normblog

Cambridge Union debate

And this is the second post demonstrating how you can recover your past life on the internet. A year ago I took part in a debate in the Cambridge Union on the motion, 'This house believes in the spread of Western liberal democracy, by force where necessary'. The six speakers each had 10 minutes in which to put their case. Today I discovered that the debate is online - here.

Name the feeling

This is the first of two consecutive posts demonstrating how you can recover much of your past life on the internet. Very shortly after arriving in this country I saw a movie called The Wild and the Willing. It was John Hurt's first appearance in a feature film and I've always remembered how he was introduced in the opening credits. I thought I had anyway. Today I went to YouTube to see if I could confirm my memory as correct. I could. (You only need to see the first minute and 15 seconds.)

Everything Flows

It's the title of the novel by Vasily Grossman that he was still working on when he died in 1964. I just finished reading it and I can't recommend it strongly enough.

Technically unfinished, I suppose, it doesn't read as though it's lacking anything. It tells the story of Ivan Grigoryevich, who has just returned to civilian life after 30 years in various prisons and camps of the Gulag. Along the way we also learn something of the lives of others with whom Ivan Grigoryevich comes into contact. Grossman weaves these individual tales into the history of the USSR, conveying with great power and also subtlety the horror that descended on the country - the cruelties, the criminality as state policy, the widespread corruption, the politically engineered famine in Ukraine (described, this, in unforgettable pages), and a sort of universal madness - all of it symbolized in the figure of one man, Stalin.

Everything Flows not only depicts a few individual lives against this vast and terrible backdrop, it also presents a philosophy - of human freedom 'stand[ing] against everything', morally and in fact. The chapter on Lenin which Grossman writes into this larger picture deserves - all on its own - to be widely read, for its psychological acuity and its understanding of the complexities of human personality as displayed, now in the private, and now in the public, domain.

Welfare as a right

Caitlin Moran in today's Times magazine (£):

What's it like, being on benefits? Being on disability benefits - "I've had a hard day's limping, to put that tea on the table!" my dad would say, as we sat down to eat something based around a lot of potatoes and ketchup. Well, mainly, you're scared. You're scared that the benefits will be frozen, or cut, or done away with completely. I don't remember an age where I wasn't scared our benefits would be taken away. It was an anxiety that felt like a physical presence in my chest - a small, black, eyeless insect that hung off my ribs. Every Tory budget that announced a freezing of benefits - new means-testing, new grading - made the insect drill its face into the bone. They froze benefits for four years in a row, as I recall: "freezing" being the news's way of telling you that you - already poor - will be at the checkout, apologising as you take jam and squash out of your bag, put them back on the shelves and ask them to add it up again. Every week you fear that this is the week the pennies won't stretch any further and something will disappear: gas, food. Your home.

It's a shame more people can't get through the Times's paywall to read it all. Moran also says: 'the invention of the welfare state is one of the most glorious events in history'.

Economics for fun and other purposes

In the three-minute film clip here, Madsen Pirie can be seen telling people that economics is fun. He illustrates the point by explaining how value is in the mind and not in objects as such. Questions about how things got their value are silly. Since we're all different we value things differently, and this explains why people trade, why they exchange things. I want something you've got and you want something I've got, and each of us wants the thing that the other's got and is offering more than we want the thing we've got and are willing to exchange. So both parties benefit from the exchange; both get something more valuable to them than what they're letting go of. No winners and no losers.

It's a quick, neat demonstration and to this extent you may get some fun out of it. But there's a small omission from Pirie's story: resource differentials. Situation one: you and I are both moderately comfortable property holders; you like to hear me play the piano, I like your home-grown tomatoes. So we trade. I let you listen to me play from time to time, for some agreed number of tomatoes. We're both content with the exchange. Situation two: you and I and a few other people own the island, and everything on it, which we along with still other people all inhabit. We, the owners, own everything, and they, the others, own nothing. This is a resource inequality such that the trades now open to those others will be constrained by their basic needs - food, housing etc - in a way that the trades open to us owners won't be. It will still be true that the others benefit from trading: if they exchange their ability to work (say) 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for a wage which will just cover the rent and their other indispensable needs, this will be preferable for them to going hungry and homeless. But whether free exchanges are as unproblematically and universally beneficial will now be more open to question. It rather depends on whether the resource differentials which are the background to the story are themselves just and legitimate or not; which may also depend, wholly or in part, on how they arose.

