“humanist tradition of using alphabetical order as a tool of social analysis and the dictionary as a quest for understanding, a weapon against idée recues and the pretensions of power”.
a celebration of intellectual trespassing by a retired "social scientist" as he tries to make sense of the world.....
what you get here
Sunday, December 27, 2015
In Praise of Scepticism
Friday, December 25, 2015
Memory's Palace
Taking his title from the Ciceronian rhetorical technique of memorising long speeches by means of an imaginary stroll through a series of grandiose palaces, and moving towards a depiction of the internet as a vast and ever-expanding memory palace, many of Hollis's potted histories establish a convincing relationship between the frailties of memory and the unavoidable solidity of material objects. As his grandmother’s mobility has declined, so the interior of the house has become a world in miniature…..
The book is organised around vignettes of his ailing grandmother, confined to her sitting room: her fireplace like an altar, her trinkets a cabinet of curiosities. The fireplace leads him back to the Roman hearth and myths about the origins of Rome: from the “Purple Room”, in which the Byzantine emperors were born, to the cave in which a she-wolf was purported to have suckled Romulus and Remus.Tea breaks with his granny aside,
Hollis proceeds chronologically, taking in the relationship between medieval furniture and British statecraft; the collector’s impulse; the commodity culture of Victorian England; and the screens and virtual rooms of the digital age.
It’s a vast span, which Hollis looks to condense thematically by dwelling on palaces. He yokes together actual historical palaces with the classical concept of memory as a type of palatial enfilade in which everything has its recorded place. It’s a tidy idea that feels tenuous by the time we enter the Big Brother house in the final section.
All books have brief indicators of subject matter on the back. Hollis’s reads “History/Architecture”, to which could be added classical culture, popular culture, monarchy, politics, consumerism, memoir, art collecting and more. This is the kind of non-fiction – like the work of WG Sebald or Paul Collins or Rebecca Solnit – that makes fiction seem predictable, thin and uncurious.
Edward Hollis's The Memory Palace is ostensibly a selective and often forensic history of interiors. But it is, more tellingly, a kind of instruction manual about ways of thinking about these histories. It's less a descriptive route-march through physical interiors, more a treatise about the mysteries of time and place."The mind wanders from room to room," he writes, "from the cave in which we began to the [data] cloud we inherit today, each one of which represents a different mode of memory."
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
55 years in a couple of pages
Now 71, Scruton has been the bête noire of British left intellectuals for more than 30 years, and gives them another beastly mauling in his new book “Fads, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left”. It is a tour de force that, the introduction concedes, is ‘not a word-mincing book’, but rather ‘a provocation’.
In just under 300 pages he Scruton-izes a collection of stars, past and present, of the radical Western intelligentsia – the likes of Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson in Britain, JK Galbraith and Ronald Dworkin in the US, Jurgen Habermas, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze in Europe. An expanded and updated version of his controversial Thinkers of the New Left (1985), the book ends with a new chapter entitled ‘The kraken wakes’ dealing with the ‘mad incantations’ of Alan Badiou and the left’s marginally newer academic celebrity, the Slovenian Zizek.
“Why, he asks, use a single term to cover anarchists such as Foucault, Marxist dogmatists like Althusser, exuberant nihilists like Zizek and US liberals like Dworken, Galbraith and Rorty? Two reasons – they call themselves this and they all have an “enduring outlook” – some belonging to the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and others to the post-war thinking according to which the state is or ought to be in charge of society and empowered to distribute its goods…..”
We are surely, therefore, overdue another term…..and the one I suggest is “emergent” (which Mintzberg, I think it was, first used to distinguish one meaning of strategy). And, as few people relish being labelled as either left or right, we need a mid-way point for them….
That
then gives a 3x3 matrix and the question is what terms to use for the resultant
combinations……??? This is what I’ve come up with as a first shot…..
key words/symbols for the various points of the political spectrum
|
LEFT |
CENTRE |
RIGHT |
OLD |
Working class |
Family, property |
Tradition, duty |
SOFT |
Social democracy |
liberalism |
duty |
NEW |
Liberation struggle |
consumerism |
The individual |
EMERGENT |
The commons |
identity |
libertarian |
You can actually read the entire “Thinkers of the New Left” here
‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognise that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’
More recently, ‘the windbaggery of Zizek and the nonsemes of Badiou’ exist only ‘to espouse a single and absolute cause’, which ‘admits of no compromise’ and ‘offers redemption to all who espouse it’. The name of that cause? ‘The answer is there on every page of these fatuous writings: Nothing.
