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Letters to My Generation

My name is Dan Rogger and this is my blog (you can find out more about me at my About me page of my main web site). It aims to present my beliefs on how to live contemporary life in a philosophical way (or how I have tried to confront some of the challenges I face on an everyday basis). Every other week I aim to write a short piece on a topic of note from the weeks gone by.

The below are letters to my generation. They are, I hope, a collection of notes that explore the idea of a social philosophy - a philosophy anchored in the idea that society is the fundamental unit of philosophical analysis. Please send your thoughts and replies to drogger@worldbank.org.

Postings (in reverse chronological order)

I Struggle

17th June 2023

I struggle with you.

I see your fears and your laughter;
Your scowl and your smile.

But I struggle to see inside you; to see the dignity I feel should be accorded to us all.
I cannot see the music that joins us in harmony.

My view of you is dominated by my perception of your ego;
By your own willingness to look back at me with the eyes of love I wish for.

Oh how I struggle with loving you, because I wish you to love me.

I see your good actions and those actions are like notes in a song.
But I cannot see the tune.

I sometimes see notes in between you.
As you cherish, or uphold, or sanctify.

But when I sit and watch you go by, I do not feel your dignity as you pass.


Why?

Why do I struggle so much with what I would ask you give me?
Why do I have to fight to see it even in those I love? Even in those who have proven their dignity.

Is it because, being our greatest test, dignity is the least visible of all our attributes?
Because in seeing it we see a version of God.

Is it because I only see it when you are stretched the most?
And when you are no longer stretched I forget you are the same person.

Or simply because we do not practice it? That we do not listen for that tune?
That in our striving to search for our own dignity we lose sight of how to see it all around us.

In searching for what is in front of us we became blind.

I must struggle on for life is naught without dignity.

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On The Benefits of Being Different: A Story for Children on Social Philosophy

9th December 2022

Alex was normally normal. She dressed like the other kids; laughed like the other kids; and she always made sure she liked what the other kids liked.

Other kids, like Ben. Ben dressed like the other kids; laughed like the other kids; and didn't like different.

Different was weird. It was scary. Who knows what different might do. So Ben liked Alex. She was normal.

And when Alex and Ben found a treasure chest, they both knew what to do. Turn the key!

The key was gold and shiny, and the box so very much like the treasure boxes they had seen in movies.  You turned the key - the box opened - it had gold and silver inside. They were going to be rich!

But when Ben turned the key, nothing happened.  He turned it again. He must've been turning it wrong. So Alex turned it. She turned it the other way. Ben tried again. Hmm. There must be something wrong with this treasure box.

Alex and Ben sat next to the treasure box. What was wrong with this treasure box? Is it broken? It looked like a normal treasure box, but it wasn't working.

"I can't believe we found a broken treasure box," said Ben as he tried the key again and again.  "Maybe Chris knows what to do," said Alex, "Maybe we should call Chris?"

Chris was normally normal. He thought that to open treasure chests you just have to turn the key. You see he dressed like the other kids; laughed liked the other kids; and importantly, thought like the other kids. He was, you know, normal.

But Chris wasn't around. And his advice - to just keep turning the key - wouldn't have been helpful anyway.

After a while, Alex realised that she and Ben were not alone. Joshua was standing close to them watching the box, the key, and them turning the key. Joshua was wondering why they were turning the key so much.

Alex whispered to Ben - "he's here", emphasizing the 'he'. They both looked up at Joshua who was standing over there.

Joshua was different. He dressed differently to the other kids; he laughed differently to the other kids; and he never made sure he liked what the other kids liked. He liked what he liked.

Alex and Ben didn't smile at Joshua. They didn't wave to him to come over. They didn't ask him how to open the box. What would he know about opening treasure boxes when he was so different? They just looked back at the treasure box and that shiny gold key.

Well in fact it was because he was so different that meant he might know something they didn't. It was because he was so different that he saw the carvings on the box that looked like two great arms wrapped around it. It was because he was so different that he saw things, well, differently.

Ben was getting frustrated.  He hit the top of the box. "Open!" he shouted. Joshua didn't like to see the box being hit, but was scared of Ben because of the way that he ignored him and didn't smile at him - not just now but all the time. "Open!" shouted Ben. The box was not going to open like that.

"Let's go and get something sharp to try and open the box." Alex told Ben. They walked off to find some tools.

Joshua watched Alex and Ben walk off, and they had looked at him but hadn't said anything. Joshua knew about these boxes. Or at least he'd read about them. They always had keys - but just to distract those who didn't know how to open them.

Joshua walked up to the box, and looked up to where Alex and Ben had gone. They had gone. He put his arms around the box and gave it a big hug. He heard a click. 'Click'. The top of the box swung open. The way you opened these boxes was different to normal.

Joshua sat down in front of the box to look at everything inside.

Later on, Jane, who liked different and liked Joshua, found him staring into the box. She walked over to see what was in the box. "Oh Joshua," Jane said, "it's beautiful!"

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On Responding to My Society at 40

6th November 2022

For my 40th birthday, I asked my society to reflect on their beliefs and express them to me. Through a book of these reflections that my wife Caitlin made for me and discussions with many of those same people, I held those thoughts close for the past year. I found them challenging and persuasive, distant and familiar, at the individual levels and taken as a group. Here is the brief response I'm sending them as this year closes:

How do we make sense of the immensity of our shared reality when it is both granular to the touch and ephemeral to grasp? Like a cloud that is at once there and impossible to hold. My answer has been that the practical essence of God is made in our interaction; both the interaction of society that happens inside of us, as well as that which happens externally. As such, the world makes most sense when we model it through the lens of society rather than that of the individual.  For me the world is most coherent when understood through `social philosophy'.

Analogous logic to this thinking drives my fierce belief in liberalism; the philosophy that has individual human dignity at its heart, but pushes us to emphasize the quality of interaction within the boundaries of rights that it defines.

What do these two pillars of my beliefs mean for how I act in the world? Liberalism highlights that no individual should be subservient to another, while social philosophy reminds us that we are defined by others.  And as such a tension between definition and subservience, between interaction and independence, is the defining feature of the struggle we face as actors in this world. Without the recognition of this tension, both sides of it suffer; without the cultivation of this tension, both sides whither.

Our interdependence is best served by public service. That public service can be as simple as the courtesy we show others on the street, and as complex as creating a lab whose primary mission is to improve the quality of government executives across the world. It encompasses every contribution to the public good in between.  Identifying how we can serve that beautiful but ungraspable mist between us and the other at every level is our route to practically expressing God on Earth. I cannot recommend anything more fully than making commitments to public service.

Perhaps a greater priority today than ever before in my lifetime is the need to console and inspire those who believe in our joint humanity and the liberalism that best releases it. We must remind each other through our mist that we are right to believe in the higher sense of ourselves as the organising principle of our lives. And then we should inspire others to join in those beliefs. History shows us that such thinking is the future, but that it must be fought for if it is to come sooner rather than later. We have come so far, and have so far to go.

I have so often been inspired by that in you that is a reflection of the above beliefs. Let us echo on through history at the smallest levels, and any above that we can. Let us be pioneers of a modern vision of liberalism and as people invested in each other as investments in the bigger sense of the self. You changed me this year. Keep on, keep on, keep on, keep on ...

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On Being Wrong

28th December 2021

At this midpoint of my life, I have constructed an answer to my philosophical questions.  It begins with the tension at the heart of knowledge of what form and structure to give competing ideas, and finds a social philosophy most coherent a response to that tension.  In turn, social philosophy drives a commitment to public service at all levels of my life, from my family and friends, through my neighbourhood.  It shapes my conception of the self and of the nature of knowledge.  But any coherent answer must have a position on what it might mean if it is wrong.

At the heart of the way I have constructed my answer is the idea of being wrong.  (These ideas link to so many of the posts below, I will not link to individual instances.) I start with the notion that any conception of thought must have structures and constraints, and as such may be judged to have components that are `wrong' in any standard sense of the word by some `meta-framework' that lies above these competing frameworks.  Such thinking can be repeated with meta-frameworks judged by their own meta-meta-frameworks.  My understanding of the world is that tradeoffs in these conceptions of thought should drive our appreciation of their value.  In other words, how my philosophies deal with being wrong is a critical part of their value.

And yet the everyday lived experience of philosophy is that being wrong under some frameworks feels very different to being wrong under others. The bounded nature of knowledge implies that there may exist conceptions of thought that make even the most expansive framework in my understanding incomplete or incoherent.  There may be `unknown unknown' realms of thought and these may invalidate that thinking within the bounds of my conception of knowledge.  Imagine a theorist first being introduced to the concepts of empiricism.  As such, it would seem that any philosophy that is able to hold up in a realisation of its boundaries must take a coherent position on that which it cannot conceive.

It must be that the boundedness of a framework does not invalidate thought within that which is conceived of.  If this were not so, and since it is a general principle would be true of any subset of the conception of knowledge, only in a totality of conceptions of knowledge could be seen as coherent.  Since the totality of conceptions include those that are not dependant on other conceptions of knowledge (or are dependant in a bounded way), then there are subsets of such that are coherent without full knowledge.  It is in fact these conceptions that can be conceived without an appreciation of the totality of conceptions, and thus must be those that we conceive in our bounded knowledge.  Coherent knowledge within their boundedness is a feature of our appreciation of them.

Since other conceptions of knowledge must interact with them for us to be concerned about the vulnerability of our knowledge to what is not known, there must be elements of our bounded knowledge that are reflections of elements of that which is unknown.  As such, our investigations within the conceptions of knowledge we perceive are the best preparations for confronting that which we do not, even if extending of our boundaries invalidates our current investigations.

However complete we believe our conception of knowledge, we must strive to extend our understanding to that which we do not know.  Though this striving must be balanced with the investigations in our current conceptions.  Since the above principles mean that we do worthwhile work in exploring our current conceptions, how should we weight our tradeoffs between these two ends? In a social philosophy framework, the question becomes how should we as a social being organize our response to these two ends?  Society should have a portfolio of investigations, and so individuals should value investigation of areas that are not societies focus.  We should go to those investigations with an understanding of the broad features of our societies' answers, such that we can understand where we have new knowledge.  And there is greater value in new conceptions of knowledge that interact with central elements of societies' answers.

To use an analogy I have used before, it is like we are choosing the path ahead.  As the fog lifts on one set of paths, we can assess the value of each path.  As the fog lifts further, we see that the paths we have been investigating are dependants of a fork in the road we would in fact not take given what we now see of the other set of paths.  Our insights into assessing the paths we saw initially are the best preparation for the fog lifting further, and assessing those paths independently was valid when they were all that could be seen.  As the fog lifts, our investigations would surely invest more in those paths that lead in the direction that we believe is truthful, while questioning whether the new paths are a greater truth.

On a practical level, the bounded nature of our conception of knowledge and of what it is to be wrong makes the search for how we are wrong in ways yet unknown to us an important part of philosophical investigation.  But that we are bounded in our conception of knowledge does not make investigation within those bounds without value.  Seekers investigating us being wrong are generating value in a comparable way to those who confirm that we are right within our current conception of being right.

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On Experimentation

13th December 2021

There is a finite capacity for finding out what truth may be.  So how should we structure our life's investigations?  Simply the time it takes to orchestrate an experiment, a search, means many alternative experiments are unobserved ... consumption of measurement, the physicality of investigation makes full knowledge impossible.  Physics is an infinitely repeated structure.  Society is an infinity of distinct structures.

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On Capital BikeShare

28th November 2021

Is there a word for a person who selects the finest bike shares from those offered at a dock? A sommelier of CaBis? A 'cabilier'?  Someone who can detect, from the look of the frame or the smell of the seat, what the quality of the ride offered by this particular vehicle will be?

For almost a decade, I have approached docking stations with an intense eye, looking for signs of wear and tear that might indicate the experience of my ride on this or that bike. What I was looking for was the fastest, easiest ride to get myself to my destination with the least resistance. It is fascinating how varied the rides I have had on Capital Bikeshares have been. On some you can ride without hands, speeding down the Mall feeling like you're flying. On others, the clack of the chain as it repeatedly slips not only becomes the music of your ride, but a reminder of your vulnerability as your seat slowly slides down into the seat tube.

This morning I rode CaBi 78564, a bike that inspired this blog post. Its bright down tube shone in the early morning light and there was something about its handlebars that seemed to me to say 'recently upgraded'.  From what I could see it was my best chance of those on offer.  The lights on the console flashed as CaBi contemplated whether I was worthy of a bike this morning. Then the green light of approval that has almost always given me a tiny thrill of acceptance in the world.  Off we went.

It turns out that 78564 is a relaxed personality, who does not believe in speed.  However hard I tried, 78564's message was that we should take things easy and enjoy the beautiful Fall foliage.  Riders on what seemed like older CaBi's sped past me with ease.  I repeatedly tried to turn the shifter to ensure it was at maximum.

However, as we gently travelled the winding streets of DC, I realised that this bike's peculiarities were in fact showing me a perspective on the world. Take it in. Stop racing past it. Enjoy the ride. Given that it took me a third longer this morning to get to work than it usually does, I had time to really enjoy the city.

And so, I reasoned further, had each CaBi been trying to show me its own particular perspective on DC and the world at large. Each bikeshare, with its own particular way of importing an experience of the world, brings to us what we lack in so many other areas of life: a rather random exposure to different states of reality.  If it was your bike, you would make it fit your preferred view of the world. But its a CaBi, and you are going to experience the world on its terms.

As another person on an even more decrepit looking bikeshare peddled past me at higher speed for what seemed like far less effort, it pushed me to reflect on what it must be like to have your strength fade. To be putting in as much effort as you always had, but see yourself slowing down. To feel the strength of the human body taken away.

My ride home was on a stallion of a CaBi. The music was good, the sun bright and the Fall colors fantastic.  It was pure joy.  But the comparison to this morning's ride made it all the richer. It was like I had been set free again.

I am now on my 1278th ride and have travelled 2,649 miles on Capitol Bikeshares. My hope is that sometime early next year I will have ridden a bikeshare as far as Google Maps says it is from DC to LA. But this morning I realised that I had been missing a trick. I never thought of that journey as one filled with encounters with characters as varied and eclectic as the CaBi community provides. The crouchy old war horse that rode me to Georgetown. The spirited romantic that took me to the Arboretum. And then there are the stolen CaBis.  What must it be like to ride them?  What lessons could I learn from such renegades?

Now I see the randomness of my CaBi rides a bit like Chaucer's 'The Canterbury Tales', with each bike a personality along the way.  And with each personality offering a different life lesson, my new morning routine will be to try to understand what this particular CaBi is trying to teach me about life. I was always surprised at how adulthood is less philosophical than I expected it to be. But I've been ignoring the lessons right under my bottom. The CaBi's random features are a lens into the world that is an intimate part of my daily life.

Though I will still look for the bike that makes me feel like I’m flying, I look forward to meeting whatever personality is in store for me tomorrow morning and beyond. I will now try to listen harder for the lessons he or she is trying to impart.

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On Asking My Society for Their Reflections and to Reflect

14th November 2021

At the heart of the philosophical approach outlined throughout this blog is the idea that features of my society matter for my broader understanding of the world.  Thus, as a defining feature of the individuals in that society, their philosophical approaches are a defining feature of the society that defines me.  Thus, knowing myself is understanding the philosophies of the individuals in my society.

In the year leading up to my fortieth, I asked perhaps a hundred members of my society (friends and colleagues) to describe their philosophical approach.  Over the week of my fortieth, I sent the following e-mail to others who I had not had the opportunity to talk to until then.

...

Dear friends,

This week I turned 40 (yay) ... For my birthday, Caitlin has been compiling a book of entries from my friends and family about their philosophical approaches to life.  I'd love you to be involved.  Unsure of whether you've been asked, I'm simply bcc'ing you and including Caitlin so if you're interested you can send her a contribution.

At the same time, I appreciate you might not feel comfortable sharing these most intimate of thoughts.  Please don't feel any pressure to contribute.

