Five More Things
Courtesy of messyfragments :
1. So what are your Taoist beliefs?
Cosmically, Taoism believes that the universe is simple and harmonious; that everything is interconnected, balanced between different forces and energies which work against each other, and at the same time complement and define each other, and each contains the potential of the other within them (which is the meaning of the “yin-yang” symbol). At the same time, the universe is infinite and therefore unknowable, and at any rate profoundly uncontrollable. Most of this I’m happy with, with some variation, if not as an actual physical model for the universe then at least as a way to view my interaction with it.
So (speaking from a moral or philosophical perspective) wisdom and education are more or less irrelevant; whether you know a little bit or a lot, what you know is still essentially nothing against the infinite universe. It’s useful to know more, of course, if you want to learn, but your decisions are as valid if they are based on intuition and guesswork as if they are based on years of research and consideration. Ambition and effort are also more or less irrelevant; there are options open to you, and paths you are suited for, and if you follow them you will most likely find yourself achieving the goals they represent, but if you try and push against the world, you will most likely expend a lot of effort to no good effect, exhaust yourself, and end up bitter and angry to boot. It’s better, when confronted by the universal, intersecting forces surrounding you, to work with and around them rather than to oppose them. By accepting what is in front of you and working with it you will find your life easy and happy. You can learn, and think, and work as hard as you like, and if that’s what satisfies you you’ll enjoy it; but you’re best served by making yourself sensitive to the world around you and opening your eyes, and following the paths that your world, and your inner nature, put you on. It sounds lazy, but it’s better thought of as reflective. Be aware of your world and live in it, rather than ignoring it and trying to power through regardless.
By the same token, it’s an essentially happy religion. Taoism has been neatly summed up in a popular t-shirt as “shit happens,” which is completely fair, as far as it goes. It sounds a little bleak, but it means, “shit happens and it’s not such a big deal.” The world’s basically a happy and harmonious place, and if you just stop struggling against it, perhaps think of other people as well as yourself and stop trying to take more than what you need from it, you tend to live a happier life. As can the people whose lives you touch. Don’t sweat the small stuff; don’t make trouble for yourself to add to trouble that is inflicted on you. Don’t hand other people the power to make you unhappy by obsessing over the negative or hurtful things they say and do. Be who you are and remember that being happy is a choice, not a condition: consider that there are people who are poor and starving but still take time for friends and to sing songs and play games, and there are people with unimaginable wealth and comfort whose day can be ruined by a bad haircut. Not that I’m anti-materialistic; as Jim (wnlj) says, “Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a better quality of misery.” Just remember that comfort and good fortune neither predicate nor forbid happiness and contentment, which you can only find within you.
There’s more to Taoism than that, but that’s what I took away from it. I worked them into my decision to believe in god fairly smoothly; most assumptions of His nature state that He is a creature of perfect love and that it is only human greed and folly that makes this an imperfect world. That works perfectly with the form of Taoism I describe above. He’s given us this world, which, however you look at it, is more or less one hundred per cent awesome. That many people in this world find the time to be dissatisfied with it is a little breathtaking.
2. Marriage
Something I find interesting is that marriages and funerals, two of the most primal ceremonies in human life, are considered among the most personal of endeavours, by cultural consensus (“this is our day,” as stressed brides-to-be have said through the ages), since to my mind they’re the most public acts you can make. Both ceremonies are conducted for the benefit of the community. It comes down to what I was saying in my last “five things” post about tribalism. I can’t speak to the metaphysical effects of funerals - should I find myself still conscious when I die I suppose I can poll all the other dead dudes and find out if formal burial rites actually have some kind of post-mortem effects on the soul - but the social and cultural purpose is all about the survivors; about addressing and contextualising their feelings and about their need to draw a line under their relationships with the deceased.
