On the subject of weasel words... Martin Raymond of the 'Future Laboratory' studies twentysomethings. He has identified a new ethical framework in their heads, which he calls 'selective altruism'. This is his arbitrary term for people who are, for example, against animal testing but for euthanasia. I might call them something else, perhaps 'animal supremacists'. People who think like that would rather people suffer than animals be tested on for their lifesaving drugs, and are careless about how human life fares in the moral swamp of euthanasia.
What such views amount to is the worst yet most tempting kind of wickedness. That which will prefer to choose an option that makes the individual feel good about themselves, rather on the basis of its effect or of the broad principles which it enacts and supports. To believe in human dignity and value is a basis for thinking about how to behave. In combination with an ethic that has room for self-sacrifice, it can ground hard decisions that might take the shine off our self-image but do some serious good. Forgetting these, and just going for the warm fuzzy feeling is not how you build a civilisation. It is how you leave one to pull it down. If this is how the new generation thinks, there are savage times coming.
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
New Year, New Truths?
I wrote earlier in 2005 about the danger of science without mystery. It is a grave danger, this certainty before all the facts are in, and it is a pit that the scientific method must lead its followers toward. Racial science and the eugenics craze is the classic historical instance of that error, and we, of course, do not know what are the contemporary examples, though judging from the smug tone to many pronouncements from the particle mill, they surely exist.
Before the New Year carries away our brain cells, here is another, subtler danger to truth to consider. We might call it progressive dogmatism. It works like this -- much progressive, socially liberal thought follows a revolutionary belief system. If the world is changed in this way, it will be better. The sister to this belief is that the revolution can never be reversed. Social change accumulates into a heap of blessings. This is bad logic. Not to speak against the belief in human progress -- I see more sign of broad melioration in human affairs than of a great wheel that will break our aspirations in the dust. Yet I also believe that such melioration is potential rather than necessary. We can sit in ignorance and want for millennia -- the Egyptians never invented dentistry, even for their god-kings. We can also regress, as the terror of the German holocaust exemplifies. People can get things wrong. This should not be controversial, especially when arguing that social norms are in error. To refuse to look back at groundbreaking social decisions is simply to privilege decisions that one feels good about having made; it is the worst kind of special pleading and blinkered thinking. Yet when this obvious error in thought goes hand in hand with science, it comes to seem respectable. Science looks like a cumulative pile of knowledge, as ideas like phlogiston and the bodily humours are thrown aside for electromagnetism and leucocytes. So progressives like to see by analogy their social agenda as a scientific discovery, a newly-revealed truth we hadn't come far enough to see yet. So animal rights is an extended awareness of animal nature, communism of history or socialism of social organisation.
The trouble is they claim this argument by analogy and not by subjecting their theses to rigorous scientific analysis. "We have done this, we have begun to think this, therefore it is an implacable advance." Science happily, is no respecter of pride or politics and is as happy to return to old ideas if they improve the picture as to bring in new ones. Two recent examples are the rehabilitation of Einstein's cosmological constant, an 'ugly fudge' which he saw as his greatest error and is now seen to be at the heart of our picture of the universe. The second is the much-derided doctrine of Lamarck, that animals can pass on attributes acquired in their lifetimes. The new science of epigenetics is finding that gene expression can indeed be affected by life experience and passed on through the generations.
Science can make these somersaults because it has an interest in truth (if too scant an acquaintance with mystery). Progressives just want to win the argument and like to give their conclusions cod-scientific weight, as if to think again or study the consequences of a social revolution were absurd. To argue for the revolution and then refuse to discuss whether the revolution has borne out your arguments, or has been brought into question by new evidence is sharp practice and argument in bad faith.
Progressive, rightly understood, is an insult. An intelligent person, interested in the truth, armed with the scientific method, must always look both ways. Not Lenin, but Janus, the god of the New Year and the old, and image of truth-seekers across the millennia.
Before the New Year carries away our brain cells, here is another, subtler danger to truth to consider. We might call it progressive dogmatism. It works like this -- much progressive, socially liberal thought follows a revolutionary belief system. If the world is changed in this way, it will be better. The sister to this belief is that the revolution can never be reversed. Social change accumulates into a heap of blessings. This is bad logic. Not to speak against the belief in human progress -- I see more sign of broad melioration in human affairs than of a great wheel that will break our aspirations in the dust. Yet I also believe that such melioration is potential rather than necessary. We can sit in ignorance and want for millennia -- the Egyptians never invented dentistry, even for their god-kings. We can also regress, as the terror of the German holocaust exemplifies. People can get things wrong. This should not be controversial, especially when arguing that social norms are in error. To refuse to look back at groundbreaking social decisions is simply to privilege decisions that one feels good about having made; it is the worst kind of special pleading and blinkered thinking. Yet when this obvious error in thought goes hand in hand with science, it comes to seem respectable. Science looks like a cumulative pile of knowledge, as ideas like phlogiston and the bodily humours are thrown aside for electromagnetism and leucocytes. So progressives like to see by analogy their social agenda as a scientific discovery, a newly-revealed truth we hadn't come far enough to see yet. So animal rights is an extended awareness of animal nature, communism of history or socialism of social organisation.
