January 14, 2005

Tsunami appeal

Posted by John Quiggin

Australia is having a national day of mourning and reflection for tsunami victims tomorrow. Copying an idea from Michele Agnew a little while back, I’ve set up a post and will give a dollar (Australian) for each comment1 on this post to our Red Cross appeal until midnight Sunday Australian time. I’ve called for cosponsorships from readers, and the response has been great. The total promise is now more then $3/comment. Come on over and help us put our money where our mouth is. If you’re so inclined, make a pledge of your own.

1 I’ve set an upper bound of 1000 which is unlikely to be reached given my normal readership, but guarantees that I and the cosponsors won’t be ruined by a blogstorm should one occor.

January 09, 2005

Around and about

Posted by Chris

I’m just back from the Oxford Political Thought Conference, which was great fun. On my trip I managed to run into Chris Brooke of The Virtual Stoa , Marc Mulholland of Daily Moiders and Sarah of Just Another False Alarm . I’ve met Chris before, but it was good to see the others as well and to compare blogospheric notes with Marc. Chris told me about the fuss about the BBC’s broadcast of Jerry Springer: The Opera . So of course I tuned in to this spendid TM production last night and greatly enjoyed such numbers as “Chick with a Dick” and “Mama Gimmee Smack on the A**hole”, before wowing to the Jerry in Hell special program complete with Jesus, God and the Virgin Mary. The microslice of the blogosphere that both hates the BBC and was in a great lather of indignation over the British government’s incitement to religious hatred legislation (Melanie Phillips and co) is going to have a problem over this one. Here’s how I expect them to handle it: (a) they’ll argue that it exemplfies the double standards of a decadent culture (everyone is careful not to offend Muslims and Sikhs but Christians can be trashed with impunity) and (b) they’ll say that whilst of course there should be no legal interference with speech, the BBC is an exception , since, funded by licence-payers, it had an obligation not to transmit JSTO. Just my prediction, now let’s wait and see…

January 01, 2005

New year resolutions

Posted by Chris

A happy new year to everyone! Time for those new year resolutions, then. Last year I resolved to learn German and, I’m astonished to say, made considerable progress. So my first resolution has to be to continue and get myself in a position where I can sustain a reasonably interesting conversation or read a short novel. Other than that, my main thoughts are of reading and writing. Thanks to reading Sebald I’ve got into my head the thought of working through Chateaubriand’s memoirs (we’ll see how that goes). And, of course, there’s the thought that every academic has, of writing more and better papers and getting them published in decent places. Before then, though, there’s that tax return to complete….

December 24, 2004

The most difficult quiz

Posted by Chris

With it being Christmas, the Guardian has again published the world’s more difficult quiz as given to the pupils of King William’s College. A first scan leaves me with a single-figure score, but I bet Kieran would do much better….

UPDATE: Mark D. Lew has posted an annotated list of answers (179/180).

November 21, 2004

German resource

Posted by Chris

Regular readers will know that I’ve been trying to learn German since January of this year. And it is going ok. I just want to put in a plug for my favourite German resource: the online German-English dictionary Leo from the Technical University of Munich. Not only is Leo invaluable as you’re trying to decipher that article in Der Spiegel or FAZ, it also enables registered users to enter the words they don’t know into a little personal list and then to test themselves repeatedly on their chosen vocabulary. Leo is also very easy to integrate with Mozilla Firefox both by adding to the search engines box and — this is really great — by installing the ConQuery plugin so you can highlight the German text and then have the dictionary open with a translation in a new tab.

August 06, 2004

Our Germs gets a gong

Posted by John Quiggin

Australia is such a small country that, whenever any Australian gets noticed for anything1 we all tend to feel a glow of vicarious achievement. So I was pleased to see that Germaine Greer was ranked second in a Prospect magazine list of 100 top British intellectuals, just ahead of Amartya Sen and Eric Hobsbawm.

