Can anyone make some sense of this?
'The subcellular localisations of oxidases generating ROS under conditions where the effects of hypoxia are examined and components of energy metabolism-associated systems maintaining redox control create a potential organisation for regulation of redox sensitive components of signalling systems in regions where changes in oxygen tension result in alterations in redox.'
taken from Wolin et al., 2007
Sometimes scientific literature annoys me, and sometimes it dives into the realms of the ridiculous. He goes on:
'For example, the loss of maintenance of reduced thioredoxin and GSH as a pool of NADPH is allowed to oxidase is likely to be associated with an accumulation of oxidised thioredoxin or GSSG, which may be co-factors in enzymatic reactions controlling the redox status of protein thiols involved in the regulation of a process such as relaxation or contraction.'
I like long sentences, but I also like them to be meaningful. Let this be a lesson to me about how, perhaps, people might feel when they read some of my more complex concoctions.
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
Responses to comments
I agree that private schools suck up the best teachers. It seems unfair if one imagines that very good teachers can improve any pupil, even if all other factors remain the same.
But if we take that assumption, then simply having different quality teachers is unfair, no matter where they are. So we can't really solve the problem entirely, although forcing teachers to work where we choose in order to keep schools' teaching abilities level will reduce the inequality.
On a practical note, that's just what people have tried to do to junior doctors, and the doctors are outraged. The good doctors don't see why they should suffer bad jobs just to satisfy unpleasant patients; good doctors have the strange belief that as better doctors they might do better in the better jobs, and make more difference there than struggling in almost hopeless jobs.
And the government has recanted and scrapped its disastrous system.
I think that teaching is similar. It's not simply that a good teacher will get the same amount more out of any pupil, but that a good teacher can get a bigger improvement from a good pupil, whereas some bad pupils will not respond to any teacher. I'd also suggest that there's a limit to what good pupils can learn from bad teachers.
All of which means that good teachers have more effect with good pupils, so it makes sense to put them there. Of course, private schools don't take all the good pupils, even if they have extensive bursary schemes; but were the private schools not providing some selection, the good teachers would be mostly wasted, especially if they are required to spend more of their time with bad pupils. Private schools are clearly not an optimal solution, but they're better than not having private schools. The optimal solution would be to bring back grammar schools, which although they do miss some people, would enable almost all the best pupils from any background better to fulfill their ability.
But the currently fashionable opinion is that grammar schools are a bad thing; so much so that no political party supports them any more.
But if we take that assumption, then simply having different quality teachers is unfair, no matter where they are. So we can't really solve the problem entirely, although forcing teachers to work where we choose in order to keep schools' teaching abilities level will reduce the inequality.
On a practical note, that's just what people have tried to do to junior doctors, and the doctors are outraged. The good doctors don't see why they should suffer bad jobs just to satisfy unpleasant patients; good doctors have the strange belief that as better doctors they might do better in the better jobs, and make more difference there than struggling in almost hopeless jobs.
And the government has recanted and scrapped its disastrous system.
I think that teaching is similar. It's not simply that a good teacher will get the same amount more out of any pupil, but that a good teacher can get a bigger improvement from a good pupil, whereas some bad pupils will not respond to any teacher. I'd also suggest that there's a limit to what good pupils can learn from bad teachers.
All of which means that good teachers have more effect with good pupils, so it makes sense to put them there. Of course, private schools don't take all the good pupils, even if they have extensive bursary schemes; but were the private schools not providing some selection, the good teachers would be mostly wasted, especially if they are required to spend more of their time with bad pupils. Private schools are clearly not an optimal solution, but they're better than not having private schools. The optimal solution would be to bring back grammar schools, which although they do miss some people, would enable almost all the best pupils from any background better to fulfill their ability.
But the currently fashionable opinion is that grammar schools are a bad thing; so much so that no political party supports them any more.
Equality and Education (from Jan. 2008)
Inspired by:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7189402.stm
and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7189874.stm
I was astonished by Wellington's headmaster's views on private schools. These schools take money from taxpaying parents and give them an education whilst the parents' taxes are kept and spent on education for others.
Already it seems that these people are being unfairly treated. They're paying twice for something that everyone else pays once for. But we can justify that, by saying that it's their choice to pay again. They don't like what their first payment gets them, and put their money where their mouths are. Very admirable, very upright and honest, I'd have thought.
Apparently not. These people are evil, stealing teachers, pupils, facilities, university places and results from those hard-working state-school pupils!
Well first let me deal with the quick ones. The facilities would not exist were they not paid for by school fees. Hence they are not stolen from anyone, nor can they possibly deprive anyone of anything.
The pupils are indeed no longer at state schools, but we've just established that pupils are expensive, so stealing them is not a crime, but a generosity (we'll get to a proposed exception in a moment).
University places are awarded by results, so they hardly count as a separate instance of theft. Results are awarded by merit, and therefore not stolen, but earned.
Finally, we get to teachers. Yes, better teachers will go to better schools. To divide schools into groups and say that better schools are stealing the better teachers is simply to state a fact that occurs throughout any workforce. Better shops get better shop assistants. Nicer customers will retain nicer salesmen. It's hardly the fault of a shop if people want to work for it; if it's its responsibility at all, most people would praise the shop for having such a status.
Schools are perceived differently, I would suggest, because people regard education as a right. And to an extent, I'd agree: in this country, we have established access to an education as a right and necessity for children up to 16. But the difference in how I phrased that is importantl. I said 'access to' education. And so many people think that if someone else is getting a better education, their rights are being infringed. Yet at the same time these people acknowledge that brighter pupils learn more, more quickly, which can be described as a better education.
So how can they reconcile the acknowledgement that people have different abilities with the desire for everyone to achieve the same amount? The only solution is for everyone to achieve at the lowest level, and this is what the comprehensive system achieves very well.
And yet I'd say that such a system is also intrinsically unfair, because those intelligent pupils are not being allowed access to education; they are being denied what they could learn. Why should we add to the unfairness of life, in making some people stupid, by acting unfairly; by making everyone else effectively stupid too?
Education is not a material item that can be imparted equally to everyone, no matter their varying abilities to use it. Education is an interactive process, whereby the more capable and motivated make themselves receive more. In this respect education is much like life in general.
But people insist on attempting to distribute education as though motivation and ability were not making a difference. And by doing so they discriminate against the motivated and talented, because these people will do well, and hence receive less effort to educate, because the effort is not spread evenly, but instead spread so as to achieve even results.
As in so many areas of life, I don't judge actions by their results, and nor do most people. If I attempt to murder a man, but miss, and instead save his life, I will still be prosecuted for attempted murder. If I help a runner in a race and he draws for first place, I have still cheated.
I don't see why the good teachers shouldn't go to where the good pupils are, or where the money is. Why should we spread teaching (or medical care) across the country so that no-one can get a good education? That just deprives the talented people of their access to an education.
A good teacher in one place necessarily deprives everywhere else of his teaching. If we followed current principles we'd have the whole country taught by one teacher, because that way no-one would miss out.
If private schools were simply schools with the same mix of talent and motivation in their pupils, but offering more money, I'd still say that they don't necessarily steal teachers from state schools. They create a sanctuary for teachers who might not otherwise become teachers.
The complaint about pupils also suggests that state schools are often deprived of talented pupils. Many private schools are selective, and so in a way it's a reasonable complaint. But what does it mean to be 'deprived of talented pupils'? Why are talented pupils a benefit if everyone is to be treated equally?
Of course, we're not supposed to treat pupils equally. Talented pupils take less time to receive the set 'amount' of education that must be dispensed, making the school's job easier. That's why not having them is a deprivation: because without them one cannot steal from their potential in order to compensate for others' lack of ability or motivation.
But as I've explained, education is not a material thing; it's an effort. Talented pupils to reach their potential as much as bad ones, and to resort to the revolting 'sheep and goats' theory ignores this entirely.
This theory categorises children into sheep (who follow the leader) and goats (who lead), after the old trick of putting some goats into a flock of sheep to give the flock some intelligence. The idea was that putting some talented pupils into a class of bad or average ones would raise the ability of the rest, letting them achieve more.
Even as it stands, I don't see the justification. The idea is to deprive a few talented pupils of what they could achieve in order to give more to others who could not achieve without them.
However, that's not how children actually work! In reality, the very bad pupils are the goats, and the average and talented pupils are the sheep; putting bad with better makes everyone bad, rather than everyone better. Everyone must go at the speed of the slowest, not at an average speed of the class in general. So mixing talent together simply deprives the talented of what they might otherwise achieve.
Modern politics is firmly against splitting people up based on talent. It's derided as divisive and elitist; it makes people feel like failures. None of which seem to me to be a bad thing. If people are divided into different talents, if there is an elite, and if some people fail to reach that level, I can't see a problem with recognising it. However, people are still blinded by their desperate desire for everything to be equal. We must be equal, people think, because that's what our society is about, isn't it? So in the face of all the evidence, people refuse to accept that nature grants us varying degrees of ability, and refuse to build a system around reality.
In fact, as I've described above, people try to build a system to create their ideal of everyone being equal, even though the structure of the system implicitly recognises that we are not!
