To Kepler’s bookstore in Palo Alto last night to hear Richard Dawkins speak about his new book The God Delusion. Dawkins’ thesis is that religious beliefs are not merely false but also harmful. He makes a strong case against the Old Testament and has harmless fun ridiculing it as a source of morality. He draws on his authority and reputation as a scientist to encourage atheists to stand up against claims that religious beliefs and sensibilities should be exempt from challenge. This is fine as far as it goes, but it is not enough, and it less than we deserve from Dawkins.
I believe that men and nations can live in peace and harmony—when they’ve tried everything else.Religious tolerance is part of what constitutes the liberal democracies. It presumes that religion is a matter of individual belief and practice: the celebrated separation of church and state. This is not a dispensation of secularism. Rather, secularism emerged in the space provided by this settlement, itself the product of countries harrowed by religious war. It took much blood to produce societies in which we agree to differ. » Continue reading “To hear a mocking bird”
Une vraie personne Louis Mahé’s speech from La Sirène du Mississipi:
Tu crois que tu es une vraie personne, que tu es unique. Mais c’est faux, tu fais partie d’un tas de filles qui se multiplient. Pas vraiment des garces, des aventurières ou des putains, mais des sortes de parasites qui vivent en dehors de la société normale. Vous n’êtes ni des femmes, ni des jeunes filles. Vous êtes des souris. Ce que vous êtes d’ailleurs, ça n’a pas de nom exact. Des écervelées avec la tête pleine d’idioties ou la tête vide. Vous êtes amoureuses de votre corps, vous pensez qu’à vous mettre en soleil, vous passez des heures à vous trafiquer le visage. Vous ne passez pas devant une voiture sans vous regarder dans le pare-brise. Tu sais où on en trouve le plus des filles comme ça? Dans les aéroports, partout où y a des avions qui partent pour les longues distances, parce que vous êtes des belles filles et les belles filles on se les dispute. On les invite d’une capitale à l’autre, et elles y vont, elles déambulent partout avec leur petit sac à la main, la guele enfarinée.
Keep Christmas pagan Charles Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Present preceded by half a century the icon of of Father Christmas made familiar by the Coca-Cola Company. So he is described as dressed in a loose-fitting robe of dark green, trimmed with white fur, and crowned with a circlet of holly. (Ouch.)
Christmas is of course the pagan Yuletide (still called Jul in Scandinavia) glossed and adopted by Christians a thousand years ago. The holly, the tree, the presents, the feasting — the Christmas we mostly keep — is the feast we kept long before the Christians arrived in the 9th century.
Moreover, while the Church adopted and adapted the festival, it never really approved of it. After the Revolution, Oliver Cromwell banned it and sent out police to force shopkeepers to open. And so it lay despised until Dickens resuscitated Christmas in the 19th century; which is why our images of it — coaches, cloaks and high hats in the snow — owe so much to his period.
Don’t you have any truck with austerity or “keep Christmas Christian”. Lay it on with a trowel.
And bring beggars to your banquet.
Why die none for love now? Uh. Lucia Berlin’s complaint is not new. Here is John Donne
Because women have become easier? Or because these later times have provided mankind of more new means for the destroying themselves and one another: pox, gunpowder, young marriages, and controversies in religion? Or is there in truth no precedent or example of it? Or perchance some do die, but are therefore not worthy the remembering or speaking of. (Paradoxes & Problems)
Learn from dogs Tom Guthrie in NSW sends some advice.
» Continue reading “Learn from dogs”
No success like failure Last night author and therapist Susie Orbach led a discussion at our local Starbucks on “how to cope with risk and failure in a society hooked on success”. Delighted to discover that where society sees failure, Orbach too more often sees strategies of accommodation.
She knows there’s no success like failure» Continue reading “No success like failure”
and that failure’s no success at all.
Magnificent Well-Being Hard on the heels of Richard Layard’s essay in the current issue of Prospect on giving happiness priority over wealth, our Australia correspondent Andrew Gaines has sent us an essay on his Project to Make Wellbeing a National Priority.
Most mainstream writing about sustainability focuses on technical changes. In fact, psychological changes are crucial as well.
