The God of the Gap

Yes, I'm Christian. This article is written from a Christian perspective. If you'd like to debate Christianity or religion in general, shoot me an email and provided it's civil and readable I'm sure we'll have a long and interesting discussion, but as far as this article is concerned, read it in the context I'm writing it in.

Since the very beginning of organised religion, there has been a nasty tendency among religious types to "prove" the existence of God using hitherto unexplained phenomena.

Before any kind of natural philosophy, it was everything - fire, rain, life, death, everything. To the Greeks and Romans, lightning was the weapon of Zeus or Jupiter; before Newton, gravity was the work of God; before modern medicine, disease; before modern biology, conception and the development of the child in the womb; today, the intricate workings of the universe at the quantum level.

It's called the "God of the Gap" argument - the "Gap" being the gap in human knowledge of the universe - and it's easy to see why it's an attractive argument, at least superficially. There's something nice and solid about it, about being able to point at something and say "That's God, right there."

But the God of the Gap, as comfortable as it might be for us at any one time, is very dangerous view to have of God, for three major reasons:

1. Science marches on. This is the most basic reason. You'll notice that these days very few people attribute gravity to God manually pulling everything back down to earth. Every day, humanity rolls back the veil of the universe a little further. We have solved so many mysteries, discovered so much about creation, and so far we keep discovering that, in terms of the everyday running of the universe, it's physics, not constant direct intervention by the hand of God, that keeps everything from exploding. There's no evidence that that's going to change.

2. Science and religion are separate things. Georges Lemaître, a Belgian astrophysicist who contributed in a big way to the Big Bang theory of cosmology - and a devout Catholic priest - was a staunch opponent of the God of the Gap for exactly this reason. He once said that to "[try] to infer the existence of God from the supposed infinitude of nature" is to "[look] in completely the wrong direction."

   Science and religion are linked, in a way - science is the study of God's creation, after all - but they are separate things. The awesomeness of creation hints, perhaps, at a Creator, but the two are necessarily separate things. As far as I'm concerned, expecting the universe to have God constantly tweaking it is much like expecting a book you buy at a bookstore to come packaged with the author himself, so that he can tweak the book even as you read it.

3. It trivialises God. This is the big one for me. Let's look at the book analogy again. Suppose that an author writes a book of which only a single copy is printed. Now imagine that the author must constantly haunt that single copy of the book, rewriting parts of it with every word that is read, simply so that the plot doesn't fall apart entirely. How terribly-written a book that must be! How incompetent an author!

   And yet that is exactly what God of the Gap proponents are suggesting - that God himself must interfere constantly with the universe He has created simply for it to continue functioning. What's more, they're turning God, creator of everything that has ever been or will ever be, into the most prolific micromanager ever.

   Take embryology - the development of an entire human being from a single cell. It's an incredibly complicated and utterly amazing process, one that we don't fully understand yet. It's easy to see why some people use it as their preferred Gap.

   But to me, attributing it to divine micromanagement makes it not more amazing, but so much less. I find the image of God sitting there assigning differentiations to cells - *points* "You'll be Liver Cell #231792. No, not you. Yeah, you." *points again* "And you, you're Interneuron #22817, don't forget to synapse with #3324670 in the hypothalamus" - somewhere between disrespectful and just ridiculous. How much more amazing is a God who designs the human genome and the mother's womb so that by the most basic of processes billions of human beings grow from a single cell, all to His plan, without Him having to personally direct every single step of the process?

I'm not for a moment suggesting that God has no say in the running of the universe. But to say that "gravity is God", or anything similar, is very, very dangerous. Gravity is physics. It was designed, written, programmed - whichever metaphor you prefer - by God, and the fact that it works is to His credit, but He has better things to do than make sure that every single Higgs boson makes its trip okay. Likewise things like embryology. I'm sure He occasionally looks down and smiles when He sees a nicely-developing neural crest or sclerotome, but He is so much bigger than personally hacking the biochemistry of every single developing cell.

On Happiness

It's been a while... Turns out med school isn't quite as easy as it sounds. Luckily, all done with that for now, so hopefully I can't write a little bit more for the next two months. Anyway, on the with show...

We as a culture spend a worrying amount of time chasing after that peculiar form of self-deception known colloquially as "happiness".

Now, that sounds like a deeply depressing sentence, but let's look at it further:

Happiness the emotion, the feeling, is not unobtainable. That's not the point I'm trying to make at all. I'm not saying that happiness is a lie, or that it is impossible to find "true" happiness.

Instead, the problem is the very idea of "true happiness" that has permeated our culture. The media have spread, if not created, the idea that happiness means an idyllic state of absolute carefreedom, with no worries or stresses, where the world itself conspires to keep away anything that might slightly taint your euphoria.

Fun fact: Life doesn't work like that. Those few, "lucky" people who seem to get life handed to them on a silver platter also tend to get a slew of personal issues that very nearly cancel out everything else. Nobody ever has everything the way they want it.

Depressing? It may seem like that, but it really doesn't need to be.

It's true, life is never going to be perfect. But that doesn't mean we can't be happy. Not the - frankly childish - idea of happiness that many people aspire to, but a sort that can actually be acquired, and that is no less special because of it.

Contentment is often used, in various contexts, as though it something less than happiness, a sort of second-best, or a consolation prize in the game of life.

But one definition of "content" - the definition I use - is "happy with the way things are", and to me there is no purer form of happiness. To pretend that everything is perfect is idealistic at best, delusional at worst. But there is something almost Zen-like about looking at the way your life is and accepting all of the ups and downs as simply part of the process.

It takes maturity to be able to say "This isn't perfect, but I'm happy", especially in a world where the movie can't be over until every problem is solved. That maturity takes work, and that's tough. I'm not there yet - it's only very recently that I got a long enough glimpse of contentment to be able to write what I'm writing now - but I'm learning how important it is to work on it.

