An Atheist's Epitaph

I get great pleasure from reading Greg Ross's Futility Closet, which never fails to surprise, challenge and entertain me. I don't like pinching other people's posts wholesale, but this was too good not to share. It's the text of an inscription on the monument to one George F Spencer of Vermont, who died in 1908:

Beyond the universe there is nothing and within the universe the supernatural does not and cannot exist. Of all deceivers who have plagued mankind, none are so deeply ruinous to human happiness as those impostors who pretend to lead by a light above nature. Science has never killed or persecuted a single person for doubting or denying its teachings, and most of these teachings have been true; but religion has murdered millions for doubting or denying her dogmas, and most of these dogmas have been false.

I'd call myself an agnostic rather than an atheist*, but this message rings very true for me.

*In this I follow my father, who answered my question "what religion are you, Dad?" thus: it is not that we do not know whether God exists (which can be resolved one way or the other, given time and/or sufficient evidence), but that we can never know.

I am reminded in this of J B S Haldane's famous remark: "My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. "

New Motorcycling Quote

Via the excellent Highwaylass, this quotation from Theresa Wallach, in her Easy Motorcycle Riding, published in 1970.

You are on your own. You are not protected by two tons of steel, rubber, foam padding and safety glass. Neither are you steering two tons of guided missile toward other cars, people and property. If you are prepared to accept the responsibility of your own actions, then motorcycling can be both safe and thrilling. Riding is an art as well as a craft and no amount of explanation can take the place of experience.

That pretty well encapsulates in a single paragraph what I have been saying on here from time to time for the last two years.

Theresa Wallach was a true pioneer. She rode at Brooklands (lapping at over 100 mph on a 350cc Norton single and winning the British Motorcycle Racing Club's Gold Star in 1939) and rode in trials. Best of all, she crossed the Sahara in 1935 on a Panther with sidecar, in the company of another ballsy female, Florence Blenkiron. No film crew, no team doctor, no back-up truck with factory mechanics, no satellite phone.

She understood. I leave you with more words of hers, which again strike a chord with me:

When I first saw a motorcycle, I got a message from it. It was a feeling - the kind of thing that makes a person burst into tears hearing a piece of music or standing awestruck in front of a fine work of art. Motorcycling is a tool with which you can accomplish something meaningful in your life. It is an art.

Thoughts

Nobody tells me what to think. You can change my behaviour through legal threats and sanctions. You can even stop me saying things by speech codes and threats of imprisonment or ostracisation. But you cannot change what I think. And, if you attempt to do that, you will find you are unsuccessful. What is in my head is mine, not yours. If you want to persuade me of something, talk to me. Give me evidence and argument - but make it real evidence and logical argument, not falsehoods and trickery, presented clearly and without prejudice or manipulation. I am wise to those things. And don't ever try to make me feel guilty about what I do or what I think. I've been around on this planet a long time now, and there are reasons for everything I say and do. I think what I think because I have thought a lot. I do what I do because it works for me. As long as I am not harming anyone, I will do as I please, and my right to do that is more ancient than your right to stop me merely because you disapprove. I'm always prepared to change my mind, if I think the evidence warrants it. But I won't be bullied into changing the way I feel by people who think I am not a worthy human being just because I disagree with them.

Speak to me as an adult, an equal, and I will listen. Patronise me, try to bully me, try to make me feel guilty for my thoughts, marginalise me, and I will not.

That Apology

Phil Walker over at The Melangerie has an interesting point to make about 10:10's 'apology' for the 'No Pressure' débacle:

"Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn't and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended." (from the 10:10 site, my emphasis)

... the person wants to portray the complainant as part of a minority, a way to set themselves in the majority. I'm hardly a rampant postmodernist, but even I can see that this is a simple play for power using words: 'I have many people on my side; you only have some.'