Marriage, to me, is very similar. Tamsin and I were together maybe six months when we decided we were happy with each other. It wasn’t a bolt from the sky, or a sudden understanding of a deep and abiding passion for one another; it was the slightly surprising discovery that we had each found someone we were willing to live our lives with, and that we were more than happy to put all the anxiety and uncertainty of the dating scene behind us. It sounds less romantic than it was; there was actually something quite profound to the whole experience. So did we need to get married in order to share our lives together, having made that discovery? In a way, no. I knew I was in love with Tamsin, and she knew the same about me; we had made the decision already. But getting married is a way of making it formal, of declaring it in front of the community. It’s all very rehearsed and structured, but even so, there’s a real sense of consequence when you make those promises in front of all those people. Again, it’s a tribal thing; it’s about declaring your commitment to the tribe and asking them to share in it. And it’s for the community’s benefit as well; you’re all our friends and family and love us, and want to feel a part of the decision we made.
Getting married is its own reason. A lot of arguments about whether to get married or not are about incentive, about what will change if you marry. The tax situation changes slightly, to be sure, and the legal relationship between both parties and any future children is vastly simplified. But other than that, why do you need to get married? Why do you need “a slip of paper,” as the argument usually goes, to confirm that you love one another? Why do you need your community there to make a decision that’s purely your own? And the answer is that marriage is a momentous step, getting married is basically about whether you’re willing to take that step. If you are, then do it; make the promise, formally and loudly, in front of your tribe and, if you’re a believer of any sort, in front of whatever God you believe in. Not because you need to, but as the most compelling proof you can give each other and yourselves that you are willing. It’s not that I don’t believe you if you say you’re willing but choose not to, but if you are, what’s the problem? If you’re not willing to make that promise, for whatever reason, then by all means don’t; but in that instance, your reason for not wanting to get married is more the issue than my reason for wanting to.
The metaphysical function of marriage is another matter. I don’t think either of us believe in marriage as a sacrament; in the idea that we are in some way spiritually transformed by the act. I also don’t think you need to “bring Jesus into your marriage,” as many priests express it in their sermons, for it to be valid. But we both believe in God, and if we got married to allow our community to share in our decision, we both wanted God to share in that decision as well. As Tamsin points out, we didn’t just make those promises to each other; we made them to everyone there, including God. He’s part of both our lives, in one way or another, so He should obviously be there for one of the biggest steps in it.
Being married rocks. It’s like having a tattoo; in twelve years, I still haven’t stopped looking at my arm and thinking, “Wow! Check out that tattoo!” Being married is a bit like that. Like, waking up with Tamsin and thinking, “that’s my wife!” Most of the time, in most of our life, there’s no difference; we just get along much as we did before. But it’s a profound difference that underlies everything, and I keep reminding myself of it.
3. The nature of evil
An interesting one. Like you, I don’t really believe in evil. Or I should clarify that:
I don’t believe in supernatural evil; in the Devil or evil spirits or anything like that. Not much of a question if you’re an atheist, but it’s an important question if you allow the existence of the supernatural at all. I’ll say I’ve never seen anything that satisfied me that it was supernatural in origin, and I am generally extremely sceptical when presented with something that is supposedly proof of the supernatural, but I’m open to the possibility, if only in a notional and theoretical way. Anyway. To me, the supernatural, if it exists, belongs to the world of God, and to me, God is love. The idea that God would create Evil just to provide a moral contrast with His own goodness belongs with the “God put fossils there to test our faith” argument; as Bill Hicks said, “Do you seriously want to believe in a God that’s fucking with you?” ‘Cause I don’t.
I also don’t believe in personal evil, in the “fill in ‘Chaotic Evil’ in your character sheet” sense of the word. I don’t think Hitler woke up one day in the late 1920s and thought, “Heilige Scheiße! Ich bin übel!” In some messed up way, I expect he really thought of himself as being in the right. Not that I think every act of cruelty or selfishness is unintended or simply misunderstood; but I think most bad people, except the crazy ones whose minds don’t work right, justify their actions to themselves in one way or another. Nobody just thinks “haven’t done enough evil today; I’d best grab my flamethrower and pop down to the orphanage.” There’s always a reason for your actions, something to give them a context that, to the perpetrator, justifies them.
