An Imperfect Epicurean

I think I have been quite fortunate, at least in the second half of my life, to have been able to find like-minded people pretty much everywhere I've lived. What seems to have varied is the extent to which people who think similarly to me represent the character of the general population of each place.

I make no secret of the fact that I am a libertarian socialist, an atheist and a hedonist, and that I vote Green. As such, I have to acknowledge that I feel more at home in Melbourne than anywhere else I've lived so far. Much as it's fair to say of those people who broadly agree with my views that presently they make up a minority of any given population - and they may always do so - it seems to be a much larger minority here than most other places.

Let's take Bathurst, for example, where I was born and grew up and spent most of the first half of my life. For much of that time, I felt pretty much like a minority of one. That was, however, more a case of feeling like a social fringe-dweller than from any sense of having a well-formed worldview that didn't match with that of anyone else. My opinions then were far more conservative in many ways than they are now - a definite product of my fairly strict Catholic upbringing, rather than anything to which I'd given serious thought in my own right. I have observed in the past that as a place to grow up, Bathurst kind of offered the worst of both worlds - none of the intimacy of a truly small town but none of the excitement of a big city either. When I visit these days I am not overly conscious of not fitting in, but I feel no real need to interact with anyone other than my parents. Most of my school acquaintance no longer live there - Bathurst is the kind of place from which young people tend to move away if they want to expand their horizons.

Canberra was the next place I lived and where I first began to realise that I was not quite so much of a misfit as I had previously felt. The first half of my time there was spent in the melting-pot of campus life and as such, not entirely reflective of the attitudes of the 'native' population of Canberra. Over the years, though, I gradually began to meet more people who actually called Canberra home - indeed, became one of those people myself. It was there also that I first found myself amongst medieval recreationists - again a small subset of any population, with even smaller subsets within it - of which more later. I have observed that although its population is not uniformly thus of course, Canberra does tend to produce a particular sort of person who is a delightful - to me, at least - blend of rustic and sophisticate; quite appropriate, I suppose, for the Bush Capital.

Then there was Perth. What can I say of Perth, with its curious cultural mix of laid-back, sun-loving conviviality and slightly uptight parochialism? For one thing, I have seldom been as readily welcomed as I was when I first moved there; I suspect that was in large part because I had a ready-made circle of acquaintance through japester but having said that, I felt they were genuinely accepting of me in my own right as well. In keeping with my previous experience, the people with whom I spent time were largely of the subcultural persuasion - not just medieval recreationists this time but fans.

Fandom as such was a new concept for me. Of course I understood generally that one could be a fan of some particular form of creative expression - a type of music, a series of novels, a movie franchise or television series for example - and of the creators themselves; but I had not yet come across people who fully immersed themselves in fandom, engaging not just aesthetically with creative works and those who produce them, but also intellectually, emotionally and even socio-politically. Although Canberra and Melbourne and just about any Western city one can name have their own fan communities, the only one with which I have really associated is that of Perth; and that, I suspect, is how it will stay.

Much as I was embraced with open arms by the medieval recreationists in Perth, there were approaches to the game here that never sat well with me. In one sense, I think this is for similar reasons to those that prevented me from fully engaging with fandom - in each subcultural group, there are those for whom it isn't just part of their lifestyle; it is their life. Perhaps I hadn't been paying enough attention before but it seemed to me that I encountered more of the latter amongst medieval recreationists in Perth than I had anywhere else. Or perhaps it was simply that the particular culture of Perth's recreationist groups was not one that readily absorbed a darker and more subversive interpretation of medieval life - which can be fun to explore if you don't take the game too seriously.

So much for my experiences. It scarcely needs repeating that they have not exactly been of mainstream life in any of the places in which I have lived, with the exception of my childhood and adolescence - so it doesn't surprise me that this was the period of my life during which I felt most out of place. I don't know that I can say I've noticed great differences in the overall character of the people anywhere I've been in Australia; but it's likely this is just a reflection of the fact that I tend to gravitate towards similar kinds of people wherever I happen to be. Of course Melbourne, like anywhere else in the country, has its share of religious fanatics, social conservatives and Liberal voters; but their voices somehow seem more muted here and that suits me very well indeed.

