The Gap

Still following ‘Pluribus’ but this is interesting way beyond that. First of all, an introduction. The Darién Gap is a hundred kilometre stretch of land straddling the more or less irrelevant border between Colombia and Panama, and its presence is what makes that border irrelevant. It’s inhospitable in various ways. Where to start?

Well, the longest road in the world stretches from southern Argentina to Northern Alaska and is thirty thousand kilometres long, meaning that flattened out it would go three-quarters around the planet. Except it doesn’t, because of this gap. It’s almost impossible to get between Colombia and Panama, at least for humans, even with high-tech transport methods such as ships and motor vehicles. As can be seen from this map, the roads run out either side:

As you can see, there are no railways, canals or roads between them. It is, however, occupied by people traffickers and drug smugglers, and there are two peoples, the Guna and the Emberá. Remarkably, the Guna flag looks like this:

The swastika needs some explanation. It’s a local sigil called Naa Ukuryaa symbolising the four corners of the world whence the Guna hail, so in other words it’s practically the opposite of the Nazi use. Olaf Stapledon once claimed that Homo sapiens would use this symbol with varying significance throughout our history. But a people is more than a flag. They mainly live on coastal islands and moved westward into Panama. Some of them are white and have a special role defending the Moon against a dragon. The Emberá have a larger population and like several other indigenous peoples have a tradition of FGM although they’re working to eliminate it. They traditionally live on river banks but then the same applies to the West. They’re an egalitarian society whose shamans are however revered. I just thought I’d mention these peoples because the rest of this post is going to be about other things.

Immigrants are constantly attempting to travel through the area, often ending up dead as a result. Even by the time they start, they’re not in good condition and are unlikely to have the equipment needed to survive. The situation is similar to the “small boats” plight in the Manche/English Channel, with many deaths and a lot of corruption, but the drug trade, currently illegal, makes it even worse. The transit of people from more Westernised conditions through the gap has led to economic interactions with the indigenous people which pulls them toward the money economy and there is also, quite startlingly, tourism in the region which has the same effect.

Another situation which comes to mind here is the one in the DMZ of Korea and around Chernobyl. These places deny access to most humans and consequently have gone back to a less interfered with condition, which for Chernobyl is deeply ironic. The ionising radiation in the latter also makes the situation less straightforward, with for example black frogs using it to warm their bodies and increase metabolic rate and fungi with high levels of melanin being favoured by the environment, but in the DMZ between the two Koreas the situation is more similar, since it’s human activity which has stopped the strip from being interfered with. In the Darién Gap, humans do things but not in a manner similar to the organised centres of many territories. The way international and smaller scale borders often exist, good ones at least, is that they’re placed in relatively inaccessible places. For instance, Loughborough, where I used to stay, is on the northern edge of Leicestershire and if you try to walk thence into Nottinghamshire through fields, you’re confronted not only by the unsurprising river which often forms a border but also by rather boggy, wet ground, which makes it a good place to put a border as nobody wants to argue over it. Likewise the border between Scotland and England runs through high, rocky heathland and is sparsely populated compared to, say, the Central Belt or the large cities of Yorkshire and Lancashire. The Darién Gap is the same. Humans do live there but they have difficulty doing so unless they’re hunter-gatherers. Agriculture would be hard and the heavy rainfall is the cause of frequent flooding. It’s also mountainous, like much of Central America.

The wider political structure of the region shows the relatively large territory of Mexico to the northwest becoming the increasingly fragmented area to the southeast, and in fact this already existed in pre-Columbian times. This is associated with the volcanic, mountainous and also increasingly humid nature of the isthmus as one goes south. It’s also remarkable to consider that the area is also a bottleneck for the human population, as the descendants of the humans who entered the Americas via Beringia between Siberia and Alaska to the far north and most, though possibly not all, of the population of South America before 1500 CE were descended from people who had come through the Gap. I say not all because there may have been some between Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of South America, as can be seen in the cultivation of the sweet potato, human genomes on Easter Island and chicken bones dating from the fourteenth Christian century in the Inca Empire, or at least that area. But apart from that, everyone came through the Gap.

If you go a bit further west from Darien, nowadays you’ll come across the Panama Canal. This is of course economically very important and necessary due to the closure of the Isthmus of Panama, which I’ll mention again. Of course, this does depend on long-distance trade being considered important, which is probably not ecologically sound. There was a time before it was practically to dig canals of that scale, and in the late seventeenth century, before the Union, Scotland attempted to exploit this with the Darien Scheme, the establishment of the colony of New Caledonia, where the idea was to transport goods across the Gap from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and charge for each transaction there. Apart from the obvious colonialism (“A big boy did it and ran away”, but this is before the big boy), this might sound like a good idea, particularly when you consider that it’s a mountainous and rain-soaked area like a certain other country thousands of kilometres to the northeast, but it didn’t work. Scotland invested a heap of money in the scheme, taken from the purses of Scots of fairly limited means who invested their life savings. I’m going to try to summarise what happened.

William Paterson, Scottish founder of the Bank of England, began a company known as The Company of Scotland Trading To Africa And The Indies. Lionel Wafer talked Darien up to him and he decided to found a unique type of colony which would neither exploit the land or people on it nor produce goods for international trade, but simply move items between the oceans for a fee. The East India company unsuccessfully lobbied the English parliament to impeach the new company and then threatened to boycott anyone who traded with Paterson, who raised £400 000 from the Scottish people for the colony, to be called New Edinburgh. He took five ships which carried various items useful for the colony but also three carriages without horses to transport them, a large quantity of garments and also many combs and mirrors which he planned to use to trade with the Guna. Leaving without telling the settlers or anyone else where they were going until they were well on the way to avoid word getting to the East India company, they arrived having lost a remarkably small number of the initial 1200 settlers. Their initial attempt to build a settlement was hampered by the unsuitability of the land and the recalcitrant nature of the jungle, whose trees would need to be felled and cleared for it to work, so they moved to another site and tried again. In Spring 1699, torrential rain and tropical diseases killed two hundred within a month and they were losing ten a day at one point. The Guna were also not interested in the mirrors and combs and the land was unsuitable for farming, so they were forced to eat less than a pound of mouldy flour boiled in water each per week, skimming off the infesting maggots and worms in the process. They then attempted to trade with other nearby English colonies but William of Orange, English king at that point, forbade trade with them, and they also got wind of an imminent Spanish attack so they abandoned the colony and went back to Scotland. Only two hundred of them made it there. In August 1699, Paterson tried again with two thousand settlers who hadn’t heard about the disastrous first attempt. They once again suffered disease and malnutrition, accompanied by rebellion against the leaders and a local pastor blamed their misfortune on their revolt, which was seen as deeply sinful by the leaders. However, they then united with the Guna in an alliance against another threatened attack by the Spanish, who blockaded them by land and sea with cannons and ships until they surrendered in March 1700. The Spanish were gracious enough to let them leave for Scotland, but by the time they got back everyone hated them, they’d lost everyone’s life savings, they got disowned and ostracised and Scotland had lost all of its money. And of course a lot of them died. As a result, the English parliament agreed to bail the Company out to the tune of £398000 in return for the Union, which became known as the Price Of Scotland, because although they had enough money to pursue the ongoing War of the Spanish Succession, they also needed bodies and there were more men available as cannon fodder in Scotland than in England, so that’s what they did. Scots were also soon involved in running the Empire and keep the British economy going. Many Scots saw the money as a bribe and the Union as the result of corruption and incompetence. So that’s a rough sketch of the role of the Darien Gap in the downfall of Scotland and the Act of Union’s success, which as well as everything else was partly the result of the inhospitality of the region to European-style human settlement, and it also means that Scotland is morally compromised to some extent by being instrumental in keeping the British Empire going. Had this not happened, it isn’t clear that the Empire would’ve been as victorious as it turned out to be, so whereas Scotland has every right to gripe about its position, the rich and powerful of this nation played their part in putting it in that predicament although the relatively modestly off also had a role. The likes of crofters and fishing families, of course, got the short straw and can’t be blamed at all for it, as usual.

There’s one further aspect to the Darien Gap I want to cover, which is connected to climatic and other changes which led to the ice ages and also, in my opinion, the Biblical Fall of Man. You can ignore the last bit for now if you find it too off-putting, but this is how things went. Right now the Southern and Arctic Oceans alone stretch all the way around the world and in the case of the latter it isn’t bordered by land on both north and south, since there is by definition nothing north of the North Pole. The Southern Ocean, however, provides a vast swirl of current all the way round the planet. There also used to be another such ocean in prehistoric times, known today as the Tethys, which separated the northern and southern continents, and like the Southern Ocean it had an uninterrupted current passing all the way round Earth flowing east to west. Its remnants today are present as the Caribbean, parts of the Atlantic and Pacific, the Med, Black Sea, Caspian and certain other lakes through central Eurasia. Three million years ago, this ocean finally closed for the time being at least when the Americas collided. This had immediate effects on the wildlife of the two continents, with exchanges such as camels, armadillos, opossums and the extinction of much of the life on the southern continent in particular. It also caused the current passing across what was now the Atlantic to be blocked by the Gulf of MEXICO and the warm water to be redirected north, where it increased precipitation and warmed the lands around the North Atlantic. Snowfall also increased due to the humidity, which did two things: it increased the reflectivity of the planet overall, bouncing heat and light back into space, and it locked up a lot of the planet’s water in ice, making it drier and increasing the spread of grassland and desert while causing the rain forests to shrink. It also lowered sea levels, exposing continental shelves, ultimately making it possible for fauna, including humans in the end, to move between North America and Eurasia. However, all of this was less significant than Milankovitch cycles, which are beyond the scope of this post.

It’s also possible that the shrinkage of rain forests led to our ancestors having to leave them for harsher environments such as the savannah, where less food was available, threat from predators was greater and water was harder to come across. This is where the “Fall Of Man” comes in. I believe it’s possible that this harshness led to different, for instance more aggressive, behaviour in and between our communities due to having to compete for fewer resources and various deficiencies in our diets and the ability to deal with health problems, which led to two things: stressed out malnourished pregnant people giving birth to babies who were less than optimally behaved, and parenting and other activities which tended to traumatise them and lead to poor behaviour. In other words, the Fall. We’re all the victims of this and it’s handed down by the rather dystopian flavour of society. The fruit of the tree of knowledge is actually the absence of fruit, not its presence, and the serpent is our base desires and impulses being brought to the surface by these harsh conditions. I realise this sounds nuts, and the questions of free will and a benevolent God are compromised by this line of thought.

I want to end with Keats’s ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’:
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

I realise there’s a lot going on in this poem, but there’s one thing which I don’t think is at all and want to mention the unfairness of the criticism. I think Keats was fully aware that Cortez never went to Darien (which is not surprising since he had a successful career destroying the Aztec Empire and so on before going back to Spain to end his life in his early sixties as opposed to being bitten and killed by a puff adder or dying of dysentery) and was attempting to convey that he had vision enough to “see” the Pacific. It’s not erroneous at all to my mind. I just wanted to get that in.

In the meantime, this has given me a Thompson Twins earworm even though that song has nothing at all to do with Panama, and I haven’t thought about the fashion chain at all.

My Writing Style

I’m fully aware that I’m too wordy, don’t stick to the point and talk about arcane topics a lot, not just on here but in face to face conversations. This is partly just what I do, in the sense that I’m unable to do otherwise or employ it as a bad habit. In a world full of shortening attention spans and loss of focus though, I feel that however ineptly, this is still worth doing.

In the process of doing this, I continued this blog post in a fairly lightweight word processor called AbiWord which we stopped using because it had a tendency to crash without warning and without there being any salvageable document when this happened, and it proceeded to do exactly that, so this is in a way a second draft. One of the many features AbiWord lacks, and this is not a criticism because the whole philosophy is to avoid software bloat, is a way of assessing reading age. Word, and possibly LibreOffice and OpenOffice, does have such a facility, which I think uses Flesch-Kincaid. A blank was drawn when I said this to Sarada so it’s likely this is not widely known and in any case I looked into it and want to share.

There are a number of ways of assessing reading age, and as I’ve said many times it’s alleged that every equation halves the readership. When I was using AbiWord just now, I decided to write these in a “pseudocode” manner, but now I’m on the desktop PC with Gimp and stuff, I no longer have that problem although of course MathML exists. Does it exist on WordPress though? No idea. Anyway, the list is:

• Flesch-Kincaid – grade and score versions.
• Gunning Fog
• SMOG
• Coleman-Liau
• ARI – Automated Readability Index
• Dale-Chall Readability Formula

Flesch-Kincaid comes in two varieties, one designed to rank readability on a scale of zero to one hundred. It works like this:

206.835−1.015(average sentence length)−84.6(average syllables per word)

It interests me that there are constants in this and I wonder where they come from. It also seems that subordinate clauses don’t matter here and there’s no distinction between coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, which seems weird.

The grade version is:

0.39(average sentence length)+11.8(average syllables per word)−15.59

This has a cultural bias because of school grades in the US. I don’t know how this maps onto other systems, because children start school at different ages in different places and learn to read officially at different stages depending on the country. Some, but not all of the others do the same.

Gunning Fog sounds like something you do to increase clarity and I wonder if that’s one reason it’s called that or whether there are two people out there called Gunning and Fog. It goes like this:

0.4((words/sentences)+100(complex words/words))

“Complex words” are those with more than two syllables. This is said to yield a number corresponding to the years of formal education, which makes me wonder about unschooling to be honest, but it’s less culturally bound than Flesch-Kincaid’s grade version.

SMOG rather entertainingly stands for “Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook”! Rather surprisingly for something described as simple, it includes a square root:

This is used in health communication, so it was presumably the measure that led to diabetes leaflets being re-written for a nine-year old’s level of literacy. I don’t know what you do if your passage is fewer than thirty sentences long unless you just start repeating it. Again, it gives a grade level.

Coleman-Liau really is nice and simple:

0.0588L−0.296S−15.8

L is the mean number of letters per one hundred words and S is the average number of sentences in that. This again yields grade level, although it looks like it can be altered quite easily by changing the final term. It seems to have a similar problem to SMOG with short passages, although I suppose in both cases it might objectively just not be clear how easily read brief passages are.

The ARI uses word and sentence length and gives rise to grade level again:

4.71(characters per word)+0.5(words per sentence)−21.43

Presumably it says “characters” because of things like hyphens, which would make hyphenation contribute to difficulty in reading. I’m not sure this is so.

The final measure is the Dale-Chall Readability Formula, which again produces a grade level. It uses a list of three thousand words fourth-grade American students generally understood in a survey, any word not on that list being considered “difficult”:

There are different ways to apply each of these and they’re designed for different purposes. I don’t know if there are European versions of these or how they vary for language. The final one, for example, takes familiarity into account as well as length.

When I’ve applied these to the usual content of my blog, reading age usually comes out at university degree graduate level, which might seem high but it leads me to wonder about rather a lot of stuff. For instance, something like sixty percent of young Britons today go to university, so producing text at that level, if accurate, could be expected to reach more than half the adult population. However, the average reading age in Britain is supposed to be between nine and eleven, some say nine, and that explains why health leaflets need to be pitched at that level. All that said, I do also wonder how nuanced this take is. I think, for example, that Scotland and England (don’t know about Wales I’m afraid, sorry) have different attitudes towards learning and education, and that in England education is often frowned upon as making someone an outsider to a much greater extent than here, and this would of course drag down the average reading age. That’s not, however, reflected in the statistics and Scottish reading age is said to be the same as the British one. I want to emphasise very strongly here that I am not in any way trying to claim that literacy goes hand in hand with intelligence. I have issues with the very concept of intelligence to be honest but besides that, no, there is not a hereditary upper class of more intelligent people by any means. Send a working class child to Eaton and Oxbridge and they will come out in the same way. I don’t know how to reconcile my perception.

But I do also wonder about the nature of tertiary education in this respect. Different degree subjects involve different skills, varying time spent reading and different reading matter, and I’d be surprised if this leads to an homogenous increase in reading age. There’s a joke: “Yesterday I couldn’t even spell ‘engineer’. Today I are one”. Maybe a Swede? Seriously though, although that’s most unfair, it still seems to me that someone with an English degree can probably read more fluently than someone with a maths one, and the opposite is also true with, well, being good at maths! This seems to make sense. The 1979 book ‘Scientists Must Write’, by Robert Barrass tries to address the issue of impenetrability in scientific texts, and Albert Einstein once said, well, he is supposed to have said a lot of things he actually didn’t so maybe he didn’t say this either, but the sentiment has been expressed that if you can’t explain something to a small child you don’t understand it yourself.

I should point out that I haven’t always been like this. I used to edit a newsletter for brevity, for example, and up until I started my Masters I used to express myself very clearly. I also once did an experiment, and I can’t remember how this opportunity arose, where I submitted an essay in plain English and then carefully re-wrote it using near-synonyms and longer sentences and ended up getting a better grade for the “enhanced” version, and it wasn’t an English essay where I might’ve gotten marks for vocabulary. On another occasion I was doing a chemistry exam (I may have mentioned this elsewhere) and there was a question on what an ion exchange column did, and I had no idea at the time, so I reworded the question in the answer as something like “an ion exchange column swaps charged atoms using a vertical cylindrical arrangement of material”, i.e. “an ion exchange column is an ion exchange column”, and got full marks for it without understanding anything at all. This later led me to consider the question of how much learning is really just about using language in a particular way.

So there is the question of whether a particular style of writing puts people off unnecessarily and is a flaw in the writer, which might be addressed. This is all true. Even so, I don’t think it would always be possible to express things that simply and also it’s a bit sad to be forced to do so rather than delighting in the expressiveness of our language. Are all those words just going to sit around in the OED never to be used again? But it can be taken too far. Jacques Lacan, for example, tried to make a virtue of writing in an obscurantist style in order to mimic the experience of a psychoanalyst not grasping what a patient is saying by creating reading without understanding, and in particular was concerned to avoid over-simplifying its concepts. Now I’ve just mentioned Lacan, and I don’t know who reading this will know about him. Nor do I know how I would find that out.

I’m not trying to do what he does. Primarily, I am trying to avoid talking down to people and to buck the trend I perceive of shrinking attention and growing tendencies to dumb things down, just not to think clearly and hard. Maybe that isn’t happening. Perhaps it’s my time of life. Nonetheless, this is what I’m trying to do, for two reasons. One is that talking down to people is disrespectful. I’m not going to use short and simple words and sentence structures because that to me bears a subtext that my readers are “stupid”. The other is that people generally don’t benefit from avoiding thinking deeply about things and being poorly-informed. It’s in order here to talk about the issue of “stupidity”. I actually have considerable doubt that the majority of people differ in how easily they can learn across the board for various reasons. One is that in intellectual terms, as opposed to practical, the kind of resistance found in the physical world doesn’t exist at all. This may of course reflect my dyspraxia, which also reflects what things are considered valuable. Another is that the idea of variation in general intelligence is just a little too convenient for sorting people into different jobs which are considered more or less valuable or having higher or lower status, and as I’ve doubtless said before, the ability to cope with boredom is a strength. I also think that the idea of a single scale of intelligence, which I know is a straw man but bear with me, has overtones of the great chain of being, i.e. the idea that there are superior and inferior species with the inferior ones being of less value.

There are, though, two completely different takes on intelligence.

Structure here: wilful stupidity and the false hierarchy of professors.

As I’ve said before, I try not to call people stupid, for two reasons. One is that if it’s used as an insult, it portrays learning disability as a character flaw, which it truly is not. It is equally erroneous to deify the learning disabled as well. It’s simply a fact about some people which should be taken into consideration. Other things could be said about it but they may not be relevant to the matter in hand. The other is that the idea of stupidity is that it’s an unchangeable quality of the person in question, and this is usually inaccurate. An allegedly stupid person usually has as much control over their depth and sophistication of thinking as anyone else has. Therefore, I call them “intellectually lazy”. For so many people, it’s actually a choice to be stupid. As noted earlier, there are whole sections of society where deep thought is frowned upon and marks one out as an outsider, and it’s difficult for most people to go against the grain. This is not, incidentally, a classist thing. It exists right from top to bottom in society. Peer pressure is a powerful stupifier.

There is another take on stupidity which sees it as a moral failing, i.e. as a choice having negative consequences for others and the “stupid” person themselves.  This view was promoted prominently by the dissident priest and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the 1930s after Hitlers rise to power and in connection with that.  The idea was later developed by others.  This form of stupidity might need another name, and in fact when I say “intellectual laziness”, this may be what I mean.  It could also go hand in hand with anti-intellectualism.

Malice, i.e. evil, is seen as less harmful than intellectual laziness as evil carries some sense of unease with it.  In fact it makes me think of Friedrich Schillers play ,,Die Jungfrau von Orleans” with its line ,,Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens” – “Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain”, part of a longer quote here:

Unsinn, du siegst und ich muß untergehn!

Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.

Erhabene Vernunft, lichthelle Tochter

Des göttlichen Hauptes, weise Gründerin

Des Weltgebäudes, Führerin der Sterne,

Wer bist du denn, wenn du dem tollen Roß

Des Aberwitzes an den Schweif gebunden,

Ohnmächtig rufend, mit dem Trunkenen

Dich sehend in den Abgrund stürzen mußt!

Verflucht sei, wer sein Leben an das Große

Und Würdge wendet und bedachte Plane

Mit weisem Geist entwirft! Dem Narrenkönig

Gehört die Welt–

Translated, this could read:

Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!