So, what is all this Nothing-ness about? ‘My view’, says Scruton, ‘is that what’s underlying all of this is a kind of nihilistic vision that masks itself as a moving toward the enlightened future, but never pauses to describe what that society will be like. It simply loses itself in negatives about the existing things – institutional relations like marriage, for instance – but never asks itself if those existing things are actually part of what human beings are. Always in Zizek there’s an assumption of the right to dismiss them as standing in the way of something else, but that something else turns out to be Nothing.’
‘Ideas,’ Rodgers writes, ‘moved first in the arena of economic debate.’ Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the dominant tropes in economics had been institutional, even among conservatives. Right-wing critics of the welfare state and state-managed economies did not speak of the market; they spoke of corporations and banks and ‘championed the rights of management and the productive powers of the free enterprise “system”.’
The idea of the market that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – ‘self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires’ – dispensed with these settings and constraints.
It also dismantled the ‘troubling collective presence and demands’ of social democracy, turning unions, workers and the unemployed ‘into an array of consenting, voluntarily acting individual pieces’.
Everyone became a buyer or seller, everything – kidneys, pollution – got bought and sold. The only thing holding it all together was the magnetic energy of these individual acts of exchange. Like most scholars of the free-market movement, Rodgers assigns great weight to Milton Friedman, ‘the University of Chicago’s most forceful politiciser’, and the right’s answer to J.K. Galbraith. He wrote columns for Newsweek, advised presidents (and dictators), and organised the ten-part PBS series Free to Choose as a counter to Galbraith’s 15-part BBC series on capitalism.
With his focus on the money supply as the source of economic well-being, Friedman helped popularise a ‘radically simplified model of aggregate economic behaviour’, in which ‘state, society and institutions all shrank into insignificance within a black box that translated money inputs directly into price outputs.’
Yet, as Rodgers points out, Friedman’s monetarism was also far more state-centric – the Federal Reserve played an almost heroic role in determining the direction of the economy – than most market theologians would have liked.What truly pushed the market into the culture – high and low – were the adjutants of Friedman’s revolution: the law professors and jurists, not just on the hard right (Richard Posner) but also on the squishy left (Stephen Breyer), who made economic efficiency the measure of all things and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches;
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Artists' Haven on the Danube
The new bridge over the Danube at Vidin is only the second such link between the 2 countries (the first was built in 1956) and the container traffic already making a nuisance of itself. Noone, it seems, thought to anticipate its effects – although a pathetically small stretch of bypass is being built around Montana….
I had forgotten how fascinating the Belogradchik crags and Serbian (?) mountain ranges are in the far distance and had to be careful both photographing on the straight stretches and negotiating the tight bends – a lorry had already come to grief and was causing a tailback…..There are no signs for the bridge as you reach Vidin – only for Belgrade and “Calafat” (a village on the Romanian side) but just follow the container traffic and you are soon on the new approach (clearly not much used by local traffic) and then on the white snake that is the long bridge…..
An hour or so in my room gave me the time to think more about what seem to be 2 projects – a modest “micro” one running with the first idea of bringing some of my Bulgarian artist friends together with some Romanian painters; the second the more ambitious one I hinted at in the previous post….
A second bottle of estate wine graced our next conversation in which we were joined amazingly by Mircea Dinescu himself who emerged out of the darkness and plumped down beside me. After some initial reserve, he was soon in great form (thanks to Sergiu’s skilful translation) but perhaps helped by realising how well I knew some of the figures of Romania’s recent past such as Josef Sava and Marin Sorescu….
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Border-crossing at the Danube
Despite sharing the Danube as a border, the citizens of the two countries have (apart from the summer trips to the Bulgarian part of the Black Sea) little contact and know very little about each other.
I’m glad to say that he too he was enthusiastic….Of course there have been previous projects such as TourNet – Promotion of cross-border networking for development of a common Bulgarian-Romanian tourist product (EC 2012 - see linked Photo library of the Danube Region); Impact Analysis of People-to-People project in Danube area (2013) an interesting pot-pourri of projects (covering, amonst other topics, dental treatment, chess, singing); and Rafting holidays
These are just some of the projects using EU and other funding to develop cultural trails in this part of the Danube but they seem to have had limited timescales or ambition. Supply-driven approaches always fail – as do good ideas which don’t take root for not trying to generate local understanding and commitment.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Losing the Plot
What triumphed in 1989 was balance. While the countries of Eastern Europe were utterly out of balance, with so much power concentrated in their public sectors, the successful countries of the West maintained a sufficient balance across their public, private, and plural sectors (usually referred to as “civil society” or the “third sector”). But a failure to understand this has been carrying many countries—east and west, north and south—out of balance ever since, as power has concentrated increasingly in their private sectors.
