Beware those who claim to have ‘found the key’

At the Perth Writers Festival many years ago I went to a talk by an author of a very well-known autobiography. He came across as a bit of a demagogue. Confident and charismatic, he told us he’d been a criminal spurned by his own society until he was embraced by the poorest of the poor. He saw the light, and now spends his time helping other downtrodden folk. The vibe of his talk was – I found the key – in a very profound sort of way – and now I am here to bring you with me. His story was colourful and appealing in its biblical simplicity. But his energy was overpowering, and a little intimidating.

Profound transformational experiences can happen, and there’s nothing to say he didn’t have one. But there are reasons to be suspicious of people who think they’ve found the key and are very confident about it. Particularly where the transformation has happened very quickly and radically – they were lost and now they’re found – and they are very attached to the particular thing that ‘saved’ them, such as eastern religion or martial arts or a particular diet. Then the next minute they’re self-mutilating, having a nervous breakdown etc. They’re still on the journey.

Three tales

Wouldn’t have wasted my time

It was a party with a bunch of my old school friends and related folk. As well as being completely babe-a-licious, many of these girls are sharply sexy dressers. I started comparing myself to them. This cotton flower dress you’re wearing, the one that you thought was sweet…it’s actually dowdy. I wondered what they might be thinking about me. Why is she still wearing that daggy peasant shit? She could do more with* –

But I then had this vision of myself growing old: wrinkles, spots, a stoop. I imagined approaching the end of my life, looking back on this little moment, and realising how unnecessary it was. That those were pretty much my last days of being classed as a young person and supposedly in my physical prime, but I couldn’t just enjoy it – all I could think about was my small imperfections in comparison to others. That if I’d understood then how quickly beauty fades, and death comes round, I wouldn’t have wasted my time.

Not so perfect after all, are you?

We were at this excellent Laksa restaurant. This couple came in; they looked like architects or town planners. Him: a cosmopolitan Tibetan guy with a classy shirt and suit pants and his hair in a pony tail. Her: cool and classy, with little ballet slippers on. They seemed the perfect urbane couple. You could imagine their apartment; minimalist, with really nice silverware and a few classy decorations. A very calm place.

They sat down. I was checking them out. Then realised they weren’t really talking. They were just staring at each other. I don’t know whether they were just naturally subdued like that, or they were having relationship issues. But I was pretty certain they were unhappy. It looked like a very uncomfortable dinner. I then realised that I got some kind of satisfaction out of their dysfunction. I was thinking, ‘Not so perfect after all, are you?’

That’s ironic, isn’t it?

Today on Australia Day, my friend and I both injured ourselves on Metro Trains. We had our bikes and took them up the back to the reserved seats, as there weren’t many elderly and disabled people around. They were those flip seats, the ones you have to press down before you sit on them.

An older man came over, hobbling with a cane, wearing a classy hat, and carrying a Melbourne University diary. We realised that my bike was in the way, so moved it to the other side of the carriage with my friends’ bikes.

He looked a bit frail so I held the seat down for him while he sat down. It was slightly awkward, and I’m not sure whether it was a bit patronising, but the seats are hard to get down. He said something to us like, ‘Worked it out now have you?’ I couldn’t discern his tone.

My friend got up to get some sunscreen from her bag, but I said she could have some of mine. Forgetting that the seats flip up when you get up, she tried to sit down again and landed arse-end on the floor. Not hurt at all, she started laughing.

Then the train moved the older man’s bag forward, and he reached to get it. I went to help him but he told me he was OK. I sat back down on my seat, rushing at my effort not to patronise him.

My seat had flipped up so of course I had exactly the same accident as my friend, except I actually banged my shoulder and hip really hard, so it took me a few minutes to see the funny side. Once I got over my pain, the older guy started chuckling too. ‘That’s ironic, isn’t it?’ he said.

Interesting that those seats are supposed to be for the elderly and disabled and yet us able bodied can’t even use them without hurting ourselves. Maybe we are just extraordinarily clumsy! The seats are actually a bit stiff to push down though, which can’t be easy if you’re frail.