Either way, if you are still thinking about your life's philosophy, then in the next couple of weeks can I ask you to mark my 40th by stopping and reflecting on your wider purpose for an hour or two?  And don’t feel that you need to communicate to me what your thinking is nor that you did it.  But I appreciate you, part of my close society, taking that time.

The below blog post summarises some of the questions I have been asking at this point in my life, that in some way summarises my philosophical approach at this juncture.

On from all of this, I hope to see you sometime somehow somewhere soon,

Dan

[Included my Questions At Forty blog post]

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On The Disadvantages of Wealth

31st October 2021

My reflections around my upcoming birthday have been partly that my life has been filled with wealth.  I have been gifted the opportunity of health, diverse experience and myriad and constant consumption.  Such constancy of opportunity has always been a boon to me as well as sowed the seeds of a discomfort I have longed to better understand.  It feels that such a discomfort is in a long tradition of unease with wealth that many individuals have expressed.

What is it about wealth that induces me to be concerned?  In the terms I conceive it here, wealth is an increase in the ability to determine one's experience of the world.  This could increase the breadth of experience and thus knowledge of society.  It enables me to take advantage of opportunities to forge a more truthful life, and reach out to and echo through a greater network of my society.

And yet by choosing my own path, I am electing to strengthen my definition by some parts of my society, and weakening my definition by others.  As such, I am isolating myself away from my original self, as defined by the original society that defined me.  This makes me someone new, defined by the new social environment in which I inhabit.  How does that new conception seem 'untruthful' to the old conception?  Or to a broader conception that one could argue has meaning to my new self?

By choosing a path that isolates the individual from the fullest sense of their original society, they could be understood to be less defined by their original society.  In the extreme, suppose that only a single aspect of one's original society drives your choices, and your future selves become increasingly defined by that single aspect.  The end of that process is to no longer be defined by society but a single element of it, which as I have written before means that you lose relevance.  If you are not defined by society, which is always relational, then in any framework of social philosophy you no longer exist as a philosophically relevant.  Total freedom is in fact philosophical annihilation.

Let us take a concrete example.  Man's relationship to Nature has been both fully defining and vulnerable.  Fully defining in the sense that originally, man was dominated by its definition by Nature.  Vulnerable in the sense that this left man at the whim of Nature's brutality.  The general trend has been for man to work towards gaining dominion of this relationship, and over Nature as a whole.  Such an effort extended man's capacity for philosophical reflection and understanding.  At the same time, it drove a wedge between an individual's social constraints and defining features of what made them up.  As such, they were freer of their original constraints, and thus less philosophically relevant.  We no longer represented the world in our broadest sense of being defined.  Rather, we experienced and are defined by a partial version of ourselves.

Such an argument can be applied to any aspect of our original selves.  Anything that wealth endows us with the ability to isolate ourselves from is beset by the tension that doing so makes us defined by a subset of our society, and thus a subset of our true selves.  That may be truthful, but comes at a cost of one part of our society choosing to eliminate another from our social definition.  Without proper awareness of that cost, we are in danger of getting the balance of loss wrong, and isolating ourselves in an untruthful way.

One should, it seems, use the freedom that accompanies wealth to become more defined by society in a way that balances the truths of our multiple selves.  The Nature example given above links to a question I was asked about my fortieth.  How vulnerable to Nature have I allowed myself to be?  (Not very.)  And how does that relate to my appreciation of where much of who I am originally came from?  (It seems important to open myself up to a better understanding of that definition.)

All this is part of my thinking around the 'question at forty' as to how one chooses one's society, and whether those choices are truthful.  Wealth feels as though it has the disadvantage of limiting our philosophical selves, perhaps even if we are cognisant of its effects.

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On The Gift of Life

17th October 2021

My overwhelming feeling about my life as I reach 40, is gratitude.  Gratitude for the gift of life itself, the health I have almost always been blessed with, the richness of the people, places and ideas that I have been surrounded with, and the extraordinary every day that it is to be a lightly encumbered human.

My gratitude seems to start on a physical and economic basis.  That I got to live at all is incredible, with almost every life I've witnessed revelling in life itself.  That I got to live in this epoch, when we are yet to destroy the world but have showered its citizens with the gifts of earth's riches.  And that of the 200 billion people or so that have ever lived, I was gifted a place in society that is characterized by never-before seen wealth.

And then that perspective is topped with the experience of love.  Being loved by parents and a sister, by a wife and children, by friends and a wider family.  Being part of communities, sometimes with tensions of inclusion and exclusion, but grappling with what it is to be part of a whole range of societies.  Inclusion, rather than exclusion, was my normal if I am honest with myself.  And this inclusion came with pleasure and power and peace.

My greatest gift, though it feels spoilt to say those words, is that I found a perspective and what I call a commitment, to Truth.  Whether a luxury or achievement, it has allowed me to feel grounded and driven, in flow while being defined.  This too is a gift, and the spark in my clod.

I have been bullied, as a child and an adult.  I have felt anguish, from inside my home and with the world as a whole.  I have feared for my life and made stupid mistakes.  And yet all these are footnotes to my wider life to date.  For my society gifted me a life approximating paradise.  Mainly free of the fears and frustrations of most of life.  I am grateful in a way I cannot express.  That is a feeling and not an idea.

Simply writing this last paragraph scares me.  How does one respond to such a bountiful life?  How did I come to receive such extraordinary gifts without experiencing the ferocity of their definition?  Why should I dare to consume them when they are not of my creation?  I am in paradise but unsure of my place there.  I am greatly blessed and searching.  And that uncertainty and searching is all part of the gift I have received.  I prize the doubt.

Thank you.  Thank you to my society near and far for it all.  I yearn to be able to write my gratitude with sufficient force that it reflects what I want to say.  I cannot.  Thank you.

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On My Questions At Forty

3rd October 2021

As part of my upcoming fortieth birthday, I have been thinking about the questions that are at the heart of my philosophy, and those I am centering my reflections around as I come up to the end of this decade.  These questions are presented below, and take the `if-then' form so to directly acknowledge the conditionality of their relevance.  They contain a huge range of ambiguities, words that take a specific meaning to me, and so on.  But they are a summary of my beliefs to date.

  • If individuals are defined by their society, and as such echo that society, the greater notion of ourselves is in that echo.  Then do we look after our greater self with the intensity it deserves?
  • If we are defined by our society, and as such are echoes of that society, then how do we choose and engage with the society that will most truthfully define us?
  • If our truth, and Truth itself, can only be stemmed from variation, then do we foster appropriate variation in our experience and understanding of the world?
  • If we are defined by our society, then is knowing ourselves a knowing of all those members of our society that make us up and their respective truths?
  • If humanity's physical experience is best defined as #BlessedButStressed, then do we build a sufficiently balanced appreciation of our blessings as we do our stresses?
  • If our echoes through society finally define who we are, then are we able to defend who we have become?

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PAUSE: HAVING CHILDREN

On Having Children

23rd December 2016

How wonderful it is to have children ... and how all encompassing.  I am afraid that I have decided to stop this blog for the foreseeable future.  Balancing life with children with the time needed to write this blog, however short, each week, is not something I feel capable of doing.

I intend to return once I have more free time again.  Until then ... 

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On Ascendancy

9th December 2016

You act as though your journey was that of a river,
Bending the world to your passage.
But you are not the river, and so cannot pass.
You are society and are embedded in those waters.
You are a ripple on the river and must flow on.
Telling yourself your history is the creek that you have carved;
Limits your world to the physical borders you inhabit.
But your ripple is a moment in the river that carries on,
Ever changed by your existence.

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On Living By Another's Preferences

5th November 2016

A fine saning.

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On Old Age

24th October 2016

A fine saning.

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On Manhood

6th October 2016

A fine saning.

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On Youth
28th September 2016

A fine saning.

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Spilt You: A Story for Children on Social Philosophy
18th September 2016

You are a cup. And that cup is filled with you juice.

It’s amazing stuff. No cup that’s ever existed has juice quite like it. And everyone else does to.

It’s a messy business. Everyday, whatever you do, your juice is spilling out of your cup all over the place!

If you go talk to a friend, you spill you juice. When you share a hug, or a story, or get upset, you juice is getting everywhere.

You’ve no top you see. You’re always going to spill whether you want to or not. And some of your juice ... well; it ends up in other cups.

Yuck! Other people’s juice in my cup?

Yup! It’s not that bad. How do you think your cup got filled up in the first place? Other people - like your Mum and Dad, Uncle Whatshecalled, and everyone in your life - spilt juice into your cup to help make who you are. To make the juice we call you.

And guess what? You can taste pretty great! That’s when you’re kind, or loving, or funny.

Of course, you are constantly spilling juice into other cups yourself. That means there is you flavoured Mum juice. You flavoured Uncle Whatshecalled juice. The more you spill into someone’s cup, the more you flavoured they are.

So what’s your flavour? It depends. You juice kind of tastes different on one side of your cup and the other.

When you are kind, the delicious part of you juice spills. When you’re not, you juice tastes bad. Its flavour makes other juices worse. If you cheat someone, your juice spills out of the side of your cup that is dirty and unwashed. Now that is yuck! And so the juice that spills makes others juice worse.

Let me say that again. If you are kind, the you flavour is great, and makes others juice even better.

So as people in your life walk around, they are going to taste different depending on how you, and everyone else treats them.

So now who are ‘you’? There’s you juice everywhere! You’ve spilt it all over your life!

What’s currently in your cup is a mix of so many other juices. And I suppose you are in so many other cups.

Whether you made them taste better all depends on how you spill your juice.

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On Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life

24th August 2016

A fine saning.

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On Jigsaws

8th August 2016

A fine symbol for social philosophy is the jigsaw puzzle.  Each piece of the jigsaw is different, either in the sense of what is painted upon it, or in the sense of where it fits and thus relates to the rest of the jigsaw.  Whilst we treat each piece as a separate entity, it only makes sense as part of the wider whole.  We conceptualise a jigsaw piece not as a relevant concept in its own right, but as making sense only as part of a wider whole.  Similarly, we could think of the pieces of the puzzle being made of the same underlying components, but made unique by its place in the puzzle.

Reversing this logic, social philosophy does not diminish the value of the individual in the same way that changing a single piece in a jigsaw dramatically alters the completeness of the puzzle or the message it conveys.  Each piece of the jigsaw puzzle is valuable to the whole.  Changing a single piece in a jigsaw can transform the meaning of a puzzle in the same way that a change in a single individual can transform Truth within society.  For example, when one person in society realises some truth about nature and can communicate that to her wider social community.

The puzzle analogy links to the discussion on why we should strive.  We work at a puzzle to make it fit in the same way that we build society towards Truth.  Our ambition is to produce a puzzle that is true to its underlying form.  In the same way, we should strive to build a truthful society.  And it is in the production of that society (that in the case of social philosophy is a constantly evolving object) that we find our meaning.

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On Symbolism

25th July 2016

I saw a man steal an altar cross.
He wrapped it in cloth and fled.
I followed him closely and swapped the cross,
For a single loaf of bread.

I returned to the church with haste.
I met the priest at the door.
He received the cross with relief,
And lay it upon the floor.

He carefully unbound the cloth,
With a care as if it were gold.
And placed the cross back on the altar,
Whilst the cloth he continued to hold.

You returned this item to me,
With its value far increased.
For this cloth I never valued,
With it we covered the deceased.

But now it is a possession,
More important than any I know.
Our friend has bestowed upon it,
The greatest Truth a man can sow.

I did not understand and asked him,
Why do celebrate this sheet?
Is it not just a cover,
For Jesus final earthly seat?

The cross is just a symbol,
Something to which we relate.
But when bandaged by this fabric,
It became like an offering plate.

For the fabric is now like Truth itself,
It is the link between us and God.
If the cross is a symbol of another,
The sheet is the connecting rod.

To the touch it feels like lightning,
It makes real what I am striving for.
It is a graceful physical representation,
Of the most divine non-physical law.

The same could be said of the bread,
That you gave to save the cross.
Without such retribution,
Your trade would have been the greatest loss.

For God is born in our interactions,
In the selves and not the self.
The Truth that you have shown today,
Cannot be placed back upon a shelf.

There is no greater symbol of God,
Than to give him a rebirth.
And sit with him and listen,
As he bakes bread upon his hearth.

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On Why We Should Strive

11th July 2016

There was nothing. There was not even emptiness. For emptiness would have been something of worth.

It was like that for most of time.

At some moment a spark arose from that nothingness and burned. It burned brightly. It was, for that moment, a speck of light and warmth.  A crackle of righteous difference that ebbed from the golden thread.

As quickly as it had come into existence it was extinguished.

Then again there was nothing. And from then on nothing reigned. There was not even an echo of that light. It had gone.

That spark did not have to come into existence. But it did. For a moment it shone.

That spark imbued the nothingness with a meaning. It transformed the past and enriched the future. Though it was immediately forgotten, it was light.  And that light had meaning worthy of creation.

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On Brexit
24th June 2016

I am feeling emptier in my heart for a country I love and confused as to who the British are. As a self-identified technocrat, living abroad with an American wife and working for a global-facing organisation, the Britain I love and have most identified with is the global-facing, pan-European heart that throbs in London. The decision to leave the EU has drawn my country away from that part of its identity, and thus reduced my capacity to identify with that part of Britain. A part of me, perhaps the part of being British that I loved most, is now a relic of history.

As my sister told me this morning, when she heard the news she cried, not for her, but for my eight-month-old nephew Charlie. The reaction of my mother was typically British; that we shouldn’t worry and that we’d work things out somehow. But my sister was fearful of what is lost for Charlie. My mother, sister and I were fortunate to have been brought up in a UK of the 1960’s to 2000’s. It was a UK that was bursting with life, looking out for the role it could play in the world stage. It was that UK in which I, and even my mother (begrudgingly) would have identified solidly as a European. And that was a choice. We chose to think of ourselves as European. Charlie will have a harder time of doing so. Though we, as his family, will do our best to make him outward looking, his country has decided to be that much more inward looking and parochial. So for Charlie, the national narrative he will be immersed in will be a fundamentally poorer one than that of the last few generations.

Of course, someone like me thinks that Britain has been at its best when it mixed it’s traditional self with the rest of the world. It was at its best when it fought for Europe in both World Wars. It was at its best when it moulded the European Union from within. It was at its best when it was working closely with other countries, however frustrating that process might be. It was at its best when it understood that its traditions had origins across the world, woven together and nurtured off the north coast of Europe.

For working in the big bureaucracy many of us do, we all know how frustrating it can be to build a joint future with other partners. It seems so much easier to go it alone and have the flexibility of independence. But being alone means being forgotten. Every initiative I have ever been involved with that takes the easier, more isolated, path, has eventually died and been forgotten. That is the path my countrymen, or just over half of them, decided on yesterday. It is a path that substantially diminishes the contributions of thousands of men and women who spent their lives trying to build a better Britain within Europe. By doing so, we lose the legacies of some of the greatest Britains of the last few decades. We punish ourselves not just today, but yesterday as well as tomorrow. It is perhaps the greatest self-inflicted wound a country has enacted on itself in recent history.

And that is exactly how it feels. As though we have had an allergy that we did not treat. There was nothing wrong, but because we did not engage properly with those who voted for Brexit, parts of our society began to attack the whole. We did not know how to treat the allergy as it became more aggressive. Some people took advantage of our weakness and stimulated its effects further. But at its root was an inability to govern an increasingly polarized electorate. There is simply too little understanding of how to manage both Brexiters and people like myself within one nation.

We could say the same about liberals in the US and supporters of Trump. Or the French political elite and supporters of the National Front. As society moves towards a bipolar world, we have to identify a way that we can more effectively manage such large differences of opinion. Implicit in this is a potentially dangerous idea that my opinion is more valid than others. But managing the ‘anti-intellectual’ tendencies that Brexit, Trump or the National Front ride on is something I am happy to stake a claim in.

