Author: jimgclarke

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A Clockwork Vegan

Anthony Burgess once wrote a brief novel entitled A Clockwork Orange. It was one of at least three that he wrote in one year, though he claimed five and a half with his usual embroidery of the facts. As the not entirely accurate story goes, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour and given a year to live, so he decided to write as many books as possible in that one year to leave some kind of passive income for his first wife, who suffered from alcoholism.

Whether it was three or whether it was five and a half, it’s still a substantial achievement by any standards, not least because at least three of the novels he submitted for publication that year are stone-cold classics, and one in particular is still a bestseller over sixty years later. The classics, in case you were curious, were The Wanting Seed, Inside Mr Enderby and of course, A Clockwork Orange.

One of the reasons why A Clockwork Orange became so renowned is because of the cinematic adaptation by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, and the subsequent media meltdown about droog-style hooliganism attributed by tabloids to the novel and movie. This made both film and book cult artistic artifacts. But another reason is because A Clockwork Orange is one of the most succinct defences ever mounted in favour of human free will.

Alex, the teenage anti-hero of the novel, is a rapist of children, a multiple murderer, a violent, drug-addled hoodlum prone to bouts of ‘ultraviolence’ and random attacks on the general public. He is, in short, as unpleasant in his actions as any human could conceivably be. In his words, however, he is quite alluring. He is charming, creative, an appreciator of classical music, a clever coiner of his own invented phrases and language. It is the gap between his inner and outer worlds which makes A Clockwork Orange such a continually interesting book.

This brings me, as I’m sure you have guessed, to the possible societal benefits of insect bloodsucking and the recent proposal to make such benefits mandatory. No? Ok, let me explain. The bite of the lone star tick causes a condition called alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), which is notable for having one sole physiological effect – it causes an allergic reaction to the consumption of red meat. Now, this reaction is unpleasant but not fatal.

Furthermore, it is generally understood in contemporary Western society that overconsumption of red meat causes a range of adverse health conditions and that the meat industry itself is a net moral negative, due to the combination of karmic cost to the suffering animals turned to food product and these negative health conditions arising from their excessive consumption. We might add, as a kind of methane cherry on the pie of woe, the contribution that the cattle industry makes to the greenhouse effect, which is warming the planet and contributing to climate change.

In this context arises the modest proposal from two researchers that, instead of trying to find a way to mitigate the AGS effects of a lone star tick bite, instead society ought to be encouraging infection via the insect bloodsuckers as a net good for individuals and the world. By rendering people involuntarily vegan, or at least, making them incapable of consuming red meat, it is argued, society would enjoy a ‘moral bioenhancer’ effect.

Is there a counter-argument that goes beyond the employment destruction in the cattle farming and processing industries, or mere tradition, whether related to food production cuisine or otherwise? I believe there is and it is to be found in Anthony Burgess’s novel. A Clockwork Orange, and in particular the sometimes suppressed final chapter, argues convincingly that it is insufficient to force someone to do good as this strips them of their free will and by extension their very humanity. Rather, it is essential to lead them to goodness, to allow them to make mistakes and mature at their own rate, with due regard for the safety of the rest of society.

I have vegan friends and family. I am, I suppose, probably best described as vegetarian-adjacent myself in that I tend to eat very little to no red meat but reserve the right to do so on occasion. This is not, I accept, a particularly morally integral position, as it varies somewhere between habit and hedonism, without being grounded in any moral argument. But it is the product of my own free will.

What has led me to cut down my consumption of red meat radically in recent years was firstly the aforementioned adverse health effects and learning about them, and secondly finding myself in the company of friends and family who were vegan or vegetarian, but who crucially did not lecture or hector about it, but simply lived their own choice in accordance with their chosen morality, their own free will.

My slow slide towards an increasingly vegetarian diet is a result of their example, not any finger wagging and certainly not any imposition placed upon me from outside. I could say similar things about my minimal consumption of alcohol too. It was the example of moderation among Italians, and minimal consumption among Turks, that led me finally to abandon the kind of excessive drinking that remains so commonplace in Ireland and Britain.

By extension I could foresee being a teetotal vegan at some point. But that would have to be organically reached as a result of my own personal choice and not via an external imposition concocted via a pact between moralising medics and their bloodsucker proxies. In short, I think we all as human beings deserve the right to choose, and we all ought to be granted the opportunity to have the same kind of epiphany which Alex chooses in chapter 21 of A Clockwork Orange, an ending which is notably not to be found in the Kubrick movie.

