I once had… let’s call it a debate with a pair of psychological wellbeing practitioners about the nature of logic in reference to depression and anxiety. It was in response to a list of “rights” given out in a group therapy session (which was neither therapeutic nor conducted with a sizeable group, but that’s beside the point), one of which was something along the lines of “I have the right to make decisions with no logical basis”. An example given of an illogical action was that you could decline an invitation for no other reason besides not wanting to go. I disagreed with this – it is logical, after all, to look after oneself, and one way to do that is by putting your own interests and desires first. When and how much you do that is all down to you.

This idea intrigued me. As Courtney herself suggests a bit later on, her idea basically makes rational action (which I think is what she means by ‘logic’) inescapable. It’s almost analytic: of course every choice I make is rational, because she basically defines ‘rational’ as ‘in line with my desires right now’. Turning down a party invitation simply because I don’t feel like accepting it is rational in this way: I have a desire not to go to the party, and turning down the invitation meets that desire, so all’s well and good. And, according to this interpretation, it doesn’t matter if maybe going to the party might have benefited me because I might have enjoyed it or met some fun people or eaten some nice food… what matters is that right now my desire is not to go, so turning down the invitation is the rational thing to do for me. (If I choose something, I choose it!)

But this is a bit weird. When I receive the party invitation, I might sit there and think: ‘Wow, that sounds like a great party! I really like all the people who’re going, and the host always plays such great music, and the food’s always spot on, and the drinks are all free, and there’s that girl whose pants I’ve been trying to get into, and there’s a good chance I might meet my future employer! And I had nothing else planned for tonight except watching Simpsons repeats and cutting my toenails, both of which I really hate!’. But here’s the thing: if I then choose to say no anyway, just because I feel like it, that would still count as rational in Courtney’s sense.

In other words, it still counts as rational if I consciously choose to give greater weight to my passing whim to do X than to overwhelming weight of evidence that it would be in my interests to do Y. And in fact, since we’re defining ‘rational’ as ‘in line with my desires right now’, and since we include in my desires any inclination on which I choose to act, then it becomes completely impossible by definition for me ever to act irrationally.

In a way this makes sense. As Courtney says, “Why on earth would you want to be illogical, anyway? How could it be good for anyone?”. But in another way, it makes rationality a not-very-useful concept. For one thing, it makes it pointless for me to ask the retrospective question ‘Was that decision a rational one?’. And for another thing, it undermines the comparison that Courtney wants to go on to make with mental health issues. The idea here, if I understand her correctly, is that mental illness is distinctive because it alone makes you choose irrationally:

The only thing that makes you do things that truly defy logic is mental illness. It is mental illness that would have you decline an invitation that you wanted to take up and would do you good – in other words, lead you to respond to situations in a manner that’s only rational within the boundaries of your illness. Each person with a mental illness gets infected with their own bizarre system of logic, at odds with the real world.

There’s a lot of truth in this. I recognise, vividly, that “bizarre system of logic” which works its way into the mind and rewrites perceptions and values. But I can’t quite get my head round how this is supposed to fit with the idea of rationality from a moment ago. If I have some disordered false beliefs, such as the belief that I’m worthless and other people are the only ones of value, then it seems just as rational (in the sense we’ve been using) for me to act on those disordered beliefs as on any other motivations. Yes, acting on a false belief isn’t going to be in my long-term interests, but then neither is rejecting an invitation to an enjoyable and useful party for no reason other than passing whim, and that didn’t stop it counting as rational a moment ago.

(By the way, talking about declining an invitation “that you wanted to take up” muddies the waters a little, doesn’t it? What do we mean by “wanted”? In some sense I can’t possibly want to take it up, or else I wouldn’t be declining it!)

So I’m not sure that I go along with Courtney’s account of what makes mental illness stand out. The problem is that defining ‘rational’ as ‘in line with my desires right now’ seems too broad to allow that distinction: it includes desires that come from disordered ways of thinking just as much as desires that come from passing whims. Both are clearly against my long-term interests, as I’m fully aware even as I make the choice, but in line with my current desires.

I’m no mental health expert, but it seems to me that there’s a different way of making the distinction, and Courtney touches on it when she talks about a “bizarre system of logic”. I suggest that the difference between what we might call a ‘harmlessly irrational’ way of thinking (such as might make me reject an invitation to something I would find useful and enjoyable) and a more serious one that’s characteristic of mental illness is that the latter is systematic. It’s not simply a passing whim, which Courtney’s “psychological wellbeing practitioners” were so keen to point out we all have a right to indulge if we want. It’s a consistent set of false beliefs based on a skewed interpretation of a principle or pattern of experience. And recognising this difference is an important first step towards deciding how to treat it — which, as Courtney points out, is already a complex, non-optimal business without having wellbeing practitioners reminding us that we’re all entitled to act irrationally if we like.

We can define words like ‘rationality’ and ‘logic’ however we like, of course — they’re only words. But I think there’s value in defining ‘rational’ not just as ‘in line with my desires right now’ — instead as something like ‘in line with my acknowledged long-term interests’. That does make it useful to ask a question like ‘Was that decision a rational one?’. And it also makes it possible to draw distinctions between what we might call ‘harmlessly irrational’ choices, like not going to a party just because you don’t feel like it, and the more serious ones, which can be based on disordered thinking of the type Courtney so eloquently describes.

When I worked in politics, my boss used to jokingly refer to this second group as the ‘H block’, since their most vociferous spokespeople were Chris Heaton-Harris, Roger Helmer, and the extraordinary Dan Hannan. (This latter character was in the news last year when he went over to the US and gave interviews, ostensibly as the voice of mainstream Britain, in which he instructed Americans in the evils of our “unpopular” NHS and recommended that they should reject Obama’s healthcare reforms lest they get left with an equally unpopular system. I kid you not.)

