Blog Update

I just posted several old short stories/short artistic pieces which I didn't see fit to publish in my original spree of short story-publishing in November and December 2014. To be clear, I actually think these pieces are meritorious, and that I erred in not publishing them originally. I want the Reader to know that, despite appearances, I am being selective; there's plenty of shit that I wrote between late 2012 and late 2014 that I will never publish here. I wrote a lot of stuff in this time, just as I write a huge amount of stuff now.

I was inspired to go through my old stuff because I finally got around to starting Dubliners today on the train, which H read and recommended to me in 2014. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, (which I read, I think, in 2013) is probably my favourite novel/novella, and it was an extremely powerful artistic inspiration for My Bleak Memoirs (which I often thought of writing/tried to write in the third-person using free-indirect style - and I have written a lot of autobiographical stuff in the third-person).

I may try my hand at fiction once more in the near future. I have always struggled to write serious fiction without a character who is me, and this is probably still true (the reason is essentially just my misanthropy/misanthropic narcissism (can't stand imagining for more than a second what it is like to be a person who doesn't think like me, or know and understand the things I do))...

This update has been almost an hour in the making, because I have been on my bed thinking various thoughts that I obviously won't try to describe in any detail. I have noticed in the last few minutes, as I began to type this final paragraph, an abeyance in my buoyant attitude towards my own artistic productions. I feel now a familiar nihilism and dread. For what purpose am I living? Why do I go on doing the things I do?

Moods, eh?

A Short Story I created in May 2013 (the events described probably took place on 28 or 29 May), Modified Sporadically until April 2014, and then Modified Heavily this Afternoon (31 January 2018)

Portrait of the Artist Chopping Chicken

He grabbed one of the four glistening, plump pink thighs from the black polystyrene foam container. It was slimy and slippery and he almost dropped it. Now tight in his grip, he slapped it down on the big plastic chopping board. He flipped the thigh over and unfurled its flaps: an underside fatmottled and gristly. He picked up the large, shiny kitchen knife from the left of the chopping board and, in this motion, roughly determined the middle of the thigh. He drew down the knife at this co-ordinate and began to saw – rapid strokes, aggressively, vigorously. It was harder to cut than he had expected: the knife seemed blunt; the chicken too tough.

He gently placed the knife on the left side of the chopping board. He flipped over the right half of the thigh so the smooth pink side was showing again. He rotated it 90° clockwise, then lifted it and put it down higher on the chopping board – away from the other half to leave some space for sawing. He drew down the knife onto the far right-hand side of the half-thigh and began sawing along a vertical axis. At last he managed to wrestle away a sliver of flesh from the recalcitrantly splaying mass. He grabbed the sliver (slimy, sticky) and wristflicked it into the nearby ceramic bowl.

He repeated the actions described in the last sentence until the chicken had been separated into roughly equal slivers, then repeated the actions described in the last three sentences except with the left half instead of the right half, then repeated the actions described in every sentence and clause up to this one seven more times (there were two cartons of four thighs he had to chop-up).

Eventually, under the tap, he sluiced the slime off his hands… and suddenly realised the lyrical, onomatopoeic/synaesthesia-exploiting potential of the verbal documentation of the actions he’d just performed!

An Extremely Bleak, Russian-style Short Story I Created in August 2013 and last Modified in July 2014

A Journey – of a widow from her bed to her bathroom with the express purpose of urination

It was morning and the light was shining on the bed through the window, the curtain funnelling it into a sharp and sallow beam. She could feel its warmth on her face, but it was cold elsewhere in the room. Cold and silent.

Got to get up.

The clock to her right, on the bedside table, was a black digital alarm clock. It was a clock manufactured in the 1980s (she had had it since the 1980s, when she bought it with her husband at that technology store that doesn’t exist anymore on Strone St near the station; it had sat in the exact same place since then) and its red, segmented numbers read 9:00.

Time to get up.

She grabbed the doona in her hand and carefully lifted it up and off her body. Now she felt very cold. She was fully exposed, too, apart from the thin protection afforded by her nightgown. Conscious of being exposed, her eyes drifted down her body: it was frail and gaunt and wrinkled and spotted and quite hideous.

It’s cold.

She sat up, using her arm as a shaky support, then slowly swung her legs round until they were hanging off the bed, then carefully stepped down on to the ground; it was freezing-cold.

Floorboards, always so cold in the morning.

Her slippers were neatly placed, equidistantly apart, just where she was placing her feet. She put her feet inside them, then she stood up.

She began to walk gingerly towards her old wooden wardrobe, feeling the stiffness of her legs and feeling pain in her hips and knees. She clasped her hands around the knob on the wardrobe door and pulled it: the door creaked open, slowly. Her dressing gown was hanging on a coat-hanger to the left, away from all the other articles of clothing which she hadn’t worn for a long time. It was blue and fluffy.

She remembered buying it, recently, at Myer. It was the last proper thing she had purchased, and even so, she had only bought it out of necessity, which was that her last one had been so tatty, and washed to such a state of thinness, that it verged on nonexistence. She had not enjoyed buying it either: she had not enjoyed going to the shopping mall, she had not enjoyed how everything was so big and noisy and shiny and grand, and she had not enjoyed the false friendliness of the staff at the shop. She had returned home on the bus with a bitter taste in her mouth. And when she had entered her house that day she had felt even more miserable. The house had felt even colder and more deathly silent than usual.

But she had quickly tried to cheer herself up because she knew being miserable was pointless.

Misery – that sick feeling in the stomach, those thoughts, those frenzied thoughts – what was the point of even humouring it?

Just after entering the house, she had started running the bath. Then she got in, began reading a Spike Milligan book and her misery dissipated within no time at all. She always followed that exact same procedure when she felt down. Spike Milligan books were great destressing agents, she found, because they were so stupid. She liked them – despite having read all of them at least three times each – because they distracted her with their ridiculous humour.

She put the dressing gown on. It felt fluffy and warm. Now wearing both her slippers and her dressing gown, the atmosphere no longer felt so hostile; no longer so cold and big and empty. It remained silent though. The only sound was the gentle padding of her slippers on the floorboards as she hobbled solemnly into the ensuite bathroom.

Her bathroom was almost entirely green and very out-dated in style. She knew its appearance must seem bizarre to a stranger, but she, personally, was used to it. In the bathroom’s far right corner was a fairly-standard looking toilet and it was that which she was walking towards.

As she did walk towards it, she made a note to herself not to look into the mirror above the sink. She took a slight sideways glance anyway; she immediately regretted it. When she reached the toilet, she sat down and urinated, listening to the sound of her piddle connecting with the toilet water and thinking of little. After that was finished, she stood up slowly, with sore knees, and flushed the toilet. Subsequently, she walked over to the sink – looking down to avoid the mirror – turned the tap on, and washed her hands. She rubbed them slowly and carefully against the hand-towel, making sure they were completely dry.

She turned on the cold shower tap, then the hot one.  

The day would be long.

Vignette from 17 October 2014

“If you’re stressed, have a chat, you don’t have to tell me what you’re stressed about,” my dad said, sitting on the table across from me.

“Ok,” I replied ,thinking about the fact I was being so taciturn. I was thinking about how I would express the fact I’m naturally this way, if that’s even true. I began brainstorming possibilities for how to express it: “I’m a reticent person, I’m an aloof person, I’m introverted.” I eventually decided to say nothing. I continued staring into the distance, spooning peas into my mouth. 

Two Surreal/Ridiculous Short Stories from 2014 that Evince my Frustration with the Strictures of "Creative" Writing for the HSC

(The first was written for the "After the Bomb" module in English Extension I (I actually submitted this one for homework and was criticised by my teacher for taking the piss), and the second was a "Belonging" in Advanced English creative that I never submitted, for obvious reasons.)

Expendable

George Lawrence was walking quickly. The early morning air was thickly foggy and it was drizzling with rain. The footpath in front of him was wet and a little slippery. The city looked even more grey than usual. He couldn’t imagine more drab concrete towers than the ones that towered above him on either side of the road.

It’s like 1984. Haha, coz it is.   

He felt stressed. He had woken up stressed, having been told the news yesterday by his boss that today was to be the day of sackings, and he only felt more so now. He was definitely a prime candidate for sacking. Unpopular, quiet, not especially productive – yes he ticked all the boxes for dismissal.

Fuck.

Maybe this would be the final time he would ever walk to his office at Williams Wealth – that was a harrowing thought. As he continued walking swiftly along the footpath, feeling sick to the stomach, he glanced down at his watch: 20 past 8. He needed to get to work early otherwise the boss would basically have no problem firing him at all – he’d have the excuse he needed. He could even imagine what that ugly little man would say:

You weren’t even punctual on the day I’d told you people would be fired. That displays an enormous amount of laziness and, I think, umm, what’s the word?, contempt for this business. I have no choice but to fire you.  