The 'many … some …' construction is a wonderful way to puff yourself up and to paint your position as more defensible than really it is. In fact, if you find yourself feeling a need to use it in order to locate yourself in the majority, the odds are that you're the one in the wrong. So let me encourage you, when you apologise (yes, when), not to use it. Apologise graciously, rather than attempting to justify your position by the back door.

Well said.

White Liberals and Kafkatrapping

Those of you not interested in politics and philosophy, look away now.

I came across two things recently that impressed me greatly. The first is a blogpost (well, more like an essay) by Edmund Standing, on the topic of 'white liberals'. It's as good an assessment of the Guradian-reading, bien-pensant mindset as I have seen, and I recommend it to you. It's long, but here's a flavour of it:

The white liberal is an unhealthy type of creature that you will undoubtedly have encountered, if not in real life, certainly via the media. By ‘liberal’, I do not mean simply someone who has a generally liberal outlook, in the sense of a ‘live and let live’ philosophy, nor do I mean liberals in the sense of the classical liberals of the conservative tradition. By ‘white liberal’, I mean a white Western individual who is likely to come from a middle class background and have a university education, considers him or herself to be both ‘left-wing’ and socially ‘liberal’, and almost certainly reads The Guardian or The Independent. White liberals espouse an artificial and pretentious form of ‘egalitarianism’, a patronising and hypocritical approach to ethnic minorities and non-Western cultures, and – in a re-hash of the notion of the ‘white man’s burden’ – devote themselves to a delusional Messianism in which they seek to ‘save the world’ through protesting against war (in real terms, protesting against non-white people having a chance at freedom and democracy), Israel (the one truly liberal society in the Middle East), globalisation (thereby opposing the one great vehicle by which poorer nations can develop), and so on, while making themselves feel and look ‘good’ by flaunting their pious support for campaigns to end poverty in the Third World (which will do no such thing, as Dambisa Moyo, Stephen Pollard, Marian L. Tupy, and others rightly point out ), and boasting about how ‘progressive’ they are by showing ‘solidarity’ with genocidal Islamists in Gaza.

White liberals, despite viewing themselves as intelligent and open-minded, are actually some of the most illiberal and narrow-minded people in society today. Their reactions to the idea that anyone might think differently to them range from gut-wrenching despair to pure hatred of the kind seen in the most fanatical of ‘true believers’. White liberals are, by and large, incapable of serious adult debate (preferring innuendo and accusations of bigotry), or of dealing with the fact that not everyone will agree with them (despite their supposed love of pluralism and a multiplicity of different ‘voices’), and tend to see any view which deviates from their cultic leftist script as a form of irredeemable moral evil.

The comments are worth a read, too.

The second is another essay/blogpost (shorter than the first one) which introduces a new term - 'Kafkatrapping'. This is a form of argument often used by the Left, in which by refusing to acknowledge your (for example) racism, you are proving that you are a racist. It makes any argument unwinnable for the non-Left person, provided that he/she doesn't see what is being done and acquiesces in the fallacy.

Good causes sometimes have bad consequences. Blacks, women, and other historical out-groups were right to demand equality before the law and the full respect and liberties due to any member of our civilization; but the tactics they used to “raise consciousness” have sometimes veered into the creepy and pathological, borrowing the least sane features of religious evangelism.

One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap. In this essay, I will show that the kafkatrap is a form of argument that is so fallacious and manipulative that those subjected to it are entitled to reject it based entirely on the form of the argument, without reference to whatever particular sin or thoughtcrime is being alleged. I will also attempt to show that kafkatrapping is so self-destructive to the causes that employ it that change activists should root it out of their own speech and thoughts.

Interesting idea, and again the comments are worth a look.

The Brylcreem Bounce

Ok, I'm certifiably bonkers, but ... bear with me.

I was driving home this morning after doing my lecturing gig at the New University, and a jingle came into my head. Don't ask me why, for I know not. But in the 70s, there was an advert for a men's grooming product called Brylcreem, I'd say 'ask your grandad', but I understand that Brylcreem has undergone a bit of a revival recently, so maybe the cultural reference isn't so obscure. The ad showed lots of men with greasy quiffs, and was accompanied by a jingle:

A little dab of Brylcreem on your hair
Gives you the Brylcreem ... bou-ounce!

