The rebirth of tragedy

Whether it is a fantasy of market freedom or one in which the market is abolished, modern politics is haunted by myths of redemption. In the prevailing anti-tragic world view, human institutions are the result of human action and can therefore be altered by human decision.

The lives that are shown in The Wire confound this seemingly obvious inference. What is done cannot be undone; history cannot be repealed by human will. The workings of necessity that have shaped the past will also shape the future. Serious politics accepts this fact. Redemptive politics only magnifies the waste of life: the drug war, which is supposed to deliver society from the evil of addiction, exposes millions to violence and chronic insecurity. Failing or refusing to accept tragedy, politics has become a theatre of the absurd.

In denying us the comfort of redemption, The Wire re-connects us with reality. When it shows human lives ending in a lack of meaning, the series confronts us with the absurd in its most pitiful form. When it shows human beings joking, cursing and carrying on despite this absurdity, it achieves something like the liberating catharsis that Nietzsche imagined being produced by ancient Greek drama. The struggles we share with the protagonists are not deviations from some ideal version of humanity that will someday come into being. Intractable conflict goes with being human. In one way or another, practically everything in current media culture is escapist in intention or effect. In astonishing contrast, The Wire returns us to ourselves.

John Gray

The case

What has been written down is not a description of the world at all, but a description of acts of observation made on the world. All our customary scientific terms such as energy, momentum, position, speed, distance, time, etc. -- they are terms specifically for the description of observations. It is a misuse of language to try and apply them to a world-in-itself divorced from the action of an observation. It is this misuse of language that leads to problems like that posed by the wave/particle paradox. Which is not to say that the world-in-itself does not exist outside the context of someone making an observation of it. Rather, as Werner Heisenberg asserted, all attempts to talk about the world-in-itself are rendered meaningless.

-- Russell Stannard

The wind in the forest

The living presence of the Great World was very very present to me. It was always clear to me from my own life that where we were nature could have just swept us away in a moment. It seemed ancient and authoritative and tolerant – but not terribly tolerant! – of our being there. My grandparents had a house that was built on Victorian notions of health. There was a sleeping porch so that you could sleep in the open air when it wasn't terribly cold. We would be out there in the middle of the night. No light anywhere except the stars. And you would hear the wind in the forest. It was amazing.

 -- Marilynne Robinson, interviewed by Matthew Sweet (from about 25 minutes in)

Welcome to Life

h/t Simon Ings

Èig

Èig, n. Gaelic: the quartz crystals on the beds of moorland stream-pools that catch and reflect moonlight, and therefore draw migrating salmon to them in late summer and autumn.

Big business

A reasonable list of prosecutable crimes committed during the bubble, the crisis, and the aftermath period by financial services firms includes: securities fraud, accounting fraud, honest services violations, bribery, perjury and making false statements to US government investigators, Sarbanes-Oxley violations (false accounting), Rico (Racketeer Influenced and Criminal Organisations Act) offences, federal aid disclosure regulations offences and personal conduct offences (drug use, tax evasion etc).

-- Charles Ferguson

Richardson's dream

Imagine a large hall like a theatre, except that the circles and galleries go right round through the space usually occupied by the stage. The walls of this chamber are painted to form a map of the globe. The ceiling represents the north polar regions, England is in the gallery, the tropics in the upper circle, Australia on the dress circle and the Antarctic in the pit.

A myriad computers [i.e. human individuals doing computations] are at work upon the weather of the part of the map where each sits, but each computer attends only to one equation or part of an equation. The work of each region is coordinated by an official of higher rank. Numerous little "night signs" display the instantaneous values so that neighbouring computers can read them. Each number is thus displayed in three adjacent zones so as to maintain communication to the North and South on the map.

