Discrimination

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15490760

'There is a substantial and growing body of evidence to back up the claim that children born in certain months do better at school because they are the oldest in the year'

I have seen this before (famously in Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling book), and it is a very sad thing. Why can't people educate children according to maturity, not age? Surely a good educational system pushes children through lessons as they learn the subject, not according to an average schedule?
Things like this make me sorely tempted to support nuclear family life, simply because of the opportunity for home-schooling children, and therefore allowing children to proceed at their own pace.
I only started making it into sports teams at 15 or so, and never the firsts, and according to research on school years, that's an impressive enough achievement, given that I'm an August birthday.
It's shocking that a segment of the population can be systematically denied access to sporting achievement and training (training because only the best at a young age are selected for further sporting coaching, and their superiority then becomes self-fulfilling). If being born in August changed the colour of a person's skin, this would have been a cause of national outrage decades ago, but discrimination is never thought of as an abstract problem that people should avoid in any setting. It seems to be only specific to race, sex and perhaps class and religion.
Many people would laugh if I were to claim that I have suffered discrimination. As a white male from a (relatively: i.e enough to count as rich but not rich enough to get anything special in life) privileged background I am the evil oppressor. And yet as an August birthday cursed with shyness as a child and unusual opinions on religion, relationships and social conformity (this last one remaining an opinion, and mostly invisible), I have been liable to quite serious isolation and lack of equal treatment. I have not suffered as much as maybe even 70% of the population, but I nonetheless object to the idea that there is therefore no injustice to be corrected. All discrimination is the same.
It's difficult to legislate for social relationships, and so I don't think there's much room for a legal solution to the judgemental attitudes people have towards me, but that does not mean that someone who thinks I should lose my job because I don't necessarily believe marriage and female purity to be good things is not as wrong as someone who thinks another person should lose his job because he sings Allah's praises in his spare time.
Both opinions are repulsive, and for the same reason.

I do think that sexism, racism and these other discriminations do not deserve special treatment. That itself is unwarranted discrimination! Discrimination, in its illegal form, should be an abstract concept of using inappropriate characteristics to bias what ought to be a fair contest. Outside of the law, it remains a problem of judging people for characteristics that are not illegal or harmful. I know that I can slip into society in a way that a victim of racism cannot, because I can at least hide my opinions and desires (and even shyness, to an extent). That doesn't make me happy with the situation.

If I were to judge a banker on the sheer naked greed he displays, I might judge it not to be a virtue because of the negative effect I perceive it has on society through a variety of routes. I am open to being persuaded that it is a virtue, although I've had that argument (not with a banker) and am not convinced.
When I am judged for, say, thinking that the notion of female purity is an arbitrary and pointless imposition on people's sex lives, it is an absolute moral condemnation with no justification. In so far as there can be any, it is that the more people question such ridiculous cultural bulwarks, the less likely they are to be obeyed, and so anyone with a particular inclination that way, or who is somehow invested in the current cultural imposition, will feel less comfortable if my opinions are allowed.
But feeling comfortable when your opinions are widely shared is not an adequate basis for judging someone's worth. The whole purpose of an open and free society is that people can hold a diverse array of opinions, as long as those do not involve destroying the openness of society. And yet many westerners seem to think that actually the greatness of our society is not its openness, or its freedom of speech, but the fact that people tend to say what they've been trained to hear.

I wish people understood what tolerance and openness mean. I think that a central aspect of these is moral relativism (to which I often return when writing these posts), because without it of course one will judge others inappropriately. So much discrimination remains un-noticed precisely because it hasn't got a big name for itself such as sexism or homophobia. It happens in small ways when someone sees 'the wrong pair of shoes', judges a shy person as rude for being unengaging, or a girl for her choice of clothing. Most of our moral ideas have been passed into law, except for people's many and varied concepts of purity and arbitrary standards of behaviour (when they don't harm others). These standards are indeed arbitrary, and a basic understanding of moral relativism will prevent people from judging others on the basis of their own unjustifiable beliefs.
There is a world of difference between
"I wouldn't do that." and
"You shouldn't do that."

People can pay all the lip service they like to tolerance, freedom and 'meritocracy', but without the basic acknowledgement that purity is a chemical concept, not a moral one, and that moral relativism is unavoidable, lip service is all it is. The odd campaign might obtain a small break for one special behaviour that requires tolerance, such as homosexual activity, but until people actually incorporate moral relativity into their beliefs and education, all that our anti-discrimination worries will get us is discrimination against only those minorities who are too small even to campaign as a noticeable group.
There is an infinite range of activities and beliefs (near enough), and an impressive enough array of possible characteristics. We need to teach people about discrimination as an abstract concept, not as something that happens to blacks, gays and women.

Tertiary (/quaternary) thought

I've thought this for a very long time, but was triggered to write it down when describing my father's behaviour to a friend, and so of course thought to write it down more fully here too.

