. I spent a lot of time getting it all down on paper – writing about it or drawing and painting. I did some huge scenes – part map, part landscape, with gargantuan shaggy beasts and archaic birds, engaged in incomprehensible behaviours among misshapen trees and alien fungi. Offshore, vast dead-eyed fish and primitive whales turned among forests of coral and kelp. I don’t know where it all came from. Nobody ever asked me about it. Dad and mum just shook their heads and tutted and went away. In my world there were settlements too, some of exquisite architecture and peopled by gentle and tolerant souls. Others bristled with armaments and dripped with pollution. And always there was a woman, and she looked past all the crap and saw me as I really was, and we’d be happy together.”
It’s difficult to pin-point any direct literary influences here but one unlikely source was Peter Jackson’s three films of The Lord of the Rings (I find the books unreadable.) They have just this sense of the tiny figure moving through a huge and ancient landscape. There’s a lot of ecology in Fruition too. The animals and plants we find there are all real or plausible, though they might not appear so to the non-biologist.

At the same time I hope my book doesn’t fall into the standard genres of 'fantasy' or 'science fiction' or 'horror'. I have trouble with these sorts of books because often they don't seem to feel the need to be even a bit rooted in real experiences and emotions, hence they can have anything happen and I’m left not caring. To really feel the otherness of these strange places, I think we need to be regularly reminded of what it’s like to live in normal everyday life. I always liked the wardrobe device in the Narnia books but I felt they should have gone back and forth more, to refresh the feeling of wonder. Doctor Who seems to amaze someone with the Tardis every other episode.
On the other hand, I find the entirely 'realistic' novel - historical or contemporary, just too pedestrian for words. They say that the difference between fact and fiction is that fiction must make sense, but I’m not so sure. Life does not always make sense, and fiction should be able to reflect that. I hope any books I write (I have two more on the way - one almost complete, the other still in my head) will always feel as if they could be partly dreamed or hallucinated but always set alongside everyday life. The novelist should not feel the need to explain every incongruity. Children's books don't seem to feel this need to tie up every loose end. (I sometimes like to think of Fruition as a children’s book for adults. Is it just me or do modern authors seem very reluctant to make stuff up?) ‘Magic realism’ always seemed too self-consciously clever. Something’s missing... Perhaps I don't read as much as writers are supposed to but I so rarely find anything I want to read these days, unless you count non-fiction, which I read a lot. That feels like a terrible thing to have to admit. Mind you, I don't like most of the music I come across either but I can usually find something new to listen to. Perhaps I'm just out of the loop.
I think I'm a very 'visual' person, and very affected by music too - Fruition seems very connected in my mind to the Fauré Requiem (which will definitely be the record I'll be running into the waves to save when they have me on Desert Island Discs. Gabriel Fortune - Gabriel Faure? I hadn't noticed that before. How curious.) TV and film seem more free to invent things without going all post-modern on us (I particularly like the work of Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, and Jos Whedon.) On reflection, I think the books that have had the most (subconscious) influence on Fruition would probably be Cider With Rosie, The Time Traveller's Wife and Moominland Midwinter.

I've also become discouraged from reading other people’s books by the fact that so many seem to have such a knowing, world-weary take on the human condition, where nobody really seems to like anyone very much and there's nothing anyone can do to change anything. (I'd love some recommendations to prove me wrong on all this by the way.) I really wanted to give Gabriel not exactly a happy ending, but something hopeful – something redemptive. I wanted him to find himself among friends in a way he never did in life. Although personally I’ve always found people difficult I do believe in generosity and humanity when I think a lot of writers don’t. Apart from anything I actually don’t think their pessimism is very realistic. It feels lazy and smug – why bother to try when everything will probably go badly anyway? Better to just enjoy the spectacle. So I also wanted to avoid what I suspect would be the normal cynical ending where he would find that no matter how he tries to change, something new inevitably springs up to thwart him. How drab. How very predictable. At the same time of course there can be no simple, clean happy-ever-after, but those aren't the only two options.
In short, what I wanted to write was the book that I’d always wanted to read but could never find.

