To Bristol’s Victoria Rooms last night for a fine performance of Mahler 6 by the University Orchestra. The moments when the hammer strikes in the final movement were visually, as well as musically, dramatic. Chatting afterwards, I learnt that the conductor had made a special trip to west London, to collect the hammer and its accompanying table. It is a great big mallet like-thing with a very long shaft. It turns out that there’s a special Mahler 6 hammer, there’s only one in the country, and orchestras hire it as necessary. So you couldn’t perform two Mahler 6s on the same evening in different parts of the UK, at least not with _the hammer_. Does each country have a dedicated Mahler 6 hammer as the UK seems to?
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Chris Bertram
I bought a Song dynasty Qingbai bowl at the weekend. So what’s so great about that, you might reasonably ask? After all, it lacks the beauty of some more modern ceramic pieces. It is hardly a patch on a high-fired Ruskin vase, from a purely aesthetic point of view. (Some of the more delicate northern Song pieces might compete, but not this one.) Well I think the attraction is this. Here’s an artefact, made from an amazing material, porcelain, about a thousand years ago. Someone crafted it then, and someone (maybe someone else) incised little pictures of fishes as decoration on the inside. They probably made hundreds, indeed thousands of similar bowls. They lived a life long ago in a place very distant from where I live (maybe Jingdezhen), and they are now dead, many many generations past. When they lived, England was feudal, probably the Normans had recently invaded, and life was short and fairly brutish. But the artefact survives, a very material, tactile link between that human being’s craft activity and the present.
I’ve suggested to some of the other CTers that we should have an online reading group on G.A. Cohen’s _Rescuing Justice and Equality_ (“Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674030761/junius-20 , “Amazon.uk”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674030761/junius-21). They can’t do it until January, so this is a heads-up. When we get started we’ll cover a chapter a week, with maybe different people taking the lead (Harry, Ingrid, Jon? …) and then comments will be open. But a condition of commenting is that you’ve actually read the text under discussion (violators will be deleted). So if you want to take part you need to get the book, and you need to get reading and thinking.
When I first started going out with my partner Pauline, in the early 1980s, I had a somewhat dismal opinion of Liverpool. She wanted to show me how great the city could be, so she insisted on taking me to the Palm House in Sefton Park. I rather vividly remember how distressed she was to find that the beatiful structure of her childhood was derelict and vandalized. My father, whose mother came from the city often recalls a visit just after the war, to a city that was incomparably exciting. He remembered the overhead railway, the buses, the underground – a place alive.
That Liverpool is the subject of Terence Davies’s wonderful poetic treatment, “Of Time and the City”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1232790/ (“Official site”:http://www.oftimeandthecity.com/index.php ). He takes the city of empire, of shipbuilding and docks, of sport, of children playing on working-class streets — the city of his childhood — and traces its decline and collapse through the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, he indicates, through music — especially his use of Mahler’s 2nd — that there is life yet and the possibility of return. It is hard to give a flavour of the combination of image, music, poetry and personal recollection that Davies conveys, but he tells us of a place that is badly damaged but still has immense weight and grandeur (aptly evoked in his shots both of industrial landscape and of great Victorian buildings like St George’s Hall). Of course it is a film that will mean most to those from the city, perhaps especially the legion of exiled scousers. But it said a lot to me, with a more episodic connection, and even those who only know it from a distance will love Davies’s work. Get to see it if you possibly can.
Liberty, the British organization that campaigns for civil liberties and against state abuse of power, has a new website centred on the British government’s proposal to hold people without charge in terrorism cases for up to 42 days. Fortunately, the House of Lords has thrown the measure out for the time being, but they may well try to bring it back again. In the meantime, whether in celebration of the measure’s defeat or anticipation of its return, you can read the thoughts of a collection of writers including Ian Rankin, Julian Barnes and Stella Duffy (particularly good, I thought).
I’ve not been able to access my work voicemail for the past month. I moved offices, but took my number with me. When I tried to access my voicemail, I kept getting a “number not recognized” message. Today, they finally told me that I had to dial a new and different number for voicemail access, different, that is, from the standard variation on the number people call to speak to me (or to _leave_ the voicemail). So I dial the new code. There’s a a month-old message from the voicemail people: “thanks for your inquiry about not being able to access your voicemail. You can’t access it on the old number, you’ll need to dial XXXX instead.”
The Times “has a story”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article5063279.ece that “Peter Millican”:http://philosophy.hertford.ox.ac.uk/peter.htm , an Oxford philosopher, was offered $10,000 to help some Republicans “prove” that Obama’s memoirs were ghost-written by Bill Ayers. On a bizarreness scale of 1 to 10, that gets close to the Obama-was-Malcolm-X’s-lovechild story.
In “Maria’s thread below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/10/27/liberte-egalite-celebrite/, commenter Iain Coleman writes:
bq. My hopes about Obama are limited to my expectation that he will be much like Bill Clinton, but with a bit more political capital and fewer illicit blowjobs. If Obama can just achieve that much, I will be delighted.
