In silvae angulo carduoso

Mid year resolution

2009-05-30T09:57:00.000-07:00

Events, dear boy, events. I hope the events are largely over, so I am planning to start blogging again. I have also just started The Theory of Moral Sentiments, so there will be plenty of material. Reviewing the posts of the last six months was disappointing; I think I was getting sloppy and, worse, crabbed. A couple of friends will be reading the book with me, which might diminish the urge to write, but I will try.

Instead of discussing the first three chapters, I have a moral case to share. The garage at work is sometimes used by people who want to smoke meth (as I have seen them do) or drink malt liquor out of the rain. As a result cars are broken into every few months, though really that is much less often than I would have thought. It was my turn, along with several other people, last week. The thief got little from me, just some headphones and a few CDs, but he left a perfect scene in exchange. The Theory of Moral Sentiments was lying face up on the passenger seat; looking in at the cover, he had smashed the window, burying the book under glass, then leaned across it to rifle through what little I had left in the car. Seeing the title of the book just visible through all the glass made the experience almost, though perhaps not quite, worth it.

Online dating

2009-03-07T00:09:00.000-08:00

Online dating is a weird thing, to say the least. Part of the weirdness is only that I don't really feel like dating anyone, so I tinker with my profile for entertainment, with a small side bet on the chance of meeting someone so great, I'd change my mind. The other weirdness is stuff like this instant messenger conversation. Okcupid has a built-in messenger, which I'm going to disable now, but I'm glad I didn't know it was on because it gave me this. Both names changed of course; hers only slightly.

First "roseforreal82" contacted me as I was about to leave for home. Her profile was illiterate, wandering, and deranged, but what the hell, okcupid keeps things anonymous so I asked her to use okcupid's internal email and said I'd reply. She sent an empty message, so lacking anything else to say I replied that her profile said she wanted a never-married Christian, and that I was an atheist and divorced. She responded with this instant messenger conversation:

[12:00:05 am]roseforreal82:hi
[12:00:36 am]roseforreal82:so u have kids
[12:00:40 am]eeyore:no
[12:01:53 am]roseforreal82:but u had a wife
[12:01:57 am]eeyore:yes
[12:02:07 am]roseforreal82:aethiest means no God right??
[12:02:34 am]roseforreal82:so u mean u prefer an aethiest woman also??
[12:03:10 am]eeyore:either an atheist or someone who is familiar with it and comfortable with the idea
[12:04:31 am]roseforreal82:hmmm is being an aethiest really matters to u?
[12:04:40 am]eeyore:yes I'm afraid so
[12:05:40 am]roseforreal82:ohhhh...so i think we are not compatible coz im a devoted catholics
[12:06:15 am]eeyore:yes that would be awkward
[12:06:24 am]eeyore:but thanks for thinking of me
[12:06:30 am]eeyore:hope you have luck soon
[12:07:28 am]roseforreal82:and im happy for ur honesty

I have no idea why she contacted me. I'm thinking bottom trawling.

Evolutionary mistakes

2009-02-27T13:45:00.000-08:00

Paul Johnson continues to use his supposedly historical column to deliver lectures about secularism. Since his ideas on that subject are long since fixed, there is little value in each new column, and I miss his reflections on history. Still, it is interesting to read arguments that are elements of who I thought I was, worn and familiar as an old blanket. Johnson dislikes and rejects Darwinism for the same reasons I did, primarily because of perceived moral and social consequences, mixed with a vibrant dislike of scientific dogmatism (more often brash, philosophically naive confidence than actual dogmatism, but it feels much the same if you do not sympathize with it).

The temptation to bow before scientism is given an extra edge by the current deification of Darwin, who finds himself, poor fellow, in the role of the anti-Christ, with his natural selection as an alternative to Christianity. Some people might argue that the survival of the fittest is a sound principle. Indeed that was the principle underpinning Hitler’s race-theory and other manifestations of social Darwinism. I believe it will lead rapidly and inevitably to the self-destruction of the human race. The crisis in the world economy, and the great war it seems likely to promote, make all these issues highly topical.

I need to read some Spencer (I read a little once for class, without retention), but I trust Jonah Goldberg when he says this use of Social Darwinism is inaccurate. The reductio ad Hitlerum, sadly, has come to subtract from an argument. What is really interesting here is the category error at the center. "Survival of the fittest" cannot be considered a "sound principle" because those two phrases belong to distinct categories, and the meanings of the words in "survival of the fittest" are different in each category. Principles make use of moral vocabulary, because a principle is a basis for moral action, while Spencer's phrase is meant to use scientific vocabulary, which freely eliminates secondary meanings from words or invents new words and meanings to serve a technical purpose.

If "survival of the fittest" is used as a principle, it becomes an implicit metaphor, with "survival" and "fittest" both changing meaning. In biology, survival only means the propagation of a genome (or perhaps individual genes, per Dawkins) and fittest only means "most able to propagate." So, "survival of the fittest" is a technical reduction, re-casting survival in the barest terms. In moral terms, however, the phrase evokes the "the flourishing of the best," which does leave room for nasty ideas like lebensraum and a master race. In moral terms, survival implies many additional things; it is in the moral world that man does not live by bread alone. Equally, "fitness" in the moral world has in view the entire organism of a man with all his behaviors, verging on "worth." The connection between the two uses of "survival of the fittest" is no more sound than the connection between chaos theory as in mathematics and chaos theory as used in Jurassic Park, where the words slide into their popular meanings, as though it were "science says [theory] that complexity is unpredictable [chaos]."

I am not trying to get at the is-ought problem here. Converting descriptive biology to prescriptive morality requires additional premisses, certainly, but in this case the conversion is by slipperiness of language. The is-ought problem would only arise if someone were arguing that evolution meant he had a moral obligation to spread his genes.

Update: Michael Shermer has an article in Scientific American making a similar point.

In a weary land

2009-02-14T20:47:00.000-08:00

Wisdom from one unwise man to another:

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul's stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.
There as a king reigned in the east:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.

Whether happiness may be found in political change

2009-02-11T13:43:00.000-08:00

Dalrymple's essay in the current City Journal is unlocked now. It is a little wandering, but as always it is rewarding to read him. He quotes John Stuart Mill's self-reflection on happiness and political change:

Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

It is humbling to compare my own experience, not all that different in nature, with Mill's. In 2000, when it briefly looked as though Gore would win on the day of the election, it was as though my own hope for the future was dying. For an hour I was inconsolable, though strangely I was not a great supporter of Bush himself. The sudden access of grief and despair, so manifestly out of proportion to a mere election, shocked me into a thorough examination of not just my beliefs but the place they had in my life; my political maturity began that day. Yet Mill was able to ask himself this question of his own genius, without the rough impetus of a noisy campaign and political defeat.

Like Mill, I was young, though at 25, not so very young. Unlike Mill, whose remarkable genius had been paired from early childhood with an astonishing education, I had been happy only to try to make sense of the world through comparatively scanty reading; he, of course, had already constructed a philosophical view of considerable power. Yet the same falsehood had gripped us both, the belief that a rightly ordered world would bring happiness, not just to a greater number of men, but personally; that the work of increasing happiness in the world is at one with working towards one's own happiness. Escaping that falsehood means abandoning the hope that all the struggle to learn about man (for ethics, economics, and politics are only branches of the study of man) has any meaning beyond the pleasure of learning itself.

Minds of great power, like Mill's, may alter the world a little, but then again they may not, and the changes worked often bear little resemblance to the intention. I doubt Mill would approve of the excesses of libertarianism, despite its closest resemblance to his thought; he did not mean to include the exuberant hedonism libertarians so often present as their highest good. Nor again would the use of cold utilitarian calculus to justify great cruelty to a few suit his character, yet it might well be that such abuses in the 20th century by totalitarians would have been harder to dress in a presentable rhetoric without Mill's work. Thoughts die as well; we scarcely know if Pythagoras really existed or what Heraclitus meant, even in the little of his writing that survives. If great minds can little expect to know the consequences of their thoughts, or even to see effects at all, lesser minds must expect no return on their efforts.

Thus the happiness in the study of man can be nothing more than the happiness in learning itself. Imlac describes the pleasure of knowledge (I think it is safe to take this as Johnson's own opinion) in Rasselas:

Knowledge is certainly one of the means of pleasure, as is confessed by the natural desire which every mind feels of increasing its ideas. Ignorance is mere privation, by which nothing can be produced; it is a vacuity in which the soul sits motionless and torpid for want of attraction, and, without knowing why, we always rejoice when we learn, and grieve when we forget. I am therefore inclined to conclude that if nothing counteracts the natural consequence of learning, we grow more happy as our minds take a wider range.

That man is so various, so utterly resistant to reduction to a system, makes his nature a study that can bring happiness for a lifetime. And yet it is so painful to learn about man and see it bear so little fruit! Imlac himself faults ignorance because it produces nothing, yet how much does the study of man produce? I have learned a little better to preserve an aequus animus; that is an increase in my happiness, at the cost of some intense pleasures; I have learned, a little, to hear the underlying sense in men's incoherence; that is an increase in happiness, though at the cost of alienation of words from sense; I have learned at last and greatest cost how tenuous are the threads that tie reason to the self; a slight understanding, that forgives much and costs more. Little enough; and when I die it will pass away with me. Surely happiness, though the emotion of it may fade, ought in its essence to partake of eternity?

I can easily believe that my mind is simply too weak to learn enough to win an unambiguous increase in personal happiness above the happiness of learning itself, but it does not seem that anyone has ever had a strong enough mind. There is, then, no happiness to be found either in contributing to the right formation of society or in the understanding of man that must precede a correct theory of society. In the end, I can only believe that in good or bad thought, in well or badly ordered societies, in knowledge or ignorance, there can be more or less happiness in the world, but only the pleasure of the learning falls to the learner, and to whom the excess or deficiency of happiness falls is the work of chance alone.

Romance

2009-02-10T00:37:00.000-08:00

A routine essay in Luddite sentiment here, but the last sentence implies something astonishing:

Seventy per cent of women said they would rather receive a love letter or poem than a text message or email, while 53 per cent of men agreed.

That is, 30% of women would rather get a text message or email. Who are these women? All the functional illiterates and the hard-faced club girls, sure, but can that really be 30%? What a horrifying thought.

Quotations too good to die

2009-02-09T19:30:00.000-08:00

One of the many almost-quotations everyone knows is the one Paul Johnson uses here:

The more I see of the intellectual world and its frailties, the more I appreciate the truth of G.K. Chesterton’s saying: ‘When people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything.’ It is one of the tragedies of humanity that brain-power is so seldom accompanied by judgment, sceptical moderation or even common sense.

Like the spurious quotation from Dostoevsky about all things being permitted if God is dead, the quotation accurately reflects the thought of the writer. In this case, it mimics Chesterton's paradoxical style as well. However, it's just as well to point out that Chesterton, in all his millions of words, never wrote exactly that.

I admire Johnson, but he goes on to commit a common error among conservative Christians:

The vacuum left by the retreat of formal religion is most commonly filled, today, by forms of pantheism. Zealots devote their lives to ‘saving’ the rainforests, deserts or habitats of endangered species. They believe, passionately, in pseudo-scientific myths like climate change, global warming and the greenhouse effect.

The global temperature has been rising, if not all that rapidly, for quite a long time now; barring some revolutionary discoveries, it is not reasonable to disbelieve in "global warming." Feel free to disagree with man-made global warming (AGW or anthropogenic global warming), or more reasonably, disagree that the warming is 100% man-made; it is also a fine position to take that the warming is not all that big a threat compared to other environmental problems.

The reflex rejection of global warming tout court is embarrassing, but it is borderline lunacy to throw in the greenhouse effect, which is a well-confirmed theory about the insulating effect of atmospheres. Venus is otherwise terribly hard to explain, and we ourselves would be v. v. cold. Johnson most likely means the bundle of policy recommendations popular with the people who talk most about those things, but flabby writing like that is what helps further the stupid caricature of conservatism as the enemy of science.

Women and squirrels

2009-01-31T13:52:00.000-08:00

My opinion exactly.

Charity

2009-01-24T20:59:00.001-08:00

In the last post I called charity, in the alms-giving sense, a grievance. I almost qualified it with "to an inflamed soul," but with men if the soul is not at least a little inflamed it is crushed. The offenses of charity are many, for both the giver and the object of it, though it is the object of charity who suffers most.

To be compelled by circumstances to accept a gift is a wound to pride, painful when it cuts into swollen ego, but a fatal poison to an honest sense of private honor. Charity demands gratitude, an elusive sensation that when spontaneous is a form of joy but that when forced cannibalizes joy in life. Charity makes one man more human at the expense of another, who is an object; apart from the injury to pride, the object is reduced in status before his family and the world. Charity is alien, often absurdly so, being given from the giver's interests and resources, so that the object's very world is made to seem strange and small. (Stevenson mentions a similar effect on the steerage passengers from the polite attentions of first class passengers on the steamship.) Charity imposes a debt, and debts weigh heavily on serious souls: "pay it forward" is a cheery high-energy American sort of thing to say, but that need to repay is a burden, and one that the object of charity cannot always set down.

It is then much easier to hate and resent the charitable man and to carry his gifts as grievances, or to despise him and consider his gifts only a partial payment on what is owed. Still, there is want in the world, and almost as much as that, man needs to give. So Jesus said,

Take heed that ye do not do your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have the glory of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand known what thy right hand doeth: that thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thy openly.

It may be that his reason for saying so was only to protect the purity of man's relationship with God as embodied in temple offerings, but that description sounds to me like a wonderfully precise solution to the problem of charity. Its foremost advantage is that God is the center and object of the gift. Christianity at its best has interpreted charity to individuals in this way, which greatly relieves the strain on the recipient. God, not he, is the object of charity; the difference in status between giver and recipient is obscured by the infinitely higher reference point of God. The gift is given in secret, so much so that the giver should almost keep it secret from himself; the recipient need not then lose status in the eyes of the world, and ideally not in the eyes of the giver either, who is enjoined not to dwell on his gift. Moreover the gift is a discharge of duty, and if it puts the recipient in debt, he may pay it off in holiness of life or in prayers; gratitude too is owing only to God and demonstrable in worship. That the prayers may be nonsense directed at nothing does not prevent them from relieving the recipient's obligations.

I think in practical terms that the best charity is to someone whose needs you know well. It did not really need an economic study, but there is a marvelous paper called "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas," showing that gifts destroy increasing amounts of value as the relationship between giver and recipient grows more distant. As an economics paper it is concerned with the material loss, but anyone who has ever gotten a severely mistaken gift knows there is an additional loss in the form of feelings of alienation and isolation. For instance, my grandparents once gave me a book by Bill O'Reilly. I was a little happier not knowing they liked him, and especially not knowing they thought I would like him. Of course that is a trivial example, but it is a serious problem for relationships so distant they are merely notional, as when Americans show up at a Mexican orphanage to paint it. I went with a church youth group to do just that. It was painfully evident that we should have left our food with them and gone back on the first day. God only knows if they ever forgave us for our sleekness and our barbecues.

The very worst charity, so much so that it is simply a wicked act, is giving money to modern-day beggars. Starting from that point, you can pretty much work out all that I just wrote.

The best I have seen written about charity is in accounts of Maimonides' "Laws of Gifts to the Poor," though I have not read any Maimonides myself. I am pretty sure I just gave an amateurish version of what he wrote, but there is no helping the fact that no matter how hard you think something through, someone got there first and did it better.

What I would like to see is a solution to the problem of charity that does not require God. I suspect none exists, with mutual aid societies a partial answer.

Inaugural poem

2009-01-22T11:24:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Alexander's poem could hardly have been worse, except by being longer. The response to it explains how poetry has become a personal hobby, like knitting. In Samuel Johnson's day, a poem that bad would be mocked savagely; today, the expected response is to ignore the poem itself in favor of congratulating the poet for the sincerity of her emotion. It is like complimenting the knitter on the color of the yarn. Well, poetry used to aspire to more than keeping you warm. It is not just the lack of any meter or rhyme, though that loss hurts, but the wandering diction and vague thoughts that make it such a bad poem.

Alexander is deaf to all sense of words; how else can this highly unfortunate evocation of the chicken crossing the road be explained?

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

Yes, others did say that: they were chickens.

John Derbyshire and the Asia Times complained about these lines especially:

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

I might have an explanation for the wretched confusion in the last line. One of the difficulties for racial activists in the U.S. is that nearly everyone wants to help and to see disadvantaged people get on, which I think is what she means by love here, but most people expect that in return the people who are helped will stop feeling so aggrieved. Since in African-American studies existential grievance exceeds honest affection for black American and African history, Alexander as a professor of African-American Studies would intuitively feel that grievance is not a negative term and that love might threaten it.

It is of course also a mistake to think that someone with a grievance will be happier and less aggrieved after being helped. Charity itself is a grievance.

Over-correction

2009-01-15T10:01:00.001-08:00

Being attached to correct usage has many advantages, earning respect, delighting listeners with pure speech, educating the ignorant, and attracting lots of chicks. It is not all good, though, since rebarbative cavilers watch closely for errors. In that spirit, I was entertained this morning by a van painted with the slogan, "Completely custom-made furniture upholstery is our business, but design is our forté." The correct pronunciation is only one syllable, but the two syllable pronunciation is so common that it is not worth minding. What delighted me was that the slogan-writer went the extra step of marking the second syllable the way it might be written if the two-syllable pronunciation were correct.

Prickly

2009-01-14T11:29:00.000-08:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a funny article arguing that Mexico is misrepresented in the U.S. press as the land of burritos and drug gang beheadings, when it should really be seen as the home of a lively literary tradition. The writer is especially impressed by the Guadalajara book fair, which does sound pretty neat. That a big city could support eight daily papers is also impressive; I wish Seattle could do the same. The article, though, is funny for its prickly pride about literacy as a corrective for the impression created by thousands of savage drug murders in the last year and the breakdown of law in large stretches of Mexico. Who could seriously think that reporting on social chaos and a terrifying rise in murder, rather than on a book fair, is unfair and biased?

Also, the writer tries to make the U.S. look relatively illiterate; the U.S. is certainly unlettered, but the writer might be a little less puffed up if she took a look at the U.S. literacy rate (99%) and the Mexican literacy rate (91.7%). Given how little Americans do with their ability to read, it may well be the case that the U.S. could benefit from Mexico's cultural example, but the writer's attitude of mixed condescension and wounded pride is just silly.

The state of life

2009-01-13T14:19:00.000-08:00

Dalrymple is the best, sometimes for no reason other than the poetry he quotes. Concluding his essay on relativism in social standards, he writes

Unfortunately, the solipsistic pursuit of happiness by people who live in close proximity to one another can, indeed often does, result in conflict. And thus it is that we come to create a hostile environment for ourselves:
for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

That is from "Dover Beach," by Matthew Arnold; it has the more famous lines about the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the sea of faith. Everyone has heard the phrase "darkling plain" but I at least had not read the poem before. The poem seems to struggle a little as a whole, but these lines are powerful and deeply moving.

The quoted passage omits a line and a half, "Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!" The omitted text clearly links the poem to the topos of Catullus 5, which has the beautiful lines "nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux / nox est perpetua una dormienda": when our brief light has once set, our night is one unending sleeping.

So da mihi basia mille, milia multa: let's kiss, a thousand, many thousand times. I would have thought pop music, being mostly about love, would use so potent an idea often, but the closest song I know of is Crowded House in "It's Only Natural":

Ice will melt, water will boil
You and I can shake off this mortal coil
It's bigger than us
You don't have to worry about it.
...
It's only natural
That I should want to be there with you.
It's only natural
That you should feel the same way too.

