Adios Amigos

Time at last for me to close up this grubby little corner of The Internets™. There, there; try to hold the tears back. I've greatly enjoyed reading many of your Bad Blogs, and probably enjoyed not reading the remainder even more... but before I go, I'll cast another couple of responses into the wind, in some kind of ineffectual effort at dressing up my dismal failure to complete more researched posts:

Laura (ASBOs): You are correct that many magistrates' courts now like to throw ASBOs around like confetti. I've been threatened with ASBOs by police twice in the past year or so; once for letting my dogs bark inside my own home (apparently, my coffin-dodging neighbours can hear the dogs at least as well I can hear their fucking late-night TV on full volume when I'm trying to get to sleep), and once for using the word "cunt" in a private conversation that was overheard by some nosey sphincter-faced old harridan in the Post Office. It's all very well people bleating about how ASBOs are worthless because young offenders regard them as badges of honour; what about the ineffectiveness inevitably caused by their indiscriminate application?

Chris (Response to my post on infidelity): "I just feel that it has been drilled into me from birth that you should be faithful and that I think is why monogamy still exists as the norm." Man, doesn't that admission just confirm my point, though? (I'm not even gonna start on the American medical drama comparison...)

Before you all vanish into the eTher, I'd like to leave you with these words of wisdom once imparted to me by Lemmy Himself:

"If people would do drugs and fuck more, there'd be much fewer wars. Because fucking and getting high are much more fun than killing people!"

And are you going to argue with fuckin' Lemmy? No: that's what I thought.

Booze Britain

Caveat: I am not British, by nation of origin... but I do know about booze.

I'm from a generation that started drinking habitually as soon as we were old enough to get away with buying it. I make no apologies for that. I don't really 'binge' as such, but I do drink every day.¹ I'm not an alcoholic: I use alcohol to self-medicate, to help me stay normal... okay, relatively normal. In the evening I'll go out and drink, or sit at home and drink, depending on what I'm doing (or not doing). For an early morning, I'll sometimes add a drop of whisky or vodka to my breakfast coffee. I drink when I'm happy; I drink when I'm sad. I drink when I get anxious (usually helps) or depressive (never ever helps, but I keep doing it anyway). I mix my drinks, even though I know it's bad for me, and not just with each other: I mix them with sleeping meds, with speed, with pretty much all the things you're really not supposed to. Alcohol is a good 'balancing' agent for other psychoactives, particularly when you're mixing those--its ability to 'take the edge off' is precisely why we use it to relax, after all. Right now I'm drinking a spontaneous back-of-the-cupboard cocktail: Romanian plum brandy, Bombay Sapphire, lime juice and tonic. It's almost unbelievably disgusting; but I'll finish it, and quite possibly mix another (waste not, want not, y'know).

What I won't do is drink until I'm sick², or drink as an excuse to start scrapping. The idea that alcohol 'causes' violence or anti-social behaviour is the kind of leap-of-logic that only a politician can make. As the links above hopefully illustrate, binge-drinking as a pastime is nothing new in Britain. Historically, it was associated with two particular classes: those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder, principally unskilled city-dwelling labourers (whose lives were typically nasty, brutish and short), and the wastrel youth of the aristocracy (some things never change). The former group would often divert most of their earnings into alcoholic oblivion, whereas the latter could afford to drink as much as they liked, do very little else, and get away with it. Until relatively recently, the bulk of the middle classes seemed to steer clear of excessive social inebriation. So why is it that such a large proportion of the British population--people who, by historical standards, have no 'need' to drink themselves into a stupor, or kick anyone else's head in--now spend a significant proportion of their spare time and spending money doing precisely that?

Forgive me if I don't bother addressing the Cameronesque oh-isn't-alcohol-awful, look-what-it's-done-to-our-otherwise-marvellous-society drivel. Plenty of things are broken about Britain--not least its antediluvian electoral system, which you'll notice the Tories are defending to the death, because they can't survive without it--but ready access to affordable alcohol isn't one of them.³ Booze isn't the problem in Britain. It's the subliminal need for some kind of escape from the underlying frustrations and hopeless inequalities inherent in a consumerist society. People to use readily available alcohol as a gateway to vent those frustrations because they're subconsciously but profoundly fed up with their miserable, dead-end, no-prospect jobs, equally self-absorbed and superficial social circles, and lack of any sense of meaning or purpose in their lives beyond "buy more shit."

Furthermore: if you assumed that social binge-drinking comprised all there is to say about Britain's drunken history, think again. This country, as a nation-state and as an empire, didn't just get pissed for kicks: it was literally built on the judicious application of alcohol-fuelled violence. Why, you may wonder (as I often do) was Britain the world's greatest maritime power for almost three centuries? Well, there, are many reasons, but I submit that foremost amongst them was the fact that the Royal Navy was perpetually off its collective wooden arse. Remember the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), which cemented Britain's unchallenged command of the oceans for pretty much the entire 19th century? From 1655 until 1834--the period encompassing the rise and zenith of British naval mastery--the Royal Navy's rum ration was half a pint a day. And this was the basic ration, as given to the lowest ratings; higher-ranking seamen enjoyed even more generous allowances, while commissioned officers weren't rationed at all.⁴ Before a major engagement, extra rations would be issued to the lower decks, with the gunners getting priority.⁵ If you've ever wondered how the hell Nelson conceived and pulled off something like Trafalgar, you only have to look to the fact that neither he nor any of his crews could have been anywhere near sober at the time. Or, most likely, ever.

Similarly, the British Army's continental and colonial successes were largely dependent upon the gin ration (and if you think modern-day gin is nasty, you don't even want to know what that shit was like). Prior to the Battle of Waterloo, several British regiments were favoured with a triple gin ration--almost an entire pint of 60%+ volume alcohol per soldier (incidentally, the poor French soldiers had to manage on a paltry 2 pints of wine a day). No wonder they held off Napoléon for 12 hours: they were probably rendered physically incapable of retreating, even if they'd wanted to.

My dictionary would have me believe that the reason we term hard liquor "spirits" in this country is something to do with Middle Eastern alchemy. I have to wonder whether the etymology owes more to these beverages' association with morale. Either way, the world would likely be a very different place today if your sailors, soldiers and statesmen hadn't been comprehensively shitfaced at every critical point in modern history. That, I think, is the acheivement of which the British can be genuinely proud.


¹According to this handy little gadget, I typically average 4-5 units a day... but I'd estimate at least 4 or 5 times that figure on a night out, which happens about once a week (except when it doesn't). Apparently, this is really, really bad for me. On the plus side, I won't be needing an expensive full-length coffin when my head implodes.

² Although to be fair, I'm no longer even certain that's physiologically possible. Maybe if I tried mixing up some Listerine and antifreeze or something...

³ Ready access to affordable alcohol has, in fact, been possibly the single greatest beneficial advance in human society since the development of sustainable agriculture.