» Update See also the New Economics Foundation
It’s true money doesn’t make you happy: a man with ten million dollars is no happier than a man with nine.
Sign on foreign-exchange dealer’s desk at Macquarie Bank
No noise My pulse is a constant soundtrack to my life, suppressed from awareness except at moments of stress. I hear the world through the tinnitus static of my ears, usually an inaudible constant. Waiting for sleep one night a few years ago in the South Australian desert, I could hear both quite clearly.
I perceive the world through the constant static of my thinking, decades of conversational debris …
Drinking the French way If you want to drink as we do…
The Week has reprinted this letter to The Independent.
The Light That Smelled What is it about this Andrew Cohen guy? Ran into his Impersonal Enlightenment Fellowship earlier this year and was puzzled by my own reaction.
Cohen argues our fast-changing world desperately needs the guidance of enlightened people; conversely, where in past ages it was fine to retreat from a stable world to cultivate one’s soul, to do so in the face of impending ecological catastrophes is irresponsible. Today, enlightenment entails engagement.
» Continue reading “The Light That Smelled”Educating Stephen Jenny Drake, head teacher at a school for children with special needs, writes on punishment. This settles the matter for me. It’s an empirical question. Many of Jenny’s pupils are autistic, and even less interested in other people than I am. If she doesn’t need corporal punishment to keep order, no one does. I am humbly grateful to my friends for educating me on this subject.
Love in context Ah Stephen, perhaps it is not fair of me to use your record of your own feelings to call your attention to the larger pattern of our age, and possibly your responsibility to them. However…
We must love one another or die» Continue reading “Love in context”
and he nearly did die the night
he saw the periscope, minutes
before the ship sank, another
failure of love.
Parenting without punishment Andrew Gaines writes again with this link to Norm Lee’s web site Parenting Without Punishing. Only skimmed it so far, but I see it addresses many of the questions I have in mind.
It conflates, though, punishment with corporal punishment. This does have the virtue of focusing on the cycle of violence and abuse that most revolts us.
» Continue reading “Parenting without punishment”More punishment Andrew Gaines sends me another ticking-off from Australia. “Not good enough.
”
Acceptable Levels Of Mild Child Abuse With the comment facility still not enabled here, Donald Maclean and Andrew Gaines have each written from the Blue Mountains of NSW. Until I’ve turned on comments, I’ll keep taking ’em by email.
» Continue reading “Acceptable Levels Of Mild Child Abuse”Religious studies The classical Buddhist term for the illusory nature of the world is maya. But 'illusory' is a shade abstract for contemporary English. The word we want for it is bollocks.
Troy Boy Brad Pitt reminds me of Brando in the heavy, dangerous presence he creates for the brooding Achilles in Troy. Director Wolfgang Petersen has opened a window into the pre-humanist world, though he ducks the treatment of women as property and the consequent homosexuality of romance. (Patroclus is shown only as Achilles' cousin, not lover; and a romance is conjured between Achilles and Patreis.) Worse, Brian Cox's Agamemnon keeps reminding me of Brian Blessed's King Richard IV from The Black Adder. As befits the 21st century, the much-invoked gods stay out of the action, which plausibly reduces the 10-year siege into a matter of weeks.
An engaging retelling of the oldest tale. But for the real wide-screen version, nothing contemporary beats the cinematic technique of Christopher Logue's War Music.
like sucking in cold air on a chipped tooth — painful, but you know you are alive. And the battle scenes belittle anything from Hollywood. reviewer at Amazon
They still do.
Financial success I measure my financial success by how little time I spend thinking about it.
Art for Society's sake Religion continues to answer the question of What to do? but few of us listen these days. In An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture, Roger Scruton argues we should use high culture to supply the mythopœic deficit. The argument sounds feeble to me, and Scruton acknowledges it as faut de mieux, but I'll keep reading.
Litigator Advice to a friend who's training to become a litigating tax lawyer: You're looking for a firm to take you on and train you. You don't fit the mould of manageable 20-something women. You need to show up for your target firms as a potential litigator, someone who might make a valuable partner.
From my limited experience, litigation happens when negotiation breaks down. Conversely, the expectation of how litigation would end is a powerful factor in negotiation. A formidable litigator is also a formidable negotiator.
