Not sheepish, but individ-ewe-al

We’re being graced with an official visit from Bob Weinberg this week. One of the things he wanted to do was make an opportunity to meet a group of PhD students and other junior scientists. This strikes me as an excellent instinct because these vastly famous people doing their tours of honour will always have the chance to meet the other famous and important scientists at the host institution, and they will usually have a chance to be paraded for the general public, but it’s quite easy for them to miss the actual working researchers. So, I signed myself up to be on the waiting list if there were any spaces for post-docs after the opportunity had been offered to the PhD students, and there were some extra spaces, so I attended the meeting yesterday.

Someone asked me what exactly Weinberg is so famous for: basically he did the original work to prove that you can turn a normal cell into a cancer cell by blocking a couple of genes and injecting another couple, and what the minimum set of genes is. And he’s by no means a one-hit wonder, he’s been doing lots of exciting stuff in the quarter century since that landmark achievement. It’s actually quite surprising that this was the first time I’d heard him speak; I’d have expected to run across him at conferences by now.

His talk was mixed; I could clearly see why he is so respected both as a scientist and as a communicator, and indeed I’m writing this post because I’m excited about what he had to say. But at the same time he didn’t live up to his towering reputation. He talked down to the group quite badly; this may well be because his expectations of PhD students are based on the American system where a new PhD student has only had a science “major” and is still very much learning. So his talk was pitched at the wrong level for European PhD students who have completed an entire degree in their specialist subject, and are used to being treated as professional scientists albeit at an early stage of their training. He also admitted half way through the talk that he was sleep deprived and in a really horrible mood, and apologized for being unusually grumpy as a result (he was really thrown by some annoying computer problems at the beginning, when it took nearly 20 minutes to get the system set up to display his Powerpoint slides).

Both his grumpiness and his slight tendency to patronize caused me to behave rather abrasively, which I’m not particularly proud of. He started out by saying that he expected to be interrupted with lots of questions, so I took him at his word. But instead of asking questions which show how intelligent and engaged with his ideas I am, I found myself jumping on apparent flaws or omissions in his arguments and generally being a bit arsey. I doubt he was offended, but I also doubt I made a glowingly positive impression.

He started off by making what I thought was a really odd argument about cancer epidemiology. He showed some figures that point out that pretty much the only thing correlated with cancer incidence is access to screening and diagnosis. So ok, there’s huge reporting bias in how we track the prevalence of types of cancer in populations or over time. I didn’t find this as surprising or significant as he seemed think it was. I think the point was supposed to be that in spite of huge changes (usually alarming increases) in the reported incidence of various kinds of cancer, the (age-adjusted) death rates didn’t really change between 1930 and 1990, or between different countries studied. So he postulated that one way to read these figures is that human intervention basically has no effect on cancer mortality; a certain proportion of people with a given type of cancer die no matter what anyone does, and a certain proportion survive because they were destined to survive anyway, (though they are likely to attribute it to some kind of faith healing or quackery).

OK, 1990 to the present there has actually been a measurable decline in mortality from breast cancer and a couple of types of leukaemia. So it’s not all fatalism; medical advances are making a really profound difference here. He said that part of the decline in breast cancer mortality is explained by awareness of the risks of HRT so that it is no longer pushed at women as it was a generation ago. I wasn’t convinced by that, because it is really only in the US that every middle aged woman took HRT, and then everyone stopped because of the breast cancer scare. According to Weinberg screening programmes and knowledge of some of the major genetic factors haven’t made much difference, but he didn’t really justify dismissing those factors. Breast cancer does also benefit from two of the only three new drugs that unquestionably outperform any therapy attempted since the 30s: tamoxifen and its friends, and the antibody-based therapy herceptin. The third unquestionably successful drug is Gleevec for a certain type of leukaemia. That gives really stunning results, like improving the 5 year survival rate from about 20% to about 95%, but it is only useful in one particular relatively rare type of leukaemia, so it doesn’t register as a blip in overall population statistics.

If the glass is half-empty, it’s depressing that humanity spent 60 years and unimaginable sums of money without making any measurable progress. If the glass is half-full, there have been three genuine breakthroughs in the past 15 years, so it could be that we’re finally on the right track. (Also, no measurable progress might mean that the survival rate is improved from 5% to 10%, meaning thousands of people are alive who otherwise wouldn’t be, or it might mean that patients get a year of decent quality of life rather than 6 months of misery, but of course would still count as mortality statistics.) FWIW, my old boss, who is not as famous as Weinberg but pretty famous, reckons that cancer will be a curable disease in our lifetime.

This stuff is more or less what all famous cancer researchers say. Some of you probably don’t get as many chances to hear famous cancer researchers giving their spiel as I do, so I’m writing it here because I think it might be of interest. The really exciting bit was the second part of the talk though:

One of the most exciting results in cancer biology recently is that the only cells that are capable of giving rise to tumours are adult stem cells. This means that cells that normally don’t grow don’t suddenly turn rogue and start growing all over the place, as used to be believed (recently enough that I was taught this model at university in the late 90s). But in fact, cancer happens when cells that normally do grow, ie stem cells, start making tumours instead of healthy tissues.

If you generalize from this, you start to wonder how far cancer cells are really normal cells in the wrong situations, rather than total aberrations. Bear in mind that all cells in the body contain exactly the same genes, but use a subset of them to perform their correct functions. Cancer cells probably have, oh, half a dozen mutations, genetic changes. But that might mean they have six altered letters out of three billion which are identical to those of normal cells. How do such tiny changes alter the whole function of the body, even fatally in many cases? What if these altered cells aren’t something entirely new, they’re just switching to the wrong sort of program.

There are two circumstances where cells are “supposed” to grow rapidly and relatively independently. One is when the embryo is developing, when it has only a few months to grow from a single cell one tenth of a mm wide, to a baby-sized baby 50 cm long (there are very few tumours that grow that fast!). The other is when a person is injured, and needs to rapidly make new tissue to repair the damage. Weinberg suggested that both these situations are relevant in a tumour.

So, we can argue that a tumour acts like a wound site when there is no wound. It rapidly makes new blood vessels, which act to provide oxygen and nutrients to the centre of the tumour mass, but the blood vessels don’t “know” that that is their “goal”. The blood vessels start to grow because the body somehow “thinks” there is a wound there that needs to be repaired. The parts of the immune system which usually deal with wounds are all present at the sites of tumours; it was previously thought that this was a response to the presence of the “foreign” tumour, but in fact this doesn’t make sense because the tumour isn’t really foreign in the way that bacteria or other parasites are. So another way of looking at it is that the immune system, triggered inappropriately, actually causes the tumour. The immune cells are responding to a wound that isn’t there, so they send out chemicals which signal the tumour cells to grow, as they would normally signal new tissue to develop and repair an actual wound.

Weinberg also pointed out that this may mean that surgery is a really problematic way of dealing with cancer. You cut out the tumour, which obviously does need to happen. But. It’s impossible to eliminate absolutely every cell, and even a single stem cell left behind can regenerate the whole tumour, because that’s what stem cells do. Even worse, surgery causes an actual wound, so all the immune system gubbins which is around will go into hyperdrive, making a really ideal environment for those stem cells to get going and grow like anything.

If this were the whole story, most cancers wouldn’t be fatal. A tumour that does nothing except grow inexorably bigger is usually referred to as benign (this is a relative term, of course!) A malignant tumour is much more dangerous, for two reasons. Firstly, it actively invades the surrounding tissue, breaking down healthy tissue to make room for the tumour to grow. And secondly, pieces called metastases can break off and be carried round the body in the blood stream and lymph system, and cause new tumours all over the place. These metastatic tumours often can’t be removed by surgery as there are too many of them, and it’s often only a matter of time before they get into vital organs and cause a total system failure, otherwise known as death.

But there are some normal cells that are meant to invade the surrounding tissue, and meant to be able to move around the body and start growth at new sites. Namely, the cells of the early embryo. Weinberg’s theory is that malignant cells turn on genes that are normally turned on at the moment when the blastocyst, the ball of frog-spawn like cells, starts to turn into an actual embryo with recognizable features. These genes help the cells to move around to position themselves in the right places to form specialized tissues, and also to invade other parts of the embryo and mother’s uterus as necessary. So if these genes get turned on in an adult, you can get metastatic cells.

This feels like it could be a really productive novel way of looking at cancer. And I think it’s cool!

Further reading:
1. Stem cells: the real culprits in cancer?. Rather impressive Scientific American article on cancer stem cells, aimed for a popular audience.
2. Reya et al, Stem cells, cancer, and cancer stem cells is a decent review of stem cells and cancer, if you have access to Nature and want to read something at a more advanced level than SciAm.
3. Campbell & Polyak, Breast Tumor Heterogeneity: Cancer Stem Cells or Clonal Evolution? is a less good review, also written by people who are skeptical of the cancer stem cells model, but has the advantage of being free.
4. Yang et al, Exploring a New Twist on Tumor Metastasis is a recent review by Weinberg himself of some of this connection between embryo development and metastasis.