Microphones for Dummies

Microphones are not that complicated, they really aren't. But some people seem to have an unnecessarily difficult time using them, so here are a few basic rules:

1. Anything said to you by an actual, breathing microphone tech or sound engineer immediately overrides anything on this list. This is a general overview only; there are many different types of microphone, many different types of sound setup, and many different types of sound engineer. It's impossible to cover everything in one list.
2. A note on the different types of microphone:
1. You do not know anything about the different types of microphone (unless you do). This list does not equip you with significant knowledge about the different types of microphone. DO NOT ARGUE WITH YOUR SOUND TECH ABOUT WHAT TYPE OF MICROPHONE YOU ARE WEARING.
2. A handheld mic is a microphone you hold in your hand. Hopefully that makes sense to you.
3. A lapel mic is a mic that is worn on your lapel (weird, né?), on your collar, or between the first and second or second and third buttons on a button-up shirt. It is not interchangeable with a handheld; you cannot hold it in front of your face. If you do so, you will sound like a robot from an '80s sci-fi film doing an impression of a gale-force wind with laryngitis, in a war zone.
   Once again for the benefit of our lecturers: You cannot hold a lapel mic in front of your face.
4. A "Countryman" is a microphone that hooks over your ear and runs down the side of your cheek. They can be bent slightly to allow the microphone tech to get the actual microphone the right distance from your mouth. The R600 microphone is not a toy, and nobody is impressed by the fact that you can bend a wire. They will be substantially less impressed when you break it.
5. A "Lavaliere" microphone has different meanings depending on where you are; in the South African lexicon (the one I know, at least) it is a microphone that is hidden inside your fringe. For crying out loud, people, try not to smear hair gel, hair cream, hair wax or anything else all over the R1000 microphone...
3. The ideal distance between your mouth and a handheld microphone is about 10cm.
1. If your life is so devoid of human interaction that you feel the need to make out with the microphone, you need to a) Consider therapy, and b) Stay the hell away from my expensive sound equipment.
2. Conversely, the microphone is not going to bite you, and at most 25% of the various species of bacteria deposited on the microphone by people ignoring 3.1) are dangerous. Please don't hold the microphone so far away that it's closer to the audience than it is to you.
4. More important than precise distance is constancy. A decent sound engineer can generally account for anything between 5 and 20cm, but if you constantly move the mic around, nobody human will be able to keep up. In summary: If it looks like you're fellating the microphone, you need to fix that (not least to avoid becoming the joke of the week).
1. Very experienced singers can use microphone movement as a vocal effect in and of itself. If your monthly income from singing alone is not enough to feed you for the month, you are not experienced enough.
2. Contrary to what appears to be popular belief, your voice does not emanate from your forehead, your neck, your breasts, your navel, your shoulders, or either of your ears. Nor does it magically issue from the air ten centimeters in front of your face. Point the microphone at your mouth.
5. Microphones are not magic voice generator boxes. They do not collect your thoughts and transform them into words; nor are they magically attuned to your voice alone, at the exception of all background noise.
   What I'm trying to get at here is that just because you are holding a microphone does not mean you no longer need to put some oomph into your voice. It is ridiculously easy for the whisper most people assume when they get a mic to be drowned out by pretty much any other noise on stage. This is particularly, but far from exclusively, a problem with lapel, Countryman and Lavaliere microphones.
6. If you are carrying a microphone, it is in all likelihood the most expensive thing in your possession. Endeavour not to throw it at the ground or at the mic tech, juggle it, use it as a crew-prod or backscratcher, wash it off with tap water when it is still on, or wager it in a game of poker. If you can possibly restrain yourself.
7. The monitor mix - the mix you hear onstage - is completely different to the house mix, which is heard by the audience. There are two valid complaints you may give to the sound engineer: "I cannot hear myself well enough to sing", and "I cannot hear my accompaniment well enough to sing". That's it. Nothing else.
8. You may have noticed that if you point your microphone towards speaker or wander too far forward, into the projection range of a speaker, you get a horrible screeching noise called "feedback". I dearly wish I did not have to explicitly state this, but don't point your microphone towards speakers or walk in places where you get feedback.
9. If you are wearing or carrying a microphone, it is on at all times. Yes, the sound engineer will mute it whenever possible, but when 20 different mic'd actors have just left stage at the same time, it's going to take a while. Endeavour not to swear at the audience when it's possible that your voice will be broadcast to the very same audience.
1. There is a feature of almost every mixing desk called AFL, which allows a sound engineer to listen to a mic that, to everybody else, is muted. It allows microphones to be checked, balances to be sorted out and general "admin" to be made a lot easier. Unfortunately, it also means that we will probably hear at least some of what you say backstage. For some reason, girls are particularly bad culprits. I have no desire to hear about your period, your sex life, your pregnancy scare, how much of a bitch "she" is, how horrible you think the sound engineer is, how much you want to slap/kiss/slapkiss/kissslap/<censored> "him", what you think the director should do to himself, how drunk you were last night, or who you want to jump at the cast party - all things I have heard before. Please, keep your mouth shut backstage.
10. The microphone tech has willingly decided to spend two weeks of his life taping wires to your sweaty skin, running around after you like a toddler constantly in need of nappy changes, freaking out every time you sit down on a R600 battery/transmitter pack, meticulously removing the hair gel you somehow managed to get inside a microphone, and staying an hour after you leave every single night to wipe your sweat off of his ridiculously expensive equipment, all so the audience can hear your solo. Be nice to the poor bastard.

&nbsp;10 Social Life Lessons It Took Me WAY Too Long To Learn...

I've always thought that at some point in my development, somewhere between being an embryo and a toddler, somebody, perhaps me, said "Yeah, I'll take the extra academic skill, you can make space by scrapping the social and sports skills. Thanks."

I spent most of my formative years with only a few friends, and nearly all of those were only according to my unique definition of "friend", namely "Someone who will tolerate my presence for any reasonable length of time." I don't blame anybody - looking back, I can imagine why people didn't want to be around me - and I've improved considerably, although there's still a lot of work to be done in some areas.

That said, there's some lessons that, looking back, I really should have figured out earlier. I still struggle with some of them; I've gotten to the point that I'm consciously aware of them, but actually putting them into practice isn't so easy.

Anyway, here they are:

1. Listen to yourself: If you think you shouldn't do/say/mention X, don't. Believe it or not, I never suffered any particular shortage of social acuity - my "social sense" worked fine most of the time. Sure, it missed out on a lot of the subtleties, but in terms of the gross details of what is appropriate or will be well-recieved, it was generally right. It was just that, for some reason that I still don't understand, I wouldn't listen to it. I'd think "I shouldn't say X" and then say X anyway. I don't know why, and it took me forever to stop, considering how basic a problem it was.
2. How to calm down: Nobody (decent) going to disown you for one small thing. I still have a problem where the moment there is any chance that one of my friends is annoyed at me, my brain stages a panic attack of truly epic proportions and the part of my subconscious that remembers what it was like to have no friends many years ago starts yelling "Fix it fix it fix it!" It's taken me a while to realise that even when it is something that I did, as opposed to a miscommunication, misunderstanding or random act of God that looks like it might be my fault, most people will get over it. More importantly:
3. When to let it rest: You can't reverse something you did by sheer quantity of apologies. When I do freak out, as above, I do two things: Try and find out what I did wrong, and then apologise profusely and endlessly. For a long time, it never occurred to me that the former can very easily seem, to the person you've offended, more like an interrogation than anything else. In the same way, the latter can just be annoying when the last thing the person wants is to be reminded endlessly of what you did.
4. Give them space: Not just when apologising, either. Different people operate at different levels of contact, a lesson I learned the hard way quite recently. What may seem to you like showing friendly concern may be nagging or even borderline stalking to someone else. Most friends will obviously give you some leeway; the closer the friendship, the more leeway you get. It can also be annoying hard to figure out where somebody's "line" is, but at some point you're going to have to work it out.
5. How to change: It's easy to use "I am who I am, and they don't like that" as an excuse for not fitting in, and to a degree it's valid; changing who you are just to fit can end very badly. But bluntly refusing to change even the slightest mannerism has pushed me away from a few good friends over the years. You don't need to change the core of who you are, but the fact is that everybody has negative attributes, and if you're not willing to at least work on getting rid of yours, people are going to have a hard time accepting you.
6. When to shut up: Somewhere between Grade 9, where I barely spoke at all, and now, a dial labelled "Utterly quiet - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 - Never shuts up" got turned up. It needed to happen, since I was sitting on a solid 1 maybe edging slightly towards a 2, but it got turned a bit far, and for a while I ended up in the 8-10 range. Everybody likes talking, but if you don't listen to other people they aren't going to listen to you. Simple as that.
7. Sometimes they don't want to know: Even if you have the right talking:listening ratio, sometimes the stuff you're talking about just doesn't interest people. I love theatre, and I love talking about stuff I've done in theatre. Many people find my stories interesting or amusing, but there are some that just don't want to hear, for reasons of their own, This is a prime example of Lesson 1 as well: I would be aware of their disinterest and just carry on regardless. But the fact is, it's not their responsibility to feign interest in whatever you're talking about. Find a topic of common interest instead of driving them off with sheer force of disinterest.
8. They have better things to do: Yet another of my faults is a tendency to get angry when I need - really need, not just want - someone to talk to, but everybody is busy. One of the harder life lessons in general is the fact that the world doesn't revolve around you, even when you really need something. A good friend might make a change to their schedule to help you out, but it's unfair to expect anyone to change their life drastically to fit you it.
9. People are complicated: I'm a logical person, and I spent a long, long time thinking that just being logical would make me a good friend and get me good friends. As it turns out (surprise, surprise!), people aren't logical. People will get offended at stupid little things, people will remain angry at you even after they accept that something was a miscommunication instead of being your fault. It's a fact of life, and learning to deal with it is an important part of maturity.
10. When to let go: In some ways, I'm an optimist, or at least an idealist. I treat every friendship as a permanent thing, and for me, the bond of a friendship lasts no matter how long you go without speaking to or seeing the friend. Even if someone else betrays my loyalty, I think that sinking to their level is childish.
    It took me a while to learn that the world doesn't always work like that. Sometimes friendships end. Sometimes it's just people drifting apart. Sometimes the situation changes in ways that make the friendship unviable. Sometimes it's because, despite your best intentions, you hurt your friend in a way that can't be taken back. Learning that sometimes you need to just let go is the hardest lesson I have ever learnt.

Drama

Welcome to James's Amateur Genetics Hour. Our topic of discussion for today is drama. Not dramatics, drama, of the interpersonal sort.

So it turns out that drama is actually a protein. It's coded for by a gene located, unsurprisingly, on the X chromosome, although a few XX individuals do show inactivation of the paternal gene, leaving them with only one functioning gene.

Expression of the protein is very complex, with multiple combinations of transcription factors capable of initiating gene transcription, but the following is known:

1. Adenocorticoids ("stress hormones") accelerate expression.
2. Compounds found in most common brands of makeup can cause a large short-term spike in drama production, along with a long-term increase with continued frequent use.
1. Stage makeup contains sufficiently large amounts of these compounds that, in certain susceptible individuals, just a handful of applications can cause an enormous, life-long and irreversible spike in drama levels.
3. Through an unknown mechanism, genes associated with low body weight in females are linked to increased expression of the drama gene.
4. It is strongly suspected that the raw materials used in the manufacture of many Apple products contain (thus far unidentified) compounds which greatly accelerate drama production.
5. In individuals possessing a slightly modified version of the gene coding from drama production, the cascade activation of complement proteins as a response to injury - even a minor injury such as a papercut - causes an immediate drama level spike.

It should also be noted that although alcohol does not "create" more drama per se, high blood alcohol levels drastically increase the activity and noticability of existing drama.

Although the drama protein is present in both sexes, its effect on mental processes differs between sexes. 

In men, it often interacts with testosterone to produce yelling fits, violent outbursts, needless power struggles, a need to assert or prove one's masculinity, and occasionally a near-total shutdown of the prefrontal cortex (the "thinking part" of the brain) in favour of the paleocortex, a more primitive area.

In women, drama interacts more readily with the area of the brain associated with social interactions and hierarchies, leading to so-called polarisation of social views: people previously viewed positively are viewed more positively, while those viewed negatively are viewed more negatively. Socially "violent" actions become increasingly frequent as the high drama levels continue. Drama also noticeably heightens the intensity of emotional responses and lowers the threshold for initiating such responses.

In both sexes, drama strongly affects the limbic system. Since the limbic system is responsible for memory, drama has noticeable effects on memory. Firstly, a regular occurrence is temporary amnesia affecting "old" memories. Very often, an individual in the throes of a drama "high" can remember only the most recent events, generally those which resulted in the heightened drama secretion, especially forgetting anything good the person(s) responsible for the drama spike had ever done before the present. Secondly, memories of even recent events often become strongly distorted; in a bizarre example of a positive feedback system, accurate memories are generally replaced with the distortion which most justifies, and therefore fuels, the drama production.

No known substance exists which can directly suppress drama production or the effects of drama on the brain. Symptomatic treatment is recommended.

Some individuals have a genetic condition in which drama production is decreased to a greater or lesser degree, known variously as dramapenia, adramapoeisis, hypodramapoeisis or hypersensibility. The exact mechanism is unknown, but clear heritability and a spectrum of effect severity indicate polygenic inheritance. Although the lack of what is otherwise a common social reaction can cause minor social problems, the disease has sufficient positive psychological and physiological effects - the latter being largely due to reduced stress levels - that treatment is not advised and has not been investigated in much depth.

This has been your Amateur Genetics Hour. Thanks for reading, and see you next time.

Prometheus

I know Prometheus came out ages ago, but I watched it this week and I feel like it is my civic duty to get this message out to everybody who has not yet seen the movie:

Don't.