From the floor of the pit a tall pillar rises to half the height of the hall. It carries a large pulpit on its top. In this sits the man in charge of the whole theatre; he is surrounded by several assistants and messengers. One of his duties is to maintain a uniform speed of progress in all parts of the globe. In this respect he is like the conductor of an orchestra in which the instruments are slide-rules and calculating machines. But instead of waving a baton he turns a beam of rosy light upon any region that is running ahead of the rest, and a beam of blue light upon those who are behindhand.

Four senior clerks in the central pulpit are collecting the future weather as fast as it is being computed, and despatching it by pneumatic carrier to a quiet room. There it will be coded and telephoned to the radio transmitting station. Messengers carry piles of used computing forms down to a storehouse in the cellar.

In a neighbouring building there is a research department, where they invent improvements. But these is much experimenting on a small scale before any change is made in the complex routine of the computing theatre. In a basement an enthusiast is observing eddies in the liquid lining of a huge spinning bowl, but so far the arithmetic proves the better way. In another building are all the usual financial, correspondence and administrative offices. Outside are playing fields, houses, mountains and lakes, for it was thought that those who compute the weather should breathe of it freely.

--  Lewis Fry Richardson (1922)

Images: View across Loch na h-Uamha to Aird Bheag, the ENIAC (the electronic computer which realized Richardson's dream).

Welcome to the Anthropocene

The photography of Edward Burtynsky

P.S. 14 June; 'What these ruined and discarded objects show is not the end of oil, writes Tony Wood, but the obsolescence of these particular machines; not the exhaustion of a civilisation addicted to petroleum, but its oblivious self-perpetuation.'

Future money

Assuming that we aren’t about to see a swift unravelling of the contemporary world into a far lower degree of complexity, the left will need to imagine and propose credit systems and monetary authorities that can prise apart debt and hierarchy, exchange and inequality. Money, and therefore debt, is always an abstraction. But justice too can be abstract, and there is no reason in principle why money and debt must serve injustice rather than justice.

-- Benjamin Kunkel

Tracks and wonders

All things are engaged in writing their history...Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted by Robert Macfarlane in the preface to The Old Ways. "The eye is enticed by a path and the mind's eye also."

Emerson and Macfarlane are thinking of an essentially benign wild and/or rural environment. Will Self suggests that in the electronically-mediated ['smart'] city, walking is often "analogous to a clinically defined psychotic state."

P.S. 14 May: Marmaduke Dando: 'Growing up in a suburb outside of the city of Portsmouth, we didn’t do God and we didn’t do nature. We just did what we were told.'

Potentially infinite

An astonishing concept has entered mainstream cosmological thought: physical reality could be hugely more extensive than the patch of space and time traditionally called “the universe”. We've learnt that we live in a solar system that is just one planetary system among billions, in one galaxy among billions. But there are signs that a further Copernican demotion confronts us. The entire panorama that astronomers can observe could be a tiny part of the aftermath of our Big Bang, which is itself just one band amount a potentially infinite ensemble. In this grander perspective, what we've traditionally called the laws of nature may be no more than parochial bylaws – local manifestations of “bedrock” laws that must be sought at a still deeper level.

-- Martin Rees

M57 - the Ring Nebula

Mutual aid

...when then Twin Towers collapsed nobody trampled each other, nobody panicked, all that savage social Darwinism you could promise didn’t happen. People aided each other in kind of extraordinary ways: a quadriplegic accountant was carried down sixty-nine stories by his coworkers who didn’t do any accounting for what he owed them on the way.

...there was this moment in which relations were completely different, both at a practical level but also at an emotional level. Everybody says everybody made eye contact, they cared about how you were, boundaries came down. And that was terrifying to the Bush administration and to Wall Street, which was essentially Al Qaeda’s target. And they had to get us back to business—remember that campaign, America Open For Business and all that other stuff? This is a long way around saying that what actually happens in disasters is that they demonstrate that people are actually very good at being communists in the sense that they instantly abandon capitalism, that they love these relationships of mutual aid, because the astonishing thing about disasters is that people are often weirdly joyous in them, because they’ve recovered a sense of agency, a sense of power, etc...

