The Randomness of Consciousness

Perhaps I was deluding myself a little when I said in a previous post that I wasn't much one for commenting on current affairs. Earlier this morning, I came across a post on facebook arguing against same-sex marriage. A number of the commenters stated that they "didn't hate gay people", but that they thought that marriage should have nothing to do with non-heterosexual relationships. I chewed my lip for a few minutes, knowing that if I posted a comment, given that this link came from a page openly against same-sex marriage, I would probably spend the next several hours anxiously awaiting responses that would evidently be hostile. But I also felt that it would be wrong to stay quiet. Even if I could never convince anyone to change their viewpoint, I felt it was important to question the reasoning that it was okay to deny to one group of people a privilege allowed to others.

This got me thinking, in turn, about my own wider ethical viewpoint, which is something that's been on my mind a lot over the last couple of weeks. I think that at the very basis of how I think about such things is my long-held sense of the randomness of consciousness.

I'm well aware that 'the randomness of consciousness' sounds like the sort of elliptical phrase that an early twentieth-century philosopher might coin, to the frustration of twenty-first century students everywhere, so let me elaborate. I vividly remember a moment, when I was about seven years old, when I was standing at a sink next to another girl at school, and I looked in the mirror and wondered what it would be like to look up into the mirror and see not my face, but hers. What would it be like to exist in another person's head? 

For a while after that, I chewed the issue over in my head, sometimes even wishing that I could escape the shackles of the body and mind that 'I' existed in and to live life as someone else. It seemed to me, in a way, immensely limiting that I should only ever know what it was like to be 'me'.

Lately, this has transformed into a general sense of how very unlikely it is that I should be experiencing life as the individual that I am. It is completely by chance that I happened to be born in England, that I find myself attracted to people of the opposite sex rather than the same, that I incidentally identify as the gender which lines up with my physical sex, that I had the fortune (perhaps!) to be born with a fairly high degree of intelligence, that my skin by chance is of a pale complexion, that I happen to have a fairly healthy body, that I ended up being born to parents with reasonably steady incomes. All these things are the case, and I cannot change them - but I feel strongly that the fact that I am who I am today, living the life I live in the conditions I live it in, is entirely due to chance. 

Therefore, when it comes to intensely debated ethical issues, I've tried not simply to wonder 'how does this affect me?' but also to ask 'how would I feel if I was one of the people involved in this'? Not simply in a straightforward 'putting myself in their shoes' sense, but also because of my above sense that I could just as easily have been born into their circumstances as they could have been into mine. A human being does not choose their parents, their place of birth, their IQ, their inherited socio-economic status, the colour of their skin, or their sexual alignment. I'm not being completely deterministic about this - people can obviously move beyond the limits into which they are initially born in some ways, for example with regards to socio-economic status - but often, the things for which people are persecuted in this day and age (their gender, their sexuality, their nationality) are those which they had absolutely no part in deciding.

This leads on to the other key tenet by which I try to figure out whether something is ethically "good" or "bad". This is that a human being should have the freedom to pursue their own happiness insofar as it does not impair the happiness of others. I've often seen this referred to as ethical humanism. To this I would also add the caveat that it is my belief that human beings have a duty to endeavour to aid the happiness of others, insofar as they are able without impairing their own. (I know I'm probably mixing my Kant with my Mill at this point...)

So, those are the two categories by which I judge an ethical problem. The first is, if the ethical problem is related to a part of someone's identity that is completely chance-dictated (such as race or sexuality), then I would consider what my emotional reaction to the two sides of the argument (pro/anti-same-sex marriage) would be if the issue affected me. The second is - how would a given issue affect the happiness of the people involved? So, with same-sex marriage, homosexual people who want to be married obviously feel strongly that it would increase their happiness to be able to do so. On the other hand, it seems to me that how two people define and demonstrate a personal relationship has no impact on my own happiness, save, perhaps, to increase it by seeing them fulfilling their own.

And that, I suppose, is how I try to live my life, and why I sometimes feel the need to wade into arguments on the internet that will just leave me shaking with sadness and rage. I do not always succeed in living up to my own ideal, but it seems to me that human beings should try to follow a rule of kindness in their interactions with people - even those who are strangers, or those they will never meet. Essentially, because of the (probably rather incoherent!) things I feel about the 'randomness of consciousness', I think that one should always endeavour to 'treat thy neighbour as thyself' - because all that separates you from your neighbour is the roll of a dice.

