I get a lot of mental exercise at DPChallenge.com, where the main subject of photography seems to be heavily subsidized by discussions of religion, belief, atheism, and politics. Unfortuantely, it’s not the good kind of exercise, where I’m kept on my toes by someone obviously much smarter than me, who uses reason in ways that show up my ignorance, or who has relevant information at his or her fingertips.

Truthfully, there is some of that. But more often, I’m left to dodge the exasperated insults of someone who has taken great umbrage with the fact that I’ve presented an opinion contrary to theirs. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, the discussion concerns faith, and the respondent is — you guessed it — Christian. But often times, discussions take a turn for the worst even when they are about other issues, and also occasionally when they are concerned with the most banal corners of photography or photographic equipment.

The membership at DPChallenge is largely American, and the truth of the matter is that it’s mostly Americans, and to a marginally lesser degree Canadians, who seem pathologically predisposed to accepting a contrary opinion on any number of subjects as a personal attack on their character. It is an absolutely frustrating experience to come up with sound arguments, rebuttals, or exposés of weak propositions, only to have the opposing person cry foul, or act like a wounded teenaged drama queen, or, most often, reply with the vilest kinds of insults imaginable. What a spectacle it was to have someone at DPChallenge call me an “amoral pig” when I made his argument look weak. When called out on it by another participant, he apologized to the pig for the unfair comparison with me.

Such is the level of discourse in our North American society on subjects as wide ranging as religious faith, green house gases, Hoya lens filters, and the awfulness of an amateur photograph.

Stephen Fry, the British actor from Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder series and others, posted a very revealing blog article concerning this phenomenon. He’d been dining with an American colleague when things turned nasty. Fry doesn’t deny that he has strong opinions, that he may even be the kind of person that is very frustrating to have an argument with. But he notes some solid differences between European and American discourse.

To a Briton pointing out that something is nonsense, rubbish, tosh or logically impossible in its own terms is not an attack on the person saying it – it’s often no more than a salvo in what one hopes might become an enjoyable intellectual tussle… [M]ost Americans responded with offence, hurt or anger to this order of cut and thrust… Disagreement and energetic debate appears to leave a loud smell in the air.

So what’s the cause of all this?

There is no appetite for true debate in the stream of discourse of North American society. Opinion, however outrageous, unfounded, or offensive, is sacrosanct. People have come to think that their opinions are unassailable, and that any attempt to weaken their position by argument is an unmitigated personal attack on their character. Their opinions, and the irrational way they defend them, are more like articles of faith than judgements of their environment based on fact. Any attempt to undermine those opinions is perceived as a sort of heretical undertaking, a below-the-belt attack against the very person holding them. There is little separation in these people’s minds between themselves and their opinions, their beliefs — their articles of faith.

For this state of affairs, we have unfounded faith itself in all its forms to blame. Faith blunts an individual’s ability to observe his own opinions objectively. There is no cool dispassionate consideration possible with faith. It merely is, and remains unassailable, untestable, impervious to critical analysis. It bleeds into all areas of a person’s life, infecting their powers of rationale. Ultimately it emboldens an individual’s confidence in herself, creating an overblown sense of self-importance that insulates from all inquiry the reason-defying catalogue of opinons she holds.

I knew that listening to Monty Python records throughout my teen years was going to help me, so I’m confident in saying that argument is a series of statements intended to establish a proposition. It’s not just contradiction. Neither is it holding one’s ground until the opponent is scared off, put off, or brow-beaten into accepting the fact that one’s position is ultimately inviolate. An argument is a process whereby one attempts to analyze an opponent’s position, find the logical or reasoning flaws in them, and ultimately expose the proposition they uphold as unfounded. It is neither a tit-for-tat, nor a kid’s game, complete with veils of childish tears and the loud stamping of feet.

But this is not understood, and argument, in its most useful form, has died. Long live argument.