Arnold and Catullus have by far the better of the idea, though. They tell their lovers, you do have to worry about the clash of armies on the darkling plain; it will tear up and lay claim to your life. You will sleep one unending sleep, your day will end. Life has no beauty, no truth, no faith, no eternity, but what you choose to make with me.

Eloise and Abelard

2009-01-09T10:30:00.000-08:00

The deficient technology of the 12th century meant Eloise and Abelard had to conduct their correspondence by letters. In the modern day, though, they would use online cartoons.

Oh god

2008-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

Another year.

Bumper sticker

2008-12-16T00:55:00.000-08:00

"If animals could talk we'd all be vegetarians."
Other stickers in that series:

"If I had a billion dollars, I'd be rich."
"If a perpetual motion machine were invented, energy would be free."
"If the moon were made of cheese, feeding a moon base would be easy."

Besides the highly counterfactual protasis, I think the sentimentality of the apodosis is unusually dippy. If animals could talk, we'd have to consider them a bunch of murderous psychotic perverts. Three minutes' thought about what animals actually do would suffice to find that out, but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

There is also the possibility that animals would beg to be eaten:

A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.

"Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?" It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters into a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.

Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.

"Something off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal, "Braised in a white wine sauce?"

"Er, your shoulder?" said Arthur in a horrified whisper.

"But naturally my shoulder, sir," mooed the animal contentedly, "nobody else's is mine to offer."

Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's shoulder appreciatively.

"Or the rump is very good," murmured the animal. "I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there." It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.

"Or a casserole of me perhaps?" it added.

"You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?" whispered Trillian to Ford.

"Me?" said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, "I don't mean anything."

"That's absolutely horrible," exclaimed Arthur, "the most revolting thing I've ever heard."

"What's the problem Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump.

"I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing here inviting me to," said Arthur, "it's heartless."

"Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod.

"That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Alright," he said, "maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just ... er ..."

The Universe raged about him in its death throes.

"I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered.

"May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months."

"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.

"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.

"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"

"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."

It managed a very slight bow.

"Glass of water please," said Arthur.

"Look," said Zaphod, "we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare steaks please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years."

The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle.

"A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good," it said, "I'll just nip off and shoot myself."

He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur.

"Don't worry, sir," he said, "I'll be very humane."

It waddled unhurriedly off into the kitchen.

A matter of minutes later the waiter arrived with four huge steaming steaks. Zaphod and Ford wolfed straight into them without a second's hesitation. Trillian paused, then shrugged and started into hers.

The Center for Future Storytelling

2008-12-08T20:50:00.000-08:00

MIT has opened a Center for Future Storytelling, a determined effort to destroy the written word in even its debased www form. Sam Leith's (until this week, literary editor of the Telegraph) comments are interesting, although characteristically of a modern Englishman he feels obliged to lout to pop culture (Twitter, GTA4, soap operas) however unconvincingly, and even if, characteristically of an English journalist, he misrepresents the situation. There is no doubt about what the Center intends: it wants to provide the tools for worldwide LARPs.

By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web.

Vampires ahoy, matey.

Even worse, one of the professors is a Ramesh Raskar, "a pioneer in the development of new imaging, display and performance-capture technologies." In a word: bodcasts.

Leith is only pretending not to understand what MIT is up to and is only playing at pop culture, but he really does know English. He says it perfectly:

The eggheads at MIT have, in this respect, more than just a prose style in common with the governing body at Meadows Community School in Chesterfield.
The closure of the library at this 759-strong comprehensive is being explained as "a move towards the relocation and redistribution of non-fiction and fiction resources in the light of the new developments in a virtual-learning environment and interactive learning".
Every clause is doubled-up into redundancy in the hope of sounding grand. How does "relocation" differ from "redistribution" - and don't they add up to "relocating from the library to the skip"? What are "non-fiction and fiction resources" - other than a fancy way of saying "all the books we have"?
How does "a virtual learning environment" differ from "interactive learning" (what learning isn't "interactive", come to that) - and is it just clever-sounding verbiage for the internet?
The thing is, the internet does some things very well, and the codex book does other things very well. There is an overlap - they are both means of preserving and sharing information - but it's foolish to see the two as interchangeable, or the former as supplanting the latter.
One of the clichés about education is that it should teach you not what to think, but how to think: and a vital part of that is understanding the shape of knowledge - being able to evaluate categories of information and degrees of authority in sources. If the educators themselves can't or won't think about these distinctions, God help their pupils.

Rem tetigisti acu, to address him in his ill-concealed native tongue.

A tip

2008-12-06T20:30:00.001-08:00

If you have your hair cut at one of those strip mall franchise places, do not use the word "proportionally" when describing how much you want cut off. She found out how much I wanted off the sides, and when she asked about the top, instead of trying to work out just what length I said something like "shorten it proportionally." She clearly thought I meant "make all the lengths equal." Now my head is a round ball of bristly red.

This is going to be an embarrassing week.

Gervaise on religion

2008-12-05T23:45:00.000-08:00

Ricky Gervaise, of The Office, preaches atheism, or at least the falseness of the Old Testament, through stand-up comedy. There are the usual objections: he is beating on an easy, harmless target instead of dangerous ones; he is attacking a minority (Old Testament literalists) among Christians; he does not know what he is talking about (saying he is "fine" with the New Testament when he rejects the Old Testament entirely); he is using his high status to abuse a low-status minority in front of audiences who loathe that minority; worst of all, he is being unfunny and calling it comedy. I wish I knew what hater of comedy first encouraged a stand-up comedian to pretend at thought.

Of course Gervaise is right that the Old Testament is substantially false as a record of fact, and even the historical books are full of errors. That bothered me quite a bit as I found out over the years just how extensively wrong the history is, but the things he makes fun of, like Noah's ark, either convert you to atheism on the spot as a child or in time stop feeling like questions of fact. That effect of a story losing the sense of facticity without undermining the worldview it helped build is a curious thing. Whatever the explanation, it is why tackling an adult Christian over Noah's ark is so futile; he has stopped believing that its truth value and relevance to his faith are connected to its facticity.

Most Christians are comfortable with assessing Biblical stories as myths, though many will refuse to use that word, since it implies affiliation with liberal theology and even outright spiritual disbelief. Instead the emphasis is on its true or inner meaning, that is, its mythical essence. Even the ones who feel obliged to defend its factual truth are, so to speak, fighting outside their borders; they can lose any number of scientific or engineering arguments without losing anything they really care about. A story that once supported a worldview has long since come to take its support from that worldview. Children in non-liberal churches are still taught the stories as written, which is a rather dishonest way of implying their factual truth and one I resent in hindsight, even if it is a little funny to think of a Sunday School teacher trying to present ideas about fact, truth, and myth to six-year-olds. It also cannot be over-emphasized how much contemporary Christians are ignorant, and disregarding, of the Old Testament, other than the chief Sunday School stories.

In none of his errors does Gervaise differ from the rest of the new atheist movement, but I want to point out something extraordinary he says in the Telegraph article:

I don't care if there are 50 per cent atheists or 75 per cent atheists in the world. I've got no problem with God being the most the popular thing in the world, with churches being filled, worship, no problem at all. People who believe in God that don't impinge on me, I don't care about. When it starts infringing on people and taking people's rights away that's a battle that's not going to be won by satirists or comedians. That's going to be won by governments saying: 'Ok you can worship what you like, but you are going to teach that evolution is the truth. You're going to tell them about matter and anti-matter and particle collision. Then you're going to say: Some people believe in the myth of Arthur and Santa Claus.' Religion is going to be lumped in with that. [emphasis added]

He is utterly incoherent in all the things I linked to, so it might be too much to expect him to mean what he seems to say, but then Sam Harris infamously wrote in Letter to a Christian Nation, "The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live." (Harris's defense.) Perhaps then Gervaise does mean it when he says that some other person teaching that evolution is false infringes on his rights. What a radical, what a totalitarian idea! This sick worldview, which is certainly Harris's if not Gervaise's, is why the new atheism must be resisted. As much as I love the discoveries of science, and even though I am not a believer, I would rather live among backwoods Pentacostals than grant the existence of a right over others' thoughts and words. Thank God for the First Amendment.

Hiroshima

2008-12-04T00:11:00.001-08:00

The book of WW2 journalism ends with John Hersey's short book, Hiroshima, which was first published as a single issue of The New Yorker. It is odd not to end the book with V-J day, which as it is gets very little mention in the book, unless the editor is making a moral comment on the Good War. Expecting moralizing and not really looking forward to it, I almost did not read it. Instead, it proves to be astounding, powerful and understated, honest and horrifying. Only an ignorant fool would conclude from it that the bombing was manifestly impermissible, yet equally only the most callous could be left with any pride in it. And at the time, there were a great many who were proud of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the one point where it is easiest to hate the U.S. for its decision is when as the wounded are still dying in the fires the U.S. propaganda broadcasts boast on and on about how only the U.S. could have organized so expensive and difficult a scientific and military invention. Hersey's understatement slightly falters there, saying the voices on the radio were "shouting," but you understand why he would lose control there.

It took me two days to read it, though it is hardly 80 pages (in this closely typeset edition), because very suddenly I would find I had taken on as much horror as I could stand; an almost physical sensation somewhat like the visual numbness produced by five or six hours in an art museum. It is beyond belief that people could live on with that in their past, and yet they did. Of the six survivors Hersey follows, none is wholly wrecked in the disaster. One young woman becomes a nun; she was crippled by a collapsing building, her leg badly twisted and shriveled, and abandoned by her fiance, a soldier who survived the war but never returned to her. Japanese Christians have always been rare; her conversion in the hospital and her discovery of a vocation are distressing indications of her desperation. Even so she turned her disaster to something brave and praiseworthy. The other five were less wounded, but the degree to which they lived full lives afterward is hard for me to comprehend.

Hersey does not hesitate to show how ruinous invading Japan was going to be--the hillsides around Hiroshima were being heavily dug in even as the bomb fell--and how to the bombed the atomic bomb did with horrible novelty what had been done to many other Japanese civilians by incendiaries and HE. Because the Japanese did not know how to interpret a daytime flight of just three bombers, and so gave the all-clear before the bomb fell, it is likely that the atomic bomb maimed and killed a great many people, especially children, who would have escaped a conventional bombing. On the other hand, it was widely thought that Hiroshima was coming due for a severe bombing, since it was the mainland military's headquarters and mostly untouched. The Japanese had already evacuated about a third of the city for that reason. The U.S. could have lessened some of the misery by warning more clearly beforehand and by broadcasting whatever was known about the risks of radiation afterward, but the one would risk a shoot-down or even a capture of the bomb and the other supposes more knowledge than the U.S. had.

In the end, the only two moral conclusions to be reached are still either grim relief that the atomic bombings prevented many hundreds of thousands of deaths in a longer war, or Richard Weaver's conclusion that the war should never have been pressed to that point. Perhaps the Japanese military would not have accepted terms that left the island and its closest possessions intact, but the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender made it certain that massive bombings and eventually a mainland invasion would be needed, in the absence of the atomic bomb. Unconditional surrender is a startling demand, and possibly, though I doubt it, one day it will be clear that it is always immoral, as the civilized world has come to accept that rape and pillage, once the natural prizes of victory, are always immoral.

I cannot really believe it made a difference in this case, however; it was not going to be politically, or indeed morally, possible to leave Japan with Manchuria, for instance, and they were at least as attached to it as Germany was to Alsace-Lorraine. Moreover in everyone's mind was Germany's surrender at its borders in 1918, and the disaster that followed. Twenty years after Armistice, Germany was again attacking the world, even more savagely than before; twenty years after Hiroshima, Japan was foremost among the peaceful nations, a bulwark against aggressive neighbors with global ambitions. Perhaps the Japanese military would have accepted defeat gracefully, surrendered Manchuria, and never again tried to build a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, but it beggars belief. Would it really then be the moral choice, to prepare the ground for another terrible war? Even if it were to prove safe, could anyone at the time, as Europe still smoldered, believe that?

The bombings, atomic and conventional, were evil things; if they were not, it is hard to think what is. But so were the horrific landings at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, and Peleliu; so were the Bataan Death March and the Rape of Nanking; so were the enslavement of Korea and the Philippines; and what good actions were there that would counter those evils and more like them? It is the end of morality, if evil is permitted against evil, but there is often no good, nor is it always possible even to know what is good or evil, and if it should happen to be known, still often the best path was lost long before the crisis, sometimes by men acting for the best. Weaver would unwind three or four generations to find the right path in 1945; but what use is so hypothetical a moral theory?

The perfect gift

2008-12-02T20:25:00.000-08:00

Durable illusions. Advertisers offer ephemeral illusions, but lost illusions cause too much upset. Religions (wrong ones only, of course) offer illusions that only death conclusively dispels. Their durability lacks confidence, though; the thought that they might be illusions gives them a hollow feel, no matter how vigorous the inquisition is. The market is wide open for truly durable illusions, as indubitably real as a sports car and as lastingly deceptive as a superstitious habit. Perhaps a large illusion would be destructive, but something too small to cause structural problems would be the perfect gift.

I think these illusions would have to be alterations of memory or sensation. My first catalogue will offer these illusions: in memory, inserting a minor bravery or a brief, requited crush, or shifting an esprit d'escalier to the proper moment, or perfecting a conversation; in perception, coloring a day with significance, or infusing a lover with special glamour, or giving the air some subtle exhilarating scent. Wonderful dreams, remembered clearly, would sell well too. The most prized of all those would surely be the entire day marked by a sense of significance, too unobtrusive to doubt and too enveloping to miss.

It occurs to me that I have memories of all those sorts of things, though not too many; just enough to make it plausible that some other entrepreneur beat me to market. People must have been buying me a durable illusion or two every Christmas. Maybe the past grows sweeter in memory not by nature but because that is where we keep our durable illusions, like toys in a toy box.

Italian bravery

2008-11-30T16:52:00.000-08:00

The Italians are very strange. They have not fought a war well or bravely in at least 400 years, but individually they often retain more of the old virtus or pride in manly excellence than any other Europeans. So Quattrocchi told his Islamist tormentors "I'll show you how an Italian dies," ensuring that he would not suffer an ignominious beheading by short blade. And in Germany in World War 2, Janet Flanner describes a similar instance:

Below the Gestapo office was a small sub-basement cell where, the Klingelputz prisoners said, the Gestapo had hung other prisoners six at a time by crowding them a row, standing them on stools, dropping nooses around their necks from an overhead bar, and then kicking the stools out from beneath their feet. One Italian became a legend by kicking his stool loose himself and shouting, as his final strangled words, "Viva l'Italia! Viva la liberta!"

How is Italy often so inspiring at the level of individual men and, once for a century or so, at the level of cities, but so pathetic as a nation? They are getting on to 140 years of governing themselves, more or less, but only recently have had any success, in the implausible form of Berlusconi. It would take most Western nations 140 years to decline to the point where Berlusconi would be welcomed for his good governance.

Not that I am inciting anti-Italian bigotry; I am a quarter Italian, have met my Italian relatives, love Italy, and admire ancient Rome without wanting Italy to be Roman. Even so, it is a remarkably incompetent nation-state.

These Terrible Replays of War

2008-11-30T01:05:00.001-08:00

World War 2 video games have always bothered me. Not ludicrous games like Castle Wolfenstein 3D or any of the other Nazis-as-demons fantasies, but highly detailed games like Call of Duty and even Squad Leader felt like an exploitation of appalling pain and horrifying bravery. Then again I thought perhaps I should think of them as celebrations of that bravery, though it still seemed a frivolous way to do it. Reporting World War 2: Part Two American Journalism 1944-1946 has a short article by James Agee of The Nation, titled "These Terrible Records of War," in which he praises two newsreels about Iwo Jima, but goes on to say something that felt just like what I had incoherently tried to work out:

Very uneasily, I am beginning to believe that, for all that may be said in favor of our seeing these terrible records of war, we have no business seeing this sort of experience except through our presence and participation.... Since I am reviewing and in ways recommending that others see one of the best and most terrible of war films [the Paramount Iwo Jima newsreel], I cannot avoid mentioning my perplexity.... If at an incurable distance from participation, hopelessly incapable of reactions adequate to the event, we watch men killing each other, we may be quite as profoundly degrading ourselves and, in the process, betraying and separating ourselves the farther from those we are trying to identify ourselves with; none the less because we tell ourselves sincerely that we sit in comfort and watch carnage in order to nurture our patriotism, our conscience, our understanding, and our sympathies.

The newsreel after all would then be followed by some comedy or melodrama. And if that is a problem, surely playing out the war's worst battles hundreds of times is far more of a problem.

Since he recommended it, I looked it up. The corny newsreel voice and music add a very unfortunate silliness to it, though it is still interesting to see that with its tank-slit view, aerial views, frequent lack of music, and tanker intercom recordings it anticipates the modern style of war reporting. At other times the old-timey style increased the sense of distance so it was hard to remember these men really were killing and dying, but the sight of dead soldiers did prompt the familiar helpless confusion of conscience. I wonder how often civilians' hatred of the enemy is an attempt to feel something, anything simple and complete in such confusion.

Story in the headline

2008-11-26T12:10:00.001-08:00

Some headlines give away the entire story just by existing. For instance, Perfectionist Who Felt Ugly Hanged Herself. For a newspaper to put such a headline on a story about a perfectionist who really was ugly would violate one of the laws of news, which is not to offend against sentimentality. Since the suicide was a woman, you also know she will be young and pretty, because it another law of news is that, apart from a rare murderess, only young, pretty women are news; the rest are statistics.

So never mind that by far the more common cases, in order, are a sad, ugly middle-aged man whose perfectionism, depression, and loneliness culminate in suicide, the same in a young man, and a distant third, the same in a young woman. Well, ugly is too much--more accurately average-to-homely, as most of us are, after all. None of those stories is news: no one wants to be reminded of so much bleak sadness or see the pictures. This young woman's story yields the warmly sentimental form of sadness now denominated "tragedy" and vocalized tsk-tsk and "Oh poor girl!" There is also the primal satisfaction of looking at a pretty young woman, enjoyed by both sexes and all ages.

This is also why 99% of nationally reported kidnappings of adults are of good looking young women. I have seen people put it down to racism, since the skew is similarly white, but if it is racism it is a very oblique kind resulting from the ludicrous value present day America puts on blonde hair. (Razib has demonstrated that in the early to mid 20th century, when America was much more racist, brunettes were favored, so blonde favoritism is not simply related to racism.)

Reporters are a pretty disgusting crew. Kind of a pity they are now our moral, political, and cultural arbiters.

Jewish Israeli Neo-Nazis?

2008-11-24T01:20:00.000-08:00

What very strange twists human nature takes! It is frustrating that the article does not have more details; something exceptionally odd must have been going on with those stupidly vicious young men.

OMG OED

2008-11-21T18:50:00.000-08:00

Nitheful: Envious, malicious, wicked; as a noun, such a person. From nithe, malice, an ancient Germanic word that can also be a verb meaning to hate or be envious of someone. Also nithe-grim: grim, cruel, savage; and nithe-iwork: an evil deed. All of these words are severely obsolete (pre-1400) but it is so sad. Some nitheful person nithing these words their power did this nithe-iwork.

What could be a better comment on the Book of Revelation than this quotation from 1350?

By þe mouþe as a lyoun bitokneþ þe manaces of þe proude Men & of þe niþeful

þ is the thorn (the OED uses a more handsome form that looks like the wynn, but it does not render well in blogspot) and ð is the eth, whose name I always have to look up. Both are "th" so it transliterates, "By the mouth as a lion betokens the menaces of proud and nitheful men." Presumably it is a reference to the description of the beast with seven heads in Rev. 13:2, "And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority."

