The expression “age is just a number“ is one that I find deeply irritating.
It’s the “just a number“ part that does it.
Nothing’s just a number.
It’s true that if you ask somebody their age they will reply along the lines of ‘35’ or ‘92’. Their answer will be just a number. But it’s not a number plucked out of thin air as in ‘Think of a number’. It’s a number that applies to something: it’s the quantifying of the precise number of years that the person has been alive.
When I’m in a generous mood I think of the use of the expression as a way that people think they are being kind to people by downplaying their age, but I’m not in a generous mood very often so I usually think that it’s just people being sloppy with their concepts.
Going off on a bit of a tangent, I quite like that sentence I used earlier “Nothing’s just a number“. It’s got several possible meanings: it can mean what it means in the context above or it can mean “Zero (I.e. nothing) is just a number”. And zero definitely isn’t ‘just’ a number – it’s a very interesting number.
When you identify as a particular type of person, you become a narrower type of person
Over the early 2020s in the West there has been a huge upsurge in people seeking and claiming ‘identities’. People, especially young people, have always sort identities of course. Young people often become wedded to very specific types of music and clothing for instance and hang out with other young people who listen to the same type of music and who wear the same type of clothes. The young people probably think that they are making choices purely on aesthetic grounds whereas they are quite likely making choices to help cement their links with their chosen group.
That phrase ‘purely on aesthetic grounds’ probably needs unpicking a bit. It makes it sound as though aesthetic values are somehow absolute and set in stone. For instance, in the visual arts blue is a cool colour and red is a hot colour, and most people react to them in a similar way. It’s a result of our evolution and it’s in our DNA. However, I expect that those evolutionary aesthetics are overlaid by culturally generated aesthetics, and very importantly, by subculturally generated aesthetics. That’s where young people’s taste in music and clothes comes in. It helps them identify with their chosen subculture.
One of the reasons that a person identifies with a particular subculture is to signal that they are NOT part of a different subculture. Different subcultures, especially different youth subcultures, are often antagonistic to each other, sometimes to the point of physical violence. We could call it the subculture wars.
Subcultures and identity (especially youth identity) often have their genesis in rebellion, as a way of showing that you’re not part of mainstream society. Mainstream society is after all boring and/or responsible for all of the ills in the world. Who in their right mind would want to be part of that?
In recent years (the first half of the 2020s) the subculture wars and the natural striving for identity have been put on steroids and have morphed into what we now witness as The Culture Wars and Identity Politics.
The obsession with identity is no longer the preserve of mainly young people and no longer has as one of his main aims the function of reinforcing group bonds. On top of this, it’s no longer inward looking. In the past identity groups and subcultures were relatively insular and didn’t interact with mainstream society in any unusual ways. To a large degree they keep themselves to themselves, as long as the group was cohesive that was all that mattered.
There’s a problem with the present day manifestation of identity politics which stems from the nature of identity itself. Identity is necessarily divisive. People choose an identity so that they are different from other people.
This is fine when it involves the relatively insular identity subcultures of youth. However, the modern day identity groups of the culture wars are anything but insular. Engagement and confrontation are their watchwords.
Text questioning the desirability of eternal life.
Most religions have a position on eternal life. In fact it’s at the core of most religions. It’s basically seen as a good thing.
Religions often promise to send their adherents off onto a higher plane of existence after death where they would spend eternity in a state of bliss, but that sounds like a bit of a long shot to me. Why would you be rewarded with an eternity of bliss simply for having endured a mere seventy or eighty years on earth?
For now let’s dispense with the religious concept of eternal life on some sort of celestial plane and think about eternal life conducted in a more practical level down here on Earth – basically living forever. It hardly bears thinking about. Forever is a very long time indeed, and apart from anything else things would start to get really boring before you were even half way through. You’d be bored to death in fact, except that you wouldn’t die. On top of that, during eternity you would experience every possible misfortune that you could possibly have the misfortune of experiencing, and not only that, you’d experience them all an infinite number of times because infinity can hold within itself an infinite number of things and still have an infinite amount of time left to do it all over again, infinitely.
If you lived forever you’d have no incentive to get up in the morning in order to get things done. You can always leave everything until tomorrow.
If no one ever died there’d be no need to create replacement people, otherwise known as children. In fact, the concept of children would be a big problem. For one thing, the planet would soon become grossly overpopulated. If there were children, at what age would they stop getting older in order to allow them to live forever? The physics and biology are unclear. But what would be clear is that there would be no such thing as sex. A dismal thought, especially if it’s forever.
