Why It’s Time To Bring An End To Terms Like ‘White Privilege’, ‘Male Privilege’ & ‘The Patriarchy’

London is caught up in fractious Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations, and social media is awash with people targeting what they call 'white privilege', 'male privilege' and the 'patriarchy'. It's almost impossible to turn on the TV or have an account on social media and to not have encountered some hysterical assertion that if you're white and male you somehow have an advantage to laud over minorities. Just this week, in the midst of BLM taking to the streets in mob-like fashion, I've had 3 white friends message me privately and tell me that right now they are feeling judged for the colour of their skin even though they have always tried to be kind, tolerant and opposed to all forms of racial hatred.

Instead of using terms like 'white privilege', 'male privilege' and the 'patriarchy', here, I think, is a better way to look at this situation. I hate racism as much as the next person, so I hope you'll hear my good intentions when I tell you that I don't think looking at individuals through the lens of the particular group identity you perceive them to be part of (white, black, male, female, straight, gay) over and above their identity as an individual is the best way to treat humans. I don't think we are at our best when we engage in identity politics. In a world of 7.5 billion unique people, the primary consideration of any person has to be at the individual level above all else. Groups of people of any category are a diverse set of individuals far more than they are a group, and people who see the world through the hostile lens of identity politics can't easily love people as individuals, because they see the individuals through the lens of the perceived in-group or out-group, not the group as being comprised of individuals worthy of love and self-determination.

Even if you're right that someone has 'privilege' because they are white or male, or even if it's true that they are part of an ethnic group that historically committed acts that contemporary folk rightly find abhorrent, there is still, I think, a better way to treat them than to lump them into an artificially constructed 'out-group' where their individuality gets diluted in the collective wash. The idea of using the term 'privilege' as a weapon against someone being white or male or part of a patriarchy is actually deluded and reprehensible - it comes right up from the bowels of critical incompetence, and it will turn us into rogues if we are not careful.

Instead of 'privilege', I think using the term 'advantage' is better - it's less emotionally connotative. It is an advantage being born in London, comparatively to Mogadishu. It is a disadvantage being born severely disabled in England comparatively to able-bodied in England. If you are born in Mogadishu and born severely disabled, that's a double disadvantage. But the upshot is, there are actually countless (literally countless) ways to measure advantage in the human species, because everyone perceives the world differently enough for those differences to matter, and similarly enough for the similarities to matter - and there are an infinite number of ways to perceive reality and all its complexity. The differences between women and men are such that both males and females will have advantages over the other - but the intra-differentials between the set of all women, or all men, or all white people, or all black people, or all gay people, or all straight people, or all bisexual people is going to be far greater than any kind of group identity differential. It’s time we saw the cessation of toxic terms like ‘White Privilege’, ‘Male Privilege’ & ‘The Patriarchy’, and I will now take each one in turn, and show why I think it is an unhelpful term.

Why 'male privilege' is an unhelpful term

Humanness is a ravine of interconnected complexity, about which 'privilege' comes in unisexual, multi-dimensional aspects of personhood: everything from intelligence, attractiveness, temperament, health, athleticism, genes, region of birth and many more factors - and those are just the attributes that are not based on the decisions we make. Both males and females have comparative and absolute advantages in each of these categories, and the further differentiations in the diverse and assorted ways to perceive the world only add to the complexity. Furthermore, in terms of the slog against natural forces, males and females have astronomically more similarities than they do differences - and by and large, despite being a highly flawed species, have worked on the same side symbiotically in pair-bonding relationships to look after one another to climb out of the quagmire together into a relatively stable and peaceable co-existence. Men have suffered, women have suffered; women have helped create a better world, and men have helped create a better world. Both are evolutionarily primed to make different decisions, have different priorities, and play different roles in support of the family unit. For most of our 200,000 year history, life has been 'Nasty, brutish and short' for both men and women - disease-ridden, in poverty, in war, in hardship, in laborious working conditions - and we have almost always got through it together; men and women by and large pulling in the same direction.

The concept of 'male privilege' comes from agenda-driven minds that don't really care much about men or women. It's just not a term that an intelligent, balanced person who understands history and science would ever utter. Those who believe in 'male privilege' believe that males have most of the advantages when it comes to social, economic, and political situations or rights - that this advantage is afforded to them solely on the basis of their sex. It's an absurd idea, and factually wrong. It's a philosophically intractable proposition because maleness is a narrow category of determination - far less important than the traits I mentioned based on the individual over and above the group. Males have some advantages, so do females, so do tall people, intelligent people, hard-working people, educated people, good looking people, healthy people, people born in geographically favourable areas - there are just too many factors to this equation for success or advantage to be solely or even primarily about maleness. No group identity is representative of its constituent parts - there is a wide-ranging diversity in every group identity we could list, and therefore no individual in that group is ever going to be wholly representative of the group, because there are too many ways for a group with one shared trait to be different in so many other ways. Where there are instances of unfair discrimination against women or men, we should, of course, do all we can to address them.

Why 'white privilege' is an unhelpful term

A similar thing can be said about 'white privilege' - it may be tempting to say that history has shown a demonstrable advantage of being a white person from a Western nation - and there's no denying that in several important senses that is true. But I don't believe the human race will progress on the basis of love and kindness and empathy while people insist on playing identity politics with people's 'whiteness' and try to make them feel morally ashamed of their ancestral associations. Not only does that rob them of the most important element of their selfhood - their individuality and autonomous agency - it seeks to divide people by trying to make them morally culpable for the terrible things their ancestors of hundreds of years ago did.

