On Being Basic

TW: Child sexual abuse.

I sincerely believe myself to be a very shallow person. Some people around me sincerely believe the opposite about me. I don’t know how to reconcile the two.

A few years ago, I led a philosophical discussion about the question of whether depth had any meaning. I don’t think we made much progress because it’s a difficult subject to come to terms with. It’s also something postmodernity wrestles with. It seeks to deconstruct the idea that deeper meaning is anything other than pretentious twaddle, basically. And there’s that word: “basically”.

I have a whole swirl of images in my mind to express what I mean here, but as would be expected none of them have much scope for extension or imposition. One trendy, or at least recently trendy, notion which I think does sum it up fairly well is that of being “basic”. Basic has apparently been summed up as this:

Copyright unknown – will be removed on request

The internet seems to want to tell me that fear of the basic is about class anxiety. If it is, it isn’t exactly the same beast as superficiality, but the less class-oriented way of looking at it is preferring mainstream stuff. The link with being shallow would therefore be that it’s essentially an unthinking conformity, an attempt to be “normal”, or perhaps just a passive acceptance of that. I can understand why that might appeal, but I’m also aware that I unwittingly fail even to recognise what conformity is. It’s more an American than British but I can definitely see where it’s coming from. It seems quite cruel and judgemental though: kind of mocking, and in a way could be seen as shallow in itself, as it could just be about stuff and image.

All that said, maybe I am basic, and maybe being basic is just shallow. The reason I’m pondering this right now is that I’m in the process of writing a story set in 1976 CE and I’m trying to vibe with the Zeitgeist. I was there in ’76, but I was also just a child. This brought two popular “classics” of the ’70s to mind: Robert Pirsig’s ‘Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and Richard Bach’s ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’. The reputation of both of these books is that they are pretentious and banal. I read them a few years apart. Bach’s book I seem to have read when I was thirteen, although I was curious about it several years previously and I heard it as an audio book before reading it. As for ZATAOMM, as I suppose I might call it, I read this at the age of twenty when a friend said it would help me break out of my prison of rationality. My immediate response to it was that it was utterly amazing, and this was at a time when I was in the middle of doing my first degree in philosophy and doing well at it. I quickly found that it was considered utterly rubbish by practically everyone else I knew, or have mentioned it to ever since, particularly the Phil and Lit crowd. Thinking back on it now, the chief impressions I have of it are that it had a background of personal identity and emphasised the idea of what NLP people might call “unconscious competence”, and it also mentioned precision engineering and the influence this could have on the performance of machinery. It’s probably hardly worth mentioning that it has very little to do with motorbike maintenance, but it does seem to have slightly more connection with Zen Buddhism. I don’t know how I’d react to it today. The only person I’ve known with a positive attitude towards it was my friend who gave me it in the first place, and I believe them to have fairly poor judgement and possibly to have had brain damage from recreational substances.

‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’ is similar in that it was lauded within a certain group but generally slated by the literary and intellectual community. It has a certain history for me which I’ll mention shortly. In the meantime, spoilers follow but it’s basically an allegorical story of a seagull whose flock shuns him because he focusses on the art and experience of flight rather than eating and flight being a means to that end, and meets a guru who can catalyse his ability to fly for the sake of flying, becoming part of a flock of that nature. Up until the twenty-first century, the book had three parts, but a fourth part written at the same time was added to it in 2013. It was also adapted into a film which Richard Bach hated, rather oddly because he said the director had inserted scenes not in the screenplay when they actually were. This film turns up on lists of the worst films ever made. I was interested enough in it to look out by other Richard Bach books such as ‘Illusions’ and ‘The Bridge Across Forever’, although I haven’t read them.

As I say, this book has an odd personal history for me. When I was twelve, I had an inspiring English teacher who seemed to regard me as special (he also taught Boris Johnson and felt the same about him, it seems). A friend of mine and myself spent the day with him in his remote rural house one Saturday, and one of the various things we did was listen to the audiobook of ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’. It was clear, both at the time and since, that he saw me as someone who was unable to conform and could only ever plough my own furrow, and he was exercised that I should achieve my potential, which he felt schooling was inadequate to support me in doing. He later resigned from the teaching profession because of me, apparently, or so he said at the time. But there’s a sting in the tail. A few years ago, he was involved in a scandal and found guilty of carrying out serial child sexual abuse on his pupils and is now serving fourteen years in prison. Hence I have the difficulty of having to work out what to make of all this. How could someone I so respected have done something so wrong? What was his actual approach to the world? Does the fact that both Boris and I were star pupils of his imply that there is something about the two of us we have in common which is, however, not actually a strength of our characters? Did he see the same thing in Boris and me?

The fact is, though, that ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’ seems to work well for a thirteen year old of a particular sensibility in inspiring them, although in my case it doesn’t seem to have led anywhere. But it isn’t really “deep”. It’s the kind of work which seems deep for a thirteen year old but not an adult, or at least a mature adult. And this guy, my teacher, taught English Lit and still had a high opinion of the novel. It makes me feel like the emperor has no clothes, that the literary canon is in fact a mirage. But at the same time, my inability to distinguish between the quality (in-joke there for readers of ZATAOMM) of different prose works feels like something lacking in myself. This is a big reason I see myself as shallow.