I really should know better than to read anything written by Andrew Bolt. It's certain to be coming from a position of conservative, white-male-privileged ignorance; I learn nothing and only come away angry. This morning, however, I forgot myself sufficiently to deviate from my usual course; or maybe I just wanted an excuse for an almighty rant.

In yesterday's Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun, the darling fascist bully-boy (gosh, I loved The Young Ones, didn't you?) came out swinging over Kevin Rudd's appearance on Q&A, in particular his "abuse" of the Christian pastor over his views on marriage.

After trashing the Prime Minister as "cynical and unprincipled" - apparently just because he changed his mind about marriage equality - Bolt rips into him for supposedly trying to make the pastor seem like a "gay-hating bigot." First of all, I doubt very much that it's possible to survive in politics without being cynical and unprincipled; if Bolt's hero Tony Abbott isn't prepared to backflip on policy and lie through his teeth as the need arises, he's in the wrong game. Secondly, if you think, for example, that LGBT people are "allowed" to have their sexual proclivities but not act on them - this is the standard conservative Christian take on homosexuality - then you are a gay-hating bigot. You may not realise it but let's not mince words over the issue here - if I were to make a comment like, "Oh, it's fine if you believe in Jesus and all that, but going to church is just disgusting," I would be slammed for being a Christian-hater quicker than I could blink.

Bolt then attempts to accuse Rudd of Biblical ignorance, observing that it was actually Aristotle, not Jesus or Moses or any other character from Judeo-Christian scripture, who declared slavery to be a natural condition. Bolt even quotes a senior Anglican minister just to emphasise how "profoundly wrong" Rudd's comment was. In doing so, he spectacularly misses the point the Prime Minister was making, one obvious to anybody who's actually thought about the arguments for marriage equality or against religious moralising. The fact is that in modern society, we simply don't get our ethics from the Bible anymore. How could we? It is inconsistent in its strictures and often downright horrifying - despite the mental and verbal gymnastics executed by religious apologists in their attempts to claim otherwise. Of course people have to be selective. Rudd is getting pilloried here for nothing more than rethinking his selections. Oh, and for the record - the early Catholic church was quite happy to appropriate Aristotle's metaphysics; and the apostle Paul is well known to have written that slaves should "obey your masters" (though to be fair, he also apparently thought the apocalypse was just around the corner).

Finally, to drive home the point that Labor, as led by Kevin Rudd, is a bad choice because changing your mind is bad, mmmkay, Bolt makes a little list - three points on which Labor changed its policy: border protection and refugees; Julia Gillard's leadership; and climate change and the carbon tax. Through it all, Bolt was right there, "warning" that Labor was getting it wrong but getting no acknowledgement, poor diddums, even when his opinion was supposedly vindicated by a policy shift. "Remember how we were abused, but never answered?" he rages, comma and all - little realising that for the most part, on all these points, his position was - to use the phrase attributed to theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli - not even wrong. Like all good little neo-cons, Bolt presents himself as xenophobic, clueless about the plight of refugees, openly and ignorantly sexist and a climate-change denier. How is an intelligent and rational person - like the Prime Minister, for example - to engage with such robustly backward thinking? Some ideas just deserve to be abused.

I've been thinking a bit about words today.

Don't worry, though - this isn't going to be a post about blogging. As I found out today whilst doing a spot of research, blogs about blogging are actually not very interesting to read. As anyone who knows me is aware, though, words are very important to me and from time to time, I like to engage in what I suppose, if it has its own word, might be called metawriting - producing words about words.

What got me thinking were some comments made by "hard-hitting journalist" (read conservative mouthpiece) Miranda Devine in the paper copy of today's Telegraph and read aloud to us by Dad, as he tends to do when he approves of someone's description of a politician. In this particular case, I was forced to disagree. According to Devine, Tony Abbott's "baddies versus baddies" description of the situation in Syria amounted to "a fair summation of a complex situation" and Abbott's "clear language" was a sign of "clear thinking." By contrast, Kevin Rudd's "verbosity" has journalists "tearing their hair out."

