Hitchens' interview: Some noteworthy nuggets

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/07/transcending-god/6076/5/

In your book, you write that human beings would do better to leave the church and gaze through the Hubble telescope or study a strand of DNA. You use the word “awe” to describe your reaction to these scientific phenomena. What would you say you’re in awe of?

It’s a version of the thing I say elsewhere, which is that my definition of an educated person is that you have some idea how ignorant you are.

Explain how that’s a pleasant experience.

It’s when you’re standing there on the verge of something that’s almost incomprehensible—when you’re standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon peering down, thinking, “What the hell is that?”

Would you call it the sublime?

Call it transcendent if you like. If you watch the sunset while listening to the “Missa Solemnis,” then you can certainly call it transcendent. As long as it’s not supernatural. There’s no need for the supernatural. The natural is wonderful enough. As Einstein said, “The wonderful thing is there are no miracles.” The laws of nature work all the time. We can’t understand them all, but we know theyare intelligible. There’s something extraordinary at work that holds it all in place.

The best way you could put it is that there couldn’t be any suspension of those laws to benefit someone who prayed, for the sun to stand still while he finished his battle. No. That would be trivialcompared to the extraordinary consistency and harmony that does seem to apply to the laws of physics. That’s beautiful. And religion is an obstacle to our seeing that. 

Social learning, idea evolution: What makes us different

http://edge.org/conversation/infinite-stupidity-edge-conversation-with-mark-pagel

[MARK PAGEL:] I'm an evolutionary biologist, and my work draws me to the big events that have shaped the history of the world. Some of these we agree upon, and others are right under our noses, and yet we take them for granted and we may not appreciate what a force they've been in our evolution. One of those is the human capacity for culture. It might easily be the most important event in the history of life.

---

It might be useful, with such a statement like that, to review some of these big events. Obviously one of the big events in our history was the origin of our planet, about 4.5 billion years ago. And what's fascinating is that about 3.8 billion years ago, only about seven or eight hundred million years after the origin of our planet, life arose. That life was simple replicators, things that could make copies of themselves. And we think that life was a little bit like the bacteria we see on earth today. It would be the ancestors of the bacteria we see on earth today.
That life ruled the world for 2 billion years, and then about 1.5 billion years ago, a new kind of life emerged. These were the eukaryotic cells. They were a little bit different kind of cell from bacteria. And actually the kind of cells we are made of. And again, these organisms that were eukaryotes were single-celled, so even 1.5 billion years ago, we still just had single-celled organisms on earth. But it was a new kind of life.

It was another 500 million years before we had anything like a multicellular organism, and it was another 500 million years after that before we had anything really very interesting. So, about 500 million years ago, the plants and the animals started to evolve. And I think everybody would agree that this was a major event in the history of the world, because, for the first time, we had complex organisms.

After about 500 million years ago, things like the plants evolved, the fish evolved, lizards and snakes, dinosaurs, birds, and eventually mammals. And then it was really just six or seven million years ago, within the mammals, that the lineage that we now call the hominins arose. And they would be direct descendants of us. And then, within that lineage that arose about six or seven million years ago, it was only about 200,000 years ago that humans finally evolved.

And so, this is really just 99.99 percent of the way through the history of this planet, humans finally arose. But in that 0.01 percent of life on earth, we've utterly changed the planet. And the reason is that, with the arrival of humans 200,000 years ago, a new kind of evolution was created. The old genetical evolution that had ruled for 3.8 billion years now had a competitor, and that new kind of evolution was ideas.

It was a true form of evolution, because now ideas could arise, and they could jump from mind to mind, without genes having to change. So, populations of humans could adapt at the level of ideas. Ideas could accumulate. We call this cumulative cultural adaptation. And so, cultural complexity could emerge and arise orders and orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.

Now, I think most of us take that utterly for granted, but it has completely rewritten the way life evolves on this planet because, with the arrival of our species, everything changed. Now, a single species, using its idea evolution, that could proceed apace independently of genes, was able to adapt to nearly every environment on earth, and spread around the world where no other species had done that. All other species are limited to places on earth that their genes adapt them to. But we were able to adapt at the level of our cultures to every place on earth.

A lot of that sounds familiar to us. But what's hidden in there is this idea of idea evolution. And if it seems easy to us, it shouldn't, because no other species on earth has been capable of doing it. And I'm including in this our recent ancestors.

