Log
La Défense
On 20th April 2009 I went to La Défense to have lunch with a friend who worked near the top of the EDF building. She was just about to start a new job, also with EDF, in Paris, so it was the last time for the forseeable future that I’d have a particular reason to come to La Défense, so I thought I’d have a good look around.
We met at the Calder spider, an apt touchstone for the entire site. Depending on one’s views, La Défense is as amazing, as ugly, as beautiful, as pointless, as inspiring or as destructive as the bizarre bright-red not-quite-spider whose distinctive presence makes it an obvious point for a rendezvous.
Phoebe said she would miss the grass, which may seem an odd thing to miss about La Défense; indeed, it would be easy to forget that it has any grass. But then when one walks around one rarely looks down, except at one point, but I’ll get to that later.
After lunch, a sandwich on the grass, as Phoebe climbed back to her EDF eyrie, a trip which ate into her lunch hour to the tune of 10 minutes each way, I started towards the Paris end of La D. [In the first version of the article I wrote “to me, the site feels the wrong way around...”, and I was right: I had mentally located the Grande Arche at the Paris end, whereas it is in fact at the far end; thanks to Lester McNutt for pointing out my error in conversation.] As you walk down to the end, you pass some curiously down-at-heel ex-shiny apartment blocks which exemplify the throwaway nature of much of the monumental architecture which gives the place the feeling of a playground of architects and presidents, and reach the Boulevard Circulaire, the road-river separating you from Paris; at the other end, at the bottom of the steps of the Grande Arche, one reaches a wooden walkway that blazes a trail on stilts into (and above) terra incognita. It is here that one looks down; partly, in my case, because of a morbid though not acute vertigo, and partly because they were building something odd that seemed to involve some short red rails, about ten metres long and four apart; much of the land underneath the walkway, which is perhaps 200 metres long, looked like a building site that was either being developed very slowly, or had been abandoned some time ago.
A visit to the Musée de la Défense made obvious some things I’d not realised: first, which is obvious in retrospect, that it’s a favourite site for architects to propose grand projects which are never realised; and secondly, shockingly, the short life-span of some of its edifices, several of which have already been demolished and replaced. There was also a clue to its immediate future: until recently the president check of the Name here, the body that oversees the development of the site, was a certain M. Sarkozy. I bet therefore that whatever deleterious effects the current economic downturn may have on France’s public works programmes, the grand schemes envisioned for La D will continue at full speed, although I imagine the names on some of the buildings planned as headquarters may have to change.
I supect that La D’s unique position at the outer end of the Grand Axe, connected to the heart of Paris yet outside its authoritarian planning regime, make it the easiest place for presidents to leave their legacy. One can build only so many Bibliothèques Nationaux, Pyramides du Louvre and Centres Pompidou, but La D can be remodelled pretty much à volonté. Indeed, it may be a good measure of presidential authority: premiership presidents manage to build their monument in Paris, while a La D legacy signal a mere championship contender.
But to return to the buildings. Just as I felt rather out of place wandering around the feet of the gleaming giants, the sort of place that one can imagine deserted without difficulty (and which I suspect probably relies for its weekend population much more on tourists than on residents), they seemed to share my unease, sticking both for our safety and theirs to their small encampment on the edge of the city, demonstrating by their rapid turnover that they too are not really at home there. The designs currently being built are, as is thankfully now commonplace, imaginative and often beautiful, as well as impressively engineered, but relieved of the old grey-suited cuboids’ oppression it’s becoming increasingly clear that the new designs are no less alienating. Indeed, the bizarre forms they often assume only heighten the suspicion that Parisians have been quite right to stick with Baron Hausmann’s prescription for so long.
Getting back on la une, I might as well have been getting in a spaceship for the return trip to earth, and that despite the fact that I knew I was unlikely to see as much or as verdant grass for the rest of the day.
Annoying DVDs is the least of it
I submitted the following comment on the BBC News story Getting inside a dowloader’s head; it was unpublished. I’ve edited it lightly since.
While it's nice to know we'll no longer be bullied while watching legally bought DVDs, it's depressing that children are again being exposed to industry propaganda, as usual with the collusion of government, and apparently this time without any of the usual public outcry (as for example when food industry bodies produce educational materials).