The referendum was further reaching, and thus more damaging, than a single election however. Being a part of the EU was a constraint on our policy making. That was its point. It was built to guide member states away from isolationism. That the Conservative party chose to put that constraint at risk was a mistake. That we no longer have that constraint makes the future of the UK a worse one than it would otherwise have been. We will now choose a more isolationist Prime Minister, we are likely to lose Scotland in another referendum, and our relationship with Northern Ireland is at stake. This will leave the UK’s median politician, let alone its median voter, a far less globally-oriented, forward-thinking individual. And they will not be constrained by the rigors of the EU.

In sum, this currently feels like the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I have had a very comfortable life, so that is not saying very much. It also sounds melodramatic. As my mum said, I shouldn’t take these things so seriously. But that ignores the counterfactual, something that will quickly be forgotten or said to be impossible to identify. That counterfactual is less about economics – British people will be OK – but rather about identity and who they want to be. This vote showed that half of Britain wants to be a small, inward looking, tend your own garden, kind of place. I suppose that’s fine, but for me it wastes a huge opportunity. For whatever historical or other reasons, Britain has spent the last few decades being a positive force in all kinds of aspects of global life. Yesterday it decided it would rather diminish its capacity to take on that role. That makes me very sad. Not angry like my sister, but very sad. The place that I loved to call home changed yesterday into a place I am not as comfortable being part of. I needn’t have moved to the US to feel isolated from Britain. My countrymen have done that job for me.

There is a silver-lining to every cloud. It will become apparent in the years to come. But I very much doubt it will ever make up for the shadow that cloud has cast over my increasingly small island. That is how I feel.

6th August 2016 follow up

For all that we are, we are.
Reflections of our past glories,
And our shames.
For we are one and all.
United in our Kingdom.

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On Living Social Philosophy in a World of Individualists

XXX

A commitment to social philosophy entails that you invest in action that 

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On Turning Ten
14th June 2016

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On My Mirror
27th May 2016

I wandered naked through the forest,
Having shed the fabrics of my suppression.
I had left those who had hemmed me in,
To relieve me of my depression.

My sanctuary was my loneliness,
I had found space to be truly free.
Free of foreign influence,
That made me who I didn't want to be.

The shadows rippled as a breeze came up,
It pointed me to a glade.
I wandered to its openness,
And stepped out of the darkness of the shade.

There before me stood a mirror,
Of the like I'd never seen.
It was a product of pure nature,
As it had always been.

Finally, I could see myself,
My soul has been unfurled.
And know what was in my heart,
Without the poisons of my world.

But the mirror was broken; empty.
My presence was not there.
It was not my mirror; empty,
My true self it did not bear.

So I shall go on searching,
For the mirror that reflects my soul.
I am not a scavenger,
But free from the begging bowl.

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On Utilitarianism
14th May 2016

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On Wu Kuan
28th April 2016

The Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery has a wonderful exhibition on at the moment with exhibits relating to the Gentlemen Artists of the Ming Dynasty.  It was wonderful to see how closely the philosophy of these gentlemen poets echoed social philosophy. One example is Wu Kuan's poem, `Hearing Cockcrow',

Screech, screech, crickets sing at night
Cock-a-doodle-doo, roosters sing at dawn
Sharply I came to a profound realization
The two things are calling to each other
Vast and vague, down from the beginning
Since the start the greater half is gone
All of us in life have our ups and downs
Every age has periods of order and chaos
We live our lives here somewhere in between
For which one truly can only heave a sigh
In my heart I hope I have earned no shame
Aside from that, what else really matters

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On Nature
12th April 2016

Social philosophy dictates that the self is carried along within many other persons.  We influence and define others, and thereby embed some part of ourselves in them.  People thus give life to our wider selves by transforming interaction into being.

In the same way that we carry with us those persons who have defined us, we also carry with us other aspects of the world that have defined us.  In the same way that we provide life for those who have defined us, we provide life for the rest of the world that has helped define us.

Whilst a rock is inanimate in itself, those interactions with it that define us lead us to bring that rock to life, and carry it with us in who we are.  We are heavily defined by the natural world around us, from our physical limits to the sustenance we are provided.  Each of these interactions defines us in some way, leaving a trace on our selves that we carry with us in our further interactions with society.

This has several immediate implications.  First, Nature is a fundamental part of our selves.  It has defined our physical and social selves, and we carry the rocks, plants and animals of past generations with us in who we are.

Second, our treatment of Nature is reflected back to us by our being defined by its character.  As Nature changes, it interacts with its past selves as embedded in human society.  It’s current self may have a weaker grip on our selves than its past selves.  However, our contemporary interactions with Nature ensure we continue to be forged by its character and the changes we make to that character.

Third, our wider self is embedded in our treatment of and interactions with Nature.  When social philosophy nudges us to tend to our wider self, it is a statement that is as much about Nature as it is about other people.

Fourth, if we are defined by Nature, and make philosophical choices, then these are partly determined by Nature’s influence.  Thus, Nature is involved in the philosophical choices we make, and is thus a philosophical actor, at least in its interactions with us.  Together we make philosophical choices.  So Nature is my partner in my philosophical search.  Tending to Nature is tending to my philosophical search, and therefore to the core of who I am.

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On Fools
1st April 2016

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On Doubt
15th March 2016

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On Value
1st March 2016

How should one identify one’s value?  In a private sector setting one might believe that the profit one makes is an indicator of one’s value.  There might be some objective, non-relative means of deciding what a ‘worthy’ level of profitability is.  In endeavours where such a market signal is not available, one must rely on other signals of one’s worth.  Again, there may be some non-relative indicator for which magnitude can be argued to be approximate to value.

These indicators could be argued to be more or less ‘worthy’ in philosophical terms.  Perhaps an indicator that approximated value by how violent you were could be said in most settings to be less worthy.  An indicator that approximated value by how happy you made other people might be said to be more worthy.

A clear criticism of this is the social context in which these indicators are embedded.  A gang member whose violence is simply to prove her ability to generate fear in others could be argued to have little worth.  However, a soldier may also be violent so to generate fear in others, but towards the end of reducing the aggregate amount of violence in society.  If everyone (including the gang member) feared one person’s violence, this might lead to a far lower level of total violence in society.  The soldier’s capacity for violence may then be argued to be worthy.  The soldier could benchmark her value against her violence in a philosophically valid way that the gang member could not.

There seems to be interplay between societal value and an individual’s local society.  Value seems to be an inherently social concept. ‘Being valued’ or ‘having value’ implies that there is something beyond yourself (in a physical or social philosophy sense) that benchmarks your value.  In the violence example above, how ‘bad’ violence is seems connected to the society at large.  The value propositions would change dramatically if we moved from perpetrating violence on real people to characters in a computer game.  This implies that your value varies from one social setting to another.

I think that is false.  If one takes value to be dependent on society, one faces the challenge of choosing which society to benchmark oneself against.  Given the infinite number of societies one can be a part of, the choice of values will also be infinite.  Unlike in determining one’s Truth, where one must balance across multiple social frameworks to understand truthful action, in the concept of value we demand a single number.  This requires a single unifying means of judging value across societies and frameworks.

What constant can be claimed to be of value in all societies?  What feature of all individuals would allow us to benchmark their value given the myriad ways in which they can be seen?  Their commitment to Truth.  The most salient assumption of my social philosophy is that I assume that there is a Truth.  This is at the centre of a society and at the centre of overlapping societies.  I have talked in the past about a ‘hierarchy of truths’.  However, I assume that the notion of Truth runs through all societies.  Corresponding to this is my relationship to it, and the link to my value.  That there is a single truth may be of no consequence if I do not relate to it.  However, I define my value by the single concern of committing to the truthful act in whatever set of societies I am in.  That unified commitment, related to the unified notion that there is a single truth in the societies I inhabit, is at the core of my value proposition.  The more closely I commit to acting in truth, the more valuable I am.

This proposition is at the core of the tension laid out at the centre of my philosophy, that a philosophical framework must both be anchored in a base assumption and flexible enough to balance the infinity of possible frameworks one can use to view the world.

This notion of commitment to truth as the measure of value does not imply that action will be the same across societies. Far from it. It is truthful to respond to the social conditions of a particular society. Thus whilst the commitment is the same, the implication differs. Two people may be of the same value but take very different actions. The gang member’s choice set may be substantially smaller than the soldier who represents the state. She must then take the truthful action within that set. It is the commitment to taking truthful action that defines the relative value of the gang member and the soldier, and not the action. Once committed to Truth, the gang member and the soldier would likely take different actions with regards violence.

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On My Gratitude
14th February 2016

Reading this blog should give you a sense of how difficult it must be to live with me sometimes.  I try to mitigate this, but whatever persists, my wife has had to put up with.  This Valentines, I'd like to deviate from my normal pattern of blog posts and just say thank you.  Thank you to my wife for putting up with me.  That you don't mind the way I organise myself has given me freedom and peace, some of the greatest gifts a person could give to another.

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On Being British
31st January 2016

I miss constant exposure to my most enduring society - British society.  The below photo is of an inconveniently parked van, taken by my sister on a walk through her local area and sent to me with the caption `Pure Britain'.

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On Choosing a Career
14th January 2016

My discussions with friends, and my observations of others, regarding their choice of career is typically anchored in the individual.  The choice is conceptualized around what would make the individual happiest, or at least happy, that would teach the individual or bring them skills that might serve them in the future.

Rarely, if ever, do I hear individuals thinking about how to spend their professional life based on what society might need from them.  I do not hear the question, "However uncomfortable or difficult a path may be, what is the path that truth would have me take given the current and likely future state of society?"  Such discussions might be made up of how to balance the competing needs of different formulations of society; whether the paths demanded of the individual across formulations were competing or complementary; and so on.

That I hear so little of this sort of introspection may be my social circle and the media I consume.  But it may also be that it is not widely undertaken.  If so, perhaps it is an argument that society-based decision making is a bad way to organize ones life.  For example, perhaps the individual simply never has sufficient information about the rest of society to make efficient society-based choices about their life.  The best one can do is simply live a life responding to the information you have on your own constraints and desires.

But the benefits, even to the individual, of making society-based decisions about their career path seem apparent to me.  In the lens of the individual you may foresee three paths ahead all of which are informed by your current experience, skills and constraints.  By taking a society-wide view of what your life should aim to achieve, you may look across the chasm along which you walk to see a place that you might truthfully contribute to.  Getting there requires you to build a bridge over the ravine of your current self.  This will be more challenging and uncertain than any of the three paths you see for yourself looking through an individual-focussed lens.  But a society-focussed view of the world expands the range of possibilities for what you should be doing.

Suppose there is a likely chance that after some time your future self will reflect on the path you have taken and ask how it has contributed to society.  Having focussed on a lens centred around the individual constrains your journey, and you may find yourself at a constrained optimum.  In contrast, taking the society-wide view from the start means that your existing constraints and interests do not limit your journey.  Your future self can then look back at the bridge you built to overcome your current self.  You are no longer defined by your history, but merely constrained by it as you build towards the greatest contribution you could make.  Your future self will see a global optimum in your contribution rather than a constrained one.

There is a chance society will shift away from your perception of what it needed, that you make a mistake in what you think society requires, and that you will make no progress towards the more challenging goal.  But thinking hard about the tradeoff between the future based on the individual-lens and the social one seems a worthy introduction to any career planning effort.

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On Persistence
31st December 2015

I have drunk Moet Champagne liquor and palm wine near Cameroon.

I have tasted chocolates in Bruges and semolina in Calcutta.

I have skimmed the waters of Lake Atitlan and swum the ponds of Hampstead Heath.

But only three things persist.

One, God. Two, Love. Three, Self.

Society is the blood of God, and he moves through Love.

Self is the bargain that we make with Life.

Bargain on that which persists and you will echo through Society.

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On [Next Post To Go Here]
15th December 2015

Thomas Cole paintings.

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On Arrogance
30th November 2015

I recently let my frustration get the better of me at work.  I was annoyed at a colleague working on a project I supervise, and let this be known in a meeting.  We have talked it through, I apologised, and I think we have reconciled.  However, in this reconciliation, he told me my greatest weakness was my arrogance.

In a social philosophy, it is quite plausible that one would conceive one's personal society as `better' than another.  The physical and other constraints to society being fully smooth (see On Lumpiness) create islands of society that would underlie such a claim.  However, I struggle with the notion that such proximate islands are so distinct (my colleague and I could be said in many ways to be very alike and I regard him as a good friend).  For me, our selves are wrapped up together much more closely than almost any other society I inhabit.  It was in fact that I felt his actions reflected poorly on our joint society that got me frustrated.  So to come across as so detached was sad, as it is quite the opposite of how I feel.  Our joint self, which is equally valuable in him and me, was at the centre of the dispute.

However, society is lumpy, and we do live on islands.  I should always be aware and respectful of the fact that another may better understand our joint self in a way I do not.  In fact, due to the lumpiness of society, this is a certainty. What was my right to be angry at another part of myself when I may not have appreciated the full features of that self?  To know the island you inhabit requires others to help you map it out.  Understanding that should make me hesitate the next time I feel frustrated at something I can never fully know, my wider self.

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On Anthem to Humanity
15th November 2015

If the voices in your head came alive, what would you do?
You’d run.

You would reduce the experience of your society to a single breath,
And then weep at the loneliness of your existence.

With your back to the crowd you'd bemoan your loneliness.

Like a pyramid that looks to the sky, unaware of its base,
You'd absent yourself from that which underpins you.

Yet your society sees you as a stream.
It debates your present as it connects to their past and hails you as their future.

Bathe in these waters and watch your reflection shimmer in the light.
You are the ripples in that stream.

Turn to your crowd, and listen to them tell you that the point of introspection is to realise its futility.
Your soul is a mirror to your society.

Clamber down the steps of the pyramid, and look at the foundations of your soul.
Be both mason and stone.

Sing the Anthem of Humanity as you ripple through the stream.
Sing with the choir that is your society.

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On Thirty Four People Who Most Define Me
1st November 2015

As part of my thirtieth birthday, I thought about and wrote to the thirty people I believed most defined me. As documented below, these ranged from my family, through teachers, to random acquaintances I met for a couple of hours.  Who defines you is a key point of reflection for anyone who believes in social philosophy.

As part of my upcoming 34th birthday, I have thought back over whether this list has changed.  Why might one expect it to change or otherwise?  On the side of change, as I have moved country, expanded my family, and graduated from my PhD, my society has changed significantly.  As someone who believes in social philosophy, it seems quite plausible that as my society has changed, so have I.  Thus looking back over my history, some members of my past may now have less relevance for who I am today and other individuals have greater relevance.  Similarly, with such a range of life changes, some individuals that have come in to my life may have changed me so significantly that they enter into the list at the expense of others.

In contrast, society seems sticky across place and time.  Empirically it seems to organically generate constraints around a specific individual that fix her at some island in the sea of broader society.  We change far less than we could.  Even as I have moved continents, I am still very much a product of my history, and look to reinforce that by creating a society here that I feel comfortable and fit with.  This precludes mixing with people particularly different from where I was at 30.  The merits or otherwise of this is for discussion another time (though it relates to my blog On Home), but such stability seems to be something that happens to many people I know.

My reality seems to be somewhere between continuity and change.  As I look through the list I wrote four years ago, I still see all of those individuals as especially pertinent for who I am today, but I would argue that the most relevant list is now a little longer.  Perhaps as we grow and change, we become more complex and thus the appropriate length of list of those who 'most' define us lengthens.  For example, the fact that I am now a father adds a layer to my identity and personality that simply did not exist when I was 30.  Joshua certainly plays a significant role in defining who I am today, but it does not feel at the cost of who I was previously.  He has changed my priorities and everyday activities as well as the way I see myself.  But I don't feel that I have lost part of my former self.  Rather, it is wrapped in a new layer of my current society.  My society has gotten a little bigger.

Adding to that list would be my new boss.  She has carved out a part of the World Bank that is a wonderful fit for what I want to do with my life.  Her efforts over the last decade to create the unit of the Research Department that she has meant that I could move to it after my PhD.  Without those efforts, I would be a different person, with different priorities.

In the last year, my sister-in-law has married my now brother-in-law.  This discrete event has changed my conception of my family, but it isn't enough to substantively define me.  However, the way that my sister- and brother-in-law have changed each other, and been an example to Caitlin and I in how to manage a relationship, means that my brother-in-law likely deserves a place.  If he had been a different person, I believe I would be to.