Sadly, the H-block has broken up somewhat in recent years, as some of its members have moved on to other things. But Roger Helmer is still there in the European Parliament, standing up for neocon europhobes everywhere. And, unsurprisingly, I have never once agreed with a single one of Mr Helmer’s political pronouncements (plus he was unnecessarily rude to me once in a bar in Strasbourg, which does tend to put one’s back up a little).

But today, to my mild astonishment, I find myself not only agreeing with him, but actively sympathising with him — and on the unlikely subject, moreover, of rape.

Last week, the Left’s favourite Tory, Ken Clarke, made some ill-advised observations about the sentencing of rape offenders during a radio interview on the BBC’s Today programme. His point, essentially, was that when it comes to sentencing there are different kinds of rape. There’s what we think of as ‘classic’ violent rape, where a woman is attacked and forced to have sex against her will. There’s so-called ‘date rape’, where two people are in bed together (in a relationship or otherwise), one of them decides at the last minute that they don’t want to have sex, and the other one goes ahead anyway. And then there’s statutory rape, where both partners are actually consenting the whole time, but because one of them is below the legal age of consent for sex, the law does not regard their consent as valid.

The outcry against Mr Clarke’s remarks was predictable. Rape is rape! Rape is always wrong! But of course, if you listen to the interview, nothing he said contradicts any of that. He was talking about sentencing, not conviction. He agrees that rape is rape and rape is always wrong. He simply thinks that the punishment for being convicted of rape should be decided based on the details of each case. Just as burglary is always burglary but the sentence varies with the circumstances, so rape is always rape but the sentence should vary with the circumstances. And, of course, it does. That’s why we appoint judges.

Ken Clarke’s mistake was not in his observations, which seem to me to be accurate and defensible, but in the fact that he made them on national radio. He’s been around long enough to know what to expect. Then again, perhaps he did know full well what he was doing, and decided to do it anyway, so as to get the issues out into the public domain — in which case, he took a political hit for the cause of rational discussion, and good for him.

Anyway. Whatever the motives, he was vilified. But then along came Roger Helmer, fringe Tory MEP, and wrote a blog entry defending him. Mr Helmer:

It’s pretty unusual to find me coming to the defence of Ken Clarke. But I think he’s had very unfair treatment from the media over his recent comments. So far as I can see, while agreeing that rape is always wrong, never defensible, that NO means NO (add your own cliché), he is also saying that the term rape covers a variety of circumstances and motivations and degrees of culpability, and that sentencing policy should reflect that. Surely this proposition is so self-evident, that it is difficult to see what all the fuss is about.

So far, so good. But Mr Helmer went further:

Let me make another point which will certainly get me vilified, but which I think is important to make: while in the first case [classic rape], the blame is squarely on the perpetrator and does not attach to the victim, in the second case [date rape between boyfriend and girlfriend] the victim surely shares a part of the responsibility, if only for establishing reasonable expectations in her boyfriend’s mind.

According to the Northamptonshire local media, responses to these further remarks have been even stronger. Comments on the web version of this newspaper report are representative:

What does this moron have to do to be sacked by the Conservative Party?! I have just had a look on his wikipedia page and there doesn’t seem to be a single group of people he hasn’t offended. He’s like that nutty old man ranting and raving at the back of the bus…

The man is a tool & laughing all the way to the bank on the Euro gravy train. I wonder if he would feel it partly his wifes fault if she was raped and beaten for doing no more than walking to her car one evening. This tool is totally out of touch with reality and should keep his mouth shut and his inane thoughts to himself!

This is an outrageous comment from a senior Conservative politician. There are no categories of rape. Rape is rape. This kind of attitude towards women will only discourage them from coming forward and reporting this hideous crime.

Well, I’ve already said that I think the distinction between different types of rape is useful and right when it comes to sentencing, even if it isn’t useful when it comes to determining guilt — just as, for any crime, judges are supposed to consider the precise details of the crime when they pass sentence. In this, both Mr Helmer and I are simply agreeing with Mr Clarke.

But what about the further claim that in some cases the rape victim shares some responsibility for the offence? This is a trickier one because there is the legitimate point that rape victims are already often reluctant enough to come forward and tell someone what happened, especially when the consequence for them is likely to be further protracted trauma followed by a fairly low probability of conviction. Anything we do to make this even less likely — such as publishing Helmer-type comments — risk making it worse.

That’s an important pragmatic issue, and I’ll come back to it in a second. First, the issue of principle. To start with, set aside the specific situation that Mr Helmer describes, and consider the more general question: is it ever possible for a rape victim to share any degree of responsibility for what happens?

It seems to me that we can invent extreme hypothetical scenarios in which it would be hard to deny that some responsibility can be ascribed to the victim. Consider, for instance, a situation where a couple are both horny as hell. Suppose the woman says, “I want to have sex with you, I want you to fuck me right now”. They go to bed, they race through foreplay, she gives every indication of enjoying every minute of it and wanting to go all the way, repeating her intentions at frequent intervals. But at the last possible moment, literally at the instant before penetration, she changes her mind and says “Stop!”.

Now suppose the man carries on. What can we say about the resulting situation? Is it legally rape? Yes, because she withdrew consent. Is it morally wrong? Yes, for the same reason. Ought the man to be convicted if it comes to court? Yes, for sure. Does the victim deserve to be raped? No, not at all — nobody deserves to be raped, ever. Did the man have to carry on, was it inevitable? No, unless he has psychological issues we don’t know about.

But here’s the crucial question for this discussion: does the victim bear any responsibility at all for the outcome? It seems to me hard to avoid the answer ‘yes’. She bears more responsibility, for instance, than the woman who is attacked and raped by a stranger in an alley, or who plays around with her partner because she trusts him and then finds that trust abused when he has sex with her against her will. Why? Because she deliberately created a situation where it was extraordinarily difficult for her partner to interpret her actions as anything but enthusiastic consent, and then withdrew that consent very late.

