On Evolution

With the sudden resurfacing of the Hillary Clinton email scandal in connection to an investigation of Anthony Wiener, the polls tightening and the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency seeming all too appallingly possible, I was moved to type into Google the question "Why are Americans so stupid?" Very many articles immediately popped up – other people's stupidity is of interest to many. It sometimes seems that everyone in the States thinks everyone else is stupid. Trump supporters think Hillary supporters are stupid; Hillary supporters think Trump supporters are stupid. Everyone is stupid. So are there any smart people around at all? Well, yes, if we look at it from the liberal point of view. Smart people know the world has been around billions of years and that all its flora and fauna have evolved gradually over time as the result of Darwinian natural selection. Stupid people think the world was created by Jehova over the course of six days in 4004BC.

And yet it is possible for a person to be so smart that he goes over to the stupid camp, at least partway. This is the topic of this post. In it I am going to discuss a logical flaw in the Darwinian Theory of Evolution via Natural Selection and argue that this leaves open the possibility of a more mystical view of the world. I don't know whether my readers will be interested in this argument but I am going to try to share it anyway.

Although literature has always been my first love, when I was school I was very good at biology, especially genetics and Evolution. I didn't just know a lot about these subjects– as an atheist I put all my faith in Darwin, in rationality and science. I read and took on board completelyThe Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. In 2005, at the age of twenty-five, I took a paper in the Philosophy of Science and was first exposed to theorists that sought to refute Darwin, those proposing Intelligent Design and Irreducible Complexity. Michael Behe's theory of Irreducible Complexity is not, by the way, stupid, not unsophisticated, adducing as evidence such things as the flagella of bacteria; naturally, though, I thought Behe's argument must be rubbish. People like Behe, I thought, were fundamentalist Christian apologists, seeking to cast doubt on Darwin's theory in order to justify their own faith and to proselytize to others – I thought Intelligent Design a kind of sophistry. I went to some lengths in an essay at the time to try to show that Darwin's theory was robust enough to withstand Behe's criticism. My faith in Darwinism remained unshaken. As I grew older, even during difficult periods in my life, even though I have thought that we try to explain too much through genetics, I still sustained the sure conviction that Darwin was right. But then in early 2013 everything changed. I had an epiphany. The revelation was so devastating that, that evening, when the flaw in Darwinian Evolution occurred to me, I even hallucinated that the moon, rather than being behind the clouds, was projected onto them.

My argument is complicated. Before I discuss it, I need to remind the reader what Evolution via Natural Selection actually is. Suppose we have a population of organisms, all of the same species. By chance sometimes an individual is born with a small mutation. Almost always this mutation is detrimental but, occasionally, it is advantageous, allowing that individual to live longer and produce more offspring than its rivals. Over time the mutation comes to prevail throughout the whole population and, in this way, the whole species over time gradually changes, incrementally evolves. Mutations are presumably always occurring. This is Darwin's theory in a nutshell. It is so simple as to seem unassailable.

When Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, no-one knew anything about genetics. The double helix structure of DNA was not discovered until 1953 by Watson and Crick. We now know much more than Darwin did about the mechanisms of Evolution. We know that humans have 46 chromosomes, donkeys 62 and horses 64. The offspring of a horse and a donkey, a mule, has 63 chromosomes and is consequently pretty much infertile – an organism needs an even number of chromosomes to produce viable offspring. Different species tend to have different numbers of chromosomes; one way of defining a species is to say that two organisms are of the same species if they can mate and produce viable offspring, something that can only occur if the two organisms share the same number of chromosomes.

The fundament issue is this: how do new species come into being, how does 'speciation', as it known, occur? How can a species with 62 chromosomes evolve into a species with 64? First we need an individual to be born with 64 rather than 62 chromosomes. A mutation of this enormity is incredibly improbable. Note that if an individual is born with only one extra chromosome it will be unable to produce viable offspring: it needs those two extra chromosomes to reproduce. Furthermore, all this extra genetic material has to be beneficial to the survival and procreation of the organism,  in order for the variation to be selected for, in order for the mutation to propagate over time throughout the whole population. The mutation must not only be very large but also be beneficial and this makes is even more incredibly improbable.

We now hit a second snag. Suppose, as we are hypothesizing, an individual is born with 64 chromosomes instead of 62 – suppose a horse is born of two donkeys. With whom can it mate? If the horse mates with one of the donkeys, it will only produce an infertile mule. In order to mate and produce viable offspring, another horse must also have been born at the same time, in the same location, as the one we are considering. These two, call them Adam and Eve, must find each other and mate, and then their offspring must mate (incestuously) with each other. Only in this way can the new species appear. So we need two similar gigantic mutations to occur in the same population at the same time and place and for the natural kingdom's instinctive aversion to incest to be suspended.  All this seems so unlikely that it seems impossible to imagine it occurring over and over again, as it must have, during the billion-year time frame in which Evolution has taken place.