George started cantering. He was encumbered by his briefcase and the inflexibility of his work trousers, but he still was able to gather a fair bit of speed. The buildings next to him were now just a blur, while the people walking along the footpath seemed to stop moving, becoming mere obstacles for him to avoid. For a few seconds, he forgot he was meant to be stressed. As the wind rushed past his face and through his hair, he forgot everything: he forgot how drab the city was and what the boss had said; he forgot work, he forgot where he was going. He was just bounding along the wet, slippery footpath, bounding through space and time, through an infinite greyness, forever…

But then he remembered everything again. He realised he was only a street away from his work. He slowed immediately. He felt sick to the stomach as he inched along, one step, two steps, three steps, four steps, five steps, six steps, seven steps, eight steps, nine steps, ten steps.

No, I can’t just inch along, I have to hurry up, I need to get to work. I can’t get fired.

He started cantering again. The canter soon turned into a desperate lurch, one which was expending all his energy and will-power. He was getting closer and closer to the building in which he worked. Finally he was there. Breathing heavily, he walked in the open door of his building, walked over to the lift, and pressed the button. He waited.

Ding!

The doors opened and he walked in. He pressed level 13. The elevator whirred and he watched the numbers light-up one by one.

11, 12, 13. Ding!

The doors opened and he walked out. He turned right down the corridor, walked towards the big door at the end of the vestibule, and pushed it open. Immediately he was hit by a wave of indistinct chatter. He gazed over the familiar bureaucratic scene: there were desks everywhere, most of them occupied, as a multitude of people tapped away on their typewriters.

Suddenly he noticed the boss, with his dumpy body and ugly bald head, was walking towards him from the other side of the room.

Why would he walk right towards me? Surely that means I’m fired.

The boss reached him, and now George could see the true horror of his blotchy and jowly face. He hadn’t noticed before but he had a hideous little mouth, a mouth which was now gaping open.

“I just wanted to have a little private chat with you, George, to let you know before I make the big speech to everyone here at Williams Wealth that I never even, umm what’s the word?, considered you for the cuts I am forced to make. You are a really valued member of my staff and I really appreciate your work ethic. Your work – ”

Suddenly the roof caved-in in front of him with an enormous crash and women screamed. Ceiling plaster was showering down. George saw that the material from the ceiling was now where a few desks used to be. People were under it. They were trapped.  

Bomb. 

Untitled

Susan stabbed a fork into the stub of meat she could see poking out of the murky, seething broth and pulled it towards her. A big hunk of soft, cartilaginous meat, tightly hugging a thick bone. Her fork only had a tenuous grip on it. She tried to quickly bring it towards her plate before it had a chance to fall off the fork, but globs of meat slipped off and flopped onto the table. A mixture of corporeal fluid and broth oozed out of them, seeping into the white tablecloth.

“Blast,” she whispered to herself.

“Here, let me pick that up for you,” Andrew’s dad said. He used his chopsticks to pick up the pieces on the table and put them into her little round bowl.

“I extend my sorrow a propos that prior error and request clemency,” Susan said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Andrew’s dad said, smiling.

“Yes, it’s really fine,” his mum said, smiling also.

Susan looked across the table at Edmund and he smiled too, but a bit more wryly.

“The comestibles are tremendously delectable,” Susan said. Susan could see that Andrew’s dad was reaching over to Andrew to ask for a translation. Andrew whispered it into his father’s ear.

Andrew’s father looked back at Susan. “Thank you very much, you’re too kind.”

“I find that praise to be very gratifying indeed. I endeavour always to act with a considerable degree of magnanimity,” she replied, smiling.

Andrew’s dad smiled at her again. While he was clearly trying to conceal his confusion and – despite his best efforts – slight contempt for Susan’s eccentric mode of communication, Susan could nevertheless discern it. She could see the slight strain in his grin, the subtle coldness in his eyes. She felt horrible that she had this effect on people who did not share her upbringing. The problem was that she simply spoke a different dialect of English from this man, and the simple reason for that was that she was raised in a different household. She could do nothing about it, and that was what made it so hard to bear.

Susan decided to tuck in to the meaty meal beneath her. The rich, spicy smell emanating from it was enticing. She stabbed a piece of meat and inserted it into her mouth. It dissolved on her tongue in an instant, and all she was left with was the intense gustatory sensation, the corporeality, the spices, the richness. That piece of meat was truly the best tasting food she had ever put in her mouth. It was otherworldly.

Suddenly she was floating in an ethereal, intangible space, sucrescent spools of light swirling around her, tipping and tumbling forward, alone, together, with all the orgiastic potential in the world.

She was back at the small white table, with the big broth-filled pot in the middle and Andrew’s face opposite her and his mum to her left and his dad to her left. Back in the dark room with the lunar, spindly-digited clock suspended high on the wall to her left, and the cramped, dirty kitchen behind her. Back with her body and its blue jumper and black jeans and its eyes that were now turning in on themselves, observing the fleshy insides of her cranium, her brain, purple and heavily veined, bumpy but soft, somehow gelatinous…

When her eyes rolled back towards the table, the entire family was gazed intently at her, with expressions of shock and concern.

“Are you alright?” Andrew’s mum asked.

“I can affirm this inquiry.”

“She often does this,” Andrew assured his mum.

Susan felt elated; the appreciation of the food Andrew’s parents had prepared her, a synecdoche for their Oriental culture, had enabled her to transcend her socioeconomic, class and racial differences with Andrew’s family and she now belonged.   

A Short Story I Wrote in February 2015

Google Ads

Michael was lying on his bed, staring at his brightly-lit laptop in his otherwise pitch-black room. The time was 11:16 PM. He had just clicked on some weird Bjork music video on Youtube without real desire. Suddenly, an ad that popped up at the bottom of the screen: “Schizophrenia: Don’t get left in the dark.” Paired with the words sat a man in a dark room with a single sallow lamp illuminating his face. Just near the top were discernible the words “A Google ad.” He rushed to press the ‘x’.

Immediately, he felt sick to the stomach. How did they know? How could they possibly know? He thought back to whether he had typed anything into google that might suggest the existence of schizophrenic tendencies in him. But there was nothing that could have done it. He probably had a very unusual google history but nothing that would indicate schizophrenia. So what was going on? Was the word unreal then? Were the CIA actually after him? Was that stuff true?

Of course not, he told himself. Of course not, of course not, you fucker. But he continued to feel sick in the stomach.

Can’t you see the obvious irony? You’re experiencing paranoid, disturbed thoughts from the appearance of an ad about schizophrenia! It was the appearance of the ad that actually triggered it! You can’t do what they what they want, now, can you? Funny. Except I shouldn’t have said they. Who are they? Maybe there is a they? No. There isn’t. But I’m not schizophrenic; I shouldn’t worry. They just detected an irregularity in my google searches but it doesn’t matter. Nobody is monitoring me. It doesn’t matter. Some things can’t be explained. It doesn’t matter.

The video continued, and, despite himself, so did the thoughts. How could this video be real? It’s so weird and unnatural. Maybe Bjork isn’t a human. No. Don’t. No no.

A Very Short Short Story I Created in September 2013 and last Modified in July 2014

Intellectual vs Plebeian, who will win?

“I posit, that is rather contumelious behaviour, and that you are an impertinent, odious cretin.”

“Stop speaking like that you cunt.”

“No. I shan’t.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you actually want to get wrecked?”

“No, thank you, it wouldn’t bestow upon me great pleasure; on the contrary, it would endow me with great suffering and anguish.”

“Can you actually shut the fuck up right now?”

“If I said yes I would be lying because I would still be speaking.”

“Seriously, shut the fuck up or I’ll smash you.”

“OK.”

Spike Milligan-esque or Hellerian Absurd Short Story I wrote in September 2013 (age 16)

Inconsequentially used twice in this title, it is inconsequentially adverbial/Don’t read this story

Amoebic Dysentery was born without a chin.

When he had come out of his mum’s nether regions covered in slime, with a grotesque and foetal aspect, everyone in the room had been revolted. Revolted, shocked, sickened, horrified.

The mother spoke first, in a tone of indignant outrage, “No child of mine shall be born without a chin, a chin is a fundamental part of a child of mine. I refuse to accept that this child of mine is a child of mine, it has no chin. Next thing it’ll have no child of mine.”

The doctor replied: “Such profound words, you must be a very well-educated woman.”

“I was educated at the school of hard arithmetic.”

“Do you mean "knocks"?”

“No that’s a boys’ school.”

“But you’re a woman.”          

“Exactly, and I was in the past too.”

“Where is that region?”

“It no longer exists.”

“OK José.”

“No, my name’s stay-at-home mum.”

“Isn’t that your profession?”

“A stay-at-home mum isn’t a profession, you dumbo jimbo.”

“That doesn’t rhyme and my name isn’t jimbo.”

“I didn’t say it was.”
“Yes you did.”

“What?”

“Why?”

“Who?”

“What do you want me to do with the lump of slimy flesh that came out of your – dare I say – private parts? I can chuck it out the window if you want.”

“Why the hell would I want that?”

“It has no chin.”

“Good point, Doctor. Hmm, it’s a tough decision… I guess I’ll have to think about it.”