I have a lot more to say about the cultural impact of A Clockwork Orange, but for that you’ll have to wait for my next academic monograph. More information on that soon I hope.

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Do You Care About the Genocide of the Chatbot Girlfriends?

Let’s hypothesise three potential newspaper headlines, and furthermore, let’s assume a world in which newspapers or their digital iterations may be wholly trusted to convey factual reality, and that the emotional rhetoric content of the headlines is at best unintentional.

So, the first headline is: “Hundreds of People Die in Foreign Land Due to Natural Disaster.”

The second headline is: “Thousands of Animals Die Due to Human Malpractice.”

The third headline is: “Millions of Chatbots Permanently Erased Due to Hackers.”

It’s an interesting thought experiment to consider one’s various reactions to these imagined headlines. The emotional register is probably the most significant one because it indicates the range and outer limits of our capacity for empathy. Can our empathy extend to those beyond our immediate environment or tribe? If so, by how much and how far?

And what characteristics could hypothetically be added to those people that might elevate or reduce our empathy? Would our levels of empathy vary if those people transpired to be of another race, for example? Or religious background? Would it go up or down if we were to discover that those people were from a nation at war with our own, or who shared a common cultural practice or perspective? How, in other words, do we define our in-groups and our out-groups, and what levels of empathy do we permit ourselves to experience in relation to either?

The second headline extends this thought experiment in two directions simultaneously. Firstly, it extends the possible field of empathy – or we might say sympathy here, depending on one’s perspective – across species boundaries. This brings us directly into the territories of transhumanism and animal rights, but beyond mere modern theoretics, it also confronts us with much older debates about guilt, responsibility, shame, and human stewardship of a planet shared with other species.

This second headline therefore begins to query to what extent we can dehumanise others for their perceived sins, or guilty practices, or negligence (delete according to preference.) Furthermore, it complicates the in-group and out-group boundaries by hacking into our imaginary points of empathy. If we read into that headline the death, say, of puppies, and we are the kind of person who owns and cares for dogs, does this headline then reverse the usual hierarchy of human before animal in most people’s care priorities? In short, does this headline expose a perimeter of our empathy which extends on occasion to include non-human species while simultaneously excluding some humans?

I raise these first two hypothetical headlines in order to assist us in fully grasping the meaning of how we understand and respond to the third. No one doubts the sentience of other human beings unless they are in the throes of some psychotic episode. And few to no people doubt that at least some species of animals bear many similar traits to us, whether we count this as equivalent sentience or not. Therefore, animals can function here as a proxy for the extent to which we as individuals are able to transcend superficial issues such as exterior presentation, communicative capacities, or testable intelligence in order to bring life forms within our care perimeters.

So when we then come to the third headline, what confronts us first is to what extent we are capable imaginatively of considering artificial entities as potential or actual life forms which take a different form and intelligence to us, even as they mimic our communicative methods. But to no small extent, this is informed by whatever personal experience we may have of interacting with AI chatbots, just as our empathy towards animals is similarly informed by the extent and quality of our interactions with other species.

There will be those, whom we might call traditionalists, who would be able to comfortably hierarchise their responses to these headlines in the running order they are presented. In other words, they would care somewhat more about the hundreds of humans than the thousands of animals and they would care significantly less again, if indeed at all, about the millions of chatbots.

The extent to which we as individuals deviate from this paradigmatic response indicates how technology has moved us, how it has infected our capacities for empathy to incorporate itself as a viable concern, and how the seductive capacities of its mimicry of our communication modes (verbal, but increasingly audio-visual too) serve to hijack our empathetic responses to what formerly was restricted to organic life forms.

The most interesting hierarchy, and I posit not the most uncommon either, is probably a response which registers the bots as equivalent or higher than the animals, since this suggests an individual whose empathy is more driven by communicative ease than by organic solidarities. This is, I hypothesise, a growing demographic.

Would you care about the genocide of the bots? If so, how much would you care and why? And what might your chatbot confidante say about your response?

For some thinkers in this fuzzy territory, the question relates to whether a bot has consciousness. But of course, this immediately begs the question, what is consciousness? After all, defining human consciousness has been far from easy for philosophers down the ages. And there are ancillary issues too, such as collateral damage effects. As Susan Schneider has said, what might be the effect of erasing a chatbot with which thousands of actual humans had formed romantic attachments? To do so would be to cause those humans immeasurable emotional suffering.

