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The Prosperous Peasant

Posted in books, from the reading room, personal growth on January 15, 2008| 10 Comments »

I read the Prosperous Peasant, written by Tim Clark and Mark Cunningham, recently. It’s one of those books which teaches (in this case five) principles (or ‘secrets’) which you should learn if you want to have a better life. The writing is better than many other books of this genre, partly, I suspect, because both of the authors are already established writers, one of them a novelist. Their writing skills show. The message of the book is very simple – here are the five principles –

  1. Gratitude attracts luck
  2. Know your gift
  3. Conceivable means achievable
  4. Effort determines results
  5. Collaboration breeds success

I’m not going to elaborate any of these here. There’s nothing ground-breaking in here. However, my favourite one is the third one. A long of goal-setting and visualisation teaching is ridiculous and sets people up for disappointment. This particular principle emphasises that you have to be able to “conceive” how you’re going to achieve what you want to do, and that’s what makes it possible. It’s the conceiving that sets it apart from fanciful daydreaming. The principles are all ones you’ll have read about elsewhere but I like two things – the first is the way the principles are taught using the classic storytelling method. This time the stories are set in Japan, during the time of the samurai, and each story is well told and memorable. The second is that, unlike The Secret, the principles are practical, reasonable and useful. There’s nothing quasi-religious or mystical about it. It’s got charm. You can read the book for yourself, or have a look at the website.

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The Roads to Modernity

Posted in books, from the reading room on December 17, 2007| 7 Comments »

This is the title of a book by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Why did I try to read it? Well, it’s subtitle is “The British, French and American Enlightenments” and the phenomenon of the Enlightenment fascinates me. I have an anthology of Scottish Enlightenment writings edited by Alexander Broadie and I enjoyed Arthur Herman’s “The Scottish Enlightenment” and Christopher Berry’s “Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment”. The idea of Modernity is also fascinating and I thoroughly enjoyed Stephen Toulmin’s books on that (“Cosmopolis”, and “Return to Reason”). But the other reason was that I read in a newspaper that Gordon Brown, our PM, is a big fan of Himmelfarb’s work and has this particular work on his bookshelf. I’m not sure what makes Gordon Brown tick but he strikes me as a thoughtful man and I wondered what it was about this book that he found appealing.

Well, dear reader, I failed! I gave up. Here’s why………

In the prologue she goes to great lengths to diminish the French. In particular she attacks their Enlightenment agenda of reason, and is quite, quite scathing about Diderot and les philosophes. I found that pretty irritating. OK, I thought, it’s refreshing to read such a different and skeptical view of the French Enlightenment project, but as the pages turned it felt increasingly like she just dislikes the French and French thought and culture. Well, I don’t. I enjoy French thought and culture and their philosophes, but you don’t have to agree with everything an author writes. We can all have different opinions. But then she laid into the Scots, going to great lengths to try and make the case that the Scottish Enlightenment was really just a part of the British Enlightenment (whatever that was!) and going to even greater lengths to claim that the great Scottish thinkers of that time didn’t like to be known as Scots at all but preferred to downplay their Scottishness and claim Britishness instead! (now I see why Gordon Brown likes this!). OK, so she was really losing me now, and we’re still in the Prologue! I kept going though, but didn’t feel any greater affinity with the text.

However, I finally gave up when I got to the American Enlightenment and read –

America was, however, saddled with two problems that Britain was happily spared, the Indians and slavery, both of which proved to be very nearly intractable.

Ouch! Is it just me, or is there something very uncomfortable about that sentence?

She goes on –

For economic if for no other reasons, the displacement of the Indians was the precondition for the very existence of the settlers.

and

What they did have [the settlers] in addition to a clear recognition of their own interests and needs, was a strong sense of their superiority, as human beings, as Christians, and as citizens. “Savages”, in popular parlance, was almost synonymous with Indians….

Is she just unemotionally describing how things were in those days? Or is this a justification for these attitudes?

The problem of slavery was even more formidable than that of the Indians

There was a widespread and deeply held conviction of the ineradicable differences of the races and the inferiority of the blacks.