She lay there on the bed thinking about it. He was thinking about her thinking about it and thinking about what she must be thinking about it and thinking about the fact that he was thinking about her thinking about it and thinking about the nature of thinking about the fact that he was thinking about her thinking about it and wondering slightly paranoidly if anyone else was real because he couldn’t know if this was all a dream and he was the only one with real consciousness because that was possible he reckoned.

She came to a conclusion: “No thank you.”

“Thank god you chose to do that” he said, grasping the baby in his hand above his head like an NFL ball, ready to hurl it as far as possible out of the eighth story hospital window.

“You looked like you were pretty happy to do it though.”

“Oh, it’s all a façade – a veneer I put up to deal with people in my work. You have to stay impersonal, that’s the way to succeed.” 

“You should write a self-help book entitled “You have to stay impersonal, that’s the way to succeed.””

“No thank you, I hate self-help books. I can help myself very well thank you.”

“Thank you for what.”

“What?”

“What?”

“What?”

“What?”

The woman’s husband had been in the room the whole time, holding his wife’s hand. He spoke, suddenly: “What?”

The doctor replied, suddenly: “Why are you joining in this conversation all of a sudden? I thought you were perfectly happy staring into the corner.”

“I wasn’t – on the inside. I was dealing with a great deal of inner turmoil as you spoke animatedly to each other. I felt isolated and alone.”

His wife spoke, “You want sympathy? I’m the one who’s been busting my gut for the last twelve hours.”

The doctor spoke, “It wasn’t your gut, it was your pelvic region because that’s where the baby comes out of.”

“Really?” she replied, extremely sceptical of this far-fetched piece of information.

“Yeah, trust me, I’m a doctor, I know my anatomy.”

“What do you know about Anatomy?” the husband said.

“Who’s Anatomy?” the wife said.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” the husband said, with a smug expression on his face, secretly – he thought it was secret at least but it might not have been because he couldn’t help looking smug – proud of his remembrance of such a quote and the extensive knowledge he had just impressed of it on the other two people in the room. Well, it was three including Amoebic Dyssentry but he was really just a lump of slimy flesh.

The doctor replied: “This is true.”

There was a long pause, then he continued, “It is true because the sensory receptors used when you smell a rose are not connected its name.”

“You just don’t understand poetry” the husband said, deeply humiliated by the fact that the doctor had won the intellectual competition – though he wouldn’t show it – though he would because his cheeks had flushed deepest darkest red like a – rose.  

“Your cheeks have gone bright like a-a rose… Ha ha how ironic!” the doctor shouted aggressively.

Still lying on the bed, pale and haggard like a woman who had just gone through the exhausting most terrible ordeal that is childbirth because she had, the woman spoke: “Your cheek by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Her husband said thank you and as he did began to blush even more. Now his face was the reddest thing on the entire planet – maybe even the entire universe – a vision of purest, unadulterated red.

“Someone’s gone a bit red” the doctor said whilst eating some bread and scratching his head and somewhere else in the hospital someone was recently dead.

“That’s a bit morbid.”

“What is?”

“A hospital.”

“True.”

“Or is it false?”

“It’s definitely true.”
“Or is it false?”

“It is impossible to know anything, including what I just said because that’s an unsubstantiated assertion” the doctor said.

“So it’s impossible to know that you know that it is impossible to know anything” the husband said.

They shouted in harmonious unison: “No yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no yes no no yes no yes no yes no.” It went on eternally.

Amoebic Dysentery joined in as soon as he could speak.

AN EXTREMELY IMPORTANT AND FUNNY ESSAY ON META-ETHICS, ETHICS, UTILITARIANISM AND REASON

Can’t get no Ethical Satisfaction (and it’s not just me)

I have this problem in my life. It’s been lurking creepily behind me for quite a long time (I inserted “behind me” in post- because I know people like physical metaphors, even if half-assed). I mean, it’s not really my unique, personal problem (it is not up to me to explain how this amendment affects my half-assed physical metaphor); it’s a problem of abstract philosophy that causes me emotional issues. It’s very vaguely related to the better-known Frege-Geach problem – which, incidentally, is itself a problem that has been known to cause emotional issues (although not to me, only to people who refuse to see that saying that all ethical discussion and activity consists in expressive/commissive speech acts is just blatantly untenable, because that’s clearly not a satisfactory account of what’s been going on in philosophical ethics for, you know, the last few thousand years (how can you propose to explain ethical language games simpliciter unless you can account for Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Bentham, Mill, Foot, Nussbaum, Singer and Parfit?)). In fact, what I just said didn’t emphasise this point enough. If you’ll permit me to apply a positive scalar to the vector we’re already skating along (people love quasi-physical linear maths metaphors the most), I want to suggest that ‘my’ problem – I use the possessive pronoun with a bashful knitting of my limbs (narrowing of the body) and a downcast gaze – is actually a problem that a very sizeable category of persons have… even if the instances of this category are not smart enough to realise it and consequently (logical, atemporal sense) do not experience any associated disquiet (to clarify a point in no need of such remediation for comic effect, if these people are depressed or anxious, it has nothing to do with this abstract philosophical problem).

Now, as a comically self-undermining disdainer of dithering coyness – sort of like Polonius (“Brevity is the soul of wit” says the least brief man in the world, much as the counter-Enlightenment mystic Jordan Peterson professes to be a Man of Science) – I staunchly refuse to dilly-dally in relating to the Reader what category of persons I am referring to in the above, and instead will immediately spit the answer out following this colon:

the utilitarians.

I want it known that I do not myself belong to this category of persons. Personally, I think that utilitarianism is a false God. And one thing that I will do very soon is explain why. But before even that, I feel strangely as if I have some sort of moral obligation (a rather rum thing, what) to say in what this problem consists – or to put it less prolixly – what this problem is.

(As the peerless philosophy stylist, Jerry Fodor, showed us, brevity has never been, and will never be, the soul of wit. If anything, it is the opposite. There is nothing witty about Hemingway. And imagine a taciturn stand-up comic. Nor are cowboys funny…)

As Ecclesiastes might urge, I will cut the hilarious bullshit now, because now is not the time. The problem is this:

Like any other smart, philosophically trained chump who is politically and ethically engaged in the world and has beliefs about what is right and wrong , about how things could go better and worse (and all that jazz), I strongly believe that the things (actions, trends, institutions) that I think are bad are bad not because they violate some divine command or some ‘rule’ forced upon us by Reason itself, but because they have (will probably have, have had) bad consequences; mutatis mutandis, that the things that I think are good are good because they have (will probably have, have had) good consequences. However, I don’t actually have any kind of systematic framework that would, as it were, ‘ground’ all these positions I take – which tend to be justified case by case, often relying on principles which I don’t take seriously wholesale – because, as made clear, I categorically reject utilitarianism (certainly, as a philosophy for living). Now, if you recall the comment I made before to the effect that I think that the problem I’m stating here is actually an unrecognised problem for pretty much all utilitarians, you might be somewhat confused, because utilitarians shouldn’t have this problem if, after all, by virtue of being utilitarians, they have the systematic framework to ground the ethical judgments they make. Unfortunately, my response to this is rather controversial – repugnant to most utilitarians (a “repugnant conclusion”). I hold the extremely edgy view, that, if you think that accepting the Humean “bundle theory” of “the self” isn’t sufficient to make a person a Buddhist (i.e. to be a Buddhist you have to actually do Buddhist activities), then, by the exact same logic, there isn’t a person alive on this entire planet who is actually a utilitarian, because no utilitarian actually lives as a utilitarian – certainly if we’re not including in this assessment any devious, J.S. Mill-influenced Satanists who think that “utility” encompasses “eudaimonia” (I feel such a move is a sure path towards not identifying as a utilitarian anymore).

Why do I hold such a mad view? Not merely because it gives me great pleasure to deflate the absurd pretensions of utilitarians – and it surely does, a major hobby of mine being to dialectically disrobe them until they are quivering like freshly shorn lambs in front of me, bleating for abatement and détente – but for two major reasons (neither of them original, both of them well-known critiques of utilitarianism), which I shall now explicate.

1.)    Nobody can even tell us what utility is; there is no formalism, nothing resembling a “neurochemical reduction”, no way of defining it beyond resort to vague, non-technical and imprecise words like “pleasure”, “pain”, “harm” and “enjoyment”, "preference realisation". How do you measure utility? How do you compare utility? How do we weigh up human versus animal utility? If you’re not the kind of utilitarian who rejects Mill’s claim about dissatisfied Socrates and the satisfied pig (i.e. you’ve moved past Bentham), then you have clearly given up on nebulous neurobabble-accounts of how you compare utility (“if the “pleasure receptors” are more excited in person A than person B, then A has more utility!”) – which is good, except that there also seems very little to stop you sliding back towards more ‘intuitive’, commonplace thinking about ethics. If you refuse to state quantitatively the ratio of ethical significance between the higher pleasures and the base pleasures (and why would you do such a patently silly thing?), then the ethical territory open to you becomes just as wide as that open to someone who rejects utilitarianism: you can go full Nietzschean and say that it’s ok if a society is highly inegalitarian and there’s lots of poverty and suffering so long as that society is producing Great Men who make magnificent works of art and achieve great scientific advances (because you think that these goods are so much more important in their contribution of utility than goods like a reduction of the proportion of the population with pneumonia or whatever); or you can go full Marxian and say that a world without Great Men would be more than fine if no-one was hungry and everyone had a nice, clean place to live; or anything in between. All is licensed. And that’s not what utilitarians want at all! The dream is a system that forces you to adopt certain judgments that aren’t even emotionally attractive to you, by virtue of the fact that they are the “correct” ones. If nobody fucking knows what this whole utility thing is about, how the fuck does this work?

