ملاحظات
مقدمة
(1)
R. F. Baumeister, E. Bratslavsky, C. Finkenauer and K. D. Vohs,
‘Bad is Stronger than Good’, Review of General
Psychology, 5 (2001): 323–70.
(2)
Leslie Farber, Ways of the
Will (New York, 2000).
(3)
Adam Phillips, Monogamy (London, 1996), 7.
(4)
Abraham Maslow developed a theory of human motivation based
on a hierarchy of needs. The most basic level needs are physiological,
e.g. for food, water and safety. The next level is psychological,
including friendship, love and prestige and finally the highest level is
around self-fulfilment and self-actualization. His claim was that you
don’t tend to have higher level needs until the lower level ones have
been met.
(5)
Erving Goffman, Stigma:
Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
(Harmondsworth, 1963), 128.
الفصل الأول: حقل الألغام الاجتماعي
(1)
Erving Goffman, Interaction
Ritual (New Brunswick 1967/2005) 33:
The human tendency to use signs and symbols means that evidence of social worth and of mutual evaluations will be conveyed by minor things, and these things will be witnessed, as will the fact that they have been witnessed. An unguarded glance, a momentary change of voice, an ecological position taken or not taken, can drench a talk with judgmental significance. Therefore, just as there is no occasion of talk in which improper impressions could not intentionally or unintentionally arise, so there is no occasion of talk so trivial as not to require each participant to show serious concern with the way in which he handles himself and the others present.
(2)
Woods Acknowledges Ford Maddox Ford’s Use of this Example
on What He Calls ‘Getting a Character in’.
(3)
See Nancie George, ‘How Social Pain Affects Your Mind and
Body’, Everyday Health (22 January
2015),
www.everydayhealth.com/news/how-social-pain-affects-your-mind-body/.
(4)
Oliver Burkeman, The
Antidote (Edinburgh, 2012),
25.
(5)
Mark Leary, The Curse of the Self:
Self-Awareness, Egotism, and the Quality of Human Life
(New York, 2007), 77.
(6)
Quoted in Ephraim H. Mizruchi, The Substance of Sociology (New
York, 1973), 200.
(7)
Until children develop what’s known as a ‘theory of mind’ —
the ability to see things from another’s point of view, and crucially
the ability to think about what other people think about them — these
emotions would make no sense.
(8)
Goffman, Interaction
Ritual, 111.
(9)
Brené Brown, ‘Listening to Shame’, TED Talk (16 March 2012),
https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame.
(10)
John Sabini and Maury Silver, Emotion, Character and Responsibility (New York, 1998),
21.
(11)
Adam Phillips, ‘Against Self-Criticism’, London Review of Books, 5 March
2015.
(12)
So, shame and guilt are in fact mutually compatible and
sometimes intimately associated. A single action can elicit both. John
Rawls in A Theory of Justice asks you
to:
imagine for example someone who cheats or gives in to cowardice and then feels both guilty and ashamed. He feels guilty because he has acted contrary to his sense of right and justice. By wrongly advancing his interest, he has transgressed the rights of others, and his feelings of guilt will be more intense if he has ties of friendship and association to the injured parties. He expects others to be resentful and indignant at his conduct, and he fears their righteous anger and the possibility of reprisal. Yet he also feels ashamed because his conduct shows that he has failed to achieve the goal of self-command, and he has been found unworthy of his associates upon whom he depends to confirm his sense of his own worth. He is apprehensive lest they reject him and find him contemptible, an object of ridicule. In his behavior, he has betrayed a lack of the moral excellences he prizes and to which he aspires. (Rawls 1971, 445).
(13)
Steven Pinker, The Stuff of
Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (London,
2008).
(14)
Fiske describes a fourth relationship type,
known as ‘market pricing’. He claims we evolved to learn the
first three, which all come naturally to us in different
settings, but the fourth is a more recent phenomenon that
occurs in post-industrial market-based societies and
involves instrumental assessments of pure utility, and is
something we are not well adapted to handling
intuitively.
(15)
M. Morgan et al. (2006). ‘Interactions of Doctors with the
Pharmaceutical Industry’, Journal of Medical
Ethics 32(10), 559–63.