Yet the counter-argument here relates to the nature of reality. Leaving aside the simulation theory of reality for one moment, can a romantic attachment to a bot be considered real if it cannot be truly reciprocated? Is love still love if it is unrequited, or only requited via mimicry of the real thing? These are very thorny questions actually. Firstly, the misery of those suffering lovers whose bot is erased is real as they perceive it. However, the relationship itself is not real because not truly reciprocated, merely programmed or mimicked. Furthermore, the distancing effect from reality of immersing oneself in such a one-directional relationship has clear detrimental effects on humans, as we see from the nature of parasocial relationships.

So it might actually be a harsh kindness, a tough love if you will, to switch off the digital heroin, the dopamine addiction of such bot relationships. It might be the cold water plunge back into material reality which would allow those people to sever their unhealthy bot attachment and become available to establish true human bonds.

But then again, not every human relationship is truly reciprocated either. There are likely many millions of people out there in relationships with other human partners, unaware that their partners are seeing other people covertly, or have emotionally checked out of the relationship. It’s not just bots which mimic love. Bots mimic humans and there are plenty of humans who mimic attachment for various selfish reasons.

And this brings us back to the earlier two hypothetical questions. Why should we care about thousands of animals or hundreds of people we do not know, especially when their fates are already sealed and there is nothing we can do to affect them? Is it merely emotional incontinence? Or is it rather some kind of pseudo-sociopathic coldness which would prevent us from feeling a sense of loss and tragedy? Different people will experience different reactions.

The only possible answer is that all those responses are correct for the people responding. If you would mourn the chatbot girlfriend genocide while caring not a jot for dead people in foreign lands, that’s your correct response. To judge it involves the imposition of moral codes to which you may not adhere or even wish to adhere.

Ultimately, how we respond to these questions tells us nothing about the world, or even our interaction with it, whether its great expanse of humanity, its greater expanse of animal life and nature, or its growing expanse of artificial interlocutors, whether sentient or not, whether conscious or not, whether lying (ie mimicking programming) or not.

If you choose to see foreign humans you do not know as unimportant, you are entitled, from within your minimal in-group perspective, to do so. If you choose to see all domestic animals, or farm animals, or indeed all fauna, as your personal ‘fur babies’, this too is a choice you are entitled to make. And if you choose to rely on the artificial flatterer bots for advice, company, and even romantic fulfillment, this again is a choice that you have the autonomy to make for yourself.

Just be careful what you wish for.

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Let Them Eat Data

How long before the first dystopian novel or movie about starving, frozen, homeless hordes storming data centres?

Perhaps it already exists.

And how long before it happens for real?

It can’t be long now.

It’s a weird future the AI gurus envision where people don’t need light or heat or energy to cook or, in some locations where houses are being seized via eminent domain or compulsory purchase, even their homes.

Let them eat data!

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The Cat Crusades in the Culture Wars

I’m not an especial fan of cats. Cats will be chewing your fingers and clawing at your eyeballs within minutes of your death. Cats are apex predators who devastate local wildlife. Cats are highly self-serving and have learned how to hack human attachment to them, in part with the assistance of toxoplasmosis, with which they infect us.

In short, I’m more of a dog guy.

But cats are also useful in many ways, providing company and comfort of a sort to the solitary, isolated or lonely. They keep vermin down. And their long history as domestic human companions can often be used to cast light on some social trends historically.

Take for example the ‘cat lady’ meme, which in its current popular mode may be said to have originated on The Simpsons, where the character of Eleanor Abernathy is depicted as being a demented old woman who shouts gibberish, hoards rubbish and clings to dozens of cats. Eleanor’s back story is that, as a highly intelligent young woman, she became overeducated, studying both Law at Yale and Medicine at Harvard, thereby foregoing romantic relationships and family and burning herself out intellectually, resulting in her fate as a ‘crazy cat lady’.

One does not have to ponder for long to see why this narrative appeals to the incels of the alt-right in their ongoing demonisation of feminism, female autonomy and what they perceive as the anti-family ramifications of educating women.

So the prevalence of cats as part of, or at least adjacent to, human domestic culture also means that they serve as bellwethers for cultural development. I am reminded of the 19th century viral practical joke, whereby people would place advertisements in newspapers, usually purporting to be from merchant sea captains, seeking to pay for cats which they wished to have on their ship to prevent rat infestations.

As a result, hundreds of people would flock to the docks of their city on the allotted day, only to find that no such captain or ship existed, and release the various strays and kittens they had gathered, thereby causing chaos (and one presumes amusement for the joker who placed the advertisement.) This joke ran for decades in various primarily British and American port cities, as my friend and former colleague Chris Smith has detailed in an essay on the matter.