2.)    A utilitarian (one who isn't drifting towards non-utilitarianism) literally has no idea what is good or bad, or what they should be doing (this is, ahem, A MASSIVE PROBLEM). If you assume, for no good reason whatsoever, that there is some vaguely conceptually appropriate sciency account of what utility really is in terms of brain states (a bunch of sentences of neurochemistry or computational neuroscience or some such) that ‘we’ will eventually arrive at (what I mean by “vaguely conceptually appropriate” is that the account will fit with enough of our existing utilitarian conclusions (and what these conclusions even are, beyond conclusions that other ethical ‘frameworks’ or ways of thinking already deliver, it is not clear to me (maybe ‘we shouldn’t brutally slaughter animals’, and ‘there’s nothing inherently wrong with fucking a dead chicken (as long as we don’t actually do it such that we cause disgust to other people)’ and ‘there are certain conceivable circumstances in which nuking a million people would be morally good’) to satisfy us that there is no better specific sciency account of this concept), and if you assume that if a person with “full knowledge” and understanding compares any two meaningfully distinct “world states” X and Y, there can only be one comparative judgment licensed by this account of utility (X = Y, X > Y or X < Y, with the same accompanying axioms as the central axioms of decision theory), then utilitarianism might be a viable organisational system for a future race of superintelligent aliens (actually, even that’s not clear at all, but whatever). However, as things stand, in the boring present, utilitarians don’t know what utility is and they can’t compare world states. Utilitarians (those who haven’t gone in the Millian direction and aren’t sliding towards a richer cosmos of values (becoming more like the rest of us chumps)) can’t even confidently assert morally banal propositions like that Hitler contributed more evil to the world than good. They simply cannot, because they don’t know if it’s “true” according to their system. The world is far too complicated to decide. What if all the history-trajectories involving Hitler and people very similar to Hitler taking control of Germany in the 1930s (people we can also call Hitler, for convenience (metaphysics like this is too impossible as to be a good use of time)) are massively outnumbered by ‘adjacent’ history-trajectories where the planet experiences nuclear Armageddon and civilisation is wiped out? NOBODY FUCKING KNOWS. Which means that even extremely basic moral judgments are unavailable for utilitarians! THIS IS A HUGE PROBLEM. UTILITARIANS PAY ATTENTION PLEASE!

Anyhow, to reiterate my key point, what this means is that utilitarians may believe they have a systematic framework for making ethical judgments, but they actually don’t; instead, they’re just making shit up and being edgy on taboos because they’re assholes (that is essentially what I think).

Meanwhile, as I kept saying before, I am myself in a major bind because I do actually think there is such a thing as ethical reasoning, and I believe in evaluating goods and bads by consequences, but I don’t actually take that logic all the way, which is, at least on the face of it (and we’ll see why we might need to look beneath the face in a minute), illogical. As I’ve explained before (e.g. in this essay (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/a-philosophically-involved-work.html), which, incidentally, I am very ambivalent about and which shouldn’t be taken as a statement of fully mature thoughts), analytic ethics survives because (crudely) some ethical judgments are more logical than others. In slightly more precise terms, I have previously noted the following:

“The way rational ethical discourse works can be illustrated by a simple, abstract model:

Person A agrees with person B that x (where x is some ethical principle or a highly general ethical judgment). Person B points out that person A is violating x in the case of y (where y is some specific issue: women’s rights, race, animal welfare, abortion, whatever). Person A argues that position on y is not a violation of x because of an error in Person B’s argument, or because of empirical considerations which Person B has overlooked. The debate either continues with further discussion of the merits in each other’s arguments or onto further discussion of the empirical considerations.”

This model explains why I am unambiguously right that, e.g., cat cullings in Australia are a good thing (I know this is a weird case study but, strangely, it’s pretty much optimal for the purpose, apart from the fact of its being ‘weird’):

People who oppose the culling of cats will claim that it is deeply wrong because YOU SHOULDN’T KILL ANIMALS IN COLD BLOOD, because IT IS WRONG TO KILL or because WE SHOULDN’T INTERFERE WITH “NATURE” (it tends to be very emotive, very deontological thinking, or, as with the last one, rather quaint and philosophically idiotic teleological thinking). But if you point out that native marsupials – all of which are vulnerable – and native birds are killed in their millions by these cats, in a fashion that surely causes tremendous suffering to these prey animals (being stalked, chased, leapt upon, bitten, scratched and ripped open is presumably a significantly more painful way to die than getting cleanly shot, as the cats are), they literally have no response, because this is also majorly unpalatable to them or should be unacceptable to them according to the ‘reasons’ they actually give. And so the inevitable outcome to such a response is either that they get up and walk away angrily, moronically repeat what they already said before, or concede that you are right and that they were mistaken. (Also, you can point out that the teleological way of thinking about nature as something that shouldn’t be “interfered with” is silly on every possible level, given that God doesn’t exist and such, and also the fact, in this specific case, that WE INTRODUCED CATS TO AUSTRALIA TO BEGIN WITH.)

This model probably also explains why anyone who says that the Iraq War was a horrific crime is correct, and explains similar such things. (I’m actually not being ironic, which may be disappointing to some.)

Anyhow, the reason that this model is emotionally unsatisfying on a deeper level is that it relativises correct and incorrect ethical verdicts to the principles that people choose to bring into play and can agree on when debating a specific ethical problem. Which is another way of saying what I said before: like it or not, there is no systematic framework. Which is another way of saying that there’s no way of justifying an entire network of ethical positions, i.e. your whole ethical worldview. Which is another way of saying that you can’t necessarily reconcile your ethical positions on different issues, even if those ethical positions were each arrived at in a pretty rational sort of way (with thinking consistent with my model of desirable ethical thinking). And responding with this sort of rubbish (https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/status/949454134716936192 “Why not just use all the frameworks, picking and choosing whenever we encounter a problem?”) is not any kind of solution, because those “theories” that Shermer mentions in that tweet are simply logically inconsistent with each other in all kinds of complicated ways (there’s almost nothing that survives as a coherent doctrine if you were to actually try to mash them all together), and the contextual picking and choosing of which “theory” to apply where will have nothing to do with Reason.

So no, there’s no happy ending, and everyone has to deal with this problem. And that sort of sucks.

Rogue Hypothesis: Excessive Cleanliness as a Cause of Acne?

I know many epidemiologists have proposed that one of the major causes of rising rates of asthma and allergies is probably excessively sterile and disinfected environments (we have seen a big rise in helicopter parenting (decline in outdoor play), wet wipes and Dettol since the 1960s and 1970s, and this seems coincident with the big increase in the frequency of these conditions). (Extra support for this thesis lies in the fact that c-section babies are more likely to have asthma and allergies (presumably  because they don't get a big dose of vaginal bacteria to start off their life).) I think that some (many?) health experts believe that the fact that kids are hitting puberty much earlier than a few decades is also related to this environmental factor. Also, I just came across this link (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle/479093), which made me think that acne vulgaris may (somewhat paradoxically but not implausibly) be related to excessive cleanliness too! Just as using shampoo causes the scalp to produce far more oils than it otherwise would (people, like me, who have stopped using shampoo, experience a dramatic reduction in oiliness), it may be that showering every day and scrubbing oils away from the skin causes the skin to 'overcompensate'.
My own life history lends a small modicum of support to this thesis. Relative to my childhood peers, I know I had an extremely lax hygiene routine, almost never washing my face and often bathing only once a week (I'd try to do twice, but I think I only did three times a week sporadically) (and I didn't like using the shower). Even as a teenager, I didn't really use the shower, and didn't really come close to bathing every day. Our house was also quite dirty and we went camping annually to a place without showers. Perhaps this explains why I didn't get any teenage acne (just pimples on the chin and the forehead every now and then but on their own (nothing resembling acne)). (I've had very sporadic, short-term outbreaks of rosacea-related, cheek-restricted pimples since I was 18, but I have massively mitigated/virtually eliminated my rosacea simply by starting to use moisturiser and it doesn't seem implausible that I will never have such an outbreak again.)
Anyhow, my sister was similar in the laxness of her hygiene routine and also never seemed to get teenage acne like her peers. We also both hit puberty very late. Yes, there are probably genetic factors involved here. The real test would be to see if the rates and severity of teenage acne in Western countries several decades ago was significantly lower relative to now. If that is the case, then the hygiene hypothesis seems much strengthened (and the palaeo-advocate-favoured "dairy" and "gluten" hypotheses are dead in the water).