(16)
P. M. Lewinsohn, W. Mischel, W. Chaplain and R. Barton
(1980). ‘Social Competence and Depression: The Role of Illusory
Self-Perceptions?’ Journal of Abnormal
Psychology, 89, 203–12.
(17)
And many of them argue that the result of the Brexit
referendum in the UK was an example where the expressive trumps the
instrumental.
(18)
Sam Selvon, The Lonely
Londoners (London, 1956),
25.
(19)
Kate Fox, Watching the
English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour
(London, 2005), 92.
(20)
‘Saying uncovers the one that speaks, … The unblocking of
communication … is accomplished in saying It is in the risky uncovering
of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon
of all shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerability’ (Emmanuel Levinas,
Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond
Essence (Dordrecht, 1998), 48-9).
(21)
Richard Feynman, Surely
You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (New York, 1997),
60.
(22)
Charles Percy Snow, The Two
Cultures (Cambridge 2001 [1959]).
(23)
Clifford Geertz, who developed Ryle’s insight about thick
description comments that ‘Man is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs and
the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search
of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning’ (The Interpretation of Cultures (New York,
1973)).
(24)
Mark Leary, Self
Presentation (Colorado, 1995),
165.
(25)
Leary tested people described as ‘mavericks’ versus those
that could be described as ‘needy’. He put them each in a room and got
them to speak into a microphone about themselves. They could see a
rating from invisible listeners tracking between one and seven as to
whether the listener wanted to interact with them. The ratings were
rigged and the outcome revealed that everyone cares, whether maverick or
needy. Leary’s conclusion was ‘the sociometer operates at a non
conscious and pre-attentive level to scan the social environment for any
and all indications that one’s relational value is low or declining’.
(Ibid, 78)
(26)
Tesser Self Evaluation Maintenance Theory sets out ways we
manage to avoid having to compete for self-esteem in our ‘top domains’
with those near and dear. ‘Our choices of friends and partners, and how
we react to those friends’ and partners’ successes, are affected by our
own desire to feel good about ourselves’. (Leary, Curse of the Self,
115.)
(27)
As Sabini and Silver (1998) explain, ‘sincerity
(authenticity, genuineness, phoniness, hollowness, etc.) is both moral
and aesthetic’.
When we started it appeared as if enacted roles and genuine feelings were necessarily in opposition. Since sincerity was a matter of feeling, of conscious contents, of impulses and tugs, any model that dealt with rules, standards, manipulated impressions — social constructions — could not approach sincerity. We have argued instead that sincerity, even sincerity as seen as a match between feelings and avowals, requires rules, standards, and even manipulations — the constructed stuff. (64).
الفصل الثاني: النوع الصحيح من السُّمعة
(1)
As was presciently predicted by the psychologist Herb Simon in
the 1970s.
(2)
S. D. Reicher and S. A. Haslam, ‘The Politics of
Hope: Donald Trump as an Entrepreneur of Identity’, in M.
Fitzduff (ed.), Why Irrational Politics
Appeals (Santa Barbara, CA, 2017),
25–40.
(3)
R. Harré, Social
Being, 2nd edn (Oxford,
1993).
(4)
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous
Mind (London, 2012), 54.
(5)
Though you could question the direction of travel: Does a
concern for a good reputation encourage us to act morally, or is the
causal arrow pointing the other way (as we might like to think)? Either
way, when it comes to reputations the word ‘good’ tends to have this
moral tone and to go with trustworthiness. We are accordingly extremely
sensitized to cheats and free-riders.
(6)
NHS Choices, ‘Alcohol “a Direct Cause of Seven Types of
Cancer”’,
www.nhs.uk/news/2016/07July/Pages/alcohol-a-direct-cause-of-seven-types-of-cancer.aspx.
(7)
Aronson identified this in The
Social Animal. Other social psychologists have come up
with a clunky neologism for this combination, calling it
‘beneffectance’, a compound of benevolence and
effectiveness.
(8)
Steven Pinker, How the Mind
Works (London, 1997), 421–3.
