Review : Civil Wars of the Three Kingdoms

My quest to fill in the huge gap in my history knowledge concerning the Civil War has taken a enormous stride with the completion of Trevor Royle's mighty tome, Civil War : The Wars of the Three Kingdoms. This 800+ page epic is about as comprehensive as any popular reader like myself is ever going to want.

Previously, I've looked at the war tangentially with Witchfinders and The Ruin of All Witches, as well as more directly at the social side of things in The English Civil War, and in some detail to its aftermath in Providence Lost. But none of these much cover the military stuff, and trying to understand the impact of the war while neglecting the whole bit about tens of thousands of solider lining up to shoot each other feels like something of a rookie mistake.

Civil War makes amends for this in abundance. As both a military and political history it's almost outrageously thorough, to the point where I decided I needed a bit of a break and treated myself to the hardback illustrated version of The Hobbit by way of diversion. Not because I was bored, just because I needed to read something else for a bit. Then I plunged right back in. Civil War is a book which demands your immersion and requires a great deal of time, but it is, I think, well worth it.

The Review Bit 

It's almost impossible to write 800 pages of perfection so let me start with the negatives. There aren't many of these and they're all really quite minor : there's the occasional apparent contradiction*, especially near the start but this seems to fade as the book progresses; though very possibly I just needed time to get used to Royle's writing style. Conversely, there are two stock phrases he repeats, "the times were out of joint" and "would not have been human" which get used ever more frequently towards the end.

* E.g. why should Charles' marriage be considered to be lacking in passion because he didn't have a mistress ? I would have thought the exact opposite ! Likewise someone being described as both "young" and "in middle" life; various other minor things like this.

There are two somewhat more substantial difficulties. First, he doesn't give much in the way of physical descriptions of anything, be that persons or landscapes (at least nothing beyond the most superficial, e.g. the hill was tall and steep), or indeed the capabilities of the military hardware used at the time. This isn't a big deal but it would have enhanced the book to have more of this. Second, a more problematic omission is the lack of a list of cast of characters. With such a necessarily enormous number of protagonists, it's inevitable that it becomes difficult to remember who everyone is, regardless of the quality of the writing*.

* Though it's still not anywhere near the complexity of the Wars of the Roses.

Like many authors, Royle makes the mistake of naming people who really don't need to be named, which makes me try and keep them all in my head when honestly most of them aren't worth it since they only make an appearance for a page or two. Similarly, because the narrative is generally large-scale and political, sometimes individual characters become extremely important but only for a little while, and then the focus moves elsewhere and by the time they re-emerge I've completely forgotten who they are.

Against this, the major narrative is extremely well-written. Royle is adept at knowing when to divert into interesting anecdotes and never dwells excessively on them, always returning to the main theme promptly. In general the style is as clear as a book like this can ever hope to be, which is praise not to be dealt out casually. Chapters are short and focused so you always have a convenient break point, and there are no stupid "footnotes" at the back of the book you have to keep turning to.

But best of all, the balance between presenting the raw facts (as we know them) and the interpretation as to why events happened in the way they did, e.g. getting into the mindset of the various characters, trying to disentangle the major socio-political forces driving the events themselves, is just about perfect. Royle favours giving the facts and generally trying to let them speak for themselves, but provides in my opinion exactly the right amount of his own analysis to keep this interesting and provocative without forcing the book to support any particular agenda. And while it may not be quite the unputdownable page-turner that Dan Jones comparable-length The Plantagenets is, it's usually lively and interesting, occasionally thrilling, rarely dull, never tedious, and always commendably thorough. Managing this in a topic this complex and important is no small achievement.

All in all, the deficiencies are far outweighed by the positives. I'm going to give this one a very solid 8/10. It is, though, quite the tome, and a bit more descriptive, narrative zeal would have sealed it as an easy 9.

The summary bit

I kept overly-extensive notes on this, so much so that if I try and even summarise those, this post will end up unbearably long. So instead I'm just going to pick out the major themes which have stuck with me from memory, mainly things that were either new to me or which I happened to find particularly interesting for whatever reason. Forgive me, then, if I don't attempt a summary of the enormously complex character of Cromwell, but I think that if I were to begin such an undertaking, this post would never be finished. 

I should also note that Royle focuses on the military and political side of things, with not much said about the social aspect (for that, Purkiss' English Civil War is by design much better). The major exception is that he also gives a commendable coverage of the immediate aftermath, and though it's not of course as detailed as Lay's Providence Lost*, it's broader in scope and better describes the context needed to understand the consequences of the conflict.

* Royle only mentions Providence Island in one brief passing sentence; Lay used this for a whole series of chapters and those were by far his worst.

Reasons for the war

Unlike both Purkiss and Lay, Royle sticks closer to the line oft told to children and tourists : that the war was primarily fought for political reasons, rather than being a religious problem that bled out into politics. Sometimes he's quite explicit about that, though he does always acknowledge the heavy religious dimension which the children and tourists are basically never told at all. 

Rather than ignore it completely, Royle simply reverses the priorities compared to the other authors. In his view, it seems that the political tensions provoked the religious disagreements which in turn eventually got everyone so cross that they just had to have a jolly good fight to sort it all out, instead of being the other way around.

Reading between the lines a little, while Purkiss takes the fact that there were abject religious dimensions to the start of the war, Royle would probably say that this too shallow a reading of events, and that this aspect was just a manifestation of the political tensions that had been festering for years : had Charles had the political acumen to better deal with the problems, the differences of faith could very possibly have been accommodated harmoniously. No, in Royle's view it's very much politics which is the root cause here, not a matter of spiritual ideology.

In my totally unqualified judgement this rings true. The religious disputes were all about such utterly trivial minutiae that anyone with any real political acumen ought to have been able to deal with them without difficulty. Unfortunately Charles had precious little of this; his tendency towards political differences and power struggles was to either suppress or ignore them. Still, the bigger lesson for me remains that religion did play a major role here. It definitely was a factor in itself, if only partly independent of the political disputes in play.

Civil/not civil

Newspapers are wont to proclaim the times as being of ever-increasing political polarisation, but I think it's vital to remember that this has always waxed and waned. Anyone saying that things are better or worse "than ever before" had better be aware that such claims are almost certainly no more than rhetorical hyperbole.

In the movie Cromwell, in one early engagement the two sides line up amicably for battle and refuse to start until the appointed time. Royle makes no mention of this specific event, but it's clear this does reflect a real sentiment of the day. While the two sides did of course go to war and were happy to shoot and stab each other to settle their disagreements, initially... there were rules. Captured leaders would be imprisoned and ransomed, or simply fined and released – or even forgiven entirely. Mercy and clemency were expected and received from both sides. Fleeing enemies were not cut down. Civilians were generally not involved. Reconciliation was possible between individuals who happened to find themselves on opposite sides; friends rent asunder could and did forgive each other, even simply agreeing to disagree while maintaining communication throughout the war. As one commander wrote to his opposing friend :

"Hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person... we are both upon the stage, and must act the parts assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour and without personal animosities".

This would seem to support Royle's assertion of a politically-driven conflict. That is, in a very literal sense, the primary disagreement was one of specific policy. It wasn't about an ideological world view, not a fundamental, identity or moral-based dispute. After all, it's much easier to forgive someone when they just disagree on the particulars of governmental structure than whether or not it's wrong to murder kittens. The propaganda may have been filled from the outset with high rhetoric, but the actions and communications of ordinary people caught up in the conflict tell a very different story. At least to begin with, at any rate.

In contrast to Purkiss, Royle's view of the war is one primarily of large-scale battles rather than individual disputes. The two views aren't mutually exclusive, however. Purkiss does seem to have neglected a lot of the set-piece battles*, as is quite proper for a social history. But Royle also makes it clear that the classical view of the war as brother-against-brother, fathers-against-sons, did occur, just not from the outset. Only as the conflict dragged on did all sides lose patience and resort to atrocities. By the end there was no question of chivalry or mercy; it became a violent bloodbath in which only might was right and the law was simply ignored, coming to a head, as it were**, with Charles.

* Royle appears to cover almost every single one of the many dozens of such large-scale actions that took place, of course in varying degrees of detail. Purkiss in my view unfairly downplays the importance of these, giving an impression that they were much less common than they actually were.
** Terrible pun intended.

The other very surprising thing I'd never heard of before, which I would never have guessed at, was that it became routine to sell captured soldiers into slavery. Yes, full-on slavery in the New World colonies. I don't think Royle gives the numbers (they may not even be known) but we're certainly talking thousands or more probably tens of thousands. And yes, of course, this pales in comparison to the later industrial-scale atrocity that was inflicted on non-European countries, but I find it remarkable that this is basically never mentioned at all. You just don't think of Englishmen selling fellow Englishmen into slavery. 

I would also have liked to learn more about "Captain Frances Dalziel, bastard daughter of the Earl or Carnwath, the commander of a troop of horsemen who rode under the banner of a black flag sporting a naked figure hanging from a gibbet". She sounds great.

