Month: October 2016

Valuing Difference

Just a quickie riff.

Whether is gender differences – male vs female cognitive difference anyone? – or race, or religion or whatever …

Difference matters.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that “significant differerence” is THE fundamental “particle” of the universe, the source of all information and all things. Whoah, but that’s maybe just me, I digress!

Trouble is in the less rarefied levels of everyday life, built-on / evolved-from a zillion levels of nuanced variety across time and space (history of the world as we know it – so far) we deal with things we find significant – things we care about – every day.

We give ’em names. As soon as we do, we have:

the named
vs
the named-otherwise

We have a binary shorthand for the thing we are currently talking about, for some reason we care about. Obviously there are differences between these things – male vs female – really big ones as it happens, at the level were at. But, however great and significant that difference, the common components in the current evolved state are even greater. Obviously. As in, Duh!

We don’t talk about men and women to deny our common humanity, or deny any spectrum of variability in gender assignment, we do it to communicate our current thought. We do well to remember the huge common ground behind every choice of name for the current subjects of our conversation, and of course it’s mostly unsaid. We’d never get anything said if we qualified every difference (content) with the entire common ground (context).

It becomes PC to ….

“don’t mention the difference”

…. because you may have some evil intent to exploit the difference, or even accidentally mislead, in an unsaid way.

We have to talk about the things that matter.
Differences matter, Difference is material in fact.

And we have to trust each other.

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This is the thread from yesterday with Andy Martin, that prompted the riff:

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Carlo Rovelli is right, in the sense that …

Interesting review of Carlo Rovelli’s latest “Reality Is Not What It Seems” by Michael Brooks in the New Statesman.

In my own review of Rovelli’s introductory work “Seven Brief Lessons“, I felt compelled to add a footnote to ensure readers understood he was peddling a minority view in Quantum Loop Gravity. Interesting in Brooks’ review of Rovelli’s latest, he highlights the well understood paradox that Gravity and Quantum theories can’t both be right.

Both are right ….
in the sense that …. they’ve both
[made useful repeatable predictions].

And both must be wrong, too.
[Since neither supports the other].

Brooks takes umbrage at Rovelli’s dismissal of more “popular” current theories – eg String and SuperSym – that aim to provide more fundamental physics than the current combination of Gravity and Quantum. Rovelli spends the final third of his latest work promoting QLG.

Being right in this world is about being useful for two or three generations – Kuhn / Kondratiev – but that is hindsight of course. Those proven right – or consigned to obscurity – are always in a minority of one when they first point out the advantages of their alternative.

A minority view, but I think Rovelli is mostly right, however successful QLG proves to be. He’s right even if QLG is wrong. And right in a more fundamental sense than simply utilitarian. Consisent with Smolin and others there is a serious attempt to bring time and law-like causation within the explanatory scope of the model, not to mention a respect for the value that philosophy brings to fundamental thinking. And then there is that healthy scepticism of the celebrity status of heroic Galilean mythology.

I’m less inclined to follow fundamental physicists who are dismissive of time, causation and philosophy than those that are dismissive of popularity.

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[Post Note : Another related review / book. Bell’s is another interpretation I have time for. Hat tip to Rick Ryalls on FB. Minority interests are not new, they just get trampled in the crowds following popularity contest winners, long before social media was invented. Same with science as any other topic of cultural interest.]

Civic Identity

One positive thought coming out of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s second Reith lecture this morning is Civic Identity

As with the first lecture on Credo, this second installment on Nationality came across again as statements of the obvious on the broad difficulties in being “definitive” on such matters of Identity Politics. Mistaken identity for sure, but what about “appropriate” identities with values to support them?

The positive thought came up in one of the later questions on Civic Identity. Having thrown-away cheap-shots on philosophers wanting to be definitive, citizens of the world vs citizens of a nation, and his own father’s belief in “Unitary (National) Citizenship” one philosophy student raised the idea of Civic Nationalism.