Snarking History - An Introduction

One of my happiest blog discoveries over the past year has been stumbling across the "Snark Squad". The raison d'etre of this blog is to provide humorously 'snarky' recap-reviews of a variety of TV shows and books. I first came to them through their painfully-funny-do-not-read-on-public-transport recaps of Fifty Shades of Grey. I thanked my lucky stars at discovering them, because it meant that I could find out what all the fuss was about without having to actually read the books. And, if their recaps are anything to go by, I had a lucky escape.

Their FSoG 'snarks' are not the friendliest review EL James has ever received, but something I love about their other recaps is that, by and large, they come from a place of love - but a place of love that recognises that, for all his awesomeness, writers such as Joss Wheedon can sometimes be just a little bit ridiculous (they do Buffy and Angel recaps as a regular feature). Such an approach is the inspiration for the series of posts that I anticipate writing over time on this blog, in between other updates. I intend to 'snark' history.

As an aspirant scholar, for the vast majority of the time I take history very seriously indeed. To me - though I am sure it is to others - the question of what people in the early modern period thought about mountains (my thesis topic) is not a trivial one. I think that understanding the past in general is a laudable and important goal, and that it is a great honour to have been given, as I have, the time and freedom to delve into the richness of past human experience. History, to me, is far more than the dramatic voiceovers of Simon Schama or the silly clothes of The Tudors. But. But. Sometimes the things that people in the past did, said, or thought, can seem just a little ridiculous to the modern eye. Sometimes it can be very difficult to resist the urge to burst out laughing in the rare books room of the Cambridge University Library. So these posts are to be an outlet, for sharing these amusing and bemusing discoveries with you all.

Of course, it is the weird stuff that can make history really interesting, and ideas that seem laughable to the modern mind can reveal, once scrutinised, a host of beliefs and understandings of the world that tell us a great deal about how different the human experience once was. So, I also hope to use my 'snark' posts not just to recount the apparently wacky things that I come across, but also to start to unravel them, and perhaps understand them a bit.

Finally, just to get you intrigued for the first 'snarking history' post - the reason I have been spurred to start this series is because, in a meeting with my supervisor this morning about the things I had discovered recently, I uttered both the term "mountain-like scrotum" and the Latin phrase, "penis terrae", i.e., the 'penis of the Earth'. And if that sort of thing doesn't require some gentle snarking, I just don't know what does. 

A case study in the (very) contemporary history of emotions

I'm not usually a commenting-on-current-affairs-kind-of-gal, at least not in a blogging sense (I may get heartily opinionated about things I know precious little about on Facebook comment threads, though). This is mainly because, largely, current affairs contentedly pass me by whilst I'm buried amidst a pile of early modern printed books. However, not even I could have missed the news, and the ensuing social media explosion, announcing that Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, died today. 

Now, I don't have any particularly vitriolic opinions on the woman myself. I studied her for A Level history and came to the conclusion that she made a lot of different decisions, some with good results, others with bad - and some whose long-term effects are still not entirely clear to us. As (if I had to declare any form of political allegiance) I would probably define myself as a socialist of some form, I disagree with a lot of the ideology behind the decisions she made whilst in power, but I have no especially strong feelings with regards to her.

I've found the discourses surrounding her death, however, really quite fascinating in terms of how it intersects with my current study which, theoretically - it is on early modern scholarly debates about mountains - is as far removed from the reaction to the death of a twentieth century politician as possible. However, many of the scholarly texts I'm currently reading (dating from between 1680 and 1700) often begin by declaring the ways in which the emotional reactions of their opponents are inappropriate; anger, passion, and temper, are all decried as 'unscholarly', even whilst those making such accusations give in to the temptation of such influences in their own contributions to the debate.