Charles and Cromwell

Royle generally gives little (but not nothing) in the way of character analysis throughout, with the major exceptions (though there are others) of Cromwell and Charles. These are examined in vivid detail. What I found most surprising about Charles was that though often having the political decisiveness of a suicidal sheep, he was actually a perfectly able military commander. He took direct command of armies on several occasions and won victories in the field. He was also, even more surprisingly, a capable administrator too. In the period just before the war when he was ruling without Parliament. the country was getting along just fine, even being in outright prosperity, for some years. The problems came when he was unable to make a choice when both outcomes were disadvantageous, in which case he'd resort to delay, dissembling and flip-flopping. Basically he'd just fall apart and lie about the whole thing afterwards. He was incompetently duplicitous.

And the Cavaliers as a whole don't seem to have been particularly cavalier in the modern sense of the word. Sure, there was their dashing hero, the bold and decisive Prince Rupert, but apart from him ? Nah, not really. Again, in the main the generals were perfectly sensible, and even Rupert wasn't reckless. Bold and decisive he may have been, but he wasn't at all stupid; this was not an era of charging headlong into battle just because honour demanded it.

The other character I have to mention briefly is the tragic figure of Montrose. A singularly brilliant general who led Royalist forces in Scotland to victory after victory, his whole endeavour ultimately fell apart : with Scotland itself seemingly secure, the Scots simply refused to carry on the fight on English soil. Montrose could understand the military situation both strategically and tactically and bend it to his will, but politically... not so much. He doesn't seem to have grasped why the war was being fought or what the Scots were seeking, ultimately consigning him to the status of a mere footnote in history.

On Cromwell, I'm restricting myself to one specific topic here. For a while I've been wanting to understand just what it is about Cromwell that causes the Irish to hate him so, with many documentaries noting this but failing to mention what it was that Cromwell actually did. Royle at last redresses this. He hardly finds Cromwell to be the demon of Irish folklore, but all the same, he clearly did enough that you can understand how and why this perception has come to be the case.

Royle makes it clear that Ireland was treated differently throughout the whole campaign. As elsewhere, there was more at work than geography, making any maps of Royalist and Parliamentarian territories complicated and misleading, with no simple clear splits between the two. There were, in essence, supporters of both sides more or less everywhere, resulting in highly complex shifting allegiances and radically different Royalist treatment of both the Scots and the Irish depending on the circumstances : now unduly harsh, now bizarrely lenient; now people to be conquered, now a vital recruitment pool. Compounding all of this was that while the Royalists were generally Catholic and the Parliamentarians generally Protestant, there was by no means a perfect alignment here. 

But whereas Scotland was in the aftermath dealt with more or less as a full partner, Ireland was treated with oppression; it got none of the rewards that came from the ultimate political stability after the war but suffered even more harshly than other regions during the conflict. Irish causalities were much higher than in the other nations, and here Royle unfairly omits much discussion as to why this should be. He notes that many of the supposed atrocities committed by Cromwell are little more than provable fabrications... but all the same, the way in which Ireland was oppressed, particularly in how its land was divided, and... yeah, Royle presents more than enough to understand why Cromwell remains a figure of hate. One short passage will suffice :

Catholic families were transplanted from their lands in Ulster, Leinster and Munster because they were to be on the losing side and the winners, the English Protestants, had to be rewarded. In pursuit of that policy many thousands of Catholic Irish were also sold into slavery in the West Indies; some of these were vagrants from the main towns, but because women and children were included in their number it added to the feelings of persecution... Catholic worship was outlawed... up to 40,000 were banished.... The use of Irish Gaelic was also banned under earlier statutes and the net aim was to produce an anglicised Protestant society in which all traces of traditional Irish life would eventually disappear.

The word "brutal" hardly feels unfair here. Purkiss to her shame doesn't mention this at all.

New Worlds

Americans love the Magna Carta for some reason, but the Baron's Revolt is hardly a watershed moment in British political history. Not so the Civil War. Here is something that feels like a fulcrum, a pivotal part of history around which the world turned. Here, set paradoxically against a background of slavery, were ideas of freedom and egalitarianism mingled with monarchy, magic and mysticism all mixed with science and empiricism, ancient despots giving way to the as-yet primitive power of the people. It's an astonishing period, the transition between the medieval and the modern, and we need a lot more dramas set in this period and for everyone to shut up about the bloody fucking boring Tudors*.

* I'm being rhetorical, but there are far too many dramas and documentaries alike about Henry VIII which add exactly nothing to the story; even Elizabeth I has been overdone. Conversely, nothing at all is even said about Henry VII (except in Shakespeare's Richard III play) or Bloody Mary.

Royle makes it clear that the Civil War was only one stage in the process, and that the full transition away from absolute monarchy was not really complete until the Glorious Revolution a few decades later. But it was still of profound importance. None of it happened by design. What began as a "crisis by monthly instalments" of a king profoundly lacking in self-awareness eventually allowed truly revolutionary ideals and ideas to flourish, but it wasn't those ideas themselves that initially drove anyone.

The ideas which did emerge, however, are sometimes strikingly similar to modern positions. Here indeed is the birth of liberalism, with a pursuit of individual freedoms, income-based taxation, an insistence on Parliament to act as a safeguard for the safety and liberties of the people. At the Putney debates we see some hints of American ideals. Thomas Rainsborough :

"I think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under."

Later, the Rump Parliament passed acts which Royle himself describes as "using language that presaged the birth of the United States of America a century later" :

That the people are, under God, the original of all just power : that the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled, being chosen by and representing the people, have the supreme power in this nation; that whatsoever is enacted or declared for law by the Commons in Parliament assembled, hath the force of law, and all the people of this nation are concluded thereby, although the consent and concurrence of the King or House of Peers be not had thereunto.

Other radicals were even more prescient, though distinctly un-American and far more of British liberal sensibilities, calling for the existence of a free health service. In 1649 ! Well, we had to wait a while...

Royle concludes with a brief, direct comparison with the Civil War and the War of Independence, going so far as to compare Washington and Cromwell. Both were real human beings, which means that neither can really be described as a hero or a villain in the truest sense, but people capable of heroics and villainy as the occasion demanded. Royle believes Cromwell was on the verge of accepting the crown when chance intervened to make it impossible; Washington would not have done so. Cromwell espoused liberal ideals (especially religious liberties, see Lay) but had no compunctions about persecuting the Irish or acting with flagrant hypocrisy as a tyrant when the situation turned against him; in America "emancipation did not extent to the black slaves, nor to the native Americans, and there was to be no tolerance for Loyalists... From that vantage point the struggle for freedom loses some of its gloss."

The only brief conclusion I will venture is that all these high-minded ideals were not the driving force of anything. Rather they emerged through bloody struggle and chance. It wasn't that someone decided one day that, "hang on a minute, having a ruler chosen by bloodline is no basis for a system of government" and then set out to overthrow the king. Instead this realisation dawned gradually on the battlefield in a war begun essentially by happenstance. Without a whole series of accidental mistakes, unfair oppression, and leaders at once perfectly able and catastrophically incapable of dealing with the situations put before them, these ideas would never have begun. With an able ruler, the ideas of egalitarianism would have languished in obscurity. 

It took the blood and muck of battle to bring the concept of equality into reality. These ideals were born in a very real world, not the ivory tower, and that means they were from their inception rife with implicit assumptions that some deserved more egalitarianism than others. Hypocrisy and inconsistency were rife. Instead of lamenting this, or cynically viewing these ideals as flawed, I think it speaks very strongly that there must be some fundamental truth behind them. What was found through harsh accident is, after all, still among our most cherished political principles, surviving uncounted upheavals and revolutions for more than three centuries. Like discovering penicillin, the role of accident doesn't mean it isn't true.

The Toxic Horseshoe

A recent glut of foolishness on my social media feeds has once again got me wondering what's wrong with people. While I've speculated about such things many times before, likening some of it to cults and anti-cults, and of course good old-fashioned cynicism, here I must go further. Lately I feel that some kind of line has been crossed, that this is all... too much. You people need to get a hold of yourselves. You badly need the proverbial splash of cold water.

Two examples will suffice, which I will not link to. First, the usual pointless comparisons between Trump and Biden, as though the two were in any way similar. Biden isn't a perfect democrat*, so the tired old rhetoric goes, so therefore he isn't democratic at all**; he doesn't do the things I want so he's of no use. And then one that really set me off : the BBC made a mistake in a translation, so therefore supposedly aren't impartial or even truthful.

* Leaving aside whatever the hell "perfect democracy" even means, there being many legitimate ways to call something democratic.
** I'm not American of course, but much the same thinking has been applied to Starmer in the UK, though rather less of late since Labour are wiping out the Tories in polls and by-elections alike.

FFS. Generalising from one example like this is morally and intellectually absurd. These kinds of judgements, coming from the kind of people that find Al Jazeera (!) to apparently be the only acceptable news outlet, are self-righteous, sanctimonious nonsense. As, of course, is saying that the anti-Trump perspective is only due to a white middle-class academic background. Diverting the discussion from the legitimate question as to just how fascist a second Trump term would be into the nuanced problems of Biden's relationship with the unions... snap out of it ! WHAT ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT !

This kind of stuff leads me to speculate that naivety and cynicism may be different ends of the same horseshoe. The underlying beliefs might be legitimately different, but the effects are the same or similar. "Things aren't going exactly the way I want", say the hopelessly naïve, "so therefore I hate them and even want to destroy them".