If I define what I mean by 'tertiary thinking' then readers will most likely guess the instances of it that bother me. Tertiary thinking is the habit of taking into account other people's responses to your actions when deciding what to do. I call it tertiary because it's the third step from the action; the first step is the action itself, the second another person's response to it, and so the third step is reconsidering the action in response to the person's predicted response. Obviously this can go on forever; it's a cycle of bluff, double-bluff, triple-bluff and so on that makes many strategic games of my youth games of chance: because two skilled players can see the best moves and must simply guess which the opponent will do. In this way, if we rank options in order we hit a game-theory problem: that the best option is to respond to the person's move and do a counter-move, but that the person will know you'll do that and will counter your move, so you counter that move instead... ad infinitum.

I’ll provide a couple of examples: firstly, as I just stated, this happens when playing games. If I want to capture a space that my opponent in a game controls, I will move towards it. But my opponent will see that his space is important, and defend it. Therefore my best option is to leave that space and take one or more less important spaces so that he has wasted his time defending somewhere that wasn’t attacked. But he knows this too, so he doesn’t defend the space. Therefore my best option is to attack the prized space.
The second example is more relevant to the contexts I am currently considering. There is a woman who wants me to cook dinner. I don’t want to cook dinner. She could ask me, but she knows that I don’t want to cook dinner and so she will only get her way half the time (in a sharing relationship). Because she knows I might refuse, she instead chooses to have a tantrum about something else. I will then respond to this tantrum by placating her, which will involve making dinner. So far, so normal. But actually, I don’t, because I know perfectly well that it’s her turn to make dinner, and so instead of her getting her way all the time, I still refuse to do things that I think it’s unfair for me to do. So as a response, she should stop having tantrums, because they’re a waste of time. However, she doesn’t, and we live through tantrums all the time.
    The two examples differ, in that one cannot reach an equilibrium, and the other does, but an unsatisfactory one. It is my experience that when people indulge in manipulation and are unsuccessful, they are especially unsatisfied, just as people who are manipulated are unsatisfied. Even an attempt at manipulation using positive actions is unfair, to my mind. A third example will illustrate. My aunt buys me a tasty chocolate box when I am staying with her. I am startled, but can hardly refuse a generous and tasty present. “Why thank-you, dearest Aunt”, I say. “I feel lazy tonight,” she replies “Would you do the cooking?”.
    The generous and thoughtful gift is suddenly no longer a kind gesture, but payment for a service to be rendered. The problem here, as with all manipulation using positive actions, is that my aunt has set both sides of the bargain. She chose that I would do the cooking, and chose what she would do in exchange. Bargains enforced by emotional blackmail are not optimal outcomes for me.

Now we know what tertiary thinking is, we can see a number of applications where it's an important concept: in financial markets, personal dealings and government policy.

Although I obviously first hatched the concept as a child, after thinking about the board games that my father taught me, I want to start with the most personal of the subjects I've mentioned here. In relationships (and not just sexual ones, but friendships too) it is very common for people to engage in tertiary thinking. My personal examples are perhaps best not described here, but it is probably easy for most people to recall an example for themselves. I can certainly imagine one: a person wants to go out with some friends, and the partner sets a deadline for return. Now if the partner wants the partier to come back at 11pm, the partner might say 9, in order to reach 11 as a compromise between 2am and 9pm.
Or a person might say "I'm fine" when she (stereotypically) is brewing an argument not because she means it but because she's saving it for a time more convenient to her. Or one might find someone saying "You don't care for me" when she means "I want my way", or perhaps "You should express your feelings more".
These examples are just a drop in the ocean of human interaction; I find that I see examples everywhere, in lots of small ways as well as these large and typically unpleasant examples. Describing these examples as unpleasant isn't very helpful, since I find almost every instance unpleasant. One final example is from the film I'm watching: Alien 3. Ripley refuses to tell the medical officer, who is her friend, about the alien, because she's worried about being judged. So she avoids his judgement by not giving him a chance.
We can easily spot some flaws in the principles that would lead to such behaviour. Firstly, and most importantly, I suppose, from a practical point of view, is that if one person can do it, then so can everyone else. When no-one is saying what he means, everyone loses touch with who thinks what, and no-one really knows each other, and communication and compromise are impossible, since no-one dares truly say what he thinks because that information is precious in the war to get his own way. Tertiary thinking turns human interaction into combat. That's hardly a way to feel close to people.
Secondly, it is inherently selfish. Accounting for someone's responses in order to get what you want does not show love or care for the other person. As I have just stated, it treats the other person as an enemy to be manipulated and fooled, not trusted. It might be used by people who claim that the other's actions are not demonstrating their feelings, but it is a very similar thing itself; it shows not an innocent person being hurt, but a selfish person being aggressive and manipulative.
Thirdly, it denies the agency of the other person. It shows an inability to trust them, or allow them to make their own decisions. In this way it is inherently aggressive, even though many instances might better be called 'passive-aggressive'. It certainly blends into emotional blackmail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_blackmail):
'Many of the people who use emotional blackmail are friends, colleagues and family members with whom we have close ties that we want to strengthen and salvage'  - parents, partners, bosses or lovers. No matter how much the blackmailer cares about the victim, they use their intimate knowledge to win compliance. '"My way or the highway" is the punisher's motto. No matter what you feel or need, punishers override you'. By contrast, 'self-punishers cast their targets in the role of the "grown-up" - the only  adult in the relationship...supposed to come running when they cry', while sufferers tack the position that 'if...you don't do what I want, I will suffer, and it will be your fault '. Finally for Forward and Frazier, 'Tantalizers are the most subtle blackmailers...offer nothing with a free heart'.