I shouldn’t have to add this caveat again, but reading the comments on Mr Helmer’s blog, I suspect I do: all my observations above are consistent with my view (and Mr Helmer’s, and Mr Clarke’s) that rape is rape, rape is always wrong, and the perpetrators deserve to be convicted. And I most emphatically do not think that the victim deserves to be raped, no matter what the preceding circumstances. If you think that I am saying these things, then you are not ascribing to me views that I do not hold, and confusing guilt with responsibility. I am discussing the separate question of whether it’s possible for the victim to bear any responsibility whatsoever — a small amount, in relation to the responsibility borne by the rapist — in some carefully-defined hypothetical circumstances.

Perhaps some people disagree with my view even in the hypothetical case I’ve described. Perhaps there is a viable view that, simply by withdrawing consent, the victim absolves herself (or indeed himself) of any responsibility whatsoever, no matter what the preceding circumstances. If this is a viable view, then I’d like to hear the defence of it, because I find it difficult to understand. And if you hold this view, then you should be aware that you think the crime of rape should be unique among all crimes on the books, in that the degree of responsibility ascribed to the perpetrator, and the sentence he receives, should be insensitive to the circumstances in which the crime took place. I’d be interested to know why you think this should be the case.

(And one further question. If you think that the victim bears no responsibility at all even in the circumstance I described above, would you continue to think that even if the victim had planned the whole thing from the start in order to entrap the man in a rape charge? If not, what’s the difference?)

So much for the question of principle. If it’s possible to invent an extreme scenario in which the victim bears at least a small share of the responsibility for the outcome (caveat caveat caveat), then the question becomes one of where to draw the line. There are thousands of different imaginable rape scenarios, and we need to know what the criteria are for judging when the victim bears responsibility and when not. Mr Helmer alludes to a situation where the woman creates “reasonable expectations”. Many commenters on his post take issue with this characterisation, and I can see their point. But the question then becomes: what criteria would you prefer?

I don’t know the right answer to that question, but I do know that there must be an answer unless you believe that there is no conceivable scenario when any responsibility is shared.

Finally, the practical question. Might comments like Mr Clarke’s or Mr Helmer’s discourage rape victims from coming forward, or increase their sufferings? I can see that they might, and if so, that would be a tragedy, because far too few rapes are successfully prosecuted as it is, and rape victims already have plenty of undeserved trauma to deal with.

But there’s a difficulty here, because if you also believe that their comments are broadly correct, then you have a tension: on the one hand, you don’t want to cause extra suffering, but on the other hand, you want the truth to be told and that truth to be reflected in public policy. And few people would want to say that any subject, no matter how right and important, ought not to be discussed if it might cause harm to rape victims.

Consider an analogy: the presumption of innocence. This is a cornerstone of English law and it applies to people accused of rape just as much as to those accused of other crimes. Among its many positive effects is the fact that it puts the burden of proof on the accuser. But this fact surely must significantly deter rape victims from coming forward, because it means they’ll have to go through a long, very unpleasant and quite possibly futile legal ordeal.

So the presumption of innocence (and its consequences) is a key factor in increasing the trauma suffered by rape victims. But should we therefore conclude that anyone who points out that the presumption of innocence applies in rape trials is acting unwisely and should shut up for fear of causing further distress to rape victims? Absolutely not, because the presumption of innocence is right and important, and rape victims as much as the rest of us deserve to be told about it and the consequences it will have for them. And if we believe, as I do, that many of the observations made by Mr Clarke and Mr Helmer are also right and important, then to try and stifle them simply because they have unfortunate consequences for people who are already suffering greatly would be a mistake. Like it or not (and I for one am pleased about it), our legal system does admit of shades of grey when it comes to culpability and sentencing, and rape victims as much as the rest of us deserve to be made aware of this.

Lord Ashdown might be right to say that making a personal attack on Nick Clegg would be gutter politics. But is this a personal attack on Nick Clegg? I’m not so sure. It doesn’t actually say anything bad about him — it simply says that AV would give him the power to choose the government. Yes, this bald claim is open to misinterpretation, but that’s not to say it’s false.

The underlying message of the poster is this: by increasing the representation of smaller parties relative to the larger ones, a proportional system is less likely to deliver an absolute majority in Parliament. But since an absolute majority in Parliament is what’s needed to choose a government in this country, the parties are going to have to decide how to arrange themselves after the election is concluded, with the result that a small party (a potential junior coalition partner) has a lot of power to choose which large party gets to form the government. If the Lib Dems were the third party, Nick Clegg would be kingmaker, as he was in the general election last year.

The poster might be tendentious and a bit underhand. But I’d say it’s no worse than the equally annoying approach taken by the Yes campaign.

It’s not the end of the world, though. Because of the upcoming referendum in the UK, this is once again a hot topic, and so I get an excuse to revisit my old blog entry, think things through more carefully, distill the various arguments down to their pure, bare essentials, and write something altogether sleeker and more beautiful.

Here it is, then, my pearl of wisdom on the AV referendum: I have no idea which way to vote.

The problem is this. I think that a proportional system is clearly a good thing for legislative elections. But I think it is also clearly a bad thing for executive elections. And the difficulty is that, in the UK, our general elections are both. When we vote for MPs, we’re voting not only for our legislature (the House of Commons), but also for our executive (the government). So I don’t know whether to vote yes or no.

If we were just voting for our legislature, it would be easy. How could we not want the makeup of our elected chamber to match the proportion of votes cast? How could anyone defend a system which perpetuates a combative two-party system and delivers strong majorities to parties that win a minority vote share? And I won’t go into the detail here, but I disagree with most of the objections being raised against proportional voting in the debate at the moment, and those that I don’t disagree with I think are substantially outweighed by the clear advantages. End of.

