Drugs Without the Hot Air

This book, by David Nutt (one of Britain's leading guru of hard-science verdicts on psychoactive drug usage and their harms - he also used to be* a top policy advisor on the topic), is one of those rare kind of non-fiction book, the exquisite and almost impenetrable presentation of brute fact. I love reading these kinds of book about complex and controversial topics - like whether gender is psychologically innate or what the value of socioeconomic equality is - it takes a certain breed of author to systematically pen down logical overviews of enormous depths of evidence, organised into coherent explanatory frameworks, remaining a robust case without descending to polemics, and still somehow being pretty easy to read.

   The core point of the book is that drug use, being essentially a personal health risk, should be treated as such by policymakers. Obviously this entails extensive analysis of said personal health risks, which are surprisingly high for legal drugs** like alcohol and tobacco and public-perception-defyingly low for certain heavily stigmatised drugs like LSD or MDMA. (I've just written a huge fat chunk of fact, in summary from the book, in the second asterisk bit below, so read that now if you didn't at the **). I've clearly had a fair bit of fun embellishing that last lump of argument with colourful detail, but the crux of the point is in the statistics and the science and the policy results, all of which you should check out for yourself - but you'll struggle to find a more reputable source on the matter than David Nutt, so I'd wager. These aggregations of fact force one to question the norms surrounding drug use, both legal and illegal - prohibition of alcohol failed spectacularly in Depression-era America, and the modern-day 'War on Drugs' has failed on a multitude of fronts (which I can't be bothered to go into detail about but is basically a huge waste of money that has among other things: overlapped systemic racism to fuel mass-incarceration of black African-American men on a horrific scale for minor crimes such as possession of weed; consolidated huge power in criminal gangs in the global South; prevented pharmacological access to substances that have shown enormous benefits in treating certain psychological problems; perpetuated societal trends of wasteful decay through the 'greenlighting' of alcohol and tobacco as legal and thus endorsed for irresponsible use; and so on). The community of socio-medical experts on the matter is almost unanimous in calling for policy-making emphasis on drug use to shift from criminality to public health.
   A government's job (imho) is to strike a balance between protecting liberties and protecting wellbeing - the 'War on Drugs' has quite blatantly failed to do this: the harms of highly-problematic substances like alcohol and tobacco are not minimised (the same can be said of crack cocaine and heroin, as the state more instinctively treats such crippling addictions as moral failures rather than behavioural health problems in desparate need of rehabilitation); the liberties to experience certain states of mind is stripped back to ones unlikely to shake up social norms (imagine if social weed-smoking was as prevalent as pint-drinking - how many more interesting conversations and thoughts would we have instead of just-another-night-down-pub, going for a wee every half-hour past about eleven p.m. and feeling unnatural urges for doner kebabs?); I feel like throughout the spread of this post I've already fleshed out some of my key points in support here; to regather - the policy structures in place are nowhere near adequate or accurate to the reality of risks of harms and benefits for these kinds of activity, being as they are governed by the normative dregs of late-20th-century scaremongering rather than by rational presentations or interpretations of fact.
   Anyway. If you feel strongly opposed to everything I'm saying - good, at least you've read this far through the post, now if you want to be reasonable instead of reactionary, I'd recommend you read the whole of David Nutt's book. And if you're really skeptical, check out his scientific and statistical sources.**** On the flipside, if you're a heartily critical liberal like me, you'll probably enjoy this book and find it massively enrich your opinions and informedness about an interesting yet generally poorly-publicly-debated issues facing British/world society today.
   To cap off this post a bit I'd like to offer a bit of personal reflection on the issue of using illegal substances for recreational purposes. For me the clincher here is their [il]legality - I absolutely do not condone such activities, not because their being legislatively prohibited renders them immoral, but because the risks of prosecution are massive, and hippies like me probably wouldn't cope well in the criminal justice system, even just brushing up against it slightly. Also, as a Christian, I must cite the biblical exhortation to in clear conscience obey worldly rulers' laws, as these are people God has put in authority over us, whether I find their exercise of such authority agreeable or not (this is why I'm such a keeno for getting Christians into counter-hegemonic activism, as resignation to political order is often lived out as acceptance of preventable injustice) - since recreational drug use is, in my view, in and of itself a morally neutral activity, I feel abstinence is probably best practice in societies where it's illegal. Despite this, given the weight of evidence about these policies' failures (discussed literally everywhere in this post) in promoting liberties and minimising harms, I do strongly advocate for the decriminalisation of many***** currently illegal psychoactive substances, and for such drugs' availability to be couched in heavy regulation and education for public health. From the sounds of it, there is much communal-emotional and artistic and transcendental-experiential benefit to be had from responsible use of some of these substances, particularly several for which the associated risks of harms are astoundingly low. (See final asterisk bit below.) Needlessly restricting well-informed responsible individuals' access to potentially good things is, in my view, a plain abuse of legislative power - especially when done so through a campaign that fuels and perpetuates so much injustice, not to mention comprehensively failing to minimise harms, or even reduce usage by notable figures.
   This was meant to be a relatively short post. Ah well. I always find it's better to run into fullish explanations of one's own perspective when writing about controversial issues, as putting forth your case with more detail and structure helps prevent angry confused commenters arguing against a straw man of your own creation because you couldn't be arsed to do a proper man. Or it would, if I ever got angry confused commenters. I don't tend to get any commenters at all, because nobody reads this blog, which is fine by me.

* As in, isn't anymore, because in a stunningly ironic demonstration of some of this book's key points, the government 'disagreed' with his scientifically and statistically sound findings and sacked him in 2009.

** Take issue with this phrasing? Think referring to alcohol and tobacco, or even things like caffeine and paracetamol, in the same category as powerful hallucinogenics and the likes of meth, ket, and crack, is ridiculous? It's probably because your definitions of what a 'drug' is have been shaped by a mixture of extreme cultural examples of drug use and public information programmes exaggerating probable harms of drug use to encourage abstinence, rather than the scientific definition of 'drug', which is basically a chemical taken into the body to produce an effect (other than sustenance - we call that 'food'). These effects can be but are not always psychoactive - magic mushrooms, whiskey, and cannabis are examples of drugs that alter one's mental state. Drugs can be used medically (e.g. aspirin, morphine) or recreationally (e.g. most psychoactive drugs, as are the focus of drug policy and this book), and of these psychoactive substances there is no clear or consistent pattern of correlation between their potential harmfulness, experiential intensity, and legal availability.
   For example, let's briefly compare ecstasy to alcohol. The former is linked to between ten and fifty deaths in the UK per year (though looking closer at case-by-case almost all of these result from combinations of poor provision of public education about how to rave responsibly and the risk of dealers fobbing people off with sometimes-dangerously impure substances, which would be an entirely avoidable problem in a legally regulated market) while the latter is linked to the deaths of around 40,000 Brits annually (also linked to 7,000 traffic incidents and 1,200,000 violent incidents per year, not to mention that it has 3,500,000 British addicts (alcoholism being a drug addiction so common to the UK that it seems to have been co-opted and justified as a reasonably widespread sociocultural quirk), is a significant contributing factor in 40% of domestic abuse and 50% of child protection cases, and overall is estimated to cause between £30 and £55 billion [yep] of damage to global societies and economies worldwide every year). Ecstasy is also almost universally described as a more intrinsically pleasant subjective experience than alcohol when taken responsibly (given that rather than slowing down your whole physiology and merely lowering inhibitions, it gives one's brain a bath in seratonin, leading to an energy spurt, also functioning effectively as a chemical flood of happiness and love***). More - whereas booze has been indisputably linked to depression and similar mental health issues on a major scale, experimental treatments using ecstasy have yielded incredibly promising results for otherwise extremely difficult-to-treat disorders (such as PTSD). 
   And yet in the UK, being as it is Class A under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, possession of ecstasy for personal use can (if you're unlucky and get caught by lairy police officers on your way to a warehouse full of banging techno and well-hydrated and surprisingly huggy strangers who automatically feel like friends) slap you in for a seven year sentence, while anyone over the age of 18 can waltz into the nearest Wetherspoons and sit quaffing an enormous range of well-regulated and high-tax-generating and generally-quite-nice-in-moderation [and legal] products until they get into an aggressive stumbling argument with someone because they shouted "BREXIT" ironically and were misinterpreted by that local regular who's an avid xenophobe (perhaps because decades of alcoholism has made it hard to take in any cohesive opinions about the contemporary world more cosmopolitan than, say, those of Nigel Farage).

