The Crommunist Manifesto

5 “Doctor Laura” at the Michael Richards/Mel Gibson school of etiquette

August 26, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · crapitalism · forces of stupid · free speech · racism

The really frustrating thing about blogging is that sometimes a week will go by where a million bloggable things happen, and I’m left with the choice of either commenting on them 2 weeks late, or flooding you with Facebook/Twitter updates every 5 minutes. As a result, I am writing about this story right after it happens, but you’re not going to read this until today:

Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the talk show host who recently apologized for saying the N-word 11 times to a caller on the air, said Tuesday she plans to give up her radio show when her contract is up the end of this year.

For those of you who don’t follow talk radio (and Science bless you for that), Laura Schlessinger is a PhD in physiology who hosts a radio show in which she verbally abuses people who call in for help. Why anyone would care what a physiologist has to say about religion (she is, big surprise, a fundamentalist Christian) or relationships, or anything besides physiology, is beyond my understanding. But they do, for whatever reason, and she hands out bad advice.

On the show in question, a woman called in to ask Dr. Laura what she should do about her husband’s friends. It seems that the husband and his friends think that they have license, by virtue of the woman’s race, to make racist comments. It’s the whole “I married a black woman, and therefore I am not racist, and therefore I can say racist things and you’re not allowed to be offended” argument. The caller was looking for the proper way to broach the subject with her spouse.

In a fit of… I really don’t know what, Dr. Laura decided instead to accuse the woman of being “too sensitive”.

“Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO and listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger. I don’t get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it’s a horrible thing. But when black people say it, it’s affectionate. It’s very confusing.”

I’d laugh, but I’ve heard this same stupid argument from my own friends. It’s either that, or saying that it’s okay to say it because it’s in a song lyric, or that somehow “nigg-a” is different from “nigg-er“. These are all profoundly stupid arguments, and all I hear when someone says them is “I want the license to say things that I know to be racist and hurtful, and it’s your fault if you’re offended.” Congratulations, you are making the same argument as those brave freedom-fighters from Courtenay, and also rapists.

I’ve talked about the meaning and history of this word before. In essence, the word has no proper context that makes it not unbelievably offensive. It is rooted in the idea that Africans are not human, and that the sub-human treatment they received at the hands of their slave owners was justifiable. In my opinion, nobody should get to say it outside a discussion of its historical and/or sociological significance. Dr. Laura pretends as though there’s never been a good reason offered for why it’s ‘okay’ for black people to use the word, and that it’s a mystery why white people (and especially white people) aren’t allowed to say it.

I read a bunch of coverage about this issue, which I’m not going to link to because they mostly said the same thing. There was one commentary that I thought was interesting and worth sharing. A blogger mentioned the similarity between black people and the dynamic of a family. I have issues with my family, as we all do, particularly with my father. Because I was raised in a single-parent household, my dad and I frequently quarreled over pretty much everything. This, I gather, is normal parent/child stuff (incidentally, for those curious, things between my father and I are now better than they’ve been since I was a small child – growing up will do that). I used to fantasize about telling him off in front of a large crowd of his friends, perhaps at his funeral. Let’s stop this here, and simply conclude that I am not a daddy’s boy. That being said, I will not tolerate anyone speaking ill of him, even my other family members.

There are things we can say to and about our family members that sound (and may be) incredibly hurtful. But let someone from outside the family come in and try saying the same things, and sparks fly. Someone who is not in full possession of all of the facts, and who is not part of the dynamic, has no license to say things they may have heard just because someone else says them. In the same way, it’s highly inappropriate for any non-black person to use the word nigger, even if many black people think it’s appropriate to use with each other. Those who pretend that they don’t understand why this is so, and belligerently go out of their way to say it anyway, have suspect motives for doing so.

So am I saying Dr. Laura is racist? Let me answer that in this way…

DR. LAURA SCHLESSINGER IS A RACIST HARPY BITCH, AND THE WORLD WOULD BE A MEASURABLY BETTER PLACE IF SHE HAD DIED AT BIRTH.