If we go back in our lineage 2 million years or so, there was a species known as homo erectus. Homo erectus is an upright ape that lived on the African savannah. It could make tools, but they were very limited tools, and those tools, the archaeological record tells us, didn't change for about 1.5 million years. That is, until about the time they went extinct. That is, they made the same tools over and over and over again, without any real changes to them.

If we move forward in time a little bit, it's not even clear that our very close cousins that we know are related to us 99.5 or 99.6 percent in the sequences of their genes, the Neanderthals, it's not even clear that they had what we call idea evolution. Sure enough, their tools that they made were more complex than our tools. But the 300,000 or so years that they spent in Europe, their toolkit barely changed. So there's very little evolution going on.

So there's something really very special about this new species, humans, that arose and invented this new kind of evolution, based on ideas. And so it's useful for us to ask, what is it about humans that distinguishes them? It must have been a tiny genetic difference between us and the Neanderthals because, as I said, we're so closely related to them genetically, a tiny genetic difference that had a vast cultural potential.

That difference is something that anthropologists and archaeologists call social learning. It's a very difficult concept to define, but when we talk about it, all of us humans know what it means. And it seems to be the case that only humans have the capacity to learn complex new or novel behaviors, simply by watching and imitating others. And there seems to be a second component to it, which is that we seem to be able to get inside the minds of other people who are doing things in front of us, and understand why it is they're doing those things. These two things together, we call social learning.

Many people respond that, oh, of course the other animals can do social learning, because we know that the chimpanzees can imitate each other, and we see all sorts of learning in animals like dolphins and the other monkeys, and so on. But the key point about social learning is that this minor difference between us and the other species forms an unbridgeable gap between us and them. Because, whereas all of the other animals can pick up the odd behavior by having their attention called to something, only humans seem to be able to select, among a range of alternatives, the best one, and then to build on that alternative, and to adapt it, and to improve upon it. And so, our cultures cumulatively adapt, whereas all other animals seem to do the same thing over and over and over again.

Contra Perry Anderson

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/perry-andersons-weberian-turn/


'Now there is nothing but capitalism. Any revolt is immediately assimilated and commodified.'

Britain's imperial past: Antidote to Niall Ferguson & his ilk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/19/end-myths-britains-imperial-past



http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/11/niall-ferguson-political-debate-england-america?intcmp=239

and a fine put-down of Ferguson by an American professor of English:  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/08/disappointed-lover-west/?page=3

another review:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/25/civilization-west-rest-niall-ferguson-review?intcmp=239

Politics 101

'Politics is rife with prisoner's dilemmas like the free-rider and tragedy of the commons problems.'


http://logic.cqpress.com/chap1/study.asp#

Chapter 1. Logic of American Politics

Study

Politics is the process through which individuals and groups reach collective agreements. Success at politics typically involves bargaining and compromise as there is often substantial disagreement over the goals of collective action. Individuals and groups can usually benefit from collective undertakings. National defense, public order, civil liberties, and public parks are all examples of public goods that would be difficult to provide through private activity.

In order to achieve collective action, however, individuals have to overcome several challenges. These include coordination problems, where agreement must be reached on what to do and how to do it. In situations where individuals agree on the benefits of a collective undertaking, prisoner's dilemmas can still lead to the pursuit of private rewards at the expense of the collective good. Politics is rife with prisoner's dilemmas like the free-rider and tragedy of the commons problems.

Proper institutional design can help individuals and groups overcome these challenges. Often, simple agreement over the rules and procedures for reaching and enforcing collective agreements can mitigate conflict. Other mechanisms, such as agenda control, veto power and supermajority rules, have been used in the past to solve problems and reduce certain costs associated with collective action.

The costs of collective action include both transaction costs—the time, effort and resources needed to reach collective decisions—and conformity costs—the extent to which collective decisions require individuals to do things they wish to avoid. Institutional design generally involves a trade-off between transaction and conformity costs. Enabling government to decide and act quickly, for example, often entails imposing substantial conformity costs. The American separation of powers system differs from parliamentary governments used by other nations primarily in the high transaction costs of its decision-making processes.

Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should understand...

