732 - The Natural-Living Test

This is an exercise at the back of Geoffrey Miller's book, Spent, which I heartily recommend. I suspect the exercise has been developed by Miller, but it draws on ideas I've found in other articles and books, so much of the knowledge will be in the public domain. It's not easily traceable on Google (I've not managed, anyway). All of which, and because Miller seems a thoroughly decent chap, and because he's motivated by a desire to get the knowledge out there, and because I'm happy to remove the test if he and/or other authors wish, and because it's a brilliant tool for meditating on, and because this blog's as much an aide memoire for me as anything I expect anyone else to read, and because I want to raise a question at the end, means I'm going to stick it up here in full. Here on in, till indicated, the text is as in Spent (pp.331-2):

This quantifies how closely your life matches that of our happier ancestors. Write down honestly how many times in the past month you have had each of the experiences below:

• Rocked a newborn baby to sleep
• Made up a story and told it to a child
• Felt the sunrise warm your face
• Satisfied a genuine hunger by eating ripe fruit
• Satisfied a genuine thirst by drinking cool water
• Shown courage in protecting a child from danger
• Shown leadership and resourcefulness in an emergency
• Shared a meal with parents, siblings, or other close relatives
• Gossiped with an old friend
• Made a new friend
• Made something beautiful and gave it to someone
• Repaired something that was broken
• Improved a skill through diligent practice
• Learned something new about a plant or animal that lives near you
• Changed your mind about something important on the basis of new evidence
• Followed good advice from someone older
• Taught a useful skill, charming art, or interesting fact to someone younger
• Petted a furry animal such as a dog, cat or monkey
• Worked with earth, clay, stone, wood or fiber
• Comforted someone dying
• Walked over a hill and across a stream
• Identified a bird by its song
• Played a significant role in a local ritual, festival, drama or party
• Played a team sport
• Made a physical effort to achieve a collective goal with others
• Sustained silent eye contact with someone to show affection
• Shamed someone who was behaving badly, for the greater good
• Resolved a serious argument using humour, emotional self-control, and social empathy
• Sang, danced, or played instruments with a group of friends
• Made friends laugh out loud
• Reached a world-melting mutual orgasm with a sexual partner
• Experienced sublime beauty that made your hair stand on end
• Experienced an oceanic sense of oneness with the cosmos that made you think, This is how church should feel
• Applied the Golden Rule by helping someone in need
• Warmed yourself by an open fire under stars

Now, add up all the numbers that you wrote for each item above. If your total score is lower than 100 and you do not feel as happy as you would like, write a five-hundred-word essay explaining why you expect your life to be happy or meaningful if you are not doing anything meaningful for others or feeding your brain any of the natural experiences that it evolved to value and to find meaningful.

[End of text]

My only quibble with this checklist is that whilst all these experiences do, I can see, amount to a very happy life, I'd want to see something about the experience of encountering pain, incomprehension, or the thwarting of a plan or desire. I can accept that we've evolved to cope in such situations, and even thrive, and I can also interpret some of the items on the list as if they addressed such a situation - the repair of something broken; the improvement of a skill through practice; the changing of one's mind, for example. I do, however, feel that peace in the face of rejection is a state one experiences throughout life - ultimate comfort in the face of death - and it isn't referred to here.

As I understand it, it's related to the role of the shaman, who may have had a psychotic episode precipitated by excessive openness, as suggested in Spent (pp.219-221), or who may have experienced at the limits of his or her being a light indistinguishable from eternity, or both, but who is certainly present in early hunter-gatherer communities, with something to offer. Is this simply the sense of oneness with the cosmos referred to on the list? I've experienced that, I think, but I've not yet interrogated my experiences fully. So this is where I must ask myself some tough questions, which I'll do in my next post.

And it certainly is not to detract from the great value of the Natural-Living Test as it stands.

733 - My Brilliant Invention!

Last night I made something.

734 - Found Encounter

In Starbucks, Newcastle upon Tyne, across the room, a young white manager, American, head of the Newcastle branch of a successful bottom-up sales company, in meeting with a British Asian job applicant and his well-dressed father.

