Category Archives: News

In Defence of, the Much Maligned, Twitter

“For any women who are compelled, against their wishes, to wear a Hijab, I would fully support such a notion [to arrange a #TakeOffYourHijab day in solidarity with the Iran protests]. Similarly, I would not like to see any woman compelled, against her wishes, to remove her Hijab either”.

I tweeted this on 31st December last year, in response to the suggestion by – counter-extremist, author, broadcaster and Founding Chairman of Quilliam – Maajid Nawaz that, what he calls the ‘regressive left’ would not support a Take Off Your Hijab Day, even though they have been vocal in their support of World Hijab Day. It’s an uncontroversial response in what I think was an interesting and important debate (one that had been inspired by the Iranian protests which were ongoing at the time).  However, it’s not the content of this debate that I want to discuss here but what happened next and how it caused me to reflect on my overall experience of Twitter (and online communication in general).

I’ve had loads of debates and disagreements on Twitter.  These have covered a whole range of subjects and have involved people from a wide range of political backgrounds.  I’ve debated with left-wing Jeremy Corbyn supporters about media bias and Donald Trump supporters about gun control, but the issue of Muslim women wearing head coverings, and the comments that I made about it, seemed to inspire a level of hostility that I hadn’t encountered on Twitter before.  Now, I should say right away that, although it felt abusive at times, what I experienced was still extremely mild compared to what others – notably women – can, and do, experience on a disturbingly regular basis.  Nevertheless, it was still quite shocking and, while I’m not one who takes offence very easily, it became pretty overwhelming.  This was partly because of the frequency with which the criticisms came, but it was more to do with the nature of the onslaught.  My points were largely being ignored in favour of increasingly personal attacks.  Eventually, feeling deflated and tired following twenty-four hours of Twitter exchanges, I muted the conversation (meaning I could only view my own previous posts, but would not see anything else) and reported some of the most abusive participants, thereby bringing my role in the discussion to an end.

This spiral into uncivilised discourse all seems rather predictable.  It’s a common trope to point out the negative and harmful effects of Twitter, and other forms of social media; it is often discussed by the public and widely reported upon by the media.  I don’t want to play down this aspect of social media; it is real, it can have extremely severe consequences and there has not yet, in my opinion, been anyway near enough done to address it – by either the companies involved, various governments, or society in general.  Online bullying, shaming, threats of rape, and the spread of destructive ideologies are just a few examples of a problem for which endless discussion has led to little in the way of meaningful action.  Nonetheless, my experience, as described above, affected me in a way that was as intense and vivid as it was surprising.  My initial weariness passed quite quickly, and what I was left with was the realisation that the overwhelming majority of my experiences on Twitter have been positive.  Sometimes deeply so.

Sure, as I said before, I’ve had lots of debates and arguments that have often felt intense and fractious, but even these have been positive in one way or another.  Even in some of the most impassioned debates, people have been civil and have tended to focus on the points being made, rather than resorting to personal insults.  Inevitably, such encounters have ended with an agreement to disagree and a mutual well-wishing from each party.  To my mind, the point of such arguments is not to change anyone’s mind – the chance of being successful on a platform like Twitter is miniscule – but to allow parties of differing political persuasions and opinions to understand why someone might think differently to them.

While I don’t doubt that there is a problem with some people swaddling themselves in the safety of their carefully constructed echo-chamber, this hasn’t been my experience.  Brexiters and Trump supporters regularly respond to, and challenge, things that I have written – and I’m always pleased when they do.  For my part, I try very hard to stick to a few simple rules that include: never passing comment on personal features and traits, and never ridiculing people for spelling and grammatical errors.  Although, my biggest weakness, I have to admit, is a tendency for sarcasm.  I am frequently sarcastic on Twitter – much more than I am in ‘real life’ – but I do think it serves a useful purpose.  I try not to be sarcastic about the things detailed above; instead, I usually use sarcasm to highlight, what I think, is a logical error in someone’s argument or just to try and be humorous about something frivolous.  What the former often achieves is the provocation of a response, in a way that blandly pointing out a perceived mistake rarely does, meaning that the issues can then be discussed in greater detail.

Of course a large part of Twitter activity doesn’t involve abuse, or politically infused arguments; most of it consists of superficial attempts to provide stimulation of the neurological pleasure receptors:

Post something that you hope is interesting or funny.

Receive a ‘like’.

Experience an instant, but short lived feeling of satisfaction (or not, if your post doesn’t get any response at all).