⁴ Also bear in mind that this wasn't fucking Bacardi, or the syrupy, 40%-volume crap we're used to nowadays; this was the stuff they used to pickle Lord Admiral Nelson's corpse for its return from Trafalgar to London. Interestingly in the context of binge drinking, by 1740 it was becoming common practice to water down the ratings' rum ('grog', of course) to prevent them from saving up several days' rations and drinking it all in one go.

( It was rare, even by the 1850s, for lower-deck seamen in the Royal Navy to survive to the age of 40, and the long-term effects of the rum ration was probably the single biggest contributory factor).

⁵ This wasn't as counter-intuitive a practice as you might suppose: given that the Royal Navy preferred to engage with broadsides at ranges under 25 yards, the gunners' nerve was of far greater importance than their accuracy.

Bad Jokes...

... or more specifically, offensive ones. I've been thinking in particular about Paul's question concerning the point at which the entertainment value of 'taboo' humour becomes outweighed by the offence it's likely to cause--or, maybe, where it crosses the line between being funny in itself, and relying entirely on shock value to get a response. I've noticed, for example, that a lot of so-called "politically incorrect" jokes essentially amount to nothing more than edgier-than-thou solicitations for their audience to join in with sticking it to The Man by smirking at grubby sexual or ethnic slurs. Neither funny nor subversive, in my opinion.

That's not to say that all humour poking fun at the often monolithic mores of modern multiculturalism¹ is un-funny by definition. In particular, Paul's Chris Rock clip highlighted how ethnic/cultural/sexual/etc. "ownership" of denigrating bad humour can make it good bad humour, and a lot of those jokes that we'd now consider off-colour² pre-date any formal notion of "political correctness" (or whatever the nom du jour is now) anyway.

Case in point: everyone knows that Jews have the best bad Jew jokes. My grandmother is a bottomless wellspring³ of bad Jew jokes, which I can only assume have been handed down through her maternal bloodline like ancestral treasures, painstakingly gathered over generations of Jewish life in notoriously anti-Semitic Hungary. Here's one of her favourites, no doubt first related to me long before I could form any words myself, and a good example of what Paul defined as "canny" ethnic humour:

Q. How was copper wire invented?
A. Two Jews fighting over a penny.

And here's a similar one, courtesy of my first Jewish roommate in New York:

Q. Why did the Jews wander the desert for three generations?
A. They heard someone dropped a quarter.

Obviously these aren't laugh-out-loud funny gags, but their humour value derives at least as much from their wry, self-deprecating context as from the fact that they're effectively taking the piss out of traditional Gentile prejudices regarding Jews. I think there's something to Paul's suggestion that a joke itself cannot profess an opinion... but the intent with which it's told, and the context in which it's placed, can certainly make a statement. The two examples I've given are jokes which might just as well be told amongst non-Jews, and might be funny in that context too--they wouldn't be the same jokes, because the nature of the humour itself would be changed by the context.⁴

I'll give you a more problematic example. About a month ago I overheard the following joke being shared between four depressingly stereotypical Sun-headlinesque Local Youths™ at the bus stop on Darlington Street:

Q. How many Jews can you fit in a Mini?
A. Two in the front, three in the back, and six million in the ashtray.

Now, they'd been talking a lot of shit--loudly--on a broad range of topics for a good while by then, and I've no real reason to suppose that the joke was made in any decidedly anti-Semitic spirit. Nonetheless, I'm afraid that at that point I intervened and suggested to them that they might like to consider closing their mouths before they got the dentist they deserved. I didn't really think about it at the time, and I didn't give it any further thought afterwards... but since last week's lecture I've started wondering,

a) if that was really the right thing to do, and
b) whether it was or not, if I hadn't inadvertently ensured that that joke would now echo through every future bus-stop those kids visited.

In terms of the first question, I still haven't made up my mind. I mean, I realise that, by any rational moral standard, I have no right to dictate to anyone else what is or isn't "fair game" for humour. On the other hand, it is a wholly different dynamic to the 'canny Jew' jokes I mentioned earlier. For example, I can't consider whether that joke would generate a 'different nature' of humour if, say, a Holocaust survivor was telling it--because I already know, beyond any doubt, that a Holocaust survivor would never tell a joke like that. That's an important distinction, and to me, it's as close as I'm going to get to that dividing line I started off waffling about. I don't see how anyone could derive genuine amusement--as opposed to hollow shock value--from something like a Holocaust gag unless they were profoundly ill in the head.

As to the second question: in reacting the way I did, and effectively reinforcing the taboo surrounding a subject like the Holocaust, have I not made those kids more likely to keep telling such jokes, in the belief that their very offensiveness in itself makes them funny? Ech...

I don't have any long depressing books to link you to this week, sorry. Instead here's a somewhat topically-segued clip of Ricky Gervais' infamous 'Anne Frank' skit. A lot of people were pretty offended by this at the time; I think it actually works about as well as any joke skirting the Holocaust can. I can't say I find it hilariously funny, but it's not grievously upsetting either.

While I was making notes for this post, I asked my grandmother--whose family in Hungary were literally wiped out in the 1940s--whether she thought that something like the Holocaust could or should ever be utilised for the purpose of humour. Her answer (and this is my summary of the discussion, not a quote verbatim) was that everything is guaranteed to offend someone, somewhere--and that you can't apply rules, or even enforce conventions, on humour anyway. I think I pretty much agree: trying to legislate certain types of joke as unacceptable, no matter how many people they offend, would not only be fundamentally hypocritical, but also totally self-defeating.

And on the topic of bad jokers... it was only a couple of months ago, when I finally saw
the movie myself, that I realised all the comparisons people have been drawing between
myself and the late Heath Ledger's character in The Dark Knight for the past 3 years
may not be entirely complimentary.

¹ It says in my module guide that we get bonus marks for alliteration.

(Seriously, I'm told that the "it says in my module guide" ploy re: assignment criteria and deadlines actually works on some tutors--the implication being that the poor student was somehow supplied with a copy of a module guide from a former year or something, and hence couldn't possibly have known that this essay was due in last week. And of course, the strategy is plausibly deniable, because if the tutor asks to actually see the bizarro-module guide, well, the student can always have 'lost' it in the interim.

Bear in mind that there are a lot of Law students at this school).

² In other news: possibly my worst unintended pun ever. I went back to edit that, but then decided that it was probably appropriate for this post after all.

³ Or maybe 'septic tank', depending on your point of view.

⁴ Incidentally, I personally don't think that level and context of humour would qualify, in itself, as anti-Semitism--but I do know a lot of people who'd disagree with me, so I'm not going to attempt to offer a definitive rule on that.

 (paraphrased).

I'm still watching you...

I know y'all been busy little bloggists lately. But it's also been sunny outside, and I'm afraid that in the rock-paper-scissors equation of time allocation, swimming in the lake defeats sitting inside writing.