The word 'bounce' was sung as two syllables, with the first glissanding from a minor to a major third, and the second back on the tonic. I can hear now the rather strained mid-Atlantic accent of the singer, and the tune and tempo, note for note. And I can also remember the version we, as skoolboys, used to sing:

A little dab of Brylcreem on your stairs
Makes your Granny ... bou-ounce!

Now, I know that this is only humorous in the 'you had to be there' sense. But what puzzled me for the next twenty miles was -

Where the hell was all this information stored? Which part of what I laughingly call my 'brain' was host to the chemicals and charges and switches and zaps that went together to recreate this resoundingly stupid jingle? I don't believe in homeopathy, and I won't accept that bits of my 'brain' had this memory in their - er - memory, without there being some physical manifestation. If I think of it as an audio file on a computer, then I suppose we are dealing with something around 200Kb, or the size of a meduim-sized photo. Oh, and another 200Kb for the skoolboy version. And this is real data: if you were unlucky enough to have me in your living room at this moment, I could sing it to you, with a fairly faithful rendition of tune and tone of voice. In other words, it isn't virtual data - it is realisable in the real world.

I suppose, in computer terms, it is a small file somewhere in an archive folder, which can be retrieved and replayed by the right combination of search terms and commands.

So - where was it? Where?

And also, while we are on the subject, where are all the other stupid, inconsequential, trivial, nugatory, negligible (except that they aren't, in the strict sense of the word) and irrelevant memories that I can recall if the circumstances are right? The rather fatty taste of a cheap ice-cream when I was on holiday with my parents in Cornwall in - let's say - 1960? The sound of the crowd at a firework display on the same trip (oooh on the way up, ahhh on the way down, since you ask - something which has proved useful in all sorts of situations)? The feel of the front doorstep (Cardinal Red) on the backs of my legs when I used to sit there talking to the girl next door at the age of nine?

It's all there.

(And why is it that I can remember the precise details of the transmission arrangements of Emilio Largo's yacht Disco Volante in Fleming's 1961 novel Thunderball (the Shertel-Sachsenberg system, if you must know), when more recent and significant information, such as the date of the Health and Safety At Work Act, is always just beyond reach, and I need to look it up? Again.)

It strikes me that the human brain is impossibly complex and labrynthine - especially when it can be used to question and examine its own workings, as it is now.

Thank you, Mr Pirsig

Fresh from a night's sleep, I approached the recalcitrant bolt again. In three seconds, I had the answer. The bolt was set down in a well, which prevented me getting the Allen key into the socket far enough. The only (very limited) angle where I could get the key in fully was blocked by the frame. So, looking at the situation from a different angle, it was the frame that was the problem, not the well. And when I looked at the frame to see what, exactly, was stopping the Allen key swinging, I found it was a thin metal strip with formed a guide to the horn wires. I bent it out of the way, and undid the bolt.

Obvious when you think about it. Not obvious at all when you are feeling 'stuck'. Although daylight and fresh head might have helped, I suppose.

The cylinder head is held on by six bolts. Yes, it is six - I checked with the manual. Five are easy to get at, but the sixth isn't. It's tucked away, underneath the front of the engine, and again the frame is stopping any kind of tool access. I may have to lift the engine a couple of inches to get at it.

One step forward, two steps back. So what's new?

UPDATE:

Six, no, seven bolts [1]. There was a useless little Allen bolt tucked away and apparently serving no purpose, but this time I spotted it immediately and gave it what for. The sixth bolt came out without a problem, strangely.

The cylinder head is now off. It all needs a good decoke, but it all seems OK in there. I am now abandoning the subtle tools in favour of a hammer and cold chisel to get the rusty exhaust headers out. Wish me luck.

[1] Nobody expects, ect.