But here’s the thing. While it’s possible to translate votes into seats in the Commons in a transparent and direct way (just add up each party’s share of the vote and give them a proportional share of the seats), it is impossible to translate votes into a government in the same transparent and direct way. A government is a single unit. It does not debate and vote on legislation, it wields executive power.

(You could put it another way, which raises different issues but essentially boils down to the same thing. What we want out of our legislature is balance, negotiation, compromise, plurality. What we want out of our executive is clarity, directness, unity, strength. Proportional voting generally delivers the former, but rarely the latter.)

Now, we have a sub-optimal system in the UK: our government is chosen by our parliament. (Skip the details about the role of Queen.) So, essentially, our legislature does double duty as an electoral college for our executive. This has several notable consequences, including the fact that the government of the day is pretty much guaranteed a parliamentary majority, because (special cases aside) it wouldn’t be the government if it didn’t have one.

Another consequence is that we have to take both roles, legislature and executive, into account when we elect our MPs — and, significantly for the current debate, when we decide how to elect them. Specifically:

• If we use a proportional system, we get the good result that our legislature directly reflects the voting patterns of the electorate. But we get the bad result that the electoral college which chooses our executive is unlikely to contain an overall majority. Result: a substantial period of negotiation by politicians intervenes between each election and government, during which manifesto commitments are debated, politics is played and compromises are made. The electorate has no control over this process; it’s essentially undemocratic.
• If we use a first-past-the-post system, we get the good result that our electoral college will almost always deliver a clear majority and thus we can see how our voting directly results in a government, with no intervening period of undemocratic negotiation. (The present coalition arrangement is a rare exception.) But we get the bad result that our legislature’s makeup is likely very different from the proportion of votes cast, with all the undesirable wrinkles and anomalies that generates.

I see three possible solutions to this problem, two of which are absurd.

1. Rewrite our constitution so that we directly elect our executive (presidency?) separately from our legislature. Use a proportional system for one and a non-proportional one for the other. This is absurd.
2. Keep the current arrangement, but switch to a proportional system, and make it clear to the electorate that it is not within our power to directly elect our own government. Ban all discussions of government manifestos and all executive-related electioneering during campaigns. This is also absurd.
3. Take things as they are and judge which is the least bad solution: a non-proportionally-elected legislature or an indirectly elected executive.

Option 3 is what’s on the table for the upcoming referendum, of course. And I have no idea right now how to decide which is the least bad of the two options.


]]> http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/proportional-representation-take-2/feed/ 2 doctorlucky vote http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/what-the-heck-are-ramparts/ http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/what-the-heck-are-ramparts/#comments Mon, 07 Feb 2011 09:39:27 +0000 Doctor Lucky http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/?p=311 ]]> From Dave Barry via Language Log:

Q-What is the correct way to spell words?

A-English spelling is unusual because our language is a rich verbal tapestry woven together from the tongues of the Greeks, the Latins, the Angles, the Klaxtons, the Celtics, the 76ers and many other ancient peoples, all of whom had big drinking problems. Look at the spelling they arrived at for “colonel” (which is, of course, actually pronounced “lieutenant”); or “hors d`oeuvres” or “Cyndi Lauper.” It is no wonder that young people today have so much trouble learning to spell: Study after study shows that young people today have the intelligence of Brillo. This is why it`s so important that we old folks teach them the old reliable spelling rule that we learned as children, namely:

‘I’ before ‘C,’
Or when followed by ‘T,’
O’er the ramparts we watched,
Not excluding joint taxpayers filing singly.

EXCEPTION: “Suzi`s All-Nite E-Z Drive-Thru Donut Shoppe.”

Q-What the heck ARE “ramparts,” anyway?

A-They are parts of a ram, and they were considered a great delicacy in those days. People used to watch o’er them.


]]> http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/what-the-heck-are-ramparts/feed/ 0 doctorlucky http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/counselling-diary-week-2/ http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/counselling-diary-week-2/#comments Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:06:00 +0000 Doctor Lucky http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/?p=305 ]]> I thoroughly enjoyed this week’s session. After the first week, which was mostly admin and introduction, we got stuck into some basic skills practice.

We didn’t do anything mind-blowingly new or dazzlingly unexpected. We just did a series of exercises, in pairs, about listening skills:


• we took it in turns to talk and listen to each other — to observe the difficulties that arise when you’re trying to do structured listening rather than just conversation
• we talked to our partners back-to-back and without them responding at all — to show how difficult it is to keep focus without feedback from the listener
• we talked face-to-face, but with the listener deliberately making things difficult by doing all the wrong body language — to show how distracting it is when someone does that
• finally, we practised good active listening technique

The most difficult part, I found, was preventing the whole thing from descending into casual conversation. The tutor suggested that the ideal ratio for a counselling ‘conversation’ was for the counsellor (the ‘helper’, ick) to do about 20% of the talking and the person being counselled (the ‘helpee’, ick again) to do about 80%. That sounds fine in theory, but I found it surprisingly hard to maintain in practice, and I only felt slightly better at it by the end of the class than I did at the beginning. I guess I need more practice.

Basically, the issue was that maintaining that 80:20 ratio felt very unnatural. It didn’t feel like a smooth, natural conversation. It felt forced and inauthentic. And this is something that’s niggled me about counselling ever since I started thinking about it, years ago: to what extent should it feel natural?