-- Rebecca Solnit

Ooze

There are many Ouses in England, and consequently much debate about the meaning of the word. The source is generally supposed to be usa, the Celtic word for water, but I favoured the argument, [Sussex] being [a] region of Anglo-Saxon settlement, that here it was from the Saxon word wāse, from which derives also our word ooze, meaning soft mud or slime; earth so wet as to flow gently. Listen: ooooze. It trickles along almost silently, sucking at your shoes. An ooze is a marsh or swampy ground, and to ooze is to dribble or slither. I liked the slippery way it caught at both earth's facility for holding water and water's knack for working through soil.

-- from To The River by Olivia Laing

'It all turns on affection'

We have one memory of [my grandfather] that seems, more than any other, to identify him as a sticker. He owned his farm, having bought out the other heirs, for more than fifty years. About forty of those years were in hard times, and he lived almost continuously in the distress of debt. Whatever has happened in what economists call “the economy,” it is generally true that the land economy has been discounted or ignored. My grandfather lived his life in an economic shadow. In an urbanizing and industrializing age, he was the wrong kind of man. In one of his difficult years he plowed a field on the lower part of a long slope and planted it in corn. While the soil was exposed, a heavy rain fell and the field was seriously eroded. This was heartbreak for my grandfather, and he devoted the rest of his life, first to healing the scars and then to his obligation of care. In keeping with the sticker’s commitment, he neither left behind the damage he had done nor forgot about it, but stayed to repair it, insofar as soil loss can be repaired. My father, I think, had his father’s error in mind when he would speak of farmers attempting, always uselessly if not tragically, “to plow their way out of debt.” From that time, my grandfather and my father were soil conservationists, a commitment that they handed on to my brother and to me.

-- Wendell Berry

England, awake!

As Scotland goes on its way, deciding what it is and what it will be in increasingly numerous and often positive directions it would be wonderful to see England do the same, to decide it is something more than the media’s presentation of the feudally servile, or drunkenly violent, the pitiable list of scared tabloid negatives - Not Foreign, Not Gypsy, Not Dying of Cancer yet. And it would be wonderful to see if London can be one of the places where England remembers how many possibilities there are in Englishness and how much it has survived. It would be magnificent and life-saving if London reminded Britain that we built a welfare state from nothing but faith in a broken country and that it worked very well. And perhaps London can be one of the places where England remembers that its entertainments weathered religious and political censorship, the closing of the playhouses, the forgetting and suppressing of songs and dances and ways of being with each other that made human beings feel they could be better in themselves and with each other.

-- A L Kennedy

'Referential mania'

In these very rare cases, the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy, because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His in- most thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. All around him, there are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.

-- from Symbols and Signs by Vladimir Nabokov

The Gulf, two years on

For me the Gulf spill has had an almost metaphoric importance beyond the spill itself. It’s shown me how we [in the US] think as a nation. How we get obsessively into something, then ignore it, and how we operate in panic mode, emergency mode. One thing most of us certainly don’t do is think like naturalists.

-- Bethany Kraft

See also Sick fish, eyeless shrimp and dead dolphins

Science and the open society

Fang Lizhi was good at explaining how, for him, concepts of human rights grew out of science, writes Perry Link. In an essay in [the NYRB] he named five axioms of science that had led him toward human rights:

1. “Science begins with doubt,” whereas in Mao’s China students were taught to begin with fixed beliefs.
2. Science stresses independence of judgment, not conformity to the judgment of others.
3. “Science is egalitarian”; no one’s subjective view starts ahead of anyone else’s in the pursuit of objective truth.
4. Science needs a free flow of information, and cannot thrive in a system that restricts access to information.
5. Scientific truths, like human rights principles, are universal; they do not change when one crosses a political border.