There was a meme a while ago where people had to take a list and bold the “privileges” they experienced growing up. I know I’ve left it too late to address this, but I think it leads to some interesting ideas in general, so I’m going to babble a bit.

To deal with the meme itself: it originated from a teaching exercise developed at Indiana State University. Most people who filled in the meme commented that it isn’t terribly well thought out. Some of the criticisms are a bit off-target; yes, it is US-centric and yes, it concentrates on class to the exclusion of other kinds of privilege, but that’s because it was designed to teach American college students about class, not to be used as a meme in the rather international and highly varied context of the blogosphere, or to make a profound statement about privilege in general. Several people argued that it fails even to address even American class privilege in a sensible way; I don’t know enough about that to be able to comment. My reading of it is that somebody who bolded most of it would have the following advantages: a financially stable background; guardians who were committed to education; to some extent, though the list doesn’t cover this as well as it might, a culture which is socially valued. Those are definitely advantages which some people have and others lack, which is not to say that everyone who has them must have a wonderful and perfect life and everyone else must be living in misery!

But I think the reaction to this meme is a good example of why those privilege lists don’t really make the point they are trying to make very well. I believe the original “privilege list” was Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 essay Unpacking the invisible knapsack. It’s worth reading her original article to see what she was trying to say before her meme (in the literal sense) started being used all over the place to make vaguely related points. I must admit I find the article rather annoying, albeit intelligently written. It very obviously comes out of second wave feminist ideas about male privilege, and McIntosh has come to the realization that the experience of black people in a white-dominated society is somewhat analogous to the experience of women in a male-dominated society. There are some immediate glaring problems with this, most notably the fact that, um, black women exist! And I would probably like the list a lot better had it been written by a black person, because it’s hard not to find it smug and patronizing as it stands. It’s also assuming that there are two races, “black” and “white”, and making what I think are rather dangerous analogies between gender and race. On a structural level I think a lot of her examples are pretty much repetitions of the same thing.

Basically, what she’s saying is that white people get treated as individuals, black people as representatives of their race, and this can cause real problems even in the absence of overt, deliberate racism. This is a useful point to make; I assume the list leaves out all the other disadvantages that POC may have to negotiate due to historical or current active racism because its audience can reasonably be expected to know about those. I’m just not sure that privilege lists are a good way to make this or related points.

Privilege is a really loaded word. I have a hard time seeing it as a problem that (some) white people can go shopping without getting harassed; it’s a problem that some POC can’t. But calling that a privilege makes it sound like white people are oppressing POC just by going shopping, which is a bit ridiculous. As pointed out (I can’t find the reference now, sorry), going through your life without being assumed to be a criminal or subject to violence or excluded from jobs and institutions is not a privilege, it’s a basic minimum that everyone should have. Redbird said something really intelligent distinguishing privileges that can only exist at the expense of the unprivileged from general unfairness. If everything from arguments to job interviews favours white people at the expense of POC, then making things fairer would at least in the short term disadvantage white people.

A big problem with the privilege list way of looking at things is that it can only really look at one axis at a time, and in fact most people are probably members of less favoured groups in some respects and more favoured groups in others. Lots of people looked at the class privilege meme and complained because it assumed middle-class people to have loads of advantages, without considering things like health, appearance, race, good versus bad (or even abusive) parenting, sexual orientation, gender identity, social ability and so on, which obviously have a big effect on whether someone has a good or bad childhood. I also don’t think it’s wise to make facile analogies between the different ways that some groups may be at a disadvantage; sexism is not the same thing as racism is not the same thing as ableism is not the same thing as fat-hatred. I also don’t think it’s wise to discuss as if all these things can readily be separated.

The original privilege list didn’t do this explicitly, but it is often used in this way, and I think it’s not surprising given the choice of term and the whole political context of this sort of list: someone who “has privilege” is automatically assumed to be deliberately wielding that privilege to hurt people who “lack privilege”. It’s common in a certain type of identity politics to talk about “the oppressor class” and “the oppressed class”. Yes, there is a very important difference between a white person making a racist remark to a black person and a black person saying something disparaging about honkies or whiteys. That doesn’t mean that all white people are racists and all black people are saints.

What happens when privilege gets brought up in (online) discussions? Sometimes it’s used to make people considered to be privileged shut up; their opinion isn’t valid at all because they have too much privilege or “entitlement” or “internalized whatever-ism”. In some cases this is a feature; if members of a minority feel that they are always being shouted down by members of a majority, and they want to create a community where that dynamic is reversed, fine, good for them. It may well be more important to hear the views of members of a (hopefully relevant!) minority. But in other cases the members of the minority are actually trying to have a discussion with the members of the majority, and appealing to privilege tends to spoil this. I think the main reason is that couching things in those sorts of terms just makes the people from a dominant background defensive. People are generally willing to accept that they have advantages compared to others, but to call those advantages privileges makes lots of people upset. Emotionally, an extremely likely reaction is to point out that your life isn’t that great after all, and I’ve seen far too many discussions derailed into hopeless shouting matches. The activists in favour of some oppressed group are accusing everybody in sight of exercising privilege (the activists who do this are as likely as not to belong to the culturally favoured group themselves, mind you), and the members of the dominant group enumerate all the disadvantages in their life and protest that they are not whatever-ist.

The thing about privilege is it’s an unanswerable argument. Anyone who criticizes it is open to the accusation that they’re just acting out of privilege which lets them deny their privilege so that they can contribute to the oppression of the unprivileged. Undoubtedly, this is sometimes the case. But assuming that it always is leads to a lot of really unproductive and circular discussions.

They don’t have Remembrance Day in Sweden. This makes perfect sense, since Sweden wasn’t involved in either of the World Wars. But it’s odd to come into November and not see any poppies.

Just like it’s odd to go to villages with no war memorial in the centre, and it’s odd to have to consciously break the assumption that people of my grandparents’ generation will have service experiences. The phrase “in the war” has almost no referent here. I’m living in a society that didn’t lose huge swathes of the entire male population in two successive generations. There was no baby boom here, but rather an economic boom when the rest of Europe was crippled in the post-war period and Sweden wasn’t (that was the time when Sweden became a nation of immigrants, because the sudden expansion of industry created a huge labour shortage).

The Jewish community remember the war, WW2 at least, but for them the war is tangled with Nazism and the Holocaust. This week we marked the anniversary of Kristallnacht; there are proportionally more people here who were personally affected than in England, I think. Those who were already in Sweden by the 30s remember what it was like with Occupied Norway on one border, and Axis Finland on the other, and Occupied Denmark just across the water. And the Swedish government allowing the German trains to travel through their supposedly neutral country, and the general atmosphere of relative sympathy for the Nazis (did anti-Communism or anti-Semitism come first? It’s hard to say.) But none of that is the stuff I’m accustomed to remembering on this date.

Facebook and LJ reminded me of the date, and having been reminded, made me feel I wasn’t remembering on my own. So I am adding my post to what seems like a kind of virtual ceremony.

A human is built from dust and their fate is dust. They spend their life earning a living. A life like a breakable cup, like withering grass, like a fading flower, like a passing shadow, like a melting cloud, like a fleeting wind, like scattering dust, like a fading dream…

High Holy Days liturgy, R Amnon of Mainz, c 1100

Cities and Thrones and Powers,
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,
The Cities rise again.

This season’s Daffodil,
She never hears,
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year’s;
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days’ continuance,
To be perpetual.

So Time that is o’er-kind,
To all that be,
Ordains us e’en as blind,
As bold as she:
That in our very death,
And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
“See how our works endure!”

Rudyard Kipling, 1906

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:2-9, c 250 BCE

Consider the following pair of statements:

A] God created the world.
B] A combination of random mutation and natural selection gives rise to new species.

There seems to be a persistent assumption that A implies not B. Even worse, there is a minor industry based on the false corollary that B implies not A, which really has no logical basis at all. This annoys me, because a lot of energy is being expended on debates which are logically stupid, but which also have harmful effects.

A is of course commonly known as creationism, and B is commonly referred to as the theory of evolution. I would argue that the two statements are almost independent. Without violating logic, a person could easily assent to both statements, or hold that both statements are false, as well as the more typical configuration of assenting to A and not B (the stereotypical fundamentalist Christian creationist), or not A and B (the stereotypical strictly materialist atheist).

Consider, for example, a Buddhist who does not believe statement A, because he holds that the world has always existed, and that there is no supreme being who could reasonably described by the English word God. I don’t think we can predict anything about what this person believes about whether or not new species evolve by mutation and natural selection. Consider also a positivist materialist type who is absolutely convinced that no such thing as a deity could possibly exist (not A). There is no reason to assume that this person believes in Darwinian evolution (B); she could for example be a strict neutralist, who believes that the persistence of some variants in a population is totally stochastic and natural selection has no significant effect. As for someone who assents to both A and B, I don’t have to make up an example; I myself hold both statements to be true (though my attitude towards the two statements is not at all identical).