The point I'd like to make is that our society is not actually founded on the ideal of everyone being equal, and nor can we ever achieve a functional society so founded. I read about a dystopia once in which a man woke up in the future in a museum 'stasis chamber' as an example of the distant past. He was shown a world in which he gradually saw decrees issued to ensure that everyone was equal, which sounds a laudable aim in the abstract. But to ensure that everyone was equal at first they were all bald. Then all mandated to walk slowly. Then all disfigured. Then all forced to chop an arm off...
To make people equal is not a laudable aim at all, nor a plausible one. We must aim to treat them equally; to give equality of opportunity. In order to do this in education we need to teach the talented to the best of their ability just as much as the untalented. Stealing time or potential from the talented to help the untalented is not equality of opportunity or treatment.
So state schools still cannot complain if they have no talented pupils. If those pupils are better able to reach their potential in private institutions (and they certainly are) then private schools are serving society very well, whilst allowing state schools more time to deal with less talented pupils.
The idea that if private schools introduced bursaries so that talented poor pupils can attend they'd still not be doing enough is ludicrous, and grates horribly on me. State schools have no intrinsic right to good pupils, nor a right to good results or university places. What matters is that each pupil gets the education he can use, and private schools with bursary systems fills that purpose perfectly. To expect more is simply ridiculous, and a result of unthinking bias against private institutions.
Similarly, to claim that private schools, with the 166 state grammar schools, have an unfair stranglehold on good university places is a revolting inversion of the problem. There is no fault with these selective, high-achieving schools; the fact that they have such a stranglehold proves that selection works to help bright people achieve their best. So it is an example of success, not a sad fact to be bemoaned.
If he wishes to bemoan this fact, he should realise that the underlying reason for it is that people are not intrinsically equal, but that he thinks they all are and should be but are not (and can't seem to make up his mind which).
Why do people have such trouble with natural variability in education? I think that in education it is a problem because motivation can make such a difference that it is indistinguishable from talent. And people do not want to take responsibility for their actions, as I mentioned earlier today. People want the end result to be the same; they want desiring something to be enough to make one deserve it, rather than working for it too.
And as with over-eating, this is reinforced by media and government campaigns and policies when it should be fought.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi
and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi
I was astonished by Wellington's headmaster's views on private schools. These schools take money from taxpaying parents and give them an education whilst the parents' taxes are kept and spent on education for others.
Already it seems that these people are being unfairly treated. They're paying twice for something that everyone else pays once for. But we can justify that, by saying that it's their choice to pay again. They don't like what their first payment gets them, and put their money where their mouths are. Very admirable, very upright and honest, I'd have thought.
Apparently not. These people are evil, stealing teachers, pupils, facilities, university places and results from those hard-working state-school pupils!
Well first let me deal with the quick ones. The facilities would not exist were they not paid for by school fees. Hence they are not stolen from anyone, nor can they possibly deprive anyone of anything.
The pupils are indeed no longer at state schools, but we've just established that pupils are expensive, so stealing them is not a crime, but a generosity (we'll get to a proposed exception in a moment).
University places are awarded by results, so they hardly count as a separate instance of theft. Results are awarded by merit, and therefore not stolen, but earned.
Finally, we get to teachers. Yes, better teachers will go to better schools. To divide schools into groups and say that better schools are stealing the better teachers is simply to state a fact that occurs throughout any workforce. Better shops get better shop assistants. Nicer customers will retain nicer salesmen. It's hardly the fault of a shop if people want to work for it; if it's its responsibility at all, most people would praise the shop for having such a status.
Schools are perceived differently, I would suggest, because people regard education as a right. And to an extent, I'd agree: in this country, we have established access to an education as a right and necessity for children up to 16. But the difference in how I phrased that is importantl. I said 'access to' education. And so many people think that if someone else is getting a better education, their rights are being infringed. Yet at the same time these people acknowledge that brighter pupils learn more, more quickly, which can be described as a better education.
So how can they reconcile the acknowledgement that people have different abilities with the desire for everyone to achieve the same amount? The only solution is for everyone to achieve at the lowest level, and this is what the comprehensive system achieves very well.
And yet I'd say that such a system is also intrinsically unfair, because those intelligent pupils are not being allowed access to education; they are being denied what they could learn. Why should we add to the unfairness of life, in making some people stupid, by acting unfairly; by making everyone else effectively stupid too?
Education is not a material item that can be imparted equally to everyone, no matter their varying abilities to use it. Education is an interactive process, whereby the more capable and motivated make themselves receive more. In this respect education is much like life in general.
But people insist on attempting to distribute education as though motivation and ability were not making a difference. And by doing so they discriminate against the motivated and talented, because these people will do well, and hence receive less effort to educate, because the effort is not spread evenly, but instead spread so as to achieve even results.
As in so many areas of life, I don't judge actions by their results, and nor do most people. If I attempt to murder a man, but miss, and instead save his life, I will still be prosecuted for attempted murder. If I help a runner in a race and he draws for first place, I have still cheated.
I don't see why the good teachers shouldn't go to where the good pupils are, or where the money is. Why should we spread teaching (or medical care) across the country so that no-one can get a good education? That just deprives the talented people of their access to an education.
A good teacher in one place necessarily deprives everywhere else of his teaching. If we followed current principles we'd have the whole country taught by one teacher, because that way no-one would miss out.
If private schools were simply schools with the same mix of talent and motivation in their pupils, but offering more money, I'd still say that they don't necessarily steal teachers from state schools. They create a sanctuary for teachers who might not otherwise become teachers.
The complaint about pupils also suggests that state schools are often deprived of talented pupils. Many private schools are selective, and so in a way it's a reasonable complaint. But what does it mean to be 'deprived of talented pupils'? Why are talented pupils a benefit if everyone is to be treated equally?
Of course, we're not supposed to treat pupils equally. Talented pupils take less time to receive the set 'amount' of education that must be dispensed, making the school's job easier. That's why not having them is a deprivation: because without them one cannot steal from their potential in order to compensate for others' lack of ability or motivation.
But as I've explained, education is not a material thing; it's an effort. Talented pupils to reach their potential as much as bad ones, and to resort to the revolting 'sheep and goats' theory ignores this entirely.
This theory categorises children into sheep (who follow the leader) and goats (who lead), after the old trick of putting some goats into a flock of sheep to give the flock some intelligence. The idea was that putting some talented pupils into a class of bad or average ones would raise the ability of the rest, letting them achieve more.
Even as it stands, I don't see the justification. The idea is to deprive a few talented pupils of what they could achieve in order to give more to others who could not achieve without them.
However, that's not how children actually work! In reality, the very bad pupils are the goats, and the average and talented pupils are the sheep; putting bad with better makes everyone bad, rather than everyone better. Everyone must go at the speed of the slowest, not at an average speed of the class in general. So mixing talent together simply deprives the talented of what they might otherwise achieve.
Modern politics is firmly against splitting people up based on talent. It's derided as divisive and elitist; it makes people feel like failures. None of which seem to me to be a bad thing. If people are divided into different talents, if there is an elite, and if some people fail to reach that level, I can't see a problem with recognising it. However, people are still blinded by their desperate desire for everything to be equal. We must be equal, people think, because that's what our society is about, isn't it? So in the face of all the evidence, people refuse to accept that nature grants us varying degrees of ability, and refuse to build a system around reality.
In fact, as I've described above, people try to build a system to create their ideal of everyone being equal, even though the structure of the system implicitly recognises that we are not!
The point I'd like to make is that our society is not actually founded on the ideal of everyone being equal, and nor can we ever achieve a functional society so founded. I read about a dystopia once in which a man woke up in the future in a museum 'stasis chamber' as an example of the distant past. He was shown a world in which he gradually saw decrees issued to ensure that everyone was equal, which sounds a laudable aim in the abstract. But to ensure that everyone was equal at first they were all bald. Then all mandated to walk slowly. Then all disfigured. Then all forced to chop an arm off...
To make people equal is not a laudable aim at all, nor a plausible one. We must aim to treat them equally; to give equality of opportunity. In order to do this in education we need to teach the talented to the best of their ability just as much as the untalented. Stealing time or potential from the talented to help the untalented is not equality of opportunity or treatment.
So state schools still cannot complain if they have no talented pupils. If those pupils are better able to reach their potential in private institutions (and they certainly are) then private schools are serving society very well, whilst allowing state schools more time to deal with less talented pupils.
The idea that if private schools introduced bursaries so that talented poor pupils can attend they'd still not be doing enough is ludicrous, and grates horribly on me. State schools have no intrinsic right to good pupils, nor a right to good results or university places. What matters is that each pupil gets the education he can use, and private schools with bursary systems fills that purpose perfectly. To expect more is simply ridiculous, and a result of unthinking bias against private institutions.
Similarly, to claim that private schools, with the 166 state grammar schools, have an unfair stranglehold on good university places is a revolting inversion of the problem. There is no fault with these selective, high-achieving schools; the fact that they have such a stranglehold proves that selection works to help bright people achieve their best. So it is an example of success, not a sad fact to be bemoaned.