When writing my list at 30, I felt that the degree of influence of individuals in my life beyond the list of 30 dropped substantially relative to those on the list.  Once again, coincidentally my age seems an appropriate number of individuals to say define me on this day.  So there is one more spot.  At least one of my colleagues seems like someone who is currently and likely to continue to be so influential in the way I see my work, that they are changing who I am substantially.  Their knowledge of the subjects I am interested in is better than anyone I have yet met, and so I gain another important teacher.  (Teachers seemed an important part of my original list.)  This final addition points to an unknown future.  Whilst they have had a significant enough impact on me to warrant a spot on my new list, their legacy in me is fragile, and whether their influence is sustained will depend on the events of the next few years.  To what extent can I predict the long term importance of those I believe are defining me today without knowing the challenges of tomorrow?

26th November 2015 follow up

I have talked to a few people about the exercise of identifying those people who most define me.  I recently talked to someone whose list would have included few teachers or perhaps even family.  His list would have been filled, he thinks, by friends.  As I have noted, my list had only a single friend in it.  Thus, it makes me even more fascinated to hear from others on who their 30, 34, or however many would be.  As a quantitative researcher, I would love to have a data set of many people's choices, and look at what determines who is in your set.  Just one more element to a quantitative philosophy.

Discussion: If you attempt an analysis of yourself like that here, please do get in touch and let me know the results!

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On Loneliness
15th October 2015

Sometimes, despite being part of a warm and loving family, and working at an organisation that cares about the same things I do, I feel quite lonely.  I believe it is at those times when I focus on the specifics of my beliefs that I feel most distinct from other people.  When I focus on the broad features of my thinking, it is copacetic with those around me.

In social philosophy, we are defined by our society, and society is lumpy.  Thus, logically there will always be some distance between ourselves and others.  Given this, loneliness is an integral part of society.  This was quite remarkable to me when I realised it, as it seems counter-intuitive.  Flowing from logic that has been expressed elsewhere in this blog, for society to exist it must be lumpy.  If we are defined by that lumpiness, we will be distinct from other parts of ourselves and of other parts of our society.  Thus, at some level of inspection, we are fundamentally different from others, or other parts of our society.  For society to exist, it must be true that there are distinct parts of society that differ, causing one to be alone in some part of one's introspection.

In fact, the feeling of loneliness is the moment at which we realise those aspects of ourselves that make it so that society exists.  The question is then what the response to loneliness should be as a society.  It is certainly true that some parts of my societies have allowed loneliness to dominate in an untruthful way.  In the UK, I am always pained by the loneliness that many of my countrywomen and men feel.  At the same time, given that loneliness allows us to sketch out those features of ourselves that define our society, it does not seem truthful to never spend time in that aloneness.

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On Using the Physical Person to Model Society
25th September 2015

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On Modelling Society
15th September 2015

What would a formal model of society look like? Understanding the nature of our societies and the societies we could have, but do not, experience requires an answer to this question.  From a philosophical perspective, what characteristics define a society and what are the tensions between these characteristics?

The basic assumption of social philosophy is that society is the fundamental unit of philosophical analysis.  Thus,  any model of society must be made up of sub-societies, as this is the basic philosophical entity.  Models of social philosophy therefore have a set of two or more societies as their basis.  The model is then a characterisation of the relationship between those base societies.  The societies we choose as our basic units could, of course, be thought of as having sub-societies, but implicit in the thinking just laid out is that we must choose a notion of society to act as the base unit in a particular model.  (An example of doing this is focussing on the physical person, who in social philosophy is a society in themselves, but we frequently treat them as the philosophical unit of interest.)

Thus, a first choice in our modelling of society using social philosophy is to choose what societies should be the basic units of analysis (such as the physical person).  This could be relative to a 'level of aggregation', such as a person or a household in a traditional framework.  Aggregation is a term that would have to be defined in the framework of analysis that corresponded to the unit of society.  (Note that there is nothing that stops us modelling society below the level of the physical person.)  It could be symmetric, where all societies chosen are argued to have some common level of aggregation or defining characteristic, or it could be asymmetric.

This line of thinking pushes us to appreciate that since all societies could be broken down continuously to sub-societies, any analysis will always be one of multiple frameworks that can be imposed on the underlying 'sea' of society.  The value of any single framework of analysis (that argues for a particular set of societies to be our basic units) should thus be weighed up against the insights of the other frameworks of analysis.  Thus, a natural complement to any particular claim of a base unit of analysis is to understand its analytical appeal.  For example, using the physical person as the fundamental unit of analysis might be argued to be of interest given the physical boundary to society it represents, but then what that physical boundary constrains in terms of society must be defended.  A base unit of society will always have do to be defined for social philosophy (as argued in this blog post, all social philosophy analysis imposes a notion of 'lumpiness').  However, it will only be fully understood as a framework when it is compared to the other notions of base societies that could have been chosen.

Having chosen base units for a model, the modelling framework must then outline how the basic social units are considered with reference to one another.  The nature of those comparisons is the second fundamental choice in the modelling of society using social philosophy.  That they can be considered within the same framework, as components of the same meta-society (a society that contains other societies), is the fundamental assumption of social philosophy.  Unless they can relate units within the same society, the basic assumption will not be met.  Thus, any consideration valid within social philosophy is one that is complete, allowing for consideration between each basic unit.  Otherwise, those parts that cannot be considered within the social framework are socially irrelevant, and thus philosophically irrelevant.

Whatever consideration is used to relate basic units, it must differentiate between them.  If this is not the case, all units are judged the same, and we return to a single entity without social character that is no longer society.  Modelling red and blue societies differentiated only by their colour must be done with a framework that differentiates based on colour.  Importantly, it does not have to be based on connections.  We only require that societies can be considered within the same framework.  They do not have to interact and change each others nature.  They can change the measure by which we understand them.

On Home
30th August 2015

My transition to living in the US has not been the smoothest.  It has been the biggest culture shock of my life, despite having lived in India, Nigeria, and elsewhere in the developing world.  Perhaps this was because I expected it to be similar to the UK.  It may also be because for the first time in my life, it is not clear that I will ever go home.

But where is my home?  What do I mean by that, and as importantly, what should I mean by that?  Is home not a concept for me to choose?

My initial response from a social philosophy perspective is that home is not where you reside, but where you fit.  As society defines you, it makes a place for you in the wider social fabric.  You define others and they define you, creating a mutually reinforcing structure for your place in your society.  It is perhaps not the place that you are happiest, but the place where your social assumptions are most closely echoed in other peoples, or the wider society.

Walking to our house in Washington one afternoon, I became emotional as I sung to Joshua ‘we’re almost home’.  ‘I’m not’, I thought.  This isn’t where I fit.  My wife’s response was that she felt something similar when she moved to the UK for me, initially finding it a difficult place to live.  Over time, she was defined by British society, and found it an increasingly happy place to live.  Her new residence became increasingly like home as she was defined by its society.

Being displaced also gave her a different sense of home.  It was no longer a fixed location, but where Joshua and I are.  We are so important to her definition that she best fits wherever we are.  I felt something akin to this over my transition to the US.  It brought home to me how how important my wife and son are to my new world.

However, I couldn’t say I still don’t see the UK as home.  Recently returning, I stood on a street corner watching people pass, and simply felt like a jigsaw piece that had been clicked into place.  The faces, the discussions, and the pace of life, all rang true with a significant part of me.

But there was something uncomfortable about it all as well.  People seemed to be homogenous in a way I had never seen before.  I clicked into this puzzle because it was made of the same cloth that I am, but it was a single sheet of cloth made of similar threads.  Spending time in a new society that was redefining me provided perspective on my old home.  It was comfortable, but had me sitting with those closest to me in form.

Does this matter?  Should we live with the closest reflections of our own self?  Social philosophy would have contrasting perspectives on this.  It would argue that society shapes us to make us fit, so we can more easily live our particular life.  Our truth is social, so having a more homogenous society might make debate more focussed on our set of social constraints.  (A more homogenous society may not imply a more homogenous truth, but it likely means that debate on our common constraints are more relevant to each individual.)  It is also where we have most joint understanding, and information on other’s societies.

Social philosophy would also argue that variation is fundamental to our understanding of Truth.  By being taken outside of our society, and by being redefined there, we are given an opportunity to appreciate the boundaries of ourselves better than we would otherwise have been.  We are forced to appreciate a new set of social constraints, and the truthful responses to these constraints.  We are confronted by the challenges of other’s in our new society, and their responses.  ‘By being redefined there’ is important, as if we successfully resist our new society’s constraints we are not truthfully responding to our new society, nor giving ourselves the possibility to truly appreciate truth there.

At the overlap of two society’s truths arises a truth that transcends either society.  Social philosophy argues the importance of understanding this hierarchy of Truth.  By making ones home elsewhere, we can appreciate this overlap perhaps more clearly than if we stay within a society in which we are defined.

This logic brings up the possibility that it is truthful to make your home outside of your society.  The question I am confronted with is therefore, where is it truthful to make my home?  The answer is surely where one can undertake the most truthful action.  This might be in one’s original society, where a person has the most information, the greatest appreciation of other’s constraints, and a legacy.  It might be elsewhere, where the mixing of societies brings out some higher truth.  Perhaps there is some optimal balance, where one tends to ones roots, whilst allowing yourself to grow where the sun is brightest.

For me, this thinking has soothed my transition to the US.  I do believe it is truthful to be doing the work I am.  But it confronts me with a challenge - to understand the new society I am living in, and it’s relationship to that I have left behind.  Choosing where to make your home is half the battle.  The other half is to appreciate its truth, and to grow in that appreciation.

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On Questioning in Life
16th August 2015

As a researcher, my basic response to my work is to question it.  How much do I really know about the topics I explore?  What evidence exists that there is an appropriate action to take? However, working in Washington DC, I meet a lot of people who are very confident that their way of seeing the world is correct.  There is a real sense here that people are confident they know what they are doing and feel they should just be given the money to get on with it.  I met a lady today who told me 'I don't evaluate things, I actually do them'.  Others have said similar things to me, and when I ask them how they know what to do they tell me something along the lines of, 'Oh, I know'.

As someone interested in social philosophy, it is not the individual's confidence that is intriguing, but the general culture of confidence that pervades Washington's society.  Very few people here seem to have many questions about what they should be doing, but rather confidently go about their jobs with faith that they are right.

My interaction with the doer this morning made me think about which societies could be characterised as having a questioning approach to life.  Are their countries that are known for questioning?  My own people, the British, are generally quite liberal, and don't question each other's ways of doing things, and are frequently quite content in the boundaries of their castles.  There are certainly questioners within our society, but I could not say that the British as a whole questioned their fundamental assumptions on a regular basis.  I struggle to think of any nation who are known for their questioning approach.

I then wondered if there was a profession who could be said to be questioning?  The most religious people in society think a lot about how to act, but they do not question the fundamental tenants of their religion.  The majority of religious people commit to an institutional religion, and must therefore limit the degree to which they question their fundamental assumptions.  Perhaps academics have the strongest claim to being society's questioners, but modern academia is dominated by subject boundaries, restricting truly free questioning of a subject's assumptions.

I really couldn't think of any society, be it a nation or profession, that I could characterise as questioning.  The world seems dominated by a general lack of demand for questioning.  This is not to say everyone thinks, as the doer does, that they are right.  Rather, the lack of questioning may also imply that people think it does not matter that much if they are right or wrong.  Though this is all speculation, the lack of discussion in society about our fundamental assumptions would imply something in these sentiments.

Social philosophy provides two ways to think about this.  First, it provides a reason to continuously question ones life.  Since an individual is determined by their society, changes that are far outside the individual's own action space can have significant impacts on their truthful course of action.  With any changes in society over time, the nature of individual and societal Truth may shift.  One needs to question whether one's actions continue to be truthful as society changes around them.  Suppose a society needed one great magician.  If there was no such person, it would be truthful for an individual to train for that position.  However, once such a person existed, or a glut of suitably qualified candidates existed, this would significantly weaken the need for any other person to become a magician.  Introspective questioning would allow each of us to ensure we continue to take truthful actions in the face of a changing society.  But since our society has imperfect information, we should also question publicly, to ensure that we share information about our actions with others who may inform us about their truthful content.  By announcing I am to train to become a magician, others can relate to me the dynamics of the magical labour market that I may not otherwise have been aware of.

Second, social philosophy, taking society as the fundamental unit of analysis, may claim that society does the thinking and places us all on a truthful path.  There is little questioning in individual lives because society does the requisite questioning and generates the appropriate social pressures to move people towards a more truthful course of action.  This would require the assumption that society's natural equilibrium state is Truth, and without reasoned guidance, it directs itself towards that state.  One might go so far as stating that individual questioning might derail that course, since it would be based on incomplete information, or incomplete reasoning.  For example, if society is experimenting with individual lives (trying out different ways at getting at Truth), then any incomplete reasoning at the individual level that alters individual actions disrupts society's experimental analysis.

My response to this is that such an assumption is both hugely morally demanding and logistically impractical.  It is morally demanding in that it tasks us to act only on impulse, with all the associated consequences.  Our awareness of the possibility of society's guiding forces implies that we should set up systems to think and coordinate truthfully at the societal level.  We should try to do as well as society, hoping that the dynamics of our collaborative efforts are of a similar quality to that of society's own thinking.  Giving in to the idea that society is thinking and questioning for us should thus be benchmarked against these joint efforts.  It seems morally demanding to decide that these efforts should be discarded.  And it is impractical because it is not clear what societal impulses we should give in to.  Society frequently gives us competing impluses to respond to, and it is our moral compass honed by questioning that charts our course between these.  Without a clear understanding of how we should respond to which impluses, giving in to a higher social force seems impractical.

Thus, with individual questioning a morally defensible position, I hope I can portray and support a more questioning society in my life.  I would, however, be very keen to hear others thoughts on who one might characterise as a questioning society, and how much a plane ticket there costs.

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On Society's Lumpiness
3rd August 2015

Social philosophy is based on the notion of analysing philosophical issues embedded within a society.  However, there are no prior restrictions on what the nature of society should be.  In particular, society could be organised such that the collection of information about a phenomenon, its communication, or the experience of it could be common across members of the society (figure 1).  Whatever external stimulus arrived at a society, the experience and information of that stimulus would be immediately shared by all.  At the opposite extreme would be a society in which, though member's experienced phenomena in a shared world, they could not interact; they could not share experience or the information gained (figure 2).  As individuals or persons, we would be 'islands' in society, unable to communicate or jointly consider our philosophical states.

All other versions of society could be characterised as 'lumpy' (figure 3).  These are societies in which individuals experience and consume some part of the world alone, and share other parts with their wider society.  The degree of sharing would be characterised by the mechanisms, physical and social, that society had for sharing experience and information.

The first step in understanding the nature of the society we are in is to note that each individual is formed, and represents, their society.  Thinking of individuals as units of society themselves is defeated by the basic assumption of social philosophy, that the basic unit of philosophical insight is society.  Rather, individuals are combinations of the society that formed them (as argued as nauseam below).  Thus, social philosophy rules out the islands theory by noting that we must be formed from society (and ignoring for now the notion of subsets of society).  A more general perspective along the same lines is that once a part of society can no longer be jointly considered with its parent, it is no longer philosophically relevant to the parent, and is automatically excluded by the basic assumption.

The second step is to note that if society were fully common, such that all members experienced it and understood it equally, there would be no variation in society.  If society did not vary, then its constituent parts would be undifferentiable, and it could no longer be understood in a framework of social philosophy.  (At the extreme of all societies breaking down into a single entity, they lose their social character, and thus are no longer society.)

Thus, these statements combined are an argument for all societies within a social philosophy to be lumpy.  It must be that to some extent society is the glue between individuals who experience the world or collect information on it differentially to their neighbours.  Though we are all summaries of societies ourselves, there are gaps between those societies in a social philosophy.

