Feels and Reals

'Reals over feels!' and variants thereof have become a slogan for the internet right in the ongoing shitstorm over whether 'objective' journalism is a thing. Simplistic as it is, it's an expression of an ideology with roots in the work of some much-celebrated twentieth-century philosophers (at least, those in the English or anglocentric tradition), and indicative of a subtle shift they engineered in how we use language about truth and reality.

The general meaning of 'Reals over feels!' is that one kind of proposition, understood as impersonal and objective, should be considered more true, or more worthy of consideration, than another, understood as personal and subjective. Statements about objects independently of some personal perspective are considered accurate; statements about how something seems to some perspective are inaccurate or invalid.

In the journalistic field, the problem with this is that all journalism, no matter how diligent, is perspectival. This issue generalises, though; there are, quite simply, no non-perspectival facts. This is not the same as saying that there are no facts. How we arrive the idea that there are objective facts despite the truth of this claim is a topic to which I'll return later.

Let's start with the basics. We have known since Descartes that the only sure foundation for knowledge is conscious experience – that the only thing that absolutely cannot be doubted is the current content of our conscious fields. I may be only hallucinating that I sit in front of a computer right now, or the image of the computer that I see may be the product of a Matrix-like simulation (or, in Descartes' scenario, a trick played by an evil demon), but I cannot be mistaken that I seem to see the computer; I cannot be mistaken that a computer appears before me.

Absolutely every other thing we take ourselves to know is known by inference, and every means of inference we have, we know to be periodically fallible[1]. So however reliable a claim of knowledge beyond immediate awareness may be, we know there must still be some small chance that it is wrong.

Why emphasise this? Well, as the physical sciences developed in the wake of Descartes, the gulf between direct awareness and the theories of the sciences widened dramatically. The seventeenth century gave us cells, the nineteenth atoms and the twentieth quanta, so tiny that any conventional notion of being directly conscious of them goes out the window.

My point is not to dismiss the theories of science, not at all; just to remind where they come from. What I want to repudiate is the relatively recent philosophical contention that because direct awareness is of appearances that often do not correspond closely to the equivalent deliveries of scientific theory, it is inherently misleading.

The difference is subtle. No-one denies that appearances can be deceiving. The question is whether appearances are inherently deceiving. The shift from the former claim to the latter was accomplished in philosophy largely during the rise of Bertrand Russell, and the fall or at least pushing-aside of the British Idealists and Continental Phenomenologists his dominance replaced.

Idealism (in this, rather than the political, context) is the metaphysical and/or epistemological theory that the world, or at least our knowledge of it, is fundamentally based on experiential/conscious facts. Phenomenology is a philosophical method that requires one to start from what is observed most directly, explain that, and then build on the explanations. Both these positions have clear roots in the idea that conscious awareness comes first.

Russell, along with friends like G.E. Moore and disciples like the young A.J. Ayer, held that these approaches had given rise to obscure and absurd metaphysical systems, convoluted theories that were of little use in actually explaining things. It's true that the phenomenologies and idealisms of the 19th century were complex, but then so is the world[2]. Russell in particular held logical clarity to be the most important virtue of philosophical systems, and was willing to ignore or bury a great many issues that would not submit to logic-based treatments[3].

What all the theories discussed so far, including those of Russell and Moore, have in common is that they are attempts to explain the relationships between the experiences of different people. We take my experience, now, of sitting in front of a computer, to be accurate precisely because if you came and took my seat, you would have a similar experience, and because if I come back to this room later today and sit in this same seat, I will have another, similar, experience.

The standard early modern philosophical explanation of this consistency would be that there is an object, the computer, in this room that produces computer-like experiences for any who sit in front of it. With modern science, however, we know that the object in this room can't be simply described as 'a computer'; it's an immensely complex structure of polymers and electronics, each themselves complex structures of molecules, which are made up of atoms, which are in turn complex structures of subatomic particles and fields that can be described mathematically and logically but not terribly intelligibly.

This sets up a huge discrepancy between the experience of sitting at the computer and the scientific description of what's going on (it gets even worse if you try to factor in a scientific description of me, and/or the process of perception). The tendency of the (anglocentric) philosophers of the 20th century was to argue that this meant the experience was deceptive and false, while the scientific description was accurate and true.

But as I argued here, the scientific description is actually much less useful than the experiential one in most cases. Our knowledge, the everyday stuff that enables us to find our way to the shops and so on, is overwhelmingly experiential in character.

And this hints at another reason for preferring the experiential to the scientific; where scientific knowledge is useful, it is only because of some effect on experience that it enables us to generate. The microscopic precision that allows Intel to inscribe GHz CPUs on a postage stamp is only worth achieving because computers enable wondrous new experiences, whether that means exploring the Mushroom Kingdom or establishing personal relationships that stretch around the globe or even just being able to do your own accounting without needing pages and pages of maths paper.

In truth, all values – not just the emotional or aesthetic, but every kind of utility as well – are values only from some human[4] perspective. Feels are reals, both in the general sense that perspectival facts are real (because they are the only kind of fact), and in the specific sense that emotional perspectives are important, because it is those emotional perspectives from which the values that make anything at all that we do worthwhile spring.

The only question that remains is why, if all this is correct, some people are so convinced that there is an 'objective' perspective, one that is right above all others. I said above that the issue is about the relationship between experiences; Russell and his colleagues came to see the explanation for the relationship as more fundamental than the experiences it relates, but there is another process at work here too.

To examine the relationship among experiences generally, you must have a set of experiences to generalise from. Ideally, as indeed the theory behind the scientific method suggests, this sample will be representative; if it is not, there is a much bigger chance of missing something important. In practice, you cannot include experiences of which you know nothing.

And the philosophers I've discussed here had relatively narrow ranges of experience to draw on. Descartes (and other influential early modern philosophers like Locke, Hume and Kant) lived most of his life in and around the courts of Enlightenment Europe. Russell and his cronies were ensconced in the ivory towers of British academia (and I can tell you from personal experience just how narrow the windows there are).

Not only did these men have a limited range of experiences to draw on, they either had or have subsequently gained a great deal of influence to pronounce with. Their positions, social class, shared ethnicity and so on have made them Great Men with Important Views; people who have differing opinions seem unimportant by contrast. This actually applies to their historical opponents every bit as much as to marginalised people today; one hardly hears the names of Bradley and Meinong in philosophy classrooms anymore.

The tendency of self-proclaimed logical thinkers to exclude dissenting opinions from both history and contemporary debate should by this point be sadly familiar. It's a self-reinforcing process; when dissent has already been shut out once, it is much easier to dismiss a second time. People clinging to Russell's model now, a hundred years down the line, may not even realise how trapped they are in it[5]. Open-minded reflection on the views of people from different backgrounds and demographics is the only antidote.

In summary, the idea of an 'objective fact' is a mirage. The only indubitable propositions are subjective in character. The philosophical models that allow us to link them together into a coherent world are at best intersubjective, a negotiation shaped by social pressures much more than 'purely intellectual' considerations (if there are any such things).





[1] It's worth stressing at this point that awareness is not purely sensory – memory is a kind of awareness, so your memory of an event (though not the event itself, if it is in the past) may serve as the foundation for some knowledge, or at least reasoning).

