Mass-Mediation

When we think about how we know something, it's customary to talk about how everyone has biases and filters. These range from biological ones (left-handedness, colour-blindness) to more technological ones (hockey sticks, red lights) to cultural ones (tea-drinking, attitudes to Japanese films).

But the world, as altogether too many philosophers have pointed out, is what people make of it. The interpretation of dreams, and of visions, and of the perception of the real, is what gives power over what people think they know and what they feel they believe. This is the mediating role that merchants of understanding play in the ecology of the idea marketplace.

We are all both buyers and sellers in that marketplace. When you watch a movie and give an opinion of your own, you are a seller; when you pass on someone else's review of that movie, you are a re-seller; when you 'buy an idea', that is exactly what you do.

The great and powerful agents of this market, however, are the mass-media giants. When you read a newspaper, it is the selection of 'news' and its presentation that determine how you view the world. Since a lot of the 'news' is mediated through a handful of agencies and a double handful of newspaper houses around the world, this becomes the world we live in and know.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does move our knowledge of the world away from the empirical and into the mediated realm. We no longer know things immediately (that is, without mediation, without having things 'in between' the world and us) but know things through their media presentation.

That is why large-scale triumphalist or exceptionalist narratives are so greatly loved. We all love a happy ending, we all love to be on the winning side, we all would like to believe that we are special people. After all, what is new is not 'news' unless it is exceptional and peculiarly interesting.

The problem, really, is that we are now blanketed by media exposure. We read too much, there seems to be too much happening, so we accept what we are told and then counter our guilt by affecting cynicism. We say, "Oh, you can't believe everything you read." What's worse is that we can't even read in order to decide what to believe, since we've decided not to believe.

Here's a little jolt.

There is exactly as much happening in the world right now as there was 5000 years ago. It's just that you're hearing more about it from people who are making money out of you wanting to know more about things that really have nothing to do with you.

Yes, there are more people on this planet. There are also fewer of the truly beautiful and interesting animals and plants that used to share it with us. Yes, there are more buildings (and bigger ones) on this planet. There are also fewer languages, fewer cuisines, fewer styles of architecture.

The media that lie between us and the world act as a sort of collective screening. The good part is that it can bring our attention to things that matter and which we wouldn't otherwise know about. The bad part is that it can bring our attention to things that don't matter and which we wouldn't otherwise know about.

Now we all have to learn a new skill: how to mediate the media. I have this image of us all in the space between two mirrors, with our knowledge of self and the world dwindling into smaller and smaller reflections.

Responses 004 (2010-2011)

The fourth question in the list was, to me, a sign of examiner mental fatigue. It sets in around the fourth question in any list of ten. That question was: 'To what extent do we need evidence to support our beliefs in different areas of knowledge?' This is such a core epistemological question that to make it the fourth of ten is somehow lazy.

My first instinct with this question is to ask, "What do we use to justify belief in an area of knowledge?" For example, let's say you have an AOK like music. You assert that a symphony is beautiful. Why do you believe this? What is the evidence?

There are two opposing extreme approaches here. You can say that for a very subjective domain, there is no absolute way to justify any belief. This means that either you need extraordinary evidence (the 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' pseudo-rule) or that you don't need any evidence except your own subjective experience (the 'I know it when I see — or hear, or smell, or taste, or otherwise experience — it' philosophy).

The key to answering this question in a manageable way is to choose areas of knowledge that are well-established and well-defined. The criteria will then be obvious, as will the levels of evidence required for various levels of claims.

But there's a tiny little kink in the question, though. Perhaps in some areas of knowledge (if they can be called that), one needs no evidence at all to believe something. Is that possible at all? Can knowledge exist without justification of the evidential type? Heh.

Faith is Weak

It was not always that way. As Matthew Arnold once wrote, the Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full. But since then has come the Enlightenment and the rewriting of the histories and lives of men.

In the past, you could believe. These days, belief is so weak that you need proof, without which you cannot believe. These days, faith is so weak that you need signs. I watch my fellow journeymen, my fellow Christians, and I realise that our common danger is that we are either Judaists or Graeco-Roman philosophers, just as is implied in this passage.