Empirically, this feels intuitively correct.  It is physically and socially unlikely that man fully shares his individual experience of the world with his wider society.  Physically we experience place and time, and typically believe that all philosophical entities in a society cannot share the same place and time.  Social constraints and other mechanisms that guide our action seem prevalent in our experience of the world.

Understanding lumpiness as a philosophical state requires us to understand the nature of informational and experiential flows, the mechanisms of these flows and an investigation into whether we can change them.  Is it possible, or more importantly, philosophically truthful, to change the nature of the glue that holds us together, moving to a stronger sharing of our experiences and information?  The benefits of such strengthening would include greater understanding of wider society, and thus a closer appreciation of Truth.  The costs are that we reduce the heterogeneity in our society's form.  As we are increasingly defined by the same experiences and information, we increasingly become more alike the rest of our society.  That reduction in diversity may in fact push us further from appreciating Truth.

Thus, social philosophy's basic structure guides us to investigate the optimal balance between embracing the union with our wider society and restricting ourselves to some local world that only we experience and understand.  In the  hugely diverse world in which we find ourselves, such a balance is personal whilst being routed in the wider social good of identifying Truth.

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On The Nature of God
19th July 2015

At the top of one of the columns that surrounds the Library of Congress Reading room (lefthand picture), where I regularly work, is the following quote (righthand picture):

"One God. One Law. One element. And one far off divine event to which the whole creation moves."

It is from Lord Alfred Tennyson's `In Memoriam, Epilogue' (see blog post below on Ulysses).  The poem questions the meaning of man's existence, and his relationship to God.  A prevailing theme of the poem is the purity of God, something which man will never truly understand.  There is an implication in the above quote, as well as the larger poem, of the universality of God, and man's distance from that universality.

I was reflecting on this quote this week, and what it implied for the nature of God.  The question naturally arose as to what social philosophy implies for the Nature of God.  The contrast between these two is the focus of this blog post.

Tennyson's quote and poem are highly representative of the classic vision of God.  He is omnipotent and everlasting, having been the cause of creation and the only survivor of it.  His nature is fully detached from the actions of humanity, and our actions do not affect it.

Social philosophy takes a very distinct view of the Nature of God.  Respecting the fundamental assumption of social philosophy, without society God does not exist in anything but abstract form.  He only exists in the sense of being the Truth at the centre of those societies that could exist.  Once society is formed, He is immediately present in that society in the form of Truth.  God is the personification of Truth.  Thus, society is the physical birth of God.  Without it, He exists, but does not breath.

This is a critical difference between social philosophy and the traditional view of God.  Social philosophy would argue that God's nature is fundamentally tied to the nature of society.  In each society, he has a distinct nature.  Since Truth differs depending on the nature of the society, so does God's character.  Individual truthful action increases the truthful nature of a society, and thus extends God's presence in that society.  To be clear, our truthful action gives birth to a greater, more present God.  It is not that we are a pure product of God, but that our joint existence is intimately intertwined.  Our natures are shaped by the extent of Truth in society, and our truthful action extends the extent of God in our society.  When we act in Truth, we make him more prevalent for our society.

A practical example is how our health is a function of the actions of huge numbers of other people in our society, from those who vaccinated their children so disease could not easily spread, through the doctors and nurses that treat us when we are ill, to those who drive safely to keep us safe on the roads.  How healthy we are is the product of a vast network of decisions made by other people.  Each truthful action extends God's presence in our lives by making our society safer and healthier.  In the traditional view of God, one prayers to God to heal the sick.  This God is external to society and acting upon it.  In social philosophy, we pray to the God that permeates all truthful action in society, and that arises from our actions.  He is the lifeblood of a truthful society, and fully connected with and dependent on it.

An important corollary of this line of thinking is that there is a topology of God throughout society.  He is not equally present because of truthful action not being felt equally everywhere.  He is more present in some lives than in others.  As actors in society, we must therefore make choices over how we act and how we help shape and build society to spread God's presence to the greatest number in our society.  It is surely a moral issue that the poorest in society, faced by more restrictive challenges, do not feel the presence of God as freely as those with the greatest capabilities.  Unlike in traditional views of God, it is up to society to extend the greatest God to all its members.

This thinking does not alter some classical characteristics of God.  He is still a force greater than the individual, since society is lumpy and no individual or sub-society contains all of society.  Given this, we cannot comprehend his totality, and will never fully understand his total self.  At the intersection of all societies is a version of God that could be said to be at the intersection of all humanity, and this may be a view of God that is believed to have a special place in our relationship to Truth.  However, this intersection is still fundamentally determined by the characteristics of the societies of which it is made up.  Society is thus crucial to both who we are and the God that is a reflection of our best selves.

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On Legacy II
6th July 2015

The short story below on death stops short of discussing the implications of social philosophy for identity's relationship to death.  As one builds a life, and an identity of achievement or output, a common refrain is to look back unsatisfied with how many things one hoped to achieve that one didn't.  However, a social philosophy points to several flaws in this reasoning.  They are all based around the idea that it is society that leaves the legacy, and not the individual.

Firstly, if truthful action is probabilistic, in the sense that there is some probability less than one that a constant set of actions will lead to the intended outcome, then it can be truthful to try but not to achieve.  Such a problem may require multiple lives to be lived towards the eventual achievement of the intended outcome.  The life that achieves the outcome is no more truthful in its actions than those lives that were lived in the same way but not chosen by Nature to achieve the outcome.

Related to this, there may be problems that require society to experiment with different ways of approaching that problem so to find the solution.  This is distinct from the above in that it is truthful to undertake different actions from those who have tried before, and given that no set of actions is ex-ante known to be more likely to achieve the intended outcome than any other, each set of different actions is equally truthful.  The lack of achievement is not a sign of failure for the individual, but rather an expression of society experimenting with different sets of actions.

This reasoning abstracts from the many nuances we must confront in our decisions on which actions to take.  What if existing evidence indicates that one set of actions may be slightly more likely to achieve our desired outcome than another?  Will everyone now follow this path, at the cost of all others?  Such limited diversification is untruthful in many cases.  The point I am making is that focussing on the truthful content of a single individuals' achievements does not capture the fact that it is society living through them.  It is society's many failures and eventual success that is truthful.  Everyone who is part of society's great experiments with Truth therefore share equally in its glory, independent of what outcomes arose from their actions.

How is death related to this thinking?  Without death, there would always be the opportunity that the individual could change their legacy in society.  Death provides a platform on which to reflect on the legacy of the individual.  This is not a faulty task if that individual's place in their society is sufficiently appreciated.

However, misunderstanding the nature of legacy as a product of individual actions and outputs may tempt us away from Truth.  This is true in terms of both truthful reporting and action. If one believes that our lives are discrete, as we near death we are tempted to retell our past in a way that secures the most promising legacy.  We attempt a telling of our lives that rationalises our diminishing future options.  This constrains our action.  We are constrained in taking the truthful action, because we value those actions that rationalise the lives we have lived.  If, instead, we realised that we are part of a broader society through which legacy persists, no retelling would be necessary, as each of our actions would live beyond our lives through the echoes of our actions in society.  Thus, our aim would be to take the most truthful action at any point, like any other moment in our lives.  The approach of death would not change that.

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On A Blade of Grass
21st June 2015

I have long said that 'Truth can be stemmed from a blade of grass'.  Such a task, however, is Herculean.  Why?  A

In social philosophy, actors are clumps of society bounded away from the rest of society in ways that make them independent. A key boundary is the ability to fully comprehend the state of the world beyond themselves. This is a direct corollary of the fact that our understanding is bounded. As such, no single actor can comprehend the reality of the society in which they exist.  If truth is a function of reality, no single actor can comprehend any form of truth. This is inclusive of their own. It is only society as an entity that has sufficient information about its reality to comprehend truth. Even then, it cannot comprehend truth in its fullness given the limits to identifying variation that its own boundaries impose.


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On Ulysses
7th June 2015

I do not talk enough about how broadly I believe philosophy and the wider contemplative world fits into the framework of social philosophy.  Most of the world's thinkers seem to me to be social philosophers, whether they knew it/know it or not.  I wanted to give one example here that has recently touched me.

I have been thinking a lot about the poem 'Ulysses' by Lord Alfred Tennyson (I think it's to do with me getting old).  It jumps out at me how frequently the poem refers to how society has forged Ulysses.  In line 18, he directly states, "I am a part of all that I have met".  

The point of this post is to say how social philosophy is widespread, and those like I who want to better understand it can learn from this work.  Tennyson brings forth a fascinating point when Ulysses claims that he will 'rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!'  Is it true that to truly be the best of oneself, one has to return to the societies in which one's greatest self was forged?  What becomes of those of us who are forged in battle but have to build a life in peace?

And yet, this post is not arguing that we should passively consume the social philosophy of the wider world.  Taking social philosophy to its limit allows us to actively assess the consistency of other work.  For example, I feel that social philosophy would hint that Ulysses was wrong 'not to yield' and not to stay at home and build a better world for his people.  It might argue that the truthful action is not to search for the societies of the past, where Truth was clearer, but to battle at home to find Truth in that place.  Is Ulysses simply too old to change to undertake the truthful path?  That's not the tension at the heart of the poem, and it doesn't seem to be Ulysses key concern.

To question this poem is difficult for me, as it brings me so much to think about.  I do wonder, however, what a fully developed philosophy of society would say to this poem, and to the many other fragments of social philosophy scattered across the world.

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A Short Story On Death
24th May 2015

I opened the door with quiet anticipation.  It creaked slightly on its hinges.  There.  A memory crystallized, with the dust moving slowly through the mellow shafts of sunlight.

The room was as I remembered it.  Or mostly so.  The plain desk without a chair.  The bed nestled against the wardrobe hindering its use.  And little else.

Ten years ago, almost to the day, I had left this room and gone home.  The year away from home.  The sadness forgotten; the warm glow of satisfaction remembered.  The years since felt long and it was warming to be back here.

I stepped in and could taste the mustiness I always remembered.  My wife would be coming from reception at any moment, so I took the opportunity to remember.  The showers to relieve the heat.  The many happy moments, unburdened by responsibility.  The freedom of my youth.

My mind wandered over the last few days of that trip.  The terrible sickness I had always told people of.  The two days and nights where my diary was blank.  The nausea.  I could feel it coming on now.  As the memory of those two days came flooding back.

The sweat.  The movement from consciousness and back.  The figure.  That terrible moment.  That choice.  Locked away as part of the deal.  I felt a heaviness building with every recollection.

And then I sensed that presence that would make it all real.  I couldn't be remembering right.  It had been the fever.  Or a terrible dream.  Or something unreal.  So I turned to the corner behind the door, where I felt him.

He was there.  The collection of half-memories solidified.  It was as I remembered.

Cloaked in black and smaller than most men, Death is a presence rather than a figure.  He is a coldness, an unknowing.  The desire to run could not become whole, and stayed as fear.  So I stood in front of him; him staring back at me.

I remembered.  Our first meeting flowed back to me with a constance I felt nowhere else.

"You came back, as you promised." His voice was weak, but with a clarity of purpose.  I was empty. "You have brought what you said you would."

Only then did I think of Gemma.  My God.  No.  I began to fill.  My desperation mixed with hate.  What had I done?  I was a child, inexperienced, stupid.  How can I have brought her here, to this?

Death's stare was constant.  He spoke softly.  "Be at peace."

I had been so sick.  I had never felt like that.  On the second night I had woken with Death nearby.  I should have gone to the hospital the day before but had been too weak.  I was alone.  Death had become my only companion.

He had had a calmness in his presence.  A certainty.  His was the only sure profession.  His purpose was clear to him, and his place in the world certain.

He had approached me with his hand outstretched, ready to clasp mine.  He seemed to have a purity about him.  That purity.  There was something about it that I could not recognise.  Something that had made me uncomfortable.

It was that sense that gave me enough strength to mutter three words. "Deal with me." He stopped his reach.  I had felt some new drops of life flow into me.

"What do you offer?"  I lay there for some time.  "My soul," and the only thing I could think of in my foolish youth, "and another."

"I collect all souls," he replied, "in time."  I searched for an answer, and found he had given it to me as carefully as he felt he could. "Then I will give you their time."

He seemed to bristle. "I can only give you these terms. For a decade I will leave you in peace.  After that time you will return here; you will bring a soul. You must cherish this soul as if it were your own."

"Once I leave this room you will not have memory of our meeting, but your destiny will be wrapped in the bond you make here.  There is nothing but these terms.  The soul you bring must have decades to live, so you trade their future for your present."

I paused to search inside myself.  In the fondness of youth we do not understand what it is to truly love another as we are taught to love ourselves.  I found peace in myself and Death melted as I raised my hand to his.

All this I had forgotten.  All this had made up who I had been since then.  I could not bear to think that this had motivated my time with Gemma.  I could not believe that my life had been directed at this.

I quivered.  Death motioned for me to sit down.  I looked at him.  There was nothing but certainty in his presence.

I slowly fell on to the bed, my shoulders hunched and my eyes filling with water.  I must have looked as if hollow.

My thoughts turned to Gemma.  She was beauty defined for me.  I thought of the first time we met, at a picnic hosted by a friend.  Her smile and the sun were how I remember that day.  I thought of the day we were married and how we held each other as man and wife.  I could feel her hand in mine and her head on my shoulder.

"I just didn't know," I stopped to choke back the tears. "I didn't know what I was doing.  Please."

Death repeated, "Be at peace."

I thought of how Gemma and I held each other as we watched a movie on the couch, or how we loved to go swimming in the summer.  I thought of our arguments.  How she had taught me so much.

What would her family do when they heard?  I could see her mother now, falling into her father's arms and he with the quiver of his lips Gemma had inherited.  I saw my own parents and my sister, and I began to cry.

Death's stare fixed me through my tears and he blurred.  I placed my head into my hands and wiped my eyes with my palms.  He was still blurred.

"Whoever enjoys a moment of love," Death said softly, "has lived."

Somehow this gave me a little balance and I could feel my breath settle.  I sat searching for something that would give me a grasp on the world I had created.  I looked up at Death as he stared down at me.

"That love is our greatest window into life."

I stared into the figure that stood in front of me.  I looked into his form and began to focus.  I searched deeper and deeper into that form and its purity.  The unease that purity had stirred in me ten years ago began to return.

I began to think about my own end and how it would drift like a whisper into that formless purity.  This began to haunt me once again but I clutched onto my unease to steady my composure.

"I think back to the first time we met," I began to echo my thoughts to Death, "and think of who I was then."  "I was scared of losing myself." "Then I think of how much I have changed since then, and," I almost breathed in a moment of relief, "and I realise how much Gemma has been a part of that." "In so many respects, she has become a part of who I am."

Death bristled at this, almost seeming excited.  "Then I am gaining a mosaic of your two souls; a beautiful idea."

This caused me to come close to tears again.  And I thought of our parents.  I thought of all they had done to define who I was.  I thought of my sister and all we'd shared.

I composed myself a little, hoping Gemma would never come to join us.  "I am a mosaic of more than two souls," I said, fixing my star with Deaths.  "I may be more than you are expecting."  My thinking was flowing into my words.

Death stood back for a moment, my words seeming to affect him.  I searched his expression for some sense of how.  His eyes broke with mine and looked at the floor.

I took myself back into my thoughts to understand what was affecting him.  His cracked lips had opened slightly and his dark eyes sat unblinking.  I thought of all those who had shaped me.  I thought of my father teaching me to saw, and how he'd let me make mistakes on a project he was working on just so he could say we'd made it together.  I thought of how he'd disciplined us when we did things he didn't approve of.  Thinking of this made me turn to Mum, who would hold us after Dad had gotten angry.  I thought of all the advice she had given me as the years had turned, and how that advice had made me who I was.  It felt as if they were with me now.

Then there was my sister who would boss my friends and I around all summer, only to come running for protection when she was scared.  I thought of all the feelings this had given me, and how I always wanted to protect her from harm.  I thought of how, many years later, I had felt it ever more strongly for Gemma.

My friends.  How much mayhem we had caused as kids, and how they had been there since then.  Their advice, their opinions, their ideas, all now mingled with who I was.