*** If you have video proof of people on MDMA being anywhere near as aggressive as a standard drunken Englishman, I will buy you a pint. And then fight you.

**** Of course it's fully and extensively referenced! We're not barbarians, are we?

***** Based on David Nutt's book, my own research through reputable portals, and having had some good insightful conversations with friends and acquaintances about their experiences with drugs (one does not simply [do a philosophy degree & be part of an environmental activist group & whatever else - student life is rife with these people and they're largely lovely] without meeting some pretty 'open-minded' folk), I have settled on a short list of some of the most common and widely-known illegal psychoactive substances that I feel should probably be largely legal, at least to the same extent as alcohol, based on their effects and health risks.
   So, in no particular order: common-or-garden weed/hash, LSD, magic mushrooms, nitrous oxide; also skunk and MDMA though possibly in a more highly-regulated category, and ketamine and cocaine in a yet higher one.
   Obviously, given the health and wellbeing foundations of my opinion here, I would only condone the use of such substances if legalised and properly regulated, and with users being fully aware of the physiological risks they're putting themselves at by taking a given drug, including systems for working out and sticking to responsible dosages to avoid social dysfunctionality and physical risk. Acting based upon the best available scientific and statistical information is crucial - you can't be responsible without being aware. I envisage such an endpoint to resemble current markets for alcohol and tobacco: you might buy a gram of coke in branded packaging decorated only by perfunctory information about safe usage and a big cigarette-packet-style picture of some coke-diseased organ or something accompanied by words to the effect of "LOOK AT THIS DISEASE THAT COKE OFTEN CAUSES": you might buy a pre-rolled spliff (if Netherlands-type coffee-shop culture were to filter over as an alternative to English pub culture) that must legally disclose at the point of sale what strength it is, in units, or some kind of measure of tetrahydrocannabinol-(the active chemical in marijuana)-per-joint, much like alcoholic beverages divulge their alcohol-per-drink as a percentage: you might buy a flap of LSD-soaked paper in a well-packaged envelope also containing a small but detailed booklet explaining how to arrange your environment and circumstances optimally.
   Who knows what the future holds?

Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

This book, a collection of essays by bell hooks, is truly brilliant. I read it to explore ideas about the importance of education in shared interpretations of society for normative trends towards social justice (especially on things like race and gender), having been awakened in the last couple of years to critical theory and feminism, and having long been interested in education's potential for radicalisation (or perpetuation of hegemonic injustice) - and also because I'm deliberately expanding my bookshelf beyond the 'default'* of white men, and where better to start than enormously influential black woman bell hooks? Specifically, in a book about how learning can help alter individual attitudes through empowerment and so overturn prevailing inequalities?
   hooks's book is part of a trilogy of essay collections about how education can be a positive force for change and justice. Her other two books in this series look more in-depth at how classrooms can be used to cultivate diverse, tolerant, pluralistic communities, and how individual students can be encouraged to question norms so as to be willing to 'transgress' these and so be better-suited as spokespersons of freethinking liberty. This book is less specific, offering 'practical wisdom' distilled from hooks's years spent as a teacher and thinker on a huge range of complex issues - from the two mentioned above to difficulties of sex and race that infiltrate educational structures to how best to communicate or cooperate in certain contexts to the uses of certain emotions or aspects of human experience in forging effective education. The core focus is on 'engaged pedagogy', a model of education in which the teacher-student relationship is not one of didactic "I have knowledge, you do not, allow me to impart it while you sit there passively"-ness nor of utterly ineffective "all perspectives are equal and worthwhile so let's discover everything together, go on, small child, you first"-ness. Engaged pedagogy recognises that education hinges upon an inequality of knowledge, but doesn't allow this to obstruct formation of communities or entrench any other existing social/political inequalities (e.g. race/gender); teachers in this model are seen as empowering students to realise their full complex identities and engage with systems of knowledge and understanding through critically thinking about issues as they encounter them, from not only their perspective but from sharing critically-thought-about-perspectival-realisations between other members of their diverse classroom/society. There are thirty-two chapters exploring an enormous range of issues but all centred on this view of education. Each chunk is shortish and highly readable, and the overall viewpoint is utterly compelling, rich with hope for human capacities and a genuine warmth and almost Christian-esque love that surprised me given the righteous but unforgiving anger that characterises so much of contemporary identity politics, an intellectual sphere to which bell hooks probably is what Alfred Marshall is to neoclassical economics. Or something.
   I don't really have any of my own thoughts or reflections on this book - it's just astoundingly good. It's challenging, enlightening, and encouraging, and if you're even half-interested in working toward an egalitarian society and/or working in an even half-educational role, you should 100% read this book.



* 'Default' because you can pretty much guarantee that on most topics, the first well-reviewed or highly-recommended book you'll find will be by some white guy, probably Western and heterosexual, if it's a 'classic' probably dead. Seeking out alternative perspectives isn't that much effort and is deeply important.

Status Anxiety

This book. the internationally bestselling guide to a vaguely-but-not-too-vaguely-defined conception of social angst about one's position and perception by acclaimed pseudo-philosopher* Alain de Botton,** is pretty good. I got it in a second-hand English bookshop in Amsterdam, of all places. My thoughts on this book are quite straightforward ("HA" thinks the discerning reader, wise to my promises of 'shortish posts', "here we go again, it's guaranteed to be an absurd thousand-or-two-word barely-structured mental drippages, one which I will not read" - yeh well shut up, discerning reader) but I really enjoy writing unplanned spurts of thoughtful text so I'm gonna have a bit more fun with this one.***