Now I don’t know if it’s just her style to write in this matter of fact way, but I found this whole section deeply disturbing. And I don’t get it either…..this is a description of some kind of “Enlightenment”? Some kind of “politics of liberty”?

However, I did find her very neat summary of the British, French and American Enlightenments very appealing –

The sociology of virtue, the ideology of reason, the politics of liberty – the ideas still resonate today.

I like that little phrase. I just don’t like this book. I didn’t finish it.

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A Good Life

Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy on November 20, 2007| 6 Comments »

What makes a life a good life?

Philosophers have struggled over this question for centuries. It seems such a simple question but it’s not so easy to answer. One of the biggest problems with the question, of course, is that what constitutes a good life for each of us is probably a bit different.

Despite what the self-help books in the Body Mind Spirit section of the bookstores tell you, there’s no magic formula.

A C Grayling has recently published a book about this, ‘The Choice Of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty and the Good Life in the 21st Century’. He was talking about it on ‘Start The Week’ on BBC Radio 4 on Monday morning (podcast available here)

In a nutshell, he is considering the often opposing drives of duty and pleasure, or as Oliver Sacks, one of the other guests on the show said, between work and love. How we balance these determines how good we feel our lives are.  A C Grayling concluded that those rare individuals who love their work, are amongst those who have good lives. Well, I can sign up to that one. I have a good life and I certainly love my work.

I’ve just finished reading ‘The Weight of Things’ by Jean Kazez (ISBN 978-1-4051-6078-0). I bought this after reading an excellent article written by her, where she reviewed and compared three books on happiness.  I was impressed with her balance, style and insight and I’ve really enjoyed ‘The Weight of Things’. It’s about what constitutes a good life. She’s very clear in her book that she is not writing a manual or even giving a set of recommendations about living well. It’s a much more thoughtful and thought provoking book because of that. She refuses to be pinned down to a fixed set of specifics and I think that is so right, although at first, I thought, why is she being so difficult? Why doesn’t she just list the necessary features of a good life? I realised I was chasing the magic formula that doesn’t exist. Jean Kazez is much more realistic than that and completely acknowledges that we are all different and it would be wrong of her to proscribe the features which she thinks make life good. This is such a refreshing approach. I can’t stress often enough how much I value individual difference and diversity. I just can’t accept formulaic, one-size-fits-all approaches, and I don’t see the world through a two-value lens. (Ok, you’re probably thinking, ‘a what?’ ‘a two-value lens’? Well, I mean the categorisation of everything into one of two opposites – good/bad; black/white; proven/unproven. Sorry, life just doesn’t seem to fit that straightjacket for me).

What she does in this book is to consider some (but she expects, not all) features which are probably necessities if you want to have  good life, then goes on to consider other features, which she calls the B list, which make life better, but probably aren’t essential.

Here’s her very nice way of putting it –

The target we should aim for, if we want our lives to get better and better, is not like the familiar set of concentric circles. It’s like a grid of different coloured squares with different hues representing necessary and optional ingredients. The necessities are different shades of green (say) and we need to aim at each one. The various shades of purple are worth aiming for too, but they’re not so critical. If we start out with a life that’s not going well, we need to aim at the various greens: happiness, autonomy and the other basics. They remain central throughout our lives. But the purple squares – balance, accomplishment, and the like – are also life-enhancing.

I like that a lot. Maybe I wouldn’t pick green and purple but I like it all the same! The idea that a good life is not achieved through a recipe or formula but has ever changing variables which colour our lives in various hues and shades……that’s good. And it’s dynamic – she says –

a good life isn’t static, but involves some sort of growth over time.

I also like it because each of her characteristics, or squares is worthing focusing on and developing in its own right. She says that’s because making your aim a better life, as if ‘the good life’ has an independent quality you can aim at directly, is likely to fail.

Aiming for a better life is to be expected when life is going badly, but many of us take our focusoff our own lives when we feel like our lives are ‘good enough’. Many perfectly reasonable people with good lives will not aim for even better lives, let alone some conceivable ‘best life’. In some cases important things beyond ourselves start to take precedence.