The benefits people derive from trading may be judged not only against what would happen if they didn't trade in the same economic context, but against assessments of the justice of their differential starting points. Whether or not drawing attention to this is fun, it's a context that can be ignored only in a simple-minded view of the world. (Via.)

A good man who sort of became bad

Further to my recent post about Claire Tomalin's life of Dickens, here she is talking about him.

(Via The Virtual Victorian.)

Teaching philosophy as an experiment in democracy

Carlos Fraenkel, a Canadian philosopher with Brazilian roots, writes at length in the Boston Review about the teaching of philosophy to high school students in Brazil. Since 2008 there's been a law there making philosophy instruction madatory at this level:

[T]he 2008 law is above all a political project. In 1971 the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 eliminated philosophy from high schools. Teachers, professors in departments of education, and political activists championed its return, while most academic philosophers were either indifferent or suspicious. The dictatorship seems to have understood philosophy's potential to create engaged citizens; it replaced philosophy with a course on Moral and Civic Education and one on Brazil's Social and Political Organization ("to inculcate good manners and patriotic values and to justify the political order of the generals," one UFBA colleague recalls from his high school days).

The official rationale for the 2008 law is that philosophy "is necessary for the exercise of citizenship." The law - the world's largest-scale attempt to bring philosophy into the public sphere - thus represents an experiment in democracy.

Fraenkel reports on practical initiatives associated with this teaching and on a 'lack of qualified personnel' (which might be of interest to philosophy graduates elsewhere, looking to travel and knowing, or willing to learn, Portuguese). To me the oddest feature of what he reports is that there are academic philosophers in Brazil who oppose the teaching of philosophy at school level - philosophy being, for them, 'not a democratic practice or an emancipatory exercise, but a rigorous scholarly discipline'. That strikes me as wrong-headed - a false delineation of alternatives. People can surely be introduced to philosophical problems and ways of thinking about them before becoming acquainted with the rigorous scholarly discipline. It is hard to see what harm it could do them and it might do a lot of good.

Rugby as a mirror on Iran

The interview here with Faramarz Beheshti explains the above title:

My film was never screened in Iran and I doubt it ever will. The fact that these women are learning a new sport which seems strange or charming for us from the outside, for them it's just not a big deal. They pick up new activities all the time. Unfortunately the women's team no longer exists. Apparently rugby itself has been bundled into an organization that handles 20 unpopular sports. The girls' team was basically shut down. The boys team was doing quite well but unfortunately their activities have also been undermined. The Rugby Federation is disbanded. These women are incredibly spirited and lively, but you can see the damage done by 32 years of this archaic regime. There is a carpet of sadness over these girls['] lives.

Carpet of sadness, archaic regime.

The ordinary lives of fiction

This is from an article by Marilynne Robinson on what literature owes the Bible:

The great assumption of literary realism is that ordinary lives are invested with a kind of significance that justifies, or requires, its endless iterations of the commonplace, including, of course, crimes and passions and defeats, however minor these might seem in the world's eyes. This assumption is by no means inevitable. Most cultures have written about demigods and kings and heroes. Whatever the deeper reasons for the realist fascination with the ordinary, it is generous even when it is cruel, simply in the fact of looking as directly as it can at people as they are and insisting that insensitivity or banality matters. The Old Testament prophets did this, too.
.....
In its emphatic insistence that the burden of meaning is shared in every life, the Bible may only give expression to a truth most of us know intuitively. But as a literary heritage or memory it has strengthened the deepest impulse of our literature, and our ­civilization.

I wouldn't have known quite how to put that but I like it, and the whole piece - where this thought is enlarged upon - is well worth your time.

