Porky Pies

From what I believe is a fairly common childhood viewpoint, as a child I was convinced of the idea of universal truth being something that adults had access to and full knowledge of. I think more than that, I believed on some unconscious level that adults had some sort of innate moral compass that allowed them to know the right decisions to make. In my childish mind these two things went hand in hand: knowing all the answers and deploying them in a morally responsible manner. I think there may be some way in which we all expect to wake up on our 21st (or 25th or 30th) birthday in full possession of all the facts; essentially grown up. I think the lack of this knowledge is one of the things most responsible for adults saying "I don't feel grown up". Of course part of becoming a grown up is coming to terms with the fact that you'll never have access to universal truth, with the accompanying comfort that no one else will either. In an ideal world we would all strive to reach as close to a universal truth as possible and negotiate our way through the world accordingly, so that to any observing child it would appear as if we were indeed in possession of universal truth and an unimpeachable moral code. Unfortunately the 'child' test is a long way from foolproof, given that it is not difficult to fool a child. It's not even that difficult to fool an adult; the Internet seems to have given us a desire to treat almost everything with credulity. It's as if we've taken the David St.Hubbins maxim to heart: "I believe virtually everything I read, and I think that makes me a more discerning individual than someone who doesn't believe anything." Perhaps even more problematic than our willingness to believe any old crap is the desire to feed any old crap to us that appears to drive so many of those we, in our childish state, believe ought to know better. 

The banner under the headline in the Metro on 14th January 2015 included the phrase "inflation hits an all-time low". I was surprised at this fact and so decided to do a little bit of research to find out if 0.5% really was the lowest rate of inflation ever. It didn't take me more than a couple of minutes to confirm that the rate of change in RPI had actually been negative for a time in 1959 and 1960, which is definitely lower than 0.5%. I'm sure if I were to present this fact to the Metro (assuming they didn't ignore me completely), they would point out that the index they were referring to as a measure of inflation was the CPI, not the RPI. The CPI didn't exist in the late 50s and early 60s, so in that sense, the Metro is entirely correct: a current measure of inflation is at an all time low, but only because 'all time' in this instance is less than 10 years. I don't think the Metro had anything more devious than a spot of sensationalism in mind when they came up with that banner, but it is indicative of the way people often use data selectively to make a point that the same data in its correct context would not illustrate quite so well (if at all). The fact that an entire radio series exists simply to look at the (mis)use of statistics in the news indicates the amount of liberty that is taken with data in politics and the media. Of course I don't think any of us is innocent of telling an incomplete story to make our point some time in our lives, but in certain quarters it appears to be almost an industry in itself. Certainly it seems almost impossible for a politician to quote any statistical data without poorly contextualising the crap out of it, even if the correctly contextualised data would have supported their point (albeit possibly less decisively or sensationally). It's almost as if being able to find data that corroborates your views is insufficient, and all data must eliminate the possibility of any other viewpoint. 

Given the amounts of data at our disposal these days, we are increasingly dependent on others to interpret it for us and it appears that an awareness of that fact has made many less, rather than more responsible in that respect. Climate change denial lobbyists seize on any inconsistency in a single piece of research to illustrate a point that flies in the face of almost all the other evidence. This is the sort blinkered logic that we call belief and associate with faith. We accept the application of such logic when it is associated with the supernatural beliefs of religion, but it seems altogether more difficult to accept when applied to more worldly topics. 

