Why I Write

Why I Write

In which I write about my reasons for and approach to writing. Meta, I know. Also slightly funny as I haven’t actually published anything else in 2015, and this is the first post in my restarted blogging.

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I write because I think I have something to say. I think there are things that I know that not everybody knows, insights and understandings that I have that other people could learn from. So yes, I think people should read what I write to learn from it.

I also enjoy writing. I find it good to structure thoughts and link things together. I find that I have sets of thoughts in my head and making links between different things, and that once I write them it’s as if that is a finshed package of thoughts that I then stop thinking about – writing something often means I stop thinking about it.

But given that I am writing and sharing what I write, it’s clear I’m not writing just for myself. Hence the above paragraph that I write because I think that other people can learn from me. It may well be that I would write even if nobody reads it – and certainly, very few people read what I write at present – but it is undeniable that that is part of my motivation.

There’s a bit more to elaborate on this, on the perspective I write from and worldview I hold, to understand why I write.

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There is a lot wrong with the world. Yet I think that humans are innately good – we know what is right and wrong and we all prefer doing good over evil.* Therefore I think that humans are good – but rubbish. We don’t think well, we are ignorant, and we are ignorant of our ignorance. We are conditioned to not feel empathy we might have for other people – as Orwell writes (he’s a big inspiration), all propoganda is about making another group feel sub-human. If you walk past a person in the street who has fallen over and hurt themself, you might well help them – yet we walk past homeless people and beggars and ignore them, often without a thought. Language is a huge part in conditioning – so we refer to people fleeing war, murder, rape and destruction not as human beings or refugees, but as “migrants” who are a “swarm”: the subtext is “Do not feel empathy for these people.”

By writing, I hope to do a little against some of this ignorance.

I believe that if you educate people, they do better things and make better decisions – both in ways that affect themselves (eg writing about life philosophy, health, fitness) and affect the wider world (writing about current affairs and issues, inequalities, etc). I feel quite helpless in the world: there is so much wrong in it, so much suffering that need not be there, that is often caused by us, and I feel so small against this and don’t know what I can do. It makes me feel powerless. But by writing, I feel like it gives me one way to make a difference.

This blog won’t solve all of the world’s problems. But you can change the world without it being earth-shaking. All small changes are changes in themselves: one person who understands gender issues better and changes how they act based on it, one homeless person helped, one more refugee given refuge. In each of these cases, the world is changed for the better. People can and do change the world, because it is not the case that only huge changes matter.

My understanding of society and history is that these small changes can have big impact. I can recall days on which my mood was changed because of one person smiling at me or talking to me. One experience can spark something, might be the first drop of water which starts off a river changing its course. We are all products of our experiences and the world we live in is a product of those who inhabit it: so changing experiences changes people and changes the world. There are so many variables and not much predictability of “history” – the “course of history” could have been changed by one tiny thing. A briefcase gets moved to the different side of a table leg, and an attempted assassination of Hitler is unsuccessful. A few times we stood on the precipice of nuclear war where one person was to decide whether to begin or not. Recently, Jeremy Corbyn would not have been nominated for the Labour leadership candidacy were it not for a small number of MPs, without any one of whom he would not have even been on the list. I may feel small and powerless against the big world, but it is possible to change it; the very idea of a ‘big world’ is mistaken, as the world is nothing but the totality of all of these smaller worlds.

It might have come across as arrogant to read earlier that I think that people can learn from things I say and that I think I can change the world. Note that I accept this motivation upfront. I hate ego: I think that ego is the enemy of life <David Belle Link> (more on that elsewhere I’m sure). I don’t mean to write in an egotistical way. And I feel that if somebody does not like learning, that may be a problem they have with their ego. I don’t mean that you should force teaching upon people all of the time, there are limits and boundaries; but me writing on my website is well within this. If you find what I write arrogant… well actually, it’s probably pointless for me to finish that sentence.

Instead of a competitive ego mentality, I much prefer a self-improvement and co-operation mentality. Be humble and be willing to learn – which includes admitting you are wrong – and you come out better for it. I don’t exist only to try to educate people, I spend far more time reading and learning than I do writing. In terms of this blog, no doubt there is much I can learn from anyone who reads it, and so it is a sort-of dream that people read it and comment back on it. I call this a dream because nobody ever does.

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No doubt I will be misunderstood and taken out of context and people won’t like me – I know this has happened already with my blog and me as a person. This is inevitable in life, and I try to make it not my fault or not to get bothered by it. I tried to make this point in a subtle way in my first foray into blogging with one of my earliest posts (“Ich bin Sitzpinkler”) being about the fact that there is a word in German for one who pees sitting down (applicable only to those who might otherwise stand), to show that I don’t take myself too seriously. Yet I learned from that post that being misunderstood is inevitable, by people who poked fun at me for writing it, and that if somebody isn’t seeking to understand, they probably won’t. Horse-water-drink adage.

Some of my views might come across as a bit extreme or shocking. I usually agree. I try my best to be open minded and think freely: what I write is what I believe to be true, after thinking and researching. Hannah Arendt, a political philosopher, wrote: “Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents… It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us – neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever it may be.” If what I write is extreme or shocking, we ought face up to it and deal with it, not hide from it.

The world is horrible and scary, and ignorance is bliss. For example, the Snowden revelations, the illegal Iraq war, environmental damage, and recently illegal drone strikes. It is far more pleasant to live in a country which we believe to be nice: yet if this is not the case, far better to face up to it and do our best in reaction to it than pretend it isn’t so. In Game of Thrones, Tyrion says that “Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.”, and this seems to me to be the way of society today. Much of the realities that we would rather avoid are extreme to learn. Often, we would much rather something not to be true, so we choose not to believe it. Or something sounds unlikely, so different to the world we might think we live in, that people don’t believe it. Tough: if it is true, it is true.

There is also a sort-of iceberg fallacy: maybe I write what I write because I have left-wing views or because I am cynical or similar (whatever these things mean), and therefore if you aren’t left-wing or don’t like cynicism you might want to ignore what I have to say. This misunderstands that I am cynical because of what I have learned, or that I have “left-wing” views not because I was born in a red blanket, baptised by Marx, and given the middle-name Trotsky, but because I seek what I think is best, and it happens that I form views which are described as left-wing. It is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Of course, if what I write is not true then this doesn’t apply. I do my best to research and have evidence for what I say: please feel free to challenge me and ask for any sources I haven’t included. All I say is: do not shy away merely because it is shocking.

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Finally: please comment. I also write to learn – though most of my learning is from reading and thinking, discussion is good too. People rarely comment on blogs, which is a shame: a conversation is more interesting. If I am wrong or you disagree, tell me. If you want a source or to ask a question, do so. And if you enjoyed it, then that’s always nice to hear.

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Alex May

 

 

 

Footnote from Hitler mention: *Discussions of this may come later – the classic ‘did Hitler think he was a good person’, for example. But I’m not discussing that here.

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NB: my thoughts on and approach to language mean that often there are words or phrases in common usage which I don’t think are correct, but sometimes use to get a meaning across see xkcd.com/1576/ for a quick explanation!). I often put these in quotes to show this – for example “course of history”, whereas I don’t think that history has a course.

 

This post was inspired chiefly, I believe, by the writings of George Orwell (his essays Why I Write, Politics and the English Language, and The Prevention of Literature chiefly) and, in terms of writing style, by Nassim Taleb, who doesn’t seem to care what other people think of him and uses language in a manner I quite like.