The human race is complex, and because there are all sorts of advantages and disadvantages based on countless criteria - intelligence, sex, geography, personality, size, looks, genes, age, and several more - I think humans do each other a grave disservice when they talk of 'white privilege' and try to make white people feel uneasy about their whiteness on the basis that racism exists. Tell the white boy who is currently under 25, lives with his parents, anxious, unemployed, depressed, addicted to porn and in an abject state of inertia that he has white privilege - I'm sure he can feel it really acutely right now. Tell the thousands of white Christians being persecuted in Muslim countries that they enjoy white privilege. The truth is, when any tribalistic force gravitates together, the humans involved have been pretty dreadful to each other - white on white, white on black, black on black and black on white - there have been European atrocities, American atrocities, Mongol atrocities, Ottoman atrocities, Persian atrocities, Arab atrocities, Ancient Egyptian atrocities, the list goes on. The biggest truth here is that, except for certain biological limitations, there are no good or bad qualities that are uniquely attributable to any group identity - be they male, female, black, white, European, African, Asian, or any other - and it is ignoble to try to tar any group with any kind of collective guilt.

It is shameful to pick on people because they have, say, male genitalia (or indeed female genitalia) or white skin (or indeed black skin), and to try to get white people to apologise by renouncing their whiteness, as several videos have shown happening recently. The Black Lives Matter folk that are demanding this are acting in a way that mirrors the racism they are trying to stamp out. Because the reality is, around the globe, every category of person is full of members having a hard time of it somewhere in the world. And even in places like the UK where it seems that a great majority of people have it easy compared to the minority of 'disadvantaged' people, I don't think 'them vs. us' is ever the best way to look at things. I think it's far more accurate (and enlightened) to think of us all as being involved in many struggles that are shared by just about all fellow humans, and realise that we all have our problems and our hardships, however well we seem to be doing on the outside.

As I've said for years, the big impediments to sound reasoning and honest truthseeking in a complex world are over-simplicity, lazy thinking and perverse incentives. To get anywhere in any complex subject, you have to start with the humility to say "I don't understand this as well as I need to", and if you're on really good form, "I don't even know some of the ways that I don't understand this". When you do this, two important things happen. The first is that you begin to act with more humility as you adopt a more circumspect attitude towards 'doing something' - realising that many of your suggestions are contributing more to the problems than the solutions. You get to see that almost all the suggested solutions to the world's problems, and the low-resolution beliefs about high-resolution scenarios, are woefully inadequate to the reality of the situation. And from that level of humility - both humility about how inadequate your understanding about complex reality is and how little you know in the grand scheme of things (epistemic humility), and humility towards others (empathy) - you get to see the world more like it actually is. You get to see that if you really want to understand a situation competently you are going to have to expend a lot of cognitive effort in focusing on a diverse range of considerations

The problem with over-simplistic responses to complex problems is that to the beholder those responses look like they offer a sufficient analysis of the problem and the obvious solution: a young black man tragically loses his life under the knee of a racist cop and there is racist behaviour showing up on social media so we should take to the streets and demand that there is a systematic redress; there is inequality, therefore the rich must be hoarding the lion's share of the wealth conspiratorially against the rest; women earn less than men on average so there must be systematic unfair discrimination against women; some negative things are happening to the climate, therefore what the world needs is the decimation of the market system; there are lots more men in CEO roles than women so we must therefore be living under a patriarchal system; there are a lot of people on low-paid jobs so we need a socialist revolution to topple the greedy bosses at the top; people seem a lot more sensitive to offence themselves, so we should silence people we don't like, rewrite history, retard debate, and censor and retard free expression - the list goes on. 

The trouble is, once you dig deeper into these things, you find layer upon layer of causal complexity, and the deeper you dig, the less information you can compute in one hit, and the greater your margin for error. There are dozens of reasons why black people show up as statistically disadvantaged, there are dozens of reasons why men earn more than women on average, there are dozens of factors to consider when we talk about trade-offs between economic growth and sustainability, there are dozens of reasons why some people are poorer than others. And then if you combine any of those factors and start to engage in multi-factorial analyses, you hit a nexus of complexity, with every single element requiring careful thought and competence-based, time-consuming assimilation of facts and reasoning.

Whenever you think you’re trying to solve one big problem, you’re probably actually dealing with hundreds of other elements sitting under the surface. The very first question you should ask yourself, before you start anything else, is “What the heck makes me think I have the first clue about what I’m doing here?” To construct the framework of a worldview to encapsulate that many complex factors is not just a difficult task that requires lots of effort, it's actually a task that few can manage. So instead, people tend to default to a simplistic heuristic - an ideology, an in-group mentality, a tribal affiliation - to shelter them from the storm of chaos that comes with multivariate analyses, where it's easy to get overwhelmed with how ignorant we are and how much effort it's going to take to get to even a reasonable level of competence on just one of those elements of consideration, let alone many of them. Social justice warriors think that if only they come together as one tribal group - black, female, gay, straight, feminist, socialist, working class, or whatever - that it's the only way we can see change, by teaming up to fight our oppressors. But not only does that seem to be false, it actually seems to be backwards - the real changes for the good almost always happen organically, by focusing more on individuals, on liberty, on kindness, on love, on encouraging people to reach their potential - that's how you get genuine advancement, that's how you get a more realistic equality of opportunity.

For that reason, I'd encourage us to refer to someone's group identity as infrequently as it is possible to do. BLM do the opposite - they make a big thing of skin colour, when the vast majority of people who are the side of progress are simply seeking to love them as individuals for who they are. By wedding themselves to a tribe that increases focus on group identity they are accentuating the division and making a big thing out of the very categorisations that love for individuals seeks to deracinate. Look at the results of taking to the streets - the hostility, the volatility, the shouting through each other - you can see the 'them vs. us' effects with your own eyes every day. 

