Should I Watch Dr. Who?

Dr. Who has always been something of a terra incognita to me. I remember I had a Dr. Who comic book when I was a kid, back in the Tom Baker days. (I use the American term "comic book" because it was more like a hardback annual than a regular comic.) But all I can remember about the story is that Dr. Who liked jelly beans.

Much more recently, I bought a DVD of the Christopher Eccleston series, the first revival. I don't remember much of it except that mannequins featured in it.

Is everybody restricted to one science-fiction series they're really crazy about? I was born the year Star Wars came out and the merchandising was everywhere when I was a kid. I even had a Star Wars pillowcase, though not because I asked for it. And yet I've never particularly been a fan of the franchise. (Rogue One is the Star Wars film I enjoyed the most, to be honest.)

Star Trek has always been my sci-fi show. And not even Star Trek in general, since I've always found the original series quite ropey. No, it's specifically The Next Generation, Voyager, and (to some extent) Deep Space Nine. (Patrick Stewart, RIP.) Those shows have meant a lot to me over the years, even though I rarely rewatch them.

But I've barely dipped my toe into Dr. Who. Yet I've always had some interest in the phenomenon from the outside. I'm interested in it as a great British institution, like James Bond or Carry On films. 

I've encountered the stereotype of Dr. Who fans being smug liberals. But I've known at least one fairly conservative Catholic who is a big fan.

More recently, I've become interested in the TARDIS. There's something tremendously appealing in the idea of a vehicle that is entirely bonded to you and has indefinite capabilities. One of the images that has haunted me for my whole life is the idea of a secret room in your own home, especially one that is somehow uncanny or supernatural. What I've heard of the TARDIS suggests it might posses such illimitable inwardness. And, to my surprise, I'm not aware of any other fictional vehicles and/or homes of which you could say the same thing. (There's the Starship Enterprise, of course. But that's never portrayed as anything other than a machine without sentience or any kind of soul.)

So, are any of my readers Whovians? Should I give Dr. Who a go, and where should I start?

Cultural Degeneration

People used to sit around the fireside, telling each other stories and singing songs, mostly drawn from the folk tradition.

Then printing came along and people started to read books-- starting out with the Bible and stories drawn from folk tradition. But lots of poetry and literary classics.

Then came magazines and newspapers, increasingly filled with salacious content and consumerism. But at least people were reading.

Then came radio. Families sat around in the parlour listening to game shows and radio serials. But at least they were using their imaginations to conjure up the pictures.

Then came television, all the family sitting around watching the pictures on the screen. But at least they were together.

Then came televisions in bedrooms, and they weren't watching it together anymore.

Then came the internet, and smartphones, and social media, and everybody was glued to their phones and Facebook and Instagram. No longer talking to other human beings, except through a screen.

And then came artificial intelligence and chatbots, and people were no longer even interacting with human beings.

This narrative is a construct, of course. It leaves out a lot. (Personally, I think the internet was an advance on the mass media of TV and radio in many ways.)

But there's a sad amount of truth in it.

Of course, my pet hobbyhorse is that the switch from poetry to just prose was a huge step in this overall decline, and the revival of serious (meaning sustained) poetry reading would be a huge step in mitigating it. I don't believe it can be reversed, outside a catastrophe that brings us back to telling folklore around the fireside.

For the Spooky Season

You might like this old blog post I wrote about spooky opening credit sequences, from various horror TV shows.

That post is thirteen years old. It doesn't include what has become my favourite of all such sequences, which is that from Tales from the Darkside. Indeed, I wrote a whole blog post about it, four years later.

How to Spot a Narcissist

If anyone ever says or does anything that upsets you, this means that they are a narcissist. It doesn't matter whether it's a romantic partner, family member, political opponent, boss, or colleague. Nor do you need any sort of psychological training to diagnose them. In fact, you don't even have to read a psychology book. You just know.

Once you have diagnosed narcissism, don't hesitate to publicize this via a Facebook post or YouTube video. Don't overthink it, just go for it.

If you find that almost everyone you have to deal with is a narcissist, remember-- the problem is them, not you.

A word on gaslighting. Never forget: if someone disagrees with your take on reality, they are gaslighting you. If you think maybe they are not gaslighting you, this just shows how effectively they are gaslighting you. In fact, the less you think they might be gaslighting you, the more subtle their psychological manipulation must be. If you only have the vaguest suspicion someone might be gaslighting you, that person is almost certainly a sociopath.

Samuel Johnson to James Boswell on Melancholy

"You are always complaining of melancholy, and I conclude from those complaints that you are fond of it. No man talks of that which he is desirous to conceal, and every man desires to conceal that of which he is ashamed. Do not pretend to deny it; manifestum habemus furem [we have caught a thief red-handed]; make it an invariable and obligatory law to yourself, never to mention your own mental diseases; If you are never to speak of them you will think on them but little, and if you think little of them, they will molest you rarely. When you talk of them, it is plain that you want either praise or pity; for praise there is no room, and pity will do you no good; therefore, from this hour speak no more, think no more about them."