I hope that clears up any ambiguity you may have at what I think of Dr. Laura.

Interestingly, she stumbled into another wheelhouse of mine when she said that she was quitting to restore her First Amendment rights:

“I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart, and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry — some special interest group deciding this is a time to silence a voice of dissent, and attack affiliates and sponsors,” she said.

Here’s the text of the First Amendent:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Also, you can spread racist speech, and private citizens are not allowed to be upset, or protest against your stupidity in legal ways.”

Can you figure out what part I added?

0 Is there a worse name than ‘honour killings’?

August 26, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · cultural tolerance · gender · law · news · religion · secularism

When you think of the word ‘honour’, it conjures an image of someone who is honest, plain-dealing, and trustworthy. What it doesn’t invoke is the image of a man who murders his children for wearing revealing clothing or dating outside his/her nationality, or for refusing an arranged marriage.

There’s no honour in murder. It is the weak-willed act of a coward who lacks any human decency. One might be able to persuade me that there is honour in the suicide tradition of Bushido, in which failure to act honourably moves the samurai to take his/her own life. I’m generally against the idea of suicide, but a person’s life is their own to do with what they want. What he is not entitled to do, however, is murder someone else to restore his own sense of ‘honour’. Any society in which one person’s mental state or social status trumps another’s right to the security of their person cannot stand.

India seems to be realizing this:

India’s home minister proposed Thursday a bill to provide specific, severe penalties to curb honour killings, saying they brought “dishonour” to India as a secular, modern democracy. “We are living in the 21st century and there is a need to amend the current law and the law must reflect what the 21st century requires,” he said. “We have to look ahead and build a society that is based on secular values and enlightened views.”

I’ve talked previously about the social climate changing for women in India. The linked article mentions that there has been an upswing of violence against women in India, and that it is necessary to make changes in the status quo if India wishes to achieve its goal of being seen as a major world power. Let it never be said that international peer pressure and secularism can’t make the world a better place to live. There are around 500 million women in India who would likely agree.

The problem with passing these kinds of laws, however, is that murder is a crime. I am still uneasy about punishing people extra for the reasons behind why they commit crimes. Punishing specific groups of people for committing certain types of crimes against other specific groups is ethically dicey ground. Is it still an ‘honour killing’ if a non-religious man kills his son for being gay, or his daughter for dating a black man? Maybe it is, and if there’s a way to state that unambiguously, I’ll be interested to hear it.

Canada seems to be realizing this:

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson says prosecuting honour crimes is a priority for the government but that there isn’t any real need to change the Criminal Code.

Murder is wrong, and that must always be the focus. If passing specific statutes against honour killing will make it happen less, then that’s a discussion we can have. I doubt very much, however, that adding on a few extra years to a life sentence is going to meaningfully demotivate a person who is willing to murder his/her children from committing the act. The way to approach these things is that we have to model and encourage secular values of respect for the integrity of a human’s autonomy and security of person, and discourage the equation of “faithfulness” with righteousness.

Every time I hear of an honour killing, there is an almost-overwhelming temptation to immediately blame religion. The stories that get the most press are those in which the murderers are Muslim or immigrants from Muslim countries. I’m skeptical of this explanation for being overly simplistic, not to mention the fact that this type of killing is not founded in Qu’ranic verse. It’s sort of like when an abortion doctor is murdered by a Christian fundamentalist – it’s a flawed interpretation of scripture (which is, in itself, flawed, but we won’t go into that here) and isn’t an accurate reflection of doctrine. The problem is the belief that underlies both Christianity and Islam (and all religions) – that there exists an unobservable external standard which is accountable only to itself, but to which all of humanity is subject; and further, that this standard is not based on something reasonable like observable consequences to humankind, but based only on how fervently you believe in it. Sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and the like existed in the societies that spawned these religions, and they persist today. Blaming a book for a human failing neglects the larger and more accurate story that’s going on.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

0 Sakinah confesses! I guess I was wrong…

August 25, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · politics · religion

You’ll remember the news about Sakineh Ashtiani, the Iranian woman accused of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. You may also remember that after a world-wide rally was held on her behalf, her lawyer disappeared, and subsequently resurfaced in Turkey. Around that same time, new allegations surfaced that Ms. Ashtiani has conspired to murder her husband, which was the real reason she was being sentenced. Of course those charges were never proven, and she denied them repeatedly.

