I’ve had a few days break on the Isle of Skye. Despite the fact that I’ve lived in Scotland all my life this is the first time I’ve ever visited Skye. I took my camera and I’ve taken some of the loveliest photos I’ve ever taken up here. It’s an island which is bigger than it first appears. It’s takes quite a while to drive anywhere because a lot of the roads are single track with passing places, winding up and down and around the mountains, through the glens and across the bracken moors. It makes every little trip here an adventure.
One of the trips was to a lighthouse. You have to park your car in the car park at the top of the cliff then walk down a long, long trail to the lighthouse (and, yes, walking back up and up and up the same trail back to the car is VERY demanding! Especially if you spend your life avoiding serious exercise!). Right at the bottom of the trail is the lighthouse which is surrounded by a black, oily bog. Once you slurp your way across the bog (waterproof shoes essential!) you come to the very point of the peninsula. The lighthouse is behind you, across the sparkling sea you see the outlines of the further islands and before you, suddenly, you become aware of this field of stone structures. Yes, the whole area is rocky and you have to clamber over huge rocks to get to the field but there before you, as you get closer, you see hundreds upon hundreds of stone sculptures.
This is simply an immense outpouring of the human creative spirit (well, unless you believe it was the fairies wot did it!) How did this start? Well, I can tell you it’s infectiously compulsive. One of those structures is the one I added to the collection. Any idea which one I made?
Everywhere we see a continuous play between forces of creation and those of destruction.
Right inside the cells of our bodies these forces and unceasingly active. Biologically they’re known as “anabolic” and “catabolic” effects. Anabolic functions build and catabolic ones break things down. We need both to be functioning well to be healthy. If they are in complete balance there’s a dynamic status quo – part of what we call “homeostasis” (a complex set of balances). If catabolic processes dominate the system degenerates and degrades. To grow, the anabolic forces have to dominate.
Makes sense, huh? Whilst creativity might involve breaking some things down, we can’t grow anything by reducing it……the building, creative processes have to be predominant. How does this fit for your life? How much energy do you spend pulling things or people down? How much time do give to destruction? And how much energy do you spend creatively building things, helping people to grow?
It’s not hard to find critics, especially cynical, destructive critics, but time spent with them is rarely rewarding. Isn’t it much more life-enhancing to be with creative people, those with positive energy and outlook, who solve problems and are motivated to make things better?
We need the critics. We need those who seem to thrive only by pulling things down. All heroes need challenges. We grow by engaging with the challenges and overcoming them. But it’s also worthwhile being aware of the toxic effects of the nay-sayers.
It strikes me that life is short and is best spent predominantly with creative, positive-minded people. They energise. They support. They help us grow.
This series is about using the movies to help us understand how we are all different, how we experience the world differently and how we all try to cope with challenges and change in our own ways. One of the commonest responses to challenge, is to withdraw – to hide, retreat, shut down. It’s an especially common way to try to deal with hurts and disappointments. The downside of this strategy is that we disengage and can easily spiral down into depression.
To see all five parts of this series put the phrase “learning from the movies” in the search box up on the top right of the blog.
We all cope in different ways. In this series we’re looking at ways of coping in parts 3, 4 and 5. In part 3 we looked at the activist way of coping.
Now let’s consider control as a strategy. The world can be a very scary place. For many people the events that occur in their lives face them with overwhelming uncertainty and doubt. If we feel the world is scary and dangerous and random, one way to cope with this reality is to shrink daily life into containable, controllable pieces. People do this to try and reduce the uncertainty and randomness in their experience. They do this by introducing routines, habits and rituals. They do this by either trying to control their physical environment – cleaning and ordering – and/or by trying to control the people in their lives. Watch the following three clips to see what this is like if we take it too far!
I’ll consider the third strategy – withdrawal – in final part – Part 5.
One of the things that depresses me most is the tendency to write off whole swathes of humanity by sticking a label on them and dismissing them. I sat on the train this week and two guys, a Scotsman and an American with a comb-over, spent the whole journey doing just that. Huge numbers of people were judged, given a label and dismissed.
Here’s an example “I work with medics. I know what they’re like. They’re only interested in one thing. Money.”
Here’s another “Everyone below the Mason-Dixon Line is an in-breeder”
Want more? No, I didn’t think you would.
So here’s a counter to all that. There is a beautiful piece of journalism in today’s Guardian about people with Down’s Syndrome. Read right down to the last paragraph – it’s the clincher! I meet people who says things like this every week. It never ceases to humble me.