So there came a time when my embryonic career in ecology was aborted and I was about forty years old and I had all this in my head. I looked at my life and realised that although I wasn't exactly old, I really was at the end of my main attempt at life. I didn't know what I was going to do next - I was single, homeless and unemployed again.  Although I guessed it was some way off I had a very strong sense of the end of my life being out there somewhere. It wasn't a bad feeling. I just knew it was there in a way that I hadn't before. So this book is also about death, but not in a morbid way (or only in the literal sense.) I don't believe in any Afterlife but I'd quite like to think that when death comes I'll find myself in a sleeping bag in a deck chair on a boat heading out into a frozen ocean...

The closet homophobe

I suppose we're all watching in trepidation what's happening in the USA at the moment - with the Republican nominations under way. Santorum scares me particularly but it did occur to me that perhaps, if the Republicans choose a genuinely insane candidate, perhaps the majority of (I fully believe) sane Americans (especially the Black and the Hispanic) will come out on polling day and tell them where to get off. That would leave us with Obama again, who is, in my opinion, probably unfairly vilified, but that's another post altogether.
What particularly spurs me to write today is the content of some of the more extreme Republicans' oratory and why the heck it seems so damned attractive to so many people - I'm thinking of course of their preoccupation with all things sexual - homosexuality and abortion most obviously, but also, if Santorum is to be taken notice of, contraception and sex outside marriage too.

Exposure

I have a friend who objects my use of reason as a way of understanding life. I think he finds it constraining and possibly unnatural. I've always had something of a scientific bent though and I find reason a useful way of 'getting a handle' on things. What I think a few people I've met over the years dislike about science and rational philosophy though is the arrogance they perceive in it - as if by taking it all apart we can define it and 'own' it (and then use and sell it), murdering to dissect, as the man said.

Why We Fight

This last week I've been exasperated in much the same way by both Claire Tomalin and Christopher Hitchens - the former this morning on Start the Week, the latter on The Today Programme last week as part of a tribute following his death.
The discussion this morning was sparked by Canon Giles Fraser (who as you may remember had to resign because of his support for the demonstrators outside St Paul's) talking about Christian morality and what it has to say about excessive wealth. Tomalin (author of the recent biography of Dickens) piped up with that dreary old saw about how such morals are 'impossible' because human nature is set by biology and evolution which favours competition and aggression. It is natural and therefore right, she says, to have children and to do anything to help them get ahead.
So we shouldn't even try to do good? Is that what she's saying? We shouldn't even bother. Because it's impossible to overturn this fact of evolution and human biology, morality is impossible. Give up. Forget it.

Hitchens' point was similar. He was talking about his long-running arguments with his brother Peter. Peter was described as coming from a utopian left-wing background, which Christopher took to have been utterly discredited. There's no point, he concluded, in trying to change the world because the world is not perfectible. Utopia is impossible.
So does that mean we shouldn't do anything to improve matters? No regulations, no laws, no intervening to relieve the suffering and injustice? No, because it'll never be perfect. Best to give up. It's how the world is. Life's not fair. Grow up.

My first inclination is to lunge at the patronising self-satisfied common-sense that I suspect underlies both their views. I don't suppose they had or have much to worry about in life and any intervention by do-gooder bleeding-heart lefties is only likely to disrupt their comfortable life-styles, if only in a small way, but I don't know either of them personally and I shouldn't be so quick to judge.

My second response is to wonder at how such weak and sloppy thinking passes as learning or journalism on a forum as generally serious and thoughtful as Radio 4.
The point of morality, or idealism in the second case, is not, as they seem to imagine, to set up Heaven on Earth. This would be, as Hitchens rightly says, a discredited philosophy. Did the Soviets or the Maoists ever really believe in it? Nobody really thinks that way now except the radical Free-Marketeers ('If only we could get rid of the regulation' they say, 'the government, the taxes... With currently undreamed-of technological advances there would be growth and development and prosperity for all. There is no alternative. It's the end of history...')
No - the point of idealism and morality is not to somehow build an ideal world where nothing horrible ever happens. There is no point at which we win and everything is lovely. There will always be greed and brutality and cynicism. Of course there will. But we don't fight these things because we think one day we will beat them. The fight is on-going. It never ends. We keep at it because we fear that if we don't it will get even worse.