   It's deeply ironic that that should've been the last sentence of the only paragraph (asterisked sub-bits, thankfully, included) to have been autorecovered; I am actually now going to have entirely no fun with this blogpost, since my laptop just crashed unceremoniously and I lost about eight hundred words. Sucks. I'd done pretty interesting and wittily-written sections on the lack of diversity represented in de Botton's encouraging pages (despite drawing on economics, philosophy, history, art, literature, politics, psychology, and whatnot, probably (no joke) 95% of who he cites or references are either educated white men who lived in Europe between 1650 and 1950, or Ancient Bloody Greeks) and on the extensive overlaps status anxiety seems to have with politico-economic systems (which lended some interesting ammunition to the psychological-emotional elements in my ever-growing personal-opinion-critique of capitalism). But these sections were lost, like tears in the oven, because for some reason even though Google Docs has an autosave feature powerful enough to actually bring a medium-to-large moth**** back to life and even Microsoft Word has an emergency unsaved-document auto-capture function if your computer crashes, but Blogger for some reason allowed me to blithely tap away hundreds of words without once thinking to itself that it should autosave. There is a 'Save' button on the post composition page, but who uses that!? (I did, just now, in sheer terror of my laptop and Blogger taking joint revenge against this lengthy complaint.) So anyway, rather than rewrite all this lost gold (it's shockingly hard to remember exactly what paragraphs you've just witnessed sucked into digital oblivion before your very eyes) I'm just gonna blast through a quick summary of the book and briefly state my largest thought-reaction to it.
   The book opens with a definition of status anxiety, which is essentially just when people worry about their place in the world relative to other people and feel sad about it when they perceive themselves to be doing worse than they'd like. The book is then split into two parts, firstly looking at five possible causes of status anxiety:

• Lovelessness: (general loneliness & lack of social acceptance)
• Snobbery: (overvaluing sociocultural status markers)
• Expectation: (holding unrealistic ones)
• Meritocracy: (personal failure is possible despite skills & hard work)
• Dependence: (we're inextricable from our socioeconomic contexts)

   No, I didn't summarise those in much detail, did I? Read the book if you're bothered. And then of course part two, looking at five possible solutions to status anxiety:

• Philosophy: (dissecting ideas to enlighten ourselves)
• Art: (engaging with culture to enlighten ourselves)
• Politics: (engaging with socioeconomic structures for change)
• Christianity: (warm fuzzy feelings of acceptance through church community, supporting an earnest vision of human equality through all their creation in God's image and thus any social factors affecting their 'status' are bunk in the eyes of the almighty and not something to get too bummed-out about)
• Bohemia: (hiding in a community of like-minded enlightened aesthetes, hippies, pot-smoking book-reading sandal-wearing meat-eschewing lefty scum. I'm joking but this chapter should be pretty self-explanatory if you grasp the basic definition of 'bohemian', which entails a flagrant disregard for social norms)

   Each of these ten chapters (each varying massively in length and number of pictures) is well-written, topically relevant, and explains well how each them may cause or solve to some degree our burdens of status anxiety. Overall, it's a very easily-readable and warmly enlightening book, one which, as the rest of Alain de Botton's work, goes a long way to demystifying (if not de-pretentiousnessifying) elements of intellectualism, in a goodwilled attempt to help people understand themselves and their lives better, and so have better ones. And this book fulfils that function pretty well. It's educational in an engaging, pleasant, and cheers-you-up kind of way, the details of complex thinkers' works brought to life in application to common problems. I'd absolutely recommend anyone read this.
   But for one complaint I have with it (and not just it, all of Alain de Botton's work that I've read or watched-on-YouTube so far) - it completely guts Christianity, guts it like a fish that Alain's not going to eat anyway because it upsets his stomach but he found it lying on the beach and he's always wanted to gut a fish out of a curious itching for the performance of minor masculine tasks. I was surprised he did a chapter about it at all, but having read the chapter, it may as well have been a chapter in which he similarly gutted the fishes of Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism; or just not done any fish-gutting and written a straight-up chapter about 'supportive communities gathered around more-or-less transcendental ideals' (admittedly, he did write a chapter about this too, the Bohemia one).***** What I mean by all of this, is in his discussion of religion, he detaches it from the part that means anything substantive at all - theology, and the possible truth thereof. Like, philosophy and art and politics are all excellent and diverse fields in which one can explore one's place in the world and find and create and actively work for meaning in multifarious ways; and bohemian lifestyles are the perfect space in which to do that. But religions are not in this same category, they're not a 'pick-and-choose-until-you-find-what-you-like' type of deal: religions make objective claims about what the universe is, what we are, what life is, what God is (if one's inluded), and what this implies about how we should think and act. Alain's discussion of how God making humanity in God's image renders us absolutely equal is pretty sound, and here an excellent blow to any attempt to manipulate social status in any way other than the egalitarianism supported by Christianity. Likewise, I can't disagree that church is an excellent form of community support and encouragement - it is, of course it is, it's designed for that purpose, humans are designed for that purpose. But the whole chapter on Christianity focuses on these two aspects: which is fairenough in a sense, because they form a wholesome case for how Christianity can be a solution to status anxiety. But while true, it's shortsighted, it's mischaracterisation; Christianity is more than that, it's not a field like art or politics or philosophy where nothing is fixed and argument or experiment drives development forever, nor a lifestyle like bohemia where anything goes in a liberal cooperative inclusive sense: Christianity proposes objective truths about the world that demand an answer. Objective truths stretching far beyond our being made-in-God's-image or being suited-for-community-for-which-the-church-is-the-archetype; truths that ultimately lead to, yes, a complete eradication of status anxiety, if only through a complete rebirth of creation in Jesus, and I'm not gonna explain the whole of it because there's a load of books on Christian theology that I've written posts about before and you can access the list of these through the labels boxes on the right, and also I've over-run my intended wordcount again, and I'm terrified my laptop might crash a third time.
   Isaac Stovell.
   Out.

* Just kidding, Alain, if you're reading this - I love School of Life: and while there are occasionally certain issues I feel you don't explore with enough critically nuanced vim and/or vinegar, I can easily look past this in realising that making such compromises is regrettably a necessary part writing books and short animated videos with the aim of popularising discussion of Big Ideas - an endeavour which I wholeheartedly support . Also there are a fair few of your views which I disagree with (especially strongly on theology - hey Alain, if you made it past that last sentence why not read the rest of this post?) but for the most part you seem to be on the same page as me so hey, whatevs, let's go for an erudite conversation over toasted sandwiches and herbal tea sometime. Or something.

** Also author of The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists, Art as Therapy, Cats Are Basically People Too Penélope Damn Your Non-Inclusive Allergies, and the Waterstones'-holiday-bargain-table-second-best-selling autobiographical My Quite Nice Life as a Pretend French Intellectual.
(sorry Alain sorry sorry sorry read previous asterisk!!!!1)

*** There are several blog-writing gimmicks that I just get a huge kick out of using: the pointless asides relegated to asterisked paragraphs (one of which this entire bit will be), totally-unnecessarily-long-hyphenated-construction-of-a-concept-that-could-just-be-explained-normally, the well-chosen random (but pleasant!) link for a random phrase (oh yeh now that was a well-chosen link - just to point out that the previous usage of the word 'that' was also a hyperlink, something that shouldn't normally warrant pointing out, but I've italicised it to help the sentence flow and the link's default boldness on a skinnier font might be harder to spot; also I wanted an excuse to embark upon a tortuous run-on sentence inside parentheses, which was the next on my list of gimmicks), the self-deprecating reflexive addresses to an enthusiastic audience that largely (I've seen my own blog's viewing statistics - hrmph) doesn't exist, and finally the self-indulgent meta-commentary, of which this entire bit has also been a part.

**** I promised I was going to have no more fun with the remainder of this post: hence why I purposefully wrote this but, knowing full well that it was a lie, and that dead moths can only remain as such until their consumption or decomposition. It's a harrowing and bleak thought. Especially since I quite like moths.

