'Even on the canals, life is slower than usual': What I've learnt in self-isolation on my narrowboat

Narrowboat265aBoats are a useful metaphor in troubling times CREDIT: GETTY

 by Paul Miles

WE ARE ALL IN THE same boat. We are navigating challenging waters. We need to stay afloat, keep an even keel and weather the storm. Boats are a useful metaphor in troubling times. My home - a 55ft steel narrowboat - and I are staying afloat, now moored opposite a field, three miles east of Bath. My only visible neighbour is moored 100m away, among flag iris and bulrushes. Behind me, arching over the canal, there’s a traffic-free bridge of Bath stone covered in lichen. In the paddock opposite is a large ash tree from which a robin sings merrily, oblivious to our woes.

Even on the canals, life is slower than usual. Hire boat companies are no longer hiring out holiday boats and, since the new lockdown, the Canal & River Trust has asked all boaters to cease non-essential travel and has lifted the requirement for us narrowboaters without a home-mooring - also known as ‘continuous cruisers’ - to cruise on to somewhere new every two weeks. Walkers, cyclists and joggers have been asked to limit visits to canals. The result is few boats on the move and a towpath that is quieter than ever, at least where I am moored.

Originally, my plan for the next few weeks was to cruise for 30 miles or so, stopping wherever took my fancy for a fortnight at a time, out into the Wiltshire countryside and up the two-mile long Caen Hill flight of locks. This flight of 29 wide locks carries the canal over 200ft up to the top of chalky downland. I still need to cruise occasionally to reach water points to top up my 200 gallon water tank and to empty my toilet - the most unpleasant chore of boating - but now I must limit my cruising and just shuttle to and fro to the nearest facilities, at historic Dundas aqueduct. Perhaps a cruise to Bradford on Avon may become necessary if I need a new gas bottle?

Narrowboat265bCaen Hill CREDIT: GETTY

The lack of boating traffic is very different from the Kennet & Avon’s heyday. In 1838/39 this canal, linking the Thames at Reading with Bristol, carried 341,878 tons of cargo, including timber, coal, Bath stone and even the occasional fancy staircase for a Georgian manor house. 

On Friday I cruised out of Bath, keen to escape walkers on the towpath and the beeping of construction traffic on a housing development opposite. 

Carrying my little home with me like a snail, I puttered beneath a much grander Georgian home that presides over the canal atop a tunnel. Cleveland House was built as the canal company’s headquarters - one of Europe’s first purpose-built office blocks - but it is now a multi-million pound private residence. As I burrowed below its cellars, a swan made the most of the backwash to shoot itself at speed in the opposite direction, passing in semi-darkness. Meanwhile, walkers and cyclists passed through the tunnel on its narrow towpath. 

I cruised eastwards past countless moored boats. Glimpses through portholes showed that some are spacious and beautifully fitted out. Others appear to be nothing more than tiny floating sheds, patched together with scrap and tarpaulins. They look as if they may sink at any moment. There is more obvious poverty among the boating community on this canal than I have witnessed elsewhere. A homeless charity, Julian House, does outreach work with the disadvantaged. During this crisis the charity is coordinating extra support via the Kennet & Avon canal boaters’ Facebook page, matching up sick, vulnerable and elderly boaters with volunteers who can shop and do errands for them. The boating community on this canal is also one of the most caring that I have come across.

Narrowboat265cThe boating community can be close-knit CREDIT: GETTY

The handsome limestone with which Bath is built was quarried and mined in the hills above Bathampton. You can see the remnants of such workings on the Bath skyline walk. From this hillside, heavy hunks of stone were riskily trundled down the steep incline to the canal and awaiting boats.

At Bathampton, I filled my tank with water and cruised on. A passing jogger was happy to beef up her work-out by opening a swing bridge for me. In afternoon sunshine, I cruised on along the edges of wooded fields above the River Avon. Over an hour’s pootling - and yet just three miles travelling - I found a new spot isolated and bucolic enough to call home. This mooring turned out to be perfect for the sunny days ahead. The sun rises directly in front of me. If I’m feeling energetic, I do my awkward attempts at sun salutations before an early towpath plod. Then it’s back for porridge, sitting in the bow, facing the sun. During the day as it arcs across the sky, the sun fills the boat with rippling light, unhindered by forest or hills. 

“I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect towards the sun,” said Virginia Woolf. Perhaps this is one reason why this nomadic boat life suits me. As well as the need for energy from my photovoltaic panels, I love to orientate myself towards our brightest star. My boat has a big side-hatch that I open to let sunshine stream in. Sometimes I sling a hammock inside the boat next to these open doors. I swing and read while reflections of sunlight on water play across the ceiling. 

There are many simple pleasures I expected to achieve in ten years of boating life: a roof-top garden, abundant with vegetables, herbs and flowers being one. So far, in this and other endeavours - to have a dog, practise art, learn guitar - I have failed. My courgette plants were munched by cattle when I moored in a field and every time I tried to grow rocket - or other salad vegetables - they would bolt in the dryness of roof-top pots while I was away. I am easily discouraged.

Now there really is no excuse. I will plant some seeds - of many kinds - and watch them grow. 