However, I do believe in impersonal evil. This is one of Terry Pratchett’s refrains, and art of my reasoning behind calling him one of fantasy fiction’s most sophisticated authors: evil begins when you stop to think of other people as people. The Nazis gave us our most graphic example of that, when a country persuaded themselves not to see an entire ethnic group as human, or not in the same sense they themselves were; once the Jews are reduced to the “rats in the cellar,” it’s easy to destroy them. They’re just rats. But much of injustice and cruelty in this world starts out the same way. “I’m just looking out for me.” “We need to get the share price up.” “They deserve it.” Once you stop empathising, allow yourself to think that someone else’s misfortune or suffering is less important than your own (or at least significantly less important; nobody really esteems other people as exactly as important as themselves, that’s human nature), you become capable of something like evil.
Taoism, as I see it, has similar views. Yin and Yang aren’t good and evil; they’re just energies in the world, and everything in it is balanced between them. Evil is a human experience, and is more or less the same as suffering; it’s a choice. When you ignore the universe with which you should live in harmony, you will suffer, and you will cause others to suffer. Open yours eyes and you should most likely find that you are acting to the good.
4. The rise of vulgarity as a conversational trend
What are you implying? J
Ah hell, I can hardly object after swearing twice above (not counting German).
Conversation is about impact, about getting and keeping someone’s attention, and that’s achieved by defying expectations in some way. It’s like comedy (which is just an exaggerated form of the same principle); it’s when you break the rules that you make me laugh, or react. Puns are based on defying your expectations of the meanings of words, creating a curious or absurd juxtaposition, while racist humour is based on defying your expectations of civilised conduct, on breaking taboos. In a less extreme form, all conversation uses many of the same techniques as humour does. Swearing, again, is about breaking taboos; about shock. If I shock you, whether I’m trying to make you laugh or emphasising a point, I can make you pay attention and react to my words.
Now. More than a hundred years ago, there was a real chance of censure for even using quite mild swear-words, in mixed-gender company, in mixed-age company, or at all in the higher social strata. So if you were to use such language for impact, you’d get the effect with only very mild language, and would still get the same effect each time you used it, as society as a whole was continually impressing on people the impropriety of that language. But for the past eighty years or so the central Western doctrine - the justification for all our wars, the reason behind all our reforms and the justification, essentially, just for being a member of the wealthiest and most privileged section of the human race - has been freedom. The US particularly bangs the drum, but Western society as a whole represents it, in every act. And under the doctrine of freedom, we can’t censure people for using bad language; we’d be impinging on their precious freedoms, and on their freedom of communication, the cardinal freedom, to boot. You stop being told off for swearing around your fifteenth birthday, and while we all understand there are still times and places, those restrictions are constantly being shifted. Not long ago, one of my clients at the bank said “I don’t fucking know, David” to me (three times, now, German aside). That was a professional unmarried woman, speaking to a professional man, and a client speaking to a vendor to boot. Clearly the world has changed.
And this process is progressive. Because we swear for impact, and any given word loses its impact as it becomes more common, we have to keep moving on to stronger and stronger language to keep having an impact. Comic movies were a bit racy when they used the word “shit” (four) in the eighties; by Four Weddings, you had to start a film with a string of “fucks” (five) to get the same effect. And then Sean of the Dead popped the old C-word (I have some standards, at least in print) out a couple of years ago. I can’t even imagine what language the kooky britcoms of next decade are going to have to use to get laughs out of us…
5. Phobias
Interesting. Not something I spend a lot of time thinking about, so my answer may be a little more rambling.
I have a discomfort with spiders. I don’t think it compares particularly with messyfragments’s own fear of them, but I don’t like ‘em and I kill ‘em when I encounter them. This is partly completely rational - where I grew up, lots of spiders can kill you dead - but also partly irrational, and I think stems from when I had a bad spider-related dream as a little boy (although the dream could have been an echo of an earlier waking experience that I’ve forgotten). They don’t freak me out per se, although I’d be unhappy to discover spiders crawling on my body without my knowledge; I can approach a spider, if only to kill it. So is that a phobia? I suppose so, but I don’t tend to think of it as a life-controlling fear.