There has been much debate recently about the differences between fundamentalism and religion, with mainstream Muslims feeling compelled to distance themselves from the actions of a minority of fundamentalists who profess the same religion. In the case of the Charlie Hebdo killings, this was complicated by the fact that a number of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were clearly offensive to almost all Muslims. Now many western observers (and indeed pretty much everyone in France) would say 'tough luck, offence is the price you pay for free speech', and I would agree with this: witness the amount of not killing Nigel Farage I do. However, making a point about free speech simply by finding the thing that most offends someone and doing it to the greatest extreme again and again is also a fundamentalist position. Just as Muslims find themeves having to apologise for some of those who profess the same religion, I find myself wanting to apologise for some of those who profess the same secularism as me. Unfortunately it seems that the Charlie Hebdo approach to making a point is the only one we can understand these days: as if we must all be absolutist or we are not genuine. Again, I can't help thinking this comes back to the dearth of real debate in 21st century society. As we no longer understand how to talk to those who disagree with us, we select evidence to satisfy those we agree with and to deny any alternative completely. We have all become fundamentalist in our outlook even if we don't express that outlook through violence. The intransigence and extremity of our position doesn't persuade anyone of the validity of our argument and the mis-contextualisation of the data we use as our proof simply undermines our argument. In our desire to win the argument we lose the debate and sacrifice any moral highground to a kind of vanity of rectitude. Surely it is better to tell the whole truth and be accepted as fallible than only tell a half truth and be rejected as a liar.  

Prizes

I won the raffle. I never win raffles. Indeed, that is what I said when I won the raffle, which seems self-evidently incorrect with hindsight. It occurs to me that it is one of the most platitudinous inaccuracies in modern speech (and that's saying something), being statistically provable as incorrect. Of course, now that I have actually won a raffle, the statistics are much more provable, and I may be bound to say that I win raffles with a frequency that is roughly consistent with the aggregate probability of all the raffles I have taken part in. This is clearly nowhere near as neat as saying you never win raffles and is probably a cast iron conversation killer. So I guess next time I'm short of things to say in a raffle situation I'll just have to remain mute, or possibly relay the story of how I used to believe myself incapable of winning raffles until I won one. Yep, being stood next to me at a raffle is going to continue to be a conversational goldmine. 

I think I might have viewed the statement about never winning a raffle as a bit of a family heirloom, as it is a favourite of my mum's, deployed most inaccurately on the occasion she won a trip to New York in a free raffle. I think for me there was a sense of familial entitlement to the downtrodden enoblement of being an eternal loser. But this outlook itself is all about a sense of entitlement: the idea that the fact of our 'never' having won is somehow a universal injustice, that raffle upon raffle has been weighted against us, denying us our rightful prize. This is only an extension of the mindset that allows successful entrepreneurs to believe that their success is entirely due to their hard work and genius, whilst it allows everyone else to feel resentful that their hard work is not similarly rewarded. It is common knowledge that we have to hold an opinion of ourselves as in some way special so that we may avoid the crushing depression that will inevitably come from realising that we are just one of 7 billion idiots bumbling about the planet with no real idea what we're doing or why we're doing it. However, this opinion must also be one of humanity's greatest stumbling blocks: if we're so clever, why would we need to listen to others? Time after time we collectively suffer the consequences of this surfeit of hubris, "never again" we all say before getting straight back to thinking we can shit gold and giving ourselves chronic constipation. 

Would changing our attitudes to raffles, the lottery or any other games of chance change any of these things? There is a chapter of the excellent '10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10' that deals with our relationship to the random, looking briefly at its transition from a cause of fear throughout the majority of human history (largely because the unknown generally brought death and/or destruction) to a source of entertainment and stimulation in the modern era through games of chance. Whilst the chapter is not explicit on the point, it seems as if taking the danger out of the random has somehow convinced us we have control over it. We are probably no more superstitious than our ancestors but in all likelihood we have a stronger belief in our ability to influence random chance than them. We have more agency over our lives than ever before, although possibly not as much as we think we do. So much of what we think we know about the world we live in is based on assumptions about how much technology, government or corporations impact on our lives and we have little, if any, evidence to support these assumptions. Our understanding of the world seems as informed by James Bind as Edward Snowden, and it is through this agglomeration of fact and fiction that we arrive at our understanding of our control over our destiny. Given our propensity to overestimate our own abilities and agency, is it any surprise we believe that we can tame chance and, when we fail to, we feel cheated? I'm fairly certain that much of the frustration underlying the social media rages that wash across our age is due to this misconception of the limits of our possible agency in fate. 

In my defence, I'd like to think that my surprise at winning the raffle was a genuine surprise that random chance had resulted in my favour despite the logic of the odds telling me that it was unlikely. I genuinely don't think that my raffle winnings are reparations that the world should pay me for all the statistical wrongs it has influcted on me thus far in my life; I just think it was a nice surprise. I guess if we can view as many as possible of the good things in life like that, then we're probably doing OK. Certainly if we view less of the setbacks as personal sleights, we'll be less angry. 