• the meaning of "politics" and the ways in which people use politics to achieve their goals
• how the setting or circumstances of politics can affect outcomes
• why smart, rational people can combine to produce really bad outcomes
• how smart, rational people can set things up to produce better outcomes
• the risks and rewards of delegating power to agents
• the trade-offs between different ways of reaching decisions (majority rule, consensus, dictatorship)
• the difference between public and private goods, and how they are produced and consumed
• why politicians don't have to be ideal, selfless goody-two-shoes to be good representatives

U.S. Party Politics: Polarised, Paralysed, Dysfunctional

Poignant  -- and amusing:  conservative apostate David Frum on his fellow Republicans losing their grip on reality

http://nymag.com/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/index2.html

1. Fiscal Austerity and Economic Stagnation
We have entered an era in which politics increasingly revolves around the ugly question of who will bear how much pain. Conservative constituencies already see themselves as aggrieved victims of American government: They are the people who pay the taxes even as their “earned” benefits are siphoned off to provide welfare for the undeserving. The reality is, however, that the big winners in the American fiscal system are the rich, the old, the rural, and veterans—typically conservative constituencies. Squeezing the programs conservatives most dislike—PBS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, tax credits for the poor, the Department of Education, etc.—yields relatively little money. Any serious move to balance the budget, or even just reduce the deficit a little, must inevitably cut programs conservative voters do like: Medicare for current beneficiaries, farm subsidies, veterans’ benefits, and big tax loopholes like the mortgage-interest deduction and employer-provided health benefits. The rank and file of the GOP are therefore caught between their interests and their ideology—intensifying their suspicion that shadowy Washington elites are playing dirty tricks upon them.

2. Ethnic Competition
White America has been plunged into a mood of pessimism and anger since 2008. Ron Brownstein reports in the National Journal: “63 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they expected their children to exceed their standard of living. Even ­college-educated whites are less optimistic (only about two-fifths agree). But the noncollege whites are the gloomiest: Just one-third of them think their kids will live better than they do; an equal number think their children won’t even match their living standard. No other group is nearly that negative.” Those fears are not irrational. In postrecession America, employers seem to show a distinct preference for foreign-born workers. Eighty percent of the net new jobs created in the state of Texas since 2009 went to the foreign-born. Nationwide, foreign-born workers have experienced a net 4 percent increase in employment since January 2009, while native-born workers have seen continuing employment declines. Which may explain why President Obama’s approval rating among whites slipped to 41 percent in January 2010 and is now testing a new low of 33 percent. The president’s name and skin color symbolize the emergence of a new America in which many older-stock Americans intuit they will be left behind.

It is precisely these disaffected whites—especially those who didn’t go to college—who form the Republican voting base. John McCain got 58 percent of noncollege-white votes in 2008. The GOP polls even higher among that group today, but the party can only sustain those numbers as long as it gives voice to alienation. Birtherism, the claim that President Obama was not born in the United States, expressed the feeling of many that power has shifted into alien hands. That feeling will not be easily quelled by Republican electoral success, because it is based on a deep sense of dispossession and disinheritance.

3. Fox News and Talk Radio
Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

2011 Sydney Peace Prize speech

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2011/11/bia_20111113_1705.mp3


http://www.sydneypeacefoundation.org.au/

On 'revolutionary pacifism'.

Smart guy, Stephen Metcalf: The Slate's house egghead

http://thedp.com/index.php/article/2011/02/columnist_balances_academic_and_popular_writing

A critique of libertarianism a la Robert Nozick:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_dilettante/2011/06/the_liberty_scam.2.html

Global climate change: It's too late

Requiem for a Species - Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change: 

http://www.amazon.com/Requiem-Species-Resist-Climate-Change/dp/1849710813

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mccKiZ9AfE

Meanwhile, an erstwhile 'denier' repents: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/global_warming_just_got_hotter_20111024/

Richard A. Muller: The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism

online.wsj.com

Richard A. Muller writes in The Wall Street Journal Europe that there were good reasons for doubt, until the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project came along.

Eulogy: Jobs

The nature of finite things is to contain the germ of destruction as their inmost being; "the hour of their birth is the hour of their death." 


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Norman O. Brown's 'Life Against Death' -- in bite size

http://www.psych-culture.com/docs/brown-life_against_death.pdf

A memoir; a father's journal to a son ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/books/23gree.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/us/01charles.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

In Chekhov’s 1892 short story “The Grasshopper” an ambitious young society woman marries a quiet doctor nine years her senior. Though tall and broad-shouldered, Dr. Osip Dymov seems small and insignificant in the glittering company of his wife’s artistic and literary friends: he looks “as though he had on somebody else’s coat.” At their wedding the young woman, Olga Ivanovna, dashes from friend to friend, urging, “Look at him; isn’t it true that there is something in him?,” as if she wanted to explain “why she was marrying a simple, very ordinary, and in no way remarkable man.”

Dana Canedy with her fiancé, First Sgt. Charles Monroe King.