[2] There's an interesting comparison here with the current state of quantum physics. Its more phenomenological elements – the mechanics that describe and predict actual measurements – are the most accurate science yet developed by man, but the interpretations that seek to explain why those relationships exist... well, here's the Wikipedia page on interpretations of quantum mechanics. Just count how many different interpretations there are, don't try to wrap your head around them all.

[3] This Spockish attitude persists today in the myriad ways our culture insists on quantifiability and computability. Things (like emotions) which are messy to compute tend to be regarded with suspicion.

[4] In the interests of inclusion, this should be 'appropriately human-like perspective', really. We want to be able to extend values and valuation to sentient aliens, sophisticated animals and so on.

[5] Which doesn't excuse their lack of awareness, since they're also likely to have more spare time and money to support self-reflection with than other social groups.

On Voting

I will be voting in the general election. I will probably vote in every general election in my adult lifetime (this will actually only be my second - I missed out by a month in 2005). I vote in every local election, too. I was going to write a post this week with a thorough and general defence of democratic participation, appealing to cynics and anarchists alike.

But I'm not sure that's helpful, particularly given how miserable the system's current offerings are. I don't have quite the same conviction regarding the importance of voting that I used to; the reasons for my remaining conviction (which is still, obviously, fairly strong) are weaker, narrower, more personal.

I used to argue, when challenged to defend centralised government, that the global scale of contemporary problems like overpopulation and climate change would require a global coordination only possible through centralisation, and that a purely bureaucratic centralisation was at least as dangerous as one with some element of democracy.

But, quite without realising it, I betrayed this argument completely when writing The Second Realm. It's not really emphasised or investigated in the story, but governance in The Second Realm (actually in the First Realm) is localised, with only the very lightest central coordination. Society functions as a network of small communities each communicating with and mutually supporting its neighbours.

Granted, it's a much smaller society with very different problems to ours and a surplus of natural resources, but apparently I don't (universally) believe central, hierarchical governance is necessary. I can at least imagine us surviving without it.

Maybe, then, voting won't always be necessary. I'm still voting this time round, though, for a whole bunch of well-trodden reasons; because the parties aren't all the same, and with a population of 60million to work with even small differences may improve lives for lots of people; because my abstinence would be read by the mass media as apathy, which makes my skin crawl; because over longer terms than the parliamentary, there's at least some reason to think that many small voices add up.

It would be disingenuous to overlook the privilege of my upbringing in this, of course; part of the reason I'm voting, and that I don't feel completely hopeless about it, is that I've grown up with the idea that my voice will be heard and will make a difference. At quite a deep level I'm not inclined to see voting as futile.

But that's also a form of optimism, and it's possible - even important - to be optimistic without being naive.

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.

Everyday sexism (that I am guilty of) part 2

Actually, this time it's not just sexism - it's every other dimension of privilege as well.

I'm working on a lengthy and complicated thing about white male identity and 'gamers' - my identity, basically. What I'm trying to do with it is address self-identified gamers defensive of our identity on the grounds that it's the only thing we have. I examine why it's possible to feel this, and how to think more broadly about our identity.

But it's really hard to do that without feeling embattled. 'Gamer' is an identity with a lot of really toxic associations. 'White' and 'male' are even worse, both having a long history of oppression and brutality. The urge is always there to get defensive, to rationalise or try to explain away my association with those identities. It's the urge to mansplain, whitesplain etc. (I'm not sure that 'gamesplain' is a thing yet, or just regarded as a combination of 'all the above') -  call it xsplaing in general.

The problem with xsplaining is difficult to state succinctly. It's most problematic when a privileged person butts into a conversation about a problematic pattern of privileged behaviour to explain why - even if not done in an explicitly abusive way, this reinforces existing power dynamics by demanding that every conversation be limited by our comfort. It also equates our discomfort with the actual harm suffered by other groups, which is dismissive of their experience as well as flat-out inaccurate.

Another problem is in demanding 'they' solve 'our' problems - the attitude of 'if you don't like it, you tell us what to do'. We're adults. If someone criticises us, we've got to be able to take responsibility for that. Before demanding specific attention from someone - adding to the burden you've already imposed on them - do some googling, or at least some self-reflection, to try to understand the problem.

This goes doubly for issues of identity. The piece I'm writing is an attempt to collect some criticism of 'gamer' and develop from that a better model of the identity. I don't agree 100% with everything I'm quoting, so there is some editorialising, but my primary purpose is not to refute or dispute those criticisms; it's to identify what we can learn from them.

So I have to be very careful of where I'm pointing my arguments. How often do I have to check for xsplaining? Every. Damn. Sentence. That's really what I want to get at here (as with last time out); this isn't something to only worry about occasionally. It's not even limited to times when you're actively engaging with someone from a different background (though that's when it's at its absolute most important).

It's so hard to resist the urge to make excuses, to haggle, to move from addressing the problem to denying it. And this is in an article specifically addressed to our concerns - I'm not trying to join an existing debate (though I am responding to one). It's even harder when engaging with people 'live'. But you can't learn or grow while rationalising; xsplaining serves your ego at the expense of your mind - not to mention at the expense of other people's peace of mind.

Idiot Overload

It's been a truism of human society for centuries that it's easier to sound convincing than to be right - 'a lie has run around the world before the truth has got its boots on' and so on. I want to pick out one particularly egregious manifestation of this, something I've only taken conscious note of recently, though it's probably not new. There may be a 'proper' name for it, but for now I'm just going to call it idiot overload.

Idiot overload happens when there are so many errors, inaccuracies and other logical problems with a statement that it's impossible to refute succinctly. 'Succinctly' here means 'coherently and within the attention span of the relevant platform' - to use a pretty blunt example, most tweets are very difficult to refute in the space of a single reply. (Another example would be how hard it is to write a comprehensive reply to something in a blog comment before other commenters get in and move the debate along).

The sole intelligible claim to emerge from gamergate, 'Gamergate is about ethics in game journalism!' makes a pretty good example. As far as I can see there are at least five major objections to this statement:

1: gamergate more or less ignores actual serious breaches of journalistic ethics, like the review embargo on Assaassin's Creed: Unity that meant no reviews were published until 12 hours after release. Sure, maybe some gamergaters shouted about it briefly, but there's been nothing like the sustained campaign of anger directed at gamergate's preferred targets.

2: gamergate has yet to articulate a clear system of ethics of any kind. Ethics are systematic - not just a collection of arbitrary laws, but a coherent framework that allows the extension of those laws into situations unforeseen by their authors (again, unsophisticated example, but the provision of the U.S. constitution for later amendments is a version of this).

3: unethical behaviour in the promotion of an ethical system is hypocrisy, and self-invalidating. If your behaviour is unethical, you are not supporting ethics of any kind, no matter how you shout about it. The ethics of what is and isn't OK in acts of protest are complex, but without thoroughly engaging in a discourse on that topic you have to err on the side of caution - one thing gamergate certainly hasn't done.

4: game journalism is, by and large, critical journalism rather than reporting. It's not purely descriptive. In the early days of gamergate, there were attempts by various gamergaters to codify the journalism they wanted from the games press - focus on facts that could be presented honestly without or in resistance to financial/privileged incentives from the development side of the industry, the removal of opinion. The problem with this is that that's not what game journalism is or was ever for. Yes, factual journalism has always been a part of it, in reports and previews of what's coming up in the near future, and in discussions of hardware, but the majority of game journalism is reviews, and reviews are always going to be a matter of opinion. Want a broader perspective than any one person's opinion? Read a bunch of different reviews.