My first instinct is that it should feel as natural as possible without compromising its usefulness. This is just based on how I think I would feel if I went for counselling. I’d want to feel like I was comfortable, having an open and relaxed chat, I wouldn’t want the counsellor to be constantly highlighting to me the fact that this was a professional encounter and I ‘needed help’. I’d want him or her (let’s say ‘him’, for the sake of grammar!) to be doing his best to make the conversation feel natural. If he routinely withheld his own opinion, or asked an obviously disproportionate number of open questions, or only contributed 20% of the speaking, or insisted on reflecting my own words back at me all the time, I think I’d start to feel uncomfortable. Not to mention using horrible counselling clichés like “And how does that make you feel?”. I’m pretty sure I’d run a mile if a counsellor ever said that to me. (Then again, I’m sure that different people need different things out of counselling. Perhaps there are some people who would hear “And how does that make you feel?” and not think anything of it. I might have an unusually high sensitivity to that kind of thing.)

But obviously there’s a tension here, because at the end of the day, a counselling session is a professional encounter, and there are certain elements that make it different from an ordinary conversation. Just off the top of my head, these include:

• I’m paying
• I’m there because I decided to be
• the guy I’m talking to is a trained professional doing his job
• there’s a time limit on our conversation
• there are certain rules and practices related to confidentiality that apply

…and so on. So I guess the difficulty is reconciling the obvious fact that this is a stilted environment with the need to not make it feel like a stilted environment. Maybe that’s one of the counsellor’s key skills. If so, I hope it’s one I can learn.


]]> http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/counselling-diary-week-2/feed/ 0 doctorlucky http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/counselling-diary-week-1/ http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/counselling-diary-week-1/#comments Sun, 16 Jan 2011 17:36:00 +0000 Doctor Lucky http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/?p=297 ]]> I’ve just started a 12-week course at a nearby college which will hopefully lead to a Level 2 award in counselling skills. The main part of my assessment for the course is a weekly ‘reflective journal’ which is supposed to track my thoughts and feelings over the duration of the course, including what I enjoy, what I find difficult, and if there are things that concern or puzzle me. Since I already have a blog which hardly anyone reads (and which I usually ignore myself for most of the year), I reckon I may as well use this to record my thoughts.

So it’s week 1 of the course. The session last Tuesday was introductory and mostly pretty straightforward. The group met (about a dozen of us), chatted to each other, looked at some very brief introductory definitions related to counselling, and went away again. The structure of the course seems pretty vague — I was expecting a schema showing what we’d be looking at each week, but no such schema was forthcoming, and in fact when someone asked for some detail on what we’d be covering, the reply was equally vague, listing only a couple of very general areas plus “lots of practice”. Oh well, I suppose I don’t much mind. There’s no particular reason why I’d need to know in advance what to expect.

We were given a little slip of paper with some suggestions for this journal entry. One of these was ‘Reflect on your decision to start a Counselling course at this time in your life’, which I suppose is counselling-speak for ‘What are you doing here?’. One thing that struck me during the first session was the variety of different answers people gave to that question. Some of the group work in roles where they interact with vulnerable people a lot, so counselling skills will be professionally beneficial. Others are thinking about a career change and wondering if counselling is for them.

I don’t have anything quite as specific to point to — I’ve been thinking about learning about counselling for about four years, ever since a trainer in a previous job suggested that I might be good at it — and I guess this is the first time since then that I’ve had the money, the spare time and the motivation all in one go! But I don’t particularly intend to change careers. I guess I’m doing the course partly because I hope I’ll gain some practical skills, or improve any I already have, and partly because I’m interested in exactly what ‘proper counselling’ (rather than just ‘chatting nicely to people’) actually involves. I’d like to put it in some more structured theoretical context.

Having said that, in the first session our tutor seemed very keen to reassure everyone that one thing the course wouldn’t do would be to put anything in a structured theoretical context! It wouldn’t be too academic, it wouldn’t involve learning theories, it was going to be mostly about practical skills and so on. I get the impression that she often teaches people for whom the idea of studying and writing (or even sitting in a classroom!) can cause some anxiety. I guess some people in the group might not have done much classroom-type education since their school days, so it’s fair enough to try and reassure them in that way. I guess I’m lucky because I do quite a lot of work in universities, including some small-group teaching, so sitting and studying is nothing new to me; I’m not expecting to be particularly fazed by the idea of being on a course, or of having to write a weekly reflective journal. I spend most of my working life writing stuff. It’s no big deal. If anything, I’d have been happier if there was less writing and more practical sessions, purely because I was hoping to get away from having to write all the time — but that may yet prove to be the case. We’ll see.

By the way, weird coincidence of the week: there’s only one man in the group apart from me, and he turned out to come from Ripponden in West Yorkshire, very close to the village where I grew up. His brother was in the year above me at secondary school! Bizarre!


]]> http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/counselling-diary-week-1/feed/ 1 doctorlucky http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/on-what-the-dictionary-calls-lexicography/ http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/on-what-the-dictionary-calls-lexicography/#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:24:35 +0000 Doctor Lucky http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/?p=276 ]]> About a month ago, I exchanged a couple of emails with a friend of mine on the subject of dictionaries — more specifically, what kinds of stuff ought to be in them.

Our discussion started when my friend disagreed with parts of a blog post from the Language Log website by Geoff Nunberg, a linguist at UC Berkeley. The main point of disagreement was over Nunberg’s claim that dictionaries are right to act as sources of lexical authority:

You could take this all, of course, as just one more confirmation of the public’s failure to understand that the dictionary is simply “a record of the language”, as lexicographers have always liked to say. But dictionaries never record the language indiscriminately. … That is, it’s the business of the dictionary to confer legitimacy on some sources and some usages and not on others. If it didn’t, it would fail its readers.

Now, I have some limited training in linguistics, although far less than either Professor Nunberg or my friend. So the debate about whether dictionaries should be prescriptive or descriptive is not new to me. I know enough to recognise, at least, that this is one of those interesting areas where the (moderately) settled opinion of practising academic experts is completely at odds with the general consensus of non-academics on the same subject. But since I haven’t really got a settled opinion of my own, I’ve decided to try and invent one here.

