How Cats, Kids and Paradoxes Can Stop Us Being Horrid to Ourselves
Many of us struggle to feel coherent. Why? And what can we do about it?
Yesterday evening, I was sitting in my local pub with a large glass of wine reading a little journal of arts and ideas (in case you care, a short piece by Mark Dooley on the philosophy of Sir Roger Scruton). Upon finishing this piece I checked my phone; and a notification from Medium touched off a brief but interesting exchange with Brian S. Hook. This little exchange, which was about something I had written about identity, started off a train of thought that I am now, dear reader, going to follow. I have an inkling that what I am exploring here is something many of us are struggling with, or have struggled with, so do, pretty please, leave any thoughts (or abuse — at your own risk). I would like to hear what you have to say.
So—earlier this summer, I gave a best man speech. It was in fact my second best man speech for the same person, which always brings certain nuances to the thing. My theme, in any case, was that my friend was and is something of a contradiction. For the sake of his privacy I will not say too much, but he is, at once, cosmopolitan and not, musical and not, responsible and not. And he is not the only one who is a contradiction. I am, after all, a transvestite, Catholic, sceptical, (in the sense that my many, many mistakes, as well as my many strange experiences, have made it plain to me that good things are difficult to build and easy to destroy). I also value intellectual and moral courage, which will unavoidably cause problems since it entails making value judgements, and will, therefore, lead some people to dislike you. Yet I am quite fond of people. Even you, reader.
But neither my friend nor I are special. We are all to some extent contradictory; we all keep two sets of books. Indeed, it was Christopher Hitchens, whose moral clarity was one of the reasons he was so compelling, who said that he did not think it possible to live without intellectual contradiction. Consider how smartphones are made. Every smartphone contains cobalt, which is needed for lithium-ion batteries, and child labour, slavery, debt bondage, human trafficking and other very nasty practices are common in the places where cobalt is torn from the ground. For those of us who find this troubling (and let’s face it: we really should), we are hypocrites. We cannot even claim ignorance. And I think this might also be applied to the way we treat certain animals farmed for meat.
Every smartphone contains cobalt, which is needed for lithium-ion batteries, and child labour and other very nasty practices are common in the places where cobalt is torn from the ground.
Now, what I have come to see is that the need to reconcile the seeming contradictions within ourselves is much more of a problem than the contradictions themselves. The feeling that we are not quite coherent — which connects to cognitive dissonance, identity crises or, more colloquially, inner conflict—can give arise to often acute distress. When we perceive ourselves not to make sense, we seek to bring ourselves into alignment, and this may be doable: if we are not living out our values, we can learn, in a step by step way, to do that. But sometimes our sense of contradiction is too strong to be dealt with. Sometimes it is not just difficult but impossible. Inner conflict can lead to dysphoria of various kinds. And there is evidence this is on the rise: body dysmorphia is climbing, for instance.
Where does this come from? Body dysmorphia can probably be traced to the pressures imposed by social media, but research from sociology and psychology suggests that rapid cultural changes and shifts in social norms, particularly those dealing with identity and values, have given rise to identity conflicts. My hunch is also that because our world is so ‘technologised’, and technology is intrinsically about control and order, we have lost some of our ability to tolerate nuance and ambiguity. We want the world to be black and white; and we are willing to pretend it is for the sake of our own psychological safety. We increasingly live through the screen—‘Pics or it didn’t happen!’—transforming ourselves into objects. (This, by the way, is one definition of alienation: the the state or experience of viewing as objects and not subjects.) ‘We think life a lot,’ writes the great Pablo d’Ors, one of my intellectual heroes, ‘but we live it little’.
How do we reconcile our contradictions? Well, role models can help. There is great comfort to be found in discovering someone who shares your particular idiosyncrasies. There is a lovely letter, in fact, published in the Guardian newspaper, that Stephen Fry wrote to his younger self, in which he discusses his discovery of queer writers like Oscar Wilde. Elsewhere, he has said that what comforted Wilde was that, like himself, he was somewhat tall and ungainly, but also witty, wonderful with words and ‘absolutely boy-mad’ (to quote Christopher Hitchens — for a second time today; I really should mix it up). We might perhaps mention how important role models are to young women who dream of entering fields that have historically skewed male. To see someone like ourselves doing something we want to do is to know that we are not, in some way, contradictory.
There is great comfort to be found in discovering someone who shares your particular idiosyncrasies.
But sometimes, those role models do not exist. And then I think it can help to think a little harder about inconsistency itself and what it means. Simone Weil, the great French thinker, wrote that ‘contradiction is the criterion of the real’. Her point, which has been made in various ways by thinkers like Heraclitus and Nicholas of Cusa, is that the world is intrinsically paradoxical. There is a coincidentia oppositorum—a unity of opposites. Extreme political parties on the left and right often have quite a bit in common. Formal paradoxes are useful for showing how the way we think about something is often the problem, rather than the the thing itself. There is the famous ‘Ship of Theseus’ problem (if all the planks of the Ship of Theseus were changed, is it still the same ship?) and various paradoxes set out by Eubulides of Miletus (at one point do grains of sand become a heap?). And there is Bertrand Russell’s ‘Barber of Seville’ (if the barber of Seville shaves the beard of all the men in the city who do not shave themselves, does he have a beard?). The paradox springs chiefly from the way in which we think about them. Iain McGilchrist sees paradox as throwing light on the two ways in which attend to the world: with the aim of using the world, which demands that we see the world as dead, static and made up of ‘things’; and understanding it, which requires that we see the world as living, flowing, changing, a Gestalt—impossible to pin down in any absolute sense.
This will perhaps sound a bit odd, but we can learn from children and cats. (I even wrote a short book about cats and what they can teach us about living.) If we observe cats, what we will discover is that they combine qualities that are polar opposites. Cats are, at once, elegant, beautiful and dignified; and yet also silly, bizarre, and comical. Cats were once worshipped for their grace and loveliness (to quote Terry Pratchett, ‘they have not forgotten this’) but today they are more commonly seen as the subjects of the ubiquitous ‘cat video’, which occupies about half the internet and amuses just about everyone. A child, too, in her innocence and lack of self-consciousness, embodies many things without any problem. We do not see her as inconsistent, or demand that she settle, like the daemons of Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ series, which decide on a single animal form when the human of which they are a part reaches adolescence. Rather, we see a child in all her complexity.
In an age of liquid modernity, and with the internet influencing us in a plethora of ways, we are bound to become more complex, made up of parts that we may come to feel do not sit easily together. It seems to me that part of thinking well (living well, in fact) is to be able to tolerate what seems not to cohere: to be at ease with ‘both/and’ rather than restlessly seeking an ‘either/or’. The world is evidently not black and white. And neither are we. If we have been led to think otherwise, or shaped to think otherwise, then so be it. But it seems to me that, for the sake of our sanity (and the sanity of those around us) it is something we should try to unlearn.