Looks like we were all hoodwinked!

Iranian state TV has aired what it says is a confession by a woman under threat of being stoned to death for adultery. In the interview shown on Wednesday, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani purportedly admits conspiring to murder her husband in 2005 and denounces her lawyer.

Of course… her face was blurred out, and her voice was dubbed over, and she was wearing a black niqab so it was impossible to identify her… but she said it was her. And so what if she all of a sudden is completely retracting her position for the past 5 years… she said it was her!

The airing of the TV confession is a sign that she could soon be executed, probably by hanging, our correspondent says. It seems the Iranian officials are sending a tough message to Western media and human rights groups that if they interfere in Iranian affairs and cause embarrassment, it will be counter-productive, he adds.

I don’t know if I can believe that second part. I’ll certainly buy that the government seems hell-bent on murdering this woman, regardless of either legality or reality or the outcry from the rest of the world. If the Iranian government thinks that anyone will be swayed by such a flimsy and obviously-fabricated ‘confession’, they’re severely overestimating the level of trust that the rest of the world has in the state of Iran. I’d be unlikely to believe this from my own government, let alone that of an evidently psychotic theocratic bully state with a history of fraud and intimidation.

The scarier prospect is that they know their video is crap, but that they don’t care enough to make it believable – that it’s just a big ‘fuck you’ to the rest of the world. From what I’ve seen of the Iranian regime, that’s quite likely to be the case.

1 Because we all need a good laugh from time to time

August 25, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · funny · religion

A buddy referred me to this website:

From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 10 March 2010 7.12pm
To: Darryl Robinson
Subject: Permission Slip

Dear Darryl, I have received your permission slip featuring what I can only assume is a levitating rabbit about to drop an egg on Jesus.Thank you for pre-ticking the permission box as this has saved me not only from having to make a choice, but also from having to make my own forty five degree downward stroke followed by a twenty percent longer forty five degree upward stroke. Without your guidance, I may have drawn a picture of a cactus wearing a hat by mistake.As I trust my offspring’s ability to separate fact from fantasy, I am happy for him to participate in your indoctrination process on the proviso that all references to ‘Jesus’ are replaced with the term ‘Purportedly Magic Jew.’
Regards, David.

From: Darryl Robinson
Date: Thursday 11 March 2010 9.18am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Permission Slip

Hello David The tick in the box already was a mistake I noticed after printing them all. I’ve seen the play and it’s not indoctrinating anyone. It’s a fun play performed by a great bunch of kids. You do not have to be religious to enjoy it. You are welcome to attend if you have any concerns. Darryl Robinson, School Chaplain

From: David Thorne
Date: Thursday 11 March 2010 11.02am
To: Darryl Robinson
Subject: Re: Re: Permission Slip

Dear Darryl, Thank you for the kind offer, being unable to think of anything more exciting than attending your entertaining and fun filled afternoon, I tried harder and thought of about four hundred things. I was actually in a Bible based play once and played the role of ‘Annoyed about having to do this.’ My scene involved offering a potplant, as nobody knew what Myrrh was, to a plastic baby Jesus then standing between ‘I forgot my costume so am wearing the teachers poncho’ and ‘I don’t feel very well’. Highlights of the play included a nervous donkey with diarrhoea causing ‘I don’t feel very well’ to vomit onto the back of Mary’s head, and the lighting system, designed to provide a halo effect around the manger, overheating and setting it alight. The teacher, later criticised for dousing an electrical fire with a bucket of water and endangering the lives of children, left the building in tears and the audience in silence. We only saw her again briefly when she came to the school to collect her poncho.Also, your inference that I am without religion is incorrect and I am actually torn between two faiths; while your god’s promise of eternal life is very persuasive, the Papua New Guinean mud god, Pikkiwoki, is promising a pig and as many coconuts as you can carry. Regards, David.