The key verses from the first epistle to the Corinthians read:

For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom — but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

This is it. The Judaists require signs to establish faith; the Greeks require philosophy (sophia means 'wisdom') — but the Christian faith in its strength needs neither. There is no need for proof; only defence of belief and reliability of witness.

To the material world, which I sometimes spend time debating, I have one main argument: how do you know what you know? The answer normally is either given in terms of signs (sensory perception, data) or by sophistry and logic. But none of these is reliable except by itself; it is reason that makes us trust reason, and our senses that lead us to trust our senses. All these things are circular in nature.

But I assert that which I believe: that though I am doomed in my sins, I am saved by God through no inherent virtue of my own. At which point, the materialist says, "You make this assertion, you have to prove it." And I reply, "No, I need not prove it except to convince you. And only the Spirit of God can do that. I need not prove it to myself, because flawed as I am, I believe."

The materialist says, "Your God is inconsistent, he defies logic." My answer is, "If He were consistent, then He could not be God." But isn't consistency a virtue? Isn't it true that God says He is the same always? No, He never says He is logically consistent; He is always the same but He is never quite perceivable as the same, being infinite.

How else would an infinite deity behave? Any of the proofs a materialist might demand would immediately make a not-God. Any limitation on His morality, His powers, His behaviour, His reason, this would make Him the slave of the material.

And so, I rest in a faith that is stronger than I. My own faith does not avail, for I am a scientist, a teacher, a philosopher, a person who must learn to put all that aside for this most important single matter. Then only, can I believe.

A Need to Believe

People need to believe that order can be glimpsed in the chaos of events, begins one infamous question discussed elsewhere in this blog. At a time like this, with a pandemic starting and the concurrent panic setting in, it's a pretty relevant statement.

Already, I've got people telling me it is a sign of the end, of the apocalypse, of anthropogenic catastrophe. Meanwhile, people track disease vectors, do the biochemistry and virology, figure out solutions. Other people blame high pig-farming density, leading to a faster rate of viral mutation. Everyone has become slightly hypochondriac; then again, maybe they're really ill.

It's easier to believe that things are knowable and hence controllable or predictable. If I were to assert that this is really all random, and that viruses only appear to spread by obvious means such as respiratory droplets (e.g. sneezing and coughing in crowded places) but actually are spread by random and unpredictable plague daemons, then I'd be pilloried as some sort of heretic by most people. Which is odd, of course, because science admits no religion and hence no heresies.

The bottom line is that science is the faith that is most rational in terms of its apparent capacity to predict the course of events in the world around us, past, present and future. It's the predictive capacity that's important. Without that, scientists are merely like children who observe a spattering of paint and see the image of Isaac Newton's death mask in it. But to predict successfully that the next spattering will show Charles Darwin, ah, that is science (or at least, very advanced sorcery).

I've always respected the late Arthur C Clarke as a philosopher of science. Two of his most profound ideas are these: a) sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic; b) intelligence has not been shown to have any survival value. The corollary to the first is of course that sufficiently basic magic should be indistinguishable from science; to the second, that the capacity to analyse, rationalise and predict events will not save us from the final consequences of those events.

The thing is that at some point, we all have faith. The question, "What do you believe is true though you cannot prove it?" drew many wonderful responses from leading scientists and skeptics. It also generated much debate. You will find that most of the deepest underpinnings of modern rationalist thought fall heavily into this category, and the strongest champions of modern rationalism have had no choice (being rational) but to admit it.

The funny thing is that you need faith to believe in reason; you do not need reason to believe in faith. Which is dependent and which is independent? Food for thought, in times like this and at all times.

Belief (in) Systems (Part III): East vs West

Yes, I'm still going on and on about belief systems. But there is method in this madness, or this method would be madness...

For a long while, some people I've met have had this slightly absurd idea that there is an insurmountable East-West divide. The idea of an East-West divide is actually a British idea, from the same megacorporate constitutional monarchy that gave us the phrases 'East India Company' and 'East of Suez', that rewrote Latin and Greek to suit their own labial and lingual incompetence, that created the idea of currency, and that set up the first global empire.

It was Kipling who wrote that, "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet..." and then contradicted himself in the next three lines and the rest of the poem. It is easy to see the obviousness of the misdirection when you know what you are looking for.

