Taking Offense

Are we ever justified in taking offense? I think the answer is “no”, by which I mean that when people take offense at a remark, they do so partly because of a fault in themselves; and removing this fault would remove the disposition to take offense.

When I talk about “taking offense” in this post, I do not refer to the act of taking offense on someone else’s behalf. Often we use the word in this way, to mean just that we disapprove of the way in which another person is being treated. We are “offended” by the people who attack Jewish graves, though we may not be Jewish. And I do not refer to our response to an “offense”, in the general sense of the word, which we use broadly to mean something like a “transgression,” a failure to follow the rules. Nor am I talking about a slightly narrower sense of the word, which we use to refer to transgressions against ourselves, things that disgust us, as in an “offensive smell.”

What I mean (I think) is the rising anger that we feel when we feel we have been “defamed”: when we come across words or pictures or actions (usually words) that slight our character. In some circumstances, such as when the slight is false and also lowers us in other people’s opinion, it is clear that we are justified in feeling wronged by such an action. But often we (or at least I) take offense at slights that are not like this, of which noone is aware except ourselves and the perpetrator of the insult. We (or at least I) hear or overhear an unflattering remark and immediately become heated by it, as if an infuriating injury has been inflicted on us.

Sometimes there is a good reason to take some offense at a slight like this, even if it does not diminish us in the eyes of any third party. The slight may be evidence of the speaker’s ingratitude, for example. And the fact that there is one party other than ourselves that thinks ill of us, and who does so on weak rounds, might be reason to feel wronged by that person. But usually (again I speak for myself here) the offense taken is disproportionate to the wrong inflicted. If the slight is false, and clearly false, then it does not take much to set the person right. And if the slight is true, then it is hard to see how any sense of wrong-doing is justified.

In either case, at least half the fault lies with the offended person. In the first case, a person who reacts angrily, who “takes offense”, has only his lack of articulateness to blame for that anger: a perfectly articulate and persuasive person would just calmly show the speaker why he or she is wrong. And in the second case (when the slight is false) surely the person who “takes offense” should not blame the speaker for her anger, but her own insecurity or self-hate, which presumably is what causes her to react angrily to a true portrait of herself. The heated feeling that we associate with “taking offense’ is really a sense of frustration at our own inadequacy.

Not being a perfectly articulate or self-secure person, I find it easier to scoff at those who take offense than to avoid offense myself. To speak personally (with the thought in mind that describing my own condition will cast light on others’) in extreme cases I can successfully avoid taking offense, for the reasons just given. An obviously false slight is easy to disprove; an obviously true slight is not worth railing against. It is when the slight is partially true (either because its import is somewhat vague, because it is precise but we lack the conceptual scheme to distinguish the intended slight from other slights, or because our behavior varies with respect to the fault) that I start to feel prickly, and am most likely to raise my voice or sulk. I wonder if this applies to other people: what really nettles is the slight that is just true enough that it is not easy to persuade the speaker that he is wrong, but is false enough that we feel a righteous desire to do so, and hence to clear our name.

By the above I don’t mean to say, in the case of any offensive slight, that the antagonist is completely blameless. If the offender knows that a slight will cause distress that is greater than any likely consequent good, then surely they have done something wrong, even if a weakness in the protagonist is partly responsible for the distress. If we persuade a person to buy a dud car for an exorbitant price, we do not escape blame simply because the person is woefully misinformed about cars.

Nevertheless, it’s worth pointing out that part of the blame does lie with the person who suffers the wrong, in the case of the offended person as in the case of the woefully misinformed person.

*******

Supposing all the above is true, what can be taken from it? The lesson, I think, is that an immunity to taking offense is a quality worth aiming for, because in most ordinary people it is a good measure of intellect and self-knowledge. (I say “most ordinary people” because there may be people who are immune to offense, but who are so immune because they simply don’t understand what people say to them, or are too apathetic to care, too lacking in self-esteem to bother with self-defense, or are just extremely mild-mannered.)

To have this sort of immunity means having the confidence and articulateness to show another person why their slight is wrong, when it is wrong. It means recognizing faults when they already exist, and avoiding the temptation to cover up these faults with indignation. And, when a person’s judgment is delicately balanced between truth and falsity, it means being able to make the sort of conceptual distinctions that help one to clarify the meaning of insult, and accordingly to act as one would in the case of a true slight (if it turns out the insult is true) or false slight (if it is not true).