***** I shit you not, my laptop literally just crashed again. Fortunately I'm deeply paranoid now about the whole charade of blogwriting, and have been mashing the 'Save' button every few sentences. Perhaps the great Alain de Botton is more powerful than we had previously conceived, and is using his populist powers of pseudo-philosophy (SEE FIRST ASTERISK) to junk up my computer cos he can sense I'm respectfully disagreeing with him on the point of his neglect of theology in discussing religion? Or many he's angry that I keep insulting-him-but-not-really? Or maybe it's upsetting him how many metaphorical fish I've gutted? Hm.

Happiness by Design

This book, a highly-readable practical distillation of wisdom gleaned from years of behavioural socioeconomic and psychological research into personal and public wellbeing by happiness guru Paul Dolan, is a real treat. I picked it up out of pure whimsy (from a little high-end bookstall in St Pancras station, of all places), which is not my usual mode of bookbuying, but I'm very glad I did, as it helped build on loads of long-run trains of thought that I've been having for the past couple of years (as such, expect me to use this excuse to litter this relatively-short (every time I say that they seem to continue on to relative-longness in defiant verbosity anyway - I need a better editor) post with loads (and I mean loads) of links to an eclectic selection of previous blogposts).*
   Before I dive into reflection, I'll give an overview of the book, which despite the breadth and quantity of academic studies it draws on is extremely consistent in proposing a simple system for managing our lives in a way conducive to happiness. Part one of the book lays out this system, exploring how happiness is evaluated, felt, and aimed for. Dolan, in true behavioural-economist form, argues that happiness, as people generally experience it, is a psychological output resulting from inputs that yield combinations of pleasure and purpose. Maximising our own happiness is achieved by realising our preference functions for pleasure and purpose, working out how reasonably we can attain ideal combinations for these, and taking practical steps to reshape our lives to resemble and contain these combinations. The key element of how we do so is attitudinal - it's what we pay attention to that yields pleasure or purpose in our lives, and therefore considerable thought and effort should go into where we allocate our attention. This part concludes with an excellent chapter about psychological hindrances to doing this well; generally subconsciously, our lives fail to make us happy in particular ways because our desires are for unpleasurable or unpurposeful things, our expectations unrealistic, or our beliefs erroneous. Part two of the book, very straightforwardly, builds on this framework for how we can better attain happiness by giving some very generalistic (so suited to a range of people) but still rigorous (so not fatuous and actually extremely helpful) pointers about how we can reform our attitudes and behaviours to make our lives more conducive to happiness. The whole book is couched in the terminology and methods of behavioural economics and statistical psychological studies, which I loved, because it lends a strong scientific flavour to what is essentially an easily accessible and enjoyable book about how to take practical steps to making your life a bit (or a lot, maybe) better. Paul Dolan's framework is coherent, positive, and flexible - there isn't anyone I wouldn't recommend this book to if you want what must be one of the least wishy-washy self-help manuals out there, not to mention learning a buttload of interesting stuff from psychology, economics, epidemiology and whatnot about public behaviour and wellbeing (all these elements will probably be more interesting to you if you're an outright social science nerd, like me).
   Okay, now the kind-of-reflective bit.
   I'm not going to try to outline all, or even a summary, of my thoughts about happiness and wellbeing and life and purpose and so on from the last couple of years, as that would be pretty much unreadably personal and unwriteably long. But here are a few** thoughts.
   Happiness is, I think it's fair to say, taken as the point of life by most modern young Western people. Largely, it is pursued out of an individualistic perspective that sets up a goal which one expects or hopes will make one happy, and then the pursuit of this goal is prioritised (within a complex series of social and economic constraints) above most other things until it is attained - or not. In this way, we are like Jay Gatsby - albeit lacking his vast resources (money, prestige, charm, a nonjudgmental neighbour played by Spiderman). But even despite his enormous lack-of-constraints, Gatsby [SPOILER ALERT] failed in his personal quest for happiness, and so do many of us. We encounter problems during our pursuits of whatever it is we think might make us happy, and many of these are personal or circumstantial, but often they are connected to wider systems of constraints on the reasonable of individual capabilities to seek pleasure or purpose. In terms of happiness, this might be a helpful way to pose the concept of injustice: the avoidable perpetuation of these structures of constraints on people's pursuit of happiness. These kinds of injustices are not hard to see: socially and culturally pervasive sexism constrains women, aspects of freemarket economics constrain people all over the world in different ways, our skew-whiff relationship with nature constrains both the capacity of future generations to sustain themselves and also leaves contemporary society living in a stilted world alien to the biosphere that sustains us. Not everyone is affected by or necessarily cares about these injustices, but the fact of the matter is, this world is far from perfect, and we as relatively insignificant parts of it can hardly expect our quests for happiness to go smoothly at every turn. So we get frustrated, we get depressed, we turn cynical, and the modern response to so having so many potential traffic-jams on our road to self-fulfilment is, largely, to streamline our concerns. In Paul Dolan's language, to restrict our attention to only things that bring us maximal combinations of pleasure and purpose and stop giving a fuck (to use Sarah Knight's language, albeit in a mischaracterisation of her argument) about things that don't feature in those combinations. Basically, in the grim disappointing mess of reality, the search for happiness makes us selfish beings, as the way we define our priorities becomes subjective. And not everyone suffers the same injustices, not everyone experiences the same constraints, not everyone's struggles overlap - in fact they often conflict. This means that the quest for happiness, in aggregate, if people take their own subjective preferences and ambitions as the core pursuit of that quest, may well actually perpetuate injustices. (This is similar to what I discussed in my post about Sarah "IDGAF" Knight's book, and is also, I think, the one area (but it's a biggy) where Paul Dolan's book falls down in providing a coherent map to living well.)
   So, what's missing? Objectivity.
   This obviously doesn't entail everyone abandoning their own perspectives or preferences or whatever. This is the cultivation of knowledge, in individuals, of the nature of the world, of their place in it, of what they can reasonably expect to get out of life, of similar realities for other people, and of the legitimacy of both their own and another persons' claims to any particular pursuit. Wisdom, in a nutshell. Imbuing people with wisdom helps them come to terms with and make the best of situations they're in, rather than the desire-driven striving to be somewhere else, somewhere better, that comes with the subjective pursuit of happiness. Wise people can and do attain happiness, of course, but never indefinitely - because nobody ever does. Happiness is a feeling, it's inherently transient. Wisdom helps people know this, and so be comfortable with their lives even where they're not feeling particularly pleasurable or purposeful. This state of wisdom-based contentment I think is best referred to as joy: one finds a consistent set of good*** objective truths to live by and refer back to constantly, keeping both happy and unhappy moments in perspective.
   What is wisdom though? I want to clarify straight-off that it is not cleverness. It is knowledge, of a sort, but not the taught-or-learnt kind - the living, intuitive, adaptive kind, that can never really be proved beyond argument but the truth of which is generally evident. For examples - it is better to build than destroy, to trust than fear. However, the complexity of uncovering objective facts about a world that has so much wrong with it proves the application of wisdom difficult indeed. At the heart of wisdom though is a practical understanding of who you are and what you're doing in the world. Mindfulness (the practice of relinquishing worldly concerns by focusing on a simple task or sensory input) is one method, long-established largely through meditative Eastern practices and picked up increasingly in modern times by Westerners seeking inner peace, of trying to attain insights or disciplines that help one know oneself. Philosophy and poetry, though extremely different in style and substance, are both also things that can help us realise things about ourselves and the world that empower us, enlighten us, exercise our faculty of wisdom intellectually and spiritually. I think the chief practical insight of wisdom, something that I'd like to believe all humans know intuitively, something so obvious once known but so easily forgotten that regular reminders from personal mindfulness and conversation with friends, from philosophy, poetry, novels, newspapers, strangers, rocks, memories, TV, trees, even Buzzfeed quizzes (eh, well, ok) are needed to reorient our awareness and living-out-the-implications of this enormous truth, is that other people's lives matter just as much as yours. They are just as complex, just as worthwhile, just as full of self-justification and self-doubt, full of joy and fear and turmoil and loss and longing, subject to constraints on agency and choice, directed by a mixture of decision and circumstance.
   This in tremendously obvious (I hope) but I so easily forget it in the moment, swept along in my own subjective pursuit of what I think will give me pleasure and purpose. The point of philosophy or meditation or poetry or art (we'll come to that in a sec) is, in this view, to instill empathy, to make that empathy genuine and affirmative and proactive, to strengthen the bonds between human persons that they may help each other have better lives. And intellectualism can be an enormous asset in doing this: critical theory is a perfect example of a field where academics, in seeking to understand culture and politics, have developed ways of explaining differences between people and differing constraints placed upon them so that these groups can learn better about the others' experience and act in a way that helps lift those constraints rather than perpetuate them (remember, this is technically (well, by my own definition) injustice). Art though may be the greatest man-made vehicle of empathy. I mean - paintings and films and theatre and television and music aside (sorry, it's not that I don't love vast swathes of those things but this, if you hadn't noticed, is a blog about books) - basically any good novel or short story will test you, will force you to empathise, at least some of the way, with a character who is not altogether like you; will bring you to understand how another mind, another life, might work, and see something of human sincerity there, even if there isn't much. A few books that do this brilliantly are this and this and this. Oh, and don't even tell me you wouldn't offer Holden Caulfield a cup of tea and just try to have a nice chat with the poor kid.
   All worthwhile philosophy, all earnest and meaningful poetry or prose, leads in some way to the conclusion of wisdom that is empathy, extended equally and absolutely to everyone. In another word, love. I believe this pops up so consistently as the endpage of morality, the central gist of human life, not because it is a nice-but-improbable target that idealists throughout history have pinned up as a muse, but because it is objectively true. As a Christian I believe that God is the point of everything, including human life, including my life, including art and trees and philosophy and psychology and behavioural economics and the pursuit of happiness and everything we might interact with during that pursuit; and I also believe that God literally is love. God exists in ongoing eternal relationships, and we were made to do so too. (This post is already waaay long so if you're curious about the theology check out this excellent overview of Christianity.) This solves the objectivity problem: God has absolute claims over all aspects of reality because God created and sustains them, so we have a definite start on how to define 'good' (this book is an excellent philosophical exploration of how God's being good provides a platform for ethics, as well as guiding behaviours consistent with Christian joy). I do not believe that Christianity has solved the problem of happiness - in this broken world, there will always be constraints and frustrations to pleasure or purpose-seeking, no matter how much injustice is tackled. However, I do think that Christianity shows us the fallacy underpinning the whole pursuit: happiness, while good, is fleeting, and is not the point - God is the point, and God is love. True wisdom is knowing this and acting from it.
   I think, as a concluding remark, that Paul Dolan's excellent insights in this book into what happiness is and how we can actively pursue it are wholely worthwhile and deserve to be read and heeded. However, they are grounded in a subjective and individualistic worldview that pays little attention (ironic) to bigger questions about the point of the entire venture - and these are questions that need asking. Reading Paul Dolan's book without belief in anything concretely objectively good may, I fear, render in people the kind of selfishness that neoliberal society mistakes for rationality. Reading this book in light of a coherent joy-giving worldview though, I think will help people make practical marginal increments on their own happiness while still operating primarily out of love (pay Søren Kierkegaard a visit, my fingers are starting to cramp). Happiness 'by design' of individual agents seeking to maximise it isn't a patch on experiencing happiness as a natural part of a joyful life in loving relationships with God and everyone else.

