The Lessons of Manila

Here is the piece I wrote for the Pub:

Thanks to Manila and its police force, we have come to the realisation that we are merely the play-things of luck and fate. Aside from the tragedy itself and the uselessness of the Manila police force, we are suddenly drawn back to investigate the tension between stability and chaos. The incident forcefully throws us on the presence, inviting us to question what it means to exist. It also enforces a moment of deeper contemplation and urges us to readjust our priorities in life. If lessons are offered through this incident, it might be the fact that it reminds us that we should never let the thought of death slip away too easily, even if happiness is what travel tends to suggest.

In this critical time, the survived victims and the affected families may seek help from psychologists. If they think psychologists have a power to console, it is perhaps because psychologists supposedly have clear-eyed investigation into the depth of different versions of human nature. However, besides psychology, there exists a discipline in the academia that can perhaps offer as much help as psychology, namely, philosophy. How might a philosopher console the victims of this incident? What can philosophy offer to fan their dim light of hopes?

Hence I wish to draw your attention to the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca. At one level, what Seneca has to offer might run counter to what a psychologist might commonly suggest, but at another level, it might actually prove more consoling. Rather than feeding the suffered with primordial optimism, what he offers is often of the darkest sort: "You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened...?’ If what happened in Manila makes us sad, it is because we are most easily hurt by what is most unexpected. But Seneca tried to calm us by reminding us that disasters will always be part of our lives, however wise we are and however advanced our technology is. Therefore, we must bear in mind the wisdom of "we might possibly die in the next second" at all times. To refuse to acknowledge the inherent complexity of human affairs is to engage ourselves into a religion of comfortableness. Our actions are rarely determined by our free will. On the contrary, it largely depends on luck and chance. Our destiny is never in our hands. How easy the long-standing philosophical debate between free will and determinism is decided by the death of eight hostages.

If the incident makes us incredibly sad, it is perhaps because the human race never has quite the capacity to understand the value of pessimism, the inability to live our sadness fully. We often harbour in our hearts a religion of optimism that assures us the fact that history is always progressive, that humans must necessarily grow wiser as time moves on, that we must always invest our hopes in the future. We have been plugged into an ancestral memory of what is comfortable. Unfortunately, this incident suggests the otherwise. It illustrates the depressing fact that the reality is always disappointing. Happiness is never guaranteed, even during a trip in Manila.

The value of a pessimistic habit of mind lies not in making us cynical, but in a paradox that griefs actually cheer us up. It invites us to the thought that somehow we are not alone in sadness that everyone perhaps suffers from the same pessimistic equivalents like ours. Moreover, it alleviates our pain by reminding us there are things in this world that are profoundly sadder than this incident- the suffering of the Africans from poverty and hunger, the Rwanda Massacre, the women who are stoned to death in the Middle East. Pessimism forces us to dwell upon things that are even darker and gloomier, which in essence induces us to reflect on this relatively minor incident that things perhaps could have gone even worse.

But what deeply underlies pessimism is more arresting. It is because pain allows us to grow wiser. It helps enforce moments of contemplation, pushing us to acquire a better sense of reality and placing pain in a more proper context, just like only when we stump a nail on the ground, we may have the awareness of pain, thus becoming wise to the fact that human bodies are fragile. What is valuable about pessimism is that it puts us through a mental gymnastics which could not have been arisen without suffering. It strengthens our minds by producing a proper amount of cerebral activity, as opposed to the predominant trend of zero consumption of brain energy nowadays. It wards us off illusions and urges us to entertain vital thoughts that promote our intellectual adequacy and emotional sensitivity.

Therefore, we come together to acquire the capacity to be happily sad. There comes the time when we must put our darkness on the table and confront it, that we should embrace sadness and suffering to push ourselves towards a more correct direction of life. The lessons? The incident in Manila was undoubtedly a tragedy, but we should allow its dimension to be a part of life, as something to remind us of what life constitutes. It offers insights for our lives as to how to be properly and productively unhappy. Only through pain and suffering, we may learn to be the masters of life. May the victims rest in peace. But I hereby wish things would go badly for all of us from now on.