Having enjoyed my burst of patriotic pride, I have to ask what they are smoking in the Old Country these days. The Australian view of Germaine Greer2 is probably best summed up by Geoff Honnor
Greer has metamorphosed into a Barry Humphries creation: the eccentric old bluestocking aunt who loves to blather on in a colourfully opinionated, slightly shocking way about the great issues of the day. These, oddly enough, seem to always come back to the single greatest issue of all - herself.
In fact, Humphries himself would rank ahead of Greer in my rankings of expat Aussie intellectuals. And if you want an expat with bitterly negative views of home, you can’t go past Robert Hughes (admittedly, since he’s based in the US, he wasn’t eligible for the Prospect poll).

1 It doesn’t even have to be something creditable. Just being noticed is enough. And we’re not too fussy as to who we count as an Australian. In particular, any Kiwi who’s done so much as pass through the transit lounge at Sydney airport automatically has their achievements added to the Australian total. OTOH, we’re happy to disown Rupert Murdoch.

2 I leave aside the shrinking pool of those who are silly enough to be outraged by her provocations

July 02, 2004

The women Prospect left out

Posted by Chris

The Guardian has reacted to the sex imbalance of Prospect’s list of 100 “British” public intellectuals (previously discussed here) , with a list of women whom they might have included.

June 24, 2004

Top "British" Public Intellectuals

Posted by Chris

Prospect Magazine are running a poll to find the top 5 “British” public intellectuals. You can see the whole list here and can vote by email to intellectuals@prospect-magazine.co.uk . I say “British” rather than British because the blurb reads: “Candidates do not need to live here or be British citizens, but they should make their most significant impact here.” So Seamus Heaney, Amartya Sen and Michael Ignatieff end up being “British”. There are some pretty dodgy characters on the list, various low rent talking heads, a Daily Mail columnist, and several people whose public ravings are at the outer limits of sanity (these aren’t meant to be exclusive categories). I’ll avoid mentioning names for fear of a libel suit. I thought about voting for Quentin Skinner as the only person on the list ever to have left a comment on Crooked Timber, and Richard Dawkins irritates me too often. In the end, my choice from their top 100, in no particular order is:

Onora O’Neill (I had to pick a philosopher and the other philosophical options are terrible and she’s done some good stuff over the years. Her Reith lectures are one of the most forthright recent attempts to drive back the “audit culture” that is wrecking Britain’s public services.)

Amartya Sen (his work on democracy and famines alone should get him near the top of any such list.)

Seamus Heaney (the only poet on the list.)

V.S. Naipaul (the only great novelist in their selection.)

W.G. Runciman (manages to be a shipping magnate and a social theorist at the same time.)

Sen and Runciman were also, aeons ago, co-authors of a paper on Rousseau, the general will and the prisoner’s dilemma, all topics close to my heart.

May 16, 2004

Bits and pieces

Posted by Chris

A couple of bloggable bits from the programme booklet for last nights opera. There’s an advertisment for the National Theatre’s production of Iphigenia at Aulis , where the copy reads

Just how far will a leader go in order to save face and secure a military victory in the East?

How far indeed?

And the notes for Valerie Reid (mezzo soprano, Grimgerde in Valkyrie) tell us that her plans include

Natasha [in] The Electrification of the Soviet Union for Music Theatre Wales .

Comments from anyone who has seen that piece?

May 08, 2004

Press cuttings

Posted by Chris

A few interesting things to link to in today’s papers. In the Guardian David Lodge writes about Nabokov and there’s an interesting account of how Roman Abramovich and the other Russian oligarchs enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian people. In the Times Matthew Parris explains that he wants Bush re-elected so that neoconservatives won’t be able to claim that their ideas never got a fair trial. And Simon Kuper in the FT tells us why last week’s football occupies his brain more than other, more serious, matters. So far as I can see there is no common thread that unites these various pieces, except for their readability.

April 04, 2004

Selfish genes, selfish individuals or selfish nations ?

Posted by John Quiggin

Following up on Henry’s post, I wanted to look slightly differently at the appeal of evolutionary psychology. As I said in Henry’s comments thread the ev psych analysis is essentially “realist”. This is the kind of style of social and political analysis that purports to strip away the illusions of idealistic rhetoric and reveal the underlying self-interest. The only question is to nominate the “self” that is interested. In Ev Psych the unit of analysis is the gene, in Chicago-school economics the individual, in Marxism the class, in public choice theory the interest group, and in the realist school of international relations the nation.