I've written way too much. Again. Here's some relevant poignant Bible words.

"I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live, that each of them may eat and drink and find satisfaction in all their toil - this is the gift of God."
- Ecclesiastes 3: 10 - 13



* My half-sincerest apologies for that extended double-nested parenthetical statement. That was monstrous and totally unnecessary but quite fun to write.

** A few. A few. Ha. Hahaha! I've just finished writing this post and reading back over it - good grief. How in the name of Buddy Glass do so many small thoughts grossly overextend into full-blown rambles? Ah well. You either read it all or you didn't. Kind regards.

*** I specify 'good' here because if one settled on objective truth that didn't build a worldview that you could comfortably accept your place in, it would ruin you, and you'd probably return, one way or another, to subjective self-directed happiness-seeking, albeit tainted by the haunting knowledge of a universal meaninglessness. Hm.

the Mighty Book of Boosh

This book, the efforts of Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding (and Rich Fulcher, Dave Brown, Michael Fielding, Richard Ayoade, and a few other people) to convert into glossy hardback book format the same zany spatchcock whimsies and characters who populated the stage show, radio show and ultimately TV show known as The Mighty Boosh. If you've not heard of this show, go away and buy the boxset right now and devour it, you'll love it; basically if you don't know the show there's no point in you reading this post other than to the end that you might come to know the show. If you do already know the show, well done, feel free to read on. I must admit, I feel slightly delegitimised in my book-blog-doing lately since this is the third book in a relatively short space of time that I've read that has basically been a content-transplant from a televised comedy (see also The Thick of It and Alan Partridge) - but who cares, culture is culture, and I've had enormous amounts of university reading to do recently so I've been taking on much less heavy stuff for recreational word-consumption. I don't need to justify my habits to you. Who even are you? Nobody reads this blog.

   Anyway: this book, to those who enjoy Boosh, is nothing amazing but is a nice fat compendium of reminders of what you love about the show, presented in a hugely creative range of visual formats and styles. Amid the majority of the book being more-or-less random graphics and visual mashup pages of behind-the-scenes rough-work content from the show, The Mighty Book of Boosh actually contains a lot of amusing stuff: there's an extended bickering email chain between shamans Saboo and Tony Harrison, there's extracts from black magic tips & tricks from Naboo the enigmatic stoner shaman (by far the best character), there's Bob Fossil's full list of 'talkbox' notes-to-himself, there's a short gallery (with commentaries) of Old Gregg's watercolour paintings, there's one of Dixon Bainbridge's manly accounts of colonial heroism, there's a full-length story about Charlie in which he has a fight with a black and white rainbow, there's an extract from Bollo's scrapbook (including his letters to Peter Jackson when he, as a gorilla, tried to audition for King Kong), there's a memoir from the Hitcher about his Victorian upbringing, and needless to say there is a huge amount of edgy-fashionista pulp from Vince Noir and pretentious-jazzy drivel from Howard Moon. Howard and Vince carry the content just as they carry the show, the borderline-surreal angles taken by the world of Boosh kept in balance by their gloriously relatable comedic chemistry, drenched in pop-culture savvy wit, their contemporary-twentysomething-Londoner lifestyles overlapping the talking forest animals and dark magic and whatnot of the show in a single weird internal logic.