 

Identity253

THE CRISIS OF

CHARACTER

Identity politics and the death of the individual

by Brendan O’Neill

NOTHING SPEAKS MORE PROFOUNDLY to the crisis of character than the phrase, ‘I identify as…’. In the past, individuals were. ‘I am a builder.’ ‘I am a mother.’ ‘I am a Jew.’ There was a confidence, a certainty, to their sense of identity, and to their declaration of it. ‘I am.’ Today, individuals identify as something. ‘I identify as working class.’ ‘I identify as non-binary.’ Or, in the notorious case of Rachel Dolezal, the American white woman who effectively blacked-up as she rose up the ranks of the NAACP, ‘I identify as black’. The rise of the i-word in our definition of ourselves, the ascendancy of what is called ‘self-identification’, is one of the most notable developments of the 21st century so far. It speaks to a shift from being to passing through; from a clear sense of presence in the world to a feeling of transience; from identities that were rooted to identities that are tentative, insecure, questionable.

Those words ‘I identify as’ – whether they’re being uttered by Caitlyn Jenner as she unveils her newfound womanhood or by an eco-friendly New York Times writer who says ‘I identify as a mammal’ – feel strikingly contingent. They speak to changeability. The undertone is ‘I identify as such-and-such for now’. Indeed, these highly personalised ‘identifications as’ something sometimes come with an acknowledgment that the identification could change in time, and change dramatically. A gender non-binary writer tells us that he/she ‘identifies as both genders’, but then says: ‘I do not know… whom I will identify as in the future.’ The Daily Mail recently reported on the case of a trans activist who identifies as a different thing on a daily basis. One day he/she is Layla, who wears ‘a dress and heels to work’; the next he/she is Layton – ‘a man who dons baggy jeans and workmen boots’. ‘I am’ doesn’t work here, because the very basis of his/her being can change in the space of hours.

Ours has been branded an era of identity politics. The New York Timescalls 2015 ‘the year we obsessed over identity’. Many have observed, often critically, that Western campuses in particular have become hotbeds of identity politics, or what is sometimes referred to as the ‘identitarian left’, which now defines itself, and engages with others, through the prism of identity rather than on the basis of ideas or shared or conflicting material and political interests. In student life and new-left circles, people are ‘identified as’, or they self-identity as, white, black, men, women, gay, straight, bi, trans, agender, non-binary and so on, and their politics takes place entirely at this level. White privilege is kept in check. Male privilege is policed. Gay culture is chastised for its incursions into black culture. White women are admonished for their attitudes to black women. Politics is no longer the sphere in which interests are expressed and convictions crash, but rather has become an arena for the pitting of personalised identities against one another: a new caste system, in effect. The individual with conviction has given way to the insecure possessor of an identity, whose primary concern is with the protection of his or her identity from ridicule or assault. We enter the public sphere as self-ossified categories rather than as thinking, convinced persons; as ciphers, representing something, rather than characters, containing something.

But the truly notable thing about today is not so much the obsession with identity – it’s the instability of identity. Humans have been hunting for identity for centuries. The instinct to define ourselves, to project ourselves into the world, is strong. And there’s nothing wrong with it. What’s new today is that identity has become an incredibly subjective phenomenon. ‘I identify as…’ Where once an individual’s identity was informed, or shaped, by experience and belief, through an engagement in the public sphere or with a party or association, today identities are self-consciously and often defensively constructed. The NYT, in its description of 2015 as the year of identity, asked: ‘How do you identify? [W]hat trait or aspect of your being is central to your idea of yourself, and your relationship to the world?’ The keyword here is your. The NYT doesn’t ask ‘What are you?’ or ‘Who are you?’, which would speak to a strong sense of being something; it asks what ‘aspect of your being’ is most important to ‘your idea of yourself’. ‘Being’ is treated almost as something external to the individual, a thing to be mined for ‘traits’ we might identify with. Identity is not something we are or we experience; it is a technically cultivated category, built from ‘traits’ and ‘aspects’ to give ‘an idea of yourself’.

What the NYT and many others describe as new era of identity politics is in fact an era in which the historical, traditional underpinnings of identity have been ruptured, or even destroyed, unleashing an often desperate search for new identities, a rush for self-identification, for shallow identity construction. The subjectivity of human identity in the 21st century is striking, and alarming. Today, to feel something is to be something. In many Western nations now, including Britain, a man can become a woman – legally, and on his passport – simply by ‘identifying as’ a woman. People now ‘identify as disabled’, and it often isn’t entirely clear that they are disabled. One academic says that his ‘personal identification as a disabled person fluctuates according to the context’. In short, sometimes he is disabled, sometimes he isn’t. The objective category of disability – as a physical or mental impairment that limits a person’s ability to engage in public life – is done away with, and instead disability becomes something one feels, one ‘identifies with’, in certain situations if not in others.

The subjectivity of identity construction, the rise of the contingent diktat ‘I identify as’, is throwing public life into disarray. Social norms and institutions we once took for granted are disorganised, sometimes crushed, by the rise of self-declared identities. Even filling in a form has become a minefield. The UK government’s public consultation document on gay marriage didn’t ask those who chose to fill it in if they were men or women; it asked: ‘Is your gender identity the same as the gender you were assigned at birth?’ It was an implicit acknowledgement of the categorical disarray of the 21st century, where it must always be allowed that people might have shunned their objective identities – in this case male or female – for a self-designed one. Facebook now has 71 gender identities to choose from. Forms used to ask us to circle M or F; Facebook offers the option of everything from ‘agender’ to ‘bigender’, ‘neither’ to ‘neutrois’, ‘two spirit’ to, of course, ‘other’, because in a world of narrow self-identification, there must always be space for the other, for the identity that hasn’t invented itself yet. Facebook justifies its many genders as a chance for people ‘to describe themselves as they are now’, again speaking to the changeability, transience, the fundamental flimsiness of modern identity.