If he wishes to bemoan this fact, he should realise that the underlying reason for it is that people are not intrinsically equal, but that he thinks they all are and should be but are not (and can't seem to make up his mind which).
Why do people have such trouble with natural variability in education? I think that in education it is a problem because motivation can make such a difference that it is indistinguishable from talent. And people do not want to take responsibility for their actions, as I mentioned earlier today. People want the end result to be the same; they want desiring something to be enough to make one deserve it, rather than working for it too.
And as with over-eating, this is reinforced by media and government campaigns and policies when it should be fought.
Laziness and obesity (from jan. 2008)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7189889.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7189967.stm
I was browsing the news, and came across, in the same day, two stories (admittedly inspired by the same event) bemoaning modern diets, and blaming modern health problems on them.
People are becoming obsessed with diets: eat less fat, eat more vegetables, eat less sugar, and this is supported by government, charity and media campaigns about our health.
Here we have a rather sad report that most people do not see treats as treats, but as perfectly normal. I'd agree that it's sad news, but more because of what is says about modern psychological attitudes. When it comes to diet, I'm only beginning to care, but not for the reasons I'm told to.
I care that there are no king-sized chocolate bars, that all crisps are now low-fat and that snacks such as sausage rolls and Peperami are now low-fat and low-calorie. I care that the frozen pizzas that I rely on as quick meals when I'm in a rush are gradually lowering their calorie content.
The reason is partly consumer pressure (king-size bars were deliberately removed, apparently), and partly market forces as a result of consumer tastes. Consumer tastes have been influenced in this regard by these health campaigns.
Now it's all very well wanting people to be healthy, but am I really going to be healthy if I expend 5,000 KCal a day and only manage to eat 4,500 because my pizzas have had their content reduced by 500? Am I going to be healthy if instead of one low-calorie pizza I eat two, and consume 6,500 KCal a day?
I'd have thought it obvious that quantity of food was far more important than calorie content. I also feel obliged to point out the less obvious fact that low fat often means high sugar, which is probably even less healthy.
Meanwhile children are fed skimmed milk, not given red meat, but instead brought up on insipid food with reduced nutritional value. If I had a bowl of cereal with full-fat milk, would I need a packet of crisps at mid-morning? The problem of wanting it all is affecting our nation's health not because we expect treats like chocolate, but because we expect to eat too much food and not grow fat from it. And if we feed children insipid foods, they will pester us for snacks in between meals.
So supermarkets are under pressure not to store chocolates at children's eye level, and various people have called for a fat tax on foods rich in calories. But it's not the calories that are the problem. It's the people's wanton gluttony. You can grow fat from eating too much muesli and organic chicken if you try hard enough.
And this inability to resist temptation is apparent in other parts of the campaigns, such as the desire to restrict advertising, and remove snacks from where children can see them. Why should children not know what exists simply because you are too weak to say 'no'? Why should children be malnourished simply because their parents cannot limit their intake quanititively, and therefore buy and share food with minimal nutritional value?
And, here is why I am beginning to care, why should I pay the same amount for food that has less nutritional value for me? I realise that in a free market market forces decide what is best, but here I suspect that market forces are being manipulated by ignorance. These health campaigns are what are persuading people to buy low fat products, and so companies follow the purchases.
But 100 doses of 30 calories will be just as bad as 30 doses of 100 calories. Eventually people will make themselves fat unless they can learn to control their desires and resist temptation. All the modern health campaigns are doing is ensuring that people spend more money on their ill-health. People clearly do not care about cost when it comes to desires; if they did no-one would smoke.
So raising prices of nutritional food will simply make life more expensive for those people who are capable of managing temptation, and as a consequence buy and eat good food. It will make it more expensive to feed children properly on staple foods such as cheese. And it will make exercise an even more expensive hobby.
Which brings me nicely onto the other great unspoken problem. Exercise is a far better way of dealing with fat than dieting. And yet gym membership costs a few hundred pounds a year.
We're bombarded with messages about diet, but as many (mostly fat) cynics point out, dieting leads to metabolic abnormalities, 'starvation mode' and rebound obesity. And yet these mostly fat and lazy cynics fail to point out that exercise suffers none of these problems. "Dieting is bad for you", I've seen it said, "so being fat isn't bad"!
I know I could have written this a little more succinctly, but it seems to me that our health campaigns are focussing on precisely the wrong thing. We're being urged to change our diets through spending money on 'healthy' foods, when the cheaper solution would be to spend less money on food.
If people aren't into cheap, it must be because it is hard for them to try other solutions. But given the huge effect that health campaigns have managed to have on people's purchases, it would make far more sense if they were encouraged instead to eat less or do more exercise, or stop giving in to children's demands for treats all the time.
But here's the rub. People are so unwilling to resist temptation that instead of accepting the consequences, they are asking for temptation to be removed, even though it removes benefits from those upright citizens who can control themselves. And the government and charities are playing along, avoiding focussing on the real solution or the real problem.
Which is a problem not with foods that we're being sold, nor with greedy corporations marketing unhealthy foods to us. It's not even with greedy corporations marketing nutritionless foods to us so that we have to buy more of them, nor even with people eating too much and doing too little exercise.
It's a wider problem than that, a problem of which eating too much is only a symptom, and it's that people simply will not take responsibility for their own actions, nor act responsibly. Our health problems are a result of laziness and irresponsibility, but that's not a message that people will accept. They wont accept it because...? Because they're too busy giving themselves treats simply because of the intention or effort to do well that they don't have time for criticism.
I agree that we have a crisis, but it won't be solved by changing the prices of food. If we somehow engineer the food market so that no-one can get fat, people's laziness and irresponsibility will remain, and disrupt other aspects of life.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi
I was browsing the news, and came across, in the same day, two stories (admittedly inspired by the same event) bemoaning modern diets, and blaming modern health problems on them.
People are becoming obsessed with diets: eat less fat, eat more vegetables, eat less sugar, and this is supported by government, charity and media campaigns about our health.
Here we have a rather sad report that most people do not see treats as treats, but as perfectly normal. I'd agree that it's sad news, but more because of what is says about modern psychological attitudes. When it comes to diet, I'm only beginning to care, but not for the reasons I'm told to.
I care that there are no king-sized chocolate bars, that all crisps are now low-fat and that snacks such as sausage rolls and Peperami are now low-fat and low-calorie. I care that the frozen pizzas that I rely on as quick meals when I'm in a rush are gradually lowering their calorie content.
The reason is partly consumer pressure (king-size bars were deliberately removed, apparently), and partly market forces as a result of consumer tastes. Consumer tastes have been influenced in this regard by these health campaigns.
Now it's all very well wanting people to be healthy, but am I really going to be healthy if I expend 5,000 KCal a day and only manage to eat 4,500 because my pizzas have had their content reduced by 500? Am I going to be healthy if instead of one low-calorie pizza I eat two, and consume 6,500 KCal a day?
I'd have thought it obvious that quantity of food was far more important than calorie content. I also feel obliged to point out the less obvious fact that low fat often means high sugar, which is probably even less healthy.
Meanwhile children are fed skimmed milk, not given red meat, but instead brought up on insipid food with reduced nutritional value. If I had a bowl of cereal with full-fat milk, would I need a packet of crisps at mid-morning? The problem of wanting it all is affecting our nation's health not because we expect treats like chocolate, but because we expect to eat too much food and not grow fat from it. And if we feed children insipid foods, they will pester us for snacks in between meals.
So supermarkets are under pressure not to store chocolates at children's eye level, and various people have called for a fat tax on foods rich in calories. But it's not the calories that are the problem. It's the people's wanton gluttony. You can grow fat from eating too much muesli and organic chicken if you try hard enough.
And this inability to resist temptation is apparent in other parts of the campaigns, such as the desire to restrict advertising, and remove snacks from where children can see them. Why should children not know what exists simply because you are too weak to say 'no'? Why should children be malnourished simply because their parents cannot limit their intake quanititively, and therefore buy and share food with minimal nutritional value?
And, here is why I am beginning to care, why should I pay the same amount for food that has less nutritional value for me? I realise that in a free market market forces decide what is best, but here I suspect that market forces are being manipulated by ignorance. These health campaigns are what are persuading people to buy low fat products, and so companies follow the purchases.
But 100 doses of 30 calories will be just as bad as 30 doses of 100 calories. Eventually people will make themselves fat unless they can learn to control their desires and resist temptation. All the modern health campaigns are doing is ensuring that people spend more money on their ill-health. People clearly do not care about cost when it comes to desires; if they did no-one would smoke.
So raising prices of nutritional food will simply make life more expensive for those people who are capable of managing temptation, and as a consequence buy and eat good food. It will make it more expensive to feed children properly on staple foods such as cheese. And it will make exercise an even more expensive hobby.
Which brings me nicely onto the other great unspoken problem. Exercise is a far better way of dealing with fat than dieting. And yet gym membership costs a few hundred pounds a year.
We're bombarded with messages about diet, but as many (mostly fat) cynics point out, dieting leads to metabolic abnormalities, 'starvation mode' and rebound obesity. And yet these mostly fat and lazy cynics fail to point out that exercise suffers none of these problems. "Dieting is bad for you", I've seen it said, "so being fat isn't bad"!