The problem is that the music and film distribution industries have managed to convince us that they represent the interest of artistic creators and performers, when in fact they're simply the current way in which many such creators and performers are rewarded for their endeavours today. Does Film Education's material discuss research from Holland that suggests that the social benefits of illegal copying might outweigh its costs? Does it discuss other ways of funding artistic creation, such as universal levies on blank media or broadband connections? I doubt it. I hope it might at least discuss subscription models, as opposed to the increasingly untenable pay-per-unit models, where CDs and DVDs that cost nothing to produce and little to distribute are sold at vast markups on their cost of production (as distinct, for example, from books, of whose price the material and distribution costs form a much bigger part).
And what about the perspective of the artist? I'm a singer, and have recorded about 40 albums in a career that has so far spanned 25 years. I work mostly with choirs whose members are usually paid a one-off fee for the recording sessions, receive no royalties on sales, and earn minuscule quantities for air-play and similar rights (I've received less than £10 from air-play during my career). The vast majority of my earnings are from live performance. Am I then upset if someone copies an album I'm on? On the one hand, it could put a small recording company out of business and make it slightly less likely that I get to record again. On the other, it could encourage someone to come and hear a group I work with live. The trade-off for me is far from obvious.
I have also worked as a translator for a major academic publisher. I was paid a substantial sum to translate a computer science text-book from French to English. The work is a specialist one, and thanks to the production costs will be expensive; it is unlikely to sell many copies. If people copy it, it will make it even less likely that the publisher will recover their considerable costs. Yet if they don't, even fewer readers will read it. As far as I know, it will only be available in printed form. Might it have been better if my translation had been government funded and made universally available, online as well as on paper? Most academic teaching and research is government funded, so why not this effort?
These sorts of questions should be being asked in every sector, remembering that it is the artists and works of art that are valuable to society, not the industries that simply distribute them. (Yes, those industries create jobs; so did many industries that have been rendered obsolete by advances in technology. There is not, and never will be, any shortage of work for humanity.)
The debate over the place in society of creative artists is too important and wide-ranging to be left to the guidance of the middlemen who currently distribute its products and whose intent seems to be to stifle both debate and innovation and parlay a short-lived distribution industry into a pillar of society, just because it works out very nicely for them.
18th June 2009
Working with a minority government
Canada House 7th May 2009
Steve Hewitt, University of Birmingham
1921 election: until then 2-party state, Conservative/Liberals each with one exception winning a majority
This was the first election in which all women voted. First election post WWI and influenza.
Other parties, having won negligible votes in 1911, won nearly 30%
In 1993 the "others" won more votes than the 2nd (and in1997 even exceeded the winning majority party).
Common in Canada as in the UK for a majority govt to have won less than 50% of the vote. Since 1945 only two elections have been won by a majority of votes. Sneakily added the UK 2005 election to the end of the graph!
Canada has had far more hung parliaments than Britain. What have these achieved? Old age pension, NI, flag (!), national pension plan, allowed anti-terrorist powers to expire, and same-sex marriage (2006-8).
Robert Hazell, The Constitution Unit, UCL
In C20, UK had 5 coalition govts, all pre-1950. 5 minority (short-lived). Last minority govt 1976-79 (except a few months in 1997). Minority govt seen as unstable, ineffective, incoherent, undesirable.
Devolved provincial assemblies have mostly been minority or coalition. (NI is a special case: compulsory coalition).
Scottish Parliament: 7 bills in 2 years, committees can but haven't initiated legislation. Opposition parties have not wanted an early election which in any case is constrained by the Scotland Act. Still an adversarial style and sense that minority govt is undesirable.
Lessons for the Civil Service: be prepared for inter-party negotiations before new govt is formed. Minority govt is conducted with an eye to the next election, which may be soon. Govt wants to deliver quickly, little scope for Civil Service to improve or amend policies. Policies need to be negotiated with other parties with particular attention to swing vote MPs.
Lessons for Parliament: could increase prospects for parliamentary reform; tighter whipping likely in Commons; House of L already defeats govt in 1/3 of votes. Minority govt strengthens Parliament vis-a-vis the executive. In last 10 years 5 defeats in HoC vs 500 in HoL.