The trouble is they claim this argument by analogy and not by subjecting their theses to rigorous scientific analysis. "We have done this, we have begun to think this, therefore it is an implacable advance." Science happily, is no respecter of pride or politics and is as happy to return to old ideas if they improve the picture as to bring in new ones. Two recent examples are the rehabilitation of Einstein's cosmological constant, an 'ugly fudge' which he saw as his greatest error and is now seen to be at the heart of our picture of the universe. The second is the much-derided doctrine of Lamarck, that animals can pass on attributes acquired in their lifetimes. The new science of epigenetics is finding that gene expression can indeed be affected by life experience and passed on through the generations.
Science can make these somersaults because it has an interest in truth (if too scant an acquaintance with mystery). Progressives just want to win the argument and like to give their conclusions cod-scientific weight, as if to think again or study the consequences of a social revolution were absurd. To argue for the revolution and then refuse to discuss whether the revolution has borne out your arguments, or has been brought into question by new evidence is sharp practice and argument in bad faith.
Progressive, rightly understood, is an insult. An intelligent person, interested in the truth, armed with the scientific method, must always look both ways. Not Lenin, but Janus, the god of the New Year and the old, and image of truth-seekers across the millennia.
Monday, December 19, 2005
Unpheasant truths
Two people are dead thanks to warm and fuzzy thinking. You know the advice they give on animals in the road -- it's there for a reason. People like to posture these days and say, 'how cruel', but better a dead animal than a dead person. This week, two people are dead because someone preferred their misdirected conscience be clean than they (and their passenger) remain alive. That is how it is. Animal rights sound like an extension of care, a widening of our concern. It is not true, not if you read Singer and not in practice either. You have to decide -- people first, or animals first. Someone has to end up dead. Not realising that is the cover behind which the animal rights terror campaigns get all the worse. If there is an animal in the way, slow down by all means if you can in safety, but don't swerve. Squash and be proud of your moral clear-sightedness. Better a dead animal than a dead person, which is why Christmas celebrates one who never dies over the carcase of a bird with a clear conscience. The spirit of the season means squashing a pheasant if need be -- not that the image will make it onto any cards this year...
Monday, December 12, 2005
Under The Shadow of Environmentalism
I was cutting down trees in the forest this weekend (not for fun or out of a hatred of squirrels -- forests are man-made environments and have to be maintained, the sort of fact that unthinking tree-huggers don't like to get their heads around). Watching the smoke of the oil fire drifting overhead, I remarked how it would seem a high-priority target for terrorists, and maybe that would come out in a few days as the cause.
One of my axe buddies lifted her head and added, 'Oh, yeah, when I attend Greenpeace meetings, there are people there from the fringe groups like Earth First. I wouldn't put it past them. Those guys are basically terrorists.'
Well, I eased my jaw back into place. I had, of course, meant Islamist terrorists, whose interests in bringing down Western economies and in attacking our oil supplies are well-documented. But I think it is an important truth that came out in that unguarded and strikingly uncritical remark. Extreme movements survive because of a penumbra of those who support their cause but not their methods, just as the IRA fed on support from America and Palestinian terrorists get a lot of intellectual and economic support from Europe these days. This is true for the Jihadists in Britain, though it is hard to get a politician to admit it, and it is true for the animal rights and environmentalist groups who believe in violent attacks for their cause as well.
I heard Peter Singer on the radio saying he couldn't be responsible for what lengths people went to under the intellectual cover of his animal rights philosophy. That seems to me fundamentally wrong. If there is a dark heart to your cause, you are responsible for helping to keep it beating. Such violence is a sign of ideologies that, as a whole, cannot grasp compromise. They are far from the abiding message of the West, home and guardian of liberty, toleration and balance. We say, to such groups: you can have something if you come to the table and talk, or you can have nothing. We will not give you all. In the face of such offers, a system of thought that has no subtlety must descend into violence or shatter into nothingness. Having too much pride for self-destruction, they begin to descend a ladder of cruelty that goes down into the depths of human depravity.
Well, we have begun to see what vile acts animal rights extremists will contemplate, and it is interesting that a keen environmentalist should see such a catastrophe as the oil blaze as what is to be expected from green brothers in arms in the future. Far worse is that she did nothing to condemn it out of hand. That unwillingness to be judgmental is the sign of a dark future ahead. The penumbra of environmentalism is Greenpeace meetings and smiley posh people like Zak Goldsmith; at its heart is a burning fuel depot such as peacetime Europe has not seen.