Louis Argument and Debate, Believers Argument, Debate

There has been a discussion at DPChallenge.com lately about the nature of morality. Typically, the religionists are lined up on one side, arguing that the only moral source in the universe is their particular god. The atheists dutifully face off with them, presenting ideas about morality’s prehistory, its probable source in genetics, how it favours the survival of a species, or its otherwise innate nature. There is little agreement other than that morality is somehow desirable, and immorality is not.

Of course, it isn’t easy to define morality, especially when the waters are muddied with ideas about its paranormal origins, or the insistence of some people in equating morality with dogmatic adherence to their religious script. But at its most irreducible, morality is that condition in human beings that recognizes suffering in other beings, seeks to end it, and desires to replace it with happiness. There is little else that it needs to be concerned with, rules of copulation, or the hierarchical roles of certain members of society, for example. Conversely, immorality can be said to be that condition which is unconcerned with the suffering, or happiness, of other beings.

I think people tend to show their true moral fibre in dealing with strangers. I personally have a difficult time with strangers. I am usually suspicious of them, and it is with only a great effort that I can bring myself to give a stranger the benefit of the doubt. I seem to be predisposed to mistrusting those I don’t know at all. What comes along with this is a tendency to discredit the actions of strangers, to cast their most innocent actions in a bad light, to assume the worst in people. It’s a disheartening struggle, because I otherwise enjoy almost everyone around me. I’m endlessly fascinated by people’s behavioural minutiae; I truly love the humanity in people.

Alex and I are relatively new swimmers, and we inhabit the “slow lane” during our four-nights-a-week lap swim. We seem to be stronger swimmers than most in that lane, but neither of us are comfortable moving on.

An older woman, a very slow swimmer perhaps in her mid fifties, has been cajoling Alex, trying to get him into the intermediate lane. Her jokes are rather unsubtle, but her smile is genuine, and one day last week, we spotted her at another pool, where Alex had a short pleasant conversation with her.

During last night’s swim, she hinted once again that he should move on, in a pleasant, undemanding way. He responded that he lacked the confidence for the next lane, and that was that.

A young teenaged boy later got in her way. “Move,” she barked at him, jerking her thumb toward the faster lane. “Sorry,” he said quietly, and swam out of her way. “I’m fucking sick of this,” she growled.

It was actually quite shocking. One doesn’t expect an otherwise kind older woman to come up with that kind of language, let alone for a child. The dramatic about-face in her demeanor was appalling. I later reasoned that she was showing us what she truly thought of her situation in the slow lanes amongst faster swimmers, and that she could not until that moment vent her frustration on us, her peers, the way she could do on a young person.

We could do nothing but ignore her for the rest of the evening, and before the swim ended, she left, her face blank, but underwritten with some kind of negative sentiment — disgust (in herself?), dejection, weariness, loneliness.

She had, in that moment, displayed her true moral being, unconcerned for the welfare of anyone else. Her willingness to inflict this kind of suffering on someone, small-scale though that suffering might be, revealed her nature. Her behaviour was highly immoral. In that moment, there seemed no question for me that this woman should be ignored by us. She seemed a small entity, as unsympathetic as she was lacking sympathy.

Why would I concern myself with this kind of non-event? There was a momentary lowering of the guard on what appears to be a rather crass older woman, and some kid bore the brunt of it and moved on. That’s that. So why would I even give it a moment’s thought?

It is indeed for the way she left. The look on her face as she walked, alone, off the deck, was about as telling as the hissing profanity. She was indeed alone. She was indeed not proud of her reaction. She was quite friendless in that moment.

I see myself in that woman. I see the moral duality, the natural sympatico coupled with the innate dourness, the easy will to negativity. I see in her behaviour the same behaviour in myself — the path of least resistance in impersonal dealings with strangers, leading to minute forms of suffering that only add to the endless measure of unhappiness in the world. I see in her, and in myself, an agent of Sadness. Sadness doled out bit by bit, in increments barely noticeable, until their crushing weight destroys the equally minute measures of happiness that may have been offered.

Morality is the will to actively end suffering, and promote happiness. There is no small measure of suffering; there is no small measure of happiness.