Practising the right behaviour

Apropos the conduct of Francesco Schettino in leaving his ship before its passengers had been got safely to land, Giles Fraser has some pertinent reflections on moral courage. He starts by asking, 'how do we know what sort of person we would turn out to be in such circumstances?' Though few of us do know, Fraser argues that there are ways we can improve our chances of acting as we should:

[T]he idea that courage requires discipline and training needs a fairer hearing. For at least since Aristotle there has been an important strain of moral thought that has recognised human virtue not as some innate given, but rather as something that one can prepare for, and indeed get better at. The reason the soldier strips and re-strips his weapon a thousand tedious times on the parade ground is so that he can do it, without thought, when he hasn't slept for days and the bullets are pinging about his ears. Over time, it becomes a matter of instinct. And the advice of the modern army is that the same is true of courage. If you rehearse "doing the right thing" enough, you are much more likely to do the right thing when terrified or confused.

Fraser goes on to say that this advice isn't specific to combat training but can be generalized to the rest of life, and concludes:

[I]t's not the fear of our inner Captain S[c]hettino that matters most. He lurks within us all. The real question is how we shape our behaviour.

The context is such that we know Fraser is talking about shaping by practising - practising in various ways to be the sort of person you hope you would be when it matters. But there is one form of 'mental' practice that people go through even when they don't have occasions to practice the behaviour that would be relevant when it comes to a crunch of some sort. This mental practice is sometimes known as morality: having a sense of what your obligations are, what you owe to others, whether because of who they are or who you are or how you're related to them, or just because they are also human beings or sentient beings; having a sense of how it is right to behave in these circumstances or in those. Such notions constitute a kind of preparation, even if they're not practice in the meaning Fraser has most directly in mind.

This is one reason why I have argued more than once here that we should resist a claim common in writing about severe wrongdoing, including the commission of evil: namely, that we would all do the same thing given the circumstances. That claim is empirically false; but it is also the wrong kind of 'practice' if I may put it thus. Better preparation is to know what you ought to do and ought not to; this will improve your chances of not succumbing to an 'inner Captain Schettino' or inner somebody-even-worse.

The discussion is also relevant to the common habit of softening condemnation of those who perpetrate terrible wrongs, softening it merely on the grounds that there were psychological causes of one kind or another operating on them. This is nearly always used selectively: for example, to lighten the burden of responsibility for wrongdoing of people perceived as politically closer to oneself, when the same would not be done for others who are politically more distant.

Writer's choice 334: Steven Barthelme

Graduate of the University of Texas and Johns Hopkins, Steven Barthelme has worked as an editor on The Texas Observer, in advertising and public relations, and as a university professor. He has written two books of short stories, the second of which, titled Hush Hush, will be published by Melville House later this year; a memoir, Double Down, co-authored with his brother Frederick; and an essay collection, The Early Posthumous Work. In August Steve was bitten by a snake which happily chose not to be a Cottonmouth. Here he writes about Nikolai Gogol's The Overcoat and Other Short Stories.

Steven Barthelme on The Overcoat and Other Short Stories by Nikolai Gogol

What strikes me about Nikolai Gogol's stories is how modern they feel more than a century and a half after they were written, conjuring an experience of uncertainty and, often, bewilderment that is perfectly contemporary. They were written between 1830 and 1850, and it's as if the rest of literature took 170 years to catch up with him.

The little Dover reprint with four stories - 'The Overcoat', 'The Nose', 'Old-Fashioned Farmers', and 'The Two Ivans' (or technically 'The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich') - is a pleasant introduction. Nabokov - who called Gogol 'the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced' - and others acknowledge Gogol to be a stylist of the Russian language who has never been equalled. D.S. Mirsky said he is 'hopelessly untranslatable'. I don't read Russian, have read only translations. In a sense I can't really hear the music, and so am responding to just 50 per cent of the pleasures of this work; that, too is astonishing.