"It's not my life that is flashing before my eyes," Death looked at me, "but all those who make me up." Death's eyes widened. All those he had taken.  It had always been so clear.  Seemingly simple.  This made things looked blurred.  Look different.

The two of us waited, both thinking, hoping.  To see Death vulnerable implied a chance.  For Death, there had never been anything but certainty.  There was always a purpose.  That must be achievable again.

Then I thought of Gemma and her parents.  She hadn't just been changed by them.  She had changed them.  Her father, it was said, had become a family man when Gemma had been born.  'The little girl that had melted her father's heart' was what her mother said she was.

Gemma was like that.  She had made little changes in so many people.  Her family was just the start.  I and they were just the strongest examples of her impact.  There were pieces of Gemma in so many people I knew.  I had just never really thought of it until that moment.

"You cannot ..." Death interrupted me, "I know."  He stepped softly over to the bed and sat down.  His intent stare was now fixed upon the floor.

I could feel his coldness next to me against the warmth of the sunshine coming through the windows.

"You cannot," I persisted, "take Gemma's soul by taking her life." "She is part of me, her father, her mother, and all those she has ever touched. The changes she inspires ripple through her community."

Death shuddered.  The suggestion that a person could be more than just an individual, more than just a soul, shook him.  His purpose, his meaning, was based on the singularity of life.  If a person lived on through all others, then ... He tried to shake the thought, visibly shaking.  What had he done?  What was his purpose if this was true?  He sat in still thought as the moments passed.

After a long pause Death looked up at me.  "You are right.  And I have failed."  Death looked into my eyes for a few moments.  "You are free."  His body seemed to shrink as mine had done only minutes before.  He stared into the ground.

Gemma stepped into the room.  She was visibly nervous from the sight of a figure that had an aura such as Death's sitting by me.  She looked at me in confusion.  "You are free?  From what?"

Death looked up at her.  With his certainty of purpose shaken, he was a shadow of his former self.  "She does have a beautiful soul, whatever that might mean."

Gemma looked at me almost alarmed now.  I stood up, realising I must get her home and safe immediately.  I took her arm to leave and she asked, "What is going on?"

"Please trust me.  We must go."  She put her hand on mine and nodded.  "Can we not help this mean at all?"  Gemma said softly as we turned.  I paused.  The humanity of the question gave me a sense of protection from the harm I feared.

"We knew each other once," I said to her, "and he feels he has lost much of the reason that brought us together.  Much of the reason for doing what he does."

Gemma squeezed my hand and looked at Death.  "We can only ever really see ourselves in others," she addressed him, "and a world without you would, I'm sure, be a poorer one.  Whatever you do, if it gives society and the people you effect meaning, then be proud of that contribution."

Death looked at her and raised his brow.  "So there is hope for me."

Gemma looked at me and could see the concern in my eyes.  We turned and moved swiftly out of the door, leaving Death in the beams of sunlight that lit up the room.

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A Poem On Love
5th May 2015

If you are to love me, love me completely.

Love me in the totality of who I am.

Of all those I live through and the society I create,

Love me beyond the borders of my home.

If you are to love me, know me completely.

Know me in the totality of who I am.

Of all those I live through and the society I create,

Know me beyond the borders of my shell.

If you are to love me, attend me completely.

Attend me in the totality of who I am.

Of all those I live through and the society I create,

Attend me beyond the borders of my body.

If you are to love me, reflect me completely.

Reflect me in the totality of who I am.

Of all those I live through and the society I create,

Reflect me beyond the borders of my soul.

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What number are you?
19th April 2015

At the Martin Luther King Junior Memorial in Washington, DC, displayed amongst his many quotes is, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

In a social framework, the network of mutuality across others is a fundamental assumption of the philosophy.  The assumption is that society must be taken as the fundamental unit of philosophical analysis.  However, this assumption does not restrict the size of that society, such that it could be limited to two people.  The quote above implies that i) all people 'anywhere' are members of our society, and ii) for each of these people, we should place a non-zero weight on an injustice done to them.

Interpreting this quote in the light of a social philosophy, a remaining question is how much weight to place on an injustice done to someone in our society.  Everyone who believes in the above two statements must face the question of how much weight they should place on injustice 'anywhere'.  In a social philosophy, there are many reasons why this weight might vary over individuals in your society.  Such a framework allows for a measure of 'closeness' to sway the moral responsibility to others in our society.  So we might be 'closer' to our children and our parents, and thus have a greater moral responsibility to them.

To define what we owe to each member of our society, we must consider at least the following things: What is the state of injustice against all of those in our society?  To what extent are we ready to understand that injustice?  How much are we ready to trade off our responsibilities across members of our society?  And how do we take action given these trade offs?

Working in international development, let me work through an example from that setting.  It could be argued in a social philosophy that I am philosophically distant from someone living in the poorest parts of the world.  On the other hand, if economic injustice is greatest there, I must choose to weigh up the injustice they face against their distance from me.  Suppose I have to decide how much of my income to donate to those facing economic injustice.  The question is how much do I give?  A fully utilitarian model would frequently argue that you should give everything you have beyond your own subsistence living allowance.  A social philosophy allows you to weigh those philosophically close to you, such as your children, higher than those philosophically distant.  But if you believe that even those socially very distant from you but still within your society should receive some of your income, you must decide what that number should be.  So the question we must all make a decision on if you believe in i and ii above, is what number reflects our philosophical weightings of those in our society who may be most distant but who face the greatest economic injustice.

A social philosophy would argue that this number is not just something that reflects who you are, but also defines who you are.  By living by a number, that number becomes part of your society and so defines you.  So perhaps the question should not be what number reflects you, but rather what number are you?

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On Defining Others
12th April 2015

This weekend I have had to look after my son completely on my own for the first time.  There is a very regular routine, and my wife kindly left a timetable for me to follow and notes on activities we could undertake.  I have only blown up one egg and caused a small international incident, so things are going OK.

As I spend time with Josh, I think of what we know about how to influence our children in a positive way.  By keeping them healthy, talking to them about the interactions they have in the world, and teaching them the basic principles around which our world is organised, we change who they are.  Then there are the passive influences we can appreciate, such as our habits, the language we use, and the rhythms of our lives, that are passed on to our children.  We are less likely to modify those to be focused on bringing up our children, but we likely give these thought.

Then there is everything else about our interactions with our children that we do not typically appreciate as playing a role in their definition.  For me, this might be how I dress, how much I talk, when I talk, how others respond to my talking, how much I hold hands with my wife, or whether Josh observes us praying or having moments of reflection in our lives.  Or it might be a host of other things I simply do not understand.

Our defining role is regarded by most people as partly economic, partly social and partly spiritual.  In a social philosophy it is also partly philosophical.  The way we define our children fundamentally determines their philosophical future as it shapes the society they are embedded in and thus the philosophical choices they will face.

The catch with our children, is that we care for their future more deeply than most peoples.  We must therefore shape their current selves to be philosophically ready for the uncertain future they face.  There are relative constants as one generation moves to the next it seems, but what about those aspects of society that are not constant?  How can we be sure we are preparing our children philosophically for the future in the face of such uncertainty?

Rather, it seems most truthful to embed in them the capacity to respond to the uncertainties.  Give them the machinery of us.  Teach them how we would face such uncertainties, so that our voice, be it among many, is part of their conversation when they face those new worlds.

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On Collaboration in Social Philosophy
28th March 2015

A big question my wife and I have had to face is how to build a life together when I am so committed to a particular world view.  My belief is to always act in Truth, whether you are acting with others or alone.  This requires any action you take with others to conform to your belief of what is truthful.  With many actions and relationships, you can simply choose which actions to take with whom so to meet this requirement.

This is a more complex task when you commit yourself to someone to build a life with.  In this case, you are committing to a huge range of joint decisions that are not specified in advance, from what to do as a family activity  on a particular weekend to what home to buy.  This intense degree of collaboration requires compromises by both parties, as perhaps the pair do not have exactly the same likes and dislikes.  A commitment to truthful action, however, is a non-negotiable.  It has to be adhered to for the committed party to be involved.

So when there are partners or other group members who do not believe in such a framework, how does collaboration work?  A first response is to reflect on the comment made in this blog that social change can arise from changing yourself.  You are reflected in others and are a reflection of your wider society.

A different response would be that one must choose collaborators (or life partners) who complement your own place in society in a way that will lead you to move towards Truth.  By looking for a partner through the lens of social philosophy, you are looking for someone with whom you can undertake the most truthful action.  This doesn't necessarily mean they have to be as committed to Truth as you.  Rather, your joint interaction should foster the truthful path in your self, and your pair.  In my case, having found a partner who is more grounded in reality than me has given me a better sense of the society we live in.

One might argue that with a sufficient commitment to Truth, whoever you are matched with you will jointly move towards Truth.  However, in societies so characterised by social constraints, it seems unlikely that this approach is the most truthful.  The original match matters because the society we live in is currently too constraining to lead us all to the same truthful path.

I can believe theoretically that the most truthful partner is someone actively resisting your commitment to Truth (perhaps this constant questioning of your fundamental assumptions will strengthen them).  However, my partner's support of my beliefs, whilst not necessarily agreeing with them fully, has been a foundation for us to work together towards a more truthful life.

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A Poem On Family
14th March 2015

Here is a poem that stems from social philosophy on a topic that deeply affects me:

You were the glade in which she grew,

And the leaves of your trees marked what she knew.

The fears that legend bore of the dark nights,

Were reflected in her perceiving of the day's lights.

Where was your confidence or self-trust?

The earthy ingredients to assuage life's rust.

Your greatest gift was marred by the shadow of your fears,

Promoting your echo through salty tears.

And my wish is that you had dealt with this,

Rather than smothered it with a fleeting kiss.

You bury your pain below the garden you tend,

So that the roses you plant grow thorns to offend.

And my wish is that your shadows would not pass to our child,

I wish that he could look at his soul with a heart that was mild.

That he could give himself the chance he should,

And build his life roaming free in that wood.

But I fear that he'll stay in your glade for too long,

And never truly sing his freedom song.

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On Social Change
28th February 2015

At the heart of social philosophy is that we are made up of those in our society, and in reverse, we are reflected in a host of people in whose societies we have played a part.  Each time we make a change in ourselves, therefore, that change is reflected in those who we make up in the future.  So personal change, in a social philosophy, is social change.  As an aside, this is also true in the sense that we embody the sum of societies that we reflect, and thus any personal change we affect is a reflection of a social process of change that goes on within us.  The societies that make us up must combine in a way that allows the change that we enact.

The notion of social change as it is commonly used is therefore a matter of degree.  The changing of ourselves is a social change, and the degree to which it is passed on depends on the processes of society.  Our changing of the next person is, by the same logic, also a social change.  And the next person.  And so on.  Changing others is changing the societies that will reflect them in the future.  Thus, undertaking social change is equivalent to changing just one person, including yourself.  The extent of social change is then determined by how society sets itself up to promulgate that change.

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On Love
14th February 2015

This is a posting for Valentines from xkcd:

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On Fasting
31st January 2015

I regularly fast.  One day a week.  A friend recently asked me why I do this.  Partly, it is for reasons that I have heard from across the major religions.  Giving up something allows us to better understand the value of it.  Most of my life I try to keep myself away from hunger of any type.  This implies I have a constant engagement with the world.  This constancy limits my ability to appreciate the value of that lack of hunger, and the value of what I consume.

There is also the reverse rationale.  Not only does fasting allow us to understand the value of the thing we give up, but also their transient nature.  If I feel full today, this has little bearing on how full I feel in a week.  Physically, our society is one in which we have a demanding schedule of eating, but each meal is relatively transient in itself.  This is in direct contrast to the constancy of Truth.  Fasting is as much about understanding the transience of the thing that is given up as understanding its value.

Fasting for more prolonged periods, such as Lent or Ramadan, has another benefit.  Giving up food in particular allows the body to be in a more meditative state.  This is particularly true in my society, in which there is too much food consumed, and many pressures to consume it.

However, my reason for fasting goes beyond these reasons, to a rationale embedded in social philosophy.  Within the context of a such a philosophical framework, our experience of the world - our society - influences who we are.  Unless I choose to go without something on a regular basis, in my case food for a day, my experience of the world is both constant and satisfied.  This limited variation in an important aspect of my life defines me.  This is true for those things directly related to fasting, for example my awareness of the value of food.  But it can also be true for how my days relate to each other, with constancy bringing about little distinction between one day and the next.

By fasting, my experience of the world becomes more variable within a controlled setting, and my broader perception of the world becomes richer.  I am connected to an aspect of the world that is important for understanding the true nature of things - scarcity - and that variation provides greater distinctions between the times I fast and those I do not.  My perception of the world certainly changes when I fast, varying my society.

Sometimes the variation brings unexpected benefits, such as realisations about the nature of change.  Without the variation that underlies all creation of knowledge, I would be unable to appreciate Truth.  And the more closely my search for Truth echoes the realities of the world, including scarcity, the closer I am to living a truthful life.

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On Mental Health
15th January 2015

I've seen a number of people in my life for whom their interaction with society is at the core of their mental health.  Though not philosophy, this topic extends the idea of a social philosophy to our capacity to formulate philosophical thoughts.

The perception of one's society is a key ingredient to how one formulates one's actions, which define one's experience of the world.  I've known a number of people who perceive the world as relatively disappointing.  They feel that other people typically let them down, and have an approach to other people that implies there do not exist individuals to whom they can look up to, or that inspire them.  This perception of society changes their actions, which in turn changes their society, changing them.  By not being inspired by the world around them, they seem to create an environment that reinforces this view.  The world therefore becomes uninspiring, leading to degrees of depression.

This chain is simply my assessment of a few people in my life.  However, it brings up an idea; that we should choose to have inspirational people in our societies that sustain our interest in our world.  As I have discussed below, the frameworks we use to assess the world, and therefore other people, are in large part a matter of choice.  We should therefore aim to include in our views of the world a means by which to find other people inspiring.  By not doing so, we endanger our passion and thirst for the world, and thus the drive that keeps us mentally healthy and keen to seek out Truth.

19th April 2015 follow up

One perspective social philosophy brings to mental health is the notion that we are made up of others.  It is the interaction of these others within us that makes up who we are and, importantly for this issue, how we experience the world.

One can see this as a conversation between all those who make us up.  The interactions between those selves that make us up will have the features of the interactions of those people from who we were defined.  So mental health is a feature of that conversation.  We must resolve the conversation between all the voices of those who define us in a way that allows us to stay stable within ourselves.  An inspiring voice corresponding to the inspirational people described above helps us resolve that conversation in a more truthful way.

A corollary of this line of thought is that the love affairs and disputes between people that define us are raging inside us to.  A social philosophy would argue that the resolution of these interactions in the wider sense would not be limited to the group that initiated them, but to all those persons that were affected by, and thus defined by, those interactions.  To this end, we must build a society that can resolve issues socially, in all those an interaction affected, rather than just individually.

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xkcd on Religion
31st December 2014

xkcd on religions.  Something fun to end the year on.  Happy New Year everyone.

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On Relationships Impacting on Relationships
21st December 2014

When I was talking to my wife about my last post, On the Interactions of Others, she talked to me about how one route to impacting on the interactions of others is through your relationships with the others.  By being a strong friend to two people in a relationship, you may help them strengthen their relationship.  There are many ways to define strong in the previous sentence that would feel satisfactory.  It might simply be shared experience, so that 'the three of us always do stuff together, and it wouldn't be the same if any of us dropped out'.  It might be a shared commitment, so sharing that commitment with them both allows them to share that commitment together.

A next step in this chain of logic is that any relationships you support may support others.  Perhaps the shared commitment of your friends inspires others to commit.  You echo on through society.  To what extent it is possible to think through this chain is specific to the context at hand, but it provides a further layer of philosophical consideration for those of us who believe in a social philosophy.

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On the Interactions of Others
7th December 2014

I look after Joshua, my son, on Sunday mornings.  At the end of the morning, I sat with Josh and prayed.  It was my normal prayer but recast as to regard Joshua's relationships with the people I pray about.  I typically think through key members of my society, long ago coming to the belief that their state is a key part of mine.