In defence of amateur ignorance

A review of Andrew Abbott’s ‘Varieties of Ignorance’ (Am Soc (2010) 41: 172–189, if that means anything to you)

This is an academic article by Andrew Abbott. His tone is a  bit pompous and like much academic stuff, the prose is slightly turgid, but there’s food for thought there. It came to hand from a friend who is an academic and talks about all the interesting things he’s read, so lately I’ve been pressing him to send me articles, which I nearly always have to make myself read because they’re so stiffly written, but so far it’s always been worth it.

Abbott’s field of study is the history of professions. His shtick is that the structure of professions is determined simply by their need for jurisdictional control, rather than by particular traits. In other words, ‘the problems handled by professions – health, disputes, monies*– do not have any symbolic shape.’ The professions culturally constitute the problems they claim to address, and they then create a structure that guarantees legitimacy before the public.

But Abbott’s field of study is only incidental to his real topic: ignorance.  In Abbott’s view there are three types of ignorance: amateur ignorance, professional ignorance, and expert ignorance.

AMATEUR IGNORANCE

Abbott starts by analysing Wikipedia’s article on professions, and the associated discussion page. Both, in his view, are ‘fundamentally ignorant…they are not only ignorant of the state of the art in the scholarly literature, they are also largely unaware of the scholarly literature altogether.’

His comments on the talk page are disdainful, if interested. It ‘resembles nothing so much as a dinner chat in a university dining hall. It is a melange of mixed agendas, unstated moral positions, sharp – even contemptuous – assertions of (usually erroneous) authority, and vastly different levels of actual knowledge, all sustained by a kind of youthful energy and a noble but naïve faith.’

You get the sense Abbott doesn’t have a particularly high opinion of undergraduates.

But what really gets me is when he says: ‘one has the sense that this group of people is more committed to having the debate than finding a conclusion – another hallmark of graduate thinking.’

But the sense that there’s always a conclusion to be found, or that you always have to be looking for one, seems a bit positivistic to me. And some of the best conversations I’ve had have been when we really are just throwing ideas around; not necessarily looking for a ‘conclusion.’ I believe enquiry in itself is of value. That said, I’m sure Abbott’s definition of a ‘conclusion’ is more nuanced than I’m giving him credit for.

Abbott labels the Wikipedians as possessing ‘amateur ignorance’: they know facts about professions, but they are ‘ignorant of modes for evaluating those facts and then on setting them and the literature into an order that will stand against the onslaughts of new facts and literature.’

I can appreciate where Abbott’s coming from. After all, he’s spent his life studying this, given it deep thought and analysis, and then he has to watch people argue round and round about it on the internet. Maybe it’s like a doctor watching people argue about whether sunburn causes skin cancer.

But amateur is really important. People shouldn’t be discouraged from seeking knowledge about stuff just because they don’t have the tools to use an online research database (and no Abbott, it is not that easy to find what you’re looking for). That just favours the privileged; those who have the time and money to study or discover the ‘literature.’ Plus, the truth is highly subjective; why should people not be encouraged to find it out for themselves? Experiential forms of learning are not given enough credit.

Maybe I’m just defensive because being amateur is kind of what I’m good at.

PROFESSIONAL IGNORANCE

Abbott talks about the substantial numbers of academics – and this is quite interesting – the amount of academics that have cited his book on professions unnecessarily or trivially (for example to justify some very general assertion), or wrongly. Some people cited his article for empirical analyses that were not central to it, but were easier to find in his book. I can remember doing that as an academic!

So some academics are citing articles without reading them properly, to give themselves legitimacy (and perhaps flatter academic colleagues)? I wonder what kind of pressures the internet has created for them to pump out work more quickly and rack up their publication tally – and how that’s impacting on the quality of their deep thinking. After all, if we care about anyone’s deep thinking, surely it’s academics.

EXPERT IGNORANCE

This is the one that Abbott dobs himself in for, and to me the most fascinating. It is when you earnestly dive deep into facts, patterns, theories. You emerge with a theory. From that point, it is difficult to think of the other facts, patterns and theories except in light of that conclusion. He also calls it ‘synthetic ignorance’, because it arises from a synthesis that can obscure complexities.

It occurs to me that the process that Abbott describes is even worse when the person’s not even on any genuine sort of truth seeking mission, ie they start with a theory and they look for the facts and patterns to prove it. In political life this is super common, probably quite so in personal life too.

