I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I
received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening
time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race
discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context
of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the
marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a
domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and
devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.
By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and
remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of
my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost.
It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to
counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.
In part 1, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.
In part 2, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.
In part 3, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).
In part 4, I surveyed the rise of analytic philosophy and attempted to show how it rejects the spiritual and the emotional.
In part 5, I evaluated analytic philosophy and the limits of its conception of meaning.
In part 6, I identified the limit that the analytic method places on discourses of morality and responsibility.
Part 7: What Pieces Are You So Scared Of?
I wasn't expecting to write this part in quite the mode I'm in at the moment. I've been feeling generally pretty positive and upbeat so far this spring, and was looking forward to rounding this series out with a similarly cheerful summation on the theme of healing and embracing a life that values emotional sensation.
But I had a bad weekend in a handful of little ways that left me feeling a bit on the low side. As ever when I get on a downer, I started to pull back from things, and especially from people. Anxiety sets in, loading every potential encounter with a hundred disaster scenarios.
There's a numbing process that's part of this, too. It's a defensive reflex, I think, shutting down the mechanisms of self-regard and self-care that identify the problem to avoid having to think about it. We're supposed to solve problems by disinvesting, stepping outside ourselves to look at them 'objectively'. This is supposed to make solutions clearer and less clouded by emotion. But sometimes the problem is the emotion, more than anything else.
In my head, at least, this sits side-by-side with the analytic method. They present themselves to me as the same process. For years I have embraced them as one, and identified all sorts of objective solutions to my problems - limited budget, for example, or shared living environments that aren't well cared for, or (when I was still living at home) the fact that my parents insist on listening to the radio news four times a day, making it completely inescapable.
The real problem, though, is and has always been the denial of inner sensation, the failure to attend to so many important dimensions of well-being, the determination to rise above 'meat'. I am starting to learn, though. Slowly, I'm thawing out.
It starts, perhaps predictably in my case, with music. Music has always offered the most purely emotional experiences of my life - I don't have the theoretical knowledge to analyse it the way I can tackle novels, films and now to a certain extent also video games. It's in music that I'm normally closest to engaging bodily - while I'm a terrible dancer, I'm also basically incapable of standing still when there's music playing.
And I have some incredibly talented musician friends. Look, I know no-one ever takes my music recommendations, but click that last link and listen to Sam's most recent album. Seriously, it's not long, and the last track is the first piece of music in a decade to bring tears to my eyes. It's five minutes that I can get completely lost in. Sometimes it's good to be lost.
Sometimes getting lost is exactly what I need. Some problems don't need the analytic distance of the cartographer - the map is clear, the map is the problem, the map shows you all too clearly what stands between you and the shining horizon. The map tells you what the walk is like, but sometimes you need to stop thinking about that and walk anyway. That's the point at which the map can't tell you anything useful.
Tuesday, 31 March 2015
Monday, 23 March 2015
Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 6
I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I
received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening
time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race
discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context
of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the
marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a
domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and
devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.
By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost. It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.
In part 1, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.
In part 2, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.
In part 3, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).
In part 4, I surveyed the rise of analytic philosophy and attempted to show how it rejects the spiritual and the emotional.
In part 5, I evaluated analytic philosophy and the limits of its conception of meaning.
Part 6: On Taking Responsibility
The concept of moral responsibility has been at the heart of my journey through analytic philosophy. The first philosophical system I encountered which inspired and moved me was existentialism, a position that has moral responsibility as its foundation and centrepiece. This stands in direct opposition to the determinism which characterised much of 20th-century analysis.
Science has long been thought to promise a perfect system for predicting human behaviour (I choose my words carefully here, since few practicing scientists have embraced this belief - it belongs more to the realm of 'popular' or at least establishment commentary). It's a classic modernist tenet, and for a while scientific discoveries did seem to be progressing in that direction. Neuroscience and psychology made great strides through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
Still, as early as 1942, Isaac Asimov could acknowledge, with his invention of 'psychohistory' in the Foundation short stories, that a truly determinist understanding of human behaviour was out of reach, prohibited by the fundamentally probabilistic character of quantum physics. This is not to claim that prediction of human behaviour is impossible, only that it can never be done with complete certainty.