"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities- I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not- that one endures." - Friedrich Nietzsche

W

On Wearing Make-Up

For most women, wearing make-up is a daily routine. However, in the consumerist society where everything has the potential to be a tool of profit-making, many women seem to suffer financial assault on the cosmetic sector. Whatever differences there are between different types of mascaras and eyeliners, from a male perspective, it leaves us in wonder how women may easily be seduced to spend a large sum of money on what is seemingly the same products. Are the satanic genius of advertisers largely to blame?

There is a long-standing prejudice against women who spend an excessive fortune on cosmetic products in modern society. If the insistence on wearing make-up should suffer analysis, it is perhaps because it hints at a lack of women's inner beauty- their reasoning abilities, their artistic merits, and their capacity of knowledge. The fact that many women need to wear make-up stems largely from a lack of confidence in themselves, thus in hope of convincing others to collect intellectual evidence around their faces, noses, and eyes. How easily secular mortals may fall for angelic faces who bear inappropriate souls.

However true this accusation is, is it proper to judge a female experience merely because of masculine blindness? Though many social critics tend to condemn this particular female experience for its shallowness, how might we arrive at a more just and accurate, or perhaps charitable, assessment of the feminine obsession with cosmetic products if we are kept ignorant of what a facial routine is? Only after we are prompted by a spirit of philosophical research of what precise aspect each cosmetic item functions for, we may understand why women would chisel a dent in their bank accounts to purchase ten of those seemingly identical bronzing powder at the cosmetic counters of Bobbi Brown and Shisheido.

If we have the patience to investigate the minutest details of a facial routine, we may then unearth hitherto unknown truths about feminine beauty. We realise that some women may favour gel liner rather than pencil liner simply because it's smoother and that a light base is mostly used in summer while a heavy base is usually exclusively used in winter because of the humidity and the dryness these two seasons hint at. The study of a facial routine not only allows us to understand why women take so long in the bathroom, it also suggests that what seems so identical from a masculine perspective may actually help transform one's outlook, through employing different styles by using colours of minutest difference, depending on one's aesthetic taste of mix and match.

But what does all this mean? What do we learn from the in-depth investigation of a facial routine? If there is something valuable about wearing make-up, it is because make-up can reflect what one's psychological make-up is. A love for dark colour lipsticks may suggest one's character is of melancholy temperament, depending on what one's analytical inclination may be. But make-up is like fashion, liable to submit itself to trends rather than generate styles. Therefore, spending an afternoon at cosmetic counters is a process of soul-searching. Unsure who they are, they are prone to adopt suggestions offered in women's magazines in order to adjust themselves to socially recognisable forms.

But what underlies the feminine obsession with cosmetic products is somewhat more arresting. On contemplation, what is generally considered inner beauty is most unlikely to go through the test of time. However intelligent women may get, they are left with no choice but to surrender to the greatest enemy of youth, namely, aging. Our reasoning abilities are subject to decay as we are getting older. What's more, is that we tend to grow conservative as we age. Folk wisdom assures us that the accumulation of life experience allows us to grow wiser, but the reality often suggests the exact opposite. Rather than changing our minds as new evidence appears, our reluctance to adopt new ideas and opinions indicates a sign of the confirmation of prejudice.

Of course, women are not spared of the same destiny. Hence, if they strip away what is likely to vanish, they are left with nothing but a pure consciousness, some vacuous beings who are critically dependent on what others might think of them. Their consciousness, however, cannot be seen, but their casings can. So what's best for them to do is to enhance their physical appearance. Little wonder why women are attracted to fashion and wearing make-up.

Cosmetic products invite us to redraw the boundary between shallowness and profundity. What seems profound on the surface may end up being shallow, and vice versa. The two-hour ritual in the morning is no easy task.

