Dollhouse ideology

I've been watching the television series Dollhouse recently. I had been wondering whether to watch it because the pictures from the series advertising it tend to be of eye-candy and hint at violence: I have a bit of an allergic reaction to such presentations as they often go with superficial: maxing out the exciting visual and emotional impact but having little to say (except: "give us money"). However, I think that it is actually more interesting than the eye-candy image gives me to infer. Kudos to Joss Whedon for producing something a bit more intelligent and raising some interesting issues about being human: what makes us  'us'. Its premise is a bit like an updated and reworked Joe 90.

In Episode 6 they intercut a series of vox pops from a news programme about the urban legend of the Dollhouse. One of them has an interviewee saying something like "... if they could do something like this, it's the end of the human race". I found myself being annoyed with this. Why? Because it cleverly hides the fact that in the situation being portrayed, where in the scenario projected by the interviewee (some kind of university lecturer) human beings are enslaved by being made into a sort of robots. The doomsday scenario misses the fact that in such a world there would be a whole class of people who would not be subject to such control: those rich and powerful enough to maintain the system because they would want its services. In other words, this little comment on such a world elides the humans who control it and in doing so, hides from view the real problem.

Just like real life.  This is a little mirror on the West: the haves' string pulling and circumvention and the exploitation of the rest is being covered up: attention is redirected (often very successfully) so that 'we' rarely if ever become aware of where power lies and how it is being further accumulated. This musing comes hard on the heels of reading a recent piece in the Guardian by Owen Jones making a closely related set of points. So Dollhouse, interestingly, gets close to making such a point but then ends up, apparently (at least at this point) colluding with the concealment of privilege.

PS. After having seen the whole of the 2 series ... in fact towards the end of the series we get to understand that the scenario I come to in response to the university lecturer's vox pop is precisely the case: the rich get to reap the rewards whilst preying on the rest of the population. Just thought I should mention that for the sake of letting it be known that Joss Whedon  and/or Eliza Dushku did seem to have that perspective in view in realising the series. Kudos that they got it past Fox! But, hey, it took them two seasons to rumble it! -At least I assume the hasty-feeling ending at end of season 2 was because it got cancelled. I gather that the original idea was for a 5-year story arc.

Why I am very concerned about fracking ...

Of course we can see the argument for getting away from being supplied by potentially hostile and/or unstable countries. However there are major -and I mean major- problems with the whole enterprise.
Most importantly it doesn't help address our need (indeed duty) to decarbonise our economy. So unless it were accompanied by a very rigorous set of mechanisms to make sure that our exploitation of these fossil carbons did not contribute to increasing the net amount of carbon and other greenhouse gasses, we should not even be considering this. This is one of the things driving a fairly furious response from members of the public and unless this is taken seriously we could have Twyford Down style protesting going on and given recent revelations about policing such things, a potential for even more bitter civil liberties issues arising. Will the costs of handling civil discurbancc also be including in the licenses? I suspect they won't; and that will mean effectively a hidden taxpayer subsidy. Better surely not to create that situation in the first place.

Secondly are the fairly major concerns about more immediate enviromental impacts. The fears about earth quakes would appear to be well founded at the moment. As do concerns about contamination of water tables and the effects on crops (I note the recent case in East Yorkshire). Again, failure to take such concerns seriously is likely to risk civil discurbance and raises the question of who will pay for policing, court cases, etc.

Thirdly, it's hard to work out why the energy security issues cannot better be met by pursuing even more rigourously the non-carbon paths already beginning to be explored and which show considerable and accelerating promise. Given this alternative strategy shows every chance of furthering several good outcomes (decarbonising, local jobs, regional jobs, potential for Britain to rejoin global leadership in related areas of tech ...).

Add that for many of us there is a big suspicion that the present government are too fond of  doing things that work well for informally influential friends and moneyed interests but are not necessarily helpful to the welfare of the wider population and for which our grandchildren will curse us heartily, and you have a recipe for a much less happy nation and huge costs in the short to medium term and stacking up exponentially as climate change accelerates.

See some further views here.
You might also 'enjoy' this news piece:

Labelling, language and ethics

A recent twitter exchange reminded me that I have often been in discussions or even arguments where 'labelling' is thrown out at some point. It is often thrown out when one party feels that nuances are being lost or sometimes when someone is attempting to play a variety of victimhood trump card. The tweet that started me off re-musing about this was this:

Twitter / Notifications: Are all labels as attempts to describe another essentially acts of judgement? Label free speech?