Clearly the root of the problem is not in fact poor logic, it’s the existence of a very vocal group of people who say that they believe A, when in fact they also believe α, namely that the creation account in the book of Genesis is “literally” true. α can reasonably be said to imply not B, because if all the species were there at the moment of creation, then there is no speciation and no evolution. In fact, it’s not totally unreasonable to say that α and B are fully mutually exclusive; B doesn’t strictly imply not α (because Genesis could be literally true, but the standard interpretation of its literal truth could be wrong), but it’s close enough.

The people who are putting serious effort into convincing everybody of α and not B are, I believe, rather dangerous. Let’s call them political Creationists (to distinguish them from the much larger group of everybody in the world who believes A; that distinction is going to be important for the development of this argument). I don’t think that ultimately, political Creationists really care whether the account in Genesis is literally true. The originators of this philosophy are American fundamentalist Christians, and they have two rather unsavoury aims. The first is to force their brand of Christianity into a position of direct political influence, including in public schools. That means they’re working to undermine the US Constitution whose First Amendment prohibits establishment of any religion. In one way that’s kind of a local issue, but American politics does tend to spill over into the rest of the world.

The second aim is to undermine the credibility of science in general. In order to increase the powerbase of a fundamentalist religion, political Creationists are trying to make critical thinking more difficult. That’s what makes it really scary for those of us who are not Americans. It also explains why people who are not at all American fundamentalist Christians are getting involved in this, including a growing minority of Muslims and a few rather wacky Jews, as well as some other Christian groups. It seems like these other groups want a slice of the power that fundamentalists in the US are accumulating, and political Creationism looks like a way to achieve that.

It’s understandable that people are worried about this phenomenon. But I find there’s a big problem with the measures being taken to combat it. I think the people who are writing books and making TV programmes in which they eagerly try to convince people that evolution really does happen, claiming that this shows all religion is false, are actually allowing the unpleasant element to frame the debate. I am not saying that arguing with them gives them legitimacy, exactly, but more that arguing with them on their terms is already giving them a significant advantage, even if their arguments are weaker. (There’s also the fact that the militant atheist crowd annoy me because of the lack of logic mentioned at the start of this post; there’s no good reason to assume that all people with any religious views at all necessarily believe α, and it’s entirely fallacious to claim that evidence in favour of evolution is evidence in favour of atheism.) But more seriously, arguing as if verifying the Darwinian view somehow “proves” that God doesn’t exist (B implies not A), is only encouraging people who don’t understand or don’t find the theory of evolution satisfying towards the theist, creationist view (not B implies A). For one thing the theory of evolution is hard to understand and not at all intuitive. For a second thing, Darwin himself said some things that were wrong, and other evolutionary biologists have also occasionally said wrong things. Nobody sensible is claiming that scientists are infallible. But the way the debate is being framed by the political Creationists, and the way that framing is accepted by the militant atheists, make it tempting to infer that if Darwin was wrong, then fundamentalist Christians must be right.

In order to “win”, all the political Creationists need to do is to convince people that there’s a legitimate controversy about the theory of evolution. They don’t have to convince people that their version of the origins of life is correct, simply that the standard scientific model is “just a theory”, and it’s a matter of pure personal preference whether you decide to “believe” in evolution or in literal-according-to-the-fundamentalist-interpretation-of-Genesis Creationism. That’s enough to challenge the scientific edifice. Once this false controversy is legitimized, it’s easy to promote other similar false controversies, because you’ve encouraged an atmosphere where the scientific method is worthless, and it’s all just a matter of what view seems most appealing. There are similar bits of propaganda about climate change, with a false controversy about whether human activity is altering the global environment or whether God promised there would never be another flood so no person of faith needs to worry about sea levels rising. And about the effectiveness of various kinds of contraception and exactly how certain medical procedures work. If there’s believed to be a controversy, most people’s sense of fairness means that they want to give equal consideration to the two “sides”, even if in fact one side is utterly disingenuous and will say anything until they come up with something that sounds plausible, while the other is based on empirical evidence and entirely open to legitimate challenges.

Let me make a note about the different values of belief for the two statements. A is clearly a statement of religious belief. You can try to challenge it on logical or empirical grounds if you really want to, but you’re probably just going to end up annoying the people who hold the belief. I would venture that the vast majority of people who hold religious beliefs do not hold them because they are completely convinced by some practical evidence or some irrefutable logic. They hold the beliefs because they find them emotionally appealing, or perhaps because they come from a community where those beliefs are common currency. That goes for a lot of atheism too, I would argue. People who hold a particular philosophical or religious belief may try to rationalize it by presenting arguments and evidence, but in the end the justification is primarily a way to make them feel better about themselves, it’s not the reason for believing a certain way. (My personal opinion is that anyone who claims they can “prove” God’s existence is believing in something that isn’t God, and anyone who claims they can prove God’s non-existence has misunderstood the nature of religion.)

B is a scientific theory. I happen to think the evidence for it is pretty solid at this point, and it does seem to make good predictions about how biology works. Rationalists defending the theory of evolution often make pious (sic) pronouncements about how scientific theory can always be challenged by new evidence or a better interpretation of current evidence. In principle that’s true, but really, how many people have personally examined all the evidence in favour of Darwinian evolution and found it satisfactory? I know I haven’t, and I’m a professional biologist! So to some extent people believe B as a matter of trust; we believe in the scientific method, with its empiricism, its peer review, its assumption of induction. And we believe in the scientific establishment as people who are true to the principles of the scientific method, and who genuinely are willing to revise their models when new evidence appears. We accept things as being true because scientists have come to a consensus on them, which is essentially an argument from authority, when it comes down to it.

Now, I do happen to think that science is about the best method we have of understanding the world. But I also think that we shouldn’t go too far in assuming that “Science” has access to the Ultimate Truth, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there is an element of trust and assumptions involved. This situation also implies that scientists have a responsibility to communicate their results clearly and honestly to the non-scientific world, and people who are not scientists have a responsibility to be educated enough to maintain a reasonable level of skepticism.

Anyway, the main conclusion is that statements A and B are independent because they are different kinds of statements. If people want to argue for or against one, they shouldn’t muddy the waters by trying to talk about the other. The secondary conclusion is that there are some extremely unpleasant people who have a vested interest in convincing people of not B, and that decent people should be very careful in how they argue against such unpleasant elements, to avoid accidentally playing to their hidden aims.

I posted a slightly tongue-in-cheek essay to my OKCupid journal recently, on the topic of men who whine that women on OKCupid are rude to them. I give several possible reasons why women might be rude in an online dating context like OKCupid:

1. The major one: most women have the experience of being pestered and hassled by men who won’t take no for an answer. Polite friendliness is taken as a definite come-on, mere polite refusal may be ignored or used as an excuse to try to persuade, so many women jump straight into blunt refusal, or simply ignoring unwanted overtures altogether.
2. In person, women are afraid (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the person and the situation) of violence. Often, women try to turn men down as gently and politely as possible, not because they really care about hurting the guy’s feelings, but because they are afraid things will turn ugly if they are too direct. It’s a balance between making it unambiguously clear that you’re not interested, and causing offence which might put you in danger. I personally hate having to judge this balance, but it is a fact of life.

   However, online the threat of violence is much less, and even verbal violence can be avoided by blocking messages from a harasser. Men who (without realizing it) are used to a certain degree of deference from women they approach in person, find it shocking when women online are free to say what they really think.

3. In an online dating context, women have quite a significant advantage over men; simply being female means you are in demand to a certain extent. That means women can afford to be picky, and in fact probably need to be picky, if they don’t want to spend their entire life managing their social network on dating sites.
4. Some women are just rude, superficial, etc. The online context allows the worst of women to behave like the worst of men, whether it’s rudeness, impossibly high standards, pursuing sex aggressively or whatever. It’s dangerous for women to do this kind of thing in real life, so few do.

Basically, my suspicion is that men have the upper hand in in person dating contexts, because of their social position and to a minor extent greater physical strength. When they lose these advantages in online dating, they are distressed. Some of them are distressed because they are genuinely decent people who are utterly unaware how a certain proportion of jerks behave towards women, and don’t understand how that benefits them in person (because they get let down gently when they approach a woman who isn’t interested), but disadvantages them online (because women are on the defensive and expect to be hassled). Some of them are distressed because they are sad cases who enjoy having power over women and can’t deal with any diminishing of that power.

The version I posted on OKCupid was a lot less harsh than this. I filled it with disclaimers about how I’m sure all the men doing the complaining are basically decent people, and how I understand that it’s really upsetting if a woman is rude to you because of other men being jerks to her in the past. Even so, within minutes I got a comment from a guy whining that I was expecting men to be omniscient, and how unfair it is that women are so mean to him. (I suspect this is partly a ploy, he wants me to come back to him and try to prove that I’m not like those mean horrible women that he’s complaining about.)