5: the feminism that gamergate actually spends most of its time fighting is itself ethics. What Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, Leigh Alexander et al have been campaigning for is more ethical weight in gaming. I suppose in that sense one could argue that gamergate is about ethics in gaming in that it's about keeping ethics out of gaming, but I don't think that's the claim gamergaters are making.

(sidebar: no, feminism is not 'an ideology', at least not in any sense that implies it isn't ethics. People describing feminism as an ideology are generally trying to paint it as a matter of opinion, when many of the most important concerns of feminism - rape statistics, wage gaps and so on - are matters of clear, repeatedly-proven facts. Just as human rights are an ethical system, not an ideology, so it is with feminism)

So there you go. It took me 473 words to give a (very brief) sketch of the objections to a 7-word statement.  I may be missing some objections outright, I'm certainly missing key details from all of those points (to say nothing of evidence and examples, but this is one blog post and I am only human). It's just not possible to give an organised, ordered summary of the objection to 'it's about ethics in game journalism' (at least, that provides any more detail than 'NO') in a short space of time - human beings don't read fast enough.

I don't have a solution to this one, I'm afraid. Other examples include 'if global warming is real why is winter still cold?' and 'evolution must be wrong, my grandparents weren't monkeys'. When there's just too much to argue against, you have to rely on the general audience understanding enough to enumerate the problems themselves, which has never yet been a safe bet (though of course we can work towards that in the long term).

Everyday sexism (that I am guilty of)

I was walking across campus on Monday and it so happened that the person in front of me on the path was female and attractive. I made a conscious effort not to ogle, and yet, when she was greeted by a group of her classmates waiting outside a lecture hall, I still had this weird moment of cognitive dissonance. Suddenly, she was a human being interacting with human beings, rather than a shape taking up a central chunk of my visual field.

Was this entirely a sexist response? I don't know - it was, after all, Monday morning and I'd just been giving a lecture on semantics for quantificational logic, so I was a bit spaced out, and maybe there's an argument that I was just startled by the intrusion of voices in what had been a quiet environment - but I think I can tell the difference between sensory and cognitive startlement. My point is this: it's that easy (for me as a man) to dehumanise a woman, even despite a conscious effort not to. That's how insidious sexism can be.

Another example, this one perhaps a little less everyday, but more stark. Over the last couple of days, Crash, the dog belonging to game developer and favourite gamergate target Brianna Wu, took severely ill and died. Wu mentioned this on Twitter and was barraged with abuse in the form of mockery of Crash, photos of mutilated dog corpses, and at least one fake account for Crash proclaiming 'lol I'm going to die soon'.

All of which is horrible and reprehensible, but that shouldn't need saying. What does need saying is this: I felt a new level of shock and outrage at this kind of abuse, compared to the 'usual' abuse Wu has been receiving (threats of rape and murder against her, her family and friends, and her business, which among other things drove her from her home).

To put it bluntly: abuse aimed at the dog had more emotional impact with me than abuse aimed at the woman.

Perhaps it's tempting to say something along the lines of 'well, yes, but the dog's innocent, gamergate shouldn't be dragging a pet into this'. That's stupid, though, because it implies that Wu is in some way not innocent. That she deserves some part of what's happened to her, which is bullshit.

My point, guys (and I do mean guys) is this: these subconscious psychological mechanisms don't go away when we decide to try to care about other people. I don't know whether these two responses are things I've learned or are innate in some way, but they're habits of thought so deep that even when trying to be conscious of them I miss them working.

And they are responses I am responsible for. Even if I was born with the tendency to think about women this way, as long as it has the power to affect my behaviour, I am responsible for making sure that it doesn't. I am responsible for making sure that my poisonous habits of thought don't spill out into the real world.

That requires an effort of constant vigilance, regardless of whether it's Monday morning and I've just come from lecturing on difficult logic. And it really matters, because (for example) a huge part of the problem of stopping gamergate, and of taking it seriously as something that must be stopped, is a lack of empathetic understanding of what life is like for gamergate targets - of how damaging harrassment can be.

It's exactly the kind of empathy that I've failed at (at least) twice in the last week which we (men) most need in order to recognise, understand and tackle this problem.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Go watch this. It's not necessarily a perfect sociopolitical model (after all, it's only an 8-minute video), but it's an interesting idea. The claim is basically that automation means that very soon - in the next 20 years or so - no-one will need to work longer than 12-15 hours in a week (note: we're talking about a quite complex notion of 'need' and a conservative estimate of the effects of automation in that sentence - but there's nothing in that to render the claim implausible).

And once you've watched the video - probably well before the end, in fact - you'll immediately be able to hear in the back of your mind the voice of your current political leadership (at least in Britain and America) raising the following complaint:

'Without the incentive to work more and work harder, everyone will just sit around all day doing nothing!'

Now, anecdotes are not data, but I believe I can provide at least one counterexample to that objection. For the last two-and-a-half years (longer, depending on how you account it), I have been in the fortunate position of working an average of less than 15 hours a week, and having living costs small enough and a wage rate good enough to make ends meet.

In that time, I've completed a PhD (including all the thesis-writing and most of the specific research), written well over 300,000 words of original fiction (seasons 2 and 3 of The Second Realm, two NaNoWriMo projects and a handful of short stories/novellas), written and recorded an EP of original music (which you shouldn't listen to because it's terrible but no-one can say I didn't put effort into it), decorated half a house, and studied a huge amount of stuff about the world, from feminist discourse to critical history to the publishing industry.

Perhaps none of that sounds very worthwhile (because it didn't make me any money, perhaps? But then what did I need the money for, if my living expenses were met?), but even the most cynical person could not accuse me of inactivity. And, since all these activities are things I value, no-one could accuse me of not trying to better myself (whether or not you think I'm barking up the wrong tree in terms of what I value).

The other objection to my example would be to suggest that I'm in some way exceptional - that most people in my (again, extremely fortunate) position would not behave the same way. There are two possible responses to that. The first is to take the objection as claiming that I possess some rare intrinsic virtue of productivity - and anyone who's seen me on an off day can tell you immediately that this is a particularly stupid idea. I am possessed of no exceptional will or drive at all, only a rare freedom to express a very ordinary human will.

The second response is to take the objection as making a purely statistical claim, that there is a body of data from which I am the exception. The problem with this is that no such body of data exists - my circumstances are simply too rare. There are very few jobs on which you can make even as much as I do from as few hours as I work, and I have exceptionally low costs of living.

In fact, the only people who work less than I do for more money are the very heirs and old-money institutions most likely to be found making this argument in the first place. So if I am the exception, it suggests that they are, in fact, a bunch of lazy tossers. News to no-one, perhaps, but nice to have it confirmed in their own arguments...

Diversity

My books are not very diverse. In all my published work and in my trunk novels, I have never written a black character. I've never written an openly gay character, or one who is not cisgendered. I briefly approached disability as a topic with Dora in the first season of The Second Realm, but fell into at least one common failing of mainstream disability narratives - the disability-that-is-also-a-superpower (think Daredevil).