Essentially my argument rests on the idea that speciation of this sort through blind chance is so incredibly unlikely as to be impossible. We don't see it happen now and so one wonders how it ever happened.

Now, I imagine my readers, being good secular liberals, will want to pick holes in this reasoning. I can only think of one piecemeal solution, one counter-argument, which can save Darwin. This is that different species can and do sometimes mix and produce viable offspring, that new species can appear as the result of miscegenation or, to use the more accurate term, hybridization. The problem with this counter-hypothesis is that this type of interbreeding almost never occurs in the natural world that we observe. What one cannot accept is that a change of this magnitude can occur through tiny increments. One cannot accept the idea that a species can evolve from one with 62 chromosomes to one with 64 through a series of tiny mutations – 62, 62 and a bit, 62 and a quarter and so on, because during through all these transitional forms individuals would probably be infertile.

Basically I am saying that chromosome number is Irreducibly Complex. I concede the argument could be wrong. I have meant for years to find a professor of biology to talk to about it. I feel obliged to say one thing though – I am not a Fundamentalist Christian seeking to cast doubt on Darwin's theory to justify some kind of religious faith. It is rather the reverse: the argument occurred to me first and caused me to question my atheism. When it appeared fully-formed in my head in 2013, it was so persuasive that it stunned me, made me wonder maybe there was a God after all. I am not now saying there is a God, I'm definitely not saying that we should accept Creationism, rather all I am saying is that the science is, if not flawed, incomplete. It is possible to accept science and mysticism at the same time. Yes, we might say, Evolution occurred and is still occurring but the process is not arising purely out of blind chance but is rather being steered by some kind of higher power perhaps. I am not a Christian. I have said that before. But I have had inklings of the supernatural… It may be that these inklings might be an interesting topic for a future post.

An Appreciation of Virginia Woolfe

The day before yesterday I finished Virginian Woolf's 1928 classic Orlando, the first time I had read it. This novel (subtitled "a biography") follows the life of its eponymous hero from his or her boyhood in Elizabethan England up to the time Woolf finished writing it, the 11th of October 1928. Orlando goes through many phases in his life; in fact partway through the novel he changes gender, from a man into a woman. Orlando is a comic Phantasy or Burlesque, a work of powerful intelligence and of penetrating psychological insight, that takes as its main subjects love, life, letters and identity; it is characteristic of the comic tone of the novel that no-one seems to notice that Orlando lives for close to four hundred years and, when he switches gender, everyone accept it basically without reservation.

I thought I would write a little about Woolf in today's post. As usual I will cite my sources. My information comes from her wikipedia page, the little that I have picked up about her life over the years, and the two novels I have read by her, Orlando and Mrs Dalloway, the later having been read back in 2010.

Those who have only a superficial understanding of Virginia Woolf might associate her with two derogatory terms: 'lesbian' and 'mad'. The reason for the first descriptor is that Woolf had a documented affair with a woman, Vita Sackville-West, in the 'twenties: Orlando is, in fact, dedicated to Vtia. The reason for the second descriptor is that Woolf had a number of documented 'nervous break-downs' during her life, the first being in 1897 when she was just fifteen, the last right before her death. When Woolf drowned herself, in 1941, her suicide note to her husband reads in part "Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do." Her 'illness' was a pivotal part of her life. I wish to tackle these two subjects, her bisexuality and her madness, because they interest me, in this post and in that order.

When I was younger, and stupid, I though Woolf must have been a closet lesbian, a lesbian who had married a man (I now know Leonard Woolf in 1912) to conform to Edwardian notions of respectability. There is a problem with this reading of her life though: in Mrs Dalloway, Woolf candidly describes a woman who has had a lesbian relationship in her youth but is now middle aged and has been comfortably married to a man for some time. One would expect a 'closet lesbian' to hide her experiences rather than talk about them. (I shall return to Mrs Dalloway later.) And of course Woolf was married to a man most of her life, from 1912 until her death in 1941. Some have argued that Leonard exacerbated her 'illness' but I feel (admittedly without much evidence) that this is untrue. In this context a small digression may be interesting. In her letters Woolf shows some pronounced indications of anti-semitism. This was common at the time: it sometimes seems that everyone in Europe (with the notable exception of James Joyce) was anti-semitic then. And yet Leonard was himself Jewish and Woolf would often refer to him lovingly as "my Jew". Woolf was a complicated creature to be sure.

According to letters Sackville-West wrote, her relationship with Woolf in the 'twenties was only consummated twice. In the context of a lesbian relationship, I am unsure what "consummated" means. But it does suggest that 'lesbian' might be too strong a word.