Minority govt can work if it has confidence and can supply agreements with support parties, can build legislative coalitions with different partiess on different issues, not frightened of snap elections and is doing well in polls, and PM does not seek to govern in majoritarian way.
Hon. Monte Solberg, PC (former Conservative minister in govt Stephen Harper)
Believes that minority parliaments are pandering, and that the govt should not always "do something about that" (especially an issue for Conservative govts). Left parties bid for votes with tax dollars, Cons water down policies to avoid defeat. Favours more activist govt. Shifts power from parliament to public opinion, long term to short term, strategy to tactics. In the end, will erode public confidence. Has taken conservatives far too long to take social problems into account. Conservatives have managed to increase social spending while still leaving the impression they don't care about the people on whom the money is spent. Public planning cycles such as budgeting are constantly broken by new elections or even the threat of them.
Hon. Bill Graham, PC, QC (former Labour minister in Chrétien and Martin govts, caretaker leader of opposition)
Plenty of experience with minority govt including provincial govts. But they are unstable and rarely last longer than 2 years). With 50 seats going to the Bloc Québequois, there won't be a majority govt. Dynamics are changed by numbers: how many major parties, and their relative strength. Does not think that the present house will survive because Canadian political temperament won't work Scandinavian-style. Knowledge of procedure becomes more important, speaker has to be more involved (has had to break seven tied votes recently). Ministerial travel: need to be able to travel but have not been able to because of turmoil at home. Committees: need less partisanship, more opposition chairs. Avoid minority reports. Foreign policy: minority parliament has greater role in foreign policy than majority.
Size of the country means that MPs from e.g. Northern B.C. have a long way to come to Ottawa. Have to travel more often with more frequent elections.
Rt Hon. Lord Wallace of Tankerness, Former Dep. First Minister, Scotland
Fundamental difference between Scotland and UK, Canada is that they have proportional representation. Hung parliament therefore expected. Liberals had therefore drawn up protocol for forming coalitions beforehand. Principle of a written agreement. Negotiated by comparing manifestos. During the negotiations, Donald Dewar asked "what Liberal Democrat nonsense is this?" about a section from the Labour manifesto!
Civil service saw itself beholden to the biggest party, requests for information by the LDs had to be cleared by Labour ministers!
The written agreement survived the death of one first minister and resignation of a second. The document was public so the coalition could be held to account. On the other hand it did not change over time, and inhibited parties to it from looking to the longer term. Important for junior partners to retain their identities.
Q&A (Chair Peter Facey, Director Unlock Democracy)
How do we reconcile number of parties with diversity of voter aspirations? Hewitt points out that in the 70s majority govts relied on MPs from mostly Ontario and Québec; most of the rest of the country was unrepresented and alienated, which led directly to the new parties and fracturing we see today.
What lessons can we learn from local govt? Hazell points out that local govt can't pass legislation, nor call mid-term elections.
Grand coalition: why not in Scotland now? Because SNP and Labout fundamentally disagree on independence. Yet in Wales Labour and Plaid Cymru did join.
Graham: problem with PR is that the party leader picks the candidates and orders them so gets even more power. Would be a good idea to test it in the provinces first. In Ontario the parties are not in municipal politics, but in BC they are.
Solberg: the current govt has tried to reform the Senate despite public indifference. Could have an important role to express regional differences. Local councils: can be more collegial because they're not on television. Media encourages outrageous and adversarial behaviour. Good television does not make stable politics. A grand coalition could cause the Liberal party to split.
It’s time for the open source community to innovate. In order of innovation at present: most innovative is academia, then web sites (mostly proprietary! but some more open than others) then proprietary (e.g. Micorosoft Live, on the coat-tails of the web and Windows 7/.NET finally doing things the way academia has been for decades) then open source (playing catch up, except in the area of basics (OS, languages) where it’s implementing academia.
April 2009, Paris
Alien in my back yard
Though the following is not really a guided walk, the geographically-challenged, like me, may like to follow on a map.
I’m sitting in my back garden for the first time this year, needing only a sweater, despite its being nearly six in the evening. I didn’t bother wiping down the chair or the table; I just picked the least muddy chair, and I’m keeping my laptop where it says. We can wipe everything down the first time we eat out here.