Take for example the idea of 'Western Religions' and 'Eastern Religions'. It's ludicrous to think that there is any such divide. There are no major Western religions at all, nothing remotely close to the great arc of religions beginning on the west coast of Asia (Palestine, on the Mediterranean) and ending on the east coast of Asia (in China). You would be going from the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity (about 2.1 billion adherents) and Islam (about 1.8 billion adherents, from Arabia) — to Zoroastrianism (the world's first revelation-based religion, from Persia), and then Hinduism (about a billion more, from India), before going on to Buddhism (about 500 million, starting in India and heading north and east), Confucianism and Taoism. Together, this is about 80% of the world's population.

The majority of the remainder are secular humanists, who claim not to be religionists at all, animists, and suchlike. If you can find a major present-day religion with more than a million adherents that has an origin in any other continent besides Asia, and a community in every other continent besides that of its origin, it will be a minor miracle. I suppose it's possible, if you count some faiths that began as local offshoots of one of those I've already mentioned, but it isn't the norm.

In fact, one is tempted to think that Asian religions are more enduring than most, and that if there is such a thing as Western religion, it consists of modifying Eastern religions by about 5%, Western variants of a global practice such as totemism or shamanism, or some technology-based idea that has the fervent impulse of a religion. If anything, deliberately irreligious philosophy seems to be a hallmark of the European or American 'Western World'.

Besides religion, I think Eastern and Western values go beyond generalities. Universal human values are universal; if they're not universal then they are religious, and that leads us back to the argument that all modern religions are Asian in origin.

Perhaps the reason that East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, is that East and West are a false dichotomy, something thought of by the Brits to divide the world conveniently, just as the Treaty of Tordesillas divided the world for the Spanish and Portuguese.

Belief (in) Systems (Part II)

This is a sort of thematic sequel to a previous post, in which I wrote about some fundamental underpinnings of worldviews. In that post, it turned out that the punishment-reward or scoring sub-system tended to trump the altruism sub-system in human individuals. Some people think that is natural (it's like the concept of 'original sin') and some people think it is unfortunate (it's like evolutionary biology going up a dead end).

The world today is messy, but the thing about history is that we could have seen it coming a long time ago. Right now, there are five key belief systems out of the thousands of belief systems there are. These five key belief systems may not be important to everyone, but their sheer size (in terms of numbers of adherents), ubiquity (in terms of geographic spread) and significance (in terms of people and policies affected by adherents) make them worth looking at.

The five belief systems I am referring to are (in alphabetical order): Capitalism, Christianity, Globalism, Racism and Secular Humanism. It is quite possible for a person to believe in more than one of these, but it is unlikely that any given person will believe in all five, especially since some of them don't 'play nice' with the others.

Why are these five systems so important?

Capitalism, to begin with, is the child of that long and painful era known as the industrial revolution. Descended from the merchant cartels of the 16th century, it eventually became the guiding economic philosophy of empire-building. Its assertions that people should strive to control the means of production individually, in an environment of free choice (the 'market') and thus create prosperity for all, have been tested and sometimes found wanting. Nevertheless, it has been the dominant economic belief system of the 20th and 21st centuries so far.

Christianity, an eastern religion which sprouted from Palestine about 2000 years ago, is now the world's most widespread and influential religion. Monotheistic and proselytizing, it has butted heads with almost every other belief system on the planet. Although Jesus and his followers seemed somewhat socialist (if not communist) in ideology, for some reason American Republicans seem to conflate extreme capitalism with empire-building AND fundamentalist Protestant (there's an oxymoron for you) Christianity. It blows the mind.

Globalism seems like a modern trend. But it is a venerable belief system espoused by most ancient civilisations; it believes in things like the unity of the world under a single integrated programme (philosophy, creed, religion, whatever) in which individual cultures and ideas can flourish. The Pax Romana and Pax Britannica were pretty supportive of this ideal; the Pax Americana not so much. The United Nations and other international umbrella organisations are all children of this belief system.