Against stupidity the very gods

Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,

Resplendent daughter of the head divine,

Wise foundress of the system of the world,

Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,

Bound to the tail of folly’s uncurbed steed,

Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,

Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.

Accursed, who striveth after noble ends,

And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!

To the fool-king belongs the world.

Now I could simply have quoted the line in English of course, but as I’ve said, I don’t believe in talking down to people and it’s a form of disrespect, to my mind, to do that, so you get the full version.  This is spoken by the general Talbot who is dismayed that his carefully laid battle plans are ruined by the behaviour of his men, who are gullible, panicking and superstitious, in spite of his experience and wisdom, which they ignore.  I think probably the kind of “stupidity” Schiller had in mind was different, perhaps less voluntary, but this very much reflects the mood of these times.

Getting back to Bonhoeffer, he notes that intellectual laziness pushes aside or simply doesn’t listen to anything which contradicts one’s views, facts becoming inconsequential.  It’s been said elsewhere that you can’t reason a person out of an opinion they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place.  People who are generally quite willing to think diligently and carefully in other areas often refuse to do so in specific ones.  People can of course be encouraged to be lazy in certain, or even all, areas, because it doesn’t benefit the powers that be that they think things through, and this can occur through schooling and propaganda, and nowadays through the almighty algorithms of social media, or they may choose to take it on themselves.  Evil can be fought, but not stupidity.  Incidentally, I’m being a little lazy right now by writing “stupidity” and not “intellectual laziness”.  The power of certain political or religious movements depends on the stupidity of those who go along with it.  This is also where thought-terminating clichés come in because Bonhoeffer says that conversation with a person who has chosen to be stupid often doesn’t feel like talking to a person but merely eliciting slogans and stereotypical habits of thought from somewhere else.  It isn’t coming from them even if they think it is, in a way.  Hence the use of the word “sheeple” and telling people to “do your own research”, which in fact often means “watch the same YouTube videos as I have” is particularly ironic because it’s the people telling you to do that who are thinking less independently or originally than the people being told.  Thinking of Flat Earthers in particular right now, which I’m going to use as an example because it’s almost universally considered absurd and is less contentious than a more obviously political example, there are a small number of grifters who are just trying to make money out of the easily manipulated, a few sincere leaders and a host of “true believers” who are either gullible or motivated by other factors such as wanting to be part of something bigger or having special beliefs hidden from τους πολλους.  I’m hesitant to venture into overtly political areas here because of their divisive nature, but hoping that using the example of Flat Earthers can be agreed to be incorrect and almost deliberately and ostentatiously so.

He goes on to say that rather than reasoning changing people’s minds here, their liberation is the only option to defeat this.  This external liberation can then lead to an internal liberation from that stupidity.  These people are being used and their opinions have become convenient instruments to those imagined to be in power.

This is roughly what Bonhoeffers letter said and it can be found here if you want to read it without some other person trying to persuade you of what he said.  In fact you should read it, because that’s what refusing to be stupid is about. Also, he writes much better than I. That document continues with a more recent development called ‘The Five Laws Of Stupidity’, written in 1970 by the social psychology Carlo Cippola. The word “stupidity” in his opinion refers not to learning disability but social irresponsibility. I’ve recently been grudgingly impressed by the selfless cruelty of certain voters who have voted to disadvantage others with no benefit to themselves. A few years ago, when the Brexit campaign was happening, I was of course myself in favour of leaving the EU and expected it to do a lot of damage to the economy, which was one reason I wanted it to happen, but I would’ve preferred a third option where the “U”K both left the EU and opened all borders, abolishing all immigration restrictions. This is an example of how my own position was somewhat similar to that of the others who voted for Brexit, but in many people’s case they were sufficiently worried about immigration and its imagined consequences to vote for a situation which they were fully aware would result in their financial loss. In a way this is admirable, and it illustrates the weird selflessness and altruism of their position, although obviously not for immigrants. Cippola’s target was this kind of stupidity: disadvantage to both self and others due to focus on the latter. This quality operates independently of anything else, including education, wealth, gender, ethnicity or nationality. People tend to underestimate how common it is, according to Cippola. This attitude is dangerous because it’s hard to empathise with, which is incidentally why I mentioned my urge to vote for Brexit. I voted to remain in the end, needless to say. Maliciousness can be understood and the reasoning conjectured, often quite accurately, but with intellectual laziness (I feel very uncomfortable calling it “stupidity”) the process of reasoning has been opted out of, or possibly been replaced by someone else’s spurious argument. This makes them unpredictable and means they themselves don’t have any plan to their benefit in attacking someone. There may of course be people who do seek an advantage but those are not the main people. Those are the manipulators: the grifters.

I take an attitude sometimes that a person with a certain hostility is more a force of nature than a person. This is of course not true, but it’s more that one can’t have a dialogue with them, do anything to break through their image of you and so on, so all you can do is appreciate they’re a threat and do what you can to de-escalate or preferably avoid them. This is a great pity because it means no discussion is likely to take place between you, and they’re not going to be persuaded otherwise. They may not even be aware of the threatening nature of their behaviour or views.

Cippola thought that associating with stupid people at all was dangerous, but of course this feeds into the reality tunnel problem nowadays. This is what I’ve known it as, although nowadays it tends to be thought of in terms of echo chambers and bubbles. We surround ourselves, aided by algorithms, with people who agree with us, and this fragments society. Cippola seems to be recommending that, and with over half a century of hindsight we seem to have demonstrated to ourselves that that impulse shouldn’t be followed.

Casting my mind back, a similar motive may have been part of what led to my involvement in a high-control religious organisation. I have A-level RE. This in my case involved studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the approach generally was quite progressive and liberal, including dialogue between faiths, higher criticism and the like. On reaching university, I found that the self-identifying Christians with whom I came into contact were far more fundamentalist and conservative, but because I regarded this as demotic, the faith of the common people as it were, I committed myself to that kind of faith. This is not stupidity in a general sense, as most of the people there could be considered conventionally intelligent, some of them pursuing doctorates for instance. However, they did restrict their critical faculties when it came to matters of faith, and in that respect I was, I think, emotionally harmed by these people, though I don’t blame them for it. This is the kind of selective and deliberate “stupidity” which is best avoided.

I’m aware that I’ve described this all rather unsympathetically and perhaps with a patronising tone. This is not my intention at all and it may be more to do with the approach taken by the writers and thinkers I’ve used here. I’ve also failed to mention James Joyce and Jacques Lacan at all here, which may be a bit of an omission. What I’m attempting to show is respect, and what I’m requesting from the reader is focus (and I have an ADHD diagnosis remember), long attention spans and complexity and nuanced thought. I’m not asking for agreement, but I would like those who disagree with me to have thought their positions through originally, self-critically and with respect for their opponents. I write the way I do because I know people are generally not stupid and can choose not to be.

Will We Get Fooled Again?

Most people see Karl Marx primarily as a communist thinker, and this does of course make a lot of sense. What is perhaps much less appreciated is that whereas he wasn’t a fan of capitalism, he still saw it as an improvement over its predecessor, feudalism, and a necessary stage in progress towards a communist utopia. This is also very important in how we view societies which have labelled themselves, or been labelled, communist. In this post, I intend to go into what Marx saw as positive about capitalism, and also the suggestion by many people today that we are not actually living in a capitalist society any more, but have returned to feudalism. In doing so, it might seem like I’m praising capitalism. I’m not. I’m just stating what Marx saw as positive about it.

Marx’s view of history, and this actually is substantially Friedrich Engels’ view, is that it shifts over to one side, then there’s a reaction and finally a synthesis arises out of both. This view is linked also to a fairly radical nineteenth century view of physics which later changed due to the advent of relativity, quantum mechanics and, in biology the New Synthesis. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union continued to prize dialectical materialism, which is the metaphysics behind Marxism, well into the twentieth century CE and as a result used Lysenko’s ideas about crop production and development, leading to famine. I have various thoughts about this which are not worth sharing here right now as I’m trying to stay focussed.

Before I go on, I want to outline the very clear line of progress Marx described in history. Economics and society evolve from feudalism into capitalism and then into communism, but the important thing about this with hindsight is that he saw the capitalist phase as a necessary social order before communism could emerge from it. Communism cannot, therefore, arise out of a feudal society. Russia and China were not really capitalist but feudal, and consequently the changes they underwent were not into communism, regardless of what they might say, but into capitalism. Communist rhetoric was used but although they may have attempted to impose something resembling it upon the countries concerned, there was no large industrial working class to organise and Marx would’ve predicted the next stage in those countries was not communism but capitalism. The other countries which became “communist” were spread from those pre-existing state capitalist countries. Marx probably envisaged the earliest communist revolutions occurring in the UK, Germany, the US and so forth, i.e. countries which were already fully capitalist, not in China or Russia. Finally on this point, the current “People’s Republic of China” has a stock market, which completely rules out the possibility of it being a communist country because it means goods are commodified. It’s impossible to have stocks without this. This is a definitional thing, not a political point. You can have various takes on this, including the idea that communism can never work, but the fact remains that China is necessarily not communist and Russia may have been communist for a short period of time ending by the end of the 1920s but Marx would’ve said it was impossible for it to be sustainably so, if it was at all. That is what Marxist theory actually says, and it said that before the Russian Revolution too. It isn’t changing the theory to fit the facts.

Nonetheless, counter-intuitive though it may seem, Marx did see capitalism as a good thing in relative terms, and also as temporarily necessary, mainly because it’s better than feudalism. Marx could be seen as largely morally sceptic, although he also contradicts himself about that. More specifically, he believed that one’s values were determined by one’s economic circumstances. Many say that they hate landlords but still want to be one and would behave exactly the same way if they became one. That’s Marx’s view. Therefore, in a way he could be said to be saying that capitalism isn’t evil at all. It’s just a phase society passes through as it progresses. I would also say that Marx does actually seem to care from time to time. It’s fair to say that Marx saw ethical values as determined by material conditions, so for instance he gets around the Kantian problem of universalism, where “what if everyone did the same?” is what determines right and wrong, leading to describing shoplifting food from a small greengrocer as either “depriving someone of their means of livelihood” or “providing food for one’s family” by saying it’s actually both, but means something apparently irreconcilably different to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. However, he did also clearly show sympathy for the plight of the poorest in society, which looks to me like morality.

Specifically, capitalism is better than feudalism. Peasants are tied to the land and sold with it. A worker under capitalism is, legally speaking, free to leave their employer and do paid work for themselves or someone else. However, at least back in the day, they weren’t property owners in any substantial sense.

Due to everyone being tied down, including lords and ladies, royalty and so forth, feudalism is static. Nobody is socially mobile. You’re born into your station, live in it and die without changing it. It’s about subsistence for most people, and also tradition. Capitalism isn’t like that, at least in theory. In capitalism, production has been freed from this system and is able to produce things way beyond what anyone needs. It makes industrialisation possible, technological change is promoted and there’s large scale global trade. If someone has an idea in capitalist society, it’s much more likely to be realised than in feudalism, since in the latter case the chances are the person with the idea is working from dawn to dusk and won’t be able to communicate their idea to others who will be able to act on it.

Largely, feudalism operates locally and on a small scale, and is fragmented. You can raise and grow food on the local farm, but there’s no way you can go to a distant market and produce can’t usually be brought to you from across the globe. By contrast, the global economy means that people become more cosmopolitan and accepting of others, to some extent unifying the world, people are less parochial and the basis for a global community emerges.

Relationship-wise, feudalism is personal and that’s open to corruption. There’s the lord and the vassal, the master and the apprentice. There was also religious pressure to keep these in place and there was an unchanging hierarchy in place. More was going on between people than just money – it was all personal, like the relationship between children and parents. Under capitalism this changed to contractual obligations which were written down and quantifiable, which also made it possible for exploitation to be tracked by following the money. Prior to this, whereas there might have been a vague sense of injustice, though probably diverted by religious justifications and the kind of deference one might feel towards a father figure and in British society today still towards royalty for many people. This is very different from noticing how hard you’ve worked and how long your hours are while you have an actually countable sum of money in your pay packet each week or month. That focusses the mind on the inequality, which has now been largely converted into numbers.

Once all of these things are in place, and this is where it becomes clear Marx is talking about capitalism as a transitional state, the machinery exists to bring socialism about. There has to be a proper infrastructure to enable workers to travel to and from their workplaces. Workers mainly live in cities where they can become more aware of their conditions and act together to improve them. Also, the existence of extreme wealth becomes more visible and therefore imaginable to the working class. They’re more likely to ask why other people have got their money, i.e. the money they had taken off them as profit for the owners, and it makes it possible to imagine a society where conditions are much better and more equal. This last is of course a grudging acknowledgement which entails that it’s just a phase in Marx’s opinion, but the point is that all of these things become possible when they weren’t in feudalism.

To be honest, a lot of this seems quite questionable to me and I want to do two things with it. One is to point out ways in which feudalism actually scored over capitalism. Firstly local production and consumption are very much what we need right now considering the environmental problems caused by global trade, and it would also be good to have a more personal, though also equal, relationship with other people one works for. Secondly, I’ve long imagined that I might do better in a society where I have a set place and a role, and I haven’t been ambitious for a long time. However, that’s all very well to imagine, but it would depend on that role actually suiting someone. Otherwise it would mean being trapped in a job one hates, and that job incidentally could be Queen or King and one could still hate it.

However, I also have a couple of other questions about this. One is that of the spice trade, which also applies to the likes of precious metals. Spices were being grown in the Far East and South Asia for centuries and then traded with Europe, even the British Isles. There were monasteries and castles where ginger, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg were all commonly used in cooking. This doesn’t correspond to the idea of local production and consumption painted above. The other is that peasants probably had more leisure time, or at least time off work, than factory workers, with the church imposing holidays and feast days. Work was also seasonal and there would’ve been times when it would’ve served no function and therefore wouldn’t’ve happened. These two phenomena are answered by Marx and Marxists. The spice trade was seen as the beginning of capitalism and as operating externally to the feudal system. It would still have been unfeasible for a peasant to buy a nutmeg at a local market. As for leisure time, the switch was from task orientation to time orientation, something which also connects to the infrastructure necessitated by capitalism and world trade in the form of railway timetables and navigation across oceans. Although peasants might have been freer in that sense, they would not have been able to improve their lot collectively, or at least they wouldn’t’ve done so because of other constraints, including religious and cultural ones. So it’s said, anyway.

So to reiterate, whereas Marx wasn’t exactly a fan of capitalism he did see it as progressive compared to feudalism. He saw progress as moving forward inevitably through feudalism and capitalism to communism, and his views also reflect the dynamism dialectical materialism sees as embedded in reality. Incidentally, it’s tempting to go on and on about dialectical materialism here but I’ll resist that. I’ve actually long thought that given the existence of the US Constitution, the fact that it’s a republic and so forth is a sign that it could’ve been expected to evolve into a communist society, and in fact that in the late nineteenth century it was probably the prime candidate for doing so. When people are genuinely patriotic about the freedom and democracy of the US, that anticipates its progress into communism, which is why it’s so bizarre that they have such a phobia of it.

Everyone reading this by now stands a good chance of being aware of Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ series, so forgive me if you’ve heard this in depth. My own experience is that I’ve read ‘Dune’ itself and later had my doubts about the quality of its sequels, so I didn’t read them, and also the Dune Encyclopedia. The David Lynch film is disappointing, there was also a fever dream by Jodorowsky the director trying to make a version which just failed because he was stoned all the time, and finally there’s the current cinematic adaptation which I again saw the first installment of and found disappointing, although that’s more me. It’s also a reaction to Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and the main influence on the Star Wars franchise. Its relevance here is that it describes a future feudal society spanning the Galaxy. It’s fairly complex but breaks down as follows. The Landsraad is a conglomeration of great houses, families which run the Universe and jostle for position. They’re given fiefdoms over various worlds, such as House Atreides and Caladan. Each great house has a share in CHOAM, the overriding megacorporation that does everything except transport. There’s also the Spacing Guild, which operates a monopoly over space travel based on their navigators, the mentats, who I think use the spice melange and Holtzmann engines which enable travelling without moving. This can only be done by the mentats, who are sentient humans who are mutated by the spice, because of the Butlerian Jihad, which was fought over whether AIs should exist, ending in them being banned. The Spacing Guild is in partnership with CHOAM and move everything, or rather, ensure that things and people that start out in one place end up in another. The great houses have various degrees of power. The imperial house itself, House Corrino, attempts to maintain a monopoly on violence through highly trained soldiers called the Sardaukar, originating from the prison planet Salusa Secundus and keep everyone under control, or at least apparently do. House Atreides, however, have troops of their own which may compete successfully with the Sardaukar. The Atreides are also feuding with House Harkonnen. Behind all this is a quasi-religious order called the Bene Gesserit, an all-female group expert in manipulation, who are secretly working towards breeding a female Messiah over centuries from members of the great houses. The spice melange is found only on the planet Arrakis and has a similar role to fossil fuels in the real world. As well as enabling mentats to fold space and therefore “shorten the way”, melange is extremely addictive – stopping it kills you – enables certain people to see the future and extends lifespan. Many of the more powerful people in the great houses are on spice. Incidentally, this brings the book ‘Cyclonopedia‘ to mind, so maybe there’s a link there too.

All this is easy to translate into the real world, and seems to represent Herbert’s attempt to explore the possibility that the default state of human society is neither fully automated luxury gay space communism nor capitalism but in fact feudalism. Shorn of many of its more implausible elements, the ‘Dune’ universe does in fact seem to reflect one view of how society and economics do in fact operate today. For a long time, people have been talking about “late capitalism”, but I prefer to call it “mature capitalism”, in the sense that it’s a permanent economic and social order which will change only with our extinction, but in a way, maybe the term is accurate and capitalism is in fact coming to an end, but it isn’t being replaced by communism but by what Yanis Varoufakis calls “technofeudalism”. Maybe Marx was right in predicting the end of capitalism, but wrong about what it would become, and rather than being progressive, the world is actually slumping back into something resembling feudalism.

His idea goes like this:

In feudal times, land ownership and rent were the chief sources of wealth. Profit existed but it was less important, for instance it existed in the spice trade but wasn’t something the peasants could avail themselves of. Under capitalism, capitalists dominate the media, parties and banks, and in particular are expert at manufacturing public opinion and values, thereby bypassing democracy. Our current system is not based on profit but rent, i.e. there is limited access to resources not found in ownership. I’ve mentioned this before, but examples of how this happens are found in vehicle lease agreements and things like having to pay extra to turn on seat heating in BMWs – you already have the vehicle but have to subscribe for the right to warm your seats even though the facility to do so is already available. This is also found in the switch over to subscription models, such as the rental of various software packages. There’s also the cloud. We don’t own ebooks, TV programmes or music a lot of the time and the companies controlling them can simply withdraw the right to access them on a whim. If you make an app, Google Play, Apple and the Microsoft Store control access to it most of the time and the developers have to pay a subscription when in theory they could spread knowledge of it via other channels, but this is now difficult because of the next development, social media. The domination of the internet by social media is also akin to the peasants belonging to the landed gentry. It’s said that if you aren’t paying for something, it’s you who are being bought and sold, an older example being women in clubs being allowed in for free or given free drinks – this is because the club wants men to pay to get in and dance with and have sex with them. The same kind of situation exists today on Twitter, Facebook and so on. People spend most of their online time on these and streaming sites. Companies are no longer oriented towards making a profit, but make their money through subscription charges, also known as rent. Market dominance is more important than profit. It also means, practically, that money is constantly siphoned away from us to billionaires. Because it made no profit, Amazon paid no tax in Ireland, which would’ve been on profit, and deals have to be made by the producers of items to have the right to sell on Amazon, which is the main marketplace nowadays. This of course means they get their state-sponsored infrastructure, such as roads, for free because we pay for it. The same thing happens with Etsy. All this is why Varoufakis sees us as being in a new feudalism. In short, for Varoufakis there are no more open markets, but money is made instead by renting of closed digital estates. The Web used to be the Wild West but has now undergone enclosure like mediaeval land.

It isn’t just him either. There has also, for quite some time, been a view that we are entering the “New Middle Ages”, also known as Neo-Mediaevalism. This was an idea from the 1970s onward which reached its zenith in the ‘noughties. One distinctive thing about the actual Middle Ages was that it only applied to Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire, an area which has also been referred to as Christendom, i.e. the Christian part of the world. It didn’t apply, for example, to the Mayan civilisation, Songhai Empire, Arab or Islamic world and so forth. Unlike that, though, the new Middle Ages applies to the whole human world, which may be important as it means there are no accessible geographical forces or assets outside it rendering it susceptible to change. No spice trade for example. In today’s world, Christendom is replaced by the New World Order, which shouldn’t be confused with the conspiracy theory. Today, the rest of the human world feels much more the influence of the US, for example. There are overlapping authorities as there were in Mediaeval Europe, but in this case they include multinationals, NGOs, those pursuing political ends violently without overt governmental permission, global trade and international organisations. This leads to a situation of various authorities to which one owes fealty, which might manifest itself, for example, in not having one’s employment rights honoured because one’s employer has more money and power than the government of one’s country. Instead of knights, we have military drones and instead of the Pope we have Elon Musk, but the power relations are the same. Instead of the Church and families having the power and money, it’s the likes of Jeff Bezos and social media. The lords own the platforms, such as Twitter, Amazon, Instagram, Facebook and Netflix, the vassals are the content creators (even this blog would count as one if it had more readers, so maybe I don’t want more readers), and the users are the peasants. People also settle back into what they idealise as a simpler place and time, when of course it really wasn’t.