Another marvelous phrase, though I am not sure how it translates:

þar beð naddren and snaken...þe tereð and freteð þo euele swiken, þe niðfule and þe prude.
There are adders and snakes...he tears and devours when evil men, the nitheful and the proud, deceive.

swike is to deceive, betray, ensnare. The -e ending makes the adjectives plural and the -en ending on swike makes it plural subjunctive. The -eð verb ending is the familiar "-eth" of ye olde English. The translations of þe and þo are probably wrong, because there are several forms that can look like those and some can work together for a different meaning. Maybe some scholar of Old English searching for naddren and snaken will comment someday.

Fun with words: the OED sayeth,

The OE. demonstrative and definite article was thus inflected:
SING. MASC. FEM. NEUT. PLURAL.
Nom. se, laterþe sío, séo, later þío, þíu þæt þá
Acc. þone, þæne þá þæt þá
Dat. þm,þám þre þm,þám þm,þám
Gen. þæs þre þæs þára (þra)
Instr. þý, þon
þý, þon

Imagine, you used to have to buy books to find out this sort of thing. I think I even have a Celtic grammar somewhere for just such a use. How clumsy compared to google.

Best sentence ever

2008-11-21T18:41:00.000-08:00

"With parturiencie for greater births, if a malevolent time disobstetricate not their enixibility." From Sir Thomas Urquhart's ; or, the discovery of a most exquisite jewel in 1652. The OED is so much fun. "Disobstetricate" and "enixibility" are nonce-words; enixability is made up from the Latin word for giving birth.

Good health by law

2008-11-17T21:46:00.001-08:00

Activists amuck.

600 lb of crazy

2008-11-16T18:18:00.000-08:00

Story. Picture.

Politicians

2008-11-16T17:57:00.000-08:00

Dalrymple on politicians.

Personality variation

2008-11-15T12:31:00.001-08:00

Some evolutionary modeling of the development of personality variation. It is along only one axis, trust, but the researchers mention previous experiments with variance in aggression.

This is your brain on activism

2008-11-13T18:18:00.001-08:00

CNN has an excellent example of activism-damaged thinking. The summary is that some labcoated killjoy has "discovered" that higher prices decrease demand. He shows that, unsurprisingly, decreased demand for alcohol means less drinking and less drinking means fewer people drink themselves to death (crashes not included). I suppose it is nice to see basic supply and demand demonstrated, but of course the lablord wants the interpretation to be that taxes should be raised through the roof to decrease drinking deaths. Characteristic errors of someone whose brain is warped by long years of activism:

Ignoring diminishing returns. The tax increases were quite large: 37% in the first case and 90% in the second, but returns diminish rapidly, from -29% to -11% after the second increase. Since the second tax increase was more than twice the first one, but had less than half the effect, sin taxes look very inefficient for controlling behavior.
Making a mountain out of a mole hill. The effect was small in absolute terms, -23 deaths/year after the first increase, then -21 after the second. The first change was, at the time, about 0.006% of the population. The second was about 0.003%. These are paltry numbers to generate national news with, let alone set policy.
Treating open systems as closed. Even Alaska is easy enough to leave for another state. Someone who is drinking to the point of cirrhosis has dedicated his life to it. What fraction of that 20-40 / year had simply moved?
Making broad policy recommendations from a narrow study. What happened to deaths due to other drugs? Alcohol is dangerous compared to pot, but it is baby formula compared to meth. Meth and several other dangerous drugs are very cheap, and if, as is likely, a large proportion of the people who die of drinking are already marginal or actually on the street, the illegality and nastiness of meth would little discourage them from shifting from more-expensive 40s to meth, as a supplement or replacement.
Treating human behavior as static. By dropping car accidents and other violent deaths, the study potentially hides offsetting increases in those. For instance, when activists got Washington to increase the drinking age to 21 but Idaho had not yet changed, there was a long dangerous period when the seven miles of highway between WSU and U Idaho had a horrific rate of accidents. Of course what had happened was that WSU students had acquired the new habit of getting drunk in Idaho, and then driving back to WSU. In this case, if higher taxes shift the proportion of drinking that is done in bars, the accident rate could easily change.
Not thinking their argument through to its logical conclusion. If preventing 23 deaths / year justifies higher taxes, why not just ration alcohol directly? If you have to present little ration coupons torn from your We-Luv-U HHS ration book whenever you want a drink, you will certainly have a hard time drinking too much. I am giving the doctoroid the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he would agree that disallowing even moderate drinking would be wrong.
Not applying similar cost-benefit and risk analysis elsewhere. How many people die in skiing accidents in Alaska each year? Snowboarding is even more dangerous; how about taxes to encourage everyone to snowboard hardly ever, ski little, and mostly go sledding on low hills. How many people on Alaskan cruises eat their final lobster tail and expire of some cardiovascular disaster? If we only taxed people in proportion to the extra pounds they carried, we could save so very many lives. Many activisits like this Dr. Little Tin God do think such taxes should be applied, at least to ugly things like fat (I have not seen one attack dangerous sports yet), but if they were to say up front all of the things they wish to tax, ban, ration, and control, they would get no hearing. Parceling out their toxic worldview one narrow study at a time helps them hide their ambition.
Treating their fellow men as children. Honestly, even if taxing drink by five cents a bottle would save 500 people a year, it would give me no reason to support the tax. All men die in time, but it is the exceptional privilege of Americans and a few other peoples in recent times to live in a complex and civilized society and yet also live as free men. A degree in epidemiology, as this doctor has, grants no authority to act as father to other men.
Implicitly treating a minor good as the highest good. In this case the minor good is longevity. The activist must treat it implicitly as the highest good because a system of ethics that prizes longevity above all other goods is manifestly disgusting, and contrary to all other forms of morality, whether ancient-heroic, existentialist, Judaeo-Christian, or any other. To live only to keep living at any cost is to be enslaved by the fear of a death that is coming for you no matter how you live.

When did the early deaths of those who choose poorly in life become satisfactory justification for binding free men by degrees? You should not have to be a libertarian--I am not one--to be sickened by the abandonment of freedom whenever a clipboard is waved at it.

Descending to personalities

2008-11-12T14:22:00.000-08:00

I've never really understood why descending to personalities meant beginning to hurl insults. Personality testing is certainly rich in potential insults; it's hard to make someone who scores very low on agreeableness and conscientiousness sound appealing. I suppose he might make an excellent highwayman.

Here is a little more detail, from a professor of psychology at UO, on the general acceptance of the Big 5 model:

McCrae and Costa’s (1985a,b,c; 1987) findings, like the cross-instrument convergence described above, show that the factor-analytic results from the lexical tradition converge surprisingly well with those from the questionnaire tradition. This convergence has led to a dramatic change in the acceptance of the five factors in the field. With regard to their empirical status, the findings accumulated since the mid-1980s show that the five factors replicate across different types of subjects, raters, and data sources, in both dictionary based and questionnaire-based studies. Indeed, even more skeptical reviewers were led to conclude that “Agreement among these descriptive studies with respect to what are the appropriate dimensions is impressive” (Revelle, 1987, p. 437; see also Briggs, 1989; McAdams, 1992; Pervin, 1994). The finding that it doesn’t matter whether Conscientiousness is measured with trait adjectives, short phrases, or questionnaire items suggests that the Big Five dimensions have the same conceptual status as other personality constructs. For example, Loehlin et al. (1998) found that all five factors show substantial and about equal heritabilities, regardless of whether they are measured with questionnaires or with adjective scales derived from the lexical approach.

Of course, the fact that Freudianism is still mucking up psychology (the quoted author even refers positively to Freud's concept of love) suggests that psychological consensus is not all that one might want.

Hoping, for the moment, that psychology isn't lost in fantasy again, there is that interesting remark about heritability. According to wikipedia, twin studies have shown these per-trait heritabilities:

Openness: 57%
Extraversion: 54%
Conscientiousness: 49%
Neuroticism: 48%
Agreeableness: 42%

Those are about as heritable as IQ. Obviously these all leave a great deal of room for environmental effects. Parents, at least traditional parents who care enough about their children to exercise authority, spend a lot of effort on controlling the environmental factors. I haven't known many people who sent their children to private schools, so this is only anecdotal, but controlling their children's environment had a substantial part in the decision. If, say, 57% of openness is heritable, and the remainder is split among school environment, neighborhood interactions, church, randomly acquired friends, and TV, then little of a child's personality conditioning can even be influenced strongly, let alone controlled, by parenting as such. By comparison, it's easy to see that marrying well vastly outweighs striving for a perfect environment. It also provides a good measure for determining what it means to marry well: good personality traits are irreplaceable and durable assets to give children, while good looks fade and money has a habit of getting lost and found across generations.

It's also interesting to think what might happen if the five factors are really capable of being inherited separately. (With S for stability instead of N:) A woman with a high A, high E, low C, low S, middle O married to a man with a middle A, low E, middle C, high S, and high O could produce, ab ovo, a middle A, low E, low C, low S, high O child who might be impulsively inquisitive and likeable past some reserve, but whose emotional stability was very likely to be disturbed in any social interaction, few of which would be sought out. Such a child might seem like an alien to both parents, with the mother baffled by seeming social retardation and the father astonished that a fellow bookworm could be so explosive and impulsive; the resulting adult might still be something as valuable as a high-energy academic like a field biologist. Coming up all trumps could be just as unsettling, as I think might have happened in my family, if it's the case that a middle A, low E, high C, high S, high O and a high A, middle E, middle C, low S, middle O yielded my youngest brother who is high A, middle-high E, high C, high S, high O, so that he gives the impression of having recently arrived from a more than usually holy and scholastic monastery.

Of course all of that takes a naive view of heritability (in reality these traits, if they have a genetic component, are spread across many genes with varying influence) and for the sake of argument disregards environment. Still it's interesting to think about the broad outlines of a personality being assembled from a mixture of parental elements, the way it's customary to talk about a child having his father's nose and his mother's eyes.

Personality

2008-11-11T13:41:00.000-08:00

The idea of a personality test has so many attractions. The results contain the vagueness and flattery of a horoscope without the obvious pseudoscience of astrology. You get to find out that you are a completely excellent kind of person and that other people are freaks. The Myers-Briggs test is a classic of that kind of personality test.

Even so, it would be very interesting if there were statistically significant personality combinations. It certainly conforms to everyday experience that there would be a limited range of broad personality groups. That sort of impression is frequently wrong, so it's important that large-scale personality characteristics, like a tendency to religiosity, are about as heritable as IQ, with r=.5 if I remember correctly. If personality is heritable and, so to speak, a mental phenotype, then it's not a priori ridiculous to look for phenotypic groupings analogous to the phenotypic groupings of outward appearance.

According to John Derbyshire (and wikipedia) psychological consensus is that the Big 5 or some similar model gets close to capturing personality variation and grouping parsimoniously. It makes no assertions in itself about whether the five axes correspond to five, or any other number, of physical brain arrangements, though that would be the most interesting discovery of all. Whether there is a physical correspondence or not, eHarmony tries to cash in on the model by matching personality types. I don't remember whether they mention the basis for their testing at any point, but the model is clearly Big 5.

Anyway, Derbyshire mentioned the Big 5 again today so I took the most official looking version of the test, which has the advantage of being part of a scientific survey. Reading the results gives a somewhat unreal sensation, like hearing myself on the phone. On the other hand, it is a short test, and as a friend who took it found, coming at a small subset of the questions from an unexpected angle can produce surprising results. I would like to see how the reliability of this short version in subsequent re-testing compares to the full version.

Update: so I took it again, just to see. I didn't try to do it at all differently, but got quite a bit of variation. Results: E 7 vs 10; A 90 vs 76; C 93 vs 66 (!); ES 31 vs 38; O 99 vs 99. I think those percentiles change as more people take the test, but that's what they were when I got the results. That change in conscientiousness is startling. When my friend re-took the test, his C score changed even more sharply, from 2 to 83. He made a good point, doubting whether the questions adequately capture the traits described by C, since there are no questions about civic or religious conscientiousness and questions about work predominate. On his second test he admittedly was trying a different way of handling close calls, but the original 2 does not describe him at all. He did find that his E, ES, and O scores were pretty stable, as mine were. Even so, the instability of the results is disappointing. Oh well, back to oneiromancy.

In the presence of saints

2008-10-28T15:04:00.000-07:00

Ugh. If this sort of thing were widely known among the general electorate, surely even the supine citizens of modern America would rise as a single body, seize the intolerable gasbags, and hurl them into the sea.

I have to get this out of my system before Obama wins and bad temper becomes illegal.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

2008-10-21T21:11:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell proved to be pretty enjoyable. It might not be quite so enjoyable for non-classicists because she wrote it as though it were an academic account of the rediscovery of magic, complete with lengthy footnotes and hundreds of pages without apparent direction, though full of interesting details. It brought back happy memories of grim plods through paceless pages. I wish she had known about the rediscovery of the classics in the late middle ages and early Renaissance, because it would have been the perfect model. As it happens it was quite a time for rediscovering ancient magic as well, though that was somewhat less successful. On the other hand magic might come out ahead, if you judge success by present-day adherents, since there may well be more neo-magick-wiccan-whatevers in the U.S. than people who can read Virgil.

The author, Susanna Clarke, writes quite a bit better than Rowling, and though her 18th/19th century tone occasionally falters, she does a pretty good pastiche. She depicts magic more effectively than Rowling as well, but for the most part prefers to leave it unexplained and often even undepicted. It is effective but after so many pages talking about the scholarship of theoretical magic I became tired of never seeing any. She does offer one explanation for Strange's magic, which amounts to a sort of musical improvisation, but with thoughts and actions instead of notes. However, that technique appears to be peculiar to him. There is a very late suggestion that no one has been doing magic but that all the magic has been done through the magicians by a powerful original magician. I think it was more a colorful statement of that original magician's power than an explanation, but it was not followed up.

I think the ending is kind of a punt, too, or else it is a set-up for a sequel, which would be even more annoying. The book is well worth reading, but I am not so sure I would read a sequel. By far the majority of the interest and all of the charm is in the gradual introduction of magic into a world that is only slightly divergent from the real London of 1800.

A political conversation

2008-10-20T23:30:00.001-07:00

Overheard at work:

[A sentence or two I missed, except for the word campaign.]
A: I'm so glad it's almost done and it's going to be ok.
B: Oh I know, it's such a relief.
A: I can't believe how bad McCain has been.
B: Yeah I used to think he had a brain but now...
A: Yeah he just doesn't have a brain.
B: [trying to be fair] Well, he hasn't been using his brain.
I: [turn headphones way up]

A and B are both quite nice. A is a MoveOn/AirAmerica fan but from having been forced to hear her frequently I don't think she actually knows what she's listening to. Very much a politics-as-identity-and-lifestyle sort of person. B is very sweet and it's a credit to her commonsense that she spends, as far as I can tell, no time thinking about politics except when it shows up in funny videos. Or in the case of Saturday Night Live, "funny" videos. It's just barely conceivable that B would have voted for McCain, if the press coverage of him had remained as adulatory as it was in 2000 or 2004.

McCain will almost certainly never be president, but by betraying his party and his own former principles for cheap popularity with journalists, he convinced two people that he had a brain at one point but then later lost it or did not use it. That is radiant political genius even a thistle has to love.

Joie de vive

2008-10-19T17:26:00.000-07:00

I had not read Dalrymple's review of La stratégie des antilopes before posting my definition of politics, but it is very much on point and as always with him well worth reading. In talking only of the irritation of community, I failed to include the positive joy that man has in destroying other men. It is hardly news to me but still a natural omission, since I tend much, much more to irritation than joy in destruction. However alien it seems to me, history and the daily newspaper show that some large part of mankind rejoices in violence for its own sake. Politics has to constrain that impulse as well, and while it does not explain the genocide, it is still noteworthy that politics had completely broken down long before the genocide. There is no polity when some men think other men are lower than roaches.

The idea that other men do wrong by existing shows up here:

Rwandan Prime Minister Jean Kambanda revealed, in his testimony before the International Criminal Tribunal, that the genocide was openly discussed in cabinet meetings and that "one cabinet minister said she was personally in favor of getting rid of all Tutsi; without the Tutsi, she told ministers, all of Rwanda's problems would be over."

Had the Hutu succeeded and been left without any foreign interference afterward, that minister would have discovered soon enough, as Stalin and Hitler did, that no matter how many groups you kill there is always another group of people who are the source of all problems.

On the pointlessness of ethics

2008-10-18T23:51:00.000-07:00

Damn that worthless idiot Rawls. At least I derive some comfort from the knowledge that when the social democratic consensus of the mid-to-late 20th century no longer seems self-evident, eternal truth to so many academics, he will fall right out of favor. Still, though he is especially bad, the fundamental mistake is attempting a theory of right behavior--ethics.

The only book of ethics that has helped me in practical ways is the Nicomachean Ethics, and even that is chockablock with nonsense, like the pretty but evanescent golden mean. I could pick any other part of ethics to beat on, but the golden mean is common to many ethical theories and particularly annoying. The trick is evident when used in a short form. For instance, a spendthrift is bad, a miser is bad, therefore take a little of both and be willing to spend but willing to save. The badness of the spendthrift and the miser are separate arguments, but one of the things I value in Aristotle is his willingness to work with the moral intuitions that, as Pinker would say, are part of the structure of our minds, and those intuitions are certainly inclined to condemn both kinds of men.

More damning is that there is no reason to suppose those behaviors have a linear, quantifiable, and exclusive relationship. It is perfectly possible to be a miser and a spendthrift; surely that is immediately recognizable in the character of the selfish profligate. Should there be a Cartesian chart of possibilities, in as many dimensions as there are human behaviors that the ethicist feels relevant to the question? I doubt very much anyone is competent to work the vector math of ethics, but if only two points are chosen, the choice will define the answer.

What most shows the golden mean to be brass is that it tells you what to do only when you already know what to do, and nothing at all when you do not. What behavior counts as miserly and what as spendthrift (to return to using only two possibilities) varies a great deal from country to country and also by time and circumstances--compare a man of 40 who gives all his wealth to a charity, though he has a family to provide for, a man of 95 who gives all his wealth to a charity, knowing his family to be well established, and a man of 25 who exhausts all his resources on a party, confident because he has so many years left to work for more. Now imagine them in different countries, even ones as closely related as America, Ireland, and Scotland; the judgments about these men would not coincide. If in your peculiar circumstances you know what would be miserly and what would be spendthrift, then by simple negation you already know near enough how to act, at least if you would prefer not to be seen to be a miser or a spendthrift. There is no need to go pretending that there is some happy place "between" wrong behaviors: just do not do them. If, as is more likely since you are thinking about it at all, you do not know what would be miserly or spendthrift in this case, then you have no points to set, no place to start, and less time to figure things out properly because you have wasted a lot of it trying to make human behavior into geometry.

Do not even get me started about Kant and Plato, those cautionary examples. Their worth, as far as ethics goes, is in pointing out others' errors and, by their own complete failures, in demonstrating the impossibility of a rational system of ethics. Aristotle will tell you a lot about how to become a good man, though he fails to show what a good man is. Only Socrates will teach you what all the virtues are: indescribable.

Politics is not ethics

2008-10-18T21:13:00.000-07:00

Adam Kirsch, who is reliably good and interesting, has an article about a Cambridge neo-Leninist's attack on Nozick and that dreary fraud Rawls. Nozick is, and probably always will be, a blank to me, since I decided quite a while ago that ethics is the most worthless subject known to man, but Rawls was inflicted on me before that decision. Rawls is in fact largely responsible for it, because a cruel satirist could not contrive a more self-satisfied, woolly-headed, base-stealing cloudcuckoolander yet ethicists have made him their king. My dislike for ethics is too long for this post, see the next one.