It doesn’t feel like my garden particularly. Partly it’s the way that the wooden decking placed on bare earth feels temporary; the rest of the garden unkempt and unturfed, so that I would feel that I’m floating on a raft were it not for the fact that the garden is itself only about four times the size of the decking, which just fits a table and four chairs, and the thing I mostly see when I look up is the fences that separate it from the gardens on the other three sides. It’s also partly that I’ve done nothing to make it mine. I’ve not gardened it; I’ve not even spent much time here. The adhān floating over the streets from the west does nothing to dispel the feeling that I’m not at home; indeed, as the weather warms it lends a rather exotic feel to the garden, and helps to release it from the bonds of its narrow bounds.
Earlier, I went for a walk from where I live, a little east of Brick Lane, along the Eastern fringe of the City, going south as far as Borough Market. Normally, when I traverse these streets, I’m walking or cycling intently or I’m paying attention to someone I’m walking with, but today I was alone, and made myself walk slower than ever, and look at what I saw. Perhaps that’s why it all made rather less sense than usual.
I emerged as ever from Woodseer Street on to Brick Lane, and turned right, almost immediately having to make my way under the hoarding that hides the scaffolding for the new rail bridge and formalises the division of the Lane into curry houses (south end) and flamboyant cafés and boutiques (north end). Walking up past Bacon Street (surely a studied insult?) I passed, as usual, only three places I ever enter: the better of the two beigel shops (the southernmost of the two), Eastside Books, a small bookshop which cleverly doesn’t stock trash, meaning that despite its lack of shelf space it still has lots of good books, and the huge coffee shop that can’t decide whether it’s a café (south) or sitting room (north), and whose lackadaisical service often perplexes customers, but whose sofas and wifi are ever tempting. Being a lazy Saturday, it was closed and shuttered.
The mostly twenty-something pedestrians seemed to be divided into roughly a third tourists and two thirds Londoners, or alternatively roughly fifty-fifty between English speakers and those who preferred other tongues. Their colourful and idiosyncratic dress suggested they might enjoy the frankly bizarre wares of the vintage and modern shops than I, alternately struck by simple incomprehension of why anyone would buy the things on offer and the thought that they probably didn’t have my size in any case.
After a quick peek round the corner into Bethnal Green Road, I retraced my steps all the way home, because it was sunny and I realised it was time to add sun cream to my bag for this year. I resisted the temptation to get a bagel, as I intended to make it to Borough Market. Having applied sun cream, I walked conscientiously back along Woodseer Street, so as not to miss anything. Specifically, so as not to miss the old Truman Brewery. At last I worked out that the mysterious glass-fronted building along the side of the courtyard opposite the main frontage to the old brewery is in fact just a facade. There are food stalls all along this part of Brick Lane on a Saturday, and I followed them behind an old warehouse, resisting the temptation to eat, but wondering at the strange sights, like the “Root-master” bus-turned-café. I looked around what was essentially become a pedestrian square, with the bus to one side, and other food stalls near it including the Laos and Thai “Laughing Buddha”, whose name on its closed shutters was written in graffiti lettering that I couldn’t seem to read directly, but somehow understood after looking at it for long enough. People were sitting on all the kerbs, mostly eating, and if not then enjoying the sun. I looked around again. It is not an attractive space. It’s friendly: there are three ways in and out, with shops around it as well as the food stalls, and touches like the converted bus give the friendly impression that people have tried to make it habitable; but overall it is still entirely man-made, with no hint of earth or greenery. Are there people unlike me for whom this is really beautiful? Or it just the best of a bad job?
Nowhere to go but in in this gallery just off Brick Lane.
Feeling distinctly foreign in my long sleeves and sun hat, with my hands in my pockets, I carried on to Commercial Street, and crossed the road into Spitalfields Market (first the new, then the old), finding quickly that Saturday is not a market day (pity) though the shops and restaurants were open as usual, albeit doing a rather more desultory trade than busy Brick Lane. Here too, there’s a strange feel: an old market completely renovated with the expensive-feeling stone and paving that seems to be common around the better sort of new development currently; but it feels too new, or perhaps it’s that one mostly sees it around expensive office buildings, and the sort of apartments that have glossy hoardings alongside the sites on which they are built, and are both unimaginably expensive and simply far too hard to the touch.
Any colour you want as long as it’s brown.