Here's something important that you might have missed. When people in the quagmire of racism, bigotry and intolerance are fighting for rights, tolerance, respect and opportunity, think about what they are actually fighting for: they are fighting to be treated as an individual worthy of love because they are a unique person of value. They are fighting (rightly) to get that job based on merit, to be able to vote, sit where they like, marry whomever they choose - they are fighting so the group identity part of their identity is given a secondary place behind their talents, personality, character, competence and numerous other qualities as an individual.Of course, BLM folk will say something like. "It's alright for privileged white men to be saying this, but our black causes need to be fought for, and how else but coming together in solidarity and unity are we going to do that?" It's a popular response, but like many popular responses, it neglects not just all the important points we’ve covered thus far, but also perhaps the most important point of all: by perpetuating the desire to categorise themselves according to group identity (however noble they think the cause, or however right about the anti-racism sentiments they clearly are) they are artificially fostering a climate in which they are being asked to be seen through their group identity first, and their individual self second. 

The best way to advance and progress is to view everyone through the lens of their individuality, judge each other according to our beliefs, views, actions and attitudes, relate to each other through our kindness and grace, employ each other through our competencies, and regard each other on our merits, allowing room to give a helping hand to the poor and vulnerable in society whenever it is needed. That is the kind of society Christ teaches us to aspire to. Where there are instances of racism and bigotry, we should, of course, do all we can to combat them.

Why the 'patriarchy' is an unhelpful term

As with ‘male privilege’ and ‘white privilege’, this is why we also need to repudiate the widespread and hasty assumption so many people make that we live in some kind of oppressive patriarchy. As in the above cases, people who peddle the patriarchy-narrative are confused about how complex the world is, how multifaceted and diverse human behaviour is, and how to properly analyse an epistemologically intractable social environment. To cherry pick a few isolated examples of where men have the edge in society, and ignore all the contra-evidence and declare 'patriarchy', is a bit like surveying people in their 40s inside a job centre and claiming that most of the people in their 40s in the UK are unemployed. Most people in their 40s in the UK are not unemployed, but if you cherry pick that sample group from only inside a job centre, it's going to look like they are unemployed. The UK may look like a patriarchy if you only look at the Catholic and Anglican churches, or if you only look at male CEOs, or if you only sample garage mechanics, or if you fall for the bogus 'gender pay gap' canard (see my side bar for articles on the ‘unfair gender pay gap’ myth). But it doesn't look very much like a patriarchy if you only sample primary school teachers, or if you look at the number of male suicides compared to females, or if you look at the ratio of men to women who have died fighting in wars or doing risky jobs. The world can be a far more kind and loving and unifying place when we treat each other as valuable individuals over and above our group identity.

Society as a whole is not accurately represented when seen through cherry-picked data analyses that are sought to corroborate the bogus arguments of people trying to score points with their identity politics. Society is much more complex than that, and the reality is, there are many ways in which men have the comparative advantage over women, many ways in which women have the comparative advantage over men, but where in most cases of human living, men and women cooperate together to work, to survive, to love, have friendships, to pay their taxes, to bring up families, to fight against nature's hardships, and to make each other's lives better (either directly or indirectly). The church probably is, in several ways, too patriarchal in its ethos - failing to capitalise on the immense benefits and diverse duality of perspective within the two sexes, as are most religions and institutions that are built on status-driven hierarchies. But to claim the whole of society is an oppressive patriarchy is to be guilty of misrepresenting the reality of how men and women really operate in a relationship symbiosis, in mutually beneficial synergies, and in reciprocal encouragement against the vicissitudes of nature's hardships and challenges.

Final word

I've said all this not to perpetuate further division, but to explain that I think anyone who sees the world narrowly in terms of group identity and seeks to pit one against the other or foster resentment towards other groups is missing the most rewarding element of being human - the sovereignty and worth of the individual as an agent of value. When I think about all the elements that make up my self-identity, I find that I am numerous things all at once: I'm a man, a son, a Christian, a manager, an employee, a writer, a weight trainer, a cousin, a libertarian, a Darwinian, a Humean, a Jungian (the good parts of Jung, heh), an egalitarian, a white person, a tall person, the list goes on. Unless we treat each other as though our individuality, our feelings and our unique personhood take primacy over any shared characteristics we share with others, we are not being fully appreciated for the whole essence of our distinct self, and we can't thrive as well as uniquely created people with a distinct purpose and an exceptional individuality.

All Humans Probably *Are* Racist, But It Doesn't Mean We Have To *Be* Racist

I think if we really could access windows into souls, we'd find that most perceived racism isn't really racism as per the dictionary definition. It will be one of two things:

1) Dislike of the person - not their skin colour or ethnicity - but of their views, beliefs, attitudes or what they represent (this will have both proximal effects and distal effects, by association). If you think of contrasting two black people like the execrable Afua Hirsch and the excellent Thomas Sowell, you'll probably sense an idea of what I'm getting at here.

2) Outward manifestation of the inner gamut of insecurity, frustration, self-regret, self-loathing, pain and hurt that lives within human beings. A lot of what seems like racist behaviour is actually fear, pain and longing from within the bowels of the perpetrators. They feel marginalised, and without much hope, and suffer from the 'malice of the underdog' that Evelyn Waugh wrote about (which actually has its provenance in Proverbs 26:26 -"Their malice may be concealed by deception")  

To that end, Black Lives Matter and the SJW virtue signallers are fighting the wrong battle from the off, because these battles are more about planting fruit-bearing seeds into our own minds than about trying to chop down weeds in other people's. Only truth, facts, love and kindness can solve human problems - and every individual stands accountable to first get their own house in order before they try to change things on the outside. If the attention-seeking Black Lives Matter and SJWs could understand this they wouldn't be partaking in misjudged demonstrations with bogus opposition to illusory enemies - they'd take some time out in solitude - you know, the place in which Byron rightly said we are least alone - and fight the enemies within that are stopping them see the power of the truthseeking individual who knows how to love.

I won't ignore the enemy they think they are fighting, though. I'll just try to expound on it on my terms, which hopefully explains why I think love and words are better than noisy protests. The best explanation I have for racism is that it is an exaptation (as per Stephen Jay Gould) - it's a trait that evolved because it served an in-group function to aid survival by helping us to be tribally connected, but has subsequently hung around in vestiges of our personality. Social development and greater cultural integration means it is frowned upon in relatively advanced places like the Western world, but it is still nested in our behavioural mechanisms, especially when we are not conspicuously exposed.