All of these realist models are opposed to any form of idealism in which people or groups act out of motives other than self-interest. But, logically speaking, different schools of realists are more opposed to each other than to any form of idealism. If we are machines for replicating our genes, we can’t also be rational maximizers of a utility function or loyal citizens of a nation. Clever and consistent realists recognise this - for example, ideologically consistent neoclassical economists are generally hostile to nationalism. But much of the time followers of these views are attracted by style rather than substance. Since all realist explanations have the same hardnosed character, they all appeal to the same kind of person. It’s not hard to find people who simultaneously believe in Ev Psych, Chicago economics and international realism. One example of this kind of confusion is found in Stephen Pinker whose Blank Slate I reviewed here, back in 2002.

Here’s my conclusion
the most interesting parts of Pinker’s book do not relate to human nature at all, but to his restatement of a pessimistic view of the human condition. In the process of this restatement, Pinker abandons his evolutionary psychology model without realising that he is doing so.

Take, for instance, his observation, following an approving citation of Hobbes, that ‘violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a “pathology”, except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms’. This is backed up by the work of political scientiist who claim that war has generally benefited the aggressors.

Pinker may well be right, but his argument is inconsistent with the claim that violence is the product of genetic predispositions acquired by our distant ancestors, that is, of primitive, irrational urges specific to males. If the Hobbesian view is right, violence will arise as a rational response to this environment in the absence of any predisposition to violence or even in the presence of an instinctive aversion to violence, such as that which evolutionary psychologists impute to women.

On the other hand, an environmentalist theory of violence such as that of Pinker in his Hobbesian mode has optimistic corollaries which he partly recognises. If the environment is such that violence is costly, a rational organism will choose the path of peace. Whatever political scientists may argue about the broad sweep of history, aggressive war has not been a profitable policy from World War I onwards. The aggressors lost both wars, and the victors reaped nothing but grief in their attempts to extract benefits from their victories. More recently, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic have ruined their countries and, in all probability, themselves by playing the politics of war. The real threat today is neither the rational use of force in the manner of Clausewitz nor aggressive genes inherited from the Pleistocene past but the culturally-generated craziness of Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh.

Ultimately, whatever contribution our genes may or may not make to our nature, there is not much we can do about them. Unless we are prepared to embark on large-scale genetic re-engineering, our only hope is to focus on those aspects of our condition that are amenable to nurture.

April 02, 2004

Newsflash: sex discovered in 1985

Posted by John Quiggin

This piece in the Melbourne Age by Michael Scammell manages to hit nearly all my hot buttons at once. It includes generation-game garbage, postmodernist apologias for the advertising industry, support for exploitation of workers, and heaps of all-round stupidity. The background to the story, it appears, is that a clothing store called Westco required its female staff to wear T-shirts carrying a lame double entendre. One worker refused, and the Victorian Minister for Women’s Affairs, Mary Delahunty protested, with the result that the company abandoned the promotion. Scammell attempts to set Ms Delahunty straight on the subjects of postmodernist irony and the recent discovery of sex.

The headline (not picked by the author, but a direct lift from the article) is Sex sells. Gen X knows this. MPs don’t. I know every generation is supposed to imagine that it invented sex, but not even the most self-indulgent of baby boomers would have the chutzpah to claim this insight as their own. Vance Packard was making hay with this kind of thing back in the 50s, and it was tired old stuff then. In any case, this discovery predates the wheel. Hasn’t Scammell heard the phrase “the oldest profession”?

Then he claims that the slogan on the T-shirt “stop pretending you don’t want me” represents ” a dollop of knowing post-modernist irony”. If this is post-modernist irony, I’ll stick with the modernist version, or better still that of the classics like Dr Johnson.

But for all-round stupidity you can’t beat Scammell’s observation that it must be all right because “Westco reports a significant public demand for the T-shirt despite its seemingly offensive message”. Can’t he see that there’s a big difference between wearing a provocative T-shirt to advertise your own wares to members of the opposite (or perhaps your own) gender, and being made to wear one to flog the wares of your employer, who is doubtless offering little more than the minimum wage for the privilege. Obviously the Westco worker who refused to wear the shirt and made a fuss about it could see what the score was. (In a non sequitur that’s typical of the piece, Scammell asserts that since this worker was willing to stand up for herself, there can’t have been a problem in the first place).