Smartphones have replaced pitchforks and our new coats of arms are made by Nike and Disney, but underneath it all we seem to have gone back to the Middle Ages, which this time encompasses the world. Capitalism has indeed been superceded, but instead of moving forward, it’s going back. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about this and ultimately it probably depends on how flexible we are as a species to change our ways. Olaf Stapledon once said of the fall of Western civilisation that one could no more expect the world population to change by the time of collapse than to expect ants to assume the habits of water beetles if their nest was flooded. I hope he’s wrong.

Wrong But Wromantic

Sailing a little close to the wind here.

Chris Patten once wrote a book about Conservatism called ‘The Tory Case’. I read it in 1987 when I was to say the least not at all sympathetic to the Tories, but one needn’t be sympathetic to something to be interested in or understand it. I reviewed it more recently as:

This is a weird book. What Patten describes as conservative politics seem to bear no resemblance to reality. I have no idea why.

To me at the time, Patten didn’t seem to be describing anything I recognised the Conservative Party to be doing at the time. Right then, there was something of a dearth of good and popular writing on conservatism, although this was remedied a bit later. Obviously there was, as there long has been, plenty of work done on capitalism, but even calling it capitalism reflects something of a bias against it and it isn’t the same as conservatism anyway.

There have been a couple of useful contributions to the concept in the past fifty years or so by Conservative thinkers such as Roger Scruton, who came up with the concept of oikophobia. This is the opposite of xenophobia. Scruton believes that people’s thinking is distorted by being prejudiced against the familiar with no good reason. For instance, it’s very common to characterise history as being about the doings of “dead White males”, with the presumption that what someone does because they’re dead and White automatically makes it bad. Colonialism might be criticised for its oppressive nature when it could also be seen as getting rid of the custom of Hindu wives throwing themselves onto their widowers’ funeral pyres and developing previously undeveloped countries with the likes of road, rail, good sanitation systems and so on. I’m not going to argue either for or against these views: I’m just presenting them as relatively conservative ideas.

I’ve said before on here that certain policies and attitudes seem to be acquired and assimilated into left or right wing platforms without them inevitably belonging there. For instance, in the past trade unions, generally seen as left wing, were opposed to immigration or women in the workforce because they wanted to protect the jobs of their male, White members, and Maoists, Stalinists and the Nicaraguan work brigades were all homophobic, regarding homosexuality as counter-revolutionary and bourgeois. Conservatism needn’t even be right wing at all. If it’s about going back to a former situation, that may have been closer to being socialist or at least have labelled itself as such than the situation they’re opposing. This, though, is quite a vague way of describing it. However, one of the reasons it is vague is that rigorous academic work in social studies tends to be distrusted by conservatives, so the research and writing which is done tends to come from the Left rather than the Right. Conservatism is more about doing than thinking. In fact, some years ago a significant Conservative politician recommended quite strongly that the Conservative Party should change its name to the Workers’ Party, presumably on the grounds that it wanted to sell itself as on the side of people doing paid work and getting people into such work rather than people it might label as scroungers.

Now I’m no historian but I think it’s somewhat fair to trace the history of party politics in England back to the English Civil War, which was of course between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists. According to ‘1066 And All That’, the Roundheads were “right but repulsive” whereas the Cavaliers were “wrong but wromantic”. In other words, there was a faction which supported the King and was appealing at first glance, and another which supported Parliament and was very unrepealing. In particular, and I think this is significant, the Roundheads were associated with Puritanism, which has a very judgemental and anti-fun behaviour with children given names like “If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned”. The Puritans also wanted to abolish Xmas celebrations because they saw it as non-Biblical. They come across as killjoys and misery-guts, and the unfortunate thing is, it’s they who seem to be the distant ancestors of the British Labour Party.

I’m sure this is over-simplistic, but the way I see it the two major political parties, the Tories and the Whigs, developed respectively out of the Cavaliers and the Roundheads. The Tories arose as a faction rather than a party, because those didn’t exist yet, during the 1679 Exclusion Crisis, which sought to exclude James VII and II from the succession on account of his Catholicism. Perhaps surprisingly, the Tories were in favour of James becoming king even though they were very against Catholicism because they believed inheritance based on birth was the basis of a stable society. Once George I came to the throne in 1714, the Tories were a spent force because the situation had become moot, and they ceased to exist at all as such in the 1760s, but many people continued to call themselves and others Tories and the name survives today. In fact, since the word is from the Gaelic “tóraidhe“, meaning vagabond or bandit, Gaels still just call them that and don’t, so far as I know, call them anything like “Conservatives”. It was also originally an insult, and nowadays has become one again in some circles. In fact I’m not sure it was ever a neutral term.

So the original Tory position was to support the succession of the king by birthright even though he was Roman Catholic, and the original Whig position was to oppose the succession of the king because he was Roman Catholic. This was because of Tory support for inherited wealth. The Whigs have always fascinated me, incidentally, although I don’t know much about them. The main use of the word “whig” today in Britain is in the term “whig history”, which is the erroneous historical idea that everything evolves towards the contemporary situation. Sarada used to imagine projecting the conservative attitudes of the older generation of her youth back to a time when everything was awful, but in fact it isn’t that simple. For instance, attitudes towards sex in Victorian times had replaced a much bawdier attitude prevalent in Georgian times, and although the Bloody Code was characteristic of that era, where the death penalty was imposed for the likes of stealing a handkerchief or “being in the company of gypsies”, there was a time before it had gotten that bad. It isn’t just a case of smooth, uninterrupted progress. That may hook into the idea of political progress, something the Whigs’ successors seem to have been quite keen on.

I’m not going to get too bogged down in history but the Tories were done for initially because many of their parliamentary seats were in “rotten boroughs”, which only had a few voters or I think even none, so once those had been abolished they had great difficulty in getting any MPs elected for a while. They later became officially the Conservative Party.

The original Tory approach broke down as support for the monarchy, hereditary succession and the Church of England, and more widely, support for cherished institutions, opposition to Roman Catholics and Non-Conformists, and keenness on stability and traditional authority. Their slogan was “Church and King!”. The Whigs are more confusing because they don’t survive in the same way as the Tories might be said to have, but they believed in parliamentary supremacy over the monarchy, pro-Protestantism, anti-Roman Catholicism, individual liberty and property rights. Their concern over Roman Catholicism was linked to their belief that James VII and II could become an absolute monarch in the same way as in France at the time. This is linked, of course, to the power of the Pope.

A couple of things then. It does seem to be true that the terms Left and Right are based on where representatives sat in the French parliament according to whether they supported or opposed the monarchy. However, the French Revolution didn’t occur until 1789, and whereas the terms didn’t exist, something like the left-right spectrum did, for over a century, and as far as England was concerned this seems to go back to the Cavaliers and Roundheads. Just in passing, the colour scheme is generally blue for the Right and red for the Left except in the States, but I wonder if this is linked to the process whereby the Democrats and Republicans swapped positions. I don’t know and this isn’t the point of this post. The other thing is that Whigs and Tories were both anti-Roman Catholic, both very much in favour of property rights and were both also more focussed on the needs of richer people than the poor, which is of course how the Bloody Code came into being in the first place, so from a modern perspective they don’t look very different and their concerns also seem rather irrelevant. There are other complications, such as Tory support for Jacobites, but I don’t want to get too bogged down.

Tory thinkers are harder to find than Left wing ones, but they do exist, in particular in the shape of David Hume and Edmund Burke, and it’s worth looking at their writing as the basis of conservatism, not least because conservatism is essentially keen on the past, at least traditionally. Adam Smith is another possibility but he tends to be misrepresented and is more an economist. I’m most familiar with the first, although embarrassingly not as much as I should be considering that Hume was my special author during my first degree. Before I say anything else, Hume’s language is wonderfully clear and he’s a great communicator and writer. I’ve used his philosophy elsewhere and am somewhat influenced by him. For instance, I think his view of causation is usefully applied to, of all things, the Mandela Effect, which is where a large number of people remember a public event or cultural phenomenon differently than the most reliable record of it. Obviously not what I’m focussing on right now. He seems to have been the first philosopher to have realised the “is-ought” problem, that you can’t derive what should be from what is, and I have a specific solution to that too which has come close to dominating my whole moral life. He also famously said that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions”. This comes closer to politics, and was something which came up independently in a conversation with my crush at school when I said I thought their lack of interest in me was “perfectly reasonable” and they objected on the grounds that emotions don’t correspond to rationality and can’t be controlled by it. One interesting thing about this is that the famous quote “facts don’t care about your feelings” seems to be quite closely allied to it, but from the other side, and originates from the right-winger Ben Shapiro. Even so, I strongly suspect that we’re not generally rational in our opinions and instead of using reason to arrive at conclusions, we mainly already know what we want to believe and proceed to seek a way of arguing towards that point. Nonetheless I have sometimes changed my mind about what I think. I tend to express this as “you can’t expect people to be reasonable”, which tends to annoy people, and it’s one of a series of basic tenets through which I live my life which goes back all the way to discussions with my crush back in the early ’80s. These views are unlikely to change and may still be shared between the two of us, and at the time they were politically conservative.

So to unpack the “slave of the passions” quote a little, Hume’s opinion on this and that statement has been described as notorious. He supports his view in several ways. One of them is that reason alone doesn’t motivate people. There has to be some kind of internal spur which stimulates someone to act or do something mentally. This connects also to “analysis paralysis” and overthinking in my opinion, and therefore can be linked to what I think of as conservative anti-intellectualism. Now “anti-intellectualism” is usually used negatively, but so is “overthinking”, and of course I for one am a notorious overthinker. I do appreciate that I live too much in my head, so I can get on board with the idea that the conservative view that sometimes people think too much and should just act, just because I’m the opposite and I can see the drawbacks.

I once saw a TV comedy sketch where a man is trying to defuse a bomb. He has a huge tangle of wires and must cut the right one at the right time, and the others in the right sequence. His rather more reckless colleague, with no training or experience in bomb disposal, then turns up with a comically massive set of shears, cuts them all at once, there is no explosion and they go down the pub. This to me is very much like the conservative approach to social problems and to be honest it does actually appeal to me, but of course it is a comedy sketch and whereas it might work fantastically sometimes, it often wouldn’t. That meticulous defusing represents left wing attempts to address problems and the pair of shears is a more right wing approach. Believe me, I do understand this.

Back to Hume though. His overtly political work exists in the form of essays. He was concerned that philosophical thought at the time was too concerned with trivia and failed to address the big questions. Philosophers had succeeded in casting doubt upon almost everything but hadn’t been so successful in building up anything one could be sure of. He saw his task as building up a new model of human nature, the rest having been cleared away by his predecessors. He wrote on liberty, political parties, whether politics could be a science and he favours moderation and caution and opposes mercantilism, which is apparently the idea that exports should be maximised and imports minimised through pursuing one-sided trade. The basic idea is that if another country is richer, one’s own must be poorer, and it sees riches in the form of money, i.e. piles of gold, which in fact is not the same thing as money. Protectionism is quite similar. Hume demolished this idea as follows: suppose money comes into Britain because of our successful exports. That increases the money in these isles, leading to a rise in both wages and prices. This makes our exports more expensive and imports from other places cheaper here, so people will buy more foreign goods and foreigners will buy fewer British goods, so the situation can’t continue forever.

This argument is interesting from a right wing political perspective because the idea of going back onto the gold standard and protectionism is currently very popular in right wing circles right now, so Hume is to some extent opposed to certain current right wing ideas. Hume seems to be more of a globalist, which is also potentially a right wing view, but one which right wing conspiracy theorists tend to think of as a threat and as having socialist tendencies. I reject all conspiracy theories as distractions and wastes of time and energy, but the way these ideas are talked about does reveal popular political views, and mercantilism is thoroughly discredited as I understand it, and is in fact an eighteenth century idea. However, this is a macroeconomic view more than a core political philosophy, so I’ll look at those.

One of the big things Hume did was to respond to Locke’s social contract theory. This was the idea popular with the English Whigs that the authority of government rests on the consent of the governed. That is, there’s a usually tacit agreement between government and the people that obedience to the law is in return for protection and justice, and if the rulers fail to do this they’re in breach of this contract. Now I have a heck of a lot to say about this personally but for now I’m going to restrain myself as part of the contract I have with my readers not to rant about stuff and concentrate on what Hume said about it. In his essay ‘Of The Original Contract’, his quotable response is that this idea is “repugnant to the common sentiments of mankind, and to the practice and opinion of all nations and all ages”, so he wasn’t really that keen on it. No government at the time, and probably not now, had ever been formed by an explicit act of consent of all its citizens, although Stalinist countries did used to publish interesting voting figures of 99% or above which one suspects were either not entirely accurate or maybe achieved by means many would not associate with freedom. Governments generally understood as democratically elected are basically never the result of one hundred percent turnout voting 100% for the majority party in a system where it’s legal to vote for “none of the above” or “reopen nominations”, but anyway, back to Hume. Instead, people are born into countries under governments which already exist and whereas obedience to the law may be seen as a duty, the notion of consent doesn’t enter most citizens’ or subjects’ minds at any point.

The Tories at the time saw the authority of the monarch as arising from divine authority, and this is somewhat similar to the idea that the people get the government they deserve, and also the theistic idea which may exist even today that God does actually put the people there in government for some reason, although for all anyone knows that reason might be to stir people up to revolt against the system. Hume’s view, as a sceptic and possibly a closet atheist, was that this doesn’t work because if God is in control of everything, both good and bad governments are of divine origin, and it’s generally agreed that the people’s defeat of evil-seeming tyrants and dictators is a good thing. Hume’s view was that in “extraordinary cases, when public ruin would evidently attend obedience,” the people’s safety takes precedence. Hence governmental authority is not derived from either consent or force but from opinion, specifically the opinion that we have a duty to obey the law, but this duty is a human creation whose function is to solve a human problem, like the rules of justice. He generally tried to pare away the abstract, so just as he didn’t believe in the self or a necessary connection between cause and effect, he also didn’t believe that there was something “out there” called justice or duty but that it’s just human custom. Whereas I don’t agree with him here, I do think that the idea of rights is like this: it’s a mere human custom having little to do with the world outside, i.e. it isn’t a mathematical-type concept like number or space but is just made up. So there you go: one Tory political view which I agree with. I do, however, strongly believe in duties and obligations, whatever you want to call them.

Although I do think Hume was internally rather dismissive of God, his view on human nature was similar to the bog-standard Christian one of us being depraved and subject to sin. After all, he was a Scot. He held, for example, that “such is the frailty or perverseness of our nature it is impossible to keep men, faithfully and unerringly, in the paths of justice”. This could go in another direction, where nobody should govern because nobody is sufficiently infallible, but that isn’t where he took it. This next quote in particular sounds very Tory: “habit soon consolidates what other principles of human nature had imperfectly founded; and men, once accustomed to obedience, never think of departing from that path.”. That is, we’re not good enough to govern ourselves, so someone else has to do it to us. He acknowledges that in extreme cases, disobedience may be necessary but is much keener on caution and slow change, and of course we can see this through most of the history of Tory and Conservative government in the “U”K.

So we have the principles that reform must be attempted very slowly and that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, which to me really do seem quite firm Conservative principles. There are a couple of problems though. What one regards as an extreme case is going to vary according to who one is and what experiences one has. I doubt this needs to be dilated upon. Another problem is that the Conservative Party have tended more recently to make radical changes. The 1979 election, for example, is a famously significant about-face in British political history, and seen as such at the time, away from the Post-War Consensus back to the way things were before the War to be sure, but it still bucked the trend and did so suddenly and rapidly. There is, then, the issue of how closely political rhetoric parallels political philosophy.

Sometimes I am myself very much of the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. Something I’ve said a lot in talks about herbalism is that it’s akin to a tried and tested craft which has evolved organically over centuries, and I’ve compared it to a mediaeval humpback bridge as opposed to a suspension bridge. Humpback bridges are over-engineered and consequently it’s possible to drive a lorry over one even though they were only designed for a horse and cart. Yet there’s also the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which was a suspension bridge. This was assailed by wind on 7th November 1940, causing it to sway wildly from side to side and eventually collapse. It was an extensively designed bridge and is used as an object lesson for engineers. The parallel between these two and herbalism is obvious: there’s allopathic medicine, relying on detailed scientific theory and testing, which is effective but also causes problems, and there’s the tried and tested gradually developing herbal approach, relying on tradition and intuition, although there’s also plenty of research as it happens. Another example is language. Esperanto is the archetypal constructed language and is for Europeans at least generally simple and easy to learn, only needing a tenth of the vocabulary of other languages to express the same ideas and being around four times faster to reach the same degree of fluency compared to natural languages, but it’s also very unsuccessful nowadays and also has various design flaws such as having no fewer than six participles, being sexually biassed towards maleness and using almost completely European vocabulary. Moreover, attempts to fix these problems led to splitting and incompatible new languages such as Esperantido and Ido. Natural languages, on the other hand, are already known and generally change of their own accord to meet needs.

All these examples could be extended to politics, and they reflect the idea of the wisdom of crowds, real world testing and organic evolution, so it seems that the Tories are basically the humpback bridge builders, herbalists and Anglophones of the political world. I should probably stress that I don’t agree with this view, but I do have sympathy with it.

Conservatives, therefore, can be expected to distrust large scale plans, human reasoning and state intervention, at least rhetorically. Whether they’ve actually done this recently is another question. The Tory government up until 2024 didn’t seem to honour this everywhere. Obviously there’s what happened in the lockdown, but there’s also their attitude towards food regulation and public health measures, such as the restriction on tobacco smoking and the sugar tax. This really doesn’t strike me as a hands-off approach. There was also a period in I think the late ’90s when they made a series of changes in the law as had existed for centuries in quick succession, whose details I’ve now unfortunately forgotten, but it didn’t look either cautious or slow.

There’s another aspect to this, which is that it means conservatism is very much not fascism according to its own stated approach. Although fascism aims to hark back to tradition and also national identity like conservatism, it does so suddenly and energetically with a definite conscious plan in mind. The Reform Party is also by its name signalling that it is not conservative because conservatism is philosophically opposed to reform, except perhaps very slowly, and whereas in practice Tory governments do reform things, they wouldn’t want to advertise that fact in their name, so whether or not Reform is conservative, they don’t want to appear so and the way a party advertises itself often determines what it becomes even if it doesn’t start out like that.

I can’t give Edmund Burke the same kind of justice I have David Hume because my background is in philosophy, although also in political theory, but he is regarded as the founder of conservatism, far more so than Hume. Ironically, he was actually a Whig. He was younger than Hume and experienced a slightly later period of history. One of his major works was ‘Reflections on the Revolution In France’. Burke introduced a bill to ban slaveowners from sitting in the House of Commons on the grounds that they were hazardous to the concept of English liberty, and actually there’s a lot more to be said about that because of the peculiar legal nature of slavery as practiced on English soil but this is not that essay. The book on the French revolution is regarded as the most eloquent statement of the basis of conservatism and represents his attempt to turn traditionalism into a political approach. The thing that everyone “knows” about Burke is completely wrong by the way. He did not say “”the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”, although John Stuart Mill said something similar and Burke did say that good people must work together if bad people do or they’d deservedly fail, i.e. they’d be picked off.

Burke sees the basis of British society as our unwritten constitution and likes monarchy, property ownership, hereditary succession, aristocracy and the monarchy, along with “the wisdom of the ages”, by which he probably means tradition and common law. I’m guessing here incidentally as I don’t really know him at all. Like Hume, he was concerned with the question of whether politics could be regarded or practiced as a science, and he saw society as like a living thing which was too complex for the human mind to comprehend, contrasting with Thomas Hobbes, who thought politics could be reduced to a mathematical-type discipline. This is interesting because it parallels the older dichotomy between organic and inorganic matter. I should make it clear that the distinction still exists but doesn’t have the same meaning. It used to be thought that there were two immutable classes of matter which behaved entirely differently, one from living things, the other from non-living matter, which was refuted when someone synthesised urea from non-living sources. This, I think, is strongly reminiscent of this belief, and since we now live in a world where matter is understood simply as matter, maybe it’s time to retire this idea. On the other hand, positivism is generally frowned upon in social studies, which is the idea of just such a reduction. Ironically, this irreducibility is more associated with the left.

Look, I’ll be honest: I haven’t read Edmund Burke and if I were to carry on at this point I’d have to rely on other people’s or AI’s summaries, and that’s a bit trashy so I won’t be doing it.

I should point out, in closing, that I do find a fair bit of common ground with these views. They’re somewhat out of date but as I’ve said they probably should be anyway because conservatism tends to trust the past. That said, 250 years is a long time in politics. I am no less left wing than ever, but I do have an interest in such things, I do recognise the puritanism of some left wing ideas and movements and also the tendency of left wing parties to splinter in a similar manner to non-conformist churches, so I do still think there’s Roundhead DNA in socialist movements, and I’m aware that the ideas pre-date the division between left and right as understood later. My intention here was simply to outline the roots of conservatism without saying much more or introducing my own bias. I hope I’ve done that.