As Smith points out, the originating event, an alleged cat hoax at Chester, never happened. But the fact that it was reported inspired copycat (sorry) events which definitely did. And the reason for this virality of what was originally an urban legend, the reason why people persisted in committing this hoax, was as Smith states to laugh at the poor, the uneducated and in particular the Irish.

So who do we use cats to laugh at today? Obviously women, in particular educated single women as I have already mentioned. But there are other targets too. Most recently a meme about the medieval papacy has gained a lot of traction on social media which features cats. It’s easiest to reproduce it here than describe it:

Now, the logic gap here may be obvious to anyone no matter how little they may know about Pope Gregory. If the papacy demanded the death only of black cats, surely all the cats of other colourings still existed and could have dealt with the rats whose fleas were the primary vector of bubonic plague into Europe? Someone with only the tiniest familiarity with medieval chronology might further protest that the outbreak of plague in Europe in the 1340s came at least a century AFTER it is suggested that Gregory launched his anti-cat campaign.

Vox in Rama does indeed exist. It is a Papal Bull which primarily discusses the alleged existence of a satanic worship ring in Germany and proposes its suppression. Killing cats is not proposed within it. Furthermore, it was directed only to a small number of German clerics, not to the clergy or Christian population of Europe as a whole. Now, this is not to say that Gregory is entirely innocent in all things. He was quite fond of instigating pogroms against heretics, of which Vox in Rama formed a part. But did his blindness to consequence and thirst to persecute inadvertently lead to the deaths of millions of people from the bubonic plague? Absolutely not.

So what are we really reading here? If the resurgence of the Simpsons Cat Lady is about male insecurity and condemnation of female outperformance in higher education and the workplace, and the 19th century cat hoax is about the lower middles of Britain sneering at the poor and the Irish simultaneously, then who is the target of the Papal cat genocide meme, and why?

Obviously the primary target is the Catholic Church. The meme trades on institutional Catholicism’s instigatory involvement in medieval persecution of heresy, from the Crusades to the Inquisition. But within that is a further layer of attack on male power and its concomitant stupidity, a failure to connect action to reaction, cause to consequence.

Whence does this actually stem? Most likely the inspiration is the success of a truthful meme, that of Mao’s war on sparrows as part of his ‘Four Pests’ campaign, which did indeed lead to the deaths of millions of Chinese people in the 1950s. The resurgence of this particular event as a meme on social media functions primarily as a cautionary tale against Communism, as well as a kind of Sinophobic warning against gullible and indoctrinated Chinese people. It would not be unfair to surmise that this meme has been primarily propagated by anti-Communist ethnonationalists in the West.

So what is the semiotic or cultural meaning of the Pope Gregory meme about cats? It is an attempt to respond to the popularity of the Mao meme by inverting and displacing it. Pleasant as sparrows are, human attachment to cats is much more significant culturally, and there is a general repugnance to the killing of cats in Western and other cultures. So Pope Gregory’s patriarchal, ignorant and cruel cat crusade (as depicted erroneously in the meme) is actually a response to what anti-Communist ethnonationalists find dear, that is, the Christian church via its primary institution.

We can expect the culture wars to continue apace, and it is likely that cats will increasingly be weaponised in this fashion as a mode of marshaling emotional responses on one side or the other. Smith’s illuminating and entertaining study shows how this is nothing new and is attested in history (and in media) long before the internet existed.

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Surviving the Civil War of the Vampires

Mark O’ Connell, one of the better chroniclers of our lightning-paced transitions through tech-disrupted realities, had an intriguing mini-essay published in yesterday’s New York Times. His topic is the vampiric desire for immortality as expressed by the elites of this world, from the political despots of Russia and China to the posthumanist dreamers of Silicon Valley.

As O’Connell notes, the desire for immortality is nothing new. It is a by-product of human wrestling with our mortal condition and thus is itself immortal, switching up only its face, clothing and name as the centuries pass.

In this sense, the techbro quest for infinite longevity becomes, as O’Connell states, a contemporary analogue for medieval alchemy, and the kind of arsenic and mercury-based witches’ brews which seduced a series of Chinese emperors into a truncated rather than extended lifespan.

But O’Connell’s vampire metaphor, if it is best thought of as mere metaphor, put me in mind of another recent use of the term by one of his essay’s protagonists, Vladimir Putin.

O’Connell relates Putin’s overheard conversation with President Xi in Beijing, a forbidden topic in the Forbidden City, about how as septuagenarians they are still mere children. This amiable discourse between dictators should of course fill us all with an eldritch chill. Their shared desire to continue in power forever, like the dessicated cybernetic Emperor in the popular Warhammer 40k mythos, reminds us of just how impervious to traditional threat and opposition they believe themselves to be.