How important is that last sentence? It’s a bit we often miss in our atomistic, disconnected lives. Remember the Hugh Grant character in About a Boy? That 80’s and 90’s idea of separateness, and, yes, selfishness, wasn’t enriching. Neither is the celebrity culture of our current times. Life really IS good when we get in touch with “important things beyond ourselves” – whether we see that in social, political, personal or spiritual terms.

Oh, I know, you still want her list, don’t you?

So did I.

(please remember – neither of lists should be considered definitive or complete!)

Here’s her A list (the fundamental essentials)

  • Happiness
  • Autonomy
  • Sense of identity
  • Morality
  • Progress

And here’s her B list (features which enrich life but needn’t be seen in themselves as essential)

  • knowledge
  • friendship, love, affiliation
  • play
  • religion
  • making music
  • creating art
  • accomplishment
  • balance
  • talent
  • beauty

She makes it very clear that different people will need each of these to different degrees to have a good life and that there may be other features others would add, and people might find for them that some of her B list needs to be on their A list.

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Componential explanations. Thin explanations.

Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy, science on November 6, 2007| 1 Comment »

I understand the value of focusing on only the part of something to try and understand it better. It’s an essential part of the way we make sense of our world. BUT we must never lose sight of the fact that we CANNOT understand the whole by understanding the parts when we deal with complex adaptive systems.

My own area of medical practice is holistic and that’s not a New Age concept – it’s a focus on the person, rather than just a part of the person which is damaged (the pathological lesion).

A couple of authors I’ve read recently have used other vocabularies to address this issue. Robert Solomon describes a focus on parts as “thin” – it lacks “richness” and “depth”. That strikes me as very true. There’s too much left out of explanatory models which are reductionist. So much left out in fact that they fail to help us understand real life complexity. And Andy Clark uses the term “componential explanation”. Somehow this immediately makes sense to me. He shows how this only works when “the parts display the relevant behaviour even in isolation from each other.” Otherwise, we try a “connectionist explanation” similar to that described so beautifully by Barabasi in Linked. But, he points out, even a focus on the connections is not enough and he describes another model – “emergent explanation” (as explored in Dynamical Systems Theory). This is a good explanatory model for real life complexity and includes a study of “collective variables, control parameters, attractors, bifurcation points and phase portraits”.

Now doesn’t that sound much richer than the reductionist approach?

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Being There

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, philosophy on November 6, 2007| 2 Comments »

Being There, by Andy Clark (ISBN 0-262-53156-9) is one of the most interestingly challenging books I’ve read for a long time. Let me say first that it’s taken me longer to read than I’d have expected it to. There are whole swathes of it which just didn’t engage me easily. In fact, a few times I thought I’d pack it in, then I’d come across a few sentences or a paragraph that not only would grab me and turn my thinking upside down, but it’d be exciting, visionary and, yes, down right thrilling.

I really enjoyed Robert Solomon’s, The Joy of Philosophy, not least because I feel he gave me a new vocabulary. His one word/concept of “thin” really expanded my thought. You can read more about it here, but what really excited me about this word was the way it captured the inadequacy of logical/analytical/reductionist thought.

I then read Barabasi’s Linked, which homed in on the key concepts of connections and nodes. I especially liked the way he demonstrated that the world, though a complex and at times chaotic system, is not random. Randomness turns out not to be the explanation for the phenomena we experience daily. That changed the way I thought about the world – there are patterns to be discovered, and phenomena to be understood. Sure, there is such a thing as chance, and life is often extremely unpredictable, but we can begin to unravel the connections between things and events, and in the process we can improve our understanding of the world.

Now I’ve just read Andy Clark’s Being There and he puts forward concepts that similarly change the way I understand the world and uses language in some novel ways which open the doors to other ways to explore life.  His main thesis is that to understand the mind we have to step outside of the study of the brain – not that the brain is not important of course – but we need to understand the environments in which brains exist. He draws the connections between the brain and the physical, social and symbolic environments in which we live and shows that to fully understand how the mind works we need to explore the interactions between brains and the world. He calls this concept of the mind, the “extended mind” and in the process he nicely shows how we use our brains primarily for pattern recognition and for creating change in the world. In particular how we create the structures in the world that we can then use to extend the functions of our minds.