Louis About me, Morality Happiness, Morality, Strangers

We’d been planning on doing something in the sun today, but it didn’t seem that either of us were up for anything in particular. We half-heartedly strapped the bikes to the back of the car and set off to the Horton’s for a starter coffee, thinking we were going to Caledon, and the bike trails there.

While waiting in the drive-through, we realized that neither of us felt up for the long trip out to a place quite close to Kleinburg. Alex found a brochure in the pocket of his door for conservation areas along the Bruce Trail, in the Dundas Valley and Spencer Gorge areas of Hamilton. We returned home to drop off the bikes, then picked the largest waterfall we could find — Tews Falls — and headed out.

It was quite an impressive sight. I had no idea a waterfall this large was anywhere near where we lived. I tried out my new point-and-shoot camera, and got a few good pictures of the falls from a viewing platform.

Alex was quiet, had been all day. Sometimes it’s difficult to read him. But like me, I think that for him, things just seem somehow out of sync once in a while, or perhaps nothing is particularly appealing. We’d had some trouble deciding what to do when the day began, and, having decided the night before that we were certainly going to do something — but what? — it was a disappointing struggle to come up with a day trip we’d both like.

But, here we were at Tews Falls, and something called “Dundas Peak” awaited at the end of an adjacent trail, so we left the viewing platform and made our way to a point high on the escarpment that overlooked the city of Hamilton.

It was a nice view (but it was Hamilton). We took a few more pictures and enjoyed the scenery a bit, then headed back down the path. We talked about going to Denninger’s for schnitzel and other good stuff. I don’t know what I was saying when I suddenly realized Alex was no longer walking beside me. I looked back, and he was standing and staring at something.

We’d just started to cross a small foot bridge, and he was crouching down and shaking his head. His mood wasn’t improving at the site of a bible verse, God this-ing and God that-ing, scratched onto the wooden rail of the bridge with a pen (beside a big black flourishing graffiti tag).

And God said to Moses, “I AM.” And you shall say to the children of Israel, “‘I AM’ sent me to you. I will bring you out of bondage to a land flowing in abundance!”

The author of this bit of divinely inspired graffito completely misrepresented the quote, as no translation fails to omit God first saying to Moses, “I am who I am”. In any event, Alex was quite animated. It seemed his level of tolerance for anything appearing to be prosyletization had been reached. What with the absurd display of this year’s Olympian track and field athletes, most of them African, blessing themselves until they must have been fairly bruised about the forehead and navel, the dangling rosaries on rear-view mirrors in cars next to us on the highway, the proliferation of cheerful floating Jesus-fish on the rear end of gas-guzzling minivans and SUVs, and the spectacle of some Conservative nobody reasoning that God must support their party because it had stopped raining just before Mr. Harper’s Big Speech, I think Alex was at some kind of breaking point. He wasn’t incandescent, he wasn’t livid, but he was certainly animated. He had certainly had enough.

It’s true, this bit of vandalizing was misplaced and stupid. I couldn’t work out why this quote seemed apropos to this particular god-believer. The scenery around it was certainly pretty, and the wooden railing would surely have been the only workable surface his black ball-point pen could tolerate for many kilometres around, but why that quote? Oh well, believers are not necessarily known for connecting their sentiments to their faith in a way that makes sense to the rest of us.

Dumb though it was, I wasn’t as put off, and downright offended, as Alex was. I did mention that I was thinking of running to the car for a pen so I could add a few words to make the thing profane, but I wasn’t serious. And of course, smuttifying bible verses isn’t just the ultimate expression of one’s emotional immaturity, it’s also deeply offensive to many, many people. One’s cause in life isn’t to offend.

As we started to pass over the bridge, a group of Mennonites were coming toward us, perhaps five men with their wives. “Oops,” I whispered to Alex, snickering, “maybe these are our vandals.” We passed them, the men looking at us and smiling, one or two saying “Hi,” the women looking only at the path.

