There is meaning in life, and life does make sense. But don’t take my word for it. Some of the best questions in the world have answers that we can only find out for ourselves.
     I’ve spent a good part of this season's shopping break re-reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon Press, 1946), which tells us that what matters is not so much our situation but our response to our situation – finding beauty in a sunrise, even in a concentration camp; seeing the beauty in frozen trees even on a forced march (“say yes to life” was part of the book's original title*) – and I have lately read Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense (Faber and Faber, 2012), which I mentioned here a week ago. Spufford’s notion of “emotional sense” rises above the small print of any doctrine.
     So what if life doesn’t make sense? Maybe it does, and maybe we could just accept that we’re not adequate to the task of making sense of it. So what if life doesn’t have any meaning? Well, on that one I’d argue with myself: perhaps life does intrinsically have meaning, but perhaps nevertheless the safer path is to accept the task of looking for our own personal meaning wherever our “looking” takes us – in my case at this moment, inconveniently, to a printer sitting on an armchair waiting to be plugged in because I want to print out some documents later.
     I remember that 1923 poem by William Carlos Williams, originally titled XXII:
 
So much depends
upon
 
a red wheel
barrow
 
glazed with rain
water
 
beside the white
chickens.
 
You can read up on meanings, interpretations, et cetera, for that one, and you can find out that the poet was a doctor who glanced out of a window to see a wheelbarrow and some chickens while attending to a sick girl, and you can find out that the wheelbarrow was actually the girl's toy, and you can find out that the poet saw the wheelbarrow and the chickens in a friend’s back yard ... and you can be told by a critic that the poem is a meditative poem. Oh, right.
     You can be given explanations that sort of work as meanings, sort of work, although they’ve been inserted between you and the poem and you don't feel them.
     Or you can just go with the wheelbarrow, the glazing of (recent?) rain and the chickens. Just go with the life in it, the picture in your mind. A man wrote about those chickens ninety-four years ago and here we are talking about them now. Not very much depends upon my printer and my armchair beside a window glazed very slightly with condensation, but I’m content to go with the word “meaning” to describe whatever it is about that wet wheelbarrow that stays in my memory.
     And those white chickens.

* ...trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager:

Seems to me that the next stage of human evolution is rubbish clearance. We have "space junk" above us, so abundant that it's a plot device for the movies (Gravity, 2013, for example), a whole sea area of plastic bottles swirling around the distant ocean, and closer to home, any "beach clean" exercise, regardless of season, returns at least a pick-up truck's worth of filled black sacks. Our natural environment is not the green and pleasant land, nor those pristine cities of architects' drawings, but a street-scene of - down here by the sea - seagulls tearing at rubbish bags. Waste Management is already a formally classified industrial sector.
     Maybe I mean rubbish reclassification. I mentioned that idea of using ground-up plastic bottles to make smart road surfaces - overlays full of AI/IT/sensors/tech stuff to communicate with driver-less smart cars passing overhead ("Stop here! That colour is red! When are you going to learn?") - over coffee with a friend yesterday, and the immediate response was first "They're too degraded" and only then "I've heard that before," which I think says something about human nature (sic; think about that phrase), but I think the point stands that if we told big whale-catching trawlers that plastic bottles were a valuable raw material, and we'd pay for them in bulk, we'd clear that sea area to the point of worrying about a shortage.
     Can't we think of anything to do with our natural environment? Our ancestors eventually worked out that they could use the wood around them to make fire. And the past was full of forests. Make houses out of plastic? Protein shakes out of supermarket waste?
     Or are we too degraded?