A friend of mine, Tim, studied psychology and psychoanalysis many years ago, and said that phobias are often displaced. He himself was stung by a wasp when at a swimming pool, when he was very, very young, and was very ill. For years, he was intensely frightened of swimming pools; couldn’t go near them. Fine with wasps, mind you. Then when he underwent therapy (I think related to his study), he eventually teased out the memories of the wasp-sting experience and was suddenly fine about swimming pools. But became phobic of wasps; now he freezes up when a wasp is in the room, and can’t move until somebody gets rid of it. Phobias are a part of nature, I guess. We are learning creatures, and part of our nature is to learn to avoid dangerous things from being hurt by them; and sometimes we learn too well, and our brain goes over the top with its aversions.
Peripherally related, I’ve been thinking about fear recently. I’ve read a little about recursion and emergent behaviour in terms of consciousness and psychology, and the intriguing assertion was that intelligence and everything that arises from it is a function of the brain thinking about thinking. Consider three (roughly) levels of behaviour: reacting, where the brain/nervous system processes nervous input and acts in accordance (I’m hungry so I will eat things until I stop being hungry); decision-making, where the brain thinks about the reaction (I’m hungry, so I will go where I remember there being food to eat it); and imagination, where the brain thinks about thinking about the reaction (I’m eventually going to be hungry, so I’d best take a look around and figure out where to get nice food when I need it).
Fear (obviously) works in a very similar way; panic is the reaction (being bitten hurts, so I’m going to ask this dog to stop biting me), fear is the first recursion (that’s a dog and they bite, so I’m going to run away before he starts biting me), and dread is the second recursion (I really hope I don’t meet a dog today). It was quite satisfying to have a clear way to delineate panic, fear and dread; I’ve always known how to use them correctly, of course, but you don’t always know how to neatly codify differences in English words. That was quite a satisfying afternoon.
Anyway, it seems to me that’s where phobias belong. To the imaginative part of the brain; the part that allows you to experience ambition for the future, or to create a tool to solve a problem that you’ve never seen, or to see the merit in acting on behalf of a community rather than just yourself. Because you know, on some visceral level, that something can hurt you - may have been hurt by something like it before - some neurotic part of your brain starts kicking in with the panic responses before the danger has actually manifested.
1. So what are your Taoist beliefs?
Cosmically, Taoism believes that the universe is simple and harmonious; that everything is interconnected, balanced between different forces and energies which work against each other, and at the same time complement and define each other, and each contains the potential of the other within them (which is the meaning of the “yin-yang” symbol). At the same time, the universe is infinite and therefore unknowable, and at any rate profoundly uncontrollable. Most of this I’m happy with, with some variation, if not as an actual physical model for the universe then at least as a way to view my interaction with it.
So (speaking from a moral or philosophical perspective) wisdom and education are more or less irrelevant; whether you know a little bit or a lot, what you know is still essentially nothing against the infinite universe. It’s useful to know more, of course, if you want to learn, but your decisions are as valid if they are based on intuition and guesswork as if they are based on years of research and consideration. Ambition and effort are also more or less irrelevant; there are options open to you, and paths you are suited for, and if you follow them you will most likely find yourself achieving the goals they represent, but if you try and push against the world, you will most likely expend a lot of effort to no good effect, exhaust yourself, and end up bitter and angry to boot. It’s better, when confronted by the universal, intersecting forces surrounding you, to work with and around them rather than to oppose them. By accepting what is in front of you and working with it you will find your life easy and happy. You can learn, and think, and work as hard as you like, and if that’s what satisfies you you’ll enjoy it; but you’re best served by making yourself sensitive to the world around you and opening your eyes, and following the paths that your world, and your inner nature, put you on. It sounds lazy, but it’s better thought of as reflective. Be aware of your world and live in it, rather than ignoring it and trying to power through regardless.