This seems to be backed up by what Carlos Navarrete found in his "Prejudice at the Nexus of Race and Gender", that there is evidence for biases against out-group males that were markedly distinct from those in the in-group. Men's biases were motivated by social dominance, presumably to increase the probability of passing on their genes, and women's biases were motivated by fear of sexual coercion, presumably because they don't want to get impregnated by males that are not going to stick around and help rear a child. Both of these findings tie in with what we know about differential selective pressures on men and women and the necessity of in-groups for survival stability.

Consider this interesting social experiment from Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Blink’:

“Consider, for example, a remarkable social experiment conducted in the 1990s by a law professor in Chicago named Ian Ayres. Ayres put together a team of thirty-eight people—eighteen white men, seven white women, eight black women, and five black men. Ayres took great pains to make them appear as similar as possible. All were in their mid-twenties. All were of average attractiveness. All were instructed to dress in conservative causal wear: the women in blouses, straight skirts, and flat shoes; the men in polo shirts or button-downs, slacks, and loafers. All were given the same cover story. They were instructed to go to a total of 242 car dealerships in the Chicago area and present themselves as college-educated young professionals (sample job: systems analyst at a bank) living in the tony Chicago neighborhood of Streeterville. Their instructions for what to do were even more specific. They should walk in. They should wait to be approached by a salesperson. “I’m interested in buying this car,” they were supposed to say, pointing to the lowest-priced car in the showroom. Then, after they heard the salesman’s initial offer, they were instructed to bargain back and forth until the salesman either accepted an offer or refused to bargain any further—a process that in almost all cases took about forty minutes. What Ayres was trying to do was zero in on a very specific question: All other things being absolutely equal, how does skin color or gender affect the price that a salesman in a car dealership offers?

The results were stunning. The white men received initial offers from the salesmen that were $725 above the dealer’s invoice (that is, what the dealer paid for the car from the manufacturer). White women got initial offers of $935 above invoice. Black women were quoted a price, on average, of $1,195 above invoice. And black men? Their initial offer was $1,687 above invoice. Even after forty minutes of bargaining, the black men could get the price, on average, down to only $1,551 above invoice. After lengthy negotiations, Ayres’s black men still ended up with a price that was nearly $800 higher than Ayres’s white men were offered without having to say a word.”

This experiment probably indicates that Carlos Navarrete was onto something about having the congenital structure for racism, and this probably applies to xenophobia too, and maybe even homophobia. But it’s not so straightforward. Our evolution has endowed us with traits from numerous historical legacies, and there are most likely degrees of racism, xenophobia, homophobia in most of us, as well as cognitive characteristics that manifest themselves as tribal and familial and territorial biases. To me, this is perfectly understandable – it doesn’t mean we are all nasty bigots – it means our mental endowments have template-based foundations based on survival mechanisms and competitive instincts that alert us of potentially dangerous situations. Perhaps we could classify these traits with ‘sub’ and ‘supra’ prefixes – they can be called sub-tendencies and supra-tendencies. It doesn’t mean we should all walk around seeing each other as racists. It’s better to think of us as creatures who have the handicap of an evolutionary legacy that once facilitated a form of racism in group rivalry but that now is suppressed with advanced cultural and social development. 

The present gives testimony to our evolutionary past. Those with a group-territorial mindset that we see by the photocopier machine at work, and in politics, and in football stadiums, and in gangs on sink estates - they closely resemble our distant evolution as much as our being vicars, charity workers and Samaritans does. It is this patchwork of elements that demonstrate our history and our mechanisms for survival, and it is this kind of personhood that we have taken into the world. That is why it isn’t surprising to realise that racism, homophobia and xenophobia are still a part of our sub-tendencies. As indicated above, it is easy to imagine why they are there; once upon a time natural selection would have favoured the genes that enabled us to identify a rival, have an acute radar against anomalous and potentially threatening behaviour, harbour a fear of the unknown, and be mindful of radically unnerving breaks from normalcy that could be seen to threaten the status quo. 

Our evolutionary legacies are seen broadly across our behaviour, because they are vestiges of our past. The evolution of the eye has left us with a large blind area in the middle of the retina. Our prurience is the result of our sexual past. Our long spine and susceptibility to back pains and injuries are the result of our quadruped ancestry. Our wisdom teeth are a result of our once having bigger jaws. Plus our fear of the dark, our blushing, our sneezing, our hairs standing up, our goose bumps, our reactions to moving objects, our trepidation at wild animals, and our behavioural similarities with other primates closest to us in origin, all of these show that we are a medley of inherited ineptitudes, built for the Savannah. 

Now here’s the key thing, I think, that keeps us civil and stops most of us becoming brutes (at last outwardly). As well as being integrated into a culture and society of other personalities, we cultivate the ability to suppress these sub-tendencies and we subvert them with what we might call our supra-tendencies. The reason the car-salesman exhibited an underlying prejudice is because it was manifesting itself in a subtle way – it bore the resemblance of a sub-conscious racism – and if he were shown the results afterwards he probably would have been quite perturbed.

Such is the necessity to suppress our vestigial racism, homophobia and xenophobia, we find most of us suppress it rather well. Our supra-tendencies are those more positive aspects of our personality (love, grace, kindness, generosity, acceptance, tolerance, charity, empathy) that we know we must cultivate if we are to avoid being complicit in a kind of Hobbesian collapse of our society. Instead of pulling out the weeds, we have grown trees to tower over them – and in the majority of cases it’s only when we scrape beneath the surface of the roots that we find the roots of the weeds too. 

A Truth Always Worth Stating...

Here are a few bullet-pointed thoughts:

* Where there is racism in the world, we should do all we can to eradicate it.