Whatever Woolf's sexuality, we would expect to learn something about it from her books and perhaps Orlando might be informative. Viriginia Woolf was very good at describing sexual attraction, from both a man's and a woman's perspective. She was aware, moreover, that social norms of male and female beauty change over time and took delight in mocking it. We should know now, of course, that these norms change. In the nineteen-sixties, the era of Twiggy, beautiful women were supposed to be skinny; today, though, the ideal of female beauty is far more voluptuous (think Kim Kardashian or Scarlett Johansen). In the Elizabethan era, during which period the first part of Orlando is set, when men wore tights, women were attracted to men's legs in the same way that, now, they are attracted to a well-defined set of abdominal muscles. Orlando contains a running gag, in the early part when the hero is a man, about Orlando's possession of an extraordinary comely pair of legs. It comes up several times to great comic effect. When Orlando leaves Britain for Constantinople, in the second half of the seventeenth century, for instance, Nell Gwyn offers the following comment. " 'Twas a thousand pities, that amorous lady sighed, that such a pair of legs should leave the country."

There are many passages in Orlando worth quoting but I shall restrict myself to one, the moment Orlando, then a man, meets his first great love, the Russian Princess Sasha. It is quite long so I shall sadly not quote in it full.

"He had indeed just brought his feet together about six in the evening the of the seventh of January at the finish of some such quadrille or minuet when he beheld, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy's or woman's, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish colored fur. But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person […] When the boy, for alas, it must be – no woman could skate with such speed and vigor – swept almost on tiptoes past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question. But the skater came closer. Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy's, but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea. Finally, coming to a stop and sweeping a curtsey with the utmost grace to the King, who was shuffling past on the arms of some Lord-in-waiting, the unknown skater came to a standstill. She was not a handbreadth off. She was a woman. Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold; longed to hurl himself through the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to toss his arms with the beech trees and oaks […]"

In this passage, Woolf captures perfectly the attraction a tomboyish girl can induce upon a man (the French word for this quality being 'gamine'). It is an example of Woolf's wonderful perspicacity. It is a thing that impresses me so much about Woolf, her incredible ability to write from perspectives not her own, including from a man's. Orlando contains passages proposing that suggest that everyone contains a masculine and feminine aspect, an idea quite Jungian. Is it true? Alas, I cannot draw any firm conclusions about Woolfe's sexuality from Orlando and the little else I have read but I hope that these observations suggest something to the reader. There are perhaps those who can go further.

I would now like to turn to the second subject I wish to discuss, her 'illness'. This is, of course, quite central to any discussion of her life. Modern scholars have suggested Woolfe had 'manic-depression' (what we now call 'bi-polar') but, in fact, and despite what I used to think, the line between bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia is actually quite hard to draw; it is arguable that Woolf in fact had schizophrenia (if we concede, as we should, that schizophrenia is an episodic rather than continuing condition). The evidence for this is in Mrs Dalloway. Mrs Dalloway follows two protagonists over the course of day:  not only Mrs Dalloway herself as she prepares for a party that evening but also a character called Septimus who has returned home from the First World War with shell-shock. The novel employs a Joycean stream of consciousness, writing from both character's perspectives, and it is plain, from how Septimus thinks, that he is utterly psychotic. When I read Mrs Dalloway, in 2010, I was struck by the accuracy, the authenticity, with which she described what it is like to  endure a psychotic episode, from the inside; it was an accuracy that could not have been born from imaginative empathy but only from actual experience. Woolf could not have written this unless she genuinely knew what psychosis was like from her own life. There is a second aspect of Mrs Dalloway that seems especially significant to me. Woolf had experience both of a homosexual relationship and of madness but, in Mrs Dalloway she separates out these two parts of herself. Mrs Dalloway is a completely sane woman who participated in a lesbian relationship during her youth but has been respectably and happily married to a man for some time; Septimus is a completely straight man who has developed schizophrenia as the result of his war experiences. Often writers want to make political points in their writings and it seems to me that Woolf is doing just that: she is saying, in Mrs Dalloway, that sexual confusion and madness are two separate things. This is something that modern psychiatrists would be well advised to remember.

One question that occupies us today and has occupied us for time immemorial is this: is identity fixed or fluid? Many people today assume that identity is fixed - an example I would adduce to show this is the truly horrible song Same Love by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis with its refrain "I can't change/ Even if I try". Woolf by contrast thought identity was fluid, explored this idea in her books and demonstrated it through her own life. So, which position is right? I don't know… but I would be inclined to trust Virginia Woolf over Macklemore and Lewis.

One final point… It may seem from a cursory understanding of Woolf's life that she might indeed have possessed an 'organic illness' as modern psychiatrists say. As I have argued before, I don't think mental 'illness' is indeed an organic disease. I feel I need to point out that you could make the case that she was driven to bouts of madness by her experiences and by the world in which she lived. Arguably, one of the things that worsened her condition was her interactions with the medical fraternity. (This idea is defended by Stephen Trombley). If she never recovered from her condition, as John Nash arguably did, it can only be because the problems in her life that had caused the 'illness' in the first place were never addressed and never resolved.