There is always a question of “we”; a presumption that there is one that means anything. Obviously there are many that mean many things. Any identity chosen by multiple individuals for their collective identity is a statement of caring enough about that identity. (Whatever genetic or memetic, biological or cultural – familial, ethnic, religious or territorial “heritage” forms the basis of that identity. The issue is simply that we have many of these at many levels.)

National identity – a particular “peoples” collective as a nation – is a political identity – like all identities are in the final analysis. The suggestion is that this is a particular “Civic Nationalism” – one based on political principles AND narrative, existing alongside other affiliations with multiple constituencies of peoples. Broadly consistent and tolerant of difference and multiplicity, despite particular points of conflict, that we can agree to forget or give low priority in most practical situations of daily life. Again we (individually) must choose to self-identify our collective “civic” nationality as distinct from all other national and ethnic identities, the point being as a statement that we accept the practicality of the governance arrangements of that civic. We are nailing our colours to the mast of a civic identity – a nation – that we declare will be used as the basis of any significant governance of conflicts and inconsistencies arising with the many other overlapping identities. We are accepting this civic identity to handle changes and accomodations involving other identities. Choosing a civic identity in no way loses or ignores the existence of our other identities and narratives as people’s other than that civic identity.

Declaring citizenship of the world is fatuous as our civic identity until such time as there is a form of world governance “we” all genuinely share. It’s a fine identity many of us also have, and even an aspirational civic identity, but until then, governance is about jurisdictions and their borders.

I’m kinda hoping Kwame Anthony Appiah’s lectures will have some punchline in the fourth episode, to bring together practical necessities of identities which bind us for real world purpose. So far it’s all about how matters of identity are complicated and non-definitive. We already knew that.

A religion is not a race, it’s an idea?

It’s a common claim in some form, in many a situation, where were are in danger of confusing or conflating prejudice based on race with prejudice based on some other social construct. It works on the assumption that race is a naturally objective class about which an individual has no choice, whereas religion is a matter of individual choice in a cultural context.

Of course the form “a religion is not a race it’s an idea?” is invoked when it’s the religious (cultural) identity that is the main topic at issue – to put some clear water between that and other issues of race. Particularly in the case where the religion is Islam, where there are strong associations with ethnic and cultural identities, it somehow seems important to maintain the distinction between different issues.

But if our topic were a racial or ethnic identity in the first place, we might have “ethnicity is not race” and “neither is race a meaningful biological thing”. In fact if we get deeper into biology we also find that even species are definable only by convention and the appropriate conventions vary enormously with context and purpose. How many scientists are keen to emphasise how flimsy are the actual differences at the mental and cultural levels between humans and our kindred species.

Down with this sort of thing. We humans ain’t so special. This is very much about identity. And, for thinking beings, identity is very much about personal identity politics, and our conformity or reaction to our cultural context.

If we add the religious angle to this, we find that which binds people is only in very small part specific ideas and beliefs that are held in common. So much did Kwame Anthony Appiah remind us in the Credo part of this year’s Reith Lectures. In fact this take on Mistaken Identities was so underwhelming, that he was seen by many (in my twitter feed anyway) to be merely stating the obvious and missing the opportunity for any important insight [Refs].

When talking race and attempting to get a grip on what we really mean, any measure we choose – skin colour – is as good and imperfect as any other [Refs]. Even when talking genetics, as scientifically rigorously as you like, it’s ultimately about statistical distributions of many possible combinations and patterns, whose own boundaries are scarcely definitive.

Some conventions are deeper in accepted science, but pretty much all the objects we are talking about and the classes to which we assign them, depend for their identity on social constructs and our (pragmatic) acceptance of these.

This is not an excuse for an anything goes – w’evs – cultural relativism. Quite the opposite. Simply a reminder that we’re not going to solve any complex issue by being precious about a specific choice of words having hard and fast objective definitions. Islamism in its political and violent extremes, has a wide range of religious and racial, extrinsic and behavioural aspects, each themselves involving cultural patterns of identity over and above anything intrinsically objective in our individual biology.

