normblog

Happy talk

I've expressed my doubts once or twice already about the thesis that happiness isn't much related to income. Tim Blair has a quicker, funnier way with it:

These money-can't-buy-happiness theorists should perform an experiment. Find two people of equal wealth; take all the money off one; give it to the other. Then ask who is happier.

But maybe it's too quick. It could be said in response to Tim that, of course, there's some lower income threshold below which happiness will evaporate for nearly anyone falling through it. But above that threshold, so the argument would go, income has little influence on happiness.

So here's a modification: find two people of equivalent wealth, take all the money one of them has above that minimum threshold, and give it to the other. Then ask etc.

Anyway, maybe it's not happiness people are interested in, but something a bit more complex, the access money gives them to resources and opportunities. Hey, maybe it's just money.

London Cricket Conference

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies announces 'a major international conference on cricket in London in March, prior to the start of the 2007 Cricket World Cup hosted by the West Indies':

Cricket: Dawn of a new world – growth, development and commerce

1-3 March, 2007

A conference exploring the influences driving the development of recreational and professional cricket internationally

Follow the link here for the programme, list of participants and details of conference registration.

Problems of human consciousness

In somewhat the same neck of the woods, though 'neck' may not be the most appropriate word in this context, here's an interesting piece in which Stephen Pinker sets out two problems about consciousness, the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem:

The Easy Problem... is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved.

The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head - why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else...

The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.

A suggestion about this Hard Problem...

... is the theory put forward by philosopher Colin McGinn that our vertigo when pondering the Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius - a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness - comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us.

I think I'll just pass on that one. But two things along the way. First this, on there being pre- and extra-linguistic forms of consciousness:

Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.

It's a necessary caution against forms of contemporary argument to the effect that we have no access to the external world except via language.

Second, there's Pinker's concluding argument that 'the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul'. Essentially it's an argument of the form I made here: that the universality of human needs and interests is a more solid starting point than the presumed immortality of the soul.

Emile deep in the brain

It never fails to amaze me how when something brings back a few bars of music, a snatch of a lyric, that may have been not just unsung by me, but not even thought about, for years, decades, I can nonetheless reproduce whole chunks of it just like that. Yet I can't remember the name of a movie I saw a few weeks ago. Anyway, maybe it's because music activates 'very ancient parts of the brain' and hooks up with 'biological experiences integral to survival'.

No kidding? Emile Ford and 'What Do You Want To make Those Eyes At Me For'?

Primo Levi to Lancashire

An appeal for your assistance from Professor Alan Johnson:

I have started a Primo Levi Reading Group at Edge Hill University, outside the formal curriculum, open to anyone, staff or student. I need multiple copies of Primo Levi's books. Any Levi books will be gratefully received and put to use, but immediately I need copies of If This Is A Man/The Truce, If Not Now, When?, The Periodic Table, and The Drowned and the Saved. If normblog readers can pass copies to me, many thanks!

Please send the books to Professor Alan Johnson, Social and Psychological Sciences, Edge Hill University, St Helens Road, Ormskirk, Lancashire, L39 4QP.

Mulga Bill

Yesterday, thanks to friends I made in Adelaide, I became acquainted with a picture book I hadn't come across previously - illustrating A. B. 'Banjo' Paterson's poem Mulga Bill's Bicycle. The text of the poem is here:

"See here, young man," said Mulga Bill, "from Walgett to the sea,
From Conroy's Gap to Castlereagh, there's none can ride like me.

The book arrived in the post, and I'll be reading it to my grandchildren at the earliest opportunity.

Nick Cohen and the anti-war left

When the Euston Manifesto was published in April last year, something strange happened. A paragraph of the manifesto had clearly stated that there were both supporters and opponents of the Iraq war within the group that had produced the document, and the list of signatories straightforwardly confirmed this. And yet the Euston Manifesto was received by some as a statement from the pro-war left. Even after the mistake was pointed out, there were those who continued to speak of it in the same terms.

So, if I'm looking across the park with a clear view of a black and white dog, and I mention this to you but you don't see the dog, the chances are that something is blocking your vision - like, maybe, a tree. If you'll just move a few steps, you should be able to see the dog.