Knowing that the victim wants love or approval, blackmailers may threaten to withhold it or take it away altogether, or make the victim feel they must earn it. If the victim believes the blackmailer, he/she could fall into a pattern of letting the blackmailer control his/her decisions and behavior.'
It blends into emotional blackmail because it abuses people's desire for compromise; to show some goodwill and reach a balanced decision. Even in meetings of strangers, humans have a desire, either instinctive or culturally engrained, for co-operation (and for good reason; co-operation is vital for society).

Am I also condemning being thoughtful and tactful, when one keeps quiet about something, or speaks carefully, in order to spare another’s feelings? I don’t think that all instances of tact fall into this hateful category, and the reason is because they don’t abuse and control another person, lead to bad consequences if everyone does it, nor show selfishness or a lack of trust. Having described general differences, can we be more specific about how to distinguish between types of tertiary thought? Of course we can! The answer, perhaps lies in re-thinking my name for the problem. Tertiary thought isn’t really the problem at all! The problem is quaternary thought: the next step in the chain of action and response. The problem is not in allowing other people’s possible responses to control your behaviour, but trying to control other people’s behaviour.  So tertiary thought is a problem only when it goes a step further and is deliberately chosen in order to obtain a quaternary response, rather than, as in cases of tact, preventing a response by not divulging the information that would cause it.
Having made this distinction, I can expand the problem to include all even levels of the chain of action of response. It doesn’t matter if you consider a person’s response to your intended action, revise the action, consider the new response and repeat any number of times: it’s all manipulative if the end-point you’re using to judge your planned actions is someone else’s response to them, rather than what your actions might achieve themselves. I do think it’s worth distinguishing secondary thought, which involves no revision of your own action, from quaternary and above.  If I simply ask someone to do something in an open way I’m not being manipulative; it becomes manipulative and an abuse of the other’s status as a free agent when he doesn’t know that I want a certain action but I am attempting to make him do it. So I might adjust a request to be particularly polite if I know the person to be a stickler for manners, but the request is still open: he knows I want something from him, and so my politeness is more akin to tertiary thought, of allowing possible responses to control me, than to manipulation of others’ responses.
I am a straightforward person in person; I say what I mean and what I think, but not because I’m simple-minded. I have seemed like an easy target for manipulation by others, but have not been: I am straightforward because I like things that way, and I dislike conflict and emotional complexity, not because I can’t spot it or am bad at it. And so I get called stubborn, because that’s the only other way to adapt to manipulation: either you join in with the lies and attempted manipulation, or you simply refuse to play any sort of back-and-forth at all, whether it be genuine compromise or simply manipulation. Of course, I also have another motive, which is that I prefer to stick to principles than emotions anyway, and when it comes to principles I don’t like compromise anyway. Most people understand this notion when I say something like ‘I’d refuse to murder a person even if it would make the rest of the world happy’, and agree that compromising one’s principles is a bad thing. And yet when it comes to ‘I see no reason why I can’t have a good night out with my friends’ some people think that a girlfriend making enough of a fuss about it should be enough for me. If I ask why she finds the idea so terrible, I’m apparently a nasty person, whereas she, who wants to prevent me having a good time, is being wronged.
This specific example hasn’t really come up for me, but I know that it’s an example from enough people’s lives to resonate with them (and, if you swap girlfriend with boyfriend, with even more people). I wonder how one gets like that: does upbringing play a role? If people are unresponsive to direct requests, but give in to childish tantrums, do they inculcate this behaviour? How much has my (strict) upbringing interacted with my tendency to rationality and thought (rather than feeling) to make me particularly devoted to principles as the basis for actions rather than compromises involving feelings? The girl I knew certainly lacked insight into her vile behaviour, and so must have grown up with it as a perfectly acceptable part of her day-to-day life; it was her default way of interacting with people, and what she always used to get what she wanted. So it was what she tried when she wanted love, but very sadly it doesn’t control people’s feelings: only their actions. And since it’s a method of introducing conflict into relationships, it kills love rather than fostering it.

So we have a world of unpleasant and stubborn ‘sociopaths’, who have experienced manipulation and prefer to avoid it, scheming manipulators who can’t trust anyone and abuse others, either without insight or to battle others, and benighted suckers who go through their lives enabling everyone else’s lives rather than living their own.