Kirsch's essay needs no comment in itself, but he quotes the neo-Leninist saying something commonplace that struck me for the first time with its utter strangeness: he rejected the idea that "politics is applied ethics." The neo-Leninist wants to say that politics is power inflicting its will, blah blah rampant reification blah, but the really startling thing is the idea that politics should ever have been considered ethics, applied or otherwise. Politics is the art of living in a city, beginning, middle, and end. Polis for city of course, though "in a city" is more simply put "together." Though man's purest misery is isolation, other people are intolerable to him. What each of us really, most sincerely desires is that there be many people about us, but that their wills, tastes, and actions not interfere with ours. That is, each man wants to be with other men but for all that makes them other men to be removed. Since those other men rudely persist in being what they are (this by the way is the genius of A Confederacy of Dunces), we are each of us continually abraded, forestalled, confined, in a word crossed in everything.

The first instinct of man is to fix that by making the most egregious obstacles vanish, and magic being lacking, murder is the preferred solution and politics the faute de mieux. Politics works pretty well for quite a few reasons. For instance, it lets interests combine and separate in ways that are more subtle than warlords changing sides on the battlefield, which permits interests to be more slender and more numerous than they would be if each had to field an army. The more interests there are, each convinced that politics will work best for it, the less likely any one interest, and the men who make it up, will either run away with the whole boodle or give up on the process and start stabbing.

So much, so Federalist Papers. I think the most effective parts of politics are much simpler. Bodies moving through space and words in our ears feel freighted with significance. Politics turns those wellsprings of meaning to the purpose of soothing irritated wills. Parades, elections, the pomp and formality of Congress, every arbitrary and ridiculous rite, all build up a sense of meaningfulness that encourages each to grant to the others some trust and sufferance. All that meaning must derive from some real thing, right? There must really be a State, if it the rites of the state feel so very important and real. For the sake of something so important and real, it is not asking much to listen a little, and so persuasion can begin. Politicians sing their songs, and the singing makes the wills of other men less irksome, by clarifying my will, dissembling your will, tarting up his will. Looking for rational, connected thought in a politician's speech is as silly as looking for sustained rationality in any song. Songs carry their sense in their sound. By singing and dancing together, crossgrained man becomes one of a tribe, a city, a nation, when by his cold and silent will alone he can only endure the role of tyrant. It is merely refinement wrought by time that the songs are long-winded speeches and the dances called parades and parliamentary procedure.

Politics is living together without wholesale murder. Look what happens to countries that try to get beyond politics, Germany Russia China Cambodia Korea.... 1 party, 100% victories in elections, and up to 20% murdered. How I wish St. Barry, St. Joe, and St. John would think, before puffing up with hot air, "They only prefer me to a skull heap."

Windows

2008-10-13T22:01:00.000-07:00

I hate it. It's ok as a desktop OS but it is horrible to do systems programming for. Why the !@$!*(&@ doesn't it have select() or even WaitForMultipleObjects() for pipes? No, registering events to trigger on overlapped writes is not sufficient. Do you
realize what a horror of unportable code that is, O pig-headed Microsoft? Not to mention excruciating to implement in perl or python.

Nor is there any excuse whatever for a minimum sleep/select resolution of .002 seconds. What is this, 1985? Do I have a turbo button my computer? This server's CPU (just one of 4) can do 500,000 operations in that time. Waitable timers are once again just not useful. If they were so damned easy, you'd have made sleep() use them internally.

Really, die in a fire already.

[Update] ActiveState python makes time.clock() use QueryPerformanceCounter(), so it provides very fine resolution for wall clock time. This is utterly unlike the meaning of time.clock() on unix-like platforms, so you would never expect it. It is wonderfully useful though. And yes I used thread message queues in the end, though not the Windows API versions, because again complex Windows-only structures are not useful for cross-platform scripting.

Crocker on Zimbabwe

2008-10-12T12:35:00.000-07:00

Someone mentioned to me that she liked Ishmael Reed's poetry, so I went to read about him. He turns out to be ghastly beyond measure, though unfortunately not beyond words, which he has a lot of. Like Ron Paul, though this is surely the only point of correspondence, Reed has a newsletter put out under his name. The sample article I read, by "Chinweizu," defends Mugabe against all charges, ranting in full blown paranoia about British war crimes committed against the ZANU-PF, misunderstanding standard international actions, and filling all the remaining gaps with ideology. I would have left it at that, but he named a specific bill, and gave a quotation from Chester Crocker, supposedly in testimony about the bill, that sounded made up: "To separate the Zimbabwean people from ZANU-PF we are going to have to make their economy scream, and I hope you senators have the stomach for what you have to do." That it's from Democracy Now! means it is most likely fantasy, but I decided to take a look; after all the Democracy Now! maniac claims the statement is in the transcript. The Crocker quotation shows up a few places online, all radical sites, but with no better attribution.

The schedule of the bill (S. 494 of the 107th) shows only three opportunities for testimony: the hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the hearing before the House Committee on International Relations, and the short debate in the House on 12/4/2001 (Thomas expires search links, but you can re-search with the day). I checked all the dates in Thomas anyway, but the other dates were merely procedural. (I did get to enjoy the declaration of National Shaken Baby Week on one of the dates.) The committee hearing includes only the formal statements of the participants, but since Crocker is not one of the participants, or even mentioned, that is not a problem. Crocker is also not mentioned in the debate, which of course was not a debate but a series of speeches in favor of a bill that after all passed by 390 or so to 11 in the House and 97 to 0 in the Senate.

I wish I had access to the Lexis-Nexis congressional database, but I am pretty confident this is a sufficient search. The bill is a small one, doing little--it suspends debt service freebies and new loans, allocates money to be given whenever Mugabe stops murdering people, and proposes international travel sanctions against the ZANU-PF leaders--on a subject of peripheral concern to the US, especially just three months after Sept. 11. Zimbabwe, formerly the British colony of Rhodesia, is primarily a British concern in any case. Given the limited American interest, the committee hearings and the short debate are a lot of time.

Added to the complete absence of Crocker from all the proceedings is the implausibility of the phrase. I did find some testimony by Crocker online, and that is not his tone; the quotation sounds like movie dialogue to me. Crocker does have a history of preferring engagement to sanctions, even with South Africa in the 1980s, so it is at least possible that he might agree with the general idea that sanctions would be unproductive. Otherwise, though, I am calling this debunked. This post is to help some other curious person from having to read quite so much congressional blather.

[Update: I was at the university library not long after so I had a chance to use Lexis-Nexis. I have the citations on a card somewhere and if I find it I'll post them, but anyone can duplicate the search. The supposed quotation first appears, quite late, in the Zimbabwean government paper among a lot of other outlandish propaganda. Hilariously, though after its first appearance it appears regularly, the citation for the quote changes every time. It is simply a government fiction, and not a well thought out or cleverly maintained one.]

Speaking of Ron Paul, he shows up in familiar mode in the House hearing:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The gentleman from New York, Mr. Houghton, mentioned that he had some reservations about this bill. And indeed, I think that we all should have some reservations about this bill. The one thing, though, that I would concede to the authors of this bill is the description of the problem that exists in Zimbabwe. There is no doubt about that.
The question I have, though, is whose responsibility is it? Is it the responsibility of us in the U.S. Congress to deal with this? Is it the responsibility of the American taxpayers to deal with it? Quite frankly, I just don't agree, no matter how bad the situation is, that it is our responsibility.

I wholly agree with the sentiment that human misery alone does not grant congress constitutional authority to act, but it comes across very poorly amid the other remarks, which are serious and actually pretty reasonable. Also, surely there are other battles for Paul than a bill that provisionally allocates $26m.

In passing, I noticed that the House Committee on International Relations transcript records a congressman uttering this immortal phrase: "The whole focus of our national posture was always the Middle East and Europe." Focusing posture sounds painful.

The best compliments are unintended

2008-10-09T00:31:00.000-07:00

Rolling into work around eleven today--yes, I have slipped back into the 11 AM-1 AM rut, but I have a big project--I was stopped by a slender, dark-haired woman with lively dark eyes who was trying to corral three little children. We have a keycard-protected building and she hoped I could help her get up to her husband's floor to surprise him. I know him, he is a smart and decent guy, but having met his wife and children I cannot honestly say I feel like he deserves them. That is the sound of commandments breaking, all right, but at least I do not care about his ass. Not only is his wife beautiful and charming, but his oldest daughter, a 4 year old, delivered a delightfully serious and very well enunciated speech about how they needed help to surprise him. Even his 2 year old daughter can speak clearly. I have a low covetousness quotient, but a beautiful wife and intelligent, serious children ring the bell and win the kewpie doll or cigar, their choice.

Of course I took them up to see him, and besides waving my keycard at the lock pads, all I did was listen to the oldest girl's speech, and reply as earnestly as I could given how funny she was and make sure the 2 year old got through the revolving door successfully. Even so, in the elevator the mother gave me this sort of piercing or shrewd look and asked if I had children. As so often with me there was that heart-stopping instant when I was not sure whether I would produce an answer that was true but not embarrassing, or simply blurt out the embarrassing truth. I said only "no," which is a success compared to what I just barely kept from adding, "that is the worst thing about my divorce," but still pretty awkward. Then she said, which was so sweet, all the more so for not I think being meant as a compliment, "It's just you're so good with children." I gather childless men are weird around kids. Fortunately my wits had caught up with the situation so I was able to pass it off with the true, relevant, and unembarrassing explanation that I was the oldest of four children, and then the elevator ride was over. What a sweet compliment; if only there were some bank where I could invest it to grow in time into a family.

Parini for the lulz

2008-10-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

An absurd article suggesting that playing video games improves the literacy of the player, or perhaps of people near the player (really). Some of the people quoted in the article think playing video games is better than reading books:

“Games are teaching critical thinking skills and a sense of yourself as an agent having to make choices and live with those choices,” said James Paul Gee, the author of the book “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.” “You can’t screw up a Dostoevsky book, but you can screw up a game.”

“I think we have to ask ourselves, ‘What exactly is reading?’ ” said Jack Martin, assistant director for young adult programs at the New York Public Library. “Reading is no longer just in the traditional sense of reading words in English or another language on a paper.”

Is an assistant director for young adult programs at a library a librarian renamed, or is he in professionalized management with librarians reporting to him? In any case, it is almost admirable how willing he is to be illiterate in support of illiteracy. Usually advocates of bad spelling, grammar, reading, etc use standard English themselves and show some evidence of letters, an ironic fact often thrown back at them by conservatives. Jack is a proper revolutionary, a vanguard illiterate: "Reading is no longer just in the traditional sense" shows how firmly he has rejected English syntax and idiom.

Gee employs some remarkable English with "You can't screw up a Dostoevsky book," but all I have to say to him is that he really should play a video game. He will be astonished to find that games let the player save his place and retry levels, so that choices are almost costless. The 1-Up mushroom will blow his mind like peyote.

The best part of the article, of course, is the appearance of my favorite moronic English prof:

“I wouldn’t be surprised if, in 10 or 20 years, video games are creating fictional universes which are every bit as complex as the world of fiction of Dickens or Dostoevsky,” said Jay Parini, a writer who teaches English at Middlebury College.

The tendentious might want to ask him what he means by "complex," and whether that word can apply in the same sense to intricate software and well-developed fiction, but look at the implication in his statement: Dickens and Dostoevsky created fictional universes, as though they were mere precursors to Tolkien and his hobby world. I had naively supposed that the "universes," or settings, of their books existed to support each story, which was the intended creation. Maybe Parini is just confused, thinking Dickens and Dostoevsky are the D&D of the Forgotten Realms.

And yes, I have read a shameful number of Forgotten Realms books, and played all the Bioware/Black Isle games. I suppose the one advantage to such a waste of life is that I can say with complete confidence that my literacy suffered for every hour reading the really appalling pulp and playing the entertaining but vacuous games.

Learning's Labor Lost

2008-10-02T18:23:00.001-07:00

Dalrymple also thinks the age of highly learned men of science is past:

Will we ever again see the polymathic like of Parkes Weber?How was such a man possible? Apart from a classical education,a congenitally insatiable curiosity, and a long life, what werethe conditions that made him possible, though not inevitable?

The collapse of classical education, and education generally, must explain a lot, but he adds something it might take an Englishman to think of:

It occurred to me that he had one great advantage over us moderns:he never in his life had to go to Tesco, find a parking spacein the hospital car park, cook a meal, take the children toschool, or book tickets online. As one American economist putit, with a certain discomfiting directness, you quickly learnthat one servant is worth a household full of appliances. ParkesWeber's career was evidence of this great truth.

Off and on bended knee

2008-09-22T20:32:00.000-07:00

There is a fine article in the NY Review of Books about science and religion. The topic is so thoroughly beaten out in so many bad articles and books that I can understand some reluctance to risk another, but this one, by Steven Weinberg, a physicist, is a fair-minded and highly educated account. It includes many references I have not seen before, like Melville's comment, "had [Emerson] lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions," which sticks it right to that pious gasbag.

He also introduced me to Andrew Dickson White, Cornell's first president and a firm believer in the war of science and religion, and to al-Ghazzali, the Sufi philosopher who introduced into Islam the deranged notion that any natural law would be an abrogation of God's freedom. I once read about this idea, and tried to ask a Sufi guest speaker about it when I was at college, but managed to mangle the question, and since then had often wondered if I had even misunderstood the idea. Apparently not, which is a relief, and I am glad to have a name to go with it.

Looking at his other book reviews, it is clear that Prof. Weinberg is highly educated both in the humanities and in science, and he writes beautifully. It is a real pleasure to see that such a man could live today. He is 75, meaning he was educated in the old world that ended between 1963 and 1968, so his erudition cannot reassure me that much about the days to come. Still it is a fine sight and it is wonderful to be alive now while such things are yet possible.

Of course this is a blog, so even though his essay is as tranquil and clear as Crescent Lake, I am going to stick my oar in, catch crabs, and go about in circles with some criticism. He says,

When I was an undergraduate I knew a rabbi, Will Herberg, who worried about my lack of religious faith. He warned me that we must worship God, because otherwise we would start worshiping each other. He was right about the danger, but I would suggest a different cure: we should get out of the habit of worshiping anything.

Perhaps that would be best; it is hard to imagine a world without serious houses on serious ground, and sad. But set against the beautiful solemnity is a great deal of evil, as anyone can see in others' religions, so that if there could be no worship at all, we might all come out ahead. What I disagree with is the idea that that could happen. Religion is an enormous grab-bag of human passions, interests, and needs, as Steven Pinker, Prof. Weinberg, and Razib have all said, but if any single thing binds it all together, surely that is worship. Worship can be sweet silliness, like Amy Grant's early records, or a mysterious obligation, like the worship owed at every roadside shrine in Shintoism or ancient Greek religion, or pants-filling craziness, like Aztec sacrifices, but it necessarily embodies a recognition that the worshipper is less than he normally feels like, and that something else is more. Some religions, like Christianity, use a kind of jujitsu to flip the worshipper into the greatness he has just exalted, but the abasement of one and the exaltation of the other come first.

Well, then, what would be lost if humanity lost religion, learned not to worship? Of course there would be no foaming imams and Pat Robertson would have to sell cars, and we could all feel a lot safer from new Nazisms and Marxisms, so that would all be good. The rest would not be so great. So strong and universal an impulse as the desire to worship implies that it has a tremendous evolutionary advantage, and possibly other benefits as well that we may enjoy without any real gain in fitness. I think the chief evolutionary advantage is in enabling a non-hive species to achieve astounding works. One of the minor benefits may well be science itself, or at least scientists may benefit by enjoying what they do much more.

If the end of worship came about because men could no longer exalt any other entity, surely great enterprises would become very rare, perhaps impossible. Humans, even disaffected bookworms, do not treat their leaders, whether a small-time CEO or a generalissimo, as though they were only men. If they did so, respecting only the office but having no greater regard for its tenant, every command would grate, every plan would draw cavils, every competing idea would threaten group unity. It might be possible to start out with the conscious submission of will motivated by desire for the communal goal, but fissiparous reason will soon show a few men, then groups of men, then whole sects, that a "communal goal" is something of a fiction, especially when your leader is a blockheaded old goat who won't see reason. He always is, of course, being human.

Dalrymple would say that the end of abasement is more likely, and already in progress. Of course he lives in England, which from every account is suffering just what would be expected in an unworshipping land, as swollen egos collide in every interaction and no one sees a reason to give an inch of ground. Perhaps that is only among the less charming classes, but that means a large part of the country. Some men might be exalted, but not in a way that lets them unite men in a common cause; it is an ersatz worship. Nasty as the city would be, I think the wild would lose something as well. In part, nature's beauty derives its power from letting its intricacy, scale, age, willlessness relieve your heart of the self-regard that so painfully swells it. Would the unworshipping man feel any awe of the natural world? Life would be bleak without that awe, but science would suffer more. Every scientist, writing of his start in science, names some special aspect of nature which in one way or another overawed him and drew him into his life's course. Even if some of them are only fulfilling genre requirements, they seem sincere and many must be; surely few of them would have come to science without that experience, often renewed.

In the end, there will be worship, though we may exclude ourselves. Perhaps mankind should stop worshipping (if "should" really means anything), or least life might be quieter, but if I and you and Prof. Weinberg all stop, we have still changed nothing about the reality that made man a worshipper and that always will re-make him so. Yet if it is foolish and futile to hope for the end of religions and to encourage others to stop worshipping, it leaves a man like Prof. Weinberg stranded. The sensible unbeliever by nature would either accept that he is an aberration with little to say on this subject to normal humanity or else dedicate himself to ensuring that existing religions tame and civilize the religious impulse. The difficulty with the latter is that for any man to choose to worship because mankind must always worship, possibly accords with logic but is humanly irrational, and rather wicked, even if none of us can quite say why.

The disadvantage

2008-09-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

The problem with blogging about something with a good reputation, like reading, is that going quiet is an admission of backsliding into vice. I should have chosen to blog about well I was doing at killing endangered animals. Everyone would have liked me more when I blogged less.

Anyway, I have been reading even in this fit of the lazies, but this post is just to call attention to a beautiful column by George Will. Eirenic is just the word for it, I think. My own life is significantly worse than four years ago but significantly better than two years ago, which I think means I need to support Pelosi for president. Or does my life only prosper when there is a Pelosi retrograde in a quarter with a descending Bush? The astrology of personal politics is a tricky thing.

Wallace Falls

2008-08-19T18:55:00.000-07:00

This weekend I went on a day-hike in Wallace Falls State Park. It was only three miles to the Upper Falls, and the rise is only about 1,300 feet, but it left me a quivering sloth for the rest of the day. The hike is well worth the pain, since it is beautiful throughout. I recommend going early Sunday morning, getting there as soon as the park opens, at 8. Even that early, on a day that was supposed to storm, I met a few other people on the way up. By the time I got back down to the lower trail, I was meeting people every couple of minutes. It would still be a beautiful hike, but it was far better for being so deserted.

I should finish with mysteries, but those recommendations are turning out so well, I will have to read one or two more. I am just finishing The Franchise Affair, by Josephine Tey. It is pure pleasure.

Why not to live south of Seattle

2008-08-14T00:12:00.001-07:00

South of Seattle (Seatac to Tacoma) is pretty scummy, but even so, a fat bastards' swingers club is remarkable. How excellent that they "hosted a naked rally for presidential candidate Barack Obama" and kept a "mobile sex dungeon" in a truck out front. Politics would be so much more entertaining if it were permitted for candidates to hold all their opponents' supporters against them.

Also, how differently the culture would develop if in popular representation libertinism wore its true, blubbery face. I Hear America Swinging tried, satirizing libertinism with unappealing people in the 70s, but even the crankiest of conservatives could hardly have expected it to be tamer than reality in 2008. This regrettable house of lardly love also reminds me of a distinction between vice and virtue that for a few years I have thought might be universally true, but that I would like to see advanced by a thinker of consequence before I accept it. By coincidence, I first thought it out when I discovered that my entirely disgusting and evil blimp of an uncle and his Cruella of a wife were swingers of long standing, or perhaps long lying.