Racism, unfortunately, is the extreme and somewhat common response to the Other. In racism, a group of humans believes that by virtue of their narrowly-defined genetic pool, they are superior to all others. This genetic virtue, already a somewhat dubious construct, is supposed to provide intellectual, moral, and even aesthetic superiority. It often co-opts other belief systems to establish itself, and has been shown to have a neurobiological origin in terms of the way humans differentiate between like and not-like.

Secular Humanism (as opposed to other kinds of humanism) is a creed which believes that a rational human, free of all supernatural influences and ideas, is a happy human. Although there are many flavours of secular humanism, the core ideals are a) secular—i.e. without religions or non-rational constructs, and b) humanist—putting human life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness first. It is an ancient creed, often veiled by the fact that earlier societies tended to pay at least lip-service to the idea of the divine, and to frown on those who didn't.

All five of these will crop up as the shadowy or not-so-shadowy influences behind almost every piece of news you encounter, in every medium of communication. I think it is not possible to find any news source which isn't influenced by at least one of these forces. This means that an educated human must at least be able to state and understand the basics of these belief systems, whether he or she (or zie) believes in them or not.

Global Themes (Part I): Belief Systems

It's funny. Just the other day I was musing about the new Granta Syndicate syllabus on Global Perspectives. Then I got an email requesting that I prepare an outline for the first theme in the syllabus, Belief Systems.

How does one go about this task? I realise that in the past, I used to sit down and churn these things out while my then-boss appropriated them and touted them as his own stuff. That was driven home to me in a big way when a report my colleagues and I wrote was submitted to the higher authorities with no changes at all, except that our names had been deleted and replaced with another name. Heh. Fortunately, while the hardcopy and softcopy may have been sold for a mess of pottage, the software and hardware are resident in this shell. I can still generate things like that, and I can do so more lucratively, as I was telling a friend not ten minutes ago.

I have now decided to adopt a 'Creative Commons' approach for any of my educational consulting projects in which I generate resource materials. Advice is given freely for reproduction in not-for-profit endeavours. But if you want to make money out of your customers by using my stuff, you will pay.

Digressions apart, here is how one goes about doing such things.

Any package of this kind has a structure consisting of five sequential parts, more or less. (The craft of knowing what other parts to add and when to add them is a separate issue, not covered here.) These five parts are: Overview & Intent, Key Points, Cases & Examples, Links & Extensions, Sources. Each part can be extended or elaborated into multiple sections. When you have exhausted all the sections, you have a package.

A package outline consists of a framing device which covers the five major parts so that your client can see what those parts look like and how they work together. If the client wants to know more, or if the client thinks he's smart enough to reverse engineer the package concept on sight, that's his choice. But you must ensure there is enough on display for such a choice to be made.

In the case of Belief Systems, the obvious approach is to begin with a quick historical survey of what people have believed and why. The intent would be to ask why people believe, and then explain the strands which make up different belief systems. The first part therefore contains an historical overview of animism, religion, magic and science as the four main kinds of belief and how these four strands of belief can be compared to the modern paradigms of faith and reason.

The second part must then give the key points of major belief systems and how they demonstrate their coherence. Marxism is as much a belief system as Buddhism, and you can probably say the same for any reasonably coherent philosophy which informs the way people think about life; a belief system is the system that underpins a worldview or a way of life.

The third part would probably include cases of religious, humanist and mathematical belief systems. But since this is a course on global perspectives and not one on philosophy, you'd have to show applicability to life choices and the impact of large movements based on these belief systems on things happening in the world today.

The fourth part would show links to the other fifteen themes; one good example would be how a belief system affects a people's belief in universal education and the form it should take.

The last part would reference some of the more useful or convenient available sources. I always begin by recommending other people's good packages. For example, J M Roberts has a knack for summarising huge historical ideas in a few pages. It isn't for the purists, but it does generate a greater sense of accessibility.

And there you have it: my belief system regarding the generation of educational curriculum packages.

Watershed

Cold, wet, watery; which is to say: it is cold, the cold has resulted in a huge amount of precipitation, and on this planet, that precipitation is mostly water. And then it petered off. Now, it is cold and wet, but less watery. It will not be dry tonight.