But I think that is a hard ideal to achieve. The lesson for the meantime is that the act of taking offence should not be read as a sign of some wrongdoing on the part of the speaker. Rather it should be read as an indication that, although a fault does lie somewhere in the slighted person, that fault should be looked for in their reaction to the slight rather than in the content of the slight itself.

Wairoa Tearooms

Here are the Wairoa tearooms on a Sunday afternoon at the end of summer.

Beside the counter there is a board with a bright green background and bird-eye pictures of meals on it. The meals are yellow and brown and reliably greasy. Sellotaped to the counter, and wafting around in the wind, is a piece of white A4 with a list of drinks prices on it. The word “Drinks” is a standard piece of WordArt, the kind of thing filled with un-special effects that you see on mediocre science fair projects: letters warped into an arc, with a shadow dropped back, letters filled in with colour that grades from bright red to bright green.

The furnishings have a thrown-together look, as if they only just moved in and don’t expect to stay for long. The wallpaper looks like it has been done incrementally, each new owner adding another band of colour without much thought to what was already there. The top third of the walls is a faded bright green. The next third is a dull yellow, and the bottom third is an anonymous black-and-green dapple. There are square pillars protruding out of the walls at regular intervals, and on each of these pillars there is, inexplicably, a number. The numbers do not seem to correspond to the tables, and they are gold-coloured on little metal plates, like the numbers on letterboxes.

There has been some attempt to give the shop a theme, and the artwork on the walls is half-heartedly maritime. There are three framed paintings of ships in storms, very conventional paintings that are the ocean-going equivalent of those pastoral paintings of the Sussex Downs that you get on table mats. On the side walls there are three stylised drawings of fish in primary colours. On the front wall, above the entrance, there is a another fish painting, this time a giant painting that looks like it was done by a promising third-form student at the local school. In a recess above the entrance there is a tangle of fishing lines and cray-fish nets. All of these things are about the sea, but they are too widely spaced to really give the shop a theme. Trying to appreciate the theme is like trying to appreciate a melody wherein there is a long delay between each note. Above the entrance there is a green sign saying “Exit”. It is a large sign and it dominates the entrance, as if it is meant as an artistic centre-piece.

At one table, four elderly people sit around and talk about sandflies and the weather. “They’ll get you in the end if they want to, they will,” says one. “They’re right bastards, you’re not wrong there,” says another. One of them, a New Zealander, orders fish-and-chips. This amuses the English couple, who say “Fush and chups! Fush and chups! Are they like fash and chaps? Fush and chups!” They all laugh. The English couple leaves, the fish and chips arrive, and the NZ man tips salt on to his meal and absentmindedly goes through a few practice rounds: “fush end cheeps,” he says. “Fesh and chups. Fosh und chapes.”

At another table there is a young male in his late teens, a Maori-looking lad with a tight t-shirt whose hem is clasped around his upper arm like a bracelet. He eats a packet of fish and chips on his own. He has fat white shoes and his left foot jigs rapidly up and down, as if he needs to go to the toilet.

A little Maori child runs in the shop and hops and waddles around the tables, completely naked. “You’re mum’s out the back, boy,” says the girl at the counter, and the child runs out the back with her fingers all tangled up behind her back.

I have come here to recharge my phone in the wall-socket, and I feel obliged to buy something while I am there. I choose a can of Orange and Lime fizzy drink. The can proudly announces that it’s contents is “5% Real Fruit.” When I’ve finished the can, overwhelmed by real fruityness, I watch a group of young girls arrive at the tearooms. One of them goes to buy a coke. The others sit down on a bench. Someone hands out straws, and they sit there bristling with straws, straws in the mouth, straws in the hand, straws as chopsticks, straws as smokes, straws as drumsticks, as backrubbers. Outside, the sun makes ballbearings of light on a green bike rack, on the frame of a bike, on the grille of a car. A Radiohead song comes on the radio. The girl returns with the coke and her friends pass it around, drinking through their straws like beaks. The finish the bottle and sit around doing little. This, I suppose, is what people do when they “hang out.” I know it is deeply uncool to put “hanging out” in quote-marks, almost as uncool as putting “cool” in quote marks, but I’ve never quite understood the appeal of just hanging out. I wonder if I am hanging out when I sit at a table and watch people move around. I decide that I’m not really hanging out, since I do actually have a practical purpose in coming here. I check my cellphone to prove that I’m not really hanging out.