I’m also reminded of this long and tangled discussion on Making Light. There was a thread that was vaguely about feminism, and a commenter showed up with an anecdote about an incident of fairly standard harrassment of a woman by men. The reaction to it was kind of amazing. Many women started talking about how she might have been in physical danger, and ways to assess the probability of and hopefully avoid really extreme things like gang rape in that sort of situation. Many men started talking about how the guy sounded like he was a bit clueless but he didn’t mean any harm, and there was no need for her to overreact so much, she should have been more polite. (Her supposed rudeness, by the way, consisted of: So I take off the headphones, look him dead in the eye, and say, “I would like to be left alone. I thought by now that would be obvious. Good night.” And I put the headphones back on.)

Now, the discussion wasn’t divided purely along gender lines, but the gulf was definitely significant. The thread unfortunately devolves into people yelling at eachother, with some trying to frame the whole discussion with standard feminist theory and others not understanding the asusmptions of said feminist theory, and I don’t think any of that is helpful. But I think it’s part of the same phenomenon I’m talking about in this post. Men just don’t know what it’s like to go through the world being female, and don’t understand why a lot of women make an assumption of malice when an unknown man approaches them. Also, they don’t see malice when it actually exists; the guy in Nicole’s story wasn’t just socially inept, he was getting off on having power over her, but he was keeping his threats deniable.

I’ve never been offended by a man chatting me up or expressing interest in me, if it’s genuine. I am offended by men being sleazy and lechy because they can get away with it. I really don’t like having to be wary of men; by nature I’m very friendly and will chat to pretty much anybody who approaches.

I’m in that annoying stage where I don’t quite have time to write about the things I want to write about. This is partly because I’ve been spending my free time following links around and reading other people’s writing, instead of posting.

So I might as well share some of the gems. The internet is full of instant gratification, but this year I’m starting to find myself drawn to full-length, properly though out essays much more than in the past, and the fact they’re online rather than in foreign newspapers I wouldn’t otherwise read is just a matter of convenience.

Michael Pollan’s NYT essay Unhappy meals was getting mocked a bit when it came out. People pounced on the comment about not eating what your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food, which out of context is a ludicrous remark. But actually now I’ve read the whole essay it makes a lot of sense to me. I think it may well be important that food is food, not a formula of a certain number of calories plus a certain set of chemicals that we define as “nutrients” or “vitamins”.

There simply isn’t a short-cut to eating healthily, you just have to eat healthily. However, even if you can get away from the mindset of looking for a magic supplement to add or a demon ingredient to avoid, it’s easy to get carried away with the idea of eating “healthily”. The attitude to health I discussed in my Health and Virtue post last year is totally pernicious, and it’s something that really frequently comes up when the issue at hand is food and diet. (Also, eating healthily has a reasonable chance of making you healthier, but there’s no guarantee at all it will make you thinner. There is essentially no reliable way of losing weight long-term through dieting.) The worst extreme of making a moral issue out of healthy eating (whether that’s environmentally healthy or healthy for you or both) has been defined as orthorexia, a mental unbalance which I think is rather prevalent in our society.

There’s also the issue that eating well is more effort than eating badly; in some cases, it’s the healthier eater who is making the extra effort, and that’s fine. But that’s not always so, and very often the extra work falls to the poorest sectors of society, and disproportionately on women. Chris Clarke’s essay on unpaid labour is well worth reading. It’s wide-ranging, not only discussing food, but it does underline the point that it is very well worth questioning where the extra labour is coming from in preparing real food from fresh, locally grown, organic ingredients. (Yes, it is often possible to spend extra money instead of extra work, but that just means that someone else unseen is doing the extra work instead of you. And sometimes they’re getting the extra money in return, but sometimes they’re not. It’s good to be aware of these things.)

On a completely different matter, try Charlie Stross’ essay on a future without privacy. His premise is interesting one and he’s a persuasive writer, though I think he’s over-estimating the technology and under-estimating the complexity of human society. Myself, I’m leaning more and more towards the view that rather than trying to keep my various online identities separate and private (ultimately a futile task), I should just make everything open and take care never to post anything that I could be ashamed or embarrassed about. One point of Stross’ that is applicable to our current technology, let alone his projected future, is that you can’t protect your own privacy online because you don’t have control over the people who interact with you and what they publish.

Hm, so much for not having time to post so I’ll just put up a few links! That turned into a long essay after all. Let’s see if I can harness that verbal energy into writing the review I’m working on.

I’ve been doing various bits and pieces of running services in the last few months, both the egalitarian traditional service with Ploni bat Ploni, and on my own, and I want to talk about my reactions to this.

I should make it clear that in Judaism, any competent adult can lead the service. It doesn’t mean that you’re especially holy, and it’s somewhat prestigious but less so than some other ritual roles which work out as rather less effort in practice. It’s preferred to choose someone of high moral character, given the option, but I don’t know many communities where they turn people down for not being moral enough! So when I talk about leading services, it’s just a minor skill I happen to have, I’m not showing off about some amazing accomplishment or high office.

The thing that started off this train of thought is that people were being appreciative when I led the Progressive service back in March. I found this slightly awkward for two reasons. The people who congratulated me on my lovely speaking voice and my interesting explanations and so on made me feel awkward because it’s not meant to be a performance, it’s meant to be prayer. But even so, it’s undeniably true that there are some elements of stagecraft involved, and the service is likely to be more enjoyable if the leader does have talents in that direction rather than not. And yes, I am good at it on a purely pragmatic level. (Well, apart from the bit where I’m totally unmusical, but in recent months I’ve been working in tandem with people who make up for that deficiency.) Compilerbitch pointed out to me a while ago that I have in fact been doing this sort of thing since I was eight (from 8 to 12 it was children’s services and fragments that don’t have ritual import, because being an adult is in fact a necessary qualification). So it’s not surprising that I know what I’m doing, and she’s right too that this kind of skill does overlap with other kinds of public speaking such as presenting my work at scientific conferences.

Even more awkward were the people who gushed about what an amazing spiritual experience it was and how I made them feel closer to God and so on. I suppose that is the aim, but it’s a very weird thing to be appreciated for. And that too is partly a matter of technique. Lowering my voice at the right moment, using my expressions and body language to underline the emotional import, judiciously picking music and texts that will evoke a reaction, making lots of eye contact to give the impression that I’m speaking personally to each member of the congregation, even crying a little if it seems apt. Stagecraft, in short, but intentionally manipulating my audience’s emotions is more acceptable in a secular context. A generous interpretation is that I’m using these techniques to help people to relate to their own spiritual feelings, and certainly it’s the case that what you get out of a service depends ultimately on your own emotional context, however skillful the leader may be.

The thing is, I don’t find it possible to be sincerely religious and lead a service at the same time, so I have to fake it a bit. It takes a lot of concentration to hold an audience like this, watching the body language of several dozen people to make sure everyone is with you, and worrying about the logistics and the timing and putting in order what I want to say and reading the Hebrew correctly at the same time. Even if it is partly acting, when it’s going well I am making a genuine emotional connection with people I don’t know very well, and that takes effort. I am certainly not praying while I’m holding all this stuff together. I usually find I’m exhausted by the end of the service, and it’s a real ordeal to be all smiley and friendly afterwards when people come to commend me on a successful service.

And to be honest, I’m not in a very religious phase of my life at the moment. I am doing lots of Jewish stuff, but I’m connecting to the community rather than to anything metaphysical. I do think that sort of commitment to the community is at least as important as personal spiritual ecstasy, mind you. When I lead a service I start with the kavannah, the statement of intention: Behold, I am ready to perform the positive commandment of loving one’s neighbour, and that definitely represents what is most meaningful about the process for me. I have this talent, and it’s something the community needs, so it’s a good fit, a good opportunity to contribute.

Not that the reaction is universally positive. The Progressive group has the usual problem of trying to be all things to all people, and there are people who are annoyed because the service is too traditional and might as well be Orthodox, and other people who are annoyed because I change what they consider immutable. Those criticisms don’t really bother me, because they’re basically inevitable in this sort of situation. We have a very new Progressive community that doesn’t have a strong sense of positive identity yet, and almost all the members are either dissatisfied ex-Orthodox people or seeking formerly secular people. Also, we’re somewhat a breakaway group from the main, Conservative community and there inevitably going to be some people who feel threatened by that and don’t approve of the Progressive concept anyway.

But I’ve had a couple of more personal and somewhat upsetting confrontations. One woman backed me into a corner and harangued me for not doing enough. She meant well, she was trying to say that my services are wonderful and she wants more, but it came across as really harsh. Never mind that I’m taking charge of at least some part of the liturgy more than once a month, and doing the bar mitzvah teaching, and taking on a good proportion of the adult education in the Progressive group, and doing a bunch of behind the scenes stuff such as being a member of the board. She made it all my fault that we don’t have enough depth of knowledge in the Progressive group, and one service a month isn’t enough to create a strong sense of community, and we should be running a comprehensive educational programme for all levels.

