This snap is a detail of Battersea Power Station in London. It’s a fine old structure that has been gradually falling into dereliction through neglect. Many exciting plans for its development have been proposed but they never seem to come to anything. Once in a while somebody does a bit of work just to shore up the structure.

Bit like this site really.

I intend to be back blogging soon. Sooner anyway, I sincerely hope, than the Battersea developers.

200 years ago, at least a couple of people in power took a more imaginative approach…

The potato had been in Europe for a well over a hundred years, but in 1785 the French were still suspicious of the things. Potatoes were fine as hog feed but thought to cause Leprosy in humans. Antoine-Augustine Parmentier knew different as he had been imprisoned by the Prussians and forced to live on a spud-based diet whilst incarcerated. Now, you’d have thought that anyone who’s survived on a single vegetable of dubious repute when in jail would be heartily sick of the damn things, but Parmentier was a scientist, a pharmacist who was impressed by their nutritional value. When back in France, he extolled their virtues in scientific papers and embarked on a series of publicity stunts to promote them for the important purpose of reducing famine. One, in particular, was a stroke of pure genius.

Having persuaded Louis XVI of their virtues, the King gave Parmentier some otherwise unwanted land outside Paris in which to plant the things. The masterstroke was to station some of the king’s elite guards around the potato fields during the daytime but then also remove them each night. Sure enough, the locals were soon persuaded of the immense value of this new crop by the presence of the guards, and before long they were raiding the fields under cover of darkness with the subsequent result that these novel tubers became widely cultivated across France.

The ruse is pleasing because its purpose was benign and the reluctance of the populace to eating this now familiar tuber is comical. Louis and Parmentier showed an admirable astuteness in their knowledge of human behaviour that is rare in politicians today. What they realised is that merely decreeing that spuds are good would be of no use since they weren’t sufficiently trusted, and forcing people to grow them would just generate resentment. Was it deception? Well no one was explicitly misinformed; the fact that they jumped to certain conclusions was entirely their own doing. The raiders thought they were having one over on the powers that be, but they had been double-bluffed.

Current leaders, on the other hand, prefer a simplistic monocausal approach to influencing behaviour. At the extreme end of this manipulation is the act of banning things. Two simple examples: the outlawing of fox hunting (in the UK) and the banning of the full face veil in public places (proposed in the Netherlands). These acts seem to ignore the very contrariness in human nature that Parmentier and Louis made use of. The politicians appear unaware of what could be called Newton’s third law of politics: to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The result of the fox hunting ban has been to revitalise a marginal and anachronistic group and to allow them to construct a narrative about urban oppression of country dwellers. The result of mere discussions about banning veils has been to help turn an obvious mark of male subjugation into an identity-affirming act of defiance.

Prior to being at the receiving end of concerted opposition, veil wearing and fox hunting were largely irrelevant fringe activities. They may have been symptoms of society’s troubled attitudes to women and to animals but they remained eccentric oddities to majority (European) society. If people are truly concerned about women or animals there are many other more important areas to tackle. Regarding women, domestic violence and equality of opportunity spring to mind, and regarding animals, horrendous farming practices and wholesale habitat destruction could be mentioned. Veil-wearing and hunting are both symbolic acts; their visibility as memes outshines any harm as practices. Memes and symbols are nourished by attention and positively thrive with opposition, as stubborn practitioners harden their attitudes in the face of the new threats. So the stronger the Government action the more counterproductive it becomes.

It’s all too easy to think of other political actions that have had the opposite effect to that desired. Some involve the military, others involve audits and targets. I do constantly despair of politicians’ lack of psychological insight, but I have to admit that I’m not at all sure how to improve things. In today’s all-pervasive media maelstrom, sneaky techniques such as used by the potato-heads above would soon be exposed, and we are simply not as naive, in fact we’re downright cynical these days. We’re always looking out for how to undermine control, which is usually a good thing in any case but does make any leader’s job similar to herding cats.