The idea is that a virtuous behavior has the distinctive characteristic that it remains attractive even when practiced by unappealing people across all classes, while a vicious behavior depends for its attractiveness on the unusual qualities of its practitioners, so that it becomes unappealing when practiced generally. By attractive I mean that seeing others do it is pleasant to strangers; even a vice despised by all draws practitioners by its material advantages and so is attractive in a sense, without being pleasant to see. If this distinction is true, then it helps explain why social conservatism can be beneficial while still being predicated on false ideas about religion and the nature of morality (and every distinct social conservatism thinks all other social conservatisms are falsely predicated). By preventing a vicious social novelty from gaining legal and social standing in its early, meretricious days, conservatism gives it time to show its true appearance, as people of ordinary repulsiveness begin to practice the vice openly.

Since I have not seen any similar idea, it may be a terrible one. Because it breaks virtue and vice loose of any permanency other than human nature and defines them in aesthetic and social terms, it might only be unobserved because it does not fit the intuitive sense that right and wrong are distinct from other judgments. Certainly one failing is that it does not explain why truly attractive behavior should be dignified with the name of virtue, but that is because I think the human mind ineluctably makes that association. Another fault is that large populations, that is societies, might not make common judgments about attractiveness; here, though, I believe what people do and not what they say, and even (or especially) those who claim to have a different moral aesthetic arrange their lives to avoid the unattractiveness of that which they claim not to find unattractive. Just visit Queen Anne in Seattle, or any of the innumerable upper-middleclass left-liberal enclaves scattered through urban areas: you will not find wobbly swingers' clubs.

The most difficult objection, I think, is that most people are repulsive in nearly every way and nearly everyone is repulsive in some ways. We do all right, compared to chimpanzees, who must be the most repulsive animals on the planet, but primarily because we hide our most repulsive behaviors behind walls, words, and willful blindness. In such a morass of ugliness, distinguishing the aesthetic advantage of virtue may be merely chimerical. For me, though, the fact that virtuous actions are so attractive is all the more striking for the fact that people are so very unattractive, and it makes virtue all the more precious that enduring beauty is so rare.

Mysteries

2008-08-12T22:13:00.001-07:00

Still stalling on Bacon, I read two mysteries last week. One was another recommendation, this time in the Wall Street Journal, The Lodger by Hillaire Belloc's sister, Marie Belloc Lowndes. It is not a proper mystery, in that the criminal is both deranged and known to the reader from the start, and should probably be called a work of psychological suspense. The twisting of mind and morals suffered by the strict, self-reliant woman of the house as she tends to her mad lodger catches the reader and twines his hopes with hers, so that when she convinces herself for a moment that he is innocent, her relief is the reader's. It is a remarkable performance, and another confirmation that if a good writer recommends a minor novel, you should certainly give it a try.

I also read The Lighthouse, another of the books I picked up at Half Price Books a couple of weeks ago. Dalgiesh is becoming a little too superhuman in his command of himself and everyone he meets. Not only does he always know exactly what to say and, far more important to his very British author, what not to say, in order to achieve the greatest possible effect on everyone else, but he even manages to solve the case from his sickbed as he suffers through SARS. As though to compensate, James has increased the intensity of his self-criticism and the torment of his highly intellectual romance, to such a degree that a man of his intelligence would surely realize he was being ridiculous.

As a mystery, though, The Lighthouse belongs to that pleasant, old-fashioned genre, the locked-room mystery. In this case the locked room is a remote island, a variation that escapes the artificiality of a door locked from the inside. For that matter, it might not even be possible to have a locked room in any meaningful sense now. Bedrooms and studies do not have chimneys, gas fixtures, bell-pulls, keyholes, French doors, or old, thick walls that could hold a secret passage. Forensic science finishes off whatever sneaky alternatives are left, with the possible exception of killing by radio, or of course by time machine. The island is also a secret preserve for the wealthy and powerful, so it takes the place of the now-implausible manor house. The result is a comfortable mystery that, whatever its faults, is no weaker than several of Sayers' mysteries.

Update: I just found that the WSJ had P.D. James give her recommendations, so I have several more books in the queue now. The only one I know is Murder Must Advertise, which James is entirely correct to choose; of Sayers' dozen novels, it is unquestionably the purest entertainment.

Walla Walla

2008-08-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

The pictures as promised.

Such a delay

2008-08-10T23:45:00.000-07:00

Classic, to blog a bunch then stop cold. But my computer broke so hard that after three days I finally had to re-install Windows. It turns out that vmware can break USB keyboards completely, and I had given away my last PS2 keyboard. Then I went on two vacations of three days each. It is all fixed now and I am home for the week. Tomorrow I will put up pictures from my trip to the family ranch.

While I was filling up the car an hour ago (still averaging more than 30 mpg, so nice) a strangely ratty man, wearing a dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves and greasy black hair, gray-streaked and tied in a ponytail and pinned up on one side, asked me if I had watched the evening news. He was crestfallen when I said I had been on the road the whole day. After a short pause, he recovered from his disappointment and let me in on the excitement: he had just been released from the hospital where he had been treated for smoke inhalation, after a fire at a local hotel. Of course he was looking to enjoy his brief fame and especially to enjoy again having been interviewed on TV, by finding someone who had seen him. He added that I looked the sort of person to watch news, which might have been flattering except that he was talking about local news and was also clearly in the mood to think everyone he met might be a news-watcher. I could not bear to disappoint him any more, so I asked about the damage (little) and injuries (none) and congratulated him on his escape, which seemed to satisfy him. He went off into the night with renewed optimism; I hope he found a news-watcher soon enough.

A Certain Justice

2008-07-29T22:30:00.001-07:00

I have let myself go completely and have read another mystery. I stopped at the neighborhood Half Price Books on Sunday and of course ended up with several books. I was delighted to find that Patrick McManus, whose North Idahoan outdoorsy humor cheered me up throughout my teens, has started writing mysteries. I got thirty or so pages into Avalanche while waiting for a prescription to be filled tonight; so far it is pleasant but a little uncertain.

I have, I think, all of P.D. James's books now, and have not been disappointed yet. Well, except that A Certain Justice, which I finished earlier tonight, proved to be one I had already read. I did not own it yet and know no one to borrow it from or lend it to, but in the first few chapters I realized I had read it somewhere. Probably it was at someone's house while I was bored. It was good enough to keep going anyway, especially since I had no other book with me yesterday.

It comes close to breaking the one absolute rule separating a proper mystery from a procedural, a thriller, or most ghastly, a true-crime work. The rule is, the suspects (or the murderer, if he is known from the start) must be sane. The murderer will likely prove unbalanced in his emotions--after all, he killed someone--but insanity is a mystery's deus ex machina. Of course a madman is even less free than we are, but the limits of madness in its many forms are so unknown to us that we have only the author's assurance that he is playing fair. Yet the greater unfairness is not, I think, in that it prevents the reader from guessing the murderer; in that sense, Doyle cheats shamelessly, Knox is far too obscure, Christie too obvious, and Sayers is sometimes hardly interested in the criminal. I rarely guess, though I watch for the hints and misdirections so that when the answer is given, I can try to see the path the author intended.

The unfairness of madness goes much deeper, for a mystery is a sort of comedy, like the classical "New Comedy," in which social disruption, mistaken identity, and cross-purposes among more or less ordinary people follow a chain of causation (even if flimsy) from chaos to greater chaos until the plot begins to resolve towards social harmony. It is characteristic of New Comedy to end with multiple weddings and a feast, and in that light it is not all that surprising that Christie, at the more obvious end, also wrote romance novels and that Sayers bent the course of several books towards that one great engagement. Even less romantic mysteries, though, follow that path of initial disruption (the body in the library) through the cross-purposes and misdirections that multiply as more disruptions, often more murders, increase the chaos, until the detective's integrating intelligence pulls society back towards wholeness and comity. Insanity breaks all that. The initial harmony is shown to be a falsehood over the bottomless chaos of madness, the plot cannot progress by a normal sense of causation, and the detective cannot by his powers of explanation formulate events into a meaningful whole. Nor can society be repaired, when the story turns on the excruciating isolation of every mind from every other.

Bacon stall

2008-07-28T23:58:00.000-07:00

Bacon is proving hard going. I could make excuses about work stepping up and the evanescing summer, but really it just has not been very interesting. I was excited about The New Atlantis before reading it, but found I had nothing to say about it afterward. The Oxford selection starts off as slowly as possible, with advice to the queen about the Church of England and those tributes and other minor works. To keep any interest at all, I had to skip to the end for The New Atlantis before coming back to the set order. The editor would have done better to lead off with a short, complete work that showed Bacon's thought in its fullest form, so that the reader, now encouraged with the knowledge of a destination well-chosen, might speed his way through the intelligent but rather tedious early works. The editor, as he reveals himself in the lengthy, sawdust-packed endnotes, is also intelligent but tedious, which probably explains his choice. Skipping to Atlantis was a good idea, and I will have to start skipping at will. Still, it grates on my autodidactic soul to ignore an editor's ideas.

Bacon on the Beach

2008-07-27T16:48:00.000-07:00

I went up to Deception Pass yesterday. For efficiency in reading, it rates poorly, since I read about one hour out of seven. On the other hand, it is a beautiful place for being inefficient in. I nearly turned the day-trip into a camping trip, but found myself too poltroonish to stay overnight with nothing but a blanket, a car, and two books.

The picture above is just some minor trail in the park, which at more than 4,000 acres has quite a few long trails. I love green tunnels and bowers and for once had remembered my camera. Just a few feet farther down this trail I startled a small snake, who made the strangest noise at me, like a loud, yawning hiss. Like Professor Savant, I walk around looking up, so the snake got back into his hole while I saw only a blur. I stopped to look in his hole, hoping to find him glaring at me, but all I got to see was a blackish-blue tail with a yellow stripe.

I was delighted to find thistles in bloom, of course. Die Disteln uber alles in der Welt (thanks, babelfish). This area of the park has a lot of barbecues and picnic tables and is next to a parking lot, so it had the most people, but still not more than twenty. For the most part everyone was quietly busy with his own entertainment, but for one older man holding court straddle-legged on a picnic table, a strained bathing suit barely a fig-leaf, his great rolls piebald in red and white. A smaller, younger couple sat opposite on a bench, looking stunned as he shouted some long story about the opposition he faced at work, with frequent recourse, despite the grizzled stubble on his balding head, to fucking this and fucking that. It was only about three years ago that I first understood that the loud and obnoxious would never grow out of it. Had I met this man earlier, I might have learned faster.

After a few miles of disoriented hiking, I lucked into this beach, where I read for an hour. I wish I lived near enough beaches to do this more often, but unfortunately the beaches in the lower Sound are not so quiet or even accessible. The slight wind off the sea made the pages stick together; though the air did not feel damp to me, I suppose it must have been. I finally finished the "device," or quasi-dramatic court entertainment, called "Of tribute; or, giving that which is due," which proved much harder to stay with than The New Atlantis. The dozen pages of praise for Elizabeth were exhausting, full of references to recent events that sent me to the endnotes, but the unceasing flattery was even more wearying. It was possibly worth it, though, to find that he praised his Queen's physical attributes in some detail, including her breasts.

Little Murders

2008-07-24T20:23:00.000-07:00

I just watched the most peculiar movie, by Jules Pfeiffer, the cartoonist. It is supposedly a black comedy but there is a lot more black than there is comedy. The marriage of a nihilist and a positive-thinker in an existentialist church is funny, as are several of the family conversations where everything said is either banal reminiscence or cliched, except for brief irruptions of dementia that are mostly ignored by the other characters. Still, I feel a little sick. The period is late 1960s New York, and everything is wrong, from the failing power to the 60 unsolved murders per month that appear to have no motive and that the hysterical, conspiracy-theorist police cannot and do not hope to solve. Pfeiffer perpetrates an especially horrifying murder to start in train a demonstration of the murders' motive. It is to him the ape-like love of making someone pay, of fighting back and killing someone when life is brutish and caged. The final scene is in fact of the men in the family truly happy at last in their metal-shuttered cage of an apartment, hooting, climbing on the furniture, slapping their chests, relieved of all torment because they have just murdered several strangers.

"Murderous ape" is certainly a better definition of man than "featherless biped" or even "rational animal," but only someone of Pfeiffer's wit and politics would respond to New York's disaster by going on safari above the human soul's First Cataract, when he needed to travel no farther than into his own memories. That the New York of his youth was markedly more tranquil might have suggested that deep causes were not needed, and a humanity surpassing his wittiness might have suggested turning his satire against the real problems. With elites like him playing games with disaster, it is amazing New York was ever repaired.

The Dark Knight

2008-07-22T22:56:00.001-07:00

I just got back from seeing the Dark Knight. It was far better than Hellboy 2, having the breadth, heft, and sense it lacked. A little too mythopoetic, but then that is what Batman is now. Even so, the final scene of voluntary sacrifice is new and powerful. Another remarkable display of dramatic reach in a genre of pure spectacle.

The Joker remains a frustrating embodiment of 20th century contradictions. Though I have not read the early Joker stories, it appears he was a murderer, but that Batman pursued him to the death. Though the Joker proved in later stories to survive each apparent death, Batman had still shown himself willing to fight it out to the only possible end, other than the commercially dull ending of state execution that capture would have meant. Then the comic book code set in and he only pulled capers, which only a highly confident society would consider reasonably repaid with death. After the CCA would have allowed him to be killed, those opinion-makers who are meant when people say "society changed its mind" had rejected the death penalty. From then on, Batman and the Joker have been entoiled in a bad 7th grade ethics question and a perpetual will-he-or-won't-he conflict between Batman's oath to defend the innocent and his inexplicable--except by the zeitgeist--unwillingness to kill off the chief threat to the innocent.

Batman should kill him. For that matter, any one of the policemen in the movie should shoot him on sight. Is it really so hard, so morally fraught, to kill someone who will, with perfect certainty, murder throughout the rest of his life? There is no slippery slope here; would it progress from permitting the killing of those who murder thousands to those who murder mere hundreds, and thence by degree until it was permitted to kill jaywalkers? The putative dilemma is only the boundless self-righteousness of an individual conscience satisfying itself at the expense of thousands. Of course it is just a story, but when it is repeated so many times to such success, it is hard not to think it has laid hold of some favorite delusion of the times. A time, after all, in which "Not in my name" passes for a meaningful, or even relevant, response to a war.

The Amateur Immigrant: Mackay

2008-07-20T21:29:00.000-07:00

Stevenson spends several pages on one person, who is a fascinating character. I will try to cut it down to blog-size, but it would be a shame to lose anything of this odd and unsettlingly familiar man.

We had one on board with us, whom I have already referred to under the name of Mackay, who seemed to me not only a good instance of this failure in life of which we have been speaking, but a good type of the intelligence which here surrounded me. Physically he was a small Scotsman, standing a little back as though he were already carrying the elements of a corporation... Mentally, he was endowed above the average. There were but few subjects on which he could not converse with understanding and a dash of wit; delivering himself slowly and with gusto, like a man who enjoyed his own sententiousness. He was a dry, quick, pertinent debater... When he began a discussion he could not bear to leave it off, but would pick the subject to the bone, without once relinquishing a point. An engineer by trade, Mackay believed in the unlimited perfectibility of all machines except the human machine. The latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound of carrion and perverse gases. He had an appetite for disconnected facts which I can only compare to the savage taste for beads... With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already no longer young, on his way to a new country, with no prospects, no money, and but little hope. He was almost tedious in the cynical disclosures of his despair. "The ship may go down for me," he would say, "now or tomorrow. I have nothing to lose and nothing to hope."

He too drank, but did not acknowledge the fact; when he once made a fool of himself getting very drunk, by strength of will he "suppressed all reference to his escapade."

In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the world but money and steam-engines. He did not know what you meant by the word happiness....

He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been real like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was his god and guide. One day he took me to task--a novel cry to me--upon the overpayment of literature. Literary men, he said, were more highly paid than artisans; yet the artisan made threshing-machines and butter-churns, and the man of letters, except in the way of a few useful handbooks, made nothing worth the while. He produce a mere fancy article. Mackay's notion of a book was Hoppus's Measurer.

Stevenson tried to argue that material production was to produce leisure to pursue happiness, which literature provides richly, but Mackay denied it: "The thing was different, he declared, and nothing was serviceable but what had to do with food. 'Eat, eat, eat!' he cried; 'that's the bottom and the top.'" He debated through teatime so he had to go hungry, which he had more than enough good humor to find funny himself.

Anything, whatever it was, that seemed to him likely to discourage the continued passionate production of corn and steam-engines he resented like a conspiracy against the people. Thus, when I put in the plea for literature, that it was only in good books, or in the society of the good, that a man could get help in his conduct, he declared I was in a different world from him. "Damn my conduct!" said he. I have given it up for a bad job. My question is, 'Can I drive a nail?'" And he plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously seeking to reduce the people's annual bellyful of corn and steam-engines.

That degree of hostility towards the humanities can be found in high tech, though it predominates only among system administrators, and "bellyful of corn and steam-engines" would be replaced by "videogames and CPUs." In my experience, most tech workers would agree with Mackay that the humanities belonged to another world, but they would first have to be told that world exists as something other than the soft options and Studies programs they saw at college. Mackay was enough a part of the old culture that he had "most of the elements of a liberal education," but it is different now: as a senior in biology told me at UM, he had not had a paper assigned to him since he was sixteen. With few exceptions, Americans who train in the practical sciences or engineering have no conception of what has been withheld from them. Of course I have met a handful of exceptions, though either their liberal education has come by birth, because one or both parents are professors in the humanities, or, as in my case, their tech career was a change in direction after a liberal arts education. What is saddest, many are Mackays by training, not nature, being quick to appreciate the true humanities when introduced to them. I have not found tech workers to be as grim as Mackay, except some system administrators, who anyway have the most noxious tech workers in their number (cf. Slashdot). Mackay in rejecting letters seems to have done more harm to himself than befalls those who merely grow up without them:

...[He] was adrift like a dead thing among external circumstances, without hope or lively preference or shaping aim. And further, there seemed a tendency among many of his fellows to fall into the same blank and unlovely opinions. One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and that is the way to be happy. Yet that is the whole of culture, and perhaps two-thirds of morality.

One other thing joins Mackay to the tech worker:

Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear of religion. I have seen him waste hours of time in argument with all sort of poor human creatures who understood neither him nor themselves, and he had had the boyishness to dissect and criticize even so small a matter as the riddler's definition of mind. He snorted aloud with zealotry and the lust for intellectual battle.

Thieves

2008-07-20T19:37:00.001-07:00

Of the worst variety. Batch-snatching makes the international news occasionally, but I had no idea it was so common. It is so sad, all those wretched people killed by mobs of lunatics.

The Amateur Immigrant

2008-07-20T00:44:00.000-07:00

In 1879, Stevenson took an immigrant-class berth in a steamship to America, one of only a few out of the several hundred below-deck passengers not intending to immigrate to America permanently. The title is partly a joke on that, and partly a bitter pun, since he found the experience hateful and not one to be undergone for the mere love of it. The second half recounts his trip on the immigrant train from New York to California, which went no better than the first half, except that it ends with his joy at the sight of California's forests and the Bay.

The foreword to this edition belongs to the very English school of captatio malevolentiae, having been given to someone who appears to loathe the author he has to introduce, on the thin excuse that the foreword-writer has written a book in the same genre. The problem with this line of thinking is that it gives full opportunity to scotch a competitor, which Raban does enthusiastically. Otherwise the foreword only contributes a highly overwrought symbolic reading of the book, featuring the deadly phrase rite de passage and the suggestion that Stevenson was "governed by it [the rite de passage pattern] more by instinct than by any conscious will to shape his writing to its demands." Which is a pretty nice way to stuff your own hokey theory into someone's work while denying him any praise.