Philosophers, who have been arguing with Laplace's demon for two centuries now, were slower to catch on. Even ten years ago, when I was in my first year at university, hard determinism was still discussed as a plausible theory, rather than merely a far-fetched possibility. So great was my determination (hah) to hold onto moral responsibility that I once refused to read an assigned article because of its determinist slant, which is about as defiant as I've ever been towards a teacher ever.
Determinism and scientism suit the analytic approach. They are theories of absolute knowledge and certainty, of everything in its place, clear and predictable. In denying the possibility of free will, they deny the meaningfulness of the aesthetic, reducing emotions, beliefs and principles to the purely causal.
This outlook has persisted despite the eventual demise of hard determinism. The philosophers who would have been determinists in a previous generation now begrudgingly begin their papers with 'we know that hard determinism is false, but...' and go on to argue that quantum randomness leaves the defender of free will no better off.
The point is not entirely without merit. Fundamental randomness does not guarantee a meaningful freedom of will. Free will theorists have long held that free will is a necessary condition of moral responsibility. The best they can claim from quantum theory is the existence of a narrow sliver of space in which freedom of the will might hide.
More insidiously, the post-determinists have targeted moral responsibility itself, even as free will theorists began to abandon the connection between will and responsibility (the resulting positions are myriad, and better covered in detail elsewhere). The essence of the new determinist argument concerns motivation, understood as whatever mental state in an agent results in their action.
An agent is morally responsible for an action, the argument goes, if their action is a product of a motivation in an appropriate way (that is, not subject to hypnosis or other control). Motivations, though, are products of the agent's character, and said character is a product of the agent's birth and upbringing. If we are to hold agents responsible for their actions, then, it seems that we must hold them responsible for their upbringing and their ancestry. This, the post-determinists argue, is absurd.
And, on the face of it, it does sound absurd. A person cannot literally be responsible for their own birth - this would distort time itself. This argument, the causal argument, seems to present a profound challenge to the existence of moral responsibility.
And yet... Let us come at this from another angle. Critical theories, such as Marxism, feminism and queer theory, recognise differences among birth circumstances as important social phenomena. The concept of privilege is vital to understanding these models, and their well-grounded demands for social justice.
These days, it is common to hear reactionaries crying that it is not their fault they were born male, or white, or middle class, or straight, or cisgendered, or able-bodied, or neurotypical. Strictly, they are not wrong - but then, you will find no serious feminist arguing that they are. What the reactionaries are doing, though, is relying on the same simplistic, causal understanding of moral responsibility as the post-determinist analysts.
Responsibility for the circumstances of our birth, for the privileges and attitudes therefrom, is something we take. It is not something we are born to, nor something we are morally entitled to ignore. The essence of maturity, of adulthood, is making this transition; this is the sense in which children are innocent.
Practically speaking, the act of taking responsibility consists in critical self-reflection, the willingness to examine our own behaviour and the attitudes which condition it, and the seeking of ways to change them where appropriate. It is the act of taking seriously our relations, both structural and specific, to others, rather than viewing ourselves as isolated particles predestined to bang into one another with whatever arbitrary results a crude social physics dictates.
Theoretically, taking responsibility requires detaching responsibility from the purely causal, embracing the messy illogicality of a putatively free choice to escape the fist of determinism. The result is not a neat theory; it has little of the clarity that analysis craves. But it is honest and liberating, and above all else it allows a hope for general, meaningful change that the determinist mindset can never offer.
(part 7)
By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost. It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.
In part 1, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.
In part 2, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.
In part 3, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).
In part 4, I surveyed the rise of analytic philosophy and attempted to show how it rejects the spiritual and the emotional.
In part 5, I evaluated analytic philosophy and the limits of its conception of meaning.