Text based art on the problem with idealism and ideal worlds.
’Your ideal world isn’t the same as my ideal world.’
The problem with thinking that you’ve cracked it when it comes to imagining what the ideal world would be like is that your ideal world probably isn’t the same as someone else’s ideal world. And that someone else probably wouldn’t want to live in your ideal world anymore than you’d want to live in their ideal world.Is Donald Trump’s ideal world the same as your ideal world? Maybe not. Or maybe it is.
Maybe your ideal world involves everyone having access to unlimited amounts of free alcohol. Maybe my ideal world involves alcohol being outlawed. They can’t both exist on the same planet.
The thing about ideal worlds is that they tend to be thought up by idealists, and idealists tend not to like the messiness that’s inevitable in life, which is why they are idealist in the first place, seeking a smooth, frictionless perfection to existence . Me, I’ve given up idealism and now embrace the messiness. It’s much more relaxing.
Ideal worlds are unattainable anyway. By their very nature they are ridiculously over simplistic and are riddled with concepts that are veritable ’unintended consequence bombs’.
Here’s an example. Fittingly, it’s an over simplistic example. Imagine an ideal world where the sun shines all day long everyday. Sounds great, especially from where I’m living, where it’s more likely to rain all day long. But wait! If the sun shines all day long then there’s no rain, ever. Without rain, without water, everything dies. Not an ideal world after all then.
This piece of text-based art is an attempt to visualise the relationship between questions and answers, specifically the way in which the answers to questions are often dependent on the way that the question is put.
To give a simple example, the question “Was Picasso a great artist?” may elicit a different answer to the question “Do you agree that Picasso was a great artist?”. It’s all in the framing of the question. The structure of the question dictates the structure of the answer. It marshals people into different ways of thinking about the subject.
Some questions, such as “Does God exist?” or “Why do we exist?”, generate the need for answers even though it may be argued by some that these questions needn’t be asked in the first place on the philosophical principal that “Whatever is, is.”.
Don’t let the truth get in the way of your opinions
This piece of text based art is a statement concerning truth and opinions, and the way that they are often unrelated. People often hold opinions in total defiance of the truth. When I say ‘people’ I mean everyone.
We sift and filter the truth so that we only notice the bits of it that conform with the way we want things to be. People tend to hold views based on what they want to believe, and what they want to believe is generally based on their personality and their circumstances, not on evidence.
A person who possesses an authoritarian tendency either as a result of genetics or of life experience is quite likely to gravitate towards political ideas that espouse authoritarian approaches to running society whether or not that approach is the most appropriate or not. For instance, someone who feels insecure in their personal life because they were, unlike their friends, lousy at sport, may be attracted to the certainty of authoritarianism. Such people would back a dictatorship because of their humiliation on the football pitch, not because of their deeply considered analysis of the dynamics of dictatorship. It’s not got a lot to do with politics
Similarly, someone from a privileged and affluent background, someone who’s never had to struggle too much to get on well in life and who’s never felt threatened by life’s unfairnesses may well espouse liberal opinions because liberal opinions are generally nice and they make their espousers feel good about themselves.
The only thing standing between you and your dreams is reality
This piece of text-based art is an aphorism about the dangers of assuming that your dreams will come true regardless of the inconvenience of the fact that the real world may have other ideas.
It’s meant as a bit of a corrective to the excesses of aspirational slogans such as ‘You can be whatever you want to be’ and ‘Be your best self’, which I think tend to set people up for a fall.
The words of this piece are meant as a humorous corrective to the usual implication of the phrase “We are stardust”.
Although the phrase “We are stardust” is actually true, in that most of the elements that compose our bodies were created in nuclear reactions inside stars, it is often given a metaphysical spin that implies that we as humans are special beings imbued with some form of cosmic consciousness or special metaphysical connection to the universe.
Well, we do have a connection to the universe in that we are part of it. But then again, everything else is part of the universe too. That’s the definition of what the universe is. It’s everything.
So remember, it’s not just us who are made of stardust: that nasty deposit that next door’s dog made outside your house is made of stardust too.
Whenever I hear a spokesperson apologising for the consequences of ineptitude by says “Lessons have been learned” I shake my head in resignation.
In this example of my text-based art the response to the statement “Lessons have been learned” is basically that we never learn and we’ll keep making the same mistakes.
Obviously in each individual case in which someone says “lessons have been learned” there will be a few superficial lessons learnt, but at a deeper level the inevitability of things going wrong again is painfully obvious.
I think it’s partly the fact that the statement is used as an attempted get-out that jars with me.