One of my axe buddies lifted her head and added, 'Oh, yeah, when I attend Greenpeace meetings, there are people there from the fringe groups like Earth First. I wouldn't put it past them. Those guys are basically terrorists.'
Well, I eased my jaw back into place. I had, of course, meant Islamist terrorists, whose interests in bringing down Western economies and in attacking our oil supplies are well-documented. But I think it is an important truth that came out in that unguarded and strikingly uncritical remark. Extreme movements survive because of a penumbra of those who support their cause but not their methods, just as the IRA fed on support from America and Palestinian terrorists get a lot of intellectual and economic support from Europe these days. This is true for the Jihadists in Britain, though it is hard to get a politician to admit it, and it is true for the animal rights and environmentalist groups who believe in violent attacks for their cause as well.
I heard Peter Singer on the radio saying he couldn't be responsible for what lengths people went to under the intellectual cover of his animal rights philosophy. That seems to me fundamentally wrong. If there is a dark heart to your cause, you are responsible for helping to keep it beating. Such violence is a sign of ideologies that, as a whole, cannot grasp compromise. They are far from the abiding message of the West, home and guardian of liberty, toleration and balance. We say, to such groups: you can have something if you come to the table and talk, or you can have nothing. We will not give you all. In the face of such offers, a system of thought that has no subtlety must descend into violence or shatter into nothingness. Having too much pride for self-destruction, they begin to descend a ladder of cruelty that goes down into the depths of human depravity.
Well, we have begun to see what vile acts animal rights extremists will contemplate, and it is interesting that a keen environmentalist should see such a catastrophe as the oil blaze as what is to be expected from green brothers in arms in the future. Far worse is that she did nothing to condemn it out of hand. That unwillingness to be judgmental is the sign of a dark future ahead. The penumbra of environmentalism is Greenpeace meetings and smiley posh people like Zak Goldsmith; at its heart is a burning fuel depot such as peacetime Europe has not seen.
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
A Bird of a Different Feather
A Bird of a Different Feather
‘March of the Penguins’ will soon be on show at British cinemas. In the USA, it has caused a great debate about the true meaning of the penguins’ story. It made me think about how metaphors can be used to obscure the truth in any debate, and specifically of how the cliched avian metaphors for foreign policy attitudes distort a discussion which affects all our lives. National defence is not about hawks versus doves. That’s just what the ‘doves’ want you to think.
‘The dove sits near running water so that if it sees a hawk it can dive in and escape’. So says my thirteenth-century bestiary. Countries don’t have that option, of course, which is where it all starts to break down. Metaphors can be out of date and they can be inappropriate, especially rigid either-or propositions. When a cliché narrows foreign policy to two flight paths, as the hawk-dove label so regularly does, the odds of finding a safe route go down. Lazy ideas bring real dangers.
Just as others have suggested we should think beyond left and right when considering the wisdom of military intervention (See the Henry Jackson Society), let me add to that: think beyond hawks and doves. As cinema audiences argue over what lessons in life can be learnt from the penguin, it is time to open our minds to the larger iconography of the birds.
We all know ‘hawk’ is a boo-word. According to my bestiary, ‘the hawk is the devil, lurking in order to tempt us’. Hawks are predators: swift, brutal and powerful. They seize what they want because they can. They kill to feed, swooping down on the weak and defenceless. Contrariwise, everybody wants to be on the dove’s side. Doves are pure, emblematic of the Holy Spirit, bringers of the olive branch to Noah. Criticising a dove is like kicking a puppy.
But there are more than two birds. Who, for instance, would wish to be an ostrich, or ‘stratocameleon’, burying his head in the sand and imagining danger will have the courtesy to pass by? More than a few now known as doves could deserve that title, if we allow a wider flock of terms. Who will admire the screech owls, whose ‘mouths speak what overflows their hearts; what they think inwardly, they utter in their voice’. Career doom-criers deserve this title, especially as they are so often ‘bound by a heavy laziness, hovering around graves by day and night’. Ovid sums the species up in his Metamorphoses, ‘A sluggish screech-owl, a loathsome bird, which heralds impending disaster’. Yes, there are those who shriek around death without the energy or restraint to conceive a strategy against it, and they are not doves.
If many fouler birds hide behind the wings of the dove, there is unacknowledged virtue flying with hawks. Consider the partridge, who will equip her nest with elaborate defences. ‘They clothe their dwelling with thorn twigs, so that any animal which attacks them is held back by the sharpness of the brambles’. The next time someone argues for the renewal of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, they should be able to present themselves as a prudent partridge defending their home, not a blood-soaked hawk.