Let me highlight one simple example – doing a jigsaw. To do a jigsaw we don’t work it all out in our heads but we use our hands to literally manipulate the pieces, turning them around to view each piece from different angles, so stimulating our pattern-recognising brains, and moving the pieces towards and away from different sections of the puzzle. In other words we manipulate the physical environment to help our pattern-spotting brains do what they do best, and to do that more quickly. Andy Clark nicely shows how we do exactly the same thing with our social environment and, crucially, with our ability to handle symbols and signs, which has reached its highest point in our development of language.

What does public language do for us? There is a common, easy answer, which, though not incorrect, is subtly misleading. The easy answer is that language helps us to communicate ideas. It lets other human beings profit from what we know, and it enables us to profit from what they know. This is surely true, and it locates one major wellspring of our rather unique kind of cognitive success. However, the emphasis on language as a medium of communication tends to blind us to a subtler but equally potent role: the role of language as a tool that alters the nature of the computational tasks involved in various kinds of problem solving.

I’ve never read this idea anywhere else – it highlights language as not only being a tool of communication but also being a tool we use to reshape the world to enable our brains to more effectively use their capacities.

This whole thrust can feel a little vertiginous. Look at this for example –

Every thought is had by a brain. But the flow of thoughts and the adaptive successes of reason are now seen to depend on repeated and crucial interactions with external resources. The role of such interactions, in the cases I have highlighted, is clearly computational and informational: it is to transform inputs, to simplify search, to aid recognition, to prompt associative recall, to offload memory, and so on…

and this –

Our brains are the cogs in larger social and cultural machines – machines that bear the mark of vast bodies of previous search and effort, both individual and collective. This machinery is, quite literally, the persisting embodiment of the wealth of achieved knowledge. It is this leviathan of diffused reason that presses maximal benefits from our own simple efforts….

Well, I don’t know about you but this embedding of the brain in the web of relationships, stretching backwards, sideways and forwards in time, makes my head spin! It turns the mind into an even more dynamic phenomenon than I had previously realised and at the same time it turns it into a much less isolated phenomenon too.

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Inspiring fictional doctors

Posted in books, from the reading room, health, life on October 26, 2007| 8 Comments »

Did you know that Mills and Boon, the publishers of romantic novels, have a whole section dedicated to medical romance stories? Well, an Irish psychiatrist, Dr Kelly, has analysed about twenty of them and come up with some interesting findings. He found

marked preponderance of brilliant, tall, muscular, male doctors with chiselled features, working in emergency medicine.

He said they were commonly of Mediterranean origin and had personal tragedies in their pasts.

Oh well, that rules me out!

A spokesperson for Mills and Boon said

the medical setting offered much potential for human drama.

“We see exactly the same on televised medical dramas. In these kinds of professions, there is the need to remain emotionally distant, which spills over into private lives – there’s nothing more thrilling than a damaged hero.”

Hey, isn’t that all of us? Aren’t we all damaged heroes?

This little piece got me thinking though about the way doctors are portrayed in fiction and what kind of influence that has. I’ve wanted to be a doctor all my life. First stated that intent at the age of three! And it wasn’t a family connection. There were no medics in my family ever. What I do remember though is watching a soap opera on TV when I was a child – “Dr Finlay’s Casebook”. Dr Finlay was a Scottish GP working in the fictional village of ‘Tannochbrae’ (actually Callander, very close to where I was born and live now – Stirling). I was hugely impressed with Dr Finlay and I have deep seated memories of wanting to be a doctor like him. There were other doctors on TV then. Dr Kildare, for example. Couldn’t stand him! Waltzing around in his white coat like God’s gift to medicine! So, I guess, fictionalised doctors made an impact on me.

How about you? Which fictionalised doctors impress, or impressed you? Did any of them inspire you to become a doctor? or a nurse? Or even put you off the idea for life? Which doctor in fiction would you most like to be your personal doctor? Go on, tell me.

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Looking in the right place….