Much concurring and Clintonista apologetics followed, from the likes of commenter MQ.
Well like Coleman, I’m not an American, nor an American resident. But, of course, I have lived under the Blair government, which overlapped with Clinton’s and shared some of its (non-blowjob) characteristics. And I’m inclined to say, “not good enough, people”. It is an exaggeration to say that every child can recite the achievements of the Attlee government in Britain or the New Deal in America, but if we had decent education systems, it wouldn’t be. It is hard to imagine even a well-educated child in a social-democratic future being able to tell us what Clinton or Blair managed in their time (except, of course, the bad stuff, in each of their cases).
There’s also a good deal of “in the circumstances” excusing in that thread. Well the circumstances included the post-Cold War dividend, with which they did almost exactly nothing. Clinton managed capitalism a bit better than the Republicans; Blair cemented the post-Thatcher consensus, spent some extra money in public services rather ineffectively, tried to micro-social-engineer using a confusing system of tax credits that no-one understands, and increased the independence of the Bank of England. Well, terrific.
There is a criterion that any progressive government ought to meet. It is one that I might quibble with in a seminar but not in life. A progressive (left, liberal, social-democratic government) ought to alter social arrangements so that they work significantly more to the benefit of the the least-advantaged members of society that they did when that government came to power. Well, The Wire is fiction, and I’ve never visited the West Side of Baltimore, but did Clinton make a difference in places like that? And are the Valleys of South Wales less (or more) hopeless places than they were ten years ago?
Clinton’s eight years and New Labour’s eleven were disappointing. They led (or will lead) to cynicism and demoralization and to renewed periods of conservative government. People can thrash around and find this or that good thing that they did (and no doubt will in comments) – but on the criterion I just gave their achievements were nugatory.
So I don’t think it is too much to hope that Obama will do better. Because doing better wouldn’t be doing much. And if Obama can’t do just a bit better, then we had better just stop all those seminars on theories of justice and “realistic utopias” and so forth, because it will be hard to imagine the possibility of any government making significant progress toward the goals we pointy-headed liberal academics discuss in seminars.
“It’s been there for a few days, apparently”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2008/oct/10/wildlife-conservation . But I first heard this morning. Someone took me round the side of the building where I work and there it was. So big and powerful, I could hardly believe it. Snoozing for now, oblivious to the stream of people passing by to take a look. You almost wonder whether small children would be safe in the vicinity. Not the kind of thing you ordinarily see in the middle of an English city.
Update: I took some pictures this morning ….
Anyone hanging round the blogosphere for a while must have encountered the wingnut obsession with evul leftists/MSM using Photoshop to do down their side. What’s this? The latest Republican talking point is that the evul leftists/MSM have _refrained_ from using Photoshop to enhance portraits of the beautiful and saintly Sarah Palin. Has the fiendishness of the MSM no limits? Virginal Postrel in the Atlantic “has some reflections”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200810u/photo-retouching . (Via the – most excellent – Online Photographer, who “also covered the story a while back”:http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2008/10/and-damned-if-y.html .)
“I have yet to meet someone who does not want a naked picture of their loved ones with text about themselves.”
“Says the wife of the President of Iceland”:http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4926407.ece . The next time I’m in ReykjavÃk, I’ll introduce myself as a counterexample.
In political philosophy you should play the ball rather than kicking the player, right? Well I agree. But then it gets hard to find a legitimate role for the Mandy Rice-Davies argument. And such arguments sometimes seem appropriate. It seems ok to notice that Hegel might have erred in finding that the local socio-political framework was what _Geist_ was aiming at all along, and that this might represent a kind of dull parochialism on his part. And when Kant isn’t willing to admit barbers to citizenship, but has fewer qualms about wig-makers, and thinks that reason supports him, we suspect something has gone wrong. It isn’t hard to multiply the examples …. Aristotle on slavery anyone?
Generally, I think, one should expect the comparatively liberal people in a society to articulate a kind of weaselly compromise between an impartial perspective and whatever the local chauvinisms and prejudices are. Partly this is psychological: it is hard to believe that uncles, aunts, cousins and neighbours are bad people, so one gives some weight to their attachments and beliefs as legitimate. Partly the pressure is political: in a democratic society winning means building a coalition and that means including the median voter. It is hard to build a coalition in bad faith, to secretly believe that your nation is a rapacious imperial power whilst reaching out to others who believe that it is a great country which (despite mistakes) basically does good in the world. And then there’s the fact that intellectuals who do try to detach themselves from local prejudice, from what the person on the bus thinks and cares about, often seem to lack a necessary reality check and end up saying a lot of crazy stuff that then earns them hostility and ridicule, some of it deserved. You don’t want to be like those guys.