Then today a older man from the main community came and had a go at me for dividing the community and stealing congregants away from the main service. He said that he feels empty and spiritually hurt when the congregation is depleted because lots of the regulars come to my service instead. And since the Conservative community have voted to become egalitarian, why do we need to create discord by having an alternative service? (He would have more of a point if he were talking about the egal minyan rather than the Progressive group, because Progressive Judaism is very different from even the most feminist Orthodox-style liturgy.) I have just about enough Swedish now to say vaguely placatory things but this tirade really wanted a detailed discussion of some quite abstract ideas and I couldn’t manage that.

*Shrug* This kind of thing is pretty much an expected hazard of the job. Some of the positive enthusiastic people were trying to convince me I should become a rabbi, and I gave my usual flip response that I really don’t need to move into one of the few careers that is worse paid and less secure than academia! At this point, though, I think I could make a tolerable job of being a rabbi. It requires a lot more than just being able to lead services, mind you, but it no longer seems like quite such a ridiculous suggestion as it has in the past.

Another good thing about leading services is that it gets me noticed. Now pretty much everyone in the community greets me by name and I’ve had several invitations to meals as a result of doing the job. For example, last night I ended up going out for a meal with some of the Americans who attended the service. (Foodwise it was nothing special, just mediocre generic Euro-Asian, but it was a nice occasion.) So there’s some material reward as well as the satisfaction of using my talents in a way that benefits the community.

I’ve been annoyed for a long time about the MMR autism scare. Well, annoyed is an understatement; I’m between furious and thoroughly discouraged about humanity at the combination of scientific ignorance and sensationalism which has created a “controversy” where none should exist. The artificial controversy is not just a matter of academic interest, it has serious medical consequences. It has led to an epidemiologically significant proportion of parents refusing to let their children be vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella, which means these diseases are becoming prevalent again. That means children are at risk of permanent disability and death from a cause which is almost completely preventable.

I can’t do anything about this, not even on the small scale where my actions would have any effect anyway. Because the story has been presented as a controversy, anything I might say about the topic is taken as taking one side in a polarized debate. There are plenty of people who feel equally passionately that MMR might cause autism, so people can pick either view based on who has the strongest arguments or the most emotive rhetoric. But the prevalence of the wrong view here is lethal.

Just this week, I was following links from blogs to news stories, and I learned that the whole idea of link between the triple vaccine and autism was invented by unscrupulous lawyers. It’s not only that the original study which showed possible evidence of a link was over-hyped to a ridiculous point, because people don’t understand about sample sizes. It’s that the original study was fabricated, because the charlatan calling himself a scientist was paid to generate data that would be favourable to the legal case so people could make money by suing health providers.

I’d heard rumours about the payments before, but I’d interpreted it charitably as someone who had a particular pet theory and was willing to take money from whomever would provide it to pursue an unpopular hypothesis. But now it seems the unspeakable scum who “funded” the original “study” even went as far as paying the referees to accept a weak paper. So, not just one person but quite a number of people were willing to pervert legal justice, and scientific integrity, and expose the whole population, especially children, to unnecessary and potentially lethal risk. In effect, they were willing to kill. And for what? Not for career advancement, not for self-aggrandisement, not even because of getting overly attached to the first interpretation of preliminary data (though I think the prime culprit probably had those bad motivations as well), but for money.

I suppose one advantage of this thoroughly nasty business is that it might be obvious enough to make people belatedly wake up and realize they have no reason to be scared of the MMR vaccine. If the causing autism thing was obviously faked, and the people behind the fake are obviously, melodramatically evil, that’s perhaps easier to grasp than the idea that the original data possibly suggested a link but later, more detailed analysis showed that the evidence doesn’t stand up. With all the controversy and its wide-ranging legal and medical rammifications, the absence of a measurable link between the vaccine and autism has been demonstrated more thoroughly than just about any other attempt to prove a negative in all of scientific history. It’s a pity that so much research effort has gone into refuting something which should never have seen the light of day in the first place, but it is absolutely and convincingly refuted.

One part of the problem is that detailed scientific evidence against the original shock story isn’t headline-grabbing. It’s much more romantic to believe in a few brave souls fighting against the evil medical establishment to protect children from the nasty vaccine, than to appreciate that the original data doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. But if it was all fabricated in the first place, by vile scum who care more about financial gain than human life, it’s understandable and not at all surprising that subsequent work showed it was baseless.

So, a combination of scientific forgery and unscrupulous media reporting led to a lot of people believing that being vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella simultaneously would cause autism. As a result, about 1 in 5 of the children who would otherwise have been vaccinated in the last ten years have not been vaccinated. This means that the population immunity is below the critical threshold; unfortunately, this means that even those who are vaccinated are at increased risk because no vaccine is perfect, so you need a big enough proportion of the population to be vaccinated so that the disease can’t spread. At least one child has died of measles in that time; maybe he would have died anyway, but no child in the UK died of measles in the decade before the controversy broke.

I think the problem goes deeper than just people holding false beliefs about the vaccine, though. Part of the issue is that people think that measles, mumps and rubella are just minor ailments that lead to nothing worse than feeling miserable for a few days, whereas autism is this big horrible scary thing. I think it’s important to emphasize that autism is neither infectious nor lethal, unlike measles and mumps. And that in turn is part of the stigma against mental illness and intellectual disability, which leads to horrors like this.

I’ve been intending to write this post for ages, cos I want to babble about learning Swedish. I found out today that I passed my second level Swedish course, and that seems as good a motivation as any to actually get on and post this.

(In theory, the European A2 level of language competence means that I am supposed to be able to manage simple shopping conversations and ordering food in a restaurant; discuss hobbies, interests and jobs using simple questions and answers; understand the gist of written texts if I’m familiar with the subject matter; understand simple statements spoken at normal pace if I know the context; write simple notes and texts though not without errors. So it’s probably a bit below GCSE level, I’d estimate. In practice my comprehension of both speech and writing is quite a bit ahead of this, but my active Swedish lags rather a way behind as yet.)

Anyway, yeah, Swedish is a great language for me, because it has lots of elongated vowels! It sounds slightly comical until you get used to it, something like if an Italian learnt English from a really plummy-voiced Etonian. In fact, it’s more “lilting” than the languages that are traditionally described as such, because it has intrinsic tone. Apparently proto-IE had it, but I’ve never come across that feature in any modern day Germanic languages. Apart from that and a few other unique features, it’s somewhere between English and German, but closer to English, particularly archaic and regional forms. So relatively easy for a native speaker of English with a smattering of German and an even smaller smattering of Yiddish. And lots of words that don’t have obvious cognates in standard English do have them in Scots: barn -> bairn; grata -> greet [to cry].

Lethargic Man described Swedish as looking like a conlang made up by a naive English speaker. And really, everything that makes Swedish hard to learn is either the same as English or worse in English. Lots of strong verbs and a few that are actually irregular, as well as a rather large number of options for plurals. Evil phrasal verbs, which however work mostly the same as in English. Mildly inflected pronouns but not most of the rest of the language. Unpredictable and non-phonetic spelling, though nothing like on the scale that English has it. If English is notorious for following other languages up dark alleys and mugging them for spare vocabulary, Swedish is at least the Artful Dodger. There’s a lot more Romance-originating stuff than I expected, and no consistency at all in how far these imported words get Swedish-ized. There’s even some of the same tendency to have both a Romance / Latinate and a Germanic word for the same thing.

Other cool stuff: lots of German style compound words. Nouns can be, and frequently are, verbed. Verbs themselves don’t distinguish person, number or aspect, only tense, which certainly makes dealing with all the vowel changes and irregular conjugations a lot easier! Though unlike English there actually is a passive voice rather than just using the past participle for the passive. Ending a sentence with a preposition is actually grammatically correct, so you can see how the despised but in fact natural construction got into English. In general, relative clauses are more intuitive if less strictly logical; you can’t always say exactly what the pronouns point to, but that allows less convoluted constructions.

Just about my favourite thing about Swedish is that it has a special word for saying “yes” to a negative question. My second favourite is that word for why is varför. Lots of precise words for describing family relationships, such as four separate words for the four grandparents. One of my Swedish classes early on fell apart completely when we learned the word barnbarn, grandchild, because a Chinese guy in the class speculated that the reduplicated word might mean “two children”. The hilarity was only increased when the teacher pointed out that barnbarnsbarn means not three children, but great-grandchild. There are also separate words for his-referring-to-the-subject and his-referring-to-someone-else, which must make writing slash easier in Swedish.

Things that confuse me: the intrinsic tone stuff, which means that two words which differ only in stress can mean completely different things. I suppose that’s no worse than English, really, but it also makes it hard for me to speak correctly, because tone is not something I’m used to including when I learn new vocabulary. Also it’s harder to guess what someone is saying from tone of voice when you don’t know the vocabulary, because some of it is just part of the pronunciation of the word itself. Adjectives hurt my brain, because they sometimes decline and sometimes don’t and sometimes just use the plural form for no obviously plural reason. The tendency to combine letters across word boundaries is a bit hard to get my head round, too. R, for example, is not rhotic, but modifies the preceding vowel, which I can cope with from English, and also softens following ss. This is ok, but it still carries on doing that when one word ends in r and the following word begins with s, which I find weird. Alphabetical order is slightly strange too; å and ä are separate letters from a, coming after z, and ö comes after that rather than mixed in with o as I would expect. But w (in foreign-imported words) is counted as if it were exactly the same letter as v. There is only really one sound I can’t pronounce, but unfortunately it is in my age and the name of the district where I live.