I could give narrative reasons for at least some of this, but that would be to paper over a genuine personal and creative blind spot. It's a problem I've been growing aware of for some time, but I think it's finally reaching the point of jumping from 'aware of' to 'actually not giving myself a free pass anymore'. (Even the fact that I could be aware of my problem without feeling motivated to deal with it is a symptom of the problem).

#Weneeddiversebooks has appeared prominently on my Twitter feed recently, with the launch of a new Indiegogo campaign, raising money to fund grants for authors, classroom campaigns and other activism in support of diverse authors and books. I've just donated, because part of the problem is that I very seldom encountered diversity in the books I read growing up.

But throwing money at other people won't fix my books or my writing. That would be Medici thinking - buying my way out of past sins. I need to learn how to write outside my own demographic.

For that, I need diverse books. There are no black characters in my books because I have carelessly, lazily imitated patterns established by the books I have read, which in my genre are overwhelmingly about white people, with other races either sensationalised or rendered as primitive savages (sometimes both at the same time). The same goes for disabled and LGBTQIA people.


It's not enough for me to contribute to the funding of diverse literature. I need to seek out whatever diverse literature exists and read it. I have (ballpark) twenty million words of epic fantasy on my bookcase, in which I can think, off the top of my head, of perhaps two well-written, non-stereotyped, non-sensationalised characters outside the straight, white, able, privileged norm. That's a big imbalance to redress.

And, of course, I need to fix the imbalance in my own work. That doesn't necessarily mean meeting some arbitrary quota of 'diverse characters', nor does it mean centering my storytelling on people whose lives I do not know from the inside - it's not my place to tell other people's stories, and doing so runs the risks of appropriation and misrepresentation. But I've got to stop writing worlds where the only race is white, the only sexuality is straight, and no character is disabled.

Fantasy novels present a reality that is not necessarily our own, but they are inescapably part of our reality - not necessarily presentations of it, but always representations of it. Diversity exists in our reality, so it must be represented in fantasy (the question of how is complex, interesting and difficult, but a topic for another time).

I don't know if I can fix The Second Realm, which I'm in the process of re-editing for a collected edition at the moment, and I'm not willing to abandon it outright (either by unpublishing it or leaving it in its current state), but I'll be choosing my next project very carefully. And, of course, following #weneeddiversebooks intently for everything I can learn.

Taking my own advice.

I've talked before about how I think Facebook is a bad setting for political debate, and how it's all too conducive to a very unproductive kind of anger. Well, I've strayed a bit lately from the arguments I made in those posts, and on Friday, I got a rather unpleasant reminder of why, whether or not it's a bad idea for most people to air their politics on Facebook, it's definitely a bad idea for me to.

Turns out I'm very bad at it. I shared a link to a Forbes article about  '#gamergate' which I thought made some very good points about the tenor of the debate. A friend of mine followed the link and took me to task over the article's denial that misogyny was at the centre of the issue.

Now, there is a debate to be had over whether the article actually denied that misogyny was at the centre of the issue, or whether the writer was simply trying to put aside the misogyny, on grounds that it had been discussed elsewhere, and focus on another aspect of the controversy, but we didn't get to have that debate. I started going to pieces too quickly.

In my first response to my friend's comment, despite re-reading and checking it over several times, I used an imprecise phrase which made it sound as if I was endorsing the dismissal of misogyny from the debate. Called on that, too, I got flustered and did a terrible job of explaining the mistake. I then sat stewing in my own anxieties for an hour or two before deleting the whole post out of fear of being screencapped while trying to dig myself out of the rhetorical hole I'd gotten into.

As a highly-trained academic writer, I normally pride myself on my ability to express my thoughts in writing, but this isn't the first time something like this has happened on Facebook. (In fairness, as anyone who's been following this blog for a while can attest, I sometimes have a little too much faith in that ability). Something about that environment really makes me feel the pressure of public access.

In this case, I don't think it helps that I mainly know very smart people - I hold the judgement of most of my Facebook friends in very high regard. This raises the stakes any time I put my views on display, because if one of them calls me an idiot they're probably right (and several of them have, at various times, done so and been right). It's possible that the anxiety that causes gets in the way of clear thinking about the words I'm using, though the problem I have is also probably partly due to differences between the academic context for which I've trained and the (for want of a better word) 'popular' context of Facebook.

Whatever the cause, I don't have a solution. I'm not kidding about that re-reading and checking. I spent at least twenty minutes each on two three-paragraph comments, and still came away sounding like a conceited idiot (and yes, while I recognise that this may mean I am in fact a conceited idiot, jokes to that effect at this point in time are not a helpful contribution). For now, though, no more sharing political material for me on Facebook.

Blog Topics

I'm starting to run out of things to blog about. Or at least, I'm starting to struggle to think of new topics again. I have a couple of half-ideas knocking around, and if nothing else comes up I'm sure they'll see the light of day soon, for better or worse, but the reason I'm blogging today rather than a couple of days ago when a new post was about due is that a couple of days ago I realy didn't think I had anything ready to say.

I feel like I blog best when I blog about my own personal experiences pretty directly. At least, when I stick to quiet little stuff about how my life is going and what it involves, I incur far less scorn (and outright anger) from people whose judgement I respect. My hit counter has been climbing a lot faster since I started trying this approach, too: after generating less than 5,000 hits in the last quarter of 2013, I've had more than that every month in 2014, with June topping out at over 18,000.

The problem is, though, that 'my own personal experience' is a pretty narrow field at the moment. Life is good: I write, I play video games, and everything else is ordinary domestic routine. However good I am as a writer, I'm pretty terrible at writing about writing. And I have some awkward hang-ups about blogging about video games, at least to a non-gamer-specific audience (okay, I guess that will do for next week's topic).

There are, of course, plenty of topics in the real world that need talking about, but past experience suggests I'm not the one to be addressing them, at least in this kind of context. The legacy of spending so many years in academia is that I tend to write quite stiffly, even arrogantly, about 'big issues', and to cloud over my core message with either laboured humour or needless pedantry.

Another problem with the idea of me blogging about topical issues is how isolated I am from them. Cash-poor though I may be, my material wealth is considerable. My family provide a generous safety-net (which I am determined to never rely on again, but having it there does a lot to help my confidence and courage). As a straight, white, middle-class man in Britain, I sit in a position of considerable privilege; I can live my ordinary life and never experience discrimination, violence or hatred unless I seek them out.

That doesn't excuse me from thinking about them, but it does mean that my personal experience - the kind of thing I can blog about - is largely irrelevant to those issues. My engagement there should be founded in listening to the voices of others, learning from them, and doing what I can to boost their signals, rather than trying to add my own. The best I could do here, in a blogging context, would be to write about how I'm trying to change my behaviour to reflect what I've learned - and I'd have to be rather more confident that I'm on the right track before I could find the courage to do that.

I'm starting to worry that even this is too preachy - one of the things I have learned from listening to others, particularly people whose lives are routinely affected by injustice, is that my judgement about how the world does or should work, and about how I should behave, is profoundly unreliable. That lack of confidence in my own instinctive opinion is probably healthy (after all, I mainly write about men whose surfeit of self-confidence causes tremendous harm to those around them), but it does make sharing my views a little more intimidating.