In my view, expert ignorance – ie the creation of some kind of meta-truth which obscures the disorderly, and often inconsistent, texture and colour of situations – is why Abbott’s supposed amateur ignorance is so important. Debating around a subject, going round and round in circles, sometimes that actually helps you understand a situation, without coming to a conclusion.

Abbott acknowledges that ‘synthetic ignorance is in many ways the reverse of amateur ignorance’. So maybe he is talking about two extremes of a pole, and anticipates a happy medium.

He also acknowledge that expert ignorance is the most dangerous, ‘for it makes us unable to see the new…Always, we are only beginning to think.’

That last line is my favourite.

*err monies? See – turgid prose! That said, I’ve seen seen way worse, academia wise.

Ant movements

I have this clear memory of being in a lecture at uni and having this vision of the earth zoomed out, with humans moving around in repetitive, pre-determined patterns, a little bit like ant movements. Teeming humans. I understand what it means intuitively, but can’t really articulate it. It’s something about the limits of our understanding and ability to effect change on the world.

I often get that feeling when I have to ingest a lot of factual information about something, or even analyse a concept. Humans trying to understand and critique human systems of thought and behaviour, using brains that are so unavoidably shaped by the same systems of thought and behaviour. Err…it’s a bit bias. We think we’re a lot smarter than we actually are, or can be.

One of the most crude examples was in Year 10 science when we learned about the stupidity hierarchy of animals – small unexciting sea creatures, insects, dogs, apes, humans (in rough and almost certainly inaccurately remembered order). The intelligence level was determined by their similarity to humans. It doesn’t even pretend to be an objective measure.

I read this fantastic essay by Zadie Smith about David Foster Wallace. I like her non-fiction so much better than her fiction. She talks about ‘Forever Ahead’, one of his stories in Brief Interviews. A boy is at an old public pool resolving to try the diving tank for the first time. He is queuing for the ladder, and watching the woman in front of him dive in:

Smith: “The difference is awareness (this is always the difference in Wallace). The boy seems to see clearly what we, all those years ago, felt only faintly. He seems that ‘the pool is a system of movement’, in which experience is systematized (‘There is a rhythm to it. Like breathing. Like a machine’)…”

Smith, quoting an excerpt from DFW’s story: “Listen. It does not seem good, the way she disappears into a time that passes before she sounds. Like a stone down a well. But you think she did not think so. She was part of a rhythm that excludes thinking. And now you have made yourself part of it too. The rhythm seems blind. Like ants. Like a machine.”

There’s a lot more to Smith’s essay than fear of automatism. But I’ll leave you to read it, and the short story too.

Moments like finding that essay remind me how much I love reading. You think that there’s almost nothing that nobody else has thought about, but there’s almost always someone whose much further along in their thinking than you. It’s hit and miss finding them though.

I don’t know if there’s any intrinsic value to working these conundrums out yourself; it may be a bit overrated.

After all, this is not an academic exercise

What makes music boring? 

Fleet Foxes, the National, Bon Iver, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: my friends really rate these bands, but I’m a bit meh about them. In What Makes Music Boring, Steven Hyden notes that describing a piece of music is boring doesn’t refer to its inherent characteristics, but simply means that it didn’t resonate with us. When Hyder thinks a piece of music that other people like is boring, his main feeling is disappointment, rather than superiority because he’s more discerning or has higher tastes.

Non-fiction writers, particularly reviewers and journalists, tend to frame their critique around a piece’s supposedly objective qualities. It’s true that expressions like ‘I feel’ ‘I think’ ‘It seems to me’ ‘I guess that’ can be tiresomely repetitive, and come across as self absorbed. Representing things as personal opinion/experience, rather than fact, could also be perceived as undermining the reviewer’s authoritativeness: i.e. why don’t they just back themselves by making a judgement?

In my view, non-fiction writing that takes a experiential, subjective approach is more meaningful. Debate and analysis of facts has its place, but is ultimately limited given that things don’t exist independently of how they’re experienced. I find writing most interesting when the author interrogates their own experiences openly, as well as imagining how others in the story might be feeling.

How did they conceive of the issues they protested about?

