Rarely Certain recapitulated
Some pointers about this site for new & old readers alike
Post status: reinforcing what Rarely Certain is and how it came about. Plus some personal philosophy.
The germ of an idea to start Rarely Certain is rooted in moments during my best ever year.
Exhausted by the anger, hysteria, hyper-moral judgementalism, thought and speech codes of my Twitter circles I'd quit that site and and chosen to examine my reactions to things a bit more closely.
Someone I was talking with a lot was massively new-agey and talked glibly of astrological forces shaping world events, 'energies', the healing properties of liquidising vast quantities of certain foods, friends who could literally see when there was SARS-Cov-2 in a building, fairies, that kind of thing.
I found her maddening.
How could this person (a highly intelligent and successful oft-published writer) go through life believing this nonsense is what I was thinking.
I began to investigate the rationalist community, because it felt important to push back. The LessWrong website was a go-to refuge at this point and, through that, I discovered the writing of Scott Alexander and his Slate Star Codex blog.
The first epiphany was this.
Why did I dive into the rationalist world when someone was expressing non-rational views about stuff?
Fear. And a concomitant internal (initially unconscious) sense of threat to my Enlightenment-infused, philosophically materialistic way of seeing.
Like many of my more illuminating realisations, it came about while scything. This matters in a practical sense, because most of the time when we are ruminating or consciously reflecting on things, all we are doing really is post-rationalising and justifying our prior beliefs. But doing something into which you kind of become immersed (sometimes called the flow state) frees your mind to see.
The next epiphanies were that we identify with our thoughts more than is healthy and that we are ambiently concerned with status all the time.
I am the kind of person who believes in x, not y.
Person B is, in some way, less than me because they believe in y.
The error of identifying with my thoughts only became clear after some time of practising meditation somewhat successfully and realising that the thoughts that you think you're producing are actually just happening. To you. Not by you. They are epiphenomena. They are not you. Nor are they even yours.
A sense I had was that most of the thoughts and beliefs that rattled around my head were given or modelled by others with whom I felt a need to identify.
We are the sorts of people who believe in x, not y.
Those other people who believe in y are inferior to us.
It helped to be living a relatively solitary life. The old cliches about finding yourself may be annoyingly pat, but they do refer to a thing that is possible (and which I believe many of us never manage to do, while never knowing that we didn’t).
So we expend inordinate energy feeling somehow that people who have different ways of seeing the world threaten our status as the anointed successors to the Dark Ages. Or something like that.
Did this mean that I was better off having nothing to do with other people then?
No chance.
That would be to give in to what now seems to be one of the most stupid tricks of the mind.
Rejecting others for having different thoughts and ideas is an admission of incomplete selfhood.
This was also how I came to see polarisation. The players on both sides of all our hot button issues think they are defending or promoting some essential truth about the world when actually they are just trying to maintain personal status via a comforting certainty that they are right. Their struggle is to feel OK as themselves because there are other people who refuse to butter them up as right about things.
Really, this is a sign of weakness. Its incomplete selfhood. Those people banging on about vaccines being a crime against humanity and those people glueing themselves to great works of art are essentially stroking themselves.
[Tangential thought experiment: have you ever seen a fundamentally happy person posting political memes?]
This was how I came to see my own convictions and certainties. As guard rails between me and the abyss.
It doesn't mean I don't believe there are fundamental truths that you can discern, under the right conditions. Nor that I have no values. I have a strong sense of right and wrong but I am also not a moral objectivist. Because believing that there are moral 'facts' about the world seems to me just another story we tell ourselves to make us right about things.
I'm a liberal but I also believe that liberalism's obsession with prioritising the individual's 'rights' over the common 'good' will see it ultimately destroying itself, without some conservative checks and balances.
I'm a progressive, but I also believe that radical progressivism is just another term for left Accelerationism and the notion that Homo Sapiens of any kind are capable of building an egalitarian utopia by collapsing what we have now just seems puerile to me. Women won't establish equal footing with men via the abolition of dimorphic sex and insisting that gender is totally a social construct. Racism won't be eradicated by forcing white people in Mansfield to pretend that they want lots of Somali neighbours. And so on.
I'm a Modernist who accepts value in Post-Modern critiques of power structures but rejects most of the word salad of postmodernism as an idle, status-seeking exercise in showing how you can prove anything with language and theory - and thereby end up knowing nothing. Bonus points for being cleverer than Trumpkins and Brexit voters.