The Idea of Dying Young

I turn 27 on Friday (yes, Friday 13th - I was actually born on a Saturday, though, which I think makes me the devil's nephew rather than his son ;) ), and as a huge fan of The Doors and Nirvana, I can't help thinking that that's the age at which people 'die young'.

As a teenager, I was obsessed by the glamour of that idea - perhaps unsurprisingly, I was the moody, insular kind of teenager, the kind who get branded 'emo' now (a label I'm fortunately just too old for). I discovered Nirvana when I was about thirteen and wallowed for a long time in Kurt Cobain's rather sad life story. I guess puberty makes everyone feel a little self-destructive.

Anyway, I became sure that I would die young - that I would have a brilliant career, be a millionaire by 25, and then die at 27 of some non-specific consequence thereof (as well as being gloomy and melodramatic, it should be acknowledged at this point that I was also insufferably arrogant -  I may still be, but hindsight makes it painfully obvious even to me >_>).

The bad news is that I haven't had a brilliant career yet. The good news is that I've managed to grow out of my desire to die young. This is mostly to do with not having pubescent hormones playing havok with my better judgement, but there's also probably an element of real growing-up involved.

There's also the realisation that lots of people die at other ages than 27, of course. Leonard Cohen is my favourite living songwriter at 79, despite definitely doing a fair amount of living fast when he was young. Keats, my greatest literary hero, died at 25 (which isn't really much comfort, since it means that by the time he was my age, he'd already written almost everything on my 'top 10 favourite poems' list).

At first glance, the names and obituaries look compelling. It's certainly true that some of the most-canonised icons of the 20th century died at 27 - besides Cobain and Jim Morrison, the most famous are probably Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones - but then, others escaped. Keith Moon, for example, made it all the way to 32. Despite his best efforts, Keith Richards is still going (hm... maybe it's something to do with being called 'Keith'?). James Dean went early, at 24, though if you'd asked me before I checked for this article I'd have sworn he died at 27.

Wikipedia cites a study claiming to show that there is actually no cluster of deaths among the young and famous at 27 (though musicians are apparently more likely to die young, just not necessarily at 27), but there's definitely a cluster of remarked-upon deaths at 27. That makes this a media phenomenon, and they can start for any reason or none at all. The cluster of deaths from 1969-71 (Jones, Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison) certainly make for fertile fodder, and apparently a remark of Cobain's mother at the time of his death may have contributed to the myth taking root.

There's an interesting and serious question about how dangerous the myth is - on the one hand, there was a time when I wanted to die young, and I can't be that unusual in that regard given how much fuss was made over the more recent death of Amy Winehouse, but on the other it's hard to claim that most people don't grow out of it long before they hit 27 themselves.

The question that more interests me (though it's arguably a less important one) is this. Most media myths take root because they fulfil some cultural-psychological need. A simple example is 'the immigrants are taking all the jobs' - it explains why there are no jobs without having to acknowledge the real reason, that the economy just doesn't have that kind of jobs in it anymore. What, then, is the social function (for want of a better expression) of the myth of dying young? I really don't have an answer, despite having experienced its power very strongly myself for quite a long time.

'Ownership' of a tragedy

There are at least three major political topics involved in the discussion that has followed the mass shooting last week in Isla Vista, California; gun violence, violence against women, and the link between violence and mental health. This article focusses on the first and last of the three, while this one discusses the second (they aren't necessarily the best articles on any of the points involved, just ones I found on facebook this morning).

All three of those debates are weighty and difficult. They are also very important, but many people are better-placed than me to tackle them in writing. What motivated me to write today is an argument I saw (also on facebook, because that's pretty much my only contact with the outside world) between people discussing the gender dimension of the tragedy and someone arguing that the 'real issue' was gun control.

I have subsequently seen more of this tug-of-war over how we should respond, politically, to the tragedy. You can argue it any of the three different ways, in both directions - from the obvious ones, like whether or not male gun control activists should be 'allowed' to dismiss women talking about sexual violence and the 'men's rights' movement (they shouldn't), to the perhaps-less-obvious, like whether mental health should be blamed (and I stress, people identified as having mental health issues are far more likely to be the victims of violence than its perpetrators; the media's insistence on blaming psychological problems is hugely damaging to campaigns for rights for disabled people).

But this isn't a zero-sum game. A tragedy is not a pot of political capital, finite in depth, from which different campaigns must compete to draw. Treating it as such cheapens both it and the people doing the treating. For anyone outside the circle of people with an immediate personal link to the event, a tragedy is a lesson, and it is a poor lesson that has only one thing to teach.

Would Elliot Rodger have been able to kill and injure as many people as he did if access to guns in America was more tightly controlled? Almost certainly not. Was his attack driven by misogynistic motives and a misogynistic culture? It seems so. Would he have turned to violence at all if he had had access to better support for his Asperger Syndrome? That's a very complex question, and worthy of deep investigation.

No one group owns this terrible event, except possibly the families and friends of the victims. No one person speaking about this has the right to tell another that their view is irrelevant or wrong (again, except perhaps to ask them to be more considerate of the feelings of those directly affected). No such division should be allowed to get in the way of learning from Isla Vista (and Sandy Hook, and Steubenville, and all the other towns that have lost their names to human disasters).

You can't be inclusive and have fun, apparently.

So I was going to blog today about how half the political parties listed on the ballot for the European Parliament elections we had on Thursday were one-issue anti-Europe parties (a situation so ridiculously satirical that it has somehow passed out the far side of satire and into actually happening), but then I read this and changed my mind.

The article is a critique of certain remarks by officials at Blizzard Entertainment (who make World of Warcraft) and Nintendo in which, roughly, they argued that their games are focussed on 'fun', and that this is incompatible with presenting ethnic, gender and sexual diversity in a responsible manner. As the article puts it, they "position 'gameplay' and 'fun' in direct opposition to producing socially-conscious content."

And the article does a wonderful job of criticising this attitude, pointing out that it's equivalent to saying that a world where Blizzard and Nintendo don't have to respect other people's lives and lifestyles is simpler or more fun (I'm summarising pretty brutally - seriously, read the original article, it does a much better job of this than I can). Originally, I was just going to re-share the article to boost signal, but then I realised there was something in it I'd like to expand on.

That's the matter of how this dichotomy between fun and inclusive came to be. Why is it that the 'fun' gets spoiled when game developers (or movie studios, or book publishers etc.) try to be inclusive? I suppose there's a risk of them getting it wrong, and producing something that condescends to the groups it attempts to include. Some might think that it would add expense, in the form of making development more complex, but as this follow-up suggests, that's certainly not true for Blizzard or Nintendo in this case.

The truth, of course, is that when you get inclusive, particularly in the videogame world, the douchebags come out of the woodwork. A small minority - far smaller than any of the 'minority' groups which inclusiveness in the media should reach out to - make a big fuss and direct it at the developers, producers and other creatives. Here is one example from a couple of years ago.

And I can well imagine that this does spoil the fun, for the developers. Nobody likes having to deal with these bigots. It potentially spoils the fun for anyone who ends up paying attention to them, too - we all know that youtube comment threads are the new train wrecks, right? You just can't look away, no matter how much revulsion you feel.