Some Corrections

I try to be as honest as I can and so I thought I would take this opportunity to clear up some minor mistakes in some of my posts. I also thought I would correct another mistake, not made by me but by others.

In the previous post, "Concerning Obama", I said that I started hearing Obama's voice in my head in late 2009. In fact, although I was, as it were, aware of Obama peripherally before then, he did not state speaking to directly until around the 10th of January 2010 (in Fiordland). The concert I mentioned was The Big Day Out, formerly New Zealand's biggest rock festival, which was held on the 15th of January 2010. Jon Stewart had been speaking with me directly rather than indirectly from about early December 2009. The voices faded out during the first part of 2010 and were probably completely gone by February or March. I should also say that I talk about these voices as though they were real because they felt real to me at the time.

In the post "A Sketch of my Uncle" I said that my uncle had nominated Roger Douglas to stand for parliament. In fact, my uncle nominated Roger's father, Norman,

In the post "The  Therapeutic  Relationship", I said that in Easter 2013 I had told my psychiatrist that I "hated" my father. This is not really true. What I really said at the time was that my father was an idiot - which is a little different from hatred. I also said in that post that, having defined the term, I would identify myself as a cat. I would now like to disclaim this and say that I choose not to identify myself as either a cat or a dog, as I always had previously.

In the post "Me and Jon Stewart Part 3" I think I said that the Daily Show screened in New Zealand TV in 2014 and 2015. Of course this is wrong. The Daily Show returned to New Zealand around February or March 2014 and had its final episode on the 6th of August the same year. This date is easy for me to remember as it is my mother's birthday.

I would now like to turn to a mistake I think others have made.

In 2008, when I was more or less well, I saw a Scottish nurse (not a psychologist), attached to the clinic treating me, whose job was to give me therapy or counseling or something. She worked closely with the psychiatrist I was then seeing. I didn't discuss much with her at these sessions. For whatever reason, I had little idea what to talk about and so generally elected to talk about the American election. I was on 2.5 mgs of Respiridone at the time. Around December of that year (shortly before the Neil Finn's second Seven Worlds Collide concert), I decided that I should at least try to talk about my feelings towards my family and mentioned some unresolved resentment towards my step-mother. Now, I think I get along quite well with my step-mother currently (she has sometime since split from my father) but it would be surprising for the child of a broken marriage not to harbor some grudge towards his step-parent at some time. At the next session with this nurse, she said something like, "You were telling me last time about your dislike of your mother." I said, "I don't have an issue with my mother - it's my step-mother I have issues with." All of a sudden I felt the dark wings of the Homosexual Conspiracy rising around me. Whatever she had thought I had said had gone in my record.

The psychotic episode that lasted most of 2009 began almost immediately after this conversation.

You see… the truth is that my mother is the only member of my family with whom I have had basically uninterrupted good relations my whole life. For most of my existence, through all of my suffering, she has been not only my mother but my rock, my best friend. She has always ensured I was kept out of hospital. I believe though, that because of this mistake, it went into my record that I disliked my mother. I believe that this mistake has followed me ever since. I think it has followed me, despite all evidence to the contrary, because it fitted the diagnosis my first psychiatrist made when he first saw me. In fact, if I have one criticism of my mother, it is only this – that she has always ensured I take my medication. But I can forgive her this because she honestly believed the doctors knew what they were doing.

It may seem a small thing but to be trapped in a system (I am still trapped in it) which can't even keep proper records is soul-destroying after a time. All the evidence since has surely pointed to the fact that I love my mother but it seems people in Mental Health Service can be deliberately blind when the diagnosis is made.

I thought I would mention one more example of clerical 'inaccuracy', only because I really feel the need to share it. In a previous post I described some of my interactions with a psychologist, also attached to the same clinic, in 2014. One day I described to him watching Jon Stewart the previous night and hearing him use the phrase "The best disinfectant is sunlight." I thought this quite profound at the time and perhaps still do. The psychologist said to me, "I think you said it." I said, no, I'm not clever enough to come up with a line like that, Jon Stewart said it. He said, again, "No, I think you said it." Interactions like this with him strongly suggested to me that he was deliberately distorting, if not falsifying, my record, purely to suit his own agenda or preconceptions.

Again this may seem minor but when people have the power to force you to take potentially brain-damaging drugs and even hospitalize you, it is important that they have some sense of who you actually are, when you are sick and when your are not, what you believe and what you don't. And accurate record keeping is a part of that process. The thing that makes me most angry is that people resort to the Mental Health System because they need help. And instead of receiving real help they are treated like they are stupid or like they are animals.

This may not seem the most interesting post but I think it important, at least to those who can read between the lines. I am tired. I slept poorly last night and the quality of the writing may have suffered as a consequence. I feel I should add one thing though in conclusion - when the Scottish nurse left the Taylor Centre some years ago she hugged me goodbye. The way she hugged me has made me wonder since if it was a guilty conscience that led her to do so.