So-called hawks may also be better known as wild geese, and without having to resemble Richard Burton. Everyone knows the sacred geese of Juno, who awoke the guards of the Capitol to the threat of the approaching Gauls. According to the De rerum naturis of Rabanus Maurus, ‘they stand for provident men, watchmen who take their task in earnest’. Wild geese fly high, remote from earthly rank, keeping watch for their tame cousins below. ‘The cry of geese saved Rome from enemy attack, the outcry of the watchful brother protects the common life from disturbance by evil-minded men’. Who would not be proud to fly with the wild geese?
Yet one bird commands our attention above all others as an emblem for those who will contemplate military action in the service of justice, freedom and human dignity—the pelican. If the dove gains applause as a symbol of the Holy Spirit, the pelican deserves as much, for it is a traditional symbol of Christ, of one willing to suffer for its fellows. The pelican mother was said to tear open her own breast, feeding and reviving her offspring with her blood. ‘Her love brings them back to life’. The pelican has long been an important symbol: it can be seen in pride of place on the crest of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. But this great symbol deserves to be remembered outside the academy. Not all who shed blood are hawks. Some are their antithesis: the pelicans.
The dove is a simple bird, and has been keeping bad company of late, no doubt impressed by the sophistication of his fellow-travellers. Luckily, my bestiary reveals that doves are able to recover from blindness. Likewise, we must find a way to stop the ostriches from fooling us into complacency, or the screech-owls driving us to despair. When that happens, we will find birds to imitate which combine action with wisdom. Hawks may not be admirable, but partridges, wild geese and pelicans are birds to inspire human heroism: prudent, vigilant and willing to bear sacrifice for the greater good. ‘Divine providence would not have revealed the natural qualities of birds so clearly if we had not been required to gain some advantage from it’.
Unfortunately, the bestiary is silent as to the exemplary qualities of penguins.
‘March of the Penguins’ will soon be on show at British cinemas. In the USA, it has caused a great debate about the true meaning of the penguins’ story. It made me think about how metaphors can be used to obscure the truth in any debate, and specifically of how the cliched avian metaphors for foreign policy attitudes distort a discussion which affects all our lives. National defence is not about hawks versus doves. That’s just what the ‘doves’ want you to think.
‘The dove sits near running water so that if it sees a hawk it can dive in and escape’. So says my thirteenth-century bestiary. Countries don’t have that option, of course, which is where it all starts to break down. Metaphors can be out of date and they can be inappropriate, especially rigid either-or propositions. When a cliché narrows foreign policy to two flight paths, as the hawk-dove label so regularly does, the odds of finding a safe route go down. Lazy ideas bring real dangers.
Just as others have suggested we should think beyond left and right when considering the wisdom of military intervention (See the Henry Jackson Society), let me add to that: think beyond hawks and doves. As cinema audiences argue over what lessons in life can be learnt from the penguin, it is time to open our minds to the larger iconography of the birds.
We all know ‘hawk’ is a boo-word. According to my bestiary, ‘the hawk is the devil, lurking in order to tempt us’. Hawks are predators: swift, brutal and powerful. They seize what they want because they can. They kill to feed, swooping down on the weak and defenceless. Contrariwise, everybody wants to be on the dove’s side. Doves are pure, emblematic of the Holy Spirit, bringers of the olive branch to Noah. Criticising a dove is like kicking a puppy.
But there are more than two birds. Who, for instance, would wish to be an ostrich, or ‘stratocameleon’, burying his head in the sand and imagining danger will have the courtesy to pass by? More than a few now known as doves could deserve that title, if we allow a wider flock of terms. Who will admire the screech owls, whose ‘mouths speak what overflows their hearts; what they think inwardly, they utter in their voice’. Career doom-criers deserve this title, especially as they are so often ‘bound by a heavy laziness, hovering around graves by day and night’. Ovid sums the species up in his Metamorphoses, ‘A sluggish screech-owl, a loathsome bird, which heralds impending disaster’. Yes, there are those who shriek around death without the energy or restraint to conceive a strategy against it, and they are not doves.
If many fouler birds hide behind the wings of the dove, there is unacknowledged virtue flying with hawks. Consider the partridge, who will equip her nest with elaborate defences. ‘They clothe their dwelling with thorn twigs, so that any animal which attacks them is held back by the sharpness of the brambles’. The next time someone argues for the renewal of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, they should be able to present themselves as a prudent partridge defending their home, not a blood-soaked hawk.