“It wasn’t them,” Alex said. And of course it wasn’t. These are people so committed to non-violence and cohabitation with humanity that they take great pains to make their very churches blend into the surroundings, should they have to locate the buildings within the greater community. Causing offense to those of a differing faith, or making a show of their own faith, would be a shocking transgression for them. If I am made to have respect for the beliefs of others merely because they have beliefs, and not because of the substance of those beliefs, Mennonites are the only group of Christians I could tolerate it for.

Eventually, we made our way to Denningers and got schnitzels and a whole lot of other good things, and had a dinner of pork and poppyseed cake and salami.

I suppose I’m amused that just the other day, I was saddened by the notion of some believer not seeing the forest for the trees, heaping empty praise on nothingness while the real beauty of his surroundings escapes him.

If you want true wonderment, you should wonder at the improbability of the universe, of our planet, and, most improbable of all, of our individual consciousnesses experiencing it all. The enslavement to the worship of nothing is deeply sad. In the end, it excludes all possible human happiness, great or small. It’s bondage that humanity truly, truly needs liberation from.

Louis Alex, Believers Believers, Bible

Alex and I went swimming in a fifty metre pool for the first time, and though we were both tired, we were quite pleased with being able to do continuous laps in a medium speed lane. It was an outdoor pool, and the afternoon turned quite cool. I was uncomfortable for a few minutes, but the briskness of the day eventually went well with the exercise. There was a slight, wobbly struggle to the car, but we soon recovered.

We decided to refuel at the chicken place, and on the way out, we wondered what we should do. Going home immediately didn’t seem like such a great idea. We hadn’t been to Bronte Creek together in some time, so we decided on the park.

Bronte Creek on a weekday evening in late August is a pleasure to be in. There were virtually no other people there. We started at Spruce Lane farm, and walked to the end of the dirt road by the pond, and turned back. The light was beautiful and golden. I wished for my camera. “Sometimes it’s better to be without it,” Alex said. He was right. Enjoying the park and his company was better than worrying about pictures.

We went back to the farm, then started a long walk around the big empty fields, copses, and farmhouses. We looked up and guessed at the structure of the clouds high above, lit from below by the setting sun. It was gold and orange and blue. They were whispy and light and beautiful. “Are those cirrus? What are cirrus clouds, anyway,” I asked. We talked about the edge of the atmosphere and the clouds that were there, and the crisp late summer night. “Look!” There were pinstripe clouds, even and regular and picture-perfect, high above our heads. “Can you spot the mares’ tails,” I asked him. He couldn’t. “There, and there.”

“We’re so lucky to be here,” he said.

Looking up into the endless blue above us, and at the golden and orange light, I couldn’t have agreed more. Then I thought how wonderful all of this was, how beautiful the admiration of it, without having to infuse this natural wonderfulness with gods.

As we walked, I imagined a believer might be compelled to talk about the creative genius of God, the beauty of God, the sublimeness of God, all the while exactly missing the breathtaking example of beauty and lovleiness all around him. The universe is so breathtakingly beautiful and light, that being encumbered by gods diminishes the experience of it for people, erodes its tangibility, like a river eroding the limestone banks surrounding it. It’s a sorrowful thing to remember the lens of fantasy that most people are forced to view the world through.

We passed another farm. There were three cows in a field on their way back to the barn on their own. One was quite young, and kicked at the air with its back legs, scampered around the two adults, nuzzled their faces. It was a sweet sight.

I suddenly realized this was the same calf, now much bigger, that I had seen six or eight months earlier, alone in the barn nearby in the cold of winter. I’d been at the park taking pictures by myself, and went to this barn to find some goats. A lonely calf was the only animal there. It was lying in a dark corner, and I didn’t see it until it stood up slowly, and made its way toward me. I pet it a bit, feeling sorry for it, and fed it some hay. It was obviously very lonely (and probably cold).

But here it was on a beautiful late summer night, full of life. It was a lucky sight, for me.

Eventually we found ourselves at the huge abandoned parking lot, choked with weeds, that leads to Spruce Lane farm. There were bats flitting everywhere overhead. “Watch what they do,” I said to Alex, and tossed a rock at one. It immediately swooped toward it, circled it quickly as it arced to the ground, then sped off when it realized it wouldn’t be very tasty.