(Unless, that is, you've got your eyes firmly shut and refuse to open them. I must take a few lines to deal with what I'll call the clever-clever account of why the Euston Manifesto really is a pro-war document, despite the fact of that paragraph - '[w]e recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention...' - and despite the make-up of the signatory group. This clever-clever account says that the manifesto is pro-war because it contains a paragraph on humanitarian intervention that is too lax in what it says about thresholds of intervention. The paragraph in question is general rather than lax; and it's true that the threshold question is a big and a tough one, to which there can be more than a single compelling answer. But this isn't relevant to whether the Euston Manifesto was pro-war in the meaning in which it was said to be pro-war by some of its critics and denied to be pro-war by its authors - that meaning indicating, without obscurity or ambiguity, support for the Iraq war. Searching for an analogy here, I propose that if you were to deny that Australia had just beaten England with a 5-0 clean sweep in the recent Ashes series, deny it on the grounds that England had had the better of some sessions of play - like at Adelaide before the roof fell in - so that their score couldn't have been nil, this would be a clever-clever, a.k.a. nincompoop, denial, one based on wilfully ignoring the meaning of 'clean sweep' and the established scoring system for calculating the result of a Test series.)

What was the tree-in-the-eye of those who couldn't see the clearly visible, those who wouldn't take at face value the make-up of the Euston Manifesto Group and the content of the document it had produced? The tree-in-their-eye was the fixed idea that the pro-war left had given out a blanket condemnation of the entire anti-war left as being apologists for Saddam, fellow-travellers with Islamist extremism, rabid anti-Americans, and so forth. But if this truly was the standpoint of the pro-war left, how could we possibly be making common cause, producing a common position statement, with other leftists, social-democrats, liberals, who had themselves opposed the war - or how they with us? The Euston Manifesto had to be a pro-war statement 'really', and its anti-war signatories either wavering or confused.

But in fact the real explanation is that, with some possible exceptions about whom I'm ignorant, the pro-war left were generally not attached to a blanket condemnation of the kind commonly ascribed to it. We knew perfectly well what the difference was between those who were indeed apologists and fellow-travellers, and people with reasonable and well-grounded doubts about the war and who opposed it because of these and without losing sight of the principles of democracy and human rights. But we also perceived, between these two political constituencies, another large group whose own opposition to the war seemed to blind them to, or at least put them into intermittent denial about, the valid reasons why others of us on the liberal-left had supported the war - as if there could be no such reasons, good reasons, for supporting the overthrow of a mass-murdering tyranny, as if there was only a single truth about Iraq, and as if the future, in terms of possible success and failure, was perfectly foreseeable. I've already written about this other constituency here.

What has all this got to do with Nick Cohen? Well, it has to do with the reception of his recently published What's Left? It's already evident from some of the reviews that Nick is being taxed with treating the anti-war movement as all of a piece. But it isn't so, and anyone who reads his book without the tree-in-the-eye I've spoken of will at once be able to see that. Even this brief excerpt from the Observer contains enough to show that Nick knows the anti-war movement was made up of others than George Galloway and the SWP. The protesters, he says...

...were right in several respects. [They] were right to feel that Bush and Blair were manipulating them into war.

And:

It is a generalisation to say that everyone refused to commit themselves. The best of the old left in the trade unions and parliamentary Labour party supported an anti-fascist struggle.

However, neither does he settle for the myth - and that is what it is - that, apart from the 'hard-left' segment of the anti-war movement, all was well on the broader left with respect to Iraq. As Paul Anderson has written in a review on Gauche:

... Cohen's central thesis is absolutely to the point. Most opponents of the war who did not share the "revolutionary defeatism" of Galloway and the SWP or the reactionary politics of their Islamist allies turned a blind eye to them. They certainly did nothing to distance themselves publicly - let alone anything to seize leadership of the anti-war movement.

And since 2003 the obsession of most people on the non-Leninist left who opposed the war - I know there are honourable exceptions - has simply been to get their own back on George Bush and Tony Blair for starting it. For the parochial self-righteous left, the important thing about the growing sectarian strife in Iraq is not that it threatens to turn into a full-scale civil war that then engulfs the whole Middle East. It is that it shows Bush and Blair were wrong three years ago - just as we said they were. Pinning the blame on Bush and Blair and demonstrating we were right matters more than working out how best to support the Iraqi people against the murderous militias terrorising their country. It's comfortable collective political narcissism, no more.