Part 6: On Taking Responsibility
The concept of moral responsibility has been at the heart of my journey through analytic philosophy. The first philosophical system I encountered which inspired and moved me was existentialism, a position that has moral responsibility as its foundation and centrepiece. This stands in direct opposition to the determinism which characterised much of 20th-century analysis.
Science has long been thought to promise a perfect system for predicting human behaviour (I choose my words carefully here, since few practicing scientists have embraced this belief - it belongs more to the realm of 'popular' or at least establishment commentary). It's a classic modernist tenet, and for a while scientific discoveries did seem to be progressing in that direction. Neuroscience and psychology made great strides through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
Still, as early as 1942, Isaac Asimov could acknowledge, with his invention of 'psychohistory' in the Foundation short stories, that a truly determinist understanding of human behaviour was out of reach, prohibited by the fundamentally probabilistic character of quantum physics. This is not to claim that prediction of human behaviour is impossible, only that it can never be done with complete certainty.
Philosophers, who have been arguing with Laplace's demon for two centuries now, were slower to catch on. Even ten years ago, when I was in my first year at university, hard determinism was still discussed as a plausible theory, rather than merely a far-fetched possibility. So great was my determination (hah) to hold onto moral responsibility that I once refused to read an assigned article because of its determinist slant, which is about as defiant as I've ever been towards a teacher ever.
Determinism and scientism suit the analytic approach. They are theories of absolute knowledge and certainty, of everything in its place, clear and predictable. In denying the possibility of free will, they deny the meaningfulness of the aesthetic, reducing emotions, beliefs and principles to the purely causal.
This outlook has persisted despite the eventual demise of hard determinism. The philosophers who would have been determinists in a previous generation now begrudgingly begin their papers with 'we know that hard determinism is false, but...' and go on to argue that quantum randomness leaves the defender of free will no better off.
The point is not entirely without merit. Fundamental randomness does not guarantee a meaningful freedom of will. Free will theorists have long held that free will is a necessary condition of moral responsibility. The best they can claim from quantum theory is the existence of a narrow sliver of space in which freedom of the will might hide.
More insidiously, the post-determinists have targeted moral responsibility itself, even as free will theorists began to abandon the connection between will and responsibility (the resulting positions are myriad, and better covered in detail elsewhere). The essence of the new determinist argument concerns motivation, understood as whatever mental state in an agent results in their action.
An agent is morally responsible for an action, the argument goes, if their action is a product of a motivation in an appropriate way (that is, not subject to hypnosis or other control). Motivations, though, are products of the agent's character, and said character is a product of the agent's birth and upbringing. If we are to hold agents responsible for their actions, then, it seems that we must hold them responsible for their upbringing and their ancestry. This, the post-determinists argue, is absurd.
And, on the face of it, it does sound absurd. A person cannot literally be responsible for their own birth - this would distort time itself. This argument, the causal argument, seems to present a profound challenge to the existence of moral responsibility.
And yet... Let us come at this from another angle. Critical theories, such as Marxism, feminism and queer theory, recognise differences among birth circumstances as important social phenomena. The concept of privilege is vital to understanding these models, and their well-grounded demands for social justice.
These days, it is common to hear reactionaries crying that it is not their fault they were born male, or white, or middle class, or straight, or cisgendered, or able-bodied, or neurotypical. Strictly, they are not wrong - but then, you will find no serious feminist arguing that they are. What the reactionaries are doing, though, is relying on the same simplistic, causal understanding of moral responsibility as the post-determinist analysts.
Responsibility for the circumstances of our birth, for the privileges and attitudes therefrom, is something we take. It is not something we are born to, nor something we are morally entitled to ignore. The essence of maturity, of adulthood, is making this transition; this is the sense in which children are innocent.
Practically speaking, the act of taking responsibility consists in critical self-reflection, the willingness to examine our own behaviour and the attitudes which condition it, and the seeking of ways to change them where appropriate. It is the act of taking seriously our relations, both structural and specific, to others, rather than viewing ourselves as isolated particles predestined to bang into one another with whatever arbitrary results a crude social physics dictates.