The debate is basically this. Should we regard dictionaries as authoritative prescribers of language usage (the ‘prescriptivist’ view), or should we regard them more simply as neutral recorders of it (the ‘descriptivist’ view)? Or, to put the same question from another perspective, what should the job of dictionary-writers be: to judge how language ought to be used, or just to observe and describe how it is in fact used?

Of course, the question would make no sense without pre-existing ideas of ‘right and wrong’ when it comes to language. But we have those in spades. We have concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ grammar, ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ phrases, ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ words, and so on. Institutionally speaking, the various world varieties of English are relatively light-touch on the ‘enforcement’ side — we Brits have the OED and there are equivalents in other speech communities, but there’s no formal political influence on the language, at least in Britain; we have nothing like the Académie Francaise, and the idea of a British parallel to the legally-sanctioned German spelling reform of 1998 seems slightly bizarre. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have normative attitudes to our language; at best it means that they are a little more populist.

And this idea of ‘good and bad language’ is what worries linguists, including my friend. And when you think about it, it is a rather strange idea. Words are just words. Language is just language. There’s nothing intrinsically less morally sound about using a phrase like ‘I ain’t', say, compared to ‘I’m not’; how could there be? They’re just two different collections of letters (phonemes, morphemes, whatever). At best, the ‘rules’ of usage that so exercise prescriptivists have no more moral force than the arbitrary codes of Victorian etiquette — devoid of intrinsic value, they have only the value that we, the interlocutors, choose to assign them.

Plus, of course, there’s the problem that ascribing moral worth to some forms (‘I’m not’) and not others (‘I ain’t') is not, itself, a morally neutral thing to do, because it empowers users of a particular dialect (the ‘standard’) and disempowers users of others. Arbitrary rules are all very well, but they shouldn’t be allowed to influence people’s genuine life chances.

This kind of argument strongly suggests a descriptivist approach to lexicography. If there’s no absolute right and wrong about language, just usage, then a dictionary’s job can’t be to assume a position of authority — it can only be to record said usage. And this is the position that my friend takes. He provided me with a couple of pages from an unpublished book of his, but they were liberally labelled with “proofs not for distribution”, so I won’t quote him directly to be on the safe side. He does, however, quote Ambrose Bierce with approval:

For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be regarded ‘as one having authority’, whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law.

So far, so good, but there’s a worry here. The analogy with Victorian etiquette is a suggestive one. Yes, from a modern perspective many of the rules of etiquette were obviously arbitrary — if breaking them was a bad thing to do, this was simply because other people in society regarded it as a bad thing to do. (In fact I’m sure we have equivalent arbitrary rules today, though I’d hope we have a few fewer than Victorian high society.)

Nonetheless, the fact was that those rules of etiquette existed, and those who used them were placed at an advantage in relevant situations, and those who were ignorant of them were placed at a disadvantage. And this is an important point when we come to consider modern language usage. Linguists, even the most liberal of them, are happy to talk about appropriateness: they point out that every competent English speaker is an expert in subtly (often unconsciously) modifying his or her speech to accommodate different situations. Plenty of gentle sketch show comedy, especially from the seventies and eighties, plays on our universal understanding that you wouldn’t use East End street slang in an audience with the Queen, just as you wouldn’t use formal RP in a Bradford pub. Every speech community has its ‘prestigious’ varieties of spoken and written language.

Notice that we can say all this without conferring any moral value on certain varieties over and above others — and here’s where I think excessive descriptivism about language can too easily miss the point. We don’t need to claim that the man who uses street slang in talking to the Queen is making a moral mistake, or is somehow inferior. (How could he be? Words are just words, blah blah.) But we can still point out that he is doing something bad in a practical sense. Ignoring the rules of linguistic etiquette puts him at a disadvantage. In the same way, using inappropriate language in a job interview or when meeting your future mother-in-law for the first time, might disadvantage you.

Now, if only there was some way you could learn which linguistic forms are appropriate in formal circumstances, and which to avoid! What you need is a guide to language etiquette! Hey, someone ought to write a nice helpful book which lists lots of approved, standardised English words in alphabetical order…

All right, I’m slipped into sarcasm. But my basic thought is this. No dictionary is completely comprehensive (even if modern ‘living’ dictionaries come closer than the traditional kind). Every dictionary — certainly every tabletop dictionary — necessarily excludes far more than it includes, for the simple practical reason that language is very big and books are very small. So what’s at issue when we argue about how lexicographers should work is basically the principle by which decisions are taken about what goes in and what stays out. And it strikes me that, while there’s plenty of space for dictionaries whose guiding principle is democratic (‘only widely-used words go in’), there’s also plenty of space for dictionaries whose guiding principle is to describe one particular variety of the language and not others. And one of the most useful varieties to describe is the one that (like it or not) carries prestige in our speech community, the variety which we use in job interviews and news broadcasts and audiences with the Queen. That’s not prescriptivism in the ‘bad’ linguistic sense — so it doesn’t make those dictionaries evil. In fact, it makes them useful to society. It is, I suppose, selectively descriptive.

Democracy is not anarchy. In a democracy, authority is legitimately conferred on some people to tell the rest of us what to do. Or, to use a better analogy, appointing judges and giving them power over their peers is not an evil practice. A good judge doesn’t try to arrest legal progress, which would be futile, but she does have authority to instruct others on what’s acceptable and what’s not in the state in which she has jurisdiction. So it is with dictionaries. If a dictionary identifies some (morally arbitrary) linguistic usages as prestigious and others as not, that is not an evil practice. It’s a useful one — so long as we understand it.