Whereas the devotedly cynical say... "the system is hopelessly corrupt and everyone is in a war against all because of the very nature of the man the beast", and this of course, leads into, "and therefore I hate the system and want to destroy it". 

Others instead are merely content to sit back and take no action because any attempts would be pointless. Neither the naïve nor the cynic are ever content, because neither will be satisfied with any mere improvement less than absolute perfection – and neither ever wants to do the legwork, just bitch and moan about it. Naivety slides all too easily into cynical inaction when perfection proves elusive.

It is not, however, that I find the underlying moral intentions of such people to be questionable. With one or two exceptions, far from it : I think most of you are indeed fighting on the right side, just in an apparently pointless and counterproductive way.

This of course all builds on the previous post about techno-Utopians versus optimists. To develop that a little further, the word utopian can have many different connotations. On the one hand to have utopian thinking can be something laudable, when someone has a clear goal and a direction as to how to get there. One does not need to actually reach the Emerald City to at least be grateful that one has escaped the clutches of the Wicked Witch, or better yet to at least made it to somewhere genuinely nice to be even if it's not actually paradise. When one is conscious of improvements, striving for more but not falling into misery because of any remaining deficiencies, taking pride in progress while continuing the good work... this is healthy. This is productive. 

Continually whining that it doesn't fit your ideal of perfection is not. This is when utopian thinking, absolute insistence that things can and should be only one particular way and no other, becomes a pejorative term.

Fighting for a particular cause can of course be an entirely noble purpose, and to some degree criticism is a necessary engine for progress. I wouldn't trust someone who never complained about anything, who never had any political or moral or social cause they felt the need to promote. But equally, I'm deeply suspicious of those who are permanently in Activism Mode. All posts, or very nearly so, must be about moral causes ! Everything must be framed in the negative about how bad things are ! Nobody can be allowed to enjoy anything so long as a single person is suffering ! There's a distinctly Puritanical, joyless Calvinism about all this, a determination that anyone not in a state of misery needs to experience some kind of perverse enlightenment with the utmost urgency.

This kind of activism is toxic. It poisons the mental health of everyone it touches, not least the activist themselves. Perpetually preaching to the converted* (as is the norm on social media) through self-righteous, chest-thumping memes accomplishes nothing. It persuades nobody. The single effect of it is to remind everyone that things are bad. I repeat, this is toxic. If you want me to take action about something, tell me what I can do. Otherwise, sure, I totally get the need to vent and rant from time to time. But if that's all you ever do... seriously, go home and rethink your life. 

* Or indeed unconverted in the case of the devoutly irreligious. 

Closely related to this of course is compassion fatigue. Most of the causes and problems highlighted seem to be things about which ordinary people are capable of doing very little, so what's the point of dwelling on it ? You can't persuade people to stop believing in God by simply declaring him a fiction; you aren't going to stop climate change by constantly reporting on the mass deaths of penguins or whatever*.

* Although to be fair, lately there have been quite a few more posts about successful environmentalism actions, and this is vital. An uninterrupted stream of catastrophism posts leads to a self-fulfilling belief that we're all doomed, a view I reject with every fibre of my being.

Look, if you really care about people's mental health, as is quite rightly in vogue right now, the best thing you can do is dial it all back. Not to zero ! But back, quite a lot. When you've started making ludicrous claims about the BBC... you aren't acting as a necessary stinging gadfly to avoid complacency. You've started with good intentions, but you're a good way down the road to hell. Remember, those who fight with the abyss should take care not to stare at monsters, or something like that.

Dun Manifestoin'

For the longest time, my friends used to insist I was anti-technology. This was despite that I used Linux long before any of them did, had dealt with the agony that is the vi "text editor", that I know multiple programming languages, routinely use LaTeX instead of Word, do CGI as a hobby, operated the then-world's largest radio telescope as my day job... I mean, what gives ? My whole life is mainly digital, for crying out loud.

It was because at the time, I didn't have a mobile phone, and still to this day have never used Facebook.

I mean, good grief.

But despite a largely digital existence, I do not align myself with the "techbro" culture that dominates Silicon Valley and certain sectors of reddit. Cryptocurrency I believe is an outright scam while NFTs aren't even at that level of credibility. Believers in such things are at best extremely foolish and misguided techno-Utopians, which is not a description I'd apply to myself. I would, however, very happily profess to being a techno-optimist.

That is, until I discovered the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Now I'm going to have to be very much more careful in applying that label to myself, because I don't want to be associated with such things. I'd sooner spit at the author in the street than join that club.

First (and be advised this post is mostly prologue), let me clarify what I mean by utopian and optimist in this context. I'm an optimist in that I believe technological development is generally, but not exclusively, a positive thing that makes life better. I believe some problems are purely or largely technological in nature, and that solutions to such problems lie mainly in further development : if your code has bugs, the usual solution is to fix the bugs, not delete the code. I believe some aspects of life can be best improved with R&D rather than political or economic solutions. I believe that the desire to learn more is inherently a good thing, that knowledge for knowledge's sake is a valuable end unto itself, that tool use, curiosity, and the desire to improve our material conditions are innate parts of the human condition, not some peculiar by-product of modern civilisation. 

"Life is not a problem to be solved,", said Frank Herbert, "but a reality to be experienced". I agree. But part of that experience is in the joy of solving problems, finding things out, experiencing new realities. There is no paradox or contradiction here, only a pleasing linguistic irony.

And note the many provisional clauses above, because these really are vital : mainly, generally, some, usual. Not all problems are technological or even material, and even not all of these are necessarily best solved through research : sometimes it may be necessary to take a new development and burn it in the fire. In the main I doubt this, but sometimes this can happen. 

Herein lies the difference, as I see it, with techno-utopians a.k.a. techbros. They omit all these caveats. They essentially claim that all, or at least the overwhelming majority, of problems are technological in nature and thus can only be solved through further development. A techno-optimist might make some exaggerated claims as a rhetorical point of persuasion, or at most get carried away in the moment; a techbro really believes the most outlandishly optimistic projections. A technoptimist might say that maybe technological solutions are the largest, pluralistic aspect of a problem but not the majority; a techbro would say that they are either totally dominant over everything else or that nothing else matters at all.

In short, tech optimism accepts the limitations of technology without denying its importance. Techbros think that all problems are materialistic and nothing else matters much in any sphere of life. Techbros insist that actual miracles will occur within the very near future (but never quite right now), and, perhaps most importantly of all, demand everyone else believe the same thing. Techbros are very much against unbelievers whereas technoptimists think life's too short to join such a silly cult.

All this lengthy introduction means I can now deal with the so-called "Manifesto" very briefly. Honestly, it's the stupidest thing I've ever read in my entire life. Most of my notes scrawled on it are expletives. It's not often I read someone's stuff for the first time and immediately wish unpleasant things to befall them, but this is one of those times.

And remember, I have literally argued with people about triangles. When I say this is even stupider than that, this claim should have some force to it.

As this perfectly respectable article points out, manifestos are supposed to fire up your own base. They aren't intended to rigorously prove a point or consider alternatives. They're chest-thumping, emotive pieces. Fair enough I suppose, but this feels like a really stupid issue to write a polemic about. If I weren't so darn busy, I'd probably be tempted to write my own counterpiece of vitriolic nonsense in response. 

Fortunately I just don't have time for that. I think I've probably given enough of the gist of the bits of the manifesto-polemic I do agree with (and there are a few) already, so I'm just going to pick a few highlights of the bits I most detest. Here I omit all the extremely irritating "we believes" which begin practically every sentence.

Developed societies are depopulating all over the world, across cultures – the total human population may already be shrinking.

There is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.

Centralized planning is doomed to fail, the system of production and consumption is too complex. Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of everyone; centralization will starve you to death... Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.

Even in totalitarian regimes, an incremental lifting of the repressive boot off the throat of the people and their ability to produce and trade leads to rapidly rising incomes and standards of living. Lift the boot a little more, even better. Take the boot off entirely, who knows how rich everyone can get.

Central economic planning elevates the worst of us and drags everyone down; markets exploit the best of us to benefit all of us. 

Our planet is dramatically underpopulated, compared to the population we could have with abundant intelligence, energy, and material goods. The global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.

However, we are not Utopians.

We are not victims, we are conquerors.

A Universal Basic Income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state. Man was not meant to be farmed; man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud.

My expletive-laded hyperbolic comments include such simple things as "fuck off and die", "I hope you boil", "please die now quietly in a ditch somewhere", "seriously, fuck off", "you are utterly mad", "you're all idiots and I hate you", "HAH HAH HAH HAH !" (in response to "we are not Utopians"), and, "you're like what would happen if Stephen Pinker and Rutger Bregman made a baby and dropped it on its head".

I mean, I did think about righting a proper rebuttal. I did consider pointing out the contradiction in saying that technology makes all work redundant but also generates more work. I thought about ranting about just how much of this verbal diarrhoea is about market forces rather than technology. And I thought about pointing out, in fairness, that yes, perhaps research and development will allow ever-more progress in technology and economic growth without causing ever more depletion of the natural world (human economics being a largely artificial construct anyway), while all the while having nothing but the most scathing attempt for the notion that the planet could or should support 50 billion of us.

But I decided to do none of that. This rambling bit of effluence is clearly not aimed at fostering rational argument, so I see no need to bother. 