There are three bars on my phone. While the next bar is under construction I watch a fly do mysterious, random circuits of a chair. It lands on the top of the chair and does its scuttling, hesitant fly-walk, darting along on whirring legs for a few moments and then stopping and scuttling on the spot, getting its bearings, then moving on again and going through the same routine. After a while it goes away, and so do the girls.

The sweaty smell of fish and chips comes from behind the counter and stiffens the air around the tables. A speaker squeezes out “Crazy,” the inescapable song by someoneorother, and competes with the rough hum of a generator, and the sounds of cutlery in the hands of busy people.


Beside the counter there is a board with a bright green background and bird-eye pictures of meals on it. The meals are yellow and brown and reliably greasy. Sellotaped to the counter, and wafting around in the wind, is a piece of white A4 with a list of drinks prices on it. The word “Drinks” is a standard piece of WordArt, the kind of thing filled with un-special effects that you see on mediocre science fair projects: letters warped into an arc, with a shadow dropped back, letters filled in with colour that grades from bright red to bright green.

The furnishings have a thrown-together look, as if they only just moved in and don’t expect to stay for long. The wallpaper looks like it has been done incrementally, each new owner adding another band of colour without much thought to what was already there. The top third of the walls is a faded bright green. The next third is a dull yellow, and the bottom third is an anonymous black-and-green dapple. There are square pillars protruding out of the walls at regular intervals, and on each of these pillars there is, inexplicably, a number. The numbers do not seem to correspond to the tables, and they are gold-coloured on little metal plates, like the numbers on letterboxes.

There has been some attempt to give the shop a theme, and the artwork on the walls is half-heartedly maritime. There are three framed paintings of ships in storms, very conventional paintings that are the ocean-going equivalent of those pastoral paintings of the Sussex Downs that you get on table mats. On the side walls there are three stylised drawings of fish in primary colours. On the front wall, above the entrance, there is a another fish painting, this time a giant painting that looks like it was done by a promising third-form student at the local school. In a recess above the entrance there is a tangle of fishing lines and cray-fish nets. All of these things are about the sea, but they are too widely spaced to really give the shop a theme. Trying to appreciate the theme is like trying to appreciate a melody wherein there is a long delay between each note. Above the entrance there is a green sign saying “Exit”. It is a large sign and it dominates the entrance, as if it is meant as an artistic centre-piece.

At one table, four elderly people sit around and talk about sandflies and the weather. “They’ll get you in the end if they want to, they will,” says one. “They’re right bastards, you’re not wrong there,” says another. One of them, a New Zealander, orders fish-and-chips. This amuses the English couple, who say “Fush and chups! Fush and chups! Are they like fash and chaps? Fush and chups!” They all laugh. The English couple leaves, the fish and chips arrive, and the NZ man tips salt on to his meal and absentmindedly goes through a few practice rounds: “fush end cheeps,” he says. “Fesh and chups. Fosh und chapes.”

At another table there is a young male in his late teens, a Maori-looking lad with a tight t-shirt whose hem is clasped around his upper arm like a bracelet. He eats a packet of fish and chips on his own. He has fat white shoes and his left foot jigs rapidly up and down, as if he needs to go to the toilet.

A little Maori child runs in the shop and hops and waddles around the tables, completely naked. “You’re mum’s out the back, boy,” says the girl at the counter, and the child runs out the back with her fingers all tangled up behind her back.

I have come here to recharge my phone in the wall-socket, and I feel obliged to buy something while I am there. I choose a can of Orange and Lime fizzy drink. The can proudly announces that it’s contents is “5% Real Fruit.” When I’ve finished the can, overwhelmed by real fruityness, I watch a group of young girls arrive at the tearooms. One of them goes to buy a coke. The others sit down on a bench. Someone hands out straws, and they sit there bristling with straws, straws in the mouth, straws in the hand, straws as chopsticks, straws as smokes, straws as drumsticks, as backrubbers. Outside, the sun makes ballbearings of light on a green bike rack, on the frame of a bike, on the grille of a car. A Radiohead song comes on the radio. The girl returns with the coke and her friends pass it around, drinking through their straws like beaks. The finish the bottle and sit around doing little. This, I suppose, is what people do when they “hang out.” I know it is deeply uncool to put “hanging out” in quote-marks, almost as uncool as putting “cool” in quote marks, but I’ve never quite understood the appeal of just hanging out. I wonder if I am hanging out when I sit at a table and watch people move around. I decide that I’m not really hanging out, since I do actually have a practical purpose in coming here. I check my cellphone to prove that I’m not really hanging out.