A final point. One confirmation of the fact that Nick Cohen's target is a real one wider than the SWP, is the intense hostility there has been, way beyond that organization, towards the pro-war left. Dip into any relevant comments thread on the Guardian's Comment is Free for a dose of such poison; note that there is a mini-industry in the blogosphere obsessed (some of its denizens to the point of appearing half-crazed) with those they contemptuously call 'the decents'; give some time, if you can bear it, to re-reading through the comment and opinion pages of the liberal press for the last four years. That you were of the left and supported regime change in Iraq has just been unthinkable, unassimilable, for many - hence the hostility and the anathemas. It could not be that there was a difficult issue and a difficult choice, with weighty reasons on both sides. If, on the other hand, you consider what volume of critical animus and commentary has been directed from the same quarters at the rank apologists in the anti-war movement, you'll find that it pales by comparison.

This is why many on the anti-war left had a tree in their eye over the Euston Manifesto; and this is why some of these same people won't be able to see clearly what is in Nick Cohen's new book.

[This post was drafted before I'd read Oliver Kamm's. Oliver's covers different ground from mine, but I'd like to echo his closing paragraph, with one modification: reader, Nick Cohen's book may also be about you.]

Writer's choice 87: Kate Long

Kate Long is the bestselling writer of three novels, The Bad Mother's Handbook, Swallowing Grandma and Queen Mum. Her first book was serialized on Radio 4 and has been adapted for television as an ITV drama, to be screened next month. She's also a contributor to The Sunday Night Book Club anthology in aid of Breast Cancer Care. Outside of writing, Kate's passion is wildlife and she runs a blog - About a Brook - about her local water vole colony. Here she gives seven reasons why she loves Alan Garner's Red Shift.

Kate Long on Red Shift by Alan Garner

1. Alan Garner's Red Shift is a love story, and I first read it at a time when I was desperate to be in love. It's a novella supposedly aimed at teenagers - I was given the book when I was fourteen - but for various reasons I don't believe it is a children's book, not least on account of the language and sexual themes. Because the book is short, or because Garner's previous novels had been for children, or because the protagonists were young, the publisher decided to put it out as teen fiction. This meant that on my first encounter with the text I barely understood half of it. I got that there was a love story between a modern day couple that went wrong, that there were two other love stories going on in the past, and that they were all connected by a stone that might have been magical. So what I assimilated when I was fourteen was a powerful, tragic romance that got into my system the same way as Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights or Flambards did the same year, and I adored it because of that.

2. There's something special about a novel that's set in a real place, and no one does place quite like Garner. He doesn't just describe a setting, he gets the dialect, and the feel, and the sense of history and the emotional pull of a landscape. The first time I saw Mow Cop, the Cheshire folly where Jan and Tom play out their courtship, I felt as though I was standing on a ley line. That hill vibrates with power. I walked round the stone building where Tom confronts Jan about her affair, and then turned and looked out over the plain and remembered the Roman soldier, Macey, and his strange connection with the Celtic woman who saves his life. The wind thundered in my ears, the sky darkened. I really thought if I stood there long enough, I'd meet one of them.

3. Garner's dialogue is unique. Spare and punchy, sometimes tricky to follow, it slices through the narrative, jumping the reader ahead to new developments and plot twists without preamble. His use of dialect, historical and contemporary, is spot-on. The voices are completely true. You don't know what the term 'dialogue-driven' means till you've experienced Red Shift.

4. The structure of Red Shift is clever and, at the time it was published in 1973, felt unusual and daring. We chop between three gritty romances, one set in Roman Britain, one during the English Civil War, and one contemporary. In each case we're given just the tip of each story and left to fill in for ourselves what happens off the page. Initially Jan and Tom's world looks the most settled and optimistic; the other two periods are in political and military turmoil. But a different kind of conflict creeps into the modern-day relationship that connects all the characters in their sense of confusion and fear. So it's possible to approach this book in two different ways: as Garner sets it out, with different time zones juxtaposed, or taking each tale and picking out its sections to read one after the other. If you try the second approach after the first, you get a different effect that alters your understanding of the individual stories and how they connect. In fact, whenever I read this novel I have the sense of a kaleidoscope shifting round, the same elements producing a different pattern. It's never the same novel twice.

