256 - TALKING ABOUT THE WEATHER - Or How To Burst A Bubble

I found myself having to explain to an American friend on Friday, as Storm Claudia washed carnage across the country, that, astoundingly, in this country where it rains more often than it doesn’t, we don’t really know how to deal with rain. I think he thought I was joking, but sure enough, the storm warnings grew and the train I was getting to go meet him while he was in the UK was cancelled. And the next one. And the one after that. Our reunion would sadly have to wait until his or my next trip to each other’s respective countries. Although it rains in Britain frequently, our rail service doesn’t know how to cope.

“We heard from a cab driver it’s the same when it snows,” he texted, incredulous.

You bet it is, I told him. The white stuff comes down and the country grinds to a halt. Schools close. Transport freezes. And roads and sidewalks are left to thaw, melt, refreeze, and turn into muddy, slippery death-traps until they die a natural death, inevitable accidents be damned.

It’s always worth paying attention when you get your insular little bubbles popped. This January we were in Sweden for New Year’s. Our second new year in the country and both times it snowed heavily on New Year’s Eve. The first time we were amazed that the downfall had no impact at all on the roads and subsequent plane home we were due to get the following day. This year it was trains. A train to Stockholm and a bus to the train station, all running smoothly and on time despite the previous day’s blizzard.

In the US I have seen flash-flooding bring down power lines and flood roads and cars, but I have also never seen a state where such downpours are frequent radically fall apart in the provision of public services because of a known and predictable weather system. If the frequent rain means your trains can’t run, they seem to work out that something needs changing with the way we run our trains.

Which is not to say Sweden or America have everything perfect. They obviously don’t. And they too have their bubbles of how things just are or have to be because they always have been. But it is to remind us that when things fall apart or don’t work in known and predictable ways, it is perhaps worth asking if what seems so inevitable and unchangeable really has to be?

I was speaking to students about war this week. It was, after all, Remembrance Day on Tuesday. And this is another classic example of a bubble. If a country does something violent to our country, what do we do? Go to war was the inevitable answer. So I asked them to consider what we could do instead of war? For many it was the first time they ever considered not fighting could be an option. War as the response just seemed so obvious. Likewise prison is another obvious consequence they have never considered revising. What could we do instead of prison when a crime has been committed and still feel justice had been served? It had never occurred to them that a crime might go unpunished and that lack of punishment be more just than the punishment.

Another class were discussing free-will and I asked them what they would do if they discovered someone they loved was cheating on them.

“You’d have to break up, sir.”

“Why?”

We traced the assumption to just what you’re supposed to do according to every film, book, TV show, song and play. The relationship must end according to culture and we are massively influenced, potentially causally determined, by that culture.

But what if it didn’t?  What if you work out why the cheating happened and see if you can get through it instead?

“What if we didn’t do what we always do?” is one of the most powerful questions a philosopher can ask. Because there are always bubbles clouding our instincts and intuitions about what must be, and it is also true that, somewhere in the world, at least someone has a completely different instinct or intuition to the dominant one and are doing things very differently indeed. Not always for the better, of course! But sometimes.

So next time you unthinkingly accept that what you’re about to do, or what is about to happen, is just the way things have to be, stop and have a think about it. Because it’s highly likely it is not. And you could be the first domino to fall that makes things go in another direction.

Author: DaN McKee (he/him)

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