Theoretically, taking responsibility requires detaching responsibility from the purely causal, embracing the messy illogicality of a putatively free choice to escape the fist of determinism. The result is not a neat theory; it has little of the clarity that analysis craves. But it is honest and liberating, and above all else it allows a hope for general, meaningful change that the determinist mindset can never offer.
(part 7)
Monday, 16 March 2015
Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 5
I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I
received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening
time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race
discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context
of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the
marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a
domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and
devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.
By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost. It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.
In part 1, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.
In part 2, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.
In part 3, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).
In part 4, I surveyed the rise of analytic philosophy and attempted to show how it rejects the spiritual and the emotional.
Part 5: Aesthetics and Anaesthetics
I only recently made the etymological connection between 'aesthetics' and 'anaesthetics', but it's hardly an earthshaking revelation. Aesthetics is (roughly) the study of art, a fundamentally sensory thing; anaesthetics make us numb, insensate. The common Greek root originally means perception.
It would not be too far wide of the mark to describe analytic philosophy as anaesthetic. Above all else, what analytic philosophy denies is the subjective. It is the search for objective answers to the grand philosophical questions. The whole analytic construction of 'rationality' opposes the value of personal perspectives, appealing to a transcendent reason which may or may not bear any real connection to the divine intellect of the early modern or classical rationalists.
But analytic philosophy undoubtedly has its advantages. The detachment it advocates can be absolutely crucial for some debates. It's particularly important when responding to criticism; one cannot, after all, take up the point of view of another while clinging to one's own. There are other ways to develop the ability to detach, but practice in the analytic method is a particularly effective and pure one.
(Note: it's far from perfect, as anyone who's ever pricked the ego or threatened the funding of an academic can attest).
And the analytic tradition in philosophy has real triumphs to its name, too; the systems of formal logic developed in the first half of the twentieth century are not just a huge step forward over their arcane predecessors. They are legitimately powerful tools of reasoning, at least within the limit of Gödel's theorem, and underpin much of modern computing.
Another important product of the analytic tradition, one that is rather more complicated to endorse, is its discourse on meaning. This is usually what definitions of analytic philosophy centre on, but the analytic discourse on meaning is almost exclusively linguistic - it concerns words and sentences, spoken and written. In aesthetics, on the other hand, languages are only a small subset of things that mean (the first part of this video has a pretty robust introduction to some of these ideas, referencing the omega of analytic philosophy, Wittgenstein).
And in aesthetics, meaning is a very different beast to the meaning of the analysts. It is lived, experienced, bodily, not a clinical study of how words point to things in the world. Analysts have devoted a great deal of work to establishing what it means to say something exists; in aesthetics, the question is simply 'is it felt?'
The modern technophile's - my - obsession with transcending 'meat' (as William Gibson perfectly put it in Neuromancer) is born of this analytic understanding of meaning, thought and reason. We disdain bodily hedonism for the 'higher pleasures' of the mind, and in doing so fail to realise that our 'higher pleasures' are really just contempt for other ways of seeing the world, other tools that are in their own way as valuable and in many ways richer than those we have learned.
Aesthetic comprehension, in a way, is a much more basic part of the human condition than analytic. This, perhaps, explains some of our disdain; a baby can feel, but only a sophisticated adult can 'really think'. That we can believe this while yearning for our lost, or innocent, or joyful childhoods is a testament to the spectacular power of the (archetypally white, male etc.) privileged ego.
(part 6)
By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost. It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.
In part 1, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.
In part 2, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.
In part 3, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).
In part 4, I surveyed the rise of analytic philosophy and attempted to show how it rejects the spiritual and the emotional.
Part 5: Aesthetics and Anaesthetics
I only recently made the etymological connection between 'aesthetics' and 'anaesthetics', but it's hardly an earthshaking revelation. Aesthetics is (roughly) the study of art, a fundamentally sensory thing; anaesthetics make us numb, insensate. The common Greek root originally means perception.