But surely, you say, it's all a matter of opinion. Morality is all about personal interests when it comes down to it. Ok, maybe the world heating up and the oceans flooding most of the cities and cultivable land looks bad but balance it against all these people who are forced to live in rented accommodation or can't afford new trainers for their children? Don't they need jobs fracking shale and clearing forests or what have you? It's all relative. In fact surely these leftie do-gooders are just another kind of totalitarianism - imposing their moral choices on the rest of us?
Listening to the issues that get into news, deciding what should be done about the financial crisis or climate change can look like it's anyone's guess but it's different if we're talking about, for example, something like child abuse. Child abuse might even be 'natural' in an evolutionary sense but nearly everyone is against it. It's not 'all relative'. What's more, presumably there will always be child abuse but the idea that we should therefore just let it happen is unthinkable.
So what is the difference? On the one hand we have a child down the street with an appalling home life because her father can't control his temper and on the other a child dying of entirely preventable disease in Africa because other people are hogging all the resources. Both happen because of human action (or negligence). One is more complex than the other (in the sense that in the second case there's no one person you can easily lay the blame on) but both are caused by decisions we humans make, and cannot be excused as 'just the way the world is'. Perhaps I suffer from an excess of empathy but they don't actually seem very different to me at all. Could it be that in fact Hitchens' and Tomalin's view of the futility of morality and idealism is just that it's all a bit too complicated? And isn't that actually a bit weak when it comes down to it?

My third response is just a sadness that so many people do seem to agree with them, if only by default. This lazy 'realism' is published and broadcast which gives it a kind of authority, and it quickly comes to seem like there's nothing to be done.

So although I'm far from Christian myself and have no simple set of commandments to offer, can my seasonal appeal to anyone who happens to read this be that we not give up on doing good for good's sake, but at least keep on thinking about it, and discussing it, and to trying to do better than our worst?

Happy Midwinter

A Working Hypothesis

Triple Spiral, Windmill Hill, UK (1996), a photo by Massimiliano Mitch on Flickr.

I don't know if there's a handy layman's term for the kind of argument that is impossible to prove wrong, even when it probably is. In science such hypotheses are known as unfalsifiable. They might conceivably be right but there's just no way of telling. Bertrand Russell's teapot is the famous philosophical example. In ordinary everyday usage though I've found it almost impossible to come up with a not-too-lengthy but convincing way of explaining what I mean. This is especially troubling because almost everyone I know has some sort of Russell's Teapot in their lives and most of them would be lost without it. I've started collecting them.

I joined Facebook recently, against my better judgement and ostensibly to promote my books and nursery. An artist friend of mine told me I should be 'Schmoozing' more and that FB is a good way to do it, but I find I'm not the schmoozing kind. Still I've had some nice catch-up conversations with long-lost friends so all is not lost. One of these friends is a self-confessed conspiracy-nut and it's always interesting to get into 'debates' with him. I'll maybe talk more about him later but one contributor on his 'Wall' commented gnomically "...but the inner eye or intuition always knows the truth..."
I wanted to scream - What? How do you know? What the hell are you on about? So are you saying people never misunderstand things? Not if they use The Inner Eye. But their intuition must sometimes get things wrong. Then they can't have used The Inner Eye correctly.
Gah!
Unfalsifiable.There's no way of showing whether this Inner Eye exists or not, or if it does what he claims it does. It's existence and infallibility are consistent with any state of affairs. You can't disprove it. It's an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Another famous one is 'God moves in mysterious ways', variations of which are used by the religious to justify the fact that awful things happen to good people. Nothing is inconsistent with God's love and omniscience. There is no valid counter-evidence. God is love.
It might be argued that "God moves in mysterious ways" and "the inner eye always knows the truth" are not hypotheses but articles of faith, but this does not prevent them being trotted out in otherwise rational debates. They're a sort of unanswerable get-out-of-jail-free card for the believer. The fact that I have no answer (or only a very convoluted one) is taken to mean that I've lost.
So I want a quick and pithy aphorism to stick into the debate at that point just to point out that, while they are of course free to believe what they like, they can't use that sort of argument in a rational debate. Otherwise anyone could just say any old thing and there'd be no point trying to have a debate in the first place.
Karma is another one - You lead a blameless life and something horrible happens - Well you must have done something to deserve it. Positive thinking - If you want something enough it'll happen. But I did really want it, and it didn't happen. Well you can't have really really wanted it or it would have happened.