Women’s colleges have been propelled into crisis by the cult of self-identification. In an era when a man can become a woman by saying ‘I identity as a woman’, can women’s colleges continue to exist? It seems not. Mount Holyoke College in the US used to describe itself simply as a ‘women-only institution’. Now it grants entry to the following dizzying array of identities: ‘Biologically born female who identifies as a woman; biologically born female who identifies as a man; biologically born female who identifies as other; biologically born female who does not identify as either woman or man; biologically born male who identifies as a woman; biologically born male who identifies as other when the other identity includes woman.’ In short, Mount Holyoke is no longer a women’s college. Men can enter, too, so long as they ‘identify as’ women. Identifying as a woman is now equal to being a woman. Feeling is reality. The entirely subjective sentiment becomes objective, legal fact.

In its recently rewritten mission statement, Smith College, one of America’s best-known women’s universities, says it is ‘absolutely’ still a women’s institution. But it also says that ‘applicants who were assigned male at birth but identify as women are eligible for admission’. How does Smith decide who is a woman? It doesn’t. It says: ‘With regard to admission, Smith relies upon the information provided by each student applicant… Smith’s policy is one of self-identification. To be considered for admission, applicants must select “female” on the Common Application.’ So a man can get into Smith by self-identifying as a woman. That makes him a woman. That Smith can say it is ‘absolutely still a women’s college’ while accepting students with penises shows how utterly subjective even the idea of womanhood has become. Even this identity, infused with biological and social experience, underpinned by historical import, informed by the longstanding cultural identities of sister, daughter, mother, can be adopted by others as if it were an item of clothing, and no doubt discarded just as easily. ‘I don’t know whom I will identify as in the future…’

Language itself, the very tool with which we communicate with one another, is distorted by the rise of narcissistic identity construction. Some individuals now demand that they be referred to neither as ‘he’ nor ‘she’ but as ‘they’. That this warps grammar – requiring such formulations as ‘they are doing well in their exams’ when referring to an individual – is considered unimportant. It is argued by identitarians that the psychic needs of the individual who self-identifies as ‘they’ override the habits of the public or the universalism of spoken discourse. At Scripps College, a women’s university in Southern California, students are now given 10 pronoun options to choose from. They can be he, she, e, per, zi, ze, they, hu, hum or hus. Here we have the construction of an entire new way of speaking, an alien, bizarre, elitist way of speaking, to satisfy the self-identity of small groups. Today, saying ‘I identify as’ doesn’t only mean you can change sex on your passport or masquerade as black when you’re white – it has also led to the reorganisation of university life and the emergence of new words, new grammar. The objective must bow to the subjective. Everything must be bent to the whims of the person who has said: ‘I identify as…’

Even the provision of basic services is disrupted by the spread of self-identity. Abortion providers are under pressure to ditch the word ‘woman’ and to declare that they will also provide abortions to men – that is, people who are actually women, hence they’re pregnant, but who have said ‘I identify as a man’ and thus must be treated as men, are men. The coalition of pro-choice groups currently campaigning for Ireland to ditch the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which bans abortion, recently put out a leaflet with this footnote: ‘While we have used the term women here, [we] recognise that not everyone who may need an abortion is a woman. We support access to abortion for everyone whether they be cis, trans or genderfluid.’ Campaigners want midwives to change how they speak. Midwife associations are being pressured to announce that they ‘serve women and people of all genders’. They are being asked to ditch the term ‘expectant mothers’ in favour of ‘pregnant individuals’. In American schools, and increasingly in European ones, too, sports are under threat: boys who identify as girls are demanding to play on girls’ teams. And on it goes.

This public acquiescence to the person who says ‘I identify as’, the rearrangement of university life, political campaigning, passports, health and numerous institutions around those who declare themselves to be something that by any basic, reasoned, humanistic measurement they are not, highlights one of the least appreciated aspects of what the NYT calls the new ‘obsession with identity’ – and that is the profound and historic crisis of public life; of meaning; of the Enlightenment ideals of reason and objective understanding; of the very idea of what it is to be human.

Too many critics of identity politics depict it as the handiwork of a coven of ‘identitarians’, a new left that usurped the old, universalising ideas of class and progress and replaced them with a narrow definition of people according to traits, gender, race, etc. In truth, the rise of self-identity, the replacement of ‘I am’ with ‘I identify as’, speaks to the hollowing out of the sphere and the ideas through which people once developed living, breathing identities, a real sense of themselves that was tangible, deep, convincing. It’s not that identitarians are foisting identity politics on us. It’s that Western societies, which have fallen into serious moral and existential disarray, have become increasingly incapable of providing people with a strong sense of identity, or of maintaining the mechanisms through which people once gained and built identities, and this has nurtured new hunts for meaning, for a sense of self, for some kind of personality at a time when the human personality is weak.