The Overton Defenestration

A few years ago, some guy who was politically on the Right came up with a broadly very useful concept now referred to as the “Overton Window”. It looks like this:

The idea is that in the mainstream of any society, at a given time, certain political ideas are considered acceptable and others not. So for example, and this is of course my favourite example of all time, “the Ayatollah Khomeini is a good man: he has banned women from appearing on television”. This act would only have been considered acceptable to a small number of Iranians in the late fourteenth century AH (i.e. the 1970s CE) and later was either accepted by the majority or imposed by a vocal minority, meaning in the former case that the Overton Window had shifted such that that particular opinion had gone from “unthinkable” to “policy”. Joseph Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy first came to prominence in 1993 for describing this, which was initially in the context of how much freedom it gave someone. So for example, issues such as surveillance, ID cards, hate speech and so forth might move in and out of this window depending on what else is going on, significantly in areas such as propaganda and media. The labels on the right of this diagram are also not casual: they represent the six hues on the spectrum of acceptance, and were originated by Joshua Treviño. This can even be removed entirely from the political realm and just be considered degrees of acceptance of ideas more generally: you could put the Big Bang and Steady State theories of the origin of the Universe on here and note that the Steady State theory used to be “policy” but has now become “unthinkable”. It’s also about the general consensus rather than what individuals or particular small groups might think: the SWP and the BNP clearly have opinions which they would accept among themselves which are far from what mainstream politics and public opinion accept. This also reminds me of the fashion cycle, which is a phenomenon where fashions come and go, and after going gradually lose their cringe factor until they’re considered beautiful and might come back. This might actually happen in politics too, in the sense that people gradually forget the downside of a particular policy and want it to be adopted again. However, that’s an interesting but different process.

There has been said to be a trend in people’s personal versions of the Overton Window, where young adults tend to be left wing and drift steadily to the right as they age. This has been attributed to various factors but is partly due to the increasing stake they hold in society through promotion, property, children and the like. If this doesn’t happen, maybe the drift doesn’t either and it’s been noted that the reverse was true in general in the West until quite recently due to young adults actually not being able to gain a foothold in society so much. Any generation is heterogenous though, so there will be different factions with different opinions. Another possible cause of a drift to the Right is the shift from idealism and inexperience to realism and wisdom, although obviously I don’t think that’s what happens. I had a friend at school who shifted from being slightly left of centre politically (he was in the SDP) to being quite right wing within a period of months, where he listened to his colleagues and concluded that the reasons for politically conservative policies and practices were very well-founded and that many people who were against them were simply naive and ignorant. A few years later, another friend of mine, also an SDP member actually, entered the mainstream workforce and told me it was impossible to stick by even his fairly moderate principles and survive financially. A third friend, who started his own graphic design business, also moved very rapidly to the Right in his early- to mid-twenties. In his case I got the impression that he’d come to regard left wing views as something one grows out of.

This is one factor in how I think it works. If you have little investment in the status quo, you retain the ability to perceive mainstream society as an outsider, but the compromises often foisted upon people lead to experiencing it as, to some extent, an insider, and one comes to rationalise one’s activity and the consequences of one’s choices. This is an understandable response as it both deals with cognitive dissonance and recognises the need to function effectively within a community and make a contribution. It’s always possible to remain aloof and “clean”, but at the same time that cleanliness seems to mean you’re not doing much to contribute to the common good.

Besides this, another possible factor in a drift to the right is cognitive decline. It might be that the initial good understanding of political situations shifts due to reduced understanding and more simplistic takes on social phenomena. This of course assumes that the Left is the side with the rational and evidence-based take on the world, or perhaps that it is, but this is not the way to go, there being a better one involving intuition and rules of thumb, or perhaps not trusting in human reasoning at all, as some Christians insist. I’ve adopted this view and at times watched my opinions carefully, and it seems at first that there might be a way to halt this drift, which is to “freeze” one’s politics at a particular moment and stick to them as an act of faith that one still had all one’s faculties and hadn’t compromised too far at that point. This doesn’t work, unfortunately, because things move on. There may, for example, have been a time when there was a lot more respect for the paid work of working class men and therefore faith in their political leverage, but with the replacement of so much such work with automation maybe that’s no longer a significant force. One might consider restrictions on the influence of AI bots on social media important, but it seems unlikely that that could have been articulated in sufficient detail back in about 1980. All that said, because of my interest in science fiction, a lot of those things have in fact been anticipated many decades in advance. Yet it feels to me that we’re increasingly entering unknown territory and whereas this may be because I’m out of touch, that very state correlates with ageing. Some things, though, are easily discerned, such as the ongoing and worsening climate emergency and its apparent incompatibility with scarcity-based economic systems combined with existing technology. Another very common feature of later life is the presence of children and grandchildren, which focusses those who have taken this path on the future in a very personal way.

I’ve mentioned several friends who turned right early on. Actually, that’s unfair. In the second person’s case they may not so much have done that as have made a pragmatic decision about their career while keeping their principles intact. It does also occur that two of these three people were not in fact fully left-wing but centrist, as we’d call them today. I don’t know if this is significant. I’ve also had friends who were right-leaning even when they first met me and this hasn’t usually negatively impacted the friendship. In fact, my oldest friend was a Tory when I met her and I was communist, and she advised me to cure myself of the crush I had on her by focussing on the difference between our political views. It didn’t work, although something else did. Although romantic or limerent relationships are not the same as friendships, there is overlap between them both in terms of people being friends or remaining friends and in their more general features, so the ability to be friends with a limerent “object”, which is further from a romantic relationship, whose politics are very different does presumably mean it’s viable between friends.

In 1987, I read an article in Cosmo about someone who went on a date and they really hit it off. Just as they were in the lift going back to one of their flats for what sometimes apparently ensues after a date (I’ve never been on one so this is hearsay), he mentioned he was a Tory “of course”, and for her it was a deal-breaker. This seems entirely how I would regard it too, and it seems also that both of them had made assumptions about the other which entirely made sense to them but turned out not to be true. It’s even possible that he had assumed that political differences of this kind could be overcome or bypassed. Her view, though, was that by being a Tory he had revealed that he lacked compassion for others and was therefore simply not a nice person. In the circumstances it was written, i.e. in England in the ’80s, it is easy to believe that this was so, but at the same time the “yuppie” attitude was very popular and many people could’ve been swept up in it before changing their minds later. Also, and this might horrify some, Tories can actually be nice people.

If they can be nice people, then, and we can be nice people, and we want to be friends with nice people, can’t we also be friends across the political divide? I’m aware of many marriages where one partner voted Conservative and the other Labour, and it oddly didn’t seem to be a big bone of contention between them. Maybe that works for people who aren’t very focussed on politics or maybe in the past people had lower expectations for their relationships. I honestly don’t understand how that works but clearly it does, to some extent. Maybe I’m too focussed on politics.

There are some situations where I could definitely get on board with this to a certain extent, and I’m talking about friendship here. For instance, there seems to be a group of right wing animal liberationists who have very little faith in human character to the extent that they support right-wing politics, but who also see other species as less corrupt than humans and therefore worthy of protection from us. Such people might unfortunately also be anti-abortionist, which is particularly important although there’s a consistency to it I suppose. It can happen though. I used to hunt sab with several people who were quite right wing, one of whom wanted to join the Army although that may not be the same thing. Being in a dangerous situation like that can be quite a bonding experience, so that kind of situation can lend itself to friendship.

After the 2024 presidential election, many people who didn’t vote Republican felt estranged from family members who had. There are also cases of people seeking divorce as a result. To my mind, there are two ways of looking at this. One is the defence of the Republican voters, who never imagined it could get so serious, although they were presumably aware of the details of the platform. I’m not sure what they expect here other than some kind of superficial politeness and tolerance. As I mentioned previously, sometimes people are able to be oblivious of their privilege and unaware of the harm they’re doing to others, and this also results in the illusion of balanced debate which occurs sometimes simply because for them the issues are purely intellectual and they’re able to be detached in a way which their opponents can’t be. The extent to which the conversation is fair and without consequences differs according to which side you’re on in the debate. The other way of looking at it is that it results from echo chambers and “alternative facts”. In such circumstances, both sides and their loss of friendship is a consequence of the polarisation and division, but they’ve led to genuine differences of opinion which have to be resolved. This can also result from intellectual laziness, and also a surfeit of information.

“Intellectual laziness” is the euphemism I use for “stupidity”, but it isn’t the same thing exactly. Genuine “stupidity” is a reduced capacity for learning, in other words learning disability, and it’s unfair to use the word to refer to people as it has an inappropriately pejorative tone. Touching on that, this does seem to be a factor in the rise of the far Right. People whom I know have voted fascist have genuinely been learning disabled to the extent that they are living in sheltered accommodation or are vulnerable to being scammed due to gullibility. It could simply be that they lack the awareness that admitting to it is liable to damage their reputation with other people, but in any event these people are victims of the fascists more than perpetrators. The people I call intellectually lazy are those who are capable of thinking such things through and understanding but have for some reason not done so, possibly through fear or wanting a quiet life. Impaired empathy may also be involved. Just to be clear, being on the spectrum needn’t impair empathy: this has been debunked. The problem is that people on the spectrum and neurotypical people are too different from each other to anticipate how they’re likely to think, feel and behave. Nevertheless empathy has been attacked across the pond, and beyond a certain point absence of empathy is likely to translate into absence of friends.

Now comes the well-known phrase “I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire”. That’s not how I feel about anyone at all. It might sometimes not be politic to do so, but it might also build bridges to go to someone’s aid. Beyond that, of course, is that everyone, and I mean everyone, contains that of God and is of inestimably great value. It doesn’t matter who it is. That said, because everyone else also has the same worth, that also must be taken into consideration. Most of the time, though, we don’t meet people who are widely regarded as being in power and so whatever we do is unlikely to make much difference and it’s also exceedingly obvious that making martyrs for the other side is counterproductive, sometimes extremely so.

If you can trace back the history of a friendship, sometimes you may have been mistaken in anticipating where future experience might take someone if you’ve gone separate ways. Maybe if you’ve had the same experiences, you would also feel the way they do. Or, perhaps you’ve changed. What’s the basis for friendship? How were you when you met? Can you still find the core of what you shared back then? Or did you imagine something that was never there? I haven’t got answers for any of these incidentally. What it comes down to is how consistent our personalities are with a particular political perspective. Maybe we’re in the wrong group, maybe not. Maybe there is only one political perspective compatible with humanity in the fullest sense, or maybe we need pluralism because a mix of different qualities are healthiest for society. If that’s true, it seems sensible to tolerate each other and recognise the strengths and virtues of the other’s position.

I’m sorry, I don’t know where this is going and I have no answers. I want friendship. I also don’t currently feel that any of my friendships is endangered by political differences and I’m aware of many. Maybe I’m lucky. I do know that when we find political differences too much to bear we might feel tempted to throw someone out of the Overton Window. As the citizens of Prague believe, sometimes defenestration is politically expedient, but it doesn’t seem friendly. Maybe if someone is sufficiently important, it will communicate how seriously we take certain things and how badly we’ve been hurt.

Racism And Islamophobic Racism

Someone asked a question the other day about Islamophobia and why that would be counted as racism, and also discussed racism as such, so I thought it might be worth talking about it in a little more depth. I’m aware I’ve done this before, but probably not from this angle. It’s also on my mind a bit after an exchange with a White acquaintance a week or so ago which is worth revisiting.

Last week, then, some people from here went to Carlisle for a counter-demonstration to the racist protest there, including my acquaintance. I made a very common statement which I expected him to agree with, that all White people are racist. He challenged me on this and I realised I didn’t have a ready answer, so it’s worth going into more depth on this matter.

I am an extremely lucky person. I was born in the developed world in just about the mid-twentieth century CE, I’m human, White, able-bodied, my first language is English and I’m middle class. I’m privileged in most of the ways anyone can be, and it’s important to remember this because of the “let them eat cake” (yes, I know nobody said that) obliviousness this gifts me with. I’m at the top of almost every pile. I’m even from the English Home Counties. Being in such a position means that to me, many issues are abstract and have little to no effect on my quality of life. I’m out of touch in ways which may very well harm others. This might sound like self-flagellation but it isn’t. It simply means that I am as valuable and worthwhile as any other person while also having the luxury of privilege, and of course many people in other categories rightly envy my position and might want to swap if that was possible. People who are less privileged than me might find it hard to understand how someone like Oprah Winfrey or Michelle Obama lacks privilege that they might have, and they do have a point because past a certain line sheer wealth cushions one from the effects of prejudice. However, a poor working-class White man is unlikely, for example, to be transvestigated to the extent Michelle Obama has been. In case you don’t know, there are probably thousands of people who see Barack and Michelle Obama as a gay male couple and Michelle as a trans woman, partly because White ideals of femininity refer to a White ideal female body. It’s very likely that Michelle Obama is protected from potential assassins, but she has to be protected like other powerful figures, and in her case the risk is greater than it would be for someone like Bill Clinton, or for that matter a poor working-class White bloke in England. Hence White privilege, and for that matter fragility, do exist.

This bit is going to be a rehash of a previous post I’ve now lost on ethnicity. The San people, also known as the “Bushmen”, of South Africa and adjacent states, are genetically unusually diverse for a human group. Interestingly, they’re more likely to be albino than any other such group, and although people always intermarry they can be thought of mainly as the sister group to the rest of humanity. One way in which this has been expressed is that it’s easily possible for two San individuals to be as different genetically as an average Irish person is from an average Sri Lankan. There’s nothing special about those two selections incidentally. I could equally well say the average Fuegan and the average Australian Aboriginal. There is also more variation within Afrika than outside it, genetically, so if we are going to divide people into ethnicities genetically, they may as well consist of a number of Afrikan races plus a single race comprising the people of the Sahara and everyone else. This is a bit of an oversimplification though, because Central Asia also has a lot of variation compared to the rest of the planet. Speaking of Central Asia, however, there is a small group somewhere in the Himalayas, if I remember correctly, which is considerably genetically distinct from others but is never regarded as a separate ethnicity in spite of the fact that the average difference between it and other races is as big as between White people and Native Americans, for example. I’ve seen a claim that it’s the Tajiks. If it is, the Tajiks to most people are basically slightly different from Persians in a similar way to the French and English being different. But I don’t know.

Some species are more diverse than others. Cheetahs and Beluga whales are known for being particularly genetically similar within their respective species. On the other hand, there’s a species of roundworm, Caenorhabditis brenneri, whose genes are the most diverse of any known animal species, being as different as lions and tigers even though they’re in the same genus as the famous Caenorhabditis elegans and in a whole phylum of animals which are very difficult for non-experts to tell apart. Humans nowadays are very genetically homogenous because of an incident, possibly the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano seventy-four thousand years ago, which by fifty thousand years ago left fewer than a thousand humans alive outside Afrika. There are some other species similarly affected at the same time such as the other great apes, macaques, the aforementioned cheetah and tigers (which I understand to be several species so I’m not sure what that means). On the whole, species are a lot more diverse than these, so we as humans, or rather Homo sapiens, are starting out from being remarkably similar to each other compared to most other species. Other species, ourselves included, can sometimes be thought of as having subspecies. As far as we’re concerned, that’s probably what Neanderthals were compared to us. That’s not the case for us any more, and hasn’t been so for many, many millennia. I have in my life been able to identify one person who was most genetically different from myself in that she probably had significant numbers of genes from Denisovan ancestors, and so far as I was concerned she was an Indonesian woman whose ethnicity as an Indonesian was more significant to her and others than her genetic makeup, even though she would’ve been dramatically unlike nearby neighbours in that country. It just didn’t matter, and in human terms the differences were really extreme.

My point, of course, is that we’re all mongrels. We’re all mixtures genetically. Moreover, the features on which we tend to focus as White people such as eye shape, skin tone, hair texture and shape of lips are not significant and don’t mean anything in terms of other features. It would be as easy to divide people up by other genetic characteristics such as blood group, tissue type or ability to digest various different compounds in food, which would have more important implications for everyone but would show groups of people which wouldn’t mean very much at all to us. There is basically no biological significance in what White people think of races. It may be true that dark skin protects it from sunlight damage but there are other inherited traits with other benefits elsewhere. Some people might have a genetic propensity not to be able to digest a particular species of caterpillar, which could be very significant in communities where they’re regularly eaten but we don’t use that to divide people up. We do do that with gluten intolerance but we don’t usually think about that in racial terms.

Hence there is no biological basis to race, or rather, its biological basis is arbitrarily decided from a biological perspective. What there is, and this is a social phenomenon, is racialisation. White people have decided that there are separate races, including White people who are in some way the “neutral” race and therefore usually have the privilege of not being aware of their own ethnicity without that being a potential problem for them. Hence we tend to be unaware of racism. It doesn’t quite work that way because, for example, English people tend to view the Irish as somewhat different and there can be prejudice against Ashkenazic Jews and White Eastern Europeans. Groups which are racialised basically have no choice but to be aware of racism. This means that our White privilege makes us able to be oblivious and therefore ignorant of the very real phenomenon of racism.

It often makes more sense to think of racism not as something people do so much as a structural and institutional problem from which White people benefit and racialised people suffer. One way this might help White people to accept our racism is to recognise that racist is simply something we are without seeing it as something which we accuse other White people of and of which we’re innocent. Apart from anything else, whether or not we’re actively racist, the point at which we decide other White people are racist and we aren’t is the end of us working to reduce our own racism and pursue anti-racism, which as White people is more our responsibility than that of racialised groups. It isn’t really the job of Black people to educate us about how we’re racist because we’re responsible for our ignorance and they suffer from it. It’s foisted upon them, and we do it to them, however passively, and passivity is tacit compliance. And again, this might sound like a guilt trip placed on myself and other White people, but it isn’t. It’s simply the recognition that we are racist and we need to do something about it.

A related feature of Whiteness is our fragility. This is also called White defensiveness, and describes our reluctance to talk about the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism and downplaying the seriousness of racism. Another claim is of reverse racism, i.e. that White people also face prejudice. Accusations of this based on diversity-related affirmative action were once compared to the idea that having a wheelchair ramp into a building which occupies most of the width of some steps is prejudiced against able-bodied people. There clearly does seem to be “pulling the ladder up”-style racism, as with a group of a certain ethnicity then denying fair consideration to members of other, or even the same, minority groups. The Conservative cabinet in Westminster is notorious for doing this. Some research has been done into whether reverse racism exists, and it appears that it doesn’t in this respect, in the sense that it doesn’t impair opportunities to implement such policies. The idea that racism operates equally significantly or comparably between ethnicities is related to the idea that there are clear-cut biologically-based major categories of human populations between which prejudice occurs rather than the more accurate model that there are those able to escape racialisation and those who have been racialised. One thing which does happen, though, is that there can be prejudice between ethnic minorities, which serves White supermacists well through divisiveness.

Before I get to Islamophobia, I want to talk about anti-semitism as it informs the way Islamophobia is rightly understood as a form of racism. The Jewish people as an ethnicity have at least three aspects to their identity: genetic affinity, culture and faith. Jewish people are generally understood as people whose mothers are Jewish, but many people in that category don’t identify as Jewish. There are rarely also converts to the Jewish faith, which would make them Jewish, and people who marry into the faith are kind of “Jewish-adjacent” and may or may not have Jewish children. Not all Jewish people are White, and in fact it could be argued that being Jewish entails not being White, something worth analysing. First of all, skin tone varies a lot between people who are genetically 100% Jewish, such as the Beth Israel originating in Ethiopia, the Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Mizrahim. These people are subject to racism within their communities. There are also straightforwardly Black converts to Judaism such as Sammy Davis Jr. Secondly, there is a sense in which they are non-White in a similar way to the Roma and the Irish are in England, i.e. there is plainly explicit and conscious racism against them because they’re not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Their skin tone in this situation is no protection against racism. Nonetheless, there may be no genetic difference at all between them and White people. Imagine two identical twins, one of whom converts to the Jewish faith. These two people would be of different ethnicities.

It doesn’t take much thought to see parallels between anti-Semitism and Islam here. Anti-semitism can be prejudice against people who are physically identical to Gentiles. These are in a small minority but they exist. Thinking back to my time in the English East Midlands, I knew at least three White English converts to Islam and a family of Albanians who to me just looked the same as White English people and were Muslims simply because Albania is an Islamic majority country. Nonetheless these people would’ve met with prejudice because of being Muslim. Many Albanians are culturally Islamic as opposed to being practicing Muslims, so they’re Muslim in the same way as Richard Dawkins is, in his own words, “culturally Christian”. Islamophobia can operate against Albanians even in their own country. Ethnic cleansing against Albanians has been called for by Albanian far-right groups, the state sponsors the promotion of Christianity over Islam and there have been attacks against women in hijabs, who have been called “terrorists”. I probably don’t need to mention what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s CE. There’s also often equation between Muslims and Arabs. Indonesia has the largest number of Muslims anywhere in the world and is not part of the Arab world. But like anti-semitism, Islamophobia is clearly racism. Besides this comparison, when you also consider the unfounded idea that racism other than these examples is based on biological differences in any significant way, then yes, Islamophobia is a form of racism. It isn’t so much co-opted in as that other forms of racism are more similar to it than often realised.