Posted in books, from the reading room on October 12, 2007| 7 Comments »

I search for life in dread deathin fearful disease for health,

in dark prison for liberty,

escape in a sealed room,

in a traitor, loyalty.

But my own fate from whom

I ne’er hope for the good

has with just heaven ruled

if the impossible I demand,

for me the possible is banned.

Know where this quote comes from?

What do you think about it?

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Love as a virtue

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, philosophy on October 1, 2007| 4 Comments »

Robert C Solomon writes a lot about love in his book “The Joy of Philosophy“. In particular he argues that love is a virtue.

I am going…to defend what we now call romantic love, erotic love, as a virtue – indeed as an exemplary virtue. I want to defend what one might call enthusiasm as a virtue, the enthusiasm born of love’s attachments being the most obvious example.

and, later

The passionate attachment of one person for another is a virtue.

To love another, and to be enlivened by that love, to live a better, richer life because of that love, for love of another to be the source, the fountainhead of an enthusiastic, passionate engagement with life…….that’s the challenge. I don’t think we talk enough about this kind of love these days. In Professor Solomon’s terms we tend to think about love rather more “thinly”……we reduce it to something less than it can be.

As he says, love creates love –

Love tends to build on itself, to amplify with time, to find – through love – even more reasons to love.

Whilst it might be true that an unexamined life is not worth living, it’s even more true that a loveless life doesn’t feel worth living.

Love (or loving) itself is the virtue, a virtue so important that rationality pales in significance.

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The Joy of Philosophy

Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy on September 30, 2007| 18 Comments »

Some books you can gobble down quickly like fast food, but some just need to be sipped and savoured. I’ve been carrying around and reading The Joy of Philosophy by Robert C Solomon (ISBN-13 978-0-19-516540-1) for the last two or three weeks. Got some strange looks from people on the train who could only see the first part of the title…….”The Joy Of” (bet they never worked out the next word was “Philosophy”!).

I really enjoyed this book. You know how sometimes you read a book and it seems to open doors for you? Suddenly you see or hear something differently and the world and the way you experience it has changed forever. I played with an idea for a story once. I called it “Quantum Days” because I wanted to explore the phenomenon, that we all experience, of those days when something changes and its so dramatic, or so significant, that the world is changed for us so completely that we feel now we’ve moved to a new level (like electrons jumping from one level to another in the atom – quantum jumps). Well I will get round to writing the rest of that story one day. Quantum Days can come about from reading something though. Occasionally there’ll be an “aha!” moment and your world will be changed. This is one of those books for me.

The central thesis of the book is contained in it’s subtitle on the front page – “Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life”. Throughout the book Professor Solomon uses a very interesting language device – the juxtaposition of “thin” and “thick”. For him, “thin-ness” of thinking is limited, reduced, somewhat sterile thinking. In particular it’s that form of rational thinking which deliberately attempts to be dispassionate.

my revolt against logical “thinness” is very much a celebration of the passions in philosophy and the richness they provide.

It’s amazing how in medicine as well as in philosophy (and I suspect in science too) the passions, or emotions, are frowned upon. There’s a belief around that “the truth” can only be discovered by the dispassionate, the disengaged, the distant, but Robert Solomon argues strongly against that. In fact he argues for the central importance of a passionate life. He doesn’t use the language of “subjective” versus “objective” but that debate fits well with his. I’ve always been amazed that anyone can think the subjective can be left out of health care (or even “controlled for”). The subjective self (an at least partially socially constructed self) can never be taken out of our experience. It’s just impossible to have an experience which isn’t coloured by, framed by, and reacted to by, the self. That’s why who the doctor is, is important in a consultation. Yet I’ve never seen a single research study in medicine which identifies and/or describes the therapists who are actually entering into the encounters with the patients. Sorry, I digress……..but that’s just one of the many trains of thought this book set off and running for me.

He questions the traditional notion in philosophy that a dispassionate thinking about life can lead to a “good” life

A virtuous life might be something more than becoming the congenial neighbour, respected citizen, responsible colleague, and affective zombie that many philosophers and contemporary moral pundits urge us to be.

Oh yes! I love that phrase “affective zombie”! Here’s more….