Um, what?

First of all, coming from a journalist, the notion of journalists getting frustrated about words strikes me as a sadly and ironically accurate reflection of the state of contemporary journalism. Certainly it's getting harder to find news publications that look like they've been subjected to the glance of an editorial eye. Worse than that, though, anyone who thinks that Abbott's comments are indicative of "clear thinking" is obviously unaware of the important difference between simple and simplistic. As I wrote in this blog recently, I'm a big fan of plain speaking, openness and honesty; but I am adamantly not a fan of the practice of "dumbing down" information - it means the speaker either thinks his audience won't understand the situation or - worse in a potential national leader - doesn't really understand it himself.

It seems that in the opinion of the unabashedly right-wing media commentators, in order to be counted amongst the "ordinary Australians" to whom Abbott supposedly appeals, one must demonstrate an inability to cope with sophisticated language. Well, by those lights, I am happy to say, I am very much not an "ordinary Australian" and nor are most of my friends and acquaintance - curiously enough, they won't be voting Liberal either, come election day.

Some days, finding words to write is like trying to get blood out of a stone.

Like today, for example. The sum total of my activity thus far has been to haul myself out of bed, make breakfast (though admittedly, that was fairly exciting), shower, dress, check my email, hover around Facebook, watch TV and go for a walk around the local area. So I really haven't generated much to write about - certainly nothing that would allow me to create a thematically unified post.

Nor am I feeling sufficiently philosophical to simply pick up an idea and run with it. I tried - I've been reading Sam Harris's website, specifically his refutation of negative reviews of his book The Moral Landscape. I really like the idea that morality can be subject to scientific investigation - I always suspected that the naturalistic fallacy was bullshit; in what way can you derive an 'ought' except from an 'is'? - but I don't at present have enough to say about it to fuel an entire post. Watch this space, though, for when I finally get around to reading and reviewing Harris's book - which I will, just not today.

In a way, my life kind of feels like it's on hold right now. Previously, the time I spent visiting my parents provided me with some much-needed downtime from work and my usual routine. Now, though, I really am taking time out from all the things I could be doing at home, from taking my life in the direction I want it to be going. So I'm trying to stay at least partially connected to the things I want to be doing, like writing - otherwise I really wouldn't have bothered churning out this post today, I suspect.

I've just finished reading this article, which is critical of Richard Dawkins and his use of Twitter to express what can certainly be taken as bigoted and racist comments. The contention of the article is that Dawkins is well on his way to becoming irrelevant to the 'maturing' atheist movement and is petulantly trying to attract attention, negative though it might be, while he still can (he's into his 70s, after all).

Well, for one thing, I have seen more than enough evidence in online fora to feel quite dubious of the claim that atheism, as a whole movement, is actually growing in maturity, as such. There will always be adherents to any philosophical position who attempt only a superficial engagement with it, who like to use it as a club to beat their opponents, whose allegiance does the community no favours; and they will always be balanced, ultimately, by those who take a more thoughtful, nuanced approach. This is true of every intellectual and cultural movement in human history.

What might be happening as atheism gains more ground in the war of ideas and more prominence in the public sphere is that the need to go on the offensive is far less pressing now than the need to consolidate the territory that has been claimed. This means the focus has shifted from making a lot of loud, righteously angry noise - something at which the likes of Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens excelled - to mounting a more balanced and considered discussion of what the philosophical position of atheism entails. Okay, so you don't believe in gods or other supernatural entities - what does that mean in terms of how you live your life?

One of the criticisms often leveled at Dawkins, even before he began blotting his copybook with sexist, racist and other blatantly privileged remarks, was that his approach to atheism is philosophically shallow. The accusation that he failed to acknowledge the depth and subtlety of religious arguments is easily dismissed; Dawkins himself does so in the preface to the second edition of The God Delusion - why engage deeply with a position based on such a nebulous foundation as the claim that a being such as the God of Classical Theism exists? There's no need to undermine a palace built on shifting sand.