As our energy and resource usage continues to grow around the World, and particularly quickly in Asia and the far East, we are running out of planet; there’s simply not enough for all to live as materially profligate a lifestyle as we do in the US and Europe. It is morally and politically unacceptable for the West to decree that no one else can aspire to its level of comfort so something has to give. The clever way is to follow Buckminster Fuller’s definition of progress and learn to do more with less, but when we’re not clever enough some are going to have to put up with doing less with less. Either way we’re going to have to accept significant changes to survive.

The irony of the potato story is that growing potatoes was actually in the interests of the farmers and there was an immediate win for them, yet some skilful mind manipulation was still needed to persuade them. How much harder will it be to convince people to accept short term hits to gain long term benefits? Read any online discussion of any environmental issue and you will see a wide range of opinions expressed. On climate change, for instance, some will say that the Earth isn’t warming, others that it is but this isn’t due to mankind, some will propose that the change is occurring but it’s a good thing (“more bikini-clad women” to quote one quip), a different bunch will agree disastrous change exists but argue there’s nothing we can do so we should live the high life while we can, and some meanies say that if people choose to overpopulate low lying or marginal lands its their fault if they suffer. Somewhere, lost in the discussion, might be someone like me fuming and calling for a few lifestyle changes to bring about greater energy efficiency. Gathering this bunch together in order for action of any sort to take place is going to require leadership. This may be from scientists, economists, celebrities, politicians, the media or from anyone else. What is certain is that merely analysing the problem and presenting solutions will not be enough. Someone, somewhere is going to need to employ a great and wondrous leap of the imagination to inspire, cajole, persuade or possibly even outwit people into accepting change.

Sound familiar? It’s the standard approach taken by books extolling atheism. And we wonder why the news doesn’t go down so well!

In Breaking The Spell, Dan Dennett speculates that religious devotion is a form of love. Certain religions may be happy with this view, after all, does not God reciprocate with his love for you too? But Dennett is looking to explain the tenacious pathology of sincere unfounded belief in the non-existent, not to inspire a warm fuzzy hug-in. To an evolutionary psychologist, love’s use is as the mental character encouraging long monogamous relationships so slow-growing and vulnerable human children may be looked after by a single pair of adults. Of course, even a psychologist knows that the experience of loving another may be wonderful, mysterious and rich; evolutionary explanations add knowledge to the experiential side without subtracting from it. The ubiquitous love of imaginary beings, some argue, is just a misdirected side effect of our ability to love real people.

Whether or not a religious person is in any meaningful way truly in love with God, faith certainly shares similar deeply held features with love such as partisanship, exclusivity and comforting blindness to logic (no, your lover isn’t the most beautiful or intelligent person in the world). So it is hardly surprising that when we atheists try to break the news to religious folk that they are misguided star-struck fools we get a prickly response. Not only are we telling people that the object of their love doesn’t exist and that everything that they think is important to them is absurd and dangerous, we are also explaining that they cannot or should not ever love in this way again.

This is the problem facing Dawkins in The God Delusion. He is passionate about his cause, and means so well, wanting to pull the wool from people’s eyes to help them see the truth, but his method is to use reason and logic to hammer home all the faults of faith. Just as some people cannot see a world outside their scripture, Dawkins never looks outside his monistic mechanistic metaphysic. As obvious and beautiful as it may seem to him, not everyone is persuaded by this view or holds it as their implicit ontology. On their own terms, scientific evidence, reason and logic do create an overwhelming case against religions, but their use is somewhat begging the question; if people were reasonable and logical to begin with they wouldn’t latch on so emotionally to those arbitrary stories from their childhood.

When pushed into a corner by one damned argument after another people either slam up their defensive armour or they blast out with their fists flailing. Thus the claims that Dawkins knows nothing about religion or that he is an arrogant fundamentalist. At the extreme end he is, of course, the spawn of Satan himself.