Given a choice between this and any other movie, choose the other movie. Given the choice between this and two hours of quiet introspection, introspect away. Given the choice between this and watching paint dry... well, that's a tough one, but you should take a minute to carefully consider the artistic merits of paint.

Prometheus is cheap science fiction at its absolute finest, the physical manifestation of Sturgeon's Law. I can't even think of where to begin critiquing it.

Spoilers ahead, as if it matters.

Since it could broadly be classified as an attempt at sci-fi horror, let's start with the monsters. The most menacing thing in the movie was an oozing metal urn. Seriously. At that point, there was an air of mystery, and the unknown is inherently scary. At that point, the movie seemed to have genuine promise.

Then, having blown his entire special effects budget on fancy computer GUIs, the director opted to use some old props from some closet on the movie lot that had last been opened in the '80s as his "monsters".

Seriously, Ridley, an oligodactylous squid? A squid? And then (spoiler alert) a bigger squid? Wow, really pushing the boundaries of horror there.

In about twenty seconds of bad surgical procedure, Mr. Scott manages to turn a suspenseful, tense, dark, eerie movie into a joke. If I hadn't been wincing at the aforementioned surgical stuff, I would have laughed.

Speaking of which... It's sci-fi. We don't expect exacting realism. But you could have done so much more with that surgery scene. Iron Man sold itself almost entirely on techporn - little pieces of metal buzzing and clicking and doing other little-piece-of-metal things. And you managed to make an emergency surgery scene with a piece of surgery equipment that is acknowledged by characters traveling on a frikkin spaceship as being insanely rare high-tech equipment boring. How?

On the general topic of realism: Once again, it's science fiction, I get it. Realism is always, and should always remain, secondary to enjoyment. But can you at least Google the size of the solar system before putting in a throwaway comment about distance that instantly rips any educated viewer out of suspension of disbelief.

On that same topic: DNA. So Engineer DNA is identical to human DNA? You do realise that humans have an extraordinary amount of genetic variation, so much that there is no agreed-upon "human DNA", and, more importantly, if they had the same genetic code as us, they would look like us. Because that's how DNA works.

It wasn't like it was essential to the plot. Having DNA would make them our precursors, barring a ridiculously unlikely chance occurrence which I would have to put down to the universe having a sense of human. Hell, having even vaguely compatible biochemistry (as evidenced by the fact that their bioweapons work on us) would relate them to us. But no, you had to throw in a "fact" that could be debunked by anyone who understands high-school genetics.

On to the characters: The only character with any apparent depth is a robot. And to be entirely honest, I'm not even sure that the robot's depth isn't just because whoever programmed it set it up to randomly do evil things as a prank. It half seems like what David does is just in there because the director was futilely attempting to add more plot.

In fact, there are a lot of things in the movie that are entirely random: take the dead Engineers seen in the first half of the film. We never find out what killed them. We know that if it was their bioweapon, they would have been turned into more bioweapon-y stuff, and that the bioweapon would still be around. And then the Engineer at the beginning of the film. What happened to him? No clue. Why? No clue. It looked cool, so they threw it in.

Then you get zombie-dude, the first real monster. We don't notice any zombifying effect of the bioweapon at any other time. It's a random one-off that, like most of the rest of the film, tries and fails to be scary.

And of course we have the Engineer. You know, the member of a higher species that managed to genetically engineer an entire ecosystem, culminating in nothing less than the human race? A member of that same higher species who, upon being woken up by the remaining crew of the Prometheus, is suddenly a pointlessly rage-filled horror monster who not only literally tears the crew apart on sight, but deliberately tries to hunt one of them down. Why? Bad hair day, I guess.

I'm only willing to waste so much of my time even on critiquing this film, so I'm gonna wrap up with a comment on the ending. The end of the film, while dramatic, is an attempt to shoehorn the film into an existing franchise, in what I assume is an attempt to give it some kind of credibility by association. But the attempt at franchise-merging is maybe thirty seconds of footage throw in at the end of the film - right at the end; shoehorn and roll credits - and a company name.

More importantly, an attempt is made to make Prometheus an Alien prologue, Alien being the first part of a franchise in which absolutely no mention is made of the world-shattering events of Prometheus, and which, as I said above, shares a company name and about thirty seconds of bad special effects with this mindless attempt at a movie.

Drying paint is sounding more and more attractive by the minute. At least the fumes arguably provide some kind of mental stimulation.

A Defence of Chivalry

There is a large body of thought these days which condemns chivalry as being an old-fashioned, outdated or even chauvinist practice. There are two major groups expressing opposition to chivalry: The first group is that kind of "modern man", typically quite young, who tend to say things like "If they want equality, let them have equality"; the second is, of course, feminists and independent women who view chivalry as suggesting that women are somehow weak and need male assistance.

Chivalry can certainly be taken too far, a fact I only recently realised through the rational argument (Hi, Jess), scolding (Hi, Tayla), and sometimes outright yelling (Hi, Hannah) of my friends. Taken thus too far, it can definitely be annoying, and can indeed be chauvinist.

Even chivalry in moderation can have its origin in a chauvinistic mindset. Certainly, the origin of chivalry as a formal code emerging in medieval Europe involved significant chauvinism: hence the "damsel in distress" archetype and other artifacts of that era.

But for me at least, chivalry has changed a lot since then. This post originally started out as an attempt to define some rules of chivalry, but it didn't take long before I realised that that's not even possible any more. Lists of rules are largely useless for defining standards of behaviour; the world has gotten far too complicated for that. Chivalry is a mindset, a way of thinking which naturally leads to a certain way of acting.

It's not, as feminists sometimes assume, about "protecting the weak," although protecting the genuinely weak is certainly an important part of it. It's about appreciating women as gifts - speaking as a Christian, gifts from God. And no, feminists, that does not mean that I think for a second that I somehow own the women in my life; it means that merely knowing them, merely having them in my life, is a gift.

Take the oft-cited practice of holding doors open. I will hold the door open for a lady as a basic action of politeness. That's chivalry. I hold the door for guys as well. That's a non-specifically-named facet of politeness. Same with helping people up; I'll offer a girl my hand to help her up out of chivalry. I'll offer to help a guy up as well, because it's polite. The only functional difference is how I hold my hand out. (For the record, I've had my offer of a hand up turned down by maybe five guys ever, and by girls maybe thirty, forty times last semester alone)

There are, of course, some less equal and therefore more controversial practices associated with chivalry. Take jackets, for example. I was fairly, uh, militant about giving cold girls my jacket last semester, until my friends eventually managed to correct me.

Let's leave out the fact that guys can metabolise faster and therefore will get cold slower, since I rather doubt most guys factor metabolic rates into their chivalry. Let's also leave out the fact that statistically guys weigh more and therefore will take longer to be affected by the cold, since, you know, it's statistics and therefore only marginally applicable to real life.