I have noticed many people - friends on Facebook and strangers on Twitter - declaring that the reactions that some have had to Thatcher's death are 'inappropriate'. Those criticising her should, some say, remember the old adage of not speaking ill of the dead, whilst those expressing happiness or joy at her departure from this mortal coil are seen as disrespectful, even disgusting. These two criticisms are obviously slightly different - I feel that this article says everything I feel is pertinent to the former (Thatcher was a public figure who divided opinion in life: in death public reaction should not be shackled by a refusal to point out the bad elements of her policy, or barred from providing a variety of views) - but the latter is, I think, a more complex issue than it seems at first sight.

I think that there certainly is something odd about a young person of, say, my generation and family background (as far as I know I do not have any immediate family members affected by Thatcher's policies during her time in power), feeling and expressing joy or satisfaction at the death of an old woman who is really by this point more a part of modern history rather than an active political player. I might disagree with what she did but it has long happened, and although perhaps her economic policies might be pointed at by some as the cause of the current recession, she never directly impacted upon my life. Politicians (or political activists) from relatively well-off families who were likewise relatively unaffected by her during her lifetime, but see her death as an opportunity to 'gloat' simply because a significant figure from the Tory past has died I also find difficult to understand. But castigating all who genuinely feel, and honestly express, relief and a sense of schadenfreude at the passing of someone who had a negative impact on the lives of thousands of people, disregards the very real impact that the actions of politicians can have on the lives of everyday people.

I say this for two reasons. The first is that I know, in a much smaller-scale way, how it feels to be negatively affected by what is nominally the decision of a single politician. If something you care about - your work, your freedom, your ability to live - is under threat or taken away, it is human nature to try to find a target for all the anger and hurt and hate that such a change causes. When governments decide things that directly affect you, you can feel completely powerless, a pawn tumbled around by a faceless, conglomerate entity. Easier by far to pick a face, a name, to impotently rage against. It is easy to look at the facts of history and say: Margaret Thatcher damaged the lives of many. But how would you, or I, feel if ours had been one of the lives damaged?

My second reason is that I always try to empathise with the emotions or passions of the historical figures with whom I'm working. To a modern eye, the debates which I'm studying seem faintly ludicrous, and it seems excessive that those involved in them should become so consumed by their arguments that they insulted one another in published works across the years and even decades. But for them, at the time, these debates  questioned the very veracity of the Bible itself - and thus, in turn, the veracity of the doctrine of salvation. For these men it was an issue of life or death. Of course they were angry. For the miners whose mines closed down under Thatcher, what happened must have struck them with a similar force. Whatever the wider economic arguments for what happened, as far as such individuals were concerned, those closures had the potential to ruin their lives and those of their families. Of course they hated Thatcher, the face of that policy, and continued to hate her throughout the years. Human beings, whether in 1690 or 1990, have always been emotional creatures.

In an ideal world, would there be people such as the one my history teacher told us about during our Thatcher classes, a man he knew who kept a bottle of champagne in the fridge for the day Thatcher died? Of course not. But in an ideal world, there would also never be social injustices. Thatcher was a politician, and she made hard decisions which had benefits for some, and disastrous results for others. Some today will grieve her death, and laud her memory, but others will not. Those who are truly joyful today will be those for whom she symbolised a time of real suffering in their lives. Criticising their emotions as improper, invalid, or even immoral is to deny how much power politicians can wield, for good or ill, in the lives of the people they serve. And just as I think that historians should try to bear in mind that the passions of the past were once real and vitally important to those who felt them, so too do I feel that this is something that modern citizens would do well not to forget.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair...

Do you know what it is like to remember something from long ago, but to be unsure whether what you recall is truly a memory, or a story that your mind made up to fill in a gap? So that is why I say that I think I remember, one Christmas evening when I was quite small - perhaps seven or eight - my Dad saying that he had forgotten a present, and taking me upstairs. I think I remember him opening his bottom drawer, and handing me a book, telling me that he had been saving it for a while until he thought I was old enough to have it. That book was The Illustrated Treasury of the Brothers Grimm.