And here’s another counter. Sugar Mouse in The Rain sent me a link to a video on youtube. (By the way, go see his blog. It’s lovely and he’s a lovely man) Here’s the video –
One aspect of understanding someone is listen to their story and hear what they talk about – material, physical, practical issues? emotional and relationship issues? or spiritual issues of meaning and purpose? Another aspect is to find out what kind of ideas they have about themselves in relation to others – in particular to explore to what extent they see themselves as connected to, and identifying with, others, and to what extent they see themselves as separate and independant. I’ve explored this latter aspect in Parts 1and 2.
But another key issue for all of us is how we cope in the face of challenges, and how we adapt to change. Just as I have a map of body, mind and spirit in consideration of the kind of world a person lives in, so I have a map of coping strategies, and again there are three – action; control and withdrawal. Let me reiterate that this is a dynamic map and whilst some people almost always seem to default to the same strategy, most of us are more flexible and use each and all of these strategies to different degrees.
Let’s explore to activist – the person who when faced with a problem or a challenge, rolls up their sleeves and gets stuck into it –
You can see it takes a certain self-belief to be able to cope with challenges this way!
We’ll have a look at control as a strategy in Part 4
This is Part 2 in a series. You’ll find Part 1 here.
One of the major ways of creating a sense of self is through group identity. We see this especially strongly in small towns and villages where there are very real, very active communities. What I mean by that is not just people who live in the same street or same town but people who work together, play together, live together. Communities of people who share values and traditions which bond them together. I gave an example of such a community in the Part 1 of this series where I showed a clip about Hobbits. Well, hobbits are, of course, imaginary creatures, and some people find it hard to identify with fantasy so here are two clips from a movie entitled “Brassed Off”. This is an at times funny, at times tragic tale of a mining community in the north of England. It’s set in the Thatcher years when the coal mines were being closed down and these communities were being destroyed. A characteristic of these northern towns was the brass band. It was just one of the ways the community bonded. Mining towns would regularly have brass band contests – like this –
You can feel the spirit of these people and how the music, the beer and the comraderie created a cohesive, group identity.
The band leader is called Danny and in one scene he has a heart attack and as he lies, seemingly dying, in his hospital bed his band gather outside and pay their respects, by playing “Danny Boy”
Oops! I should’ve warned you to have your tissues ready! Moving, isn’t it? It’s probably the only time a brass band has moved me to tears!
Think back to the character we saw at the start of About a Boy. Can you imagine that he would have the same needs, the same desires and the same experience as these characters in this tale?
We are all different in so many ways and, in health care, to find the best treatment for someone, we have to discover who this person is who has this particular disease. Otherwise we’re probably going to fail to help them to recover.
I was recently asked to give a talk at a Palliative Care Conference in Dundee. One of the organisers had seen me use movies as a educational tool when teaching doctors and wanted me to demonstrate that. It was well received and I thought I’d put up a series of posts based on the talk. I hope you like them.
TWO QUESTIONS FOR ALL DOCTORS
I think the core of a doctor’s job is to try and understand people. One thing I find helpful in that regard is to have two questions at the back of my head during every consultation –
What kind of world does this person live in?
How does this person cope?
With the first question, I’m trying to understand what’s important to the person and how they create a sense of self. I won’t go into this in much more detail just now but one well-known way of viewing the world is through the triad of body, mind and spirit. I find that quite helpful. We can consider each of these as a focus and for every one of us we can place ourselves on the this map – the body, mind, spirit map.
For the purposes of understanding where someone lives on this map, I think that the body represents the physical. These are people to whom physical security and physical reality are paramount. They prioritise material issues and they tend to prefer to have a rational, logical approach to problems – you’ve probably heard someone say “Don’t give me your touchy-feely nonsense!” when asked to discuss how they are feeling. Utility and practicality are their key values. For others, emotional security is more important. They are very aware of feelings and of relationships. They see themselves in relation to others. The third focus is spiritual and by this I mean the need to make sense of the world and the idea that there is something greater than each of us as individuals. This might be religious but it might not. What is important to that person is that they need to have a sense of purpose.
This map, by the way, is not a set of boxes into which people should be placed. The map is more like a map of three areas or neighbouring countries with flexible, moving, overlapping borders. Some people spend all their lives in only one of the countries but most move around!