Despite this apparently shallow cycle, Twitter (and the wider world of internet communication) can be, and frequently is, the source of meaningful personal encounters and opportunities that might not otherwise be possible.  In the spring of last year, I was struggling to find the motivation I needed to finish an assignment.  I was reading the news, making repeated trips to the cupboard for snacks, listening to music, staring into space and, naturally, checking Twitter.  As part of this particularly long bout of procrastination I constructed and posted some frivolous tweets – hoping, of course, for another short-lived hit of dopamine.  One such Tweet was a comment on my current efforts of procrastination alongside a wish to obtain just a small portion of – Art Historian, Oxford University lecturer, author, TV presenter and enthusiastic Tweeter – Dr. Janina Ramirez’s – apparently (as anyone who follows her work will know) endless levels of energy.  These kinds of Tweets rarely get any response at all, so I was surprised when Janina replied.  Although it was a small gesture I was struck by the kindness of it.  I wasn’t commenting on something she was trying to sell, and she didn’t need to respond; I was quite happy throwing Tweets into the, usually unresponsive, abyss.  Instead, I received my sought-after hit and also enjoyed a fresh wave of motivation, with which I was able to complete the assignment (for which I received my highest mark of the previous few years).

Anyway, to take a sharpened cleaver to a rather long story, this simple sharing of Tweets led to my attending the wonderful Gloucester History Festival, where I was able to chat with Janina, who is the President of the festival, along with some of her supporters and friends – a few of whom I had briefly communicated with on Twitter before.  One of the main things that struck, and surprised, me about this experience was how easy it was to speak to those people I had met previously on Twitter.  Although I don’t avoid crowds (I quite enjoy them), I don’t usually feel very comfortable meeting a lot of new people and can be perfectly happy staying in the background, either on my own or with a small group of friends.  On this occasion, however, the joy of meeting people who I’d only known online, and getting on well with them, was quite emotional and even a little overwhelming.  Since then I regularly converse with the people I met there, and now consider them (Janina included) to be friends.  That such meaningful relationships are possible from relatively flippant tweets is a wonder, and stands firmly in opposition to the characterisation of social media as a vacuous and futile cesspit.

My very involvement with the Middle Way Society, and the friendships I’ve made within it, were also made possible through online communication.  If I hadn’t become involved in a debate about the definition of religion on an online forum several years ago then I wouldn’t be writing this, and nor would I have subsequently had so many wonderful opportunities.  My experience of meeting founding members Robert and Barry (at what I thought was a Secular Buddhist UK retreat, but was in fact a kind of committee meeting for a soon-to-be-no-more organisation), was similar to the one I later had in Gloucester.  We’d all been involved in several discussions on the aforementioned forum and, on eventually meeting in person, we seemed to know each other better than I had expected.  Robert, Barry and Peter (who I met at the same time online, but later in person) quickly became dear friends.  Following the ensuing foundation of the Middle Way Society, I was asked if I’d like to join, which – after some hesitation (I’ve always been wary of becoming part of a ‘group’) – I agreed to do, as well as agreeing to become a member of the committee.  This has meant I’ve been able to push myself and achieve things that I never thought I would – like writing blogs, for instance.

There are many problems with Twitter (and social media in general), but there are also many  positives. We are still learning how to use this relatively new form of interaction; we are still immature and naïve.  Even so, I feel confident that we’ll learn how to make use of social media with more maturity and care than we currently do.  Part of the problem is that this new frontier of communication gives the illusion that we are not dealing with embodied human beings, but lines of text generated from an abstract source.  This has the effect of reducing our sense of social responsibility and shielding users from the effects that they have on others.  Social conventions and restrictions can, when implemented wisely, serve as cohesive and stabilising forces.  These have yet to develop fully, or effectively, in cyberspace and it remains difficult to predict what form they will eventually take, but I nonetheless believe that things will get better.  By highlighting and encouraging that which is beneficial, as well as highlighting and challenging that which is harmful, we can begin to negotiate a Middle Way between the extremes of an imagined online utopia on the one hand and an online world that is categorised as a threat to society itself on the other.


You can hear our 2016 podcast about public shaming on social media with, journalist and author, Jon Ronson here.


If you are, or know someone who is, experiencing online abuse then these links provide advice of what you can do:

http://www.stoponlineabuse.org.uk/

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/more-quarter-uk-women-experiencing-online-abuse-and-harassment-receive-threats

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/bjp8ma/expert-advice-on-how-to-deal-with-online-harassment


All pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and licenced for reuse.