* But too many people look for racism and claim its existence when it is not occurring.

* Where there is unfair discrimination in the world, we should do all we can to challenge it.

* But too many people look for unfair discrimination and claim its existence when it is not occurring.

* Where there is unjust inequality in the world, we should strive to make things better.

* But too many people look for unjust inequality and claim its existence when it is not occurring.

And herein lies the trouble: most people want to make the world a better place – but to do this with maximum effect you have to seek the truth, employ reason, and have a balanced perspective on reality. If not-real real instances of racism, unfair discrimination and unjust inequality are being mixed in with real instances, then it's harder to do a good job of eradicating the genuinely bad elements in society. A detective is going to find it harder to solve real murders if large swathes of the population play dead.

Aristotle, very likely influenced by Aesop's famous fable of the boy who cried wolf, popularised the maxim that when habitual liars do actually speak the truth they are not believed. This is why the offence-seeking social justice warriors, the snowflakes, the raving lefties, the maladjusted environmentalists and all manner of paranoid, affronted alarmists do themselves no favours when they continue to perpetuate myths and hostilities - like the bogus racism they see as a tool to advance their identity politics, the mythological unfair gender pay gap, the toxic victim-mentality, the misandry, the fabricated complaints about inequality and the absurd socialist agenda to further their cause (see here and here for more about the damage this does).

Because if, by chance, they do stumble upon a genuine untruth or a real injustice that requires action, they will probably find themselves falling victim to the 'cry wolf' scenario where too few people take them seriously enough on these matters. That's why it is essential at all times to earnestly seek the facts and truths, and not be taken in by convenient nonsense! It will make people trust you less on the things you may be right about - and people will always be doubtful around you, never being sure if they can trust your judgements.

Here is the biggest set of home truths the world will always need - it's a tough but necessary reality check:

1) We as individuals are to blame for most of our problems.

2) We can fix all the problems for which we are to blame by making incremental improvements.

3) There are some bad situations for which we are not to blame.

3) We can make all the bad situations for which we are not to blame better by making incremental improvements.

4) We blame others most of the time for things we are unwilling to fix ourselves by making those incremental improvements.

5) We do this because displacement, transference, denial and projection make an easier path of least resistance than the effort of making those incremental improvements.

6) We should all have sympathy with one another, and help each other, because incremental improvements are easier if we feel supported and valued.

7) Those incremental improvements are roughly this: seeking the truth, embracing facts, improving our attitude towards other people and things, being committed to fixing the faults within our inner-machinery.

Some people may find number 1 difficult to swallow, but I think that's because society has been spoon fed a rather anodyne narrative about the merits of personal responsibility, achievement, diversity of talent and individual strengths, preferring instead a fabricated equality and a counterfactual persuasion that there is always someone else to blame for why our lives aren't going as well and aren't as successful as other people's.

The most valuable truth any of us can learn about personal responsibility and having a fulfilled life is that proper motivation to make positive incremental improvements really will make life better, if we'll only try with determination for our own betterment, and keep persevering. This will be an easier journey for some people than others - of course that's always going to be true - but what is the alternative except for each individual to do the best they can with the talents, experience, background and raw material they've been afforded?

So here's the rule, and it's replete in Biblical wisdom: Only we as individuals can ultimately make our lives better (see James 4:17 and Galatians 6:7-9). Sure we can have help, and positive circumstances that aid our journey - but ultimately we have to take the lead in desiring better for ourselves, and if we do, we'll start to see those problems around us becoming more manageable. Just as we can't write a good novel without a good story, we can't create a good life without a good inward effort to make positive changes and fix the faults within our inner-machinery.

Here's another rule that's as old as scripture; small changes will beget bigger changes - if you start small, even small things might seem hard - but if you keep making small changes for the better, you'll get to the stage where it isn't that difficult to make big positive changes. That's because compound interest is one of the most powerful forces in the world (that is, interest on interest where P (1+(r/n))^nt). How that translates here is that if you try to be better you will be able to become even better still in a way that resembles the formula for compound interest (see also Matthew 13:12 - “Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance”).

Let’s have a bit of fun to show how compound interest can increase the abundance of one’s abundance. Let's take marriage as an example - marriage is hard, and it's really difficult to be a great husband or wife. And while it’s not easy to monetarise qualities in a marriage (it’s not as hard as you think either) let’s say that in order to be spiritually mature enough for marriage you have to be £1000 worth of amazing. Two beloveds can marry if they are both worth £1000 each. A marriage that begins with a £2000 joint account balance of amazingness should then look to become even more amazing together - in how they bless others and each other, and in how their love grows and deepens - to add interest to the interest they are accumulating.

Let’s give some calculations. Suppose the beginning marriage balance is £2000, and the couple can manage a weekly addition of amazingness of just £1 each (£2 total). In other words, each beloved only has to become more amazing at a rate of 1/2000th every week for the rest of their life, making small improvements to become better beloveds. In 50 years, with a weekly addition of amazingness of just £1 each, with an annual interest rate of 10% (which is roughly equivalent to improving yourselves by just 1/10th of your total amazingness each year), and an annual compounding interval (the interval your savings will compound at), your marital value after 50 years will be £360,881. If you can manage a 15% annual interest (improving yourselves by just over 1/6th of your total amazingness each year) then your marital value after 50 years will be a staggering £2.9 million. If you add another 5% to the annual interest rate, and can manage 20%, your value after 50 years will shoot up to an astounding £23.3 million.

While the figures are partly a bit of fun to show how interest on interest can accumulate - there is an important analogue in relation to becoming better people: the more improvements we make - in our thinking, in our truthseeking, in our attitude towards others, in our diligence - the better still we can become, giving ourselves and those around a more enriching and fulfilling life. That truth will always be true, irrespective of what is going on around us - it is an ineluctable law of being flawed humans.