This, for me, is a fundamental way of creating a sense of self – a way of answering the “who am I?” question. But related to this there is another way, which is how we see ourselves in relation to others. For all of us we live with a tension of two opposites – the need to be separate, unique, individual AND the need to belong, to love and be loved, to identify with others. I say this is related because I find that often the physically-focussed person is more towards the pole of individuality and separateness and the emotionally-focussed towards the pole of identification with others.
So take a look at this movie clip and listen the main character’s monologue. Here is a man who has a sense of being self-contained and who is materially-focussed.
“I am Ibiza!”
To see the opposite pole, have a look at this clip. Here are people whose sense of identity comes from the community –
“It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life”
These are two good examples of very different ways of experiencing the world, different sets of priorities and different ways of creating a sense of self.
OK, so some of you will be saying hobbits?? They’re not real! But, trust me, the Hugh Grant character in About a Boy isn’t real either! But let me address that in Part 2 where I’ll show a couple of clips from one of my favourite movies, Brassed Off, which is set in a Northern English mining community. You can compare that to the lifestyle of the hobbits in the Shire.
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.
I’ve always had a bit of a passion for science. But what does that mean? What is science? There’s a lot of talk these days about anti-science, as if it were some kind of political party or team to be opposed, or about bad science, which, strangely, tends not to be a discussion about either the philosophy of science or about more or less effective methodologies. In fact, people do tend to apply labels to the experiences of life and those labels, unfortunately, more often stop thought than promote understanding.
So, let me say what I mean when I use the word science. My understanding of what science is owes a lot to the philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. He said there were three ways to think about experience – science, philosophy and art. You can read more about that here. He said science was thinking about function. That makes a lot of sense to me. A scientific approach to a phenomenon is one of curiosity, one of wonder; it’s driven by a hunger to understand. Specifically, it’s about a hunger to understand how something works – whether that be the brain, evolution, or the weather. Indeed it’s about a way of trying to make sense of some aspect of the world. There are two important consequences to the Deleuzean definition for me – one is that science is only one way of thinking about the world, and the other is that it is the main way to think about how something works.
But there are other factors to consider when thinking about science. Popper’s famous principle of “falsification” really hit the mark too. The scientific method is not one of proving things; it’s one of attempting to disprove things. In brief, what Popper said was that we form a hypothesis (an explanatory theory of something) and then, as scientists, we conduct experiments to try to disprove that hypothesis. The more we fail to do that, the stronger the hypothesis becomes. In other words, good science is a process of never ceasing to doubt. A good scientist never says he or she has worked everything out and there’s nothing more to be discovered here. A good scientist must be humble, open-minded, curious and never cease to wonder. When you read the writings of a scientist who claims to be the holder of The Truth, or who claims to be absolutely certain of their position, beyond doubt, you know you’ve found a scientist who’s lost the plot. Scientists aren’t gods. They are people. When they get hooked on certainty conversation with them becomes uncomfortable or even downright unpleasant. That’s not a function of science though, because a scientific approach necessitates a perspective of doubt which should humble.
There’s another quality which is often mentioned in relation to science. One definition I read, (and I confess I can’t right at this moment remember where!), was that science is the study of what can be measured. Well, I’m not entirely comfortable with that definition but I can see where it’s coming from. It’s impossible for us to lead a value-free life. Everything we think and experience and do and influenced by our values. In the scientific approach, there is a tendency to value the physical over the non-physical and that’s what tends to lead to a view that science is about what can be measured. For example we can easily measure the physical dimensions of red patch on the skin of a patient with eczema but we can’t measure their itch, and we can’t measure their emotional experience of their eczema. If we dismiss what can’t be measured we dismiss the experience of eczema (as Cassell would call it, the “illness”) and focus only on the physical changes which are measurable (Cassell again – the “disease”)
So, let me say again. I’m passionate about science. Why? Because I am insatiably curious! I love to explore and discover. I love to understand the world, my life and the people I meet. I know that understanding is an eternal process. It has no stopping point. It’s never finished. It has no conclusion. So, for me, science is a way of understanding life better. That said, philosophy and the arts are equally important ways of understanding the world and each will shed a very special light which the other ways of thinking won’t.
I am equally passionate about philosophy and the arts.
I titled this post “Good science” because I want to highlight a positive conception of science – insatiably curious, constantly developing, continuously humble, practised with an intention of building our knowledge and understanding.
I welcome constructive criticism and suggestions. I will not, however, tolerate abuse, rudeness or negativity, whether it is directed at me or other people. It has no place here. ANYONE making nasty comments will be banned.
Heroes Not Zombies 