Political Ramblings: On Disagreement and the Role of Values and Dispositions in Forging Different Factual Understanding of the World

I have long been anthropologically curious about the people who identify as scientific rationalists or Bayesians and politically identify as “centrists” and “moderates” or belong to the faction of socially liberalish “libertarians” (many of whom are happy also to identify as “centrists” or “moderates” or, in recent times, “neoliberals”). For about two years, I have occasionally looked at the public Facebook of Eliezer Yudkowsky and read the discussions of the S.V. “rationalists” who comment on his posts. On Twitter, I look somewhat regularly at his feed, along with that of Robin Hanson (I psychologically couldn’t stand following either of these men (seeing their tweets in real time), but I read the stuff they re-tweet or tweet every now and then)), along with that of Scott Alexander (even if he doesn’t tweet often), and I follow Julia Galef, and I also recently came to follow this moderate libertarian called Cathy Young (she is reasonable enough of the time to be tolerable, and more often than not criticises people I would criticise in much the same terms). I have followed Steven Pinker ever since I revived my Twitter account in, I think, early 2015 (whenever it was). (Steven Pinker is different from the rest of these people from my perspective since I just think he is far more interesting and knowledgeable, often tweeting interesting articles on a range of different topics (even if he sometimes tweets stuff I think is super dodgy) and refusing to use the medium for tribal sniping. He’s also different in the respect that I have a certain degree of respect for him as an academic totally outside of the internet context, having read and enjoyed all of his books except The Sense of Style (I have plenty of criticisms of The Better Angels but you can find these elsewhere on my blog with a bit of searching, and I also think The Blank Slate has major flaws but now is not the time for my thoughts on his philosophy of biology, given that I have also written about that elsewhere), and being in possession of an appreciation for his research in linguistics and cognitive science. He’s also different in the respect that he definitely isn’t a full-blown loony economic-libertarian like Yudkowsky seems to be and Galef might be (Galef is perhaps economically very agnostic, there are few indications). Further, Pinker doesn’t talk constantly about “signalling” and “Pareto distributions” like the Yudkowsky-Galef-Hanson gang (I’ve gotta say that this econbabble just creeps me out). Scott Alexander is also somewhat of an outlier at least insofar as I have enjoyed some of his blogposts, whereas I haven’t derived much insight or enjoyment from stuff written by Julia Galef, Robin Hanson or Eliezer Yudkowsky). I also keep tabs on the entrepreneurial psych graduate with slightly too strong views on gender differences, Claire Lehmann, and the puerile, edgelord evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, as well as his partner, the “sexologist” and vegan, Dianna Fleischmann. I also keep occasional tabs on a man I believe to be a very creepy and irrational person with horrible views called Bryan Caplan, who seems to have a strong relationship with Yudkowsky and Hanson (Hanson works at the same Koch brothers-supported institution as Caplan, the economic-libertarian stronghold, George Mason University). (Incidentally, I may soon write a brief demolition of an insanely stupid and ridiculous philosophy-of-science blogpost Caplan wrote several months ago comparing basic economics to anatomy (it is wrong on every possible level, factually and conceptually moronic), a post which happened to be retweeted by Mr. Yudkowsky.) I also follow Nicholas Christakis, who may be ideologically not too different from me (my exposure to him outside of Twitter strongly inclines me to like him and view him as intelligent and decent), but whose Twitter activity looks, for the most part, like that of someone within the emerging Quillette orbit (Bret Weinstein is a very, very similar case (really smart and decent-seeming outside of Twitter but distasteful (to my mind) on it); I stopped following Bret when he proclaimed that genocide and rape were adaptive (I was also sick of the stanning for Ben Shapiro and J. Peterson (obviously, this makes sense from the point of view of generating followers but I couldn’t stand it))). I also follow Noah Smith, who seems like he has a long association with Yudkowsky, Galef and Hanson (and also the very prominent libertarian economist Tyler Cowen, who is connected to these other figures), although he seems to be much more of a conventional progressive (a conventional Democrat) than these others I’m mentioning. I also follow Rolf Degen, this (apparently) libertarian dude who spends a huge amount of time writing short pithy summaries of papers in psychology and social science, inserting a lot of strong opinions about PC and so on (I should clarify that I think he’s a good and entertaining follow, even if I suspect he has questionable attitudes about sex and gender and such).  I also keep tabs on Jonathan Haidt (much of what I would say about that guy was already said by Massimo Pigliucci on blogs several years back). I have also long kept tabs on that irritating, nasty buffoon Michael Shermer (Pigliucci wrote some stuff on him back in the idea that holds up). And I also keep tabs on the insane clown known as Jordan Peterson (a man who is clearly not a scientific rationalist but who claims the mantle nonetheless (given his attraction to pseudoscience and counter-Enlightenment mysticism, his fervent opposition to “Postmodernism” is hilarious to me)).

Last but not least, I’ve a long-standing vendetta with Sam Harris. More on him in just a minute.

I’ve tried my best to understand the centrist rationalist and empathise with her point of view, but I must admit that I just get endlessly frustrated with the fact that she never seems to talk about issues that I think are vitally important to talk about. These are issues like nuclear annihilation and sabre-rattling with North Korea, climate breakdown, soil erosion and salinization, air pollution, ocean pollution, overfishing, forest loss, habitat loss, extreme weather events, species extinction, the methane eruption taking place in the Arctic, the health and diet of American citizens, American poverty, how difficult it is to be an American on food stamps (“American” because I’m thinking almost exclusively about Americans (as you may have noted)), massive racial inequalities in education and health, mass incarceration and the horrors of the private prison system, atrocities committed by the US government, atrocities committed by Israel, the famine in the Horn of Africa, fraudulent and larcenous behaviour on Wall St, obscene Wall St bonuses, the financialisation of the US economy, the civilian toll of recent US bombings and Obama’s drone assassinations, dangerous jingoistic attitudes among the US public, the lies of “Free Trade” and the severe toll of IMF liberalisation and the “Washington Consensus” (Neoliberalism) in many developing countries around the world including Russia, sexism and misogyny in popular culture and pornography and as manifested in sexual harassment… and instead choose to spend most of their time criticising SJW dogmas and worrying about “free speech” issues (Jesse Singal is someone who I politically strongly identify with who has tweeted and written about this stuff I just mentioned really intelligently in a careful and considerate way (he’s writing a book on social justice activism), and he’s not who I’m talking about). Basically, it just inclines me to a deep moral suspicion. For example, I just can’t help finding something slightly distasteful about the fact that someone with a public profile would spend their time discussing such petty political issues as women mocking men who wear cargo shorts (this is a real Galef tweet subject, typical of her consistently anti-feminist output). Obviously, most of the figures I mentioned above would smirk or sneer at most of the issues I mentioned, since they disagree with me about what is actually going on in the world and how the world works (what is worth worrying about). But I strongly suspect that, at root, this has a lot to do with a gulf in values anyhow. Why? Well, I think that our values, psychological dispositions and personality can lead us to acquire very different perspectives on the world, since these factors strongly affect what we actually choose to spend our time learning about. I think the vast majority of these figures haven’t read – and probably won’t read – the books that have influenced my political worldview, like Stiglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents or The Price of Inequality, or The Essential Chomsky or Who Rules the World? by Chomsky, or Collapse by Jared Diamond, or Flannery’s The Future Eaters, or the Peter Turchin canon, or Limits to Growth: the Thirty-Year Update, or Steve Keen’s Debunking Economics, or Gerry Mackie’s Democracy Defended, or Peter Wadhams’ A Farewell to Ice, and they don’t read George Monbiot columns and they’re not friends with the people I’m friends with and they don’t subscribe to the Youtube channels I subscribe to, and most of them aren’t camping-loving hippies like me with a strong affection for wild spaces and a consequent attitude of profound disgust and hatred towards those mega-corporations whose pollutants destroy ecosystems of great beauty and biological importance, and they don’t weep for the suffering of the impoverished and downtrodden and the sick, and they are not deeply moved by the first track of Sufjan Stevens’ album Michigan – I could go on. Meanwhile, I have not read the things they have, and had the experiences they have had. This has determined a lot.

I think one of the key ways in which many of these people are irrational is that they seem blind (many of them) to the way their psychological dispositions have shaped their political outlook, whereas I am not.