I'm opinionated about education. I believe I have the right to form those opinions, keep those opinions, develop those opinions, and attempt to inflict them on people as a form of testing. Opinions are opinions, but when used as the basis for policy, it is good that they are tested. Some opinions are clearly wrong in certain circumstances; it is clearly not right to say that not all opinions are clearly wrong. Some opinions are more important to some people; that is, having greater import and significance; and some opinions are less important.

The reasons one might believe in this are simple: everyone practises a sort of ranking. This is a consequence of neurobiology; certain sounds, sights, and stimuli are responded to more sharply than others. It is like blue light and red light. Building from this fundamental truth, it becomes obvious that some news items, some effects and affects, some consequences of policy are of greater import to some people. Can it be said that this is clearly the case of certain matters?

Yes, I believe so. Time and time again, in any belief system, one is told that X is fundamental to belief, or that Y is of key importance, or that Z1 and Z2 are the greatest and second greatest commandments. Hence, if you have a belief system, it might be true (by fiat, or by acclaim, or by authority, or by necessity, or axiomatically) that something in it is of greater importance than all other things. If I were a Christian, for example, I might consider this to be more important than any kind of worldly knowledge or wisdom: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; and your neighbour as yourself."

Why would I do that? Because, according to my putative belief system, the author and completer of my faith said that these were of paramount importance in the context of commandments. If I want to be true to the system, I have to believe that in any discussion of commandments (i.e. things we are told to do), these are the most important. And so on.

There is a dangerous trap in postmodern thought (although not all of it) which begins with saying that all viewpoints are equally non-definitive. This might be true, charitably speaking, but it is not the same as saying that all viewpoints are equivalent or identical or equal; in content, authority, utility, economy, and other qualities, they will be of differing value.

Think on these things, said the apostle. Think.

Truth (Short Version)

The truth is that we have to believe such a thing exists. To believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth may not exactly be the assertion of such a truth, but it's close. In fact, our every action compels us, on reflection, to believe that absolute facts of existence underpin our universe, but that we might not ever be able to know them all.

This faith in an absolute truth underpins the scientific revolution. We actually have no way to know that science is for real, or that reason remains constant. Every observation we make might be random, and yet seem to fit a model that appears rational. Two questions, if honestly answered, dispel the entire thin tissue of science.

1. Why must scientific laws exist?
2. What is the ratio of our observations to the total quantity of observations that can be made?

In the end, it all boils down to having crude and imperfect knowledge of our local universe, and being able to make predictions which work – without knowing why this must be so.

So why must truth exist? Because the truth is that either meaning exists or it does not. The existence of meaning requires a true architecture and a true architect; the absence of meaning means that nothing at all, including stoicism and other philosophies of rational acceptance, resignation or inevitability, should matter to us. In order to reason at all, we must have faith.

Spiritual Matters

A slightly off-centre view of the title of this post is that it verges on oxymoron. Most traditions would have it that spirit and matter are not the same, either in abstract or in nature. But this particular topic was brought up by a certain young lady who asked me why my spiritual beliefs (or beliefs in spiritual matters) were the way they were. My first instinct on telling myself this was to think of Barbra Streisand, which perhaps dates me somewhat (and also leads on to worse jokes).

My considered response was that I would think about it. And so I have.

I won't state my beliefs in detail, but what I will try to do here is attribute them to various influences in a kind of Rabelaisian catalogue, minus the scatological references. I assure you that this does not leave nothing behind, as more cynical readers of that great French author might say.

I come from a family of mavericks, in some senses. The great-grandfather who donated my Y-chromosome was a stern and demanding scholar who translated his religious text into the local dialect of the Kra peninsula. His wife, the eldest of a string of young ladies, came from a family line which had been disinherited for their religious beliefs. She was one of the first local teachers of the Methodist variety; the local school was first set up in her house. Of my eight ancestors of that generation, five were of that ethnic group known as 'Asian gypsies'.

Their son, my grandfather, has been described elsewhere in this blog. He was a very talented person, and knew it; his struggle with pride and wrath occupied him often, and he generally triumphed over them. He found the time to be a doctor, a scholar, a person who was always learning from others. His wife was a great one for managing his finances; I remember going on shopping expeditions with her and learning many things about saving and spending. She ruled in domestic matters: diet, the household, the privy purse - traditional elements of oikonomia.