It goes on… absolutely hysterical.

0 Malaysian courts reach the 1980s

August 25, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · gender · news · religion

To be fair, lagging only 30 years behind is a pretty immense feat for a theocracy, especially one as messed up as Malaysia…

There are two big news stories out of Malaysia that are making headlines:

1. Malaysia appoints first female Shariah court judges

Malaysia’s first women Islamic court judges are starting to hear cases this month after Shariah legal authorities gave them the same authority as their male colleagues, an official said Wednesday.

I can’t pretend to be thrilled that it’s a religious court that these women have been appointed to – the very idea of a religious court is a perversion of the concept of justice – but it is measurable progress insofar as it is an official recognition that women can wield equal legal authority to men. Consider that Canada appointed its first female Supreme Court justice in 1982 (for those of you who keep track of this sort of thing, that’s one year after Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to the US Supreme Court). My most optimistic scenario here is that the presence of female judges will shift the balance toward equality for women in the courts. My least optimistic is that these women are either anti-feminist or will be so cowed by the religious authority that they will make even more sexist rulings.

Again, lest we feel too smug and superior about the west, Venice just licensed its first-ever female gondolier. Way to go, Italy.

2. Malaysian men denied clemency for poorly-constructed religious excuse

Both Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens delight in pointing out that religious people have very little to fear from atheists. A common tactic is to talk about how churches will be torn down or burned by atheist activists in their zeal to punish thoughtcrime – Dawkins/Hitchens rebut that the religious do a far better job of desecrating each other’s holy sites than atheists ever will. This story out of Malaysia is no exception to that:

The attack on the Metro Tabernacle Church in Kuala Lumpur was the first of a series of attacks on houses of worship following the “Allah” row. Eleven churches, one Sikh temple, three mosques and two Muslim prayer rooms became targets of arson and other incidents.

Non-Muslim churches are using the word ‘Allah’ in Malay as a placeholder for God (much in the same way I use ‘YahwAlladdha’, although without the associated mockery). Some Malaysian Muslims are incensed by the violation of their trademark, saying that Christians are hatching a devious plot to make Christianity look more like Islam in order to gain converts. People of Malaysia: your religious leaders think that you are functionally retarded. Recently, a number of sites of worship were torched as reprisal for the semantic issue. Two men caught and charged with setting the fires tried to plead out by saying they burned themselves at a barbecue.

Luckily, the judiciary appears to be a bit more sane than either the accused or the religious leaders, and charged the morons appropriately. Of course there’s a whole host of other religious nonsense underlying the issue (there always is), but at least the judges made the right decision.

I might have to revise my opinion of Malaysia based on this new information. Of course, it still remains a crime to convert from Islam to another religion (or, I’d imagine, no religion at all), and they’re still wildly homophobic, but Rome wasn’t built (and then converted and sodomized) in a day.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

0 Google discusses net neutrality

August 24, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · free speech

Those of you who have been clamoring for more information about the current net neutrality fight (who am I kidding… a total of 4 people read that post :P) will be happy to know that I’m not the only one talking about it. Our old friends at Google, after discussing the issue with Verizon, have tabled a proposal for net neutrality rules:

The two companies on Monday announced seven principles for U.S. regulators to use when crafting so-called net neutrality rules. The suggestions include the prohibition of wired broadband providers from discriminating between different kinds of internet traffic, a rule that would also prevent charging content providers extra fees for prioritized traffic.

They propose fines (which are too small, in my opinion, but it’s the right direction) for anyone violating the rules, and guidelines for transparency rules.

Sounds good, what’s the catch?

The new rules would not initially apply to the wireless internet in order to preserve the incentives for service providers to continue investing in what is a relatively new technology, the companies said. The companies also suggested the rules should not apply to specialized services that use the internet but are not actually a part of it, such as a specific gaming channel or a more secure banking service.