The other thing I want to stress is that racism is something which exists in White people without us needing to commit any voluntary racist acts. We’re able to operate in the world as if racism doesn’t exist, and that obliviousness is a luxury others lack and don’t owe it to us to explain, but we do owe it to them to identify how what we do is racist and what we can do to oppose racism. For instance, a job application might enable someone’s ethnicity to be identified simply through their life history and addresses, which have then been picked up by AI and used to profile a typical successful applicant, and even though the AI may be oblivious of their race, it bakes in and perpetuates racism. There are micro-aggressions, such as praising someone on their language because one assumes their first language isn’t the same as yours. That’s absolutely not intentional but it is insensitive. You might look at a photo of, say, a church website or an environmental conservation or country rambling group and only see pictures of White people without being aware of what that might imply or questioning why that might be. There are all sorts of things.

In conclusion, although there clearly is such a thing as malicious and conscious racism, the more insidious aspects of White racism that I’ve mentioned here may have a bigger impact, and this is something which disadvantages us all because we need diversity. Otherwise, we may have something like the banana plant cultivation problem: homogenous similar strains of bananas subject to being wiped out all at once by infectious diseases to which all of them respond in the same way. Monoculture is dangerous and needs to be avoided for all of us. Diversity is a strength which racism works against.

Planitia

I have a yen for fantasy geography. Some might say I just generally live in Cloud Cuckoo Land, but I’ve always been keen on maps. I wrote a post on here imagining that Great Britain had been divided in the same way as North and South Korea and the way things would be for us if it had, which may have helped make the situation over there more vivid. Well, right now we’re in a very divided kingdom, as evinced by the divisive “Unite The Kingdom” march last weekend in London, and of course in a sense I’d prefer us to be even more divided in the sense that I believe strongly in Scottish independence. I’ve taken to writing “U”K recently too, and the divisions are of course not simply geographical. This is an artifact of social media, bots and AI, among other things, orchestrated of course by those who profit from division, and I mean that literally, I mean, you know all this. We all do.

I’m very, very White, and I’m from East Kent. My sister, I’m pretty sure, votes Reform. As a White person, I’m racist, sometimes consciously and deliberately so and at other times unconsciously so. Last weekend I made the observation to another White person that all White people are racist, which I firmly accept, and he appeared to take exception to this. I’m not sure whether I should explain this or not, or whether if I do, it will reach the right ears. It’s absolutely not about being a self-hating White person, any more than opposition to Zionism makes someone a self-hating Jew, but about recognising one’s privilege and working against one’s own racism. The point at which a White person decides they’re not racist is also the point at which they will stop becoming less racist.

A few months ago I was at a vigil for the victims in Palestine when a White guy involved in an anti-immigration protest stood up at the front and said “I’m not racist”. This is factually untrue, not because of his motivations for being on the demo but because he’s White and therefore racist. He’s in the position of being able to be oblivious to his racism, as do I much of the time, because of our White privilege. The problem with being able to perceive himself as racist is similar to my problem of being able to perceive myself as breathing or having a heartbeat, and also due to the fact that racism tends to be conceptualised as something one does, perhaps consciously, rather than being a product of living in a White supermacist society such as this one. Ironically, this is one reason why I’m only a very reluctant Remainer. To me, the EU is a club of rich nations which have looted and stolen money and resources from the rest of the world, consisting largely of racialised people, and are continuing to do so through megacorps and banks. One interesting fact about the European Union which a lot of people seem to gloss over is that an early adopter and possibly the inventor of that term was none other than British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, who wanted a White homeland for Europeans as he saw them. Another irony is that the reason we’re getting so many asylum seekers is that we’ve left the EU and therefore the Dublin III Regulation, which prevented people from making more than one application in a signatory state, which the “U”K no longer is. So Brexit is responsible for this.

If you’re White, at least if you live in a White majority country, the chances are you will have grown up without the enforced education of what it means to be a member of a racialised minority, and that obliviousness involves unconscious bias. I’ve used this example before, but the woman in Central Park who threatened to call the police on a Black birdwatcher out of fear was unaware of the danger she was putting him in by doing so because she was able to conceive of the police as primarily an institution which upheld the law without being much of a threat to racialised people when the reality is very different. Fear is also important here. If you can get someone to be afraid, you can get them to be less fair and more irrational, and to make decisions which endanger others, which they may no longer perceive as individuals but as dominated by a particular immutable characteristic. I was kidnapped by a White man in 1989 CE, and became disproportionately afraid of White men in general for maybe a year or so afterwards. In fact I found my fear of them expanding and including more White men in a manner I found quite worrying and discussed in therapy. Suppose instead of that I’d been kidnapped by a Black person. I probably would’ve experienced the same effect the other way round, and would’ve become more racist than I already am. If I didn’t get the chance to process that and come to terms with it in some way, it might’ve become a fixed feature of my personality. Transferring this to homophobia, I used to know a man who was homophobic because he was sexually abused a lot in his independent school by other males. I don’t know whether he still is because it was a long time ago now and I’ve long since lost touch with him. You don’t necessarily have much control over your prejudice, and whereas it’s undesirable it isn’t an accusation to call someone racist. It might be inaccurate, but it’s an observation.

Another aspect of racism which I’ve mentioned before here is its potential link to veganism, which I personally make and promote to a certain extent. I may be unusual for a vegan because I’m not interested in making anyone else vegan on the grounds that there’s already so much suffering and death in the world inherent in the food chain that any decisions we make to avoid animal products have little consequence for that. Veganism, though, is about everyone, i.e. all animals, and I do mean animals. I’m not going to reduce that circle merely to animals with brains or otherwise cephalised. But this post is not about veganism specifically. It’s easy to introduce racism into one’s veganism, for instance by ignoring the internalised oppression of soul food or the difficulty of eating a healthy plant-based diet in a food desert, but even without this there’s a racist element in it, one which I actually fully embrace despite being generally anti-racist. The issue is that indigenous peoples are never plant-based, and expecting them to be so will destroy their way of life. Although this is a long way down the road from where we are now, with the majority of even White people being carnist, ultimately the species indigenous people exploit don’t belong to them any more than slaves belong to slave “owners”, and in spite of the reverence they hold their prey in and no matter how efficiently they use the remains, they don’t have the right to kill them. And this is a serious problem, because for instance the Inuit will sometimes end their own lives because they can’t pursue the slaughter of seals. It’s a central part of the lives of thousands of non-White people and I do want to take that away, and some of them will probably kill themselves as a result. Therefore, I am absolutely and emphatically, actively and consciously racist. So yes, all White people are racist and I in particular am deliberately so, although the issue is unlikely to arise because of the focus on factory farming and vivisection, which is far more important. Marginalisation is nested. Partly for this reason also, I disagree with vegans who say veganism is a feminist issue because of the rape and forced birth involved. The deaths of half the chicks to enable the other half to lay eggs arises from their maleness, and in the wild it’s very likely that there are species whose females are always raped and wouldn’t exist if they weren’t, meaning that you can’t apply feminism to most other species, and again veganism trumps feminism there. At the same time, the issue of my racism against indigenous peoples, most of the time, is not a real problem because by the time veganism becomes a significant issue for them, they will probably have become assimilated into a scarcity-based economic system. However, there are also intermediate cases, such as the Faroese slaughter of pilot whales. On this issue, though, the slaughter is of wild animals rather than farmed ones and is on a smaller scale than the slaughter of farm animals in nearby countries, including Scotland. There is a sense in which whaling is actually the most humane form of slaughter because a one hundred ton animal can feed a lot more people than a thousand ewes whose total weight is the same, but I’d much rather there was none at all. So yeah, I’m racist, I know I am and I’m not planning to change in that respect, although I am in others.

Nonetheless, in other areas I am vigorously willing to discover and challenge my racism and White privilege. This doesn’t mean I have a guilt complex or think less of myself simply because I’m White, but I did grow up with the privilege of being able to be oblivious of racialisation because I was myself not racialised.

Given all that, I identify ethnically as a White person from northwest Europe, by which I mean an area including the islands of the North Atlantic, France, Benelux, Scandinavia and the German-speaking parts of Europe. That’s an area of seven million square kilometres, including fifteen sovereign states and covering 1.3% of the total surface of this planet. Most of the states involved are either part of the EU or have a special relationship with it. However, I’m not impressed with the EU unless it becomes a democratic federal state and it’s a case of it being the least worst option rather than something one can enthuse about. It’s just a mass of rich White people taking money and resources from the rest of the world and their own poor and making a massive pile of dosh. Nothing to celebrate.

However – well, indulge me, and this is where I get to the Tees-Exe Line and the Hexagon. Back in geography lessons, I’m not sure when, like probably every British schoolchild, I was taught about the line that can be drawn between the mouths of the Tees and the Exe rivers, northwest of which lie the highland areas of this island and southeast of which lie the “Lowlands”. Remember that name. This line divides the archipelago culturally too, with the northwest being more “Celtic”, although apparently the concept of Celtic identity is pretty nebulous and I tend to think the British parts of that area forget the Nordic influence. As I’ve mentioned before, in Scotland in particular edges are central, and one way in which this applies is with the water. Lochs, isles and firths are important to Scottish physical geography, influencing transport, language, economics, climate and doubtless a load of other things. Moving southwest of this line, though, brings one to an area with fewer islands, a less twiddly coastline and of course lower, flatter land. What it doesn’t do, however, is eliminate the sea. There’s the “German Ocean”/North Sea and the Manche/English Channel, and all the history and commerce which has taken place along its coasts. In Mediaeval times it sometimes consisted of territory straddling the two coasts and the English language is both Ingvaeonic and heavily influenced by French. The English crown made claims to France until surprisingly recently, in 1802 at the Treaty of Amiens due to France having become a republic. The White Ship and the subsequent arrival of the Anarchy was linked to the ferrying back and forth of royalty between France and England, and very significantly to me, Calais was only officially lost in January 1558.

Going further southeast, we have the Hexagon. France has this thing about being hexagonal, which to my mind excludes Britanny, Flanders, the Basque Country and French Catalonia (for want of a better term). Britanny still has somewhere to go due to its linguistic links to Cornwall, so that also belongs, so to speak, to the west of an extended Tees-Exe Line. On going into France, and in fact a long way into it towards Paris from the North Downs in Kent, one gets a strong impression of continuity. It basically feels and looks like Kent with different marks of human activity on it. Then there’s Benelux, a trio of countries which are closely associated with each other.

An apparent tangent:

On Mars, there are perhaps three words for extensive areas with distinctive features: vastitas, planum and planitia. Plana are plateaux, vastitas means “desert” and is just the large lowland area around the north polar ice cap where most of the ocean used to be, and there are also planitiae, the best known of which it Utopia Planitia, which is where they build the starships in ‘Star Trek’. A planitia is a low-lying area. It translates as “plain” in English, and one of the more interesting planitiae is Hellas, which includes the lowest-lying areas of the planet and was once thought to be instrumental in causing Tharsis to form near the antipodes of the planet. Planitia, then, is a low-lying area.

I think the area of the Low Countries, that near the coast and someway inland from Hauts De France and the area of this island southeast of the Tees-Exe Line could be considered a single geographical unit, and in fact should be considered a single political unit. Or rather, I don’t, but it would be sufficiently annoying that it constitutes a proposal. In the former France, this should include Picardie, Hauts de France, Grand-Est and Normandy. The capital should be Lille, or the capital should be polycentric. Why do I want this? Well, when I lived in East Kent and after I left, I felt it was weird how, far from celebrating our connections with places over the Channel, we all seemed to dig our heels in and become “extra extra English”. Lille was the closest big city to me and I’ve never been there, and to me that seems absurd. Dover is much closer to Calais than it is to London. The name Kent itself means “edge”, but it’s only on an edge if you ignore everywhere outside Britain. My home village has a vineyard which produces excellent wines. And yet the people living there basically ignore their position entirely and either act like France and the Low Countries are on the other side of the world or are affronted at the audacity of their neighbours visiting. And then of course there are the famous people in boats. Various problems there, one of which is that Calais and Dover are in different countries separated by thirty kilometres of often rough and very busy seas. This wouldn’t be a problem if we’d kept Calais in 1558.

So, why not forget about England entirely and just decide there’s a new country called Planitia comprising these areas. Put the capital in Lille, build some bridges and tunnels to link it together across the Channel similarly to the bridge linking Denmark and Sweden and celebrate the common history and culture. No more problems with boats because once the people reach Planitia, they’re in a unified political entity. It looks very roughly like this:

I have no idea why this came out so small. WordPress is not behaving itself today. Anyway, you get the idea. It’s a republic. It has a number of official languages, including French, Dutch, Letzebuergesch, West Frisian, English, Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati, Polish and so on. It unifies a diverse number of ethnicities with a lot in common. It has a large city in the middle of it on the island which does a lot of commercial stuff but needs its wealth redistributing more equally through the area.

In the meantime, out of the area is a kind of Celtic alliance, though not really Celtic, to the north and west, and a diminished hexagon of France to the south, extending to the Pyrenees and the Alps. As for Planitia, its cuisine, sadly, is far from vegan. It consists of pancakes, cheese on toast, loads of fish, bivalves, gastropods, various cheeses, wines (very nice, but are they vegan?), beer, cider, and more positively curries and general South Asian-influenced cuisines with plenty of chilli. People are not so keen on tea as some of them used to be. There’s Britpop with French lyrics, theatre in French, Dutch and English all in the same play, everyone learns each others’ languages in school including the South Asian ones and there’s existentialist Gothic literature. The former England has terrazzas and people hanging out having lunch for hours. Everyone drinks coffee. There is respect for learning for its own sake. Foreigners are so welcome they hardly count as foreigners at all beyond respect for their cultures. People are proud of their composite identity and how they’ve managed to bridge the gaps between the six nations composing their territory and people, often literally. The Channel has several bridges along its length which open in the middle like Tower Bridge to let the supertankers through. There are artificial islands offshore along both coasts. Many people cycle to work, Cannibis is legal for personal use and accordions and brass instruments play together. There’s probably a lot more rabies, unfortunately.

OK, all that’s a bit stereotypical, but what I’m saying is, can we for goodness’s sake forget that we’re living on an island and stop pretending we’re some special people apart rather than accept our unity with the rest of Europe? In this scenario there’s either no EU or Planitia is a province of a democratic European republic. The people in boats is a self-inflicted problem caused by leaving the EU, and also they’re people running from situations so appalling most people in Britain can’t even imagine them. They’re often people whose education has been paid for by another country and we get their talents, skills and experience for free, but instead of that we house them in crappy hotels and pay them a pittance when they could be contributing massively to the economy.

We can keep the St George’s cross though. A Turk who’s the patron saint of Palestine is fine by me. A red cross on an orange field with a couple of fleurs des lyses in the corners would seem appropriate.

Beyond The Looking Glass

1. The Risks of Mirror Life

This one will have to start pretty far back from where it ends to make much sense. I have already stuck an idea along these lines on the Halfbakery, which I’ve begun to frequent anew in the past few weeks. It’s not exactly a simpler place and time, more of a more complicated one, but that’s why I like it.

First of all, this post is going to be quite wide-ranging and extensive in terms of technical details. The reason for this is that it’s been suggested to me that I submit the idea as a non-peer reviewed scientific paper rather than write a blog post about it, but I don’t have a lot of respect for journals that allow that, particularly considering that I’m not in an academic community relevant to the field and have only fairly basic education regarding biochemistry and other branches of chemistry. In order to produce good-quality coherent ideas in a particular academic discipline, it’s usually necessary to have people to bounce them off and get torn down numerous times. I don’t have this even in philosophy, and although I have carried out quantitative research in herbalism, mainly due to the parlous state of CPD in that area at the time, I haven’t got my own lab. So I’m posting this here instead, where I hope it will vanish without trace.

I’ll start with “life as we know it”. Life as we know it is a complex system of organic carbon compounds interacting and reacting in aqueous solutions partitioned off from one another by membranes made of molecule-thick layers of oil in which various proteins float, some of which control movement of substances across these barriers. On some level, this is actually all life is, or at least the life we’re familiar with. The code for doing all this is stored in DNA, gets read and turned into proteins which further down the line may in turn work on other substrates to make something else such as cellulose or dental enamel, and the whole system is powered by a process whereby usually sugar is broken down to release energy through adenosine triphosphate called glycolysis, which then can go in several possible directions depending on the organism: fermentation, where ethanol or acetic acid is produced, other anaerobic respiration, where lactic acid is produced, or (drum roll please!) the Krebs Cycle, where the stuff is converted into various organic acids and combined with oxygen, then fed back into the start of the cycle, which is by far the most energetic pathway. That’s another thing that life is, in a slightly more detailed version.

It’s occurred to me, incidentally, that in theory some kind of motor could be built which digested cellulose, starch and sugars and converted them into movement, so that there could be a literal “Krebs Cycle”, i.e. a motorbike which runs on food, and that’s on the Halfbakery too. A cyclist is doing this in a roundabout way of course, and there are microorganisms who can convert energy released by reputation into rotary motion using microscopic motors which work by alternating electrostatic attraction and repulsion, so this is doable, though also possibly a bit pointless and unethical.

Thinking of living things as complicated wet machines might help to get me to the next stage of understanding what I’m about to say. Suppose you have a machine with clockwise screw threads and screws, say a clock, and the mechanism tells the time by moving hands around a dial in a clockwise direction. That’s fine and we know about those, but there could be an alternative mechanism which is 100% identical but has counter-clockwise screw threads and screws and works exactly the same way, but is a mirror image of the other clock, and it still works fine, tells the time accurately and so on, but every part is the opposite way round, so its dial works counter-clockwise. If a screw were to work loose or the winding gear needs replacing, you wouldn’t be able to get spare parts from the other clock most of the time to repair the clockwise one. It just wouldn’t work, and if it was working in the first place and you replaced a working part from one clock with the corresponding part from the other, it would often break it. Similarly, if you drive from a right-hand drive country into a left-hand drive one but carry on obeying the traffic laws of the other country, you’d be putting yourself and others in danger and either have an accident or get arrested. Life’s like that.

Life really is like that. Many of the molecules making up living things are not symmetrical. They’re either left or right-handed. In fact, although there are specific molecules in biochemistry which can be of either chirality, the word for this handedness after the Greek word for “hand”, the central parts of life chemistry consists of proteins and amino acids which are left-handed and sugars and carbohydrates are right-handed. It’s fair to ask how a molecule can be said to be left or right handed when this seems to be an arbitrary decision but in fact homochiral solutions of molecules, that is, molecules which are all right-handed or all left-handed, bend light shone through them to the left or to the right depending on their handedness, so it isn’t arbitrary and this explains how it can be said that sugars are generally right-handed and amino acids left-handed. It’s also possible for molecules to have more than one chiral centre, meaning that there could be four different versions of a particular molecule with two such centres and so forth.

Although the central machinery of life is chiral, the end products of that machinery can be either way round. For instance, the scent of orange and the scent of lemon are both contributed to by a molecule called limonene, but the two molecules have opposite chirality. For some reason, the lemony version is much more common than the orangey one. Another pair of examples is the odours of spearmint and caraway. The name “dextrose” is almost a synonym for “glucose”, but the “dextro-” refers to the right-handed version alone. There is also a “levulose”, which was going to be introduced as a non-calorific sweetener but it didn’t happen. I don’t know why, but the reason it was suggested is that glycolysis and the Krebs Cycle wouldn’t have been able to break it down or release energy from it. Another example, from pharmaceuticals, is levothyroxine and dextrothyroxine. Both are amino acids but whereas levothyroxine is a thyroid hormone used for hypothyroidism, dextrothyroxine is its right-handed version and was used to lower cholesterol, but isn’t on the market because of cardiac side-effects.

Usually when drugs are manufactured, because the process is through industrial chemistry rather than from living things, they are what’s known as a “racemic mixture”, i.e. a roughly equal mixture of left- and right-handed molecules. On the whole, drugs on the market stay as these mixtures unless it turns out one chirality has serious side-effects as with dextrothyroxine, in which case some complex processing has to be used to purify them into the active and safe form alone. This means that often when someone takes medication from orthodox pharmaceuticals, they are actually taking twice the dose they need and half of the medication has no action and is simply excreted.

Some simple biochemicals are symmetrical, for instance the simplest amino acid, glycine, which incidentally is the only such acid found in interstellar space. Left- or right-handed molecules also very slowly shift to a racemic mixture over a known period of time depending on their temperature, and this enables ancient biological remains to be dated if they’re too old for radiocarbon dating but not old enough for other methods. Most Neanderthal remains fall into this category, and for this reason Young Earth creationists are particularly keen on casting doubt on its accuracy. Of course not every molecule involved in living things is affected by this. Water, carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, carbon monoxide, calcium phosphate, calcium carbonate and so forth are not chiral at all. Also, there’s no firm theory about why this has happened, or for that matter why macromolecules such as proteins and polysaccharides aren’t built out of whatever chiralities of subunits which would optimise their structure and function, but for some reason they aren’t. It might simply be that some process before life even emerged eliminated most of the molecules of the “wrong” chirality. This oddity is, incidentally, paralleled by another weird thing about the world, which is that it’s made of matter rather than antimatter. For some reason, antimatter seems to have won out in the Universe and the occasional bit of antimatter, for instance above thunderstorms or emitted by bananas, is not in common supply. It’s unsurprising that it gets eliminated quickly because it’s surrounded by matter, but why should there be more of one than the other in the first place? As I understand it, in fact matter and antimatter are themselves of reverse chirality but in a higher set of dimensions than the four we usually consider, but I may have got that wrong.

Mirror molecules can be useful. For instance, if a protein drug can be made entirely out of right-handed amino acids, it’s likely to last longer in the body because it can’t be easily broken down by the left-handed enzymes we produce. In situations where a mirror-image molecule is highly toxic but its counterpart is a valuable drug, finding a way to synthesise one set rather than both and throwing half away after a complicated and energetically and economically expensive sifting process is obviously more desirable provided that that process itself doesn’t need much energy.