Stuckness

Writing the previous post reminded me of a passage in ZAMM (link below) on 'stuckness'. It's one that stuck (heh) in my mind for a long time after I first read the book. I've found the whole passage and I'm going to copy it here. If you don't like philosophy, or mechanical things, or non-traditional approaches to problems, look away now. Your loss.

The passage starts with a hypothetical situation - you are trying to get a screw out of a side-cover and it won't turn. In your haste, you have applied too much force and have torn out the slot, so that your screwdriver will no longer work. (Anyone who has worked on Japanese bikes up to about 1990 will remember the engine screws made of pressed milk-bottle tops that they used to use.) So now you are stuck. In Pirsig's words:

Normally screws are so cheap and small and simple you think of them as unimportant. But now, as your Quality awareness becomes stronger, you realize that this one, individual, particular screw is neither cheap nor small nor unimportant. Right now this screw is worth exactly the selling price of the whole motorcycle, because the motorcycle is actually valueless until you get the screw out. With this reevaluation of the screw comes a willingness to expand your knowledge of it.

He continues:

You're stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It's absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle.

This isn't a rare scene in science or technology. This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain stuck ...

This book is no good to you now. Neither is scientific reason. You don't need any scientific experiments to find out what's wrong. It's obvious what's wrong. What you need is a hypothesis for how you are going to get that slotless screw out of there and scientific method doesn't provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they're around.

This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It's a miserable experience emotionally. You're losing time. You're incompetent. You don't know what you are doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a real mechanic who knows how to figure these things out.

It's normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you're inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It's just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.

What you're up against is the great unknown, the void of all Western thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional scientific method has always been, at the very best, 20-20 hindsight. It's what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination - "unstuckness" in other words - are completely outside its domain ...

Let's consider a reevaluation of the situation in which we assume that the stuckness now occurring, the zero of consciousness, isn't the worst of all possible situations, but the best possible situation you could be in. After all, it's exactly this stuckness that Zen Buddhists go to so much trouble to induce; through koans, deep breathing, sitting still and the like. Your mind is empty, you have a "hollow-flexible" attitude of "beginner's mind." You're right at the front end of the train of knowledge, at the track of reality itself. Consider, for a change, that this is a moment to be not feared but cultivated. If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded full of ideas.

The solution to the problem often at first seems unimportant or undesirable, but the state of stuckness allows it, in time, to assume its true importance. It seemed small because your previous rigid evaluation which led to the stuckness made it small. But now consider the fact that no matter how hard you try to hang on to it, this stuckness is bound to disappear. Your mind will naturally and freely move toward a solution. Unless you are a real master at staying stuck you can't prevent this. The fear of stuckness is needless because the longer you stay stuck the more you see the Quality-reality that gets you unstuck every time. What's really been getting you stuck is the running from the stuckness through the cars of your train of knowledge looking for a solution that is out in front of the train.

Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It's this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Chapter 24

Information is Beautiful

Here's my website of the week: Information Is Beautiful. It's a site with lots of graphics of statistics, presented in a visually appealing way. Thought-provoking, too - sometimes you need a visualisation to help you understand things the conscious mind finds too abstract. The idea of the billions of pounds being flung around to 'promote recovery', for example. Once the figures get into the hundred billions, my mind goes blank. This graphic helps you see the relative sizes of the figures, and there are some surprises. Check out the size of the Iraq war, compared to feeding every child in the world for a year, for example. (That's not a political point there, by the way, but it makes you think). Click on the image for the full thing.



Or how about this: the Walled World? I had never thought about the world in this way before (well maybe I have, but not at this level of detail). The Israeli wall in Palestine suddenly fits into a much larger picture. It's like we in the West are living in a gated community. Not necessarily a bad thing (living in the West is pretty good, I reckon), but when you see the huge spaces outsidde the 'Wall', you start wondering all sorts of stuff. Like 'I want to go there'. Again, click for a better view.



There, that's something else to gobble up your time. Say thank you.

Close one

A box van, yesterday.