Anyone reading this has probably figured out by now that I have something of a 'thing' for books and reading, so I of course devoured the book as soon as it was in my hands. The first story, "The Frog Prince", and the brightly-coloured illustration of it on the cover, left me sniffing slightly at the thought that I could ever have been too young for this book, but it soon became apparent that beneath the fairy-tale cover there waited for me stories that were truly dark, with illustrations that were, to an eight-year-old (and even perhaps to a twenty-one-year-old!) a little chilling. With two older brothers and no sisters, there was no Disney Cinderella for me - only the Brothers Grimm version of the story, in which the ugly sisters cut off their toes in order to try to fit Cinderella's glass slipper.

 Some of the more disconcerting illustrations from The Brother's Grimm.

I am sure my parents must have read some of the stories aloud to me, or perhaps I did to them (I fear from an early age I had a strong sense of drama when it came to reading aloud, and once exasperated my mother so much by correcting her tone and emphasis in reading the dialogue in the Narnia series that she suggested I take over), because I cannot shake the remembrance of spoken rhythm when I think of the story of "Rapunzel", in which the witch, and later the prince, sang to her window - "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair..." But when I look at the book open beside me now, I realise that memory has played its tricks on me; in my edition the word "long" is absent. But, of course, Rapunzel's hair was long - so long that it reached the bottom of the tower in which she was imprisoned.

For mostly as long as I can remember I have had long hair - not as long as Rapunzel's, perhaps, but longer than the norm, I think. I have painful memories of my mother brushing it (Loreal no-more-knots for kids was used in copious amounts in our household), and also a bemusing one of my eldest brother, not long after he'd first got a girlfriend for the first time, showing me how to brush it out painlessly starting at the bottom and working your way up - Mum had always just determinedly brushed from the top down, dragging the knots with her.  And I realised that my long hair is something I feel surprisingly strongly about, when I read this blog post, about a woman donating her long hair to a charity for making real-hair wigs for cancer victims.

In it, she speaks about the buzz that she got from doing something that she felt would make such a meaningful difference for people in need, and I toyed for a moment with the vision of doing such a thing - of giving away my hair, of proudly wearing a buzz cut and knowing that, perhaps, I had made someone suffering something that I cannot imagine feel just a tiny bit better. But I fear that I am not, perhaps, that selfless. 

The problem is - and this will probably seem ridiculous to people who are perfectly happy with short hair, or who have long hair and would lose no sleep over parting with it - that I have looked into the mirror and seen long hair framing my face for some many years that I am not sure I can imagine me without it. When I went on a month's expedition to China (which included trekking in 40 degrees heat and extremely high humidity), I actively decided that I did not want to cut my hair, though I knew it would be a bother to keep clean and brushed (not to mention out of my eyes - goodness, I hate the wind sometimes!). My logic was this: even when I had not showered for a week, even when I was wearing hiking boots, trekking shorts, and a t-shirt dripping in sweat, I could brush my hair, and that would be my luxury. In the last four years I have had it cut to shoulder-height once, because a man who had hurt me badly had praised its length. I wanted to change, and wanted to be a different person from the one he had made a fool of: cutting my hair, for me, was the biggest change I could think of.

Since then, my hair has grown out, and when I look at photos of my short (to me!) haired phase I feel a bit perplexed, because I do not look like myself. I still threaten to Mr S that I will cut it when he makes a habit of catching it in his cuffs or leaning on it, but I would never really do it, and it would not be the fact that I know he likes my long hair that would prevent me. I'm not sure if it's as simple as saying that my long hair makes me feel 'feminine', or that I want to be a princess like Rapunzel, but, perhaps it could be as simple as saying that I like it. I like the feeling of running really fast against the wind and feeling it stream behind me. I like tying it up in a bun, still damp, and letting it down hours later to see a muddle of curls. I like fiddling with it, though I have grown out of the habit of chewing on it, as I did when I was at the age of first reading The Brothers Grimm. My long hair is free, but I value it more jealously than I do anything else that I might be able to donate - more than coins, more than blood. So, much as I would like to be able to do something as amazing as the blogger linked to above, I do not think I could - because it would mean giving away part of myself.

Of course, even Rapunzel, the epitome of the long-haired heroine, lost her hair to the witch's scheming scissors. But, so long as the worst threat to it continues to be my husband's elbows at the table, my messy, not-exactly-blonde-but-not-exactly-brown, but above all long locks, will remain exactly where they are. At the very least they might come in handy if I find myself locked in a very tall tower.