There are three bars on my phone. While the next bar is under construction I watch a fly do mysterious, random circuits of a chair. It lands on the top of the chair and does its scuttling, hesitant fly-walk, darting along on whirring legs for a few moments and then stopping and scuttling on the spot, getting its bearings, then moving on again and going through the same routine. After a while it goes away, and so do the girls.

The sweaty smell of fish and chips comes from behind the counter and stiffens the air around the tables. A speaker squeezes out “Crazy,” the inescapable song by someoneorother, and competes with the rough hum of a generator, and the sounds of cutlery in the hands of busy people.

The Nut

Here is a poem about death. It owes too much to John Donne.



If inside that shell
A universe could fit,
And all of stuff, all stories, songs and stars,
All weight and store, all ways, signs, lightness, waste and wars,
Could therein dwell,
While we two sit
Outside, with only you and I
And breath, to wait and wonder why
We were not lost
Inside that nut-bound ever-widening sphere -
Even then, despite its host,
Eternity it could not boast.

But if instead I chose
To wait within those walls,
And near them could, tending ever more close,
Ever stay but near or, closing, all knowledge lose;
Then, though enclosed,
I’ld know no walls.
I’ld no outside perceive
And could with ease believe
That ball to hold
Inside all, and all inside.
Then, your palm feeling that form told,
You might my boundless all enfold.

Thus (knowing none to wait
Beyond) as our live set
Expands in time, our space of days to fill,
We sense each second’s sequence to a timeless null
Converge. Even late,
They’ve never met,
For to pass is to pass all sense
And to meet it is to pass, hence
Our mortal trap
Is all around enshelled in air:
We each within our lifetime’s gap
A tight eternity enwrap.

Applied Anthropology

If you are a prospective employer who has come across this blog while looking for proof of my credibility, please do not read the following. Otherwise, let me explain.

The following is a work of anthropology, not of smut. Recently, for ten days, I entered a new and interesting cultural environment, and set about trying to absorb and understand and like it. And you can get a good lot of understanding, you see, through participation. So when I was kindly given the short piece of creative prose shown below, I was obliged by the forces of scholarship to reply with something of my own; and if my reply is as unsavoury as the authentic example of the local culture reproduced below, then so much the better for scholarship.



Woodpecker Wood

I stuck my finger in
A woodpeckers hole
The woodpecker cried
God bless my soul.
Stick it in stick it in
Remove it.


Tuatara Lust

Once upon a time
On an island by the sea
I was puffing from a climb
I was holding to a tree

When I saw a lusty lizard
From the corner of my eye
And she hit me like a blizzard
Made me wobble made me sigh

“Come with me” said the lizard
With a tuatara blush
And I’ll flip you like a wizard
In my hole inside the bush

So I came upon her hole
Yes I came to her all right
I got muddy in her hole
And I beat her bush all night.

And she told me she was greedy
And I told her I was too
When we finished I was bleeding
I was tender I was bruised.

Oh I was puffing all the time
I was holding to my tree
Once upon a time
On an island by the sea.

Island Life

From one point of view, my time on Taranga Island was a tale of misery and degradation. I was woken at 6am by the guy in the next tent calling me a tosser. I was assailed by immature nicknames, and by a Red Hot Chilli Peppers song repeated endlessly for the sole purpose of irritating me. I was forced by peer pressure to down shot after shot of Johnny Walker whisky, drunken out of a shot-glass made up of the sawn-off top of a soft-drink bottle; and having done that I was forced by general merriment to suck up split wine from the lid of a food container that had been a playground for rat-shitting rats the night before. I was mocked for going down the hill too fast (“Can ya smell the lolly bin Mike?”). I was mocked for going down the hill too slowly (“Hurry the fuck up Grandad”). I held onto a cliff face by a slippery root and two flax leaves while my supervisor stood on a ledge above me and laughed and made jokes about risking my life seven times for the sake of three weeds. I tripped over on a root the first day. Immediately this appalling misdemeanor gave rise to huge false guffaws from my travelling companions, as it did for the next ten days. For 10 days I had no dry socks. For ten days I put on a wet shirt in the morning and took a wetter shirt off in the evening, and I came back to camp to wash out of a small blue tub of cold water, an activity that was partly a bath and partly a shower and combined the worst aspects of both. In the evenings I sat and watched people hunched wordlessly over something called the “Brick Game”, an appallingly addictive electronic device that emitted many piercing electronic noises, including a tinny rendition of the famous part of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. I was surrounded by puerility. After a few days my protective reserve had worn away and I cheerfully joined in with the puerility. I composed a “bestiality ballad”, seven verses about an erotic adventure with a tuatara. I noted a brand of chocolate called “Dark Ghana,” and observed that this was a neat little euphemism for excrement, and having made this discovery I took every chance to extend it and explore its many variations. When the sole female on the trip went behind a tarpaulin to shower, and her jerking, rubbing silhouette came through the other side of the tarpaulin, and the others put all sorts of merry construals on the shadowy and naked movements, I joined in. When I went to the long-drop at night I had to whack the sides with a stick to get rid of the rats. And so on.