But treating such bigotry and hatred as unbeatable is part of the problem. In saying that 'fun' is incompatible with inclusion, developers like Blizzard are surrendering the field without a fight. It's particularly weak of them in respect of World of Warcraft, where they could replace every non-player character with a gay black woman and only one player in a thousand would even notice.

Blizzard bigwig Rob Pardo is quoted in the article as having said of inclusion, "I wouldn't say that's really a value for us. It's not something that we're against either....", but that's not a fence you can sit on. Failing to uphold inclusion as a value is acting against it, because it allows a toxic status quo to persist. Failing to challenge the douchebags is letting them win.

Graduation

So, I was going to leave talking about graduation ceremonies and why I don't like them until I was due to graduate (which is to say, July), but then I realised that putting up a blog post saying GRADUATION IS BAD AND YOU SHOULDN'T GO right as people are actually graduating might be construed as sneering or otherwise unpleasant. So, you get it now instead ;)

I will not be attending my PhD graduation, and there are several reasons for this, most of which are personal to me. At least one is a more general criticism of the modern style of ceremony, and I'll get to that in a minute, but I want to start by saying this: your graduation is a celebration of your achievement, and if you want to celebrate your achievement that way, go to.

In some ways, the biggest reason I'm not going to my graduation (and that I didn't go to my undergrad ceremony either) is that I don't like wearing a suit and generally dislike formal celebrations anyway. That's not how I prefer to have my achievements celebrated. Particularly with something as individual and niche as a PhD, I found a much more satisfying celebration to be going to lunch after my final examination with my two examiners and my supervisor. Your mileage may vary.

The big problem I see with the modern graduation ceremony, particularly in evidence during my MA graduation (the only one I've actually attended), is the factory-assembly-line quality of it. Graduands queue up at one side of the stage, are released one at a time to walk across, receive their handshake and their stamp of approval, and disappear again, now certified graduates. At my MA graduation, the presiding university official (who was some sort of deputy-pro-vice-mini-chancellor) hadn't even bothered to learn his 'I admit you to the degree of...' lines and was reading them from a card cupped in the palm of his hand.

If this sounds a little bit Marxist, it's fair to say that it probably is. This is about as close as I get to true Marxism. I'm not sure I buy the line that all our systems of formal education have been designed to stamp out good capitalist workers, but I certainly felt that way as I stood in my prescribed uniform (which was given one last check-over before I was allowed onto the stage) and marched to the precisely-calculated script and blocking that would get two hundred students through the ceremony in the allotted two hours (or whatever the numbers were).

And it's particularly galling to see this at a university level. University is supposed to be about education that allows and encourages people to flourish in their own right and way. It's about individual effort, innovation and thought. It shouldn't just be viewed as a 'better job ticket' (particularly since, these days, there are so few graduate jobs that it really isn't a better job ticket). There should be more to celebrating a degree than just a handshake and a certificate.

I would much prefer graduation ceremonies to be smaller, maybe having each department or even each course have its own small ceremony. This way, graduands would be celebrated by people who knew them, knew the character and value of their achievements, and understood their work. Graduates might even be given the chance to speak, briefly, about their university experiences both in and out of the classroom. Perhaps it would cost too much money (though universities must spend quite a lot on graduation as it is), but that's the kind of graduation I'd be interested in going to.

Again, though, these are just my feelings on the matter, and because I hate formal celebrations and formal wear, there's nothing for me in the other column. Ultimately, this is an aesthetic problem - a problem of appearance, style and manner - rather than an ethical one. Going to a graduation ceremony doesn't endorse the industrialisation of universities, necessarily. It just resembles it, and that's what I don't like.

Words that confuse me: 'liberal'

Growing up in the UK in the 90s and 00s, the Liberal Democrat Party was the main option for left-wing voters who didn't trust Tony Blair's 'New' Labour Party. Though (or perhaps because they were) electorally something of a running joke, always third and never in a position to contest for second, they stood for everything that real politicians lacked the conscience to stand for. They were, or at least seemed like, a party of compassion in an age of spin, a party of reason and intellect in an age of populism, the first party beside the Greens to take ecological issues seriously and so on.

I was proud to help my dad campaign for them in the 2001 and 2005 general elections, to support him in his (ultimately unsuccessful) bid to be a Lib Dem councillor, and to vote for them twice myself, at a by-election in 2005 and again in 2010 - though in the latter case, the choice proved profoundly misguided. It will be a long time before I vote for them again, I suspect, but that's a different story.

That was my first experience with 'liberalism'. In college and university, studying philosophy, I had my second, in John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' and related reading. As presented in that book (though a broader picture of Mill's work is more complex), liberalism is a primarily social doctrine about ensuring equality of treatment for all and maximising personal freedom, particularly of culture and expression. It fit very well with my understanding of 'liberal'.

So I was very surprised, when working as support in a sociology of education lecture, to hear the lecturer say that the father of classical liberalism is Adam Smith, he of 'The Wealth of Nations', which to me at the time was the founding work of the profoundly right-wing ideology of laissez-faire capitalism.

I was discussing this contrast with a friend a couple of weeks ago (hi Andy!) and he opined that 'liberal' is a meaningless term these days. It's certainly hard to reconcile a term that can refer both to Mill and Adam Smith, or in a more modern frame to both John Maynard Keynes on the left and Milton Friedman on the right.

Partly, it's to do with the growing gap between American and British English. Even Wikipedia has had to admit that there's a split developing. Roughly, in Britain where socialism has always traditionally represented the left, 'liberalism' is generally taken in a more right-wing sense (though this is less true in the middle class, who I think are less influenced by a socialist conceptual scheme), whereas in America, where socialism has been so thoroughly demonised that it's a political smear, 'liberal' is the safe (or at least safer) label for a left-wing politician. It wouldn't be the first time that I've absorbed the American definition of a term over the British.

Anyway, I'm interested to hear if anyone else is as confused as I am by all this. What does 'liberal' mean to you?

(Sidebar: let's keep the - entirely justified - complaints about the behaviour of the lib dems since 2010 elsewhere, please? None of us are happy about it, but it's a debate for a different time.)

Orson Scott Card

Every so often, I come across an issue which, though it deeply troubles me, I can't find a rational, analytic way to approach. The riots of two years ago were one such. This week, I've been reminded of another. See, it seems the Ender's Game movie is finally on its way.

In a way, this isn't a concern at all for me, since I haven't been to see a movie in a long time, and don't intend to go out of my way to see one in the future. I don't really like just watching things anymore - I want to be involved in what's happening in my entertainment. So the point is moot; I won't be going to see Ender in the cinema.

The thing is, if I was going purely off the quality of the book, I'm pretty sure I'd make an exception for Ender (putting aside the complex question of how severely the book will be ruined by Hollywood - and, given certain important but brutal scenes, I can't imagine how it wouldn't be). From a purely literary standpoint, Ender's Game is one of the finest works in the sci-fi canon, one of very few to stand alongside Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Arthur Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. It's an amazing achievement.

But its author is a terrible, homophobic bigot. This column is a typical example of his views. I'm not going to get into an argument about its (total lack of) logic - other people have done better jobs elsewhere, and it pains me too much to have to think that so brilliant an artist could be so repugnantly shortsighted and conceited.