It isn’t solely a problem in personal relationships. We have exactly the same problem at institutional levels, of which the most important is the relationship between politicians and the media. A politician might like to answer questions directly, but he knows that if he does give a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’, even if he explains the answer and qualifies it, his thoughtfulness and all the exceptions will be ignored and the straight answer will be misinterpreted all across the media. The politician then gives complex and careful answers in which he devotes most of his brain power (minimal or not) to thinking about how to avoid traps, rather than dissecting the issue well. The journalists are starved of both silly splashes misinterpreting politicians and decent interviews expressing real opinions and politics, and so become more aggressive, and meanwhile the audience becomes ever more disillusioned with the wily and sly politicians. This relates to something I’ve mentioned before, which is how forgoing responsibility, even when there is no compulsion to be responsible, often has negative consequences. In this case the journalists who ignored a general rule to report on news, and instead started to create it by misquoting politicians, or focussing on small parts of their speech, sent the whole of politics into a downward spiral in exchange for a few cheap headlines.

Where else do we get this problem? Well, science suffers terribly from exaggeration. The field of thought that aims for unbiased assessment and logical detachment has ardent self-promotion at its centre. The numerous causes, from funding and career assessment, through to recognition and the chances of standing out amongst many, could be considered in an essay about this alone, but I think it worth saying that if you know that people will automatically subtract a set amount of certainty from whatever you express then in order to have them reach your desired level of belief in your research you simply over-emphasise the importance of your findings. If readers were better able to be scientific, and scepticism were better calibrated to the claims being made and the research supporting them, then there’d be less incentive for this. But now that it exists, if you want funding or to be published, you need to have something more spectacular to say than everyone else, and that means exaggerating more, in order to reach the ‘right‘ outcome of being competitive. It says a lot about humanity that we’ve managed to coat with lies the field of endeavour that seeks truth. We’ve corrupted it to human ends of making money, careers and social esteem and forgotten about the truth entirely. It’s a metaphor for every ideal that ever existed.

Did you think I’d finished, or had left politics behind? It’s not just the relationship between journalism and politics that suffers, but political discourse itself. Politicians have learned not only to fear sensationalism, but to use it. This gives us a tendency to extremism, and, where they can get away with it, simplistic analyses of situations that beguile supporters (and frustrate critics).

Politicians aren’t the only ones. The more we rely on responses, the more it seems acceptable. If it becomes too normal, we have people who think that the law should act in the same way. We start to have judgements responding to popular opinion that take into account emotional responses, whilst also purporting to be fair and just. Given that different people have different emotions, using them to determine a punishment, or whether a crime has been committed, can hardly be fair. I’ve been less than positive about emotions and their use in decision-making before, and said my piece more comprehensively there.

Finally, we come to economics, that makes the world go round. Free markets use the premise that individuals know what’s best for them. When it comes to stock markets, the premise is that crowds, by pooling their knowledge and putting a financial gain or loss on the knowledge, know better than any one individual, and each company is rated very accurately. Any one person can then gain an advantage by trusting the crowd more than his own, incomplete, knowledge. If more people trust the crowd, the sum of knowledge going into determining the price decreases, and markets become more volatile as more and more people respond to the changes as signifying wisdom. We get bubbles and other unpleasant consequences (economists are better placed to explain the problems of volatility than I am). Once again, it all comes from thinking about others’ responses (although in this case, not trying to control them). Where tertiary thinking turns bad we need either another stage of action and response, to turn into quaternary thinking, and trying to control a person, or we need a ‘game-theoretic’ approach in which there is a negative externality (this started as an economics paragraph, after all) to the benefit to be had by changing one’s response.

Humans have evolved big brains precisely because of the advantages of predicting others’ actions. And yet I don’t think that we should always employ this ability. An economist might ask how we could capture the negative externalities of the situations where it has bad consequences. I might ask how we stop people doing it (which are very similar questions). One way is to impose a social penalty on it. If people were to realise when someone else is using others, rather than their own abilities and exertions, and not give them funding, respect, headlines, votes or jobs on the trading floor, then I think it’d die down for a while. If, in personal relationships, people respond to manipulation with more of the same, the antagonism is destructive. If everyone were to adapt by being stubborn and not bending to emotional pressure, then perhaps we’d all learn to compromise using more sensible methods than manipulation, such as truth.

Isn’t it amazing where board games can take a child?

Efficiency

I grew up treasuring efficiency. I wanted the remote-controlled car that lasted longest, not the flashiest one (yes, I realise that's not necessarily the most efficient, but from a child's point of view in which charging is not a cost it is. It gave me the most time for each 'play'). I wanted games which I'd use a lot. And once I had something I used it. I was even known to choose sweets based on how long they took to eat, since there was no point in the expensive sherbet dips which took 2 seconds to eat.
It was an essential feature of who I was. Maybe that's why I turned to science; the concept of parsimony is simply requiring theoretical efficiency. I was good at efficiency. When we ran around the mountains to reach various markers I planned the route. No other group took our route, and we won comfortably (also due to running the 26 miles rather than hiking).
When we spent two lessons in geography not learning about either tectonics or flooding in Bangladesh, and tried to guess from maps where to put a big city for best resource use, or how to link a number of cities in the best network, I was almost interested in geography. Nowadays we have computer programmes that do this (via iterative methods: no-one's found a programme to solve this better), or else we use slime mould.
As I grew older, we got into more complex problems. When we were asked how we'd guess a fraction if we could only be told that it was higher or lower, a load of people were stumped because they didn't understand the question. One guy said he'd go up in 0.1 intervals. He was thinking of ruling out each decimal in turn on a calculator display screen. I rolled my eyes. I would always start with 0.5, then halve the possibilities each time. It needs fewer guesses, which saves time.