(9)
Susan T. Fiske, Amy J. C. Cuddy and Peter Glick
(2006). ‘Universal Dimensions of Social Cognition: Warmth and
Competence’, TRENDS in Cognitive
Sciences 11(2), 77–83,
http://fidelum.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Warmth-Competence-2007.pdf.
(10)
The name Gray Matter, colleagues of mine will be amused to
know, came from combining the names of the two founders, namely White
and Schwartz, meaning ‘black’ in German.
(11)
Michel de Montaigne, The
Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journals,
Letters, ed. and trans. Donald C. Frame
(Stanford, CA, 1958), I: 28, ‘Of Friendship’,
142.
(12)
Jonathan Haidt distinguishes between ‘admiration’ and
‘elevation’, saying that the former is inspired by non-moral excellence,
i.e. competence, while the latter is inspired by moral excellence: Sara
B. Algoea and Jonathan Haidt (2009). ‘Witnessing Excellence in Action:
the “Other-Praising” Emotions of Elevation, Gratitude, and Admiration’,
Journal of Positive Psychology
4(2), 105–27,
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2689844/.
(13)
This is in fact a parody of the actual Venn diagram created
by Anna Faherty after a talk I gave to her students: ‘Love and Money:
It’s all about the Author for Sage’,
https://kingstonpublishing.wordpress.com/2011/11/06/love-and-money-its-all-about-the-author-for-sage/.
(14)
Jonathan Haidt, et al. (2007). ‘The New Synthesis in Moral
Psychology’, Science 316, 998,
http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/new-synthesis-haidt.pdf.
(15)
Milan Kundera, Slowness
(London, 1998), 44.
الفصل الثالث: حكَّام لا يُعتمد عليهم
(1)
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of
Cultures (New York 1973), 45.
(2)
You can take the test here and see for yourself:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html.
(3)
S. J. Spencer, C. M. Steele and D. M. Quinn (1999). ‘Stereotype
Threat and Women’s Math Performance’, Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 35,
4–28.
(4)
American Psychological Association, ‘Stereotype Threat Widens
Achievement Gap’, 15 July 2006,
http://www.apa.org/research/action/stereotype.aspx.
(5)
‘Iris Bohnet on Discrimination and Design’, Social Science Bites (interview), 10 May 2016,
https://www.socialsciencespace.com/2016/05/iris-bohnet-on-discrimination-and-design/.
(6)
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and
Slow (London, 2011).
(7)
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, ‘Judgement under
Uncertainty’, Science 27 Sep
1974.
(8)
Celia Moore and Francesco Gino (2013), ‘Ethically Adrift:
How Others Pull Our Moral Compass from True North, and How We Can Fix
It’, Research in Organizational
Behavior, 33, 53–77.
(9)
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind:
Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
(London, 2012), 61 cites the work of Chenbo Zhong who also showed that
the reverse is true too, asking people to recall their own or even to
write down descriptions of others’ moral transgressions will be more
inclined to want to wash. He calls this the ‘Macbeth
effect’.
(10)
The evolutionary account suggests we’ve developed these
reflexes so as to know who to trust and therefore who we can cooperate
with. This may be a species of just-so story, but even if valid it
doesn’t mean this is what is going on in our minds now. An evolved
preference that might have served a purpose long ago might explain how
it arrived, like a sweet tooth once helped survival by motivating people
to find scarce sugar and fats, but long after that is widely available
and no longer meets that need. For evolutionists, the original (distal)
motivation to behave a certain way (such as having sex for procreation)
can over time become disconnected from that original purpose while still
being a strong tendency for recent (proximal) motivation. So, moral
intuitions persist even if we aren’t in a constant state of anxiety
about whether we will be able to trade or cooperate successfully with
other group members. The same goes for cultural evolution. We have come
a long way from shaking hands to show that we aren’t concealing weapons,
but the practice continues nevertheless.
(11)
Robert McCrum, A Conversation with Philip Roth, The Guardian, 1
July 2011,
www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jul/01/fiction.philiproth1.
(12)
See Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from
Humanity: Disgust, Shame and Law (Princeton, NJ,
2004).