We got to the car in almost total darkness. The sky where the sun had almost completely set was dark blue and red. The whispy clouds streaked from horizon to horizon. Jupiter stood out like a shining rock toward the south.

I opened the window as we drove slowly on the tiny road that led toward the park exit, letting in the evening air. It had been a perfect day, a beautiful evening. It would be a gorgeous night.

We are so, so lucky to be here.

Louis Alex, Believers Believers, Bronte Creek Park

How many times have I been insulted in life? How many times has that been in the bodiless environment of the Internet?

Exactly. And so I wonder why one small insult out of countless others has me bothered.

I’ve had a lot of success on Craigslist. I recently posted an ad for an iPod Touch I no longer need, and got a bite almost immediately, but the individual wanted 20% off my listed price. I’ve always gotten exactly what I’ve asked for on Craigslist, so I replied in two curt words that I’d only be taking my asking price. “No, $300,” was how I put it.

An hour later, I got back a reply saying, “Get over yourself,” followed by a large ASCII Star of David. My name is Steiner, a classic German name that confuses some people, who take it to be Jewish. It seems this symbol was supposed to stand in for something, to intimidate me. A shaming device of some kind. A yellow badge, I think.

I immediately deleted the e-mail, then revived it a few minutes later. I looked at it for a while. I’m not the most charitable of men, nor the most even-tempered. Several replies came to mind as I wondered at what I should do. “Wow, I’m convinced, it’s yours — free!” was one. “Steiner is a German name, Genius,” was another. Various other flavours of sarcasm seemed apt. Later, it seemed to me that I could also take the route of pointing out how his message was received: with some alarm, and some sadness at its implications.

The young man was from Toronto. He’d used his full name in the “From” header of his e-mail, and, it being very unique, I looked him up and found a Flickr web page and a few other things. In addition to his likes, dislikes, the town in Romania where he grew up, friends, and hobbies, there were many pictures of him. Here he was with a few friends, also twenty-something, lounging in a nondescript apartment. Here’s a girl with him. He’s carrying an infant in this one, and here’s a picture he’s taken of himself, holding a point-and-shoot at arm’s length.

What path has led this ordinary person to the place where it seems acceptable to him to offer a stranger a deflating insult, and a veiled threat? And what’s the appropriate response?

The second question is easier for me to answer. In a case like this, the appropriate response is no response at all. For one thing, we are, unfortunately, forced to consider that an individual capable of a menacing text reaction like this is also capable of much more. Further, what could be gained by reacting negatively? Or even with sadness and alarm, my most sincere response? I couldn’t imagine this person responding well.

No, I quietly ignored his response.

About the first question, about how it came to be that he, or me, or anyone else, would think that such a response could be legitimate. There’s no real answer. The usual observations about faceless communication and the ease with which one can abandon civility while engaged in it come to mind. But it seems there has to be some larger issue, some explanation that would account for the willful injury people cause on a daily basis. It’s not that online communication engenders acting badly; it seems to me there’s a callousness inherent in many people that is exposed by online communication. Perceived consequences being minute, many feel free to act in whatever way is expedient to vent their ever-shifting negative emotions. Even a second’s worth of thought for how the other is made to feel seems too long.

Generally I love people, but it’s an on-again, off-again affair. They so disappoint. I am enthralled one moment, overjoyed at their complexities, torn to wonderful shreds by the fickleness of their delights and passions and pursuits, in awe of the heights of intellectualism they can climb to; and then I’m dashed again, brought down by their pettiness, by their dogmatic and inward-looking steadfastness to unreason, to selfishness, to emotional, intellectual dwarfism. I wish I knew what brings people to the very boundaries of supreme selflessness, only to be snapped back into their own self-concerned little world with the bright silent violence of a meteor crashing into the atmosphere.

I’m a victim of it and a perpetrator at the same time.

Louis General Communication, Morality, Selfishness, Strangers