I can see why people like these Unfalsifiables. They can be invoked when a sense of order or justice seems to be lacking in the world, or as an explanation for the inexplicable. They're a guard against uncertainty and chaos. The friend I mentioned above likes to think of himself as very rational and even anti-religious (As he likes to remind us all, he has a physics degree) but at base I suspect his preoccupation with conspiracies is a search for order in what he sees as an evil world. He may have rejected God but that hasn't stopped him believing in the Devil. It does at least give him something to go up against. Some of the conspiracies, once argued through, require such extraordinary powers of organisation and mind-control that the only recourse is to use them as evidence for some immense global (possibly alien) super-power. Hence David Icke and the Illuminati. (More Unfalsifiables.)

The whole spiritual/religious edifice is a mesh of Unfalsifiables. Heaven gives comfort when a loved one dies, Hell, a sense of justice. Souls and spirits explain away the incongruities of consciousness and personality (and life-after-death). You don't have to blame yourself if your children go astray if you can put it down to them just being born that way. Fate and Destiny likewise. It just wasn't meant to be, say the hippies.
I want to include Common Sense and Categorical Imperatives here too. On the one hand, Common Sense is invoked as the self-evident normal way to do things. It is not questioned where this 'sense' comes from. It's just the way it's done, they way they've always been done. Likewise there are things that are simply not done. End of subject. Categorical Imperatives are commandments from on high for the atheist. You simply don't do that sort of thing around here.
God of course is the biggest Unfalsifiable of the lot. He conveniently explains everything away. No need to think at all if you don't feel like it. You just use your infallible Inner Eye and there He is. More than anything, Unfalsifiables mean there's a lot of things you don't have to think about. They're just given. They mean you can relax and get on with the important things in life, like shopping, and looking cool..

I want to say a bit about Belief here. I recommended a book a few posts back called Being Wrong, by Kathryn Schulz, which is generally excellent but which makes the mistake, I think, of using the word 'belief' way too broadly, and she's not alone. She uses it to cover all sorts of human cerebral activity including ideas, assumptions, observations, theories... I think this is horribly misleading but not unusual. I've thought a lot about this and have come up with at least four distinct meanings of the word.

First up - there are the kind of beliefs people have despite the fact (or indeed because of the fact) that there is no material evidence or rational explanation for them - things like God, Heaven, The Inner Eye, Karma. Such beliefs are an assertion of a personal conviction that something is so, irrespective of what anyone else says. We tend to talk of 'Believing In' such things. Having Faith is a similar sort of idea.

This is very different to what the scientist means when she says 'I believe in Evolution'. I prefer not to use the word 'believe' like this because I think it's very misleading but in this case the strength of the 'belief' results from the strength of the material evidence and rational explanation. What she's saying is she thinks she has very good reason to think the theory of evolution is true. She thinks the evidence is strong and the logic sound but like any scientific hypothesis it could in due course be radically modified or falsified completely. This is sometimes described as 'Believing That' something is the case and has nothing to do with Faith.
If you want to see the difference, try transposing a religious assertion into scientific language:
'I believe that my redeemer liveth, given the available evidence, but further work is needed.'
That's just not faith.