Beyond ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative facts’

After the recent inauguration of Donald Trump, a row broke out about the number of people who actually attended the inauguration, in which Trump’s spokesperson was derided for using the phrase ‘alternative facts’. The evidence, as illustrated by the photos, seems pretty clearly not in support of the ‘alternative facts’ offered by the Trump administration, but I’m not interested in discussing the details of that (which have been much debated) here – rather I’m interested in the outrage attached to the idea of ‘alternative facts’. After all, the thinking seems to go, we have the facts here, so how can there possibly be alternative facts? A similar line of thinking seems to be behind the burgeoning phrase ‘post -truth’ – as if we used to know the truth, but now people aren’t accepting that truth any more. My  view is that people who pay attention to evidence and try to develop personal objectivity are not doing their cause any favours by talking in terms of ‘post-truth’, but rather reinforcing the kind of confused thinking out of which the Trump phenomenon has been born.Inauguration_crowd_size_comparison_between_Trump_2017_and_Obama_2009

Let’s first reflect on some basic features of the human condition, that we can all probably find in our own experience. We all have beliefs about the world, but those beliefs have also often turned out to be wrong, even if we held them along with lots of other people. This applies not just to ‘values’ such s the past belief that slavery is OK, but also to past ‘facts’ such as that the world is flat. As an individual, I can confess that I used to believe a number of ‘facts’ that I now no longer accept, such as that sisters are always older than you, that I would never be able to find a girlfriend, or that it’s safe to drive at 60mph over a moor with loose livestock on it. There are also the limitations of our senses, perspective, and most of all our language, which depends for its meaning on our bodies and metaphorical constructions, not some kind of correspondence with potential truth (for more on these sceptical themes, see this article). On the whole then, we must admit that we have no access to facts. It’s not just Trump who is deluded if he claims to know ‘the facts’ or ‘the truth’, but you and me too. Post-truth politics, along with post-truth philosophy and post-truth everything else, thus seems to have begun with homo sapiens as a whole, and our emergence of a capacity to hold and express any kind of belief that we might assume to be true. The first post-truth politician was the Serpent tempting Eve.

If we finger populist politicians for a fault that it can easily be seen that we all share, then, it is hardly surprising if we’re seen as hypocritical. Though I don’t see a lot of the often unpleasant social media output by Trump supporters, one thing that has struck me about a lot of what I have seen is the predominance of accusations of ‘liberal hypocrisy’. If liberals claim to have ‘the facts’ and respond to Trump’s excesses with blustering counter-assertions in a similar style, that accusation doesn’t seem to me wholly unjust. I think there are far more effective ways of responding that identify much more clearly what Trump and his henchmen are doing wrong and which avoid this ‘post-truth’ shortcut. It’s not whther they have or don’t have the facts, or don’t share your view of them, that matters here: but that they don’t offer those facts with provisionality, are not open to correction, are not interested in examining evidence or justification, are not even concerned about gross inconsistencies in their beliefs, and are not at all interested in improving on their beliefs or making them more adequate. In terms of values, they do not respect the truth or the facts. In relation to all these points, I agree very much with Trump’s critics that the new administration’s attitudes are extremely alarming.

If you genuinely respect the truth, you don’t claim to have it, just as if you respect the power of electricity, you don’t stick your finger in a live socket. Truth is a meaningful concept to us, because we use it in all sorts of ways in all sorts of practical contexts – for example, in science, in law, and in everyday conversation. We have set up an abstract model in which ‘truth’ stands for an idealisation – a fabled position in which we could really know what is going on, not just more than we did before, but totally, as in a God’s eye view. But nevertheless that abstract idealisation is just an extrapolation of our much more limited experience: the experience of recognising things we didn’t ‘know’ before, and of confidently interacting with the world around us in a consistent way. Most of the time, our confidence about how the world works turns out to be justified, so we apply this idealised concept of ‘truth’ to that experience, in the process completely failing to take into account the limitations of our view. So it’s very important that ‘truth’ is recognised as meaningful, and not relativised in its meaning, but at the same time recognised as beyond our reach.

Let’s take an example. A child brought up in a household with a  friendly dog, confidently playing with it and interacting with it, thinks it’s ‘true’ that dogs are friendly. When he encounters the first unfriendly dog, though, his whole model of the world is briefly shaken, the ‘truth’ is shattered. There may be denial – the unfriendly dog doesn’t really count as a dog. There will certainly be initial stress, followed by suspicion and unease in a new uncertain relationship with dogs. But we don’t all have to be as fragile as that child, if we stop thinking in terms of ‘truth’ but rather cultivate the awareness that our beliefs are only justified for the moment on the basis of the evidence so far. If we can be aware of other possibilities to begin with, we will be less overwhelmed by the nasty surprise when it happens.

In the realm of politics, that means concentrating on the qualities that actually matter in making our judgements adequate, the ones that involve a larger respect for truth, rather than railing about others offering ‘alternative facts’: namely the personal qualities of provisionality, awareness, imagination and observation. It means setting the example to those who don’t understand this, and teaching children not to ‘tell the truth’, but rather to reflect upon and justify what they say. It means holding Trump to account, not for ‘lying’, but for being grossly inconsistent and failing to offer evidence or respond to criticism.