Don't worry, though: I've been watching your mad scrambles for extra blog posts to push up your grades before the end of the month with considerable amusement. Speaking of voyeurism, A Rebel Yell has been telling us about Facebook stalking. Apparently, "clues are: wall posts replying to every status update, viewing every posted picture of the stalked, etc..."

Now, I'm not going to argue that this is extremely bad behaviour (although I would question how it could be considered attractive, or something any healthy individual would 'indulge' in...), but I would like to qualify your list of symptoms by pointing out that they're not always indicative of obsessive stalking, per se. Sometimes, they're merely evidence of terminal boredom. I have a couple of work colleagues, for example, who seem compelled to post headachingly inane responses almost every public post I make on Facebook. But I'm pretty much convinced that they do the same thing to everyone on their 'Friends' lists, because I know for a fact that they have literally no lives and nothing better to do. I don't believe for a moment that their continual, incomprehensibly tedious Facebook-keeping demonstrates an obsession with me. It just proves that some people are really, really sad.

I have a question for Chris, who asks in his post Tattoos and Body Modification that you "please don’t expect to get a full facial tattoos and ear lobes down to your crotch and still expect to get a good job in a popular store, or for that matter a job where you see and interact with other people." And my question is: why not? Why is it okay to judge and dismiss someone based on certain aspects of their appearance and not others?

For example, when interviewing someone for a part-time position last week, I wasn't allowed to tell them, "Sorry, I don't want you working here; you drive a big fat-ass SUV everywhere and you're wearing not one, but two St George's Cross lapel-pins. You are quite clearly a colossal wanker, and I need you to please get out of my sight before I reflexively slap your stupid fat face." However, I've seen my manager deny a crappy register job to a kid with tribal tats all over his face and neck, give it instead to an interviewee who was far less articulate and intelligent, and later justify his decision to me with the assertion that the kid's tattoos would "upset customers." So what's the difference? I'm personally prejudiced against toffee-nosed twats who drive oversized gas-guzzling cars; my employers (and probably most others) are institutionally prejudiced against anyone with specific, visible body modifications. Why is their bigotry permissible?

Just something worth considering in the context of why--and especially how--body modification is seen as 'being bad'...

Claire (Skin Deep) makes the important distinction between having numerous tattoos and having shit tattoos, and correctly points out that the former will always be more attractive than the latter irrespective of the amount of ink involved. Not sure I agree with her assessment of Megan Fox and Angelina Jolie as "the most beautiful women in the world", though...

Another interesting point touched upon in Claire's post is the issue of pain. This is one of the objections to body art that I've never really understood, because I can't say that I've ever had a tattoo that I'd describe as painful. Sure, the process is uncomfortable, and it's often pretty sore for a couple days afterwards... but pain is, like, pulling your hamstring or slamming your finger in a car door (or stabbing a red-hot tack needle through your earlobe--twice). It's something that, by definition, really makes your nervous system drop whatever it's doing and pay attention. It's debilitating. For me, the discomfort of the inking process hasn't (yet...) approached the level of intensity or urgency that would qualify it as "pain."

Also yeah: if we last until 60 we're all gonna look a mess anyways. 'Cos, you know: old people do. Diffused tattoos will be the least of our worries.

Niccy (Pornography): Seriously, how does porn 'devastate lives'? Maybe I'm just super dense and have totally missed your point, but unless you're actually referring to shit like, say, 'child porn' or snuff films (which are categorically not forms of erotica, for several important psychological reasons), I can't see how pornographic material can be considered dangerous or destructive in itself. You mention sexual crimes, but I'm not aware of any evidence to implicate porn as a causative agent. People commit sex crimes for all sorts of fucked-up reasons, but I've never heard or read of a case in which an offender watched some kinky videos and inexplicably decided to go out and rape someone just in case somebody else was standing around with a camera, or something.

Not following the logic here...

Body Modification

Nothing says HARDCORE like vegetable knives in your nose.

All right, so we don't all keep our cutlery in our nostrils. But, as Dr Follett pointed out, we do all modify our bodies in various ways. In fact, at the most basic level we don't have a lot of choice. Human beings have evolved in such a way that there is no distinct line between behaviours that are considered 'grooming' in other species, and what we have to acknowledge in human terms as body modification. If we didn't cut our toenails,¹ for example, we'd wind up progressively crippled (whether we live in shoe-wearing cultures or not).

Even the line between "necessary" body modification and aesthetic or expressive body modification is an almost entirely subjective one. I've heard certain people maintain vigorously that not cutting one's hair short all the time constitutes a long-term health hazard, in terms of risk of infestation and (I shit you not) accidental injury. Coincidentally, the same people generally tended to regard tattoos or piercings as socially reprehensible stigmata...

Yeah, yeah, you're saying. We know there's no logical consistency in Polite Society's attitudes to pretty much anything, body modification included. But it's not simply a case of Us vs Them (or 'modified' vs 'unmodified') here: very few of us who have permanently modified our bodies can claim to be free of judgemental or small-minded attitudes to others, and other forms of modification in particular.

Case in point: Me (always the best one, I feel). Over the years I've had a modest quantity of ink smashed into my dermis in various locations--most of which most of you will remain fortunate enough never to see--and accumulated a fair few pieces of gradually-tarnishing metal embedded in various soft fleshy parts (although I confess that many of my most ill-advised piercings have not been extant for some years now). I actually pierced my left ear myself, at the age of 12, by means of a tack needle, a camping stove, a wine-bottle cork and some pink-titanium CBRs another kid had stolen from a market stall (I'm pretty sure he nicked the bottle of wine too, come to that). The main reason, in my admittedly hazy recollection, was that possession of ear piercings was one of the most heinous imaginable contraventions of the rules of the boarding school in which I was incarcerated.² Yet it's not uncommon, when I see some other BM practices (or their results), for my first thought to be "oh, no way", "why on earth would you do that", or "that just looks fucking stupid."

I suspect--or maybe just naïvely hope?--that the reason for the rise in popularity of highly visible, permanent modifications is essentially the same reason why I won't take out my piercings or wear a suit (or cut my hair, or shave, etc...) for job interviews: if people are going to judge me on some stale, flatulent preconceptions regarding my appearance, then I'm afraid they can just get fucked. I've had 30 years to make up my mind about the values of integrity and self-respect, and I still find myself wholly unwilling to trade an iota of either for wealth or social status. In a word: knickers.

So I'm not suggesting that we should try to identify which forms and/or functions of body modification are "more transgressive", or "less meaningful", or whatever. Fact is, nobody chooses to do any of these things without a rationale that makes sense to them, and the right of an informed adult to do whatever they want to with their own body is not up for debate as far as I'm concerned. What I would recommend is that those of us who defend that right bear in mind that the issue of prejudice vs recognition is no more black-and-white than the semantics of definition I mentioned above.

Oh, and don't tattoo your pets, please. That's just fucked up.

¹ Or chew them; whatever works. And don't go 'ew', because that's exactly what human beings did to curtail errant toenail growth back before they came up with clever things like files and nail-scissors. Just go watch chimpanzees' grooming routines if you don't believe me.

