Jane Thomson's Blog: But I'm Beootiful!

Tis the season to attend Christmas parties with people you don’t really like, don’t know very well, and/or total strangers. So dust off the toothy smile, dig out the small talk and tell yourself…strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet!

Actually I have no problem with talking to strangers. It’s strangers who have a problem talking to me. But back to small talk. Here’s my take. Five or ten minutes on the weather and your Christmas plans is fine, it’s all social butter to the, uh, awkward intercourse required at the average Xmas do. After that, it’s boring.

What IS boring? Yes, it’s in the eye of the beholder but I’m still going to be judgemental. Lack of curiosity is boring. If you’ve been talking to me for half an hour and you haven’t asked me a single question, that’s boring. Lack of self-awareness is boring. If you haven’t realised, after ten minutes explaining the exact route you plan to drive so as to visit all of your grandchildren by Boxing Day, that this topic is unlikely to be of interest to anyone except maybe your kids, there’s something missing. Food, in my opinion, is kinda boring (eat it, don’t talk about it). Ditto alcohol and drugs. And medical conditions. Unless it’s one I’ve got, of course. Also, don’t launch into long discussions of people not present who you know and I don’t. Unless they’re famous actresses or something, I guess.

What do you think is boring?

What is NOT boring? Stuff that you know that I don’t (other than people). Goats and their quirks, how to tell if you have a leak in your tank, what it was like when you went to prison, why you hate Trump and/or Biden, that time you got abducted by a UFO, and scurrilous rumours about a certain person we (both) know and despise. Anything personal and honest, like your road to recovery from narcissistic personality disorder or narcolepsy. Opinions, especially unfounded ones. Disagreements, as long as they don’t end in punch-ups. Taking an interest – in other people, in life, in the world around you. You don’t have to be an egghead to enjoy thinking and wondering and listening and theorising and then chucking out the theories and getting new theories or just making stuff up…

Speaking of which, last week I kidded a bunch of people into believing the following was a real article in the Guardian. (Well, it could have been, if they weren’t so PC.)

A global survey by CoolTravellers.com has ranked Australians as the second most boring people in the world after the inhabitants of Liechtenstein. Based on feedback they received during the survey (which was conducted online via social media) the reasons for this included Australians’ unwillingness to talk about anything emotional, serious or intellectually challenging, their ignorance of other countries and cultures as well as of science and literature, and their general lack of passion.

“I was invited to an Australian barbecue in Brisbane,” said one respondent, Thea. “All the women wanted to talk about was the weather and diets, and all the men wanted to talk about was the weather and sport. It was excruciating!”

“Went on a blind date with an Australian once. I asked him what he was passionate about, he couldn’t come up with anything. Then he said his car. Well that just about finished it for me,” said Sofia, from Spain.

“Half the Aussies I talk to online don’t even know who Freud is or like Dostoevsky. And they think we’re backward!” said Oksana, from Russia.

48% of respondents thought that Aussies were generally friendly, but 68% agreed that they were ‘tight-arsed’. “You always hear how relaxed Australians are,” said Giulia from Italy, “it’s fucking bullshit, you get fined for parking your motorcycle on the sidewalk, you can’t even take your top off at the beach and all the pubs close at eleven. I’ll never go there again!”

There were, however, some positive comments among the general canning. “They hate arguments and they won’t discuss politics, sex or religion but at least they don’t set fire to their garbage bins,” said Jules from France.

“They have these things called public intellectuals,” said Matt from the UK, “and they do all the thinking while the other guys just focus on bagging refugees. Maybe we could learn something?”

Ok, so this is fake – but is it true? Are Australians really boring, in your experience? Or are (insert your nationality here) even MORE boring than us?

(For an alternative answer, visit here)

A way of thinking about the most brutal moral problems of our time? Well, any time, really.