A JOURNAL FOR JORDAN

A Story of Love and Honor

By Dana Canedy

Illustrated. 279 pp. Crown Publishers. $25.95.

Multimedia

Audio & Photos

Lessons From a Soldier to His Son

Related

An Appreciation: From Father to Son, Last Words to Live By(January 1, 2007)

Dana Canedy’s powerful memoir, “A Journal for Jordan,” begins by sounding similar notes. She has climbed from working-class roots, the daughter of an African-American military family at Fort Knox, into journalism’s highest echelons: reporter for The New York Times and part of thePulitzer Prize-winning team that created the 2001 series “How Race Is Lived in America.” She dates the managing editor of The Boston Globe and vacations on Martha’s Vineyard, enjoying lobster, single-malt Scotch and evenings of Scrabble.

But that relationship fades, and in its aftermath Ms. Canedy visits home. In her parents’ living room in Radcliff, Ky., she encounters First Sgt. Charles Monroe King. A tall, handsome and heavily decorated soldier eight years her senior, he had served in Operation Desert Storm, Kuwait and Guantánamo Bay.

“I wondered how a man blessed with so much beauty could possibly be bashful,” Ms. Canedy writes. But she also finds him stiff, old-fashioned and provincial. Sergeant King is not a voracious reader of books and newspapers; he makes grammatical errors; in a 45 miles-per-hour zone, he drives 45 m.p.h.

After Ms. Canedy returns to Manhattan, Sergeant King pursues her by phone. “I was instantly conscious of how little interest I had in dating a soldier,” she writes. “My ideal man,” she says, “looked like Charles but wore a suit to work and carried The Wall Street Journal under his arm.”

“He’s not exactly my type,” she tells a girlfriend. “I mean, what if I have to introduce him to the executive editor at a Times event? He mispronounces words and doesn’t keep up with the news.”

Chekhov’s Olga gets her comeuppance, like a character in an O. Henry story: her obsession with the imagined talents of her fellow social climbers eclipses her recognition of her husband’s true brilliance. As Dr. Dymov dies of diphtheria contracted from a patient, attending doctors snarl at Olga: “What a loss for science! Compare him with all of us. He was a great man, an extraordinary man! ... Merciful God, ... we shall never look on his like again.”

I wish Chekhov had pushed deeper to explain that Olga grieves not for her husband, but for the lost status his eminence would have given her.

Like the fictional Dr. Dymov, the real-life Charles King is of quiet excellence. He is full of decency and honor. He is trusted and beloved by the men he leads, and to the last, he will never betray their trust. He offers Ms. Canedy respectful, full-hearted adoration. She accepts his courtship, but still frets that he is beneath her.

“I wondered if Charles could truly be happy married to a willful woman who earned considerably more than he did,” she writes.

There is subtle parsing here of crosscurrents of race and class: both Ms. Canedy and Sergeant King have climbed beyond the sphere of their parents’ achievements and of their modest neighborhoods, but Ms. Canedy has scaled higher. Dare she turn around now and reach back for this man? The writer is hard on herself, letting the best light fall on Sergeant King.

But, unlike Olga’s tale, Ms. Canedy’s narrative becomes a love story. Sergeant King’s goodness wins her heart. “Even though I still found it irritating when he mispronounced a word, I had grown to love his mind.” Not all great love stories are ignited by the lightning bolt of love at first glance; this humbler I’m-going-to-talk-myself-into-this-good-man version is believable and real.

They hope to marry, but now time is short. George W. Bush is elected; the twin towers fall; the White House purveys false assertions of weapons of mass destruction; Iraq is invaded; Sergeant King is called up. The two cling to each other whenever he can find time away from training his troops. The couple conceive a baby, then Sergeant King leaves for Iraq. In his duffel bag he carries one of Ms. Canedy’s last gifts to him, a new-father’s journal.

Sergeant King will leave Iraq only once, for two weeks, to meet his 5-month-old son, Jordan. He does not speak of the war. Instead the new parents nestle with their jolly boy and try not to count off the days. Sergeant King writes in his journal every night, committing a lifetime of wisdom to its pages, in case he fails to return to raise Jordan. The father’s journal forms the backbone of this memoir. (It was also the subject of a Times article by Ms. Canedy in 2007, “From Father to Son, Last Words to Live By.”)

On his last visit Sergeant King presents Ms. Canedy with a painting he has made: a self-portrait of a man with angel’s wings, kneeling before God. She shoves it back at him in a panic. They say goodbye, then each stands alone and sobs — Ms. Canedy in her apartment, Sergeant King (she learns later) in the lobby. On Oct. 14, 2006, Sgt. Charles King is killed when an improvised explosive device rips through his Humvee.