Scammell goes on about “grid girls” at the Grand Prix, and near-naked models at fashion shows, but these workers know what they are offering from the start and (at least in the case of successful models) are paid accordingly. If he wants to work out what’s going on here, Scammell would be well advised to go back to school and learn some old-fashioned class analysis instead of the 1990s postmodernism he apparently thinks is still hip.

March 04, 2004

Jackboot

Posted by Chris

“The launch of his Kulturkampf has been a blitzkrieg.”

Sidney Blumenthal trips over the fascist octopus in a polemic against G.W. Bush.

March 01, 2004

What's in the order of a name?

Posted by Eszter

In the comments section of Chris’ recent post about a date, people have started debating whether it makes more sense to list the year, month or day first in a date. This discussion made me think about how different languages/cultures present names. In Hungary, “last” name comes first. To me this always made logical sense. After all, even in cultures where given name comes first (a practice that seems to be prevalent in most places I know) the order of the names gets reversed on certain lists to put the family name up front. This makes more sense, for example, when alphabetizing people in a group (e.g. in a classroom). So why does given name come before family name otherwise? Other than Hungary, I have heard in Japan family name is listed first, can anyone confirm that? Are there any other examples of such ordering of names?

Completely trivial

Posted by Chris

I still have a childhood memory of our teacher pointing out that the date was 6/6/66. Tomorrow, at one minute past midnight, in those (sensible) countries which represent dates as day/month/year, the time and date can be represented as the sequence 00:01/02/03/04 .

February 18, 2004

Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away

Posted by John Quiggin

Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, in today's Australian

But, of course, if the international community knew early last year what it knows now about Saddam's WMD programs, there would have been less debate in the Security Council about the appropriate action. Kay's report shows that removing Saddam was the only way the international community could be assured that he would no longer threaten anyone with WMDs. Far from unstuck, the WMD case is proven.

February 10, 2004

In Defense of Rumsfeld

Posted by John Quiggin

US Secretary of Defense has received general derision for the following rather convoluted statement

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know
As I'm giving two papers on this general topic in the next couple of days, I feel I should come to his defense on this. Although the language may be tortured, the basic point is both valid and important.

The standard planning procedures recommended in decision theory begin with the assumption that the decisionmaker has foreseen every relevant contingency. Given this assumption, making the right decision is a simple matter of attaching probabilities (or, if you like my rank-dependent generalization of the standard model, decision weights) to each of the contingencies, attaching benefit numbers (utilities) to the contingent outcomes that will arise from a given course of action, then taking a weighted average. Whatever course of outcome yields the best average outcome is the right one to take. In this way, uncertainty about the future can be 'domesticated' and reduced to certainty equivalents.

The problem is that, in reality, you can't foresee all possible contingencies = the 'unknown unknowns' Rumsfeld is talking about are precisely these unforeseen contingencies. Some of the time this doesn't matter. If the unforeseen contingencies tend to cancel each other out, then the course of action recommended by standard decision theory will usually be a pretty good one. But in many contexts, surprises are almost certain to be unpleasant. In such contexts, it's wise to avoid actions that are optimal for the contingencies under consideration, but are likely to be derailed by anything out of the ordinary. There's a whole literature on robust decision theory that's relevant here.

Having defended Rumsfeld, I'd point out that the considerations he refers to provide the case for being very cautious in going to war. Experience shows that decisions to go to war, taken on the basis of careful calculation of the foreseeable consequences, have turned out badly more often than not, and disastrously badly on many occasions. The calculations of the German military leading up to World War I, including the formulation of the Schleiffen plan, provide an ideal example.

Finally, I should mention that I saw a link at the time to a post somewhere that seemed, from the one sentence summary to be making a similar point, but I was too busy too follow it, and can't now locate it. Anyone who can find it for me gets a free mention in the update.

UpdateAt least one such post has come to my attention, atLanguage Log, along with a useful link to Sylvain Bromberger who has, it seems, written extensively on the theory of ignorance. I will be keen to chase this up.