Media coverage of the pay dispute between Victorian nurses and the government has so far been limited to recounting the history of the dispute and outlining the competing positions of both sides, with a little analysis. I appreciate that journalists probably don’t have the time or inclination to do a Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion for a state industrial dispute. But in addition to the recounting of facts and arguments, it would be interesting to find out more about the underlying ideological frameworks, perceptions, and experiences of the various participants in the conflict.

It’s a fight of sorts, so the parties in dispute take diametrically opposed positions and argue over the facts. The structure of the situation means that they’re not interested in exploring ambiguities (although perhaps they do need to consider them in anticipation of an eventual compromise). But how do you get the truth when neither of the sides have any motivation to find the murky truth that exists in between their polarised positions?

It’s my experience that being politically active, either party-political or issues-based, makes it easy to jump on a bandwagon. Sometimes you need to. As an advocate, lobbyist, or a decision-maker representing one side of a conflict, spending too much time pondering the grey areas can do your head in.

My instinct is to sympathise with the nurses. The government (simplified version) wants to reduce nurse numbers, replace nurses with ‘lower-skilled’* assistants, and reduce nurse-patient ratios, in order to save money. I’m not sure whether the money saved will be thrown back into the health system. It kind of sounds like a bad idea, doesn’t it? If something sounds like a bad idea, and you don’t have the time to find out the facts, is it fair enough to assume it’s a bad idea?

But surely there are certain tasks, like cleaning, wiping up, etc, that could be done by other workers that haven’t gone through nurse training, and hence are paid less. And is it necessary to have a completely inflexible nurse-patient ratio; are there absolutely no settings where numbers could be reduced?

I really do hate the word ‘efficiently’, I feel like it probably represents an ideology that don’t agree with. But if you’re the government, and you have a certain amount of taxpayers money to spend, don’t you have a responsibility to make sure money’s not being wasted?

There are a few problems with the government’s position though. What are they doing with the money they save? Will it be thrown back into the health system, where the funds are desperately needed? (Sorry if there’s an obvious answer to this that I don’t know, but I’ll bet there’s not). And how will the added ‘flexibility’ by implemented in practice? Given the shonky ways things are often done, it seems inevitable that corners will be cut, and patients’ care compromised. Maybe it’s better to have inflexible rules when it comes to heathcare, even it does mean that the government’s not saving every possible penny.

A friend told me he overhead a conversation between a young nurse and an old nurse on the tram yesterday. You could tell by looking at them that they were really nice people, he said. One of the nurses saw the other wearing a red shirt and then asked if she was going to the protest, and pulled out her own red shirt from her bag, taking it out of its wrapper.

He found the subsequent conversation disappointing. His description of it was something like: Old nurse: Are you going to the protest? Young nurse: Yes. Old nurse: hopefully a lot of people will be there. Young nurse: Yes… and on like this, in a kind of repetitive way. He’d been hoping to hear some discussion about the issues and their perspective on them.

Now it’s not like these guys exist for the purpose of holding ‘interesting conversations’ to appease bored commuters. But this story interested me, becuase when I was at the protest yesterday, I was wondering how many of protesters had formed their views by reflecting upon the issues in light of their own healthcare experiences, and weighing up all perspectives. Or was it more about banding together, doing it for the team?

I always get caught up in protests; they have a grand narrative feeling, giving me the sense that you’re immersed in a reality larger than yourself. I feel like there’s a war and I’m on the right side; a problematic feeling, I think. This one had a wholesome, celebratory feel. The music was perfectly rousing – they were playing ‘I see Red’ – and the protesters reminded me of a lovely, usually political dispassionate mum or aunty who’s been stirred into action on this one occasion by the absolute worthiness of a cause.

Looking at them, I wondered how they conceived of the issues they were protesting about. Were they really passionate about healthcare, with well-worked out reasons why they didn’t agree with any reduction in the ratios? Were they just there to support their mates? Did they have a well-founded feeling, borne of their experience, that actual implementation of the so-called ‘flexibility’ provisions would result in a reduction of health standards?