Why Marriage Should Be Privatised

I believe in freedom of association as the best way of dealing with most social and industrial issues, not state intervention. What we choose to believe, speak, write down, who we associate with, and who we choose to trade with should be almost entirely a matter of personal liberty, not government authority. It’s unsurprising I think this way, as I believe the state should take a step back out of many things in which it involves itself, given its mass inefficiency and stultifying mechanisms.

With this in mind, I want to turn to the subject of marriage. My view is that the state should recognise that marriage is a Christian union, and Christians should recognise that many people want to have a union that is not Christian. Consequently, I think there ought to be two distinct formal unions: one, a Christian marriage and therefore formally recognised under Christian principles, and the other a civil partnership formally recognised under whichever non-Christian principles the participants happen to value.

I’m a Christian, and given that Christian marriage is a private triangular affair between God and two beloveds (and by extension, the beloveds’ loved ones, friends and church congregation), I think it would be highly appropriate and far more spiritually liberating if marriage became privatised and was no longer under the thrall of the state. As long as the marriage contract establishes property rights, and as long as the law still protects children, in that you can only be legally married at 16, and there are sufficient legal contracts in place to address matters concerning children, the state is an extraneous element of the marriage bond. Marriage is a Christian unity; the bureaucratic elements are invented by the establishment.

Think about what Christian marriage is; it is two beloveds who love each other, and who love God and want to put Him first, and promise before Him to be devoted and committed to each other for the rest of their lives. There is nothing the state can do to ratify a union that is ordained by God. What legitimises the love is the relationship, not the paperwork. There are lots of couples who have the paperwork but not the love and high quality of relationship, and there are lots of couples who have the love and high quality of relationship but not the paperwork. If a couple has the mutual devotion and promise each other to put one another first for the rest of their life, then there is no reason why marriage contracts can’t be private affairs that are drawn up by the beloveds (or on their behalf if they choose), and instituted in the church before God.

On a wider note, the great thing about individual liberty is that there is room for diversity. There is no pressure for us all to think the same way, and through trial and error we get to shape society according to complex revealed preferences. In a society where marriage is private, people would be free to sign marital contracts that best suit their individual beliefs. But given that Christian marriage is a unique Christian concept, the church would be able to apply its own articles to the contracts the beloveds create, and the beloveds would tailor those contracts to the authority of their chosen church – one that they declare to be sanctioned under God’s authority.

It’s time that Christianity wrestled back control of its own institution and reclaimed it as a purely Christian spiritual union between beloveds before God. You see, the question must be asked; in the case of the majority of unbelievers - why would they even want to get married in a church? When the Christian church performs a wedding for couples who do not share the central beliefs of Christianity, they are engaging in ceremonies for couples for whom the central tenets have no intrinsic religious value (it seems these numbers are increasing all the time too). Of course, non-religious couples shouldn’t be legally prohibited from getting married in a church if the church consents – but that’s not the point. I can only wonder why those couples would want to if they don't have any beliefs that would naturally affiliate them to the church's ethos. That people still do is, I should imagine, a mere historical legacy of habit that is slowly dying in out in Britain as we gradually become more secular, and the Church of England gradually erodes into an even tinier minority.

If my beloved and I didn't believe in the central Christian tenets, there is no reason why we should have any desire to get married in a church, mosque or wherever - just as if we were vegetarians we'd have no desire to go to a steak house for our evening meal. In changing long-standing traditions and not seeking refuge in the unreliable legacy of the status quo, we are likely to have a society in which people choose things because those things match their views and beliefs, not because history dictates that ‘This is how it has always been done’.

 

When gay people or unbelievers seek to defend people’s right to not be discriminated against by any sectarian faction of the church, I think they are right to do so. But I think they are arguing in the wrong direction. They act like vegetarians trying to defend the vegetarians’ right to go into butchers’ shops, when what they would be better doing is trying to convince more vegetarians to give up butchers’ shops altogether and seek food stores that better cater their tastes. I think that numerous people are still getting married in churches simply because 'marriage' in a church happens to be the oldest ceremonial legacy in this country, or because society says a church wedding is somehow more exalted than a civil ceremony, or because of pressure from family, and other similar reasons. Why would they want to unless they have emotional, spiritual or analytical affiliation to the church's ethos? Realising this probably is the best the best way to forward the debate and culturally progress too.

Society needn't be so polarised anymore, and it will be much less like it in the future; just as we now have supermarkets in which meat-eaters and vegetarians can happily shop together choosing only the products that match their tastes, we probably will eventually evolve a cultural system in which people pick their ceremonial rites of passage in accordance with their views and beliefs. I understand non-religious funerals are rising in numbers; in 150 years (maybe sooner) they probably will outnumber church funerals. Fast forward 150 years and my guess is you'll find church weddings being almost exclusively chosen by Christians, and the majority of other lifetime commitments being non-religious civil commitments. We will probably escape the historical legacies of anti-church discord and well-worn religious clichés, and live in a society in which chosen rites of passage match people’s tastes and beliefs, and where those unions are a private affair and not under the authority of the state.

The Lockdown Luxury Our Forebears Wouldn't Understand

I’ve been relatively quiet on the subject of Coronavirus (just 3 blog posts, see here - which is quiet for me! Heh!). One reason is because I’ve been very busy; another reason is that articles on Coronavirus are fraught by being riddled with incomplete information (which we won’t know until after this is over) and are therefore full of pointless projections and comparisons; and a third reason is that whatever you believe with regard to whether or not domestic governments have handled the crisis well or poorly, I would prefer a spirit of kindness and encouragement on the grounds that I think, by and large, people are trying their best to get things right, and I commend them for that.