Plato's Tweets

I liked that one about Epicurus so much that I decided to read another BBC Future post by the same author : Would Plato Tweet ? And this one's pretty good too. Before I dive back to the usual consciousness/reality posts, I think here I'll stick with the theme of social media instead.

Long before philosophers were writing books and papers, their thoughts had to be transmitted in a way that could grab their audience's attention – there was an element of public display. Early philosophers also developed highly elaborate public personas. Empedocles, who's credited with inventing the idea of the four Classical elements, made his public appearances with extravagant flair – a purple robe, a golden belt, sandals of bronze – and referred to himself as an incarnate god. 

These Socratic dialogues, which are the fountainhead of the whole philosophical tradition that follows, can be read as a fictionalised biography of a career influencer – the Collected Twitter Threads of Socrates, liberally reinvented, yet perhaps faithful in spirit. 

In the age of social media, we may be returning to a state in which a thinker's claim to wisdom relies on their ability to effectively perform it – with the additional requirement that they're able to transmute that performance into content.

That's quite interesting. I've been vaguely thinking about deepfakes and other AI-generated misinformation. I see many claims that some coming deluge will be nothing less than apocalyptic for out faith in news reports, about which I'm extremely skeptical. A more likely worst-case scenario, I think, is that it would return us to a pre-video era, when no videos could be trusted as the gold standard of accuracy because none existed. 

Even this, I think, is not really plausible, but the parallels of social media taking us back to a worse, less well-informed past is a healthy way of stopping us from getting too misty-eyed about a lost Golden Age when you could believe everything they put in the newspapers. It never existed. Today's misinformation problems are just the latest in a long line of attempts to confuse instead of convince; different in their specifics (very importantly so !), but not pointing to some fundamental change or decline in human psychology.

As Plato represented him, Socrates was unimpressed by moral posturing. And so according to the journalist Olivia Goldhill, he would well feel the same about this characteristic of social media, wherein people often hypocritically implore others to be more kind and virtuous. The more you display certainty in your self-righteous posting, Socrates might have argued, the more likely you are in fact ignorant of your own moral shortcomings.

Oh very much this. Not so much for Plato's likely perspective (I'll get back to that), but for the whole accusative, holier-than-thou tone of social media in general. Endless memes about what's wrong with the world, who to support and who to blame... I hate it. The petty judgements, the culture wars that make moral issues out of things which have no moral aspect to them whatsoever... and the endless anti-religion memes ! Just who the hell is it these are appealing to ? Who is ever going to be persuaded by them, and if they're not supposed to be persuasive, what are they for ? And what in the world – this one particularly confuses me – is the point of posting very long articles but then not be willing to have a discussion about them ?

Look, I get the need to vent and rant (he says, going on a rant). I don't get the need to do nothing but state your moral beliefs over and over again. And I don't for the life of me understand why we're not supposed to have a conversation. It's okay to argue with people. Arguing is good for you ! We should be encouraging actual discussions, not just sanctimonosity !

But let's move on.

The sophist Protagoras was said to have espoused a theory of "relativism", which essentially suggested that since our individual perceptions differ, we are each limited to our own subjective construction of reality. One can see how this thesis is exemplified by aspects of the social media experience, as we scroll through an apparent infinity of information, yet always within the confines of our private information bubbles. 

As I was saying, we all live in our own multiverses, which helps explain why the concept is such a good bit of science fiction even if it relies on lousy physics. This brings us to the titular question of whether Plato would in fact participate in social media. Here I somewhat disagree with the conclusion : 

To combat the problem of distinguishing desirable from undesirable information – good from bad influencers – Plato introduced an infamous degree of censorship into his theoretical city. Jenny Jenkins at Swansea University has speculated as to whether he would have allowed citizens to use Facebook, surmising that this would have been a resounding "no". "Facebook does not have the intention of promoting morality, and does not particularly seek to educate its users," she writes, "so I think Plato would have disapproved of it for this reason alone."

This question of filter bubbles / unwelts / multiverses is one that keeps gnawing away at me. We should absolutely and unequivocally clamp down hard on abject misinformation. But beyond that, what do we want social media to be ? A place where we can only ever hurl judgemental, petty memes at each other ? A pseudo-encyclopaedia where factual accuracy must be reinforced at all times ?

The best answer I can come up with is "something like real life". Where we generally agree on most issues with most of our friends, but not everything. There's overlap, but never a complete one, and our attitudes are similar enough that disagreements (at least on issues of no immediate importance to us) aren't at all likely to lead to slanging matches; and of course best of all is when slanging matches don't actually matter and nobody goes away permanently angry.

Now as to Plato, I disagree because I think looking at his ideal society is the wrong approach. Plato didn't actually live in his ideal society, and the article quotes a famous admonishment of his against the written word :

"They will be hearers of much, without learning anything; they will appear to know much, yet for the most part know nothing; and they will be miserable to be around, having become wise-seeming, without actually being wise." (Phaedrus 275a-b; my translation)

But the context is missing here. The point is that you can't take everything literally, that everything is subject to change and cannot be determined with absolute certainty (even if he was indeed after a search for objective truth). Above all, Plato stressed most emphatically that if can you can ever arrive at real Truth at all, it's only through extreme effort and through a process of dialogue with others. So while he might well reject specific implementations of social media, and certainly most of the business models that foster it, I doubt he'd reject the notion itself.

For unlike the physical agora, where the whole crowd may be deceived at once by the ideological seductions of an itinerant sophist, the virtual agora is different for each crowd member. We receive the proffered wisdom of the modern philosophers and sophists "alone together", to use the social scientist Sherry Turkle's phrase. We are each deceived uniquely, adding ever another layer between us and our collective grasp on what's actually there. And it is we ourselves, when we post and repost, tweet and retweet, who deceive one another, circulating our own sophistries.

When social media works well (and it often does work well), it connects interested people with genuine experts, or people of similar interests and levels of knowledge but with qualitatively different perspectives and backgrounds. When it fails it connects idiots. Plato would definitely not approve of the latter because nobody would, but equally, who would disagree with the former ? To disagree with people having productive friendships just because they occur digitally rather than physically wouldn't make any sense. More on that in an upcoming post, but for now :

It may be that some Stoics – whose ranks included people of all classes and extractions, slave and free, Greek and Roman – would have had at least an ambivalent, and perhaps a guardedly optimistic view of the possibilities offered by online social networks. Insofar as they offer a mechanism for connectivity, they can foster real community – particularly when their users are engaging with one another in good faith and to mutual benefit, as may indeed be the case with content creators who provide education, community empowerment or therapeutic support to their audiences. 

A Stoic might ask, are you using this platform as a rational contributor to human well-being and the community of the Universe? Or to aggrandise, entertain or escape from yourself? If the former, go for it; if the latter, delete your accounts.

And I think Plato would probably agree with this. As with all critiques of social media, the problems aren't usually with the messaging system per se, but with the business model around it. Whether you send a letter or a tweet or a phone call, if your dialogue helps you learn or foster genuine connections, this is generally a Good Thing. Plato would certainly not approve of the kind of social media that feeds endless adverts (especially the political kind) to its users, and would undoubtedly insist on strict regulations. But if it could be devised in such a way as to allow good, thoughtful discussions, or just for the typical sorts of everyday conversations everyone has anyway, I don't see him having any objections.

Feeling Epicurious

This is not another post about consciousness and reality, though it does start off that way.

Even though for all sorts of reasons I think materialism is quite silly, that doesn't mean I don't find any value in it. Actually I agree with a very great deal of it; I think there is something out there, I just think that that is demonstrably different from what's in here. But in many ways I think maybe just simply agreeing that it's not all consciousness-all-the-way-down may be the more important point. Let's all gang up on idealists ! :P

Anyway, I much enjoyed this BBC article on the Epicureans. I don't know much about Epicurean philosophy at all (I don't seem to get a good impression of it from popular media) but I might have to address that. 

The Epicureans believed that even the contents of our minds – our thoughts and perceptions – are comprised of very fine atoms of a certain kind. On this basis they asserted that all perceptions are equally real – even dreams and optical illusions are real, in the sense that they are made of actual, material stuff just like anything else...  it reminds us that the contents of our screens, like the contents of our minds, are not less real than the external sense objects we perceive, just different. As the philosopher David Chalmers puts it, in two helpful phrases : "information is physical", and "virtual reality is genuine reality".

I certainly agree with Chalmers that VR can constitute something "meaningful" in the emotive sense. The medium doesn't much matter for this (with some caveats I'll return to at the end). Whether we receive information via a book, a letter, a trained parrot, television, braille... none of this has any bearing on the emotional implications. And I would agree that VR has some level of existence : it must do, because we can't respond to something that doesn't exist. But :

These bits are physical things – in early computing they were housed in sequences on punched cards, now they are embodied as voltages on tiny transistors. Different sequences of bits (ones and zeroes), different digital information. Different shapes and arrangements of atoms, different bodies.