That everyone from the Passport Office to Smith College now nods dutifully along as a man tells them ‘I am a woman’ confirms that the cult of self-identification cannot be put down to crazy individuals claiming to be things they aren’t, or obsessing over the most narrow, least interesting things that they are: black, gay, whatever. Rather, society itself is complicit in this process, and as such it inflames it. Incapable of reconstituting the old validation of people for what they did, or for who they became through achievement, work, discussion, interaction and other social and political accomplishments, society instead gives the green light to the celebration of people for their ‘traits’, or for their narrow cultural or biological identity, or, increasingly, for who they claim to be, with little in the way of objective reasoning.

But it goes deeper than that. Far deeper. The modern West doesn’t only fail to hold back the tide of reason-defying self-identification, whether it’s Smith College immolating itself and its historic mission at the altar of gender self-identification or medical bodies claiming to provide abortions for men when they know very well that they do not because that’s a physical, objective impossibility. More importantly, it was the moral disorganisation of Western society over the past five decades that nurtured today’s identity politics, and created a climate in which identity has no real, felt, objective foundation but instead has become a fleeting, unsatisfying thing unlikely to fill its adherents with anything like a sense of achievement or true human value.

What we are faced with in the 21st century is the very serious situation where all the objective underpinnings of human identity have frayed or died. All those things individuals once defined themselves through – nation, church, work, family – have corroded in recent decades. We live in a post-national era where shamefacedness about our nations’ pasts is preferred over questionable national pride. A phoney cosmopolitanism that explicitly eschews ideas of national identity is now promoted by our elites. Churches in the West are in constant crisis, reeling from one scandal to another, and seemingly lacking the moral resources to withstand the tidal wave of relativism. In an era when few know (or are willing to say) what is right and wrong, churches have lost their purchase, and shedded worshippers.

Work has been thoroughly disorganised, too. Physically, the Western workplace has changed, with traditional male jobs increasingly giving way to a softer, feminised workplace where short-termism and job-sharing are the order of the day; and morally, too, the idea of work has transformed, and now tends to be seen less as a provider of comradeship and identity than merely a means to make ends meet. Trade-union membership is stagnating; industrial action has all but disappeared. Few would now say, ‘I’m a lathe operator at a factory’, as an expression of identity, of self, as they might have done in the past; rather, it would be merely a description of how they make money.

And the family has become hollowed out, too. Yes, we still live in families, and they provide us with great security and meaning, a sphere in which we can be ourselves, develop ourselves, nurture the future. But relentless external intervention into private life has undermined familial sovereignty, and risks reducing parenting from a lived part of our identity, a key part of who we are, to a skill we must get right. The declaration ‘I am a father’ is now more likely to elicit looks of concern, advice from the government, and some supernanny hectoring, rather than admiration for that once serious identity as provider for and socialiser of the next generation. To be a father now is to require guidance, not to be the architect of guidance.

The foundation stones on which identity was built for decades, the national flags, religious faith, workplace meaning or class feeling through which we constructed a sense of ourselves, through which we discovered or defined ourselves, are gone – or are at least shaky, insecure, withering. And in such circumstances, our sense of self can become weak; we cultivate new identities that feel unfounded, unanchored, changeable rather than convincing.

That the hollowing out of the old capitalist order and its institutions nurtures a crisis of identity has been noted by various thinkers of the postwar period. In the 1950s, the American sociologist David Riesman, observing major shifts in the education system and the workplace, noted the emergence of a new generation that seemed to lack, as he put it, ‘presence’. They seem to have, ‘not a polished personality’, but ‘an affable, casual, adaptable one’, he said. They were ‘present-oriented’ too, unlike their parents’ or grandparents’ generations, and those in ‘the earlier stages of industrialisation’, who were more ‘oriented toward the future, toward distant goals’.

These observations were taken further by the American thinker Christopher Lasch in the 1970s, most notably in his book The Culture of Narcissim. As a result of major quakes in the spheres of work, family and society, a new kind of individual was emerging, argued Lasch: one who ‘needed to establish an identity, not to submerge [his] identity in a larger cause’. Lasch’s observation of a new climate of narcissism in place of the old ideal of the strong-willed individual engaged in the world – John Stuart Mill’s individual with ‘strong susceptibilities that make the personal impulses vivid and powerful’ – was based on a recognition that the disarray of institutional life did not free the individual to discover his ‘real self’, as the hippies claimed it would, but rather gave rise to a new generation with a very weakened sense of self.

Lasch was struck by how the unravelling of social orders and norms gave rise to individuals whose sense of self was ‘weak, ungrounded, defensive, insecure’. He referred to the ‘weak self’, the ‘minimal self’. He noted that ‘apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free [us] to stand along or to glory in our individuality’. Instead, it ‘contributes to [our] insecurity’. It leads the individual to ‘depend on others to validate his self-esteem’, until he ‘cannot live without an admiring audience’. Where the strong individual of the past realised himself through engagement with the world around him, the new minimal individual merely wants to be consoled by the world, flattered by it. In Lasch’s words, ‘For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individual saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design’. Julie Walsh, in her 2014 book Narcissism and Its Discontents, describes the Laschian distinction between the post-Enlightenment idea of the individual and the postwar weakened, narcissistic self as a difference in attitudes to, or more fundamentally relationships with, the external world: the former sees the world as ‘a wilderness to be shaped by the subject’s own design’; the latter seeks only ‘self-consolation’ from his surroundings. The former is a subject, using thought and conviction to engage and become; the latter is an object requiring moral massaging from others for his very survival.