February 03, 2004

Horoscope-ed page

Posted by John Quiggin

The 'Gray Lady' nickname of the NYT implies the kind of conservatism and caution that's appropriate to a journal of record. But in what is, as far as I know, a newspaper first, today's NYT brings the astrology column onto the Op-Ed page, providing horoscopes for the Democratic Presidential hopefuls.

I'm bemused by this. If the implied view is that astrology is so patently silly that no-one would take it seriously, isn't this rather a juvenile trick to play on Erin Sullivan, noted as the author of Saturn in Transit and the forthcoming Astrology and Psychology of Midlife and Aging., who appears to have contributed her column in all seriousness? If the implied view is anything other than that astrology is too silly to be taken seriously, isn't this insulting to every reader of the NYT who has even a high school level of scientific literacy? No doubt there is some ironic postmodern stance that is appropriate here, but I can't quite locate it.

Update The Letters page ran three letters on this, one tongue-in-cheek supportive, one critical and one, from an astrologer, concluding

I hope that Ms. Sullivan's intelligent presentation of astrology is just the first for The Times. Perhaps we now know what we've suspected all along: the Gray Lady always reads her horoscope like everyone else.
I think we have to conclude that the NYT is "having two bob each way"* on this one.

* This Australian idiom refers to a horesracing bet that pays off for either a win or a place.

January 13, 2004

Logic in the Times

Posted by Brian

From the NY Times:

Tim Hurd, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a branch of the Transportation Department, said a vehicle either met the specific technical requirements of being a light truck, or it did not.

January 05, 2004

Tony Soprano as management icon

Posted by Chris

Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times (my favourite columnist but subscribers only) reveals that:

A new year and a new type of management hero: Tony Soprano, foul-mouthed, bullying mob boss from the telly. Tony has just had a leadership book written about him, putting him on a par with Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, General George S. Patton, Moses, Sven-Goran Eriksson and Jesus, all of whom have been sucked dry for their last management lesson. But with Leadership Sopranos Style , Deborrah Himsel has taken the genre into fictional territory for the first time (that is if one gives Moses the benefit of the doubt). Ms Himsel, whose day job is vice-president of organisational effectiveness at Avon Products, explains her unusual choice of subject as follows: “Tony’s . . . results orientation and empathy are certainly at the heart of his leadership gestalt.”

January 02, 2004

Beer

Posted by Chris

orval.jpg
Oddbins the off-licence (that’s liquor store to you guys) nearest my home recently got in a largish selection of Belgian beers. I spent a month in Belgium just over a year ago and one of the many pleasures of being there was sampling as many of their excellent brews as I could. There are many many different styles, but my favourite of all was a Trappist beer (made by monks) called Orval . It is not as strong as the other Trappists and has a slight aftertaste of grapefruit (no-one else tastes this!). Every Belgian beer has its own dedicated glass and Orval is no exception - it is one of the most stylish.

As well as the Trappists (Orval , Chimay , Rochefort ,Westmalle and Westvleteren - the hardest to obtain) there are many distinctive styles such as the Lambics (Gueze Belle Vue) either straight or fruit flavoured, lager-style beers, British-style beers (developed for WW1 Scottish soldiers), dark ales, white beers (such as Hoegaarden) and so on. I’ve been given many different estimates of how many different ones there are (up to 2500!) Wonderful.

November 05, 2003

Follow-ups

Posted by Chris

A couple of follow-ups to things I’ve blogged recently: Tim Lambert has assembled a chart of where various bloggers are on the Political Compass test. Three Timberites are listed so far. The two dimensions of the test seem to resolve to one in practice, with most people on a diagonal running from left-libertarian (hooray!) to right-authoritarian (boo!). In unrelated news, there’s an op-ed at PLANETIZEN by Robert Steuteville on the new urbanism and crime issue (link via City Comforts ).

November 04, 2003

Type Like a Pirate Day

Posted by Brian

Apparently it’s easier on your hands to type like a pirate. (Hat tip: Mark Liberman.)

October 22, 2003

Leaves on the line

Posted by Chris

Travellers on Britain’s rail network are used to long delays and an all-round miserable experience. They are also used to implausible sounding announcement involving excuses aimed at “customers” (“passengers” having been abolished by some deranged management consultant around the time of privatization). One well known one is “leaves on the line”. Now the Guardian has an account of why the leaves might indeed have become a problem, and only recently! “The wrong kind of snow” still awaits an adequate explanation. (Hat tip to The Virtual Stoa .)