Your passion, energy and intelligence are manifest. You don't, however, occur for people as formidable; you don't manifest that quality. In finding the law firm that will train you, you will learn to manifest that.
How will you do that? From your Jungian training, you already respect the transformational power of mythology. Use that to empower yourself. Traditionally, you might study particular ancient myths or meditate on certain Tarot trumps; but, hey, you have the 21st century's vast array of story-telling aparatus at your command.
Try Ripley's character in Alien and Aliens. Or Dave Robicheaux in the novels of James Lee Burke; you'll find a few in the crime section of most public libraries. He is an avatar of the Wounded Healer, a hero with the Achilles heel of his alcoholism. Or — last night's discovery, a gift from Maurizio & Gabriella Iori, our guests a fortnight ago — director Sally Potter's own character in her wonderful film The Tango Lesson, in which the English diffidence of her manner mutes neither her passion nor her formidable ability to create a movie from her imagination.
Another light A barker on Hampstead High St guided us in to a small charity jumble sale. Late in the afternoon, so the best was of course gone. Still it's always worth looking through what Hampstead people throw away. The sale was in aid of the Impersonal Enlightenment Fellowship, whose spiritual leader Andrew Cohen correctly points out that while we rich, educated First Worlders have the power to avert the various catastrophes threatening the human race, our fascination with the life of the ego — money, sex and status — effectively prevents us from doing so. What the world needs now is enlightened people, which means devoting our lives to realising our Authentic Selves. Of course he's right, but aren't we all just too mean and too stupid to do that? Not you, of course, but the rest of us. Possibly not: an opportunity next weekend to hear Cohen make his case.
Jolly Sooper Jilly Cooper wrote Class a generation ago. Part of my fascination with it is in reading about my formative influences decades after they influenced me. Actually, most of what Cooper wrote remains true today. The middle classes still think it rude to say What? and good manners to say (I beg your) pardon?; while the upper classes say What? and consider Pardon? a mark of vulgarity. Cooper also spots patterns I'd never noticed.
It seems insane, by the way, that all the lower middle and lower-class girls who come from Epping and Romford and the East End work in the City with upper and upper-middle class men, who wouldn't dream of marrying them; while all the upper- and upper middle-class girls who live in Knightsbridge, Fulham and Chelsea, can't face going any farther east than Mayfair on the tube, and therefore work with all the middle- and lower-middle class spiralists in advertising, whom they wouldn't dream of marrying either. [Punctuated and hyphenated as the book. I know: it drives me nuts too.]
Cooper uses stereotypes such as Harry Stow-Crat to make her points, which makes for a facetious book. Still I'm repeatedly shocked to find aspects of my upbringing, such as engraved silver napkin rings given as christening presents, singled out as typical of my class. (Upper class children apparently get engraved tankards.) So many attitudes and aspirations I had supposed my own are revealed to me as merely absorbed from my background.
Ultimately, it's a liberating read, as Cooper describes and lampoons the tactics that serve the fundamental strategies of the various classes — the upper classes to exclude and conserve; the middle to rise; the lower to endure. As a boy from the lower middle class my education at public expense at an English public school occurred to me as but part of the natural rise in rank I projected for myself. My first great romance was accordingly with the daughter of landed minor nobility. What a comedy. (And what a priggish and mean-spirited poem.)
Still it shakes me to reflect on how much of my life has been spent recoiling from what I saw as my fall off that ladder. A decade and a half, for example, in Australia, the Great Offstage.
I tried to be sui generis,
to march along different streets.
It's a shock to discover
the Different Drummer
is merely playing backbeats.
Life marches on.
That idiot Kinsella I was just thinking about Richard Neville while washing dishes today, and marveling at the changes that made Playpower a hit in the 70s and unpublishable today. 
Innocence was the first word that came to mind, but naïveté was what stuck. Stevan Apter draws my attention to Corrupting the Youth, in which UNSW mathematician Jim Franklin tells how Australian philosophers left their country's young without a moral compass, citing Neville and Germaine Greer as examples. Not even my beloved teacher David Armstrong escapes. "That idiot Kinsella was absolutely right," concluded David Stove. The cover shows the famous jacaranda tree outside the Department of Traditional & Modern Philosophy at Sydney University, and brings back happier memories than this.