Concerning Obama

Those who know a little about me might be surprised that I consider myself a committed left-winger, pretty much a socialist. My father after all, I think it's safe to say, is close to being a neo-conservative, being a Libertarian and an ACT party supporter. But I don't inherit my political beliefs from my father. My mother, and my immediate family generally, are all over on the Left side of political spectrum – in fact, when my father and mother first married he was a Labor supporter who moved to the Right at the same time as the Labour party did, during the '84 Lange government. Possibly I didn't inherit my political beliefs from anyone at all: they just came to me naturally as an expression of my core personality.

Despite being a New Zealander, I find American politics fascinating, perhaps because the differences between the Left and Right is much more clearly drawn there than here in New Zealand. I like Trevor Noah, John Oliver, Bill Maher and liked John Stewart very much; in New Zealand, there are few voices on the Left in the media – but then the political consensus is generally far further over to the Left here than in the States. Sometimes it seems to me that the US lags behind the rest of the world on some issues, like health care, but on other issues, like cannabis decriminalization, it is ahead of the curve, or, at least, ahead of New Zealand.

The 'illness' that I suffered was very political. It is hard to overstate just how much psychotic episodes were influenced by what I read in the newspaper, by politics generally. The episodes I suffered for most of 2009 began in the interval between Obama's election and his inauguration. My father recently said to me, "You don't think there's a connection?" Well, yes… but not because I am a representative of the Loony Left but for reasons more complicated than that. I sometimes think part of the reason I became sick was as a reaction to idiots on the Right. In 2009 and early 2010, when I was hearing voices continuously, I used to hear Barack Obama a lot and this is what I want to talk about in today's post.

Obama is currently enjoying massive popularity and so it is easy to forget that that wasn't always the case. During the early years of his presidency, many Democrats were very disappointed with Obama. He campaigned in 2008 on the promise of closing Guantanomo Bay but has never managed to do so; he has failed to properly address the topic of income inequality despite the 99% movement; he has never been able to get any kind of sensible gun regulations passed despite the fact that a majority of Americans want them. Arguably, the fact that the Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate for most of his two terms paralyzed him, prevented him from achieving his wanted goals. But also arguably Obama has had a tendency to listen more to his opponents than to his supporters, to conciliate rather than lead. Particularly in late 2009, when I believed I was telepathic, I used to talk often with Obama in my head. This is crazy I know. The impression he gave me then, the Obama I talked to in my head, was of someone who felt trapped, unable to accomplish what he wanted, of someone only just barely coping with stress of the job he had taken on. He had no-one else but me (and Jon Stewart) with whom to talk to about it.  We were all trapped in a box together. I also sensed that he felt himself the object of virulent racism and that this caused him some considerable distress. This was the era of the Tea Party Movement after all. I remember, at one point, during a concert I attended, he addressed, and it seemed to me he knew he was he was taking a risk when he said it, as "nigger-lover" - a derogatory term used in the Southern US for white people who like black people.

People are affected by what others think of them. (This has been a theme in some of my posts.) Last year I saw the real Obama deliver his State of the Union address and one thing I noticed was that, when talking about Muslim Americans, he gestured towards himself. Was he unconsciously signaling that he was secretly a Muslim, as Donald Trump and so many bigots on Fox News have suggested? Of course not. He was simply involuntarily registering his awareness that a wide swath of Americans had decided, out of prejudice and paranoia , that he's Muslim. Obama is not immune to what those on the Right say about him and can't entirely ignore hostile opinions. This is not altogether a bad thing. Obama understands Islamaphobia. He understands it because, even though he is not a Muslim, he has himself been the victim of it. Lefties often identify, without being fully conscious of it, with the oppressed groups they fight for - for instance, Jon Stewart, when talking about racism, probably became in his mind a little bit black as a result. Support for oppressed groups has its cost though - I remember a piece by Jessica Williams effectively chastising Stewart for being a "helper whitey". In a way, to return to Obama though, perhaps being perceived as a Muslim makes him better at understanding the war on Islamic jihadism.

But the Barack Obama of 2015 was different from the Obama of 2009 and I want to return to 2009.