Dennett is aware of this problem but wastes so much time in his book trying to cautiously smooth the fears of any religious readers brave enough to peer inside it that he ends up being boring, before solidly whacking them with the cold steel of scientific logic in any case.

Guys, your books are great, but people just aren’t religious for logical reasons. They don’t sit down and look for a satisfactory explanation for the scientific laws of The Universe, weigh up the pros & cons of various scriptures, and then decide to become a Jain or a Zoroastrian (even if they were allowed to be). Unlike scientists they don’t often think or care about “The Universe” that much. From a scientific or philosophically naturalist viewpoint religions appear bizarre, arbitrary and irrational, but harping on about that isn’t going to change anyone’s mind. Few of us, if any, hold a fully coherent and non-contradictory set of beliefs, and this doesn’t worry us at all.

Tufyal Choudhury explored this area amusingly at the British Museum on Friday night. Looking for an explanation for why so many younger generation Bengalis in the UK are turning to more assertive forms of Islam he offered the suggestion that it was a way to get back at their parents. As first generation immigrants the parents were often economically marginalised (er.. poor) and so seen as weak, and for many their defining battle was for Bangladesh’s separation from Pakistan in 1971, a separation that the commonality of religion between the two regions was too feeble or irrelevant to prevent. Becoming a pious Muslim gives you a power in the World, it taps into a structure of authority and purpose, it makes you someone. I found this funny, as I like the idea that becoming more Muslim is on a par with becoming a goth or a punk. If the rebel theory holds over time, then perhaps we need just wait a few years until the next generation of recalcitrant UK/Bengali kids start turning to atheism.

Whether or not he is correct in his claims, the point is that Choudhury is taking the right approach. Faith is a personal thing, with psychological, cultural, social, political and even economic reasons for existing. Certain clerics may build elaborate post-hoc logical filigree premised upon the foundational tenets of their faith, but that’s just their job; it adds to the perceived grandeur of their institutions just like using more gold leaf or commissioning another statue. Any logical constructions built by the larger religions are very much secondary to their psychological core services.

The real function of the pro-atheism books is not so much to persuade the religious to change sides but instead to strengthen and empower the existing atheists. In the UK, where religion isn’t as pervasive as in certain other countries many non-believers are simply atheist by default. These books may help turn mild “don’t care for or about religion” types into more passionate and informed defenders of the lack-of-faith.

Until 9.11 the most important political reason for countering religious power was the rise of the American Christian right. I still think this is the most dangerous religious force in the World, since the US is such an unhelpfully active military power. But the Christian encroachment on the White House was slow and steady, no single event jolted atheists into thinking that they couldn’t continue to coexist (though separately) with believers, after all, being nice may often trump being right. It was the spectacular and dramatic terrorist events committed in the name of Islam that awoke the proselytising side of atheists, and that made religion into a news item.

The irony of this is that this stupid, evil, terrorism may be a greater force for turning some people away from God (just as it convinces its supporters of the power of their faith) than all the patient, precise, and reasonable logical arguments laid down in books. I don’t know where the next force against faith will come from but I doubt that logic will be involved; a major celebrity reporting an atheist miracle, perhaps?

If you have a WordPress blog and would like to use this theme then feel free to pick up a copy at the bottom of this post. [Edit: this version has been superceded. The latest one is available here.]

I didn’t set out to write a theme. I found a lovely one, called White As Milk by its designer Azeem Azeez, which attracted me by its deliberate visual sparseness and simplicity. I’ll just take this, tweak a few minor things and start blogging, I thought.