W

On Dinning At Home

An edited version from the Pub:


For those of us who have more than enough to eat, dinning out might be considered a culinary delight. However much we love eating, it seems we are reluctant to invest enough confidence in ourselves to lay down judgements concerning the quality of food. Rather than ranking a wide range of restaurants according to a subjective hierarchy of taste, we tend to sacrifice our free will and surrender to tyranny, namely, the authority of food critics.

If we can't trust our own tastes, it is perhaps because the judgement of food, like art, has been left to an elite group who supposedly possesses profound knowledge of food. However, our eating according to their ideals also suggests that we neglect our own preferences of what good food is and willingly to be deluded by the fact that what the food critics think are good must be of culinary delight. How easily our unaided minds might be seduced to surrender to the objective judgement of what are good and bad.

If we are easily tempted to like restaurants, it is perhaps because they are able to offer what home-made meals precisely lack- customer service, the grand displays of the dishes, the kinds of interior of decorations which inspire the feeling of awe, and perhaps a live band. Restaurants, therefore, harbour a sense of perfection, fooling us into thinking that utopia might be just within our grasp.

However, that's precisely the danger of going to restaurants because they are likely to enforce moments of distractions. Instead of salivating to respond to what the chefs offer, our moods of happiness are wedded to the table settings, the exquisite interior decorations, and what music the live bands offer. How easily the efforts of the chefs who collapse their delicate and complex feelings into a set dinner can be undermined by what anchors to their creativity in the first place.

This then brings to us the significance of dinning at home and our habit of dinning. If there is something intrinsically more valuable in dinning at home rather than dinning out, it is because what we eat often provides a far more accurate account of who we really are. Our love for, say, steak not merely hints at our willingness of vegetable self-sacrifice and unhealthy diets, it might also accede to the symbolic meaning of, perhaps, our inability to empathize or our distaste for natural environment, depending on what our analytical inclinations may be. If we consider food in a psychological light, we may then unearth the inevitable link between food and personality.

But what does that mean? What does it have to do with dinning at home? It's because only through our subjective evaluation of what good food is, we might know ourselves better. The process of eating is also a process of soul-searching. It provokes our philosophical sentiments as a means of self-understanding. If dinning at home has something to do with the analysis of the self, it is because home-made meals are endowed with self-love. We only cook meals based on our own criterion of what is good. The merits of home-made meals lie in a sense of belonging, not only to ourselves, but also to the reality, because it always runs contrary to utopianism (which restaurants are often assumed to suggest) and offers us a sense of imperfection. It drifts us away from delusion and urges us to focus on what is real.

What's more is that we like to dine with our loved ones. If restaurants tend to distract us like the internet, then it merely means we are unlikely to address what really matters in life, things that we often talk about in an intimate friendship such as "What is your dream?" or "What might love mean to you?". Dinning at home mitigates the probability of being distracted and recovers a sense of intimacy. It strengthens the bonding of all kinds of loving relationship.

Many kids now favour fast food. And equally, adults tend to celebrate their reunion in restaurants. Not only the value of supper has been largely neglected, what proper environment we should dine in has also been largely devalued. Only after we revive the value of home-made meals, dinners will never be the same again.

W

On Boredom

In the modern technological civilisation, most of us probably get bored every day. If we get bored easily, it is perhaps because we at heart wish to escape from the monotonous everyday rituals. Exhausted by working in a compressed environment of corporate waters and engaging in the same orgies of gossip, we may realise there is something that needs to be changed, though we hardly know what precisely that "something" is. We need a break to get away from the habitual, not just from the tedium of the curtains and dinning tables our homes hints at, but also a break to get away from ourselves.

Aside from the everyday rituals, our sense of boredom largely stems from the web technology. Not only it conspires to kill our ability to be patient and unstimulated, it has also become the major anchor of distractions. One might be easily considered extraordinary if he could focus on a conversation with his best friend on MSN for more than five minutes, let alone the possibility of an intimate friendship. Moreover, bombarded with images and Youtube videos, the web has risked summoning our long-forgotten archaic suspicion of words and restoring our deep admiration for cave paintings. It hampers our semantic instinct. It's a miracle if you are still reading.