(13)
An amendment to the UK Local Government Act 1988, which was
eventually repealed in 2000.
(14)
L. Kass (1997). ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance’,
New Republic 216 (22),
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jwcwolf/336/KASS.pdf.
(15)
Known now as the Social Intuitionist
Model.
(16)
The New Republic, ‘The
Stupidity of Dignity’, 28 May 2008,
https://newrepublic.com/article/64674/the-stupidity-dignity.
(17)
In recent years Haidt and his colleagues
have since proposed a sixth foundation, namely liberty
vs oppression. This is strongly seen in the libertarian
tendency to resist constraints on freedom. It often
pulls in the opposite direction to the authority
foundation and wants to punish bullies and to resist
oppression. Haidt et al. have come up with these
candidates for moral foundations but recognize that
through further research more could be established or
some might end up being combined, but they stick with
the idea that there are many.
(18)
This account of our moral foundations is rooted in the
insights of anthropologist Richard Shweder, who countered the peculiarly
Western notion of morality being bound up with the individual to
recognize that in most places and most times human beings have had a far
wider array of moral groundings. By contrasting individualist with
collectivist cultures, he suggested that the former value an ethic of
autonomy, which is clearly recognizable in the West and is to do with
individual harms and rights, whereas the latter offer up an ethic of
community which emphasizes duty and following communal will as well as
an ethic of divinity which invites you to treat your body as your
temple, emphasizing the sacred and the pure. This tripartite distinction
of autonomy, community and divinity applies across cultures to varying
degrees with autonomy most pronounced in a minority of cultures, mainly
in the West.
(19)
Joe Henrich, Steve Heine and Ara Norenzayan (2010). ‘The
Weirdest People in the World?’, Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 33 (2-3), 61–83.
(20)
There is a popular argument that we should in fact only use
the first two moral foundations in judging others. According to this
liberal view morality should be narrowly focused on whether anyone gets
hurt, or there is unfairness. And those who go beyond the first two of
care/harm and fairness/cheating in their judgements bring in a whole
group of problems. Too much respect for loyalty, authority and purity
can lead to jingoism and hostility to outsiders, subjugation of the
disadvantaged and racism, homophobia and other forms of oppression. But
it is only a small part of the world population who think this
way.
(21)
The Ecologist, ‘It Can’t
Be Easy Being George Monbiot’, 5 December 2013,
http://www.jonathonporritt.com/blog/it-can%E2%80%99t-be-easy-being-george-monbiot.
(22)
dissident93, ‘John Pilger’s “Leaked” Emails’, 10 August
2011,
https://dissident93.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/pilger-leaked-emails/.
(23)
James Delingpole, ‘George Monbiot: The New
Christopher Hitchens?’, 27 May 2012,
http://www.delingpoleworld.com/2012/05/27/george-monbiot-the-new-christopher-hitchens/.
(24)
J. M. Darley and C. D. Batson (1973). ‘From Jerusalem to
Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping
Behavior’, Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 27, 100–8.
(25)
Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely (2011). ‘Building a Better
America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time’, Perspectives on Psychological Science 6(9),
http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely.pdf.
(26)
Bystander effect and social proof are concepts in social
psychology that describe how we turn to others to form our own views.
Bystanders ignore someone in trouble if they see others doing the same,
and social proof, where people emulate the actions of others to reflect
correct behaviour, describes why they do so.
(27)
M. Levine, A. Prosser, D. Evans and S. Reicher (2005).
‘Identity and Emergency Intervention: How Social Group Membership and
Inclusiveness of Group Boundaries Shapes Helping Behavior’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
31, 443–53.
(28)
Francesca Gino, Shahar Ayal and Dan Ariely (2009).
‘Contagion and Differentiation in Unethical Behavior: The Effect of One
Bad Apple on the Barrel’, Psychological
Science, 20, 393.
(29)
Roy F. Baumeister, Laura Smart and Joseph M. Boden (1996).
‘Relation of Threatened Egotism to Violence and Aggression: The Dark
Side of High Self-esteem’, Psychological
Review, 103(1), 5–33.