From one point of view, then, all of these happenings made up a truly unpleasant period of work. From my point of view, however, they were all part of the fun.

Under The Weather

I am writing the following in the middle of a wet and energetic storm, on an island in the middle of a boiling sea that stretches to Whangerei on one side and to Chile on the other. My tent walls are flapping and heaving in the wind. My sleeping mat is damp at the edges. My toilet bag, the one pair of trousers I brought on this trip, my silk sleeping sheet, and the plastic supermarket bags in which I keep my clothes, are all soaked. Lying on my mat, both of my elbows are dewy with rain. The floor of the kitchen is churned up into a chocolate muddy ruin. Bits of wet dirt are smeared around the floor at the front entrance of my tent. The fly covers the tent imperfectly, leaving gaps at its base that are exposed to the weather, and from the inside of my tent I can see a band of dirty sequins around the base of my little room, where the rain has splattered mud over it. In numerous places the tent and the fly have made contact, so they’ve become stuck together by the wet, and you can see the cross-hatched thread of the fly through the tent walls, like wrinkles through a wet t-shirt.

When we arrived on the island there was a dry gully running up the side of the campsite on the true right. Now it is a brown, frothy torrent, and I can here it rushing away like a battery of waterfalls. The nikau palms are streaming with water. The palms have v-shaped spines that channel water toward the main trunk, whereupon it runs down the trunk in a transparent film. Touch the tree with your finger and you make a streaming parabola of froth.

This is great weather for sliding on tree roots and for leaving slick skid-marks and messy handprints in the mud. It’s good weather for athlete’s foot and for growing mushrooms between your toes and for relandscaping your hands, wrinkling up the skin into tiny pink ridges, and also for lying awake and listening to the sounds of water: water tapping on the roof; water punching on the roof, water pouring over the roof as if from a large bucket and seeping through the gaps, water strafing the corrugated plastic that sits between the food and the flood; the long wet rushing of a river, the thumping and grinding of surf, the tapping of water on leaves.

It’s great weather, too, for getting your jacket drenched on the way from the tent to the toilet, and your singlet drenched on the way back. Good for improvising jackets out of plastic rubbish bags, and for losing your beer down a river that comes up over night. The only dry things I have are my stationary, my sleeping bag, and the insides of my fingernails.

Camping tends to heighten the need for alertness, commonsense, time-saving improvisations. The rain exaggerates this tendency. Scroggin goes inside a plastic bag inside a plastic bag inside a pocket. Cellphones go inside a plastic bag inside a plastic bag inside a thick blue dry-bag that you close by rolling up the top third and securing a clip across the top, which goes inside the inner pocket of a pack. When going outside in the rain, roll up your trousers and the arms of your shirt so that they don’t get too wet. Your skin will get wet, but your skin dries quicker that cotton. Keep a towel (a pile of broad-leaves will do) at the tent door to leave the mud on when you get in. Do not put the head of your bed at the entrance-end of your tent – you want your dirty feet to be at the entrance, which is dirty already; and your want your face to be as far from the dirt as possible. Put your clothes in plastic bag and use those bags as barriers between yourself and the wet sides of your tent. Moving in and out of your tent is awkward, so you want to do these things as little as possible: before leaving, make extra sure you have everything you need for going outside; and do the same when you go back in.