This just in from Hussein Sayed, Chief Market Strategist at FXTM. It's a news release put out to anybody likely to be spending their holiday writing about Bitcoin - the idea being, of course (do I need to explain this?), that they can quote from it freely. It's an interesting take on where we are now, and for me, worth saving. No, I don't usually pick up media releases in this space, but hey, let's not make a rule out of that. So here goes.
      Hussein Sayed writes (in black):
     With most financial markets in vacation mode, Bitcoin is the only currency making big moves in a holiday-thinned trading week. 
     After crashing by more than $8,000 from an all-time high, Bitcoin is up 3.5% at the time of writing [release received here early on the 27th]. Although the recent plunge frightened many Bitcoin fans, when looking at the relatively short history of Bitcoin trading, the price action seems just normal. During 2017 the cryptocurrency crashed by 30% or more six times. Every fall was followed by huge price appreciation until it peaked on 17 December.
      I say (in grey):
     A pleasingly sane comment, after the switch from "We profile the new Bitcoin millionaires" to "Bitcoin was always a disaster waiting to happen" in the main media. Hussein Sayed continues:
      Whether the Bitcoin bull market is close to an end or just pausing for a short break, remains to be a wild question for 2018. I still believe that Bitcoin is in a bubble formation. However, there’s no effective test to measure at which stage we are currently standing. For example, equity prices may be said in a bubble territory if investors are willing to pay much more for a stock than the intrinsic value which is justified by the discounted divided stream. Similarly, econometric tests may be run on bonds, commodities, currencies or any other asset to come up with a justified value. For Bitcoin, there isn’t any fundamental basis to justify the price.
      Buying Bitcoin falls somewhere between investing in a stamp collection and buying gold, with the two complications that, one, it's digital, etc., and therefore compatible with the global economy, and two, it has a history of misuse almost as bad as that of, say, the US dollar. Oh, and the technology doesn't seem to be quite there yet for keeping your investment safe. Moving on:
     Traders should look at multiple factors to anticipate the next move, such as government regulations, hedge funds' interest, the stability of the network, and broader mainstream adoption.
      And the long-term argument in favour may be very different from the short-term case. For all we know, Bitcoin may turn out to be the Betamax of some future cryptocurrency war, with Ethereum or maybe some kind of Fedcoin as the VHS. Sayed concludes:
      However, latest signs are not encouraging. Here are a few: Israel became the most recent country to propose banning companies based on digital currencies to trade on its stock exchange; a South Korean bitcoin exchange has been hacked, leading it into bankruptcy; cryptocurrency exchanges are disabling transactions temporarily due to high traffic; professional traders on CBOE seems to be going short on Bitcoin.
      I remember the phrase "take profits".  Not that I'm spending the holiday writing about Bitcoin, but it's a strange and interesting subject at the moment. We are the beneficiaries (sic) of a globally interconnected economy; it's digital, it harnesses the power of technology, puff, blah; and as a result, we're all happily shopping and investing online, telling our digital assistants to pick up the remote and channel-surf for us, living wonderfully tech-enabled lives as we watch fit people being active on our screens.
      And yet we balk at a currency that fits in so neatly with everything else.
      Whatever next?

Birdsong in the early morning. Bulbs coming up. Silence from town and easy parking in the streets around. The students have all gone home for the break. Birdsong. Not just gulls, but childhood, we're-in-the-country birdsong. Not even the background noise from the docks. No ships coming in. Big rain last night, but now a uniform grey-blue as the light comes up. Last night was the Solstice, Yule, so the days will lengthen now, and the sunrise move back around the horizon, fetching up close to the three trees where we used to live. There'll be people on Gyllingvase Beach as I write this, getting ready to welcome the sun.
     If this isn't the longed-for Zombie Apocalypse, it must be the Friday before Christmas, before the shops open. And yes, there among the headlines, the annual warning that the roads might be congested out of London tonight. Oh, the importance of ritual! The "Christmas survival guides" and the round-ups of the year. It seems odd to me that faith in a divinity, or a divine presence, or a whatever, is so widely required to meet the exact specifications laid down by a religious dogma. Even the Nicene Creed, whichever version you take, has the subtext: We believe what we've been told to believe.
     Maybe the shopping, wrapping, gathering together around food and presents, the TV-ad representations of weather rarely seen in these islands, maybe all of that is closer to the original spirit of the winter festival - sorry, Spirit of the Winter Festival - than the reason we're supposed to give for turning up in Church in the middle of the night and sheepishly greeting our neighbours before bellowing out the last verse of Oh Come All Ye Faithful.
     There's an interesting book, and I'm just finishing it now, on the whole Modern-Day Christianity thing - how it is possible to retain a belief in all of that in the face of reason, et cetera. The title says it all: Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense by Francis Spufford (Faber and Faber, 2012). The idea seems to be that not everything needs to make sense to be a means of connecting to something profound. Parables don't need a basis in fact, but in truth.
     Which is where we remember that while science insists on laying down its own terms for any debate, dictating rationality and its limits, the rest of us remain free to read anything we like into the dawn chorus.