A forest of signs

The stream of data continued. Gas volumes pumped through the BTC and Druzhba pipelines, racial assaults in Australia, coltan mining yields in the DRC free-zones, incidences of Marburg hemorrhagic fever in those same zones, hourly volume of technology stocks traded on the Nikkei...Jaz was no longer analyzing these clusters himself, just feeding him into [the new global quant model] Walter, which was unearthing connections at an alarming rate. Everything seemed to be linked to everything else: the net worth of retirees in Boca Raton, Florida, oscillating in harmony with the volume of cargo arriving at the port of Long Beach, Southwestern home repossessions tracking the number of avatars in the most popular online gameworlds in Asia. At first Jaz had wondered whether the model was a hoax, something that existed only in Cy Bachman's imagination. Now he found himself disturbed by its power. What would happen when they started trading?

-- from Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru.

A Darkness

In A London Address, an Artangel podcast recorded in January, the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez says:

Great books are more intelligent than their authors.The books we call classics are Pandora's boxes whose warnings tend to be vindicated by history. One of the most fearsome characters in [Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel] The Secret Agent is Mr Vladimir, theoretician of terrorism, who at some point in the novel suggests a series of outrages: "Let them be directed against buildings for instance," he says, "and that on two conditions." The first is that they must be a fetish, recognized by all the bourgeoisie. And second the attack must be "of a destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable - in fact, mad."

I was not in London when the twin towers of the World Trade Center [in New York] fell in September 2001, but later when the war in Iraq was broadcast live on television I watched it from a friend's living room near the Emirates Stadium. Like many, I thought the war was a mistake. Like many, I regretted the atrocities of Abu Ghraib. Like many, I was wounded by the images of the red buses torn apart in the 7th of July [2007].  But like very few I remembered the all too believable words of another terrorist pronounces in Conrad's novel: "To break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim. Nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heath shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half the battle would be won then. The disintegration of the old morality would have set in in its very temple."

To what extent did they achieve this, those who attacked New York and London?  I do not yet have the answer, but I will not stop asking the question.

The question remains urgent. See, among others:

• The war on terror is corrupting all it touches, while parliament meekly passes each twist of the ratchet of repression 
• How the US uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses
• The Birthplace of Big Brother and  
• Tim Berners-Lee urges government to stop the snooping bill

A too-soft heart

The 2010 Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, currently in prison in China, wrote that the Mao era "caused people to sell their souls: hate your spouse, denounce your father, betray your friend, pile on a helpless victim, say anything to remain 'correct'", and argued that the consequence was today's "Age of Cynicism in which people no longer believe in anything".

Such generalisations can feel uncomfortable to those with little or no first-hand knowledge of China. Many recent commentators have noted the futility of trying to summarise everything currently taking place in China, let alone trying to predict what may come next.

But Yiyun Li's fiction echoes Xiaobo's analysis of a society hollowed out by its past, of people who have lost their moral bearings and struggle to find any meaning in life. Character after character in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl rejects intimacy in favour of isolation, and those who do scramble after lust or affection end up disappointed or betrayed. "People who do not cling to life perish, one way or another," reflects the narrator of the opening story, "Kindness". Every story in the collection has a suicide.

-- from a profile of Yuyun Li

'The Blue of Distance'

There is no distance childhood...Their mental landscape is that of like a medieval paintings - a foreground full of living things and then a wall. The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy and loss...

-- Rebecca Solnit in an Artangel podcast

The land beyond the sea

I happen to come across this today (hat tip GM), which happens to resonate with things I've been thinking about for a couple of months.

Got Better

Granta has published a short piece by me on running and not running as part of its 'exit strategies' series. Since I wrote it I have heard from my GP that the X-ray shows no indication of osteoarthritis, and I am in the clear. (The pain and swelling in my knee may be the result of running in shoes that were worn out and other factors. After more than a month's rest I'm feeling fine, and am starting - cautiously - to run again.)

Anyway, I can say 'got better', at least for now.  Any resemblance I may bear to a newt is down to something else.