Just on the other side of Brushfield Street, around Artillery Lane, one gets back to the sort of more worn streets that look like people might actually have lived there for some time. Many of them are tiny, quite a few pedestrian, and the behemoths of nearby Bishopsgate loom, even though you can’t see them; nonetheless, it’s a comforting place to be, like the back streets of Victoria, a quick and (to my ignorance) unlooked-for escape through the cracks in the polished surface of London’s modern thoroughfares.
I emerged thence onto Bishopsgate at last, and almost immediately crossed the road to Liverpool Street. It seems odd today that the station is named for it, as, though no lane, it’s just a side street, and I’ve walked along it most often at night after getting off a bus taken after the tube closes, which terminates round the back of the station. There are places I’m pretty sure I’ve been once or twice but unaccountably forgotten, and I think the Metropolitan Arcade is one of them; although quite how I managed to forget finding Leonidas inside, I’m not sure. It’s good to be reminded that shopping at railway stations is nothing new. Walking down Old Broad Street, my eye was caught by the promising stone and pedestrianism of New Broad Street, and indeed aesthetically it was pleasing, but by now I could already feel I was into the dead zone of the weekend City.
When making a film about the apocalypse, it’s pretty much compulsory to have a scene showing a famous city centre devastated. Sometimes, when the apocalypse is not one of material destruction but, for example, a mysterious disease, the city in question is unravaged. I understand that for the dream sequence in Vanilla Sky (here the disease is mental, and affects only the protagonist), where the city in question is Manhattan, it was an expensive operation that required filming at sun-up, and paying for the streets to be cleared. No wonder that the low-budget 28 Days Later was set in London: all the crew had to do in this case, I imagine, was turn up early on a Saturday or Sunday. The artificial shade of tall buildings that confuses the sense of time adds to the unreality of knowing that you’re in a vast capital city that is thronged by tourists as you walk, and yet, apart from the unremitting murmur of traffic, you may as well be alone.
On London Wall I noticed a sign on a church, which turned out to be All-Hallows-on-the-Wall, advertising an installation made of 189 miles of wool. I went in. A group of people were having a couple of enthusiastic conversations; one was the artist and the rest appeared to have some connection with or professional interest in the exhibition; I was, it seemed, the only chance visitor. The installation was simple: a huge hank of continuous woollen thread suspended at its mid-point by a severe rope knot secured at four points to the walls, with the ends draped evenly over a large area of the floor; it was just possible to squeeze between the falling skeins. As I left I took an information sheet; it turned out that all the wool, about 55 fleeces’ worth, had been donated by one Yorkshire company and spun by another. I also accepted a toffee, which surprisingly took the edge off my now-insistent hunger pangs.
Simple enough not to be ridiculous?
As I got towards Bank, signs of life started to reappear, along with another even more desired chocolate shop, Paul A. Young, and I corrected my course towards London Bridge. I crossed Gracechurch Street, attracted by more small streets, and suddenly, and again I’m sure not for the first time, found myself facing the Monument, trying to decipher its Latin, and then, having read the translation and laughed at the anti-Catholic official graffiti that was first added in 1681 and then removed in 1830, walked the length of Pudding Lane itself, now looking much too broad for its length, despite being a cul-de-sac; it really is a pudding lane.
London Bridge is one of my favourite vantage points. My favourite views are in daytime directly south along the bridge to the ill-matched sentinels, St Olaf’s house and the extraordinary building whose name I haven’t yet found, and at night north towards the city. These are visions removed from human scale, and I find them exhilarating.
At the far end of the bridge, Southwark Cathedral is almost buried. It was about four o’clock when I reached it, and its sunny courtyard was crowded with people eating food from the adjacent Borough Market. I went inside for a couple of minutes; a service was in progress, and a mixed-voice choir was singing an early twentieth-century magnificat that I knew but couldn’t identify just well enough to cheer the Anglican in me for a couple of minutes; then I went back outside and felt a bit silly to have arrived just as the market was packing up. Nonetheless, a stall under the railway bridge still had plenty of pork, their speciality, left, so I bought a baguetteful, and finally sated my by now considerable hunger pangs, sitting on a bollard looking at a semi-abstract figure near the river.