Thus far, I haven’t quite been describing prescriptivism — but then, neither was Nunberg when he wrote:

When it comes to the interesting or important words, that is, the dictionary is never a record of ‘the language’, but only of the way it’s used by a certain set of its speakers. That set changes from one word to the next, of course: the people whose usage is authoritative in defining ironic or repudiate aren’t the ones you’d go to to find out the meanings of annuity, prefix, or bling, and it’s an important part of the lexicographer’s job to link words with their proper authorities and subdiscourses.

My position up till here, and Nunberg’s as I read it, is still one of descriptivism, albeit an unusual kind, because (we say) a dictionary doesn’t prescribe the level of prestige possessed by particular forms, it simply supplies a useful description of that level of prestige. Really, that ought to be grist to the descriptivist’s mill, and perhaps my friend might be persuaded to agree — at least in the broad sweep of the argument, if not in the details.

But actually I think things can be pushed a little further, and here’s something that an out-and-out descriptivist will surely recoil from. It seems to me that the process by which linguistic forms gain prestige is to some extent circular. It’s true in general that usage determines what’s prestigious and what isn’t — as Bierce was at pains to point out, dictionaries can no more arrest change in their languages than a judge can arrest legislative progress in her country. But, if you have a society where people recognise that dictionaries are good recorders of arbitrarily prestigious forms of language, then they will (reasonably) come to regard any word they find in the dictionary as prestigious. And then it’s only a small step to allowing dictionary-makers to choose forms and make them prestigious, and suddenly your dictionary is not just a descriptive record of the language but a prescriptive authority. When that happens, dictionaries do in fact determine usage (in a limited way) as well as just describing it — just as judges do in fact make law (in a limited way) as well as just applying it.

And I suppose that’s how the day comes when someone points to a dictionary and says, ‘Look! This proves that the word I’m using is ‘correct’ — it’s in the dictionary!’. And I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with this either, so long as everyone understands the meaning of those scare-quotes around ‘correct’. If we remember that they mean ‘an authorised part of a pattern of usage that’s been arbitrarily assigned prestige by society and recorded in the dictionary because of the practical value that such arbitrary prestige confers on its users’, then all is well and good. But if we forget, and instead imagine that they mean ‘more morally worthy than other forms’, then something’s gone wrong.


]]> http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/on-what-the-dictionary-calls-lexicography/feed/ 0 doctorlucky Dictionary http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/red-letter-day/ http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/red-letter-day/#comments Wed, 13 Oct 2010 06:22:12 +0000 Doctor Lucky http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/?p=270 ]]> Yesterday I received three pieces of post that made me very happy.

The first was a lovely letter from a friend which reassured me about some issues that had been bothering me. The second was a DVD of Poirot season 12. And the third was this exchange of emails…


Christmas dinner (mwaa ha ha ha haaaaa)

From Hannah, To Choir
Betsy, I’ve been in touch with the Rushcart Inn as discussed and booked our Christmas meal on Saturday 27th November, at 7pm – Bob’ll try and give us a space on our own again but he has moved things around a bit and ‘done a bit of a refurb.’ (It’s the Alma all over again…)

Anyway, at the risk of making Pete groan loud enough for me to hear him in Regent Street, Bob would like our menu choices by the beginning of November if possible. The choices are pretty much the same as last year, but…

Melon with strawberries and grapes
Crispy garlic mushrooms
Vegetable soup

Roast turkey
Roast beef
Panfried salmon (extra £2)
Cheese and broccoli bake

Christmas pudding
Homemade trifle
Cheesecake

Three courses comes to £15.95 a head (plus the supplement for salmon) but obviously if anyone just wants a course off the normal menu, I’m sure that will be fine (and cheaper, obviously!)

I’ll send the choices again in a few weeks so don’t worry about responding straight away, unless you want to!

Hannah xx

From Pete, To Choir
I can see it might be useful for him to know he needs to prepare extras of whatever we order, but surely he only needs to know a few hours in advance? I can’t be the only one who thinks a month’s notice is bordering on OCD..

More importantly though: ooo – Trifle!

From Me, To Choir
What I don’t get is why Pete minds at all! I mean, from my point of view it would be good if I could decide EVERY meal a month in advance, forget, and then turn up and get a pleasant surprise each time. I much prefer the low-stakes task of choosing food I’m generally going to enjoy, to the high-stakes task of trying to figure out what I fancy RIGHT NOW. It’s like having someone choose your meals for you, only with the added bonus of that person also being you!

From Pete, To Choir
Aside from the obvious downsides of taking sponteneity out of the equation, planning your food in advance like this spoils your enjoyment.

The Standard Restaurant Food Ordering Model:
Imagine you’ve just spent a very productive 20 minutes gorging yourself on an enourmous roast (or similar large dish). When asked “would you like to see the dessert menu?” your immediate reaction is something along the lines of “I couldn’t fit anything else in”, but then you realise there might be a banoffee pie option (obviously king, queen and ace of puddings), so you say you’ll have a look at the menu just in case. Whereupon your eyes spy the trifle and you quickly order and devour said pudding.

The Ordering In Advance Model:
You’re halfway through your enormous roast, thinking something along the lines of “brilliant there’s loads of food still left on my plate”, when suddenly you remember you’ve ordered trifle. Panic grips you as you think “oh god I have to make sure I still have room for cream, custard and sherry soaked sponges!” You start running through complex equations in your mind, weighing up quantity and tastiness of the food in front of you and the potential delights of what’s to come, you don’t want to take it easy on the savoury stuff only for the dessert to be a disappointment. Beads of sweat start to appear on your brow and you scan the room to see if you can spot a trifle on any of the neighbouring tables. Eventually you decide to play the percentages and leave a reasonable chunk of room for afters. Then disaster strikes and you realise all is lost: jelly trifle.

From Sarah, To Choir
Pete- your solution is just to eat, isn’t it? Especially if cake is involved!