September 16, 2003

Writing, thinking, daydreaming

Posted by Chris

Musing further on whether technological development has helped or hindered thinking, and especially philosophical thinking, it occurs to me that the ideas of which I’m (rightly or wrongly) most proud have generally started not when I’ve been trying to do philosophy, but when I’ve been daydreaming about it whilst doing something else: travelling on a train, riding a bicycle, swimming or whatever. Purely mechanical and repetitive activities can been good for this too, though it is for good reason that there are a whole range of philosophical stories in which philosophers let cooking pots boil over, poison people or run them down whilst in the middle of their reveries.

Then there’s the business of writing, of trying to turn ideas into publishable prose. I’ve adopted two strategies for getting this done - both of which work very well, but eventually seem to run their course.

Strategy A is the Anthony Burgess method. I read an obituary of Burgess which revealed that he would write 1000 words every day before retiring to the nearest bar to sip a martini. I’m sorry to say that I skipped the martini part, but, for a long time managed the routine of 1000 words. Many of those words, certainly most of those words were garbage and got thrown away, but gradually, like whisking mayonnaise, publishable material started to emerge. Indeed my best ever paper (IMHO) came from following this writing strategy.

Strategy B I think of as the “football method”. Whilst I can spend whole mornings (and afternoons) getting absolutely nothing done, everyone who watches football (soccer) knows just how much can happen even in a few minutes of extra time. (I spend far too much of my life watching football matches.) I’ve found that 45 minutes of intense writing activity, followed by a 15-minute break (half-time) followed by a further 45 minutes, is also very productive (repeat as required).

The two methods are similar in that they allow you to get a lot done (cumulatively) in a little time, though one is like piecework and the other is like payment by the hour. Given I know their effectiveness, I think the complaint academics make that they don’t have enough time for writing and research is probably misconceived. Time, strictly speaking, isn’t the issue. What is a problem — as I know from the fact that I’m having to manage a department for the second time in my life — is that it is far too easy for other matters to colonise your head. To work effectively you need to be able to do a combination of concentration and daydreaming (self-hypnosis is good here!) but that isn’t possible if your thoughts are full of finances, staffing problems and achieving the next government target.

August 20, 2003

Trotsky's great-grand-daughter

Posted by Chris

Via both CalPundit and Mark Kleiman comes the news that Trotsky’s great-grand-daughter has a high-profile position in US administations as director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She seems to have an odd line on the incompatibility of science and politics. An interesting nugget of historical gossip, anyway.

August 18, 2003

Road signs

Posted by Chris

For me, one of the interesting things about visiting another country is the slight strangeness of the everyday. In France, for example, everything is slightly different from England: light fittings, electrical sockets, window catches and openings, the fact that they don’t use kettles, the typography on signs etc etc. Having lived in France for a while, I really really enjoy films like Polanski’s The Tenant and Depardieu’s Loulou for the way in which they get the detail of French life. Ireland just isn’t weird like this. Everything is the same as back home … or so it seems. Then, having been lulled into complacency by the apparent familiarity of everyday objects one is pulled up short by something that just isn’t how an English brain expects it to be.

Road signs are a good example of this. In England, signs painted on the road surface are laid out as they would be on a page, reading from top to bottom. In Ireland, such signs are designed on the sensible (but different) assumption that the driver will process the words in the order in which the car approaches them. None of the guidebooks we have warn about this! So, approaching a bridge on a country road we encounter:


STOP

TO

PREPARE


An English driver’s brain says STOP! at this point - which is exactly what we did whilst working out what we were supposed to be preparing for. Another good one was


TAKING

OVER -

NO


Into which my brain subliminally inserts a question mark, presenting me with the advertising slogan-like “Taking over? No”, and then pauses expectantly for some continuation like “Try Smith’s widgets instead!” You get used to it in the end.