This desire to treat the world as a mirror, as a thing that must validate our self-esteem, is far more pronounced today than it was in the 1970s. The cult of self-identification, the insistence that grammar, education and institutions reorganise themselves around what individuals feel themselves to be, takes to the extreme the reduction of public life to the level of mere validator for insecure individuals. Lasch’s work also helps us to see how phoney is the freedom claimed by those who ‘identify as’. They frequently insist that they’re liberating themselves from outdated structures and social expectations. They pose as harbingers of a new and daring way of life, overturning everything about the old order, from gender to language, family life to social attitudes. This is false for two reasons. First, because what they present as their self-willed rebellion against and undermining of the old social, moral and sexual order is in fact a long drawn-out process of capitalist and institutional decay that has called into question almost everything Western societies once took for granted. And it was authored not by them but by various profound historical events and developments. They are really prettifying social and moral crises, standing on the rubble of the West’s decayed sense of itself and declaring: ‘We did this.’ And secondly, the freedom promised by the new narrow self-cultivation of identity is shallow indeed; in fact, it is not freedom at all.

The new identitarians, or self-identifiers, might technically be liberated from old social pressures, gender norms and moral expectations – though it’s more accurate to say that those things fell apart rather than the identitarians having broken free of them – but they have become locked into new and even more insidious relationships of dependency. Their need for constant validation, for self-consolation, for an ‘admiring audience’, means that while they may be free of past, burdensome social expectations, they have become psychic slaves. They are dependent upon the recognition of others, especially officialdom. The frenetic subjectivity of their identity creation disguises the extent to which they lack any sense of genuine human subjectivity – as actors in and on and through the world – and instead have become objects of the therapeutic industry, maintained and even directed by the approval of institutions and experts.

This explains the angst-ridden nature of much self-identification, the feeling of being under siege, of being at risk. Whether it’s trans campaigners trawling for evidence of transphobia and insisting that their very ‘right to exist’ is constantly being called into question, or student-union officials erecting safe spaces in which no Islamophobia, transphobia or any other phobia may be expressed, these supposedly free and easy new identities feel anything but free and easy. They’re tetchy, needy, defensive, ugly even. They need validation, and they seek it everywhere. Gay-identity campaigners hunt down the remaining handful of cakeshops that refuse to bake for gay weddings and insist they make them a cake; trans activists myopically peruse the press for any hint of anti-trans criticism and demand retractions or censorship; campaigners demand that schools, colleges, hospitals, everyone change their language and admission forms and behaviours to account for the feelings of infinitesimally small numbers of ‘two spirit’ people or ‘men’ who want abortions. And it’s never enough: for the fragile identity, validation is a constant necessity. The self-identifiers are liberated from the past, yes, but they’re enslaved by the 21st-century validation machine, their esteem locked in a danse macabre with the self-esteem industry.

Where earlier celebrators of the individual emphasised our capacity for autonomy and for governing our own minds and sense of ourselves, today’s self-identifiers cannot exist without the blessing of new forms of therapeutic authority. Mill’s view of the strong individual was a creature who used ‘observation to see, reasoning and judgement to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision’. Contrast that with today’s self-indentifiers who claim words wound, that individuals are vulnerable, that, in the words of one, ‘our mental safety is threatened by those who question our right to exist’.

Indeed, one of the most striking and complex things about the new era of identity is the coexistence of a highly subjectivised search for identity with a tendency to ossify identity, to fix it, to make great claims about its basis in biology or science or fact. This is most notable in the contemporary gay movement, which on one hand presents itself as a liberal strike against the social and moral strictures of the past, but on the other is constantly looking for material evidence that homosexuality is a fixed, biological fact. Gay academics hunt for a ‘gay gene’, or for evidence of ‘gay animals’, speaking, in Peter Tatchell’s words, to a ‘terrible lack of self-confidence and a rather sad, desperate need to justify queer desire’. Among trans activists, too, the claim to be consciously and radically upsetting gender norms sits uneasily with the essentialism of corrective surgery to turn men into ‘women’. Trans-sympathising experts have built up a huge base of alleged scientific authority to demonstrate that transgenderism is a real condition.

Meanwhile, many of the new self-identifiers contradictorily claim that they have no choice but to be what they feel themselves to be. Trans teenagers will kill themselves if we do not allow them to become the gender they were really born as, threaten trans activists. The bigender person profiled by the Daily Mail, who self-identifies on different days as Layla, a woman, and Layton, a man, strikingly said that this ‘isn’t a case of me waking up and choosing to dress a certain way. I’ve got no control over whether I’m going to be Layton or Layla on a certain day.’

How do we explain this strange coexistence of highly subjective identity cultivation with an instinct to biologism and essentialism? This coexistence of radical, freely chosen identities with the idea that there is also no choice – that trans people feel like women in their very souls, and gay people may even possess a particular gene? This coexistence of the casual ‘I identify as’, and ‘I might identify differently tomorrow’, with the urge to crush any criticism or questioning of that identity? This, too, speaks to the weakness of identity in the 21st century. These are attempts to anchor the new identities, steady them, make them provable, tangible. But there is nothing of substance to anchor them in or to. No social movements, no democratic institutions. And so they become reliant for their existence on the validation of others, and on the craven acquiescence of a society that cannot, or at least will not, uphold any kind of objective measurements or encourage the cultivation of identity on the basis of engagement, belief and achievement.