Enough of the background. You can all see that fewer guesses is a good thing if, for example, it's an integral part of a computer programme. We don't want to spend three times as long watching our computers process things because the programmes are inefficient. Efficiency is hugely important.
Why do we have markets? We have markets because, we're told, they're the most efficient way to distribute goods and services. History shows us that all alternatives that have been tried (at a state level) are indeed distinctly worse. Hooray for efficiency! I can buy what I want cheaply because everyone else wants one cheaply too.

So let's look at housing. Yes, it's a bit of a jump in subject. This country's housing stock is hugely inefficient, requiring the architectural intelligence and insight of a chimpanzee. We have the ability to design buildings that need neither air conditioning nor heating, because they create and use draughts and sunlight.
Instead we stick a load of bricks together (or perhaps embed some steel in some concrete and encase it all in glass) and call it modern. Spanish haciendas and the old stone churches needed more ingenuity!
I've mentioned the incredibly backward nature of housing before. It amazes me that in the modern world we have the ability to save resources (both natural resources and money: heating or air conditioning are a large proportion of running costs for most buildings) but we don't use them. It hurts deep inside. Efficiency, I love you much too much (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcH-qRUvGlQ).

Well, I've clearly got a problem with housing. Thankfully, technology is used so much more in other industries, like... motoring?
I'm an efficient driver. In fact, when I started to learn, I was told that I was being dangerously efficient. I would coast everywhere, and we are told that it's best to have the engine engaged in order to have more control (and prevent safety mechanisms locking the steering wheel). I only really started leaving the engine engaged when my instructor told me that engine braking uses less fuel than an idling, disengaged engine (and saves brake wear). I love efficiency! Not for me the thrills of over-revving just for the sound, nor speeding right up to the junction only to brake hard.
We can make engines that run 40 mpg. We can even make vehicles that run 80 mpg. We can make vehicles so efficient that I could do the Oxford-Cambridge-London circuit with a quarter of a tank (rather than the half that I did use). We can fit more people into vehicles, and we even have specialised vehicles, called buses and trains, designed to do just this.

But do we? No.

Europeans are better at it than the wasteful Americans, who, despite needing to travel further, prefer their cars and engines huge and hugely wasteful. Not for me a money-saving, petrol-saving (gas-saving, for those of you not up with the hip lingo), world-saving vehicle. I'll waste my money on destroying the world, thank-you very much. I like the place that much. Well, with people like that around, I can sympathise.

We spend fortunes on paint jobs and bodywork, on getting the latest model and cleaning. Is any of this for efficiency? Do we improve the bodywork for better aerodynamics? Do we see that the latest model can squeeze out an extra few miles every day?
Do we do all this for comfort? Does the next model have a reclining, cushioned chair but our old one just the hard wooden seat? Sometimes convenience might play a part: a new CD player, better air conditioning, new upholstery, a gearbox that doesn't stick on 5th, but mostly this is all for one thing: style.
We waste money because we're buying respect. I don't know from whom these people are buying respect, because I can't see the reasons for admiring desperation and waste.