One thing I found a bit disingenous was that the speakers kept saying this was not about pay, it was about nurse-patient ratios, which was met by loud cheers from the crowd. But if you look at the Australian Nursing Federation’s log of claims, an 18.5% pay increase is first on their list. Conditions are obviously vitally important too, for both patient and nurse welfare, but perhaps it would have been more honest to say that this is not just about pay.

I understand that the issue of respect and resourcing for nurses is intrinsically linked to their willingness, ability, and capacity to do their job properly, which of course affects patient welfare. And I’m not doubting the commitment of nurses, but I do wonder how many would protest if the issue was purely about patient welfare. Perhaps that’s an irrelevant and not entirely helpful question given that nurse and patient welfare will always be interdependent.

*I’m not totally convinced about calling them ‘lower-skilled’, which implies a hierarchy of professional worth. I guess ‘lower-skilled’ could, in this context, mean something that is easier to learn, i.e. it takes less training? But in many contexts, it seems like ‘lower-skilled’ is used as a lazy synonym for ‘paid less.’

Narrative therapy

Someone was telling me about narrative therapy the other day. From what I understood of our conversation, narrative therapy assumes that everyone has their dominant stories, which marginalise a whole range of other important stories.

On a more systemic level, dominant stories include ideologies, such as capitalism and patriarchy, and perhaps even feminism and democracy. Whether these stories have a positive or negative effect is beside the point, but the fact is that any kind of ideological framework obscures ways of thinking that don’t fit with it. The therapist helps the patient deconstruct their dominant narratives and unearth the more marginal stories, to find different ways of understanding their identity, and help them work out how to live as that person.

I think about it like this: when people ask you about a particular situation, without thinking you’ll often give a similar run-down of events each time. The story you will tell is compatible with accepted understandings and template modes of thinking, and it’s socially acceptable. But there are a whole lot of other alternative realities behind it that you won’t even acknowledge to yourself because they don’t quite fit into your dominant story.

To give a simple example, you go travelling, and someone asks how it is. The story you tell will be ordered and have a definite plot. It will fit with their expectations about what they are going to hear. Anything that doesn’t fit with the plot, that is ambiguous or contradictory won’t be included. But there are other stories, memories or thoughts will linger in your mind for years to come. Sometimes you catch yourself thinking about them and wonder, why am I thinking about that? And often, dismiss the thought pretty quickly.

Narrative therapy seems like a pretty useful idea for thinking, personal development, and creativity in general. Politics, maybe, too? The Occupy movement is interesting to think about from this perspective. It won’t give a list of demands that ticks the boxes in the dominant template, similarly, it’s not anti this or anti that. It’s more abstract and cosmic in outlook; trying to find a new, more real, textured and nuanced way of thinking about things and doing things.

But as you’ve seen, this doesn’t go down well in our reductionist political landscape, where things need to have a nature, purpose and function, and ambiguity, uncertainty, slowness and softness are often painted as bad. Even if the movement peters out, interesting ideas have a long life, and will often resurface is some shape or form.

What the hell is water?

It’s amazing how quickly your mind, given the space of a short holiday, will turn to questions about the choices you’ve made, the kind of life you live, how to find meaning and whether there’s any point at all. Sure, these points of enquiry are present in everyday life, bubbling away beneath the surface, but in between brushing your teeth, going to work, and attending various events, there’s not much time to explore these fundamental questions, and in any event, doing so can highlight uncomfortable, intractable dissonances with the life you’ve chosen, or fallen into. Instead, you spend a lot of time thinking about concrete and contextual things, without considering their broader meanings, for example, this weekend I thought about: what food to eat when hungover, the purchase of a sequinned dress, fear of my landlord and whether to give someone a second chance.

But given a bit distance from the strictures of daily routine, and some space for dwelling on things, the brain soon starts to rebel from its usual obedient functionality. The questions, doubts, and dawning realisations emerge, ephemerally at first but quickly reaching a crescendo. But how quickly you forget when you get home.

I wonder if, given four years of just not doing much, reading, writing, relaxing in a relatively placid environment, you’d emerge much wiser about life. We have a limited amount of time on earth, and if one of the things you seek is understanding and consciousness, you need to carve out time and space. And I’m not talking about going to India and connecting with the soil etc, or joining an ashram. Reality is right here. Anyway, read this, if you haven’t already.