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What Is The Sound Of One Head Banging (Against a Wall)?

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 ‘But, Sir, what do you mean by that? What is critical analysis?’

 

‘I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not collecting disconnected scraps of information from Wikipedia because they sound good, then passing them off as your own beside a nice Google image of said subject matter.” (Editor’s note: that method is best kept for blogs).

 

Silence in the room. The unique silence that settles on the faces of bemusement and detachment.

No further questions.

 

When you analyse it, being the teacher can at times be almost as futile as the teaching itself. Promoting doubt in a room full of certainty is releasing the dove that barely gets off the ground before coming home to roost. Faced with the unwinnable war, the only defence left is to call up to the box the worst simile one can think of.

Call forth the witness…

‘Using language we can all understand, explain to the jury what it’s like to engineer learning through the introduction of abstract concepts, more commonly referred to as analysis?’

‘Well, it’s rather like sticking an SD memory card into a film camera. Spools, not slots, yeah? Or even like wiring an onboard computer system into the dashboard of a ’55 Karmann Ghia. Dials, not screens, if you catch my drift.’

‘Thank you, Mr Simile. The prosecution has no further questions.’

 

No doubt there are worst similes, but are there worse-equipped learners? Across the globe on isolated chairs, millions. Within a purely cultural context, it is harder to find a more disingenuous bunch than those from lands who do not like voicing doubts, who know fine well their elders are their betters and that truth is knowing what you like and liking what you know. Knowledge as fixed inheritance is the way to see it. Perhaps it pays not to think too deeply. In most of the world it pays neither to offer too much commentary nor court too much controversy. After all, who wants the emerge black and blue from the scrum of free thoughts? Or worse still, not emerge at all (from that place behind the sun).

 

When you are raised on rice, wisdom is not to sift through the grains with a fine tooth comb. When you are hatched on rock hot enough to fry eggs, flying too close to the sun can send you into an early tailspin. But what has egg-fried rice to do with analytical awareness? Diet is the the answer. Diets of learning are just as telling as the calorie diets we usually think of. Strictly-speaking, a diet is anything ingested and not all that is ingested is digested. Not all that glitters turns to shit either. Protein thinking leaves the learner lean and hungry, primed to hunt down and disembowel the mythical beasts in their canon of knowledge. But monounsaturated fats leave them flaccid, helpless to kill those mythic sloths that refuse to shift their lazy asses. That’s a narrative shorn of happiness. Recall happiness? That thing the Dalai Lama called the be all and end all? More to come on the marriage of knowing and being.

 

Globalisation:- the conjurer of the weird (Ebola – where does it disappear to for so long when it’s not busy making eyeballs bleed?), the wonderful (Bob Dylan, 74 and still touring the world), and the worrisome (Jihadis with padded abdomens lurking in your midst as we speak) delivers the whole package. Through it, new ideas are vectored as virulently as communicable disease. Exotic notions of going from an ignorant to an articulate society are imported by air, cable and sea on the back of exotic foodstuffs imported by air and sea (Side note to Les ancien regimes: you cannot always have your cake and eat it.) That’s what happens to the local gazette when the village becomes the world and the world the village.

In regions outside the Anglosphere where obesity and type-2 diabetes go unchecked, diets were not always so rich in calories. Nor were they so rich in heuristics (learning through trial and error; self discovery), nor in critical thinking, nor in the free exchange of ideas, all of which amounted to a kind of open-source software of philosophy to trump the jealously-guarded source code of truth that old elites held so stubbornly to for so long.

Through all the Jamie Oliveresque frustration at trying to convince the turkey-twizzling recalcitrants to switch to a diet of kale, goji berries and organic salmon, there is an electrical dialogue going on across hemispheres of the brain, as well as the planet. Some talk of divergent thinking about what constitutes thinking as a clash of civilisations. It’s as if the redoubtable Saladin himself had returned to meet Richard the Lionheart in the sequel to the Third Crusade. The battle for hearts and minds is more subtle than that and not always fought on the same front.