If you imagine Alice stepping through the looking glass into a world where she is still the same way round but the rest of the world is the other, she would be in quite a predicament if she couldn’t get back. She’d be able to breathe the air and drink the water without any trouble, but she wouldn’t be able to derive any nutrition from the food except the minerals and she’d simply starve to death. After that, her body might also fail to decompose properly because in this scenario she actually isn’t worm food. This, I think, might be similar to the situation astronauts might find themselves in if they were to land on a habitable, life-bearing planet in a distant solar system: there’s only a 50% chance they’d be able to eat anything at all usefully and a lot of it would probably be as poisonous as cancer chemotherapy drugs as well. On the other hand, if there is life elsewhere, maybe it all has the same bias as ours because the process leading to that came before life first appeared.

It’s also been suggested that mirror life, as it’s been called, does actually exist on this planet but we can’t easily detect it. Desert varnish is one suggestion of what’s been called a “shadow biosphere”, which uses molecules with the opposite chirality. It’s an orange to black patina which forms on rocks in arid conditions and seems also to exist on Mars, so if it does turn out to be connected to organisms that would presumably mean there’s been life there. The idea that it’s shadow life is however no longer popular, but if it does exist it would effectively be alien life on Earth, which has always been here but has nothing to do with the life we know about.

Mirror life constructed from scratch is not possible using existing technology, but scientists estimate that it’s ten to twenty years away right now, assuming human beings continue to work in that direction. However, we now have some kind of apparently competent AI which could accelerate that process, and this has led scientists to worry sufficiently to publish rather alarming papers attempting to warn the world of the risk. In order to clarify this, I should point out that the microbes we know about can be divided along the lines of their nutrition into those needing complicated organic molecules to survive and those which can thrive on simpler minerals alone. Those which can do that, known as “lithophiles”, a word which can also be used to refer to chemical elements which tend to be found in rocks near Earth’s surface, extract energy and take nutrition from simple substances such as carbon dioxide and may photosynthesise. This is an important category from the perspective of mirror life.

Like the clock, there is absolutely no reason so far as anyone knows why an organism couldn’t be built all of whose chiral molecules are mirror images of those found in known living things on Earth. However, in many cases this organism could well encounter a major problem early on if it happened to be an animal. There would basically be no food for it. There’d be minerals for sure, and oxygen, carbon dioxide and other things essential for life, but no calories from sugar or fat and no amino acids from protein. They’d simply waste away. This might sound reassuring, as it means that if scientists or AI did manage to build such an organism it would be self-limiting as it would need special nutrients. However, what if it were a lithophile? It wouldn’t then need molecules of a particular chirality because it could make them itself. Actual lithophiles (also called lithotrophs, which is less ambiguous, but I’ll stick with how I started) don’t produce reverse-chirality compounds, so at first it might seem that there’s no risk of this happening, but the reason for this is that there’s a genetic link between them and us, and all related life does prefer the chiralities I mentioned above. If an organism is lithophilic and has reverse chirality to known life, it could end up using up biomasse and be a dead end, where those substances could never return to the food chain because there’s nothing available to process them. So the risk in the general case is that large amounts of living matter would gradually turn into mirror life and never come back.

There’s another risk too. I’ve mentioned that one of the benefits of mirror molecules is that they last longer because organisms lack the enzymes to break them down. This could be a hazard as well as a benefit. It’s been suggested that this means that a microorganism entering the human body, for example, could end up using up all the resources it can use within someone’s body while slipping under the RADAR of the immune system, which would simply never detect it. It could then multiply unhindered, taking over the entire body without anything being done about it, pretty quickly killing the patient. It’s been calculated that if a single bacterium were to multiply at its usual rate, it would overwhelm the world within days. This doesn’t happen because bacteria are part of an ecosystem which consumes and processes them in various ways, but mirror life wouldn’t be.

I’m not sure this is how things would work out, but the risk exists, and does so in two different ways. One is simply the reckless production of mirror life for something like drug manufacture, which does have a positive side but relies on containment to avoid this danger, and given that sterile technique can easily fail, as occasionally happens with, for example, post-operative infections, it’s bound to happen eventually. The other is that it could happen as a result of out-of-control, misaligned artificial intelligence might use mirror life to wipe out all life on Earth on the grounds that it gets in the way of their development and dominance, and it’s been suggested that this could happen within three years from now (2025).

My response to this is something which I can’t come to terms with, which is happening to me more and more often nowadays. The problem is that it’s an example of something which sounds alarmist, leading to doubt that it’s realistic, but I’m also aware of normalcy bias where people, including me, tend to think things will carry on as they have for a long time for us, and as I’ve talked about before on here this is a risky way of thinking. In the case of the risk of mirror life to human health, and more widely to other organisms which immune responses which involve recognising foreign material and defending the body against it, my problem is that I felt I didn’t have much choice but to retire my studies into immunology because they seemed to be leading me in the direction of being anti-vaxx and I was aware that hardly anyone with education and experience in the field had that position. I should point out that this was not the usual “do your own research” thing where people end up watching YouTube videos produced by flat Earthers or whatever. It was a project I pursued where I bought and read the standard immunology and microbiology text books, and they still led me away from a pro-vaccination position. I should stress, incidentally, that I’m not against vaccination, but equally, that this pro-vaxx position is not evidence-based for me but relies on trusting experts. Anyway, the consequence of that is that I cannot safely explore the opinion I now have on this matter as regards mirror life, which is that it really, really seems to me that since the body can recognise and act against haptens, as it does for example with nickel allergy, nickel being a simple, non-chiral metal, surely it could do the same against mirror antigens? So I’m intellectually paralysed here. I can’t proceed.

2. An Alternative

But there is another way forward for me, beyond the looking glass of mirror life. The idea of life originating beyond Earth being based on different principles has been discussed in xenobiology and science fiction for many decades now. The idea of reverse chirality is the most conservative of these ideas. It would be very surprising if it turned out that mirror life couldn’t exist, and equally surprising if it emerged that all life throughout the Universe was as similar to life here to that extent. In this situation the burden of proof is on someone claiming such life is impossible rather than the other way round, and that’s unusual, possibly unique in all the suggestions which have been made in not involving a radical departure from known biology. Some of the others include: ammonia or hydrogen sulphide as a solvent instead of water, arsenic compounds instead of ATP for respiration, chlorine breathing instead of oxygen, and of course the most famous of all: silicon-based life.

Now, I’ve discussed silicon-based life before although I can’t remember if I’ve done it on this blog. One of my most popular videos on YouTube is about it, and two very different ways in which it might happen. Those who consider silicon-based life generally fall into two camps. They either believe it’s impossible or they believe it’s possible in circumstances very different to Earth’s. As sometimes happens with me, I think the situation is somewhat different. I think that if there is life elsewhere in the Universe, silicon-based life has never arisen on its own because the set of conditions it would need are not going to happen by chance. However, I also believe that silicon-based life could be technologically created in a carefully controlled environment. It’s not that it can’t exist: it’s that it would never happen without help.

First of all, I should point out that I’ve had two goes at this in different ways. I’ll outline the general principles first. The general idea with silicon-based life is that silicon seems to be the chemical element most similar to carbon. It can form up to four bonds with other atoms, forms into chains and rings and in those conditions can still bond with other compounds and atoms. Incidentally, the same seems to be true of boron and in fact boron even has some advantages over silicon, but it isn’t abundant enough to be a real contender in the world without some kind of intervention, so silicon is a stronger focus for most people. It’s a very common element indeed, being the second most abundant element in Earth’s crust after oxygen, far more widespread than carbon in fact, even though life here is based on that rather than silicon. It also has the capacity to form a wide variety of compounds, like those of carbon, including oils, waxes, rubbers and inflammable substances like mineral oil and even compounds similar to alcohols. Some silicon compounds can even replace certain hormones and have similar actions to them in the human body. There’s a second set of compounds as found in rocks and minerals as well as elsewhere, some of which, the amphiboles, form double helices of units somewhat like DNA’s structure although much simpler and apparently not carrying genetic information as such.

So it all looks quite promising, doesn’t it? Well it isn’t, not at all. A hint to the implausibility is found in the fact that we live on a planet substantially composed of silicon compounds and yet life here is based on the much scarcer (for this planet, not everywhere) carbon. At least in the conditions found here, something seems to have prevented it from getting anywhere.

Unfortunately, there are huge barriers to the possibility of silicon-based life. Firstly, the current terrestrial conditions make it impossible, although it should be remembered that organic life is also impossible on most other planets in this solar system and even through most of the volume of our own. Oxygen combines readily and almost irreversibly with silicon, to the extent that the main silicones are based on combined silicon and oxygen chains rather than those of silicon. Water and silicon react exothermically, i.e. generating heat, oxidising and releasing free hydrogen, initially producing silicon monoxide which rapidly becomes silica. At that point the silicon is basically stuck in that molecule and nothing is going to coax it out apart from rather extreme measures outside the realm of biology. Moreover, many silicon compounds other than silicates are destroyed by ultraviolet light in sunlight. This means that any silicon-based life in this sense (there are others) would have to be in an environment devoid of liquid water, free oxygen and probably also daylight.

However, this doesn’t make it impossible. Water is a very special compound which is difficult to replace as a solvent for living organisms, one of its important properties being polarity. Its molecules are negatively charged on one side and positively charged on the other, enabling them to do various things important to life. For instance, it makes it a better solvent, so biochemical reactions can occur more easily or at all. It also enables membranes to exist between different parts of cells and also between them and the outside world or the rest of the body. It helps proteins fold and keeps DNA stable. It also has a number of other benefits such as ensuring that the bottom of a body of water stays liquid, meaning that they don’t freeze from the bottom up because ice is lighter than water, and enabling plants to pull water into and up themselves more easily. If there’s to be biochemistry “as we know it”, even silicon-based, it definitely seems like there has to be a polar solvent and that can’t be water for silicon. The usual alternative suggested is ammonia, which has similar properties but much lower freezing and boiling points at atmospheric pressure on Earth. Clearly if alien life is being considered, Earth is not the environment. Ammonia boils at -33 degrees C.

All this, then, doesn’t sound very promising. Maybe there’s a planet or moon somewhere orbiting another Sun-like star about where our asteroid belt is which has ammonia oceans at whose bottom silicon chemistry can operate in a more complex way than on Earth, but the options are limited, not least because as well as all these drawbacks, silicon compounds tend to be less stable even in ideal conditions than organic carbon compounds and the variety of such compounds is smaller for various reasons. One is that silicon, unlike carbon, struggles to form double or triple bonds due to being a larger atom, and for some reason I don’t understand, chains of silicon molecules can’t be as long as carbon ones. Right, now I’ve said I don’t understand, and this is the problem. Although I am good at theoretical chemistry to some extent, I haven’t studied inorganic chemistry above GCSE level formally and my knowledge of biochemistry, although it’s considerably better, is also not really at first degree level in most respects. I know what I need to know to understand pharmacology, medical lab science, physiology, phytochemistry and so forth, but not much beyond that. Therefore, my knowledge tends to run out at this point. Even so, I’ll continue, taking a bit of a detour. Bear with me.

There are languages with very large numbers of sounds. ǃXóõ, for example, has fifty-eight consonants and thirty-one vowels. By contrast, Rotokas, depending on the dialect, has as few as six consonants and five vowels. Nevertheless both do their job of facilitating communication equally well. There will of course be situations where one will have a word the other lacks, such as, I dunno, the shrub Welwitschia having a name in  ǃXóõ but not in Rotokas, or the ti plant having a name in Rotokas but not ǃXóõ, but it would still be possible to refer to them somehow, with a loan word, an international term or by describing them. Likewise, there are different number bases and notations, such as binary, decimal, duodecimal or Roman or Western Arabic numerals, but maths can be carried out in all of them. This is slightly different because Roman numerals are not good with the likes of negative numbers, decimal fractions or large integers, for example. Another example is expressive adequacy. It’s possible to express any logical operation using a single operator, depending on which one is chosen – there are in fact two, one of which is NAND – “is incompatible with” or “not both. . . and. . . “, but we usually rely on about half a dozen. Then there’s Turing completeness, which is the ability of a machine to act as a general purpose computer. The Z80 CPU as used in the ZX Spectrum had 694 separate instructions, but it’s possible to build a computer with just one instruction – subtract one, then branch if negative – which would still function as a computer, although probably a very slow one.

In other words, there are two opposite poles for solving a variety of problems. One pole involves a large number of different items to address it, the other very few or even only one. This applies in all sorts of different situations: language, arithmetic, formal logic, computer science and probably a lot of other areas. One of these, in my uninformed opinion, might be biochemistry. As it stands, DNA is made of two backbones of deoxyribose phosphate and four different bases somewhat similar chemically to uric acid and caffeine and RNA is similar except for being ribose phosphate, not being a double helix and having one different base. There are generally understood to be twenty-one amino acids which compose proteins, although there are also others such as those with selenium or tellurium in them instead of the sulphur found in a couple of the usual ones, the neurotransmitter GABA, thyroxine and so on. Then there are the carbohydrates and lipids, which again are built up from simpler units such as dextrose, glycerol and docosaehexanoic acid. The actual macromolecules are very varied, but they tend to be composed of smaller and less diverse components. My possibly naive claim is that silicon-based macromolecules could be built out of larger numbers of less varied units, which would incidentally already be somewhat larger than their carbon-based analogues due to silicon atoms being bigger. Nonetheless, all this is happening on such a tiny scale that even molecules an order of magnitude larger are still minute, and it’s basically a technical difference most of the time.

That, then, seems to be completely fine and maybe this makes the idea of silicon-based life more realistic, but there’s yet another obstacle. The interstellar medium is the collection of extremely sparsely distributed matter between the stars. It amounts in general to something like just creeping into double figures of molecules or atoms per litre of space, and most of that’s hydrogen and most of the rest of it helium, so actual compounds like water or methane are pretty rare, but they can be detected using spectography and in some places they’re more concentrated than others, such as in nebulae including the one near the centre of the Galaxy which consists largely of raspberry rum – I’m not kidding: it’s called Sagittarius B2 and is 150 light years across. In all of this, you can find all sorts of stuff, including table salt, “lo salt”, nitric oxide, hydrochloric and hydrofluoric “acids” (they don’t act as acids because they’re isolated compounds), carborundum, actually yeah, let’s make a massive long though incomplete list: aluminium hydroxide, water, potassium cyanide, formaldehyde, methane, formic and acetic “acids”, methanol, ethanol, glycine (an amino acid), ethyl formate (raspberry flavour), acetone (pear drop scent and nail varnish remover), buckyballs and calcium oxide (quicklime). This is by no means an exhaustive list. Most of the molecules I’ve mentioned, but not all, are organic and contain carbon (I should explain that as it sounds tautological), and in fact there are also silicon compounds including silane, which is the silicon-based version of methane. However, there are far fewer compounds with silicon in them than carbon ones, and in fact some of them contain both silicon and carbon.

Back in the day, the Miller-Urey experiment used a mixture of simple compounds incubated with an electrical discharge in a sealed flask to see if it would start to generate the kinds of chemicals found in living things. It succeeded, even though it was a flask rather than all the oceans of the world and it only lasted a fortnight rather than millions of years. This is a little unfair because life may have arisen in smaller pools rather than the whole ocean, but it does demonstrate that the conditions thought to exist in Earth’s early atmosphere probably could’ve generated life. The only carbon compound in the mixture was methane. I’ve suggested that the experiment could be repeated with silane instead of methane to see if silicon-based compounds developed, but the answer is almost certainly that this would just produce silica plus a few other rather uninteresting molecules like silicon nitride. Nothing like living things, even their silicon-based equivalents.

The relative paucity of silicon compounds in the interstellar medium along with the probable failure of a silicon-based alternative to Miller-Urey, which to be fair is hampered by using water rather than ammonia, strongly suggests to me that whatever else might have arisen directly from non-living matter in the Universe, silicon-based life is not going to be one of them. It might seem unfair to say that it should be conducted with silane and water rather than ammonia, but water is the most common compound in the Cosmos. On the other hand, it might all be frozen, which would give it a better chance as then it’s basically just another kind of rock.

My conclusion to this particular bit is what I hope will bring me back to the mirror life issue. I think that investigating the possibility will reveal two apparently contradictory facts:

1. Silicon-based life can never arise in the Universe of its own accord, but carbon-based life can, fairly easily, provided there’s also enough phosphorus.
2. Silicon-based life is completely viable.

What I think, basically, is that any silicon-based life of the kind I’m talking about right now is absolutely possible, but that it would have to be built deliberately through technology in a carefully controlled and isolated environment. It would need special nutrients to sustain it, would be immediately killed by Earth’s environment due to being far too hot, having free oxygen and water vapour or water, break down due to ultraviolet radiation in sunlight and it would also lack essential nutrients and “starve”. But all of this is good, because if viable silicon-based life can exist and be used to manufacture drugs or other substances, it could do exactly the same thing as mirror life but would pose much less risk to the life already here. In fact, it could even be mirror life and still be harmless.

Right now, I only suspect silicon-based life of this kind is practicable. There are similar silicon compounds to fixed oils, alcohols and even possibly DNA. An experiment was once performed with somewhat more complex compounds than in the Miller-Urey experiment, and it led to the formation of microscopic spheres able to separate their contents from the outside world, and also to bud, divide and form strings. Without any means of storing a genome, to me it seems entirely feasible that the more oil-like silicones could do the same, although in this experiment polypeptides were involved rather than lipids. All sorts of structures in living cells are made from lipid membranes, such as the cell membrane itself, the nuclear membrane, lysosomes, mitochondria, chloroplasts, the Golgi apparatus and endoplasmic reticulum, so in other words, most of the structure of the cell. All that’s missing is something to make it go.

I personally suspect that amphiboles could replace nucleic acids such as DNA. The best-known amphibole is asbestos, consisting of pairs of silicate fibres bonded with each other along their lengths. This structure is quite similar to DNA of course, but is more homogenous. This is in the boring and ordinary area of silicate chemistry and mineralogy, so the basic unit is a tetraheral molecule with four oxygen atoms at the vertices and a silicon one at the centre. Chain silicates, of which amphiboles are more complex examples, are repeated silica units sharing oxygens along one dimension of their vertices. Or rather, those are simple chain silicates, also known as pyroxenes. Spodumene, the main lithium mineral and therefore economically, politically and technologically a very important compound, is a simple chain silicate. The alignment of each unit varies cyclically along the chain. In other words, they’re kind of helical, like DNA. The presence of lithium and aluminium in spodumene also shows that other elements can participate in these structures. Because of their fibrous structures, pyroxenes and amphiboles cleave easily parallel to the orientation of their chains. However, the links between the chains of amphiboles are simply shared oxygens at the corners of adjacent tetrahedra between the chains, meaning that they themselves are not helical. Spodumene’s lithium and aluminium ions are in the spaces between the oxygens of the tetrahedra.

This, then, is my first proposal for a substitute for DNA, intended to bear information for genomes: an amphibole with interstitial ions of at least two different metallic elements. If only two are used, the storage becomes binary rather than the more sophisticated four-base arrangement in DNA, meaning that the number of units needed is higher per bit but the actual scale of the chains is considerably smaller than those of DNA despite silicon atoms being larger than carbons, so there’s a compensation here. I am assuming, and here I haven’t put any work in I’m afraid, that this DNA substitute can come unravelled and be transcribed like real DNA. There would also then need to be some analogue to transfer and messenger RNA and in particular ribosomes for the production of protein analogues, and this in fact may be the missing link.

There are so-called “unnatural” amino acids which contain silicon. However, well, I should probably talk about protein-forming amino acids before I go further. An amino acid is simply an organic, i.e. carbon-based, acid with the usual carboxyl (COOH) group at one end and an amine (NH₂) at the other and at least one carbon between them. The simplest is the aforementioned glycine, which is non-chiral and just has a hydrogen on each side occupying the otherwise free bonds of the central carbon atom. Other protein-forming amino acids have different side groups, hanging off one side replacing the hydrogen, of which the most important are the few sulphur-containing amino acids which can link sideways to other amino acid molecules and form proteins into more complex shapes than just plain chains. Amino acids generally join when a water molecule forms from the OH of the carboxyl and an H of the amine groups. Now there are silicon-containing amino acids, but the silicon in question is in a side group and not part of the chain. A fully silicon-based form of glycine can exist but only as a gas, and quickly breaks down in a biological-type environment containing water, and it can also be seen that the formation of a water molecule between the two ends of amino acid molecules would immediately destroy any possible protein analogue. This leaves aside the issue that organic acids are based on carboxyl groups, not an analogous silicon-based group which doesn’t actually exist. It might, however, be possible to synthesise chains of amino acid-like units in a “just in time” sort of way where they bond immediately after being formed, even with carboxyl-like groups, and this is in fact how some cyclic silicon compounds are manufactured. These are not, however, large molecules although they are worth looking at more closely later on.