I know I could have written this a little more succinctly, but it seems to me that our health campaigns are focussing on precisely the wrong thing. We're being urged to change our diets through spending money on 'healthy' foods, when the cheaper solution would be to spend less money on food.
If people aren't into cheap, it must be because it is hard for them to try other solutions. But given the huge effect that health campaigns have managed to have on people's purchases, it would make far more sense if they were encouraged instead to eat less or do more exercise, or stop giving in to children's demands for treats all the time.
But here's the rub. People are so unwilling to resist temptation that instead of accepting the consequences, they are asking for temptation to be removed, even though it removes benefits from those upright citizens who can control themselves. And the government and charities are playing along, avoiding focussing on the real solution or the real problem.
Which is a problem not with foods that we're being sold, nor with greedy corporations marketing unhealthy foods to us. It's not even with greedy corporations marketing nutritionless foods to us so that we have to buy more of them, nor even with people eating too much and doing too little exercise.
It's a wider problem than that, a problem of which eating too much is only a symptom, and it's that people simply will not take responsibility for their own actions, nor act responsibly. Our health problems are a result of laziness and irresponsibility, but that's not a message that people will accept. They wont accept it because...? Because they're too busy giving themselves treats simply because of the intention or effort to do well that they don't have time for criticism.
I agree that we have a crisis, but it won't be solved by changing the prices of food. If we somehow engineer the food market so that no-one can get fat, people's laziness and irresponsibility will remain, and disrupt other aspects of life.
Monday, 23 February 2009
The role of violence
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,450884,00.html
I was told about this story (the above link to Fox News is the first one that appeared on a Google search) and I mentioned that she was being rather provocative. Understandably, I got pounced on because it sounded as though I was blaming her for the assault and excusing her attackers. I didn't mean that, of course: I said what I meant and neglected to couch my speech in the necessary obeisances to my interlocutor's preconceived notions.
I agree that violence is not a nice thing. We have societies, in part, in order to curb our violent instincts and protect us from those of others. That these protesters attacked the woman was a crime and one for which they should be punished.
But we also have societies in order better to receive and mete out justice. In the U.S.A., there is a constitutional aim of allowing people to pursue life, liberty and happiness, based on the idea that if it doesn't interfere with others, it shouldn't be a problem. This arose from overcrowding and poverty in Europe, but also from religious intolerance. The 'founding fathers' regarded such persecution as evil, and went to great lengths to found a nation free from it; an aim that most people, within and without the U.S.A. will agree is laudable.
And yet here we have a little old lady who thinks it right and proper to abuse the immense power of the state to prevent innocent people from pursuing happiness without interfering in anyone else's life, based on her religious beliefs.
I grew up with other young boys and, as young boys do, we occasionally got into fights. The next day we might not all be friends, but we'd get on with our lives. A few bruises more or less didn't matter too much: it's a rough-and-tumble world.
There were also people who mercilessly persecuted certain victims by exclusion, insult, intimidation, theft and vandalism. Day in, day out these people would pursue their agenda of destroying others' lives for their own twisted personal reasons.
Can you guess which of these two types of agression the victims found more unpleasant?
I believe that some things are far worse than a bit of violence. Of course violence is a wide range of things, and murder is harder to reverse than bullying... but then extreme bullying can be felt very much like a slow death of torture, and allows little in the way of a decent life.
People have a slightly disturbing tendency to focus on violence to the exclusion of other unpleasantness. I went to a meeting last week at which the talk was entitled something like 'Why we no longer need men'. The talk started with the suggestion that pathenogenesis made sperm unnecessary (sadly this is not, to the best of my knowledge, true, because we have not yet managed to remethylate DNA appropriately) and then focussed on the idea that men are responsible for much of the evil in the world.
Men, apparently, are the perpetrators of 85% of crimes and form 90-95% of the prison population (suggesting that they are responsible for an even larger proportion of serious crime). We can also dive into the stereotypical feminist spiel about men starting wars, men competing and men lusting for and working towards power over others.
Even if I ignore the problems of generalising from a category to all its members, or of applying collective punishment (as a gradual 'phasing-out' of men could be considered to be), I think that we're missing something important, and to make my point I shall indulge in some stereotyping of my own; when I refer to women, I could perhaps be taken to be saying 'people with characteristics traditionally labelled as feminine and believed to occur more often in women'.
Women also like power. However, women chase power in a different way. They are said to be more interested in social relationships, in group dynamics (and tend to be more collectivist in general) and in emotions. Men are said to be physical creatures, keen on DIY, spatial reasoning and hand-to-eye co-ordination. Women are more spiritual (confirmed by psychology surveys, if you're interested). Given these stereotypes, which do not even begin to judge crime, we would naturally expect men to commit more violent crime.
However, there is an opposite of this conclusion: that women will commit more 'emotional violence'. A world without men might have less physical violence, but would not necessarily be a better place: a point I made at the meeting, but given the light-hearted attitude of many attendees, one that I did not need to expound apon further. Of course, the more accurate way to describe this conclusion would be 'a world without those traits traditionally called masculine would not be a better one'. The traits themselves are not bad: they merely lead to certain types of bad actions, just as 'feminine' traits lead to other actions, good and bad.
If I were given a choice between a world in which people initiated physical violence when angry or upset, or a world in which they always indulged in emotional manipulation, I would choose the former. Violence seems more honest; emotional manipulation spiteful and backhanded. Violence is open; emotional manipulation secretive and furtive. If we are to condemn the abuse of power, then the abuse of social relationships in the 'feminine' manner seems at least as bad as the overt threat of physical violence in the 'masculine' manner. It is not just the poor victims of bullying at school who might agree: more recently a friend of mine told me about his time teaching in a 'sink-school'. He encountered a fair amount of animosity, I gather, but was quite clear that the girls' calumnous rumours and mocking were much more unpleasant than the boys' knives and fists.
The final point will be extremely truncated (for now: I hope to return to the relationship between collectivism and morality at some point) might be that men tend to be more independent. Independence from social pressures inevitably leads to less obedience to social rules, and could be considered to be a firm point in favour of calling women the fairer sex. However, independence and autonomy can be considered intrinsically desirable, and can lead to great advances as well as crimes. It is similar to the question of whether we should use mind-control to prevent crime; preventing crime is a good thing for society, but if we reduce humans to controlled automatons then we have lost their (and possibly our) humanity, and forgotten the purpose of society entirely.
I could go on about the links between mind-control and religion, or forestall critical comment about how social pressure is an integral part of society, but that will have to come another time, if at all. In an era of 'soft power', when even the U.S.A. looks to be switching its means of international interaction, and in which we live in comfortable, relatively gentle societies, insulated from violence of each other and of nature, and in massive social groups, we seem to be forgetting that violence is not the worst thing that can happen, and that the threat of violence and its use, which trumps all other sources of power, is not the worst action a person, parent or government can take.
Perhaps the feminists have won more than they think in changing society to be this way. But if we insist on peddling this pernicious creed, and believe it ourselves, we will find ever more young men ready to rebel against the cloying and domineering system that makes them feel guilty for being themselves, and rather than co-operating with it to some extent, ready to remove themselves from it entirely. The use of social pressure to warp minds and to cause this guilt only leads to tension and a confused system of values, and the relief of the tension will come from throwing off the entire social system, which seems a worse outcome than creating a sensible social system in the first place.
That's enough of my Marx-style revolutionary talk. I won't make predictions, as he did, about revolutions that never occur. An increasing number of 'amoral' criminals, however, I suspect will be a better prediction. Until we solve our social problems: of emotional manipulation in personal relationships and societal ones; of peer pressure and imposition of values and expectations; of poverty and unequal opportunities; and of access to resources, rights or justice, we will not grow out of violence, and nor should we. Violence is the tool of last resort, and should our societies not mature into institutions free of these social problems, or grow into institutions that create these problems, we will need violence to change them. We should not discard it so quickly.
I was told about this story (the above link to Fox News is the first one that appeared on a Google search) and I mentioned that she was being rather provocative. Understandably, I got pounced on because it sounded as though I was blaming her for the assault and excusing her attackers. I didn't mean that, of course: I said what I meant and neglected to couch my speech in the necessary obeisances to my interlocutor's preconceived notions.
I agree that violence is not a nice thing. We have societies, in part, in order to curb our violent instincts and protect us from those of others. That these protesters attacked the woman was a crime and one for which they should be punished.
But we also have societies in order better to receive and mete out justice. In the U.S.A., there is a constitutional aim of allowing people to pursue life, liberty and happiness, based on the idea that if it doesn't interfere with others, it shouldn't be a problem. This arose from overcrowding and poverty in Europe, but also from religious intolerance. The 'founding fathers' regarded such persecution as evil, and went to great lengths to found a nation free from it; an aim that most people, within and without the U.S.A. will agree is laudable.
And yet here we have a little old lady who thinks it right and proper to abuse the immense power of the state to prevent innocent people from pursuing happiness without interfering in anyone else's life, based on her religious beliefs.