Now maybe I’m missing some relevant information here, but that seems completely reasonable. Wireless infrastructure has not had as long as wired internet to turn a profit for the companies who invested the capital to develop it. Allowing them to monetize wireless services will provide incentive for them to develop and market newer types of services; penalizing them for innovating will do the opposite. These are corporations, not charities – they are in it to make money, and in a capitalist framework that’s a good thing.

And yet, the critics are losing their shit:

[The above] two suggestions in particular, however, drew heavy criticism from consumer groups, technology bloggers and other internet companies.

I can understand if there is a risk of a Trojan Horse ploy, by which consumer internet access is re-classified as “specialized services”, but that’s an issue that can readily be settled in the courts. What I can’t understand is why providing different levels of service to internet banking and gambling websites will in any way infringe upon the individual’s ability to speak freely.

You who who else doesn’t understand it? Google Vice-President and long term net neutrality advocate Vint Serf:

I viewed the discussions with Verizon as an experiment or an exploration of how two rather polarized views of net neutrality could ultimately end up reaching some sort of compromise that both parties would be equally unhappy with. In some ways this represents not a stake in the ground, but rather the exploration of common ground and what that common ground might look like. I see it as a kind of homework assignment that Verizon and Google have attempted to complete just to show what happens when you try to come to some kind of common perspective.”

I hope that I have established my credibility as someone who cares passionately about free speech. Net neutrality is vital to the grassroots development of ideas and entrepreneurial innovation – look how the internet has changed the way we look at the world and conduct our daily lives since it became widely available in the 1990s. Imagine what will happen in the next 20 years.

That being said, I don’t see these rules as being unreasonable. As Serf points out, there needs to be a compromise between doing the ideal thing and what is practical in business terms. Verizon (and Google) exist to make money. They do so by providing us with the means to access the internet. In order for this dynamic to be able to continue, we have to embrace the reality that everything changes. We must be willing to adapt to the political and business realities. Standing resolute on the spot and objecting over issues that harm nobody and are completely reasonable compromises doesn’t do anything to protect the consumers that these critics claim to represent.

Disagree? I want to hear why.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

0 Exciting new blog developments

August 24, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · Uncategorized

Hello to all of my faithful readers, and also to those who just use me for a moment’s distraction and don’t call the next day. There are a couple of new things that have happened recently that I want to share with you.

First, I am thrilled to inform you that last week, this blog hit the 25,000 views milestone. Considering that this site is only 6 months old, and that I haven’t really done any significant or targeted marketing, this is well beyond my wildest expectations.

The site averages 133 hits a day (with a mode value of between 50-75 hits on a usual day)
The 5 highest-trafficked posts represent nearly 70% of total traffic
June 8th was the busiest day, with 4,672 hits
A total of 153 posts have gone up, with 387 comments between them

Obviously, this wouldn’t have been possible without you. I started writing without a clear plan, or an idea of the impact I might have. I still get a little weirded out when someone tells me they read my stuff. So I want to thank you for sticking around, reading, commenting, and telling your friends about the site.

Second, I am honored to accept an invitation from the national blog Canadian Atheist. This is a site with multiple commentary from a variety of authors across Canada. I will be sharing some of my thoughts on religion, civil and human rights on a regular basis on this site. My longer think-pieces, as well as my discussion of race and racial issues, will remain here at the Manifesto. There are a lot of great writers at Canadian Atheist, and I don’t think there’s a single one there with whose views I actually agree, so it’s a great chance for me to join a discussion. It’ll be a good chance for those of you interested in religious and secular issues to check out a variety of views, and see where your own feelings lie.

Finally (this one is the most exciting), my very first blog has been resurrected. Yes, friends, Porocrom’s Crappaper is once again disgracing the face of the intarwebz. This was a sort of catch-all site with movie and music reviews, commentary on pop culture, and lampooning interpersonal relationships. Poromenos and I plan on generating new content for the site soon, so feel free to poke around our archived posts for now. For fun, try to guess who wrote which item.

Anyway, that’s what’s new around here. Lots of stuff coming your way at this site over the next two weeks, including a post that I’ve been waiting to write for about 4 months (that’s coming on Monday). Enjoy!