So-called hawks may also be better known as wild geese, and without having to resemble Richard Burton. Everyone knows the sacred geese of Juno, who awoke the guards of the Capitol to the threat of the approaching Gauls. According to the De rerum naturis of Rabanus Maurus, ‘they stand for provident men, watchmen who take their task in earnest’. Wild geese fly high, remote from earthly rank, keeping watch for their tame cousins below. ‘The cry of geese saved Rome from enemy attack, the outcry of the watchful brother protects the common life from disturbance by evil-minded men’. Who would not be proud to fly with the wild geese?
Yet one bird commands our attention above all others as an emblem for those who will contemplate military action in the service of justice, freedom and human dignity—the pelican. If the dove gains applause as a symbol of the Holy Spirit, the pelican deserves as much, for it is a traditional symbol of Christ, of one willing to suffer for its fellows. The pelican mother was said to tear open her own breast, feeding and reviving her offspring with her blood. ‘Her love brings them back to life’. The pelican has long been an important symbol: it can be seen in pride of place on the crest of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. But this great symbol deserves to be remembered outside the academy. Not all who shed blood are hawks. Some are their antithesis: the pelicans.
The dove is a simple bird, and has been keeping bad company of late, no doubt impressed by the sophistication of his fellow-travellers. Luckily, my bestiary reveals that doves are able to recover from blindness. Likewise, we must find a way to stop the ostriches from fooling us into complacency, or the screech-owls driving us to despair. When that happens, we will find birds to imitate which combine action with wisdom. Hawks may not be admirable, but partridges, wild geese and pelicans are birds to inspire human heroism: prudent, vigilant and willing to bear sacrifice for the greater good. ‘Divine providence would not have revealed the natural qualities of birds so clearly if we had not been required to gain some advantage from it’.
Unfortunately, the bestiary is silent as to the exemplary qualities of penguins.
One man's freedom fighter...
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". A reply for you next time someone recycles this thoughtless cliche your way: "To be a freedom fighter, you have to be fighting for freedom". Now they can try a phrase like "caliphate fighter" or "religious intolerance fighter" if they like, but it's so much harder to hide behind.
Friday, November 18, 2005
Frank Furedi - Th Age of Unreason
The Spectator.co.uk
Superb Spectator article on the fall of truth and the rise of emotional nonsense. Not coincidentally, the same issue finds Mark Steyn slamming the Constant Gardener for exctly those faults, a film I argued against some time ago. Whatever the media darlings say, make up your own mind. Protect your heads! Montaigne said that books could be more dangerous than poison, because once you'd read them, they were in your mind forever; poison can be thrown up again.
Superb Spectator article on the fall of truth and the rise of emotional nonsense. Not coincidentally, the same issue finds Mark Steyn slamming the Constant Gardener for exctly those faults, a film I argued against some time ago. Whatever the media darlings say, make up your own mind. Protect your heads! Montaigne said that books could be more dangerous than poison, because once you'd read them, they were in your mind forever; poison can be thrown up again.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Truth and Pragmatism on Radio 4
BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - Pragmatism
A superb debate on "In Our Time" on Pragmatist theories of truth. Feed you mind.
A superb debate on "In Our Time" on Pragmatist theories of truth. Feed you mind.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
London's Child Soldiers
The cleaner's son got shot last week. It's a sign of how far we've come that that may not shock you. What should I expect? This is London after all, the great world city where everything that can happen does happen. Certainly if it involves guns and knives. But I was shocked by this one. He was shot by a machine gun. Now that should be unbelievable: we like to laugh about the Americans and the crazy guns they can buy legally, Alito refusing to accept there was a constitutional ground for him to turn down a law on private citizens buying machine guns in the US. (Never mind that that wasn't the basis of his judgement; that's never stopped a good sneer before.) Oh yes, we're much more advanced in London. Here only the criminals have automatic weapons. Of course, that's nothing new either -- those sisters outside the nightclub, the Shakespeare girls, were shot to ribbons by machine guns. No, what got me about this story of London life was why this mother's son survived. 'He only got shot in the leg,' she explained, 'as they drove by in the car, because the machine gun was so heavy and the boy firing it was too young to hold the muzzle up properly'. Doesn't that break your heart? Shouldn't it? All those pictures of child soldiers in Africa we like to cry over could be taken right here on a South London estate. Oh yes, everything that happens in the world happens in London. More's the pity.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Friday, October 21, 2005
Truth and mystery
Consider the difference between Christianity and science in their attitudes to truth. Christianity says there is an absolute Truth, but we cannot wholly know it, only see through a glass darkly. Science is right behind Truth, but says it can be known through the scientific method. The trouble with that claim is that, lacking a completed science, what we really have are highly predictive theories, which will nevertheless be overturned or at least replaced by the next paradigm shift. That means that science gives itself a sense of confidence that it cannot live up to. Just as the Wars of Religion in Europe came out of a retreat from the Christian doctrine of mystery, the horrors of the Twentieth century are precisely the horrors of absolute certainty as permitted by rationalism: in racial science and Marxist economics. Clever people may not be able to reconcile their rationalism with Christianity any more, but they need to find a sense of humility akin to the Christian notion of mystery in their approach to Truth. Otherwise dogma and inhuman horror will haunt us while reason is wide awake. For my money, the savage logic of Peter Singer being the main example right now.