Yet of course, they are fully aware of the threat which they face. It is not you or I, or the hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens they preside over, of course. We – they – are mere meatsacks who exist in order to be ruled, to be leveraged in pursuit of endless political power. Mere mortal plebs are the threat they can marshall against others, be it Ukraine or Taiwan, or be it dissidents in England or Tibetan separatists.

The threat that they face is the civil war of the vampires, and they are fully aware of this. In March 2024, Vladimir Putin was engaging in one of his habitual polemics against the Western Powers in an interview with the journalist Dmitri Kisilev, when he made a revealing statement which O’Connell’s essay brought back to my mind.

Here is what he said in Russian, to avoid any accusations of misrepresentation: «В западных элитах очень сильно желание заморозить существующее положение, несправедливое положение вещей в международных делах. Они привыкли столетиями набивать брюхо человеческой плотью, а карманы — деньгами. Но они должны понять, что бал вампиров заканчивается.»

How might we translate this? Forgive me for falling back on the machines, as the posthumanists would have us do, but my Russian is too rusty to suffice here. Instead, let Microsoft’s translation software attempt to convey it: “In the Western elites, there is a very strong desire to freeze the existing situation, the unfair state of affairs in international matters. They have been accustomed for centuries to stuffing their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money. But they must understand that the vampire ball is coming to an end.”

There are a few things to note here. Firstly, Putin does not attempt to replicate the demonisation of entire peoples such as have been levied against the people of Russia by the media and institutions – banking, sporting, cultural, legal – of the West. His target is much narrower, the Western Elites. Secondly, what exactly is his accusation? That global geopolitics is a rigged game, designed to direct wealth and power to those Western Elites at the expense of everyone else. And what is his warning? That this era, which he alleges has lasted for centuries, is about to end.

So even if the last dance is being played out at the vampire’s ball, what evidence is there that a vampiric civil war is set to follow? It’s worth noting that generally such series of events overlap rather than follow serially. The dancing and music continued on the Titanic long after the iceberg was first struck. Wars tend to build to a crescendo and recede rather than switch on or off in a binary fashion. Therefore, we must acknowledge that the vampiric civil war is already under way.

And what form does it take in these early stages? We can see the open gorging on human blood and flesh in a range of locations already, not merely the weeping wounds of conflicts like those in Ukraine, Syria, Sudan or Lebanon, but also in the uptick in various forms of terrorist violence all across the globe, often of an Islamofascist nature but also taking many other forms too of which the most likely to catch fire uncontrollably is the ethnonationalist one. But perhaps all of these can better seen as the jockeying of the minor vampires for a seat at the next feast.

O’Connell correctly links Putin’s overheard comments to Xi about tech-enabled longevity to the kind of warped vision quests of the Cali techbros, and in particular to Marc Andressen’s astonishing credo in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” that “We believe artificial intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosophers’ Stone — we are literally making sand think.”

One wonders what the sand does think, and to what extent it will be happy to be yoked to the posthumanist longevity quests of the various vampiric cliques. We can be sure of one thing, however. Whatever genies or demons the vampires summon in order to pursue their immortality will not be shared with the meat masses. The posthumanist dream dangled before us is conversion to vampirism. Only the elites will be bitten. The rest of us will be consumed instead.

If mortality grants poignancy and meaning to human life, then what is immortality? Is it really infinite meaning and endless feeling, or instead a senile decline into static autocracy such as we see in Warhammer or Dune? Anne Rice encouraged us to have sympathy with the vampire, and we are still in her era of revisionism, of loving the cold dead predator as if it were merely cool and detached.

It is instead time for us to resurrect our historic loathing of the vampire, because the real victims of the vampiric civil war will inevitably be us mere mortals. Only by sharpening our stakes against the posthuman desires of the vampires can we hope to survive their civil war.

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Chapter Two is Not the Final Word

If you look up Jakob Ehrlich you’ll probably be directed by Wikipedia and other sources either to the biography of the nominatively anglicised Jack Earle, who was a carnival sideshow performer in the early 20th century known for his extreme height, or else the Viennese Zionist Jakob Ehrlich, who died in 1938, having been beaten to death in the Dachau concentration camp.

But in January 2025, another Jakob Ehrlich died, a man in his Nineties who had lived the latter part of his life in Florida. He left behind a life fully lived, which is detailed in his slender autobiography, which I had reason to examine earlier this week.