I grew up with other young boys and, as young boys do, we occasionally got into fights. The next day we might not all be friends, but we'd get on with our lives. A few bruises more or less didn't matter too much: it's a rough-and-tumble world.
There were also people who mercilessly persecuted certain victims by exclusion, insult, intimidation, theft and vandalism. Day in, day out these people would pursue their agenda of destroying others' lives for their own twisted personal reasons.
Can you guess which of these two types of agression the victims found more unpleasant?
I believe that some things are far worse than a bit of violence. Of course violence is a wide range of things, and murder is harder to reverse than bullying... but then extreme bullying can be felt very much like a slow death of torture, and allows little in the way of a decent life.
People have a slightly disturbing tendency to focus on violence to the exclusion of other unpleasantness. I went to a meeting last week at which the talk was entitled something like 'Why we no longer need men'. The talk started with the suggestion that pathenogenesis made sperm unnecessary (sadly this is not, to the best of my knowledge, true, because we have not yet managed to remethylate DNA appropriately) and then focussed on the idea that men are responsible for much of the evil in the world.
Men, apparently, are the perpetrators of 85% of crimes and form 90-95% of the prison population (suggesting that they are responsible for an even larger proportion of serious crime). We can also dive into the stereotypical feminist spiel about men starting wars, men competing and men lusting for and working towards power over others.
Even if I ignore the problems of generalising from a category to all its members, or of applying collective punishment (as a gradual 'phasing-out' of men could be considered to be), I think that we're missing something important, and to make my point I shall indulge in some stereotyping of my own; when I refer to women, I could perhaps be taken to be saying 'people with characteristics traditionally labelled as feminine and believed to occur more often in women'.
Women also like power. However, women chase power in a different way. They are said to be more interested in social relationships, in group dynamics (and tend to be more collectivist in general) and in emotions. Men are said to be physical creatures, keen on DIY, spatial reasoning and hand-to-eye co-ordination. Women are more spiritual (confirmed by psychology surveys, if you're interested). Given these stereotypes, which do not even begin to judge crime, we would naturally expect men to commit more violent crime.
However, there is an opposite of this conclusion: that women will commit more 'emotional violence'. A world without men might have less physical violence, but would not necessarily be a better place: a point I made at the meeting, but given the light-hearted attitude of many attendees, one that I did not need to expound apon further. Of course, the more accurate way to describe this conclusion would be 'a world without those traits traditionally called masculine would not be a better one'. The traits themselves are not bad: they merely lead to certain types of bad actions, just as 'feminine' traits lead to other actions, good and bad.
If I were given a choice between a world in which people initiated physical violence when angry or upset, or a world in which they always indulged in emotional manipulation, I would choose the former. Violence seems more honest; emotional manipulation spiteful and backhanded. Violence is open; emotional manipulation secretive and furtive. If we are to condemn the abuse of power, then the abuse of social relationships in the 'feminine' manner seems at least as bad as the overt threat of physical violence in the 'masculine' manner. It is not just the poor victims of bullying at school who might agree: more recently a friend of mine told me about his time teaching in a 'sink-school'. He encountered a fair amount of animosity, I gather, but was quite clear that the girls' calumnous rumours and mocking were much more unpleasant than the boys' knives and fists.
The final point will be extremely truncated (for now: I hope to return to the relationship between collectivism and morality at some point) might be that men tend to be more independent. Independence from social pressures inevitably leads to less obedience to social rules, and could be considered to be a firm point in favour of calling women the fairer sex. However, independence and autonomy can be considered intrinsically desirable, and can lead to great advances as well as crimes. It is similar to the question of whether we should use mind-control to prevent crime; preventing crime is a good thing for society, but if we reduce humans to controlled automatons then we have lost their (and possibly our) humanity, and forgotten the purpose of society entirely.
I could go on about the links between mind-control and religion, or forestall critical comment about how social pressure is an integral part of society, but that will have to come another time, if at all. In an era of 'soft power', when even the U.S.A. looks to be switching its means of international interaction, and in which we live in comfortable, relatively gentle societies, insulated from violence of each other and of nature, and in massive social groups, we seem to be forgetting that violence is not the worst thing that can happen, and that the threat of violence and its use, which trumps all other sources of power, is not the worst action a person, parent or government can take.
Perhaps the feminists have won more than they think in changing society to be this way. But if we insist on peddling this pernicious creed, and believe it ourselves, we will find ever more young men ready to rebel against the cloying and domineering system that makes them feel guilty for being themselves, and rather than co-operating with it to some extent, ready to remove themselves from it entirely. The use of social pressure to warp minds and to cause this guilt only leads to tension and a confused system of values, and the relief of the tension will come from throwing off the entire social system, which seems a worse outcome than creating a sensible social system in the first place.
That's enough of my Marx-style revolutionary talk. I won't make predictions, as he did, about revolutions that never occur. An increasing number of 'amoral' criminals, however, I suspect will be a better prediction. Until we solve our social problems: of emotional manipulation in personal relationships and societal ones; of peer pressure and imposition of values and expectations; of poverty and unequal opportunities; and of access to resources, rights or justice, we will not grow out of violence, and nor should we. Violence is the tool of last resort, and should our societies not mature into institutions free of these social problems, or grow into institutions that create these problems, we will need violence to change them. We should not discard it so quickly.
Sunday, 15 February 2009
Something from last November
I was browsing some news stories a week ago when I noticed one about a Christian prayer society arranging a world-wide prayer day for the world's economies. Not only that, but some of these Christians had travelled to Wall Street to pray through the brazen bull.
It reminded me of the Israelites melting down their gold and praying for help in the desert while Moses was indulging in a little mountaineering. It's idolatry.
It's amusing that they can lose sight of their religion so much. It's a bit like Roman Catholics praying through their saints. I wonder if the jealous God really does listen to the saints' intercessions, or whether he has cast them all into hell because of his jealousy.
People always want a guide; a feeling of direction and purpose; some solidity in the shifting sands of time. Politicians don't help; they're too engaged in the highfalutin game of politics to snare anything more than a passing fancy, which is all they need. Giving people a sense of direction can safely be left to other people, which is where religions pick up the slack.
Of course, the concept applies on a smaller scale. Leading hikers requires you always to give an impression of confidence. If you become unsure of where you are and you let everyone know they become positively irrational, even if you have a foolproof plan for finding out. Saying "if there's a stream around the next bend we're here, but if not then we're here" isn't good enough. You get complaints, people wanting to stop, people wanting to turn back or try a different route: a whole disaster that they'll remember next time. I always wondered what the purpose of the phrase 'if you're not confident in yourself others won't be' was. If I'm not confident, why would I want to mislead others into being confident?
But a few experiences of that and I realise that the answer is that whereas my confidence is graded, for the ones being led it's much more of an all-or-nothing trust. I might have a minor doubt, but the smallest doubt suddenly makes them realise that the leader is not worthy of complete confidence and they feel lost. It's the feeling that matters, not the rational recognition that it's only a minor doubt.
Of course, people's nature forces leaders (in all aspects of life) to appear confident and not admit to mistakes that might give a pattern or forecast a larger problem, because admitting to doubt or error frees people's demons of doubt. Thus when the larger error emerges they feel especially let down. I didn't really want to justify chronic deception, so I'll save this for later and get back to my point, such as it is.
The terminology of hiking, with leaders and paths and getting lost translates nicely into our customary metaphors for more abstract things such as life paths and societal direction. When our leaders let us down, as inevitably they will, being mere humans, many of us will feel irrationally lost. Religion scoops up the lost and gives them a rock on which to rely that nothing else can. You can place your faith in things or people, but people lie and make mistakes, and things are transitory and easily lost themselves: all things must pass (except the Balrog!).
The very definition of an omniscient, immortal God makes Him impervious to these doubts. Religions always gain in times of trouble because they feed on the human need for direction; they provide direction that outlasts a person or a material objective, and they do this by invoking a greater power. This is why so many people convert after a stressful event. They think that they've simply realised what is important in life, but actually they've gone for what's simple, because all the little things that drive you from day to day seem insignificant and so diverse when weighed against a life-changing event; a life-changing event makes people lost; it makes them question their direction, and simply finding out that the direction can be questioned, as we've seen, can cause an extreme emotional response.
Of course, we all rationally know, when I write it here, that our direction in life can be questioned, but we don't really care until something gives us that emotion of doubt. It is only then that we grope for certainty elsewhere.
Psychologists have shown in various cunning tests (which I may add later) that humans are very good at forgetting to question the ends and focus very much on the means to those ends. We’ve even developed management-speak for it: ‘thinking outside the box’. These studies show that we don’t naturally question implicit goals, and when I suggest that this is the same thing as having a larger purpose in life, we can see that we don’t like to question these goals, or have them questioned.
I’ve touched on this subject before, when thinking about the motivations of religious terrorists: they had an unswerving faith in their religion and its doctrine, and so when they are forced to question what they are taught are parts of it, the emotional reaction is to dislike the thing forcing them to question themselves, which is western culture and its spread.