Another weird thing is that it’s common, though not obligatory, to breathe in while saying “yes”. To me, someone speaking through an indrawn breath has immediate connotations of shock or fear. I would have thought that sort of thing was at a more basic level than language, and without really thinking about it, expected it to be essentially universal. Here, though, a gasp means “I agree” or “That’s so”.

Not too many false friends, though slut means finished and it’s a slightly odd thing to see in big letters all over the place!

Anyway, yes, Swedish is cool. I’m having a lot of fun learning it, and I think I’ve got over the initial hump and know enough of the basic structure that I’m picking up new vocab, and feeling more natural with the grammar, as I go along just by being immersed. My accent still sucks, but I can make myself understood if people are prepared to overlook that.

I’m probably going to offend everyone with this post, but hey. Several things have come up recently that have put the idea into my head to post about the dreaded topic of abortion.

The main trigger was Lavendersparkle’s excellent polemic. I really like her argument, and it’s one I don’t really see being made in all the mountains of pointless aggro that makes up most of the abortion debate. She argues that The majority of abortions in the US and UK are caused by patriarchy, and gives a very closely reasoned and compelling explanation for this position, because: Abortion doesn’t solve [...] problems; it simply makes them less visible. It pushes the burden of ‘dealing’ with them onto women who are then expected to be thankful that had the ‘choice’ to have an abortion. And her conclusion is the triumphant: I get so annoyed when I see pro choice feminist schmucks kidding themselves that they’ve achieved some kind of feminist utopia by being allowed to use their money, their bodies and their offspring to cover up the huge injustices of our society.

Then I found myself discussing abortion with Ploni bat Ploni, and ended up being quite vehement about certain aspects of the issue. I think I’d probably like to set my thoughts down here.

The last thing which really convinced me I should overcome my trepidation and post about this is the aftermath to this incident at Den of the Biting Beaver. (In case you haven’t seen this, I’ll summarize the background: Biting Beaver is a fairly strident American feminist blogger. She experienced a contraceptive failure and posted about having to go through hell to get the morning after pill. Her post was very widely linked, primarily by lefties outraged at the way the ill named “moral right” have all but closed off access to emergency contraception in the US. But this prominence brought the post to the attention of the pro-life crowd, some of whom proceeded to troll her (see the first link). Eventually, Biting Beaver was able to obtain her morning after pill. However it didn’t work, and Biting Beaver was brave enough to post publically that she is pregnant and intends to have an abortion.)

This conjunction of people talking about abortion served to remind me why I potentially alienate everybody by being neither pro choice nor pro life. Essentially, I think the pro choice movement is generally well-meaning, but in their fervour to keep abortion legal, lose sight of the fact that abortion is not a good thing. However, I think much of the pro life movement is actively evil, even though I am broadly in agreement with the basic tenet that abortion is wrong.

What I think about abortion actually isn’t terribly relevant here; I want to talk about the debate and politics around abortion, not rehash the debate. But FWIW, I believe abortion is wrong, but not murder. I don’t believe that making sure all pregnancies are carried to term is the greatest moral imperative that could ever exist. There are some circumstances where abortion is the least worst of several bad options.

Anyway, my beef here is with the kinds of arguments and behaviours that exist on both sides of the debate. When it comes to the pro life movement, it’s not even a case of the ends justifying the means; most of the methods and arguments are not only cruel and unjust, but actively counterproductive. The people who called Biting Beaver the vilest of names and sent her death, rape and torture threats when she was in the middle of a personal crisis are surpassed in evil only by the people who sent her apparently helpful, sympathetic emails with recipes for lethal poisons they claimed were herbal abortefacents. And that kind of thing is all too common in the pro life movement. A prolifer would argue that it’s not fair to judge the whole movement by a few fringe extremists, but the fact of the matter is that even the supposedly moderate sectors of the pro life campaign do a lot of harm, and don’t save any babies in the process.

Good sex education would prevent a large number of abortions, yet pro life politics seems to support leaving sex education as late as possible and as incomplete as possible. Teaching teenagers (and vulnerable adults) that having sex is evil, but using protection is really, really unforgivably evil can only lead to unwanted pregnancies. Lying about the effectiveness of protection and the biological reality of pregnancy might change a few minds on the abortion issue, but only for as long as the victim remains ignorant; once they find out they’ve been deceived they’re almost certainly going to reject the central part of the message too. That is to say, if your argument against abortion is based on an Aristotelian view that a zygote contains a little tiny human being, fully formed from the moment of conception and therefore having full human rights, it’s a pretty weak argument given that an early embryo is not in fact a miniature human being. And arguing from cuteness is very dubious indeed; there are plenty of non cute creatures and people who need protection and if a foetus’ rights depend on the fact that it’s (supposedly, though actually not) cute, they are not real rights.

Attacking women who are sexually active (and if someone’s pregnant there’s no way for her to be in the closet about it) is only going to encourage abortion. In general, promoting rigid gender roles is likely to leave more women vulnerable to being pressured into sex or unsafe sex or, in fact, abortion. Arguing as if having a baby were a punishment for being “irresponsible” or worse, slutty is certainly not an encouragement for keeping the baby if an unwanted pregnancy occurs. Restricting adoption to white, middle class, monogamous, straight, married couples (and then slandering even those who do adopt because it’s so important for children to be brought up by their biological parents) means that it’s harder to find adoptive parents and more women will choose abortion than otherwise. In Biting Beaver’s case, the actions of the pro life movement led directly to her being in the situation of needing an abortion; the lie that pro life propaganda has promulgated that the morning after pill is an abortefacent means that more and more medical institutions are reluctant to prescribe it, and the length of time it took Beaver to obtain her pill would undoubtedly have reduced its effectiveness.

As for withdrawing funding from charities that provide medical care and education to the world’s most vulnerable, on the grounds that such charities have “links” (defined extremely vaguely) with abortion providers, that is absolutely morally despicable and is certainly going to lead to more, not fewer, babies dying. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff on these lines, where abortion is so broadly defined that various gynecological medical procedures are subject to the same opprobium, and again, worse healthcare for women and mothers is going to lead to more pre-natal deaths. So this is wrong even if you somehow believe that the mother’s welfare is entirely irrelevant and only the unborn child matters.

I can only conclude that the real motive of the pro life movement is not, in fact, preventing abortions. I think part of it is in fact simple misogyny. As a side note, I don’t believe that “the patriarchy” is trying to make lots of women have unwanted babies, any more than I believe that there is a worldwide conspiracy of men to make lots of women have abortions. This is primarily because I don’t find it plausible that there is a worldwide conspiracy of men full stop. But “the patriarchy” can be a useful shorthand for all the ways that society is systematically unfair to women. I do think that some of the pro life attitude is based on assumptions which boil down to women being inferior and sex being evil and so on, and that some of that has the largely incidental consequence of putting lots of women in situations where they need abortions while also attacking them for being in that situation and for having abortions.

A major part of it is this weird political thing where you somehow convince the electorate to vote against their interests by using abortion as an emotional lever. If voting for a right wing party, no matter how racist, authoritarian and even incompetent it may be, is seen as supporting the baby savers over the baby killers, that’s a very strong card for the right wing party. I have also seen the extremely cynical argument, I think probably from , that people who don’t have good access to birth control are likely to be more politically compliant. Some of the best people, the ones who would otherwise be at the barricades, are neutralized because they are precisely the ones who will step up to their responsibilities and take care of more children than they can really afford.

Now to the pro choice movement. I think because they are fighting such a dreadful beast, many pro choicers are inclined to get quite fanatical about their cause. Anyone who expresses the slightest doubt that abortion is great, the pinnacle of human achievement, and people should have as many abortions as possible because yay abortion, is suspected of helping the pro life enemy.

I think there is an important difference between the US and Europe. Certainly, it is American politics which dominates online debates, and the issues are not always applicable over here. I know that some people react to stories like Biting Beaver’s relatively smugly, sure that that kind of religious fundamentalism claiming to be pro life in order to push a particular religious agenda, could never happen here. I’m not so complacent about that; I think a lot of American political ideas do contaminate the meme pool over here. Still, while the evil pro life movement has less traction in Europe than the States, there are important differences in the respective pro choice movements.