Byers and Liars
Funny things lies. Read 'As You Like It', where the clown, Touchstone, makes a whole routine about how courtiers know the many forms of the lie. Stephen Byers seems to be hoping he has got away with the 'lie indirect'. The judge has shown he didn't tell the truth, but can't prove he meant to, so can't say he lied. At least the House of Commons are still investigating. The trouble is, we never know what someone thought as they said something untrue. The bar is set at an impossible height if that defines a lie. We might ask whether the speaker could be reasonably be expected to have known the truth and whether it would have been in their interest to have told a lie instead. Both seem to get a yes for Byers. Since he admits to telling the truth, we ought to call it a lie. That sort of robustness is the only route back to trust in politics. You can't 'build trust'; you can only tell the truth and punish liars. Saying you've 'no explanation' for why you told an untruth is no excuse, just the sound of a weasel in a suit.
Monday, October 17, 2005
We're always doomed: get busy
We're just Waiting for the Lights to Go Out according to the Sunday Times. But then, we often are, as The Cooling World on Brain Terminal will remind you. For those who missed the Seventies, it was the decade of global cooling and the return of the Ice Age, which politicians weren't doing enough to prepare for. And all over Britain, people are anxiously rescinding their canaries' privileges in the face of bird flu, confining them to solitary and changing their water in washing up gloves. Disaster porn is a circular diversion: one of those pleasures that keep us from thinking about the failures in our lives without actually solving anything. Failure on a civilisational scale makes personal weaknesses so heartwarmingly trivial. Not that all doomsaying is nonsense. Of course it is true that asterioids fall and flu pandemics strike (but Spanish flu only killed more than WWI because it happened in its aftermath, hitting the weakened immune systems in vulnerable groups) -- but this knowledge is nothing new. Religions have always assumed cataclysmic scenarios: which is why there are so many versions of the flood myth. What is new is the pride of the scientific version, that thinks it invented Armageddon and argues the only answer is paranoid despondency, a condition in which you scrutinise every scarepiece in the paper and do nothing about it. Maybe empires do always fall, but who thinks Greece and Rome have really gone? Their legacy is the foundation of our civilisation: in law and science, art and religion, liberty and government. So even (perhaps when) the West falls, it will leave Michelangelo's David, Newton's Principia, Darwin's Descent of Man, Shakespeare's Hamlet, the American constitution, English common law... and on and on. The saddest thing now is how we remember our mortality but not the value of making things that last. Montaigne says that eternity is in love with the productions of time and we can still read his Essays because he understood that a sense of mortality drives us to reach for eternity. Today we say doom is close, and hence prefer the fly-by-night, the flimsy and the ephemeral. That is like the rabbit hypnotised by the knife held over it. Art in particular needs to discover not events and happenings and self-destructing cobwebs of whimsy, but solid, made things. Masterpieces are a gift across the line into the dark future. The threat of doomday, as religion has always understood, allows us to focus on eternity and live as if our acts and our creations were forever. The truth is "death, but not yet". Wisdom is driven to get busy and build against the inevitable.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
A beautiful truth
Too easy to criticise how the pursuit of truth has lost its lustre. Here is something absolutely astounding we have found is true: M=E/C.C Don't tell me truth doesn't accomplish anything. One equation changed the world. The hard task of winnowing out truth is worth every scrap of effort.