If we are suffering from the epidemic of boredom, it is because we can no longer possibly appreciate the value of being bored. Rather than making rooms for us to indulge in daydreams, boredom throws us back on the reality, the notion of the here and now, urging us to realise what is it that we really want in life. If we walk in any franchise American bookshops, most of the best-selling books are easily categorised into the self-help genre, normally about how we boast up our low self-esteem or how to become the next Bill Gates and Steve Job. The danger of modern society precisely lies in our ability to be overly optimistic because we can no longer derive pleasure from the darkest moods. If we could never endure loneliness, we might never understand the value of friendship. Likewise, if we could not entertain periods of boredom, we might not be able to understand the value of excitement and stimulation.

It is, perhaps, why we are more productive in the mood of boredom instead of the state of being occupied. Boredom allows us to realise what remains vacuous in our lives, reminding us that perhaps a change is needed. It drifts us away from a succession of well-known tasks and enforces a contemplative habit of mind. In the age of the internet, boredom is much needed.

W

Love or Tolerance?

At the start of a romantic relationship, it is not uncommon to slide into what we may call romantic pathology- that our partners must be figures of perfection. Only after a period of time, along with the objective evaluation of our friends, we may be spared of all the romantic fantasies and forced to admit to the inherently normality of them. If we are consistently reading things into our partners which don't belong to them, it is perhaps because we often fall into the delusion that their physical beauty necessarily aligns with the quality of their souls- that they must be filled with delicate and divine thoughts. It is only in dialogue with loneliness we may justify the existence of love.

Whatever our fantasies may be, the reality is always in the habit of disappointing us. A partner with an angelic face who supposedly possesses the ability to read Oscar Wilde's works may end up pinning her interests firmly on an issue of Cosmopolitan. This opens up a range of interesting yet dangerous questions: Why would she prefer to listen to Britney Spears rather than Mozart? Why would she favour a PC rather than a Mac? Why would she admire a pair of Converse's instead of Jimmy Choo's?

If there is a danger regarding our conflicting tastes, it might be because most of the arguments we have largely stem from a subjective hierarchy of tastes rather than nationality, class, and the likes. Yet we often hear the saying "I love you for everything you are." However many pages of the romantic diary we have contemplated, all of us seem more than happy to cherish the conventional wisdom of "everyone makes mistakes". Hence we should tolerate whatever flaws deeply clung to our partners' characters because what elicits love in the first place is that we love them for who they are.

But again, reality cannot be more unpromising. It seems we are often too unfortunate to see such reasoning applied to a romantic relationship. Rather than exciting our admiration for the political virtue of liberalism, most of us secretly harbour an idea that our partners must behave according to our ideals. If only we pay more attention to the nature of love, can we not conclude romantic love bears the same coercive structure of dictatorships in our political history?

From a distance, politics seems unrelated to love. But on closer inspection, we may easily arrive at a more charitable assessment of the relationship between both of them. The nature of romantic love might be easily seen as a contrary pull away from one of the highly praised democratic values, namely, tolerance. Though we may openly agree on the notion of diversity of ideas and opinions, romantic love is by nature fascist, that our partners should appreciate or depreciate certain things based entirely on our preferences. The fact that their tastes differ from ours suggests that their aesthetic logic is somewhat superficial which is in need of much edifying. But should we not respect their tastes?

If we think romantic love is coercive, it is perhaps because we often misunderstand what tolerance truly is. British philosopher Karl Popper suggests that tolerance is not to leave each other alone, but rather, to desire to understand each other. Rather than taking pride on being ignorant of what we are tolerating, we should understand what we are tolerating by enforcing an open dialogue. Therefore, the value of tolerance lies not only in permitting diverse ideas and opinions, but in the democratic virtue that all opinions should ultimately decided by discussions and debates even when they conspire to offer unhappy endings.

