by Henry Farrell on August 15, 2003
One of my favorite silly science fiction novels from the 1960s, Fred Hoyle’s _Ossian’s Ride_, has long descriptions of the remote part of Ireland where I’m staying. Hoyle was Britain’s Astronomer Royal, and the main proponent of the now unfashionable Steady State theory of the universe’s origins (or, more precisely, lack of origins). He also wrote a few bad sf novels; _Ossian’s Ride_ is probably the worst of them. However, it’s interesting for what it says about attitudes to Ireland in the period when it was written.
_Ossian’s Ride_ presents an Ireland which has been transformed by a new industrial revolution. Irish firms have suddenly and mysteriously started to manufacture new super-light, super-strong materials, and the world wants to know how they’re doing it. But Irish authorities have declared large parts of the countryside off limits to foreigners. The hero of the novel (who’s British, if I remember correctly), goes through a series of sub-39 Steps adventures before finding his way to the Ring of Kerry, where he discovers that aliens have landed beside Caragh Lake, and have been giving the locals a helping hand.
For all of the novel’s hokey plotting, it’s fun to read if you know the places that Hoyle is writing about – he gets the geography right, so I imagine that he took a few holidays around here himself. And it’s interesting to note that a 1960’s UK scientist thought that a tech-savvy Ireland was a suitably outrageous starting point for a sf thriller. And that he presumed that the Irish would need help from space aliens to do anything about it. Ireland was then regarded (with some justification) as a bucolic, pre-industrial backwater. Of course, Ireland has since developed a world-class technology manufacturing and software sector, skipping past the industrial revolution without any alien intervention worth talking about (unless Bill Gates is from outer space).
!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/kerry.jpg!
Insert alien manufactory here
by Henry Farrell on August 15, 2003
I’m on holiday in Kerry in South West Ireland, where the official history of a local golf club tells us that
bq. [xxxx Golf Club] has a proud history of equality, with Lady Gordon a full Captain in 1921 …
by Henry Farrell on August 11, 2003
Tyler Cowen has a nice, short piece on art and Western civilization, which gently takes a forthcoming Charles Murray book to task. The Murray book, by Cowen’s account, concludes that Western civilization has an overwhelming advantage over its non Western equivalents in music and the arts. As Cowen says, it’s hard to sustain this argument with great confidence, because the surviving evidence is grossly skewed. Since many forms of non-Western art haven’t survived, or went unrecorded until very recently, we can’t say with any degree of certainty that, say, John Dowland was any better than his Gabonese equivalents.
But there’s a second issue, which is very nearly as important – a version of what anthropologists refer to as Galton’s problem. The quick and dirty version of Galton’s argument is that there’s something very iffy about the assumption that cultures are self-referential, coherent wholes, which are absolutely isolated from each other. Western art didn’t evolve in isolation from its non-Western equivalents : at crucial points in its history, encounters with non-Western art drove it in new directions. Peter Conrad’s definitive study of 20th century art, _Modern Times, Modern Places_ has an entire chapter on how African art deeply influenced various modern greats. Conrad claims, and I have no reason to doubt him, that it’s simply impossible to understand Picasso without taking account of the influence of African mask art from Congo and the Gabon.
by Henry Farrell on August 10, 2003
Am on holidays for the next 10 days in London and the West of Ireland, so expect intermittent blogging at best from this Timberite.
by Henry Farrell on August 9, 2003
Jon blogs below about winning office with a mere plurality, which touches on issues that political scientists, and theorists of a certain bent, have thought a lot about. Kenneth Arrow’s “impossibility theorem,” which I’ve blogged about before, indicates that if you make certain reasonable assumptions about people’s preferences, no possible voting system (or other means of social choice) can be expected to aggregate people’s preferences without distorting them. This suggests, according to the late William Riker, that democracy is bogus.
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by Henry Farrell on August 9, 2003
And while we’re being snippy with tech-crazy rightwing bloggers, has anyone checked out Steven den Beste lately? His topic du jour is how European males don't like rugged, manly Harley-Davidson bikes, and have persuaded them to come out with a ‘castrated,’ ‘effeminate’ version. Whatever. I dunno – I’ve never been able to get the den Beste thing myself. He’s always reminded me of the bloke in Searle’s Chinese Box – parsing and recombining facts without ever understanding them. I imagine him locked in a cubicle somewhere, endlessly surfing the web for factoids which he weaves together into vast conspiratorial ‘explanations’ that are almost, but not quite, unlike real political analyses. His posts are vaguely interesting on the level of spectacle, but I can’t for the life of me imagine why anyone takes him seriously. Evidently, the WSJ _Opinion Journal_ disagrees.
by Henry Farrell on August 8, 2003
Glenn Reynolds outs himself as a Transhumanist – why am I not surprised?
bq. Would I like to be smarter? Yes, and I’d be willing to do it via a chip in my brain, or a direct computer interface. (Actually, that’s already prefigured a bit in ordinary life, too, as things like Google and wi-fi give us access to a degree of knowledge that would have seemed almost spooky not long ago, but that everyone takes for granted now). And I’d certainly like to be immune to cancer, or AIDS, or aging.
Fair enough if that’s what turns him on. What’s a little less impressive is his dismissal of skeptics as cheerleaders for AIDS, irritable bowel movement, and everyday stupidity. _Contra_ Reynolds, there are serious, principled reasons why you might want to disagree with transhumanism. And this argument has been going on for a long, long time.