But the accusation of shallowness comes from the other side of the faith divide too and really, it's a pretty fair call. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist first, not a trained philosopher. If you want depth from him, read his works on evolutionary theory, not his attacks on religion. Having said that, even the latter, I was somewhat surprised to discover, are not all bluster and aggression; The God Delusion is actually a relatively gentle and humorous read, certainly when compared to, say, Christopher Hitchens' flights of bullshit-busting bombast in God is Not Great. There is, after all, something to be said for meeting obfuscation head-on with plain-speaking, straightforward arguments - and no-one can deny the elegance of Dawkins' writing.

None of this, of course, is an attempt to defend his abuse of privilege with his ill-considered tweets. And perhaps he really is becoming irrelevant to the long-term project of advancing atheism. Maybe every public intellectual has a best-before date.

But one thing that struck me forcibly as I read the article was just how eager we humans seem to be to find cracks in the armour of others and use them as an excuse to denigrate the whole person, to dismiss all their works and opinions as tainted because somewhere along the line, they've fucked up. I believe it was at least in part this tendency that allowed the Australian media to conspicuously fail to recognise the brilliance of Julia Gillard's speech condemning sexism (even though the rest of the world seemed to have no trouble giving credit where it was due). We judge people harshly for getting it wrong and find it very easy then to forget the times they got it right. And for some of us, the greatest victim of this imbalance is ourselves when we turn our overly critical eye inwards.

I decided recently that I'm not going to be that person who takes the measure of others - or of myself - by their failures. I can acknowledge those times when I make mistakes and get it wrong, without using that to invalidate my successes. And I find, increasingly, that I can accept that the people I admire are not perfect, nor should I expect them to be. But the reasons for which I admire them don't disappear in a puff of inappropriate behaviour. So no, I am not going to be shamefacedly hiding my signed copy of The God Delusion at the back of a bookshelf - it is and will remain a valued possession I am proud to own.

One of the great things about having abundant time on my hands at present is that I get to revel in domesticity. It's not that I actually love doing things like laundry and dishes and mowing the grass, but there is something inherently satisfying in the sense of setting one's home to rights.

And there's more to it than simply cleaning and tidying and maintaining - although that certainly has made up the bulk of today's efforts. This afternoon even found me in the front yard tackling our overgrown lawn before the pernickety nature-hating neighbours complain about it again. I was going great guns until the whipper snipper said no and refused to start, or to keep running once it did start. I don't know why. The Powertool Whisperer, I am not.

Be that as it may, my plans for our place extend beyond keeping things tidy and in check. One thing I've been intending to do since we moved in is replace the half-finished mural on the wall of the spa room (which, it has to be said, looks a bit rubbish) with one of my own design. Another, more recently conceived, plan is to make loose covers for the couches in something like burgundy brocade. Then I could line the walls with my paintings, add some luscious draperies, maybe some mood lighting, replace the curtains with something a little less sedate than the rose-print ones that look like they belong in a country tearoom...in short, to make the house just a bit more bohemian, somewhere more suited to an artist-in-residence - i.e., me.

But there is one more thing our place needs - that I need, particularly - and that probably won't be as easy to come by as all the small improvements I'm intending over the coming months. Today I received a call from the Victorian Dog Rescue and Resource Group in response to my application to adopt a dog. Having been badly burnt by our previous experience of adopting a rescue dog, we are taking great care to make sure that the next time goes well and that we find the right dog. The great thing about VicDRG is that they are equally careful to ensure that they match dogs with households, and they were honest enough to say it may well be that they don't have the right dog for us, at least at present. It's likely that we'll end up fostering a dog first, and perhaps a number of dogs before we ultimately find one that will really suit our family. But I really want to persevere in the quest.