Monday, October 10, 2005
Watch the method, not the money
So 'The Constant Gardener' is coming out in Britain, with fulsome praise already oiling its path. Never mind that it is paranoid and delusional, encouraging a fundamental misunderstanding of the power of capitalist free enterprise to achieve great good. Megan Basham gives it an intelligent roasting, but expect much kowtowing before something that indulges people's worst suspicions. How horrible, to devote so much aesthetic skill (the cast is stellar and the cinematography looks fabulous) to peddling paranoid lies. A sign of a civilisation in fundamental confusion. I am reminded, however, of a wider and more dangerous trend than a rather silly conspiracy theory about Big Pharma. Like most of us, you have probably picked up the cynical reflex of looking at the funders behind a piece of scientific research and then decrying it on that basis. "The Salt Council! No wonder they found it killed slugs!" True, there is a tremendous capacity in human action for subtle biases to creep in and lead us in the direction of our self-interest. What is so dangerous in this trend is that it fundamentally misunderstands, and effectively discards, the scientific project. Science is based on the idea of an objective and replicable method. If a paper has found a result your preconceived ideas can't cope with, you must try and replicate it under ruthlessly strict and double-blind conditions. If that fails, you can rest easy. If not, you need some new ideas. So who funds the research shouldn't matter, because the method stays the same. Now it may be true that an initial paper is wrong in its claims, even when peer-reviewed, because of methodological errors. A recent analysis suggested as many as half of all papers may make unintentionally false claims. But subsequent attempts at replication or disproof by a new experiment that tests the original hypothesis in more rigorous ways will settle this one way or the other. A finding that survives peer-review, replication and a variety of experimental tests for its predictions can be considered robust, although always open to correction if a paradigm-shift provides a fresh and more complete explanation of the phenomena. But to say that the scientific findings of someone who disagrees with you can't be counted is to take the same corner as paranormal 'reseachers' who say there is a paranormal effect that prevents paranormal effects manifesting themselves under laboratory conditions. Not only can we not agree on the truth as a consequence, we can't even argue about it. Trapping the world in bubbles of false consciousness is just giving up on truth and science out of a refusal to hear results that may challenge our dearly-held assumptions. The cynics who hold this view would normally want to save that piece of derision for the religious right, but they suffer the same flaw if they will rule out truth on the basis of who funds a scientific study. After all, the only criticism you can really make in such cases is, "how dare they investigate that hypothesis!" To which the only reply is, because it might be true. Which goes to show which side is open to truth and which is trapped by dogma. The value of special interest groups funding research using universally-accepted objective methods is that questions that common prejudice thinks it can answer on instinct are forced to prove themselves. Naturally, all sides of a question should be addressed, but if funding is free and open, that should happen in a healthy marketplace. Defending ourselves against groupthink is hard work. Only asking questions when we are sure of comfortable answers won't do the trick.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
Get Your Facts Straight About Israel
The Big Arab Lie (Read this before shooting your mouth off against Israel)
Facts aren't news
So now there has actually been time to discover what happened in the aftermath of Katrina and it turns out to have been mostly nonsense. A scandal-hungry press being fed gobbets of scandal they were all too willing got believe as anecdotal evidence for a larger trend produced accounts of events in the Superdome and on the streets of the forsaken city that simply did not happen. But where are the apologies? Where are the journalists being held to account as politicians would be for such a failure. Of course, there lies the problem: who will interview the interviewers. Meanwhile, proof, if it were needed, that 24-hour news has nothing to do with the truth, which requires time to ascertain.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Helping neutrality along
Journalistic neutrality aint what it used to be. Just about everywhere I looked carried the story of the doctor being reprimanded for supplying someone with lethal drugs with a headline about how he "helped" them. Now without coming down on either side of the argument I think you can see how that takes sides. Not necessarily because journalists are pro-euthanasia, tho more likely than not many are, being urban intellectuals of a certain class, but because it's a more interesting story that way. Where is the true news to be found these days? Dead and stuffed behind a radiator because it was too boring to look after. Choosing the emotionally stimulating word may be good story-writing procedure, but it certainly doesn't make for factual reporting.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Entertainment/News?
So Tony Blair raged at the news coverage of Katrina as Anti-American. What he doesn't understand is that it's not about politics any more. Not there isn't likely to be a majority in the BBC who dislike America: they advertise their jobs in The Guardian after all. But the PM doesn't realise that the primary risk to news isn't political bias any more -- it's the desire to entertain. John Humphrys has been defended by his friends for the past week or two for his marvellous lack of bias, his even-handedness. 'He's nasty to everyone', they say. What is being missed is that, when a news program is driven by the desire to entertain and not to discover and disseminate truth it will always choose the most exciting angle. What could be more boring than news that said, 'actually, the US isn't a vicious persecutor of black people: it's more complex than that'? And attacking everyone as if they were a seasoned liar is not the route to truth -- it just degrades the public discourse and encourages popular paranoia. Truth is hard work, and only entertaining by accident. We have to decide whether we want news or entertainment. You can't have both.
Kanye believe it
Kanye West demonstrates the state of truth in our civilisation. He believes that because it feels true to him that blacks are being persecuted it is true. I heard Bonnie Greer on Radio 4's 'Any Questions' yesterday saying that Whitey needed to realise how viscerally black people felt the truth of persecution in what they saw in New Orleans on their TVs. Now Kanye's just a singer trying to make a lot of money. What's appalling is how intellectuals like Bonnie get behind that sentiment. Let me explain it again, Bonnie. It's true if it's true; feeling's got nothing to do with it. But this has been going on for a long time -- a friend once explained to me he'd been taught that sexual harassment had happened if a woman felt it had. Who can defend themselves against the vindictive or the paranoid under this kind of politically correct nonsense? Funny too that those who peddle such muddleheaded garbage will generally be the first down the throats of the religious for valuing their spiritual experiences. Our civilisation rests on the existence of a single, external truth. The world has one way that it is. Facts are accessible to reasoned investigation. Forgetting that delivers us into the hands of demagogues -- and then real persecution begins. The made-up kind, we can live with.