Pouring milk on troubled waters

Finally, my colleagues have become aware of the word 'hipster', the pejorative du jour of the last seven years. They appear to have grasped the rules with which it is generally applied quite well too: never directly address another with the term, ascribe general attributes of hipsterness (having a beard, a tattoo or anything vaguely trendy) to indistinct groups of others not directly known to you, maybe rib your peers by pointing out the attributes that they have in common with these vaguely designated others, etc. I am aware of all of this because amongst my colleagues, the inference is generally directed towards me, being the one with the biggest beard and having recently lived in East London. Although such behaviour is new to my colleagues, it is a version of a game many of us have been playing for years: always happy to apply the epithet to others, never even willing to countenance the possibility that it might apply to us. I remember going to Portland (Oregon) in 2011 and being amused to find a local magazine editorial confronting the H word head on: "Hipsterhipsterhipsterhipster" it began in an attempt almost to exorcise it, before going on to explain how Portland was not Portlandia. And it was right too: Portland is great city with much to offer beyond coffee, beards and bicycles. However, I was reading this article in a room at the Ace Hotel, where the bored receptionist, seemingly made entirely of slender limbs, had done everything but slam a typewriter on the desk in order to impersonate his Portlandia double when we'd checked in. He wouldn't have intended that association (in his defence, I think the Portlandia episode might have come later - in his prosecution I think it might genuinely have been based on him), it simply arrived as negative association from external observation. And from the fact that he was a bit of a dick. 

That miserable git from Shooting Stars recently wrote a terrible article about how much he hated Hipsters. One of the biggest failures of this article was that he was entirely unable to identify his quarry: ultimately settling for the people that had been foolish enough to take on the activities his generation had just grown out of. If that isn't a crass 'young people are rubbish' I don't know what is. The problem with Will Self's article is that he fell straight into Hipster identification trap: find an other that you don't like/understand and who are probably measurably cooler than you (and very much in the way that these things can be measured, or at least can be perceived to be) then apply the favoured pejorative of the time to them. In a desire to get past lazy journalism, Self went a step further and attempted to explain just what had caused this most nebulous of pejorative others to exist. Of course it was at this point that it became clear that he was really just talking about people younger than him, in much the same way as I'm sure previous generations labelled all young people 'hippies', except that hippies were an identifiable subculture. No one goes out of their way to be identified as a hipster. Or do they? 

I've been looking at this whole thing very much as if it were a given that the H-word is simply a nebulous pejorative applied to anyone irritatingly more fashion conscious than you and not an identity that people wish for themselves. And then I saw the Channel 4 News cereal thing. Firstly, it was the first time I'd heard a news presenter identify hipsters as a subculture, responsible for shaping parts of the socio-cultural landscape. Secondly, there were the owners of the cereal shop themeves, who were a walking, talking cliché: fullsome beards, check; slick back quiff-type hair, check; sleeve tattoos, check; ridiculous concept boutique that no right minded person can imagine ever spending money in, check; utter obliviousness to the greater social context into which they've dumped their massive offence-turd of clueless consumerism, check. This last was fantastically illustrated by the man terminating the interview ("can we stop the interview, I don't like the questions you're asking") when the interviewer pointed out that they were in Tower Hamlets, one of London's poorest boroughs and that the actual local residents might struggle with paying £3 plus for a bowl of cereal. I guess I'd always assumed that there was a bit of a responsible future-looking attitude to the hipster mentality - riding bicycles, eating locally grown heritage blah, etc. - but I guess that's just me falling into the trap of ascribing certain value-sets to a broadly and poorly defined other based on observations of a few people that I have selected as my representatives of that other. Most likely I have chosen those with whom I can in some way identify (after all, I wanted to stay at the Ace Hotel in Portland), yet I do not always like what I see. Similarly Will Self only saw younger, more hirsute and irritating versions of himself. It's as if we look in a mirror only to find our reflection beguiling and repulsive at the same time. 

