Winding Down the Year (2)
Happy 2017 to all (?) my readers.
Resolutions:
(i) Be kind
(ii) Look for beauty
The rest will be what it will be.
Winding Down the Year (1)
As 2016 crawls off to the knacker’s yard, I’ve had this running around my head:
A Great Disturbance in the Force
When Princess Diana died in 1997, colleagues and I discussed the reactions to her death. We agreed that she seemed to have married into a shitty life and it was sad she died young in that manner, but we weren’t in floods of tears, we didn’t buy flowers to leave in the park, and it didn’t disturb our emotional lives at all. This wasn’t an exercise in cynicism, it was just that she wasn’t known to us personally and personal grief wasn’t involved.
Wind forward nearly 20 years to 2016 and the roll-call of the fallen, most recently Carrie Fisher, whose death was announced yesterday. In the case of Carrie Fisher, of course I regret her death and have empathy and sympathy for those who knew her; but all year, as public figures have died, my Facebook timeline, when I had one, and my Twitter timeline have featured people declaring the depths of their sorrow at individual deaths in ways that veer towards the mawkish, featuring photographs of the deceased with strap lines attesting to the lachrymose desolation of the poster. These are not from friends and family, whose grief is understandable, but from normal punters. Ms. Fisher is the latest to trigger such reactions.
I don’t get it. I don’t understand why people want to make a public display of emotional inadequacy: what do they want, a medal?
Carrie Fisher: RIP
Can You Hear The Music?
Another Christmas gone.
Our Christmas was pretty much like we’ve done for several years now–I make my mince pies on Christmas Eve, then make dinner on Christmas Day, and then flop somewhere and snooze. That’s pretty much how I like it and, so they tell me, it’s how everyone else here likes it too.
The only thing different is this year I didn’t watch the Dr Who Christmas edition when it was broadcast (I was snoozing) and, so far, still haven’t watched it. I’ll get around to it sooner or later.
However I did watch the Sense8 Christmas Special on 23rd December and have watched it again twice since. I’ll probably watch it some more times too. You will gather from my watching it three times already that I enjoyed it, and that it was a joy for me to reconnect with the characters. The special served to move the stories of the characters forward and also to set up some themes for season 2, which appears on Netflix May 5th (Will experiencing some of Angelica’s memories and Jonas’s explanation quietly did that).
If you’ve seen my three previous posts about Sense8 you’ll know that I love this show for many reasons, and I enjoyed the Christmas Special for those same reasons. The core reason is the way the hand-wavy science-y stuff about being senseate and psycellium and shit does its heavy lifting in the outworking of the core metaphor via the interplay of the characters, rather than being front and centre as techno-babble. This alone makes Sense8 more interesting than 99% of so-called sci-fi on TV (or in the cinema, for that matter). The other core reasons are the commitment to “show don’t tell” and the emotional engagement I have with the characters.
The Christmas show wasn’t perfect: I think it suffered a little from being a stand-alone episode, particularly in some of the early pacing. Also, to these British ears some of the dialogue seemed over-written. But these are niggles rather than substantive criticisms. As ever the show brought big smiles to my face and, once or twice, some pressure behind my eyes (often involving Sun Bak, but also, surprisingly, Bug).
Anyway: this is how senseates celebrate their birthday–no napping on the couch for them.
In The Realms of the Unreal
Somewhere around 1979 or 80, I read Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method. I got to it by a roundabout route: his How To Be a Good Empiricist was in a Philosophy of Science tutorial reading list, and I was sufficiently intrigued by that to read more of him.
Against Method is not without its critics, some, though by no means all, of whom understood what Feyerabend was getting at. It’s a while since I last read it and the detail fades, but I do recall the thrust of one of his core suggestions: that Galileo succeeded in the long run not because he had better arguments in the abstract, but because he was better at arguing.
A similar analysis can be made of Martin Luther, often said to have sparked revolution when he nailed his theses to a church door. That’s not really true: his theses were in latin and unintelligible to most of the population. He really got motoring when he pointed out, during a period of significant local economic trouble due to widespread crop failure, that German money was lining Italian pockets.
This has been in my mind for a lot of this year in the context of Brexit and the US election. It will also be important if we ever have to endure another Indy referendum here in Scotland. There was an assumption on the part of the ‘Remain’ side and the non-fascist part of America (and remains an assumption of the “No” side in Scotland), that it is enough to present facts and arguments to convince the ‘other side’ of the logic of your case, at which point they will shake your hand and thank you for correcting their misconceptions.
They will not.
Analysis and logic are important, but they are not sufficient; in fact they are easily sidestepped by portraying them as the nit-picking pettifoggery of “experts”. The SNP understand this, as does the loathsome Farage. For those of us who value an open, inclusive society, we need positions and arguments that appeal to people’s emotion and instinct, not just their minds.
And they need to be memorably expressed in no more than 140 characters.
Recent Comments