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

4 Oh good, Canada still uses slave labour

August 24, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · crommunism · race

I don’t even know what to say about this one:

The B.C. government has terminated a contract with a Surrey forestry company after 25 workers – many of them immigrants from the Congo – were found living in substandard conditions near Golden in late July.

That’s not even the bad part; this is:

Most of the 25 workers had travelled from eastern Canada for jobs clearing brush near Golden. They were living in a bush camp and complained of a lack of food and inadequate facilities, a church worker in Golden told The Vancouver Sun. And the workers told government officials they were not fully paid and on the job seven days a week.

Slavery makes good economic sense. It’s even practicable – get people who have few options, take them away from any resource they’d have to achieve alternate employment, then bully and threaten them into accepting low wages (or no wages). When they have no other options, they’ll take whatever they can get. It’s the ultimate victory of free-market capitalism: get as much as you can for as little expenditure as possible.

But then of course, there’s the whole thing about being evil. Inconvenient, eh?

I try to make these posts have a bit more relevance than simply linking you to news items I find in the paper. There’s an underlying theme here that I think is interesting, but most of you probably won’t like. There’s a hip-hop artist called Ras Kass who released an amazing album back in 1996 featuring a song entitled The Nature of the Threat.

Warning: language and content advisory

Nature of the Threat is an interpretation of history whose thesis is essentially that white people are inherently evil – highlighting the atrocities perpetrated by whites throughout history. It’s quite a task to separate the fact from the fiction in the song, but there are a number of points that deserve exploration and discussion (Euro-centric teaching of history, the legacy of systemic racial discrimination at the hands of Europeans). I like the song, even though I disagree with many of the components, and doubt the validity of the thesis. The above story makes me think that slavery has nothing to do with the colour of people’s skin, merely a desire for power and the opportunity to exploit others. It is an unfortunate coincidence that many of the workers are black Africans, but the business owners are not white:

Khaira owner Khalid Bajwa said he has been treated unfairly by the ministry, who didn’t give him an opportunity to correct any camp deficiencies. “I don’t know why they are complaining. We never had problem with our camps. It is a bush camp. It is not a tourist camp,” he said. “We were setting up the camp. We had just moved there.”

Of course Mr. Bajwa’s story paints only part of the picture:

Quesnel native Christine Barker, 24, had worked in the woods for other companies for five years without incident. The single mother said Tuesday she has never dealt with abuse like what she experienced at Khaira…

“When we started the work refusal, that’s when the camp conditions got even worse – showers were denied. … We were refused food because we weren’t working for him at that time.” She said she witnessed a supervisor threaten to kill one of her Congolese co-workers and throw a knife at him.

Sounds like slavery to me.

The point is that while we can blame white Europeans for a lot of the problems in the world, we can’t do so based on the colour of their skin. There’s nothing genetically cruel or inhumane about white people, just as there is nothing genetically lazy or stupid about Africans. People are people, and given the right set of circumstances and motivations, they will commit the same atrocities, or acts of kindness, or feats of inspired genius. The situation we have now is merely a product of how things shook out in the world. We cannot rely on the inherent goodness or evilness of people, we must realize that the situation determines out behaviour better than we suspect, ensure that all people have equal access to protections under the law, and then work to ameliorate those situations that lead to destructive or oppressive behaviour.

I feel motivated at this point to make an unequivocal statement that I don’t have any particular animosity toward white people. As a sometimes student of history, I recognize that the story of our world has been filtered through a European lens, and that my white friends and family members are victims of the same system that I’ve been speaking out against. Those of you who know me personally will be able to attest to this. For those of you who don’t, you may read through the rest of my writings (particularly last Monday’s post) if you doubt my sincerity. If I have caused offense, please accept my apology (and tell me so in the comments).

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

6 Being creative without a Creator

August 23, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · bmusic · crommunism

A friend sent me a link to a 20-minute talk on creativity by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the novel Eat, Pray, Love. I’m not a big fan of the book (I got through about 25 eye-rolling pages before giving up and reaching for the remote), but I am a big fan of (my friend) Claire, so I gave it a chance. I was right with her up until 8:30 when she started in on “creative mystery” and an external, supernatural source for creativity, and then the rest was invocations of magic and self-indulgent privileged pap, the likes to which Jim Carrey would be a fervent subscriber.