² I don't think the Rules even made mention of piercings other than ears; their authors probably never conceived of such an abomination. Other things that were banned at that boarding school included (but were by no means limited to):
- tobacco (check);
- alcohol (check);
- drugs, obviously (double-check);
- possession of 'inappropriate material' (this term was used to encompass pretty much everything from wank-mags to D&D rulebooks to heavy metal cassettes--triple-check);
- growing one's hair during school holidays (check);
- loitering in town on the journey between school and boarding-house, and/or hanging out with kids from other schools (check);
- especially girls (check);
- wearing full-length trousers, as opposed to shorts, during summer term. I don't think I ever managed to break this one. For some reason, nobody ever decided to save up their pocket money for a pair of illicit trousers, rather than speed or vodka.

Oh yeah, that's what I was going to do over the spring break...

... you know, write more stuff in this blog. Oops.

Samantha (Infidelity): I'm intrigued by the turn of phase, "I have managed so far not to have a boyfriend cheat on me." Now, correct me if you think I'm making unfounded assumptions, but that suggests to me that you perceive a partner's 'fidelity' to be your responsibility at least as much as theirs.

I personally find the concept of mandated exclusivity, just on its own, damn near impossible to get my head around; so reading that really made me go "uhhh?" This isn't a criticism or an attempted piss-take: I'm honestly curious as to a) whether or not my interpretation of your words is accurate; and if it is, b) how the maintenance of a partner's 'fidelity'--i.e., their acquiescence in the condition of exclusivity, or monogamy or whatever you want to call it--can realistically be attributed to any passive influence on your part (rather than to their own active conformation to societal precepts, or fear of social opprobrium, etc. etc.)

Niccy (Infidelity): "What’s the point in cheating really? Is it not better to be single and free of restriction, both sexually and emotionally?" I'd say, what's the point of rigid 'single/committed, faithful/unfaithful' dichotomies in the first place? Wouldn't it be better if people could simply acknowledge and respect each other's emotional and sexual needs as human beings, instead of automatically dragging their relationships down with expectations of control and demand?

Call me a hippie or whatever--and this is not addressing your post specifically, but social mores in general--but I just cannot see how it's mature or reasonable to require people to pigeonhole themselves as either "single" or else confined to one, exclusive relationship. And committed until what, exactly? Until either or both parties have gotten so miserable in themselves that their continued propinquity becomes unendurable? Because as far as I can see, these arrangements almost always end in acrimony, melodrama and compulsive feelings of loss or lessening for at least one party anyways. And we're supposed to view this mode of relationship as healthy and normative...?

Chris (Profanity): Congratulations on the phrase, "fought against the tide of shits and fucks." Truly inspiring.

Drugs (again)

Not really a post-in-being; more a follow-up to my previous one:

So it turns out that even the government doesn't know what the point of its drug policy is--but they do admit that it's costing British drug users an estimated £13.9 billion a year in extralegal resources. Disgusting.

(Also, this is definitely the last post I'll make about drugs here. Honest. Almost certainly. Unless there are any more).

Bloggery doggery doo

In which your humble author, as is his wont, makes a brief and unnecessarily facetious roundup of responses:

Laura (Drugs): Just to nitpick, mephedrone isn't "known" to have caused any deaths (and very few illegal drugs are). There's certainly been a lot of headline drivel-slinging, most of it based on button-pushing words like "suspected", "linked" and "fear"... but you'll notice that none of those articles explicitly suggests that mephedrone has been the medical cause of any deaths. That's because there's no evidence that it has; only yet another frantic journalistic caracol of implication and scare-mongering.

Wainwright and Smith, for example, had been mixing mephedrone with alcohol and methadone (which are two things you should never take together anyways, let alone adding anything else). In fact, the only case in which mephedrone has been medically implicated as contributing to a cause of death is actually described as being due to the "adverse effects of methadone and mephedrone" (emphasis mine).

It's especially telling that the only factual information any of those articles provides concerning the impact of mephedrone is the report that "180 pupils had skipped classes after taking the drug at a secondary school in north-west Leicestershire." Oh yeah, the end of the world is clearly nigh...

Chris (Drugs): "If you really have no clue about whether you should take drugs, stick to the simple rule of DON’T."

Nooo. If you really have no clue about whether you should take drugs, it's well past time you found out!

If 'infidelity' is so bad...

... here's a question that I'm surprised nobody else asked during the lecture, because it was certainly at the front of my mind:

What's so great about the concept of 'fidelity' anyways?

Because folks: from where I'm sitting, it looks hypocritical, sado-masochistic, and profoundly unhealthy in any psychological context you care to name.


Caveat: I have never done the whole 'committed relationship' thing. I have never wanted to, nor really understood why anyone else would want to (I mean, I can postulate various dysfunctions that might explain it, but try as I might, I still find it impossible to empathise). I have no doubt whatsoever that human beings are not naturally 'monogamous.'

Establishing an exclusivity/ownership dynamic in a sexual relationship--a dynamic usually endorsed by screwed-up societal preconceptions, no less--is pretty much the polar opposite of what I know as 'love', I'm afraid. It's effectively declaring (with whatever superficial intention, and however mutually) that your partner's happiness and emotional welfare are constrained by the same factors and arbitrary standards as your own, and that they therefore have no right to be happy in themselves and/or with anyone else, or to try anything new while they're 'committed'¹ to you.

You wouldn't do that kind of crap to a friend; what the hell makes it okay--expected, in fact--to do it to a lover??

Frankly, the whole thing stinks of codependent selfishness and ravening personal insecurity. The term 'cheating' itself suggests depriving someone of something to which they are entitled--as if attraction or love are finite resources, which need to be rigidly graded and rationed out² on a priority basis. Folks: emotions don't work that way. If you love someone, you don't somehow love them any less if you also happen to love someone else. You're don't somehow find them any less sexually appealing if you also happen to be fucking someone else. Attraction may well wear out in many cases, but it can't be appropriated, or diluted through proliferation.

Then there's the whole marriage thing, with the civil/religious aspect... but that's secondary, and just sordid. Religion, like the monster that it is, will eagerly nurture any perverse social construct that makes people easier to control (and/or more miserable). Again: this is not a natural or rewarding state of affairs. Your affection is not some kind of unstable toxic waste that needs to be safely contained by some sterile, impermeable patriarchal bullshit, lest it seep out and impurify everyone else's precious bodily fluids. Or whatever.

Approaching sexual and emotional fulfilment through such a tortuous labyrinth of hangups and disturbing complexes is neither healthy nor sensible. If people can't maintain responsible relationships via open and honest communication, they don't deserve to have any.

Discuss.

¹ I would love to make a bad psychotherapy pun at this point... but I have a girlfriend who works as a consultant psychologist, and people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

² Presumably for the good of the war effort...

Stand and deliver

Whatever, Stuart.