To which I replied:

Of course: but 'judgment' understood as 'attempted discernment' vs 'prejudce'; some = self-take

And then also:

Meaning what by 'label'? Where does noun end & label begin? Speech acts by def are ltd gestures

What I was trying to gesture at with these necessarily brief responses (hey, they're tweets!) is that labels are, viewed from one angle, a way of referring to someone else. They are nouns. Sometimes they are nouns which those who are referred to are comfortable with or even choose for themselves. Sometimes, however, they are nouns that the refered-to dislike and would prefer not to be used. I sense that often 'labelling' is used to refer to this latter kind of noun-use. This is because nouns don't only have dispassionate meanings but also have emotional connotations which are part of their use-meaning and if the connotations are disparaging then they cannot be used equally by all parties to the dialogue equally: the use of a disparaging term will constantly be alienating and tension-building to at least one party.

The problem with the term 'labelling' is that it can get used as a catch-all term to try to disallow an(y) attempt to briefly characterise something that someone would rather not talk about at all even when there is no real negative connotation.

The solutions to the snarl ups, I think, are to find mutually acceptable terms where there is a genuine issue about a term and to remain aware that labels are 'limited gestures' and to be prepared to learn more fully and sympathetically about their referents.

Finding mutually acceptable terms is important. The solution here is not to disallow using any term at all: clearly if something is to be talked about, ways of refering need to be agreed. All language is about a communal agreement in order to carry meaning from mind to mind; it is mind reading by mediation and the mediation has to be a communally agreed instrument (vs Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's story). In fact languages are constantly in the process of being agreed, misagreed and disagreed, and it is in that dynamic linguistic-communal dialogue that accusations such as 'labelling' themselves make sense. They are a bid to steer the terms of the rhetoric.

Mutually acceptable terms is a way to recognise the bona fides of the parties in the discussion. To insist on using a disparaging term against objections is, in effect, to communicate contempt for the other. But note that the alternative is not to cease to give a label for that would mean ceasing to talk about the matter. No, the alternative to a disparaging label is to find a noun which is able to serve as a helpful token in conversation towards mutually-satisfactory ends.

The other dimension I mentioned above is to recognise the limitedness of labels. Actually, this is to recognise the limitedness of language and that 'labels' are actually a particular kind of noun (signifier, if you will). In short, what I mean by this is that I cannot convey to you the fulness of what is in my mind when I speak or write. Language is like using a two-dimensional artefact to try to convey a four-dimensional reality. It is 'lossy'.

To use language we have to choose a focus from the total of the (already limited) reality we are aware of and we have to find verbal gestures to help someone else find our focus. We then (in actual fact simultaneously) have to choose further dimensions of related bits of reality (usually our attitudes and reasons for interest are involved) to incorporate into the verbal gesturing. We do this drawing on the presumption of shared information in order to achieve the compression necessary to make a message. In effect we are hoping each time that from the limited information we can convey, the other mind will be able to reconstruct enough of our intentions for a part of our mind to be read through the medium of our speech act.

So it's no surprise that labels do not convey fully the reality of what is referred to. And since we are also inevitably conveying something of our attitudes, it is no surprise that in any community-crossing conversations, we may have to recognise that attitudes or beliefs encoded in our own usual use of the term may have to be challenged and re-negotiated for the purposes of civil and civilising conversation. Clearly this implies that the the problem is not the label itself, it is our unwillingness to be challenged and to accommodate others' views. In that we are at the edge of attitudinal matters to do with stereotyping, contempt, self-justification etc.

In the light of what I've just written, the "act of judgement" issue in the original tweet can be understood more clearly. Any use of language involves us in judging what to focus on, what is relevant, what attitudes to 'it' we convey, where lines of demarcation are to be drawn etc etc. We cannot speak without such judgements, or as I put it in response, "discernment". The question is what attitudes are being conveyed (and that includes both sent and received)? And it is the attitudes that are really in view. The problem is that the labels can themselves become the rhetorical point at issue rather than the attitudes. The easiest way around this is to try to remove the label by agreeing terms: either not to use a particular term or to mutually accept a term on the understanding that it is being used in a certain way.