So, for example, liberal Serbs kind of acknowledge that Milosevic did some bad stuff, but urge you to see the context, the other side of the picture. Liberal Israelis loathe the settlers and all their works and feel kind of bad about the Nakba and the occupation, but think of the Zionist project as basically legitimate and good. Liberal Russians might bemoan some of Putin’s excesses, but think that something had to be done about Chechnya. Etc. And, again, you can multiply the examples. Moreover (and it complicates the picture) some of these people might actually be right. In their case, the truth really might lie in the middle.
So, leaving the supporting arguments to one side, for a moment, what sort of conclusions about the world would you expect well-paid American liberal intellectuals to reach when they came to think about global justice? I guess I’d expect the following. I’d expect a good deal of hand-wringing about the relationship between patriotism and universal morality, and I’d expect them to discover a legitimate role for patriotism. They’d find out that it is perfectly permissible to have a limited preference for one’s fellow citizens (especially poor and minority ones) over outsiders. They’d therefore agonize about issues such as immigration but accept the right of states to control their borders, reject the notion that justice requires any kind of global redistributive principle but favour some limited doctrine of “assistance” to those suffering desperate poverty overseas. And I’d expect them, being smart people, to come up with some varied and ingenious arguments to support such conclusions. John Rawls, Michael Blake, Samuel Freeman, Richard Miller, Thomas Nagel, Elizabeth Anderson … even (or especially?) Michael Walzer, end up in the same place. Kind of a coincidence huh? What would Mandy say about that?
Pancho: So what does political philosophy have to say about the banking crisis?
Lefty: Excuse me?
Pancho: Well, millions ruined, pensions and savings binned, an appeal to taxpayers to save the banks? It all seems rather, um, well _distributive_… I’d have thought you could give us some policy advice?
Lefty: Well I don’t really do that kind of thing, I do ideal theory.
Pancho: What’s that when it’s at home?
Lefty: I’m mainly concerned with devising optimal principles of social regulation under conditions of strict compliance, this is far too messy for me …
Pancho: Go on, have a go!
Lefty: OK well, since you insist …. Luck egalitarianism might be a good starting point.
This blog post is a shameless plug for a friend’s book. But I wouldn’t be writing it if I didn’t believe that the book is a tremendous achievement, as well as being a very moving personal document. “Havi Carel’s Illness: The Cry of the Flesh”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844651525/junius-20 (“UK link “:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844651525/junius-21) is published tomorrow by Acumen. It is a philosophical meditation on the nature of and social meaning illness, disease and death. It discusses philosophical and psychological literature, Epicurus, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. But it is also a personal memoir, it is about Havi’s experience of being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, about what that meant for her presence in the world, about how she appeared in the eyes of others, and how she felt she appeared. It is about the encounter with medical professionals and their detached and external perspective on another’s catastrophe; it is about the varied reactions of friends, some of whom couldn’t maintain friendship. It is about how to confront the fact that all your assumptions about how your life is going to go: career, relationships, family, old age, can just be taken away. Havi was diagnosed with lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare disease that affects young women, and for which the progosis is about 10 years from the onset of symptoms. The sufferer experiences a progressive decline in lung-function over that time. Life may be extended by a heart-lung transplant, but that’s, obviously, a difficult business.
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Michael Reiss “has been forced to resign as Director of Education of the Royal Society”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/17/evolution.controversiesinscience . Absolutely shocking, in my view. Several of those calling for his head, such as Sir Richard Roberts, made much of the fact that he is an ordained minister. But since at least two FRSs — John Polkinghorne and Bernard Silverman — are also priests, that’s hardly a reason for the Society not to employ him. The RS statement says:
bq. “Some of Professor Michael Reiss’s recent comments, on the issue of creationism in schools, while speaking as the Royal Society’s director of education, were open to misinterpretation. While it was not his intention, this has led to damage to the society’s reputation. As a result, Professor Reiss and the Royal Society have agreed that, in the best interests of the society, he will step down immediately as director of education.”
Well, no, they weren’t “open to misinterpretation”, they were wilfully misinterpreted by those who were always going to be determined to do so, and it shows real spinelessness on the part of the RS that they didn’t back him. As “I blogged a few days ago”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/09/12/dealing-with-creationism/ , Reiss didn’t call for creationism to be part of the science curriculum, he said (absolutely clearly, _in his original statement_ of his view) that teachers should, as a matter of good pedagogical practice, be willing to engage with students they encounter who come to the class with creationist views. That seems to me to be a perfectly legitimate position for someone concerned with science pedagogy to take. Others may disagree with the substance of his view. That’s fair enough. But to push him out for saying it? Dreadful.
(A list of issues where partisans are only willing to tolerate a simple straightforward and unequivocal expression of the party line (on either side) and will seek to punish deviants: anything touching on religion and education (including this issue); Israel/Palestine; abortion/right to life, ….etc. )
Update: see also James Wimberley “here”:http://www.samefacts.com/archives/britain_/2008/09/fundamentalists.php .