The historiographical question Chris raised in last week's lecture, regarding the social 'respectability' of bandits and outlaws, is an interesting one. There have, of course, always been flamboyant robbers, and flouters of mercantile or revenue laws, in almost every society and at every time in recorded history--the archetypes of the highwayman and the pirate seem to have particular resonance in the British popular consciousness, for example. Yet it does seem that it's only during certain periods and under certain conditions that these types of criminal can be come widely admired and storied amongst the general public. I'm going to run with Dr Norton's historical examples, albeit in a more general sense, to illustrate why that might be the case.

For a start, the story of Robin Hood was not unique by any means. During the late 14th and early 15th centuries, such tales were circulated widely amongst the peasant classes (although they wouldn't be written down and romanticised for the edification of the nascent middle class until at least the 1450s). It's not hard to find any number of reasons why. The period in which 'Robyn Hode' was purportedly active--the mid-1300s--going into the period of such stories' actual popularisation--the early 1400s--covers the final throes of the English feudal monarchy's irreversible decline. As if the spiralling governmental corruption, incompetence and brutality of the times weren't bad enough, during those 3-4 generations the Kingdom not only endured the worst natural disaster in its history but also fought several ill-advised, grisly and vastly expensive wars in both foreign and domestic theatres. It wasn't just merchants and landowners who were fed up, and becoming far less afraid of saying so: peasants were also increasingly aware of the system's inadequacies and injustices, and increasingly aware of their ruling classes' crumbling power base. All across western Europe, the feudal monarchies were being shown up as exhausted, politically bankrupt, and most importantly, manifestly incapable of maintaining the basis and justification for their authority: that of the security of the lands and peoples under their rule.

Fast-forward to the early 1930s, then. Forget all the specious media comparisons and electioneering bullshit concerning the current international investment recession: it's pretty much impossible for anyone who didn't live through the Great Depression¹ to accurately envision what it was like. We're talking 1 in 4 people of working age unemployed in America by 1933 (and things were even grimmer elsewhere--with far grimmer results). People weren't just losing faith in specific politicians or even national governments; some seriously believed that the entire Western hemisphere was heading into a terminal socio-economic inferno, especially given the recent political 'apotheosis' of the world's other continental power. The vast majority of the population were genuinely frightened for their livelihoods and futures; and, as a consequence, genuinely pissed off at both the financial systems that had precipitated the crisis, and the governments that had proven hopelessly ineffectual in their attempts to stabilise it. It's not surprising that the kind of gangsters and outlaws Chris mentioned in class flourished under these conditions, and it's equally unsurprising that so many people perceived their crimes as 'striking back' against the authorities and interests that had betrayed the nation into economic disaster.

That's what I think, anyway. When the majority of people feel secure and validated in their socio-economic milieux, bandits are reviled as predatory sociopaths whose crimes are unforgivable transgressions against the common interest. But when enough people get fed up with rampant misgovernment and hard times, bandits may well become the dashing champions of the downtrodden underclass.

It says far more about the rest of us than it does about the criminals themselves.

¹ Usually dated '1930-39'; I think that delineation is eminently debatable, but maybe not in this blog.

Greetings, fellow drug fiends.

Aha: drugs. You know, I could quite easily fill up the entire blog with this topic... and in the process, quite likely incriminate myself towards enough fixed-penalty short-term sentences to see out the remainder of my natural lifespan in jail. So, let's not.

One point, though, that Gerry was polite enough not to belabour in class (I'm not) is that you are all drug users. Many of you, moreover are certainly drug abusers--assuming we broadly define abuse as irresponsibly health-damaging consumption.

Do you, perhaps, smoke and/or drink frequently? Get pissed, even? Then you--yes, you--have a drug habit; and one, incidentally, which carries significantly greater health risks than those associated with the abuse of almost any illegal recreational drug.

Similarly, if you use prescription medication regularly--for anything from allergies to emotional disorders--odds are that whatever stuff you're taking is more dangerous to misuse, and has more unknown side-effects, than (say) speed or coke.

Anyone drink coffee? I know from experience that a lot of us seriously struggle to regulate our mood without our appropriately-scheduled caffeine infusions. Again: drug-taking; addiction; deliberate alteration of mental states.

Hell, I daresay most of you eat meat. "What the crap is this about now?", you ask? Well, your farm-reared sacrificial offerings are pumped full of antibiotics, growth hormones and goodness knows what else. So when you chow down, you're effectively choosing to deliberately ingest whatever biochemical residue is still stagnating in that dead tissue. Mmmm.

All that being said, though... In the interests of topical focus, I'm not going to get into the issue of recreational drugs' preposterous illegality here. Nor the question of why religious and state authorities have relentlessly persecuted personal drug use, which I think was covered pretty well in class. Nor even how drug laws cause far more (and far worse) social problems than those they purport to solve, because that's a whole book on its own.

We know the facts of government policy regarding drugs. What I'd like to ask is: why do we buy it? Why do we, as a society, largely support heavy-handed, invasive drug laws--especially when we freely (indeed, according to some, endemically) abuse dangerous legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco?

We know that, medically speaking, the government is pulling our collective chain when it describes drugs like acid or Ecstasy as "dangerous." You don't need to hold a distinguished professorship in sociology¹ to observe that the problems so often attributed to 'drug use' are, in fact, caused by an illegal drugs trade, which encourages exploitation as the inevitable consequence of its prohibition. National authorities clearly feel that their gains in terms of social control via criminalisation outweigh any potential gains in revenue via regulation--or else they wouldn't do it. Attempts to prohibit drug use have, historically speaking, not only failed dismally in their stated objectives but also perniciously undermined our civil liberties. So why does a majority of the population tacitly condone that rationale, and accede to its implementation, even to the point of putting their own kids in jail for smoking dope?

It can't be adequately explained by simply pointing out that the vast majority of people are idiots, and therefore naturally inclined to mindlessly obey laws and conventions that are manifestly stupid and irrational (which they are, by the way). The specific issue requires a little more analysis than that. There are no doubt all sorts of complex social factors at work. I'd just like to throw out a personal theory regarding one of them, in the context of why drug use is so widely regarded as "being bad."

I suspect it ties back to the social concept of personal freedom vs social progress--something which seems to underpin our collective cognition with regard to 'bad behaviour' in general. This got me thinking on the topic of masturbation² again--or more accurately, back to the point Mark made in the Week 5 lecture regarding the nature of modern social stigma attached to masturbation: the fact that it was a form of sexual activity that (in common with 'sodomy' and so forth) had no potential 'issue', and was thus regarded as a waste of (reproductive) resources, thereby attracting the opprobrium of religious authorities concerned with social stratification and control.