In this novel, Hornby confronts the Good Joe Theory. We all believe ourselves to be Good Joes, even Good Joes who occasionally do Bad Things. No one more so than his heroine Katie, who works as a doctor in North London, and is sure she is a better person than her husband David, who writes a column for a local newspaper as The Angriest Man in Holloway. David and Katie think liberal, vote New Labour and worry about Blair at dinner parties. They also do Good Things like donate to a homeless charity by standing order and this, together with her work as a doctor, suffices to assure Katie of her status as a good person.
Katie's belief in herself as a good person is confronted in the opening paragraph, as she finds herself in a carpark in Leeds, on a mobile phone to her husband, asking for a divorce. She had thought that she was not the kind of person to do that. Particularly in a car park and over a mobile phone. But apparently she is. Her belief starts seriously to come apart when David's character changes after meeting a spiritual healer. I’m a liberal’s worst nightmare, he reflects, I don’t just talk the talk, I walk it. As David starts to take immediate and personal action to look after the homeless, Katie is confronted by the discrepancy between the person she is and the person she thinks she is. Brutally funny, Hornby resists an easy resolution. A difficult story to end, and equally difficult to put down before the very last page.
To Jane Pinckard, alone this Christmas:
All us humans live with our internal narrators of failure and despair. If we don't celebrate Yule with others, we spend it with our internal accusers, which is why Christmas is always such a busy time for the Samaritans. It's all bollocks, but it'll bring you down anyway.
My own birth family is wary of gathering. This year Miki is with me, and though uninspired by the season, we are invited to a huge Christmas lunch with friends. Last year she was in Japan, and I brought my mum to London and we did the whole nine yards: tree, carols, lunch for 6 including a beggar invited for the second year running, and various friends otherwise seasonally stranded.
Don't spend Christmas alone again, dummy. It's not good for you. Jane, reconcile with Anne. What, you gonna die still pissed with each other? Fly -- flee! -- to Chicago and celebrate with Robin. Hire a hall and invite your gaming friends to a 48-hour LAN party. You can see from the talkback you're not the only one otherwise alone at Christmas.
God rest you merry gentlemen, and gentle lady writers too. Lawd bless us all, turkeys every one.
Yeah, though I walked in the shadow of the valley of death, still would I fear no evil, even though no support staff comforted me.
» Continue reading “The long, quite good Friday”Oh how I hate to read papers on the mind/body problem that announce I’m not trained in philosophy, but... Thus Charles Tart on “An Emergent Interactionist Understanding of Human Consciousness”. Struggle on. What’s good among the speculative coining of distinctions that don’t buy anything is:
» Continue reading “Tart on consciousness”Deborah Branscum reports that John Gray, author of best-selling Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, is a fraud.
» Continue reading “The doctor is out”More Sheldrake. Turns out precognition is real as well.
» Continue reading “Precognition is real”Turns out telepathy is real. This from Sheldrake’s The Sense of Being Stared at, in which he describes experimental work done in recent decades. Sheldrake is a reputable biologist and a Fellow of The Royal Society. His reports are reliable.
» Continue reading “Telepathy is real”He wasn't built for the long haul; not everyone is. August Kleinzahler’s memoir of his big bad brother now online at the LRB.
The LRB reviews April Blood, a new book on Lorenzo de’ Medici’s political career. We’ll give Il Magnifico the last word today.
Chi vuol esser lieto, sia
Da doman non v’e certezza
Be happy if you can, there’s no certainty about tomorrow.
Stefano Lanzavecchia sent an article suggesting we look better with clothes on. That matches my observations in Selfridges. In the whole crowd I saw only one unknown woman for whom I felt desire. She looked like a model. Otherwise it wasn’t a sexy experience, just lotsa nekkid people. Clothes make us more attractive, not less. How come? Roger Scruton argues in Sexual Desire that we’re attracted to persons, not bodies. We dress up to present our characters more emphatically; clothes heighten our presence.