Hinkley C

You have explained several times now that you favour the deployment of new nuclear reactors which you believe could consume the existing waste legacy as fuel. Some people question the feasibility of this technology and I don’t know enough to comment on it, but I would encourage you to continue this line of research, as a supportable method for dealing with our toxic legacy is still needed.

But good or bad, this is not the technology on offer at Hinkley C. What we are opposing here is the same old waste pile, the same old lengthy and expensive decommissioning, the same old secrecy and state collusion, the same old “off site emergency” hazard, and potentially the same old thyroid cancer for my daughter, 25 miles away. It only looks different because it has been re-invigorated by the fear of climate-change, modern propaganda techniques, the ageing of the anti-nuclear generation, and the lack of any democratic platform for opposing specific plans on the ground.

-- Theo Simon to George Monbiot

'The current financial system poses an existential threat to Western democracy'

We have at the moment this monstrous hybrid, state capitalism – a term which used to be a favourite of the Socialist Workers Party in describing the Soviet Union, and which only a few weeks ago was on the cover of the Economist to describe the current economic condition of most of the world. This is a parody of economic order, in which the general public bears all the risks and the financial sector takes all the rewards – an extraordinarily pure form of what used to be called ‘socialism for the rich’. But ‘socialism for the rich’ was supposed to be a joke. The truth is that it is now genuinely the way the global economy is working. 

The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat. No democracy has ever been destabilised by terrorism, but if the cashpoints stopped giving out money, it would be an event on a scale that would put the currently constituted democratic states at risk of collapse. And yet governments act as if there is very little they can do about it. They have the legal power to conscript us and send us to war, but they can’t address any fundamentals of the economic order. So it looks very much as if Marx’s omission of the word ‘capitalism’, because he foresaw no alternative within the existing social order, was an instance of his crystal ball functioning with particularly high resolution.

-- from Marx at 193 by John Lanchester. Lanchester is good, too, on some of what Marx and Marxists got wrong.

NDD

Two piece on 'Nature Deficit Disorder' today

In Natural Childhood for The National Trust (UK), Stephen Moss frames NDD as a disorder leading to physical health problems in children including obesity, mental health problems, and growing inability to assess risks to themselves and others.

Timothy Egan at the New York Times argues that growing epidemic of obesity in the US is linked to lack of time outdoors.

Aleks Krotoski challenged the idea that nature deficit disorder exists and that not going outside is linked to an increase in obesity among children. But whether there is a causal link or not, it seems clear that getting kids outside more -- in addition to other changes such as better diet -- could help them in many ways.

Egan makes some deep links:

Nature may eventually come to those who shun it, and not in a pretty way. We stay indoors. We burn fossil fuels. The CO2 buildup adds to global warming. Suburbs of Denver are aflame this week, and much of the United States is getting ready for the tantrums of hurricane and tornado season, boosted by atmospheric instability. 

Last week, an Australian mountaineer named Lincoln Hall died at the age of 56, and in the drama of that life cut short is a parable of sorts. Hall is best known for surviving a night at more than 28,000 feet on Mount Everest, in 2006. He’d become disoriented near the summit, and couldn’t move — to the peril of his sherpas. They left him for dead. And Hall’s death was announced to his family. But the next day, a group of climbers found Hall sitting up, jacket unzipped, mumbling, badly frostbitten — but alive. He later wrote a book, “Dead Lucky: Life After Death on Mount Everest.” 

Still, having survived perhaps the most inhospitable, dangerous and life-killing perch on the planet, Hall died in middle age of a human-caused malady from urban life — mesothelioma, attributed to childhood exposure to asbestos.

The challenge

When the modern world was being born, the supposedly inescapable limitations of human nature was a conservative theme. Inherited traditional beliefs and forms of authority were held to be all that most people could understand or live by. To convince a wide public to reject these a priori limits and trust themselves morally and politically was the first, heroic task of Enlightenment intellectuals. Faith in progress was once a precondition of progress. It still is, to the extent that contemporary right-wing libertarianism insists that democratically controlled enterprises must always be less efficient than hierarchical ones like corporations. 