5. That feeling of shifting elements, coupled with the extreme spareness of the style, results in moments of ambiguity. Do Thomas and Macey see into the future? What exactly is the power of the axe head? What does it mean for Tom when he sells it to a museum instead of keeping it? Nowhere is the ambiguity more evident than at the end when the stories come together and it's hard to know who's speaking each line, from which time zone. What will happen to Macey and the girl when they leave the mountain? Does Thomas survive his wounds and live happily ever after, or is it his widow who places the axe head in the chimney for Tom and Jan to find four hundred years later? And what of Tom and Jan? Sometimes I read it as a happy ending; more often that they're parting forever. The inclusion of a letter written by Tom in code held the key, I assumed for years, but when I eventually worked out what he was saying I was no nearer. Instead of being annoying, though, the ambiguity is fascinating, a challenge. Each time I begin I think: This time I'll see it all. I never do. It doesn't matter.

6. This book has grown up with me. Every time I've read it, it's reflected me back. The first time through I didn't realize Jan and Tom were having sex, the information's given so obliquely. It wasn't till sex came into my own life that the penny dropped: that's what Jan means when she says to Tom their relationship's 'become all one thing'. And as I've become middle-aged I can see the questions the book asks about loyalty, betrayal and forgiveness fall beyond the confines of a youthful romance. Of course, it's not the only novel to have changed like this: I read Sons and Lovers as a virgin, as a wife and as a mother of boys, and it was a different book every time. But Red Shift got to me earlier, during my formative years.

7. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, one of the reasons I'm fascinated by this novel is because it's so far from what I say I like. I'd always maintain that I prefer books which are clear and not deliberately opaque, where I'm at all times pretty much on top of what's happening. I like an upbeat, life-affirming ending. I don't enjoy witnessing violence and I'm not really into the supernatural or the mystical. But here's a book which wraps up all those elements I'm uncomfortable with in one powerful package, and I love it. So it tells me something about myself as a reader which I didn't know. How special is that?

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

Madeleine Bunting, utopian

It's been a while since I featured her here, and you know me - I don't like to fail on my commitments. So welcome back Sorrowful Madeleine. She's having a go at 'liberal progressive moral superiority', this in response to the anger lately directed at the Catholic church on account of the exemption sought over gay couples adopting children. Here's the thing that interests me:

The more vehemently one hears liberal progressives claim progress, the more one wonders who they are trying to convince.

Increasingly, the stridency with which the non-religious attack the religious belies their own profound insecurity - that the progress they like to attribute to western or enlightenment values is a much-compromised property. It is challenged by almost everything we see around us: climate change, rising levels of mental ill-health, growing economic inequality fuelled by debt and hyper-consumerism. As Oliver James's new book, Affluenza, makes clear, the nostrums of the west's "good life" - success, fame, wealth - mask an extraordinary vacuity of purpose, a desperate, restless discontent.

Even on a more prosaic level, Jade Goody and Branscombe beach have been such absorbing spectacles because they echo our fear that the "progress" of rationality and freedom has done nothing to enlarge the human spirit. Indeed, the "larger freedoms of mind and action" of secular Europe... have proved just as much a licence for egotism as for noble achievement.

Never mind the particulars, and what you might want to say on each one, agreeing, disagreeing or splitting the difference. But notice the two unspoken comparative reference points here. For, of course, unless you live in a perfect utopia (reference point one), you're going to be able to compile a list of problems and ills like this one of Bunting's. Does it dispose of the idea that 'secular Europe' and (more generally) the pluralist democracies do indeed represent a progress, relative both to what preceded them and to the actually-existing alternatives (reference point two) by which they've been challenged?

Things may not be poifect altogether, but they do provide a space in which Sorrowing Madeleine can express her... umm, sorrows with respect to 'vacuity of purpose', 'restless discontent' and the alleged smallness of the human spirit. And that is quite spiffing.

Think Mugabe...

... think Barclays. See this report in yesterday's Observer.

From one of Cathy Buckle's letters (scroll down to 13 January):

It began on Christmas Eve when three men aged 23, 30 and 37 died of hunger and exhaustion in Inyathi. The men were arrested after being caught digging for precious minerals. The men were then forced by Police to fill up trenches for six days. Thulani, Matthew and Gift are reported to have died of hunger and exhaustion at the end of six days of extreme labour. A Police spokesman refused to comment on these deaths but said: "We make them fill up the trenches because they are the ones responsible for the mess."