There are no politics here, no accusations against the Bush White House. Ms. Canedy, having fallen in love with a career soldier, respects his sense of duty too much to rail against his orders. But “A Journal for Jordan” is impossible to read without a sense of bitter knowledge that this principled man fell at the behest of leaders less guided by honor. That is no trick O. Henry ending. It is a denouement full of suffering, worthy of Chekhov.

Goldbuggery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard

Russell: What I Have Lived For

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind ...  


Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer."

http://users.drew.edu/jlenz/br-prolog.html
http://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Bertrand-Russell/dp/041522862X

Thompson Invictus

Fred Inglis - The Nation  - 20 Sept 1993

[The late E.P. Thompson, U.K. correspondent for The Nation, conveyed
his nuclear disarmament message to an American audience via powerful
articles in our pages.  We asked a friend to evoke the stature of the
man.]

----------

The greatest living historian of the English-speaking world died on
August 28.  Edward Thompson was the son of an American mother and a
British father, a methodist poet-preacher who almost became a Buddhist
and who was a close friend of Nehru as a result of his passionate
advocacy of Indian independence.  Edward's brother, Frank - poet,
scholar, naturalist, hero - was executed while fighting with the
partisans against the Bulgarian fascists at a moement when, as Edward
came to believe the Allied negotiators could have bargained him out
of captivity if only the first frosts of the cold war had not begun to
glint in Sofia.
   

Thompson carried all this history into *his* history: the history
that he wrote and the history that he made.  Seen from down here, his
life was a victory wrung out of many defeats.
  

He was, to begin with, a Communist, like his brother.  His
communism was drawn from that best strain of genteel English idealism,
compounded of more or less equal parts of Marx and William Morris (of
whom he wrote an early biography) and of the great blast of
excellently high-minded and public-spririted generosity that blew from
his father's Oxford at the end of the nineteenth century.  Thompson
stood squarely in that grand tradition, and reached beyond it as
well, to Swift, Wordsworth and Paine, to the Dissenting Academies of
whose quarrelsome and fraternal formation he was so great a
chronicler, and above all to William Blake, whose contradictory and
ardent vision and whose richly comic caricatures of Old Corruption
brought such color and power to Thompson's own imaginative
dramatization of class and world politics.  (Thompson's last work, his
long-pondered book on Blake, comes out this fall.)
   

In 1956, like so many honest Communists in Britain and North
America, he left the party - just before it threw him out (for
continuing to publish what became *New Left Review*) - quietly, and
without any of the breastbeating that attended loss of faith in some
quarters.  Indeed, he didn't lose faith; not in equality, liberty,
fraternity, or faith in the absolute calling of the intellecutal to
oppose coarse old power, Blake's Nobodaddy, and its monstrous rutting
in lies and cruelty.

   

His idealism had taken him already to the scarred and fledgling
nation of Yugoslavia in 1947, where for a year he helped build one of
the railway lines that was to lead Tito's delicate federation into a
prosperous future.  After 1956, it took him to work in that peculiarly
British institution, the extramural department of an industrial
university, where students come in the evenings to voluntary classes
with a curriculum designed in partnership with their tutor and
intended to answer questions about their experience largely ignored by
more official reading lists.
   

Out of that teaching came Thompson's 1963
masterpiece, *The Making of the English Working Class*, an enormous
Marxist-Morrisan history of the years between the French Revolution
and England's modest substitute, the Reform Act of 1832.  The book
spoke like a novel of that great slow surge of feeling and self-making
that both drove along and held together the fissiparous movement of
the poor and the propertyless as they sought to understand and endure
the apocalypse of capitalism in its first headquarters over those four
decades.
   

In the meantime Thompson began his thirty-odd years of devotion to
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.  In 1957 and for a few years
afterward that was a largely British affair, and he fought the fight
on the spot.  He went briefly to head the Center for the Study of
Social History at the newly founded University of Warwick in 1965 but,
discovering that the local businessmen who were so prominent in that
university's affairs had never noticed the propinquity of social to
socialist, resigned in a characteristically principled and noisy way,
and turned full time to the lonely, ill-paid craft of writer and the
dodo role of man of letters.
   