Your basic trolley problem (invented by British philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967) is laughably simple. You’re out for a walk when you see five people tied to a train track. The train is coming – right now. Luckily there’s a lever nearby that switches the train on to another track – on which ONE person is tied up. Whatcha gonna do? One or five?

In my philosophy class (ie, real life) people’s trolleys go off in all directions. ‘I’d untie the people!’, ‘I’d fix the track!’, ‘I’d notify the rail authority!’ I mean for fuck’s sake people!

But this is not real life. Or is it? Actually, only the other day in my job as a CIA agent, I had to decide whether to torture a guy to get him to reveal a plot to blow up the Oil Magnates Annual Christmas Party. Oh the agony…waterboard one guy, or allow the gruesome death of hundreds of oil company executives?

What would you do?

Or take Israel and Hamas. Israel’s clearly decided that killing 20,000 or more Palestinians is ‘worth it’ in order to destroy Hamas and thus deter future attacks. Hamas, equally clearly, has decided that the ‘martyrdom’ of 20,000 Palestinians is worth it in order to bring the world’s attention to the injustices perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinians. The only people who don’t seem to get much of a say are the Palestinians, who might, conceivably, disagree.

So who’s right? Well, Immanuel Kant would say that people can never be merely a means to an end. So if killing people is wrong, it’s wrong, whatever it may or may not achieve. What I’d say to Kant is, ‘Immanuel, the means IS the end.’ If the means feels icky, the end’s not worth it.

Said someone in my class, ‘All this talk of what’s ‘better’ (five or one, dead Palestinians or dead Israelis) is beside the point. We’re in no position to judge – it’s up to the nation involved.’ Which is certainly true so far, since for all the international finger shaking Hamas and Israel are still proceeding on their merry way.

But God don’t you hate relativism?

Anyways, the point is that a lot of moral decisions are a choice between bad and worse. And often we don’t even realise we’re making them. Next year, for instance, I’m having a holiday in Greece for eight weeks. Not only is this killing the planet, but also, by spending the money on flights, accommodation, etc, I’m NOT spending it on rescuing animals, starving children, etc. My philosophy group members square their own selfish spending decisions up with themselves by saying stuff like, ‘But I’m a volunteer life saver, isn’t that enough?’ and ‘You’ve got to be kind to yourself to be kind to others’. I on the other hand just give up and admit I’m a bad person. As Annie Lennox says ‘if I had a dollar for every sin I’d have a mountain of money up to my chin.’ Great song!

Is it ok to be a bad person, sometimes? Can I have a dollar?

Anyway, here’s what I think the Israelis and Palestinians should do. First, stop dropping bombs. Then just like, walk up to each other, you know, one at a time, hold out their hands, and say something like, Hi, I’m Joachim, I’m sorry this all seems to have gone to shit. Would you like a coffee and baklava? That way, the means and the end are both fine. And peace will come. Fuck governments, let’s leave them to play in their blood-stained sandpits all by themselves.

PS this month’s free curated literary fiction, at The Selective Bookworm. My favourite (short) read is The Giant Comes, by AJ Saxma. Part fable, part social commentary with a flavour of the Arabian nights (no harem pants though) it’s definitely worth a download.

They’re worried about our welfare.

My last philosophy class discussed animal rights, and pretty much agreed that the issue isn’t rights, as such, but welfare. You don’t have to give animals rights to be nice to them – right?

I look forward to this principle being applied by the Alpha Centaurians when they get here. They probably won’t ask to be taken to our Leader – I mean, when you go into the paddock do you ask for the head cow? They’ll just, you know, assume dominion (since the Intergalactic Bible states that God has given them authority over the universe and all the beasts within), and then they’ll begin farming us. If we’re good for anything. Exterminating us, if we’re not.

Rights are a funny thing. I saw a sign in Target a while ago that said ‘You have the right to look good on a budget!’ I do? Maybe I also have the right to be a famous novelist and …no hang on, I don’t think you can just claim rights, Rose. Somebody has to be prepared (and able) to give them to you. Which is why pigs don’t have them. Or Chechens, most likely.