It would not be too far wide of the mark to describe analytic philosophy as anaesthetic. Above all else, what analytic philosophy denies is the subjective. It is the search for objective answers to the grand philosophical questions. The whole analytic construction of 'rationality' opposes the value of personal perspectives, appealing to a transcendent reason which may or may not bear any real connection to the divine intellect of the early modern or classical rationalists.
But analytic philosophy undoubtedly has its advantages. The detachment it advocates can be absolutely crucial for some debates. It's particularly important when responding to criticism; one cannot, after all, take up the point of view of another while clinging to one's own. There are other ways to develop the ability to detach, but practice in the analytic method is a particularly effective and pure one.
(Note: it's far from perfect, as anyone who's ever pricked the ego or threatened the funding of an academic can attest).
And the analytic tradition in philosophy has real triumphs to its name, too; the systems of formal logic developed in the first half of the twentieth century are not just a huge step forward over their arcane predecessors. They are legitimately powerful tools of reasoning, at least within the limit of Gödel's theorem, and underpin much of modern computing.
Another important product of the analytic tradition, one that is rather more complicated to endorse, is its discourse on meaning. This is usually what definitions of analytic philosophy centre on, but the analytic discourse on meaning is almost exclusively linguistic - it concerns words and sentences, spoken and written. In aesthetics, on the other hand, languages are only a small subset of things that mean (the first part of this video has a pretty robust introduction to some of these ideas, referencing the omega of analytic philosophy, Wittgenstein).
And in aesthetics, meaning is a very different beast to the meaning of the analysts. It is lived, experienced, bodily, not a clinical study of how words point to things in the world. Analysts have devoted a great deal of work to establishing what it means to say something exists; in aesthetics, the question is simply 'is it felt?'
The modern technophile's - my - obsession with transcending 'meat' (as William Gibson perfectly put it in Neuromancer) is born of this analytic understanding of meaning, thought and reason. We disdain bodily hedonism for the 'higher pleasures' of the mind, and in doing so fail to realise that our 'higher pleasures' are really just contempt for other ways of seeing the world, other tools that are in their own way as valuable and in many ways richer than those we have learned.
Aesthetic comprehension, in a way, is a much more basic part of the human condition than analytic. This, perhaps, explains some of our disdain; a baby can feel, but only a sophisticated adult can 'really think'. That we can believe this while yearning for our lost, or innocent, or joyful childhoods is a testament to the spectacular power of the (archetypally white, male etc.) privileged ego.
(part 6)
Monday, 9 March 2015
Words Matter
(content warning: discussion of ableist terms, reference to other slurs)
I changed the URL and title of this blog yesterday, to remove the ableist slur 'stupid'. I apologise wholeheartedly for not doing this sooner and for failing to treat this issue with the gravitas it deserves until now.
The rest of this post is addressed to anyone who thinks this is making mountains out of molehills, or that I needn't have bothered making the change.
Let me start with the obvious: words matter. They have power. I'd be a pretty poor writer if I didn't believe that. And power is always dangerous - not necessarily always harmful, but always accompanied by the danger of causing harm.
Words can become harmful in lots of ways, but one of the most serious is when used to justify (or in the justification of) harmful policies. We rightly regard racial slurs like the n-words as harmful because of their association with governmental policies and societal patterns of slavery and segregation - policies and patterns with costs both measurable (in death and injury figures) and immeasurable (in lost human potential and complex, oppressive legacies).
Why, then, is 'stupid' harmful? It is, after all, a very common word, and one not normally connected to any great opprobrium.
The simplest answer to this is a direct comparison with racist language. Constructions of intelligence have sometimes been used as viciously as constructs of race to justify policies every bit as horrible. The eugenics movements of the early 20th century are the best examples of this - in the 20s and 30s, many 'developed' nations including Britain and America forcibly sterilised people who failed to meet certain standards of 'intelligence' (usually measured with IQ tests - the exact purpose and value of which remains controversial to this day). More famously, Nazi Germany sent people to concentration camps and even gas chambers on 'intelligence' grounds as well as racial.