Here I don't think it can be said that information itself is qualitatively the same as physical objects. Information (VR or whatever) is something mental. It's only when a person reads a book that information arises. Without a mind to read it, there's nothing but atoms of text; digital information can be instantaneously summoned, dismissed, manipulated in ways impossible for physical media – and mental imagery is vastly more flexible. I won't dwell on my preference for a dualist interpretation here except to note that you can view in this in either a very weak or much stronger way :

• The weak interpretation is that things have different aspects which might be ultimately no more fundamental than labels. A table is one collection of atoms, a hedgehog is another. From our everyday perspective it makes sense to say that these are qualitatively different, even though at a very fundamental level they're basically the same. 
• The strong interpretation is that this means mind and matter are utterly irreconcilable and have totally different modes of existence. Arguably this makes it impossible for them to interact by definition.

I think it's on very safe ground to say that minds certainly show qualitatively different behaviour to atoms in the weak sense, thus leaving open the possibility that they could be unified with matter in some unknown, possibly unknowable, "neutral monism" way. As to the strong interpretation I remain deeply conflicted. On the one hand, I reject the need to insist that fundamentally different things can't interact (for reasons given at length here and here), but I also don't necessarily see that we must absolutely insist that because things appear to be qualitatively different then they really must be so at the most fundamental level.

In short, I don't know what the nature of reality is. And I get a bit worried about those who do.

Nevertheless, to return to the BBC article, the Epicurean approach of treating all perceptions as having, let's say, equal validity rather than equal modes of existence, has a lot going for it.

Epicurus believed everything reduces to atoms and void – including our mind (psyche) – and so rejected the conception of the immortal soul, which had been central to prior religious and philosophical thought. The gods, he held, may exist – but even if they do, they have nothing to do with us, and hence give us no moral obligations, no divine law, and no higher purpose. Therefore, the best thing you can do, and in fact the highest good, is to pursue a life of "pleasure" [my quotation marks].

Despite how that sounds, the Epicureans did not feel that this consisted in a life of sex, drugs and dithyrambic poetry (Dionysiac party songs). Rather, they felt, the pursuit of pleasure would be best effectuated by a simple life... For pleasure, as they conceived it, is not something you add up, cumulatively – rather, it is defined negatively, as the absence of pain. The term for this freedom from pain was ataraxia — literally, a state of not-being-shaken-up, a freedom from turbulence.

Preserving your ataraxia was a matter of balance. Should you drink some wine? Sure! – a little. Should you have sex? Yes! – some. If resisting these urges disturbs your mind, then satisfy them with moderation – there's no moral superstructure barring you from doing so. But don't overdo it, for it will shake you up, disrupting your ataraxia.

Which closely aligns with my own practise of "moderation squared". Do everything in moderation including moderation itself. It's fine if you occasionally go to excess, in fact if you don't do this you're missing out on the full range of experiences. And of course the more extreme the activity, the less you should ever do it. Likewise, it's generally a good idea to try anything once, but it doesn't make sense when you've got an extremely high confidence that you won't enjoy it or find it worthwhile.

This brings in the article's main point, which is about how we should behave digitally. The Epicurean view of reality may have led to their approaches to life, but quite honestly, I don't think this actually matters. What matters is not the nature of stuff but how it affects us. Whether it's all solid physicality or idealistic fog, the important thing is how we respond.

We do not seem to be living in an age characterised by "freedom from turbulence". And nowhere is this more evident than in the context of our information culture, and in the chaotic maximalism of our digital experience...  a radically Epicurean course would be to avoid the online world altogether – to completely eschew the extraneous stimulations of the body-mind that come with adding layers to your reality. This would be in keeping with what we're told of Epicurus himself, who spurned the life of the polis (the Greek city-state), with its rhetorical intrigues and social complexities. Instead, he dwelt with his followers in a community called the Garden. 

Well here I start to get a bit more worried. I get that sensory bombardment becomes overwhelming, but this "Garden", particularly given a refusal to participate in the outside world, sounds an awful lot like a commune or even a cult. And that's no good at all, invariably just exchanging one rat race with another. But then the author asks, "how can we go about cultivating Epicurean gardens in our digital spaces? How to dwell online in pleasure and peace?". And this implication of a Garden as a temporary retreat, that I think has much more value.

Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash coined the term "informational hygiene", which has since come to refer to the discipline of keeping your search history, and therefore your mind, clear of digital disinformation. A related concept is technologist Clay Johnson's "information diet". Both of these terms, hygiene and diet, recall Epicurean ethical categories — hygieia (health) and diaita (habit, way of life) – and emphasise the physical-material impact that digital information has on our minds. 

This I like very much. As in, let's say, the analogue world, some interactions are valuable and others are toxic and destructive. You can never avoid this completely, but you can manage it. You can avoid the sewage and stay digitally healthy. Don't avoid digital reality if you don't want to, but treat it just like every other aspect of your life. Live the digital life you want to live. 

As an aside, the idea that we must break down filter bubbles and echo chambers is one I'm increasingly skeptical of. It's a good idea to foster productive discussions, yes, and definitely a good idea to prevent outright violent radicalisation. But we don't go around insisting that everyone in real life actively goes around soliciting discussion from people they really don't like very much. We let this happen naturally. Perhaps something similar would work well for digital hygiene ? That would mean, of course, simply ditching a lot of the algorithms for suggesting people we might like to connect with.

But of course just as books are not phone calls, so digital social media has concerns all of its own compared to town halls and postal letters :

Unlike a regular garden where we simply choose what to include and exclude, the algorithms of online platforms create a feedback loop between our own curatorial choices and what gets presented to us in turn. If choosing to follow someone on Instagram is like selecting and planting a flower that you're consenting to see and smell on a daily basis, on TikTok, the flowers are cast unbidden at your gate, an atomic bombardment at the threshold of your perception. You may think you're the gardener, but it's equally the algorithm, and the garden is you!

This is where the materialist metaphysics of Epicurean thought becomes especially relevant. For, from such a perspective, you are matter experiencing itself, and in the realm of digital experience, you are specifically informational matter experiencing itself. Therefore the digital content you curate, and that which is curated for you, become the actual stuff of your mind – vestigia, as the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius calls the material images that make up consciousness: "footprints" of the perceptions we have encountered, the content we have put into our brains. 

And this is not just one-directional: it is not only a matter of what you put in, but what you put out. Every digital gesture – every comment, post, message – may be conceived as an addition to a garden that is shared. A provocative tweet, for example, may indeed merit a profusion of indignant @replies – but does that make the garden any better, or worse ? There may be individual pleasure in sharing them, but the question would be whether that pleasure is sustainable for the digital environment.

Oooh, I like this. There's clearly a need to vent that must be balanced with the need to cultivate, and that's not at all easy. If I live my life largely online, then not going on a rant from time to time is directly equivalent to keeping stuff bottled up, and that's not healthy. But my need to be angry may cause more damage to other people, and with social media there's at least the potential (albeit hugely unlikely) for this to spread much further than in the analogue world.

The Epicurean ideal would be to make these additions with a maximum of care and intentionality, in order to maintain a minimum of psychic turbulence throughout the digital community. The question is not "online or offline ?" but "community or not-community ?" In other words, are we using digital spaces to connect with one another in the shared project of diminishing pain, or vainly attempting to escape reality and disconnect from ourselves ?

Thinking in this way cultivates a relational understanding that is ultimately ecological, revealing insights into how we can interact healthily not only with other people, but also with the built and natural worlds. It provides the basis for an ecology of information, where we might cultivate collective awareness of the material costs of our information systems (the energy it takes to power the internet), as well as its psychological costs (a consideration which is also ultimately material). 

It's very easy indeed to dehumanise people on text-based media because so much of the human aspect is already stripped away. This unique style has certain advantages (text can be in some ways a far more efficient information delivery mechanism) but of course it entails risks. We feel free to spew more hyperbole when the other guy barely seems real. And we might need to use more hyperbole because we can't convey the same emotions otherwise : we have to compensate for our lack of body language and tone of voice. 

Ultimately remembering that the recipient is every bit as human, every bit as conflicted, flawed and brilliant as anyone we'll ever shake hands with, isn't always easy. But this Epicurean admonition towards digital health and hygiene, treating all realities as equally valid, may at least help.

When not to fight

I read Rutger Bregman's Human Kind recently and I hated it. There are some interesting bits but large tracts are offensively stupid and purely, nakedly ideological, replete with the "noble savage" fallacy in extremis. I'll do a proper review eventually but the short version is : leave it on the shelf. It's awful.

But, one thing that does come across (that the author doesn't really intend) is just how difficult psychology is. All those popular studies : the prison experiment, the electric shocks, the tribal children's camp... all come with major caveats. It's not that they're generally wrong (except the prison one, which was a sham), it's that human beings are complicated. And the popular term "replication crisis" is, I think, a terrible way of looking at it. It implies we already know exactly how studies should be done and should be immediately be able to tell when a result is obviously incorrect, or at least suspicious. That we've already got a handle on the basic methodology and have just slipped up a bit.

I suggest that this isn't the case. I suggest that we don't know the best way to do psychology experiments. People are just too complicated for that, with simply too many variables to put into neat categories, in a way that's qualitatively different from the physical sciences. Trying to say it's all group conformity or obedience or sheep-like desire to fit in... nah. This is over-simplistic nonsense. Useful concepts to be sure, and applicable in the right situations... but not universally by any means. 

It's not that the studies aren't worth doing, it's that none of them are worth promoting as having some unimpeachable insight into the human condition. They simply don't. They give us clues at best, but no more than that. They don't give us answers in the same way that the experiments in natural sciences usually do.