Hence to argue is to tolerate our conflicting tastes. But however democratic we may be, a constant argument over what a perfect sofa should be like or how leggings should be worn will result in a romantic revolution, namely, the threat of breaking up. If our aesthetic opinions and habits can no longer relax with a sense of humour, it is because we are in danger of understanding each other too much, a realisation of the inherent incompatibility between us and our partners. Each party stands firmly on the ground of doing what's best for the other. Though the truth is often depressing, it seems perhaps a stable relationship can only be founded on the contract between absolute authority and absolute obedience.

If romantic love makes no allowance for the idea of tolerance, then perhaps we may legitimately conclude that there is no "true" love at all, for everyone is unique, especially in the aesthetic realm. Our romantic fantasy is merely a naive romanticism inspired by novels and films. Romantic love, often mistaken as the same thing as marriage, should only be considered as stops rather than lifelong journeys. It is only intervals between loneliness. After all, we all have to die alone.

W

Why Architecture Matters

An edited version from the Pub:

From a distance, one might be in awe of the modernist beauty offered by a metropolis. But from up above, a landscape full of skyscrapers, surprisingly, evokes a sense of architectural pessimism. Rather than presenting to us the aesthetic equivalent of what Le Corbusier once envisaged , an overwhelming number of skyscrapers invites us to the possibility of reconciling two values that seem to be inherently incompatible on one single landscape, depending on how one views it.

If our appreciation of architecture has been hampered, it is perhaps because it runs counter to the ideals of a financial city. To care about a field that achieves so little, yet consumes so many resources, is to risk harbouring in us an idea that artistic merits don't always necessarily align with economic reward. However, there is a long-standing argument in aesthetics that beauty implies moral goodness. Hence if we live in a beautiful work of architecture, we will eventually become better. Unfortunately, in reality, a beautiful work of architecture, whatever its moral messages are, doesn't always nurture such naive romanticism. How six million of Jews could have been spared of their lives if beauty could command Hitler to emulate its spirits of what an utopia might be like.

If architecture has failed to change us, it is because there is hardly an objective criterion for beauty. The beauty of a work of architecture is largely based on persuasion, instead of forcing us to adopt the values it suggests, it only offers suggestions, rather than laws, which we are not obliged to follow. But in the age that only makes room for certainty, that only gives birth to people whose thinking is critically dependent on traditions, customs, and taboos, it seems architecture lacks the authoritative status to order how we should live.

It is, perhaps, why the property developers, whose minds only bear the notion of profit, are carpeting the landscape with utilitarian style of buildings, office buildings and apartment buildings alike, whose every window is of the same size, whose every floor offers no improvisation, and whose the exterior displays a lack of the use of a variety of construction materials. Though we rarely wish to be blown away by novelty, their obsession of order provokes in us not a feeling of admiration, but rather, a feeling of condemnation, as a proper response to their tedium. How much I feel sorry for the moderns who always work in the compressed environment of corporate waters, and after a long day of work, come home to see this. How easily our wish to escape from the monotonous everyday rituals may be wiped out by their insensitive aesthetic logic.

If the power of architecture only lies in persuasion, it doesn't necessarily mean it lacks the power to change us. What is valuable about a work of architecture is precisely that it only offers suggestions, rather than exciting our admiration with indisputable evidence, it merely suggests a way of living that might differ from our own, about how we might live and what we might become. To learn to appreciate persuasion is to understand the art of entertaining doubt. Our reluctance to be sceptical largely stems from an exaggerated sense of what we can achieve and that the world must be composed of black and white, nothing more. We are most hurt by what is most unexpected because we have obsessively clung to the idea of absolute certainty. Our frame of mind is either endowed with undue optimism or undue pessimism which makes no allowance for the idea of probability, rendering inherently complex human behaviours so simple.