It's a saving grace that we all have such short attention spans. Old-style revolutions depended on whipping up a crowd past boiling point and keeping it there. Death, disaster, beheadings ensued. New-style revolutions start strongly, but fizzle out as our attention turns to the next prompt for our indignation. Old-style "and keeping it there" doesn't seem to work any more.
     Except in the sense that new-style revolutions continue beneath the surface. The indignation seems to be today's dominant emotion - we're all ready and waiting to be shocked by the next headline - but change seems to be a more considered, more gradual thing. Indignation can become a reflex - and news a supplier of cues for those reflexes - but somewhere down there, quietly, while we're all ranting, the world quietly changes.
     As if we've evolved superficial emotions as a safety valve. As if the world is a lot more stable, or at least slow-moving, or more importantly capable of accommodating change without revolution-style convulsions, than all the screens would have us believe.

Let's keep this brief. It's a Friday, the Christmas break is looming up at the end of next week, and the early Spring Clean is well under way in this household. Global warming, no doubt. This time of year, this year, feels more than usually like an opportunity to step back - this enforced break of a couple of weeks in the year, I mean, before we all go out to watch the fireworks -  and to walk along the beach, think, review, furtively dam a stream and build a sandcastle, contemplate, meditate, drink and eat, let go for a while. And apply the Hoover to the stair carpet, which is next on my agenda.
     Maybe sometimes it just is an opportunity to step back, et cetera. There were several enthusiastic explanations of the term "constructive ambiguity" on the airwaves last week. There was a breakthrough in the glitch-up negotiations over the Northern Ireland/Eire border, apparently, so we can all go on to talk about UK/EU trade now. The inspired use of "constructive ambiguity", we were told without any guile or irony, has enabled the opposing sides to read into the agreed NI/Eire terms whatever they want them to contain. So if you think about it, there's no breakthrough, just both sides pretending to believe that they've got what they want.
     One certainty, for whenever, is that any eventual UK/EU trade deal will be greeted by both sides claiming to have got what they want. "Constructive ambiguity" was Henry Kissinger's term, wasn't it, and what's great about nowadays is that we can move forward with absolutely everybody knowing, agreeing and even broadcasting that this is only a pretended breakthrough - isn't it great? No? Be quiet. Twenty-eight nations negotiated that breakthrough, the EU twenty-seven and the UK, and in the modern style, they went beyond the eleventh hour, the last moment, negotiating through the night, up to the wire, crashing the pips, running on fumes, more and more coffee, et cetera, blah, blah, into the following week - which has about as much dramatic impact as a monster movie where they show you the monster from the outset, but never mind.
     Twenty-eight nations. Imagine a world in which it was possible to leave cross-border trade talks to the traders, councillors, shoppers on either side of the border in question. People who knew each other, who traded every day. Disaster! Imagine the unemployment in the Chancelleries of Europe*, if we left people to do their own negotiating.

*The Chancelleries of Europe by Alan Palmer was first published by Allen & Unwin in 1983, and was - is - a study of the high-level negotiating bodies that ruled Europe until all their constructive diplomacy finally ran into the mud of the First World War.

My digital radio was struck by lightning the other day. About six in the evening, loud bang, bright flash, the radio died. Nothing else, just the radio. My first thought was: what a pity that didn't happen during the pre-news ad about "giving the gift of digital", or some such phrase. Narrative truth almost requires a re-ordering of the facts, but no - it was a few minutes after the ad. And no, the radio didn't die. Services weren't available for a while, but they were there when I tried it later. I wonder if The Great Editor In The Sky is trying to tell me something - and if so, what?
     Cue speculative daydream: in any story about the supernatural, or the "I believe there's more", or the conventionally religious, whether it's fictional or factual (sic), the "other side" always has a great deal of difficulty getting through. Why? What are these boundaries and why are they/would they be there? It's consistent, this difficulty, across all storytelling, so I imagine there's a reason more substantive than, say, "thick fog in the Channel".