The nation-state may have replaced the religious hierarchy as the de facto social authority, as far as contemporary Western society is concerned; but I think the principle remains the same, in terms of drug use. We are trained and conditioned literally from birth as social units; we subconsciously process everything we do through a dichotomy of 'constructive' vs 'indulgent' behaviour--and we're taught that the two are wholly separate are antithetical. Our social conditioning is based on the premise that only behaviours contributing to a lifestyle that endorses and engages with the social system (mostly in terms of definition through gainful employment, societally-improved models of 'relationship', and especially the avoidance of social criticism or introversion) can be considered 'constructive' or worthwhile. It's all about making your investment in an artificial, control-based system for (wholly subjective) mutual benefit.

To use drugs recreationally--to intentionally trip or get high on whatever--is to make an investment in yourself. The experience itself is not something that you can contribute to society, or even effectively share with anyone else.³ You've got nothing material to show for it once you come down; the benefits are entirely internal, and entirely personal. Recreational drug use cannot, therefore, ever be termed a 'constructive' activity in the conventional, social sense... and I think it's that which subconsciously informs the systemic social prejudice against it. People are artificially wired to object to anything which appears to represent unsanctioned self-indulgence. It doesn't need to be harmful or destructive in order to be 'bad'.

¹ Just for the record, I am not attempting by this remark to discourage anyone from pursuing a distinguished professorship in sociology, if they really must.
² Because most things do.
³ I'm thinking mostly in terms of hallucinogens as my example here, but the point also applies to stims and other 'party' drugs to a less exclusive degree.

Comments? Oh, go on then

Week 7 already. Oy gevalt, where does it go...

While I'm playing Blog Catch-up, I may as well throw some more drivel at some of you:

Graham (They tried to make me go to rehab): bear in mind that typologising every conceivable form of misbehaviour or dysphoria in terms of ever-more-pedantically-specific 'disorders' is also great for business--if you're a big psychiatric consultancy group and/or an international pharmaceutical corporation (which also happen to be the places that government and media tend to look for 'expert analyses.' How about that).¹

You might say that medicalisation is the new new Western disease...

A Rebel Yell (Chocolate May Cause Violent Behaviour): I'm not picking on you, I swear... but I fear you may have fallen prey to bad journalism on the part of HealthandAge.com, whose Susan Aldridge (yeah, PhD) appears to have done a very suspect job of reporting on the Cohort Study analysis. Reading the BJP article and the actual report itself, I get the impression that the whole chocolate-on-demand thing is being cited as symptomatic of ineffectual parenting in general: not as a primary factor, and certainly not as a medical cause of later delinquency.

I do agree that the study itself doesn't satisfactorily demonstrate a direct correlation between juvenile chocolate consumption and adult conviction. (It also doesn't really suggest anything about emotional development that isn't already widely-recognised, and far better articulated by other studies).

That said: there are plenty of medically sound reasons why it's not a great idea to give kids chocolate and sweets frequently, or in large amounts... so I'm not sure exactly what the author was aiming to accomplish with that article.

A Horse called Golgotha (Lies): "If you take a disliking to somebody, surely pretending to get on with them for the sake of avoiding hostility is the right option?"

Hell no. Absolutely the opposite. If someone pisses me off to the point at which I feel they should know about it, then believe me: they'll know about it. Dissembling about interpersonal grievance and conflict only leads to passive aggression and other despicable behaviour. Better by far to have all that stuff out in the open and honour satisfied.

(It also gives the offended party the chance to find out if they're wrong, or have misjudged the offender(s) without realising--whereas if they just keep it to themselves and sulk about it, they risk being stuck with any misconceptions).


¹ In fact, I've noticed that in this country the government tries to actually hire said experts to advise on an ongoing/permanent basis, rather than just paying them a load of money for one-off policy endorsements. If that's supposed to make the whole arrangement look less sordid to public observers, someone should let them know it isn't working...

Bad cinema and worse excuses

Yeah: Being Blogged... isn't. It's been neglected while I spent a week writing an essay on the Holocaust and giving testimony in court.¹ With all that out of the way, though, I'm going to say a few words concerning last week's 'bad cinema' topic--but only a few, because I thought about it a lot last week and unfortunately my attention/retention span is pretty hey I feel like blueberry pancakes, look at that funny monkey.

No; actually one was plenty, thanks.

However, rather than reiterate a lot of what people said in class last Thursday about cinema in general and Kids in particular, I'm going to briefly zero in on the binary issue of controversy and censorship.

Now, I have a theory that 'controversial' films are made controversial almost entirely by people who haven't seen them. From observing the kind of folks who get involved in PublicOutcry™ pants-wetting over film, TV, books, video games and so on (and so on), I've come to believe that at least 99% of them are personally ignorant of their subject matter. They start out with some specific sociopolitical axe to grind--usually something to do with their religion/morals/right-to-never-ever-be-offended by anything being under threat--and simply seize on various forms of creative media as pretexts for inflicting their batshit obsessions on the rest of us. A generous selection of fatuous drivel posing as artistic critique, whose raison d'être is actually to discourage its readers from making up their own minds about anything, provides them with all the 'information' they feel they need.²

They then form protest groups and quite often get things banned--especially in this country, whose government has historically been just about the most repressive Western 'democracy' in terms of prohibiting films and literature even without any public pressure.

¹ These two incidents were, I assure you, totally unrelated.
² I should mention, in the interests of fairness, that many comparative reviews don't have any such agenda; in fact, some of them manage to have no apparent rationale whatsoever. Disney's Aladdin as one of the 25 most controversial movies of all time? Right...

Further thoughts on social health vs personal choice...

... in response to A Rebel Yell's Response to a Response (and while displaying great restraint in foregoing the opportunity for a limitlessly recursive series of post titles):

"I suggested a compulsory 'stop smoking' course as it is not a punishment of the pregnant woman, like a fine would be, but it is clearly advocating the welfare and health of an unborn child."

I dunno; I suspect that a lot of smokers would consider it very much in terms of a punishment, and very much in terms of targeted discrimination. I'm not going to take a polemic stance on this specific issue (primarily because I don't have one), but just for the sake of dialectic: what about, for example, expectant mothers who eat a lot of junk food? What about those who don't exercise as much as you or I might think they should-- or those who exercise too much? The ones who drink? The ones who suffer from anxiety or stress-related neurosis? The ones who stand under trees in thunderstorms...?

You get the idea. Are we to single out mothers who smoke, when there are others whose lifestyles might well be even less healthy for their unborn children? If not, where do we stop legislating? Do we demand that all pregnant women attend a whole slew of programmes to discourage them from every conceivable foetus-damaging habit, just to cover all the bases? On exactly what kind of fulcrum could we consistently balance the rights of the mother against the rights of an unborn child?

I sure don't know-- but I do know you'd have a bastard of a time getting more than two or three members of the public to come to a consensus...

"I feel that the principal of choice SHOULD be undermind if it is to the detriment of another being."

Well, again (in a much more general sense), the question there is: where do you draw the line? Who are we going to trust to define and administer, for example, "the detriment of another being"? The government...?

Porn and pregnancy...

... in two entirely unrelated comments. (Sickos).