Am liking the planning in advance- extra opportunity to think about food and then the surprise when I find out what I have actually ordered too- win-win situation!

From Oli, To Choir
What a thought provoking email correspondence this has turned out to be!

I think this calls for an amalgamation of the two models. Perhaps it would be better to order provisionally in advance and then be allowed, on the day, to change one item on your menu, either for another food item or for what I shall call ‘post pub meal credits’, aka PPMCs. Said credits can then be exchanged for beer, wine, kinder eggs, or even more Christmas crackers. Order is restored to the pub culinary universe and all is well.


]]> http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/red-letter-day/feed/ 0 doctorlucky mailbox http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/what-i-do-3/ http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/what-i-do-3/#comments Tue, 28 Sep 2010 12:37:12 +0000 Doctor Lucky http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/?p=242 ]]> There comes a point in most casual conversations where I’m asked, “So what is it you do?”.

This is a problem.

I can live with the fact that people don’t really know what I study. (Who knows what I did last summer?) After all, I signed up for an MA in philosophy, so I can hardly pretend now that I didn’t know a certain level of head-scratching incomprehensibility would come with the territory. (What? You don’t think it was a good use of time to spend two years worrying about whether we’re living in a computer simulation?) And besides, my MA was only part-time, so I could always just sidestep the whole conversation by not mentioning it.

But that’s not so easy to pull off when it comes to earning my daily bread, because conspicuously I do earn that bread. There’s no getting away from the fact that I do something. That ‘something’ keeps me quite busy, in fact. The difficulty is in saying exactly what it is.


This worry has been niggling at me for a while, but only in a very minor kind of way, because I’ve never been the type of guy who’s bothered about people in general knowing much about me. But yesterday a friend of mine (really quite a close friend, someone who in all modesty I’d like to think knows a fair bit about me) admitted that she didn’t really have much of an idea about what I do. That was a little bit annoying at the time, but on reflection it’s kind of fair enough.

Part of the problem is that what I say I do varies depending on who I’m talking to. That’s because some of my work is freelance, and as a freelancer you never know where your next job will come from — so you have a vested interest in presenting yourself to new people in a way which improves the odds that they might offer you some work at some point in the future. So, depending on the context, I normally pick one of these options:

• I’m a writer.
• I’m a musician.
• I do science communication.
• I work in media.
• I teach.
• I’m a designer.
• I’m, uh, well, I’m a freelancer.

Now, one conspicuous element that all these replies have in common is that they’re annoyingly vague. They’re not like saying “I’m a policeman” or “I’m a mum” or “I’m a trainee funeral director”, where my interlocutor immediately gets a clear image of what I do and can judge whether or not he’s in the least bit interested in continuing the exchange or would rather go and get another sausage roll. If I say “I’m a writer”, he’s virtually compelled by the rules of polite conversation to respond with something like, “Oh really? What do you write?”, and it all goes downhill from there.

OK, but really. What do I do?

I suppose I can come clean and admit that I’m not really a writer; that’s misleading. Yes, I spend a lot of my time writing original prose, but then so do policy advisors and secretaries and judges. I don’t write stories or poems (or rather, on the occasions when I do, nobody pays me for them). But then, I’m not really a musician either; although I do make money from music, it’s rarely from playing an instrument or teaching, and it’s a pretty small share of my income overall. And now I come to think of it, I don’t really do science communication, because that suggests I spend my days reporting to the public (or schools, politicians, whatever) on scientific research, and that isn’t true. Nor do I work in media, unless you count writing two or three press releases a year as a media job. I have to admit that I don’t teach, at least not by any usual standards — I have no education qualifications and I don’t think 8 hours’ contact time three times a year counts as being a teacher. I suppose I do do some design work, but it amounts to such a small percentage of my working week that to call myself a designer is mostly just a vanity. And I’m afraid that even the claim ‘I’m a freelancer’ is suspect, since if you asked the taxman he would point out that nearly all of my income comes from regular full-time employment, taxes and pension paid by my employer.

But maybe if I can’t honestly summarise my so-called career, I can at least describe what foolish people pay me for:

1. I provide communications services for researchers. I suppose this is most like consultancy work. I advise people on how to present scientific research to the public; I design publications and write copy; I write press releases and talk to journalists.
2. I develop websites. I’m no techie — my understanding of code is pretty sketchy, so I don’t delve very far in that direction. Instead, I work on user interface design, specifically figuring out ways to present large amounts of information to casual visitors without it getting stupid. Luckily, I work alongside a technical guy who points out when my ideas make no sense.
3. I conduct ensembles and train singers. These days I mostly work with choirs. I have one regular weekly choir in York and a handful of other groups which meet less often. I’ve also made some extra cash running a choral holiday and directing an annual weekend singing workshop in Norwich.
4. I design and write publications. This has various incarnations, including university brochures and prospectuses, corporate newsletters, and even (recently) rulebooks for board games.
5. I teach ethics to trainee doctors. OK, I admit this is a slightly random one. Three times a year, I teach a short course in media ethics for undergraduate medical students. It’s partly about the mechanics of how the media works, and partly about how that impacts on ethical issues, especially with regard to medical practice and medical research.

And that’s that, I think, except for the occasional toe-dipping into something completely random, which doesn’t really count.

I suppose the difficulty is that there isn’t really a single common thread running through all my work — and that makes it tricky to summarise, and even trickier for friends to remember. Another complication is that I am really poor at keeping my work life and my leisure time separate, to the extent that my friends will quite frequently find me planning murder mystery parties on a Wednesday morning, or conversely updating a university website on a Sunday afternoon.

I guess the long and short of it is that even I don’t really know what I do half the time, which is a mighty stupid situation to be in.


]]> http://remnantsofremnants.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/what-i-do-3/feed/ 0 doctorlucky fun