American pro choice arguments are often based on rights and feminism. Women have the “right” to choose, the “right” to self-determination, the “right” to decide what happens with their bodies, the “right” not to be pregnant and not to give birth and not to be mothers. AIUI, the original laws permitting abortion were based on considerations of privacy, so it makes sense that this is the argument that pro choice campaigners rely on. The problem is it makes little sense to talk about the right to do something which is not a desirable thing to do in the first place. Pro lifers would counter that the unborn child has a right to life which trumps the right of the woman to these issues of autonomy and privacy. And my problem here, as very well expressed by Lavendersparkle, is that by loudly proclaiming the right of women to minimize the effects of injustice by having abortions, it is easy to forget about fighting the injustices which led to women being a situation to want to have an abortion in the first place.

European pro choice arguments tend to be much more medical. In the UK, which is the situation I know best, the law and many of the arguments are framed in terms of permitting abortion where carrying the pregnancy to term would harm the health of the mother. At the moment, a situation where having a child would totally ruin the mother’s life is, and I think justly, regarded as a real harm. But there’s this other aspect, which is about the health of the potential child. Foetuses with congenital defects can be aborted right up to full term; there is no time limit as is the case for healthy foetuses. This political reality is, I think, extremely harmful to the cause of disability rights. If one frames the argument in the American terms, one can say that a woman has the right to refuse the responsibility of caring for a disabled child. That’s perhaps distasteful, but my opinion is that it should be distasteful. That’s what the whole idea of the right to choose is based on, that women are entitled to kill a foetus if they don’t want to be responsible for the baby it will become. But in Europe, you often hear people arguing that abortion is morally best for the baby, because it would be “cruel” to bring into the world a child that would have such terrible quality of life. That is an argument I have a huge problem with, because it very quickly shades into the meme that it is better to be dead than disabled.

I happen to believe that the issue, like many moral questions, is extremely complicated and good people can come to different conclusions from me, and still be good people. But if you want to take exception to this, go ahead.

Currently, the main place where I hang out online is LiveJournal. I’m not sure if LiveJournal is going to continue to suit what I want from blogging, so I’ve set up a WordPress account. I’ve crossposted some of my old posts, ones that I think are of general interest rather than the day-to-day personal stuff that makes up the greatest proportion of my journal. I have not decided whether I’ll switch completely, but for the time being I’m going to be running the two in parallel.

More and more, I am noticing a really pernicious meme: the substitution of health for religious virtue, or even salvation. And the notion of virtue that is being replaced with health was a bad and dangerous frame for morality anyway. A blog post like this is only the tiniest of drops towards countering this bad meme, but I would rather make the post than do nothing. And of course I welcome any criticism or development of my argument.

The other week I was in synagogue for a Progressive service. The rabbi commented that the prayerbook we were using omitted the traditional practice of reciting the passage from Deuteronomy which states that if you follow God’s law you will have good weather and good harvests, and if you don’t you will have famines. I might question the wisdom of drawing attention to passages that you have decided to omit, but anyway. The point is that most people see this as a pretty nonsensical position; they either conclude that the Bible is rubbish, or they read it in such a metaphorical way that the plain meaning vanishes out of sight, or they don’t read it at all, depending on their approach to Scripture. (The commonest Orthodox practice, by the way, is to read it, because you mustn’t change the liturgy, but in an undertone because it makes people uncomfortable.)

Of course, religions come up with all sorts of devious ways to explain the problem that transparently, people aren’t happy in proportion to their moral or religious virtue. For example, apologists may regard undeserved suffering as a test of faith, or they may relegate the reward and punishment business to the afterlife or other incarnations. To my mind, this kind of thing is pretty bad theology. Anyway, it’s very hard for anyone taking any sort of rational approach to believe that good people get rewarded while anything bad that happens is a punishment.

However, many rationalists who would laugh hilariously at anyone who tried to take literal reward and punishment seriously, are quite prepared to accept something completely analogous when it comes to health. Everybody knows that it’s important to eat a balanced diet, do proper exercise, refrain from ingesting toxins, and avoid obvious unnecessary risks. Let me be perfectly clear: I’m not denying that all those things are important and desirable.

But it doesn’t follow that if you live healthily, you won’t get sick or have any debilitating accidents. Everyone dies eventually. Everyone. You don’t attain immortal life by following the appropriate magic ritual. And the very great majority of people get sick at some point during their life; at the very least people either die young or grow old. On average, people who make healthy lifestyle choices are healthier. But that average tells you absolutely nothing about a particular individual.

It most certainly doesn’t follow that anyone who does get sick must have made bad choices. Just as Christianity goes way off the rails when it preaches that people who are rich must be enjoying God’s favour because of their good moral choices while anyone who is poor must deserve it, any philosophy which argues that everybody whose health is less than perfect must have done something to bring it on themselves, is complete bullshit. Stated like that, of course, few people would agree with that position, yet many people argue as if that were a valid assumption and take positions which do very much boil down to the idea that “good”, ie healthy, people get rewarded and “bad” people who deliberately choose to be unhealthy in spite of all the evidence get punished.

One parallel with bad theology is that what is considered to be healthy behaviour consists of a set of rules that are extremely baroque, not at all internally consistent, and often simply arbitrary. Plenty of people think I’m weird for keeping kosher and avoiding pork and shellfish, but are perfectly happy to cut out whole major food groups from their diet such as fat or carbohydrates. There’s definitely a kind of asceticism going on. A healthy diet is a sparse one, and any food that tastes good or drug that produces good emotional feelings is treated as decadent, even “sinful”. (This ties in with the false connection between health and thinness, which I’m not going to go into here because that’s too much flamebait even for me.)

And there’s the hierophantic aspect of authority. Who gets to decide what is healthy or unhealthy? The mysterious “They”, or “scientists” or “doctors” or even “the government”. Scientists are playing the role of priests here. They are initiated into the mysteries; as a scientist myself, I don’t deny that it does take years of study to become one! And the ordinary lay people (now, there’s a significant word, don’t you think?) must simply accept the wisdom from on high. And of course, most scientists and experts don’t bother to communicate directly with the unwashed masses; we get our information about health filtered down through the media, and through groups that are blatantly manipulating us, either for our own good (one hopes) in the case of government propaganda, or simply for the sake of profit when it’s snake-oil merchants peddling their latest diet plan. Or perhaps somewhere in between. Of course, there are all kinds of rival cults each claiming that they have the One True Way; just observe a debate between supporters of Conventional Medicine and believers in Alternative Medicine some day.

Indeed, there’s a very direct link between equating richness with virtue in bad forms of religion which have degenerated into just props for a corrupt political establishment, and equating richness with health. Not everybody has equal ability to make “right” choices. Yes, it is theoretically possible for a person in financial straits, lacking access to good education, and perhaps with a tendency towards addiction, to live healthily. But it’s very unfair to hold disadvantaged people to the same standards as privileged people. Rich people are almost always healthier than poor people, and better able to deal with any health problems they do have. This does not mean rich people are morally superior, just that the definition of virtue we currently have is one that is vastly easier for rich people to live up to than poor.

There are a myriad of factors which are not within an individual’s control. Of course, that doesn’t mean people should give up trying, but those factors are important and being too busy rushing to moral judgements to account for them is dangerous. To go back to the economic issue, nobody chooses to live somewhere that is unsafe in terms of exposure to violence or toxins, but many people can’t afford to live anywhere generally healthy. No amount of eating up your greens will prevent you from getting sick if you are constantly exposed to asbestos or can’t afford to heat your poorly insulated house properly or you are forced to work unreasonably hard in a stressful job. These issues need to be tackled at a societal level, and blaming individuals who fail to be absolutely saintly in a bad situation is a huge distraction, as well as being morally wrong.

There’s also just random bad luck. This is a concept that many people have a really hard time dealing with, but that’s just how the world works. Sometimes a person gets sick or has an accident not because of anything they did wrong, or because they suffered the consequences of bad politics, but for no reason at all. It’s easy to see why it’s tempting to believe that a healthy lifestyle will keep you safe and healthy; knowing that you do all the right things allows you to be confident that you are one of the “saved”, but it’s a completely false confidence. You might just as well believe that if you do the right magic ritual, some benevolent spirit will keep you safe from harm. And it’s not just that this belief is wrong, it’s also actively harmful to people who do suffer from bad luck, because they get blamed as a psychological defense mechanism so that healthy people don’t have to confront the possibility that something terrible might happen to them too.

A couple of additional notes, to pre-empt the most likely criticisms I expect for this essay. Firstly, I’m not in the least saying that Christianity is terrible or any worse than any other religion. I think some of this view of virtue may be partly influenced by Protestantism, but that’s a guess I can’t prove. It happens that Christianity has been a dominant influence in our society for a long time, and there’s nothing more to any bias in my depiction than that.

On other occasions when I’ve made arguments similar to this, I have found myself getting distracted into stupid debates about whether people should take responsibility for their actions. I absolutely believe that people should take responsibility and should know and accept that their choices have consequences. That’s a given, as far as I’m concerned. But taking responsibility is a completely different thing from believing in magical rituals, or trying to claim that virtue is always rewarded.

