It's Always More Complicated

Docs doing AID in a unregulated system do not have the most pellucid of reputations (The great sperm heist: ‘They were playing with people’s lives’), but this guy was a particularly noxious instance: ‘Every time I find a new sibling, it’s like I’m ruining their life’: the fertility doctor who went rogue. Ugh.

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And on the topic of copying, though in a rather different mode: Plagiarism Today Plagiarized in a Plagiarism Atonement Essay:

Bello, an author who admitted to plagiarizing in her now-cancelled debut novel, wrote an article about the experience and, in that article, included poor paraphrasing without attribution of an article that I wrote over a decade ago.

The changing meanings of radical objects: Josiah Wedgwood’s anti-slavery medallion:

It was this tension between the medallion’s radical history, and its problematic implications 200 years on, that sparked our research into this complex object.

I rather liked this piece on the way people have visceral nostalgic feelings of goodness about things which are (whatever they may have meant in the past) now not doing good: The Fireplace Delusion. I wonder how these sorts of feelings generalise - I think of people forcing food on other people against their will, or seeing rejection of it as a rejection of them/love/whatever - that at one time they did have a positive meaning but now the problems appear.

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This possibly (because somehow this has me thinking about Norbert Elias' theories of The Civilising Process and how we're perhaps going through a set of changes that relate to that... 'nice people wear masks'....) links on (or not): Social mindfulness matters – for all of us:

Social mindfulness is defined as everyday acts of kindness towards strangers which have little or no cost to the individual but matter greatly for the collective. Social mindfulness measures the extent to which someone is considering the impact of one’s own behaviour on others.

And on systems which do not work as intended, and how one might achieve the desirable end aimed at: What the Fitness Industry Doesn’t Understand:

[Y]ou can’t just teach millions of children that exercise is painful, humiliating, or a punishment for their failures and expect them to swan into adulthood with healthy, moderate beliefs about their bodies.

It is, of course, not entirely logical that any of these things should have to be profitable in order to exist, or that people who want to provide these services should have to make the math work out on their own in order to do so. To make exercise instruction and equipment available for everyone, no matter their level of fitness or mobility, would be a public good—improving population health, reducing health-care costs, and making millions of people’s lives better. This is the type of thing that a functional modern society should endeavor to provide to its members, regardless of individual ability to pay. As Petrzela, the historian, pointed out to me, these services have been freely given to the public in the past. Before the private-sector fitness industry exploded in the 1980s, tax-funded recreation centers, youth sports leagues, and community pools were much more plentiful[.]

Spotted a tweet (I suspect it is one of those that gets recirculated at intervals) saying, 'Normalize reaching out to writers you don’t know to tell them you loved something they wrote', which could probably apply to other fields of endeavour as well.

And somebody eeyoreishly* responded - the implication being that they did this via Twitter, which may or may not be the way to do it - that when they do that the person does not write back or reply, not going to do that any more.

There is - is there not? maybe? - a distinction between telling someone that their work means to a lot to you and wanting to establish some kind of reciprocal relationship? Also, there could be all sorts of reasons why the person did not respond.

Okay, I am a grumpy ol' hedjog who thinks that people ought to say 'thank you' when you have provided them with a pdf of an obscure article that they have solicited in rather curt fashion via academia.edu... (sometimes I cannot imagine why).

But is not the idea of telling people you loved their work, about brightening their life but not imposing a burden?

*Actually I think this is a bit unfair to Eeyore.

Or, further thoughts on the problem of performing Random Acts of Senseless Beauty.

I will concede, she conceded, that I may be unduly prejudiced against the yarnstormers and graffiti knitters and their contributions to brightening up the cityscape for a purely personal reason: at university I was acquainted with someone who bedizened her room in the student residence with all sorts of handmade knickknackery and textile crafts and the effect was frankly disturbing.

On the whole, I am with those people in the comments to that post who were saying more or less that there are people out there who need scarves more than the statues do, even if you are making an Artistic Statement thereby.

Which I don't think is being Judas Iscariot about the pot of precious ointment, because a one-off gesture between individuals is a bit different, no?