   Other than the short-but-hilarious full-colour sixteen-page comic inserted in the book's middle (in which Howard buys an old Spider & Rudi jazz-fusion record), the highlight of the book has to be the crimps. The crimps, in the show, are playful shortish improvised-sounding funny little songs (seriously, watch these) that Howard and Vince chuck about every so often, in quiet moments, just between them; they're so distinctively Boosh though, and so delightful, that they encapsulate so much of the beating heart of the show by directly capturing the pure creative synergy and flow between Howard and Vince, two characters who are so different but who work together to form a twosome perfectly, and the crimps display this perfectly. In the book the lyrics to the crimps are written out in expansive twisty flowing colourful text, graphic and often difficult to read but if you're familiar with the crimp you can follow it, and the drawn visualisation of the words fits Howard and Vince's performance of them brilliantly. Crimps are the most delightful aspect of Boosh as a show, and I think it's genius that they managed to convert it into something printable.
   Overall, the whole book follows this creative line really closely, and manages to be as visually enjoyable and engaging as it is genuinely funny to read, with intensity of both words and pictures spaced out nicely. So, this book would be a pretty good present for someone who loves The Mighty Boosh, and introducing someone to The Mighty Boosh would be a pretty good idea for anyone who appreciates innovative fantastical comedy.

the Ladybird Book of Mindfulness

This book, part of a recent effort popular among British hipsters in their late-20's-early-30's (no actual research done here I'm just going by stuff I've seen on social media and my own preheld stereotypes) to revive the old Ladybird Learners - you know, those A5 hardback books for kids with delightfully calming full-page watercolour illustrations and easily-readable friendly informative text educating the young reader about a particular topic, for example 'Vehicles' or 'Dinosaurs' or 'Space'? Everyone's dad or mum had them when they were young and they've kept them somewhere in a box of old stuff and you probably had a passing familiarity too throughout your own childhood because of these books' sentimental value to your parents. Eh, maybe I'm assuming a minor aspect of my early life to be more culturally typical than it is. Do you know what I'm on about? No? If not you may as well just give up, this post has nothing for you. Actually no, stay with me. You might like the idea of this. You might not like this post though, I can tell from glancing over what I've already written this is gonna be a pretty sketchy one. This has been a horrific paragraph and all - I'm starting a new one.

   So, anyway, this is part of a publishing effort to pay homage to these classics, only with a satirical twist - these are Ladybird Learners Books 'For Grownups' - i.e. tackling not general concepts to educate oneself about in childhood but large social and cultural challenges facing [contemporary British hipsters in their late-20's-early-30's, sue me for inaccuracy]. Titles include not only Mindfulness but Hangovers, Dating, The Wife, The Husband, The Shed and Hipsters and a couple of others that I can't be bothered to click 'next' on my Amazon search in order to name. The format is the exact same: calming full-page watercolour illustrations (cannibalised from the Ladybird's classic range of books) and easily-readable friendly informative text, only rather than educating, every page pretends to explain the illustration in a slightly absurd and completely sardonic way. To give you a taste of what this looks like: a delightful calming full-page watercolour illustration of a mill in a windy cornfield with autumn clouds scudding by overhead: the easily-readable friendly informative text to the left reads "Mindfulness is the skill of thinking you are doing something when you are doing nothing. One of the good things about mindfulness is that you get to do a lot of sitting down. Sitting down is good for the mind because so much energy is stored in the lap." Or a delightfully calming full-page watercolour illustration of a middle-aged farmer kneeling at his prize turnip amid a largely-weedy field: the easily-readable friendly informative text beside it announcing "In ancient times, Guru Bhellend entered a state of mindfulness that lasted thirty-five years. During this time, he thought about everything. When he had finished, he wrote the answer on a grain of rice. He never married." It's pretty low-level entertainment but amusing in a dry little way, like how a stranger who manages to be both a bit eccentric and a bit boring starts making comment-sized chunks of conversation with you during a prolonged passive encounter (e.g. at a bus stop if you had first exchanged a brief complaint about tardy public transport to break the ice). (I have no idea where that came from.)

   Mindfulness, to get back to this book, is a concept much punted about by young adults I know, or at least the culture they're a part of: it's a pretty vague but agreeable state or feeling people try to experience to improve inner peace, self-knowledge, stress relief, and a variety of other kinds of psychological and emotional stability. It's a lovely idea, one the practice of which can involve almost anything depending on what helps you focus on a simple physical repetitive task or arrangement of mental/sensual inputs, so as to free the mind from concerns about anything not included within that experience. For some people it's scented candles and a hot chocolate and knitting along to folk music, for some people it's jogging to a park bench and sitting down and staring into space for a bit, for some people it might be stroking a cat, for some reorganising a bookshelf, for some making chapattis or pancakes or cheese on toast, improvising jazz on the piano, whittling in the bath, cracking open a can of lager and watching football or cult sitcoms, covering entire pads of paper in intricate doodles while vacantly humming along to Classic FM, whatever. Variety is the spice of life.
   I've actually tried practicing mindfulness recently;* to be honest it just felt like a pretty normal 'solitary attempt to relax' so the deliberate intentionality with which I embarked upon it just made it feel forced, and while I certainly had a peaceful life-affirming time, it wasn't in a particularly different way to any normal successful 'solitary attempt to relax'. Hence my cynicism about mindfulness, which endeared me to this book's skewering of those strange impractical beings among us who strive for it. Just calm down and relax like everyone else does, do something you enjoy and affix your attention to it so you enjoy it properly. That's not a groundbreaking mode of how-to-do-life (this is though - lolz); it's just part of how you should be doing stuff anyway.
   I think this might be one of the most stream-of-consciousness/actually-just-bonkers posts this blog has ever witnessed. I'll just wrap it up here. This Ladybird Book of Mindfulness, along with (one would expect) the other [7? 9?] books in the series. Note to prospective readers of this book - if you're interested in mindfulness, expect to be amused but not aided in your striving to be mindful. More to the point, if you're interested in mindfulness, stop taking it consciously seriously as a lifestyle/mindset/worldview pursuit! Just start relaxing naturally - throw your mind and senses more fully into your activities and pleasures, whatever they may be.

Peace, fellow human.


* The first time I literally just listened to techno-funk remixes of vintage soul tunes for ninety minutes while colouring in a mandala and eating pistachios. The second time, I'd found out that the YouVersion Bible app has an audio feature, so I coloured in another (arguably better, at least more intricate) mandala while listening to the entirety of Ecclesiastes and eating a small range of sandwiches. The third time, I lit an incense stick, made a cup of lemon & ginger & honey tea, and just listened to Kanye West's new album The Life of Pablo all the way through (only available on Tidal and, erm, Piratebay, because nobody has Tidal and nobody's going to get it just because Kanye's on too erratic and immense of an ego-trip to just release an album like a normal $53million-in-debt Greatest Artist Of All Time would. Dammit Kanye, why do you do this to yourself!?).
   I would highly recommend any of these activities as 'solitary attempts to relax'. Reflective prayer and going for walks and reading Good (Søren Kierkegaard or Emily Dickinson or the Catcher in the Rye or the Remains of the Day kind of Good) books are also things I've found surefire ways of instilling clarity and tranquility.