Card's views have little to do with me personally - I am sure he would have little or no objection to my life and lifestyle - but many of my friends are bisexual, gay, or (and I can only assume this is even worse from Card's rigid, box-thinking viewpoint) transgendered or gender-fluid. I cannot read Card's articles without thinking of those people, and I cannot read Card's fiction without thinking of his articles.

I have copies of Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead on my bookcase (I didn't actually enjoy Speaker that much when I read it - before I knew of Card's views - and I haven't picked it up again since). I read Ender last year, allowing myself one last chance to study the craft of it. It was a painful, conflicted experience. I found myself reevaluating what might have been in Card's mind as he wrote about the relationships among family and among young friends which are the novel's most powerful features.

There are big, meaty philosophical debates to get into here: in the first place, a debate over whether a work of art's aesthetic value can be or should be separated from the artist's morality, and in the second a debate about whether a book or film - particularly one as rich and challenging as Ender - should ever be boycotted. But I can't get into them. I've been trying to think of an approach for a couple of days now, and all I have is what you've just read.

I suppose I'm joining the boycott of Ender whether or not I actually advocate it. I'm not terribly comfortable with that distinction - normally I take it as a principle that you should only do things you can advocate for with a clear conscience - but it's what I'm stuck with in this case. My reasons for not seeing Ender in the cinema are, fundamentally, to do with Card's views, whether or not they should be. If you find you can still enjoy the book despite opposing Card's views, go see the film (though I do agree with the suggestion of the article I linked above, that you should donate the cost of a film ticket to a gay rights group as well).

Can the government force you to be evil?

Here is a story about a group of Christian (or at least Christian-owned) businesses in the US trying to get out of providing healthcare support for abortions on religious grounds. The article is clearly written by an atheist, and one who makes much of being shocked and horrified by the prospect.

Two caveats before we go any further: first, I'm assuming that Hobby Lobby and the other companies involved are sincere in their faith. If they aren't, then it's just another political lie, any one of which is as bad as another when it comes to shaping policy. Secondly, I am against Hobby Lobby etc. in this case - I agree with the author of that article that there is no biblical justification for opposing abortion, and even if there were, I don't think these companies should get an exception from the law.

(Also, the specific defence offered by the appeals court is ridiculous - basically, they appear to be treating a corporation and its business practices as a 'form of evangelism', which is horseshit).

BUT

I do want to try to make a slightly more neutral analysis of what's actually happening here. The reason that, to an atheist, the idea of a religious exception to a law is so abhorrent is that it seems to contravene the First Amendment to the US Constitution, because it is a law 'respecting an establishment of religion'.

There are two points to raise here. The first, obviously, is that the constitution is subject to amendment and reinterpretation in all sorts of ways, and should fit the will of the people. If Hobby Lobby etc. feel that the constitution should be changed, they have a right to challenge it. That said, I think there are very good reasons for the First Amendment, or something like it (I come, after all, from a country where Bishops still sit in the legislature).

But here's what the First Amendment actually says:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

And what Hobby Lobby could claim, I think, is that the law requiring them to provide funding for abortions is prohibiting the free exercise of their religious beliefs. They believe (again, assuming they're sincere) that abortion is the murder of children, and thus prohibited by their religion - and, indeed, by any sane morality ever. They believe it's evil.

And you can say, as the author of that article does, 'well, that's just what they believe, and people can believe anything without that making it right', but this completely misses the point. All judgements about what is and isn't evil are belief judgements. If there are facts about right and wrong, we have yet to discover or agree on any of them.

(This isn't to reject the science - there are facts about what contraceptives are and are not abortifacients, and nothing Hobby Lobby's owners believe can change that.)

Let me construct an analogous case with a politically opposite situation (and I apologise for how hazy my knowledge of actual US law is in this instance). Say that at some point in the future, the US goes to war. You oppose the war personally, but accept that (unlike, say, the Iraq invasion) appropriate democratic process has been followed. Then the government institutes a draft and you (or your child, or friend, or whatever) is called up. Do you allow the government to force you into acts of violence you believe to be immoral?

Of course not. Or at least, it would be an act of severe moral cowardice to go along with it. You look for due-process ways of opposing the government's decision. In the most extreme case, you can renounce your citizenship, but nobody expects you to do so as your first course of action.

And as far as I'm aware, Hobby Lobby are following due process. In the first place, this is a debate about the interpretation of the 'prohibiting the free exercise' clause of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court in the US is, at least by tradition, responsible for the interpretation of the constitution. To get access to the Supreme Court, you have to go up through all the lesser courts. To my knowledge, that's what Hobby Lobby and the rest of their group have done.

Again, I'm not saying that their case should succeed (unless it is, at the widest level, the will of the people of the US, but if it is then the people of the US need to think again about why the First Amendment is so important). But the kind of knee-jerk reaction in the article I linked at the start is not helping and is arguing in the wrong place.

The argument I would be making against Hobby Lobby is that whatever the personal beliefs of its owners, their corporation is in the public sphere (i.e. affects many people besides the owners and thus exemptions for personal beliefs don't apply) and must be bound by public laws. If they don't like the laws, they must get out of the public sphere because the laws governing the public sphere are just and justifiable.

Reacting with horror and anger will just put people's backs up and polarise the debate, and that's never good for democracy.

Privacy part 3: What is it?

Part 1 - Part 2

In part 2 of this rather impromptu series, I finished up by asking some questions about the link between secrecy and privacy. Part of what I was asking, and indeed something that's been bubbling along under the surface since the start, is what is meant by 'privacy', and what issues count as issues of privacy.

Here's how the dictionary defines privacy:

"A state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people; the state of being free from public attention." (Source)

So there are three different kinds of issue that fall under privacy, if this is correct (and it sounds plausible to me). First, there are issues of observation, secondly of disturbance, and third of public attention.

Each of these kinds of privacy breaks down further, too - there is, at least arguably, a difference between government observation, corporate surveillance, and individual invasions of privacy like stalking. Public attention could mean the kind of paparazzastic fervour visited on celebrities, or the attention of a crowd in the street rubbernecking at an accident.

The question, then, is whether there are activities which legitimately should be kept free from any of these three kinds of invasion. Are there times when one should be unobserved? Are there times when one should be undisturbed? Are there times when the public should avert its collective gaze?

The answers to the latter two questions, I think, are clearly both 'yes'. There are times when invasions of privacy in both of these senses can inflict actual psychological harm, if nothing else. The collective public attention in particular can be very stressful for those it picks on, particularly if the large-scale media gets involved.

But most of the discussions I see about privacy seem mainly to be about the first kind of privacy - observation. And I still struggle to approach the question of 'Are there times when one should be unobserved?' in a constructive way at all. I think this is because I separate the fact of being observed from the fact of information gained through observation being used in any way (and I do this at quite a basic, intuitive level, not necessarily as a rationally-considered position).

This separation suggests to me that merely being observed cannot make a difference to anything. It's true that sometimes when observed we behave differently - I've said before that I'm powerfully self-conscious, and prone to sudden bursts of awkwardness from accidentally making eye contact with strangers - but this may be blurring the line between observation and disturbance. It's not the observation that's the problem, but (at least, arguably) the various social constructs around it which make it disturbing.