It may well be that most of those who complain about lack of truth, when pressed, would actually agree that what they value in practice are these ways of justifying and adjusting our beliefs. But while they continue to use ‘truth’ and ‘post-truth’ as a lazy shortcut, I think they will play straight into the hands of people like Trump. All that such populists have to then do when challenged is to turn back to their unsophisticated supporters, deny the criticism, and offer their own ‘alternative facts’. The discussion will then stay at the completely unfruitful level of mere claim and counter-claim. As our beliefs about the world are wrapped up with our goals, our ontological obsession with what is or is not ‘really’ the case is our biggest weakness, the absolutizing vulnerable spot in our cognitive abilities. It’s only by putting ourselves in the messy middle zone of neither accepting nor denying these ‘realities’ that we can make progress, whether in politics or any other area of human dispute.

 

Picture: Comparison between inauguration crowd sizes for Donald Trump in 2017 (left) and Barack Obama in 2009 (right). Images copyright to 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee (left) and ewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images (right), and are used at low resolution under fair use criteria. 

‘Middle Way Philosophy’ Omnibus Edition E book now available

The e-book of the Omnibus Edition of my ‘Middle Way Philosophy’ seriesMWP Omnibus is now available. This includes the full texts of all four volumes of ‘Middle Way Philosophy’ (see the pages for each on books/ Middle Way Philosophy books on the menu above). At £7.50, this ebook is by far the most economical way to access this text, which offers a detailed working-out of this whole approach to philosophy, psychology, desire, meaning, belief, ethics, politics and practice. To purchase a copy please follow this link. In time it will also become available from Apple, Amazon, Kobo etc. As previously posted, it’s also available as a paperback.

The MWS Podcast 65: Bjorn Ihler on surviving Utøya, resolving extremism and the Middle Way

We are joined today by Bjorn Ihler , who is a peace activist, writer and filmmaker working against dogmatism, particularly  in the forms of racism, hatred and violent extremism. His work is greatly founded on his experiences as a survivor of the attack on Utøya island in Norway in 2011. He’s written numerous articles for national and international newspapers and has been an inspiration to many activists through participation in conferences and organisations such as the Oslo Freedom Forum, Against Violent Extremism and the Forgiveness Project. Bjorn has a degree in Theatre and Performance Design and Technology from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Art In 2013, he collaborated in the writing of the play ‘The Events’ by David Greig, an account of a survivor resembling the Utoya attack and he’s is currently producing the film ‘Rough Cut – Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity’. Bjorn recounts the events of July 22nd 2011 and its repercussions. We discuss the roots of extremism, how education can play a key role in terms of addressing the problem, especially critical thinking and how all this might relate to the the Middle Way. 


MWS Podcast 65:Bjorn Ihler as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_65_Bjorn Ihler

Click here to view other podcasts

Migglism: A Beginner’s Guide to Middle Way Philosophy, now published

After a number of months of preparation, and helpful input from a number of people in the Middle Way Society, my new introduction to Middle Way Philosophy, Migglism, is now finally published. It aims to provide a brief and accessible way into the ideas, and is illustrated with cartoons by Norma Smith and Peter Goble.Migglism Cover Katja

Migglism is the first book to be approved by the Middle Way Society publications committee, which is formed to give the society’s support to self-published books about the Middle Way. This facility is open to any author who wants to publish a book relating to the Middle Way and submit it to the society for approval.

The book is available in both paperback and e-book versions. Currently it is only available from Lulu, but within a few weeks it should also be available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other major online sources. Please note that a greater proportion of money goes to me, and less to Jeff Bezos, if you buy from Lulu rather than Amazon.

Here are the links to the Lulu pages where you can purchase the book:

paperback

e-book

Here is the ‘blurb’:

‘Migglism’ is a short term for Middle Way Philosophy, a practical philosophical approach developed by Robert M. Ellis in a Ph.D. thesis and a series of books. Middle Way Philosophy brings together insights from Buddhism, philosophy and psychology to offer a framework of thinking for a range of integrative practices. This book aims to introduce these ideas in an accessible way.

‘The Middle Way’ is not a compromise, but a process of navigating between dogmatic extremes. By avoiding either positive or negative claims that go beyond experience, we can find a new way of thinking, valuing and practising.

“The middle is the chaotic and confusing place between the extremes. While the extremes are simpler and more attractive, it is the mess in the middle where the interesting and creative activities occur – it is where we should be. Robert sets out a foundation for a way of thinking about the middle ground as a place to move towards.”
Ed Catmull, President of Pixar and Walt Disney, and author of Creativity, Inc.