The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k

This book, a lifestyle/mindset/worldview/self-help/whatever book by Sarah Knight, is much less counter-cultural and irreverent than it pretends to be. I bought it literally because I'd had a weird day and the title made me laugh, but then once I started reading it, I realised there was more subtlety to her lifestyle/mindset/worldview/whatever (let's just call this a 'mode') of Not Giving A Fuck* [NGAF] than I'd presumed.

   Rather than completely sacking off everything that you don't unquestionably want to do (I call this amoral extreme-end of NGAF the Zero Fucks Given [ZFG] mode), successful NGAF is about 'budgeting' the fucks you give to maximise personal happiness - it's more of a form of mental decluttering.** This budget operates by scrutinising demands, real or perceived, on your time, energy and money, and assessing which of these are actually worthwhile given their impact on your happiness. Things which genuinely do improve your life, or upon which you're dependent in some reasonable way, it's worth giving a fuck about: things which you simply do out of social/cultural/economic obligation, if reasonably avoidable, go ahead and cease giving that fuck. A big part of this is detaching yourself from caring too much what other people think of you and your choices. She is careful to stress that adopting NGAF as a mode shouldn't turn you into an asshole - determining whether it is someone's feelings or someone's opinion 'obligating' you to give a particular fuck is a good way of negotiating situations where you can legitimately give fewer fucks without hurting someone (even if you might upset them a little bit, but that's their fault for thinking something they give a fuck about is of universal value). I'm not entirely convinced that she's solved this Not Being An Asshole problem, as I'll discuss shortly, but she's definitely worked out a fairly reliable model for organising fuck-giving decisions (there's even a fucking flowchart).

   Having established this framework, Sarah then walks us through Things, Work, Friends, Acquaintances & Strangers, and Family, to help us determine which fucks to decide if we give or not - these sections are accompanied by listing exercises (which I've not done yet as I gave more of a fuck about finishing the book*** than actually performing NGAF-style decluttering). Once we've decided what we give a fuck about, she then provides some helpful pointers about how we actively stop giving particular fucks (without being a dick about it); these methods revolve around honestly and politely explaining yourself, and actually she gives some really helpful pointers. The whole book is littered with examples as well. Finally, she revisits our NGAF-enlightened life, decluttered of unwanted fucks, and shows us how much better for body, mind and soul it can be. Great.

   For all the efficacy of NGAF as a mode, I had two main problems with this book. Firstly, it's a mode very much tailored to highly-autonomous individuals - people without social, cultural, or economic disadvantages holding them back from deciding exactly what they want to give fucks about. The book's target market is almost definitely American middle-class misanthropes (every single example given reeks of this: oh no, an acquaintance's weekend wedding in Europe! oh no, a skiing holiday with the inlaws! oh no, a colleague's poetry recital!), but something as generalistic as a mode should be one that at least works for people with varying degrees of privilege. People who are constrained by social, cultural, economic, or any other kind of disadvantage often simply don't have the freedom to not give fucks about certain things that someone with more autonomy in how they allocate their time, energy and money would readily stop giving a fuck about. That's not to say I expect a mode to completely solve all inequalities of individual capabilities - that's fucking absurd. However, NGAF does clearly work better the more privileged you are, but unfortunately so does life in general in many ways (like, that is the nature of privilege), so maybe this isn't a problem with the book at all and I'm just upset about injustice. Probably. I often am. Who gives a fuck.

   Secondly, I had a bigger and more substantive objection to NGAF as a mode. I think it lies at too much risk of turning into ZFG - i.e. a mode where no fucks are given about anything that is not of direct self-determined desirability to an agent. Although Sarah Knight has tried build a consistent safeguard against this into her methods, I'm not convinced they'd stand the test of real people. Let's use Rick as an example. Rick's catchphrase is literally "I don't give a fuck"**** - he's narcissistic, nihilistic, basically just a nobhead. Now, he's also fictional, but he represents the selfish core of all human agency, which is especially strong in highly-individualistic neoliberal societies like modern Britain and America. Empowering neoliberal nihilistic narcissistic nobheads with the sense that their happiness is the top priority of any exercise of their agency isn't spiritually healthy for society - you don't have to think too hard once you start NGAF to realise that the constraints of not hurting other people or their feelings aren't objective boundaries, and you may as well just maximise your own happiness-oriented agency and give zero fucks. If part of NGAF's foundation is detaching yourself from what other people think, where does the requirement to not be a dick come from? If you can live with yourself being a dick, surely other people's opinion doesn't matter, and the only reason you'd need to mitigate your dickishness in any ways to any people is because you've worked out you get more from maintaining a relationship in a particular way than you would by letting your ZFGness taint it. Basically, I believe that people are naturally inclined to be as selfish as they can reasonably get away with unless hooked onto a positive love-oriented mode,***** but NGAF is the opposite of love-oriented - it's self-fulfilment-oriented, and so will naturally tend towards decaying into ZFG - people will become Ricks (apart from not elderly alcoholic genius scientist terrorist inventors: at least not in all cases. Lots of people might just not be very smooth at the ZFG method and become this guy).

   So, this book makes some interesting recommendations about how to mentally declutter, but I think given our sociocultural context of rampant individualism, we should be wary in accepting modes of life like NGAF - it will only further fragment communities, widen inequalities, perpetuate injustices, and loads of other things that I give lots of fucks about.

* I was going to censor this post but I decided that since nobody reads this blog anyway it would be a waste of a fuck if I worried about offending someone. I censored the 'fuck' in the post's title because she censors the 'fuck' in the actual title of the book - I guess you can't have the word 'fuck' proudly displayed on public bookshop shelves or something. Also, it's 2016 - how are you not completely desensitised to the word 'fuck' yet? I have been since the age of twelve or so (unless around particularly sheltered company, where conformity instincts kick in and I feign a little flinch if Rude Words are said). If you have a problem with this word, Sarah Knight's book is probably not for you. I didn't count but I'm pretty sure there's over a thousand fucks included in its wordcount - simply because the 'fuck' is the key concept to her system of ideas and practices, so why the fuck wouldn't she fucking mention fucks a lot? (I've used 42 in this post. Just did a search.)

** Sarah Knight does in fact attribute the book's inspiration (and title) to a Japanese bestseller, Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up - this book is basically an extension of those principles into what you give fucks about.

*** I'd planned on breezing through it and then writing a one-sentence blog post about it, simply stating that in the spirit of the book I wasn't giving a fuck about this particular post, but I actually had some pretty interesting thoughts about this book and the NGAF method, so here you fucking go.

**** Okay, so he has several. Wubba-lubba-dub-dub, whatever, I don't give a fuck.

***** Yeh, five is definitely too many asterisks. I've already opened tabs for the links I was going to use to expand on this point though, so I'll type up the fucking footnote anyway. Humans are social animals by nature, highly community-dependent and enmeshed in complex layers of obligations: I believe this is due to our being made in the image of a God who is primarily relational and exists as love. This means social systems of obligation, i.e. things we're made to give a fuck about, can't be reduced to individual decisions - some things are required for communal cohesion, for effective societies, for justice - and responding to these complex structures of obligation in a way that truly reflects our nature as beings made to love and be loved is bigger than simply giving moral fucks, as all fucks which we do or don't give reflect part of our volition to work for collective good or for our own. And that means non-individualism should be fundamental at the individual level. (Didn't know which words to use as the link for this but it's also somewhat relevant.)