I’m not sure what significance all the items in the image at the top of this post have. I’m probably not in the right generation to judge. A Gen-X version of that image would probably include a lava lamp, fibre-optic lamp and a digital watch. I do recognise the iPhone, the pumpkin spice latte and the “Aztec” ‘phone cover. This is apparently what young White women liked at some point in recent years. The first two I would veto because of the complication of their ethical background, but it isn’t a question of æsthetic taste. Regarding the so-called “Aztec” print, I actually do really like it and hanker after a pair of leggings with that pattern. Speaking of leggings, I’ve practically lived in them for the past three decades, including black ones, but prefer multicoloured bright ones. I have not and would never wear Uggs, but again that’s due to ethics. I wouldn’t buy North Face gear because I consider it to be a waste of money – it’s all about the label. I don’t see an issue with the purse. It just looks nice. I dunno, does this make me basic? Does it matter or is that just an equally shallow and meaningless accusation. Most of my choices seem to be made on an ethical basis. I don’t know if that makes me deep or shallow, but I’d probably say the latter because there’s the probably misogynist and possibly carnist stereotypical image of the woman who cares too much about fluffy bunnies.

Which brings me to ‘Watership Down’. I was really into that book for some time in ’78, shortly before the film came out. It isn’t really about “fluffy bunnies” at all, but nature, particularly humans, “red in tooth and claw”. I seem to recall Richard Adams called it “a children’s book for adults”. It has the non-human animals as character thing shared by ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’, and I can in fact link that to the other book because as a younger child I used to read a lot of such books, such as ‘Ring Of Bright Water’, ‘Tarka The Otter’ and ‘Bambi’, which unsurprisingly isn’t anything like the film and has been interpreted as an allegory of anti-Semitism. It seems to be a popular, mass-market novel and not part of the mainstream literary genre, which I continue not to get, and the fact that I don’t get it, I think, makes me shallow.

What does it mean to be shallow? Well, I can give you an example. There was some kind of documentary series about the human condition on TV a couple of decades ago which contrasted the human and non-human animal states by briefly depicting a man living in a prison cell with all his material needs satisfied. There is much to criticise about this idea. One is that that isn’t how prisons work because much of the time it’s emotionally stressful due to the immediate prospect of violence and assault, and another is that the quality of most animals’ lives would be adversely affected by being in captivity although they would have their direct physical needs satisfied and be protected from potential physical dangers and health hazards. Nonetheless, I have to be honest about this. That doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice to make to me, if it really was that way. There would be issues regarding exercise and company, and the choices would be limited, creating a potential ethical problem, but apart from that I’d probably end up treating it like a lifelong spiritual retreat, or I might just fill my time with popular cultural artifacts. Significantly, it would be nice not to have to struggle to survive all the time. So I imagine. I think this makes me shallow. It means I’m more concerned about immediate physical needs than anything else, such as freedom and the opportunity to make a positive difference to the world.

What is depth though? Is it linked to self-awareness? How much insight do I have into my own personality? Well, I’m not sure those are healthy questions. They seem like navel-gazing. It seems less appropriate to share that kind of tiresome self-analysis publicly. There’s enough of it in my diaries. It’s worth doing of course, but substantially to become a better person in how one treats others and perhaps uses and develops one’s strengths to help them, and that includes the non-human world incidentally.

There’s an idea in the Qabbalah where one is supposed to obey all the mizvot before one can even get to the second step on the Tree Of Life. It seems to me that this is problematic in two ways. One is that it seems to view ethical behaviour as a mere preliminary rather than an end in itself. The other is that it presumes that someone would be able to be morally perfect, and achieve that within about forty years of life. Neither of these things seem desirable. In fact they are by definition not desirable because that which is good is all that is worthy of desire. Anything else a scholar is doing in this manner is surely only going to be a distraction from a righteous life. The Qabbalah is paralleled elsewhere by alchemy, astrology, some aspects of Yoga and contemplating choirs of angels, in that there is an esoteric element dominating the rest of the discipline. This, I think, is at least similar to depth if it isn’t actually depth itself, and as such the starting point, which for the Qabbalah seems to be study of the Talmud to encourage ethical action and life, is superficial, but that then means that the good is superficial, and if depth involves looking beyond good and evil to other, supposèdly “higher”, things. If that’s what depth is, I don’t want it and see it as unhealthy.

On the other hand, maybe that isn’t depth. Research, apparently carried out by the department of the bleedin’ obvious somewhere, has shown that reading mainstream novels increases empathy. I’m not sure about this because I feel, as I’ve said before, that there are ideas “out there”, promulgated by mainstream literature, that influence how we think about ourselves, which are ultimately based on fictional characters and situations, and these seem to have a momentum of their own which could take them away from the real world of relationships. Moreover, it’s been said that CBT works better than depth psychology to resolve many difficulties, so I don’t know, is getting there half the fun?

How, then, do I feel about being shallow? Well, I’ve thought about this a lot and my conclusion is that it is in fact a deficiency. There are various widespread features of being human, including language use and layered interpersonal relationships. Not being able to maintain these things or take them up and develop them like most people could be seen as making me less human. I think I want to be human, and also neurotypical although that ship sailed in the 1960s for me. I don’t want to stigmatise other neurodiverse people in any way either, so in a sense negative feelings about neurodiversity, which is what I think this is a manifestation of, is internalised ableism, so perhaps I shouldn’t feel this way. Therefore, perhaps I should embrace my superficiality as part of who I am.

To close then, bear in mind that if you think this post was “deep”, that means I lack self-awareness because I consider it shallow, like me, so it’s a contradiction.