My maternal grandparents were both teachers, of English and Geography and much else beside. I remember my maternal grandfather feeling rather elated ('chuffed' is probably the best equivalent) on determining to his satisfaction that all his grandchildren were intellectually 'gifted' - the debates as to what this meant, and whether this was true, notwithstanding. He was a dedicated teacher who did his teaching diploma in London, a rarity at the time; he became principal of his school. His wife, my rather exciting and excitable grandmother, claimed to have been a biker chick in her youth (which I took to be some sort of anachronism – perhaps I was wrong).

My parents teach as well; my father's an historian, mum taught English and Literature. They aren't the only practitioners in my family - my brother and sister have followed those lines as well. Medicine, business, engineering, real estate and economics are some of the other disciplines embraced by family members; some don't really have an easily classifiable job, and at least one is a journalist. We're an eclectic bunch. This set the stage for my childhood and my upbringing.

Dad and mum essentially homeschooled me while I was attending the local school. This gave me two kinds of education – the kind that you learn to endure in a classroom, and the kind you learn to seize for yourself given an opportunity or two. Which brings me to spiritual matters. I was exposed to Hinduism and various forms of Chinese religion at an early age. Islam followed, and I also remember my father teaching me to count in Punjabi. (This affinity for Indian languages extends to my sister, who learnt Malayalam in university). I grew up speaking three Chinese dialects very badly, along with English (which by any test is my mother tongue).

It was my father who introduced me to science through the medium of aged stacks of Understanding Science magazines. This would have a profound and painful influence on my life. I was never very good as a theoretical scientist, having picked up 'bad' mathematical habits (chiefly the use of intuitive shortcuts) from the talented numerati in my mother's family. I have been a far better practical scientist, but that isn't really saying much.

In the end, my experiences with death decided me. There had to be some kinds of beliefs that survived death, although information doesn't survive singularity, as Stephen Hawking (my erstwhile neighbour from Cambridge days) once said. If there were such, it would of course be good to find out what they could reasonably be. I picked monotheism in the end – if there is a God, then Occam's razor almost mandates there should be only one.

That's a terrible account of how I came to faith. I am not very sure how else I could put it. Applying a scientific method to religious documents? Interrogating those around me in some sort of qualititative research exercise? I don't know. Perhaps God was humouring me. I wouldn't be the first.

Faith

I think there has been too much nonsense written about faith, evidence, truth and knowledge. Perhaps the first thing about faith is that it is certainty which eludes reason. If there is a deductive process leading to B from A, then B is not a matter of faith (excepting the matter of belief in A, which might very well be a matter of faith). If there is evidence leading one to conclude that C is a likely scenario accounting for all the evidence, then this is a matter of reason as well. Only if there is a complete absence of conclusive evidence, all evidence being the sort that is supportive rather than directive (i.e. the evidence is consistent with the scenario, but does not necessitate it), can there be space for faith.

True faith is a stark, cold position. It is a redoubt set in a ring of high stone walls against a black and starless sky. Faith does not lend itself to questioning, and faith may entertain reason but is not susceptible to it. Faith has often been called an emotion, but it isn't even that - emotion has physiological effects and antecedents, but faith is too subtle for those. Faith is not a matter of the crude sensory perception of the body, or even the finer differential perception that the body derives from those senses.

Faith is thus not reliable in the evidential sense or the deductive sense; it is not reliable in terms of instinct, emotion or perception - if it were, it would be undermined by anything which could defeat these guardians of the mind. Why should faith be of any use to us then?

Faith is of use when no evidence or reasoning, no perception or emotion, can give us an answer. In a darkness where all human powers are cloaked and baffled, it is the one thing that might give us a chance of sight at all. For faith, as the Good Book says, is the assured certainty of things that are hoped for, and the substantive reality of things which are not perceived. It is justified true belief (as some have said about knowledge) which contains its own justification, certifies its own truth, and leads to raw and unembellished belief.

And it does not sit well with everyone, for there will always (of necessity as well as nature) be those who must see as through a glass darkly. It does not always sit well with me; it has a terrible bedside manner and an uncompromising personality. But I have learnt that it is the only thing, besides hope and love, that can be relied upon in dark times.