I found my way back up to the bridge by the direct stair that I had ignored on my way down, and stopped at the bottom of Gracechurch street to try to find the advertised toilet in the subway, without success, as the London Transport employee who asked me what I was doing as I peered through the gate closing off the station told me that there wasn’t one. I checked the adjacent public toilets on the traffic island at the intersection of Eastcheap and Gracechurch Street, again more out of interest than need, and then started walking back up towards Bishopsgate, but cut off towards the Gherkin (offically, the Swiss Re Building). I remembered that there were some quotations on the top faces of the low walls-cum-seats that edge the square at its base, but I was wrong: they were in fact each an idea for things to have in an Arcadian garden. (They may of course still be quotations, but no source was given.) I walked around the building reading them on both sides (the walls on the north and south sides are higher and without inscriptions). When I’d finished a group of Italians was still occupying the last quotation, so I asked “scusa, posso lire che è scritto qui?” and having thanked them, wondered what a “classical highlight” painted on a tree would be.
I continued East, finding myself eventually at the deserted stalls of Petticoat Lane market, and walking back along Wentworth Street towards Brick Lane and home, to sit in the garden and eat a bit, and think about what I’d seen.
From the bright busy upper Brick Lane to the quiet over-neat fringes of the city, to the gloomy and deserted City, to Borough Market, bustling even as it closed, it’s as if I’ve crossed several worlds this afternoon, none of them mine. Was it because I walked alone that I felt a stranger in all these places? Because none of the people I saw seemed to be much like me? Or is it the place? I’ve never felt at home in London, wonderful and exciting as it is, and having spent an afternoon looking at the nearest parts of it closely, I began to have a better idea why. Almost all the places I visited today were either not designed for people, or had been appropriated by people with whom I have little sympathy, or both. The only moment I recognised was the music in the cathedral, but even that was just an imitation. The pork was good, though…
4th April 2009
I’m still not over English diphthongs
In vespers some time during Lent, I nearly misread a word in a psalm, but ended up singing it correctly, only syllable by syllable, rather than as a whole word. As I sang it I had an odd feeling, first of having done it wrong (as I so nearly had) and then that in fact it was more correct than usual. What had happened? I had sung two adjacent syllables of which the first ended in a vowel and the second began with one, and I had sung the vowels completely separately, just as they should be! Until then I hadn’t realised that I normally do make a slight diphthong between adjacent vowels. It was doubly odd both to be made to realise this at the same time as realising that despite its being so ingrained, I could yet be tricked out of doing it.
Spring 2009
A new trinity: truth, beauty and lovejoy (love without joy? is that possible?; joy without love is a sword); hope is a necessary precondition of love, and a last resort, not part of the trinity; faith an empty shadow.
Spring 2009
To defend or not to defend one’s culture?
What is the attraction of old things? It’s visceral, and, it occurs to me, opposed to, yet seems to outweigh in its depth, a similar attraction to novelty. The latter is fleeting, and soon wanes, in respect of any one object; the former deepens and strengthens as the object ages. Especially, why the respect for old lineages, languages, and above all, considering the general reverence for scientific advance, ancient knowledge? Whence, in short, the golden age myths?
This is just part of the question. The other part concerns the relative importance of remembering and forgetting. Over time, we want to remember the good things we have learnt and forget the bad. Knowing which is which is hard enough, but I’m not going to get into that here. There’s a more serious problem: how to untangle the two? The entanglement is what occurs in culture, and especially, in religion. Religions in particular tend to insist on their unchanging transmission, which perhaps evolved in an age where errorless copying was extremely hard, but which now is sufficiently easy that the insistence on it becomes harmful, as dogma forbids change over vast spans of time and space. In the past, this insistence on verbatim copying has assisted the preservation of good ideas; now, it forces us to keep the increasingly stale bathwater with the rather wrinkled baby. How can we make cultures more open to change? Can we make hierarchies come to love version control? (Unfortunately, it’s noticeable that change if anything is enforced more ruthlessly than stasis, because one of the most important things about it is to foster the illusion that change has not occurred, because that makes it easier to rely on the respect of the old, by effectively backdating change as far as possible; also, because change is painful to the hierarchies it often unseats, once it has been dealt with, the possibility of further change must be removed.) So really the problem is how to change religious (especially) and cultural (to a lesser extent) cultures to accept change. Not as the norm; a degree of stasis is a good thing, but as part of a normal process. In some ways this already happens, but there are two problems. Take the Catholic church as an example: it has had synods, but not often enough, and, over time, debating in more and more restricted areas. Both the frequency and profundity of change needs to be increased, and therefore the insistence on identity needs to be diminished. Connections to the present need to be more valued, and connections to the past less.