By the same token, it’s an essentially happy religion. Taoism has been neatly summed up in a popular t-shirt as “shit happens,” which is completely fair, as far as it goes. It sounds a little bleak, but it means, “shit happens and it’s not such a big deal.” The world’s basically a happy and harmonious place, and if you just stop struggling against it, perhaps think of other people as well as yourself and stop trying to take more than what you need from it, you tend to live a happier life. As can the people whose lives you touch. Don’t sweat the small stuff; don’t make trouble for yourself to add to trouble that is inflicted on you. Don’t hand other people the power to make you unhappy by obsessing over the negative or hurtful things they say and do. Be who you are and remember that being happy is a choice, not a condition: consider that there are people who are poor and starving but still take time for friends and to sing songs and play games, and there are people with unimaginable wealth and comfort whose day can be ruined by a bad haircut. Not that I’m anti-materialistic; as Jim (wnlj) says, “Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a better quality of misery.” Just remember that comfort and good fortune neither predicate nor forbid happiness and contentment, which you can only find within you.
There’s more to Taoism than that, but that’s what I took away from it. I worked them into my decision to believe in god fairly smoothly; most assumptions of His nature state that He is a creature of perfect love and that it is only human greed and folly that makes this an imperfect world. That works perfectly with the form of Taoism I describe above. He’s given us this world, which, however you look at it, is more or less one hundred per cent awesome. That many people in this world find the time to be dissatisfied with it is a little breathtaking.
2. Marriage
Something I find interesting is that marriages and funerals, two of the most primal ceremonies in human life, are considered among the most personal of endeavours, by cultural consensus (“this is our day,” as stressed brides-to-be have said through the ages), since to my mind they’re the most public acts you can make. Both ceremonies are conducted for the benefit of the community. It comes down to what I was saying in my last “five things” post about tribalism. I can’t speak to the metaphysical effects of funerals - should I find myself still conscious when I die I suppose I can poll all the other dead dudes and find out if formal burial rites actually have some kind of post-mortem effects on the soul - but the social and cultural purpose is all about the survivors; about addressing and contextualising their feelings and about their need to draw a line under their relationships with the deceased.
Marriage, to me, is very similar. Tamsin and I were together maybe six months when we decided we were happy with each other. It wasn’t a bolt from the sky, or a sudden understanding of a deep and abiding passion for one another; it was the slightly surprising discovery that we had each found someone we were willing to live our lives with, and that we were more than happy to put all the anxiety and uncertainty of the dating scene behind us. It sounds less romantic than it was; there was actually something quite profound to the whole experience. So did we need to get married in order to share our lives together, having made that discovery? In a way, no. I knew I was in love with Tamsin, and she knew the same about me; we had made the decision already. But getting married is a way of making it formal, of declaring it in front of the community. It’s all very rehearsed and structured, but even so, there’s a real sense of consequence when you make those promises in front of all those people. Again, it’s a tribal thing; it’s about declaring your commitment to the tribe and asking them to share in it. And it’s for the community’s benefit as well; you’re all our friends and family and love us, and want to feel a part of the decision we made.
Getting married is its own reason. A lot of arguments about whether to get married or not are about incentive, about what will change if you marry. The tax situation changes slightly, to be sure, and the legal relationship between both parties and any future children is vastly simplified. But other than that, why do you need to get married? Why do you need “a slip of paper,” as the argument usually goes, to confirm that you love one another? Why do you need your community there to make a decision that’s purely your own? And the answer is that marriage is a momentous step, getting married is basically about whether you’re willing to take that step. If you are, then do it; make the promise, formally and loudly, in front of your tribe and, if you’re a believer of any sort, in front of whatever God you believe in. Not because you need to, but as the most compelling proof you can give each other and yourselves that you are willing. It’s not that I don’t believe you if you say you’re willing but choose not to, but if you are, what’s the problem? If you’re not willing to make that promise, for whatever reason, then by all means don’t; but in that instance, your reason for not wanting to get married is more the issue than my reason for wanting to.
The metaphysical function of marriage is another matter. I don’t think either of us believe in marriage as a sacrament; in the idea that we are in some way spiritually transformed by the act. I also don’t think you need to “bring Jesus into your marriage,” as many priests express it in their sermons, for it to be valid. But we both believe in God, and if we got married to allow our community to share in our decision, we both wanted God to share in that decision as well. As Tamsin points out, we didn’t just make those promises to each other; we made them to everyone there, including God. He’s part of both our lives, in one way or another, so He should obviously be there for one of the biggest steps in it.