I came across this quotation just now and was struck by just how much it clashes with the general discourse about depression today.

I'm not saying that Johnson is right, mind you! The last thing I would want to do (insofar as my writings here might sway anybody) is to discourage anybody from seeking help or counselling if they're feeling depressed. I can well believe that it saves lives in extreme circumstances.

But in my own experience, I haven't noticed that expressing feelings of ordinary melancholy or dejection ever does much to lift them in itself. People are usually depressed about circumstances. Talking about them doesn't usually change those circumstances, although a conversation might help in other ways: for instance, someone could be reassured that their anxieties are ill-founded, if the other person has greater experience on the matter at hand.

I think Johsnon is right in saying "you want either praise or pity"; most people in this situation are probably looking for pity. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. I've done it myself (sometimes on this blog). Maybe pity isn't the right word. Maybe it's reassurance that your feelings matter to someone. Or hope that you might get some special treatment, which perhaps everyone needs once in a while.

We're always hearing these days that men don't talk about their feelings enough and this is why there is so much male suicide. Personally I don't believe this for a moment. What if men don't particularly want to talk about their feelings and the problem is not their feelings, but external realities-- such as soulless secularism, loss of community, fragility of relationships, and so on?

Johnson's attitude is perhaps surprising given his love of The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, a half-a-million word treatise on the subject of depression, which he famously said was the only book which could get him out of bed an hour earlier than he wished to rise.

Love of the Modern World

As a conservative I'm always complaining about the modern world, particularly the things it lacks: tradition, ceremony, community, enchantment, etc. etc. I love everything that's old-fashioned and nostalgic and long-lasting and ancestral.

But every now again--- and I've written about this before-- I feel a positive love of the modern world.

(Almost) everything about it. Budget hotels, Coca-Cola, televised sports, newspaper cartoons, shop windows that are lit up all night long, logos, train timetables, fan clubs, iconic album covers, petrol stations, bags of peanuts, showers, apartment blocks, adolescence, old age, subcultures, fads, the myriad of different occupations and ways of life available to most people...and so on, and so on.

I've often suspected that, if any one of us was dragged back in time to the High Middle Ages or the Victorian era or Gaelic Ireland...we would be massively nostalgic and feel a sentimental longing for all these things. I'm not just talking about sanitation, safety, indoor heating, or all the conveniences that everybody accepts as desirable. I'm specifically talking about all the fripperies and pageantry of contemporary life.

It's not that I want to get rid of all those things, though I certainly think that some occasional austerity and puritantism would do us a world of good. My conservatism lies more in the fact that I want to combine them with the things we've lost.

My "Keeping Things Interesting" Blog Post Trilogy.

Ten years ago, I wrote a trio of blog posts on the importance (as I see it) of keeping society interesting. They can be read, should you wish to do so, here, here, and here.

I'm not saying they're great or anything. What I will say is that I keep coming back to these ideas again and again.

Sometimes, when I'm arguing with liberals (or progressives, or leftists, or whatever you want to call them) I resort to saying: "But imagine if you get exactly what you want. Fifty years down the line, do you think society is going to be better for it, or do you think people might actually miss all the things you want to abolish?" (For instance: gender roles, hierarchy, national boundaries, stereotypes, irrational taboos, everyday aggravations and inconveniences, etc. etc.)

Of course, I don't say it as articulately as that. (People always paint themselves as winning arguments. It's one of my bugbears.)

Like every other argument, this could be reduced to a reductio ab absurdum. Total war would be interesting, wouldn't it? But that's not the sort of thing I mean. I'm not making an argument like that of Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, who said that the suffering of life could only be justified as a spectacle for the gods-- but that this does justify it, and the more of a spectacle we provide the better! (Nietzsche, being an atheist, was obviously speaking figuratively.)

I'm taking for granted that people's basic needs take priority: food, shelter, safety, etc. But I think that people's non-material yearnings kick in a lot sooner than is generally supposed.

The quotation that I always use to illustrate this idea is one from George Orwell, and on which I'll finish:

By far the best known modern Utopias are those of H. G. Wells. Wells's vision of the future is most fully expressed in two books written in the early Twenties, The Dream and Men Like Gods. Here you have a picture of the world as Wells would like to see it or thinks he would like to see it. It is a world whose keynotes are enlightened hedonism and scientific curiosity. All the evils and miseries we now suffer from have vanished. Ignorance, war, poverty, dirt, disease, frustration, hunger, fear, overwork, superstition all vanished. So expressed, it is impossible to deny that that is the kind of world we all hope for. We all want to abolish the things Wells wants to abolish. But is there anyone who actually wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia? On the contrary, not to live in a world like that, not to wake up in a hygienic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms, has actually become a conscious political motive. A book like Brave New World is an expression of the actual fear that modern man feels of the rationalised hedonistic society which it is within his power to create.