It's generally good policy to not throw around as insults words that the Nazis used to justify genocide.
One final thing; I want to point out how easy it is to overlook this issue. When I started this blog, I was twenty-three, already in possession of a master's degree and well on my way to a doctorate - hardly able to claim general ignorance, and yet I had no idea that my choice of phrase (a reference to Bill Clinton's famous campaign policy from 1992) could be harmful. Worse, I was literally working in disability support for students at the time - none of my (actually quite limited) training had addressed this issue.
And it gets even worse than that, because a year or two later I was working with a student whose course included modules of disability studies and special educational needs. There were several lectures about ableist language, including specific problems with the language of intelligence, and I still didn't see a problem with my own blog title. It's very easy to dismiss issues when they require you to change.
Learning to rid my everyday vocabulary of words like 'stupid' - to put them in the procribed category where they belong - is not easy. But there are plenty of better words, both as insults and to refer to things that are strange/absurd. We can - and should - live without words that are imbued with such harm.
Here's a great resource for examining ableism generally, and here's their excellent collection of articles addressing specific ableist terms.
I changed the URL and title of this blog yesterday, to remove the ableist slur 'stupid'. I apologise wholeheartedly for not doing this sooner and for failing to treat this issue with the gravitas it deserves until now.
The rest of this post is addressed to anyone who thinks this is making mountains out of molehills, or that I needn't have bothered making the change.
Let me start with the obvious: words matter. They have power. I'd be a pretty poor writer if I didn't believe that. And power is always dangerous - not necessarily always harmful, but always accompanied by the danger of causing harm.
Words can become harmful in lots of ways, but one of the most serious is when used to justify (or in the justification of) harmful policies. We rightly regard racial slurs like the n-words as harmful because of their association with governmental policies and societal patterns of slavery and segregation - policies and patterns with costs both measurable (in death and injury figures) and immeasurable (in lost human potential and complex, oppressive legacies).
Why, then, is 'stupid' harmful? It is, after all, a very common word, and one not normally connected to any great opprobrium.
The simplest answer to this is a direct comparison with racist language. Constructions of intelligence have sometimes been used as viciously as constructs of race to justify policies every bit as horrible. The eugenics movements of the early 20th century are the best examples of this - in the 20s and 30s, many 'developed' nations including Britain and America forcibly sterilised people who failed to meet certain standards of 'intelligence' (usually measured with IQ tests - the exact purpose and value of which remains controversial to this day). More famously, Nazi Germany sent people to concentration camps and even gas chambers on 'intelligence' grounds as well as racial.
It's generally good policy to not throw around as insults words that the Nazis used to justify genocide.
One final thing; I want to point out how easy it is to overlook this issue. When I started this blog, I was twenty-three, already in possession of a master's degree and well on my way to a doctorate - hardly able to claim general ignorance, and yet I had no idea that my choice of phrase (a reference to Bill Clinton's famous campaign policy from 1992) could be harmful. Worse, I was literally working in disability support for students at the time - none of my (actually quite limited) training had addressed this issue.
And it gets even worse than that, because a year or two later I was working with a student whose course included modules of disability studies and special educational needs. There were several lectures about ableist language, including specific problems with the language of intelligence, and I still didn't see a problem with my own blog title. It's very easy to dismiss issues when they require you to change.
Learning to rid my everyday vocabulary of words like 'stupid' - to put them in the procribed category where they belong - is not easy. But there are plenty of better words, both as insults and to refer to things that are strange/absurd. We can - and should - live without words that are imbued with such harm.
Here's a great resource for examining ableism generally, and here's their excellent collection of articles addressing specific ableist terms.
Thursday, 5 March 2015
41.62MB
'IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE', thundered a friend of mine on Twitter when I said something about finally getting a smartphone. I took the plunge in January, at last feeling I have enough spare cash - over a long enough time-frame - to make being able to keep up with a 24-month contract a safe bet. I looked forward to joining the truly modern part of the modern age, the edge where we're beginning to bleed into cyberpunk, the networked species.