The father understands top-down, hierarchical companies, and starts by trying to establish what health and safety measures are present in the company, what insurance, should an angry customer assault his son.

"We're all responsible for our own actions," says the manager. He brings in his partner, who says he broke his back and was off work for two months. "I paid him, though he made no sales," the manager says, "Because I felt responsible; he's a friend; it was the right thing to do. But I don't expect you to understand the business model. My father doesn't understand. Behind my back, he tells people I run a business, but never to my face."

"But what do you want out of this? You say you're from Nigeria, but where's your... home? What do you plan to do with all the money you make?"

"I plan to retire. Early. Fifty. Live in the Bahamas. Drink Pina Colladas on the beach ... I want to know I've worked well."

The conversation lasts forty minutes, intensely. Back and forth. Two cultures negotiating, but neither giving ground. Still, neither coming to blows. The manager shakes the hand of the father, and holds his coat out for him, dressing him. The word "respect" is used. The father allows himself to be dressed.

735 - Coinage

I remember a long simile in a linguistics book linking words to coins, the syntax and semantics on one face, the phonetics on the other.

But words aren't just like coins, they are coins, I think. They take a little effort to create, share, and remember, so they're definitely work, and money is a work battery. We say they have currency, meaning both that they're presently in use, and that they're in use, in flow, in community.

Like coinage, the meaning of words is ascribed by people, and defaced by them. Parity of semantics occurs across cultures, but cannot be used unless a phonetic exchange rate is established. Or the sounds can be celebrated, like the bare weight, shape, and imprint of sestertii in the hands of a British numismatist, cross-culturally, where the meaning, te amore, is less certain.

They can be shuffled around, and each unit used in varying quantities, to sum to a larger thought. To be or not to be. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/ Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/ And, by opposing, end them. Both sentences mean the same, though one hangs heavier, like a fist of shrapnel.

And one can be word-rich, which spent in story-form buys one a meal or a bed for the night or for life. People value words, like they value gold. The spending of words is a sign of generosity.

Words inspire a deep morality, though no deeper, perhaps, than a balance sheet. The grandson of a publisher, I had many, though not so much cash. At 33 I gave them away. Now they fall into my lap. But I'll die in silence.

736 - Cafe Culture, Dance City, Newcastle

Very interesting talk at last night's Cafe Culture event, about reinvigorating society's commitment to informal education - the sort you might find in an evening class or a youth club, or simply from the guitarist you know down the street.

Chiefly memorable for me because:
1. I walked into a granite seat on the way to the meeting.
2. I grabbed a seat with no legroom or place for my oversized coat and scarf, which I shoved down the coat sleeve.
3. I bought an expensive latte and then knocked it all over the floor (see above).
4. I was joined on the row by four women who bridled when I tried to smile and make eye contact.
5. I found the handkerchief I had beautifully ensured would be in my coat pocket on the bedside cabinet, instead, when I got home, my nose having dripped through the meeting.
6. I left the meeting at the interval, not before trying to shove my arm down the sleeve with the scarf in it, and getting stuck half way, and pulling the scarf out the other end like a magician doing a rubbish trick.

If I'd stayed, maybe I'd have suggested there might be mileage in exploring the way social networks can co-ordinate informal learning, especially because my old class at primary school is getting in touch with one another, and I'm finding all kinds of things out about where they are now. It'd be great, starting from a shared educational experience, to explore the areas of life we feel we missed at eleven, and fill them in. Great research project for an educationalist. One of my fellow pupils, for example, was the son of an avante-garde proto-punk jazz musician. If I'd known such people existed then...?

737 - Nimble Jack

By way of an illustration that storying isn't just theory, today I was making my slow bear-like way up Grainger Street when an even larger man, dressed in construction gear, approaching a builder's skip, bowled in front of me, causing me to duck down and sideways to keep out of his way.