Anyhow, I also have high confidence in one prediction of mine that most of the figures mentioned would not make: global progress in life expectancy and health outcomes will stagnate or reverse within the next two to us three decades due to us reaching a tipping point in soil loss and pesticide overuse and the ravages of increased extreme weather events. (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/09/the-environment-versus-silliness-no.html).
We’ll see 😉

Onto Sam Harris, for fun. I have a very low view of Sam Harris, as I've made clear in a previous blogpost (https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/11/a-slapdash-bricolage-of-reasons-to-hate.html). I have long been infuriated by how some Harris fans are smart enough to recognise a mediocre critique of Harris (and yes, obviously, no doubt, he has been very sloppily and unfairly smeared a great deal (to what extent this smearing is unusual for a public figure is not clear to me though, even if it is definitely a bad thing, as all smearing is)), but not smart enough to realise his major cognitive bugs nevertheless. He is a sloppy thinker who says silly and crude things; I document many of these things in that post. I am unfortunately resigned to the attitude that if you don't have this view of Harris after having properly read and digested a fair portion of the sub-sophomore-level material he has written on questions of morality, on religion, on crime, on race, on 'free speech' and on 'spirituality', you are intellectually my inferior and not the sort of person I want to interact with. Unless you are 17 or younger – then you might be redeemable. 

If a Harris fan who appeared pleasant enough in respects other than being a Harris fan pressed me on those last two sentences there, I would say that I was employing hyperbolic rhetoric, even though that is basically how I feel. Of course, on reflection, I do strongly suspect that some of the 17+ year-olds are redeemable even by my own misanthropic lights, and I do at least realise that Sam Harris is not even close to the most repugnant talking head with a big internet following (at least he’s not Stefan Molyneux or Sargon of Akkad). I do at least acknowledge that we have some common ground, insofar as we are both Atheists, and are both abstractly, verbally committed to being "reasonable" and "rational" and paying fealty to institutionally bona fide science in our pursuit to understand the world. We also have common ground insofar as we are both intellectually curious about a wide range of things. And I like some of the people he invited on his podcast; most of them are worth talking to, at any rate. 

But that doesn't really change the fact that I find the combination of self-importance, spurious thinking and racism that the man exhibits intensely irritating. Perhaps it's a personal defect of mine, but I think I am far more enraged and outraged by the man who is a pretender to the name of scientific rationalist, who uses this mantle to espouse crude and often racist or immoral notions, than the total irrationalist and mystic. It’s even worse if the pretend rationalist has a lot of sycophantic supporters who are absolutely convinced that the man is highly rational (and also "eloquent" and "highly logical" and so on), as Harris does. It probably is a defect. Then again, I do genuinely think that Harris holds very distasteful views: the racial-profiling stuff (never motivated by expert opinion, which was against); the ridiculous, unsupported nonsense about America being a clumsy "well-intentioned giant" (he is usually extremely scant on evidence in the domain of politics, which is very evident in the Chomsky emails (not that his epigones are even capable of noticing this)); the rhetoric about white nationalists being truth-tellers about Islam; the Motte and Bailey dancing that he constantly resorts to when defending his edgy-thought-experiment-based political oeuvre ("Classic regressive leftist, not understanding that I was just using that thought experiment like people do in philosophy seminars, to probe and push our intuitions, to try to see if there is an abstract principle to back them up" (even though I am using these thought experiments in the context of making political arguments and proposing concrete reforms, and their inclusion would be utterly random and bizarre if I didn't think they had some significance beyond this very abstract theoretical purpose)); the love affairs with really dodgy people who reinforce his Islamophobic views (http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/04/11/4651763.htm, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n21/pankaj-mishra/watch-this-man, https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali); the apparent recent acceptance of the whole box-and-dice of the Charles Murray perspective on race and intelligence (please see these on why this is intellectually wrong-headed: https://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2017/05/solving-race.html, http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html); the nonsense about the Israeli army being humane (see original link for citation and discussion, and please see this website also: https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/); the lingering pussy-footing ambivalence about the Iraq War, despite its awesome destructiveness and horror (he may now be rhetorically condemnatory, but I remember that when the Rubin Report was just starting out, he expressed a very clearly ambivalent attitude, when asked by that clown-looking dullard if he was a “neocon” (check this out for yourself, if you can find it)); and, generally, the value system that motivates him to focus on the shit that he does focus on, when he could, e.g., focus on climate breakdown and pollution, or American poverty and disease, or promotion of peace activism.

Now that I’ve finished bitching and moaning, here’s a list of people whose way of analysing the political and economic world doesn’t annoy me:

Basically all the people in the Evonomics orbit, but Peter Turchin and David Sloan Wilson in particular (also used to be a huge Steve Keen admirer but have somewhat lost patience with his cocky rhetoric and the way he portrays the economics profession), Jared Diamond, Ann Pettifor, Joe Stiglitz, George Monbiot, Jesse Singal (my favourite person on Twitter, bar none), the Chapo people (I enjoy two out of every three of their episodes; I can’t fully get on board with everything they say, and I think they are more tribally left than me and less scientifically-minded), Chomsky, Barrett Brown (on board with the misanthropy), and Glenn Greenwald (this guy is anti-tribal to his core, and I fucking love it, being myself likewise with somewhat similar ideas about the world (though I doubt that my libertarian feelings are quite as strong as his, and I couldn’t motivate myself to focus on these issues like he has)).

In some ways, this is kind of a motley crew, but that reflects the fact that I don’t in fact belong to any tribe. The commonalities that do exist tell you a great deal about my values and how I think the world works. I personally think that these people are, if you average them out, just about as rational in evaluating evidence and following logical implications as the figures I mentioned at the start, even though they tend to be much more ‘left’. Which means that the dominance of the popular “rationalist” and “sceptic” movements on the internet by “centrists” and libertarians possess on the internet is by no means a state of affairs dictated by Reason itself. And I think we – whoever wants to join me – need to overturn this hegemony.

A Complicated (but Quickly Bashed Out) Essay about Australia Day, the Early Years of the Sydney Colony and Questions of Nationhood and Unity

As we approach January 26, the Australia Day-related content being produced in the Fairfax media, in youth-targeted new media (Junkee, Pedestrian), in the Betoota Advocate and on talk radio gives me the strong impression that the level of dissent building around "Australia Day" is unprecedentedly significant. The level of dissent may well have reached 'boiling point', such that it has made the day too controversial to survive in its current form. In fact, I will stick my neck out and predict – let these public words be the reader’s ‘bond’ (my ‘skin in the game’) – that whatever the near-term course of events, "Australia Day" on January 26 won't survive the next 15 years, and that many of the concomitant 'true blue' Australian summer customs, like extravagantly barbecuing meat, not taking sufficient care of one's skin or drinking gallons of beer will massively atrophy in that same time period (these customs have already atrophied non-massively, at the same time as the Australian accent has been more internationalised since the 1970s (http://www.smh.com.au/national/its-all-english-but-vowels-aint-voils-20100125-mukf.html)). The most important recent event stimulating the debate – the event that catalysed the most recent eruption of dissenting media discussion – was the decision of Triple J to move the Hottest 100 Countdown to January 27. This seems to be a decision of quite momentous significance, given how significant this radio program is to many people's Australia Day customs (parties). It seems like a sign of just how much more popular the anti-colonial reframing of the date has become over the last two or three years (it feels to me that the use of the phrase "invasion day" in the Fairfax press and in youth-targeted internet media (Junkee, Pedestrian) has ramped up in the last two years, although I would need someone to do a systematic study to be confident about the exact window).

(A recent conversation with my mum has reminded me that young people like me have a tendency to see progressive attitudes like these as having had a longer popular history than the study of history (or older people’s recollections) bears out. For example, so many young Australians were justifiably lamenting how “long it took” Australia to legalise same-sex marriage compared to other countries, but we shouldn’t forget how radical the shift in public attitudes has been over the space of only fifteen years, when the legalisation of same-sex marriage was an extremely fringe proposal with very little popular backing and no major press coverage.)

Personally, I broadly support this dissenting attitude, although I don't think I think about these issues in a way that the vast majority of persons do. I definitely have a "mood-affiliation" with the dissenters, but the truth is that I would have a mood-affiliation with people dissenting against any national day, since I am anti-patriotic – in fact, anti-tribal – to the very core of my being. (Long Narcissistic Interpolation: I'm the kind of person who loves sport, but cannot will himself to sing the national anthem when he goes to sporting matches (at the Australia-Syria World Cup-Qualifier Playoff Game played in Sydney, I took a photo of myself sitting down during the national anthem while tens of thousands of people stood up singing Australia's quaint and dysphonious national anthem, and joked to my friends in Messenger (and my dad who was with me) that I was pulling an August Landmesser (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Landmesser)[1] and feels sorry for the other nation –  indeed, starts barracking for them – when Australia is beating them badly (in the last two Ashes series, I was more on England’s side in the last two tests). I basically am wary of all flags and emblems, and am typically repulsed and dismayed by tribal displays of all kinds. This anti-tribalism started very young; I may have been less inclined as a child to feel sorry for players from other nations in sports when Australian teams or players were on top, but from really the beginning of high school I was repulsed and disturbed by the insane unified chanting that went on during the sporting events and couldn’t get on board with most of the grandstanding about the school, despite my family history with the institution (being literally a fourth-generation attendee (my great-grandfather, whom I never knew, attended the school, along with my grandfather and father). I also recall that I never could really get on board with extravagant celebration of sporting victories, because I typically didn’t feel a great deal of loyalty to my team (I usually figured there were probably as many nice people on the opposing side as there were on mine, and there were always several people on my team whom I didn’t like or who harassed me in the subtle ways that macho males harass people whom they seek to abase)). Nowadays, my political attitudes reflect my deep-rooted anti-tribalism; I identify with a personal statement of Chomsky that he has repeated in different words on more than one occasion to the effect that he always felt alone or part of a tiny minority in terms of his political opinions. The fact that this is the case makes me profoundly pessimistic in terms of my political outlook.)