In truth, Stevenson deserves a great deal of praise for so minutely recording and affectingly conveying the sensations of an immigrant, both material and social. The physical conditions are an education in themselves; I never would have guessed that below-decks passengers would be fed on the scrapings of the cabin passengers' plates, nor that even this sort of food was a privilege only of the better of the two below-decks classes, and a treat to relieve the grim (though first-run) food they got for other meals. His phrase for twice-run food is "broken meat," which was new to me and has been frustrating me with lack of opportunity to use it. It would be better to read this short book than to read my account of the physical details, but I have to quote this description of the nighttime air in steerage: "The stench was atrocious; each respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese."

I do want to write about his observations of the other immigrants, though. He found them not at all what he had imagined, both better and worse. The men play gambling games incessantly, but bet no money, an astounding instance of virtuous and beneficial self-control; the mothers affectionately watch their children swing around on the outer railing, apparently callous to the risk; the working class immigrants prove to have far pickier taste in food than Stevenson; there is frequent singing and dancing, especially when a fiddler shakes off his sea-sickness, but the men prove unable to shed their dignity for an eight-man quadrille; above all, the immigrants have a remarkable mildness, where he had expected adventurers:

Comparatively few of the men were below thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families; not a few were already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young. Again, I thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of humanity, with bluff or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager and pushing disposition. Now those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days. Mildness was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild endurance.

Considering the immigrants in light of England's faltering economy, he finds that the economic battle was harder than he knew:

Thus it was only now, when I found myself involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate how sharp had been the battle. We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a ship full of failures, the broken men of England.

Though in fact many of the immigrants were from mainland Europe. And again:

As far as I saw, drink, idleness, and incompetency were the three great causes of emigration, and for all of them, and drink first and foremost, this trick of getting transported overseas appears to me the silliest means of a cure... Change Glenlivet for Bourbon, and it is still whisky, only not so good.

Yet that their mildness was not mere broken spirits is shown by their cheerfulness: "Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety."

He describes, on arrival in New York, the great crush of immigrants from the many steamships that had landed over just the last three days. If his steamship was representative, what change was worked on America by the introduction of so many cheerful, dim, orderly, drunken, silly, gentle refugees from sense? Contrary to general prejudice in America, foreigners often remark that kindness, mildness, and orderliness are the most striking characteristics of Americans, followed by ignorance, unrealistic thinking, and luxurious over-indulgence. Perhaps the immigrants passed on exactly what they brought, but somehow the country only became greater. There could hardly be greater praise for the power of freedom.

Irony

2008-07-17T00:20:00.001-07:00

So instead of writing about culture I went to see an instance of the trash culture Kael regretted, a sequel even. Hellboy 2 turns out to be pretty good as comic book movies go: better than the wretched Spiderman movies, not nearly as good as Batman Begins or Ironman. The plotting is better than in the first one, where the story wanders at random before unexpectedly producing a boss battle that demonstrates just how much is gained when the plot progresses in suspense and intensity towards the climax, and lost when a scene simply shows up holding a sign saying, "I am the climax;" also, a good climax would not be correctly described as a boss battle. The new story still makes no sense at all, which is a pity because Mignola's stories are excellent, his best talent.

The characters are feeble and flat, and that would be incredibly pretentious to observe about a comic book movie, except that Batman Begins and Ironman have just recently shown how greatly good characterization helps and how naturally it can fit into a comic book plot. At least the characters are not stupid, annoying, and vile, like in Spiderman. Mignola writes more believable characters in the comic book and even in the animated Hellboy movies, so it is probably the fault of Del Toro, who gets co-writer credit. After all, he made the villain of Pan's Labyrinth, the colonel, a ludicrous combination as cruel as the Marquis de Sade and as effective as Snidely Whiplash. (I realize that the true villain is his dead father's military honor, man; but that is such a stupid idea, I will not mention it, out of charity.)

The spectacle is remarkable even for a special effects laden genre, though in the usual way the plot had to be dragged from one special effects encounter to another. Now we go into a trolls' market full of marvelous creatures doing... well, whatever it is, they are not doing market business. No problem, they are meant for sixty seconds of gaping, which they are well worth, and then it is time for a fight. With that over, now we go back to a low effects environment, but the bad guy has a little present for the good guys. He could just kill them, but he would rather throw the last remaining forest god at them, inconveniently stored in dehydrated form. He also neglects to bring water, but that lets the Mexican jumping bean of a god bounce into the sewer so it can rise up hugely out of the broken pavement. Of course in its exuberance it throws cars; you would think that audiences either hate cars and want to see them suffer, or love them so much that it is an easy way to grip their emotions, like putting a baby in danger. Possibly inspired by a similar train of thought, Del Toro then adds a baby in danger.

The worst of it, though, is that the fight is so confined and predictable. Once the god is wheeled onto, or blasted up through, the stage, it mostly stands in place, flails a bit, and promptly loses. The god is huge, but the scene is small and cramped. Will Smith's high-speed drive through desolate New York has such effect because driving is a trivial, mundane thing, but it is set on a huge stage, so large it loses any sense of staginess, evoking the wide-open feel that all the audience know from their own driving. Through that common sensation you enter into the movie's world and the desolation becomes eerie and powerful, rather than mere showy scenery. Del Toro is having none of that, and all the carefully arranged big scenes and the final battle are just as much pointless show, Hollywood-epic except when bathos interrupts. Ironman, otherwise well-constructed, succumbs to that cramped staginess in its final scene, letting down the rest of the movie. Ironman's villain is at least subtle and believable until that scene, but the Lucasly-named Prince Nuada apparently practiced sword-spear fighting for millenia only to stand around uselessly while his plans are thwarted.

I do like comic book movies, and this one was pretty good as they go, but it is frustrating to see a studio spend $85 million on a movie only to save $100-$200,000 on a cheap script or, as seems to have happened here, to hire a well-known but foolish director to cripple a good writer. Three last points: the opening puppet-battle is wonderfully and perfectly done; enough Danny Elfman, seriously; and Selma Blair is very pretty. Maybe very, very pretty.

The Zeitgeist is a most dismal animal

2008-07-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

A sudden outburst has rained stories about loss of culture all over the place, with the National Post getting in a fine article today. I think tonight I will try a little of the old ~~ultra-violence~~ analysis and synthesis on some of the more interesting ones. In the meantime, two good quotations found by the writer:

Not long before she died, Pauline Kael remarked to a friend, "When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture."

Rather than rub in her honest admission, here is my own: mid-century American high culture gives me the sense of suffocating in a heavy comforter, so that the low culture of the time still feels like fresh air in comparison. Only Thurber redeems the mid-century literary culture, though Bunny Wilson does his best to entertain onomastically.

In 1933, Aldous Huxley wrote, "The Zeitgeist is a most dismal animal, and I wish to heaven one could escape from its clutches."

Of course it is possible to escape its clutches--it does not even require a shack in Montana--but escaping will deny you a trendy drugged-up life in Hollywood.

Life of Johnson: Dec. 13, 1784

2008-07-13T23:08:00.000-07:00

It is strange, to feel so sad for the death of a man who lived into old age and died in bed 223 years ago. But it is sad; the book so resounds with Boswell's honest love that you cannot help but hear the echo of Johnson's voice, see him in his strange mannerisms, and feel a share of that love yourself. How terrible it is that men die can hardly be imagined, but page by page Boswell manages to put into words the impossible truth that even 1,400 pages seem too few to hold. I almost wish I had not read the book, so painful is it to feel the reality of death.

The last year of his life was marked by great pain, especially from dropsy, a hideous disease, which all but crippled his legs even when it was in remission. He seems to have been treated with the right sort of medicine for one kind of dropsy, since he was given powder of squills, a diuretic herb. He also had opiates to ease the pain, so for the time he was fairly well provided for, but I had a brief physical urge to get him an oxygen tank when he so often could hardly breathe. Even in such pain, "during his sleepless nights he amused himself by translating Latin verse, from the Greek, many of the epigrams in the Anthologia," but as his last year wore on, he regretted that he could no longer even read away his insomnia, saying that on sleepless nights he used to be able to "read like a Turk," which I suppose means lying on his side on cushions.

His last year was spent trying to convalesce in the countryside; he went to his hometown, but found all his remaining friends had died. He then had a wretched year of isolation, seeing no one close to him, and often no one at all. Boswell includes a long series of his letters, which were his sole contact with his former life, and that are highly affecting as the uncomplaining but honestly despairing notes pile up. May it be, that however I die, my last year should not be so utterly alone. And may I also be spared the fate of Boswell, who prostrate with melancholy, failed to write for most of the year, so that after this letter he was only able to get one reply to Johnson before his death:

To James Boswell, Esq
Dear sir, I have this summer sometimes amended, and sometimes relapsed, but, upon the whole, have lost ground, very much. My legs are extremely weak, and my breath very short, and the water [dropsy] is now encreasing upon me. In this uncomfortable state your letters used to relieve; what is the reason that I have them no longer? Are you sick, or are you sullen? Whatever be the reason, if it be less than necessity, drive it away; and of the short life that we have, make the best use for yourself and for your friends....[ellipsis original] I am sometimes afraid that your omission to write has some real cause, and shall be glad to know that you are not sick, and that nothing ill has befallen dear Mrs. Boswell, or any of your family. I am, Sir, your, etc,
Sam. Johnson

How endlessly Boswell must have reproached himself.

As his life dwindled to weeks, he came back to London to die. When a doctor hoped he was feeling better, Johnson said, "No, Sir; you cannot conceive with what acceleration I advance towards death." His friends then were often with him, though his death has a horrifying solitude about it anyway. I suppose death must always be a terrible solitude; even though I picture those who die in bed meeting their end supported by companions, it must be solitary when there is one second that for everyone is followed by another, except for him.

A young woman, the daughter of a close friend, came to ask Johnson's blessing, which proved his last action:

The Doctor turned himself in the bed, and said, "God bless you, my dear!" These were the last words he spoke. His difficulty of breathing increased till about seven o'clock in the evening, when Mr. Barber and Mrs. Desmoulins, who were sitting in the room, observing that the noise he made in breathing had ceased, went to the bed, and found he was dead."

Life of Johnson: Miscellaneous

2008-07-13T00:04:00.000-07:00

A few disconnected bits before the last post:

Speaking of Lord Lyttelton's supposed vision of his own death and its occurrence as envisioned, which Johnson had heard from Lyttleton's uncle, he said "It is the most extraordinary thing that has happened in my day... I am so glad to have every evidence of the spiritual world, that I am willing to believe it," and when someone said he should already have enough evidence, he replied, "I like to have more." Several times, Johnson's eagerness for proof of spirits gives Boswell pains to clear him of the charge of superstition. Except when pressed, Johnson often described his fear of death as though it were a fear of damnation, but more proof of a spiritual world could not reassure someone fearing the worst from the spirit world. I take this to be further proof that his true fear was of annihilation.

Johnson told a funny story of human perversity:

You put me in mind of Dr. Barrowby, the physician, who was very fond of swine's flesh. One day, when he was eating it, he said, "I wish I was a Jew." "Why so? (said somebody;) the Jews are not allowed to eat your favorite meat." "Because, (said he, ) I should then have the gust of eating it, with the pleasure of sinning."

While discussing whether life was "upon the whole more happy or miserable," Johnson argued for misery and Boswell added the argument, "that no man would choose to lead over again the life which he had experienced." Boswell says, "Johnson acceded to that opinion in the strongest terms." I agree too, except that if I could go back with the knowledge I now have, I would risk it, though with not a lot of optimism. However, Burke argued for happiness:

Every man would lead his life over again; for every man is willing to go on and take an addition to his life, which, as he grows older, he has no reason to think will be better, or even so good as what has preceded.

Boswell blames false hope, and quotes the first line from the elegy Johnson wrote for the strange lower-class doctor who lived with him for decades. Here is the whole first stanza:

Condemn'd to Hope's delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts or slow decline
Our social comforts drop away.

He also quotes Dryden, who is much more on point:

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat,
Yet fool'd with hope, men favor the deceit:
Trust on, and think tomorrow will repay;
Tomorrow's falser than the former day;
Lies worse; and while it says we shall be blest
With some new joys, cuts off what we possest.
Strange cozenage! none would live past years again;
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;
And from the dregs of life think to receive
What the first sprightly running could not give

The unexamined life

2008-07-11T14:26:00.000-07:00

Unlike Socrates, I think the unexamined or unexamining life can be worth living, but only by those who can live it. Whether some daimon or some demon compels it, others must examine, and if that examining is uninstructed and unaccompanied, it is a torment that twists and cripples thought. I have often thought that many of the strangest elaborations of religion must have their origin in the undirected examinations of compelled minds. Even a land-bound peasant or a stone age tribesman may be born with such a mind, and lacking any lightning-rod to direct his inspirations harmlessly, his mind must instead blaze up and burn without relief. The intricacies of pre-modern magic, medicine, and mythology testify to the perverse ingenuity devoted to them. As there are fewer and fewer living men with whom life may be examined, those who must examine their lives draw ever closer to the savage's desperate isolation of mind. The great rise in conspiracy theories may in part come from that loss of all prior thought.

In Xenophon's Memorabilia, Socrates describes just the union of society and learning that is the rightly directed use and the satisfaction of a compelled mind:

The treasures of the wise of old, written and bequeathed in their books, I unfold and peruse in common with my friends. If our eye light upon any good thing we cull it eagerly, and regard it as great gain if we may but grow in friendship with one another.

Life of Johnson: Reading

2008-07-11T00:49:00.000-07:00

Boswell says Johnson was not a croaker, one who complains about his age in all ways. Johnson found his age very pleasing, except that "subordination is sadly broken down in this age." The Tory Telegraph still makes the same complaint, but calls it "lack of deference." Johnson does twice say that reading had declined, once in reference to lawyers' preparation and I think to doctors the other time, but it seems he only thought more training was now acquired in conversation than formerly.

In keeping with the Johnsonian spirit, I should make it clear that I would not choose any other age, all the others being poor in knowledge and menaced by torturers going by the name of physicians. Scientific advances have been an increasing proportion of each century's glories from the 16th, but this age has seen science become unearthly in its glory and beauty. Medicine has become powerful too, and it is an everyday thing for a sick man to be told, "Take up your bed and walk." My grandmother just had a knee entirely replaced, and the other will be done in a few months; she will travel to Italy this year. Johnson tried hard to get to Italy in his final year, hoping the better climate would help, but his too-helpful band of doctors could not make him well enough.

There are many other wonderful things about this age, among them that basic literacy and some degree of knowledge belong to more people than ever before. My earlier complaint is more specific: that group, never large, of people who can attain to significant knowledge and true literacy is now afflicted with the delusion that those attainments are at best private games and at worst sabotage of the efficient machines that will create heaven on Earth. Since Dewey's fools have come to the worst conclusion, the result has been that every year's births provide the raw materials for an educational system more perfectly stripped of knowledge than the year before. If you happen to be one of those industrial inputs, but are somehow so badly machined that you end up with some part of a humane education, you will find that the other inputs, having stayed on the assembly line, can no more understand your peculiarity than a BMW could see the point of a horse. People are not more stupid now than before--they may even be smarter, and many become powerful engines of science--but even with smart listeners, the whole of life cannot be conversations in the form of lectures starting at first principles.

Even highly esteemed graduate schools in the humanities have little to work with, though they do their best by drawing from overseas and from private schools. It is painful to listen to professors talk and to realize that you are witnessing the descent of man; in classics, the greatest scholars are all past retirement, and many are over 80. They have been great from their early days, as I found whenever I read their published work, though of course they have grown more learned over time. Professors of 50, unless they were educated entirely overseas, have little of the older generation's penetration, but are serviceable: hammers, not lances. Professors of 40 show astonishing gaps in their knowledge, and professors of 30 sometimes seem never to have opened a book from outside their field or this year's NYT bestsellers list. American graduate students in their mid-20s, though their native talents may be great, would have been rejected by undergraduate admissions fifty years ago for appalling unpreparedness. All of this refers to Americans educated in public schools and most private schools; the rest of the world was not so stupid as to admire Dewey.

So imagine being an American of 30 or 35 but by ill chance possessed of a mind roughly molded in the older style. As you look far ahead to those nearing death, you see scholars who utterly outstrip you; looking ever closer, you find people more and more like you, though more finely modeled; somewhere around 50, they grow more alien; when you look behind at those coming up, you realize that their principles of thought are becoming not only alien but hostile, fused with political ideology. Every year the desolation, like the Sahara, increases its borders a little more, but also adds more savages who only know the wasteland. They love the wasteland; men love the manner of life to which they are born, and resent attempts to unearth and tear up its radical errors. All this is not pleasant now; it will be intolerable in thirty years, when the wasteland covers everything and only scattered anchorites remember what was lost.

Johnson would surely not believe the extent of the collapse, but he would understand how reading might die, once learning was no longer esteemed or profitable, and other entertainment was cheap and ubiquitous:

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them. There must be an external impulse; emulation, or vanity, or avarice. The progress which the understanding makes through a book, has more pain than pleasure in it. Language is scanty, and inadequate to express the nice gradations and mixtures of our feelings. No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions, which contain a quick succession of events.

Life of Johnson: Cats

2008-07-09T23:47:00.000-07:00

I used up my writing time with that last post, but how can I not write about Johnson and cats. Boswell writes,

Nor would it be just...to omit the fondness which he shewed for animals which he had taken under his protection. I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature.

He also let Hodge climb up on his chest, which upset Boswell the cat-hater. On another occasion, Johnson was talking of a loony young nobleman who was "running about town shooting cats"; falling then into a "sort of kindly reverie, he bethought himself of his own favorite cat, and said, 'But Hodge shan't be shot; no, no Hodge shall not be shot.'" What a sweet image that is, and the most tenderness I remember seeing an Englishman express towards an animal before the 20th century.

I also now want to call a cat Hodge, but my Dinah could never learn to ignore a new name so perfectly.

Taking recommendations

2008-07-09T23:00:00.001-07:00

Most of the time, if a writer recommends a book it is new and publicized well enough that the recommendation is mostly unneeded. Recommendations for older books have proved worth following up, though. From Theodore Dalrymple I picked up Malice Aforethought, an excellent mystery that would belong with Ronald Knox's and Dorothy Sayers' mysteries, except for its quiet lack of sentimentality. George Will recommended I Hear America Swinging, which was an odd but entertaining experience in itself, and a little unsettling, too, to see how far its satire had become reality in thirty years. I just now finished The Belles Lettres Papers; it is a pity I have already forgotten who recommended it, because it was well worth interrupting the Johnson marathon. Which reminds me, I first read Rasselas because of Dalrymple's recommendation.

So far all the recommendations have given the best kind of delight, unexpected and unobligatory. Belles Lettres is written as though a history of a literary journal, narrated by a smooth, politic young editor. It is a light satire on office and literary politics, which I enjoyed even though I last read the NYT Review of Books, where the author was once an editor, five or six years ago and do not keep up with literary fashion. I also cannot help thinking the author, Charles Simmons, must be the namesake of Charlotte Simmons in Tom Wolfe's novel, but none of the reviews suggest why that might be and I am not very willing to read one of his tomes just to find out. Wolfe, for me, suffers the blight of over-recommendation, which encourages all that is mulish in me; there is enough of that to start with, so I may never get around to him. It may be just as well, since reading lengthy descriptions of college girl sex written by an elderly man has a slightly creepy feel to it.