Works of Love

This book, a series of in-depth philosophical-theological-social-ethical meditations on the nature of Christian love by the great Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, is one of the most rewarding, challenging, and uplifting books I've ever read. I started reading it way back in October 2014 as it was one of the recommended readings for a philosophy module I was doing - I used it as one of the foundations of my mini-dissertation but never actually finished it, despite finding it thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating. This was probably because it's very long and very dense, and I prefer reading shortish easyish books so I can finish more sooner so my blog racks up more posts (only half-jesting here): but in the last months of 2015, given a particular prolonged mindset that came over me, I returned to Søren's work and it has genuinely helped me keep my mind and heart oriented in joy toward God who is love. The blurb of my copy proclaims boldly how 'LIFE CHANGING' a 'SEMINAL WORK' this is, and it is, but like Emily Dickinson (another writer whose work in recent months helped me continue to know God, love and joy), Kierkegaard's life is not as fondly celebrated as his works, because it was also often characterised by loneliness, illness, and sadness.* What I find brilliant about these two, American poet and Danish philosopher, is that their work does tell of this misery - but refuses to let it define it (or them) by being the ending: both resolutely turn to God, to love, to joy, and adroitly display what a complete comfort that is. So yes, for a struggling Christian, this book probably would be life-changing, for the depth, breadth and persistence of its complaints, rebukes and encouragements.

   I should probably discuss the book's content a bit.

   This is easier said than done: Kierkegaard is a highly analytical but far from a systematic philosopher, and the subject matter lends itself to deep idiosyncratic meditations on a particular aspect, angle, or argument. It's not just random reflections bundled into chapters though: coherent structures to his thought are evident throughout, and every point he makes or conclusion he reaches is, with some thought (or, thankfully, more often, his own continued explanation) consistent with the overarching pictures he paints about what love is and how it works. I won't really go into these, as they run very broad and deep. The first half of the book tackles the meta-nature of love: how Christians understand God as being love, how God's eminence as the primary and defining being therefore makes love the primary and defining force and essence of all reality and how this should upend everything we think we know about goodness, since human ideas about 'love' are minute, immature, corrupt and skewed compared to the actuality of God-as-love. He also explores the notion of commanded love, how there is no contradiction in love being a compulsory facet of human activity, questions of who our neighbours are (hint: everyone) and why human nature's relationship to God's nature compels the loving-each-other-as-ourselves core of Christian ethics.

   The second half of the book is applications of this radical conception of Christian love to various active aspects of life: encouraging people, trusting people, being hopeful, seeking others' good, forgiving and forgetting, remaining loving, being merciful, winning over the unloving to the cause of love, mourning the dead, and praising love itself. Kierkegaard examines each of these facets of how we live in love, building from the conceptual base of the first part. One point that he frequently restates I will mention because it's a brilliant realisation: if God is love, then in any functional relationship between humans, all feelings and actions between those humans is irrelevant, as a functional relationship is a loving one, which necessarily includes God as a third element in that relationship, and God in perfection necessarily flattens all non-perfectly-loving elements of each of the two persons as they are no longer just relating to each other but to God. This holds for any two persons, be they friends, enemies, you and some homeless guy you'd really rather not feel compelled to buy a sandwich. Of course, such relationships, in our broken and sinful world, do not de facto occur, but by the grace of God and the uplifting work of his loving Spirit, we can (should) strive to emulate them.

   If I've made it sound complicated please forgive/disregard me (or leave an angry comment if you're so inclined, goodness knows it'll be nice to at least know that I've got readers). Søren is a philosopher but this is not a philosophy book: he's not developing complex theoretical structures or proposing grand intricate maps of reality: he's a Christian, using his ability as a philosopher to walk the reader in wisdom through his many thoughts about the most important thing a Christian thinks there is - God-as-love. And yes, these thoughts are extremely deep at points, yes, at points he goes into a lot of detail to argue for a particular point and so the prose becomes difficult and dense, but stick with these passages, because he uses them to connect thoughts that bring you to a realisation of some truly beautiful things, some intensely challenging things, some immeasurably encouraging works of love.
   For a Christian reader, this book is now one of the first I would ever recommend someone read - it is supremely uplifting, and you genuinely feel you are discovering more about how to know, serve and emulate God. Non-Christian readers might also enjoy it but I would expect they'd find it confusing: the active reality of Christian love is so counter-intuitive, so against the grain of our modern cultural sensible individualism, that Kierkegaard's conclusions would just come across as mad. And in a way they are - I certainly felt that - but that's why it's such a refreshing challenge, because humans are built to know God, to know love, but we are so distant from its reality that hearing extensive in-depth truths about what it is and how it works and how we fit into it doesn't immediately feel like good news. But, of course, it is. [I was going to find a quote from the book to lend this concluding sentence a bit more oomph, but there's just too many good ones, and I can't be bothered to comb back through the whole thing. Anyway; absolutely worth a read.]

* A fact that is better reflected in his other philosophical works, most of which are about irony, despair, godlessness, and so on. Also, this hasn't got much to do with anything I've mentioned in this post but I want to include a link to it anyway because it's hilarious: follow this twitter account for a superb feed of Kierkegaardian thinking combined with the everyday lifestyle reflections of Kim Kardashian. You're welcome.

Dealing with Depression

This book by Sarah Collins and Jayne Haynes is a short overview of the challenges Christians face when struggling with, or knowing people who are struggling with, depression. I bought it because since mid-October I've been going through a fairly mild but still unpleasant bout (yes, that is the main reason why my blog's been fairly dry over winter - sorry) brought on mainly by prolonged unemployment and exacerbated by my lifelong insomniac (and somewhat neurotic) tendencies, and this seemed like a good resource. I can attest that it was, but not as immediately helpful as talking openly to close Christian friends, and even more importantly, praying, about the issues I was facing. Other books have also been huge helps, primarily Emily Dickinson and Søren Kierkegaard, writers who express joy and beauty in more accessibly poignant ways than almost anyone else I've ever encountered: perhaps because a constant self-aware love of God lay at the heart of each of their efforts as poet or philosopher.
   Anyway, I should probably say something about this book. It's a decent resource - overviews the basics of depression, its diagnosis, treatment, and particular problems that it may pose for Christians who may perceive it as spiritual as well as psychological; the writers take us to the Psalms, where comfort in sorrow can be found, and remind us of some solid gospel truths to keep in mind or speak to those suffering from depression. Each chapter closes with a Christian's account of their struggle with depression and how it affected their faith, or how others encouraged them: similarly, there are appendices recounting a pastor's efforts to disciple a sufferer, a husband's account of his wife's suffering, and an in-depth story of a first-hand struggle (told by Roger Carswell - a great man, he's written dozens of Christian mini-books like this one, and is an old friend of my dad's).
   I think this book could be an excellent little resource for equipping churches to better engage with depressed persons, but if you are actually depressed and struggling to fit that into your Christian worldview, this could be helpful but probably isn't the book you need: there are plenty of others out there, but honestly, I would recommend you turn instead to God's word itself. Oh, and talk to people - I know that can be hard, but hopefully Christians are getting better at picking up clues about mental health, and they'll be there to initiate, include, and encourage you.