What men and women want Two lists from Jenny Duck from Intimate Communion: Awakening Your Sexual Essence. Notice intelligence is the only quality both men and women want of each other though, predictably, women value it more than men do. And the other desirables have nothing to do with each other, except for one quality: women want men to be going somewhere in life (directions) and men want women to support them in it.
Spencer Tunick’s photograph arrived from the Selfridges ‘event’ this spring. I’m clearly visible, but whom do you recognise naked?
Adventure stories end in two ways: They all lived happily ever after or And they were home in time for tea.
» Continue reading “Adventure stories”From time to time I drop everything to focus on getting one urgent thing done. If this goes on long, when I emerge, my task list has turned red. My time management system has crashed and I need to get back in control. It looks like I’ll never get back on top of this! So I’m sorting what needs doing into three phases, and setting up a parallel category system.
» Continue reading “How to restart a crashed time management system”What are the things that matter to today’s readers of magazines like The Face? Best-selling novelist Zadie Smith on the needs and desires of modern style slaves
» Continue reading “A Short Catalogue Of Things You Think You Want”One good turn gets most of the blankets. Is age too high a price to pay for maturity?
» Continue reading “More on maturity”do what you can for them — how they need you! — and party on
» Continue reading “Pity the young”Steven Spielberg captures it so well: our image of the Good Life centres on a loving family. Arguably, our politics reflect our different presumptions about how to map that to civil life. Or perhaps, how to recover in adult society a remembered or imagined happiness. Pinker reminds us of the lessons of evolutionary psychology: that families encompass real conflicts of interest, between siblings, and between parents and children.
» Continue reading “Happy families”
Gates of Eden Julian Jaynes speculated in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that schizophrenics’ auditory hallucinations — hearing voices — are the remnant of a once-universal internalisation of authority that broke down in the second millenium BC, and that from this breakdown arose our subjective consciousness; that is to say, our experience of ourselves as actors with free will. On his view, consciousness is more recent than literature, and he traces its emergence in the books of Homer and the oldest parts of the Bible.
Consciousness emerged in suffering with the disappearance of god-given certainty. By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept. Jaynes describes how early matter-of-fact representations of the divine companions of rulers gave way to rulers and priests supplicating the gods. My god, my god, why hast Thou forsaken me? This shift is depicted in the artwork on Sumerian cylinder seals, the oldest art objects we have. (There is a large collection in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, though I didn’t see the shift clearly when I looked.)
Science continues the religious project to recover the lost certainties of Eden.
Train life, I decided, takes some beating. At some point in the morning, generally when you have gone for breakfast, your bed vanishes magically into the wall, and in the evening just as magically reappears, crisply made with fresh sheets. Three times a day you are called to the dining car, where you are presented with a thoroughly commendable meal by friendly and obliging staff. In between times there is nothing to do but sit and read, watch the endlessly unfurling scenery or chat with your neighbour. Trevor, because he was young and full of life and unaccountably had failed to bring any of my books to make the hours fly, felt restless and cooped up, but I wallowed in every undemanding minute of it.
[...] If this sounds like a living death, don’t be misled. I was having the time of my life. There is something wonderfully lulling about being stuck for long spell on a train. It was like being given a preview of what it will be like to be in your eighties. All those things eighty-year-olds appear to enjoy — staring vacantly out of windows, dozing in a chair, boring the pants off anyone foolish enough to sit beside them — took on a special treasured meaning for me. This was the life!
Bill Bryson · Down Under
I don’t know what to make of Bryson. If you ask people how they would spend their time if they did not have to earn a living, travel is one of the most popular answers. And Bryson is one of the most popular travel writers. So his idea of good travelling must be what many people consider the Good Life. That makes Bryson a significant writer.
What is Bryson’s idea of the good life? To be free of responsibility, looked after by other people and gently entertained. A living death — or dinner in front of the TV? Or do I admire Bryson’s candour?
There is no escape from language, warns Jacques Derrida. Similarly there is no escape from the crowd. Had I any notions there was something original in my discovery of the delights of Genoa last month, or contemplating the Festival au Désert in Mali next winter, finding articles about both in today’s Daily Telegraph magazine should have cured me of them.
I like roots, but a person needs repotting now and then.
novelist Celia Brayfield in Saga Magazine April 2003