Most notably in the United States, likewise in the realm of globalization, many large corporations have attained positions of entitlement, justified by the prevailing dogma of our day, from economics: that greed is good, property is sacrosanct, markets are sufficient, and governments are suspect.
We have to understand that a balanced society, like a stable stool, has to rest on three solid legs: a public sector of political forces rooted in respected governments, a private sector of economic forces based on responsible businesses, and a plural sector of social forces manifested in robust communities.
The most violent century in human history, it was hardly the best advertisement for the “bland fanatics of western civilisation”, as Niebuhr called them at the height of the cold war, “who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence”. Niebuhr was critiquing a fundamentalist creed that has coloured our view of the world for more than a century: that western institutions of the nation-state and liberal democracy will be gradually generalised around the world, and that the aspiring middle classes created by industrial capitalism will bring about accountable, representative and stable governments – that every society, in short, is destined to evolve just as the west did.The start of 2015 saw me in reflective mood - with a post “Will this too pass?” which referred to a paper about the global crisis I had just put online which opened with a table capturing the intellectual debates of each decade since the 1930s. The first few entries give the flavour – “the end of capitalism”, “the managerial revolution”, “meritocracy”, “the end of ideology”,” revisionism”
It seems impossible to get a social or moral consensus in our societies for the sort of rebalancing which Henry Mintzberg has brilliantly argued for
- the voices are too diverse these days
- People have grown tired and cynical
- Those in work have little time or energy to help them identify and act on an appropriate programme of change
- Those out of work are too depressed
- Although the retired generally have the time, resources and experience to be doing more than they are
- But they have lost trust in the capability or good intentions of governments let alone the promises of politicians
- Are confronted with too many disparate voices in the reform movement
- Most of the “apocalyptists” (such as William Greer and Dmitry Orlov) who have confronted the collapse of industrial civilisation counsel a Candide-like “garden cultivation”
The painting is of the Ottoman troups battling outside the gates of Vienna.......posted the very day Suleyman's burial chamber is reported found in southern Hungary
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
Yes to Yustina Wines
Apparently the winery also organises "food-matching" evenings.....obviously one stays over for those!!
Saturday, December 5, 2015
A "lion of prose" - RIP
These last few days I have been doing something I rarely do – I have been “savouring” a book – word by word as distinct from my usual habit of skimming. …..laughing out loud in delight at the language; marking sections every few pages with a pencil. And this is a novel – not my usual fare! A detective novel to boot – "Strange Loyalties" (1991). The book - the last of a trilogy - is written by one of the most underrated writers not only of the British Isles but perhaps in the English-speaking world - William McIlvanney
Here are a few samples of his style -
The thought was my funeral for him. Who needs possessions and career and official achievements? Life was only in the living of it. How you act and what you are and what you do…. are the only substance. They didn’t last either. But while you were here, they made what light there was – the wick that threads the candle-grease of time. His light was out but here I felt I could almost smell the smoke still drifting from its snuffing….(p80).
It was one of her partners who answered (the phone). When she knew it was me, her voice – always distant – more or less emigrated…..(p112)
Attractiveness facilitates acquaintance, like a courier predisposing strangers to goodwill, and my mother had acquired early an innocent vanity that let her enjoy being who she was. But the kindness of other people towards her made her as idealistic as my father in her own way. She tended to think the way people treated her was how they treated everybody. She thought the best of them was all there was (p 128).
Why do the best of us go to waste while the worst flourish? Maybe I had found a clue….Those who love life take risks, those who don’t take insurance. But that was all right, I decided. Life repays its lovers by letting them spend themselves on it. Those who fail to love it, it cunningly allows very carefully to accrue their own hoarded emptiness. In living, you won by losing big; you lost by winning small (p 134).