Both our internal information people and the local press are
getting very excited because some Karolinska people have made some
pretty good progress towards developing a test that will predict
dementia 20 years ahead. [Press
release, with links to the original article] It’s cool science, no
doubt about it, but I can’t help wondering, would you want to
take a test at the age of 50 that might predict that you had a high
chance of being senile by the time you were 70? I guess it’s the same
problem as with any predictive medical testing: in the absence of a
cure or even sensible prevention, what’s the point of knowing?

I think it’s the timescale that bothers me, in part; I don’t have the
same objection to, say, cervical smears which tell me whether I might
be at risk for cancer in the coming few years. That allows me to do
something about it in terms of possibly readjusting my life plans. But
I can’t plan on the basis of some terrible thing that might happen in
20 years’ time; I’d just have to live with the knowledge that this was
likely to happen to me, which I don’t think would be good
psychologically.

It’s true that almost everybody expects to be mortal (the exceptions
are a few religious people and a few quasi-religious geeks who think
the Singularity is going to cure death). So you always have to run
your life on the basis that you have a few decades at best and
possibly even less. But I’d still rather not know the probable time
and manner of my demise more than a few years in advance, I think.

My friends, I am having a crisis of faith. (Not the religious kind; I don’t have much of that anyway, and I wouldn’t bore you with noodlings about details of theology.) No, I am starting to question my faith in communication.

I have always believed that communication is really, really important. Before I was even verbal my mother used to lecture me about how you should always be careful to communicate exactly what you mean and tell those close to you how you are feeling. And I’ve always lived with that principle.

The doubts started when a friend pointed out that in fact good communication is no guarantee of a good relationship, and most relationships that go wrong go wrong for other reasons apart from communication problems. We were talking mainly about romantic relationships but it’s applicable to other kinds too. For example, if one person stops loving their partner and prefers someone new, the original partner is likely to be hurt and upset, and no amount of communication about what the situation is is going to change that the situation is in fact bad.

There’s also all the issues around attraction and sex and that sort of thing. It’s something I spend a lot of time worrying about: what if he thinks I’m flirting with him when I’m not, what if I say something general and it’s taken as a personal insult, and so on. But it’s possible that this fear is exaggerated, it’s a leftover from adolescence when none of us had any clue about these things, and now that we are adults we don’t need to spell everything out because we have enough shared assumptions and common sense that this kind of disaster isn’t likely any more.

Sartorias made a really interesting post about marriage in fiction. She points out something that I hadn’t thought of: misunderstanding is a convenient way of creating narrative tension while still maintaining sympathy for both characters involved. (Of course, it can get really annoying if it’s over-done to the point where the reader is left thinking, if only they’d bothered talking to eachother on page 1, the whole novel would have been unnecessary!) But just because a lot of fictional relationships run into this particular set of problems, it doesn’t mean that this is a proportionately huge danger in real life.

I still think good communication is better than bad communication, and some communication is better than none. But I am really wondering if I’m making too much of it. If one feels obliged to discuss every detail of one’s feelings and thoughts, that has the potential to get boring. And several people have suggested to me that my very direct style of dealing with attraction can be unromantic or even intimidating, compared to the more expected style of flirting based on lots of hints and allusions and playfulness.

Of course, there’s a huge sample bias here; since I believe communication is very important, I’m drawn to people who also care about communication. Indeed, some of the people I love best in all the world are the people I trust to tell me about anything I might want to know of their inner state, and to clarify and make effort to be sure we understand eachother always. But I do know empirically that there are people who are perfectly happy in their relationships and friendships, without basing their interaction on talking about absolutely everything or even really on conversation at all.

If communication isn’t the whole story, the major factor that makes the difference between good and bad relationships, then what else might there be? I’m tentatively inclined to propose the assumption of goodwill. Perhaps if there is mutual trust that the people involved care about eachother and don’t mean eachother harm, any misunderstandings that might arise will be temporary and easily dealt with, and not the big terrible tragedy that I expect them to be.

I certainly don’t intend to stop trying to make sure I listen and communicate to the best of my ability. But perhaps I should be less obessive about this point. What do people think?

It occurred to me the other day that I don’t really care about immortality. This may be a common theme to quite a few of my quirks.

Woody Allen is supposed to have said I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. It’s meaningless to ask the question whether I would choose to live forever if I had the option; a world where literally not dying was a possibility would be so different from this world that it’s impossible to guess who I’d be or predict what decisions I would make. But the point is that none of the usual consolations proposed impress me very much.

I’m not interested in an afterlife. I find it unlikely that personness, the soul if you don’t mind religious language, could persist after the death of the body. I’m prepared to be surprised, but it’s not a big factor in how I think or in my religious approach. I suppose this fits in with the cliched view of Judaism that Judaism focuses on this life (in contrast to Christianity which is perceived as being obsessed with reward and punishment after death). That’s an over-simplification of both religions, but the bit about focusing on this life is definitely true of my own religious approach.

I’m not too interested in the metaphorical kinds of immortality either. I’m not expecting that anything I have done or created will continue to have much impact after my death. I would hope that my friends will cherish good memories of me, but that’s only going to last for a short while after I die. As for my work, well, I’ve chosen a very fast-moving field where any contribution is likely to be ephemeral. OK, it’s part of the mythology of science that everything builds on what has gone before, but I suspect the extent that my experiments will matter in a hundred years will be so small that it might as well be random chance. It won’t measurably matter whether I existed or not. And that doesn’t bother me.

This possibly also explains why I’m not a creative person. I am quite resigned to the fact that my life will be irrelevant to the world within, at best, a few decades of my death. So I’m not attempting to make any art that might “live on” after I’m gone.

And I’m childfree, very. I have no interest in passing on my genes. I feel I’ll still be just as dead with descendents as without, so I might as well devote my life to my own interests, rather than nurturing random people who share some of my genes.

I’m not of course arguing that all creative people, or all parents, are trying to cheat death. But I wonder if I might take a different path through life if some shot at immortality were a motivation.

A random passer-by contacted me to ask: Is it difficult to reconcile science and religion? The flippant answer is: in my world, they never really quarrelled. But I thought I might expand a bit on that, especially as a few people expressed interest in seeing my thoughts on the topic when I alluded to it.

I think asking this kind of question relies on certain (often unstated) assumptions about both science and religion. So let me have a go at defining why I am not religious in the sense that some random stranger probably assumes, and also why science is different from the conception of it I think the questioner holds.

I can’t remember who it was that said we shouldn’t assume that a certain strand of Fundamentalist American Protestantism represents all religion. (I also suspect that the media portrayal even of that sort of religion is an unfair caricature, but I’m no expert.) My religion, Reform Judaism, is closer to that assumed model than many; we’re working from a similar founding principle of monotheism, and we have one major text, the Old Testament, more or less in common. So we’re using some of the same metaphors. But I do think the differences between my religious approach and that stereotype is more profound than just, I’m nice and tolerant and emphatically non-proselytizing whereas they are mean old fundamentalists who hate gay people and want most of the world to go to Hell.

So what does religion mean to me? I will admit I am somewhat embarrassed about talking about my personal beliefs and religious understanding (you’ll get a readier answer if you ask personal questions about, say, sexuality, for sure). But I’ll have a go, and if you want to ask further questions, I’ll do my best to answer them.

The starting point of my religion is monotheism: God is One, and almost everything else is up for grabs, but not that. God is so utterly unique that it is not possible to describe or define God, because God can not be compared to any material thing. There is some relationship between the nature of God and the nature of the universe and existence, which for a limited human understanding is partially approximated by talking of God as the Creator.

So far so deist; I suppose where religion comes in is that I believe that this God has, so to speak, chosen to enter into a relationship with human beings. Revelation, not creation, strikes me as the real miracle. By revelation I don’t necessarily mean that a particular set of texts were dictated word for word by God, but that God has given people some means by which they can try to relate to the Divine, however paradoxical this may be for a God who is so utterly unique and undefinable. I’m sorry if this is couched in rather abstract terms, but that’s the best I can manage for an explanation.

Claiming to know how revelation works would be like claiming to know how God works, which I emphatically don’t (to me, that is essentially idolatry). But it seems to me that part of it is living within and exploring the system defined by centuries of religious thought. And part of it is looking for God within God’s creation. Believing that God created everything we can observe (and probably a whole load of things beyond what we can observe too) doesn’t at all seem incompatible with wanting to know exactly how the universe works. In fact, I would go so far as to say that my belief in a Divine Creator encourages me to study creation in as much detail as I am able.

Science, to put it very simply, seems like one of the best tools available for doing this. To me, science is definitely a tool, a method, not a collection of facts. The only way science can be seen as being in conflict with religion is if science makes one set of assertions which conflict with the assertions made by a particular religion. I don’t think science is about making assertions anyway; it’s about making deductions from experiments to construct falsifiable hypotheses. And my religion is not making the kinds of assertions that conflict with empirical evidence either; I don’t hold it as an article of faith that the world was created in 7 days 6000 years ago. This isn’t because I have rejected that belief in favour of scientifically derived facts about the history of the universe, but because my religion never asserted that in the first place.

I am aware that to certain people at certain times, science has me