But I’m a programmer; I like to understand code, and when I peered inside I found a few pieces that didn’t seem to fit together. Basically, the code appeared to be showing its age and heritage; it was a theme modified from another that was based on another and so on. And fragments of each of the previous versions lay around like archaeological shards in rock strata. One or two files didn’t seem to have any use any more, the same idea was expressed differently in different contexts, and areas at the margins of use (such as error messages) did not appear to have been restyled at all. It’s all so visually simple, I mused, surely the code doesn’t have to be this complex? I’ll just do a little tidying…

Being a programmer doesn’t mean I’m a web developer. My HTML, PHP and CSS skills ranged from extremely dusty to non-existent so I had to mug up on these, CSS especially, and to learn the particular ways of WordPress too. Before long, the tidying had become two weeks of fiddling, tweaking, testing, and code bothering. No file remained untouched. Slowly, I realised that my tweaking was improving my understanding of WordPress themes more than it was improving the theme itself. And when I had come to terms with why WordPress and PHP encourage so much duplication and complexity, when everything looked fine in my browser, Safari, and when I had at least visited all the code and pushed it around until satisfied or simply bored, I started testing more widely.

This demonstrates my naiveté, stupidity really, web-wise. Of course the design appeared totally scrambled in IE, and ugly in FireFox and Opera. I should have been testing on these all along, and hacking to meet their individual quirks, especially the irritating wayward ways of IE. So another round of snagging and twiddling was started to find a compromise that would at least survive in each of these, and slowly I found out why so many apparently strange or redundant oddities had been in the CSS in the first place.

So did I make any progress at all? Perhaps a little. I have tried not to alter the overall visual style of White As Milk which I still like very much, although I have made the main column thinner and have played with the colours. The main other changes are

• The layout varies according to text size and on browsers other than IE will squeeze to fit restricted window space. This should make it easier for people who need or prefer to change the text size.
• The style sheet is associated with all media so print outs should look similar to what is seen on the screen.
• Oversized elements such as large pictures or long lines of text in pre tags should now be contained within the column width in all browsers.
• Various phrasings have changed according to my whim although in general I hope there is greater consistency and that messages, whilst brief, are informative.
• “Pages” (such as this one) may include comments; if you don’t want them then you should explicitly turn off pings and comments for the appropriate pages.
• The code, and the CSS in particular, is more extensively commented. Perhaps this will help users to make their own adjustments more easily.

Skimmed Milk has been primarily built to meet my own needs. I haven’t added extra functionality, fancy AJAX features or any other bells and whistles. Author names are not handled & there are no templates for pop-up comments or attachment pages. For the moment, at least, the scope of the theme is as minimal as its design.

If you’d still like to use it then pick up a copy below and follow the WordPress instructions to install. Do let me know about any bugs, suggestions for improvements, or just what you think. Finally, I send my thanks and respect to Azeem Azeez, Michael Heilemann and any others for creating the originals on which this version is based.

Download Skimmed Milk 1.0

[Note: this version has been superceded. The latest version is available here.]

Well, the World is facing some pretty shaky times and we need to look for saviours to take on the Willis role. So whom should we pick? After reading Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny I’m proposing Amartya Sen. OK, he might cut a diminutive figure next to Willis, and he won’t handle weapons with quite the same panache, but if anyone paid attention to his careful, patient, prose we would be a darn sight closer to saving civilisation.

He’s only writing here on identity and sectarianism so we might need others for other issues. George Monbiot to fight global warming? Arundhati Roy to fight for people against power blocks? Richard Dawkins to tackle faith and superstition? But learning from Sen how better to get on with each other as individuals and communities would make a good start toward tackling the other problems.

Sen is a septuagenarian Nobel-prize-winning economist who made his name in development economics. In addition to providing complex mathematical analyses he would take time to point out simpler truths: “Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.” As a child, he saw both famines and communal killings in his native India prior to partition. Famines due to British mismanagement, and killings due to sectarian hatreds being stoked up by self-serving local leaders. He seems to have spent the rest of his life investigating how to deal with these evils.

The key point of Identity and Violence is that we all have complex multiple aspects to our personalities. As well as religious, ethnic, class and cultural backgrounds, we have many other facets that may include professional interests, political or sporting allegiances, social involvements, tastes in food, art or music and so on. To reduce any individual to being a cypher defined by a single feature is to diminish them greatly.