There’s a further problem, an even more profound one. Today, we’re faced not only with a corrosion of the external world of institutions and movements through which we once gained our identity, but also a weakening of the internal world of the individual, of conscience itself. The sensitivity of the new identities to criticism or slight speaks to the demise of the Enlightenment individual who gains his sense of self not only through objective institutions but also through the development of inner convictions. In the era of conviction, public debate, public criticism, was welcomed; in fact it was encouraged. ‘The energy of the human intellect does from opposition grow’, said Cardinal John Henry Newman. In the era of self-identity, of weak personalities reliant on endless validation and personal identities lacking any meaningful foundation, public discussion is restricted, policed, lest it ‘harm’ or threaten the ‘right to exist’ of the weakly cultivated new individuals. The more they bind up their entire existence in their new, unconvincing personal identity, the more they experience criticism of that identity, not as opinion, but as threat, a mortal, existential threat. Far from liberation, the new generation’s daily experience is existential vulnerability.

What is today referred to as the rise of identity politics is in truth the hollowing out of the institutions, beliefs and freedoms around which life and identity were shaped and cohered for centuries. It is a crisis not merely of politics, or class, or the left; it is a crisis of character, a questioning of what it means to be human, an uncertainty as to how we become fully human. Addressing the emergence of new, weak identities, and the corresponding creation of a therapeutic industry and new forms of moral censure to prop up these identities, will require more than ridiculing the new left or the so-called ‘identitarian movement’. It demands nothing less than the reconstruction of public life, and the rediscovery of our faith in the strong individual who both makes and is made by the world, rather than simply needing to be consoled by it. It requires that we refuse to acquiesce to alienated, subjective identity-making, and instead recreate the conditions in which people can develop their identity through the exercise of moral autonomy, and through creating and engaging in new institutions, new ideas and new societies.

 

 

Postscript251a

 

Death by selfie

Is the lust for likes on social media encouraging people to take life-threatening risks? Chris Stokel-Walker pokes his lens over the precipice

IT WAS AN ORDINARY DAY in Wolverhampton, a small city in the English Midlands, in December 2017, right up to the point that Jay Swingler’s head got stuck in the microwave. Swingler, a popular YouTuber known for his goofy behaviour, had inserted a plastic tube into his mouth, slipped a green plastic shopping-bag over his head and then cemented himself into a microwave using Polyfilla, a type of plaster normally used to fill small holes. The plaster expanded more than expected and, crucially, Swingler allowed it to set. When he tried to loosen the microwave, it wouldn’t budge. The fire department had to drill him free as paramedics stood by in case of injury.

Though the stunt went wrong, it propelled Swingler to a new level of stardom. Before posting the video, Swingler was gaining roughly 10,000 subscribers every three days; in the three days following the posting, he attracted 70,000 new subscribers. His video was viewed 850,000 times within 13 hours of going online.

Daredevil behaviour in pursuit of likes, retweets and shares does not always have such a soft landing. The number of self-inflicted injuries and fatalities in the name of attention-seeking is growing: between 2014 and 2018 more than 200 people worldwide died while taking a selfie. In October 2018, Jon James, a Canadian rapper, fell to his death while filming himself on an aeroplane wing.

Joanne Orlando, a researcher in technology and learning at Western Sydney University, blames the mechanics of social media which prize constant validation from others. Since people are more likely to comment on dynamic selfies than static ones, many are reluctant to upload anything that looks too ordinary. Algorithms on many platforms reinforce that tendency. If a particular pose or shot proves popular, then it is served up to more people. Other users, seeing its success, may try to match or outdo the stunt in order to be rewarded by that same process. Mona Kasra, a professor of digital media at the University of Virginia, recently travelled to Iceland, where locals reported a spate of tourists placing themselves in harm’s way while trying to capture breathtaking photos on the lips of volcanoes. “They’re not equipped and don’t know how to deal with that environment,” she says.

Smartphone cameras can now take pictures of near-professional quality, but they also have limitations that may encourage dangerous behaviour. Digital zooms produce blurry images, and the field of view in phone-camera lenses is often narrow. Trying to get the best shot, some people shuffle closer to precipitous edges in order to capture more of the backdrop behind them.

In October 2018, a couple died after falling off a cliff in Yosemite as they perched for a shot. That is not as unusual as it should be. Of the 200-plus deaths-by-selfie between 2014 and 2018, some two-thirds of deaths involved great heights, water or a combination of the two. An app for smartphone cameras that identifies potential hazards and flags up locations identified as dangerous by previous users is now available.

Phones are not the only devices to encourage risk-taking. The GoPro camera can be fixed onto a person’s head to allow participants in extreme sports to capture dramatic, first-person footage. Runners and cyclists use gamified fitness apps such as Strava to compete with each other and receive online “badges” as reward for accomplishments. These can prompt an individual to take a more dangerous route down a mountainside, for example, in order to reach the top of an online leader board. “We are very amenable to manipulation by reward even if it puts us in danger,” says Adam Johnson, a behavioural scientist at the University of Bath. His colleague, Lukasz Piwek, is more circumspect about causation. But a forthcoming paper written by the pair shows that cyclists who use Strava are very speedy, a fifth of users pedal at more than 22mph, and the fastest are the most likely to pay for the app.