Ultimately I'm a human being. Which means not being an ist first.
To be an ist of any sort means subsuming your ordinary humanity, with all its flaws, into someone else's idea of 'justice', someone else's idea of the 'right' way to be, someone else's idea of what makes me or you 'an ok person'.
No off-the-peg value sets for me, however many retweets and followers they were pulling in.
Then I had the money shot thought.
If being in good standing with people - of social value to them - requires believing what they believe, where does that leave love?
Scything in a light drizzle is especially good for these trains of thought.
Recently I stole and adapted an idea from
that he calls 'thick and thin desires'. I love Luke's writing, which springs from the work of René Girard and makes it accessible for the modern reader.I adapted it to consider human connection and love.
Something I noticed about being one of the shouty left wing progressives on Twitter was a feeling of 'comradeship' with all the people who agreed with me. This felt good, but never felt good enough without constantly being 'topped up' by more agreement.
Reflecting on this I realised that this 'comradeship' was a 'thin' connection. Empty psychological calories.
Feeling this 'comradeship' was actually a substitute for what we really need. Which is the thick connection typically called 'love'. Where you don't give a fuck what someone thinks about things because their value to you is their existence as them. Maybe they do nice things for you, or maybe you admire them for what they can understand or achieve, but those are bonuses. When you love someone their value is intrinsic. They might have a stroke and cease being able to tell you what they think about anything but you will still love them. Just for existing and being with you in this life, somehow, by choice. They might be family or friends but it isn't biological. You aren't forced to love them by hormones. You love them because they just are and are there, in your world.
Those thick bonds are rare in my experience, but they seem to be what really matters.
Some other thinkers I have to thank for helping some of this become clearer are
They may not self-identify as humanists but they are invaluable to me in focusing on what it is to be human.
This is already getting too long, so one final epiphany.
(Honestly, try scything - it's great)
A lifetime of anxiety and unease gave way that year to something else and I reflected on what that something was.
It turned out to be a general sense of I wouldn't change anything about this moment a lot more of the time than I'd ever previously experienced.
Doesn't this just mean being happy?
It might be a bit picky but I'm not keen on the term 'happy'. It suggests a transient state. You're happy during a good fuck, or a delicious dinner, or when you hear a great tune that goes right into your brain stem, or when you learn how to make this widget fit into that place to make something you need to happen happen properly. Then the moment passes and one of you has to sort out the bins, the dinner detritus needs clearing up, the tune ends and the widget is just doing its thing without you noticing.
I prefer wellbeing. The state in which you can exist more or less constantly. Contentment. Even when frictions are occurring, because you wouldn't want to change the background hum for anything.
When you're pursuing happiness you're generally pursuing things that will inevitably pass. If you find wellbeing it rides out the frustrating and uncomfortable moments.
Weirdly, this was how I overcame feelings of distress during a year of quite unpleasant dental work (artificial bone grafts, which are as horrible to experience as they sound) lying there in the chair, with my head vibrating from whatever horrors were being inflicted by Dr Le Guiffant and thinking this is fucking grim but also interesting, it won't be happening later and it will stop in a while. I certainly wasn't happy, but the wellbeing never dissipated.
So that's what Rarely Certain set out to explore. The liberating quality of accepting yourself, discerning the value of people beyond the content of their minds, the courage to reject peer pressure and how we can feel OK without the permission of others.
Closely examining commonly expressed propositions about morality, critical thinking and politics can be unsettling. In my case it was iterative, rather than a sudden awakening.
It was seeing so many things that I had thought that I believed turn out to be very much not settled, as questions of epistemic fact.
It was realising that I had never really believed a lot of things that I thought that I had believed. Instead, what had been happening was that I had chosen some perspectives that worked in a certain context and maintained them on that basis. I was being that kind of person rather than myself.
As an educated, cosmopolitan, middleish class, intelligentish person I was the product of a culture. It's often called WEIRD (western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic) and also typically named as western liberalism.
Reflecting on this (while - very saliently - spending time largely alone in nature) it became clear that I was living to someone else's script. Believing - and voicing - what is permitted by a culture that has become the dominant force in my lifetime; social liberalism, progressivism, whatever you want to call the project which seeks to build the individualistic utopia which sees everything reinvented to fit some theories.
I saw the chasm between this ideology and the project of just being human.
I just made a choice.
Rarely Certain is about the various ideas that followed.