Joe Bennett's "Land of Two Halves": Metaphors

By “metaphor” I don’t mean just metaphor, but any kind of inventive and striking comparison. Joe Bennett is a prolific manufacturer of metaphors. His writings, including “A Land of Two Halves,” are jumping with them. Most of the time they are good: they are vivid, original, funny, and suiting the rest of his prose in being compact, deft, unlaboured, more witty than eloquent. Even when they are not so good they are worth reading. Here is a selection from “Two Halves.”


Landscapes

Away to the West lie the purple foothills of the Southern Alps, a range of mountains like a dog’s back teeth that form the spine of the island.

..the sky stretches out, as delicately blue as a thrushes’ egg.

…where the land is carpeted in tussock the colour of a lion’s pelt.

Below us in the last of the afternoon sun the lake is crinkled like kitchen foil. A paddle-steamer chugs across it like a toy in a bath. Mountains climb straight out of the water…their jagged tops like the crest on a tuatara’s spine.

Fed further up the valley by waterfalls like straight white pencils, the water gathers here in swirling pools of green translucency, like thick stained glass slowly on the move.

The landscape was green as an ad.

When the whale rose, it rose like an island, a grey-brown hugeness.

I’m standing in shadow but the sky holds tufts of clouds like fading vapour-trails lit pinky-orange from below. The sinking sun has turned the highlands to the north the colour of ginger biscuits, slashed by the deep black shadows of the gulley. Waterfowl of all kinds are swinging across the sky to roost, like packs of slow arrows. The plaintive calling of a pair of paradise ducks carries forever across the stillness. The lake’s a mirror. Ducks tow rippled vee’s across it. And on the far side of the water the lights come on in Te Anau and the town seems dwarfed, puny. Eye-candy comes no sweeter.

A plane offers a view that we probably shouldn’t have, a view we can’t live in. It presents the land like a brochure.


…billiard table bush…

…knitting needle bush…

The spur-winged plover, a sort of lap-wing, with jowls as yellow as lemon-peel…and they take off into the night making a noise like train brakes.

It’s crown is an asymmetric mess, like an inverted root system. I lean against it, give it a slap. It’s like slapping a building.

A pair of ostriches with necks like vacuum cleaner hoses.

…feta, goats cheese in brine, huge waxed bowling balls of Gouda, Parmesan that crumbles like weather-worn sandstone.

I can understand the appeal of a steamtrain rattling along beside a lake…the gleaming beams of steel that link the wheels to the engine and circle like elbows.

Weather

The West side of each marquee is concave. The east side balloons like a pregnancy. Any unsecured corner of the canvas slaps like staccato applause. Guy-ropes thrum like the strings on a double bass.

Sudden full-blooded rain sweeps in from the Tasman sea, hitting the roof like flung gravel.

People

Unmatching Formica tables, unemptied ashtrays, a carpet like a disease, a drunk woman with three kids in need of a slap…

Their stereos thrum with bass, like heartbeats heard through a stethoscope.

His every movement is laboured and deliberate. He chews as if making a series of conscious, disconnected decisions to move his jaws.

They lean like a picket fence, their backs to the bar, their elbows on it, watching a Super 12 game between the Wellington hurricanes and an Australian team.

As he runs the whole pub stands on tiptoes and purses, tenses, clenches fists as if trying to hold back an orgasm.

The crows groans and oohs and cheers as one and surges like a school of fish.

His van looks like he’s deliberately pelted it with rocks.

Unkind

A lone woman strides the bank in three-quarter leisure-wear, power walking to the next cappuccino, and fiercely swinging her arms as if into the balls of an assailant.

She’s got the arse of a shire horse, a mighty thing ballooning on either side of the chair like two taught bags of cement.

Grim

The beach is stark. Waves the colour of dishwater pound the sand, receding to leave a scum of soiled froth that gasps and subsides like a spent fish.

Walking its streets feels like touring a cemetery that is not quite historic enough to be interesting. [Greymouth]

[motel rooms] resembled temporary porn studios, and probably some of them were – though rarely while I was in them.

A ceiling of stippled plaster, each stipple minutely tipped with dirt like a smoker’s tooth. Every guest has left a molecule of self…The air is like gravy.

Clouds weigh down like a press.

Most of the pokie players are over forty. Their faces are the faces of cattle in the rain.

Amusing

Sleek as bullets, they [pukekos] step high over the wetlands on their huge splayed feet as if studiously avoiding dogshit.

The penguins waddled along, like waiters with piles.