Being married rocks. It’s like having a tattoo; in twelve years, I still haven’t stopped looking at my arm and thinking, “Wow! Check out that tattoo!” Being married is a bit like that. Like, waking up with Tamsin and thinking, “that’s my wife!” Most of the time, in most of our life, there’s no difference; we just get along much as we did before. But it’s a profound difference that underlies everything, and I keep reminding myself of it.
3. The nature of evil
An interesting one. Like you, I don’t really believe in evil. Or I should clarify that:
I don’t believe in supernatural evil; in the Devil or evil spirits or anything like that. Not much of a question if you’re an atheist, but it’s an important question if you allow the existence of the supernatural at all. I’ll say I’ve never seen anything that satisfied me that it was supernatural in origin, and I am generally extremely sceptical when presented with something that is supposedly proof of the supernatural, but I’m open to the possibility, if only in a notional and theoretical way. Anyway. To me, the supernatural, if it exists, belongs to the world of God, and to me, God is love. The idea that God would create Evil just to provide a moral contrast with His own goodness belongs with the “God put fossils there to test our faith” argument; as Bill Hicks said, “Do you seriously want to believe in a God that’s fucking with you?” ‘Cause I don’t.
I also don’t believe in personal evil, in the “fill in ‘Chaotic Evil’ in your character sheet” sense of the word. I don’t think Hitler woke up one day in the late 1920s and thought, “Heilige Scheiße! Ich bin übel!” In some messed up way, I expect he really thought of himself as being in the right. Not that I think every act of cruelty or selfishness is unintended or simply misunderstood; but I think most bad people, except the crazy ones whose minds don’t work right, justify their actions to themselves in one way or another. Nobody just thinks “haven’t done enough evil today; I’d best grab my flamethrower and pop down to the orphanage.” There’s always a reason for your actions, something to give them a context that, to the perpetrator, justifies them.
However, I do believe in impersonal evil. This is one of Terry Pratchett’s refrains, and art of my reasoning behind calling him one of fantasy fiction’s most sophisticated authors: evil begins when you stop to think of other people as people. The Nazis gave us our most graphic example of that, when a country persuaded themselves not to see an entire ethnic group as human, or not in the same sense they themselves were; once the Jews are reduced to the “rats in the cellar,” it’s easy to destroy them. They’re just rats. But much of injustice and cruelty in this world starts out the same way. “I’m just looking out for me.” “We need to get the share price up.” “They deserve it.” Once you stop empathising, allow yourself to think that someone else’s misfortune or suffering is less important than your own (or at least significantly less important; nobody really esteems other people as exactly as important as themselves, that’s human nature), you become capable of something like evil.
Taoism, as I see it, has similar views. Yin and Yang aren’t good and evil; they’re just energies in the world, and everything in it is balanced between them. Evil is a human experience, and is more or less the same as suffering; it’s a choice. When you ignore the universe with which you should live in harmony, you will suffer, and you will cause others to suffer. Open yours eyes and you should most likely find that you are acting to the good.
4. The rise of vulgarity as a conversational trend
What are you implying? J
Ah hell, I can hardly object after swearing twice above (not counting German).
Conversation is about impact, about getting and keeping someone’s attention, and that’s achieved by defying expectations in some way. It’s like comedy (which is just an exaggerated form of the same principle); it’s when you break the rules that you make me laugh, or react. Puns are based on defying your expectations of the meanings of words, creating a curious or absurd juxtaposition, while racist humour is based on defying your expectations of civilised conduct, on breaking taboos. In a less extreme form, all conversation uses many of the same techniques as humour does. Swearing, again, is about breaking taboos; about shock. If I shock you, whether I’m trying to make you laugh or emphasising a point, I can make you pay attention and react to my words.