Ladies, if a guy offers you his jacket, he's demonstrating the fact that he appreciates you as a friend/girlfriend/family member of your choice/beautiful woman and he doesn't want you to be cold. Take it or leave it (I previously had a problem with letting people leave it, but I'm working on it). But for crying out loud, don't get annoyed at the guy for just offering; he's being nice, he's being polite. Turn it down if you want to, give him one chance to insist just to be polite, and then maybe consider getting annoyed.

The next controversial aspect of chivalry is the whole "protect girls from bad guys" thing. Ladies, just in case you don't know, guys are bastards. I know one guy who I'd be willing to bet has no bastardliness in him, and he's seriously exceptional. And guys understand guys; it stands to reason. We can read their intentions readily and we know how best to deal with them. It's never been about an assumption that you're somehow too weak to handle it yourself. It's just that, being girls, you aren't as well-equipped to deal with guys as we are, at least not in that facet of life. Thus, we're there to look out for you.

Yes, I do believe that it's my duty to protect my female friends. I also believe that it's my duty to protect my family, particularly my younger brother (although by now he's more than capable of protecting himself), and indeed all of my friends, male as well. It's just that with my male friends, being male myself, there are very few - if any - threats that they can't protect themselves against that I would be any help with.

Finally, we have the issue of "don't hit girls," or however it was phrased when it was taught to you. Now, I don't think I've ever heard anyone except the most hardcore feminists complain about that one, but I'm going to discuss it anyway.

The objective fact is that women are more often victims and less often perpetrators of gender-related violence. This is one reference. Yes, it's Wikipedia, but you're welcome to research more deeply if you have an issue with the statistics. Also note the statement in that article that some experts think that statistics of violence against men may be proportionally inflated due to increased reporting rates and the inclusion of self-defence against abusive boyfriends/husbands in the statistics.

Through some combination of male and female psychology (and endocrinology) and the fact that the "average man" is stronger than the "average woman", men are more likely to hit women than the other way around. Testosterone is a nasty thing, especially when combined with anger. The rule exists as a failsafe; its absoluteness is there specifically so that it can override heat-of-the-moment anger.

Obviously it can be taken too far. Guys, if you're being attacked by a serial killer who happens to be female, if you get the chance, drop her. It's common sense. The rule exists to stop actions in anger from going too far; that's all.

So yeah. Chivalry isn't about strong men protecting weak women: it's an aspect of the greater area of politeness and common decency which is important enough to us to give it a name of its own.

Please don't pitchfork me. Ciao.

On Nice Guys Finishing Last

"Nice guys finish last." We've all heard it; those of us who have occasional moments of holier-than-thou hubris have probably thought it at least once. It's the ultimate self-satisfying cliché for self-described "nice guys".

And... That's kind of the problem. I don't know if the aphorism is true or not; for starters, quantifying "nice guy"-ness would be difficult at best. But true or not, it's a stupid excuse used to vent anger at the supposed unfairness of the world.

Let's start with confirmation bias. The world is flooded with reports of "I'm a nice guy finishing last", with almost none of "I'm a nice guy not finishing last". This obviously leads to a general impression of nice guys finishing last, but think about it; the nice guys who don't have the problem have nothing to complain about; it's common sense that we would hear less from them.

Now, to be honest, it wouldn't surprise me to find that nice guys do finish last. After all, being nice kind of implies having morals, and a lack of morals makes a guy much more comfortable with manipulating girls, and fellow guys, to get what he wants. Depending on your definition of "finish", that goes a long way towards explaining bad guys getting a head start. On a more benign level, a nice guy would probably do his best not to get involved in a relationship that would end badly for the girl; thus, fewer relationships; thus, "nice guys finish last".

So yeah, maybe nice guys do finish last. You know what? Deal. If your morals are really bugging you that much, drop them and do what you want. Being a good person has drawbacks. Surprise! Did you expect your morals to get all the girls? Like I said, it's up to you.

More importantly, did you really expect being nice to be, in and of itself, the only thing you need to bring to the table in a relationship? Come on, guys. Of course being a decent person is a good thing, even an essential thing, in a relationship, but you can't build a relationship solely on that. Grow up a bit and find something you can actually contribute to relationships, and then you might have the beginning of a basis for complaint about the unfairness of the universe.

Then, of course, we have one of the fundamental pillars of my personal philosophy: Yes, life is unfair. Way the world works. Deal with it, or... actually, yeah, dealing with it is pretty much your only option. All you can change is the amount of time you spend sulking about it beforehand.

---

This post was the result of a long chain of thought that was either begun or accelerated several months ago by this article. It's a pretty good read, and it expands pretty nicely on that last sentiment I wrote about.

On Relationships (as Physics)

How's this: Think of relationships as chemical bonds. All interpersonal relationships: acquaintances, friends, best friends, romantic relationships, everything. Sounds weird, but think about it...

In this model of relationships as bonds, people are particles. And people have valence: It's called, somewhat fantastically, the Monkeysphere. More scientifically, it's called Dunbar's number. You're welcome to look it up, but it's basically an upper limit on the number of people we can think of as fellow human beings; the number of meaningful relationships we can have. It's a physical thing, and it has to do with the size of a particular part of our brains.

But it also makes sense if you think about it: There is definitely an upper limit on the number of friendships you can have. There's also an equivalent to double/triple bonds, albeit more analogue. You can have many acquaintances, a good number of friends, a few close friends, and certainly not many romantic relationships. That last one isn't just a matter of social norms and/or personally morals. People who fake romantic feelings aside, nobody can deal with a large number of genuine romantic relationships. Thus, the valence of personal relationships.

It's also worth noting than different people have different valencies. Again, it's fairly obvious. Some people make many friends, but struggle forming close friendships; other have insular groups of close friends, but few acquaintances; some couples are so deeply into their relationship that they have almost no friends outside that relationship. And so on and so forth.

Observe what happens when you throw a group of previously unassociated people into a new situation. Pretty much what happened to me when I moved into res at the beginning of this year, but it applies to any situation where you have a bunch of people thrown into a new social environment.

In the beginning, there's not a single friendship or acquaintanceship. You have a whole cloud of particles, bouncing around randomly. Pretty quickly, people get introduced, make acquaintances. Little clumps form, small groups of people. They aren't very stable in the beginning; particles, people, break off, bounce around, find a new group to stick to.

Gradually, patterns start to form; not completely stable, but the changes get slower. You can see the outlines of the groups that will eventually form, even if they're still putative. At the same time, the groups start interacting; the "bridges", people connected to many groups, become apparent. You also see loosely overlapping groups; not quite close enough to form one group, but forming a sort of metagroup encompassing many smaller, still-distinct groups.