Thirdly, there is the way people 'believe in' something as a kind of assertion of hope and trust. You might say you believe in your marriage, or the UN or human nature. It's partly based on past experience, but is also about optimism. You feel they've been trustworthy in the past and you'd like to believe they won't let you down in the future, but you can never be sure. Anyway there'll definitely be no future in your marriage unless you believe in it to some extent. Again, you could just as easily say you 'have Faith' in it.

Fourthly I think there's a sort of common sense, taken-for-granted sort of belief where we just assume things about the world because it's never occurred to us to think otherwise. This may include anything from simply 'knowing' that tables and chairs are solid and not made up mainly of empty space, that Jesus loves you and that wearing sandals with socks is just plain wrong. Mostly we're not even aware of these kinds of beliefs until someone challenges them.

Needless to say people use these meanings almost interchangeably a lot of the time. Religious people believe in God in all four ways. Sometimes they like to try using material evidence but when that doesn't work their faith is strengthened by the lack of same. Ultimately they tend to fall back on hope and trust. For many uneducated people it never occurs to them to doubt.

Some people see science as a belief system in the first sense, but in fact it is a system based on Working Assumptions, or it should be. There are scientists who cling to their theories like articles of religious faith or express a 'belief in' them because otherwise no one will take them seriously but this is not what science is about. The most profound assumptions in science are ones like the assumption that you can usefully apply maths and logic to physical phenomena - that it is useful to measure and count things, add them up and average them and put your results on a graph. It also assumes that physical principals do not just arbitrarily vary from place to place. A mile in Jo'berg is assumed to be the same as a mile in London. Causality is generally assumed to hold true. Birth does not cause conception, except in a very roundabout way. Further, science only takes into account physical forces and objects - it assumes there are no spirits or Gods working in the background arbitrarily manipulating your experiments.
There is no a priori reason why any of these assumptions should hold true. They just seem to work, and have done for a very long time. They produce useful results and predictions. It may not seem like this when we are confronted with the sheer extravagance of The Search for the God Particle or the apparent inanity of Dark Energy, or the controversies about Climate Change or Vaccination, but those are at the outer edge of scientific understanding and almost necessarily beyond most of us. Normal science builds satellites and mobile phones and cochlear implants and whatever one may think about those things they definitely work (most of the time). This is because the working assumptions behind them (maths, causality, and without divine intervention) hold up. As soon as they no longer do so (once they are falsified) they will be discarded. This is what is so different to the unfalsifiable Givens above.

I know this view of knowledge is unattractive to people compared to the unfalsifiable 'Truths' listed at the top. People don't like uncertainty. They like to think they know what's what. There's something manly about standing up for what you believe. Saying 'I can't be sure' seems more like a moral failure than a simple statement of the human condition. Our leaders are expected to know exactly how things are and what's to be done, and woe betide them if they seem a bit confused. Of course decisiveness and certainty are not the same thing. Making a decision when you aren't sure what you're doing is almost more heroic than pretending you do. And sometimes we need to believe we know what's happening (in the third, positive thinking, sense) in order to motivate ourselves and others. Positive thinking probably works because it makes us more alert and open to possibilities but that's all a bit woolly isn't it. Far easier to posit some Cosmic Ordering keeping an eye out for us wishing things would happen and then, out of the blue, intervening to grant our wishes. Psychology is such a bore by comparison. All those books...
It's easier too to imagine too some kind of sentient being standing over the world, somehow keeping it all running, harmonious and balanced, than having to grapple with all that physics, which, after all doesn't have all the answers anyway. Likewise seeing consciousness as some sort of irreducible and immortal soul inhabiting our material bodies is so much more manageable than neurology. And the neurologists don't have all the answers either. Surely they should by now, if they were ever going to?

But of course I'm being facetious. God, Intelligent Designer, the Soul, what are they made of? Where are they? How do they operate on the world. What do they want? These explanations are simpler than the scientific only in so far as they are easy to say. We don't actually know anything about them. The scientists may have to write out and explain a lot of complicated equations and stuff (frankly I don't get it) but the believer has to come up with all sorts of substances and forces that we have no notion of, acting in ways we can't detect, for reasons we have no way of understanding. And yet they claim to be able to grasp all this just by sitting quietly and using their intuition. What arrogance!