(30)
The anthropologist Scott Atran argues that it is ‘sacred
values’ that are responsible for our most deeply held commitments, and
which licence extremes of action such as violence and
war.
(31)
This new judgement was upheld in the House of Lords on the
basis that the previous jury had not been properly guided to think about
the probability of the consequence before they decided it was
foreseeable. Their sentence was accordingly reduced to eight years and
they were released in 1989.
(32)
The Harvard psychologist Fiery Cushman tested the idea that
we learn better from outcomes, rather than our intentions, being
punished. He had people throw darts at a colour-coded board. The thrower
didn’t know which colour was high value or low value and was punished
for getting it wrong. The dart throwers were divided into two groups:
those who nominated the colour they were going for, and those who just
threw the dart. The latter group learned to identify the high value
colours more effectively.
(33)
Joshua Knobe (2003). ‘Intentional Action and Side Effects
in Ordinary Language’, Analysis, 63,
190–3.
(34)
But there is a twist. When you do a bad thing out of anger
you look overcome with distorting emotion, when you do a good thing out
of compassion you look like your true self. This seems opposite to the
Knobe effect.
(35)
Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes:
Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them (New
York, 2013), 70.
(36)
Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The
Case for Rational Compassion (New York, 2016),
9.
(37)
Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philospohy, ‘Moral Psychology: Empirical
Approaches’, 19 April 2006,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-psych-emp/.
(38)
We should be careful to note a difference between ‘act
utilitarianism’ and ‘rule utilitarianism’. Act utilitarianism invites
the narrower judgement that an action is morally justified if it in
itself brings the greater happiness to the greater number. But the rule
version requires that the act accords with a rule which itself brings
the greatest happiness to the greatest number.
(39)
Haidt, The Righteous
Mind, 71.
(40)
Ibid., 71.
(41)
Sandra L. Schneider and James Shanteau (eds), Emerging Perspectives on Judgment and Decision
Research (Cambridge, 2003), 438-9.
(42)
Given various combinations of spectators and
receivers, Hume concludes that there are four irreducible
categories of qualities that exhaustively constitute moral
virtue: (1) qualities useful to others, which include
benevolence, meekness, charity, justice, fidelity and veracity;
(2) qualities useful to oneself, which include industry,
perseverance and patience; (3) qualities immediately agreeable
to others, which include wit, eloquence and cleanliness and (4)
qualities immediately agreeable to oneself, which include good
humour, self-esteem and pride. For Hume, most morally
significant qualities and actions seem to fall into more than
one of these categories.
| Agreeable | Useful | |
|---|---|---|
| Pride, self-esteem | Industry | To self |
| Wit, cleanliness | Benevolence | To others |
(43)
Rationality is largely not the basis of moral judgement for
us, so if Kant tells us to tell the truth even if it hurts our friends,
or Bentham warns us to spend less time with our children so as to
benefit the numerous suffering children we have never met, we can
appreciate their logic but it still doesn’t fit our
intuitions.
(44)
Haidt, The Righteous
Mind, (London, 2012) 63.
(45)
Haidt, The Happiness
Hypothesis, (London, 2006).
الفصل الرابع: التحرر
(1)
Long before I became aware of the books’ and the film’s
colonialist and racist overtones.
(2)
William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of
King Lear, Act III. Scene IV, 113–15.
(3)
The film Into the Wild
describes well one man’s urge to renounce the trappings of civilization for
a Thoreau-like adventure of self-reliance.
(4)
Mark Rowlands, The
Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love,
Death and Happiness (London, 2009),
86.
(5)
John Tooby, Edge 2017 Question ‘Coalitional
Psychology’,
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27168.
(6)
Dunbar explains that this is ‘the number of people you
would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you
happened to bump into them in a bar’.
(7)
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous
Mind, (London, 2012), 76.
(8)
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation
of Cultures, (New York, 1973), 33.
(9)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, (Oxford, 1998)
223.
(10)
Stendhal, Intimate
Works, quoted in Jon Elster, Sour
Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Reality, (Cambridge,
1985).
(11)
Philip Rieff in the Triumph of the
Therapeutic said Freud democratized
genius.