And I also saw Netflix's fantastic documentary Ordinary Men the other day. This looks at the often-overlooked participation of the German police forces during the Holocaust. As you would suspect, it's not an easy watch, but it's an important one. The main point is that so many of those committing the atrocities were not evil monsters. Oh, they did evil, monstrous things, undeniably ! But they did it not for their own gratification or even because they wanted to. They didn't even do it because they had no choice, with the worst that befell anyone failing to kill their assigned victims being social ostracization. 

No, they did it, so the documentary claims, because they felt it was necessary. Most of them didn't want to do it at all. They got no sense of gratification or pleasure from it. They actively realised the horror and repugnance of what they were doing, looked the barbarity of it full in the face... and did it anyway. And that, in its own way, is far more terrifying than viewing them as demonic : no, they were just like you and me, so the theory goes, but under the right circumstances...

Of course the flip side of this is that just as genuine monsters are much rarer than we might think (if they weren't, we simply wouldn't have civilisation), so too are genuine heroes. By the same token, perhaps, ordinary people are equally capable of heroics. No need to look around for those with the rarest combination of courage, integrity and decency, because anyone is capable of extraordinary actions in the right conditions.

All that being true, with any conclusions on the human condition being provisional at best, this article from the Guardian cuts a little differently :

President Joe Biden began his remarks in Israel with this: “Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of Isis, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world. There is no rationalizing it, no excusing it. Period. The brutality we saw would have cut deep anywhere in the world, but it cuts deeper here in Israel. October 7, which was a … sacred Jewish holiday, became the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

“It has brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by millennia of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jewish people. The world watched then, it knew, and the world did nothing. We will not stand by and do nothing again. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”

With this, Biden reinforced the rhetorical framework that the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett expressed, in typically unashamed terms, in an interview on Sky News on 12 October: “We’re fighting Nazis.”... without the historical context of Israeli settler colonialism since the 1948 Nakba, we cannot explain how we got here, nor imagine different futures; Biden offered us, instead, the decontextualized image of “pure, unadulterated evil.”

Genuine monsters, I stress, do exist. But leaving aside the lunatics who instigated the Holocaust, those who "only" participated in it.... that's where human nature gets really scary. That's where we get deeply uncomfortable questions about exactly who we are as a species. If you accept the conclusion in the documentary (which accompanies a book of the same name), then the trick of making comparisons to the Nazis as unalloyed evil stands revealed. If your enemy is truly pitiless, sadistic, and beyond all redemption, then it becomes all too easy to justify any sort of response in order to stop them.

But if they're not, if even the Nazis who carried acts of what should be unthinkable evil were, in fact, actually relatively normal people in the wrong circumstances, then this is a reminder that there are limits to justifiable retaliation. That there are bounds which should not be overstepped. Not that there shouldn't be any response at all, that's stupid. Clearly, WWII had to be fought and the Nazis had to be stopped. This is self-evident. But was every Allied response justified ? Was the carpet-bombing of Dresden a sensible form of retaliation ?

To return to present times, in the Russia-Ukraine war, I believe, there is a really quite impressive case of black-and-white, with one side as clearly villainous and one as innocent as you could ever find. There, I think, there is a very clear victim to support and an adversary to challenge. If you don't stand up to abject, unfair hostility, if you turn the other cheek towards such pure malevolence, you're simply surrendering. To say the Ukrainians shouldn't fight back to reclaim lost territory is to surrender to bullies; to place the blame somehow on NATO is a shocking, deplorable case of cynicism overriding good sense and decency. To say the West shouldn't support the victim in case the bully does something even worse is the very worst sort of cowardice and outright stupidity. Well of course they will do something worse if you don't stand up to them ! It's an open, shameful invitation to let them do as they please.

But so far as I can tell the current Middle East crisis is wholly different. There, every political state involved seems to be awful. Not necessarily the same type or degree of awfulness – I make no comment on that score – but still awful. No side can be meaningfully said to be better than the other when both behave like this. In war, yes, you expect collateral damage... as a tragic side-effect. But Israel appears to be actively soliciting it.

The Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant said: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party, to take another example, called for “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth”. There are many other such expressions by Israeli politicians and senior army officers in the last few weeks. The fantasy of “fighting Nazis” drives such explicit language, because the image of Nazis is one of “pure, unadulterated evil”, which removes all laws and restrictions in the fight against it. Perpetrators of genocide always see their victims as evil and themselves as righteous. This is, indeed, how Nazis saw Jews.

Biden’s words constitute therefore a textbook use of the Holocaust not in order to stand with powerless people facing the prospect of genocidal violence, but to support and justify an extremely violent attack by a powerful state and, at the same time, distort this reality. But we see the reality in front of our eyes: since the start of Israeli mass violence on 7 October, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza has surpassed 4,650, a third of them children, with more than 15,000 injured and over a million people displaced.

Surely, all this violence in this case is just not right. And I emphasise the specifics because "both sidesism" is typically a fallacy, as it most certainly is in the Ukraine conflict. It's normally the sort of idiotically naïve pacifism/fascism that one expects from contemptible fuckwits like Jeremy Corbyn. I get that. But if both sides actually are awful... ?

The central issue is simple : the actions on each side are unjustified. You can't justify gunning down festival-goers and you can't justify cutting off food and water to an entire city in response. They're both shit. What was done to you in the past has no bearing on how you treat innocent civilians in the present. 

Sometimes, just sometimes, right is right and wrong is wrong. If one side is right and one is wrong, there's only one option who to support. But if both are wrong, why support either ? Why insist that one side has the right of it, that there must necessarily be heroes and villains when in fact there are neither ?  And even if you do find that overall one side must be supported, that doesn't mean you accept everything they do without question. Israel, just like any state, has the right to exist and to defend itself. It doesn't have the right to act with impunity or to commit war crimes. Nobody deserves that much leeway.

Review : a ReMarkable device

My 40th birthday has, horrifyingly, come and gone and the world hasn't ended. I don't have crippling arthritis or the need to constantly discuss mortgage rates, so I think I can continue to hold True Adulthood at bay for a while longer yet.

What I do have is something ubiquitously advertised on reddit : a ReMarkable 2 digital notebook. Normally the incessant advertising frequency alone would put me off, but (a) it seemed like a genuinely useful idea and (b) Shirley already knows someone who has one and likes it.

Oddly enough, I think they're almost underselling this. "No one device will transform the way you work", they say, "it's about fostering better habits". But I have to say, while it isn't perfect, it genuinely is transformative. I've read more papers since I got it than in the rest of the year combined and I've actually enjoyed doing so. For that alone I find it astonishing. 

For comparison, I had a Kindle some years ago, and while I liked it for books very much, reading PDFs on it was hopeless. On this it's a whole new experience. You can't compare the two. Likewise I have a Rocketbook digitizable notebook (you can't call it truly digital since it uses actual and paper and pen and you have to scan it manually with your phone). That's surprisingly good for what it is, but again it just isn't in the same league as the ReMarkable. Writing wasn't pleasant because of the glossy paper and too-thick marker men, and though the scan was better than I was expecting, it just wasn't good enough for easy reading. And erasing the notebook when full was downright tedious. It was a clever idea but not really a practical solution.

Whereas for the ReMarkable 2, to cut to the chase, I give it an easy 9/10. What it does well, it truly excels at. However, what's useful to me and what's important to you might be different, so as well as singing its praises I'm also going to tell you every minor niggle I wish I didn't have to contend with. There are in fact quite a lot of these, but for me at least they are so minor that they seldom if ever detract from the core experience. A big plus here is the 100-day trial period in which you can return it.

I wouldn't normally write about a product like this so soon after getting it, but because of last week's conference I've had disproportionate use out of it already. I've read and annotated a dozen papers and written 56 pages so far (journals, meetings, and random thoughts – the last post on this blog was originally written on the ReMarkable, this one was made from notes I kept while using the device). That, I think, should be more than enough to give a detailed review.

Let me start by saying that the branding for this is wrong. Badly wrong, actually. It's not the world's thinnest tablet because it's simply not a tablet*. Comparing it to a tablet is like comparing a duck to a mongoose : sure, there are some similarities, but it's a bit of an odd thing to do. No, what it is is a digital notebook. All of the more negative reviews I've come across fail to understand this, expecting it to have a web browser and suchlike whereas this is something it quite rightly deliberately avoids. You wouldn't complain your paper notebook doesn't have a built-in radio or detachable legs or allow you to communicate with horses so don't expect it from this one either. It doesn't even have a clock, nor should it. There's nothing to distract you whatsoever. You can just get on with stuff.

* Their other slogan, "paper tablet", is a bit better, but not much.

It is, in a very real sense, a metaverse product. It seamlessly merges the digital and physical worlds, and by and large succeeds brilliantly in combining the best of both. The instant auto-saving help it feel exactly like a paper notebook while the auto-sync, erasablility, and powerful editing tools (drag a box around your handwriting and you can scale, rotate and translate it – this is genuinely useful and far from a gimmick) make it, equally, fully digital. 