The second point is that the pressures for this reductive diminishing come from opposing sides embracing each other in a deadly dance. To respond to a stupid claim such as “all Muslims are terrorists, Islam is a religion of the sword” by saying “no, all Muslims are peace loving, Islam is a religion of beauty and truth” is simply to take on board the original accuser’s tactic of lumping a diverse and varied group together as one unified entity. It is in the interests both of the opponents of a group and of the leaders of the group itself to sharpen the group’s boundaries and lay claims to the group’s focus as being the defining feature of each of its members. But it is not necessarily in its members’ (or de facto members’) interests since once this reduction is agreed the racists’ work is largely done.

Sen therefore attacks the official views of multicultural Britain as “federations of communities”, where everyone is slotted into a single rigid, defining and unchanging community box. He calls this plural monoculturalism and argues that government attempts to tackle terrorism through the aid of religion (by cosying up to religious leaders, for instance) have magnified the power of the clerics over non-religious domains such as the social and political. The reductionist claims of the religious extremists are then strengthened not diluted.

He reviews arguments for and against globalisation trying to tease out meaning from this sprawling term. He points out that global trade in goods and ideas is nothing new and that the global influence on supposedly Western ideas should be better recognised. There is no real logic in opposing science just because it is seen as Western, but Sen reminds us that it’s as much the result of Indian, Chinese and Arab ideas (amongst others) as “Western” ones anyway, adding a further irony to this self-defeating stance. In fact, he warns that any exclusively oppositional mindset (against the West, against Islam, against the ex-coloniser, or whatever) is a severely restricted one since it cannot escape from being locked in relation to whatever is being opposed.

On specific issues he shows himself to be on the side of the light; he is solidly opposed to the arms trade (85% of arms are from the G8 countries, 50% from the US), to fatally restrictive patent laws, and to the outrageous barriers to trade facing poorer nations. He outlines the difference between trade justice where the poor are paid fairly, and trade exploitation where, in their desperation, they are forced to accept a pittance, and thus blows the trickle down/rising tide theories right out of the water.

He regards the UK government’s moves to widen state support for faith schools as outrageously divisive; we need more ways to enable the mixing of cultures, not to separate them. True multiculturalism (as opposed to plural monoculturalism) arises where people make informed and reasoned choices about how to live unrestrained by tradition or other pressures. For instance, a woman should freely choose her manner of dress, not be forced by one group into wearing a veil, nor by others into wearing a short skirt (my example). A particular behaviour is followed freely only where the awareness of (and possibility of picking) alternatives exists.

I’ve been dipping in and out of the frenetic exchanges on Pickled Politics and Ali Eteraz’s old and new sites, skimming the correspondence on the New Generation Network, and wading through the reams of comments on The Guardian’s CiF pages, and seen relatively few mentions of Sen. This surprises me, as I think he talks a lot of sense (and the NGN really should make him their patron saint!). At times I feel that much of what he says is blatantly obvious, but when I look around at the comments of bloggers it is more than evident that not everyone thinks this way. At other times his incisive turn of phrase gives clear expression to an otherwise murky or vague set of concepts (and I hope that I haven’t misrepresented him too horribly above). He’s an academic, a good-mannered campaigner, so he doesn’t shout or harangue you, even when covering emotive or volatile topics. But at the end of his quiet and precise book I found much to like and nothing to disagree with. That’s rare for me, and that’s why I think he’s a such a hero.

Here’s an amazing thing: the squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray! Yes, that’s right. I’ll say it again more slowly: the darker-looking square marked A at the top of the board and the lighter-looking square marked B in the shadowy area are actually the same physical colour. Your monitor is displaying the same colour values in each area.