And yet, here at the end of my first monthly billing cycle, I've used barely 2% of my 2GB data limit - 41.62MB, to be precise. Obviously, part of that is that I'm new to this device and don't really know what it can do, so I'm not yet using it for many of the things it could be.
That's comforting, but it's the minor part of this issue. The perspicuous truth is sadder; I'm simply not mobile enough, in my day-to-day life, to get much out of mobile computing. I spend the majority of my time within ten feet of a high-powered PC with a cabled connection to a fibre broadband router that gives me download speeds in the region of 9MB/s. When I'm out of the house, I'm walking to places, most of which are workplaces of one or other kind.
A mobile phone cannot change a stationary life. And while the extent to which I don't get out much is perhaps a bit disheartening, it's equally true that I get most of the things that other people do on their smartphones on my PC. Crucially, it's when I'm on my PC that I'm most connected to the rest of the world.
That's what really matters with mobile communications technology, after all - how much more communication it enables. Being romantic and optimistic, we could say it's how much closer together it brings us, the potential to blur the edges not just of communities but ultimately of individuals as well. Talking about the rise of analytic philosophy last week, I mentioned Leibniz; his philosophical system, the 'monadology', posits human minds/spirits as the building blocks of the universe, with space, time and everything that fills them emerging out of the phenomenal (sensory/felt) tensions between us. I've always liked that image as a way of thinking about humans in networks.
I feel that way even when I feel disconnected from those networks. And maybe that's where the greater sadness resides in my current situation (I realise, writing that, that this is all terribly self-pitying, so sorry, I guess). If I already have all the benefits of mobile technology - something I can't anymore deny - then I can't blame any disconnect on technological barriers anymore.
And indeed, I am trying to reach out more, to engage more, to communicate whether from my desk or my pocket. So while the smartphone itself isn't going to change my life, it might yet prompt me to make some changes.
If nothing else, I've been able to spend hours laughing at this game about an enormous, hilariously fragile fish.
And yet, here at the end of my first monthly billing cycle, I've used barely 2% of my 2GB data limit - 41.62MB, to be precise. Obviously, part of that is that I'm new to this device and don't really know what it can do, so I'm not yet using it for many of the things it could be.
That's comforting, but it's the minor part of this issue. The perspicuous truth is sadder; I'm simply not mobile enough, in my day-to-day life, to get much out of mobile computing. I spend the majority of my time within ten feet of a high-powered PC with a cabled connection to a fibre broadband router that gives me download speeds in the region of 9MB/s. When I'm out of the house, I'm walking to places, most of which are workplaces of one or other kind.
A mobile phone cannot change a stationary life. And while the extent to which I don't get out much is perhaps a bit disheartening, it's equally true that I get most of the things that other people do on their smartphones on my PC. Crucially, it's when I'm on my PC that I'm most connected to the rest of the world.
That's what really matters with mobile communications technology, after all - how much more communication it enables. Being romantic and optimistic, we could say it's how much closer together it brings us, the potential to blur the edges not just of communities but ultimately of individuals as well. Talking about the rise of analytic philosophy last week, I mentioned Leibniz; his philosophical system, the 'monadology', posits human minds/spirits as the building blocks of the universe, with space, time and everything that fills them emerging out of the phenomenal (sensory/felt) tensions between us. I've always liked that image as a way of thinking about humans in networks.
I feel that way even when I feel disconnected from those networks. And maybe that's where the greater sadness resides in my current situation (I realise, writing that, that this is all terribly self-pitying, so sorry, I guess). If I already have all the benefits of mobile technology - something I can't anymore deny - then I can't blame any disconnect on technological barriers anymore.
And indeed, I am trying to reach out more, to engage more, to communicate whether from my desk or my pocket. So while the smartphone itself isn't going to change my life, it might yet prompt me to make some changes.
If nothing else, I've been able to spend hours laughing at this game about an enormous, hilariously fragile fish.
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