Of course, part of the problem is that we hear linguistic usages in a sense through the ears of the communities we know. So the individual conversation also has to take account of the wider social context. So, while you and I might agree to use a term in a relatively neutral fashion for the sake of advancing our understanding, we also have to conduct the conversation knowing that others may hear it differently. And so, for the sake of taking the fruits of our better understanding (I would hope that might be the outcome) to our wider communities, we may be best to agree to use terms (labels) which would be best received by our respective communities and yet also have the best chance to convey to them the better understandings we arrive at and also to foster those communities in a wider inter-communal conversation.

So, in the conversation that began this reflection, I was eschewing the terms "conservative" and "liberal" in (popular) ecclesiological contexts. I was doing so as an attempt to agree different terms for conversation because I feel that these terms do not help me to think about the issues. They sound Political to me and that jars: I may be 'conservative' in terms of accepting a reasonably orthodox interpretation of Christian faith, but I tend to think that doing so implicates me in taking a far from conservative view of social matters. On the other hand "liberal" may better describe many of my attitudes to social issues, but not how I view doctrine, scripture, the relationship between God and world etc etc. So I tend to use the terms "orthodox" and "open" to try to signal that what I think is a linkage in the wider world between "conservative" faith and "Conservative" politics and between "liberal" politics and "liberal" faith is not in operation here.

I judge it is harder to change the terms in the wider world (for a variety of reasons) so it is easier to change my own self desgination and then to try to have the conversations about why I would want to do that. To me that is better than to have a sense or even the experience of being written off because of the label or of being unwittingly co-opted also because of the label. (It's embarrassing or anxiety-provoking to find oneself wanting to challenge someone who assumed that you shared some viewpoint of theirs).

I guess, with reference to the original tweet as presented above, that I do not think that "judgement" is necessarily negative or disparaging. It is possible to label positively and to judge in favour. It is not the act of judging that is the problem in reality. it is judging to the detriment of others, to do so unfairly on the basis of a characteristic that is not inherently negative and to refuse to revisit the issue of the fairness of the judgement. We need to focus on the attitudes not the act of judgement.

The Spiritual Discipline of viewing from the margins -why do it?

It is actually pretty shocking to read the results of research into human prejudices based on looks. I can't now recall which USAmerican comedy series had an episode where one of the characters who has been blind to how his good looks have (exageratedly) tended to give him a free pass and a bye in all sorts of situations, gets a glimpse of how the other moiety lives. It should be required viewing!
Here's a synopsis of some results: If You Look Like This, Your Pay Check Will Be Higher Than Average - Business Insider And basically it's telling us that "Numerous studies have shown looks can impact career advancement. Some say physical appearance matters even more to employers than a cover letter.   Researchers have found that facial structure, hair color, and weight all can affect our paychecks.We can't help our genes, but some of them may be helping us more than others."

It probably starts really early in life. I seem to recall from primary school that those who had physical characteristics that were regarded as pleasant or desirable (and here I mostly mean in non-sexual terms since I think that 8 year-olds are not so tuned in to that dimension of attractiveness) tended to get preferential treatment from peers. And those of us with characteristics considered less desirable (red hair, very thin, plump, too fair, too brown, freckles ... to pick some that I recall) tended to be passed over.

The Biblical stories up to and around I Samuel 16 are reminders that physical appearances and prowess can be overrated and cause us to miss the real worth of what people who appear unprepossessing have to offer.

However, I find myself wondering beyond the almost truistic status of this observation to think about how we can and should do something about it. Clearly in some HR policies about recruitment, we get some sense of how this might be: eliminating things that give obvious clues about race, sexual, marital, religious status and the like. Ruling out certain kinds of questions in interview. And some of this can look and feel heavy-handed until you realise how deeply seated our prejudices often are and how easily and naturally we go into (self-) justification of them.

This brings me to the importance of what I've called in the title of a new "spiritual discipline". That is to say "new" to the classical lists of spiritual disciplines, though in fact it is probably a spiritual perspective that calls on several spiritual disciplines in the classical sense.

I would hope that I wouldn't need to rehearse the reasons why a Christian would take it reasonably for granted that we should have a care for those who are disadvantaged, down on their luck or otherwise disheartened. The main dispute between Christians is about the best means to address this. However, I would suggest that as we are not immune from self-justifying memes, tropes and distortions of thinking, we need to make sure that we have means to persistently address such distortions.