Every so often I would jot down my thoughts about the device using a file on the notebook itself, and then to write this post I opened that file on the PC app. Combine this with the mobile app and you essentially have access to all your notebooks all the time. There's even an extension so you can add long webpages straight to the tab... sorry, digital notebook*. What's more, the quality of the handwriting when shown on the PC/mobile is perfect, allowing for easy reading with no strain except in terms of trying to decipher my own rapid scrawl.

* EDIT : I've just started using this and I'm very impressed so far. It makes it far more convenient for reading long web articles. However at least once it's cut the end off a piece, but I haven't used it enough to say how frequently this occurs.

But beware : like upgrading from SD to HD, it's definitely something I would find very, very hard to downgrade from. There's no going back.

The Good

I must admit that the writing experience on this is, contrary to the sales pitch, not quite like writing on real paper. Not only is the tactile sensation different, but despite many other reviews claiming otherwise, there is in fact a little bit of noticeable latency between the act of writing and the the e-ink appearing. But I would stress heavily that this is not enough to cause any issues, and the latency is now something I only notice if I deliberately watch for it. We're only talking a very small fraction of a second here.

Likewise the feel of paper isn't perfect, but it's more than close enough. A critical threshold is certainly exceeded : my handwriting on this is indistinguishable from my handwriting on real paper. And this required no effort on my part to "get used to" anything. Crucially, I don't at all enjoy the physical sensation of writing on standard glossy screens, but this matte screen and specialist stylus instantly met with my approval, even if it doesn't feel as much like paper as I was expecting.

The resolution of the display is exquisite. You can zoom in and out, pan around, and the touch screen controls are intuitive. Adding more pages is done by flicking forwards on the final page and tapping a button. You can use your fingers or the stylus for most operations; I slightly prefer the latter. You can always hide the menus except for the very small, unobtrusive control icon in the top-left, so there's nothing but you and the page. The screen size is spot-on perfect : large enough to make everything readable and give you lots of space to write and draw, small enough to be easily portable. And of course there's a complete impossibility of smudging, which given how I hold my pen at a weird angle, is a big benefit for me.

I have the Marker Plus stylus which comes with an eraser on the back. I have to say I do find this of benefit. You can also tap with two fingers to undo the last continuous draw you made, but sometimes being able to have the detailed control of the physical eraser is extremely handy. I don't think it's strictly necessary but it is certainly nice to have. The marker is magnetic and snaps to the side, but it took me a while to realise the magnetic attraction was much stronger if I put it near the top of the notebook rather than midway down the side. With that, there's no worries about it falling off. You can give it a good hearty shake and the marker stays in place.

The marker itself is expensive and the nib unfortunately wears down over time, with the website saying it lasts between 3 and 7 weeks, of course depending entirely on usage. But you get 9 of these nibs provided; there's no need to ever replace the whole marker unit just the nibs. It doesn't require any charging.

A major asset in terms of the digital side of things is the organisation. As well as a one year free trial to ReMarkable's own subscription storage options, you can also integrate with others for free. I set up OneDrive and the procedure was simplicity itself, giving me access to my ~1 TB drive which is essentially inexhaustible for papers and notes. Some file types can be converted on-the-fly to PDF so you can then download them to the device itself, though very strangely this doesn't include .txt files.

In the device and its own native apps you can arrange files in a standard directory structure and also assign them an arbitrary amount of tabs, so keeping things discoverable is as easy as possible. Essentially you can start a whole new notebook for every passing thought if you really want to, with no need to worry about paper and making it far easier to search through than the Leaning Tower of Notebooks of Random Notes that's accumulated on my desk.

Similarly, the user interface is a breeze. It takes a few minutes to learn your way around and becomes second nature in no time at all. In fact on the whole design front I have to give them full marks : they've really thought about all this very carefully. If it isn't quite perfect, the small details they're implemented are invariably bigger positives than any mistakes they've made. Using it just becomes so instantly normal.

In terms of document functionality, you get about 50 page templates to choose from and a variety of pen styles. I gravitated quickly to the smallest line-separation page style and the thinnest pen. I use a thicker one for headings but that's about it. Honestly it's unlikely I'll ever use much else but it's nice that they're there. You can also add (but not name) different layers of text so you can toggle what you see, but this isn't something I've played around with yet. Nor have I tried anything more than simple diagrammatic sketches, though I don't think it's designed as a drawing tool.

Moving on, battery life is advertised as up to two weeks, and I think this is probably not far off the mark. Leaving it on standby overnight, the battery doesn't drain at all. But in a very heavy, full day of continuous use of reading papers, you might drain it in two days. Note-taking uses quite a bit less power, which I'd estimate would get you three or four days. 

Under more regular use (56 pages in a week is something I could only manage during a meeting, I'd never come close to this normally !) I think a week would be easily possible, though a full two weeks might necessitate only light use. Right now, I charged it a week ago, used it moderately for the first three or four of those days and it's still on 47%; a nasty little cold has meant I've barely touched it in the last three days. So standby time is excellent, maybe even longer than two weeks. You're unlikely to get charge anxiety unless you really have a total writing fixation-fetish, in which case you probably need to see a psychologist.

Lastly I'll repeat that the lack of features is an asset, which I mention again because I was initially skeptical about this. It seemed a bit like a minimalist gimmick deliberately avoiding the need for the designers to do any more work, but I was dead wrong about that. Having one device that does one thing really well is far superior to having one that does a billion different things with inescapable notifications. When they say it lets you focus, they aren't being lazy and they certainly aren't being pretentious.

The Bad

There's very little about this I could really say is genuinely "bad". There are two points I don't like though. First, my only point of real frustration is that pinch zoom is unresponsive with PDFs, usually taking several attempts to get it to do anything – and then it zooms in too much or too little, requiring a good deal of tweaking to get things right. A GUI slider or something would have been far easier. 

Fortunately landscape mode is an acceptable workaround in most cases (since this makes things large enough for readability) but still there's real scope for improvement here. Many PDFs come with a substantial border than means the zoom-to-width setting isn't always accurate, so better control of this would certainly be a big improvement.

Secondly, searching PDFs. You can do this but it's slower than a hibernating tortoise, which is extremely strange. There isn't a workaround for this except to use the device in combination with a PC or other device. That said, I haven't found it a major imposition, just an occasional nuisance.

The Ugly

No, there's nothing ugly about this device. It's a premium product and it shows.

But... there are plenty of minor deficiencies, stuff I thought was obviously missing or could easily be improved. In brief :

• I want a shortcut to quickly switch between pens. Reading papers I frequently need to highlight text and then add my own annotations, and using the menu is just that bit slower than it needs to be.
• While the highlighter pen can snap to text, the eraser can't do this : you have to erase a whole section of highlighted text to erase the highlights, rather than word-by-word.
• A landscape mode for the whole OS would be nice. As it is it remembers your preference per document, which is fine but makes things inconsistent.
• The PC app should default to the last directory used when uploading files, which would make things more convenient. It's always annoying to have to go down through an entire directory tree to find a file.
• I want to be able to order tabs in the tab menu alphabetically ! This is the most bizarre omission.
• The book folio cover should have been designed to also act as a stand. The keyboard folio (which I don't have) can do this, but I'm not sure if I'd benefit from this enough to make it worth forking over the really quite substantial amount of cash.
• Converting text : actually this performs better on my horrible messy scrawl than I was expecting, though I haven't used it much. Still, it'd be nice to have this option on the PC app and allow conversion of whole documents rather than one page at a time. EDIT : You can absolutely convert multiple pages all at once, my mistake.

My Verdict

Sometimes, lots of little niggles accumulate into a major annoyance. Not so here. The core of it, being able to do handwriting digitally either on empty pages or documents, is outstanding. The vast majority of the time you can just get stuff done, such that when there is any sort of interruption, it's so minor that you still come out well ahead. For me the ability to hold a PDF file at any angle and write on it however I like, with that convenient hard surface rather than the flexible printed page, is a godsend. I need to annotate academic texts to read them, and having ready access to them on multiple devices, not needing to wrestle with the printer any more.... bliss !

It's hard to guess how this would be for other people, but my suspicion is that you'd have to be really anal about handwriting to reject this on grounds of writing quality – the sort of person who insists on vinyl or magnetic tape in place of streaming. But for those of us who aren't twats, I doubt anyone would have any real issues with this for its designated purpose as a reading/writing device. Ignore anyone who says it doesn't do feature X if feature X has nothing to do with what you can do with regular paper books.

The elephant in the room is the price, which is not cheap. Not cheap at all. Would I have got it for myself anyway ? I can only say possibly yes, as a treat, and even then only thanks to the return policy (my experiences with the Rocketbook having made me wary). But would I have kept it despite the price ? Unhesitatingly : oh hell yes. It should be cheaper, but having made the plunge, I don't want to climb back out. It's lovely.

The Monstrous Multiverse

Why is the multiverse such a popular notion ? Scientifically it's bollocks. It replaces physics with statistics and utterly lacks explanatory power.

But psychologically... maybe it's just true ? We live in different mental worlds as a matter of course, inhabiting different umwelts to each other. When I first encountered this concept of our perceived sensory reality, I thought it might be applicable to politics as well as biological sensors. But the more I think about it the more I think I've underestimated its almost infinite scope.

We have different politics, yes, but also different cultures in all aspects, which – often enough, though certainly not always – never interact with each other. Even walking past outside diners at a restaurant, pedestrians don't enter the customer's umwelt, not really, even though they may pass within inches of each other.