The more interesting point I want to make here is that our response to Coronavirus is a demonstration of capitalism at its finest, and a demonstration of socialism as a beneficial adjunct to the market when applied properly. This delineation is what I call the market economy and the socio-personal economy. The principal distinction is that the market economy has exchanges that are precisely recorded in terms of cash exchanged or increases/decreases in 1s and 0s on banks' computers, and the socio-personal economy has exchanges that are less-precisely recorded in terms of helpful gestures and voluntary transactions for the good of one another (there is lots of overlap between the two, of course - a financial economy has a necessary social economy woven into it, because it’s hard to be successful in business without good socio-personal qualities).

The key difference between their operations is roughly this. In the financial economy the demand almost always exceeds the supply (of a limited range of labour, goods and services), because suppliers maintain their status differential (principally income) by increasing their prices or their supplies (or a combination of both), and endeavour to become top of the supplier tree by out-competing their competitors. Whereas in the socio-personal economy, the potential supply (of a nigh-on unbounded range of actions) almost always exceeds the demand, and suppliers who care enough about others maintain their status differential (primarily their character and reputation) by trying to summon up new ways to improve their surroundings and become better people.

The key take home lesson of the temporary lockdown of much of the economy is that our ability to do so is testament to the success of capitalism and how well-off we’ve become relative to any time in history. We can afford to take 6 months off in ways that would have killed our progenitors in the fraction of the time. I’m not saying there won’t be dire economic consequences of the lockdown. But the fact that we can do it at all and pull through together is because our economic prosperity is so prodigious, our capacity to help each other (with time, with donations, with resources) is so plentiful, and our technological advancements (laptops, mobile phones, the Internet, Skype, Zoom, etc) are so impressive. None of our ancestors could have afforded a lockdown like this.

There’s no question that people living 100 years ago wouldn’t have been able to give up work for 6 months and survive; and people of 50 years ago would have done slightly better than them, but still would have only been able to give up a fraction of their work time compared to now. The consensus for a lockdown was equally a consensus (whether known or unknown) for the triumphs of capitalism. And the consensus for the benefits of pulling together and voluntarily helping each other is equally a consensus (whether known or unknown) for the triumphs of a socio-personal-kind of socialism (the one I’m always advocating) that doesn’t interfere with the fundamental beneficial mechanisms of the free market. 

And if you’re tempted to respond that the government’s financial rescue mission during the Coronavirus is a testament to the powers of a socialistic redistributionist economy, then your error is a bit like a man who sees a passer-by jump into the river to save a drowning boy and thereby concludes that it’s a good thing when we all jump into rivers, mess our clothes up and risk drowning ourselves in the process as we get tangled up in the reeds and stuck in the muddy river bed. 

Here’s why. The principal metric of a successful financial economy is in ascertaining value (which is consumer surpluses + producer surpluses). Created value helps us determine whether resources are being allocated well or poorly, and prices provide the information signals that help us determine whether resources could be allocated even more optimally. The sharing of ideas through competition is what helps us advance, not just in terms of improved allocation of resources, but also in terms of better products at cheaper prices and more readily available to meet increasing demand. The government hand-outs are a necessary act to help in a crisis – but they are an attempt to save trees that have already been planted, not to irrigate once barren ground in the way that capitalism does. It's only because of capitalism that there is any government or socialism at all.

 

This Stunning Picture Caught My Eye.....

The image above caught my eye when shared on Facebook. Its creators have called it a Bible Visualisation Graph. Here's Chris Harrison, one of its developers, describing how the image was developed and what the viewer is seeing:

"This set of visualizations started as a collaboration between Christoph Römhild and myself. Christoph, a Lutheran Pastor, first emailed me in October of 2007. He described a data set he was putting together that defined textual cross references found in the Bible. Together, we struggled to find an elegant solution to render the data, more than 63,000 cross references in total. As work progressed, it became clear that an interactive visualization would be needed to properly explore the data. Instead we set our sights on the other end of the spectrum –- something more beautiful than functional. At the same time, we wanted something that honoured and revealed the complexity of the data at every level. This ultimately led us to the multi-coloured arc diagram. The bar graph that runs along the bottom represents all of the chapters in the Bible. Books alternate in colour between white and light gray. The length of each bar denotes the number of verses in the chapter. Each of the 63,779 cross references found in the Bible is depicted by a single arc – the colour corresponds to the distance between the two chapters, creating a rainbow-like effect."

What are we to make of it? Is the pattern pretty? Yes, I’d say so. Is the Bible Divinely inspired? Yes, absolutely. But even with both of the foregoing being true, the kicker question is this; is the Bible arc pattern significant in any meaningful way beyond a lot of mathematical noise and pretty rainbow-like pattern? This is a complex matter, for which I'll attempt a cross-examination here.

For the prosecution

I'm not convinced that the internal cross referencing is as remarkable as many people jumping on the bandwagon are claiming. There is, no doubt, a power law of connectivity between the Old Testament and New Testament (and within the two Testaments), but the magnitude of cross-referencing is first and foremost because of the length of the book and its complex but cohesive narrative. Once we drill down into the accretive layers of the pretty pattern, what's most important here is not so much the number of connections, but the power and significance of those connections. After all, if we looked for all the cross-referencing of common themes in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, then we could likely find a similar pattern of connectivity as the Bible arc, especially if we studied the texts in a linear fashion (the same would probably be true if we looked for thematic connectivity in something like Derek Winnert's book of film reviews or Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - we'd probably see something similar, albeit not quite as powerful).

The other problem with deciphering patterns of this kind is that they are only as meaningful as the imputations of the beholder. As I said in my essay on free will:

"Whether we are talking about information in Shannon terms, or even as a more generalised concept, information can't reasonably be treated merely as some kind of intrinsic property embedded in the system itself - it is necessary that information should be seen as an extrinsic property of a system too. That is to say, a system contains information by virtue of its relation to another agent or system capable of perceiving, interpreting and responding to that information. For example, a computer program, a set of songs, or a bunch of holiday snaps burned onto a disk is information only inasmuch as it consists of patterns that can be used by that computer as instructions. Likewise the Bible only contains information by virtue of its relation to minds that have the capacity to correctly interpret the meaning though cognitive instructions. We must always bear in mind that expending resources on information through interpretation and analysis requires a second descriptive sense, because it is "information" intrinsically and yet also "information + mind" extrinsically."