The trend is global. Los Angeles County Sheriffs have reported a 38% increase in rescue missions since 2013 as more and more people end up in trouble while trying to capture the perfect photo or video. In 2017 British emergency services were called out to more than 3,000 incidents that had associated field notes which mentioned YouTube, nearly double the number of such calls in 2013. In an extreme case in America in the same year, Pedro Ruiz III, a young YouTuber, died when his girlfriend, Monalisa Perez, shot him at close range under the mistaken belief that a hardback book he was holding could stop a .50 calibre bullet.

India is on the front line of selfie fervour: over half of the selfie-related deaths recorded since 2014 occurred there. The country’s ministry of railways now warns people to avoid taking selfies on the tracks; and Mumbai’s police force has identified 16 hotspots in the city where selfie-takers could put themselves in danger.

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Many selfie-takers are conscious of the dangers. In the early days of January 2017, Viki Odintcova, a 23-year-old Russian model, lowered herself off a beam at the top of the Cayan Tower, a 1,004-foot edifice in Dubai. Eyes closed, she leaned into thin air as she clung onto the hand of an assistant who was all that stood between her and a sharp fall into the waters below. She then opened her eyes so that her assistant could take her photo with his free hand. The photo went viral, but she deleted it from her Instagram profile after a backlash from followers who believed that it would encourage others to repeat her prank. The two videos that remain on Instagram documenting the stunt have been viewed more than 3.2m times. But Odintcova says she is no longer proud of her daring: “I was just trying to leave a trace in history.”

Some platforms have responded by age-blocking content that might encourage minors to undertake copycat stunts. YouTube quickly barred younger registered viewers from watching Swingler’s video, for example. But such measures are crude and are easily bypassed. Some platforms exist with the specific purpose of hosting material excluded by mainstream sites. One such site, LiveLeak, gets 36m hits a month.

And so the proliferation of outlandish stunts continues. Social networks keep promoting extreme content, and their users are unlikely to start favouring mundanities in sufficient numbers to divert the algorithms along a safer course. Beware the wisdom of crowds!

Chris Stokel-Walker is a freelance journalist

ILLUSTRATIONS: BRETT RYDER

 

 

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How to make a zombie...

by James Russell

ZOMBIES ARE EVERYWHERE. ‘The Walking Dead’, ‘Zombies’, ‘Pride, Prejudice and Zombies’, ‘Left 4 Dead’, etc. It would appear we cannot get enough of zombies and similarly to previous cultural love affairs with monsters and horrors this could represent a shared fear.
Like the popularity of alien invasion flms during American Macarthyism and the rise of slasher films in times of the Zodiac Killer and other violent criminals, zombies represent something. Whether it is our fear of disease and decay or our over whelming primal need to consume and reproduce we don’t know. What we do know is that zombies are real.
To understand the biology of the zombie you must first understand its origin and history.
The first medically verifiable case of a zombie was presented by Dr.LamarqueDouyon and pertained to a man called ClairviusNarcisse who returned home to his family eighteen years after they buried him. His medical records showed he was pronounced dead by two western trained medics. Narcisse had fallen victim to a group known as the Bizangos, a secret society of vodou sorcerers, or Bokour.
The Bizangos found their origin in the 1790s when Haiti was still under rule by the white slave masters. Fearing Vodou the masters banned any practice of the faith. Which caused the first slaves to rebel and escape to the mountains where they set up their own communities; people know as the Maroons. It was the Maroons who were the first to organize slave uprisings, blessing those who vowed to murder the white slavers with the blood of a sacrificed animal in a ceremony known as the Bois Caiman. This in part would lead to the Haitian revolution and the establishment of Haiti as the first independent black state who were free to practice their faith. The Maroons would later form the Bizangos, acting as a spiritual force patrolling the Haitian populous through the powers of Vodou.
Depending whom you ask in the Vodou faith, the zombie has different definitions and properties. In most folklore it is the living dead who have been brought back through sorcery, but to Max Beauvoir; the Supreme Vodou Chief and Head of the Bizangos, it is a spiritual matter in which the Bokour removes the desire to do bad things from those who have been deemded criminal. In Vodou it is sacrosanct to take a life so zombification is a method of punishment that doesn’t offend the gods. Narcisse had been brought before one of these tribunals and deemed quilty on of an unforgivable crime and transformed into a zombie to punish him and protect the people he may have victimised.
Stories of a potion that possesses this ability to convert one into a zombie were reported as early as 1938 by Zora Neale Hurston, but she believed no person would dare divulge the ingredients and this remained true until Wade Davis, a Harvard ethno-botanist, infiltrated the Vodou community with assistance from Beauvoir. He uncovered and collected a sample of the zombie preparation, and was involved in the first biochemical and anthropological analysis of the powder.
Its ingredients included puffer fish, tarantula, cashew leaves, bearded fire worm, velvet bean, cane toad, jimson weed, hispaniolan boa and the bones of an infant. Each ingredient holds its own meaning in folklore but from a biochemical standpoint there are two ingredients that stand out. Puffer fish and jimson weed.
Puffer fish produces a powerful neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin that stops nerve cells from firing action potentials by binding to the cells membrane and blocking the passage of sodium ions. This stops nerves from communicating, temporarily rendering victims in completely paralyzed in a death like state so severe that most physicians cannot differentiate between. This is where the stories of undead zombie find its origin. In reality zombies are not people brought back from the dead but under the effects of powerful toxins that stimulate death.
The slow shuffling movements and impaired neurocognitive functions often associated with zombies can be put down to the effects of the DaturaStramonium plant, also known as Jimson Weed or the ‘Zombie Cucumber’. This plant is a member of the infamous nightshade family and contains a range of tropane alkaloids, many of which are used in medicine as analgesics and anticholinergenics. The effects of the plant leave the victim in a delirious and suggestible state. The result of prolonged exposure would be akin to a chemical lobotomy, robbing a person of their facilities and free will. This is why the Bokour use it to punish criminals.
The zombie is an idea that lies between the world of physical science and the metaphysics of vodoo, though bastardised into our modern interpretation the zombie is real and nature holds the ingredients to create it. 