Life of Johnson: Americans and the end of the war

2008-07-08T23:03:00.000-07:00

So my interest in seeing Johnson thwarted by American victory is not to be satisfied. He says almost nothing, only expressing his relief when the administration that lost the war was replaced. It seems it had an effect on him though, for he says twice to Boswell that he no longer enjoys talking about current politics; in 1783 he says, "I'd as soon have a man to break all my bones as talk to me of public affairs, internal or external. I have lived to see all things as bad as they can be." I am a little sorry for him; the American victory began the utter defeat of his kind of Toryism, though after the rapid losses from that day to the mid-19th century it took another century for old Toryism to be extinguished entirely. The fissioning of the Anglican communion, which is happening right now in the split Lambeth and FUCA conferences, shows how far things have changed from the days of loyalty to Church and Crown, but how the forms still linger.

The Anglican problems, which were caused by the theological novelties of the North American Anglicans (Episcopalians) and of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, remind me of what Johnson said about freedom of religion: "Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test." It seems the gay bishop thinks much the same.

I promised to return to Taxation No Tyranny, but there is not a lot there; I think Boswell is right that it is largely bluster and sophistry. But there are two interesting arguments. The first is a familiar one; if the state's power of coercion is an affront to liberty, then there must either be anarchy or tyranny. He does not give theoretical grounds for believing the state will not become tyrannous, even though he values the power of coercion over individual liberty, but then again no one has found a theoretical basis for valuing liberty over government power that does not lead at least some enthusiasts to anarchy. What he ought to give is a discussion of the mechanisms by which the emphasis can shift back and forth between state power and liberty. He could then argue that the American revolts were a disruption of those processes and that giving in to them would make the damage irreparable. His desire to give colonies no quarter and to reserve all powers to the parent state makes that impossible though. His views remind me of Hobbes, though I do not remember a reference to him and the index does not have anything useful.

The other interesting argument still causes trouble today. Johnson spends several paragraphs on a mock Declaration of Independence by Cornwall, which because of their independent linguistic and ethnic background as Celts he considers a stronger case than the Americans make. The underlying argument is the same one used against Woodrow Wilson's puffy idealism: if any people desiring a state must have one, who can be refused a state? Soon enough all states will the size of Lichtenstein, if long tenure imposes no limits on secessions because of historical grievances or ethnic identities. A cruelly oppressed people might safely be granted that right without risking general secession, except that the colonists managed to convince themselves they were cruelly oppressed when they were really governed lightly. It is embarrassing how extravagant the complaints were when the offenses were so much less than everyday federal actions now. What makes more sense is that a people should form a separate state when it has become numerous and prosperous and has shown an effective and beneficial ability to govern itself. That is not as exciting as sic semper tyrannis and other bloody slogans, and of course men of good will and intelligence can agree on a principle like that yet bitterly disagree that it applies to any particular instance. Still, it is no way out, to try to make the whole problem disappear into the primacy of the Crown.

The broken window fallacy

2008-07-07T09:06:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, there is a story about how disasters help the economy with all the new jobs in construction and so on. The economic illiteracy required to give that idea even superficial plausibility exceeds the usual reporter's ignorance: not only does the idea fail even thirty seconds' reflection, Bastiat explained the fallacy in detail two centuries ago. Trust the Boston Globe, the worst broadsheet paper in the country, to provide the latest example. The Boston Globe is one of the few sources I ignore completely, though in this case the Arts & Letters Daily link tempted me in to enjoy the Globe's humiliation.

News sources on my ban list:

The Globe - try reading it for a week; it will amply prove itself the most stupid paper you have ever read.
The Daily Mail - a rabid tabloid with the loosest sense of truth, it has somehow become digg fodder and is showing up all over the place as though it employed sane or honest reporters.
Newsweek - self-parodying in its earnest furrowed-brow stupidity, it is strictly an opinion follower; if you read any other news already, reading Newsweek is like reading one of those old Reader's Digest compressed classics after reading the original. Newsweek is also distinguished among the three newsweeklies by the least attention to accuracy, in its polls and in its articles.

I will read articles anywhere else, even occasionally lunatic blogs, but those three offer nothing but the mental clutter of disinformation. Well, and the occasional funny self-immolation, like today.

Knox discovery

2008-07-03T00:03:00.001-07:00

I just found a book for the holiday, an astounding find since four of the six mysteries Knox wrote have been OOPed with prejudice. I have read the two in print, but the other four command ludicrous prices on abebooks.

Of course I will be violating American copyright law when I read that, since it is merely 81 years old. In Johnson's time copyrights lasted less than twenty years, which does seem too short, but the hundred years he proposed, and that thanks to Disney is now the law in the U.S., is surely far too long. Even excellent books fall out of print long before a hundred years elapses.

Johnson: Going for a roll

2008-07-02T23:50:00.000-07:00

What with cleaning and yardwork in preparation for the 4th, I have not made much progress, though I am down to the last 200 pages or so. Boswell's depiction is so detailed and affectionate that I actually feel sad as the end approaches. How could anyone read the Life and not come out loving Johnson? Even the way he sometimes makes me think of Ignatius Reilly is in the end charming. Apparently Boswell censored some of Johnson's low humor, which is both a surprise, given what he included, and a shame, since the way Johnson told low jokes would have to show a lot about him. I was just going to say that Johnson was very dignified, but though he often was, he could also be wonderfully goofy. Once, in his 50s or 60s, when he came to a grassy hill, he said something like "I haven't been for a roll in a long time," and rolled down the hill. Another time, in his late 40s or early 50s, he got talked into staying out all night drinking and running around, and when morning came he and a friend went out boating I think, and made fun of Boswell for being too responsible to come. Boswell does not give enough of that sort of thing for me to have a feel for how that playfulness fitted in with the rest of his personality, but at any rate it is very appealing.

Why read?

2008-06-30T19:52:00.000-07:00

Reading must often feel a useless indulgence. Unless you are part of the society of authors and scholars, you will rarely have the satisfaction and improved understanding that come from dissecting a work in conversation. Nor does reading bring any significant amount of praise or even recognition, since with so few now reading, you will meet hardly anyone who knows how Rasselas differs from Tuesdays with Morrie, or that one book even can differ in any meaningful way from another. Nearly all think of reading as nothing but a hobby, increasingly rare and in its more serious form simply eccentric. Worse, what little recognition there is for reading belongs to those who read, or at least flatter with the pretense of reading, the latest profitless works of trendy literature or radical politics. When someone says he is a reader, hide your own reading or risk having to fight your way out of the conversation when he starts to praise some House of Sand and Fog or Hegemony or Survival. It is even more depressing when the reader turns out to read only books on personal finances (men) or self-help (women); they look on books as mere stuff to line their material lives, not readers but paper wasps.

As it happens, reading good books is of private advantage; it is difficult to prove to doubters why this should be, but once acquired a well-stocked mind reconciles a man to life. By contrast, Theodore Dalrymple described the self-destroying pain of those who reach their 30s without internal resource, just as the delusory significance of youth fades. Still I would like to believe that these strange electrical whorls, that for the moment fill my mind but soon enough will uncoil and go dark, have some kind of purpose outside myself. Johnson's essay in the Adventurer, issue 85, gives no proofs, but offers wonderful reassurance.

An opinion has of late been, I know not how, propagated among us, that libraries are filled only with useless lumber; that men of parts stand in need of no assistance; and that to spend life in poring upon books, is only to imbibe prejudices, to obstruct and embarrass the powers of nature, to cultivate memory at the expense of judgment, and to bury reason under a chaos of indigested learning.

Astounding that at the very dawn of the modern age, Rousseau's foolishness had already spread generally. Johnson might as well be responding to a modern pedagogical statement on the value of critical thinking over "rote learning." His next argument has by now been made often, but it is delightful to hear how he says it:

If reason has the power ascribed to it by its advocates, if so much is to be discovered by attention and meditation, it is hard to believe, that so many millions, equally participating of the bounties of nature with ourselves, have been for ages upon ages meditating in vain: if the wits of the present time expect the regard of posterity, which will then inherit the reason which is now thought superior to instruction, surely they may allow themselves to be instructed by the reason of former generations. When, therefore, an author declares, that he has been able to learn nothing from the writings of his predecessors, and such a declaration has been lately made, nothing but a degree of arrogance unpardonable in the greatest human understanding, can hinder him from perceiving that he is raising prejudices against his own performance; for with what hopes of success can he attempt that in which greater abilities have hitherto miscarried? or with what peculiar force does he suppose himself invigorated, that difficulties hitherto invincible should give way before him?

Johnson comes now to the part that, even if I can see how the sentence I italicized is only assertion, still warms me with reassurance:

Of those whom Providence has qualified to make any additions to human knowledge, the number is extremely small; and what can be added by each single mind, even of this superior class, is very little: the greatest part of mankind must owe all their knowledge, and all must owe far the larger part of it, to the information of others. To understand the works of celebrated authors, to comprehend their systems, and retain their reasonings, is a task more than equal to common intellects; and he is by no means to be accounted useless or idle, who has stored his mind with acquired knowledge, and can detail it occasionally to others who have less leisure or weaker abilities.

I wonder though, what Johnson would say to those of us whose minds fall between the discoverers of new knowledge and the common intellects, in an age when the common intellects are little interested in new knowledge and wholly uninterested in anything old. To live in an age of ignorance has the selfish advantage of making even modest minds seem great, to themselves, for merely attempting what was once required of young students. It is not a very satisfying feeling though.

If I have dwelt on the unhappiness of having no public benefit in reading, still Johnson goes on to say much the same thing:

Persius has justly observed, that knowledge is nothing to him who is not known by others to possess it [Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter: your knowledge is nothing, unless another knows of your knowledge.]: to the scholar himself it is nothing with respect either to honor or advantage, for the world cannot reward those qualities which are concealed from it; with respect to others it is nothing, because it affords no help to ignorance or errour.

He goes on to recommend that scholars cultivate skill in conversation, to make their knowledge of public use and honor, and to practice writing, so that their scholarship and their conversation are both made more exact. What, though, would Johnson say is to be done, when there is not conversation to be had, nor many readers to be found for writing?

To write a blog, praise myself, and take another swig from the bitter cup of learning, I expect.

The well-deserved death of poetry

2008-06-30T13:09:00.001-07:00

Why do editors permit such idiocy as this?

Although Plato didn't quite sink the art of poetry, he cast suspicion on the craft, and poets since then have rarely been comfortable with their place in society. Even the popular Romantic poets — Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others — lived on the edge of the social whirl, not quite respectable. More recently figures like Allen Ginsberg have derided their country. Poets have an unruly streak in them, and have not been the most welcome guests at the table of society.

That is both cliched and ignorant. Plato may have banned poets in his ideal society, but he did so because the status of Greek poets in reality was very high; he would not have bothered to ban today's poets. Just off the top of my head, poets have been the "most welcome guests at the table of society" in these periods: Greece, 8th century BC - 15th century AD; Rome, 1st century BC - 5th century AD; England, 16th - 19th century. Similar ranges could be produced for Italy, France, Russia, Japan, China, and India, though I would have to look up the dates. The truth is, poets and poetry have been highly welcome "guests at the table of society" in almost every place and time, except for our godforsaken wasteland. What a damned insulting fool Parini is.

Anyone whose world of poetry starts with Shelley and Byron, counts T.S. Eliot highly, and explains itself through Emerson, is himself the best explanation for poetry's death. Parini also quotes from Hopkins exactly the kind of line I despise: "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed." No-man-fathomed. Parini's supposed lamentation of poetry's decline from popularity is really that disgusting oleaginous genre of self-congratulation that runs, "O! Alas, we are such bold thinkers and so deep, that few can value what we do!"

Modern poetry

2008-06-30T09:11:00.000-07:00

I hate it so much. But to start with, something I somewhat like. Last night I read some more poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is clearly an important person because he always goes by all three names. I think I admire at most one in three so far and like maybe half of those. His frequent hyphenated phrases drive me nuts, and priest or not it is a little ridiculous how he can scarcely keep his poems from claiming to find Christ in something. Or as he might say, his happy-hyphen-harbor sparking-pains the gray-grim inward am of holy Christ. That is, it hurts me. I mean this sort of thing, this hallmarkian opening line:

CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Yuck. This one is worse yet, if you can stand to look. I also am not bowled over by "sprung rhythm," which is altogether too close to the modern idea that poetry is text arranged in a strange fashion by someone who names himself a poet. Still, his good poems are such pleasure they make me read and re-read them out loud. There is a poem of quintessence, a borderline gnostic poem, and my favorite so far, grief over the self's autumn.

So that is praise, more or less; by comparison, I hate Billy Collins' poetry. Apparently he was our poet laureate for a couple of years, confirming my impression that poet laureate means "wretched affliction on the language." His WSJ article from Saturday has several examples of his work. I think I would like him personally, since he seems unaffected and, if not actually funny, at least humorous. It would no doubt wear on him, however, when I started and closed every conversation with "Please stop writing poems."

I did read more of the Life of Johnson this weekend, as well as the Adventurer 85, an essay on reading that I really want to talk about. But I was out of town at my uncle's memorial so I will have to work out the backlog today and tomorrow.

Life of Johnson: Americans

2008-06-27T10:42:00.000-07:00

Johnson bitterly hated America and was violent on the subject of the tax protests, even before the revolution. He wrote a long pamphlet against the tax protests, called Taxation No Tyranny, which Boswell, who favored the American complaints, said was largely bluster and sophistries. From my first read, it seems he had a theory of apostolic succession in government, so that once a proper government was formed, all subsequent alterations and branches derived their authority from the original, or else had no authority at all. I have never heard that before, so I want to think about it more.

Otherwise, he has not made many interesting arguments. He wastes time on the straw man that Americans were opposed to taxation itself, though he admits they granted the theoretical right of taxation. Much later he addresses the real question, of taxation without representation, making the expected argument that the colonists are included in parliamentary representation as much as all the other groups of people who have no direct vote. He does not appear to realize that those other groups might well deserve representation as well. He even uses the existence of rotten boroughs, unrepresented cities, and the small electorate as arguments against the idea that every region deserves representation. In a way, the thread of his thought does resemble what later happened, with America splitting away, then the formation of legislatures in Canada in 1791, the reform of rotten boroughs in 1831 and again in 1867, the grant of representation to cities founded in modern times in 1832, and the extension of suffrage in 1832.

He adds that the original colonists had the potential (though few the actual ability) to vote before they left England, so their departure was a voluntary abandonment of the right to vote. I suppose that is true, though it seems more likely that they abandoned voting on practical rather than theoretical grounds. In any case, why would that original choice to abandon the vote descend from those few original settlers to the three million Americans of 1778, in their large(ish) cities governed by assemblies? They had no practical ability to move to England, and the original condition of the settlers, of small armed camps in the wild, with little need for representation in England, did not resemble the young commercial states, with their frequent and complex interaction with England.

He did suggest that the "planters," which I hope does not mean only the Southern plantation owners whose slave-owning he elsewhere condemned, could have bought large estates in England, which would have given them the vote and potentially seats in parliament. That idea was not very practical, given the danger and distance that had prevented trans-Atlantic land holding for two centuries, and again revealed how little he cared whether representation was distributed unevenly. That method would have made a small group of self-selected wealthy men the sole representatives of the colonies, without recourse for the rest of the colonists.

He argues that royal charters to the colonies can be amended at will by the king or parliament, without appeal by the colonies, while the colonies are not allowed to point to long-standing usage to prove their rights. In a way, that grants the colonists' argument, that parliament and the king were beginning to strip the colonies of their traditional rights, and that to grant the power of taxation without representation was to put all freedoms at the whim of the king. He does not mention it, but the colonists were also greatly exercised by the thought that religious restrictions would follow on taxation, with the appointment of bishops from England and the enforcement of Anglicanism as the state religion.

The pamphlet was written in 1775; it is surprising how little Johnson mentions the war afterward, even in 1778. Since he and Boswell fight so bitterly on the subject that they stop seeing each other for a while, more than once, perhaps his lack of comment is only tact on his or Boswell's part. Still, he does not mention the war in letters to others. Only with Gen. Burgoyne's defeat does war news in the ordinary sense break in.

Life of Johnson: More wine

2008-06-25T22:48:00.001-07:00

Boswell says that Johnson could only abstain completely or drink (or eat) too much, though when he drank too much it was in private. His explanation for drinking to excess in private is all too understandable:

Johnson: I require wine, only when I am alone. I have then often wished for it, and often taken it.
Spottiswoode: What, by way of a companion, sir?
Johnson: To get rid of myself, to send myself away.

He adds that "wine makes a man better pleased with himself," though often less pleasing to others, and adds a reason that explains why, if I have to go to a party, I go straight for a beer:

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what has been locked up in frost.

He adds, "this may be good, or it may be bad," but when the alternative is a frosty lack of ease, I am willing to risk the bad. Boswell in this sense acted on Johnson like wine, prompting him to talk freely, even posing inane questions just to stir Johnson into action. Another friend said of Johnson that he was like a ghost, only speaking when spoken to. I did not know that ghosts were like that, but it shows how generally silent Johnson was without the influence of wine or Boswell. When Johnson said, "A man should cultivate his mind so as to have that confidence and readiness without wine, which wine gives," I think it is a worthy sentiment that nevertheless represents Johnson's hope for himself, not his actual behavior. He was a great one for resolutions, even long into old age, despite recognizing that men achieved little with resolutions. If Johnson's astoundingly cultivated mind could not break the ice dam without help, regardless of his resolutions, I think that disability must be intrinsic to certain minds. In much company, too, the ability to take equal part in conversation decreases with greater cultivation.

Though it does not mean much, it is funny that when he was a "water-drinker," Johnson "supposed every body who drank wine to be elevated," that is, plastered. I would also like to know whether "wine" in all these discussions means only wine, or includes spirits and beer, since they go unmentioned. The details (cellars, vintages, bumpers) are all of wine, but it is odd not to hear anything at all about the others, especially since one of Johnson's great friends, Mr. Thrale, was a wealthy brewer.

Life of Johnson: Wine

2008-06-24T21:59:00.001-07:00

Without thinking about it, I started drinking late, have only drunk too much a handful of times, and on the whole prefer not drinking, nor has any stronger drug tempted me, even when offered. When people find out, usually while swapping drug stories, they hardly believe it is not from some excess of religion. I rarely explain, because it is somehow embarrassing to admit the sole reason, that thinking clearly makes me happy, and thinking muddily makes me unhappy, which is what Johnson, who for a few years drank too much, felt too:

[I left off drinking wine] because it is so much better for a man to be sure that he is never to be intoxicated, never to lose the power over himself. I shall not begin to drink wine again, till I grow old, and want it... It is a diminution of pleasure, to be sure; but I do not say a diminution of happiness. There is more happiness in being rational... Supposing we could have pleasure always, an intellectual man would not compound for it. The greatest part of men would compound, because the greatest part of men are gross.

(He was 69 when he said that; "till I grow old" must mean very great age. Also "to compound for" means "to settle for," so to exchange happiness for pleasure.) It is probably relevant that Johnson had a painful fear of madness, which I share; that fear is the fear of "losing the power over himself." He also greatly feared annihilation: "No rational man can die without uneasy apprehension" and "It is in the apprehension of it that the horror of annihilation consists." It does not create happiness, to pull the shades and dim the lights when daylight is so brief, twilight so gray, and night so empty.

Rev. Dodd

2008-06-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

The case of William Dodd is very strange. He lived in the absurd style called maccaroni, even though he was a clergyman, and even more oddly achieved great popularity for his preaching, which I would have thought at odds with his unpopular fashion. His luxurious life far exceeded his real means, and in time he forged a note for the enormous sum of 4,200 pounds, which at a minimum would be $400,000 in present money. He was gently punished by public hanging.