Of course I presume that only vacuous idiots would see their reflection in the cereal guys, with their by-numbers approach to life, but just because these people are visible and idiotic does not mean we can ascribe crass stupidity to an entire group of people, especially when we have so comprehensively failed to define that group in any other way. Many people that the majority would define as hipsters have set up bakeries and craft breweries, markets and butchers; many of these things may be in some ways novel, but they are not novelty, or crass or stupid. They are simply taking something already extant and looking for new experience in it: it's what young people do. Does it say something about our society that we want them to fail, that we want to find the most shallow of motives in everything they do; that when we do find the shallowest example of this minority we hold them up as an exemplar, damning the whole?

Parmesan

The level of the debate surrounding the photo of a house with a white van in front of it and some St George's flags hanging from the windows was exceptional. Of course I mean exceptional in that from the very beginning nothing of any substance was said. 

Firstly, Emily Thornberry posted a picture on Twitter stating that it was in Rochester. Then everyone (not least Ed Milliband) decided to read all sorts of negative connotations into this and blame them on her and get all upset about the Labour Party sneering at the working class. 

Just in case the working class aren't clear on this: everyone is sneering at you, even the Labour Party (but probably not as much as anyone else who claims to speak on your behalf). It's OK, you get used to it, I should know, I'm a member of the liberal intelligentsia, and everyone sneers at us too. At least as the working class, everyone usually sneers at you in private whilst publicly asserting your unassailable right to do, say or act however you like because you are the only social subgroup to be considered genuine; the rest of us are lying to ourselves. This at least is what I can glean from my (admittedly limited) interaction with the popular press. 

As saying that you speak on behalf of the working class is a cardinal sin, all parties involved in any 'debate' concerning the working class tend to spend most of their time trying to accuse the other parties of having the audacity to patronise the working class whilst trying to avoid being accused of the same thing themselves. Although in many ways, this makes such debate more complex and nuanced than most modern political debate, if anything it means that even less of the actual issue gets discussed. This is an achievement of sorts, just not one that should be celebrated. 

The level of debate surrounding politics at the moment is so low as to be utterly meaningless: no one even bothers introducing proper policies any more, they just make up some headline grabbing crap that'll never actually make it on to statute and then ram all the ugly stuff into the small print. When it actually gets debated in parliament everyone is so busy shouting empty platitudes at each other that genuinely fractious legislation can sail by without anyone batting an eyelid. It's like government exists at two levels: the hilarious press circus and the bit that quietly gets on with selling off our assets to its mates. What's really odd is that I'm sure there are some very clever people in parliament (not all of them obviously, otherwise how do you account for David Cameron), but they all seem so shit scared of being presented as idiots that they never dare say anything intelligent. 

I don't have a cure for this because it's fairly deep rooted: we went to war in 2003 based on evidence that everyone knew was made up; we just chose to ignore the blindingly obvious, like we'd collectively stuck our fingers in our ears and gone 'lalalalalalala, not listening...oh look we invaded a country illegally, whoops'. So if we can ignore the massive steaming, humming dung heap that was the 'case for war' in 2003, is it any wonder that no one has pointed out the fact that nothing in the last Tory election manifesto has actually even been hinted at in the last five years. I'm sure the excuse would be coalition government, but you can't blame everything on the Lib Dems, even though the Tories have made a pretty good fist of it. The truth is that for some time now an election manifesto has been a fairly meaningless way of grabbing headlines without actually having to commit to anything. 

So where does this leave us? I think we should accept that the content of the the debates around the elections is basically meaningless and that there is nothing we can do to change this. Indeed I think we should embrace this fact by demanding that politicians take all spurious claims to future policy out of their debates and instead simply pick a topic for debate like they did at school or Oxbridge. I think next May our politicians should stick to one topic and only debate which is the best cheese. 

Privilege

I was at a pelican crossing the other day whilst a large number of people were crossing the road. As soon as the lights began to flash amber, the chauffeur of the car at the crossing began to drive, effectively pushing the still crossing pedestrians out of the way. Although the chauffeur briefly acknowledged the pedestrians' immediate compliance with his rewriting of the laws of the road (allowing him not to have to run them over), I doubt if his passenger did or if she was even aware that this was in defiance of convention or law. After all, why should the rights and safety of a bunch of pedestrians get in the way of her arriving at her destination fractionally earlier? 