Carl Cohen says that rights are ‘a claim that one party can make against another’. Apparently, you have to belong to a species whose members have ‘moral agency’ to have a right to rights. That is, you have to be human. What good luck, to be born into the only species on earth with the unique qualities necessary to have rights! Phew!

Which led me to think…what if a lost tribe of Australopithecii were discovered living in the swamps of Paraguay (ok I don’t know if Paraguay has swamps but let’s just say it does). Would they have rights (in virtue of being, perhaps, pre-human)? Or would we just have an obligation to ‘minimise their suffering’? Because as our cousins, or ancestors, or whatever, they’d be great for medical experimentation, you’d think…

I mean, isn’t being human a sort of continuum? Stan the Man writes out his New Year’s Resolutions, plans his next trip to Fiji and agonises about the homeless. Chad the Chimp resolves not to get into another fight with Big Bruce, plans to seduce that sexy chick with the red butt, and is pretty damn cross about that time he got beaten up for stealing the bananas when it wasn’t even him, it was that sneaky two-faced bastard who goes round picking out everybody’s fleas like butter wouldn’t melt!

Basically, I think it comes down to this. If you want rights, you have to be able to fight for them. You have to be powerful enough to demand them. You’re an Iranian woman who doesn’t want to wear her headscarf? A guy in an orange jumpsuit in Gitmo? A sheep? You have no rights.

Not yet, anyway. But if you did, you’d have something more than just ‘welfare’. You’d have something to wave around, to appeal to. You could say ‘you bastards, you’re denying MY RIGHTS!’.

That is, you could say that, if you could talk.

Blood on all our handsWe cannot hope to wash them cleanHistory is mysteryDo you know what it means?Motorhead, “Brotherhood of Man“ In an earlier post, I wrote: Whether I end up keeping the resolution or not, and barring some extraordinary event that absolutely “demands” comment, my aim is to keep my counsel for the next […]

From Apartheid to Genocide: Israel in Gaza

I asked my philosophy class this question last week, and nobody could think of a single freedom they’d be willing to die for.

Then again, we’re Australians, not Palestinians. Side issue. The thing is, we’ve got so used to having all our various freedoms (plus the inevitable nanny-state limitations like having to wear a seatbelt and not being able to access information about how to commit suicide) that we can’t imagine dying for any of them. I mean, it’s just not going to come up, right?

So what WOULD you die for?

John Stuart Mill reckoned that we should be free to do whatever we like, as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. I’m somewhat in favour of this. Drugs? Knock yourself out. Don’t want to wear a helmet riding your bicycle? Fine, crack your head open then. Seatbelts in cars? Feel free not to wear one, but if your kids aren’t wearing them, may the full force of the law come down upon you. Want to tell everyone on Twitter that vinegar cures cancer? Maybe not…

Where are you on that?

Apparently, there are countries where people don’t much care if they’re free, as long as everybody’s getting fed, watered and sheltered to an acceptable level. China. Saudi Arabia. Australia?

And then there are places like Iran, where women risk getting shot, beaten to a pulp and put in solitary confinement for the freedom to decide whether or not to hide their hair. I mean, wow! I ADMIRE those women! I think I’d rather die than wear a niqab…but then, I’m sixty so it’s easy for me to say.

Freedom or death! I mean, death…how bad can it be, anyway?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Yesterday I was trying to convince my class of nascent philosophers that the phrase ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ is total crap. So ingrained is this mantra (and so bad am I, evidently, at arguing the case) that I failed. But look, I said – weirdos aside – who goes to the local rubbish tip for a picnic? Do tourists flock to the grim housing estates of outer Paris? Why do models fall into two perfect halves when you split them down the middle? Why does nobody except architecture students like the Pompidou Centre? (seriously, there’s research!).