When it comes to the Bible, a seven year old boy might be able to determine meaning in the texts but distil no meaning from the cross-referencing; whereas a Bible scholar would incorporate profound evocation of meaning into the patterns that young boys would not. In other words, the real remarkability of text patterns is always likely to find its provenance in the complexities of human thinking and the associative psychology and culture that bootstraps the meaning behind the context. What might make the Bible arc patterns insignificant beyond their immediate attractiveness to the eye is that we could probably take any linear text (say the complete works of Shakespeare, or a set of historical encyclopaedias) and form links between parts of the text at random and generate a similar pattern to Harrison and Römhild's pattern.

For the defence

Even if all the above is true - and I think it is - there is no question that the Bible is the most remarkable book in the world in terms of its multi-layered connectivity and profound complexity. And whether you're a Christian or not (I am), let me tell you one thing with absolute certainty: if you don't try to evaluate the Bible through the starting lens of 'This is the most astounding book ever written', your interpretation of it will be grossly inadequate to the task of uncovering its deeper rewards.

I suppose for the contemporary mind such as ours, a good way to illustrate this is to think of it as a book of stunningly complex hyperlinked text. We all know what hyperlinks are in the modern age. If you surf the Internet you can traverse the digital globe through a vast nexus of connected web-pages, knitted together by hyperlinked functions (like this). The Internet is the world's most remarkable modern achievement - but what makes it remarkable is the collective bottom-up intelligence behind it. It is the best living example of evolutionary emergence of complexity and order spontaneously created in a decentralised fashion without a designer. Nobody sat down one day and planned the Internet as a fait accompli phenomenon - it is a global system of interconnected computer networks that evolved over time, and it is still evolving, in a cumulative step by step process of trial and error that tailors to our tastes and needs like a simulacrum of mind itself. It provides a microcosmic example of where the complex emergence of order occurs not from being designed top down, but by a long natural selection-type process.

In the manner that's most significant here, the Bible is the opposite of the Internet - it is the ultimate top-down work in nature. But it is also the ultimate bottom-up work too (a fact many Christians are woefully incompetent at grasping), as the writers are afforded the dignity and grace to colour and flavour the narrative with the intensity of human perspective - both positively and negatively, but always authentically humanly. The scriptural accounts involve the huge conceptual wiggle room to factor in the whole gamut of human qualities and flaws: they form the substrate of every future human narrative henceforward from its creation.

Regarding the mathematical function on the x-axis of Harrison and Römhild's pattern representing the 64,000 textual cross references found in the Bible - this leads us to the 64,000 dollar question, regarding to what extent this zooming in on the informational content gives good reason to think that Divine choreography is behind the process. I've already said that the patterns themselves probably aren't compelling enough on their own. But given that the Bible consists of 66 diverse books, written over 1500 years, in different geographical places, by people who often never met - the overarching narrative and nexus of connectivity seems to be remarkably too complex to have been fashioned by mere human insight, and with too coherent a narrative and interconnected, cohesive complexity to be written without the inspiration of God.

The information band-width of the Bible and its granular tenets that form the central narrative of the Christian love story between God and humankind (especially the prophecies about Christ's Incarnation, written hundreds of years before the New Testament) is too broad and ingenious for such a tapestry of complex, consistent, internally self-referencing, integrated thought and ideation to have been written by mere men. The fact that the 66 diverse books of the Bible, written over 1500 years, in different geographical places, by people who mostly never met can encapsulate the rich and diverse historical, cultural and psychological complex of the range of authors and contributors, yet also imbue the ingenious coherence of a single author and not of a contrived message between writers, is testament to its majesty.

Coronavirus Tip: When Appropriate, Become Schrödinger's Shopper

The lockdown during Coronavirus is excessive because the law is too low-resolution to capture the full and complex gamut of human needs. While there's definitely a spectrum ranging from essential trips (key workers doing their jobs, food shopping, getting medication for a vulnerable family member) to non-essential trips (parties, barbecues, sports events), there are definitely trips out that are currently deemed illegal that are both harmless and socially beneficial.

Here are some fictional cases I just made up. Take beloveds Jack and Jill, who both live on their own and work from home, but who visit each other because they love and miss each other. Take Bob, who suffers from depression, and who finds solace in his weekly catch ups around his best friend Frank's house. Take Margaret, who lives alone, but who takes inspiration from going out to paint landscapes, and needs to keep busy and creative for her own well-being. Or take Belinda who has started dating Jack and doesn't want the seed of something special to fail to germinate; or Wendy who comforts her brother and recent widower David with hugs and help with his domestic responsibilities.

While we can easily sympathise with the spirit of the current social restrictions, there are many safe, low-risk ways to go out that impose no significant danger for anyone else but the participants, but that would be prohibited under the current lockdown laws, and constitute an unfair imposition on the people involved.

To those people, my light-hearted tip to get around this problem and avoid having to lie to the police if you're stopped is this: become what we might call Schrödinger's Shopper. That is, when you go out safely to see your beloved, or safely to provide a hug and comfort for your lonely friend, or safely to buy the paints you need to stimulate your life with meaning and avoid the doldrums of mental inertia, adopt a Schrödinger-esque superposition state of being both a shopper or not a shopper depending on whether you get stopped by the police.

 

If you're travelling to see another person in safe circumstances, then if you make your trip without getting stopped by the police, no problem. If however you do get stopped, tell the police you're about to go shopping, and then go shopping, make your visit to where you were going, then drive home with your shopping (or shop for the person you are visiting - the world is your oyster), ensuring no lie has been told, and you've covered yourself by being both a shopper or not a shopper depending on whether you get pulled over and asked what you're doing out.