Yugoslavia; communism; disarmament; the labor movement; the
business university.  In 1973, soon after the murder of his comrade
Salvado Allende, alone in the lovely, provinical, almost Palladian
house in which he and his wife, Dorothy, lived these past thiry years,
Thompson reckoned up a few of his defeats in a poem apostrophizing his
old typewriter, "In answer to your call/ I rush out in this rattling
harvester/ And thrash you into type."
   

The biggest defeat was still to come.  In 1979 he published a
little pamphlet with a minority press called *Protest and Survive*
(which he rewrote for a U.S. audience; it appeared in the January 24,
1981, *Nation*). Its title parodied a ludicrous booklet issued to the
country advising its citizens on how to survive a nuclear attack.
("If you have a home fire extinguisher--keep it handy").  The pamphlet
called to action "the people of England" and charged them to refuse th
installation of the new generation of cruise missles in the English
countryside without benefit of parliamentary debate.
   

The second cold war had been declared by Carter, fervently affirmed
by Reagan and ear-piercingly seconded by Thatcher.  Thompson moved
for the opposition of the people.
   

They came.  They came by the millions from all over Europe, and not
a few from North America.  The missles arrived and were reviled.  The
people stayed.  Thompson spoke for them.  In a few pages of
pamphleteering, on a few hundred platforms, in the pages of the
liberal press, tired, tirelessly, he wrote a different account of the
history that had been and the history that might be.  He summoned up
the hideous nightmare of what he called "exterminism," and
counterposed a vision of free peoples refusing to do what the hairy
ogre Nobodaddy told them to do.  And in the end--in Prague, Berlin,
Bucharest and elsewhere--they didn't.  It was even a sort of victory.
A great writer captures the best feelings flowing through a
given historical moment and gives them form.  Thompson caught and held
the feeling of two generations utterly fed up with the mendacity,
waste and pointless cruelty of the cold war; and having held them, he
made the feelings speak and tell.  To do this, he broke off his proper
scholarship and created an idiom for the weeklies that outstrips all
the great journalistic masters.
   

Now, there is nobody left who commands the prose with which to
summon the somnambulist people of England to defend their ancient
liberties.  And there is nobody left who could live the life of writer
and man of letters as Thompson did.  Yet the line of defeats that make
up his life and that, taken together, constitute the triumphant victor
of his life, may still teach us much, on this or that side of the
Atlantic.  What they teach was best spoken in a single poem much
admired by Thompson himself.  Its strong, familiar and stirring
Victorianness has its place in the obituary of such a man: "Say not
the struggle naught availeth...."

----------

Fred Inglis is a professor of cultural studies at the University of Warwick and author, 

most recently, of The Cruel Peace (Basic).

Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth

Say not the struggle naught availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth And as things have been, things remain. If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be, in yon smoke concealed Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, And, but for you, posses the field. For while the tired waves, vainly breaking Seem here no painful inch to gain Far back through the creeks and inlets making Came, silent, flooding in, the main, And not by eastern windows only When daylight comes, comes in the light In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright. http://exagminations.tripod.com/id27.html http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081223221740AA9bYUw

Nisbet, conservative sociologist

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north120.html

Fascinating appreciation of Robert Nisbet (whose 'Sociological Tradition' was in the Penang Free School library) by a conservative, Gary North.  


"Was Nisbet a conservative or a liberal? I shall now make a statement that may get me into a lot trouble: there have been no prominent conservative philosophers in the Anglo-American conservative movement. They have all been classical liberals. Nisbet was no exception.

What is my definition of a conservative? It is a person who believes that the irreducible unit of civil law is not the individual citizen."

Recent book by Brad Lowell Stone, Robert Nisbet: Communitarian Traditionalist(2000).

Marriage in Time: A Primer

IN THE 1990S, Stephanie Coontz, a social historian at Evergreen State College in Washington, noticed an uptick in questions from reporters and audiences asking if the institution of marriage was falling apart. She didn’t think it was, and was struck by how everyone believed in some mythical Golden Age of Marriage and saw mounting divorce rates as evidence of the dissolution of this halcyon past. She decided to write a book discrediting the notion and proving that the ways in which we think about and construct the legal union between a man and a woman have always been in flux.

What Coontz found was even more interesting than she’d originally expected. In her fascinating Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, she surveys 5,000 years of human habits, from our days as hunters and gatherers up until the present, showing our social arrangements to be more complex and varied than could ever seem possible. She’d long known that the Leave It to Beaver–style family model popular in the 1950s and ’60s had been a flash in the pan, and like a lot of historians, she couldn’t understand how people had become so attached to an idea that had developed so late and been so short-lived.