In fact, people everywhere like the same thing, once you get down to the nitty gritty. Nature (tamed or wild, depending on taste). Symmetry. Harmony. Fractals. Curved surfaces broken up by interesting things to look at. Probably even dogs like that stuff, could they but express their yearning for more Parthenon-like dog kennels…

Sure, some of us like prehistoric butts (stone-age instincts run hot), get tattoos in odd places, pull our earlobes down to our shoulders or wear dresses by avante-garde designers . Some of us like Mozart, others punk rock. Personally I think the Mona Lisa’s nice but a bit meh. But those are details. Nobody really likes recorder music and if they say they do they’re lying.

Anyway, during this class, someone asked a very pertinent question, which was, why ANALYSE beauty? Isn’t it enough just to appreciate it. My answer? This poem.

Rage, if you must, against the dying of the light,

But while you’re at it, spare a curse or two for urban blight…

No, more, for this is war, a war of taste and smell, of sound and sight –

Resist, resist the cancered concrete, the shadowed towers, architect’s delight

Against the gaping malls and golden arches wage the vain outnumbered fight.

And struggle, struggle for simple things, for beauty, not what they tell us we should like

For beauty feeds the soul but ugliness, step by heavy step, will call us all into the stinking night.

Israelis and Palestinians. Catholics and Protestants. Bosnians and Serbians. White Australians and black ones. Always the same problem, always the same solutions. A) Exterminate the other guys. B) Fix them their own place so we don’t have to deal with the fuckers. C) If you can’t exterminate them, make sure they learn their place. You on top, them on the bottom.

For fuck’s sake, as I think Jesus may have said, just be nice to one another, dudes, how hard can it be? The hippies were right. Somebody’s got to change something, sometime. Which is why I wrote this (yep, off with the fairies) poem…

Send warships filled with roses.

Drop jokes from the sky, and chocolates.

Load the drones with glitter and the rockets with hearts.

Offer apologies and then forgetfulness.

Sit down in the rubble and sing for peace,

Take an enemy by the hand, offer a life freely,

If that’s what it takes, for you will lose it anyway.

Be naïve, embrace the innocence and the smiles

Of infancy, share the good things of this place as you would with a beloved friend,

And start not THEN but now.

Why do amoebas move away from stuff they don’t like?

Well der. Because the amoebas that didn’t, are no longer with us. Only the ones that went, ‘urrggh, that bit of seawater’s a bit too warm!’ and ‘Niiccce…algae!’ survived to reproduce.

So let’s say I’m an amoeba (I am, actually, at times very close to being an amoeba). How exactly do I develop the ability, to make a ‘choice’? I mean, somebody’s got to go first. Does the fact that I – Amoeba A – happen to live in a place where amoebas like me happily divide and multiply, and Amoeba B’s misfortune is to live over a sterile volcanic vent – necessarily result in my descendants evolving an ability to distinguish between the two? Why not take the passive path of the pebble, which really doesn’t mind?

Amoebae mutate and reproduces; pebbles don’t. But it still puzzles me: what drives living thing to want to survive? Did the coding come first – that first random change in DNA that allowed an organism to respond in some way to its environment – or did the preference – for existing as opposed to not existing? And if it was the coding, then why – ever – the preference? As the behaviourists used to say, what you want is irrelevant for all practical purposes: it’s what you do that matters. So why aren’t we all automatons?

Darwinists would say, of course it was the coding. First some amoeba randomly developed the ability to move a little bit, and then the ones that happened to move towards nice things or away from nasty things, survived to reproduce, etc etc, and eventually you get, at the pinnacle of evolution, cats – creatures driven by obscure desires and unfathomable purpose!

But what if the desire to live drives the coding, and not the other way around? Thomas Nagle in Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False argues something similar, when he says (paraphrased by the New Yorker) that the mental side of existence must somehow have been present in creation from the very start. There is something, Nagle says, that it is like to be an amoeba.

And maybe that’s why they move away from stuff they don’t like.