It may be that I am in some way more sensitive to it these days or it may be simply the case that it occurs more, but I have noticed an increase in the number of people who seem to think that wealth gives them more rights. This is a mistake: wealth brings advantage, it does not bring precedence. At least it shouldn't. It should not change your position as a citizen in that the same laws should apply to you. Of course we know that this is not always the case, we know that there are those with enough money to pay to avoid the inconvenience of having to comply with the law. In the 20th century - with the wealth of the colonial period still sloshing about - perhaps we would have expected this to be a thing of the past, or a state of affairs restricted to tin pot dictatorships. However, as the UK slips back into its place as a medium sized country buffeted by global market forces, we tend to take on more and more of the values of the tin pot dictatorships we used to look down upon. This is not a phenomenon that is exclusive to the UK though, throughout the world, there appears to be a subservience attached to wealth that goes beyond simply reverence. 

At a political level (and this is certainly true of the UK) there is a continual undignified scramble to get wealth into the country regardless of whether that wealth stays in the country or benefits the country in any way. This seems to be driven by a more general perception of wealth as good in some way other than the potential of it disseminating itself amongst others. It seems that we have been told that wealth accumulation is a good thing so much that we believe wealth to be some form of abstract moral force for good, rather than simply a resource that has no moral value except in its use. This perception seems to extend to the wealthy, who appear to believe that their ability to accumulate (or inherit) wealth makes them some sort of übermensch, soaring above the concerns and petty ties of the rest of us mere mortals. Unfortunately, because we are presented no alternatives, we aspire to be like these people, assume that this is possible or even probable and therefore cannot see why they should be party to the petty restrictions that we ourselves will happily rise above once we achieve their elevated position. We allow our media to lionise these people, presenting their lives as the utopia we seek and as a result we come to believe that they must be in some way better than us. It is a 'better' that we believe we can aspire to, but it is a 'better' none the less. So we sit like expectant children and lap up any wisdom that the grownups impart, safe in the knowledge that they have all the answers. We defer moral authority to them in the same way a child does to adults, but we are not children. We have allowed ourselves to be infantilised by the unfulfilled promise of shiny things and assurances that there are those more worthy than us. 

Of course the narrative of the right is that I'm just a bitter lefty, jealous of others, but I beg to differ. I am not jealous of the wealth of others, I count myself perfectly well off. Of course I could always do with a bit more, but I would think that wouldn't I: I'm conditioned to. My issue is not with others' wealth or with others accumulating wealth, it is with those who think that wealth entitles them to more than those without wealth beyond the luxury that wealth brings, or that it gives them primacy over others, or makes them better people. It does none of these things: no one should mistake the fawning of sycophants blinded by the glare of their wealth for a change in their societal rights and obligations. 

Pungent

It is a running joke amongst my friends that I don't drink New World wine. It's not true, I don't discriminate against any wine simply due to its origin. However, like anyone else, I have acquired my own taste in wine, which has come largely from being given various French wines to drink by my family throughout my formative years. This means that the big bold jammy flavours that dominate much New World wine don't really chime with my palette. Some people genuinely like this kind of wine, perhaps many people, but I suspect that much like I have with (most) French wine, many people have learned to like this style of wine. Wine being wine though, or at least a lot of the nonsense that floats around wine being what it is, many people probably think that this kind of taste defines 'good' wine. This is obviously horse shit: whilst there is good and bad wine, much of it is just wine you like or wine you don't like. I don't particularly like big brash wine, but that doesn't mean I don't think other people shouldn't drink it if that's what they like. However I'd equally like to carry on enjoying the wine that I like, which is why I worry when I hear about French wine makers making wines in the 'new world' style. I even heard about a wine maker in Burgundy taking a load of their wine, sticking it in new oak barrels and doing all sorts of other things to give it that New World style. In Burgundy: the second most famous wine producing region in France. 