Fundamentalist evangelicals of all faiths wish to convert the world, not only to save their souls (a laudable aim), but possibly also for the probably subconscious desire never to be forced to question one’s principles of faith by coming into contact with someone who thinks differently. Many people desire and seek conformity (something which Jungian typology suggests to us, as well as simple observation), and this is yet another aspect of this same desire not to have oneself questioned: if everyone believes the same things, no-one has to explain anything, guess others’ motivations or think or communicate in any way about these things.
In fact, all these emotional responses seem very much like evolutionary adaptations to force others to accept our goals and plans; we naturally have this powerful emotional response to being questioned, and similarly, because we have evolved as social animals, we have an instinct to conform or at least not to question others.
Those of us who lack the desire to conform more than most are also perhaps those more prone to rational questioning of goals and beliefs. Which comes first (if either) is the same question as which comes first of the desire not to be questioned and the desire for conformity. I suspect that it comes from a greater ability to separate oneself from instinctive, emotional reactions and to trust the rational mind despite the doubts and uncertainties that it creates.
I believe that many followers of religion use it as a support; a crutch that replaces an inquisitive disposition with simple absolutes, all for the sake of laziness and the fear of the uncertainties that thought produces. I also have tried to suggest, by tying together various strands of knowledge and conjecture, that this is an emotional problem that is not isolated from other parts of life, such as existential dread, or mid-life crises, as it is also known, and that it causes identifiable problems in the world (such as religious terrorism).
My final suggestion, however, is that it is this fundamental divide between the emotional aspects of religious faith and the rational recognition of life’s uncertainties and unknowns that really separates science and religion. We often hear of, or read, debates between ‘science’ and religion (although actually they’re debates between scientists and religion, or sometimes not involving science or scientists) and those of us with sense dismiss this artificial dichotomy as being inappropriate: science is not a system of belief with one opinion on everything, in the way that religious doctrine is. Science is a process; admittedly a process that leads us to truth, which is what religious doctrine claims to give us by different means, but nonetheless it seems strange to compare a process or method to a set of definite beliefs.
It is the difference in attitude and character that really distinguishes science and religion: when people have these debates inevitably someone appeals to our feeling that there must be a higher truth; suggests that there is more to life than cold science and rails against the materialistic, object-oriented society in which we live. Materialism isn’t much related to science, except by the emotional distance from religion. These debates are attempting to address, in my opinion, a fundamental divide in human character: between the cold, rational, thinking side of our minds and the emotional, intuitive and unquestionable side of humanity.
Maybe this is why some doctrines of Christianity do not accept intellectual assent to the possibility of God, or the rational decision to believe, as sufficient belief; such a person remains a heathen in their eyes, because the essence of religion is not actually belief in God so much as a certain feeling; as one evangelical explained to me (I paraphrase him here): ‘the revelation of the gospels; a certain knowledge of the Truth’. The idea of absolute knowledge of something unproven revulsed me, and I had a different sort of revelation. This madness (known as faith) is apparent in many areas of life, not just in religion.
It is what made Tony Blair, our much-esteemed ex-PM, seem so terrible to me: from the moment he appeared in the media, he projected an image of a man on a mission; who knew the absolute rightness of his beliefs (even as they swapped around) and had no doubts. This is why his reforms have been so galling: it was not that he won heated debates with everyone agreeing that both sides had a point but he was right, but that he refused to accept that he other side had a viable opinion. The image projected was one of certainty, and I’m tempted to call it an unbalanced mindset.
Of course, the rational approach allows for more shifting of opinions as more evidence points in other directions, or perhaps better arguments occur, but I’d still call it more balanced, because it is closer to the theoretical ‘correct’ answer, whereas blind faith in one side or the other can be far from the truth. If the faith is questioned, or proven wrong, the mindset is also more unstable, since it is not predicated on shifting evidence or the ability to change.
If religions want to stop the haemorrhaging of followers then the dumbing-down of worship must stop. In my opinion (and no doubt many people will have taken offence at the suggestion) religion caters to the emotional part of us, and as such image is vital. A person isn’t going to have faith in the ultimate truth if it acts like a 45-year old trying to be ‘hip’ by speaking in outdated colloquialisms. He’s going to feel more inclined to believe if it has the musty, ancient awe of giant structures, recurring echoes and the continuity of millennia of traditions.
People believed in Christianity when it was all in Latin and they didn’t speak the language and didn’t even read any language. Understanding of the words is no barrier to belief (in fact, one might suggest that understanding of what is written is more of a barrier to belief). The CofE has no need to convert its poetic and rhythmic prayer-book English into modern tripe. The ties of older English unite disparate dialects rather than alienating them. The King James Bible was translated by people who were great intellects and took many years over crafting elegant and powerful phrases; to throw away the emotional impact of their work because of a modernizing agenda implies that the heads of the Church do not understand the role of religion in people’s lives.
I’m tempted to think that it’s arrogance (a traditional trait amongst high-ranking clergy) that makes them think that they can take on the rational mind and win, perhaps combined with their own ‘deep knowledge’ that they represent the Truth. However, things are far more often due to incompetence than conspiracy, and so it is more likely that they do not understand what is happening. The rock of a person’s life on which a person depends when nothing else is there cannot be an ever-shifting platform of marketing slogans and youth jargon. Modern marketing is very successful in selling products, but to treat one’s religion as a product is to misunderstand its very nature. Religion is a support (and although I consider it an unnecessary one I understand that many people do rely on it), and by making religion ever-changing religious leaders are removing that support: they are forcing people to cope with shifting ideas and ensuring that they feel alone and without the comfort of familiarity.
Perhaps I should be glad that religion is accelerating its own death, because this might make people happier to accept science, but I don’t think that this is how things will happen. I think that the CofE will simply lose followers to faiths that ignore the cult of change and modernisation that New Labour popularised, because I think that this need for some certainty will always be present in a population. These other faiths might well be less harmless than the CofE, and then rationality will begin to suffer, rather than gain.
It reminded me of the Israelites melting down their gold and praying for help in the desert while Moses was indulging in a little mountaineering. It's idolatry.
It's amusing that they can lose sight of their religion so much. It's a bit like Roman Catholics praying through their saints. I wonder if the jealous God really does listen to the saints' intercessions, or whether he has cast them all into hell because of his jealousy.
People always want a guide; a feeling of direction and purpose; some solidity in the shifting sands of time. Politicians don't help; they're too engaged in the highfalutin game of politics to snare anything more than a passing fancy, which is all they need. Giving people a sense of direction can safely be left to other people, which is where religions pick up the slack.
Of course, the concept applies on a smaller scale. Leading hikers requires you always to give an impression of confidence. If you become unsure of where you are and you let everyone know they become positively irrational, even if you have a foolproof plan for finding out. Saying "if there's a stream around the next bend we're here, but if not then we're here" isn't good enough. You get complaints, people wanting to stop, people wanting to turn back or try a different route: a whole disaster that they'll remember next time. I always wondered what the purpose of the phrase 'if you're not confident in yourself others won't be' was. If I'm not confident, why would I want to mislead others into being confident?
But a few experiences of that and I realise that the answer is that whereas my confidence is graded, for the ones being led it's much more of an all-or-nothing trust. I might have a minor doubt, but the smallest doubt suddenly makes them realise that the leader is not worthy of complete confidence and they feel lost. It's the feeling that matters, not the rational recognition that it's only a minor doubt.
Of course, people's nature forces leaders (in all aspects of life) to appear confident and not admit to mistakes that might give a pattern or forecast a larger problem, because admitting to doubt or error frees people's demons of doubt. Thus when the larger error emerges they feel especially let down. I didn't really want to justify chronic deception, so I'll save this for later and get back to my point, such as it is.
The terminology of hiking, with leaders and paths and getting lost translates nicely into our customary metaphors for more abstract things such as life paths and societal direction. When our leaders let us down, as inevitably they will, being mere humans, many of us will feel irrationally lost. Religion scoops up the lost and gives them a rock on which to rely that nothing else can. You can place your faith in things or people, but people lie and make mistakes, and things are transitory and easily lost themselves: all things must pass (except the Balrog!).
The very definition of an omniscient, immortal God makes Him impervious to these doubts. Religions always gain in times of trouble because they feed on the human need for direction; they provide direction that outlasts a person or a material objective, and they do this by invoking a greater power. This is why so many people convert after a stressful event. They think that they've simply realised what is important in life, but actually they've gone for what's simple, because all the little things that drive you from day to day seem insignificant and so diverse when weighed against a life-changing event; a life-changing event makes people lost; it makes them question their direction, and simply finding out that the direction can be questioned, as we've seen, can cause an extreme emotional response.
Of course, we all rationally know, when I write it here, that our direction in life can be questioned, but we don't really care until something gives us that emotion of doubt. It is only then that we grope for certainty elsewhere.
Psychologists have shown in various cunning tests (which I may add later) that humans are very good at forgetting to question the ends and focus very much on the means to those ends. We’ve even developed management-speak for it: ‘thinking outside the box’. These studies show that we don’t naturally question implicit goals, and when I suggest that this is the same thing as having a larger purpose in life, we can see that we don’t like to question these goals, or have them questioned.