Next, your life as fiction – and while I’m on the subject of fiction, I just wanted to give a shout-out for Orna Ross’s After the Rising, free (but only till 7 October), free to download at the Selective Bookworm I was in two minds about promoting this book. On the one hand, it’s a great historical fiction read on the Irish Civil War of the 1920s, a gripping insight into the passions and bitter divisions of the period and the lasting effect of the conflict on the lives of people who weren’t even born when it ended. On the other hand,, Orna Ross has a publicity manager!! Who amongst us hard-scrabbling indie authors can dream of a publicity manager! Deeply envious, but I’d definitely recommend it. Or you can pick something else while you’re there, including F.L.Rose’s (that’s me) The Point of Us).

I used to laugh at ghosts, God and people who buy healing crystals.

I still despise religion and healing crystals BUT…in my kooky old age, I’ve decided that maybe materialism isn’t necessarily where it’s at. By materialism, I mean not buying more handbags but the idea that everything in our universe can be analysed and explained in terms of purely material forces – gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, etc.

My basic premise is this. What you can perceive is limited by the tools you use to perceive it. We used to think lightning was God having a tantrum, because we didn’t know about electricity. We used to believe in ‘evil humours’ because we couldn’t see germs. Ask a computer the meaning of life and it’ll say 42.

So if you use the scientific method to analyse our world, and you begin with the assumption that everything is material (no ghosts, thanks) you WILL get scientific answers. Which work. As far as it goes. But if it happens to be the case that the universe also comprises non-material substances or forces, don’t be surprised if the scientific method gives us no indication of this. Wrong tools.

So the obvious riposte is – why should we think that there are any non-material substances or forces at work in the universe, given that we have zero evidence so far that such substances or forces exist?

It’s a good point. But is there really zero evidence?

I mean, what usually happens when we’re presented with ‘evidence’ that non-material stuff exists? We label it delusional. We dismiss it, because – we say – it can’t be verified (or falsified for that matter) through the scientific method. We say, ‘If any of this stuff was real, wouldn’t the Skeptics Society have handed out that million bucks by now?’ (To be fair, nobody’s yet been able to prove that anybody else is actually even self-aware. Yet. NB, maybe we should set up a prize…) It doesn’t fit in with our dominant paradigm – which is, these days at least, that the universe comprises ONLY material stuff.

Case in point – I read a study once ON a study of a dozen northern UK housewives who had experienced, in some form, the presence of a dead family member. The meta-study showed that the original researchers went in with an (understandably) sceptical, rather than neutral, attitude. As a result the housewives (in deference to the attitude of the academics) also qualified their experiences with little asides like ‘but I guess I could have just imagined it…’ and ‘at least that’s how it felt at the time…’. Basically, no one was allowed to take any of it seriously.

Anyway, what kind of ‘evidence’ am I talking about here? People seeing ghosts. Near death experiences. Coincidences. Deja vu. Religious experience. Foreknowledge. Remote mental communication. Moving to (slightly) less controversial examples, how about consciousness itself, which has yet to be explained as an emergent mechanism of matter. Or the experience of a universal consciousness reported by people trained in serious meditation?

“But that’s not evidence!!!” the committed materialist bursts out. “That’s delusion! Or chicanery!”

Well yeah, maybe (magazine psychics, Jesus walking on water…). But it’s also possible that we just have no framework in which to place that kind of information. We’ve got our materialist framework (yep, that’s definitely a split proton). We’ve got our emotional framework (yep, that’s love!). But we don’t really have a framework for ideas about the nature of the universe that go beyond our everyday physical and social context. I mean, look how we struggle with quantum physics and the concept of infinity. What, it goes on for…ever? And ever???? And…you’re saying an electron can be here, and not here, at the same time??