It's also around this time that you start seeing the beginnings of fault lines, in large enough populations. Two or more large metagroups form, with a distinct sparsity of bonds between them. Of course, they're basically never entirely separate, but the few bonds that exist will struggle to keep the groups together.

Over time, as a rule, the groups become less insular, and a distinct social network starts to form. Groups are still apparent, but more strongly interlinked, with the exception of the fault lines mentioned above. Bonds still rearrange occasionally, but rarely drastically at this stage. Some friendships wax, others wane, but the network is approaching stability.

Eventually, given a lack of outside disturbance, an equilibrium forms. Now, as any chemist can tell you, equilibria can be static or dynamic, although static equilibria are very rare. In this case, a static equilibrium means a social network that does not change (much). The gradual fluctuations of friendships continue, but the network remains stable.

Then you have dynamic equilibria: We all know that couple (perhaps more than one) who perpetually break up, get back together, and break up again. That's basically what a dynamic equilibrium is: Things are constantly changing, but it's always the same change. That particular example of a dynamic equilibrium is a particularly unstable one which tends to resolve itself one way or another with time, but there are more stable examples. That peculiar type of friendship that fluctuates between conjoined twins and mutual, vitriolic hatred; more "normally", friendships that appear and fade continuously, normally for a very long time.

Social networks are fragile things, though; although they very, very rarely shatter entirely, it can sometimes take only a small change in one part of the network to cause the entire network to subtly rearrange.

Add something new to an existing network; for example, a new romantic relationship between two people in the network. This subtly affects the friendships of their mutual friends, and those changes ripple out until their entire social network is vastly different.

Once again, this is something we're all familiar with from personal experience. In the particle metaphor, a single new bond forms, changing the valency of those involved and affecting the structure of the "molecule" around them. These changes affect the next "layer" of people, and the next, and so on. Often, the equilibrium is entirely broken, and it can take quite a long time for a new equilibrium to form.

The most drastic changes after a disturbance tend not to affect the more stable, tightly networked groups. This makes sense; the close bonds between good friends tend to survive even severe disturbances, instead, the network tends to fragment at weak points; weakly-linked groups separate and form new metagroups, for example. Here, the fault line effect becomes apparent; extremely poorly-linked metagroups break apart very easily. It's here that we see the polarization of groups, the "Them vs. Us" mentality which characterises highly fragmented populations.

All of this has a physical analogue: molecules, especially large biomolecules which best match the large networks people tend to form, tend to break at specific weak points under certain types of pressure.

That's all for now, but this is a pretty interesting idea for me, so more will probably follow.

On Racism

The universal conception of racism seems to explain it as stemming merely from extreme bigotry, from one group thinking they are better than another and acting on it. But while that certainly seems to have been the case in the past, and while bigotry is certainly still a large part of racism, it seems to me that in South Africa at least the actual causes are far more numerous and complex.

At its most basic level, the universal cause of racism, along with all other forms of prejudice and discrimination, is difference. In this case, difference of physical appearance certainly plays something of a part, but I personally would argue that differences of language, culture and worldview are far more important.

Off the top of my head, I can find three pieces of evidence to support this:

Firstly, in certain parts of South Africa, in certain social groups, the old Afrikaner/Soutie animosity is still alive - not quite as flagrant, as vicious or as strongly felt as typical European/African racism, but nonetheless quite present. Now, although it's probably theoretically possible to distinguish someone of Afrikaner descent from someone of English descent, physical appearance is for all intents practically useless in this particular vendetta.

Secondly, the phenomenon of self-titled "coconuts" (or, recently, "Oreos"), people of African descent with a stereotypically "white" western upbringing, being readily accepted into normally prejudiced societies or groups, shows that behaviour and culture play a large part in racial discrimination.

Finally, the same depression is apparent in non-racial contexts. The one that immediately springs to mind is the classic jock/nerd rivalry, but there are many others to be found with a moment's thought.

What does cause racism then? Beyond the simple description of "differences" mentioned above?

Although I'm certainly not a sociologist, my best bet is that it's a fairly simple process, something like the following:

You have two types of people, culturally speaking (and, coincidentally, racially speaking), in the same environment. By the natural ebb and flow of social situations, they will naturally form into groups. But a person of one type - for the sake of political correctness, let's call them Venusians - is going have trouble fitting into a group with the other type of person, whom we shall call the Neptunians (Political correctness is silly enough without me having to use the word "Martians").

It's not that they would deliberately ostracize him. It's just that he wouldn't fit in. He wouldn't be able to relate to them. They way they prioritise flord over fneerp, the fact that other people's klud doesn't seem to matter to them... And the language barrier would always be a problem. Technically he can speak Neptunian, but they can't seriously expect him to learn all nine tenses. They can all speak Venusian, but they can't pronounce their zaks right and he has to spend an extra ten seconds trying to understand everything they say.

Likewise for a Neptunian trying to fit into a Venusian group. They don't seem to care about flord at all, but they're absolutely obsessed with fneerp and they can get really uptight about their klud. And then there's the language barrier again.

It's nothing deliberate or malicious, but it's a fact of life that you're going to get two groups. Perhaps there may be more groups, but they will be visible as two supergroups, Venusians and Neptunians. And it's a fact of sociology that if you have two groups competing for resources, there will be animosity. It's the way we're programmed.

Thus far, we have enough to explain Afrikaner/Soutie animosity. But what about the bigotry, and the bigoted kind of racism?

So we have two groups beginning to develop a fair amount of mutual animosity. But one group is more powerful than the other - not intrinsically, but they have better technology. It's a short leap from "We don't like them" plus "We have power over them" to "We're better than them." Human nature again, I'm afraid.

So racism, as far as I can tell, doesn't start out with bigotry. Bigotry is a cross between a symptom and a stage of development of racism, but the real origin is far more simple and, depressingly, more a matter of human nature than of racists being intrinsically bad people.

Typically, this is where I would unveil my four-week plan for eliminating racism worldwide, but unfortunately I don't have one, and I'm not sure there is a simple solution, never mind one a medical student with a blog could figure out. Hopefully, though, this has been at least a little enlightening for someone.

Good and Evil; Right and Wrong

People love good and evil. That's not to say that they love evil in itself, but they love the idea. Good and evil provide a wonderful juxtapostion, a dichotomy which lets us simplify life and divide it into two easy categories. Good is, well, a good thing; evil, a bad thing. Done and dusted.

But it's a false dichotomy. The world isn't nicely divided into good people and evil people. In fact, there very few evil people, and even those generally considered evil have rarely, if ever, thought themselves to be evil.