You can probably guess part of why the illusion works so well—we automatically adjust to counter the darkening due to the shadow —but the illusion continues working even when the green cylinder “causing” the shadow is cropped out:

This shows another part of why the illusion works; we make different assumptions about sharp edges than we do about gradients. The final picture should help you to see the truth of the claim that the squares are the same gray:

The illusion’s creator, Edward H Adelson, provides a more complete explanation.

It’s not new; I’ve been personally marvelling at it for a few years now. But familiarity doesn’t seem to defuse its effect. I consciously understand its workings, I can talk myself through it, but I just can’t make its reality seem intuitively present to me. It’s a fantastic optical illusion, but it’s also so much more; it’s a great scientific parable that illustrates key attributes of the way we think.

The first point is that much our thinking happens below the level of consciousness. Even what we perceive as being pure raw data about the world is the result of our automatic filtering and structuring of our sensory inputs. The world is real, but our knowledge of it is constructed, mediated by our minds. In a classier blog you’d get a quote from Kant here since he wrote about this in the eighteenth century, but I haven’t read him so you’ll have to do without.

The fact that this subconscious processing can be fooled in contrived situations doesn’t mean that it isn’t intelligent or useful. On the contrary, these heuristics usually do a fine job of building our model of the external world. In the instance illustrated above the colour adjustments act to give us a more stable view of the appearance of things, just as we intuitively learn that further objects are not actually smaller, or that they are not turning when we tilt our heads.

The assumptions these perceptual arrangements implicitly contain are, of course, appropriate to the situations typically experienced during their evolution. The further we get from these situations, the more likely it is that assumptions fail and our perception is tricked. Sometimes we can turn these perceptual mistakes to our advantage. In our evolutionary past, for instance, finding a flat image that contained a perspective view of the world would be exceptionally unlikely. So when we look at a realistic picture we are tricked into seeing “a world behind it”, rather than gaining a neutral view of the picture surface itself. It is this illusion that enables much art and photography and that sets us up for the checkerboard illusion above.

Optical illusions are fun and popular because it’s easy to lay plain both the illusion itself and the proof that it is an illusion. Cognitive illusions, however, are harder to show but are just as real. Similar to our preparation of optical sensory data is our automatic structuring of judgements on everything that just seems intuitive to us. These could be views on whom to trust or fear, what to eat or be disgusted by, or how safe or risky a venture is, for instance. Our assumptions about morality in particular seem especially close to us, and it is this closeness that suggests to me that the thinking underlying these attitudes is analogous to the visual processing above.

A key point is that we are not exclusively determined by our evolved nature. Quite the opposite is true, in fact; if we put our minds to it, if we carefully reason things through, we are able to consciously transcend our intuitions and distinguish the illusory from the truthful, just as we could above. The trouble is that this takes effort, and although it may be possible to create a reasoned argument for an alternative view, our subconscious primitive impulses may continue to nag at us, again, just as they do above.

Going with the flow is cognitively relaxing but lazy. It’s much easier to be interested in the views and opinions of beautiful people than of ugly ones. It’s much harder to trust people who’s appearance or behaviour differs from our own. It’s easy to find unfamiliar foods disgusting, unfamiliar music unlistenable, unfamiliar dance or social practice comical. We have evolved to hold dear the appearance and practices of those we grow up amongst, and to be suspicious of outsiders.

An awareness of these lazy tendencies is the first step in freeing ourselves from them and the remaining steps simply require holding an open mind, exploring beyond our comfort zones, and taking a calm, careful and reasoned view of what we find. This stance may sometimes be found in scientific or other academic writing, but it is almost by definition popularly seen as wrongheaded or difficult. Our tragedy is that it is therefore the very opposite of what the politicians and the media tend to feed to us.

Well this is my shiny new blog and that childish feeling is with me. I don’t want to start until all ideas are clear in my head and until I can map out the future structure of all arguments and discussions in their entirety. But, of course, if anything will it’s the blogging itself that will help me to get this thinking straight. So I can’t put things off any longer: this is the first blot. The rest of the mess will follow shortly.