Politically... it's partly about morals to be sure, probably even the dominant part. But it's also simply perception. What's relevant to one is of absolutely no concern to others. If you don't actually experience or witness the effects of a policy on a person or a group, it's likely of no concern to you. Awareness is just not the same as experience, like being told the plot of a TV show rather than watching it unfold. So essentially some events are literally not happening in our individual mental worlds.

Of course hard external reality does sometimes collide with these mental realms. It's not that reality isn't real or such. It's just that most of the time, or enough of the time at least, most of reality simply doesn't matter.

And this goes far beyond politics. Large tracts of reality simply don't exist for each of us. There's a whole world of the ins and outs of football shenanigans that don't exist for me. Details of celebrity lifestyles and the finer points of violin techniques alike hold no reality for me whatever. A myriad of mental worlds we'll never have the chance (or misfortune) to explore ! And of course for most people, poor unfortunate wretches that they are, astronomy too just isn't a thing.

To hammer home the point : the same event can be experienced by different people in radically different ways, e.g. an amazing emotional movie to one might be a pile of crap to another. A delicious cake to you might be disgusting to me. The substance, the sensory input, is the same but the output experience is not.

Why does this arise ? Probably from a huge number of causes. We grow up with different experiences, acquire different biases and perspectives, experience different teachings and have natural, pre-determined inclinations. A plethora of tiny differences gradually accumulate and develop. Most children, presumably, are more similar to each other than in the case of most adults.

The multiverse of science fiction is thus appealing because psychologically it captures what we anyway experience. It takes something we experience mentally, something we feel emotionally, and gives it a physical incarnation, just as monsters are our fears made flesh. It's the same basic principle at work, just manifested very differently.

Whether this has any bearing on actual scientists advocating the existence of a real multiverse, I don't know. I suspect not, that this is only a coincidence. I don't think our everyday experiences have much shaped the development of many-worlds theory : this is just a natural interpretation of the quantum mathematics. But maybe it's made people more receptive to it.

That's So Meta

Never did I think I would ever have the slightest interest in anything that came out of the demon-haunted orifices of Facebook (sorry, Meta), let alone listen to anything the Zuckerbot had to say. Nevertheless, last week's Meta Connect has me genuinely excited.

First off, I've seen a few outlets expressing surprise because for some reason they thought the metaverse was already dead. This is of course nonsense. As I noted on the first post I did on the metaverse back in 2021, a timescale of five years was plausible but definitely on the optimistic side of things. I was a bit more skeptical a couple of months later, while in March this year I revised a plausible framework (for mass adoption) to the end of the decade. Not for a moment have I ever had the impression that the metaverse is anything imminent; postulating something as being about 5 years away is basically synonymous with allowing a large margin of error. I've never seen Meta claim the ultimate vision of the future is anywhere near nigh. Quite where people have got this impression, I don't know.

Anyway, I've noted throughout my coverage of this that the whole concept is hardware dependent. Thresholds of comfort, price, battery life, affordability etc. must all be overcome for XR to rival (say) mobile phones in significance. The hardcore fans like to claim that the Quest 2 was a huge upgrade from the Quest 1, but I've tried both and honestly it's not. It's incremental : better resolution, more processing power and that's it.

The Quest 3, though... this is sounding like a much bigger deal. Not a revolution that will usher in a new era of human existence, but a much more important step towards changing how we access the digital world.

In the Meta Connect event itself, we got the official launch of the Quest 3. I've seen several hands-on tests with this, and so far as I can tell it seems very impressive indeed. On the Quest 1 and 2, the passthrough gives you get a blurry, grainy, warped, over-exposed, black-and-white view of the world that's enough to stop you bumping into things but nothing much more than that. On that last link, you can clearly see that on the Quest 3 even small real-world text is readable. In full colour, with a massively improved light balance and far less distortions. 

And of course, it gets significant (but more incremental) general performance upgrades. But one can cross a threshold either through one giant leap or many small steps, and here too things look important. We're getting close to, though perhaps not yet equalling, the graphical fidelity of PC VR in a standalone device.

But wait, there's more ! Meta also announced other significant developments. First, their AI program continues apace, generating (for some reason) AI characters tailored to specific tasks. Most eye-catching of these was Snoop Dog as a Dungeon Master. Quite why anyone in the world would want this, other than for momentary shits and giggles, I know not*, but the branding is likely on-point. Most people seem to like pointless celebrities for some reason, though I was more interested in their developing a no-code AI development platform to open this customisation (eventually) to the masses. Plus, they announced far faster and higher-quality AI image generation, which will be directly integrated into WhatsApp in the near future. Job concerns aside, this is the democratisation of creativity.

* The Zuckerbot asks, "why not ?". But I say, why Snoop Dog when you could have Brian Blessed or Ian McKellen ? What's wrong with you, you weirdo ?

Finally there was a return of sorts to the metaverse with their smart glasses. These are much (!) cheaper, better looking and more functional than Google's ill-fated foray. They don't offer metaverse access in the conventional, image-based sense; they don't overlay any visual imagery on what you see. Instead they provide access to Meta's AI, allowing you to query what you see wherever you are (as well as recording and even streaming video and photographs). Although I don't personally want them, I think this is a pretty neat trick. It incorporates the digital world directly and instantly into the regular world, so in that sense they can be said to be metaverse-compliant.

What does all this mean ? For that we go to the "first metaverse interview" (I recommend watching the very beginning and then skipping to 30 minutes in). Watching this, I have to say I felt like Vash in Star Trek : The Next Generation, holding with awed reverence "a piece of the future". Now the interviewer is, it must be said, quite annoying and half the content is just him saying how impressed he is... but... he might be right. If the uncanny valley hasn't quite been fully crossed, the expedition is well on their way up the far slope to the sunny uplands beyond. The degree of realism, the subtlety of expression and nuance of emotions the avatars convey, is far beyond anything I've seen before.

When we get to this quality more generally - and we're not there yet in any meaningful way, since this is just a proof of concept that takes hours to set up per person in a dedicated scanner - we have to confront Morpheus' admittedly-cliché question, "What is real ? How do you define real ?". It's easy to dismiss the metaverse as overhyped techbro nonsense when it's all dumb cutesy cartoon characters, but when you have something with such a visceral sense of presence, when it reaches that level of realism... then it's rather harder to ignore. And some commercial apps (like Brink Traveller) already reach comparable quality for static landscapes... so this is absolutely something we can do. It's going to happen, ready or not.

And that, as per the interview, really lays out the vision of the metaverse and what it means. It's the seamless integration of digital and physical reality. You just can't do that with a phone or desktop PC.

Now, feeling like I've soiled myself, I have to say I wholeheartedly buy into the Zuckerbot's vision of this (extremely serious caveats about whether I trust him notwithstanding). He's right to say we need physical reality, that going on hikes, being in nature, talking with friends, using physical hardware - this all matters very much. But he's also right to say that the digital world is meaningful too. Content isn't any less important because it exists only digitally. The right approach is to use the differences of the two to complement each other. Which is why I found the VR Oasis hands-on test of the Quest 3, though the guy seems lovely, to be quite baffling in its claims that augmented reality isn't really that important compared to fully-immersive virtual reality.

As discussed in the interview, when you can have such a lifelike interview with someone, when you can connect with anyone in this way... why wouldn't you ? Zoom, it seems, won't last five minutes when such a technology is widespread. Likewise, the Quest 3 already allows you to bring digital objects into your reality in a semi-permanent way. The question here really is why not rather than why. Yes, absolutely, you need many objects to be real, solid, physical things. You can't have a VR toaster. But many others you don't. You want a pinball or snooker table, you don't need one. You want a full-size dinosaur skeleton, you don't need one. Unless you're an actual palaeontologist, I suppose, but even then, a virtual model sounds pretty useful to me !

The biggest potential impact of the Quest 3 is for me productivity. It appears to begin to breach several important thresholds : comfort (better weight distribution and so narrow you can reportedly drink while wearing it), accessibility (no need to set up boundaries any more), performance, and flexibility (being able to freely and without hassle switch between real and digital worlds). But while I'm longing to set up Stranger Things portals to the upside-down all over my home, the thing that I think is potentially really impactful is, of all things, the integration with Microsoft Office. If I can have multiple windows acting as giant, lifelike monitors wherever I am, if it's comfortable enough to use for work for extended periods... that's a big deal. If I can keep different windows open showing me the figure I need to write about full-screen whilst still being able to write about them... that makes a real difference to how I work. How much of a difference, time will tell.

Of course the Quest 3 itself won't have us all wearing goggles the entire time. The photorealism of the avatars is still only a working prototype, not a mass-market consumer product. So no, the Quest 3 will not itself usher in the metaverse (no, you still don't need "metaverse officers" !)... but it's making it look an awful lot closer, and a lot less like the delusional pipe-dream of a typical Silicon Valley twatface. 

The end of the decade, the Zuckerbot says, is when we might have glasses rather than goggles for delivering genuine lifelike "holograms", when the digital and physical worlds collide. And for all his myriad faults, I really want to see what happens when they do. And I'm tired of the constant luddite anti-tech rhetoric. The optimistic vision is just so very much more appealing.