Certainly the most significant piece of legislation passed during Obama's two terms has been Obamacare. I felt strongly about it at the time - New Zealand has a robust public health care system and there is virtually no-one, except maybe a few radical libertarians, who thinks we should adopt the American insurance-based system. America needs and still needs to bring its health care system into line with the rest of the developed world. A story illustrates how important it was to me. One day in November 2009 I was at work, taking bets on horses over the phone, my job at the time– I was hearing voices continuously and the voices I heard that evening were my father and step-mother telling me how bad the Affordable Care Act was, how disastrous the consequences would be. I came home and told my brother who was looking after me for a couple of days (my mother needing a break from me) about the end of The Crying of Lot 49 where Oedipa Maas is left unable to decide whether she has uncovered a massive conspiracy or whether it is all in her mind. I went to bed and, lying in bed, heard in my head the Republicans in the Congress or Senate arguing against the Affordable Care Bill. After a time I couldn't bear this any longer, climbed out of bed and went to the bathroom to vomit in the basin. When I went back to bed, I heard, this time, the Democrat side of the debate and was finally able to get to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I read in the newspaper that the Affordable Care Act had been passed the previous day. I honestly had had no idea that, when all this was going on in my head, it was being debated in Washington.

This was a significantly bizarre event in my life and I think it occurred as the result of a significant event in history. I know Obamacare is imperfect. But I still consider it an important step in the right direction.

Another issue that has always greatly concerned me was climate change. I have almost always believed that it is occurring and that it is anthropogenic. My father has always been a global warming denier (although he has been quiet about this issue in recent times). In late 2009, the warming trend had reversed for a couple of years and there seemed some possibility that the climate change deniers might be right; I was, of course, talking with Obama and Stewart in my head and they themselves seemed worried and unsure. So I spent time researching absorption spectroscopy on the Internet and talking about it with them to reassure them the science was valid. Of course, if I'm to be rational, I would have to say that I was reassuring myself rather than them but it seemed to me at the time that they themselves needed convincing.

My psychosis of 2009 was often concerned with such issues. It seems absurd to me now that I should have been so involved, in my head, with American politics back then. There is a lot more I could say about this period but I have referred to it in previous posts. Perhaps as a New Zealander I should now keep my nose out of American politics and focus on what's going on here at home. There are issues here. There are some issues however that are universal - and one is the treatment of the mentally 'ill', here in New Zealand and elsewhere. This is perhaps the issue that I should be writing about, the one I know the most about because it directly concerns me and the people I know.

This post is about Obama though and so I should perhaps conclude by talking about him a little more. Barack's manner has changed considerably over the years, since 2009. In the early days he could seem stilted and professorial, aloof. He could seem overly intellectual and detached from others. As time has passed, though, it feels as though he has relaxed into the role of president and become more comfortable with himself and the rest of the world. His approval ratings reflect this change in attitude. If it is permissible for me to venture this idea, it seems to me that today he has embraced his blackness, and that he is less concerned with racist Republicans than he once was. His public persona reflects now the person he really is. Perhaps Obama has achieved less in the way of concrete legislative change than he promised in 2008, but his stature as a public figure is indisputable. What he will probably be remembered for most is his wonderful oratory, his speeches, his rhetoric. What we say changes the world and Obama, more than most, is aware of that. Words, as I have said before, shape the world and Obama knows it.

A Sketch of my Uncle

In today's post, I have decided not to discuss politics or philosophy or literature, for a change, but instead talk about a family member, specifically my Uncle Tom who died in 1997. I am working from memory of what my mother has told me and so details may be a little inaccurate.

My Uncle Tom was born in 1923 and was the oldest of my mother's three siblings, quite a bit older than her. As a teenager he was involved in the radio - he and a friend, Alan DeMalmanch, had a show called the Schoolboy Rovers on New Zealand Radio. In the late 'forties, he was a breakfast DJ in New Zealand and then later in the 'forties in Sydney. He travelled to Britain and had some success there, again as a radio DJ, but as the result of a lung condition decided, on doctor's advice, to return to the gentler climate of New Zealand.

During the forties, while he was working as a breakfast DJ, he completed degrees in New Zealand history. He slept little and maintained his heavy workload by chain-smoking and taking Benzedrine every day. A little later in life he would put away a significant quantities of whiskey every night in order to wind down. Together with Alan, Tom acted in plays directed by the quite famous New Zealand crime novelist Ngaio Marsh. One play that my mother often mentions is A Midsummer Night's Dream - my uncle, who was a very diminutive man, played Puck, a role which probably suited him extremely well

Tom was very passionate about politics, a passion he had inherited from his father, my grandfather. The thesis of his history degree was concerned with the birth of the New Zealand Labour party. In the 'sixties or 'seventies, he nominated Michael Douglas to stand for parliament – he had been friends with the Douglas family, themselves long time Labour supporters. The shift by the Lange government towards extreme neo-liberal, Friedmanite economic policy during the second half of the 'eighties, a lurch carried out under Roger's stewardship, left Tom feeling personally betrayed and he never forgave Roger. MP Chris Carter represented the Labour party at Tom's funeral in 1997.