August 17, 2003

Ireland

Posted by Chris

Pauline and I are just back from a ten-day holiday in Ireland. It was our first time there and we were impressed. It also turned out to be a pretty smart place to visit given the prevailing weather conditions: untypically there was hardly a drop of rain, but the temperatures were comfortable rather than lethally hot (as they were elswhere in Europe).

I may opine further on the country over the coming days, but given CT’s numerous Irish contingent, I’m sure to get slapped down by those with greater expertise. Without them, though, the holiday probably wouldn’t have happened and certainly wouldn’t have taken the form it did. Thanks first to Henry (and family), whom we were lucky enough to meet up with and enjoy a wonderful lunch of Killorglin smoked salmon provided by his mum, which we followed by an exciting drive across the Kerry mountains. Here’s a partial Crooked Timber team photo in Kerry (Henry is the tall, handsome one).


chrisandhenry.JPG

And thanks to Kieran, whose post last year about Newgrange set me thinking about visiting Ireland. Newgrange is a remarkable and magical place which puts Stonehenge in the shade. 5200 years old, perfectly aligned with the sun for the winter solstice, and absolutely dry inside after five millennia. What an achievement.

August 05, 2003

Hiatus

Posted by Chris

This particular bit of wood is off for a brief holiday in Ireland. Henry reported a while back that internet access isn’t great. So even if I wanted to, I probably couldn’t blog. With luck, I should meet up with Henry in Kerry somewhere - thereby doubling the number of Timberites I’ve encountered in “real life”.

July 25, 2003

Orwell on food technology and modernity

Posted by Chris

I posted a pointed to to a moderately pro-GM report the other day. But in the comments section I got pretty revolted by the suggestion that one day we might synthesize all our food. As I said there, I want my potatoes from the earth and my apples from a tree. I don’t think there’s anything especially “green” about feeling this and I’m somewhat embarassed, as someone who is supposed to live by good arguments, by how hard I find it to get beyond the raw data of feeling, intuition and emotion when I try to think about what is of value.

The best I can do, is, I think to notice how much of that is of value in human life has to do with an engagement with the natural world and a recognition of the uniqueness and (sorry about this word) the ‘otherness’ of the world beyond the human. I’m not just thinking about raw untamed nature here (Lear on the heath) but also about the way in which an artist has to work with the natural properties of pigments, a gardener has to work with plants and their distinctive characteristics, and a cook has to work with ingredients. Architects too have to work with materials, with stone, wood and so on.

Contrast this with an attitude that sees the non-human world as merely an instrument for or an obstacle to the realization of human designs and intentions. On this view what is out there has no intrinsic value that we ought to respond to and respect. (And perhaps when we think that it does, we are just engaged in a projection of our concerns onto the world.)

As I’ve suggested, I’m not really sure how to think in this area (is this ethics, aesthetics or what?). And I’m alive to the danger that I’m running together a whole range of different issues that ought, properly, to be distinguished from one another. While worrying about all this, Orwell came into my head. I’m thinking partly of the Orwell of The Road to Wigan Pier who is revolted at technology-freak socialists of his day and who observes that the tendency of of modern development is to turn us all into brains on the end of wires. But a famous passage from Coming Up for Air also came to mind: the one where Bowling bites into a sausage:

The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly—pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was FISH! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.

Outside the newsboy shoved the Standard into my face and yelled, ‘Legs! ‘Orrible revelations! All the winners! Legs! Legs!’ I was still rolling the stuff round my tongue, wondering where I could spit it out. I remembered a bit I’d read in the paper somewhere about these food-factories in Germany where everything’s made out of something else. Ersatz, they call it. I remembered reading that THEY were making sausages out of fish, and fish, no doubt, out of something different. It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of. That’s the way we’re going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruit-trees. But when you come down to brass tacks and get your teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that’s what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth.

The attitudes Orwell’s character is repelled by are now found less on the left and more in parts of the right (especially the libertarian right). TechCentralStation is a good place to observe them. But this clearly isn’t a left-right thing. Nor is it straightforwardly a matter of modernism versus anti-modernism. I also want to be alive to and to respond to the excitement and fluidity of the modern world - driven, in parts by markets and technological developement. Nevertheless, Orwell (together here with Rousseau, and Wordsworth, and …) is onto something important, I just wish I could better articulate exactly what it is.