But entwined with democratic self-confidence, there grew up a less reflective faith in unlimited material progress, based partly on a belief that human wants and needs would grow to match increases in productive capacity. This may have seemed plausible before the environmental limits to growth became obvious in the mid-twentieth century; but more important, it was also convenient for those who wished to deflect attention from the gradual and many-sided loss of autonomy that industrial mass production and bureaucratically organized medical/educational/psychotherapeutic expertise imposed on nearly everyone. As the state, the economy, and the institutions regulating everyday life all grew in scale, the only sphere of autonomy left to ordinary people was consumption. And so an entire ideology and technology of consumption arose, on the premise that happiness consisted primarily in consumption, which could apparently be increased without limit. And if that’s true, then our powerlessness doesn’t matter.

-- George Scialabba

The Royals

Anyone who wants to know what the Occupy Wall Street protests are all about need only look at the way Bank of America does business. It comes down to this: These guys are some of the very biggest assholes on Earth. They lie, cheat and steal as reflexively as addicts, they laugh at people who are suffering and don't have money, they pay themselves huge salaries with money stolen from old people and taxpayers – and on top of it all, they completely suck at banking. And yet the state won't let them go out of business, no matter how much they deserve it, and it won't slap them in jail, no matter what crimes they commit. That makes them not bankers or capitalists, but a class of person that was never supposed to exist in America: royalty.

-- Matt Taibbi on Bank of America

Thoughts for the day

If you're not angry you're not paying attention.
If you're not terrified you're not paying attention.
If you're not joyful you're not paying attention.

Sparks

Devices for producing electricity began to appear in the eighteenth century. Johan Winkler, a professor in Leipzig, could charge himself from a 'friction machine' and set glasses of brandy on fire by throwing sparks from his tongue.

-- a vignette from The Music Room by William Fiennes

Booms and flashes

A couple of recent articles in New Scientist about strange sounds and lights on Earth:

* Every so often, a loud booming noise is heard from over the horizon without any obvious explanation.

*Weird earthquake warning lights (one of 'seven wonders of the atmosphere').

No flow

Three days ago I learned that I may have osteoarthritis in my right knee.  This is no big deal in the scheme of things. It is not unusual in someone of my age (I am 48), but nor is it very common, and it hit me like a hammer blow.

I have been fortunate with my health and have been cross country running for many years. I have trekked in some of the toughest and most beautiful terrain on Earth. This year I had started training for a spring event, and was particularly looking forward to it, not least because some other avenues in life seem dark, perhaps blocked.   Running in the woods and the hills when the sun is bright can be a peak experience:  I enter a state of flow -- a zone -- that I otherwise experience only a few activities such as music and thinking-and-writing (when the thinking-and-writing is going especially well.

The complex

Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka argue that 'the nonproliferation complex' -- 'a loose conglomeration of academic programmes, think tanks, NGOs, charitable departments and government departments all formally dedicated to the reduction of nuclear dangers' -- is based on a (self) deception. Excerpt:

To eliminate the danger of eventual nuclear war, we will have to embark on a far more revolutionary political project than the nonproliferation complex acknowledges, or perhaps is even aware of. A study from 1946, when only one nation had the bomb, captured the problem:

"Effective international control to guarantee that atomic weapons could not be used by an aggressor nation is virtually impossible under the present concept of a world divided into nations maintaining their full sovereignty. No system of inspection can be expected to be 100 per cent effective in such a world, and 99 per cent is no guarantee."

The authors of this statement, not dreamy idealists but the US joint chiefs of staff, recognised what the complex has avoided. Nuclear abolition is not going to happen unless a regime is devised capable of preventing a national from building a bomb on the sly. Such a regime would have to be more powerful than any existing state, so cannot be conceived as part of a world divided into sovereign nations. If you want to get to nuclear zero, this is the kind of political agenda you have to address. As long as the tacit twin goals of the complex -- selective non-proliferation and ineffectual abolition -- continue to shape the international agenda, one outcome is certain: a world filled with nuclear weapons.