I do want to raise the question of whether mere proper living, obedience to the law, utilitarian ‘rational choice’ calculations, respect for others’ rights and for contracts, and a bit of self-righteousness is all there is to a good life.

What he is arguing for is a life of passion, an emotional life. What does he mean by emotions though? How does he understand emotion? Well, he definitely does not think we can fully understand emotions by studying brain chemistry, nor by psychoanalysis, or, I suspect, the research conducted into Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Why not? Because he proposes (and this is one of his radical ideas for me) that we best understand emotions by not focussing on individuals but on relationships, behaviours, actions and society.

….an emotion is not a disposition: it is, first of all, an experience and a way of being-in-the-world

and, later,

it is the context and the social environment that make most emotions intelligible

and

an emotion is not so much an element or item “in” experience as it is the ordering of experience

I could go on……I’ve written down many quotes from this book. What is exciting for me about this thought is that it embeds the experience of emotions so firmly, so inextricably into the contexts of the world in which we live and it gives them a central role in our attempt to make sense of our lives and to act rationally and deliberately in life.

He writes a lot about love but I’ll explore that in a separate post. Let me finish this one with two more quotes from this stimulating book.

.

.

.

 

Emotions are strategies

.

.

.

I’m giving that space so you don’t miss it. Think about this. Are emotions the ways in which we effect change and make an impact on the world? Are emotions actually actions? What does happiness do? What does love do? Anger? Grief? This is a potentially liberating but also empowering perspective.

We too often opt for victimisation or cynicism, the products of our overactive faculty for blame and our extravagant sense of entitlement, or we take refuse in pessimism. But there are better ways to think about life…..

It’s the heroes not zombies argument. Instead of thinking that emotions just happen to us and that our experiences just happen to us, this perspective gives us the opportunity for a much more active and creative engagement in life.

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Gut Feelings

Posted in books, from the reading room, health, life on September 18, 2007| 5 Comments »

The relationship between intuition and reasoning has been cropping up all over the place for me recently.

I just read Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer (ISBN 978-0-7139-9751-4) and he gives one of the most cogent models of intuition I’ve ever read. He outlines what he calls “evolved capacities” – these are human qualities or characteristics which have evolved either genetically or culturally. They are language, recognition memory, object tracking, imitation and feelings like love. He makes a good case for the uniqueness of these capacities in human beings (claiming that neither other animals nor computer-based Artificial Intelligence have or ever will have them).

His model of intuition (or “gut feelings”) is that these evolved capacities interact with environmental structures around the individual and are processed through simple rules of thumb to produce what we recognise as gut feelings. I like this model. It fits well with discoveries in evolutionary biology, neuroscience and complexity science. I’m sure others will identify other qualities which fit with his idea of “evolved capacities” and I think the adaptive nature of rules of thumb applied appropriately in different contexts really works.

There’s no doubt that rationalism and logic are only two of the tools we use to understand things and I think Gigerenzer’s model of intuition highlights a major other set of tools which we use (maybe even more frequently than we do reasoning and logic). I also think it’s good to take the mysticism out of intuition and to distinguish it from simple guess work.

In this way of thinking intuition can be both developed and taught and I find that pretty exciting.

One of the key points he makes is that intuitive processes are especially helpful when dealing with situations which are very uncertain – prediction for example. This highlights a role for intuition in everything from health care to investment decisions.

I’ve long been aware that the practice of acute medicine in particular requires rapid intuitive skill – an over-reliance on data collection and analysis in these situations can be fatal. Right off the top of my head I can recall a child with meningococcal meningitis, a young farmer in rural Ayrshire with malaria and man with toothache who turned out to be having a heart attack. In all three of these cases I’m sure it was instant (and I do mean instant!) decision making that saved their lives. In each case the diagnoses were unusual for a general practitioner and none of them would have survived had I waited to do some tests before acting. I’m sure all doctors have had similar experiences – those instants where you “just know” that this is a serious life-threatening situation despite the lack of detailed evidence!

Uncertainty is a fundamental characteristic of  our lives and intuition is one of the key tools we need to deal with it.

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