Because for me, no matter how firmly I put my stamp on the house and garden, no matter how deeply I settle into the life of writer/artist/domestic goddess, home just won't quite feel complete without canine companionship.

Sometimes you have to go away for a while to recognise those home truths that have been so much a part of the everyday that you've stopped seeing them.

It took a two-week break catching up with friends and family for me to realise that I really had become completely disenchanted with my job. The result was, of course, that I walked away from it to pursue my long-held desire to make my living with my own words (rather than someone else's).

I've now come back from two-and-a-half weeks in Perth, again catching up with friends and family, and what I have realised more than ever is that it's good to be home.

In the past, I always used to feel slightly dejected at the end of a break or a holiday, because it was quite a dull prospect to have to go back to the familiar territory of home. So it was with a certain amount of surprise that I realised on Saturday night when my plane landed at Tullamarine that I was happy and looking forward to getting on with my life back home.

There's more than one reason for me to be surprised at this response. I feel as if I've been quite disengaged from my life for most of the past couple of years, really since losing Bossie. The combination of grief, depression and self-medication is a great way to lose your motivation and just find yourself going through the motions, maintaining a shell of an existence with no real substance. It's not that long since I've begun to claw my way back out of the fog and try to start living again.

So actually feeling happy to be home is a great sign that I'm beginning to find my feet with what feels like a whole new start. It's early days, of course, but I now know that I'm where I want to be, where I belong.

Jealousy is an odd sort of emotion. I think this might be because it's just so useless, especially when compared to other emotions like fear, love, anger, joy and so on. The utility of these more primal feelings is readily apparent, not merely in that they motivate action, but that the actions they inspire can have beneficial effects upon our lives.

It's less clear that jealousy can have any positive utility. It's not simply that it's really more of a meta-emotion with its roots in fear. It's a cunning little bastard as well - it has a most unfortunate tendency to make people act against their best interests, especially when it comes to relationships. If you cling too hard to a partner for fear of losing them, that's often a great way to drive them from you. Possessiveness is not an attractive quality.

My own experiences with jealousy have been somewhat ambivalent. Certainly I have felt it, but I never felt good about feeling it - I always saw it as a flaw, as betraying a lack of confidence, as something I wasn't really entitled to feel, if one can be said to be entitled or not entitled to feel anything. And I was very aware of its unattractive manifestation. As such, I tended to suppress it.

These days I very seldom experience jealousy and on the rare occasions I do, I don't need to suppress it because I can talk myself out of it altogether in very short order. Even before I was able to do this, jealousy had faded into the background for the most part; what I tended to feel instead, in situations that might previously have provoked jealousy (such as a partner flirting with others), was a consciousness that I ought to feel it, or that others might expect me to feel it, rather than any real experience of jealousy itself.

There's been plenty written on the subject of managing jealousy in polyamorous relationships, and it's interesting to me that one of the reactions people often have to the idea of polyamory is that they couldn't do it because they get jealous (to be fair, I used to think I couldn't be polyamorous either, but that had nothing to do with jealousy - I was simply too focused on my one partner at the time to really be interested in anyone else). In stark contrast to my own attitudes, some people seem almost to embrace jealousy, as though you don't love someone enough unless the thought of them with anyone but you is enough to send you into a fit of rage. The culture of monogamy has normalised jealousy, even though it is at best pointless and at worst, terribly destructive.

The real problem with jealousy - and ironically, the key to overcoming it - is that it turns everything it touches into a zero-sum game. One person's gain has to mean loss to another, so if someone else has something, you have to miss out. Enter, jealousy. But in my experience, life doesn't work quite like that. Yes, everything is a trade-off, but it's not so black-and-white that there's no room for grey. For the most part, it's simply not the case that one person's gain is another's loss and that's that. Sharing and co-operation might cost me an effort of will (especially if I have to do these things with people I don't like much) but the benefits, if I stay the course, are generally worth it, and much better than I'd get if I jealously tried to hold on to everything for myself.