'The Overcoat' is one of Gogol's masterpieces. In Russian literature, the remark 'We all came out from under Gogol's "Overcoat"' is variously attributed to Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and others (including one French critic - those guys have said everything). The first pages of the story sound like simple burlesque, scoring off the pathetic clerk with the silly name Akaki Akakievich, who is the target of sport, first by the narrator and then by all the other characters in the story. And then a peculiar thing happens. We slip into the point of view of a young man in the office where Akaki works, one of those who have been making fun of him, who 'suddenly stopped short, as though all had undergone a transformation before him... And long afterwards, in his gayest moments, there came to his mind the little official with the bald forehead, with the heart-rending words, "Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?" And in these penetrating words, other words resounded - "I am your brother".' That's pretty much this nameless fellow's whole role, but it changes the trajectory of how one reads the story, in a way characteristic of Gogol.

One of the brilliant things Gogol does is to separate the idea of sympathy from the idea of merit. This is more apparent in the less celebrated 'Old Fashioned Farmers' story that splits almost perfectly in half, the first part taken up with 10 pages of gluttony and sloth, the second part a tragedy in a minor key. A visitor happens in on an old couple with no redeeming qualities who live on a decaying country estate, where the servants and staff are robbing the owners blind, the dog's bark is 'phlegmatic' and the flies 'covered the ceiling with a black cloud'. For 10 pages Afanasii and Pulcheria eat and complain, eat and rest, eat and moan. Eight meals in one day, by my count. The visitor participates, reports all this in a faux deadpan narration where the glee at wretched excess fails to be hidden.

Then the story turns. Wild forest cats from the neighbouring wood 'had a long conference with Pulcheria Ivanovna's tame cat... and finally led her astray, as a detachment of soldiers leads astray a dull peasant'. Pulcheria is sad but soon forgets about the lost cat. Then later it returns, wild, and Pulcheria coaxes it inside and feeds it meat and milk. She reaches out to touch the cat, 'but the ungrateful animal had evidently become too well used to robber cats, or adopted some romantic notion about love and poverty being better than a palace... [and] sprang out the window, and none of the servants were able to catch her. The old woman reflected. "It is my death which has come for me" she said to herself.'

She does die shortly thereafter, and Afanasii is just crushed. The rest of the story, another seven or eight pages, records him alone, inconsolable, and lost. Eventually he too dies. What strikes me as interesting, or more than interesting, as genius, is the way genuine feeling is induced following the flat buffoonery of the story's opening pages. By this approach sympathy is emphatically detached from merit, and redefined as something not so much deserved as freely given.

The other two stories are equally interesting.

'The Two Ivans' is about a tiny quarrel between old friends which relentlessly grows until it takes over not only their whole lives but the life of their community. It is wonderfully funny, an extended piece of theatre (Gogol's play 'The Government Inspector' is another masterpiece), disguised as an early, perhaps the first ever, Bavarian Cream Pie joke.

'The Nose' is probably one of the most inventive stories ever written, the tale of a drunken barber who may or may not have sliced off Major Kovalyov's nose, which the Major finds to have gone missing one morning, and of the Major's frantic, paranoid rushing from pillar to post, in hope of recovering the nose, including running into it dressed as a State Councillor, complete with gold-embroidered uniform, plumed hat, sword, carriage and driver. A State Councillor is several pegs higher on the official Table of Ranks than the Major himself, so there is a delightful scene (it happens in a cathedral, where the Nose is doing devotions) in which the poor noseless and bewildered Kovalyov stutters his intimidated way to the assertion 'You are my own nose!' But the Nose scoffs, makes some insulting allusion to the Major's inferior rank, and drives off. The physics of all this is never explained.

One of the finest sequences in the story is the painful mock ratiocination in which Major Kovalyov attempts to get intellectul control by analyzing what is happening to him (how is this possible? what can I do?), step by careful step determining that he isn't drunk, he isn't asleep or dreaming, the nose is indeed gone, the situation is 'indeed incomprehensible'. This thinking hard is echoed at the story's end - after the nose has been restored to Kovalyov and he's back on the boulevard, promenading happier than ever - in the narrator's reflections on his own story (which reflections can't be called anything but post-modern - in fact pretty much all the significant 'post-modern' aesthetic moves can be found somewhere or other in Gogol). To wit:

'Only now, on second thought, can we see that there is much that is improbable in it. Without speaking of the fact that the supernatural detachment of the nose and its appearance in various places in the guise of a state councillor is indeed strange, how is it that Kovalyov did not realize that one does not advertise for one's nose through the newspaper?... it's improper, embarrassing, not nice!'... 'But the strangest, the most incomprehensible thing of all, is how authors can choose such subjects'. The last line is: 'Whatever anyone says, such things happen in this world; rarely, but they do.' The casual, afterthought insertion of that hesitation, that 'rarely', is the essence of Gogol. Which is doubt.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

Football and the experience of injustice

As regular readers of normblog will know, I'm not too keen on the snooty attitude which certain people, thinking themselves 'above' it, have to spectator sport. I call it philistinism. Not being interested in sport, that's fine. Thinking it's vulgar and of no merit, that's philistinism. Anyway, one of the constituent themes of this philistinism is to say that sport doesn't teach you anything important about the world.

Yes, it does. Take the way in which a bad refereeing decision in football can determine the outcome of a game - so that, for example, a penalty given when it shouldn't have been, or not given when it should have been, can mean that a team wins or loses when it otherwise wouldn't have. Nearly all supporters moan and groan in these situations (though they usually don't moan or groan when their team gets the benefit of the bad decision). But it teaches people who follow football about a certain kind of injustice; this is injustice that isn't remediable and has to be accepted. Morally, of course, we think it important to prevent injustice and to put it right when it takes place anyway, at least to the extent that we can. But there are injustices that happen willy-nilly and which cannot be repaired. Football supporters know this in their jeans genes.

A word a day

A very happy blog birthday to Sally at The Word Den, which is one year old. You can read about balloons, or about the origins of the word 'ointment', or - well, every day a different word. I wonder, though, if Sally's ever given the treatment to 'soap'.

World War I and modern sensibilities

In the New York Times, William Boyd considers why for the British 'the memories, images and stories of 1914-18 seem to have a persistence and a power that eclipse those of the Second World War'. He ventures some reasons he thinks specific to this country: in Europe, he says, the memories of the First World War were partly erased by the Second, more so than here. At the centre of his explanation, however, is the sheer scale of battlefield slaughter, which 'defies credulity':

[I]t is the Western Front and trench warfare that define the war in memory. It was a deadly war of attrition in which millions of soldiers on both sides slogged through the mud of no man's land to meet their deaths in withering blasts of machine-gun fire and artillery. And at the end of four years and with about nine million troops dead, the two opposing forces were essentially where they were when they started.
.....
... The tactics were 19th century - advance on the enemy. But the enemy had weapons of mass destruction - the battlefield was dominated by tanks, machine guns, howitzers, aircraft and poisonous gas. Some 117,000 American servicemen died in the 19 months of United States participation in World War I - more than twice as many as in Vietnam, nearly 20 times as many as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

No society today would accept such a horrendous casualty count. At the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, on July 1, 1916, the British Army suffered 60,000 dead and wounded - in one day. It was arguably the worst butcher's bill in military history, of army versus army. There is a very real sense in which the modern world - our world - was born between 1914 and 1918. Something changed in human sensibility. Soldiers wouldn't be willing to engage in such slaughter. Toward the end of the First World War, even, tolerance for past norms had begun to end. In 1917, much of the French Army mutinied and refused to attack. They would defend but not attack. The days of cannon fodder were over forever as a result of that war...

It doesn't directly contradict Boyd's suggestion about the way WWI altered modern sensibilities, but I have seen it suggested more than once that, by its brutalizing effects, that war may have played its part in preparing the ground for the Nazi genocide in Europe.

Interruption

More here.

How many movies have you seen?

You may not know the answer. I don't know the answer either (I mean, as it applies to me), since I didn't start keeping a record until 28 January 1967. However, since then I've seen 2,476. This is feature films and doesn't include shorts. So, dividing by 45 years, which is what it is within a few days, I've seen 55 movies per year, which is a lot fewer than the blogger posing the question: it's one a week give or take, way behind A.D. Jameson's more than two a week. One a week is a good average, and I must try to maintain it. Lately, I've been falling off the rate (compared with 1967 when I saw 160, and 1968, 105). (Via Andrew.)