East is East and West is West, but in the classroom the twain has and shall continue to meet. When we consider the so-called civilising mission of the imperial British and French of the 19th century, their missionaries were the teaching task force. Then, as before and since, with trade and military intervention went the transmission and diffusion of the seller’s ideas into the buyer; the ruler’s weltanschauung onto the unwitting and often unenthusiastic subject. Preaching was teaching and teaching was the crucible of cultures. The philosophy of free trade went in lockstep with the philosophy of free thought although both had a chaining effect, as Gandhi beautifully exemplified by showing that Indian philosophy was every bit as enlightened and more as that of the British Raj. When delving into the dynamics of what happens when Western ways of critical reflection, relativism and self-awareness come flush against Arab absolutism or Chinese Confucianism, when we place the individualist against the collectivist, only then does indoctrination/ enlightenment/transmission, whatever you choose to call it, become apparent as a process. The process is both two-way and convoluted. Thinking across cultures therefore reveals more sequences than an improvised dance troupe, and more patterns than a thick book of carpet samples.

Can an old dog be taught new tricks? Why would he want to? Banging one’s head against a blank wall because others don’t see your point of turning truth in on itself brings a smile on the faces of the politely detached. The smiles, for all we know, could be inane grins revealing the tensions of smuggling critical and reflective intellectual practice through the back door while operating a strict autocratic code at the front. That polite detachment, for all we know, could be the embarrassment-cum-denial of farting on public transport. Inscrutable as that look is, inscrutable as these exotic creatures are, the critical thinker in there says, this has got to be cognitive dissonance in its manifest form. Look, they are thrown by the confusion of holding opposing values of tradition and modernity as simultaneously true. On their gormless faces is the priceless visage of someone whose left and right hemisphere has been cleaved in half. Surely, their culture is anoxic. Where is the oxygen of free, unhindered thinking? Have wings will fly; have knuckles, will drag.

And then the thought arrives: what if the reason these heavenly creatures are so joyful, the reason they laugh and smile with such sense of abandon, is because they are the ones whom knowledge has set free? Unlike the critical analyst, plagued by doubts, chained to uncertainty, floating aimlessly outside the box, maybe it is they who rejoice in the security of the box, and in the certainty of a knowledge that is immutable and unchanging as the book itself. Who needs doubters when everyone knows that when a tree falls in a forest it makes the sound of millions of hands clapping. There is solace is knowing what you know.

What the halal is going on? The tables have turned.

Who has the cognitive dissonance now?

 

 

Three Guesses As To What Really Matters

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Suffering from another paroxysm of doubt – a bobbing on the big sea moment – Tolstoy seemed the natural choice of port for the Gen X refugee to find anchorage in. Let it be known not only common folk or mendicant monks seek to know what really matters. Kings, too, have tipped their crown in neediness of an answer to the big three – 1) When is the right time to do the right thing? 2) Whom is considered most worthy of being the beneficiary of that right thing? And, 3), what is that right thing to do in life above all other right things? If Christ could do it on a bike, and Hindus on their hands and knees around the Holy Mountain, then Arthurian types can go in search of answers, too, finding them planted in unlikely soil.

What is the right thing to do, when is the right moment to do it, and with whom should it be done? Are such questions that go to the heart of the matter to be considered existential conundrums unlike any other? Who can tell. At least, with Tolstoy we have an agony uncle worthy of trust. Let’s face it, rules are rules. Fables, myths and necromancy when they come, come packaged not into ones, not twos but threes.

Three the magic number: three wishes; three wise men; three wise monkeys; three fates, furies and graces; three the number of intelligence in the Kabbalah; the father, son and the holy ghost; Great Pyramids; the belt of Orion; three of a kind; three chances to put things right.

And so it came down to three questions that Tolstoy’s Certain King went to slay with allegorical brevity short as a cocktail stick. When he took his ruler of a faraway realm on his kingly quest, still he did so with a point, but not the kind that spears pitted olives. His was in mind. As De Troyes’ Fisher King was crippled with injury, Tolstoy’s Certain King (one presumes) of Slavic peasantry is crippled with that most chronic of conditions: indecision.