I’ve touched on this subject before, when thinking about the motivations of religious terrorists: they had an unswerving faith in their religion and its doctrine, and so when they are forced to question what they are taught are parts of it, the emotional reaction is to dislike the thing forcing them to question themselves, which is western culture and its spread.
Fundamentalist evangelicals of all faiths wish to convert the world, not only to save their souls (a laudable aim), but possibly also for the probably subconscious desire never to be forced to question one’s principles of faith by coming into contact with someone who thinks differently. Many people desire and seek conformity (something which Jungian typology suggests to us, as well as simple observation), and this is yet another aspect of this same desire not to have oneself questioned: if everyone believes the same things, no-one has to explain anything, guess others’ motivations or think or communicate in any way about these things.
In fact, all these emotional responses seem very much like evolutionary adaptations to force others to accept our goals and plans; we naturally have this powerful emotional response to being questioned, and similarly, because we have evolved as social animals, we have an instinct to conform or at least not to question others.
Those of us who lack the desire to conform more than most are also perhaps those more prone to rational questioning of goals and beliefs. Which comes first (if either) is the same question as which comes first of the desire not to be questioned and the desire for conformity. I suspect that it comes from a greater ability to separate oneself from instinctive, emotional reactions and to trust the rational mind despite the doubts and uncertainties that it creates.
I believe that many followers of religion use it as a support; a crutch that replaces an inquisitive disposition with simple absolutes, all for the sake of laziness and the fear of the uncertainties that thought produces. I also have tried to suggest, by tying together various strands of knowledge and conjecture, that this is an emotional problem that is not isolated from other parts of life, such as existential dread, or mid-life crises, as it is also known, and that it causes identifiable problems in the world (such as religious terrorism).
My final suggestion, however, is that it is this fundamental divide between the emotional aspects of religious faith and the rational recognition of life’s uncertainties and unknowns that really separates science and religion. We often hear of, or read, debates between ‘science’ and religion (although actually they’re debates between scientists and religion, or sometimes not involving science or scientists) and those of us with sense dismiss this artificial dichotomy as being inappropriate: science is not a system of belief with one opinion on everything, in the way that religious doctrine is. Science is a process; admittedly a process that leads us to truth, which is what religious doctrine claims to give us by different means, but nonetheless it seems strange to compare a process or method to a set of definite beliefs.
It is the difference in attitude and character that really distinguishes science and religion: when people have these debates inevitably someone appeals to our feeling that there must be a higher truth; suggests that there is more to life than cold science and rails against the materialistic, object-oriented society in which we live. Materialism isn’t much related to science, except by the emotional distance from religion. These debates are attempting to address, in my opinion, a fundamental divide in human character: between the cold, rational, thinking side of our minds and the emotional, intuitive and unquestionable side of humanity.
Maybe this is why some doctrines of Christianity do not accept intellectual assent to the possibility of God, or the rational decision to believe, as sufficient belief; such a person remains a heathen in their eyes, because the essence of religion is not actually belief in God so much as a certain feeling; as one evangelical explained to me (I paraphrase him here): ‘the revelation of the gospels; a certain knowledge of the Truth’. The idea of absolute knowledge of something unproven revulsed me, and I had a different sort of revelation. This madness (known as faith) is apparent in many areas of life, not just in religion.
It is what made Tony Blair, our much-esteemed ex-PM, seem so terrible to me: from the moment he appeared in the media, he projected an image of a man on a mission; who knew the absolute rightness of his beliefs (even as they swapped around) and had no doubts. This is why his reforms have been so galling: it was not that he won heated debates with everyone agreeing that both sides had a point but he was right, but that he refused to accept that he other side had a viable opinion. The image projected was one of certainty, and I’m tempted to call it an unbalanced mindset.
Of course, the rational approach allows for more shifting of opinions as more evidence points in other directions, or perhaps better arguments occur, but I’d still call it more balanced, because it is closer to the theoretical ‘correct’ answer, whereas blind faith in one side or the other can be far from the truth. If the faith is questioned, or proven wrong, the mindset is also more unstable, since it is not predicated on shifting evidence or the ability to change.
If religions want to stop the haemorrhaging of followers then the dumbing-down of worship must stop. In my opinion (and no doubt many people will have taken offence at the suggestion) religion caters to the emotional part of us, and as such image is vital. A person isn’t going to have faith in the ultimate truth if it acts like a 45-year old trying to be ‘hip’ by speaking in outdated colloquialisms. He’s going to feel more inclined to believe if it has the musty, ancient awe of giant structures, recurring echoes and the continuity of millennia of traditions.
People believed in Christianity when it was all in Latin and they didn’t speak the language and didn’t even read any language. Understanding of the words is no barrier to belief (in fact, one might suggest that understanding of what is written is more of a barrier to belief). The CofE has no need to convert its poetic and rhythmic prayer-book English into modern tripe. The ties of older English unite disparate dialects rather than alienating them. The King James Bible was translated by people who were great intellects and took many years over crafting elegant and powerful phrases; to throw away the emotional impact of their work because of a modernizing agenda implies that the heads of the Church do not understand the role of religion in people’s lives.
I’m tempted to think that it’s arrogance (a traditional trait amongst high-ranking clergy) that makes them think that they can take on the rational mind and win, perhaps combined with their own ‘deep knowledge’ that they represent the Truth. However, things are far more often due to incompetence than conspiracy, and so it is more likely that they do not understand what is happening. The rock of a person’s life on which a person depends when nothing else is there cannot be an ever-shifting platform of marketing slogans and youth jargon. Modern marketing is very successful in selling products, but to treat one’s religion as a product is to misunderstand its very nature. Religion is a support (and although I consider it an unnecessary one I understand that many people do rely on it), and by making religion ever-changing religious leaders are removing that support: they are forcing people to cope with shifting ideas and ensuring that they feel alone and without the comfort of familiarity.
Perhaps I should be glad that religion is accelerating its own death, because this might make people happier to accept science, but I don’t think that this is how things will happen. I think that the CofE will simply lose followers to faiths that ignore the cult of change and modernisation that New Labour popularised, because I think that this need for some certainty will always be present in a population. These other faiths might well be less harmless than the CofE, and then rationality will begin to suffer, rather than gain.
The word 'slut'
When I hear someone use the word 'slut' I know that the person in question is highly likely to be a decent sort of person, but that the speaker is someone with whom I should avoid innuendo or discussions of sexual issues.
It would be funny, I suppose, if it weren't such an effective tool for controlling women's actions.
It's not really a tool of the patriarchy or of misogynist men: it's used a lot more harshly by other women, who wish to control their fellow women, and use this as a means of social disapproval.
They do this because if some women sleep around a lot, or even a little, it makes the rest of the women, who don't, worth less to men. It's basic economics, and the use of the word slut is a negative advertising campaign to distort the free market.
Of course, these people tend to be social conservatives, and would never phrase it that way, because that tends to go with being economic conservatives, who worship the free market.
It would be funny, I suppose, if it weren't such an effective tool for controlling women's actions.
It's not really a tool of the patriarchy or of misogynist men: it's used a lot more harshly by other women, who wish to control their fellow women, and use this as a means of social disapproval.
They do this because if some women sleep around a lot, or even a little, it makes the rest of the women, who don't, worth less to men. It's basic economics, and the use of the word slut is a negative advertising campaign to distort the free market.
Of course, these people tend to be social conservatives, and would never phrase it that way, because that tends to go with being economic conservatives, who worship the free market.
Thursday, 12 February 2009
Religion: crime against humanity
I was in a discussion recently which was, initially, discussing the problem of free will: a thorny issue for everyone. I'll leave that subject for another time, because I want to quote one of the people who mentioned a tangential issue:
'... a deterministic machine, and only a deterministic machine, can have free will. (Now it also needs consciousness, so it can't be just any machine).
A rock fails to qualify for free will by many criteria. It can't even think. It isn't even making a decision. Gravity is just pulling it closer to the nearest massive body.
I don't see programming as being contrary to free will, since people that are brain washed still have free will. And yes, there is a strong parallel between programming a computer and teaching a person to respond automatically to something, as what happens when people strictly make choices based on religious and other moral tenants [sic].'
It's this last statement that caught my attention. If we ignore his misuse of the word 'tenants' and replace it with 'tenets' (and the unnecessary 'what') he makes a reasonable point. Religious and moral ideologies are very similar to computer programming. I would, however, disagree with the suggestion that this programming is perfectly compatible with complete expression of free will.
The essence of religious ideologies is that a person feels forced, or chooses, to obey a large range of commandments in a number of different situations. These are imposed by a 'higher' authority and require no thought or consideration: just obedience. The choice, if the person truly did exercise it, rather than simply being programmed as a child or by long exposure, is still less of a choice than making a choice with every individual decision: the person has committed to one course of action which then governs a great deal of his life. Such a decision spares him the need to think; he can blindly follow his religious law safe in the knowledge that someone else has done the thinking for him.
I will address some consequences of this in another post, I think, but here I wonder if this is both right and good. The UN has declared that a person can not lose responsibility for his actions because they were dictated by a higher authority, a declaration implicit in the judgements about Nazi warcrimes, in which junior soldiers were punished for their roles despite having been ordered to do these things by senior officers. If this is current UN doctrine, why then do we tolerate (socially, not legally, which would be a different question) institutions such as the Catholic Church, which in particular represents a 'top-down' hierarchy of moral authority, in which the minions do the bidding of senior members, and are trained to do so unquestioningly in many instances.