The reason that the old philosophical cliche 'If a tree falls in a forest and there's no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound?' is normally considered to be a specious and silly question is that observation is supposed to make no difference to the way things stand (Schrodinger and his cat notwithstanding, but that particular bit of physics only applies to subatomic particles anyway). So, for anything you do, there is no reason to be concerned about whether it is observed or not because it cannot possibly make any difference either way.

Perhaps this seems too hard-line. The author of this rather vague and unfocussed article certainly agrees. He says that the real privacy issues arising from government surveillance (observation) are problems of data handling, not collection. They are problems of whether the government's (or any other agency's) holding of your data can harm you in some way.

For example, one of the problems of government surveillance is that of false positives - of the government (or any other agency - I keep stressing this because I'm far less worried about government surveillance than private corporate surveillance) guessing from the data it collects about you that you are guilty of something which in fact you haven't done. Perhaps you buy some books about Islam and a government-owned computer somewhere judges that you may be becoming a radical, rather than just curious.

Another problem is that knowledge is power. A government that holds lots of information on its citizens is more likely to be able to wield its power against them if it becomes corrupt. For example, a government that keeps detailed track of its citizens' locations is better-placed to arrest one for blowing the whistle on corruption or malpractice in government.

I agree entirely that these are the problems arising from government (or corporate) surveillance. What I disagree with the author of the linked article about is that these are privacy issues, or possibly that these are issues of invasion of privacy. They are issues of government (or corporate) secrecy and/or incompetence. They are issues of a power imbalance which is probably an inevitable part of even democratic governments.

And, crucially, they are issues of a lack of transparency. When we do not know what information the government has about us, or how that information is being used or is going to be used, there are all sorts of ways in which we can be harmed. Not knowing makes us powerless. It stops us defending ourselves.

My point is that freedom of information should be a two-way street. Governments (and corporations, though I recognise in this particular sentence that's a more radical view) should under no circumstances be allowed to operate in secret - they must be answerable to their citizens (or stakeholders). Of course, a government or corporation that is always answerable to all its citizens or stakeholders is an ideal, a dream, but as I said last time out, that's what I deal in. I accept the practical need for privacy just as I accept the practical need for some government secrets.

But the ideal, always-answerable government is one whose information-gathering and information-holding can cause no harm, because its citizens can always prevent it doing so.

There's still a lingering question over whether privacy should be protected even in a world where it is impossible that invasions of privacy could cause any harm, but I cannot see a way to get hold of that question discursively at all - it seems like it will reduce to a matter of intuition about what life would be like in such a world - so I won't be pursuing it here, at least for the time being.

Principle, Practice and Privacy

There is a difference between how things are and how they should be. What I mean is not the obvious, that things (generally speaking) are not how they should be, but that the question 'how are things?' is a different kind of question to the question 'how should things be?'

In philosophical terminology, 'how are things?' is an empirical question - it seeks information about the world, and is answered by using our senses, our scientific methods, and so on. 'How should things be?' is what we call 'normative'. For present purposes, though, I'll refer to this divide as the practice/principle divide; this can be made explicit by extending the two questions into 'How are things, in practice?' and 'How should things be, in principle?', both of which are relatively familiar from an idiomatic point of view.

Philosophy is preeminently the study of questions of principle. It may - indeed, should - take account of matters of practice, because principles that turn out to be irrelevant to the world aren't much good to anyone, but a philosophical analysis is an analysis of principles, and the skills that ten years of studying philosophy equips one (specifically, me) with are the skills of this kind of analysis. It's not a subject aimed at establishing how things are, or even about predicting how things will be.

Why bring up this distinction? Well, in the first place, I've had several brangles with people over the life of this blog, both here and elsewhere, because we were unclear which side of the principle/practice divide we were talking about. Most people, quite rightly, think in terms of practice first. From the perspective of actually living, it is less essential to think about principle, but that doesn't mean it's not important to have some people who think about principles - which is what I try to specialise in.

The particular reason and context for talking about this now is that the distinction neatly characterises the responses I got to my blog post last month about privacy. In that post, I asked for reasons to be concerned about violations of my privacy. I (quite deliberately) didn't make a principle/practice distinction; I wanted both kinds of reasons.

I got some very interesting practice-based reasons, and I am now less complacent than I was about practical matters of privacy. But I got no response based on a general principle. The closest I got was the point that the specific case of PRISM clashes with the principle of the rule of law, because the US government is supposed to be bound by the 4th Amendment, which PRISM clearly violates (thanks to Rafe for this point). That's entirely correct and I agree wholeheartedly, but because it refers to a specific case, it's still a point of practice rather than principle. The question of principle would be 'Is the 4th Amendment justified?'

A common theme among the practice-based answers I got was, in a way, principle-directed, in that it asked 'If there was no principle of privacy, where would infringements of privacy stop?'. An example of this is the question 'Would you still not object if the government put a camera in your bedroom?', the implicit point being that this is surely something that would make me object on privacy grounds.

It's true that I would feel deeply, powerfully self-conscious and uncomfortable with a camera in my bedroom. But, to turn this into something that is truly a question of principle, we can ask whether I should feel uncomfortable in this way. I am uncomfortable with my own body, to be sure, and don't really like having other people see it (even relatively commonly-exposed bits of it, like my arms - and it's very rare to see me in shorts or with bare feet), but this is because of a whole bunch of negative messages society is throwing at me, possibly combined with a pathological psychological condition or two.

I like to believe that, were all those factors removed (none of which I consider to be essential to who I am, so we're not talking about changing me in anything I consider to be a significant way), I would be entirely happy to be seen naked. I would like to believe, perhaps even, that I could be proud of my body, and thus untroubled by the idea of a camera recording me getting dressed or whatever.

The 'What about a camera in your bedroom?' question gets its emotive force from the fact that many of us are ashamed of at least something that such a camera would record - whether it's getting undressed, or dancing around the bedroom in our underwear, or watching My Little Pony, or whatever. But we can argue that this shame is a result of an unjust stigmatisation, and that (so long as they are not harmful), the things that we do for pleasure/fun should, in principle, never be subjects for shame. If you love My Little Pony, it should be a subject for pride, a part of your identity, rather than something you dislike about yourself.

The really interesting question, from a principled point of view, is whether you can ever do something you're proud of and still want it kept private. I think I'm going to have to split this topic there, though, and tackle the link between secrecy and privacy separately.

Let me be clear about one thing: the fact that there is a question of principle hanging over privacy does not invalidate practice-based arguments for privacy. In particular, it doesn't invalidate democratic decisions; if most people still want privacy, our governments ought to be legally bound to uphold it, because the principle of the rule of law is very clearly desirable, and that means democratic governments doing what their people want.

If we do, in our next installment, conclude that there isn't a principled ground for privacy, then we can still say that privacy is a temporary necessity, and the need for it a symptom of a deeper illness (society's tendency to shame and stigmatise, or even outright punish, certain activities and kinds of activities). The situation is analogous to going to war - we abhor, from a principled point of view, the killing and destruction, but we must sometimes cause some killing and destruction (so the theory behind military responses goes, at least) to prevent greater atrocities.

I'm not saying we should all happily install cameras in our bedrooms tomorrow. I'm just saying that the question of why we shouldn't has a deeper answer than the purely emotional one.