Tom was a writer and he became a teacher. He wrote, among other things, a TV play called Plainsong, about the abolition of the provincial governments in 19th Century Canterbury, and a play about Christ titled The Crucifixion which presented Jesus as a political revolutionary rather than as a religious figure. I remember seeing, with Tom, a revival of this play performed in the grounds of the Auckland Anglican Cathedral in the early 'nineties. But Tom was easily discouraged and, at any rate, during this period he tended to focus all his energies on teaching rather than writing. Tom taught English at Mt Albert Grammar and, from what I have heard, was an extraordinarily inspirational teacher. He taught my father, in fact, in the 'sixties, and it was through a party organized, I think, by my uncle that my father first met my mother. Later Tom taught at the Teachers' Training College.

Tom had many gay friends at a time when homosexuality was illegal. His oldest friend, Alan, who I have mentioned, had several same-sex relationships during his life, the last being with a chap called Grant with whom he had a civil-union for some decades. Tom, though, was pretty much a bachelor for all of his life, although one woman, Mary Hopewell I think her name was, loved him unrequitedly for a very long time. To be honest, I don't know if Tom himself was gay or not. My mother has told m, though, e a story that when the petition for the legalization of homosexuality was going round in the 'eighties, he made her stop the car so that they could leap out and sign it.

My mother has said that Tom was probably unhappy for most of his life. I think he was sensitive: he picked up on all the evils and hypocrisies of the society in which he lived and somaticized them, suffering ill health constantly as result. He was unusual, liking Shakespeare and poetry in a time when the national norm for masculinity revolved around "rugby, racing and beer" – although I should say that my uncle loved betting on the horses and this was perhaps his only pleasure during the last long period of his life. I think my uncle may have been a bit fey – there was a little of this in my mother's family. Tom loved and believed in astrology and tarot readings and was exceptionally good at reading people.

In the 'seventies, I think, Tom was diagnosed with severe emphysema and given only a couple of years to live. It was probably a consequence of a life-time of chain-smoking. He immediately retired. Despite this prognosis he survived right up until 1997, although he was on oxygen towards the end. It was during this period that I knew him. He would come over every sunday for a roast lunch and, lying supine on the couch, deliver long lectures about English history. In 1997, as a result not only of emphysema but other complications, was admitted to hospital. I went to visit him. Lying in bed he said to me, "Andrew - the song, the song!" I had no idea what he meant and when I asked him to explain, he was unable to. These were his last words to me. Later that week, I was in the bedsit out the back of my house with my best friend at the time and my first girlfriend. My mate put me and Danielle in the closet and 'hot boxed' it by blowing pot smoke into it. It was the first time I kissed her. The next morning Mum and I received a call from the hospital to say that Tom was in rapid decline. By the time we arrived he was dead – I remember us walking into a surgical room to find him laid out on the table, his face a death rictus. My mother sent me off, stoned as I still was, to phone all his friends to tell them that he had died. So my memory of the first time I kissed my first girlfriend is indissolubly linked with the memory of my uncle's death.

I know stories like this may make me seem like a stoner but this is not really the case. It's just that some of my key memories are associated with weed.

This is only a sketch of my uncle. It may not be altogether accurate. I know from personal experience how easy it is to hurt someone by misrepresenting his or her life. I hope, however, that by saying that this description may not be altogether accurate, and is definitely too short, I may be given some leeway. It is in the main accurate I believe. 

Concerning Oscar Wilde and Kurt Cobain

About a fortnight ago, I wrote a post about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love called "An Interpretation of a Couple of Rock Songs". I perhaps did not expressed my self perfectly, but it is still very well worth reading. I suggest the reader have a look at it and another post, "Concerning Kafka and Wilde" either before or after he or she reads this post.

Oscar Wilde said of himself that he was one who "stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age". He wrote this about himself in De Profundis, the long letter he composed to try to ward of despair in Reading Gaol in 1897 to which he had been imprisoned, wrongly perhaps, for engaging in homosexual activities. I don't have my copy of De Profundis on hand but I recall that Wilde felt that his life was not his own, that history was speaking or acting through him. The ultimate example of someone whose life and death was not his own, of someone who is a vessel for history, is Christ; De Profundis contains an extended discussion of Jesus's character. This may seem odd to people who have only a superficial understanding of Wilde's life and what happened to him - but if we imagine Wilde as a scapegoat, as someone who was destroyed for speaking too candidly about love, his obsession with Chris makes perfect sense. Christ, too, perhaps was crucified for speaking about love. It seems like Wilde's life was a work of art created by something more powerful than him, as though some implacable and unappeasable Fate had him it its grasp and wanted to teach the world a lesson by making an example of him.