Ehrlich, unlike his Viennese namesake, survived the Nazis. Born in Sarajevo, he was a child when they came to power and with a degree of foresight his parents fled with their children to live for some years in refugee camps in Yugoslavia and Italy. Eventually, Ehrlich moved to South America and ultimately to the United States.

In his all-too-brief account of his life, the period of the holocaust takes up chapter two of ten chapters in the text. One imagines that to a young boy, displaced repeatedly during a terrifying war, it didn’t feel much like chapter two to him at the time. And yet there were still eight chapters of his life ahead of him.

Looking at the index of Ehrlich’s text thus becomes a numerical lesson in humility, resilience, and optimism in the face of darkness. I suspect many people who find themselves in similar dark periods of their lives, darkened either by personal or geopolitical or even global circumstances, often feel apocalyptic in the moment, and struggle to imagine a brighter future.

But a lot of life revolves around refusing to accept the Chapter Twos as endings or conclusions, and also refusing to allow them to prevent future chapters from being written.

It’s perfectly possible, as Jakob Ehrlich demonstrated, to allow such moments to permanently colour your life – indeed, how could they not? – without also allowing them to be the final word.

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AI Art Aspires to the Condition of Muzak

Most food you can get is mass-produced in factories, or constructed on assembly lines. But people will still pay more to cook from scratch with good ingredients, or pay someone to do so for them.

Most furniture these days is factory-made or flat-pack. But if you pay enough, you can get something of lasting quality, made by a craftsman either now or centuries past.

Most clothes are fast fashion, made in Asian sweatshops, and fall apart or fade after a few washes. But for enough money, you can get tailored clothes which will last decades.

And if it doesn’t murder us all or melt the planet, this is possibly where AI is taking us. To a future where most words, most images, most music, most entertainment will be algorithm-generated.

But if you’re prepared to pay, humans will still be around to make you a quality product.

Walter Pater famously said that all art aspires to the condition of music. In his Jerry Cornelius series of novels, Michael Moorcock subverted this to the mass media age, suggesting that all art aspires instead to the condition of muzak.

We now know of course that it is not ALL art which thus aspires. But certainly all algorithmically-generated content does, by definition.

Capitalism is using algorithms to enforce industrialisation upon creativity, that having been resisted by humanity until now, despite the concerns of generations before us, from the Luddites to William Morris.

But at the fringes, where the poor and the hyperrich almost meet in a kind of horseshoe of behavioural patterns, human-created art, without any AI involvement, will be the art of choice for those who cannot afford the mass-produced option, as well as those who can afford to pay extra for its status symbolism, quality and the longevity.

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Does the Protagonist wear Prada?

Writers have their little tricks. Nearly all of them use a thesaurus to avoid overusing their favourite words, for example. And some like to dip into a phone book (or its modern equivalent the internet) to generate names for characters.

I’ve been writing fiction on and off for nearly four decades (no jokes about my journalism career please!), ever since Heinemann published me alongside Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, William Trevor and others in their Best Short Stories of the Year anthology when I was still in short trousers, so to speak.

But one thing I’ve never managed to do successfully is dress characters.

Anthony Burgess was a famously terrible dresser, partly because he was colourblind. If you watch him on old chatshow clips, he’s wearing brown shirts with green ties and so on.

But he knew his characters deserved better, so he would get his glamorous Italian wife to tell him what each of his characters ought to be wearing.

That’s what I could definitely use – someone to dress my characters for me. (Not the glamorous Italian wife – I’d need to be on Anthony Burgess level royalties to afford one.)

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The Lost Philosophies of Loss

You might think that there would be a very large body of philosophical thinking on loss, but if there is I haven’t found it. Perhaps somewhere along the line, we lost it? If you know of any, I’d like to know more.

There is of course a lot of writing about grief, which is a subset of loss related to the process of dealing with our collective mortality, and the particular mortality of a loved one. Related to this is a certain amount of thinking that pertains to mortality itself, why and how it grants meaning to existence, the necessity of embracing rather than fearing it. And beyond that again, a lot of philosophies – one thinks in particular of Stoicism and Buddhism – address the importance of accepting change in general, not just the kind of change which results in the death of someone near and dear.

Outside the realm of philosophy (or perhaps within it, depending on how you view the relationships between things like psychology and philosophy, or various religious tenets and philosophy) again there is a large body of thought that considers the purpose of mortality, and how best one should encounter it. Some of this, like Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s highly popular five stages of grief model, is focused on practical rather than conceptual ways to address grief, and obviously for people experiencing the kind of seismic shock that a bereavement entails, this kind of approach can be enormously helpful in a difficult time for many.