I think that the insight that we understand our social world best if we make sure that we view it from the underside; from the perspective of those who are not thriving in it. I think that this is an attitude that grows out of consideration for the disadvantaged and marginalised. It takes seriously loving our neighbour as ourselves by 'putting ourselves in their shoes' and so contributing to avoiding patronising and superficial responses which in effect do not respect them and therefore are not loving. And if there is any truth to the thought that we respond best when we understand well, then we should be making sure that our understanding is well-informed by the perspective of those who have to see our human social world from a perspective of hurt, exclusion and/or inaccessibility.

We tend to judge -as that research indicates- by the trappings of success. This means that we tend, unless checked, to perpetuate the conditions that continue to favour the already successful or those who have characteristics we associate with it or that we just 'like'.

So to offset this, to become more neighbour-loving and to change and be formed in the likeness of Christ, we will do well to find disciplines to embody and enact seeing from the underside.

I hope I'll be able to post soon about what such disciplines are and how they might play with other more commonly recognised spiritual disciplines.

Dog, Book, and Scandal by Bard Heads:

At the Edinburgh Fringe, I've just been to see Bard Heads: Dog, Book, and Scandal:  The write up drew me in, I think because I'm a bit of a sucker for alternative timelines and counterfactuals and this kind of 'what happened next?' story beguiles that same bit of mind. It said this:
"In Dog, Book and Scandal, Friar Laurence faces criticism over star-crossed lovers’ fiasco. Inspired by Romeo and Juliet, Bard Heads catches up with Friar Laurence one year on from the tragedy. Written and performed by Richard Curnow"
Well, I enjoyed the performance. The actor (for 'tis a monologue in three main voices) comes over in the main character as a humane and likeable soul: a winsome performance. The other two characters are a bit cartooney but really they are the foil for the main character so that is not necessarily a fault. Some echoes and quotes from Romeo and Juliet form part of the text. The Shakespearean Tudor, however, doesn't fill the time and much of it is in a reasonably contemporary English (though at one or two points I wondered whether a more 'classic'-sounding phrase than "man up" might have have been found). However, to have attempted the whole thing in a Tudor-English style would almost certainly have been a mistake.

The play explores (spoiler alert!) how Friar Laurence is coping a year on in exile in Mantua where he's settled down into a useful existence as an apothecary's assistant (and helped prosper the business it seems). Richard Curnow, the actor, plays the apothecary for the purposes of setting up a dialogue with the friar; the apothecary being the voice of cynical godlessness (and also of a right to choose to die) poking and prodding the doubting, would-be-humanistic theist who is the friar. Perhaps there is a whiff of the pantomime villain about this character, but then, some of Shakespeare's characters have this at times and so I don't rate it a defect, necessarily. At the end of the play the friar has conceded to cynicism but has also bounced back somewhat from it. Faith has been tested to destruction but a resurrection of sorts also takes place - a more ambiguous faith but perhaps more hopeful.

I did feel it a shame that the meaning of faith was more fully explored: we get a tantalising glimpse of a move from a dogmatic faith which tries to act up to certainty towards a faith that is more about trust -though trust in what is where the ambiguity stays. Perhaps it needs to in order not to engender or collude with further versions of dogmatic faith?

I enjoyed the use of lines of the prayer "God be in my head..." to give a sense of a depth of faith to the friar that is not cartoonish but rather can be seen to be wide-ranging in the friar's piety, giving a sense of a real spirituality.

The other character produced for the play is that of Juliet's nurse. Again, she's a bit of a cartoon complete with rustic accent (which seemed to have linguistic features from the west country and the north east of England, though perhaps this was some move towards original pronunciation?). The nurse serves to situate the friar back into the Verona scene by being a representative voice of those who appreciate the friar and do not blame him for his part in the matter of the death of two star-crossed lovers. The nurse also serves (as a gossipy character) to give some of the narrative background.

I loved the dog of the title whom we never meet in person but the fact that it is called 'Jesus' gives a few little wry puns with a smidgeon of significance within the play -and it's nice that this is not overdone; just sitting there discreetly.

Altogether, I definite "go and see" if you're in Edinburgh at a little before 3pm on August 5, 7, 9, 12, 14, or 16.