Now. More than a hundred years ago, there was a real chance of censure for even using quite mild swear-words, in mixed-gender company, in mixed-age company, or at all in the higher social strata. So if you were to use such language for impact, you’d get the effect with only very mild language, and would still get the same effect each time you used it, as society as a whole was continually impressing on people the impropriety of that language. But for the past eighty years or so the central Western doctrine - the justification for all our wars, the reason behind all our reforms and the justification, essentially, just for being a member of the wealthiest and most privileged section of the human race - has been freedom. The US particularly bangs the drum, but Western society as a whole represents it, in every act. And under the doctrine of freedom, we can’t censure people for using bad language; we’d be impinging on their precious freedoms, and on their freedom of communication, the cardinal freedom, to boot. You stop being told off for swearing around your fifteenth birthday, and while we all understand there are still times and places, those restrictions are constantly being shifted. Not long ago, one of my clients at the bank said “I don’t fucking know, David” to me (three times, now, German aside). That was a professional unmarried woman, speaking to a professional man, and a client speaking to a vendor to boot. Clearly the world has changed.
And this process is progressive. Because we swear for impact, and any given word loses its impact as it becomes more common, we have to keep moving on to stronger and stronger language to keep having an impact. Comic movies were a bit racy when they used the word “shit” (four) in the eighties; by Four Weddings, you had to start a film with a string of “fucks” (five) to get the same effect. And then Sean of the Dead popped the old C-word (I have some standards, at least in print) out a couple of years ago. I can’t even imagine what language the kooky britcoms of next decade are going to have to use to get laughs out of us…
5. Phobias
Interesting. Not something I spend a lot of time thinking about, so my answer may be a little more rambling.
I have a discomfort with spiders. I don’t think it compares particularly with messyfragments’s own fear of them, but I don’t like ‘em and I kill ‘em when I encounter them. This is partly completely rational - where I grew up, lots of spiders can kill you dead - but also partly irrational, and I think stems from when I had a bad spider-related dream as a little boy (although the dream could have been an echo of an earlier waking experience that I’ve forgotten). They don’t freak me out per se, although I’d be unhappy to discover spiders crawling on my body without my knowledge; I can approach a spider, if only to kill it. So is that a phobia? I suppose so, but I don’t tend to think of it as a life-controlling fear.
A friend of mine, Tim, studied psychology and psychoanalysis many years ago, and said that phobias are often displaced. He himself was stung by a wasp when at a swimming pool, when he was very, very young, and was very ill. For years, he was intensely frightened of swimming pools; couldn’t go near them. Fine with wasps, mind you. Then when he underwent therapy (I think related to his study), he eventually teased out the memories of the wasp-sting experience and was suddenly fine about swimming pools. But became phobic of wasps; now he freezes up when a wasp is in the room, and can’t move until somebody gets rid of it. Phobias are a part of nature, I guess. We are learning creatures, and part of our nature is to learn to avoid dangerous things from being hurt by them; and sometimes we learn too well, and our brain goes over the top with its aversions.
Peripherally related, I’ve been thinking about fear recently. I’ve read a little about recursion and emergent behaviour in terms of consciousness and psychology, and the intriguing assertion was that intelligence and everything that arises from it is a function of the brain thinking about thinking. Consider three (roughly) levels of behaviour: reacting, where the brain/nervous system processes nervous input and acts in accordance (I’m hungry so I will eat things until I stop being hungry); decision-making, where the brain thinks about the reaction (I’m hungry, so I will go where I remember there being food to eat it); and imagination, where the brain thinks about thinking about the reaction (I’m eventually going to be hungry, so I’d best take a look around and figure out where to get nice food when I need it).
Fear (obviously) works in a very similar way; panic is the reaction (being bitten hurts, so I’m going to ask this dog to stop biting me), fear is the first recursion (that’s a dog and they bite, so I’m going to run away before he starts biting me), and dread is the second recursion (I really hope I don’t meet a dog today). It was quite satisfying to have a clear way to delineate panic, fear and dread; I’ve always known how to use them correctly, of course, but you don’t always know how to neatly codify differences in English words. That was quite a satisfying afternoon.
Anyway, it seems to me that’s where phobias belong. To the imaginative part of the brain; the part that allows you to experience ambition for the future, or to create a tool to solve a problem that you’ve never seen, or to see the merit in acting on behalf of a community rather than just yourself. Because you know, on some visceral level, that something can hurt you - may have been hurt by something like it before - some neurotic part of your brain starts kicking in with the panic responses before the danger has actually manifested.