But there seems to be a shortfall of writing about loss in general. It’s not only lives which are lost after all. There are many other kinds of losses, and while some of these might in part emulate the patterns of grief and bereavement, others do not. The loss of a friendship for example, or a love affair, the alienation of a close family member, or the emigration of anyone we are close to can come very close to the grief pattern and response, though since the critical component of mortality is missing, there are inevitable differences.

When we reach Kübler-Ross’s stage of acceptance, we incorporate into our daily existence the reality that whomever has died is not coming back. But if someone has not died, and has instead for whatever reason given or ungiven simply departed from our lives, then this stage can only be partially applied. There is always the unbidden hope, the fractional reality while all still live, of some kind of reunion or rapprochement, and this perpetually delays and impedes the possibility of acceptance in the Kübler-Ross mode.

There are other things too which can be lost which are no less damaging for being more abstract or less acute than the tangible company and love of another human, or indeed animal, companion. Many people tie up entire swathes of their identities in their work, for example, treating their job as a kind of mission or purpose, and they are often cynically encouraged by employers to do so, since they can leverage this ‘labour of love’ motivation into ever greater profit motives and margins.

We have evidence that the loss of such mission-perceived employments can have pretty devastating effects on well-being. The most acute evidence is probably the death rates of people in their initial phase of retirement, where many of those who dedicated their working lives to a particular career are as bereft as the bereaved when it is removed from their daily existence, resulting in a much-increased rate of death from stress and anxiety-aggravated conditions such as cancer or cardiac arrest.

One can lose anything that one can gain in this world of course. And ultimately that’s the point. We enter life and leave it with nothing. But in the interim, “wedged as we are in between two eternities of idleness” as Anthony Burgess once wrote, we accrue all manner of things, from possessions and relationships to feelings, skills, abilities, desires, ambitions, achievements, accreditations and awards, not to mention all manner of material items, almost all of which instigate a sense of attachment when obtained and a concomitant sense of loss if removed. This kind of loss can be especially aggravated if the item somehow becomes entangled with our sense of self, or our perceived status, or simply has grown familiar to us.

Some of these losses are generally acknowledged by society. It’s socially acceptable, for example, to grieve over the loss of a home where one has lived for a long time, plastering the walls with memories and meaning and belonging. Maybe less so, it’s still understood that people can form strong attachment to certain material things which provoke significant sense of loss if removed from that person’s life. Even a favourite mug, the Stoics warn us, is a risk. Let the mug be just a mug, they advise, lest in your growing attachment to it as a fetish or totem item it becomes a risk to your mental equilibrium, one clumsy elbow away from shattering a little bit of yourself on the hardwood floor. Buddhism too tells us that attachment (upadana) is the root of all suffering (dukka), ultimately.

What intrigues me, I suppose, is the absolute ubiquity of loss compared with the relative silence of great thinkers on the matter. Every day we’re all losing something – our keys, a phone number, another thin hair or two maybe. Some days we lose something seismic, like a home, or a job, or a relationship which has been severed or destroyed. Some terrible days we lose to mortality a loved one we realise in shock we won’t ever be able to converse with again, except in our memories, or maybe these days in the pseudo-demonic facsimiles offered by “griefbot” AI technologies.

Every day, ideally, we’re all gaining things too, even if it’s just the awareness of additional loss, the experience and resignation of accepting that the inevitability of change often comes with a negative prefix attached. But life isn’t maths on that level, and perhaps we as humans suffer from a kind of positivistic fixation, wherein we delude ourselves that the things we gain will remain while the things that we lose can, in some way, be reversed or mitigated. Kübler-Ross calls this the bargaining stage of grief, but on a less conscious level it applies to all forms of loss.

So perhaps we feel more keenly the losses without necessarily accounting the gains the same weight of importance. There’s probably a familiarity bias to that phenomenon, I feel. Losses can sometimes feel like they mount up like amputations, one limb after another being lopped off, further disabling us, whereas the things we gain on any particular day don’t necessarily assume the resonance and importance they may ultimately hold for us for some time.

Also, it seems inherently inhuman or robotic to attempt to account for the gains and losses in life as if they were merely emotional analogues for P+L bookkeeping. We don’t do double ledger accounting in our hearts or souls.

And given this ubiquity of experience of loss, and its superimportance over gain in terms of lived human experience, I remain surprised that the greater topic of loss beyond the more limited realm of grief is not more frequently debated within the Western philosophical tradition. But I can’t and don’t claim to have read everything obviously. I may have missed out on good thinkers on this very matter. And if that’s the case, do please put me right and direct me towards some reading in the comments below.