The most precious value of architecture therefore lies not in its functionality, but in allowing us to speculate what may on the surface seem so certain and promising. It equips us with a rather pleasant form of cynicism, the sort that wrests us out of delusion instead of destroying all our hopes in human nature. It won't pull us away from taking sides, yet leaves us to remain fresh open to new evidence.

Architecture tends to redraw our perspective on what the world might be. Far from being composed of black and white, architecture acknowledges the existence of a grey area. It blurs the distinction of complete belief and complete disbelief, forcing us to suspend them properly. It requires us to open ourselves up to the idea that our opinions are susceptible to change as our experience accumulates, even our ideals of happiness.

If we are to escape such intellectual naivety, we may have to arrive at a more charitable assessment of architecture. It is not necessarily an indication of self-indulgence and our social status. Many great religions understand the significance of architecture and use it to subordinate people to attend to certain beliefs that depart from the norm in light of persuasion. If architecture aligns with our personal ideals of what a good life should be, it might help plant the seeds for creative originals rather than obedient drones.

W

Do We Still Have Friends?

I wrote a piece for the Pub:


One of the most obvious benefits of the internet and mobile phones is perhaps that it draws us closer to each other. Though we discover ways to connect with our friends no matter how far apart we are, it seems deep friendship, as Aristotle suggests, does not come easily. We may have more friends than we used to, but paradoxically, our relationships with each other have grown increasingly shallow. How many of our text messages involve with the promotion of intimacy? How many of our tweets seek to cultivate our friendship?

Perhaps, it is true, many of our text messages and tweets force us to pay attention to the minutest details such as our breakfasts and dinners. Though our grand enquiries about what we eat for breakfast at one level allow us to acquire the necessary knowledge of what a proper breakfast should be like, at another level they hint at our lack of emotional intimacy that suggests the modern society is suffering from the epidemic of superficial talks.

Imagine the following conversation on MSN between me and my mother:

"Hey mom!"
"Hi Will"
"Just to tell you, B is becoming a MT"
"What is that?"
"Well, MT means management trainee."
"Oh see, good for him."
"Anyway, gtg. ttyl."
"What?"
"What?"
"I know gtg means got to go. What do you mean ttyl?"
"Oh, ttyl means talk to you later."
"Really?! I didn't even know that!"
"So got to go. Talk to you later!"

Thanks to iPhones and Blackberries for making us text and chat easily.

The original intention of inventing the internet was perhaps to bring convenience to the general public. If the above conversation suggests the contrary, it is perhaps because the web technology conspires to give birth to confusing short phrases. It leads us to suspect the virtue of patience, rather than confining us to the tradition of writing accurately, it undermines the importance of spelling and generates a perhaps rather innovative style of writing. Though the internet, which is the origin of the "culture" of haste, is essential to our economic reward, it has risked inspiring a paradox- that we write more by writing less. In this technological civilisation, a message that is supposed to take a much shorter time to deliver ends up taking twice as long now.

Moreover, the internet also urges us to cast aside patience and favour a trust in distractions. It is no longer uncommon for us to chat with our friend while watching YouTube at the same time. The screens on our mobile phones only make allowance for cliché questions such as "How was your weekend?" or "How was your dinner" rather than what really matters in life, thus fooling us into thinking that we have already cultivated our friendship. What the world needs is technology absenteeism- that a lack of electronic devices and the internet might actually draw us intimately closer to each other.

Dropping our devices might be the best idea, but no one can survive without either mobile phones or the internet in the modern society. What seems to pull us together might actually prove detrimental to friendship. In our busy days filled with futile bustle, we need breaks that that allow us to articulate what lays buried in our hearts. We need to open up our minds and accept the diversity of human minds, that a Google search engine won't fulfil our desire for a true human interaction. Because we are not just CPU's that just process data.

If the internet makes us less human, what should we do? Rather than texting messages and tweeting, we should call up our friends. We need to make our words count. After all, it does not take much time to greet our friends face to face.

W