Thinking about Josh's relationships with my parents, my sister, my wife's family and so on, solidified a part of my world I have not thought enough about - the relationships between members of my society.  These relationships are philosophically important to me, for they may go on to shape who I am.  By relating with and changing each other, members of my society change that society, and thus what shapes me.

The relationships of others in my society - that of my parents for example - are independent of me in a few ways.  First, I don't understand those relationships in the way I do any that involve me.  I know less about their content and take less time to think about them.  Second, it seems truthful for each relationship to have some degree of privacy, and so there will always be boundaries to the extent I can involve myself in others relationships.

But do I not also have a responsibility to understand and support these relationships?  Partly, they are parts of me talking to other parts of me, in the sense that I have defined all of those in these relationships.  And thus I have a responsibility to ensure my selves interact truthfully.  Beyond that, I am faced with a multitude of opportunities to support these relationships, and these are reasons to support.

In many ways we already do this, by connecting people for example.  It is, however, an important new area of reflection for me.  How far do I and should I support those in my society in their relationships outside of those with me.

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Social Philosophy
23rd November 2014

It is good, every so often to restate my philosophy.  Here is the November 2014 edition.

There are an infinite number of frameworks ... [well that took long]

This implies that a more satisfactory treatment of philosophy is one in which differential philosophical frameworks can co-exist within a society, and within an individual.

A framework is a set of constraints on thought ...

Individual is the physical life whilst person is the wider social sense of the self. 

[see 'On Modelling': However, it will only be fully understood as a framework when it is compared to the other notions of base societies that could have been chosen.]  To be able to assess the value of a framework of analysis.

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Trying Again
9th November 2014

It's my birthday again.  It's a time I typically reflect on life.  And increasingly over the last few years I have reflected on the same things.  One, that my deepest regret is that I have not done more to develop my understanding of my philosophical foundations.  Two, that I have produced so little relative to my ambitions.  The two combine beautifully in my ongoing inability to keep this philosophy blog alive.

So I shall try again.  With this year all about productivity and discipline, let us see whether I can hold myself to this task: every two weeks I will write on some aspect of social philosophy.  I shall also go back and try to tidy up some of the half-finished and missing entries that I had hoped to write.

May it please hold.

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On Turning Ten
1st November 2014

This poem by Billy Collins, 'On Turning Ten', really touched my wife and I as we think about the process of our son growing up:

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

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On Closeness
1st September 2014

In a social philosophy, closeness plays an important role in ...

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A book on courtesy: Chapter 8: Telling others what to do??? 
1st August 2014

A philosophical life is as much about the small actions as it is the large. Defining how you will walk along the path you choose is important, just as the direction of that path.

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A book on courtesy: Chapter 7: ??? 

12th July 2014

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A book on courtesy: Chapter 6: ??? 

1st July 2014

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A book on courtesy: Chapter 5: ??? 
1st June 2014

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A book on courtesy: Chapter 4: ??? 

1st May 2014

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A book on courtesy: Chapter 3: ??? 

1st April 2014

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A book on courtesy: Chapter 2: Information, uncertainty, and empathy 
1st March 2014

A philosophical life is as much about the small actions as it is the large. Defining how you will walk along the path you choose is important, just as the direction of that path.

when lady shouted at me???

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A book on courtesy: Chapter 1: It's alright to complain
21st February 2014

One morning I ran into work and was stretching outside my office. One gentleman, who'd I'd never seen before, was outside the main offices talking on his mobile phone. He was quite audible as he was using his hands free kit and had both headphones plugged in. I thought it quite amusing to be forced to share in his conversation but wasn't bothered by it.

However, you could see those people working on the ground floor of our shared offices were getting increasingly frustrated and after a while were shouting to try and get his attention. Because he had both earplugs in, he couldn't hear them. So, feeling bad for my colleagues, I went up to just ask if he could talk away from the window. He didn't like it.

"That's there problem", he grumbled, and then stormed off saying to ???

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A book on courtesy: Preface 
1st February 2014

A philosophical life is as much about the small actions as it is the large. Defining how you will walk along the path you choose is important, just as the direction of that path.

Common language

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On Courtesy
1st January 2014

A philosophical life is as much about the small actions as it is the large. Defining how you will walk along the path you choose is important, just as the direction of that path.

Common language

when lady shouted at me???

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On a Survey of Social Philosophy
1st October 2014

Text. Have spent a lot of time thinking about my place in my society - the persons and organisations that define me, how I am perceived by others, and how I define others.  The most natural extension of all this is to survey others on their own responses to each of these questions and create a data set of responses across individuals.

how does the world look from other parts of society?  stuck on islands.

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Title
15th December 2013

F

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On How I Define Others 
25th November 2013

At the end of the Preface to the book I made out of the my thirty letters to my society, I wrote, "The next step is to reverse the question, and ask the extent to which I have defined others.  This will paint a picture of the wider conception of me.  It will define the borders of my social self, and ask me whether the character I find is in line with my intentions and my conception of Truth."

At first, I thought that I would be as systematic in identifying my role in others lives as I had been in understanding others roles in who I am.  However, I have struggled to identify my social self 

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On How I Am Perceived
10th November 2013

Social philosophy teaches us that an individual's relationship with any other individual is embedded in a unique society.  Since that relationship is therefore defined by that society, no two relationships will be the same unless the underlying societies are the same.  The differential between the societies will characterise the difference between the relationships.

???The past two years worth of posts have focussed a lot on the definition of a single me???

This implies that a person is experienced differently by all those in their society.  You can only know someone up to the society in which you are embedded.  The margins along which this matters are unclear to me, but I thought that for this birthday I would explore the extent to which my closest friends and family characterised my personality differentially.

To get at their perception of me from multiple angles, I used a multi-variate personality test, the Big 5 test, that ...

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On Writing About The Thirty One Organisations That Most Define Me
3rd November 2013

For my thirtieth birthday, I wrote to the thirty people I felt had most defined me.

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Organisations That Most Define Me: Institute for Fiscal Studies
25th October 2013

F

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Organisations That Most Define Me: My wider family
26th December 2012

F

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Organisations That Most Define Me: My nuclear family
19th December 2012

F

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On the Thirty One Organisations That Most Define Me
8th December 2012

For my thirtieth birthday, I wrote to the thirty people I felt had most defined me.  However, I was careful in the introductory post to that exercise to say that individuals were key vessels through which society moved.  Society can also move through organisations.  For my thirty-first birthday, I would like to switch the lens to the thirty one organisations which I believe have most defined me.  To introduce this train of thought, and the 31 blog posts discussing the corresponding organisations, I want to describe why I think the notion of organisation differs from that of the individual, and why it is a useful framework to understand ones self.

Given the multiple frameworks we could view individuals and organisations through, it is important to begin by recognising there are frameworks in which individuals and organisations are the same.  Both are social actors, collections of individual influences, and a product of social constraints that bind them.  One can think of instances in which they are both philosophically relevant entities, such as having the ability to take moral action and responsibility.  Organisations can collect information, process it, and act upon it.  These frameworks act as a reminder that in a social philosophy there is a sliding scale between individuals and organisations, and variation in the proximity of the two conceptions.

However, there are ways in which we might characterise them as distinct, or in social philosophy, as facing distinct social constraints.  The physical nature of the person creates social constraints that organisations do not share and that play a key role in a persons individual lives.  For example, the inability to be in multiple places at one time, so that a person cannot collect data or communicate in physically distant places constraints the person and not the organisation.  Similarly, there seem to be actions that an individual or organisation can take that the other cannot.  For example, for many the ability to fall in love is a significant component of the personal experience.  On the other hand, critically for sustaining much of human achievement, the organisation persists beyond the boundaries of the single lifetime.

Reflecting earlier posts, it seems that using organisation as a distinct conception to an individual requires us to outline how their social constraints differ.  For the exercise I want to undertake, I can provide a sketch of the constraints I use to classify an organisation.  Organisations are entities that can simultaneously and consciously coordinate across multiple distant points at once (such as government's capacity to defend multiple physical points and thus protect its citizens).   In the sense that I feel organisation is typically used, this coordination is consciously defined, rather than simply willed by God.  There are corollaries of this definition, such as the organisation being able to persist beyond human interaction (for example a company still exists in law even if it is not active), but that stands as my description of the characteristic of an organisation.

It is important to note the difference between my conception of the individual, the physical life, and of the person, the wider self reflected across society.  It is not that organisations are distinct from persons because they can be in physically distant places.  In my social philosophy, persons live across many individuals, and thus can be in physically distant places.  Rather, it is the simultaneous and conscious coordination of actions across a distance beyond the physical boundaries of the individual.  This could be criticised as an artificial boundary.  There is certainly room for further clarifications as to what exactly determines the boundary of the person and the organisation.

Discussion: How could we effectively characterise the difference between organisations and persons?

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On Wider Tensions 
30th November 2012

Last week's entry, On Tension, asked to what extent my freedom to choose my life's central tension should reflect the wishes of those who had given me that freedom. I focussed on my grandparents, but could of course talk of my wider ancestry and the debt I owe them.

I focussed on my grandparents because ...

has made me think of the wider debt I owe to my society, and the

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On Tension
25th November 2012

All of my grandparents were defined by a central tension in their life. My paternal grandfather always fought between his love of the good life and his wish to do the right thing. He had a strong sense of social justice, and gave away almost everything he had to those he thought more deserving. This jarred with his love of beauty and luxury. Staying in a nice hotel in Eastern Europe one winter, he couldn't stand to see so many people hungry outside. He wrapped up all the bread he could find in a tablecloth and threw it outside to all those who couldn't find a meal.

My paternal grandmother wanted deeply to study medicine, or to live a more academic life than she did. The chance to be a doctor was taken away by her father as he believed women shouldn't study to the degree she wanted to. And then the war left her with an everlasting fear that she would never be safe again. She was torn between her hopes of another life, and those who would take it away.

My maternal grandfather wished for a better world. He was angry at the injustice in the world around him and the resistance to his efforts to make it more just. He wished to create a community around him that would be an island of values in an otherwise indecent world. Such a plan had within it the seeds of its own unravelling, as his children had their own hopes for a different future.

My maternal grandmother, although immensely commited to her family, always though of what could have been. A young man she had fallen in love with had died in the second World War. Whilst she had been happy enough with my grandfather, it was clear she always wondered what her life would have been with her first love.

We can view each of my grandparents as having had a tension that was a defining pillar of their life. To differing extents, these tensions were defined by external forces. The second World War had played a central role in each of my grandmothers' lives, robbing one of her security, the other of her love. My grandfathers were both torn between their sense of social justice and their other ideals, be it luxury or capitalism, with the war challenging both of these.

These thoughts make me consider viewing my own life this way, and asking what the central tension of my life is. It is certainly one that I have chosen for myself. That I am free to choose the defining feature of my life is quite remarkable. Through so much of history, the central tension of a person's life has been chosen for them. Be it the search for food, the submission to or resistance of an authority, or the boundaires of culture.

My own generation has huge freedom to define the central tension of their lives relative to those who have gone before us. The external world asks less of and provides more to us than it has before. The opportunities that come with this relative plenty rests on the shoulders of all those who have gone before us. What debt do we owe them? How do we choose the central tension in our lives so to recognise that debt? Like some religious or cultural practice dictates actions that intend to respect their ancestry, what are we to do to respect ours?

An obvious first choice is to use part of the newly gained freedom to undertake actions that would please or satisfy those whom we owe our debt. In some religions this would take the part of a sacrifice. Rather in my life, I have to ask whether I am living in the way that my grandparents would believe is right.

As I understand it, I am fortunate. My grandparents were all motivated to some extent by social justice and academic pursuits. That I am following a path that respects each of these makes me feel that they would be at least satisfied with my path.

If I find we are at odds however, to what extent do I subjugate my own will to my perceptions of their preferences? For example, my religious beliefs are certainly distinct from those my paternal grandmother would wish I had, and not in the tradition she would have wished. How far do I shape my religious practices so to satisfy my understanding of her hopes for me? Should I conciously try to bend my beliefs towards hers?

Then there is the case in which my grandparents only wish me happy and well. Does this give me the freedom to choose my path within these broad constraints, or should we look beyond their wishes and organise my life so as to reflect important pillars of their lives that have relevance for my society today?

My answers to this final set of questions are not well defined. So far my response has been to at least try the path they would have wished when it is not the one I would have chosen. It may give me an appreciation of their point of view. I have even smoked a cigar or two in honour of my grandfather. I don't think that will be an ongoing legacy.

Discussion: These are certainly not questions I have been equipped to deal with in my upbringing so far. Have you answered them for yourself? It seems that other traditions have investigated these questions. Have they found answers?

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On Femanism
18th November 2012

My wife is currently reading Caitlin Moran's 'How to be a Woman'. On a train journey with her I picked it up and had a little look. Ms Moran is very funny. "If I've gone from being wholly undesirable (then), to being looked down upon as a slag (now), this is, surely, a bit of a promotion? Becoming a woman has to be done one step at a time and this is, in its own way, considerable progress." (p.127)

She is also angry. Angry with the way women are regarded and influenced by society.

And so am I. When close female friends tell me of their common insecurities with other women, it angers me. Someone who believes we are defined by society, as I do, is faced by the notion that women are being defined to feel insecurities in a way that men are typically not.

So I looked into whether the feminist movement has been populated with any males, as I was interested in their perspective. Male feminists exist, but it seems that the relationship with feminism and feminists is complicated. So let's side step those issues by saying I am a femanist, someone who believes in society's responsibility to support women to reach their capabilities as it does men. Whether this overlaps with feminism or not, let's say this is a descriptor of what I'm for.

Agreement with feminist or femanist ideals is only one part of why someone who believes in a social philosophy would care about feminist/femanist issues.  When I look down at the list of the 30 people I feel have most defined me, a substantial portion of them are women.  And therefore, I am made up in large part by women.  A misguided approach to women will end up being a huge part of who I am through the females that define me.

If I am a mixture of the people I have described over the last year, and all the others I have not described, there are two reasons why the way women are regarded and influenced by society matters directly to who I am.  First, they are the raw ingredients of my person.  Suppressing the potential of women therefore directly suppresses my own potential.  Second, in the mixing of those ingredients, if society is set up so to suppress the contributions of women, then the mixing itself is biased.  I suffer again from being less of a person than I could have been had I had the full contribution of the potential of the women who make me up.

This social philosophy perspective says that not only do I want to protect the full contributions and freedoms of women, but I want to be the fullest person I can be.  When society is biased against a group in an untruthful way, I myself suffer in becoming less of a man than I could be.

The relationship between feminism and femanism that I read a little of in the past few days could be stated as follows.  The claim could be that I am unable to appreciate the issues that Caitlin Moran talks of because they are things I would have very little understanding of, and that my experience is ill-equipped to empathise with. An imprecise approximation to an experience will add little to its analysis if a precise appreciation already exists. I could respond that I may have a slightly different, not just poorly understood perspective.  In the same way that multiple perspectives or more data allows us to better understand a scientific phenomenon, surely the male perspective on the female experience is useful.

One could also claim that as being a key part of the discrimination against women, men are critical in understanding feminist issues.  A male perspective allows us to better understand the drivers of half of the society these issues occur in, and often the half implicated as the source of feminist grievances. It seems funny science to try to understand male behaviour without asking any of them. It also allows us to draw society's boundaries more clearly. Whether a woman's constraints are artificially imposed or those of humanity can only be understood by looking at men as well. By the logic that a woman best understands the boundaries of her world, a man is likely to understand the boundaries of his. Finally, if men don't get to talk about woman's issues, how will we learn?

But these are not what a social philosophy contributes.  It says that feminist issues are all persons issues in a very direct way.  We are all partly defined by the biases against women that prevail in society, so the impacts of these biases arise through all persons defined by that society.

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On writing letters to my society
12th November 2012

So a new birthday, and a year of reflecting on who I am made up of.  The last 30 posts have hopefully given a sense of who I am.  As importantly, they are a reflection of how an individual is formed in the framework of a social philosophy.