I'm sure the last sentence could easily be interpreted as snobbery (as I'm sure it will if any of my friends are reading this!) but it is actually a concern about diversity: if even the French start making wine in a New World style, who is going to make Old World style wine? The interesting thing about wine (and unfortunately much of what has traditionally helped the snobs scare others off) is its massive diversity and variation: for the inquisitive there is always something new to discover, even if you might not like all of it (and no one does). If everyone starts making the same kind of wine, that diversity goes away and wine just becomes another way of getting drunk. The success especially of cheaper Australian wine has been all about delivering a consistent product, i.e. one that will always taste exactly the same and can be produced in large batches. This is the same approach that was applied to lager in Britain in the 1970s, which resulted in a very consistent product but with a very small amount of flavour. Of course no one can accuse Australian wine of lacking flavour, but I can't help feeling that here too quantity may be a substitute for quality. 

Having lots of flavour as signifier for quality is a modern phenomenon that can be observed across all forms of drink that one can be snooty about: coffee, wine and beer all now have their big flavour aficionados. Look at the craft beer craze: to all intents and purposes it is a good thing, popularising the small brewery and brining different kinds of beers to the market, except that almost all of the beer is American-style IPA made with very strong imported hops. Certainly these days it seems as if, in London at least, you can go into a pub claiming to sell real ale and you might struggle to get a classic bitter, mild or traditional IPA. It seems churlish to complain when there are more different beers around now than there have been for many a year, but when that difference can only really be defined by subtle variations in the volume at which they shout "HERE, HAVE SOME MORE HOPS," you have to ask how much actual variety there is. Clearly very hoppy beer is an acquired taste - just like very fruity wine or very fruity coffee - I'm just not sure why I should acquire it. There are many other tastes out there that I have acquired that I'm perfectly happy with, as well as (I hope) still more that I have yet to acquire and look forward to acquiring. I object to the inference that I lack taste simply because I'm not that keen on certain very strong flavours. To me this trend towards making every taste bigger is merely an attempt to codify taste along the same lines as American fast food companies codify value: bigger is always better. It requires no independent thought or personal valuation, because the decision has been made simple for you: bad food has no flavour, so good food must have lots of flavour and the best food must have the most. 

Again I am sounding like I think all of the new food and drink movements are a bad thing, and I absolutely don't. I just think that like every other potential cultural niche, 'artisan' food and drink can no longer be of any interest to anyone for any period of time before it is instantly codified, commodified and commercialised. The various food fads that have swept through London in the last few years like forest fires, their flames fanned by the wind of blogger, social media and general Internet hype - dirty burgers, barbecue and ramen to name but a few -  are testament to the fact that barely two restaurants can constitute a movement in the scramble for the new in food just as much as two vaguely similar bands used to constitute a new form of music in the pre-Britpop NME. We have arrived at a world where enough of us are keen to taste the next exciting, exclusive, underground thing that the definitions of luxury and exclusivity have to be broadened to fit us all in, and in broadening they have to appeal to a wider audience and to appeal to a wider audience they have to shout louder, and in shouting louder, they have become much less subtle or nuanced. Perhaps this is simply the inevitable result of an ever growing global middle class: that even things that are not mass produced fall foul of the homogenising forces of mass opinion. I hope not. I hope that just because my tastes are counter to the prevailing trend, that doesn't mean that they are to be drowned out entirely by the noise of ever louder flavour. 

Peripheral vision

The other day got on a Jubilee Line train in rush hour. It was very crowded and I had to squeeze in to the space just inside the door. I quickly looked around the carriage to see if there was any space to stand in and noticed plenty of it in the space between the seats. I excused myself as I squeezed through the crowd to the empty space and rather expected one or two people to follow me, but they didn't. They didn't even look round, they just remained crushed up against each other in the space between the two sets of doors. There was easily space for three people in the space beside me, but no one was inquisitive enough to notice. 

I can't help seeing this as indicative of current attitudes in general: people are so desperate to hang on to their miserable little bit of existence that they don't even look round to see if there is a simple alternative that will be better for everyone, themselves included. 

It also shows that I'm the kind of idiot who thinks society is for observing rather than engaging with.