I understand also that the notions of souls and after-lives and karma are comforting, and faced with a grieving Mother there is no way I would try to take that away from her. Faced with imminent death I might even pray myself. It's got to be worth a try, when all else fails. I might even, under those circumstances, be able to convince myself that it might be true.
I also understand why moral philosophers need their categorical imperatives, just as the religious need their commandments and precepts. Because without it, they say, how could there be any moral foundation to life?

Philosophers like to remind social Darwinists that you can't derive 'ought' from 'is' (meaning you can't derive what people ought to do from what is the case in other species. Our ancestors might have been racist but that doesn't make it ok for us to be racist) but the reverse is true too. You can't derive 'is' from 'ought'. Just because something would be a good thing doesn't mean it must be so. It would be nice if there was a simple moral code 'out there' for us all to abide by or face the consequences. It would be wonderful if all these evil bastards, torturers and child-abusers got their come-uppance in the here-after. It would be nice if all the dreadful things that happen in the world could be put down to this one Big Brewin' Evil so we knew where to aim the rocket launchers, but wanting it doesn't make it so, and I don't think I'll ever be able to convince myself otherwise, and actually I don't want to. I'm ok with working assumptions. I'm ok with not being sure. It doesn't stop me being hopeful. And when someone does something generous and beautiful I don't want to give the credit to some otherworldly being. When someone is saved from danger or cured of a disease I want to give the credit to the rescuers or doctors, not to some imaginary guardian. We do amazing things - we, humans, and we deserve the credit.

Most of the time, here in the relative comfort of modern Europe, we tolerate each other's Givens because they are at worst irritating, at best, quaint. But when the people's of the wider world come to face each other, armed with their conflicting Unfalsifiables, how will they ever speak to one another? Maybe they just want to kill one another and don't care how they justify it. There's nothing much to be done about that, but on the other hand maybe they're just mistaken about each other. Maybe some of them, if it was drawn to their attention, might admit they weren't so sure any more and that maybe the other guys had a point. Maybe they could come to see some of their Givens as working assumptions. Maybe if they sat down and thought about it and perhaps looked at the evidence sometimes, maybe some of them might change their minds. I know it sounds far-fetched but you never know. It could happen. It's better than the alternative.

I'm very aware that this leaves open the question of where I get my values from and how I justify being so outspoken about them. Rest assured I plan to come back to that.

And The Wisdom To Know The Difference?

St Paul's protest camp, a photo by simonjenkins' photos on Flickr.

I heard the other day some pundit in the finance industry opining that the concepts of Left and Right in politics have become largely meaningless. It seems to be a popular view and I see what they're getting at - with the demise of the Iron Curtain back in the 80s and the much-vaunted Triumph of Capitalism and the fact that the main political leaders, at least in the UK, have become eerily interchangeable since then (though apparently not in the US where politics has become more polarised than ever.) It seems as if the old Left/Right wing Labour/Conservative debates have become largely redundant.
And yet... I still see the difference. It may not be discernible in the Houses of Parliament and it may be harder to define than it used to be in the old Communist-Block/Free-World era, but I reckon it's one of those things where, like pornography, you know it when you see it.

"...to change the things I can... accept the things I can't... and the wisdom to know the difference", so the old saw goes. That last line was always intoned to me as a teenager with added emphasis, as if the difference was obvious and I should just shut up about it and get a proper job. I grew up in a rather conservative working class family and Mrs Thatcher would have been proud. Conservatism is very much about accepting the world as it is and making the best of it.
Some accept it with regret. It would be nice if things were different they say, 'in an Ideal World', but 'Life's not fair.' Best to just keep your head down and get on with it. Conservatism and being working class have this in common - it's all about knowing your place, not making a fuss. It's the whole Protestant Work Ethic thing - very Calvinist.
Others of course like the world being as it is - life is about getting all you can, while you can, and sod everyone else.