Although I'm not trying to make a case for banning moral pronouncements, because that would infringe freedom of speech, and nor do I wish to legislate to attempt to control people's beliefs, I do find this contrast (one might almost say hypocrisy) startling. Imams and Catholic priests preach to their congregations in some places, I am told, as though their speech is divine revelation, and it is believed to be divinely inspired by some. A system in which an old man in Rome can tell millions of people that one cell is a human being and have them believe it is not only worrying, but actually has a noticeable effect on the country.
This example is the one of Catholic, Labour ministers in Britain attempting to change legislation on abortion in order to have it conform slightly more to Roman Catholic doctrine. Here we have people attempting to ruin the lives of some innocent young women, against all rational argument, because of the decree of a man who ought to have no say whatsoever in the running of a country of which he is not even a citizen.
If we contrast this to the Nazi soldiers who ruined (and took) the lives of innocent Jews, against all rational argument, because of the decree of a crazed loon, we can see two differences. First of all, their crazed loon was actually the leader of their country, with corresponding authority over it, and secondly, they were committed, as soldiers, to obedience, this being a vital part of soldiering.
The Catholic MPs, on the other hand, were committed to representing their constituents and were entrusted with the running of the country themselves: the man in Rome was not an elected official in Britain.
That we tolerate this corruption of our democracy and even praised these MPs for their principles demonstrates how widespread and how common this brainwashing is. We do not regard it as a shock, to be removed when seen, but in our cosy and comfortable world we have come to accept it as normal. We should not. People need to think about things, despite the powerful urge to rely on set beliefs and retire into lazy certainty, never to update or consider the beliefs again.
'... a deterministic machine, and only a deterministic machine, can have free will. (Now it also needs consciousness, so it can't be just any machine).
A rock fails to qualify for free will by many criteria. It can't even think. It isn't even making a decision. Gravity is just pulling it closer to the nearest massive body.
I don't see programming as being contrary to free will, since people that are brain washed still have free will. And yes, there is a strong parallel between programming a computer and teaching a person to respond automatically to something, as what happens when people strictly make choices based on religious and other moral tenants [sic].'
It's this last statement that caught my attention. If we ignore his misuse of the word 'tenants' and replace it with 'tenets' (and the unnecessary 'what') he makes a reasonable point. Religious and moral ideologies are very similar to computer programming. I would, however, disagree with the suggestion that this programming is perfectly compatible with complete expression of free will.
The essence of religious ideologies is that a person feels forced, or chooses, to obey a large range of commandments in a number of different situations. These are imposed by a 'higher' authority and require no thought or consideration: just obedience. The choice, if the person truly did exercise it, rather than simply being programmed as a child or by long exposure, is still less of a choice than making a choice with every individual decision: the person has committed to one course of action which then governs a great deal of his life. Such a decision spares him the need to think; he can blindly follow his religious law safe in the knowledge that someone else has done the thinking for him.
I will address some consequences of this in another post, I think, but here I wonder if this is both right and good. The UN has declared that a person can not lose responsibility for his actions because they were dictated by a higher authority, a declaration implicit in the judgements about Nazi warcrimes, in which junior soldiers were punished for their roles despite having been ordered to do these things by senior officers. If this is current UN doctrine, why then do we tolerate (socially, not legally, which would be a different question) institutions such as the Catholic Church, which in particular represents a 'top-down' hierarchy of moral authority, in which the minions do the bidding of senior members, and are trained to do so unquestioningly in many instances.
Although I'm not trying to make a case for banning moral pronouncements, because that would infringe freedom of speech, and nor do I wish to legislate to attempt to control people's beliefs, I do find this contrast (one might almost say hypocrisy) startling. Imams and Catholic priests preach to their congregations in some places, I am told, as though their speech is divine revelation, and it is believed to be divinely inspired by some. A system in which an old man in Rome can tell millions of people that one cell is a human being and have them believe it is not only worrying, but actually has a noticeable effect on the country.
This example is the one of Catholic, Labour ministers in Britain attempting to change legislation on abortion in order to have it conform slightly more to Roman Catholic doctrine. Here we have people attempting to ruin the lives of some innocent young women, against all rational argument, because of the decree of a man who ought to have no say whatsoever in the running of a country of which he is not even a citizen.
If we contrast this to the Nazi soldiers who ruined (and took) the lives of innocent Jews, against all rational argument, because of the decree of a crazed loon, we can see two differences. First of all, their crazed loon was actually the leader of their country, with corresponding authority over it, and secondly, they were committed, as soldiers, to obedience, this being a vital part of soldiering.
The Catholic MPs, on the other hand, were committed to representing their constituents and were entrusted with the running of the country themselves: the man in Rome was not an elected official in Britain.
That we tolerate this corruption of our democracy and even praised these MPs for their principles demonstrates how widespread and how common this brainwashing is. We do not regard it as a shock, to be removed when seen, but in our cosy and comfortable world we have come to accept it as normal. We should not. People need to think about things, despite the powerful urge to rely on set beliefs and retire into lazy certainty, never to update or consider the beliefs again.
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
I can't see how the financial crisis would have been worse for me than the alternative; I already have no savings and minimal property. Now I'm just going to have to work my way in a system which I know is liable to collapse in the future.
Has anyone come across the phrase 'throwing good money after bad'? Humans have a tendency to support things when objectively they ought to see that getting out is a good idea. It happens in scams, and it happens, perhaps, when propping up flawed financial systems.
If these huge loans are to have any purpose other than making the next crash appalling then there needs to be radical (and I'm not using the word lightly) international reform.
As a schadenfreude zombie, unable to think rationally because of my irrational desire for justice, I find myself agreeing to some extent with calls for heads to roll. This desire to punish people who were either too greedy or incompetent to be doing the jobs that they did (because they could have acted responsibly even if it were just to add their voice to calls for things not to be too complex for them to understand) is not at all something to be dismissed lightly as mere human instinct that can be ridden over.
It is very much like my (slightly snide) comments about economists just following human instinct to support a losing system in which they have already invested.
Yes, we have these instincts, but we also have very good reasons for them. Between them, bankers and governments have made my future a lot worse. Along with all the anti-environmentalists, who expect to be dead before I start suffering from their destruction of the world, I can imagine a distinctly unpleasant future.
I could be optimistic, as such people encourage me to be, and try to dream of miraculous technological achievements that solve all our problems, or dream of scientific consensus being wrong, but that doesn't suit me. Why should I even take the risk of my future, when the possible outcome is so terrible, when people now could avert that risk by making relatively small sacrifices? Why should I allow them to get away with idiocy, corruption and greed just because there's a chance that it won't give me a hard time in times to come?
Civilisations arose, I think, because people wanted justice, and wanted it enforced. I'm almost veering into the Marxist opinion that society will collapse when I say that not enforcing justice (or not fooling people into thinking that it exists) by allowing these rich men to march off into obscurity with money made from ruining economies that we all share will make a lot of people extraordinarily angry.
They might not act immediately, but the seething resentment will still exist, and might well manifest itself in other ways, such as rises in petty crime.
Has anyone come across the phrase 'throwing good money after bad'? Humans have a tendency to support things when objectively they ought to see that getting out is a good idea. It happens in scams, and it happens, perhaps, when propping up flawed financial systems.
If these huge loans are to have any purpose other than making the next crash appalling then there needs to be radical (and I'm not using the word lightly) international reform.
As a schadenfreude zombie, unable to think rationally because of my irrational desire for justice, I find myself agreeing to some extent with calls for heads to roll. This desire to punish people who were either too greedy or incompetent to be doing the jobs that they did (because they could have acted responsibly even if it were just to add their voice to calls for things not to be too complex for them to understand) is not at all something to be dismissed lightly as mere human instinct that can be ridden over.
It is very much like my (slightly snide) comments about economists just following human instinct to support a losing system in which they have already invested.
Yes, we have these instincts, but we also have very good reasons for them. Between them, bankers and governments have made my future a lot worse. Along with all the anti-environmentalists, who expect to be dead before I start suffering from their destruction of the world, I can imagine a distinctly unpleasant future.
I could be optimistic, as such people encourage me to be, and try to dream of miraculous technological achievements that solve all our problems, or dream of scientific consensus being wrong, but that doesn't suit me. Why should I even take the risk of my future, when the possible outcome is so terrible, when people now could avert that risk by making relatively small sacrifices? Why should I allow them to get away with idiocy, corruption and greed just because there's a chance that it won't give me a hard time in times to come?
Civilisations arose, I think, because people wanted justice, and wanted it enforced. I'm almost veering into the Marxist opinion that society will collapse when I say that not enforcing justice (or not fooling people into thinking that it exists) by allowing these rich men to march off into obscurity with money made from ruining economies that we all share will make a lot of people extraordinarily angry.
They might not act immediately, but the seething resentment will still exist, and might well manifest itself in other ways, such as rises in petty crime.
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