Some acts of senseless beauty I am okay with - e.g. guerilla gardening even if I don't do this myself, because I can kill plants just by being the same room with them, so my trying to sow seeds broadcast would probably bring about the Waste Land.

But as a general rule, I think it falls under the same There Is No Simple General Rule rubric as random acts of kindness - there are very few actions which everybody on all possible occasions will be assumed to be kind and accepted with gratitude. (Okay, an earlier tirade of mine on acts of kindness that were actually less than helpful or useful incited someone else to post about my Amazing Lack of Gratitude To People Who Were Only Being Nice, but I still think that if you offer to let someone stay in your apartment, it is only civil to do this if the apartment is actually habitable and the gesture will not involve various other individuals in trying to get the boiler to work, etc.)

Because there is such a very strong subjective element to what is considered beauty, your enlivening of the drab urban landscape may be my twee-overload plz 2 pass sickbag. Or the responses evoked by Epstein's Rima when it first appeared in Hyde Park and regularly got vandalised with paint.

I've been chewing over (something I really rather seldom do), Oliver Burkeman's column in this week's Guardian Weekend, Beware the kindness of strangers.

Probably to do with my own issues around random acts of kindness and generosity and the extent to which they are morally problematic.

Even without going down the road of ranting on people who perform unwanted acts of helpfulness, I have certain issues around all this.

I never got together the post I was musing a week or so ago on the perhaps undue influence on my infant psyche of the Little Red Hen ('"I'll do it myself", said the Little Red Hen'), to the point of cutting out the completely pointless asking of the Cock and the Mouse (who appear to be slobbing on the sofa drinking beer and watching TV, in retrospect) and just getting on with stuff. Which ends up with me struggling with an awkward shape armful of archive boxes or whatever and getting into the lift and working one finger free to push the button, and then shifting the bundle so that I can open the door that's not on an automatic latch and opens out towards me (rather than being one I can lean on to get through), and.... You know, possibly people are disturbed by the sight of a small greyhaired woman doing this? (Though in earlier days I do remember snarling at people offering to help me with heavy luggage that I could manage.) Usually the things aren't actually heavy, just awkward. A lot of the time this is really because I find doing this myself less of a hassle than explaining what I want to someone else and waiting for them to do it, and the possibility of them getting it wrong, and - etc.

Which does seem partly relevant, or perhaps not.

Another thought was that you actually have to be able to afford to be generous (with whatever): in Charlotte Yonge's Heartsease, someone points out to Violet that she will find it very trying not having a proper marriage settlement and not being unable to make donations to good causes because she has no money of her own. Being able to be generous may be giving out certain messages.

I know when there are those various online appeals for help in some dire situation or for some excellent cause, I have a whole set of worries going on about too little/too much, does it look show-offy largesse-throwing, does it look penny-pinching grudging...

In connection with which, I was also thinking about whether it would not be desirable to be able to do this kind of thing anonymously, which isn't always a tickable option - partly at least because I also internalised the whole 'doing good by stealth' thing but also because of this issue about What It Looks Like.

But then (I'm really on a roll here with Always More Complicated hedgehog yoga, arm under one foot, head under the other knee, you get the picture) mightn't people also find anonymous gifts somewhere on the scale towards creepy? I was having a moral dilemma about this last week which turned out to be unnecessary simply because in the event the decision didn't arise.

I'm not sure whether any of this actually relates to the article in question. Though thinking a bit further about the dynamic of reciprocity - isn't there a hand-it-on element that is not about direct reciprocity to the person who makes the gesture of kindness, but a kind of reciprocity within a larger scheme of things whereby a person does something similar for someone else? For example, if someone helps someone else with their shopping, isn't this modelling a desirable course of action towards someone struggling with heavy burdens, rather than expecting directly reciprocal assistance.

Though possibly what he's getting at is that there are acts of kindness which aren't actually random but relate to the needs of a particular situation and a manifestation of sensitivity to other people, whereas something like e.g. those women who were putting out plates of cupcakes for passerbys is random and pointless and likely to arouse suspicion rather than a benign belief in the loveliness of the strangers who did this.