I do not know if Claire’s intent was to murder my neurons; I doubt that she was trying to lobotomize me through the intarwebz. She did ask me to write about some of my thoughts on the creative process from the perspective of an atheist. I suppose I have some claims to qualifications in this regard, given that I do spend the non-science half of my life playing and creating music. I’d like to share some of my thoughts on this subject, but first I want to address some of the themes that came up in Ms. Gilbert’s talk, which is available below:

Is suffering necessary for creativity?

A commenter on my strangely-popular “I am not my ideas” post from a few months ago brought this up. Some of the greatest artists of all time (think Van Gogh, Beethoven, Vonnegut, the list goes on) have suffered, and from their suffering came their genius. The image of the tormented artist is so common as to have become almost completely cliché. Douglas Adams satirized this phenomenon in his Hitchhiker’s Guide series, in which time travel inadvertently robs the galaxy of one of its greatest works of art by making the artist happy. Of course, we have to remember that Douglas Adams was a creative genius, and was not particularly unhappy. Nor, by all accounts, were Bach, Shakespeare, da Vinci, John Lennon, this list goes on as well. While suffering can yield insight that can bring creativity forth (and in my experience it is much easier to write albums when you’re sad than when everything’s awesome – just ask Matthew Sweet), it is not necessary to suffer in order to bring forth great works.

Is the supernatural the source of creativity?

Ms. Gilbert spends some time talking about daemons or geniuses, supernatural embodiments of inspiration that are the conduits between the artist and the divine. As with all supernatural agents of causality, there’s no evidence for the existence of faeries (which, to her credit, Gilbert admits). Being a musician, I can testify that inspiration does seem to come from nowhere. I’m sure that other artists and musicians have a much more palpable experience of inspiration than I do (things kind of just pop into my head, rather than being overcome by a ghost that demands me to have a pencil in my hand). However, given the diversity of ways in which inspiration strikes people, and the fact that it hits some people more often than others, and that to all appearances it strikes at random, it’s safe to say that inspiration is not likely caused by a supernatural force for which there is no evidence.

Subjective experience vs. objective reality

Our brains make a fundamental error when it comes to subjective and psychosomatic experiences. Because we interpret the outside world through our senses, we confuse sensory experiences with reality. So when, after meditating for an hour, we feel connected to an external loving presence, that does not constitute evidence that that presence exists in reality. Don’t get me wrong – there is a lot of value in subjective experience. Feeling connected to the world, or to nature, or to your fellow human beings can bring you a sense of happiness and motivate you to be a better person. However, to make the leap from feeling something and then assuming that it exists requires non-subjective proof. To wit, just because artists feel an external force driving them to create doesn’t mean that there are muses or daemons or disembodied geniuses that explain it.

Gilbert would like us to return to the days of magical thinking, in which we attribute inspiration to outside ethereal forces. Reality is all well and good, she seems to say, but we’d feel a lot better if we pretended there were invisible spirits whispering in our ears. If we screw up, well it’s the fault of the spirits. When we succeed, attribution to the spirits will prevent us from getting swollen egos. Who cares if it’s all a lie if it makes us feel good? You can probably tell I’m not a big fan of self-deception, even when it’s practical. It might comfort us to lie to ourselves, but the truth is important. It enables us to deal with each other in a way that reflects the world around us, and prevents us from endangering each other through misinterpretations of reality.

So where do I think inspiration comes from?

There’s a common criticism of skeptics and scientific skepticism that we want to strip the majesty and beauty out of life. Apparently, to some people, understanding how something works makes it less beautiful. Of course, having no idea how something works makes you sound like a complete moron, but that may not be the worst thing in the world. That being said, I still reject the idea that familiarity breeds contempt. I’ve known that stars were inconceivably large nuclear reactions happening in space billions of kilometers away since I was a little kid – none of that makes a starlit night any less beautiful. I’ve known that music is caused by vibrations in air resonating tiny bones within the inner ear causing neuron activity since I was in elementary school – none of that makes me enjoy Beethoven’s 6th symphony any less. I’ve known that there are evolutionary roots for familial love since I was in university – none of that makes me love my parents any less. Understanding the processes behind the world around us can lead to deeper and more beautiful understanding of reality.