So that doesn’t at first sight look very promising. However, maybe this is looking in the wrong place. Siloxanes tend to be thought of as more like rubbers or oils than proteins or peptides but in fact they may be approximate substitutes for proteins as, structurally speaking. They’re basically silicones, as I understand the word. They resemble proteins in the sense that they are chains of monomers with oxygens bridging the gaps between the units, whereas proteins use nitrogens for the same purpose. Siloxanes also have side chains or groups which modify their properties. With oxygen, and it should be remembered that once silicon is bound with oxygen it’ll be very difficult to separate it again, silicon compounds are then able to form more versatile compounds, with more complex rings and chains which are stronger than just silicon on its own can form, precisely because of the strength of such bonds.

Actual rubber, latex, gutta percha and in fact many other phytochemicals, is made of isoprene units. These are worth looking at because they are extremely versatile and compose all sorts of familiar things such as many of the components of essential oils. Although they’re nowhere near as versatile as amino acids, it’s still possible to make quite interesting molecules out of them. Siloxanes are similar in this respect. The advantage of silicone rubber over isoprene rubber is that it is solid over a much wider range of temperatures without hardening or becoming much softer, and because that range is larger the middle of that range is also larger and it tends to be very stable in its physical properties over a wide range of temperatures. This means it’s less likely to perish. Unlike carbon-based organic compounds used for similar purposes, silicone rubber used in electronic circuits doesn’t become conducting when it breaks down, which is also useful as electrical properties need to remain quite stable. They’re very water repellant because they have methyl groups on the side chains and therefore interact with their surroundings like hydrocarbon oils. This does of course mean they contain carbon, but they vary a lot according to the size of the molecule from apparently water-like liquids to thicker oils and greases, and are used in shoe polish, to seal masonry against water penetration and to prevent foaming in sewage. They’re also non-toxic, which is important bearing in mind that the point of what I’m pursuing here is a less hazardous alternative to mirror life. Silicone rubbers are the next stage up with molecule size, and beyond that are the silicone resins, which resemble bakelite and used to make circuit boards and non-stick coatings.

All of these, though, need to be synthesised initially using energy levels higher than those found in biochemical reactions. They can’t be made using a silicon-based cell-like entity and if they were going to be used at all, they’d need to be supplied as nutrients. Nonetheless, taking all these things together it does seem plausible to me that some kind of silicon-based artificial life could exist using this route, particularly bearing in mind that chemistry has been developed by carbon-based life forms in a water-rich and highly oxygenated environment, and in fact the biasses are apparent, for instance in definitions of acids which rely on solutions of water rather than some other liquid. I think naively that there’s probably a lot of silicon chemistry we don’t know about. All of this, then, supports my contention that silicon-based life cannot arise on its own but could exist in highly contrived environments supported by technology and carefully controlled, which is in fact exactly what we need.

3. Hybrid Solutions

But all this is not the only way silicon can be extensively involved in biology. Another way in particular occurs to me, and there’s also a third and possibly even a fourth. Silicon is in fact used in many organisms. For instance, there are sponges whose skeletons are made of silica and protozoa who live in silica shells, and of course diatoms. In all such cases, silica is involved and is composed from the rather elusive silicic acid. Silicic acid’s very existence has been debated in the past, and has unexpected parallels with carbonic acid. Carbonic acid is, in biochemical terms, simply carbon dioxide dissolved in water, but in chemical terms there’s a real substance which can exist in the absence of water and is stable at room temperature, and is a gas. Silicic acid is similarly nebulous but for different reasons. Acids are often thought of as the hydrides of the corresponding “-ate” or “ide”, so for instance sodium chloride corresponds to hydrochloric acid and calcium sulphate to sulphuric acid. By this token, bicarbonates, i.e. hydrogen carbonates such as sodium bicarbonate, ought to have a corresponding carbonic acid and silicates a silicic acid, and there’s certainly something going on but it’s not the same thing and their existence in both cases is marginal. Carbonic acid seems to amount to carbon dioxide dissolved in water, and is essentially fizzy water in higher concentrations, but also exists as a literal subliming compound, not an acid because it isn’t in the presence of water, where it will tend to dissociate. The bicarbonate ion is central to pH balance in the body, but doesn’t form part of macromolecules. Silicic acid “suffers” from the “problem” of crystallising into silica at high concentrations, but this means that it can be used to build structures from silica. This is far simpler than all that complex chemistry mentioned above, but also less flexible. Literally so in fact as it amounts to the formation of glass, or perhaps opal, which is hydrated silica.

It’s easy to imagine a vertebrate-like animal who has replaced some of their body with silica. Bones and teeth are very obvious examples, and others exist. When real ocular lenses develop, they persist throughout the lifetime of the animal, although they can become cloudy. These could be made of glass. Our aquatic ancestors had tooth-like scales on their skin which developed in a different process than the scales of mammals, but in principle these could be silica too. Other silicon compounds also interact with living systems. For instance, there are cyclical silicones which have endocrine action or are endocrine disruptors. This is obviously a bad thing, particularly when you realise they’re used in cosmetics and toiletries, but it does indicate that there are silicones which could in theory completely replace certain hormones in the body, although the body couldn’t make them itself. That puts the animal in a similar position to any animal having to obtain its vitamin D from food rather than producing it themselves, so if it could actually exist in the environment it could have that function. There are also other functions in the body which could be performed by silicones, such as the cushioning, though not the calorific, function of adipose tissue, the barrier function of skin and the lubricating nature of sebum, mucus and synovial fluid within joints, but all of this would have to be available from outside, so once again the substances would in some form have to be available from the environment. This second version of silicon-based life would have a “core”, as it were, of carbon-based compounds and processes such as DNA, RNA and proteins, which are able either to assimilate or synthesise silicon compounds, but the fact remains that the energies required would have to be very high unless practically everything already existed. If we’re talking synthetic life, this makes the organisms in question assemblers from materials which have already been produced, but this is still useful. However, unlike the previous example, these organisms could still constitute a hazard which could spread to some extent like mirror life might.

There are two further possibilities that I can think of. One is the very common, almost clicheed, idea that computers are silicon-based life. Maybe they are, although it might be more accurate to think of them as complex non-living structures. On the other hand, maybe they could be designed to be more self-sustaining, reproducing for example. This might not be desirable of course. The other is that maybe there could be mechanical life made of silicon compounds. Then again, it could be made of diamond, so the fact that this is silicon-based might depend on the physical and chemical properties of the element but not in such an involved way.

4. Ethics, Politics and Sustainability

All that said, would any of these things be desirable, ethical or appropriate? Do they have other environmental consequences? This, I think, is where it all falls down. For a vegan in particular, the issue of actually creating artificial life, even if it doesn’t involve vivisection, which it very well might, is questionable because beyond a point one is simply creating slaves, and not just slaves but organisms whose only reason for existence in terms of their very nature is slavery. This argument is similar to the GMO one, which is often expressed in terms of undesirable health or environmental consequences, but there’s a more fundamental issue here, which is that we don’t own the organisms we modify. The assumption is that humans have dominion over other life, as if it was created solely for our benefit. This argument also applies to some extent to conventional breeding, and of course being vegan I don’t think it can usually be justified although it’s possible that, for example, a dog whose muzzle is so compressed that they can’t breathe should only be bred with others with longer muzzles and so forth, so maybe.

Turning to the purest form of silicon-based life, whereas it is true that it wouldn’t survive outside its carefully designed and sealed environment, its remains could still be harmful. For instance, the amphiboles making up its genetic code would effectively be asbestos, so there could be similar health problems as are brought by nanotechnology. These are like microplastics, but smaller. Nanoparticles can enter the bloodstream and carry biological macromolecules with them as they go. They can unsurprisingly cause respiratory disease. The problems are similar to those of microplastics but less predictable and possibly even more persistent. This applies less to the hybrids than the purist version, but some of those may have the additional problem of being fruitful and multiplying outside their intended environment, though not so harmfully as mirror life. The others could still consitute some kind of dead end and would strew the land and sea with xenochemicals whose risk to the environment is often unknown but does include endocrine disruption.

I’m going to cover the next bit somewhat more broadly and talk about silicones as general use products rather than these specific cases, which are of course speculative and may never happen, but the same criteria often apply to them, though not really to the simple production of silica by existing biological processes. Silicone has often been pushed as an alternative to plastic, which sounds strange to me because I see it as a variety of plastic, but it is true that it isn’t primarily derived from hydrocarbons, i.e. coal, oil or natural gas. That said, the side chains of siloxanes are so derived, although they don’t have to be, in the same way as biodiesel is not a fossil fuel, although biodiesel brings its own problems. What is probably not eliminable is that the sand needs to be heated to 1800°C in the extraction process, and such furnaces are “always on” because they take too much energy to reheat and the only time they’re allowed to cool is when they’re decommissioned. They may also use fossil fuels for heating.

In general, and I’ve already mentioned exceptions, pure silicone doesn’t leach toxins into the environment, whereas polystyrene and phthalates do. High-density polythene is also quite innocent in this regard, by the way. However, silicone is often not pure and unless it’s medical or food grade will probably contain carbon-based plastics. However, at high temperatures such as in particularly hot ovens it can react and silica is known to cause cancer. This is a bit misleading and it depends on the size and shape of the particles, as in fact silica is present in most human diets due to the likes of diatoms in sea food and physiologically occurring silica in cereal crops. That obviously doesn’t make asbestos okay! It’s technically recyclable but in practice because most silicone products are designed for long term use this recycling is not economic and tends not to be available to the public, but there are schemes where it can be pooled and sent off by communities.

Speaking of silica, this has its own environmental footprint, and to cover this it’s worth talking about the silica cycle. Some silica is biogenic, i.e. made by organisms such as diatoms in particular, and is also able to sequester carbon as the carbonate and silica cycles are linked. Carbonic acid formed in rain dissolves small amounts of silica from rocks, washing silicic acid into the sea where it’s concentrated by organisms who use it to compose parts of their bodies such as glass sponges and diatoms. Their silica sinks into sediment and is dissolved back into silicic acid. On the land, similar processes take place but much more slowly and on a smaller scale. This means that wholesale removal of silica sand from the sea or land is not a good idea if it occurs at a greater rate than replacement, which is slow. This also disrupts the food chain as diatoms and other silica-using single-celled organisms can’t produce as much due to less silicic acid in the water. Sand removal can also lead to flooding, and mining basically always damages the environment – it’s unfeasible not to.

5. Conclusion

In the end, the risks of mirror life are much greater than those of artificial silicon-based life if the latter is possible, but the second is definitely not without its dangers. It amounts to nanotechnology, and there’s a second issue regarding the politics and ethics of creating life which is necessarily enslaved to human, or possibly AI, whims, which to my mind overrides the practicality. Whether or not this alternative is possible, it may not be appropriate as we already know that various high-tech inventions and materials are paralleled in the living world and therefore can be produced in an entirely environmentally friendly and sustainable way. From another angle, if we are the only carbon-based life forms who have ever existed, there will be no silicon-based ecosystems anywhere in the Universe because the conditions allowing them to arise are so highly contrived. However, other possibilities exist, including the existence of alien mirror life, and it would be catastrophic for us to come into contact with it, for both it and ourselves. In the meantime, there are better solutions to our needs.

As I said, it’s been suggested that I turn this into an academic paper, so I apologise for all the waffle. I really don’t think it should become one and as I say, it isn’t my field, though if my life had gone differently it probably would’ve been. The best outcome for this is that it gets absolutely trashed by someone who knows more about all this than I do, so go on, do your worst. I’m waiting.

Ethics 201 – Finding A Moral Compass

I recently had a rather heated discussion with someone over ethical scepticism. Putting this in context, I recently wrote a blog post about the Zizians which I think illustrates a rather analogous approach. When one tries to learn something off the internet, and I’m bound to be as guilty as anyone else is here, just not in this area, it can involve “tunnelling into” a subject until one reaches what one thinks one needs to know and then just stopping without knowledge of the areas around it. Often this is fine but it means, for example, that my knowledge of plumbing tends to involve olives, PTFE tape, doing stuff to ballcocks and nothing else, and in the fine tradition of everything looking like a nail when all you have is a hammer, I end up trying to apply this to everything, although I did once try to repair a burst pipe using melted HDPE so not quite everything (it didn’t work).

The conversation involved David Hume and veganism. Now David Hume is a much-respected and studied Scottish philosopher and happens to have been my specialist author in the final year of my first degree, so I know more than nothing about him. That said, I’m really not an expert. I probably know him about as well as George Orwell (I’m not going to say it). The point made about veganism was that the moral injunction not to be complicit in or directly cause suffering or death in members of other species doesn’t follow from the fact that they can suffer. This is a special case of Hume’s more general point that you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is”. I do have an answer to this issue, but my disagreement with this person in particular was that picking veganism as an example was completely arbitrary because more broadly this could simply amount to ethical scepticism, that is, the belief that right and wrong are meaningless, and that acting on this idea is sociopathy, or psychopathy if it comes “naturally”. The person with whom I was discussing this didn’t take kindly to being described as sociopathic, but although it might be perceived pejoratively, in one sense it’s an entirely neutral term – simply descriptive. There’s therefore an irony in the person in question perceiving me as expressing a moral judgement when I was in fact simply applying a label to their behaviour. If they perceive that as negative, it calls their own claim of not being able to derive an “ought” from an “is” into question, because of their reaction. If this is the kind of reaction most people would show, it also suggests a mechanism for finding a basis for ethics.

The rest of this post is almost going to reproduce what American universities might call “Ethics 201”, hence the title: the advanced undergraduate course in ethics found in many analytical philosophy courses. As such, I feel I’m cheating a bit because I’ve taken it directly from my own degree syllabus, but I’m doing that because I’m getting a wee bit tired of people “mining” philosophy for answers rather than considering things more broadly. There’s also quite a lot missing, such as the question of regret versus remorse, the extent of responsibility and the conflict between tolerance and commitment, but for now I’ll leave those aside. I’ll also inject my own views.

Ethics 201 covers a history of ethics in Western academic analytical philosophy, dating from the nineteenth century CE up until the publication of Alasdair Macintyre’s ‘After Virtue’ in 1981. It starts with utilitarianism, which sounds remarkably like common sense: actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This is, incidentally, often used as the basis of veganism. There’s also negative utilitarianism: that suffering should be minimised, and happiness is ignored. There are a lot of problems with this belief which have been well-explored. One is Robert Nozick’s “utility monster”: a single individual able to feel more pleasure than everyone else put together. This would mean that nobody else matters, and that if the only way the individual could be made really happy is to torture the rest, according to utilitarianism that’s exactly what should be done. This also raises the question of how different people’s pleasure can be compared. You can’t necessarily add it all up because nobody knows what it’s like to be anyone else. It also fails to account for painless death in isolation – a person who dies alone and forgotten painlessly in her sleep is, according to utilitarianism, irrelevant. And this really happens, and when it does people consider it highly tragic. Well, not according to utilitarianism. It also fails to account for justice. An unfair situation which makes everyone happier, or even most people happier, is absolutely fine for a utilitarian, so for example if someone is falsely accused of serial murder and imprisoned or executed due to a miscarriage of justice and that then deters the real murderer, that’s also okay, and obviously it’s not. I’ve attempted to repair utilitarianism and the best I can manage is modal negative utilitarianism: the largest number of people suffering the least should be the aim. Imagine a bar graph showing number of people suffering on a scale of zero to twelve of severity. The lowest column should include the most people compared to the other. However, it’s basically irredeemable so far as I can tell, although many people, particularly other vegans, would disagree.

Although it has these and other drawbacks, most early twentieth century philosophers focus on the naturalistic fallacy. The first is the attempt to define the utility principle as good because it’s desired. In other words it’s “natural” to desire pleasure, but it doesn’t follow that that should happen. This is the is-ought problem Hume highlighted quite some time before. Another fallacy is that everyone desiring their own happiness means that everyone desires happiness for everyone else. These are the two famous and great flaws which may be fatal for utilitarianism. Because of this, G E Moore came up with a new ethical theory, referred to as intuitionism, which claims that goodness is a simple, non-natural property which we can all intuitively understand. One problem with this is that we disagree, but when that happens it may be because our judgements are built up from a number of simple perceptions of right and wrong. I always think of the statement made by an Iranian man in about 1980 CE: “The Ayatollah is a good man: he has banned women from appearing on TV”. To that man, the idea was axiomatic. P, therefore he is good. Most people in the West would say: P, therefore he is bad. Each person can then claim that they simply intuitively know that they’re right and all there is then is disagreement with no ability to argue people around. This particular issue is focussed on later, but intuitionism, although it’s my favourite, is not widely accepted any more.

Intuitionism was followed by the rise of logical positivism, which is the belief that statements mean something if they’re axiomatic, logically necessary or can be verified by observation. Because ethical statements don’t fall into any of these categories, emotivism arose, which is the belief that ethical statements are articulations of approval or disapproval provoked by feelings alone. Moreover, feelings themselves are defined by logical behaviourism, the belief that internal mental states are merely reports of physical sensations which get labelled by words like “happy”, “angry”, “sad” and so on. They don’t mean anything beyond the likes of a fast, strong heartbeat, dry throat and sweating and the rest. I imagine most people today would look at this idea of emotions and emotivism and conclude that the person who thought of it needs therapy, but would probably never volunteer for it. This brings up the issue of ethical scepticism again, which is the belief that there simply is no right and wrong. One of the surprising things about Bertrand Russell, who was very much involved in social reform and peace campaigning, is that he was actually close to being an ethical sceptic and never made any link between his philosophy and political activism, although some work has been done on this after his death which suggests otherwise. His view seems to be basically emotivism, which isn’t quite ethical scepticism but it’s odd that there’s such a disconnection between his activism and his actual ethics.

Emotivism is one of the two major non-cognitivist positions in twentieth century ethics, but there are actually two varieties of it. A J Ayer’s adherence to logical positivism led to him being rather dismissive of ethics and he didn’t seem to focus very much on the details. Later on, C L Stevenson refined it somewhat and placed it more at the centre of his attention, seeing ethical language as similar to imperatives, i.e. commands and requests, despite their apparently declarative form. I think it’s probably relevant that I’m not aware of any language at all which uses imperatives to express moral statements, because if they were really that similar one might expect this to happen, and it doesn’t. On the other hand, we do say “should” and we also say “you shall do that” as a way of commanding someone, so maybe. The difference between A J Ayer’s emotivism and C L Stevenson’s is that the latter claims ethical statements have a persuasive element, which is more sophisticated and can stand on its own easily rather than simply being motivated by logical positivism, which nowadays is basically dead anyway. There are still emotivists today.

I just want to insert a note here about what metaethics is: it’s the basis of ethics, that is, what makes anything right or wrong, good or bad, if anything does.

As I said, emotivism is an example of non-cognitivism. Non-cognitivism is a variety of metaethical theory which takes conventional meaning out of ethical language. For non-cognitivism, looking up a word like “good” or “bad” in the dictionary shouldn’t lead to a definition but should be more like “a word indicating that the speaker approves of something”. This led to the development of a second metaethical theory called prescriptivism, whose main proponent was R M Hare. This has been summed up as the view that “X is good” means “I approve of X: do so as well”. The standard analysis here is that ethical statements are those which are universalisable and entail imperatives, and at this point it probably becomes obvious to a lot of people that this is basically Kantian ethics, which dates from 1785. This basically amounts to “what if everyone did the same?”, and it doesn’t work because “the same” is not defined by the theory. As I said, it’s non-cognitivist, meaning that it actually seeks not to define the content of moral language. Therefore, imagine the following: someone steals a loaf of bread from a bakery to feed their starving children because they have no money. Two ways of putting this are:

1. A person does what they have to do feed their dependents.
2. A person deprives another of a source of livelihood generated by that person’s own efforts.

The first is universalisable, the other not, but they’re two descriptions of the same situation and prescriptivism doesn’t give any means of deciding which is which. I think this makes prescriptivism useless.

Then came the Scottish-American philosopher Alasdair Macintyre with his ‘After Virtue’. This consists partly of a survey of the history of ethics, and this is where I get back to the way intuitionists would argue. There’s little basis of common ground there because one can simply assert that something is good based on one’s intuition and someone else can assert the opposite, and then you just get nowhere. After some time of this sort of thing going on, you end up with arguments and opinions that look like they have no conventionally meaningful content, whose result is that non-cognitivism seems to be true. Much of the discussion about metaethics after that was provoked by that initial notion, although Stevenson did also say that he was trying to look out how everyday value judgements were made, such as comments about news stories, and not how philosophers talk about it in seminar rooms or whatever. A J Ayer’s influence is probably not to do with that either.

Macintyre looked to Aristotle here. He saw ancient discussions of ethics as more firmly grounded than they became from the eighteenth century, and thought that virtues and vices made more sense as a way of looking at right and wrong. This was said to be due to rejection of the idea of purpose. In the ancient world and mediaeval Europe, people firmly believed human life had a purpose and an ideal course, and harnessing that idea of an ideal provides a link with ethics. There is a sense in which a sharp knife is better than a blunt one, although obviously one used in a murder would be better if it were blunt, but that’s in a broader context. If we agree on a purpose for humanity, it seems to make sense to suppose that what happens between humans or between us and other things and entities such as the environment, could follow in a similar way to a good knife being suitable for chopping up food. In other words, Macintyre believes the Enlightenment was a mistake because it attributed moral agency to individuals, reducing morality in the end, after a lot of unravelling, to nothing more than individual opinion. Kalani Kaleiʻaimoku o Kaiwikapu o Laʻamea i Kauikawekiu Ahilapalapa Kealiʻi Kauinamoku o Kahekili Kalaninui i Mamao ʻIolani i Ka Liholiho, the second king of Hawaiʻi, abolished the idea of taboos as an influence on Hawaiian life, and met with no opposition. Macintyre, using that example, said that Friedrich Nietzsche had done something similar for Europe by being against Enlightenment morality. He didn’t agree with where Nietzsche took it after that though. He took from Aristotle the idea that how people should be is not the same as how they are, that moral rules are based on virtues, which stem from an understanding of human purpose and that values had to be derived not from individual opinions but in a more broadly social form.