Graham: I don't think it's accurate to speak of the porn industry in terms of being "symptomatic of a moral sickness in society", no. Its success is predicated on a combination of two factors:

• people masturbate a lot more than they get laid...

• ... and a whole lot more than they get laid with the kind of people they'd really like to.

Porn simply provides accessible visual stimulation as a proxy for imagination (and/or reality...). If you like, it's pre-packaged, emotionally-sanitised sexual fantasy for lazy consumers. And that isn't a criticism, as such-- just an acknowledgement of the fact that it's often easier (or at least less time-consuming) to whack one out to some smutty photos or videos than to rely on less tangible forms of mental stimulation. The whole point of it is that it doesn't hold any emotional investment, and facilitates the safe discharge (tee, hee) of sexual urges. And you're correct in that natural human curiosity is an important element in that... but then, it's an important element in pretty much every kind of cognitive process too, so I wouldn't read anything too specific into that.

Now: I suspect that if the context of someone's porn consumption goes beyond that superficial level, then they're taking it all a little too seriously; that's how functional disorders such as so-called 'porn addiction' arise, in which it's seized on as a substitute for dealing with reality, rather than as an aide. In that respect, yeah, there can be a personal problem, with the potential to make itself a social problem-- but the cause is the sufferer's underlying dysphoria, not the means they use to express it.

So, no: porn isn't the key to some kind of Pandora's Box of latent hypersexualised depravity buried within our collective subconscious (or whatever). Neither is it, in itself, indicative of any such tendency in individuals or societies. People are simply hardwired to be curious about anything that's suggestive of sex on any level, but particularly visual stimuli-- that's because a) vision is our primary perceptive sense, and b) primates don't have 'heat' cycles or any similar 'patterns' of sexual engagement (so on a purely reproductive level, we rely on individual circumstantial signifiers for courtship, rather than collective/seasonal ones).

... which is a pretty long-winded and drivelly way of suggesting that pornography, while arguably not essential, is pretty much inevitable in any human society in which images can be reproduced. For example, even during the apogee period of Victorian table-leg-covering, Henry Hayler was doing a brisk trade in dirty projector and microscope slides.

A Rebel Yell: I'm not sure I follow the reasoning for your argument in favour of government intervention to legally discourage/prevent pregnant women from smoking. You've stated "A baby is a human being (obviously!) and will have the same rights as anyone else. This should not be any different just because he/she is in utero."

This is neither 'obvious', nor entirely true...

A baby categorically does not have the same legal or civil rights as a adult. Its parents are expected-- in point of fact, legally required-- to assume responsibility for all that stuff until their child attains majority. A foetus, more to the point, doesn't even have the human rights attributed to a child... but its mother does. Which brings me to my point:

In modern Western society, the personal choice of the mother-to-be holds primacy over considerations of her unborn child's health-- and, I'm afraid, rightly so (albeit on general principles, rather than applied morals). This is a good example of something that is no doubt morally wrong being legally right, simply because restricting personal choice and freedom in this case would invalidate those same principles in every other legal context. I have no doubt that Joseph Cullman was keenly aware of this when he made the apparently grotesque comment that "some women would prefer having smaller babies." While the remark itself was motivated solely by cynical business interests, the nature of its implication is nonetheless significant: that the freedom of mothers to smoke, despite being well aware of the risks involved, is paramount.

Now I agree that you, and with Lou, that smoking while pregnant is a hideously irresponsible and morally indefensible thing to do. I agree that social opprobrium should fall like the proverbial ton of bricks on any woman who chooses to do so. But I can't agree that the principle of that choice should be undermined or compromised. It's repulsive, it's tragic, and yes, the women in question probably don't deserve to have kids... but mandating government oversight, even if it's only in terms of compulsory attendance on an assisted quitting course, would amount to putting a bomb under the foundations of our universal personal liberties.

Week 12

I don't have any spectacularly exciting ideas, sorry. Most of y'all seem to be advocating a trip to Amsterdam, but I can't really believe that very many of us have got the spare money (or the time: Week 12, I mean, think about it...) to make such an extravagant excursion feasible.

At least, I know I haven't, so I can't get behind that idea.

One topic that struck me as being conspicuously absent from the module guide was that of pornography-- particularly its changing position / status as 'entertainment' in modern society (or has that really changed, in any meaningful way...?), and the means and media of its consumption. Both the the production and the consumption of porn are still regarded as essentially 'bad' by social moralists-- just think back to the Moral Majority censorship shitstorms of 1980s America (those of us who were around)-- yet it's now freely available in any flavour and quantity to anyone with an internet connection... and I can't help but notice that a very large section of the class cited pornographic photos and/or videos as primary masturbatory aides in Thursday's survey.

I think that a session on porn and its value to society is clearly called for...

Just following up...

... on a question I raised in class last night, regarding the widespread adoption of neonatal circumcision in the US, and its (possible) anti-masturbatory rationales:

"A remedy [for masturbation] which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision, especially when there is any degree of phimosis. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anaesthetic, as the pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment."

- John Harvey Kellogg

(Just think about that next time you reach for a box of Bran Flakes in the supermarket, folks).

Now, it turns out that Kellogg himself didn't explicitly advocate circumcision of newborns for this purpose (although his position is arguably even creepier-- he's essentially saying that for it to have any "salutary effect", the victim has to be old enough to know what's going on, and experience the pain in context). However, plenty of other medical professionals did. This article¹ traces the history of the practice in America with an overview of its pseudoscientific justifications; prevention of infant masturbation being one of the prevalent themes.

And while we're on this particular, queasy topic: I used to live just down the block from the world-famous Museum of Sex in NYC, where they have a whole permanent exhibit section of ingenious tools for the facilitation-- and prevention-- of masturbation. That's right, it's ACTUAL PHOTO TIME:

Mark showed us the blueprints; here's the end product. Also note the contemporary depiction of the pernicious effects of self-abuse on health and personal appearance, in the background.


Shall I put this one up here as well? I sure can't think of a reason not to!

I'm afraid that (numerous) other photos of the masturbation exhibits are not suitable for posting here, given the blog guidelines... but are freely available in one of my Facebook albums, for those of you who have access.

¹ You'll need to log into EBSCOHost via your university Athens account. If you can't get in directly (sometimes it logs you in, only to dump you at the e-Journals home page so you have to start searching all over again...) you're looking for David Gollaher, 'From ritual to science: the medical transformation of circumcision in America', Journal of Social History, vol. 28, no. 1 (1994), pp.5-38.

Slow week, huh?

Never mind; here's a couple of responses to what people have written...

Regarding Graham Quirk's post, 'All lies are not equal': ah, lying by omission. This wasn't addressed in detail during the lecture, but I think it's ultimately subject to the same qualifications regarding integrity as lying by direct misrepresentation. Where it differs is in how you go about gauging the relative significance of the information (the 'truth') you're not telling. You make the point that, at any given time, a whole lot of information which might be crucially important to you is simply boring and/or irrelevant¹ to anyone else; generally, though, I don't see that withholding that kind of stuff equates with actively fabricating a falsehood.