Of course, I also cheer along with the “Australia Day” dissenters for some of the reasons that the popular commentators are giving. I do think that it’s excellent to raise awareness of the horrors of the process of colonisation and dispossession of this continent, and the  non-systematic genocide (genocide that doesn’t take place in a relatively short time-span with some degree of government-level instruction, organisation or at least endorsement but consists instead of thousands of acts of theft (and destruction) of vital resources, abductions, and of course outright massacres and lynchings over the course of decades or centuries, with the final outcome of a massive reduction in the original population and the loss of entire languages and cultures and ways of living (the validity of the category is strengthened by the fact that Australia is obviously not the only place where this occurred)) that took place over roughly 150 years with a fuzzy final boundary somewhere perhaps in the 1950s or 1960s. This was a nation founded on genocide; our soil is stained with blood. I also think Australia is still a country where racism is probably more widespread and tolerated than in countries with which we otherwise share the most similarities – the place of One Nation and our political culture generally (the output of The Australian) suggests that we may be more racist than our neighbours New Zealand, and also Canada, the country which is economically and socially most similar to us (population size, demographics, economic base and structure (resources, property bubble)) – despite how ethnically diverse we have become over the last forty years, with a very high rate of immigration. This may seem somewhat orthogonal to the issue at hand, but I think that many – me included – see the idea of tarring January 26 as “Invasion Day” and moving Australia Day as a kind of important offensive in the war against Australian racism, and see the movement as an engine for the norm-shift that would be nice to see. Most importantly, the movement to tar January 26 should help (or would ideally help) raise awareness of current problems in indigenous communities in this nation: in particularly, the blood-curdling facts about the gaps in life expectancy and literacy between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

Also, as Mark Kenny writes here (http://www.smh.com.au/comment/australia-day-the-case-for-may-9-20180122-h0m65w.html), there’s also just the obvious argument that January 26 shouldn’t be seen as one of the key dates in the founding of the modern white Australian nation, completely leaving aside all that icky genocide stuff, because that date marked instead the set-up of a penal colony by another nation, not a new nation, and there are other days which just seem nicer to pick.

This said, one of the things that makes my take on this issue very unlike that of most “Invasion Day” partisans is that I suspect that the very fact that the dissent around “our” “national day” has reached this fever pitch is a sign that our society is in what Peter Turchin calls a “disintegrative phase”, also indicated by the political infighting, and that this portends more political chaos and polarisation for our near-term future (which in turn makes me extremely worried about our ability to transform ourselves into the green economy which we could have transformed ourselves into already, or to address increasing wealth inequality). Perhaps I ought to actually do the hard work of seeing if a tweaked version of the Structural-Demographic Theory does actually retrodict the major political fluctuations in Australian history – certainly the contours over the last sixty years aren’t so different from those in the US, and we certainly have seen the same "elite overproduction" in terms of too many people with law degrees – but the reason I make this bold claim without doing this hard work is, of course, because we have seen such an astonishing degree of political dysfunction in this country since the infamous events of the 2009 backstabbing, with no stability of leadership and factional warfare raging in both major parties. And one of the big bold claims at the centre of the research of Turchin and others in the nascent field of cliodynamics is that a state that loses strong cohesion and slides into political dysfunction – a state that loses some of its assabiyah, which is forged by unifying symbols, celebrations and rituals, and is at its strongest when these rituals are at their strongest – loses a lot of other things along with it: becoming more prone to corruption, popular revolts and violence, and more prone to popular immiseration as egalitarian policies and state welfare become untenable due to political dissension.

By introducing these interesting conjectures, I do not mean to suggest that the Invasion Day-meme promoters are fomenting this dissent at the ultimate cost of the stability and health of our entire society; I do not mean to sound like one of the acolytes of the very prominent “social psychologist” Jonathan Haidt[2], who has put forward the extraordinarily grandiose, Hegelian-sounding thesis (e.g. in the Ted talk I watched a few years ago) that the clash of the yin and yang of the disruptive Left and the obdurate Right is the thing that keeps our societies in a healthy equilibrium. (I think that this thesis is so vague as to be meaningless and worthless. The ontology – “Left”, “Right”, “social balance” – is not a scientifically powerful one. I have no truck for claims of this kind.) In fact, it seems clear – whether conservatives like it or not – that Australian society simply cannot be brought into a new equilibrium of cohesion and harmony (even a tenuous one) without some kind of disruption that accommodates the radical dissenters, because it appears that there are now millions of people out there who will not tolerate going along with the national rituals and displays as they exist. These people cannot be re-educated, and so the rituals need to change.

  Actually, it may be ‘uglier’ than that from the point of view of national unity. I think that a huge number of people from my generation are not patriotic at all; many people, like me, also have problems with Anzac Day, and a new date for Australia Day wouldn’t make them suddenly “love Australia” like nationalists do. But, hey, maybe people can co-operate in big societies even without strong unifying banners that transcend the individual tribe. Hopefully, Australian politics can be ‘healed’ (become less dysfunctional and polarised) without a resurgence in more patriotic-type attitudes that help bond people from very different walks of life, with otherwise very different outlooks. But maybe it cannot. I don’t know…

   

Anyhow, the thing that actually motivated me to write all this is that I started (in December) reading (sporadically) Tim Flannery’s The Explorers, his 1998 curation of first-person sources (journal entries or book extracts) by Australian explorers and other adventuring colonists. I’ve only got up to Flinders writing in 1803, but one of the things that Flannery really emphasises with his curation of the sources describing the early years in the Sydney colony (and also Cook and Banks’ interaction with the people who lived along the Endeavour River in 1770 after the big shipwreck at the GBR (account by Banks)) is that the early relations were largely peaceful and good-natured, with people on ‘both sides’ of the massive cultural divide intrigued by the knowledge and innovations of those on the other (and the devastating early smallpox epidemics, which killed so many Sydney aboriginals, were not, it seems, attributed by the local people to the colonists). Of course, there would have been massive white racism and there were abductions, but there were no massacres in the first few years and the word genocide is totally inappropriate to describe this very early period, when the colony was a fledgling, desperately struggling enterprise (before the age of frontier drovers and the like) and the maintenance of good relations with “the natives” was probably vital for the very survival of the colony (hence why Phillip ordered that anyone who killed the Aborigines would be hanged, and endeavoured to become close to the Eora people, leading to his friendship with Bennelong). As many people know, even after Phillip was speared at Manly, he ordered his men not to retaliate. Watkin Tench’s compelling and sometimes funny account of the 1791 expedition with Colbee and Boladeree, Lieutenant Dawes and Governor Phillip to discover if the Nepean and Hawkesbury rivers formed one stream is particularly illuminating in this regard. The interesting thing is that it almost seems as if the desire of the colonists to explore beyond and through tribal boundaries and to cultivate friendly relations with whatever peoples inhabited these regions might have helped to forge better relations between the Aboriginal tribes! Colbee and Boladeree are described as being very wary of going into others’ country and talk often of how bad and infertile the country they are walking through is compared to Rose Hill, but when Watkin Tench and the gang make friends with a friendly man on a canoe with a face “marked by smallpox” (but “a cheerful countenance”) called Gombeèree, we see something else: Colbee and Boladeree start happily talking to this man, and at some point Colbee participates in a healing ritual for Gombeèree: giving another man from his tribe, Yèllomundee, the water he needs to ‘heal’ Gombeèree’s old spear wound by means of some symbolic, animistic medicine (spitting the water onto him and symbolically sucking spear tips out of his chest). Now, it does seem as if Colbee and Boladeree have talked to people from this country before, and I might be wrong on this hypothesis – regardless, it’s heart-warming to see the level of conviviality that was occurring at this stage.

Also, I liked learning about this man: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wilson-john-2803. I’m sure someone has mentioned him to me before, or I’ve read something about him before, but I didn’t know the exact details. Fascinating.

Anyhow, people talking about “Invasion Day” should be aware that the Sydney aborigines didn’t seem to see it that way at first, and it seems that there was little to no indignation about stolen resources and sacred areas, at least while the colony stayed small. Well, perhaps that makes me sound a bit like Keith Windschuttle or something, and I don’t mean to invalidate this phrase. I don’t really think it should sound reactionary to emphasise these early peaceful relations, because they only throw into greater relief the atrocities that occurred later. The Sydney aborigines were not savage, barbarous, obstreperous, irascible, antagonistic or bellicose; they were tolerant and often welcoming. And yet they would eventually be annihilated.

Nothing to celebrate about that.