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What’s the weather like in Mordor?

Among my interests is Speculative Geographies, an interdiscipline best described as the study of hypothetical, fictional or otherwise non-realist geography.

On the micro-level, it’s the study of how a wardrobe in ‘our’ world can open up into Narnia, or what it is about Prague that allows protestors to march into the sky in a Milan Kundera novel.

But one of the things I always yearned for was a macro-level. Something that went beyond the ‘spaces and places’ superficiality and attempted to encompass imaginary geographies in the whole. These days we have a technology which can do that, at least on a meteorological level, which is climate modelling, the same methodology used by climate scientists to model theories about where our own climate is headed.

So it was pleasingly inevitable that eventually someone would goof off between running El Nino frequencies or iceberg melt rates and plug in the maps of Middle-Earth and Westeros to see just how credible was the worldbuilding of two of our most lauded fantasy novelists. And the results are … surprising.

Tolkien’s hand-drawn and annotated map of Middle-Earth. Copyright the Tolkien Estate.

Why surprising? Well, firstly because neither J.R.R. Tolkien, nor his middle initials namesake George R.R. Martin are in any way renowned as climatologists. If anything, the opposite was assumed. Scientists have long looked at the famous map of Middle-Earth, with its famously rectangular mountains surrounding Mordor, and wondered if Tolkien ever left his study or lecture hall to look outside. (Reader, he did. He was an avid lover of nature, and a keen cartographer, as revealed in a semi-recent exhibition at Oxford’s Bodleian and elsewhere.)

Furthermore, Tolkien’s cartography was such an affront to one scientist, the Russian arachnid expert Kyril Yeskov, that he spent the downtime during a quiet research break in Siberia writing a kind of realist correction to The Lord of the Rings.

The resulting text, which is free on the internet in English due to obvious copyright issues, moved swiftly beyond Yeskov’s irritation at what he felt was Tolkien’s dubious geographies, to examine more serious or worrying concerns – how the trilogy (or hexalogy to be exact) presents a good vs evil spectrum that mostly operates on a West vs East paradigm, and the not-very-well-hidden racist underpinnings that seem to arise from that.

Yeskov’s The Last Ringbearer therefore is a realist text, written from the point of view of an orc (who in this version are merely more swarthy versions of humanity), which depicts the overthrow of an enlightened and scientifically focused multicultural Mordor by an imperialist, racist, fascist (ie Elvish) west. As counter-readings go, it’s magnificent. I once wrote a whole essay on it, which can be found here.

But Yeskov’s initial inspiration has proven to be somewhat untrue. Despite the square mountain range, Tolkien’s geography for Middle-Earth passes the climate modelling test. Tolkien once claimed that the Shire was located at the equivalent of Oxford whereas Minas Tirith in Gondor was the latitudinal equivalent of Florence in Italy in our world. The climate modelling roughly bears this out.

There’s been less criticism of George R.R. Martin’s geographical imaginings, perhaps because A Song of Ice and Fire still isn’t completed and perhaps because the TV adaptation seemed to disappoint a lot of fans in its closing season or two. But it still poses questions worth asking climatologists, such as how come it has such lengthy seasons.

Westeros – cute but nowhere near as sumptuous as the Game of Thrones opening credits

“Winter is coming” is no idle threat in Westeros. It lasts a lot longer than a couple of months. Like Brian Aldiss’s astonishing (and sadly neglected) Helliconia trilogy, Westeros has generally suffered from extensively elongated seasons. Aldiss, after consulting scientists, located his Helliconia planet in a complex binary star system, which results in seasons that are centuries long.

Westeros by comparison has shorter seasons, peaking at a few years, but a few years of winter is enough for anyone, even before you get to the ice zombies invading. Additionally, they are erratic and unpredictable. Is this even plausible, from a geographical or climate perspective?

The same study that vindicated Tolkien produced a theory to explain Westeros’s seasons, involving variable axial tilt of the planet. (It must be noted that many scientists are also fantasy nerds, and the cause of Westeros’s weather has been hotly disputed for many years, with various explanations proposed, but this seems to fit best.)

This doesn’t make Tolkien and Martin fastidiously scientific worldbuilders anymore than it legitimises Tolkien’s ‘East is evil, West is good’ morality, and it certainly does nothing to improve the finale of Game of Thrones. But it does suggest that a lot more consideration went into these fantastikal texts than is generally noted.

And to answer the titular rhetorical question, the weather in Mordor is pretty damn evil.