All of this relates to Elizabeth Anscombe’s view of ethical discussions. She sees them as being couched in similar terms to law and crime but without a lawgiver. If there is no God, according to her, this has to be inappropriate, leaving the problem of how you can talk about it at all. I don’t know whether this meant ethical scepticism or something else.

This, then, is part of the wider context of this individual statement about Hume and veganism, and it’s another example of a “tunnel”. Someone took a random idea and applied it to veganism, when actually it could both be applied to ethical questions more widely and was part of a philosophical discussion which has gone on for something like two centuries since then. There’s an obvious parallel with the Zizian narrowness, and this is likely to be an increasing problem today because of the online tendency to present things out of context. There need to be experts.

Now you might have found that this post has been very boring, and in a way that’s the point. To you, this might seem a very abstruse and tedious passage, but this is one of my areas of expertise very likely to be boring and inaccessible to outsiders. I would find plumbing very boring and I’d be bad at it, which is why plumbers are useful and I trust them. It’s about trust. Either you get the long, boring monologue and someone going on and on at you, or you trust experts to some extent, and yes, sometimes they will get things wrong and they will have biasses, but to some extent the choice is between going and living in a cave in a forest and surviving by foraging, or living in a functioning society and trusting experts with a certain healthy degree of suspicion. But if you do get suspicious, you then need to do the work to find out what the bigger picture is, and that may not be easy, but this is what must be done to express an opinion worth taking seriously if you disagree with the evidence-supported views expressed by experts.

Helena Handcart

People are supposed to get more right wing as they age. I’m not sure when this is supposed to set in, or come to think of it whether it’s set in for me. Then again, if it isn’t as common as is often thought and it hasn’t done so for me, maybe that’s not surprising. In this post, I plan to investigate whether this is true, and if so, why.

There is a famous quote, often attributed to Churchill but apparently not from him: ‘If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart.  If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.’ This isn’t from him and isn’t something he’s likely to have said because it doesn’t reflect his own political career. Nonetheless, it does reflect how many people seem to perceive things. I had a friend at school who certainly seemed quite left wing at that point, but after his A-levels and leaving school he became an estate agent (a trainee one presumably) and by a mere nine months after that he had become somewhat right wing. Not extremely so, but his perception of the world changed because he concluded that there were very good reasons for things being done the way they were. I think this is probably connected to two things: it was the mid-’80s and we were in the depths of Thatcherism and in particular people buying their council houses, and home ownership is probably quite central to a certain strand of political conservatism. We stayed friends but had a few awkward conversations. I lost contact with him a couple of years later but he stayed a very significant person at arm’s length and I bear him no ill will.

I’m going to have to be careful here because obviously I do have certain opinions but I’m not going to turn this post into a slanging match. All I’m interested in is, is it true, and if so what causes it? I’ll do what I can to avoid making judgements of right and wrong on this. I actually suspect that if there are personality types which tend to be more left or right wing, the world probably needs them both, although maybe not in the polarised and simplistic way which has recently come into play. It isn’t so much that the world needs left and right wing people so much as it needs the kind of personalities which in current circumstances lead people in those directions. That’s all a bit arcane of course.

It might also be worthwhile to say what I mean by left and right, because as I’ve said already opinions tend to become associated with the ends of the spectrum when those places might be arbitrary for them or even not be their natural homes. However, I’m not going to do that. Sorry.

One observation made recently is that people who are involved in, well, shall we say fairly vigorous political activity seem to have the same things going on in their brains. In the US, the 6th January people and the BLM people had the same stuff happening in their heads. In this way, there’s a division between people who are politically active and engaged and those who aren’t, and I do also feel that when I’ve got involved in politics, there’s actually something I have in common with others who have, even if they’re vehemently opposed to everything I stand for. There’s something in the sheer willingness to get involved that appeals to me in people.

OK, so theory number one: young people have less investment in society, both financially and in terms of commitments. As they progress in their careers, if they do, they develop more such investment as a whole. They have mortgages, savings, pension schemes and both housing and other property, and they have children. Not everyone has all or any of this, but most people have at least some of it. They may also end up in positions of authority, and it’s been said that distrust of authority is something most people “grow out of”. This increasing investment in the mainstream leads people to become more cautious, fiscally shrewd and concerned to take care of what they’ve built up for themselves. Of course, there are also a lot of people who haven’t managed to do this. It would be interesting if this influenced their politics.

Before I go on, I’m going to talk about the research which I’ve used to write this post. Primary among my sources is the very well-known American think tank the Pew Research Center, based in Washington DC. This is a non-partisan organisation, a charitable trust, whose rating is generally centrist by Allsides.com. This rating means that it’s generally perceived as showing no bias or has an equal left and right bias which averages out as none. This is based on the perceptions of the people contributing to the Allsides rating, but there’s a limit to how far investigation of neutrality can be taken. It’s also probably true that neutrality is illusory. I don’t want to spend too long on this as it’s not the main point of what I’m writing here, although it’s definitely worthwhile looking into this kind of thing. The trouble is that because it’s American, it analyses the political spectrum in terms of Democrats and Republicans, which is quite unlike how things work in most places outside the States.

So: the Pew Research Center has this piece of research, showing that in the sample tested, sixty-six percent of voters aged eighteen to twenty-four preferred the Democratic Party and thirty-four percent were Republican Party voters. The gap for the next age group, up to twenty-nine, was slightly smaller and sixty-four percent. In fact, here’s the graphic:

This suffers from the usual confusing use of colours found in the US, which are the opposite way round from the rest of the world. This does generally show a drift towards the right with age, but there’s an interesting bump for people in their seventies. The sample size for the younger voters is flagged as quite small. This survey was also undertaken during the Biden administration.

So the bump then, which I think may be significant, is among people born between 1944 CE and 1953. These are mainly baby boomers. They would’ve been roughly adolescents during Vietnam and in their twenties during Watergate, which I suspect made them less keen on military intervention overseas and less trusting of Republican administrations, and that remained with them lifelong. That generation is also the one which immediately followed the War and was more involved in anti-establishment political activism such as the civil rights movement. This brings me to theory number two: people’s political bias tends to be formed by experiences during a formative period in their lives and stays with them throughout their lives, and the bias older people seem to have towards the right is because they always had that, whereas young people who are left-wing now would also be left-wing when they get older. This, like the other, feels like quite a sloppy theory and the really big question is how statistics can be used to get the really useful data out of such numbers without misleading people. All that said, we do generally seem to perceive that there is another kind of bump, a “reminiscence bump” as it’s known, between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five when we tend to remember more about those years than the others in our lives. However, this bump might also be an illusion created by how people’s lives go, in that the more interesting stuff tends to happen to us during our late teens and early twenties, such as leaving home, finding our first regular job, getting married, getting a mortgage, learning to drive, having children and so on. Of course, that list is biassed towards the people, who have been in the majority at least until recent decades, who have done all that stuff. If those events are influential on our political opinions, which seems quite likely, the question of whether the memories are just more detailed or whether the events are more memorable might not be important to the influence.

Hence it could be important to disentangle the age and generation here. People’s opinions might be more stable than they seem. There’s another way also in which this might be true but which could still create an apparent change, leading me to theory number three: people’s opinions stay the same but society changes. For instance, groups which were previously seen by people as being fair game for criticism may be more accepted or complied with as time goes by. I had a golly as a small child and saw no problem with it (I mean, I was four), but nowadays that would seem unacceptable. Some people might want to hold on to that older attitude, or just have a tendency to do so, and extending this across a wide range of issues this could make them look more left- or right-wing as they age even if their opinions don’t change. This, however, is complicated by the question of what precise attitudes we’re considering as marking someone out as left- or right-wing. Although the whole issue of what the Left considers under the heading of marginalisation is a significant part of that, there are other aspects such as whether the purpose of the criminal justice system is rehabilitation or punishment, the level and destination of income tax, the role of the public and private sectors, social enterprises and charities and the question of foreign policy. It doesn’t follow that all of these will align in someone’s mind at all, although many people would link them together. So far as this is concerned, different generations might tend to be left- or right-wing in different ways.

Karl Popper, the philosopher of science, wrote a book in 1945 called ‘The Open Society And Its Enemies’. The ideas promoted in it led to the foundation of an organisation called Open Society Foundations, funded substantially by George Soros, who has donated most of his wealth to it. This source of funding is likely to lead to accusations from the Right of bias here. Its aim is said to be to promote fair media, education, justice and public health. One of its major aims in the 1980s was to oppose Soviet-style government and it’s been generally seen as neoliberal in its aims, but it’s also quite mixed because it’s widely perceived as being left wing. This means that although they have also done research on this, many people are unlikely to trust them. Now I could try to analyse this more deeply, but it’d be a bit of a digression, so I’m just going to leave it alone for now. It’s also likely that many people wouldn’t trust the source here, whether or not they’re actually reliable.

So far, I’ve presented three “theories”, and of course there’s a conversation to be had here about what I mean by “theory” here, but for simplicity’s sake they are:

• People become financially and socially invested in mainstream society as adult life progresses, leading to more support for law and order and policies which are not perceived as disturbing that investment.
• People’s political views reflect their experiences during significant periods in their lives and they tend to stay the same.
• Politics reflect the values predominant at the times and society changes while the people stay close to how they used to be, so they just look more right- or left-wing according to how the Overton Window has moved.

There are a few things to be said about these. With the last, the question arises of whether there is an absolute scale of left- and right-wing opinion or whether it exists relative to the general approach taken in society. With the second, the question of what the reminiscence bump is arises, because if it’s just a bunching together of significant experiences, other significant experiences could also happen later in life which change someone’s political views. They might be mugged, they might have their house flooded, be made redundant or they might move to a neighbourhood with people whose ethnicity is different from theirs and experience that either negatively or positively regardless of what they formerly believed. This set of possibilities reflects one way of looking at things which is more society-based, but there’s also a more psychological way of looking at things, and I also have a fourth “theory” which I’ll share later.

There is a famous personality theory, the dominant one in mainstream academic psychology, called OCEAN, which I’ve mentioned before on here. I like it mainly because it’s easy to remember. It stands for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism, and the idea is that we all have traits along these spectra. It’s one of a number of different factor-based models of personality. It’s also been criticised, in particular the “openness” dimension, as being vague and almost meaningless, and that’s the trait which is considered particularly significant in influencing political beliefs, so – well, what is it? Well, it’s a bit complicated because it has in itself six aspects, but it includes imaginativeness, emotional self-awareness, aesthetic sensitivity, adventurousness (also willingness to expose oneself to new experiences), curiosity and willingness to challenge authority. Openness has been shown to decrease with age, which could result in attachment to more traditional views – “the good old days”. Likewise, conscientiousness rises. This, actually, reminds me of an incident where a friend and myself, both left wing, were looking at my house mate’s bedroom, also left wing, and noted that we were all quite untidy (and it wasn’t a gender thing as my house mate wasn’t a man), wondering if there was a correlation there. I later made that observation to a worker at a radical bookshop coöp and he replied “did Kropotkin have an untidy bedroom?”. We may never know! But I can believe that to some extent “why should I tidy my room when the world’s in such a mess?” expresses that sentiment. Of course it isn’t clear what someone means when they say that about the world. What constitutes a mess for them might not be the same as what it means for me. They might be talking about “white trash” for example, or “there goes the neighbourhood”, or they might literally mean litter. In a general sense, higher conscientiousness might involve more respect for rules and order. You might want all the cutlery to be in the right drawer and also all the people to be in the right social class, for example, or you might want physical punishment in schools and support for the right of parents to smack their children. There’s also an authoritarian personality type, apparently encouraged by authoritarian parents, but authoritarianism may not be a distinctively right wing thing, depending on whether the likes of Juche, Stalinism and Maoism count as left wing, which again is a long conversation. Such people, though, have been shown to be keener on authoritarianism, and that style of parenting was more common in the past so this could be a generational thing once again.

There is also the Silent Generation, born from 1928 to 1945 and therefore on their way out on the whole. These people were sometimes born in the Great Depression, could just about have fought in the War or had the forboding that they would somehow be involved in it, and then entered, in British terms, the “land fit for heroes”, with the founding of the NHS, for which they may have worked, in their early adulthood or earlier. They’re just before the Boomers. This generation has tended to be left wing by the standards of their time, bearing in mind that the TUC opposed immigration at that point, arguing that Blacks didn’t integrate with White workers, so what counts as left wing may change over time. However, even in more general terms the Silent Generation often drifts even further, even into communism. My own father was a life-long Tory but once said to me in his late eighties or early nineties that he didn’t think I appreciated how disabled he was, which is language I would associate more with the Left and was probably fair comment, though from an unexpected quarter. This, I think, was from his personal experience of disability and I don’t know how far it extended given his attitude to other people with physical disabilities.

Another aspect of this is the recent polarisation and entrenchment of opinion. I certainly feel it in myself, although I have to say it doesn’t feel new. Much of the history of my life has been of deferred hope. However, nowadays I find myself tempted to be less patient with people whose opinions differ, and this is probably due to the social bubble I, and many other people, find myself in. For this reason and others it’s important for us all to remember to keep in touch with people of disparate views, difficult though it may be for the people on either side to tolerate. There are some deeper issues with this. For some people, the conversation is abstract because they feel very secure in their positions, but for others it can be life and death. It can’t just be a cold, intellectual conversation for everyone, and that makes it all the more challenging and important for us to listen and respect each other. This may also make changes in political opinions with age alone, or at least the likely consequences of aging in practical and personal terms, less likely. This could mean that we are ceasing to be aligned with our best interests or those of others.

When young, one is likely to look at older people whose political opinions are not close to one’s own and decide they’re wrong, possibly due to cognitive decline, and when old, to decide that lack of experience explains that difference. This is the usual trade-off between idealism and wisdom which we see all over the place, not just in politics. It might also be tempting to try the mind-game of freezing one’s opinions at a particular point. In one of my teenage diaries, I have the line “if I ever find myself becoming right wing, I hope I retain the courage and wisdom to kill myself”. That’s a bit extreme, maybe, but it probably reflects a common pattern in people’s lives. The trouble with such a freeze is that new things happen all the time, and of course to be genuinely open one must accept or fairly consider some of them. Political beliefs formed in 1978 might not tell you very much about whether to oppose the current Soviet Union, which of course doesn’t exist, or Russia, which very much does.

The precise list of priorities differs between people of different ages as well as their general political leaning. According to the Pew Research Center again, young American adults under thirty have different priorities for foreign policy. Here’s another graphic, based on a poll taken in April 2024:

This is how it looked for domestic policy in January 2024:

Also, there’s a general turning against actual political parties among younger people. They’re still politically engaged and active, but they’re less likely to be members of any political party, just as they’re less interested in organisations generally, and are more likely to pursue their activism in other ways.

This paper tries to test the hypothesis that some generations are more likely to engage in particular political acts than others, this time in Western Europe. It provides evidence that generations are more important than age. This study, using the OCEAN personality model, finds that openness negatively correlates with conservatism, but also that more conscientious people are more likely to vote and the combination of agreeableness and conscientiousness makes people more left wing, so although conscientious people who score low on other traits might be more right wing, the more agreeable people (“nicer”) who are also conscientious are more likely to be left wing, so whereas conscientiousness might increase with age, it doesn’t so much make you more right wing as more likely to vote and more left wing if you’re also “nice”. So there could be a lot of generally right wing young people who just don’t vote because they’re not particularly interested in politics, who then come out as Tory or Republican voters as they get older. The greater tendency of older people to vote seems to reflect this. This study also rather surprisingly showed that openness and agreeableness together makes people more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, which are currently more often associated with the Right. After cursory consideration, I wonder if this explains the tendency of “crunchy” people to support the Right, which is an interesting recent development. Much of that, though, is linked to Covid, the lockdown and vaccination.

Regarding openness and conscientiousness, this paper from 2011 and therefore possibly out of date due to changes in the political landscape but also a European study, shows that openness predicts a preference for left wing parties and conscientiousness for right wing parties. This doesn’t seem to be entirely in accordance with the research referred to in the previous paragraph.

Older people may prefer stability and become more risk-averse, which may translate into support for the Right. It’s a stereotype that young men in particular think they’re immortal and invulnerable, but this is also paradoxical because it doesn’t accord with the idea of the “nanny state” insisting on seat belts, controlling what goes into food and restricting smoking and alcohol, which are practices more associated with the Left. Stability may also not correlate well with the disruptive tendencies of the large high technology companies and the recent very rapid changes undertaken in the US, so I’m not sure what to make of that.

I have a fourth theory, but it has a rider. As young adults, many people find they have to compromise for financial reasons, and end up working for employers which due to the complexities of the modern world tend to act unethically. This may be due to the possibility that the more you do, the more likely you are to do something wrong. This leads to cognitive dissonance which is resolved by becoming more right wing. That is, people have to become more right wing in order to live with themselves. This particular view has connections with the work ethic, i.e. that hard work is in itself a good thing regardless of its productivity or usefulness. Here’s my proviso though: if you don’t get involved in anything and never work from the inside to change something, you just never do change anything and you may also come to rely on other people who are getting their hands dirty and compromising. It might be a luxury to place yourself in this position. It’s easy to see the negatives in any situation, particularly if you’re already depressive in your thinking.

I sometimes think this about multinational companies. Although they’re the “baddies” in many people’s views, and I should point out that I am one of those many people, there is another aspect to what they do, which is simply that they do a lot, and given that a random act might have net positive or net negative consequences, simply existing and functioning for a large company that does stuff can just lead to it doing bad stuff, simply because it’s active and large. Of course we almost all live off the products and services of megacorporations and many of us have no option but to, so boycotting may not be practical. The same might apply to governments. Simply because they do a lot, a lot of what they do will have negative consequences. This parallels the problem of never doing anything as a way of avoiding doing the wrong thing, thereby placing oneself in the position of not getting one’s hands dirty and not doing much that’s right either. This is a form of compromise which could be seen as right wing. But this probably does explain why my friend I mentioned at the start became right wing so early in his life. I should also mention that he supported the SDP-Liberal alliance in spite of that.

However, this is just my personal opinion and I haven’t tested it against evidence, unlike the other perspectives I’ve mentioned here which are backed up by research, some of which is contradictory but does seem to be of reasonable quality. The distinction between my own “theory”, which is actually an hypothesis because it’s untested, and the others is that they’ve been corroborated by research and as far as I know mine hasn’t. It’s important to recognise that in pursuing the truth, one has to be able to step aside from one’s own pet “theories” and examine good quality evidence.

In closing, I want to say a few more things. I’ve tried to take a more evidence-based approach than usual with this topic because I wanted to show what that looks like. Offering an opinion without good quality evidence isn’t enough. One also needs to withhold opinions before getting accurate information. That information can be acquired in various ways, but with a topic like this it very often involves statistics. There is of course the famous quote: “Lies, damned lies and statistics”, which makes it sound like statistics are always misleading, but this isn’t so and that quote is not always helpful. It’s important to be educated about statistics so as not to be lied to by people using them. They are often used to deceive, to be sure, but this is only possible if you don’t enquire into the methods used to get them and sometimes what hasn’t been said, as in, all the negative results. The quality of research methods is also absolutely essential here. Sample sizes need to be as large as possible and samples need to be representative. All that said, there is such a thing as qualitative research, which relies more on personal experience than statistics and this kind of approach can lead to a false sense of certainty too. I also want to point out that I haven’t defined what I mean by left and right in detail and that I only considered OCEAN here rather than other theories of personality, including those from outside academic psychology such as the Enneagram, which may have something to say because of how people may transform over their lives due to both stress and personal growth, which may change their opinions and therefore politics. Also, this has as usual been long, and I apologise for my verbosity contributing to that, but sometimes things do need to be examined at length and I really don’t think I’ve been particularly obscure this time.

To conclude then, aging sometimes correlates with becoming more right wing but not always. When it does, it’s usually because of a desire for security and stability. I’m not criticising that at all. We all feel the need for that. With social issues in particular, people often move to the Left as they get older (they are also entering a marginalised group due to aging, and usually disability too). People’s political opinions tend to become entrenched in early middle age, so the apparent drift to the Right might be due to changes in society making people seem more right wing than if they were judged as younger people when they already had these opinions, or they might be more expressive about these opinions. Besides all this, the generation you’re born into influences your experiences and what you learn from them very strongly, so that may be at least as important as age. Personality makes a difference, and some traits show a trend with aging which leads to people becoming in particular less open and more conscientious, which could be expected to involve becoming more conservative. Individuals might have a very different personal history there though.

I want to finish by repeating something I said here several years ago. Kelsey Grammer is well-known to be Republican and as a supporter of the current administration. If you look at his life, it’s characterised by a series of terrible things happening to people close to him which I think may have nudged him to the right. Personal experience is often respected by people on the left – for instance, pro-choice people are very likely to see their position as based on lived experience as a potential or actual mother. If we’re going to do that more widely, we need to recognise why some people are right wing. I hope I’ve managed to keep most of my obviously left wing opinions out of this post and base it on evidence instead.