I've always found Conservatism, at least in the UK, an odd paradox. Conservatives used to be all about The Establishment - landed gentry, hereditary wealth and all that. It was about the established church, obedience to time-honoured status and authority - to the monarchy, the gentry, the clergy, the courts, and beneath them the police, the teachers, the doctors and ultimately the husbands and fathers, who's homes of course were their castles. In extremis there was the military. The assumption was that these men (and it was all men) knew best. To defy them was at best highly irregular, at worst, illegal, immoral or unnatural. Conservatism and Conservation joined forces to preserve the time-honoured traditional landscapes and ways of life of the British People.
Then, around about the 80s, Conservatism came to mean something completely different, in some ways, completely the opposite. It was all about making money, at any cost to society (even if it meant dismissing the entire concept), morality or legality. If you could get away with it it was ok - as long as it resulted in profits and growth. (The legal system could be modified accordingly.) Everything and anything was for sale. Meritocracy, Social Mobility and Competition were the governing ideals. Cutting edge technology was the means. In theory at least, if you could do the job better than anyone else you could have it - wherever you came from, no matter what class, sex, race or age. There would be no point in discriminating against, say, a black lesbian over a bunch of white guys if she was the best for the job. You'd only be limiting your profitability. Old Conservatives no doubt would have had something quite different to say about it.
How these two 'Conservatisms' could possibly get on in the same party still baffles me. Sure, the Establishment were by far the wealthiest people in the country, like the new breed of global entrepreneurs, but there the resemblance ends. Old Conservatism has by and large ended up snoozing in the Upper House but their ideals still surface, apologetically, with Back to Basics, Caring Capitalism and The Big Society, and probably most stridently in Euro-Scepticism and UKIP.
There's nothing wrong with being sceptical about the EU. I make it my business to be sceptical about politics and economics generally but the Euro-Sceptic seems to be more in the grand old Conservative tradition of blaming the foreigners when things get tough - be they EU bureaucrats or immigrants. Right Wing politics, including old style Conservatism seems to be very much about defining one's self against outsiders - whether it be at the family level, the gender level (all us men together), racial, national or even species level (Right-Wingers are far less likely to worry about the 'rights' of animals unless they're their pets.) Changing the things you can and accepting the things you can't naturally focusses you on your immediate surroundings - the people and place you grew up with. Everything else is quite literally beyond you. Under extreme circumstances the consequences can be dire - most obviously in pre-war Germany where The 'Other' was simply to be exterminated.
But I don't want to suggest that Conservatives are Nazis. God knows, Left Wing politics has its own monsters.

Being Left Wing, as I suppose I broadly am, is not an exact mirror image of the Right. Left wingers, it seems to me, tend not to see the world so much in terms of Them and Us. There is a vague, possibly Utopian sense that we really are all in this together (all of us - men, women and children, all races, creeds and nationalities, sexualities, ages and states of health, even other species, even The Environment), and that, even if we're not all equal (whatever that means) we are somehow all deserving of (that hackneyed phrase) Equal Opportunities - The Pursuit of Happiness and all that. Democracy, Human Rights, The Rule of Law...
But wait - isn't that what the modern Global Entrepreneur believes too? Well yes and no, because the Capitalist sees this freedom and happiness only in terms of material wealth, markets, competition. The left-winger sees this 'deserving' being in spite of differences in material wealth, even of the poorest and most powerless, even in those, to some extent, who have brought their misfortune on themselves, through crime or negligence. Right-wingers are typically far less forgiving - assuming an uncompromising notion of the freedom and power of the human will. Whatever mess you may end up in you have no one but yourself to blame. Get over it. Left-wingers believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt, of rehabilitation, of mitigating circumstances, of second chances. If this all sounds terribly idealistic and airy-fairy, it is. It's an ideal. Something to aim at.