I believe life is about learning, and when you stop learning, it's all over. I apply the same thinking to motorcycling. I turn over every experience, good or bad, in my mind, to see if there is anything to be learned from it. If there is, I try to make adjustments to the way I do things, so that future unpleasant things are made less likely.

Most folk assume that bikers are vulnerable and are always being taken out by car drivers (and vans, and lorries, and coaches, and the rest). Bikers are the worst at this; it's always someone else's fault. People think that one accident, or close call, will unnerve a rider so much that he/she decides that the risks are just too great, and hangs up his/her helmet forthwith. It's as if the dice are constantly rolling, and one day they will roll in such a way that the real and terrible nature of what you are doing is made clear (provided that you survive the experience), and you pack it all in out of self-preservation. I have a colleague - an intelligent and thoughtful guy - who hardly rides at all, because he is just waiting for something dreadful to happen to him. He's in victim mode before he throws a leg over the saddle.

It doesn't work that way for me. I try to ride to a system where nothing should be unexpected. If I have a close call, I will look at what caused it. This will probably be one of four things:

• Poor bike control (like taking a bend too fast for the conditions)
• Poor judgement (like overtaking where there isn't room to complete it safely)
• Poor observation (like failing to see a junction where a car emerges)
• Poor anticipation (like failing to take account of other drivers' stupidity).

Then I will have a good old think, and see if I can build the experience into my riding for the future. That's the way ordinary riders get good, and good riders become expert. If there is ever a situation where I have to say to myself:

There is no way on Earth I could have avoided that accident

then that is the day I will put the helmet in the spare room, put the bikes on eBay, and retire to a life of Ford Mundaneos and air conditioning and power steering and little pine trees that smell of artificial nature. Everything else is just learning and a chance to improve.

As an example, I hereby admit to having something approaching a close call this week.

I was following a large box van along the main road, with heavy traffic in both directions and not many opportunities to overtake. The van was doing a steady 35, and I needed to get to work. I got a view ahead of the van on a curve, and the road up ahead in my lane was clear. When a brief opportunity for an overtake arose, I did all the checks, and pulled out to overtake. The chance to get by was a bit of a 'pinch', so I accelerated hard. At the same time, the van I was overtaking started to pull out and closed off the bit of road I was hoping to use. No signal.

Bacause I had left plenty of room, there was no great drama, and I braked and pulled back in, then followed him through and overtook him later. No harm done, although my heart-rate was fairly high for a couple of miles afterwards. What had happened was that the van was following (at a distance of a few feet) a slow-moving car, which I hadn't seen. He spotted the same chance that I did, and didn't look in his mirror. If he had, he would have seen a large white motorbike with a large man aboard, right in the overtaking position. But he didn't. He saw me as he pulled past the car, and had the grace to wave an apology.

I made several mistakes here. I should not have assumed that the van was just driving slowly for no reason. I could not see the bit of road in front of the van (or the car it contained) and so I should not have gone, but waited for the opportunity for a better look before committing myself to the manoeuvre. (Cardinal rule - never try to put the bike anywhere your head hasn't been five seconds before.) I could have had my headlight on, which might have alerted him to my presence earlier. I could have just decided to hang back and get to work a minute or so later. In other words, although the van driver pulled out into my way without a signal, by better roadcraft I could have avoided the situation. My fault, then. No excuses.

My philosophy is that other roads users can do anything that the laws of physics will allow, and probably will, and that my safety is no-one's responsibility but my own. If I had crashed as a result, it would have been my fault - maybe not legally, but if you're in a hospital bed or worse, who cares about legally? So I had a think, and built the experience into the now quite large database of Things That Can Go Wrong When Overtaking. Hopefully, I am a slightly better rider today than I was last week.

And so it goes.

If I ever have an experience where, despite all the soul-searching and analysis, I could not have predicted or prevented it, than I will admit that there are uncontrolled dangers out there for me, and I will pack it in. Until then, every ride's a day at school.