We know that the brain is incredibly complex. It adapts to novel stimuli, regulates an incredible number of processes simultaneously, all below the level of what it’s most famous for – conscious thought. It is entirely possible that the way some brains are wired permits a type of lateral thinking that pulls together disperse thought processes that come together to form music. The phenomenon known as synesthesia – wherein sensory input of one type is interpreted as another type (seeing sounds, hearing smells) – certainly supports this conjecture. Some brains might just be better-suited to creativity than others, and ‘inspiration’ may ‘strike’ these brains more often. The arrival of such a strike would be experienced in a variety of different ways. This would also explain why creativity is often (but not necessarily) associated with poor mental health – an atypical brain chemistry and structure will have broad-reaching effects.

Without intending to, Elizabeth Gilbert has paralleled my idea of separating one’s ideas from his/her sense of self worth. I have written songs I’m proud of; I’ve written some stinkers that even I don’t like myself (sadly, far more of the latter than the former). I don’t beat myself up for writing crappy songs, or having crappy performances, in the same way I don’t get a swollen head when something I’ve written makes people cheer. It feels good, but I know that it’s not about me, it’s about the song. I don’t think the song was floating around in the ether, waiting for me to pull it in – that view, if anything, is more arrogant than being glad that my brain popped it into my head. I’m not my ideas in the same way that I’m not my songs – I’m just happy to be able to use my brain to say things in a way that people will listen.

So while I think Ms. Gilbert has the right conclusions in thinking that musicians shouldn’t live and die by their success, and that a rejection of the song or book or painting is not the passage of judgment on who the artist is as a person, she spuriously tries to invoke magic and daemons to make this happen. There are better, non-magical, non-woo-woo ways of accomplishing that goal.

TL;DR – Artistic inspiration can be explained through natural processes, and does not require appeals to woo-woo to exist. The non-magical nature of inspiration doesn’t make it any less wonderful or special.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

0 Movie Friday: Anotherآجر in the دیوار

August 20, 2010
by Crommunist
· blog · bmusic · culture · free speech · movie

I don’t often talk about my musical side (I actually had to create a new “music” tag for this post). I’ve been playing since I was a little kid, and I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t banging pots and pans, or singing, or doing something else musical. Music is, quite literally, an integral part of my entire life. I guess I’m lucky I don’t live in Iran, where rock music is banned (and for about a gojillion other reasons). Music isn’t just music. Anyone who knows about Dmitri Shostakovich, or Bob Dylan, or Chuck D knows that music can be, in addition to social commentary, fuel for a revolution. Hip-hop is being picked up by Inuit youth in Northern Canada as protest music against social injustices. Reggae, as many people forget, was equal parts smooth grooves and calls for uprising (think of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up or Desmond Dekker’s Israelites). As hip-hop is to disenfranchised North American youth, and reggae is to oppressed Caribbeans and Africans, rock and roll is to a generation of Middle-Eastern youth, growing up in a war zone they had no part in building.

Enter Blurred Vision, a Toronto band fronted by two Iranian brothers, who use rock to comment on what is happening in their homeland of Iran. Right now, a single of theirs (a re-imagining of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall (pt. II), is reaching an international audience. Because this is right up my alley, I thought I’d share it with you.

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit it – it’s not Mozart. The thing that struck me about this song is that 30 years after The Wall was released, this song can be perfectly applied, almost unedited, to a country that didn’t exist (in its present, oppressive, theocratic form) at the time. There are themes in music that are timeless, and good music can reach out through the veil of history and resonate within our psyche. So to anyone who brands any type of music as “just noise” or “not really music”, remember that Philistines said the same thing about Pink Floyd back in 1979.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!