You might be tempted to the easy conclusion that biology is our racial marker, distinct from religion. Sure an individual may generally have no choice about their biological make up, but how that particular biological entity is assigned to a class – even a biological one – is a cultural choice.

We’re always ultimately dealing with individuals. Prejudice against the freedoms and free-thought of individuals is still prejudice whatever class of race or religion we’ve assigned it to. From the individual’s immediate perspective it matters little whether the constraints on their freedoms are biological (genetic) or cultural (memetic), they’re still constraints, and at the individual level both are intertwined with each other and with collective group effects.

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[Post Note: Reference for social constructs and political theory around race in particular. Falguni Sheth – book and blog. Hat tip @contronline.]

Human Belonging

One current Brexit / Corbyn / Trump meme – the disaster that is 2016 politics the world over it seems – is the whole Citizen of the World vs Nationalism polarisation. It is perfectly reasonable to have national pride and interest whilst participating individually, collectively, actively, rationally and ethically in our environmental cosmos of course. Nothing to do with any fatuous post-truth meme, simply more of the needless polarisation of fictitious choices. A middle-way scarcely does justice to the infinity of alternatives beyond the two offered.

In fact when writing previously on identity politics I concluded, that it ultimately comes down to how we choose to self-identify across multiple “constituencies” and, of course, those many overlapping constituencies run across many dimensions on many scales from “me, myself, I” to …. well, the cosmos itself and all points between.

I’m looking forward to this year’s BBC Reith Lectures by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, covering colour, culture, country and creed under the series title “Mistaken Identities”. Sounds like pretty much my own agenda in the Identity Politics post above.

One reason I’ve been looking forward to it is some earlier tweets by @TheosElizabeth who attended the recordings. Today she made it the topic of her @BBCR4Today “Thought for the Day”

The full (brief) text captured below:

Elizabeth Oldfield — 11/10/16 – Good morning.

It was a huge privilege to be at the recording of this year’s BBC Reith Lectures last week, the first of which will be aired on 18th October. Given by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, the four lectures will cover colour, culture, country and creed. His overarching title is ‘mistaken identities’- the implication is that these identities are not and should not be absolute.

I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Globally, we are seeing a resurgence in strong shared identities, most visibly nationalism, but also class, region, race and religion. This has prompted many an anguished comment piece on the crisis of liberalism.

In *very* simple terms, the liberal project sought to make the individual more important than these shared identities. This has delivered a huge amount of good stuff- it’s rightly credited with much of our peace, order and prosperity, as well as personal liberation.

However, it has weaknesses. We know from wellbeing research that the ability to be a free individual isn’t all we need. We also long for community, for a meaning and purpose bigger than ourselves, for some kind of hope. Liberalism alone can’t provide these. Maybe we do need shared identities after all.

The need to find a way to acknowledge these longings, while also holding onto the good things liberalism provides, is now an urgent project for our best thinkers.

And Many of them, not necessarily religious themselves, are acknowledging that Christianity might have something to offer. Between tribal and divisive shared identities on one hand, and disconnected individuals on the other, there might be a third choice. Christianity provides for believers belonging, purpose, meaning and hope. We know this does have a positive impact on wellbeing. Crucially though, Christianity is not a shared identity that should allow you to retreat into tribalism. These positive benefits should instead be used to serve, not attack, those outside the group. None of which is to say that the church has anything like a perfect record on these things. Far from it. But for those seeking a new way forward, the ideal of an identity that’s both shared *and* outward facing might well be worth a look.

Tribalism tramples on the idea that good fences make good neighbours, the idea that “identities are not and should not be absolute”.

Ha, and completely unrelated, but somehow also apposite this morning from Julian Baggini.

Steel – It’s not the Economy, Dummy

When I talked about the strategic significance of losing British steel-making back in March this year, this week is exactly what I had in mind.

National defence is not merely business.

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[Post Notes:]