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Letters on my thirtieth: Orazio
3rd November 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Imran
26th October 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Gilles
19th October 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Amina
12th October 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Adrian Hewitt
28th September 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Richard Blundell
13th September 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: David Pearce
29th August 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Tony O'Connor
18th August 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Nigel
3rd August 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Emily
22nd July 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Don
8th July 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Mary Lou
24th June 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Caitlin
10th June 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Siddharth
25th May 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Andy Booth
14th May 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Michael Bush
28th April 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Angel
14th April 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Khalil Gibran
30th March 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Clive
17th March 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Mr Boyd
3rd March 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Mr Stubbings
20th February 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Marc
8th April 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Hilde
4th March 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Rebecca
19th February 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Dad
5th February 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Mum
22nd January 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Grandpa Walter
8th January 2012

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Grandpa Ron
27th December 2011

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Grandma Senta
13th December 2011

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth: Grandma Mary
29th November 2011

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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Letters on my thirtieth (or On the Thirty People Who Most Define Me)
8th November 2011

Social philosophy teaches us that we are defined by those who make up our society.  One way to see this is in a fully disaggregated way of society flowing through us all.  Another framework takes more seriously the fact that there are physical and conceptual boundaries to these flows.  Persons, the physical individual, are key vessels through which society moves.  They are thus a useful level of aggregation to think about when trying to understand society.

The question then becomes who are the people that define me?  And who are the people who most define me?  At the level of the individual (rather than fully disaggregated society), we are not exposed to all persons equally, such that some will have a greater effect on who we are than others.

As part of my thirtieth birthday, I want to explore who I believe are the thirty people who most define me.  I will write a letter to each of them describing why I think they are of such importance, and summarise these thoughts in this blog.  Each letter will begin with the following paragraphs,

As part of my 30th birthday, I have spent some time reflecting on those people who have had the greatest influence on me.  People who have guided and shaped who I am.

My philosophy is embedded in the idea that we are made up of the society in which we live.  Those who shape an individual's society define who they become.

Most of what influences the make up of an individual is subtle and disparate.  However, as I look back over the past thirty years, there are a few people that emerge as uniquely influential.  I am thus writing to the 30 people I feel have played the most important roles in defining my society.  Celebrating my first thirty years is, for me, about celebrating the people who have made me who I am.

I hope that this exercise comes across as the very opposite of self-centred.  For me, the process of introspection is to realise the society within you, and thus to realise the very opposite of self: that we are made up of everyone else.  I hope that this exercise comes across as a celebration of those who have made me up, and of my wider society.

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On Christmas
25th December 2009

What do such holidays mean to us today. ???

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On Second Life
25th December 2009

From Ian Fleming's 'You Only Live Twice':

You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face.

???

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On Beowulf
13th December 2009

Quote from Beowulf???

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On An Experimental Approach to Philosophy
28th November 2009

On the film Up. ???

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On Birthdays
15th November 2009

Today ???

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On Up
1st November 2009

On the film Up. What such movies can teach us???

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On The End of Things
25th October 2009

Sebastien - Le Ritournelle. Without death, there is no life. ???

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Charlie Speaks
18th October 2009

Video: Charlie Chaplin tells us that "more than cleverness, we need kindness" in this beautiful speech from 'The Great Dictator', Chaplin's highest ever grossing film and first 'talkey'.

Wisdom versus knowledge???

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On Music
13th September 2009

This week I heard a fantastic quote from the musician and composer, Terence Blanchard:

“Beethoven said that music is deeper than philosophy. Ludwig, what do you mean music is deeper than philosophy? He says well in the end we finite creatures, we don't have a language or even a linguistic eloquence that can begin to be fully truthful to the experiences that we have the short time we're here in time and space. So therefore we need some sounds, even some noise, organised noise, we need silence between the notes and the sounds that get at the deeper truths of who we are.”

It struck me as a perfect summary of the power of music. It is a language that extends our capacity to express. Good music tells the best stories. But it can also express important philosophical emotions that are difficult to communicate through words. This links to my conception of Truth: whilst we can determine a structure from which our presuppositions can be analysed, the core assumptions of our beliefs come from what we intuitively feel about an issue. Music makes me feel a broader range of and more in touch with those instinctive emotions, emotions that seem connected to my intuitive sense of what is good, bad, right, and wrong.

Discussion: Do you think of music as having these features? Can words do justice to the feeling music gives us (and if so, can you give me some examples)? My wife has just asked me how one could debate with music, and if you couldn't, how useful music would be as a philosophical tool?

December 2021 addition: In a social philosophy, understanding wider society is critical to philosophical investigation.  How does one understand wider society when language and culture impose limits to communication?  Music is a step towards a mutual understanding that overcomes language and culture barriers to a greater extent than speech and writing.  As a window into the social self of the musician, and into what defines them, music is a summary of the self and its society that can be communicated across languages and cultures.  Perhaps it is a more accessible summary than any other.  Thus, music across the world is thus a more accessible window into different societies than language and thus a tool for better understanding truths across the world.

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On Excess
6th September 2009

I just read a passa???

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On Chivalry
23rd August 2009

I just read a passa???

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On Legacy I
9th August 2009

I just read a passage in Mark Rowlands's 'The Philosohpher and the Wolf' that brilliantly describes a view of legacy I find :

"It is in our lives and not, fundamentally, in our conscious experiences that we find the memories of those who are gone. Our consciousness is fickle and not worthy of the task of remembering. The most important way of remembering someone is by being the person they made us - at least in part - and living the life they have helped shape. Sometimes they are not worth remembering. In that case, our most important existential task is to expunge them from the narrative of our lives. But when they are worth remembering, then being someone they have helped fashion and living a life they have helped forge are not only how we remember them; they are how we honour them.”

Th???

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On Motivation
26th July 2009

I am finding it unusually difficult to motivate myself to do my work. This is typically not a problem for me, as I enjoy what I do. Poor motivation is a Catch-22 as you are not motivated to snap yourself out of it. So you keep on working poorly, potentially compounding the reason for your lack of motivation.

I recognise this cycle, and so need to focus my energies on revitalising my enthusiasm for work. I stopped work to concentrate on why I might be uninterested in what I am doing, made a list of potential causes, and

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On Mental Preparedness
19th July 2009

I start my ???

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On Praise
17th May 2009

This week I heard two great things about a colleague, and relayed them to him when I next saw him. I was inspired by a wise man I met when I was in India. I had been working in a little village alone for a few months and felt throughly overwhelmed by the experience. The night before I was going to leave he sat on a rock with me and said "You know people say you have done well”. This came as quite a shock, as I imagined I was generally thought of as the fat little white man who sleeps too much and can't throw very well. The message I took home was what he said next; "Too often people speak well of a person to others, and others amongst themselves, but the circle is never completed. I wanted to complete this circle.”

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On Philosophy
10th May 2009

The last few weeks have been a challenging learning experience. The project I worked on for the last three months fell apart, and I had to confront???

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On Rights of Passage
5th April 2009

I start my ???

Video: David Attenborough documents the incredible San people of the Kalahari

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On Memories
29th March 2009

I heard a song this week in which the singer describes a memory from his childhood. He walks down to the river with his father, who scoops a cup of water from the river with his hand and has his son drink it. The event is vivid in the singer’s memory, “as if it were yesterday”. It seemed an important moment in their relationship, though the details of its symbolism were left to the listener.

It got me thinking. What are those memories most vivid in my childhood? In particular, what are those memories associated with my parents? And which of these have symbolic significance like that described in the song?

I remember my father watching over me when I was very small, and that my Mum used to make a ‘castle’ out of the giant boxes that my sister’s nappies came in. I remember my first rally with my Dad, and watching TV with my Mum. Then there is lots about school, and my childhood best friend.

It surprised me how little there was in the way of ‘rites of passage’, like that described in the song. I remember not talking for a day as a challenge to get a penknife, but that’s not really the same. I wonder how many of my friends have vivid memories of rites of passage like described in the song, or in books, or that exist in more traditional societies.

The absence of such memories reflects, for me, the sense of linearity I have had growing up. Life is always comfortable, always measured, and typically understood. My sporting, academic, and even romantic moments in my life don’t ring with the kind of energy that make these songs so vivid.

The song goes on to relate a memory of when it was going to rain one day, so the neighbours came over to ensure the hay bails all got into the barn before it rained. Again, a vivid memory of community vibrating with energy that I’m not sure I possess. I doubt many people I know would have such memories.

None of this casts a shadow on the amazing things my family provided. It just seems a part of life I might want to provide for my own children. Rites of passage may be part of our lives today, but by not marking them in anything but the most superficial or subtle ways, they lose some of their weight in our lives. Bringing back a little of the structure to our rites of passage may mean something to our children.

I'll finish with a quote from a book about the wisdom of aboriginal elders:

“Traditionally we didn’t celebrate birthdays, nor the silver anniversary for husband and wife. You were born and not measured by years. It wasn’t about how long you were married, but who you were in that family unit – Mother, Father, children, Grandfather, Grandmother, Auntie, Uncle. Our celebration was about living; age was about wisdom and knowledge, not how old you were.”

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On Criticism
22nd March 2009

We seem to be hard-wired not to take criticism well. For a long time, I would fume if anyone criticized me. At school, I always thought I knew better than the teachers. (Once I was dragged out of class by the vice-principal for telling my teacher I could do a better job than he could and then trying to do so.) At work, they just didn’t understand how right I was. And I’ve had a reputation in my family for ‘getting on my high horse’ and telling everyone just how it is (ironic that I am admitting this in a blog post).

However, the older I get, the more I realise how foolish this all is, and that criticism is a healthy part of a good life. One can get so wrapped up in what you are doing, you forget all the paths you could have taken, but didn’t. Since you can only see the world from one perspective, another is a gift. And if there is a way of getting a bit of reflection going, then I'll take it.

Criticism is often delivered poorly, so one has to be strong enough to cut through the delivery to the useful stuff at the centre. That might mean getting home and saying, 'you know what, she had a point'. It can be even more productive if you can realise it at the time.

If one can become strong enough to do this, I believe one should go out hunting for criticism. First, you can criticise yourself. I’ve been trying to stop and reassess more recently: what part of that mix up was my fault, and what can I learn to do better next time? I don't want to run round in circles second guessing myself, but I am usually far enough from that for it to be a worry.

Second, you can get others to criticise you (in a sweet and constructive way of course). I'd love to know what my friends do when faced by everyday problems, and in my experience there is limited discussion of such things. I'm talking about real nitty gritty debate about what is the right or wrong thing to do in a situation, or whether such concepts are relevant. No one should mind a bit of 'street ethics' or '. I have tried doing this, and it seems most productive when you are clear in your mind what your general position is, and what the most important logical leaps and assumptions in your argument are. You can then have people have a go at each one.

I aspire to take criticism in a way that will ensure the provider will be ready to give it again. Many people seem to react, quite understandably, either defensively or by being silent and fumey. This doesn’t make the deliverer feel useful, just sorry they said anything (or proud they got at you). I try to be ready to take criticism well. A friend of mine I had asked to look over some work asked me ‘How critical can I be?’ “As much as you like,” I replied, “I am able to take a lot of criticism.” “Good,” he said, “I have a lot to say.”

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On Marriage
15th March 2009

My wife and I are now seven months married. And it is brilliant. It really is different. ???

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On Prayer
8th March 2009

Whatever religion you are, whatever form you believe God takes, and even if don't believe in God, prayer is fantastic. Prayer makes you focus for a time on what you most want to say to God, or to yourself. If you start with thanks, as I do, it focuses your mind on all the things you have, and can thus make you more satisfied. If you include aspects of your recent past, it helps you reconsider them, contemplate lessons learned, and reignites a dedication to commitments made. If you go on to request, it makes you reflect on what you can do to achieve your aim, and gives you determination to achieve it.

For those who believe in an omniscience presence in the world, the rationale for prayer is simpler: a communion with God. I want to focus here on prayer by those who are agnostic, atheistic, or uncertain. In this case prayer is a ritualistic engagement with the personification of your basic principles and beliefs. So few people, at least that I've talked to, feel that this sort of interaction is useful unless you believe in God.

But why? Why does giving thanks or asking for things we care about have to be directed towards anyone but ourselves? I don't believe it does, and think prayer can be just as powerful a force in the lives of those who do not feel responsible to pray. It has played the following 'non-divine' roles in my life:

  • It gives me a regular time to reflect and be grateful for what I have. It is very refreshing.
  • Praying when I'm nervous calms me down as I vocalise the challenges and realise their limitations. Since I associated pray with peaceful, meditative time, it is soothing.
  • In being a practice, prayer helps us engage with what we are happy about, fearful of, and committed to without distraction, haste, or uncertainty. It is not the only way to engage, but it is a good one.
  • It can focus the mind and make me driven, as if I had given myself a pep talk.

Discussion: Does anyone reading this prayer for non-spiritual reasons? If you don't prayer, why not?

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On Change
1st March 2009

I start my blog with what I think of as my founding story. Most of my teenagehood was a classic British teenagehood, complete with irresponsibility on as many margins as I could find, unless there was something good on television.

One night, I was on a train coming back from a weekend of mild debauchary. We were pulling into a station when a load of friendly British lads started throwing bottles at the train and screaming. The lady across from me seemed scared, so I said she could sit next to me and they wouldn't bother her. She did. We started talking, about many things, and our conversation turned to religion. As we were about to part, she gave me a little book, and, having written her phone number in it, said we should keep talking. When I opened it to find it was a bible, I almost felt duped into talking about Christianity.

The little book sat on my table for weeks, until one night, having thought about the things that lady had said to me, I opened it. I started to take it everywhere, and read it voraciously. It said so many things that strengthened the doubts I had been having about my lifestyle. And it gave me immense food for thought.

I didn't stop there. I talked to a friend of the family, and he gave me a passage from Khalil Gibran's 'The Prophet'. This had an instant and momentous impact on me. It was, in the terminology of my teens, absolutely wicked. I found as much Gibran as I could get my hands on, read 'The Teachings of the Buddha' compiled by Paul Carus, then as much Buddhist doctrine as I could find. Having made it through all the major religious texts, I found a book of Socrates, and then took up reading philosophy. This was much slower, and was more at the level of 'Sophie's World' and 'The Children's Companion to Nieztsche', but I loved it.

I gave up on what had been my closest circle of friends. One night at a lock-in my best friend at the time pulled himself a pint and wouldn't pay for it; so I did. He reacted badly to this and told me to "$£@$ off". I thought 'what a bloody good idea'. I walked the whole night to get home, and thought the whole way. You can do much better than this Rogger. Change. Change for the better.

The rest of that year at school I was increasingly thought of as a total geek. No one really knew what I was doing, and I was too embarrassed, and had too little courage to argue otherwise. But looking back on that train journey, and the change it has since inspired, I thank God for that lady. I call her my angel.

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Introduction
22nd February 2009

My generation and I entered this world at an amazing time. Never has there been so much wealth, so much freedom from want, and so many opportunities to enjoy and experience the world. With these opportunities we can do basically anything we want.

At the same time, we sometimes feel overwhelmed with choice, and continue to face many of the same challenges, of direction, partnership, and balance, that every generation preceding us have had to face

Of particular importance to me is how to deal with the fact that there are so many people in the world materially poorer than I. However, I will not write about that inequality here. That is what the rest of my web site is about.

Here I want to develop a better understanding of how I, and people like me (my generation), should try to live the best life we can. How do we deal with the freedoms and capacities that we have been granted, unique in history as we are? What philosophy do I turn to having been brought up tied only weakly to any individual religion? What can we learn from our distinctive perspective on the past to enrich our present? I would also like to hear from others on all these questions, and on the topics to come.

Why have a blog? It is a great thought pad. My commitment to writing regularly means I have to think regularly. It helps me concretise my own views. I also hope it will inspire conversations with others, so my beliefs can be independently assessed. Finally, given how little discussion I hear about the philosophy of today, I hope I am developing a little useful food for thought.

Discussion: Is it a good idea to have a blog of this sort? What can I do to make it better?

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