---

[1] Although it was a joke, I do really believe that the tribal conformity and emotional unity on display in these sorts of occasions is probably much the same phenomenon as one saw in Nazi rallies, or as one sees in the public marches in North Korea

[2] A guy who has done some interesting and important research, but who I think can get really carried away with his conclusions, as we’re about to see. (Also, his seeming belief that he has transcended politics is pretty hilarious, given that he is a political activist.) 

NONLINEAR DYNAMICS

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3861g21r A review of Turchin's Ages of Discord (more an exegesis), which turns into a brief meditation on the limits of conventional mathematical social science (the failure of mathematical social science to model society as the dynamic nonlinear system society is).

Conclusion of this piece says it all!

Would love to find a graduate school somewhere in a couple of years where I can be mentored in developing my own such models...

My Second Extract from Wadhams' Book

Chapter 13: “The State of the Planet”

“[…] It is time to look at the planet as a whole and consider what state we are in.

First, there is no let-up in the rate of growth of greenhouse gas concentrations. Despite all the fine words of politicians and the efforts made by some countries to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, the overwhelming effect of fuel-hungry economic growth in China and India is to continue to drive carbon dioxide concentrations ever upward. Given that levels, which have now reached 409 ppm (mid-2017), are already too high for non-disruptive climate change, the fact that they are continuing to accelerate upwards with no let-up at all is profoundly distressing. They are not even beginning to slow. And let us remember that all of the CO₂ has a potential radiative forcing associated with it. Whether it is absorbed for a while in the ocean or in plants, it has by now been taken out of the ground, put into the climate system and is able to exert that radiative forcing, now or in the future to heat the Earth. As we saw in chapter 9, methane is an even more worrying gas. When its level in the atmosphere flattened off in the late 1990s people were relieved, and thought that some law of nature was asserting itself. It wasn’t, and as of 2008 growth began again and is now approaching the growth rates of the 1980s. It is possibly significant that the resumption of methane growth coincided with large summer retreats of sea ice and associated warming of the Arctic shelf seabed; the link between Arctic offshore processes and global methane levels is becoming more and more firmly established, which means that there is worse to come.

Secondly, every planetary indicator looks negative. The human population, now 7 billion, is projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, and 11.2 billion by 2100. It is difficult to see how these numbers can be fed, given that we are experiencing large-scale climate disruption already, which is affecting the bread baskets of the world. Climate warming is reducing the area of cultivable land in places like sub-Saharan Africa, while theoretically improved yields at high latitudes cannot be realized because of extreme weather events. We are destroying forests. We are running out of water resources. And agriculture, which has to be an intensive, energy-hungry industry in order to feed so many people, is sensitive to shortages of vital raw industrial materials. The Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, for instance, has drawn attention to the growing shortage of phosphorus, a vital element in the production of artificial fertilizers. The UN population predictions for 2100 are particularly worrying because they are split into continents: most continents show a large growth but one which can perhaps be coped with, while Europe shows a decline. However Africa shows a quadrupling in numbers, from 1.1 to 4.4 billion. […]

Since Africa cannot feed itself now, how will it cope with four times as many mouths, especially with global warming disrupting food supplies and causing desertification? The answer is that it won’t. The rest of the world will have to feed Africa. Given that the rest of the world is likely to be obsessed with its own problems, one can foresee a shortage of compassion and a shortage of aid; the result will inevitably be famine on a massive scale […]

The population problem is not just one of food. Every human being is a carbon emitter, and so the problem of reducing total carbon emissions is made much more difficult if there are more people. Every human being needs space for someone to grow the food that he or she requires, so we see massive destruction of forests worldwide at a time when we desperately need more afforestation to reduce carbon dioxide levels. Every human being needs water to drink, and fresh water resources are getting scarcer, so that we may have to depend more on desalination, itself an energy-intensive process that releases carbon. It is difficult to deny the equation: more people = more carbon emissions. Yet we seem to have forgotten the emphasis on the population explosion which concerned analysts of the global system in the 1970s, like the authors of Limits to Growth (1972). The problem hasn’t gone away and it hasn’t been solved, except for a while – by drastic means – in China.

[…]

What can we do?

Emission Reduction

In the past, and even today, green organisations have emphasized what we can do as individuals to mitigate climate change by reducing our carbon emissions. We can recycle our rubbish, insulate our homes, drive smaller cars, eat more vegetables and less meat. All these help, and also instil a sense of global civic virtue, of being aware of the needs of the global village as opposed to our own individual desires. But fi every person in the UK applied every possible energy-saving measure to their normal lives, the result (from those that have tried it) is a reduction of only about 20 per cent in energy use. Useful, but, as the late Professor Sir David MacKay, the UK Government’s chief scientific adviser on energy and climate, said, ‘If everyone does a little, we will achieve only a little.’

There is no doubt that to achieve more than a little, political decisions have to be made on energy production, which means that political courage must be shown by governments. Here despair sets in when one considers the history of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) discussions, where the early optimism of the Kyoto Protocol (1997) gave way to the terrible failure of the Copenhagen (2009) and Durban (2011) meetings. Sadly, a typical politician’s first response to the climate change criis is to only quote predictions for this century, or even less, and to assume that climate change stops as soon as the IPCC graphs go beyond the 2100 limit. Britain’s own past Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Owen Paterson, said on 29 September 2013, with astounding complacency,

“I think the relief of this latest report is that it shows a really quite modest increase, half of which has already happened. They are talking one to two and a half degrees.”

Firstly, of course, ‘they’ were no the IPCC itself but an ignorant newspaper report on which he apparently relied for his knowledge. The 1-2.5­^o­C is actually forecast for 2050. The ‘half of which has already happened’ demonstrates that he imaged that climate change stops at the end of the IPCC projections instead of going on. And of course the word ‘relief’ is the real giveaway; it was also, no doubt, a relief that he thought that he could get away without taking any action at all.

A typical politician’s second response is that we can reduce our carbon emissions some time in the future (typically ’30 per cent by 2032’ or some suchlike figure) and thus stop climate change from getting out of control. This neatly lets current politicians off the hook. But it is untrue. For a start, the CO₂ already put into the atmosphere has a flywheel effect – a molecule of CO₂ lasts for much more than 100 years in the climate system and the world has yet to catch up on the potential warming of existing CO₂ (maybe only half has been ‘realized’). So reducing our emissions in the future is much less useful than reducing our emissions now, and reducing our emissions now is less useful than actually reducing carbon levels. The most useful things to do would be actually to reduce the amount of CO₂, for example by switching 100 per cent to nuclear power, which public opinion makes impossible; or to use technology to mask warming, i.e. put a sticking plaster on it, by geoengineering, buying us a little time. Nothing else can save us from serious consequences, although of course CO₂ reduction is still absolutely necessary. In this case the so-called ‘green’ organizations, such as Greenpeace and WWF, are unhelpful to humanity because of their opposition to both nuclear power and geoengineering.

The ratchet effect of carbon is rather like the ratchet effect of human population. Put very crudely, the ‘natural’ level of CO₂ in the atmosphere during interglacial periods is 280 parts per million (ppm) and thus of the present level of 409 ppm, more than 120 ppm has been put there by Man burning fossil fuels. Supposing we stopped emitting CO₂ altogether, all of a sudden. How fast would CO₂ levels go down? Well, with the survival time of added CO₂ in the Earth’s energy system being at least 100 years, we might expect a maximum of 1 per cent of the added CO₂ to ‘fall out’ of the system per year, so CO₂ levels would diminish only 1.2 ppm in the first year of carbon abstinence. It will take forty-five years to bring the level down to the 350 ppm which most scientists think is ‘safe’. Similarly, with the human population being 7 billion and an average lifetime of, say, seventy years, if humans completely ceased to reproduce it would take ten years for the population to diminish to 6 billion by natural decline. So if a food production crisis hits due to climate change and reduces our capacity to feed people by a billion, it will be impossible to match these new lower levels of food production quickly by birth control alone – nature will instead inflict mass starvation on us.

If we continue on our present path, eventually all hydrocarbons in the Earth will be extracted and burned, so our love-orgy with oil will have to come to an end. But by that time global warming will have become so extreme that life will be insufferable, if not impossible. We need a new Manhattan Project to clean up our atmosphere, an effort by the world greater than any effort that it has ever made, and it must be worldwide because we all breathe the same air. In the absence of such an effort the effects of climate change will become very apparent quite a short time into the future – in twenty or thirty years the world will be a different and much nastier place than it is now. There will never be another era for Man like the one that ended with the economic crisis of 2007. People will need to consider their personal futures and will try to live in cool countries like Norway or Canada, with low populations and many resources. This leads to the serious question, if it is now too late for us to preserve our planet by reducing or eliminating carbon emissions, because have left it too late to start the process and because we live in a society in which high carbon emissions are ‘built in’ to the social and physical fabric, what can we do? There are only two possibilities: use technical methods to reduce the rate of warming while allowing CO₂ levels to continue to increase; or develop even more advanced technical means to actually take CO₂ out of the atmosphere […]”

Wadhams’ thoughts on geoengineering will be extracted soon…