…and a lot more convincing than the concrete moa, which looks at first glance to have been surprised by a proctologist. And at the second glance, it still does.

In fifth-form Physics I learned that if you filled a matchbox with nuclei and then dropped it, it would sink thirty feet into the ground. New Zealand pies are similar.

By far the most vigorous thing on show is a fibreglass salmon, thirty feet tall and sculpted in the act of leaping, perhaps because of the telegaph pole stuck up its arse.

Each mussel is the size of a dighy..and has a frilly fringe of flesh attached to it, like a pensioners gumline.

Unexpected

Pukeko corpses are a common sight on the verge…their sleekness gone, like wrecked umbrellas.

Clouds mass out to sea like grey-black cauliflowers.

The foresters drop me in sunshine that feels brittle, like elderly sellotape.

Queenstown squats beneath the mountains like a whore in a palace. But she’s a rich whore, and a pretty one. The prices in the real-estate windows have strings of zeros in them like the wheels on the Kingston Flier.

Boys Debating Nicely

Note: This post originally appeared as a guest post over on Philosophy Etcetera.

I note that there has been an upsurge of interest in all-male schools in New Zealand, and that part of the reason for this is, reportedly, the "feminising" of coededucational schools (no references, sorry: it was some time ago). According to one principal, coed schools are becoming increasingly unsuitable for boys because they do not cater for the "masculine" needs of boys; in particular, coed schools tend to emphasise "group discussion and deliberation," rather than more combative, aggressive activities of the kind that are attractive to young males.

Reports like this bring out a problem in school education thathas been suggested to me by a small amount of anecdotal evidence and a slightly larger (but still fairly small) amount of personal experience: namely, that the tendency among school-age males towards combative activities, and away from cooperative activities, looks to be at odds with some of the intellectual values that school is supposed to inculcate in students. Let us suppose for a moment that school-age males do favour combative over cooperative pursuits, including those in the domain of critical thinking. What kind of problem does this present, and how can it be mitigated or overcome? Is the problem exaggerated?

This question is interesting to me partly because intellectual values in question here are of a kind that is especially pertinent to Philosophy. One of the skills that study in Philosophy is meant to develop is the ability to argue nicely: to take other people’s views seriously, and to respond to them with charity and sensitivity; to be open to the possibility that one might be wrong, and to revise one’s beliefs when one discovers that one is wrong; to avoid simplistic dichotomies between right and wrong*; to regard the pursuit of truth as an inherently valuable activity, and not to sacrifice this end for the sake of other ends, such as that of beating a long-time rival, winning personal glory, or avoiding the embarrassment of public error. This may not be a comprehensive list, or an entirely accurate one, but you get the idea. And it is natural to think that the intellectual and social qualities in this list cannot be introduced unless the combative spirit of young lads is somehow softened or removed. What I want to argue here is that that the situation is quite so bad as one might think, given this brief analysis of the problem. Male combativeness is a real problem here, but it might also be part of the solution; and insofar as it is a problem, it is only partially a problem.

*I do not mean to say anything daringly post-modern here. I mean to say that many claims are too vague or complex to be straightforwardly true or false; and that the best way to arrive at a truth about such statements is to replace it with a set of more precise claims, whose truth-values may differ from eachother.

The first point to note is that arguing nicely is not the only end of communal discussion. We also want students to argue rigorously, and one way to promote this value is to encourage students to subject any beliefs or arguments to severe scrutiny. To be sure, an overly combative person is likely to bestow such scrutiny primarily upon the ideas of his opponent; and to ignore or obfuscate the errors in his own thinking. But at least this is a start. One might also object that a combative person is more likely than a cooperative one to be dishonest in his scrutiny: to exaggerate the flaws of their opponents' thinking by the use of deviant dialectical tactics, of rhetorical rather than philosophical forms of persuasion. But it looks to me as if that sort of dishonesty is more a function of the intellectual powers of the disputant, rather than their attitude to the debate. If all members of a dispute are good at distinguishing rhetorical tactics from philosophical ones, then it looks as if this problem would at least partly disappear. For, if one is really intent upon proving one’s opponent wrong, and everyone involved is aware of what constitutes a genuine proof; then any deviant tactics are likely to be counter-productive to one’s competitive aims. So one way to cope with a combative spirit, and to turn it towards worthwhile intellectual ends, is to improve the rational powers of students.

Of course, such rational improvement is not sufficient to guarantee a good discussion. Social and other intellectual skills are also important. But again, it is a good start.