In fact, the more look around many industries, the more waste we see. People buy guzzling engines, cheap light bulbs, inefficient homes and refrigerators, endless new clothes etc. I can't really complain about some effects of fashion, like bars that charge as much for a measure spirits as the whole bottle costs. It's frustrating if people I know want to go there 'because it's nice', but it's a different issue.
This drive to waste is an inherent quality of capitalism. This is hardly a new observation: we've had complaints about consumption and consumerism for decades. Why does capitalism value short-term interests?
Firstly, the mobility of capital, and the nature of the stock market, means that at any one moment investors want to see an immediate improvement in stock values. They can sell when they want, and invest elsewhere, so if they have to wait, they won't.
Secondly, people have problems with future-discounting. They don't buy a product that costs twice as much and will last ten times as long. Having wealth now is given disproportionate value over wealth in the future. Maybe this is a psychological trait we have because of the nature of nature: life is nasty, brutish, uncertain and short. However, we don't live in nature any more, and life is more dependable. You can depend on regretting frittering your money away pointlessly.
Thirdly, at the intermediate level, companies have no incentives to prioritise long-term plans. Companies are run by individuals. They need make an immediate, individual impact, in order to be promoted (or not get fired). They need to get things done now. If you judge people on a month's results, but it takes a year to form a good relationship with a customer through friendly and efficient provision of follow-up services, then you'll have very pushy and unfriendly staff. CEOs can sack hordes of staff to cut costs and leave the company before it runs itself into the ground.
Of course, not all capital is as mobile. Those who can't keep up lose. Private investors and ponderous pension funds invest for the longer-term, fighting the other pressures to short-term considerations. When short-term considerations are given priority, long-term investors lose, along with everyone who has long-term interests: the workforce, customers (whose customer service might suffer if a company fails) and related business that work with that company (and have invested in future business). And who gets their money out first when a company goes under? Is it done under a length-of-investment basis, so that those who put their money in first get something? No, because that might lead to pyramid schemes (even though these are outlawed separately). Is it those with business relations? No, it's the big lenders. It's the people who invest short-term and could have bought the debt the day before. So there's even more reason that big banks with short-term investment outlooks thrive. We even have supercomputers buying and selling within fractions of a millisecond of each other. That hardly seems like a useful activity. The big banks make money, and we need to ask ourselves where this money comes from. Is it enough to say 'well, they pay taxes, so it's alright' (leaving aside their ingenious tax avoidance schemes which become so much more worthwhile when done on behalf of enormous amounts of capital)? If they're a tax on business itself, it's no good to allow it because some of the money goes to the exchequer. When businesses fail because of stock market games, employees and medium lenders lose out. When a stock-market investor makes money, it must come from somewhere. Do we, as a society, think that the supposedly more efficient distribution of capital is worth this tax of greed that costs billions of pounds?

That's enough getting side-tracked. The point is that capitalism is geared for as short-term an outlook as possible. This is partly because people are that way too. But we expect our societies to be run with some consideration for the future. So government needs to step in and impose long-term considerations. Not just environmental externalities, but incentives for people to make sensible long-term decisions.
We wouldn't be in a mess if people actually cared about efficiency and sustainability. Capitalism can never fully value efficiency of the sort I'd naturally want to value, because efficiency gains in resource management will always be outweighed by efficiency in resource consumption. Why make it stretch further when it's cheaper to use more?
The only time capitalism can value efficiency is when there's nothing left to consume. By it's nature it can't account for finite resources until they are gone, which is the height of stupidity. We need a hefty penalty on taking things that can't be replaced. Not just an environmental penalty because most of these things generate pollution, but a penalty that takes into account the incredible externalities of depriving everyone in the future of using that good for any and every possible future use.
Since we don't even know all the possible future uses of any good, the penalties need to be large to allow for possible very useful uses. That's efficiency. Why is it good to burn as much as possible now? If they knew what underlies modern economies, would most people really accept the sort of nihilism that says the future has no rights and that destroying the planet now is acceptable if it gets us better lives for a day or two?

I want to see futuristic houses where the draughts are treasured parts of the architecture. I want to see a world where the amazing insights in mathematics are applied to everyday problems; where we travel in electric cars and have oil left to make plastics. But long-term visions require planning, and if you mention planning, you raise the dread shadow of state-planning and control, feared before anyone even sees what it actually looks like.

So we're stuck with the belief that out of chaos comes order. It's true; evolution proves the tautology that things that best survive survive best. Until a shock, like running out of resources, or meeting something new. Evolution shows that the order from chaos is only responsive, and never predictive. The dodo, the dinosaurs, the kiwi... there are endless examples of the losses incurred by the 'it'll work out without interference' attitude.
But not bothering to anticipate the future is incredibly inefficient. If we only ever respond, we'll always lag behind, dragged along by the forces we create. We need to get cleverer. We need efficiency.

Where can we find it? State planning is dead, a catastrophic failure, like the introduction of the cane toad. An impossibility that is too complex ever to work. Wait! What? We don't understand the problem well enough, so we dismiss it, but when it comes to problems like what to do when the resources run out we're told 'we'll solve it, even though we haven't yet'. I detect some bias in the levels of optimism.

As it happens, I think we should have great optimism about state interventions. The cane toad was a failure in adjusting complex market-like systems, but there have been hundreds of successful instances of biological control since then. Our understanding improved, and so did our success rate. Biology is leading the way. We just need economists and politicians to follow.

Equality

The following post is an amalgamation of some responses I made to an interlocutor who was promoting the doctrine of equality.

The idea that we can dismiss all characteristics as irrelevant to a person's worth is a circular argument. We start of with the supposition that everyone is of equal worth, and then use this premise to discard any factor that might make people of different worth, and then finally conclude that everyone is of equal worth.

The statement that everyone is of equal worth is false. There is obviously no practical justification for such a statement, so we turn to moral justification. I can't think of any moral premise that can lead us to the conclusion that 'everyone is of equal worth' except by arbitrarily assuming this to be so.

This assumption leads to some interesting conclusions. If everyone deserves the same amount of life satisfaction, then people like myself who are not particularly excitable or happy deserve far more resources than those who provide these things for themselves; or, in contrast, people like myself who are never depressed deserve less simply because of who we are.