Where I had come into what I took for manhood….meant much to me, not just as a geography but as a landscape of the heart, a quintessential Scotland where good people were my landmarks and the common currency was a mutual caring. Why did it feel so different to me today, a little seedy and withdrawn? p 183
(Some might have thought her mad). But she wasn’t mad, just too sane to play along with the rest of us. She had awakened from her sleep-walk long enough to recognize the minefield we call normality. She had found a way to admit to herself the prolonged terror of living. Some people never do. p 206
The invention of truth, no matter how desperately you wish it to be or how sincerely you believe in the benefits it will bring, is the denial of our nature, the first rule of which is the inevitability of doubt. We must doubt not only others but ourselves. (p 210)
You offer him a vague perception and he takes it from you, cleans off the gunge and gives it back, having shown you how it works. He clarifies you to yourself. (p258)
Little wonder that in the tributes now being paid to him, this was said
His true peers were not alumni of the American hard-boiled school, such as Chandler and Hammett, but the likes of Gogol and Dostoevsky, Zola and Céline. He wrote about hard times and tough people – so-called “big men” and trauchled women – dealing with the fallout of unemployment, poverty and ignorance.“Why Willie is not better known outside his own heath has always been a mystery. In any other country that prizes the art of literature he would have been lionised.
McIlvanney, born in 1936 in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, established himself some time ago as the best Scottish novelist of his generation. Docherty (1975), a social-political family novel set in a declining mining community, won the Whitbread award for fiction. Long before any but a handful of people had heard of Alasdair Gray, and before James Kelman had published anything, McIlvanney was recognised as the man who spoke authentically for the Scottish working class, out of which he had, like so many, been educated, being a graduate of Glasgow University and then a schoolteacher. So perhaps he wasn’t surprised when another teacher, encountered in a Glasgow bar, told him he had disgraced himself by stooping to write a crime novel – namely “Laidlaw”.
The charge was ridiculous; crime is a serious matter. Of course, most crime fiction is ordinary fare, read for amusement only. It may trivialise what is not, and should not be, trivial. But crime is at the heart of many great novels. Bleak House, which is a crime novel, is not trivial; Simenon’s novels are not trivial or mere entertainment; nor are McIlvanney’s three Laidlaw books. Their subject is the ruin of the body, the distortion of the soul, and the corruption of society.McIlvanney never allows us to forget that the damage crime does is not merely physical. Murder is always a form of betrayal, a denial of the respect with which we should treat each other. It infects everything around it.
Laidlaw, an intellectual policeman, is damaged by what he experiences. He believes in communities; interviewing an elderly, loyal, but saddened mother in "Strange Loyalties", he reflects that there is nothing he wouldn’t do for the working-class women of that generation who held families together. But he himself is driven into isolation.
McIlvanney is an existentialist writer, like Camus, whom he admires, has learnt from, and matches.He has never been prolific. If he had taken the advice he was given – to write an annual Laidlaw novel – he might be a rich man in his old age; but he has always gone his own way. The republication of these novels now will revive interest, and perhaps lead him to write another, as he has sometimes talked of doing. But his reputation, not only as the father of tartan noir, is assured. “Docherty”, almost 40 years on, is established as a modern Scottish classic, and I have no doubt that “The Kiln” (1996), which is, in one sense, a two-generations-later sequel, is a masterpiece. It confirmed him, to my mind, as the finest Scottish novelist of our time.
It is one of those rare books that does what Ford Madox Ford thought imaginative literature could do better than any other art, making you think and feel at the same time.The “Kiln” is a novel of a hard-won maturity. Its hero, a novelist lost in the dark wood of middle age, sits, looking out at a cemetery, in a rented flat – in Edinburgh, not Glasgow (a sign of his displacement) – and gazes back on the summer when he was 17, in limbo between school and university, a magic summer which saw his passage to adult life.
The evocation of that time is beautiful, but now, behind him, is a broken marriage, memories of erratic social behaviour, and he is perplexed, as we all must sometimes be, by the question of what he has made of his life. He broods on the problem which is perhaps central to all experience: how to reconcile his sense of what he owes to himself with his knowledge of what he owes to others. There is then a vein of melancholy in the novel, but this is relieved by the often joyous vitality with which that summer is recalled, and enlivened by the acute social observation and darting shafts of wit. It’s a novel that tells you how it is, and therefore enriches your imaginative experience.
As a novelist myself (Allan Massie), I admire its craft. As a reader I can only be grateful. Almost 2,000 years ago, the younger Pliny wrote that “a man’s life contains hidden depths and large secret areas”. The thought is common. In Faust Goethe says: “Die Menschen sind im ganzen Leben blind” – men are blind throughout their life. True enough, but the best novelists offer us a means of opening our eyes, peering into these depths, and exploring these secret places, and they do so whatever their subject.
William McIlvanney is one of the rare novelists who help us to know both the social world and our innermost selves. He is both moralist and artist, and a writer to be cherished.
There was a great interview with him in a 2010 issue of the Scottish Review of Books