And to run with your example, yes: 99% of the time, when someone asks "how are you?" they're just going through the motions of social protocol. Hardly anyone actually gives a crap, or wants to know how you're feeling, when they say that-- it's just a verbal gesture, usually made (and responded to) without any conscious thought. Volunteering a perfectly candid response is far more likely to discomfort or offend people than just glossing over the grinding misery of your neurotic existence with the customary (and largely untrue) "fine thanks; yourself?"²

That said: lying by omission does need to be considered in terms of integrity when you know the information you're withholding is important (or at least potentially important). Particularly, I would say, in the context of pre-existing misconceptions: if you know someone's already being deceived (whether by you or someone else...), and/or simply has the wrong idea about something, and you could put them right, or set the record straight... but choose not to. That kind of situation, I think, definitely needs to be assessed in the same way as more 'straightforward' lying.

Briefly: A Rebel Yell goes even further in Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!, and suggests that human relationships, social circles and even basic self-perceptions are built upon reciprocal frameworks of benevolent untruths. I'm not sure I can really agree with that: it seems to assume degrees of codependence and mutual validation-seeking with which I'm personally uncomfortable (and oh boy, will you ever hear about that when we get onto the issue of 'infidelity' later in the module). Speaking for myself, I have a very low tolerance threshold for meaningless platitudes and hollow politeness--³ and if I bother to ask someone a question, then yeah: I want an honest response according to their point of view, not whatever bullshit they might think I'd like to hear.

¹ This is obviously a murky area, because in terms of friendships or relationships, one's own evaluation of 'relevance' is likely to be highly subjective...
² And just as an aside, the ability to dissemble in this respect is not only taken for granted in social settings, but absolutely essential in the workplace. When your boss says "morning, how are you?", you need to be able to lie-- because you're unlikely to make much progress on your mortgage if you reply "I'd be a lot better if I could smash your fucking teeth out, you bloviating pillock."
³ Note: being polite is not the same thing as having good manners; all too often it's actually the opposite. I'm hoping to drivel on at length about that in another week, too...

I love being lied to: it makes me feel important

Many years ago Baltasar Gracian declaimed, "a single lie destroys a whole reputation for integrity." Of course, being a Jesuit, what he really meant was that getting caught in a lie destroys your reputation for integrity (which may just be why he also recommended, "do not hold your views too firmly.")¹ Those of us who aren't fortunate enough to be clinical psychopaths are already well aware of why lying is immoral, regardless of the motive-- for one thing, it's an insult to other people's intelligence² (which I suspect is the real reason why most of us object to being lied to, never mind all our lofty moralising); for another, it's a flagrant contemnation of the essential human need to understand and qualify our existence, via the pursuit of irreducible fact and the concept of 'truth.'

As such, I guess I have difficulty with the reasoning that a lie which causes nobody any direct harm is simply a more advantageous substitute for an unpalatable truth. I think it goes beyond interpersonal trust or propinquity; in a very real sense, when we lie we're actually dehumanising ourselves, and each other, by generating deliberate contraventions (or obstructions) to 'the truth.'³

That said, one can weigh the impact of said dehumanisation (and/or the risk of getting caught in a lie, which is honestly less of a big deal to me) against the potential negative consequences of telling the truth. When the latter is clearly likely to cause more harm or grief than the former, then it's reasonable to lie. In other words, Kevin has it right about the concept of lying with integrity: if you're going to do it, do it for a good reason, and know exactly why you're doing it. Obviously that doesn't make it moral, and a good reason doesn't automatically make it a 'good' thing to do. But honesty is not the same thing as integrity. The former is telling other people the truth; the latter is telling yourself the truth.

If I really have to lie-- and it does take a pretty dire imperative to make me consider it-- that doesn't stop me feeling dismal about it afterwards. Even so, I'll do whatever's necessary to make damn sure I don't get found out-- not least because if I do, all the agonising and self-loathing has been for nothing. And let's face it: it's easier to cope with a bad conscience than with a bad reputation.



¹ On the other hand, it's also worth bearing in mind that a reputation for integrity is easily acquired if you happen to be very good at lying-- a fact which, as someone pointed out in last night's lecture, is vital to the operation of most modern electoral systems.
² Which raises the question: do you feel less bad about lying to stupid people? I know a lot of people have mentioned that they consider it less offensive to lie to strangers than to friends, which I really don't get at all; but what about dumb people compared with smart people? Maybe if we perceive someone's understanding as being more limited, we assume that they don't have as much 'use' for the truth and hence it doesn't matter as much if we lie to them for our own benefit?
³ The quotation marks are because the concept of 'truth' itself, obviously, is often subjective... but that fact doesn't have any moral bearing on its presentation or misrepresentation.

A few more comments...

... and then maybe I can find something worthwhile to say for myself. (No promises).

To Lou, regarding The Theft and other such...: I think the point that needs to be made is that while the act of stealing is always technically immoral, it's not always unreasonable. It's entirely reasonable to point out that some thieves deserve the items they steal (essential food being the example most people have cited) more than their 'victims' deserve to profit from them. Entirely reasonable-- just not really justifiable within the context of social morality...

Also, just as an aside, if someone steals your iPod and you go break their head, that's not 'stealing it back': it's recovering your stolen property, and hence technically redressing a wrong, rather than compounding it. I don't think it's possible to make a rational case that people engaging in unreasonable theft don't fully deserve whatever they get.

Belatedly, in response to A Rebel Yell's first post, just vis-à-vis the following remark: "when questioned ‘why is incest bad?’ people were struggling to answer. We KNOW/BELEIVE its bad behaviour, but ‘cos it is’ doesn’t seem a sufficient answer." Well-- I dunno. I suspect incest might be one of those things that just provokes a visceral, entirely subrational revulsion in a lot of people. I know that's certainly the case for me... and I'm pretty sure that's not merely because my sister is a disgusting bitch.

And Claire, regarding "Would you steal a car": I'm intrigued by your examples. What is it about stealing a car that makes it worse-- or at least warrants a more severe form of punishment, as you seem to be suggesting-- than stealing "makeup, or sweets or something small"? Surely, since neither cars nor makeup nor sweets can be considered necessities¹, the crime is identical and hence the punishment should be the same.

Are you implying that the monetary value of the item in question should be proportionate to the penalty² for stealing it? Because honestly, that strikes me as straying dangerously far into the territory of value-based morals, where you're at risk of winding up with the (material) tail wagging the (judicial) dog as far as your legal system is concerned...


¹ In fact, I can at least imagine a range of circumstances in which someone might actually need to steal a car-- whereas I can't think of any in which a similar necessity could be presented for stealing makeup, for example...
² To pre-empt any confusion, I'm talking only about the penalty for the theft here; not the compensation potentially due to the victim(s).