People like good and evil because it lets them split the world into two parts. More importantly, it lets us say "I'm not evil, so I must be good". Makes sense, right?

But the world isn't that simple. I rather doubt that any studies have been done to back me up, but I can nonetheless confidently make the assertion that Christianity has lost more souls to pettiness and squabbles within the church itself than it has ever lost to Satanism.

Evil people - well, people we consider evil, although I think they're often just misguided - do damage, certainly. But more damage is done by perfectly normal, everyday, "good" people. Not because these people regularly attempt to genocide entire ethnic groups, but because there are so many more of us. Off the top of my head, I can think of perhaps five genuinely terrible people who have lived in the last half-century. No matter how much damage they do, they will struggle to match the damage done by the 6, 7, 8 billion people who lived alongside them.

And this is where the truly worrying implication of the dichotomy of "good versus evil" becomes apparent. Greater atrocities have been committed by people working fervently for Good than have ever been committed for pride, selfishness, greed or any other hallmark of an evil person. One need only think of the inquisitions, witch-hunts and crusades of the Christian church; the more recent homophobia perpetuated particularly by modern churches, mainly in America but also elsewhere (The rightness or wrongness of homosexuality in a Christian context is a topic I am neither qualified nor willing to discuss, but the blatant hate preached by some churches is doubtlessly wrong); the various atrocities committed by Oriental religions, including militant Buddhist sects in and around the 16th century; and perhaps most strongly in the modern Western consciousness, militant pseudo-Islamic terrorist groups.

These are only a few examples; a little research will provide you with many more. And every one of these groups is convinced that they are doing not just something acceptable to good, but something mandated by good.

To paraphrase Sir Terry Pratchett, they have gotten so caught up in Good and Evil that they have forgotten about right and wrong.

It's a scarily easy thing to do. If you think about it, you will realise that we all do it, to a greater or lesser degree, on an almost daily basis. How many times have you looked down on someone for doing something "evil" - someone you know or someone in the news, it doesn't matter who - and completely forgotten that they are human beings, like us; if you are Christian, they are your fellow (lost) sons and daughters of God.

We get so caught up in insisting that we are good (as opposed to being evil, which we clearly are not) that we excuse almost every wrongdoing as a momentary slip-up. "Okay, so I did something wrong, but I'm still a good person!"

But good people are people who do not do wrong things - or do them as little as humanly possible. Nobody is completely, perfectly good, and I know perhaps a handful of people who are almost good people. Almost, but not quite.

When we trick ourselves into thinking that being "good people" allows us to do wrong things - not evil, but wrong - it is the first step towards a very slippery slope that leads to very "good" people doing very Wrong things.

On Being Labelled

People who keep on insisting that they're "tired of being labelled":

(Be honest, we all say it sometimes)

It's unfair. There. See? I agree with you. Simplifying someone until they're a two-dimension caricature isn't fair on that person, and in an ideal world everybody would treat everybody as a complete person.
But the sad fact is, that's not going to happen. It's physically impossible. Tomorrow morning, from the moment you wake up, treat everybody you meet as a whole and complete person. Extrapolate their background, their context, and their personality from what you can see of them - logically. Make no judgements you cannot substantiate with logical progression from readily available evidence. Let me know how long you last.

People who consciously "don't label people" have simply moved up to a higher, more equal level of labeling - not necessarily a bad thing, but nonetheless not an absolute lack of labels. The absolute best we can do (assuming absolute, blind equality to be "better") is leave everyone's labels blank, but that leaves us crippled in our interactions with everybody. Imagine introducing yourself to a white/European-looking man who can't speak English by running through every dialect of every South African language on the basis that they could be his home language, or introducing yourself to an African man by running through Spanish, French, Italian, Greek and Russian first. It sounds absurd because it is. We need to make snap judgements about people based on information that doesn't completely logically lead to the conclusions we make.

We can't know every possible fact about a person before we interact with them, or do anything affecting them. We have to put people in boxes based on what we know about them. And no, it's not fair; racial and sexual stereotyping - and therefore racism/sexism - exist because race and sex are the two facts we can immediately and (almost always) unambiguously determine at a glance.

But it's the way the world works. We all do it, and we would go crazy otherwise. So you have a choice: You can play the game and make it easier for people to put you in the right box - how you dress, how you act, how you talk and what you talk about, and how you treat people around you are all things almost entirely under your control. Or, if you want to, you can continue to "refuse to be labelled" and have people carry on labeling you anyway. Because believe it or not, most people don't particularly care. Sad but true. Deal with it, or spend the rest of your life crying in the corner. It's really up to you.

(A rant about) YOLO

I am the first the acknowledge that there is a good sentiment behind "YOLO"; so good, in fact, that Horace mentioned it (as carpe deim) in the first century BC. The same theme even appeared with only minor changes in The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest "story" writings - as opposed to records of laws etc. - known to modern civilisation. Life is short, and it is important that we take opportunities to enjoy it while we can.

But the YOLO fad has degenerated from what may once have been a genuinely good philosophy - I know that's optimistic, but despite the world's best efforts I do still have some shred of faith in humanity - into something that I can only describe as utterly stupid. I refuse to soil the names of perfectly good adjectives like "terrible", "moronic" and their compatriots by using them to describe something so totally devoid of meaning or rational thought.

As far as I can tell, "YOLO" translates not just to "You Only Live Once", but "You Only Live Once, let's try and make it as short as possible".

It's the ultimate excuse to do stupid things - just what teenagers have been looking for all along. They display a blind faith in the principle comparable to the blind faith of the Salemites in the judicial process of the Salem Witch Trials (With similar results on the health and safety of the group and those around them, too).

You hear a rational argument against something stupid? "Shut up and stop being boring. YOLO!" In a way, it's the ultimate way of distancing yourself from stupid decisions: Instead of accepting responsibility for the stupid decisions you make, or even showing the responsibility required to think about the decision in the first place, you pin the responsibility on an abstract principle. Even after the fact, when you're feeling the consequences of your idiocy, it's easy to just say "Ah well, YOLO" and carry on to the next act of idiocy, and so on and so forth.

Texts

All good fiction is layered. In fact, for me personally, this is what distinguishes good fiction from amateurish fiction. It's a skill I have yet to fully grasp: In every good piece of literature or other fiction, there is more to the work than what we see first-hand.

This is actually quite a simple concept to grasp - although there's certainly enough information that it will doubtless take a while to absorb it all - but generations of literary analysts and English teachers have managed to wrap the simple concept in some wonderfully complicated words. In the typical fashion of long words used by English teachers, despite making the subject more complicated, these do manage to give us a deeper look into the various layers.

