Picking up on some remarks of mine, Brian Leiter is playing the “which contemporary philosophers will still be read in 100 years” game – which can be quite fun. My money is on Rawls and Parfit. Not that they are necessarily the best, but other contenders who have written less monumental works will have their thoughts incorporated into philosophical discourse in a way that floats free of the original form those thoughts were couched in.
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Chris Bertram
In recent weeks the hit TV programme on British TV has been Restoration, which invites viewers to vote for the dilapidated country house, castle, factory or mausoleum they most want renovated. Patrick Wright has been a shrewd observer of the “heritage industry” since the publication of his landmark _On Living in an Old Country_ in the mid-1980s. He has a good essay in the Guardian on the ambivalence of restoration and on the often -attached social snobbery. He reveals, among other things, that it was veteran anarchist Colin Ward who coined the phrase “heritage industry” in the first place. I’ve been active in Bristol Civic Society for the past few years, and the tension Wright points to between a backward-looking conservationism and the desire to preserve and build a well-functioning urban environment is one that I see played out all the time. Read the whole thing.
I blogged a while back about wanting to see Good Bye Lenin, and I finally managed to do so last night., so this is just a minor update. I’d recommend it: it is warm, funny, touching and humane and I managed the suspension of disbelief a lot better than I’d anticipated from contemplating the idea of the film. I was surprised to see that the auditorium was packed. I have the good fortune to have a small cinema at the end of my street (how long it will survive, I don’t know) and I’d been to see Veronica Guerin a couple of weeks earlier in the same place on the same night of the week and there had been just three of us watching. Odd that GBL should be so much more popular.
I was not surprised that the newspaper which carried a column including the lines “A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully” in the aftermath of September 11th 2001, should head its comment page two years on with a reference to September 11th 1973. The message the Guardian thereby seeks to convey is that what happened in New York two years ago is nothing special, and has to be seen in the context of US responsibility for other crimes against humanity.
After September 11th 2001, I was, like many other people, disgusted by the various statements made in the Guardian, New Statesman, London Review of Books and elsewhere, to the effect that the victims somehow got what they deserved, shouldn’t really be considered innocent and so on. I said so at the time, and then later on my blog, Junius, and then in a paper I wrote on the war in Afghanistan. When, as liberal or a leftist, you make such points, you get a good deal of approbation from the conservative and libertarian parts of the blogosphere. The sentiment being “joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.” It is nice to be praised, to be considered part of the “decent left” and a “non-idiotarian”. While I may flatter myself that I’m not especially susceptible to flattery, I know that I’m not exactly immune to it either.
In today’s FT, Samuel Brittan reviews John Gillingham’s European Integration, 1950-2003 : Superstate or New Market Economy?. One interesting snippet, which I knew about but deserves wider publicity:
bq. Readers may be more surprised to find the name of Frederich Hayek given as the source of the alternative neoliberal interpretation. For most of today’s self-proclaimed Hayekians view everything to do with the EU with intense suspicion. Indeed I was sufficiently surprised myself to look up some of Hayek’s writings on the subject. Although he played no part in the post war institutional discussion, he had written at some length on the problems of federalism in the late 1930s. Hayek was among those who believed that some form of federalism, whether in Europe or on a wider basis, was an important step towards a more peaceful world. In a 1939 essay, remarkably anticipating the EU Single Market Act, he argued that a political union required some elements of a common economic policy, such as a common tariff, monetary and exchange rate policy, but also a ban on intervention to help particular producers.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s latest post – The Fabric of the City – deserves a wide readership, both for itself and for the wealth of resources it links to. Lots of stuff about New York’s transportation infrastructure, abandoned subway stations and so on. There’s something about abandoned stations (especially underground ones) that calls to mind murder, mystery, romance (the stuff of old movies basically). There used to be such a station, perhaps more than one, on Berlin’s U-Bahn. It was part of the West Berlin network but was situated under East Berlin. The trains would pass through slowly, the old station was illuminated by a few 40w light bulbs and (I think) sometimes there were East German police on the platform with dogs.
One can’t be a blogger for long before being reminded of the sad truth that people tend to believe information that is congenial to their interests and disbelieve that which isn’t. The blogosphere, and the internet more generally, provides people with a ready made source of prejudice-confirming information. There’s a ready-made market then for sites like TechCentralStation that have the convenient look of authoritative sources but are actually largely written by bloggers of a libertarian and/or conservative cast of mind to provide easy, prejudice-congenial op-ed-like material.
I spent some time looking at TCS’s global warming pages at the weekend. These are largely devoted to debunking the view held by the majority of expert opinion that CO2 emissions have contributed substantially to global warming. It would, after all, be pretty convenient if conventional opinion turned out to be mistaken: I haven’t done a survey but I’d be willing to wager that an average member of TCS’s core demographic emits rather more carbon than typical human beings do.