Something similar can be said for Kurt Cobain. As early as "Come As You Are" from Nevermind, Cobain seemed to be prophesying his own death. ("And I smell/  And I don't have a gun"). Kurt Cobain's life and death did not belong to him alone, it belonged to his age. To those who listen to his music it seems somehow inevitable. A great and terrible mystery is associated with his suicide, few indeed understand it, a mystery that can only engender conspiracy theories such as the rumor that spread soon after his death that Courtney Love had had him assassinated. I don't pretend to know absolutely why Cobain killed himself, I am no expert on him, but I believe I have some idea. What is important for my purposes here, in this post, is to point out that Cobain's death was more than one man's tragedy, it was a social and historical event with significant cultural consequences. Cobain was killed by irresolvable contradictions in the culture in which he found himself. One can gain some sense of the social impact of Cobain's death from listening, for instance, to the song "Hey Man, Nice Shot" by Filter, a song that does not reference Cobain directly but makes perfect sense if we assume it was addressed to him.

To my mind, Cobain's story and Wilde's story are equally significant because the verdict of history ran so counter to the truth of their lives. Perhaps things are changing and people now are reappraising these two seminal figures. Last year I saw Montage of Heck, a documentary about Cobain, and, although I believe it not to be a fully complete or accurate picture of the man and those he knew, I think it relays at least a couple of important truths, that Kurt and Courtney loved each other and that the idea that others might think that they didn't, that the relationship was fake, caused Cobain significant distress. The whole purpose of Montage of Heck is to show that the relationship was genuine. The idea that Love was somehow responsible for Cobain's death seems to me absurd (we must look elsewhere for its cause) and yet it gained traction after his death. Why do music fans dislike it so much when their heroes fall in love and loath the woman involved? The opprobrium heaped on Courtney Love in the years after Cobain's death reminds me of the hatred Beatles fans felt for Yoko Ono after the Beatles broke up. She was blamed for the band's dissolution. John Lennon, during his solo career, wrote song after song expressing his love for Ono but perhaps the mob didn't believe him; perhaps people thought this relationship was fake. It seems significant that Mark Chapman, the man who killed Lennon, was obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye. Presumably he thought Lennon was just another "phony".

Montage of Heck is concerned with love and love seems to be the common theme of all these tragedies. One pop-psychology idea that has gained a certain following in recent years is that there are only two possible orientations toward life: love and hate. Although this seems overly reductive, it can be a useful way to approach the world. I am not a Christian but I think the idea of universal love is an important principle, a tenet to embrace. The Christian teaching that, if someone does you wrong,  you should "turn the other cheek" is almost impossible to live by but it gestures toward a profound truth. Hatred creates the thing it hates. In recent years, for instance, it has been fashionable to blame Islamic terrorism on the religion; otherwise slightly sensible people such as Sam Harris and Bill Maher have argued that there is something evil in the idea of Islam itself. This is wrongheaded. What breeds radicalization of Muslims is prejudice against Muslims. This is why Obama has steadfastly refused to frame counter-terrorist policy as a war between religions. As many commentators and policy makers, including Obama himself I believe, have repeatedly pointed out, to do so would be to play into the hands of the fanatics.

It might seem like I have digressed but I am still circling the same subject. Arguably, Cobain and Wilde were both destroyed by hatred, by the tyranny of public opinion. In De Profundis, Wilde describes a moment when, while being transferred from one prison to another, he was made the victim of verbal derision by a jeering mob at a train station platform. It was probably the worst, the most traumatic, event that ever occurred to him. Wilde was very concerned with what others thought of him, saying on one occasion earlier in his life something like "It's not what happened that's important; it's only what people think happened that's important". At another point in De Profundis Wilde says something like "My name has become a vulgar word among low people". To be made an object of scorn, of public shaming, was his worst possible nightmare. Like Wilde, as Kris Noveselic points out in Montage of Heck, Cobain was also acutely concerned with what others thought of him. It might seem strange to say that Cobain was the victim of hate – surely everyone loved him? His fans, perhaps, idolized him but few understood him. Although I have said that one should try to foster an attitude of universal love, one can draw a distinction between authentic love and false love. Genuine love is based on recognition, on understanding, and to pretend to love someone while utterly miscomprehending him or her is not too dissimilar from hatred. Cobain needed Courtney Love and he needed his love for her to be recognized by others.

It might seem, by the bye, that I am using the word 'love' ambiguously, sometimes in reference to platonic love and other times to erotic love. This is because the word 'love' is itself ambiguous, an ambiguity that may have been responsible for many catastrophes. (For a discussion of this, see the post "Concerning Love".)

Both Cobain and Wilde, I am arguing, were destroyed by public opinion. At this point, I would like to return to Jesus. For a long time, Christians believed that Christ's death was caused by the Jews, his own people, and vilified them as result; anti-semitism was a part of orthodox Christianity until after WW2. Of course, anti-semitism is stupid - Christ would have been crucified wherever he was born. If he had been born in England, he would have been crucified by the Celts; if he had been born in France by the Gauls. Wilde was destroyed by the English and Cobain, I suspect, was driven to suicide by citizens of the United States. Every age has its scapegoats, its martyrs. What destroys these people is a kind of mob mentality and it can take a very long time for popular opinion to accommodate itself to the actual truth. I wonder if things could be changing now.