Another point is that arguing nicely is something that one can be combative about. There is no difficulty, at least in principle, of getting a few groups of people together to compete against eachother with regard to their facility for dignified, honest, cooperative deliberation. Of course, there is some difficulty, in principle, in having groups compete against eachother with regards to the sincerity of their commitment to arguing nicely. If a student sees the worth of arguing nicely only when such a practice allows him to compete viciously with rival groups, then clearly that student is missing something important. But a facility for arguing nicely is, I think, at least as valuable as a desire to argue nicely for its own sake; it is certainly a good start.

Perhaps it is a little unrealistic, though, to think that combatively-minded young lads will be as enthusiastic about competing over something like communal inquiry, as over things like romance or wrestling. But if this is the case, then the problem may lie not with the combative nature of young lads but with their disinterest in formal learning: they turn away from communal inquiry not because it does not allow them to indulge their combative instincts, but because it is an intellectual rather than a sporting activity. This is still a problem, of course, but it is a problem for another day.

And, insofar as communal inquiry does fail to satisfy the combative instincts of energetic young lads, something can still be salvaged (conceptually at least) by clarifying the notion of "combativeness." So far I have used the notion of "combative" in a fairly loose sense. Now I want to distinguish a few senses of the word, because I think there are some kinds of combativeness that are more compatible with cooperative debate than others. It is possible to distinguish conceptually between these senses of the word; distinguishing between them in practice (ie. by separating out one sort of combative behaviour from other sorts) is probably a lot more difficult, and eliminating the undesirable forms of combativeness is probably more difficult again. But the conceptual distinction is a good place to begin. So here are three kinds of combativeness:

Antagonism. To say that males are antagonistic is to say that they enjoy situations where two or more people are not only fiercely engaged in some competition or another, but that they compete spitefully or maliciously. They genuinely wish to cause eachother personal harm, either physically or emotionally or socially; and if they cannot do it themselves they like to watch it happen.

Competitiveness. The trait of relishing any chance to set one's own abilities against those of another. Fierce competition need not mean antagonistic competition: one can "play hard but play fair."

Ambition. I use "ambition" to refer to a desire to excel, though not necessarily at the expense of others. A merely ambitious person will wish only to perform as well as they possibly can, enjoying the strain and excitement of a difficult challenge. The challenge need not be posed by another person, and the strain need not be against another person.

Now, clearly antagonistic people are going to be ill-suited to good communal discussion. Not only are they likely to see the activity as an effort of self-aggrandisement, but that self-aggrandisement will take the form of petty personal abuse. They are unlikely even to engage their opponent in genuine debate, except about his height or facial features or the habits of his mother. Competitive people will be more successful, since they will compete over the matter under debate (ethics, politics, religion, the quality of some work of art, etc.) rather than irrelevant personal details. And people who are merely ambitious, without being competitive (in the sense just defined), will be even more successful in arguing nicely: they will not only seek truth themselves, but also encourage the efforts of others to seek the truth, since by doing the latter they enhance their own chances of achieving that end. So ambition is not only compatible with arguing nicely, but also conducive to it: far from being removed or softened, it should be encouraged.

Just how these three different traits are manifested in the average male school student (ie. in what kind of interrelation and in what proportion), is something for phsycologists and sociologists and teachers to work out, I think. It is empirical question (though of course not a merely empirical question). But it would be hard to answer the empirical question without having the conceptual distinction already in place.

I have written all of this without ever having tried to engage young males in good communal discussion, and I would be interested to hear from anyone who has had practical experience in this matter. Is it as difficult a task as it is sometimes made out to be? And are there any other traits within the broad notion of "combativeness" that I have missed out, or that are especially prevalent in school-age males? Comments appreciated, as usual.

Education as an Ideal

Over here is a part one of my introduction to my interest in Education. The other two parts were posted over on Philosophy Etcetera, which kindly let me post as a "guest blogger" for a few days. So here are Education as an Ideal Part 2 and Education as an Ideal Part 3.

Signpost 3: Odds and Ends

After a prolonged bout of too-much-to-do, a short but debilitating attack of can’t-be-bothered, and a few days of sore-head, I have decided to add some more things to this blog. What sort of things? This and that and the other thing, plus some odds-and-ends, some miscellany and perhaps one or two boondoggles as well. Over the next few weeks on this blog there will be more of the same.