Similarly, a hunter who catches three rabbits for every one rabbit another catches is in effect being told that his rabbits are of less value if both get the same outcomes. That's hardly fair treatment.

Finally, ability is not simply inherent to some people, but is multiplicative with effort. If I make the effort to achieve more, giving me the same reward is telling me that effort is worthless. If everyone deserves the same outcomes as everyone else, we are telling people that character and virtue are worthless. This is in stark contrast to many moral theories, whose main aim is to justify the labelling of virtues as virtues.

I know that invoking Karl Marx will make some people automatically disagree, but he agreed with me:

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only -- for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

Marx is saying that we can have equal rights or equality, but not both. If try to change the natural differences in ability, desire and need then we will treat people very unequally, which would contravene a doctrine of equal rights and equal worth in the eyes of the law. I won't touch further on the idea of taking into account people's subjective wants and desires in order to try to give everyone the same amount of life satisfaction. There are enough problems with that for a post on its own.

People are not practically equal. This is an undeniable fact (as long as you accept anything about reality at all). If we grant them equal moral worth then we make sure that we don't have universal rules that specifically grant more rights or punishment to a pre-defined group of people. That is the essence of giving everyone equal worth: that all are equal in the eyes of the law (to start with).
If we start dealing in resources, rather than simply moral rights such as which actions a person can and cannot take, we move into defining material worth. If we are defining material worth, we cannot escape the fact that people are not materially(/practically) equal.
I refuse to accept that equal moral worth necessitates a jump to enforcing equal material worth. Moral worth is about not denying a person a place on a bus simply because of skin colour. Material worth is unconnected. If a person cannot pay for the bus ride, then skin or not he doesn't get a ride.
If someone is so materially lacking that he is unable to fulfill basic moral rights, such as voting, getting public services that are theoretically available to all and so on, then these things are not available to all, despite the moral contention that they should be, and so our society has passed laws to ensure that they are more accessible. This requires material investment, but it is not a statement of material worth.

A lot of unhappiness and dissatisfaction comes from the equation in people's minds of material and moral worth and the observable differences in material worth. The solution is not to attempt to make everyone of equal material worth despite the manifest injustices that would be involved, nor simply to state that it's a theoretical goal that can never be achieved (what a system of morality that would be, that states that the world is immoral, even before any free agent has taken his first action!).
The solution is to accept that it is fallacious to link material and moral worth. If we can expunge this foolish notion from people's heads a great many aspects of life would be avoided. Things like the hero worship of rich men, the hesitance to challenge and stand up to the old and established, the deference to irrationality because it's spoken by a successful businessman... all these things are partly caused by foolish people linking moral worth to other factors. A simple excision of the fallacy of 'the appeal to authority' from the world would be a nice start, including removing the use of (and need for) endless references to old philosophers (like Karl Marx).

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who then was the gentleman?

is the refrain of the Peasants' Revolt (of 1381). These people were not arguing about whether they ought to receive as much life satisfaction as everyone else. They were simply stating that 'Jack's as good as his master', not in terms of material worth, but in rights. They wanted to be able to travel to different farms and get paid what they could get (because labour was in short supply after the plague), rather than be constrained by area or by fixed prices. This line of radical politics has long been an English tradition, but I don't see it as leading necessarily to equal material worth.
In contrast, I can see an English tradition for pricking pomposity and arrogance. The English as a nation have for a long time had a tradition of marked irreverence for status and authority. It is this radical notion that moral (and intellectualand logical) worth is not linked to social status, power or wealth that has been particularly well-incubated in England, and it is this fact that continues to escape philosophers, politicians, the rich, wealthy and powerful all over the world.

Radicalism need not delve into strange notions of absolute equality. Simple confirmation of what peasants knew 600 years ago would be a good start for modern politics.

Bayesian inference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference
'One of the crucial features of the Bayesian view is that a probability is assigned to a hypothesis, whereas under the frequentist view, a hypothesis is typically rejected or not rejected without directly assigning a probability.'
Most people have a truth and change it when enough evidence has accumulated. Some people learn to treat truths as more or less probable, but have to do this consciously. This leads to paradigm-shifting, because people stubbornly resist new evidence until it's really overwhelming.

Some experiments on belief revision have suggested that humans change their beliefs faster when using Bayesian methods than when using informal judgement. If I say I am intuitively Bayesian, I am claiming that I more naturally accept a certain level of uncertainty in statements of 'fact'; that my informal judgement typically involves subconscious assignation of probabilities of truth to certain statements rather than a binary system of accepting or rejecting it.
I'm sure that most people do this to an extent. But studies show that it's certainly not an everyday mode of thought.I believe that this approach to science is very important. Scientists currently test whether a hypothesis is true by seeing if the data pass an arbitrary limit of probability. If, given that the hypothesis is not true, the probability of getting the data is too small, they conclude that the hypothesis is true. The Bayesian method would be to assign a probability of truth to that hypothesis, using the data to measure that degree of probability.