Three things make me wonder if we need to be a bit more cautious about our assumption that what can’t be analysed scientifically can’t, therefore, exist. One, the huge paradigm shifts we’ve experienced so far even just scientifically. We’ve gone from the idea that the world’s made of earth, water, air and fire and God made Adam and Eve six thousand years ago out of dirt to knowing about DNA and multiverses. And we think we’re well on the way to having it all sorted??? Two, the very commonness and frequency of non-material experiences or intuitions. Mass delusions exist for sure but when enough people spot an anomaly there’s a point when it ceases to be an anomaly and you have to consider expanding the basic theory. Newtonian physics to Einstein and all that.

And three, how very limited we are, as humans. We are bounded by our sense of self. We don’t even know what it’s like to be a bat, an ant or an eagle, let alone what it’s like (if anything) to be a tree or a star. We don’t even know how it is that we want to survive (or want anything, for that matter – more on that another time). We’re like the blind guy declaring the elephant is all trunk.

Then again, like, chem trails.

Probably I wouldn’t be putting the case for any of this stuff if I hadn’t myself had a few ‘numinous’ experiences. Which I could easily put into the ‘delusion’ basket. But I’m finding it interesting to explore the ‘what if not’ side of the argument. So I think I’ll just keep doing that for a while on this blog…sorry.

On 14 October Australians will be asked to vote on a referendum to change the Constitution to include an indigenous council – the Voice – which will advise the national government on things that affect indigenous people, specifically. It’s probably the major political issue making Australians red in the face right now.

Those pushing for a YES vote (the YES case) say it’s a way of recognising that indigenous people were here first – 60,000 years worth of first. They say that the Voice will make sure that government listens to indigenous people and consults with them before it does stuff to ‘help’ them. They point to good things that have happened because government has listened. Finally, they say, we’ll be able to close ‘the gap’ – the big difference in life expectancy, health outcomes, educational achievement, etc etc – between indigenous and other Australians.

The NO case don’t believe this (and neither do I). They point out, anyway, that plenty of indigenous people live perfectly ordinary lives on the coastal fringe like everybody else, and that ‘the gap’ mostly affects the relatively few people living in remote or outback communities. Where, admittedly, horrible shit seems to go on.

We’d all agree that good things happen when governments listen. So I’d ask, why don’t they just listen now then? Why change the constitution? Because, they say, once in the constitution the Voice can’t be got rid of. Governments of all persuasions will HAVE to listen. But that’s just the problem, say the NO case. They’ll be sticking their noses into every damn thing! Don’t get your knickers in a twist, say the YES case, it’s just another advisory group. The government already has hundreds – even some on indigenous affairs (I rest my case).

So then, I wonder, why should the government of the day necessarily listen to the Voice any more than it listens to any other advisory group? Sure, it can’t get rid of it, but it can ignore it. Either the Voice is going to be especially influential, or it isn’t – you can’t have it both ways. (If we really want the Voice to be influential, we should give it a couple of big mines and call it BHP. Or a stash of brown paper bribe bags and VIP tickets to major sporting events).

Then – say the NO case – this referendum will enshrine race in the Constitution. Specifically, you’re going to have to be indigenous to be on this Voice thingo. But race is already in the Constitution, say YES – ‘the government shall have power to make laws for any race’. Any race, sure, but this is going to specify a particular race – Aboriginals – and that’s new. Just how Aboriginal you’re going to have to be, to be on the Voice, is an interesting question – increasingly so, since indigenous and non-indigenous people continue to recklessly intermingle to the extent that eventually it’s going to be hard to tell one from the other. Half? A fifth? A tenth?

But anyway, I’m going to vote YES. Because indigenous people got together at Uluru and asked for it, because they think it’ll make a difference (whatever I think), and because us more recent immigrants into Australia owe them a small leap of faith. We took their country and it really is a pretty special one. We’re not going to give it back, we’re not going to pay rent, we’re not going to ‘cede’ sovereignty. Indigenous people lost that battle two hundred and fifty years ago and to pretend they didn’t is almost as meaningless as trying to kick out the Norman conquest. That match is over.

But voting YES to the Voice is the least I feel we can do, so I will.