Imprisoned women in Afghanistan

Kimberley Motley, an American lawyer, writes of the case of Gulnaz, the woman jailed for adultery after being raped - and, more broadly, of the plight of other Afghan women in prison for so-called moral crimes:

After years of advocacy by human rights groups and other activists, and a decade of war by the United States and its allies - a war in which the need to uphold the rights of women has often been invoked - Afghan women remain trapped in a legal system that often punishes them for being the victims of brutal crimes.

My illiterate client told me of her experience [of] going to court with her illegitimate daughter and not understanding the legal process. She was forced to represent herself after her Afghan lawyer failed to show up, yet the judges who presided over the case refused to allow her to speak. Instead, they berated Gulnaz for lying, insisting that women cannot get pregnant by having sex just once. This assertion was the basis for the 12-year sentence that was imposed, with a wrenching caveat: Marrying her attacker would allow her to be "free."

Unfortunately, Gulnaz's case is not an anomaly but represents the situation that more than half of the imprisoned women in Afghanistan find themselves in - locked up for moral crimes, according to a recent study by the United Nations.
.....
Rule-of-law initiatives, particularly on women's rights, have a better chance of success if the international community exercises more oversight and makes a greater effort to understand how the Afghan justice system really works. At present, I am the only Western lawyer in Afghanistan taking on such cases.

Here.

The Momma 'n' Daddy Collection 127

The appearance of these Momma 'n' Daddy posts may have become more intermittent, but it isn't because I've run short of material. The tradition is inexhaustible and for good reason; it records unchanging verities. Today, after a long hiatus, we have John Denver singing 'Matthew'. How much more specific could a song be than to be designated thus, with the proper name of one man, Denver's uncle? But, as you will now see, it brings us back to things that are universal and enduring - the joys and hard times of childhood, the stories and memories passed from one family generation to another, and what it's like to be a farmboy in Kansas.

Had an uncle name of Matthew
Was his father's only boy
Born just south of Colby, Kansas
Was his mother's pride and joy

Chorus
And joy was just the thing that he was raised on
Love was just the way to live and die
Gold was just a windy Kansas wheatfield
And blue was just a Kansas summer sky

And all the stories that he told me
Back when I was just a lad
All the memories that he gave me
All the good times that we had

Growing up a Kansas farmboy
Life was mostly having fun
Riding on his Daddy's shoulders
Behind a mule beneath the sun

Repeat chorus

Well, I guess there were some hard times
And I'm told some years were lean
They had a storm in forty-seven
A twister came and stripped them clean

He lost the farm and he lost his family
He lost the wheat and lost his home
But he found the family Bible
And faith as solid as a stone

Repeat chorus

And so he came to live at our house
And he came to work the land
He came to ease my Daddy's burdens
And he came to be my friend

And so, I wrote this down for Matthew
It's for him the song is sung
Riding on his Daddy's shoulders
Behind a mule beneath the sun

Repeat chorus (twice)

Here is John Denver singing the song.

[The Momma 'n' Daddy Archive, containing all the details of the series, is here.]

Rosie goes to war

Rosie Bell has thoughts on the recent column by Robert Fisk featured here a few days ago, and she makes some important distinctions in discussing it.

Friday Falklands Fun

Down at Comment is Free, Flavia Dzodan is laughing heartily, so let's join her in that. She's laughing over David Cameron's suggesting a colonialist attitude by the Argentine government towards the Falklands. Dzodan, who was born in Argentina, thought at first that his remark must have been mistranslated. But no:

With this comment Cameron did a bit of historical "re-arranging the furniture". He conveniently forgot to mention that the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands were expelled by an act of force in 1833, and the current population descends from the people brought by the British to replace the Argentinian inhabitants. By definition, this is an act of colonialism.

Well, I chuckled heartily and then read on, looking for how Flavia Dzodan was going to handle the earlier history of Argentina. Read on... read on... read on. Nothing. Big fat nothing. Not even the tiniest squeak. It seems that Spanish was always spoken in those parts, or that its present inhabitants are all there because their forebears were invited to tea. Guffaw - nonsense is free.