 

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Waltzing with Wolves

The coach left el Puente de Don Manuel at 9:30 a.m. on a bright morning in October as we set off for the Wolf Sanctuary (Lobo Parque) near Antequera.  We arrived early, in plenty of time to sample the offerings of the snack shop, and for those who can read Spanish and know how to work machines, enjoy very hot coffee in a paper cup.

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The wolf park was founded by a German couple, Daniel Weigend and Alexandra Stieber in 2002 as a refuge for wolves who were unable to live in the wild.  It is a private company that serves as a centre for the scientific study of wolves.  As our guide pointed out, it is almost impossible to observe wolves in the wild because they are wary of people.  A scientist may track an animal for days, only to see it disappearing into the woods.  If an odd assortment of wolves (i.e. those who did not naturally live together in a pack) were put into a cage and observed, their behaviour would be aggressive and far from natural.  The wolf park provides shelter for animals so that they can live in conditions as close to their natural habitat as possible.  It is true that there is a wire fence separating visitors from the wolves, but this serves to keep people out rather than to enclose the animals.  Altogether there are 400,000 square metres of land through which they can roam.

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To begin with, our guide took us to see an Alaskan Tundra Wolf, which had a beautiful white furry coat.  A second wolf (Hudson on the right) had been brought from a zoo in Amsterdam in the hope that the pair would mate and produce offspring, but like all courting couples they needed time to get to know each other, and were kept separately until they felt more comfortable together. 

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Many myths have surrounded wolves in the past, depicting them as predators, which is why they have been hunted almost to extinction, but in fact man is the wolf’s biggest predator, not the other way around.   In reality they see us as a threat rather than as prey, so they have no reason to come to the wire netting to pose for photographs.  The guide carries a bucket of snacks, which she throws over the fence to attract the wild animals.  They have surprisingly good table manners, each waiting patiently to receive his or her piece of meat.  There was no fighting amongst them.  However, they do literally ‘wolf’ it down, often to regurgitate it for the youngsters.  Normally the wolves are fed a large amount of meat twice a week.

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Our guide explained that all dogs are descendants of wolves, but it took 20,000 years of evolution to produce a domestic version.   Wolves cannot be tamed.  Sometimes cubs are reared by hand, but at a certain point they will revert to their natural behaviour.

We moved on to view the European and Iberian wolves, who lived in packs.  Contrary to popular belief there is no dominant male, only a couple that produces cubs.  No other wolves are allowed to mate within the pack.  The Iberian wolves consisted of the two parents, ten young wolves and two uncles.  In the wild, a wolf who wanted to start his or her own family would have to leave the pack in the hope of finding a mate elsewhere and starting their own pack.  But being a lone wolf is a risky business.  They would no longer have the protection of the pack and would have to hunt for their own food without the benefit of a team.  For this reason many adults choose to endure single status in order to stay within the comfort and safety of the pack

We didn’t visit the Timber Wolf (a native of Canada) because there is only one left and the guide said she liked to leave him on his own. He is 14 years old, which is well beyond the average lifespan of 7 years for a wolf living in the wild.  The wolves at the park are never released into the wild because they are used to people and have not developed a natural fear of them.  They would not be able to survive long before someone shot them.

The Wolf Park also shelters other animals in need of a home.  We were introduced to two pot-bellied pigs, one of which was very friendly and allowed us to scratch his bristly head.  He had been kept as a pet by a family that lived in a flat.  A dwelling without a garden is not a suitable habitat for pigs because they need to root around and to roll about in mud.  As he grew bigger he started to destroy furniture, and as a result was kept on the balcony night and day.  A neighbour alerted the authorities, and Daniel and his team were able to rescue him.  He now lives happily in the Wolf Park in more natural surroundings.  The refuge also houses a family of foxes, one of which was happy to let the guide make a fuss of him.  Next to them was an area for geese, hens and ducks.  They were free to fly in and out, but the enclosure was surrounded by an electric fence to keep out wild foxes.

The company offers other programmes, such as training for dogs with severe behavioural problems.  Our guide pointed out that it was more a case of training the owners!

For people wishing to take close-up photos of the wolves without the barrier of wire netting, a two-hour visit can be arranged with a member of staff accompanying them inside the fence.

There are also night-time sessions for those who would like to howl with the wolves.

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By Janet Patterson - Author of ‘Al Gore goes to Heaven’