For thousands of years, marriage had been a primarily economic and political contract between two people, negotiated and policed by their families, church, and community. It took more than one person to make a farm or business thrive, and so a potential mate’s skills, resources, thrift, and industriousness were valued as highly as personality and attractiveness. This held true for all classes. In the American colonies, wealthy merchants entrusted business matters to their landlocked wives while off at sea, just as sailors, vulnerable to the unpredictability of seasonal employment, relied on their wives’ steady income as domestics in elite households. Two-income families were the norm.

Not until the 18th century did labor begin to be divided along a sharp line: wage-earning for the men and unpaid maintenance of household and children for the women. Coontz notes that as recently as the late 17th century, women’s contributions to the family economy were openly recognized, and advice books urged husbands and wives to share domestic tasks. But as labor became separated, so did our spheres of experience—the marketplace versus the home—one founded on reason and action, the other on compassion and comfort. Not until the post-war gains of the 1950s, however, were a majority of American families able to actually afford living off a single breadwinner.

All of this was intriguing, for sure—but even more surprising to Coontz was the realization that those alarmed reporters and audiences might be onto something. Coontz still didn’t think that marriage was falling apart, but she came to see that it was undergoing a transformation far more radical than anyone could have predicted, and that our current attitudes and arrangements are without precedent. “Today we are experiencing a historical revolution every bit as wrenching, far-reaching, and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution,” she wrote.

Last summer I called Coontz to talk to her about this revolution. “We are without a doubt in the midst of an extraordinary sea change,” she told me. “The transformation is momentous—immensely liberating and immensely scary. When it comes to what people actually want and expect from marriage and relationships, and how they organize their sexual and romantic lives, all the old ways have broken down.”
For starters, we keep putting marriage off. In 1960, the median age of first marriage in the U.S. was 23 for men and 20 for women; today it is 28 and 26. Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/

http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/about.htm


http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

Victimhood and its Uses

http://www.jesusandmo.net/2011/10/19/badge2/

Michael Mann on Power in the 21st Century; Lukes' review of Gellner biography

http://www.amazon.com/Power-21st-Century-Conversations-John/dp/product-description/0745653235/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books


http://www.amazon.com/Ernest-Gellner-Intellectual-John-Hall/dp/1844676021
http://newleftreview.org/?view=2922&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nlr71


In an interview with John Davis he remarked that ‘not having had a faith, I think I do understand . . . what Descartes and Hume and Kant were about, namely, the struggle to establish the foundations of knowledge’, and ‘[n]ever having been a member of a community but having been on the margins of a number gave me an understanding of . . . what the yearning for community is all about.’ 

When I first saw Berber villages of the central Atlas, each building clinging to the next, the style wholly homogeneous, the totality crying out that this was a Gemeinschaft, I knew at once that I wanted desperately to know, as far as an outsider ever could, what it was like inside.

It is clear that his life experience led him, as Perry Anderson observed, to a far less intense and exalted view of national allegiance than that of Max Weber, another figure who loomed large in his intellectual firmament. What Gellner favoured was the limited, liberal nationalism of Masaryk’s Czechoslovak Republic, namely,

the acceptance of ‘forms of life,’ from styles of food, handshakes and wallpapers to political rituals or personal relationships—but an acceptance which no longer endows anything with an aura of the absolute, but is ironic, tentative, optional, and above all discontinuous with serious knowledge and real conviction. In this limited sphere of ‘culture,’ relativism is indeed valid. In the sphere of serious conviction, on the other hand, relativism is not an option open to us at all.

Bertrand Russell on Work - and Idleness

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html


First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.

Angelus Novus: 'Progress'

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.


-  Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

Turkey & Kemalism: a masterly conspectus by Perry Anderson

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/perry-anderson/kemalism

In the spring of 1924, Kemal scrapped the caliphate, a religious institution still revered across the Muslim world (there was a wave of protest as far away as India), and was soon closing down shrines and suppressing dervishes, banning the fez, changing the calendar, substituting civil law for the sharia, and replacing Arabic with Latin script. The scale and speed of this assault on religious tradition and household custom, embracing faith, time, dress, family, language, remain unique in the Umma to this day. No one could have guessed at such radicalism in advance. Its visionary drive separated Kemal from his predecessors with éclat.