I’m really not sure if any method other than trying to improve the lot of those worst off will work, however, as otherwise it always seems to go against the grain, and again strangely it is usually those worst off whose ideas are hardest to change. Again, I’d love to know how this is adaptive.
Also, comments on an article in Y-Net News:
It’s not so interesting to pull out the contradictions in the article itself. Quoting the commandment “thou shalt not be a victim” does not square with considering that one deserves a “free F-16”. However, we very quickly get to some interesting questions:
1. Why are humans so fascinated with history? Story-telling about oneself is fairly obvious: it’s the way our memories have evolved. But why are old things so attractive? Where do the myths about golden ages come from? Why is “old” so often equated with “good”? (Here, it manifests as: why do Jews need Israel, rather than a state somewhere else?)
2. What on earth are we to do about religion? This man doesn’t seem to be terribly religious, and yet religion is at the root of his worst prejudices.
3. Perhaps the most interesting question to me at the moment, because it is the one that is least familiar to me, is this: to what extent is it important to preserve culture & history? This is a relatively new problem, as until a few thousand years ago we didn’t have any. Yet forgetting is an important skill. People who don’t learn to forget end up unable to learn and grow, because the human brain has only a finite capacity. The same is true of societies. In the Jewish context the question runs like this: if antisemitism is such a problem, why not stop being Jewish? There are two answers to this: first, because that is allowing oneself to be defeated by antisemitism. Secondly, it is obvious that something of value is lost if the Jewish culture and the Hebrew language is lost. But assimilated Jews don’t automatically lose all their culture, so what is forgotten, where, and what matters? It’s obviously to do with story-telling again, but answering the question: “how can we change our culture to remove the bad things and allow progress with the good?” is hard and a question that is rarely addressed directly.
I am rather appalled by this:
“Every display of anti-Semitism from London to Mumbai hurts me, yet deep inside I’m thinking that Jews who choose to live abroad fail to understand something very basic about this world.”
If he doesn’t believe in a world in which Jews can live outside Israel, then what is the point of Israel?
Early 2009
Sacred pre-texts
An extraordinary thing about the Bible & Qu'uran is that they are the foundation of extraordinary literary edifices but are themselves relics of a pre-literary age. The concerns with texts, intertexts, subtexts, indices, concordances, references, not to mention plot, character &c. as things with their own objective existence are utterly alien to the texts themselves. What would a sacred text for the literate be like? No wonder Midrash, Haddith and Christian commentaries are so important to theologians; it's a bit of a surprise that they aren’t more important to ordinary worshippers.
Early 2009
Silver bullets
Do-it-alls: Tuomo Valkonen (ion et al), Charles Moore (Forth), Bob Armstrong (CoSY), Ian Piumarta (fonc), Niall Douglas (Tornado et al), the Smalltalk community (possibly the only entire community with this mentality?), Niklaus Wirth (the Oberon system).
What is the allure of neat, compact, universal answers (sometimes called, especially in extreme cases, “silver bullets”)? Is it a longing for the simple old days when one really could know everything that was known? Is it not in any case necessary for some people to build their universal systems, because only by over-emphasis of new principles can one elucidate them sufficiently to convince others of their utility in even appopriate, restricted domains, at least, when they are organising principles rather than theories of specific interactions? For example, without the Smalltalk people would we have Java? Similarly, Charles Moore, even if we don’t agree with him, poses hard questions about what is really useful, and what is just “customary cushions” (isn’t, but should be, a quotation from somewhere). Niall Douglas reminds us that there are clear benefits to a relatively modest throwing out and reworking of our existing systems; CoSY (and Emacs) that an apparently over-specialised system can serve well as an operating environment for at least some users (rather less specialised and rather more users in Emacs’s case). Tuomo Valkonen is like Niall Douglas but more hard-line, but he too reminds us of some uncomfortable decisions (e.g. the vast amount of effort put into anti-aliasing rather than into improving displays).
Late 2008–mid 2009
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