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by Henry Farrell on August 6, 2003
by Henry Farrell on August 5, 2003
Via Invisible Adjunct, I see that Bob at Unfogged has had a smart idea -academic reality tv. His proposal – _Ph.D. Island_ – desperate Ph.D. students, with tenured faculty sitting in judgement, awarding one lucky candidate a half-way decent job in a half-way decent city.
It’s a nice concept – but I have an alternative proposal. I reckon that we male social scientists are in urgent need of a different sort of reality tv. All of us could do with some serious input from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Academic lawyers have their bow ties, b-school types have their Armani outfits. We have our badly fitting blue suits. Anyone who’s ever been to the APSA annual convention, and seen several thousand of these suits milling about a hotel lobby, checking out each other’s name badges, has glimpsed the very bowels of fashion hell. I’m not exempting my own dress sense by any means – I’m a classic exponent of the anonymous slacks, blue shirt and bland tie combo myself. We all need help: if there has ever been a profession that could do with a serious makeover from the fashionistas (whether they be gay or straight), we are it. TV producers – I’m waiting for your call.
by Henry Farrell on August 1, 2003
Just a quick note; I’ve dumped on the _Economist_ a couple of times in the last few weeks, so I should say that it has an excellent open letter to Silvio Berlusconi on its website today, with a detailed dossier on the various legal controversies that Mr. Berlusconi has become embroiled in. I especially recommend the discussion of Berlusconi’s attempts to smear Romano Prodi to Glenn Reynolds, who may wish to revisit this snarky and unpleasant little post from a couple of months back.
This is something I hope to blog about at greater length sometime in the next few days, as the story develops. Megan McArdle speculates that the _Economist’s_ dossier will cause “a lot of consternation in Italy.” Sadly, I suspect that it won’t have much political effect. Berlusconi’s disinformation machine which has already described the _Economist_ as a Communist publication (sic) after it published a previous article on his shady dealings, and gotten away with it, seems to be gearing itself up again. His company’s lawyers are describing the _Economist_ article as “more of an affront to the true facts and journalistic decency than to the honorable Mr. Berlusconi.” Since Berlusconi has a lock on both public and private tv, his people will be able to spin the dossier as an attack on Italy’s national pride rather than the damning litany of facts that it is. More on this as it develops.
by Henry Farrell on August 1, 2003
There aren’t that many philosophical romances published in English any more; the genre seems to have fallen into a quiet desuetude. Me, I blame Umberto Eco. His splendid _The Name of the Rose_ gave us high expectations, which were to be disappointed by the arid academic score-settling of _Foucault’s Pendulum_, and then forcibly dashed into the gutter by the otiose _Island of the Day Before_. At a stretch I suppose, you can count popularizations like _Sophie’s World_, which are of arguable philosophical merit and inarguable novelistic triteness, but I don’t really see why you’d want to. However, if, like me, you enjoy books of this sort, I’ve got three recommendations which I suspect many CT readers will never have come across.
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by Henry Farrell on July 31, 2003
I settled down last night to re-read _Firebreak_, Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake’s) last-but-one Parker novel, which begins with the sentence.
bq. When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.
This induced a feeling of complete comfort in me, which is rather odd when you think about it. Why is it that so many people find it relaxing to read about murder and violent crime?
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by Henry Farrell on July 31, 2003
The Economist (subscription required) has a rather silly editorial this week, deploring Congress’s efforts to push back FCC deregulation of the media industry. If you believe the _Economist_, the FCC was a disinterested champion of economic stability, while its “interested opponents” were shouting nonsense “about “grave threats to diversity of opinion in America, and even democracy itself.” Worse, the decision is a symptom of a wider malaise; “political meddling in regulatory policy is on the rise,” and the real problem is that “regulators, far from being unduly immune to the business of politics, are not sufficiently independent of the politicians.”
Even by the _Economist’s_ bombastic standards, this is a fact-deficient piece of free-market puffery – its account of the politics behind the FCC battle is laughably inaccurate. But that’s by the way; what’s interesting is the broader lesson that the Economist wants to draw from the affair. It claims that politics and regulation shouldn’t ever mix. In making this argument, the _Economist_ demonstrates a profound incomprehension of the actual relationship between politics and regulation. In fact, Congress’s 400 to 21 vote to smack down the FCC is a perfect example of how politics _should_ work to correct regulators. But to see exactly why, it’s necessary to trudge through a little political science.
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by Henry Farrell on July 29, 2003
There’s a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about a DARPA project which aims to predict terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups, through creating a futures market, in which traders can speculate on the possibility of attacks; the NYT picks up on it too. Most of the commentary is negative, but Josh Chafetz likes the idea, and invokes Hayek.
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by Henry Farrell on July 29, 2003
Via William Sjostrom, I discover that George Will has opined on the draft EU constitution. I suppose I should be grateful that a stateside pundit is actually writing about it; not many people outside the Eurocracy are interested. Indeed, according to the Commission's own figures, only 45% of Europeans have even heard of the Convention that prepared the draft constitution (up from 30% in March). Furthermore, Will starts off by making a reasonable point – that Europe can learn some useful lessons from America’s constitutional history – but he frames it in a rather condescending fashion.
bq. Europe is, relative to the United States, remarkably young, meaning naive and inexperienced regarding the writing of a constitution. The handiwork of the 105 members of the convention which, led by former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, drafted the document for 16 months reflects a failure to grasp what a proper constitution does and does not do.
Unfortunately, Will’s article goes downhill from there, as it becomes increasingly clear that neither he nor his research assistants know very much about the European Union, or indeed about any constitutional tradition other than the American.
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