But systematic though it was, the transformation that now gripped Turkey was a strange one: a cultural revolution without a social revolution, something historically very rare, indeed that might look a priori impossible. The structure of society, the rules of property, the pattern of class relations, remained unaltered. The CUP had repressed any strikes or labour organisation from the start. Kemal followed suit: Communists were killed or jailed, however good diplomatic relations were with Moscow. But if there was no anti-capitalist impulse in Kemalism, nor was there was any significant anti-feudal dimension to it. Ottoman rule, centred on an office-holding state, had never required or permitted a powerful landowning class in the countryside, least of all in Anatolia, where peasant holdings had traditionally prevailed – the only real exception being areas of the Kurdish south-east controlled by tribal chiefs. The scope for agrarian reform was thus anyway much more limited than in Russia, or even parts of the Balkans, and no attempt at it was made.

Yet the social landscape hit by the cultural revolution was at the same time the opposite of a stable traditional order, in one crucial respect. If no class struggles lay behind the dynamics of Kemalism, ethnic upheavals on a gigantic scale had reshaped Anatolian society. The influx of Turks and Circassians, refugees from Russian or Balkan wars, the extirpation of the Armenians, the expulsion of the Greeks, had produced a vast brassage of populations and properties in a still backward agricultural economy. It was in this shattered setting that a cultural revolution from above could be imposed without violent reaction from below. The extent of deracination, moral and material, at the conclusion of wars that had continued virtually without interruption for more than a decade – twice as long as in Europe – permitted a Kulturkampf that might otherwise have provoked an unmanageable explosion. But by the same token the revolution acquired no active popular impetus: Kemalism remained a vertical affair.

Though it broke, sharply and abruptly, with Ottoman culture in one fundamental respect by abolishing its script and so at a stroke cutting off new generations from all written connection with the past, in its distance from the masses Kemalism not only inherited an Ottoman tradition, but accentuated it. All premodern ruling groups spoke idioms differing in one way or another, if only in accent or vocabulary, from those they ruled. But the Ottoman elite, for long composed not even principally of Turks, was peculiarly detached from its subjects, as a corps of state servants bonded by command of a sophisticated language that was a mixture of Persian, Arabic and Turkish, with many foreign loan words, incomprehensible to the ruled. Administrative Ottoman was less elaborate than its literary forms, and Turkish remained in household use, but there was nevertheless a huge – linguistically fixed – gulf between high and low cultures in the empire.

Kemalism set out to do away with this, by creating a modern Turkish that would no longer be the despised patois of Ottoman times, but a language spoken alike by all citizens of the new republic. But while it sought to close the gap between rulers and ruled where it had been widest in the past, at the same it opened up a gap that had never existed to the same extent before, leaving the overall distance between them as great as ever. Language reform might unify; religious reform was bound to divide. The faith of the Ottoman elites had little in common with the forms of popular piety – variegated cults and folk beliefs looked down on by the educated. But at least there was a shared commitment to Islam. This tie was sundered by Kemal. Once the state started to target shrines and brotherhoods, preachers and prayer meetings, it was hitting at traditional objects of reverence and attachment, and the masses resisted it. At this level, the cultural revolution misfired. Rejected by the rural and small-town majority, Kemalist secularism was, however, adopted with aggressive zeal in the cities by modernised descendants of the Ottoman elite – bureaucrats, officers, professionals. In this urban stratum, secularism became over time, as it remains today, in its blinkered intensity, something like an ersatz religion in its own right. But the rigidity of this secularism is a peculiarly brittle one. Not just because it is intellectually thin, or divorced from popular feeling, but more profoundly because of a structural bad faith that has always been inseparable from it.

There is no reason to suppose that Kemal himself was anything other than a robust atheist, of more or less French Third Republic stamp, throughout his life. In that sense, he is entitled to be remembered as a Turkish Emile Combes, scourge of monkish mystification and superstition. But in his rise to power, he could no more dispense with Islam than Talat or Enver had done. ‘God’s help and protection are with us in the sacred struggle which we have entered upon for our fatherland,’ he declared in 1920. The struggle for independence was a holy war, which he led as Gazi, the Warrior for the Faith of original Ottoman expansion, a title he held onto down to the mid-1930s. ‘God is one, and great is his glory!’ he announced without a blush, in a sermon to the faithful delivered in a mosque in 1923. When the constitution of the Turkish Republic was framed in the following year, Islam was declared the state religion. The spirit in which Kemal made use of Muslim piety in these years was that of Napoleon enthroning himself with the blessing of the pope. But as exercises in cynicism they moved in opposite directions: Napoleon rising to power as a revolutionary, and manipulating religion to stabilise it, Kemal manipulating religion to make a revolution and turning on it once his power was stabilised. After 1926 little more was heard of the deity.