The analogies are rich as they are universal. Indecision is as injurious to the mind as a hurtling javelin is to the thigh. This moral maze, full of ankle-twisting turns, knows no bounds of credo or class. The ruler is expected to be judicious to the extent of having answers to the trickiest questions tucked into his hem. Nonetheless, it is to the furthest reaches of the forest, to the old and frail hermit living in a dacha-cum-shed, that he experiences a comedown of humbling proportions. As wisdom is the burden of the elite, so it is the gift of the obscure.

To the question of ‘what the right thing is to do’ (presumably this question extends beyond simple quandaries like Sainsbury’s car park is chock-a. Will anyone really notice if I park in the disabled space?), apparently hermetic sagacity comes down on the side of digging seed beds in pity of the old hermit shirker who claimed he was too buggered to do it for himself.

As to the question of when is the right time to do the right thing, like the old adage goes, there’s no time like the present. The when ends only when the present ends, which is never until it is stepped out from. Our king, now engaged in menial labours considered essential by Shaolin monks for attaining mindfulness, is now inadvertently digging his way to the answers he seeks by virtue of having rolled up his sleeves and working that hoe like such a demon that he stops noticing time and forgets what it is he wanted to know. Only when he stops to reflect does he realise that the right time to do the important things in life is lost when the mind is either running ahead or falling behind.

The when embedded within the what comes twice to the fable. The other most important time existing for the king in the quantum mechanics of the present moment (where either something’s nature is known but not its location or else its location but not its nature) is when he turns from market gardener to red cross medic and saves a man with a blinding bit of field dressing. Little does the king know that the man, consumed by vengeance, was out for his blood. But instead of regicide the stranger in the forest finds the king is stemming his own gushing blood in an act of compassion, for why the king does not know.

As to the question of who benefited from that right thing and that right moment, the knackered old hermit and the wounded wannabe assassin became the king’s most important task, the only thing that mattered. Just as your average Uncle Joe does not take up arms for a cause but for himself and those either side of him, so Tolstoy, through the hermit, avers that the most necessary man is he with whom you are, for no man knows (in that very moment) whether he will ever again have dealings with anyone else.

The king has, quite unintentionally, received his true coronation. Mindfulness is the crown he wears. Presence is now in his heart, leading the hermit on to distill the essence of the good thing, which is to perform man’s sole purpose of being: doing good. Kant wrote the only unqualified, unconditional good was the good that arose from good will; goodness not to conform to norms of goodness, rather goodness for its own sake.

Our king left the protection of his realm asking three questions he thought should govern and guide a life in which he had grown dissatisfied, and for which he was deservedly awarded his Duke of Edinburgh. He left a substandard realm of irrelevance only to discover a sublime state of benevolence. He threw off his chain mail to don the saffron robe. And all because he was not afraid to invent himself in the mind of the writer whose own life needed questions answering, metaphysically-speaking. Ask Tolstoy and ye shall receive.

 

 

Gall Stones that Crack the Mirror Pool

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“It wasn’t until middle age that narcissists became depressed, because of their failed relationships.” So writes Zoe Williams in this morning’s guardian.com, quoting the authors of The Narcissism Epidemic. So how else could causation flow through these variables? Relationships failed because narcissists grew depressed and depression stemmed from hitting middle-age? Was it that relationships failed because depressives hit middle age and this aging process arose through being a narcissist? Or that it wasn’t until relationships failed that narcissists became middle-aged, and relationships failed because who the hell wants to cuddle up to a depressive? Where does narcissism begin and depression end? For that matter, where does middle-age end? In failed relationships? In depression? In a late blooming of narcissism? In a toxic brew? Most pertinent of all, where does middle-age begin? And have I left the solar system of youthful vigour and entered the Kuiper Belt of wrinkling despair?

“Don’t worry, son. You’re very much in the game. The solar wind has just died down a bit today. Take it from an old timer, you’re as young as the woman you feel.’

“Let me illustrate, Dad. It’s almost as if I’m cruising through deep space billions of miles from Earth. There’s Neptune out my starboard porthole. Still, I’m not sharing the view, if you catch my drift.”

“You don’t have to paint elaborate pictures. Come out and say it, son. You mean you’re lonely?”

“Hell, yes. I don’t feel women these days. Haven’t sniffed an opportunity since I left Earth. Tell me, how old does that make me?”