I watched Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew yesterday. I’d been meaning to watch it after reading Jerry Cohen’s report of the effect it had had on him (see If You’re an Egalitarian How Come You’re So Rich?). I’m not a religious person, but the film did not disappoint. It is an extraordinarily sparse portrayal of the story, shot in black and white against the Italian countryside. The acting can’t account for the power of the film, because, there really isn’t any. The actors are all non-professionals and, mostly, they just stand around and look (there are many closeups on their faces). The camera often shakes, and the production values are crude. But Pasolini succeeds in creating something of great beauty and emotional power.
There’s no real need to comment on Michael Meacher’s ravings about 9/11, but the BBC report (as currently displayed – I’m sure they’ll fix it) contains the following:
bq. Mr Meacher told the Today programme he was a conspiracy theorist and said he was simply “in favour of giving people the facts”.
UPDATE: They’ve now inserted the “not”.
Glenn Reynolds asks
“WHY DOES THE EUROPEAN UNION hate the world’s poor so much?”
and links to a Guardian article about Franz Fischler’s rejection of demands from poor countries that the Common Agricultural Policy be reformed. Fair enough, it should be: Europe should abandon its protectionist policies that, as Glenn says, harm the poor. But a more thorough reading of the same article would have led him to this paragraph:
bq. Washington and Brussels have tabled a joint proposal on agriculture that would involve far smaller cuts in protectionism than developing countries want. The proposal has been countered by a blueprint from leading developing countries that would involve far more aggressive reductions.
A joint proposal then? So it isn’t just those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys after all.
OpenDemocracy has a short piece by Paul Barker on the late Cedric Price and the idea of the Non-Plan. Here’s a quote that will delight some and annoy others:
bq. “Architects”, he once said, “are the greatest whores in town. They talk in platitudes about improving the quality of life, and then get out drawings of the prison they’re working on.”
The idea of the non-plan sounds fascinating:
bq. He and I collaborated on Non-Plan, an anti-planning polemic, which infuriated architects, planners and assorted do-gooders. The idea emerged during a conversation I had with Peter Hall, geographer and planner, in the late 1960s. Both of us were appalled at the disasters that urban planning had brought about. We wondered if things could be any worse if there were no planning at all.
bq. What worried our critics, who were many, when the four of us published our Non-Plan issue of New Society (20 March 1969), was their uncertainty about our political stance. Was this anarchism? Or deep-dyed conservatism, a precursor of Thatcherism? Our essential point was that you should always think very hard before telling other people how they ought to live. They had their own preferences, which ought to be respected.
bq. We suggested carrying out a Non-Plan test. Four districts should be freed from all controls, and we could then judge whether the upshot was any worse than what happened with the controls on. To make readers sit up, we chose four much-cherished slices of English countryside for our test. The resultant incandescence was highly satisfactory.
I’m intruiged, and mean to find out more.
From a Guardian article bemoaning the decline of national cinematic traditions comes the following catalogue of national characteristics as revealed in film:
bq. The Japanese, haunted by feudal warlords and ancestral ghosts. The Italians, preoccupied with fascism, communism and huge family meals. The Spanish, grappling with catholicism, beggars and a taste for the surreal. The repressed, puritanical, Swedes. The French, who adored infidelity, bourgeois dinner parties and murders in provincial towns. The British, engaged in an interminable class struggle. The Russians, the Poles and the Czechs, evading the communist censors with sophisticated comedies and metaphorical allegories. And, of course, the Americans and their obsession with rugged individualism, the wild frontier and the “American dream”.
Oxford philosopher Kathy Wilkes, probably best known for her book Physicalism has died. The London Times has has a obituary. (I’ve now started to add Donald Davison obituaries to this post).
Speaking of Rousseau, I hope that my fellow-Timberites will forgive a little self-publicity. I now have copies of my new book Rousseau and The Social Contract in my hands, and a very nice feeling it is too. If you’d like to buy a copy (for only £9.99) you can click on the image below (which takes you to Amazon’s UK website). The publication date is tomorrow for the UK, but not until November for the US (I’ll post a link to the main Amazon site when it becomes available there).
Over at the Virtual Stoa, Chris Brooke has an highly entertaining post on the uses of the classic western in explaining Rousseau’s political philosophy:
bq. One of the many valuable things I learned from Bonnie Honig when I was a graduate student was that the reasons why Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s lawgiver must leave the city he helps to found in Book Two Chapter Seven of the Social Contract are the same as the reasons why the cowboy rides off into the sunset at the end of a Western….