Text Structure

The basic structure of text and its surrounding texts is roughly as follows. From most "external" at the top to most "internal" at the bottom:

Paratext

v

Metatext

v

Text

v

Subtext

What is Text?

Obviously to understand all of the weird names, we need to understand the base around which they're built. It's not particularly complicated most of the time. In books it's easy. The "text" is everything that we see written in a book that is part of the book itself - everything we are explicitly told.

In scripts and screenplays, the definition gets a bit wobbly. Some people insist that the text of a script is everything written down in the script itself. Others, however, insist that since the script is meant to be performed on stage, only the spoken words of the characters are text.

This line becomes even more blurred with actual performance. Obviously in a movie or television series there is no "text" per se, but we still use the word to describe what we see. The most common point of view - though not by any means a universally accepted one - is that the text comprises everything we, the audience, actually see.

Metatext

The text about the text.

Metatext is everything directly related to a work that is not part of a work itself. Note that, despite the fancy italic tagline above, it is not enough for it to be merely about a work - it must be intrinsically linked to the work, normally giving information about it, without strictly being a part of the "text" itself.

For a book, this could mean footnotes, annotations, and so on. Some people consider the stage directions in a play to be metatext, while others consider them part of the text itself. Things like character notes for the actors and director, however, or notes on stage design for productions of the play, are certainly metatext. Even movies have metatext: Think of the text scrolling across the bottom of the screen telling you where and when this scene is taking place, or the various overlays placed over the film to show that the scene is being viewed with binoculars, for example, or from a handheld camera.

Metatext is useful because it adds depth to the work. This does two things: Firstly, it helps pull the reader or watcher into the world of the story, ensuring their suspension of disbelief and making the story more real to them. Secondly, and this is not to be disregarded, it lets the writer(s) show off all their fancy research and/or the work they've put into building the world surrounding the story.

Paratext

The text surrounding the text.

Paratext is everything about a work of fiction that does not form "part of" the work itself. The term encompasses a broad spectrum of things: Everything from the title or blurb of a book, to movie posters and trailers, to (according to some) previews and reviews of the work.

Paratext doesn't contribute to the story itself, but it does serve one important role: It brings in audiences, be they readers or cinema-goers. It's a quirk of the human psyche which is the core of modern marketing: A catchy title, engrossing tagline, or well-designed poster can bring more people to a work of fiction that actually making the fiction a little better for the same total investment of money and time.

Subtext

The text beneath the text

Subtext is really the odd one out in this lineup, because it does not, in the strictest sense, exist. When someone tells you to "read between the lines", they're telling you to read the subtext. Subtext is the meaning that is not written down, and it is absolutely essential to fiction. In fact, the ability to quickly and easily grasp subtext is the hallmark not only of a good writer, but of a good reader as well. Many great works of fiction seem incomprehensible or pointless if you only take them at face value. The subtext of these works often holds more meaning than the text itself - although whether this makes the work a work of genius or insufferably impenetrable depends on who you ask.

Subtext is also far more integral to good fiction than meta- and paratext. A book can exist without a blurb or a review, but without any meaning beneath the text of the book, it's ultimately just a wall of writing. Subtext is also far more complex than the metatext and paratext I've discussed above. In fact, there are many subtypes which we group together under the name "subtext":

Contextual Subtext

Subtext about what, when, where and so on

The most basic form of subtext, contextual subtext is everything that we can deduce about the environment (the context) of the story's events without actually being told. This means things like the time of day, or the location of a story. For example, if a conference room is introduced early in the story, and its description includes a distinctive mahogany conference table, any reference to a mahogany table in a later scene implies that the scene is set in the same conference room, even if we're never explicitly told that.

Likewise certain other things. For example, imagine a TV series involving a team of forensics experts. Working in the lab, Expert A, a DNA specialist, discovers something of importance to the investigation. Cut to the next scene: Expert B, an interrogator, is telling a suspect about the new evidence. We don't actually see Expert A telling Expert B this information, but the implication is that this happened; it's certainly unlikely that the interrogation expert discovered the information himself.

Character Subtext

Subtext about what characters think

The most basic rule of good fiction is good characters. "Good characters" means, quite simply, more than one dimension: There is more to the characters than meets the eye. This "more" is exactly what character subtext is.

There's a somewhat overquoted piece of writing advice which applies to all subtext, but particularly to this: "Show, don't tell." Rarely in a piece of good fiction will we be told that a person is easily irritated; instead, we will be shown them getting irritated in a situation that normally wouldn't be irritating. Likewise with relationships: Instead of being told that Angela and Bruce have a rocky marriage, we'll see them having a marital spat.

Character subtext also refers to the dimensions of a character which we never see: Their thoughts and feelings, and how they react internally to what's happening around them. In almost all books, we only know the characters (perhaps excluding a single viewpoint character) from their actions. The assumptions we make about the causes for those actions are the subtext: We're never told, for example, that so-and-so intensely dislikes office politics, but we can clearly see it in the way they behave. Furthermore, we might be able to make assumptions about the reasons for this dislike if we observe their actions closely enough.

This enhances the characters in two ways: Firstly, it's easier for us to believe what we see than what we're told by a narrator or another character - especially since unreliable characters and even unreliable narrators are increasingly popular devices in modern fiction. Secondly, giving characters more depth makes them more real to us, allowing us to be drawn into the concerns and emotions of the characters themselves.

"Supertext"

Subtext which overarches, not underlies, the text

Not all subtext is strictly "between the lines". Some, you could say, is actually a lot bigger than the lines. I'm calling it "supertext" because it sounds cool and I've never actually heard a name for it. This is stuff like themes or plot arcs - the meaning which hovers over the entire story.

Look at the theatre classic The Crucible by Arthur Miller. It was written around the time of the McCarthy trials, an infamous miscarriage of justice, and it was written by a victim of this miscarriage of justice. It was written about the Salem witch trials, another infamous miscarriage of justice. The two are never explicitly linked, but the connection is clear. The same thing occurs throughout fiction.

Why We Have Them

All of the various texts don't exist arbitrarily. In the world of fiction, anything superfluous tends to die off quickly, but all of these have been around in some form or another from the very beginning of fiction. Folk stories, the very first fiction, have text, metatext (the storyteller's comments on the story), paratext ("I tell you what, kids. Sit quietly, and I'll tell you a really great story tomorrow."), and subtext (for starters, the moral intent of the story). All of these survived even until today.

The reason they survived is because ultimately they make the story more real to us, and that is the hallmark of truly brilliant fiction: That just for a moment, we can abandon our conscious disbelief and lose ourselves in a world where anything and everything is possible.