“Look at you. You look great for your age, lad. What I would give to have looked that good when I was any age, far less the age you are now.”

“You’re trying to imply I’ve entered my middle years without actually giving it an ‘official’ title, aren’t you?”

“Don’t be soft. I’m sure you’ll find someone who’s, er, not like the others, and you’ll put all your troubles behind you and she’ll be the one who’ll go the distance. And I mean to Neptune and beyond. You’ve got time still, lad. Oodles of it.”

“What are you trying to say? That I’ve flunked every relationship because I’m in a funk I can’t free myself from? A bit too self-absorbed, eh? No room for others? That’s basically what you’re saying.”

“Well, son. Now you mention it, you’re your own worst enemy. A bit too caught up in yourself, at times.  Sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but you need to learn to consider others a bit more. Give a little to take a little. See ourselves as others see us.”

“You mean I’ve got narcissistic tendencies?”

“Well, hmm, narcissistic is a bit strong. It’s not like you’re always try to catch your reflection in shop windows or anything. When you’ve lived alone as long as you have, it’s not easy to give up all that self.”

“Your not really painting a rosy picture of me here, Dad. I can see my dating profile now: solitary, sociopathic type. Scores high for misanthropy, low for empathy – a real plus these days. Has the advantage of not often being wrong about anything. Loves watching people and animals suffer. Carries around a small vanity mirror for those times he forgets just how much of a catch he is. More boom than bust type of guy, although does love getting to the point(s) with women. Brilliant company by his own admission. A bit of a silver fox. Is aging so gracefully that he has been compared to Clooney, not once but twice. Age not an obstacle as his charisma is transcendent. Looking for a sexy twenty-something. Personality not such an issue as he will be doing most of the impressing. You thought the koh-i-noor diamond was one of a kind. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

That’ll go down a storm with the ladies. Tell me where I went wrong, Dad.”

“Well, I suppose we’ve all got to love something or someone, son. We’re only human, after all.”

Narcissists are by definition excessively preoccupied with protecting and aggrandizing the ego, and since the ego’s primary motive is the preservation of self, why not experience the inward tugging of the self-serving soul the closer one comes to their own eventual auto-destruction? So it stands the test of reason that it can never be too late to develop that life-saving proclivity for narcissism. And if narcissism got you feverish when you were younger, early middle age seems about the right time to let delusions of grandeur mellow into a warm mug of mindfulness, easy on the ego.

From the moment the toddler accepted it was not mum’s thirteenth paired rib bone, more a pivot around which the universe was spinning, is it not the case that narcissism cut a swathe through little Lord Fauntleroy’s life practically undetected? Vaunted self-importance ain’t the preserve of the selfie gen. We were over-inflating our tyres long before Mr Dunlop showed the wheel the way. The difference is, now narcissism has found an instant digital outlet for a population of smart phone-conscious lemmings where previously it needed developing in a darkroom. The difference is, now viral self-love drives extinction of countless species and the worst kind of  relationships are those we have with nature. It’ll be in our species’ middle years that the aftermath of the man-nature abusive relationship will be felt as a source of mass depression.

It is axiomatic that only at the onset of middle age do we fall into a slump. It explains a lot about personal midlife crisis and catharsis, the slow onset of rigor mortis, adoption of new creeds (Scientology and Kabbalism not exempted), and all that other life-begins-at-40 mantra. It explains how the coming-of-age personality can crash and burn (by descending into anguish, alcoholism, discontent, pill addiction, and other chemico-ontological pitfalls) only to subsequently emerge rebuilt, lightened and more philosophically lean from the experience.

For all those failed relationships staring back at you from the millpond of your mind, for all the remorse of not reacting with the soulful completeness of the post-you instead of that room full of mirrors from where the pre-you used to look out in confusion, bear in mind that the task of being one of billions of little living deities is not simple when advancing years makes peeing feel like breathing fire through the urethra, and the stiffness on waking like one’s bloodstream has been transfused with embalming fluid while they were sleeping.

There are more reasons in this world of ours to be insecure than there are to be narcissistic. To make an omelette worth being, one needs to find mirrors worth cracking. The 21st century narcissist really is walking on eggshells.