Friday, September 16, 2005
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Know-nothing Donkey Good; Smart-alec Humans bad
"It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe in nothing than to believe what is wrong." Thomas Jefferson
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Water makes a real difference
We see the condition of Africa and it is hard to know where to begin. Aid sent out indisciminately may salve our consciences but do little good, or even harm. One of the best ways to give money is to support drinking water infrastructure. Not only does contaminated water bring an enormous amount of suffering through disease, the lack of a convenient source of water is economically crippling as women have no choice but to walk extraordinary distances on a daily basis to meet their family's most basic need. Studies have shown water infrastructure has the most powerful impact on development. Support health, women's rights and development -- give to Water Aid, or Pump Aid, who have won the St Andrew's Prize for the Environment for their pump design that can be easily repaired without importing expensive parts. Use the links to visit them. And then get Aquaid to supply water to your office.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Great art is real art -- follow this link
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/durer/large-turf.jpg
Albrecht Durer's The Great Piece of Turf (1503) is an astounding image of the Northern Renaissance. Western civilisation at its greatest is about escaping convention and precedent to see and portray the world as it actually is. Here, an ordinary piece of earth is considered a valid subject for a picture, not as incidental detail beside a picture of a saint or a prince, but in itself. Durer looks at the world, suppresses his personal quiddities and historical locus and records the truth, without losing an ounce of beauty. Magnificent, as anyone who saw it at the National Gallery in London last year would have to agree.
Albrecht Durer's The Great Piece of Turf (1503) is an astounding image of the Northern Renaissance. Western civilisation at its greatest is about escaping convention and precedent to see and portray the world as it actually is. Here, an ordinary piece of earth is considered a valid subject for a picture, not as incidental detail beside a picture of a saint or a prince, but in itself. Durer looks at the world, suppresses his personal quiddities and historical locus and records the truth, without losing an ounce of beauty. Magnificent, as anyone who saw it at the National Gallery in London last year would have to agree.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Who is Sancho's Ass?
Wiser than the rider... and wiser than the dreamer in front.
There is an etching by Rowlandson, Doctor Syntax Sketching the Lake where the foolish Doctor gawps out as he scribbles, holding the book between him and the landscape. Under him, his horse has lowered its head. Knowing what water is good for, it is enjoying a cool drink.
Humans know more than animals about almost everything. How many dogs would you trust with your taxes? But our great fault as a species is this willingness to project a glamour over facts, then wonder why rocks we wished away keep tripping us up.
Sancho's ass is the secret hero of Don Quixote. Not Sancho Panza, who is as credulous as his master is deluded. Not Rocinante, a bag of bones hidden behind an heroic name. Sancho's ass, nameless and dreamless, was the only one of the questers who knew how hard the ground was every step of the way. He is an eternal reminder of facts that go on being true even when we'd rather ignore them.
Sancho's ass is an English ass (of Spanish extraction), not an American one. Yet Sancho's ass (UK) has to put up with Sancho's ass (US) day after day, a further, profound acquaintance with reality. Sancho's Ass agrees with Montaigne:
There is an etching by Rowlandson, Doctor Syntax Sketching the Lake where the foolish Doctor gawps out as he scribbles, holding the book between him and the landscape. Under him, his horse has lowered its head. Knowing what water is good for, it is enjoying a cool drink.
Humans know more than animals about almost everything. How many dogs would you trust with your taxes? But our great fault as a species is this willingness to project a glamour over facts, then wonder why rocks we wished away keep tripping us up.
Sancho's ass is the secret hero of Don Quixote. Not Sancho Panza, who is as credulous as his master is deluded. Not Rocinante, a bag of bones hidden behind an heroic name. Sancho's ass, nameless and dreamless, was the only one of the questers who knew how hard the ground was every step of the way. He is an eternal reminder of facts that go on being true even when we'd rather ignore them.
Sancho's ass is an English ass (of Spanish extraction), not an American one. Yet Sancho's ass (UK) has to put up with Sancho's ass (US) day after day, a further, profound acquaintance with reality. Sancho's Ass agrees with Montaigne:
Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our asses.
Monday, August 29, 2005
Wise Words from the Master
"Pray look better, Sir, quoth Sancho; those things yonder are no Giants, but Wind-mills, and the Arms you fancy, are their Sails, which being whirl'd about by the Wind, make the Mill go."
Don Quixote, Part I, Book 1, Chapter viii
Don Quixote, Part I, Book 1, Chapter viii
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