The greatest evil

The greatest evil is not one action; a murder, a rape, a day's torture. It is a state of being. It is the merciless persecution of people by exclusion, insult, intimidation, theft, vandalism and maybe violence. Day in, day out, pursuing this agenda of destroying others' lives for their own twisted personal reasons.

It isn't triggered by rage or insult, personal greed or any sort of deliberate intent. It is sheer thoughtlessness. One might call it a lack of compassion, but it's done by people who in other ways can be very compassionate, and isn't the same lack of compassion one finds in deliberate crime. One might call it selfish, but it's no more specifically due to selfishness than almost any action is.

It is thoughtlessness, low-level malevolence and a lack of principle. A valuing of immediate emotional concerns over principled action; partaking of the widespread belief that small unpleasantnesses don't really matter, especially when done to strangers, even though the person who ought to judge such a thing is the person to whom you're being unpleasant.

Anyone can avoid murdering a person. Someone who commits murder either doesn't subscribe to the same moral principles as the rest of us, or else was provoked beyond self-control.
But those same supposedly principled people who subscribe to moral rules and most stridently denigrate a murderer for his momentary loss of control will often be the same people who break their own principles in small ways every day, and will nevertheless feel self-righteous about themselves and their lives.

It is this hypocritical self-righteousness that is the greatest evil in the world. I can cope with murderers who claim that the rules are pointless and don't apply. I can cope with criminals who regret their misdeeds. I despise all the everyday bigotry, bullying and other hypocrisy that the self-righteous never admit is wrong.

Given that it is thoughtlessness that leads to some of this, is there some way to correct it? Well, of course there is; make people think about things. But the problem is then how to make people think about everything when they have no natural tendency to do so. We can have awareness campaigns about bullying, racism, sexism, leaving litter on the streets and about countless more things or aspects of these large problems, but the more things people are reminded about, the more likely they are to forget something.
What is required is not 'awareness campaigns' for individual cases of unpleasantness, but a general rule. Coincidentally, something rather useful was first described by Immanuel Kant, a famous German philosopher. His categorical imperative says that one should judge the principle underlying the action and consider what would happen if everyone were to act according to that principle.
In a democracy, voting might be a good example of an application of this principle. There is no commonly accepted immorality in not voting, but Kant's categorical imperative gives us a new analysis: we consider what would happen if everyone were to feel too lazy to vote and we realise that anarchy (or, if almost everyone were too lazy, rule by a very few people who had taken advantage of everyone's laziness to vote themselves power) is undesirable. We are therefore obliged to vote.
However, Kant's emphasis on the principles underlying an action is most relevant here. People will frequently judge that a little insult here or a push or a shove there are insignificant, but it is not their place to judge. They, when questioned on the subject, usually admit that the action was bad, but that it didn't matter. If we could only teach people to think about principles and not consequences then we might eliminate a lot of the little evils in the world that all add up to a lot of nastiness.
When a man owes £1, and decides not to pay the debt because it's insignificant, he is stealing. When he queue-jumps, he is cheating. When he insults someone, it can hurt, it can be spread and it can sow little seeds of doubt about someone in others' minds. If it was meant to be insignificant, then it was better unsaid. Bullies need to think what the world would be like if everyone were to bully those they could: we'd have no social cohesion at all, and we'd have networks of force and dependence. Without the social fabric of society, the bullies would either be petty-minded thugs living in perpetual fear of someone killing them in order to pre-emptively save themselves, or else weak dependants being abused by other thugs.
Queue-jumpers face a similar problem: if no-one had any respect for the accepted method of rationing demand to limited resources then we'd have great heaving masses at every counter. The sharpest elbows and strongest shoulders would win (I'm blessed with both, thankfully).

But this is just repeating what I've said before. What really matters is that the small things do matter. Nothing can be assumed to be insignificant. If it's wrong, it's wrong no matter how small it appears. £1 to one person might be a couple of minutes' work. To another it could be a day's pocket money.
We should always judge based on our principles, not on our feelings. I have heard people excuse themselves because they had been stressed earlier, had a bad night or just couldn't be bothered. Laziness is no excuse; nor is grumpiness, PMS or any other stress. The spreading of small evils is something that almost everyone does, and it is the false justification through irrational arguments that drives me utterly batty. When we talk about murder, we don't say 'oh, I did it because I slept poorly'.

What we do find, however, is that people say
"I just couldn't deal with it any longer. (S)He'd been going on at me for years and that [whatever it was] was the last straw."

Just imagine if every time someone felt grumpy or lazy, instead of taking it out on other people they controlled themselves. Would those poor benighted murderers ever reach the snapping point? If other people stopped the bullying and the cheating, would there be any gradual build-up of rage?
Are the 'great' evils strange manifestations of the devil, or could they perhaps be partly a result of everyone else's little evils building up in someone?

What are the similarities between a murder and an insult? They both require a lack of self-control. They are both wrong. Neither becomes right because of personal opinion. If you do something to someone else, it should be with his consent.

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.

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.

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.