I've deliberately couched my characterisations of Left and Right in caricature, but the obvious point here is that hardly anyone is either entirely left or right wing. They're useful labels for broad tendencies and a useful shorthand for describing some extreme individuals and groups. If there's a parallel on the Left to the changes in Conservatism over the last 30 years it's that no one over here seriously believes in the kind of faceless grey uniformity advocated by Mao and Lenin (but not, I'm pretty sure, by Marx.) The big change is toward much more individualism on both sides. The difference is once again that the Left do not see their individualism expressed purely in what they can buy.
Much was made for a while of the likes of Michael Portillo's move from Marxist student activist to Tory MP, as if this exemplified the demise of socialism as a viable political force, when for me, all it meant was that some people tend to think in extremes and assume that if the answer doesn't lie at one end of the spectrum, that it must be at the other. When I was at Brighton Poly back in the 80s I'd have been accused of being a Woolly Liberal for this but if Mr Blair hadn't hijacked the term I'd have been quite happy to talk here about some sort of Third Way.
Some see this as evidence of weakness - as an inability to make up one's mind. Being a real Leftie is extremely hard work and I have no such aspirations. We all, to some extent, have to live in The Real World, because we only have one life, we have to make the most of it. In my experience the very committed left wing activists are not the most self-sacrificing individuals but those who really enjoy what they do. Those who dismiss all protesters who are not utterly committed, true to the cause and without contradictions miss the point. It is necessary, no, essential that the Anti-Capitalist protesters outside St Paul's both pitch their tents outside the cathedral, getting attention by making a minor nuisance of themselves, but also nip off to the pub (or even home) in the evening (as the infamous heat scan photo suggested a few weeks back) because they have lives too. It doesn't make them any less right to make a fuss. The Bankers certainly won't feel compelled to stick to any coherent ethical standards in their endeavours. They'll both try to make as much money as possible at the office and perhaps go to church or give to charity as well.
What bothers me much more is that whatever the individual practitioners get up to in their time off, the logic of the market they serve is inexorable. It is an amoral machine for making money. And modern politics has hitched itself to this machine.
This is why I sometimes find I have more in common with old-style conservatives than one might expect (and why some of my most enjoyable debates have always been with them) - because we both have a sense that something is wrong, and it's a moral sense, not rational, not economic.
The difference, going back to Serenity Prayer at the top, is our differing notions of what can and can't be changed. The Leftie almost of necessity remains open to the possibility of making things better. It's almost an article of faith, no matter how unformed our strategy might be, or how futile our efforts. The Triumph of Capitalism is not the success of some great moral humanist system of progress and development, it's what's left after everything else has failed. It's Natural Selection, red in tooth and claw. Its strength is that it thrives when you stop trying to do something better. Left-wing politics goes against the grain, a constant uphill struggle against just giving in and doing what comes naturally. And since the old totalitarianisms have been discredited, it's piece-meal, incremental, a process, not a goal, and demands constant vigilance.

I was brought up very strongly with the notion that very little could be changed and that the sooner I realised that and got on with getting a job, getting married and having kids, buying a mortgage and the insurance and the pension and all the rest of it, the better, because everything else was just Cloud Cuckoo Land.
My dad was a Trades-Unionist (a shop-steward actually) in the 70s and an old-fashioned Labour man. He believed that there was not much to be done with the world except to try to get fairer slice of the pie for your self and your family through negotiations and, if it came to it, industrial action. He thought a lot of his colleagues were layabouts and spongers. He believed you couldn't expect to have a voice unless you put yourself up for election. Otherwise all you could do was vote and accept the consequences. I don't agree with a lot of that but he had a powerful (sometimes intimidating) belief that people really ought to do better but I don't think he thought there was much point in trying to change the world (at least not when I was old enough to debate with him) and I think that was a terrible shame and a waste, because he had so much more energy than I do for these things. My dad was a force for the good. I'm sure everyone who knew him would agree with that.
Still as just one in seven billion (give or take) I'll be happy if I can make just slightly more than one 7,000,000,000th of a difference, and that will have to do.