Johnson tried hard to have Dodd's sentence commuted to transportation, even going so far as to write Dodd's final address to be delivered in Dodd's name. Dodd showed the same thoughtless, self-centered character to the very end, not bothering to let the world know what papers Johnson had written for him, even after it could no longer harm his cause to let it be known; that selfish omission very much bothered Johnson later. The ludicrous reverend did at least write Johnson a letter of thanks, though crammed with emphases (italics in print, maybe underlining in the original?) and exclamation points, far beyond what mere impending death could justify. (When writing the night before being hanged, the number of exclamation points granted is double that of the next highest allotment, the announcement of the birth of one's first child, so, two per page. But a good man will not abuse that license.) Had Dodd lived in the age of email, his final note would have been scarcely visible through the crowd of upset faces. Apart from his regrettable style, though hanging is a brutal punishment for forgery, Dodd comes across as a very creepy and hypocritical man, whose absence would have to improve the world. Johnson in fact only argues that Dodd be made to disappear by transportation to the most distant colony available.

Johnson, in his final letter to Dodd, makes a surprisingly callous argument:

Be comforted: your crime, morally or religiously considered, has no very deep dye of turpitude. It corrupted no man's principles; it attacked no man's life. It involved only a temporary and reparable injury.

But this was in an age when arrest and imprisonment for debt was so routine that Johnson himself once was saved from arrest only by an immediate payment from a friend. The sum of money was so large that the man who paid out on the forged bond must have risked bankruptcy, since Dodd squandered the money and the nobleman whose name had been forged preferred to prosecute Dodd rather than pay. Bankruptcy then did not mean several years of unpleasantness and some embarrassment, but utter collapse of life and probably imprisonment, during which the man's wife and children would have no protection except for the meager help afforded to paupers. The saintly Dodd may well have done less harm just to stab a man and take his purse, though a common mugging may not have commanded such public support. To be fair to Johnson, it is of course possible that the bond purchaser was so extraordinarily rich that he could absorb even so large a loss; neither Boswell nor wikipedia describe the purchaser.

Johnson was not opposed to trade and famously said "a man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is getting money," but he also said, of a man who had shot a Scottish nobleman in self-defense but was convicted anyway, that a commoner has no honor to defend. Clergy were often noble, and bishops were honorary lords; Johnson seems to treat all clergy as honorary minor gentry at least. A banker or money-lender would not have that distinction, even though Johnson would have no special prejudice against them. It is hard to follow the thought of a man who could be passionately against slavery, when that position was still uncommon, but just as passionately for the subservience of nearly all men to a few.

Life of Johnson: Death

2008-06-22T01:11:00.000-07:00

Johnson had a peculiarly intense fear of dying. If Boswell brought up the subject of death, he grew agitated and if pressed farther was hardly able to speak and was physically affected as well. It was not very kind of Boswell to upset Johnson so more than once; he admits it himself. Still, the experience let Boswell give this wonderful description of Johnson's fears:

His mind resembled the vast amphitheater, the Coliseum at Rome. In the center stood his judgment, which, like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After the conflict, he drove them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him.

I wish I had learned earlier that, though different people have different wild beasts of the mind, it is true for everyone that most of the beasts can never be killed; only in the last few years did I realize, to continue the metaphor, that the nearest thing to victory is to learn the special tricks to send each beast crawling back to its den with the least combat.

On another occasion (like the first, provoked by Hume's carelessness of death), Johnson says that "he never had a moment in which death was not terrible to him." He adds, "The better a man is, the more afraid he is of death, having a clearer view of infinite purity." I think he means, a better man knows better how far he falls short of perfection, and so knows better how he deserves damnation. Boswell elsewhere does say he thought Johnson's fear to be not of dying, but of what came after. Still, it was talk of death that upset Johnson, not talk of the afterlife.

When Boswell asks, "Is not the fear of death natural to man?" Johnson answers, "So much so that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it." He feared for his conduct on his deathbed and wondered, "I know not whether I should wish to have a friend by me, or have it all between God and myself." As with his drinking, even in the greatest pain he wished no one to see him fail in right conduct. I recently experienced this ranking of shame above pain when I went in for some neurological testing related to a long illness. The tests, which return immediate results, had a significant chance of finding that I had a progressive illness that would soon cripple and in a decade or two kill me. A sweet-natured friend wanted very much to drive for me, and I found myself asking a question much like Johnson's. In the end I asked my brother to come, since someone had to and there is less shame in going to pieces in front of a brother. As it happens, the tests returned good results, but I would make the same choice again. The experience of keeping composure under considerable strain makes me more easily believe Johnson's observation that "scarce any man dies in public, but with apparent resolution; from that desire of praise which never quits us." Of course that was the last century of frequent public executions in England, so the observation would not be merely speculative.

By the way, I am not giving page numbers because if you search for any phrase from a quotation (you may have to convert it back to British spelling) you will turn up the right page on books.google.com. Also, the page numbers on the Google books editions are not at all similar.

Life of Johnson: Economics

2008-06-19T23:05:00.000-07:00

Johnson's economic beliefs are interesting. For instance, when Boswell asks, "Would it be for the advantage of a country that all its lands were sold at once?" Johnson responds, "So far as money produces good, it would be an advantage; for then that country would have as much money circulating in it as it is worth." On the one hand, he recognizes the value of a ready supply of capital, but on the other, he clearly believed in the land theory of value. Smith himself believed in the labor theory of value; the idea that value means nothing but the value assigned by men came much later.

Johnson later makes a statement that would please an economist of the Austrian school: defending a wealthy woman who made a show of her highly effective charity, he said "I have seen no beings who do as much good from benevolence, as she does, from whatever motive... To act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite beings. Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive." Of course they go farther; my economics professor would have put it, "Human benevolence is inseparable from vanity, interest, or some other motive." But he would have agreed with Johnson's conclusion: the effect is still good and deserves praise.

I am not sure what to make of this quotation: "As to mere wealth, that is to say, money, it is clear that one nation or one individual cannot increase its store but by making another poorer: but trade procures what is more valuable, the reciprocation of the peculiar advantages of different countries." It may mean that Johnson thought all economic growth was zero-sum, or that hard money, being inherently limited in supply, must move around rather than increase or decrease. That would imply deflation and inflation as real economic worth changed. I think he does mean that the sizes of economies are zero-sum, but his recognition of competitive advantage, which he sees increases real wealth independently of currency supply, makes it unclear.

Nearing page 800. Boswell is suddenly taking multiple pages per day; he says at the start that he wishes he met Johnson earlier, but would anyone have ever read the 15,000 page book that would have resulted?

Life of Johnson: Happiness is forgetting

2008-06-19T22:51:00.000-07:00

"That man is never happy for the present is so true, that all his relief from unhappiness is only forgetting himself for a little while. Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment."

So Johnson does mean, when he says men are never happy in the present, that they are never happy because of the present. Also, I was going to write today about the ephemeral happiness of high spirits, which he did not seem to allow in yesterday's quotation, but he says enough with that description of relief from unhappiness as self-forgetting.

Though he went through long periods of abstinence from drink (in a very sodden age), he says that when not abstaining, he often drank wine by the bottle to raise his spirits. He drank alone, though, in order not to embarrass himself. I understand it, but the deliberateness of his self-erasure is very sad.

The Plausibility of Life

2008-06-19T08:07:00.000-07:00

The Plausibility of Life makes the exciting argument that phenotypic plasticity, both in development and in adult life, greatly facilitates evolution. When trying to explain it, the easiest example for me is the change resulting from moving a population to high altitudes. The red blood cell count and breathing rate increase to compensate for the lower oxygen content; those changes are phenotypic variation, without genetic change. Those changes create other stresses on the organism, though, so the population undergoes selection for genetic changes that relieve the stress. The result is that a population can colonize a new habitat without having to wait for fortunate mutations, and once in the new habitat can evolve to fit better, with the existing plasticity of phenotypic expression facilitating rapid evolution.

This article exactly matches the example, and there are two other interesting aspects. First, the mutation described has clearly happened in three separate populations. Even assuming direct descent, the Andean founding population would be separated from the Tibetan population by at least several thousand years, during which time the high altitude adaptation would have been unneeded. Random mutation soon wrecks anything not selected for, so it seems much more likely to have evolved separately several times. Second, the speed of evolution is astounding. The ability to achieve very pronounced changes in the phenotype by altering the degree to which a gene is expressed (also part of The Plausibility of Life's argument) makes evolution very rapid in cases like this. Even assuming humans have lived in the Andes for 10,000 years with a generation every 20 years, that is still only 500 generations in which to achieve a remarkable adaptation. It is interesting though that the adaptation has not completely swept through the population. I know too little about population biology to guess why that might be.

Life of Johnson: Happiness and laughter

2008-06-18T21:59:00.000-07:00

Everything Johnson says about happiness and depression convinces me, almost painfully. I am reading his Life now because I read his Rasselas last year. It is an almost classical form of philosophy, an investigation of happiness through a dialogue, and beautifully lucid.

Pope's Essay on Man is also wonderful, though I scarcely remember anything more than that. Boswell has Johnson commenting on Pope's line,

[Hope springs eternal in the human breast:]
Man never is, but always to be blest.

Boswell writes, "[Johnson] asserted that the present was never a happy state to any human being; but that, as every part of life, of which we are conscious, was at some point of time a period yet to come, in which felicity was expected, there was some happiness produced by hope." Further, that man is happy in the moment, "Never, but when he is drunk." In one of his prefaces, Boswell says he thinks Johnson underestimated man's potential for happiness because of his melancholy. With charming guilelessness, Boswell says he is sure he has had more happiness out of life than Johnson did; Boswell was something of a wencher and a wine-bibber. Johnson must be overstating in any case, or Boswell misunderstanding, because the first assertion means that men are sometimes happy in the present, though that happiness properly belongs to their future self, whose state is the cause of the happiness.

Hope is happiness and despair, not a lack of pleasant feelings, is the opposite of happiness. I wonder what Johnson would think of the idea that there is a second happiness, also not in the present. When long-held hopes are worked towards and then achieved, they leave happy memories, even if at the time there was no real happiness. So people are happy in the memory of rearing children, in remembering that they have acted rightly, in having been to school, in having achieved a career, in short in all kinds of things that while still in progress cause too much strain and work to produce a sensation of happiness.

Recent attempts to develop a scientific understanding of happiness have emphasized that our minds can only dimly imagine the future and more imagine than remember the past. We therefore choose paths unlikely to take us to happiness. There is some science to it, but it is mostly a rhetorical trick. The argument is that remembered happiness, being inaccurate, does not count, or counts for much less; with remembered happiness not counting, it is easy enough to show that gaining some hoped-for state brings much less happiness than expected, and thus that the hope itself was mistaken. But why should remembered happiness not count? It is hardly relevant that my memories are not a bald factual account; they are the only sort of memories available to me. Neither can I implant wholly delusional memories as a shortcut to happiness. If I had the mind of a computer, I would be irrational to have the hopes I do, for they have such difficulties in them that to remember every detail would be intolerable. Having the mind of a man, I have every reason to expect that some of the great satisfactions of mankind will be mine as well. But I think the new science of happiness does successfully describe why pursuing happiness through new toys and entertainments is delusional.

Johnson was not as gloomy as it might seem; even while depressed he was good-natured and enjoyed wit and conversation. Sometimes, when the depression lifted, he would be in a "humour for jocularity and merriment," and would laugh often, "a kind of good humoured growl." Boswell quotes another's description of it: "He laughs like a rhinoceros." A good laugh is such a delight. I have a great-uncle whose sweet-natured, quiet, almost rumbling chuckle, which makes the skin under his chin wobble, is one of the great pleasures of knowing him. Strange but wonderful laughs seem to run on that side of the family; my grandmother, his sister, has a sweet, girlish laugh even in her seventies. Her son, my uncle, had a short, odd laugh that was very endearing, especially with the motion of his prodigious gray eyebrows emphasizing his pleasure. He died a year ago, and even though there was much more about him to miss, how sad it is that while the good he did may be remembered, no one will ever hear his laugh again, and in time it will be forgotten.

I first wrote that this would be divine vandalism, if there were divinity, but that makes little sense and is probably pose. If there are two archons battling across creation, one making, one destroying, then it makes sense to call one a vandal, or maybe it just drowns nonsense in a sea of absurdity. If there is a god as described in Bible, in either Testament, then this sort of thing is merely unintelligible, the actions of a creator who labors over small delights but soon smashes them. Paul says,

Will what is molded say to its molder, "Why have you made me like this?" Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? (Rom. 9:20-21)

The potter may make and smash as he wills. If the Bible did not say it, no one would ever have guessed that so capricious a creator could be said to love what he treats so lightly.

Life of Johnson: Germs, happiness, the Scots

2008-06-17T17:55:00.000-07:00

Still in a dull-ish part, but here are some quotations I would like to remember.

Kenneth Macaulay (great-uncle of Thomas Macaulay, the Whig historian who so savaged Croker) wrote a history of St. Kilda, a very isolated island, in which he included a "wonderful story that upon the approach of a stranger all the inhabitants catch cold." Someone told him to leave it out; Johnson praised him for leaving it in: "To leave things out of a book, merely because people tell you they will not be believed, is meanness. Macaulay acted with more magnanimity." It has been a given for centuries that a man should tell the truth even when he will be attacked for it, which helps encourage honest men to do just that, but I at least had never thought how especially hard it can be to tell the truth when the reaction will simply be disbelief. I like the contrast of meanness and magnanimity, which says that a great-souled man knows the world to be so large that its oddities will exceed his own knowledge and that it is timidity to conceal them. The story was also likely true; it is explained elsewhere that the islanders rarely had ships visit, so for someone who knows about germ theory, it is easy to believe that each visit was a new exposure to diseases from the mainland.

Johnson, who persevered through life-long depression, said this about climate, which seemed directed towards me and my complaints about Seattle's gloom: "What is climate to happiness? Place me in the heart of Asia, should I not be exiled? What proportion does climate bear to the complex system of human life? You may advise me to go to live at Bologna to eat sausages. The sausages there are the best in the world; they lose much by being carried." Still, there is no denying that one of Seattle's rare sunny days lifts my spirits.

Johnson did not think much of the Scots, or at least he had some prejudice that he enjoyed using to tease Boswell. Johnson's critical acumen led him to reject the supposedly ancient Scottish poem Fingal, which had in fact been largely forged. In a letter to Boswell, speaking of the discoverer/forger's claim to have manuscripts (which he never produced), Johnson said, "If old manuscripts should now be mentioned, I should, unless there were more evidence than can be easily had, supposed them another proof of Scotch conspiracy in national falsehood. Do not censure the expression; you know it to be true." I happened to see a book (The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History) on the same topic, in the Telegraph I think, just last week; I would like to read it. Anyway, it is not a peculiar vice of the Scots, but a common disease of weak and resentful nations. Germany, Russia, Japan, Ireland, and most recently Mexico have all succumbed to it. I suppose multiculturalism prohibits the observation that men often lie to further a common delusion and that few delusions are as gripping as mystical nationalism.

Life of Johnson, I

2008-06-16T21:23:00.000-07:00

Though as I start this blog I am 600 pages through Boswell's Life of Johnson, and the great man is already 66, there are still about 700 pages to go, so no harm done. Also I have just been reading the years around the trip to Scotland, which are very boring, the interesting parts all having been written into Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, so this post will not even be about the Life.

Before starting the book, I read Macaulay's review of Croker's edition. It is not much of an encouragement to read the book, but it is pretty funny. Macaulay starts off softly, with the first sentence: "This work has greatly disappointed us." From there he goes into a little warm-up routine. "This edition is ill compiled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill printed." A little farther on: "The tomes absolutely swarm with misstatements into which the editor never would have fallen, if he had taken the slightest pains to investigate the truth of his assertions, or if he had even been well acquainted with the book on which he undertook to comment." He accuses Croker of gross ignorance and negligence akin to medical malpractice, compares Croker to schoolgirls to his disadvantage and repeatedly fantasizes about lashing him as a schoolmaster would a pig-headed little boy.

Having now warmed up, Macaulay goes for a touch directly on Croker's class: "A very large proportion of the two thousand five hundred notes which the editor boasts of having added... remind us of nothing so much as of those profound and interesting annotations which are pencilled by sempstresses and apothecaries' boys on the dog-eared margins of novels borrowed from circulating libraries; 'How beautiful!' 'Cursed prosy!' 'I don't like Sir Reginald Malcolm at all.' 'I think Pelham is a sad dandy.'"

Croker does sound like an idiot, and only a very small number of his comments survive in the 1953 OUP edition I have, and all of his ill-advised omissions and additions to the text have been reverted. Still, it is hard to believe any man could be as much of a jackass as Macaulay portrays him. Macaulay wholly justifies himself, however, when he complains that in Croker's comments, "We have 'fallacy' used as synonymous with 'falsehood.'" It warms my thistle-ish heart to hear someone who commits that gross solecism so savagely abused.

Macaulay animadverts against Boswell and Johnson as well. After saying that Boswell is the foremost biographer of all time, he strangely continues by calling Boswell the worst of men:

"We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phænomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect... Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame... Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London... Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof he never could have produced so excellent a book."

Having read about halfway through, I think I can defend Boswell. Perhaps he becomes especially stupid later, but so far he seems like a guileless man of moderately good intelligence and much better education. His views on literature, where they differ from Johnson's, largely amount to agreeing with the dominant opinion of his time regarding each author, but he occasionally makes a good point. He does seem to have driven Johnson and others crazy at times, but he was pretty clearly a kind and good-natured man and only a little given to sycophancy. I was going to say that Macaulay might have been misled by the lack of celebrities and celebrity hangers-on in his day, but surely there are no worse sycophants than courtiers. The explanation for Macaulay's intense hatred of Boswell and considerable abuse of Johnson, is hinted at in these lines and explained in the Life. Macaulay says, "Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples."

And that is it. Macaulay was a fervent Whig, so a republican, an abolitionist, a hater of the old aristocracy, and in short the bitter enemy of Boswell (who was, after all, a Scottish nobleman) and of Johnson's politics, if not of Johnson himself. Both Boswell and Johnson often say things that would be intolerable if said now, and sometimes that were poorly reasoned, but it would be very foolish to judge what kind of men they were, by looking at what kind of men in the 19th or 21st century hold some opinions similar to theirs. A man who believes in the unmoving Earth in 1500 is not (without further evidence) the same sort of man as one who holds the same belief today.

It explains Everything.

2008-06-16T20:57:00.000-07:00

My reading has been increasing lately, and finding I have more to say than any one person has time or patience to hear, I mean this blog to absorb the excess. Much of the pleasure in reading is in discussion afterwards, and for me at least it helps fix what was read more firmly to discuss it or at least to write about it.

The advantages of a blog over a private literary journal are that someone might read a post and be interested enough to comment, so I could have both writing and discussion, and failing that, I can at least nurture that false hope, where with a journal I would have to leave it accidentally and enticingly open when guests were over, to have any hope of notice. Since any self-respecting journal contains embarrassing admissions and a great deal of sex, intense frustration would be bound to drive away forever whatever readership I briefly gained. Also, I will save a bundle, not having to buy quite so much purple ink and green paper.

The Latin is from Winnie Ille Pu and is taken from chapter four, the introduction of Eeyore. Ior, auritulus cinereus is Eeyore, a little grey donkey. In silvae angulo carduoso is in a quiet thistle-filled spot in the forest. Gustatus carduorum is a taste for thistles. As Eeyore says of his missing tail, "That accounts for a Good Deal. It explains Everything. No Wonder... How Like Them."

SING.	MASC.	FEM.	NEUT.	PLURAL.
Nom.	se, laterþe	sío, séo, later þío, þíu	þæt	þá
Acc.	þone, þæne	þá	þæt	þá
Dat.	þm,þám	þre	þm,þám	þm,þám
Gen.	þæs	þre	þæs	þára (þra)
Instr.	þý, þon		þý, þon