Yesterday I updated my Facebook status with the declaration that I had done everything I had intended to do during the day. Once the update was posted and when I lacked the energy to do anything about it, I realised I had missed one thing - posting a blog entry. So this is my second one for today, just so I can retain my intended average of at least one post per day.

So what else had I intended to do yesterday?

The one real essential on the list was packing for my trip to Perth. That was in fact the last item to be ticked off the list, after I'd done the other things, and of all the intentions, this one required the least expenditure of energy - all the requisite laundry had been done the night before.

The two most time-consuming and energy-intensive activities were cooking a couple of stews to stock the freezer with homemade ready meals; and a couple of gardening tasks to further my progress towards turning the ornamental garden bed in our backyard into a functioning vegie patch.

So after a less-than-promising start to the day - the waking-up-at-appropriately-early-hour didn't go so well - I duly dropped JP off at work and headed to the markets for provisions. That done, I picked up a pruning saw and a bottle of vodka (that's honestly not as weird as it sounds...) on my way home and then finally had breakfast, at about 11:30.

Then it was out into the garden to attack the thorny tree that was leaning at a somewhat alarming angle and generally getting in the way of clearing the garden bed. I won't say the pruning saw made short work of it, exactly, but the end result was that most of the tree is now in pieces in the green waste bin, along with the satisfying amount of vegetation I pulled up. The stump will be a larger task than I had the tools for yesterday, but I did at least create enough space to plant out one of my potted tomatoes that had been happily outgrowing their pots in the spa room. The other two were relegated to the two large pots by the back porch that had previously been home to some French breakfast radishes.

It was then time to get on with the stews - one with beef and beetroot, the other chicken and green veg. They were both simmered at low heat, one in the oven, one on the stovetop, for a few hours, then seasoned, tasted to ensure an appropriate level of deliciousness, then decanted into containers, cooled and safely stowed in the fridge (to be transferred to the freezer first thing this morning).

Then I packed. Earlier in the day, I'd remembered that on my last trip to Canberra, I'd left my toiletries bag behind, so that led to a quick trip out to resupply. Somewhere in amongst the big activities I also managed to make some experimental herbal tinctures and also phone my parents and contact a few Perth friends.

So all in all, despite my failure to blog, it was still a satisfying day. And I slept better last night than I had in over a week.

This morning I stood at my front door and debated with Jehovah's Witnesses.

I know this is an ultimately pointless exercise, of course, because nothing I can say is going to convince two middle-aged men who are heavily invested in their religion that they might have less cause for certainty than they think. But it was satisfying and there are reasons for this that run deeper than the superficial joy of having at least shunted the JWs out of their script.

A few weeks ago, I was walking along the foreshore in front of Southgate and there was a man waving pamphlets and mumbling something about "If you want to be saved"...blah, blah, blah. Part of me really wanted to walk up and ask him what he really thought he was talking about - who, what and where was this god he was peddling? Of course I didn't do that. I was not that person, not that day.

Today I became that person.

So why is this a good thing? 

I have spent a lot of time over the past several years contemplating life's manifold absurdities and wondering how, as conscious beings, we humans might approach them; I've been questioning my beliefs, discarding ones I found lacking and building new ones, hopefully on the basis of at least some substantial evidence; and learning how to defend them.

The thing is, it's easy to think of an argument against theistic belief (or anything you happen to be arguing against) when you're on the other end of an internet link. It's easy to trot out the same old rejoinders that have been typed and typed again in countless online fora. It's not so easy to martial one's thoughts when put on the spot in the face of a committed opponent.

Now, the two JWs I encountered this morning were not exactly incandescent with evangelic zeal - I was hardly batting in the big leagues. But the me that obtained only a few weeks ago would have politely told them I wasn't interested and sent them on their way, rather than engage them in discussion. That difference is important to me, not just  because I now don't have to spend the rest of the day regretting a missed opportunity.

You see, there comes a point at which one's beliefs really can't be taken seriously unless they manifest themselves in behaviour. Today I stood up for what I believe. In a small way, to be sure, but it was real. I know. I was there.