At the instant that I could have taken affront - obviously I was there; I'm sure he clocked me; was he playing status games? - the option opened to me to become, briefly, nimble Jack, weaving out of the way of a Giant. I took the option. It felt like stepping into one character, but at the same time, I had let the 'me' that was about to take affront fall away. That felt disconcerting, but the rush of being nimble Jack for a semi-second is still with me.

I don't think I've stereotyped the construction worker as a wicked giant - or myself, for that matter, as ducking and diving. Rather, it feels like for a moment, for practical purposes, I've opened a window of play, a storyspace, in which, rather than being hurt, I've retained my dignity through an agility I might not have accessed as ambling bear.

Later, I can review the situation, sensing I lost the perceptions of one aspect of me, but gained the perceptions of another. Curious though, that this other was a character offered to me in folktale form, and that I took it in a split second with a minimum of logical thinking.

738 - Storying and Trait Signaling

A longish quote, to start, from Spent, by Geoffrey Miller (2009):

Innovations in asymmetric warfare are always initially considered to be treachery and terrorism by the side that believes it is stronger according to traditional criteria. In retrospect, such tactics are inevitably reframed as natural historical progress in the efficient conduct of warfare.

Likewise, every signalling innovation in human culture is at first considered unfair and disreputable, at least by those who excelled at the previous signaling game. Medieval lords were no doubt driven nuts by the minstrels and troubadours who used musical innovations (isorhythmic motets, polyphony, even madrigals!) to seduce their wives and daughters, rather than winning them by the traditional methods (physical force, economic oppression, religious indoctrination). Elvis wasn't playing fair by wiggling his hips and sneering, and Miles Davis wasn't playing fair by being so damned cool, handsome and talented. From the viewpoint of social competitors and sexual rivals who "play fair" by getting formal educations, working full-time jobs, and paying full retail prices, any of these alternative ways of displaying one's personal traits seem like cheating. However, from the viewpoint of rational individuals seeking maximum social and sexual status at minimal cost, all these tactics were wonderfully liberating. Indeed, such signaling innovations seem to drive most of the progress in the technologies, ideas, and institutions that we call civilization.

I do think that with storying I've hit on just such an innovation. What one does is deliberately sequestrate one's identity, in the context of a given circumstance - time period, location, role, virtual reality - and proceed proactively to customise it, internally first, then, if one wishes, externally too. Role-play games allow this - perhaps most, if not all, arts do - but key is the internal action. The means by which such shaping occurs are those of traditional storytelling, turned by the teller in upon him or herself.

It certainly would not appear fair to those with traditional takes on identity that one might, by playing the role of a troll, and allowing one's seductee into one's storyspace in a character of their choosing, win their attentions, but the end result, in evolutionary terms, would be social and reproductive success. Fairness, as Geoffrey Miller suggests, need not come into it. Ideas about the multiplicity of a person's identity/ies, as explored by Rita Carter in her book of the same name, might have more to offer such a progressive artform than traditional concepts of an ultimately uniform personality.

To establish whether storying has a genuine appeal, it might be useful to investigate how effective it is at displaying personality traits that might otherwise not be signaled. The artform would be truly revolutionary if one were able to demonstrate, through an understanding of neuroplasticity, perhaps, that one was not able simply to display, but over a short or longer period, alter one's traits. In so far as, say, Christianity is about replicating in oneself the psychological and emotional traits of Jesus Christ, this is a realm already well trodden by religion, and supported by society.

I've had an inkling, and written before, how storying might give rise to issues around the civil rights one possesses over one's identity. Interestingly, perhaps, following his comments on the asymmetrical trait-signaling arms race, Geoffrey Miller explores whether it would be desirable for society to establish the psychological traits of its citizens through the gathering of data from, for example, one's relatives and neighbours; one's private email and social networking footprint; one's brain imaging or DNA testing. He concludes that, although this will become increasingly viable, its value would be suspect, because our most efficient personality detectors are those already hardwired in our brains. If storying ever did take off, however, one might expect a backlash, from traditionalists keen to protect their social and reproductive hegemony, against those enhancing themselves with a more flexible approach to personal identity. In such circumstances, the monitoring, and monochroming, of personality traits might become politically appealing.