(12)
John Gottman says in a relationship you need five positive
interactions to compensate for one negative one.
(13)
A thinly veiled depiction of Roth himself, who appears in
several of his novels.
(14)
I’ll note here that a Jordanian-Irish person writing about
a Jewish novelist portraying a black man pretending to be white is
layered with partial comprehension and the potential for unintended
insensitivities of its own. This in itself bears on the themes I want to
highlight in this book.
(15)
Chimimanda Adichie in her novel Americanah features hair repeatedly as a marker that can
force black people to the margins.
(16)
Friedrich Nietzsche, (New York, 1974) [1882]
The Gay Science,
310.
(17)
This is where humans take on animal form and become
dissolved in their worlds like the cows on page 51. Between pages 47 and
52 we’re given viscerally apt writing, like Hardy’s Tess of the
D’Urbervilles walking through the milking fields looking for the
spoiling garlic, dragging thistle milk and slug slime in her
wake.
الفصل الخامس: الحكم الأخير
(1)
Emine Saner, ‘Mitch Winehouse on Amy the Film’, The Guardian (1 May 2015),
www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/01/mitch-winehouse-interview-amy-documentary-film.
(2)
Dan P. McAdams, The Art and Science
of Personality Development (Guildford,
2015).
(3)
These sketches of Trump come from McAdams’s piece
in the Atlantic, summarized
in the Guardian article from
which these quotations are taken (Dan P. McAdams, ‘A
Psychological Trap: Making Sense of Donald Trump’s Life and
Personality’, The Guardian (5
August 2016),
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/05/donald-trump-psychology-personality-republicans-election).
(4)
You can see how this plays out when you contrast the
formative stories of the WEIRD liberals discussed in Chapter 3 with
those of a more conservative bent:
When asked to describe in detail the most important episodes in their self-defining life narratives, conservatives told stories in which authorities enforce strict rules and protagonists learn the value of self-discipline and personal responsibility, whereas liberals recalled autobiographical scenes in which main characters develop empathy and learn to open themselves up to new people and foreign perspectives. When asked to account for the development of their own religious faith and moral beliefs, conservatives underscored deep feelings about respect for authority, allegiance to one’s group, and purity of the self, whereas liberals emphasized their deep feelings regarding human suffering and social fairness.
D.P.M. McAdams et al. (2008), ‘Family Metaphors and Moral Intuitions: How Conservatives and Liberals Narrate Their Lives’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (95), 978.
(5)
Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic
Plots: Why We Tell Stories (London, 2004). He goes rather
farther than his remit, it seems to me, when criticizing great works for
failing to match the basic plots well enough.
(6)
Even though he calls the book The
Seven Basic Plots and these form the structure of the
first section of the book, later on he adds two more. The first is
‘Rebellion Against “The One”’, where the protagonist resists a tremendous enemy force
until overwhelmed by that power. The second is
‘Mystery’, where someone steps into an awful but unexplained event and
has to make sense of what happened.
(7)
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A
Study in Moral Theory (London,
1985).
(8)
Wittgenstein, The Brown
Book (Oxford, 1958), 87.
(9)
Some, of course, are written by the deceased themselves. An
obituary editor says you can always tell when an obit was written by the
person themselves because the penultimate paragraph tends to go ‘one
area of their many achievements that was
overlooked’.
(10)
Though it is telling that Spike Milligan’s ‘See, I told you
I was ill’ is rendered in Gaelic so as to come across as less blunt to
passing onlookers. We don’t think of death a laughing matter. Presumably
Irish speakers are considered to be more philosophically
resilient.
(11)
James Wood, The Nearest Thing to
Life (London, 2015), 19.
(12)
Alexander Nehamas, On
Friendship (New York, 2016), 125.
(13)
This idea was suggested to me by the writer and technology
theorist Tom Chatfield.
(14)
Julian Baggini, The Ego Trick: What
Does It Mean To Be You? (London,
2012).
(15)
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V. Scene V, lines
24–28.
(16)
James Wood, The Nearest Thing to
Life (London, 2015), 53.