Did you see the thing in Nature about the semi-synthetic organism? Scientists have managed to add artificial letters to the genetic code. No, I don't understand it either, but we're all made up of A, C, G, T, which are the basic proteins of all life going back to Trilobites and beyond (disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about), and now, scientists have created a blob of E. Coli bacteria that contains not only its natural A, C, G, T, but also brand-new artificial X and Y as well. Exciting, right?
     [Why they chose to upgrade E. Coli, no idea. But that does strike me as the kind of weird detail you tend to find in authentic science. When they're not observing the effects of too much coffee on laboratory mice - good coffee, probably*, wasted - most scientists do tend towards developing weapons-grade tummy bugs and rogue bacteria. In the films I watch, anyway. And they always eventually leave the window open - or find a way to rip their pressurised suits just at the wrong moment.]
     If you're a scientist, the good news about A, C, G, T, X, Y is that we can now (or rather, eventually) make new proteins. And these can (again, eventually) be used to treat diseases in ways that they're not being treated already. But if you're at the blue-sky end of human thought-processing, this works out as a really good excuse to panic. We've spent so much time and money, fact and fiction, obsessing over whether we might build a machine that comes alive and starts killing us (insert my usual set of references here) - and now these spoilsports have just gone and re-routed life into (semi) artificial things. No need to create it after all; they've just diverted it.
     In a potentially terrifying way, at least. The scary thing about artificial intelligence is not that a hyped-up calculator might generate so much heat that it develops consciousness and decides that we're a threat, but that it's networked. Even this laptop is spying on me through its camera, after all. I wrote once here about sex robots (second paragraph, and don't miss the footnote). Imagine the attention you'd give to getting the privacy settings right on one of those. All too easily, AI shares your secrets with its peer group.
     Little robots like Pepper, or any one of those table-top gadgets that talk back at you, or that sex robot of yours, they're all networked back to something (not necessarily somebody) outside your control. I remember a presentation about Pepper: you'd tell your device at home that you needed something, and when you got to the bank, the robot there would recognise you and tell you why you can't have it - sorry, would give it to you. The bank's robot would continue the conversation where your Pepper left off, anyway, because the two of them have been talking about you.
     Scientists have added artificiality to life, so in effect we can say that they've added life to artificiality. The whole singularity thing, all the work of everybody who's ever taught a machine to play a board game, is deleted in an instant. If life now flows into machines, like a river into a new course, we might as well dump the word "networked" and replace it with "telepathic". Imagine living things, like us, who are networked to each other and to the internet of everything around them. How primitive we will seem to them.
     We're all doomed. Again.

*Was it the whole internet, or just social media, that some scientist developed just to check on the coffee machine on the floor below? I forget the story. We could digress into the space program and non-stick saucepans at this point. Packing to go into space must be a bit like ticking off an old-fashioned wedding list. 

Here's one for the record. Rachel E Dubrofsky, associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida, was quoted in The Observer recently*, defining "hipster racism" as "the domain of white, often progressive people who think they are hip to racism, which they mistakenly believe gives them permission to say and do racist things without actually being racist". Interesting idea. Dubrofsky has written papers - and two books - on various issues around digital culture, including a 2016 piece entitled Authentic Trump: Yearning for Civility, and here's some further reading.
     I don't think "hipster" is anything I need to worry about, and confronting one's own -isms requires rather more self-knowledge than any of us can be confident of possessing, but this did get me thinking. In culture, politics, just about anything else, it seems to me that an assumption of virtue settles around one side of any divide, while an assumption of courage settles around the other. Too often, the virtuous end, or the courageous end, justifies the means. I don't want to give examples, but people convinced that they're working for a good cause can be as harmful to the rest of us as people convinced that they're facing up to reality.
     If you're the good guy, you get to kill the bad guy and go home afterwards. I remember thinking as a child: but surely, the bad guys think they're the good guys? If we want a metaphor, maybe we should think more about breaking eggs gently when we're making omelettes.

*26th November 2017. Article by Arwa Madhawi, "There's nothing funny about 'hipster racism', no matter how you dress it up'.

Afterthought. Across the whole spectrum of human activity, we readily accept that there's more. In politics, there are conspiracy theories, for example. In media, "secrets" are always being "revealed". We take it for granted that the world around us has a private life that's more interesting than what we see. And yet in the huge area of the human soul, the spirit, we come over all dogmatic that there's nothing beyond what we can perceive with our senses. Science works best when it's most open - the art of applied curiosity - but it contradicts something fundamental in the human mind when it insists on its own limits.