It's very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like

Together

...Religions have wisely insisted that we are inherently flawed creatures: incapable of lasting happiness, beset by troubling sexual desires, obsessed by status, vulnerable to appalling accidents and always slowly dying. 

They have also, of course, in many cases believe in the possibility that a deity might be able to help us. We see this combination of despair and hope with particular clarity at Jerusalem's Western or Wailing Wall, where Jews have, since the second half of the sixteenth century, gathered to ari their griefs and to be their creator for help. At the base of the wall, they have written down their sorrows on small pieces of paper, inserted these into gaps and mong the stones and hoped that God would be moved to mercy by their pain. 

Remove God from this equation and what do we have left? Bellowing humans calling out in vain to an empty sky This is tragic and yet, if we are to recuse a shred of comfort from the bleakness, at least the dejected are to be found weeping together...

-- from Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton

P.S. 16 Feb: 'Religions are human creations,' writes John Gray. 'When they are consciously designed to be useful, they are normally short-lived. The ones that survive are those that have evolved to serve enduring human needs - especially the need for self-transcendence.'

Stephen Hester and the sheriff of Rockridge

Stephen Hester explained that he and his colleagues had a duty "to defuse the biggest time bomb in history in terms of bank balance sheets."

But who created the time bomb if not the banks and their chums in off-shore and secrecy jurisdictions, aided by politicians?

How some conservatives corrupt language

One has to jump through some hoops of rhetoric and framing to get from Margaret Thatcher's 'there is no such thing as society' to Mitt Romney's 'corporations are people, my friend' but there is a straight line linking the two.

Niall Ferguson's abuse of language is no less striking when he adopts Joseph Schumpeter's most famous phrase to write, with evident relish, of an upcoming attack on Iran that 'It feels like the eve of some creative destruction.'

Winston Churchill, a great conservative, would not have talked of war in this way.

An ocean was here...

...once, perhaps twice

Here's an image, taken in 2005, of ice near Mars's north pole:

Move your money

Move your money

Short

In a discussion of the financial crisis, Francis Fukuyama recommends The Big Short by Michael Lewis. “What this book does quite brilliantly is show that there was actually a high degree of intentionality in creating the crisis.”  This is something that any of us who have tried to educate ourselves now know well.  Much of the financial system was, and largely remains, predatory. A primary question now is what to do about it.  (Some ideas, perhaps here and here.)

I read The Big Short a while ago and strongly recommend it to anyone who hasn't.  Only today did I start reading Boomerang, Lewis's more recent collection of essays. The piece on Iceland is funny as well as insightful:

...Back away from the Icelandic economy and you can't help but notice something really strange about it: the people have cultivated themselves to the point where they are unsuited for the work available to them. All these exquisitely schooled, sophisticated people, each and every one of whom feels special, are presented with two mainly horrible ways to earn and living: trawler fishing and aluminium smelting There are of course a few jobs in Iceland that any refined, educated person might like to do. Certifying the non-existence of elves, for instance...But not nearly so many as the place needs, given its talent for turning cod into PhDs. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Icelanders were still waiting for some task more suited to their filigreed minds to turn up inside their economy so they might do it. Enter investment banking...

It remains to be seen whether women will make a better job of Iceland's future than its men have of its present...assuming men let them.

Sky light

Early yesterday evening I was, while calm, quite down. Then, on the way to collect L at about 5.20, I saw the sky. It was very clear, and a deep blue light filled the west before the oncoming night.  The new moon, about a quarter full, was towards the zenith in the south.  Beneath it and slightly to the right was Jupiter. Further towards the southwest and considerably lower though still high up (perhaps 45 degrees) was Venus. The clarity was exceptional and I fancied I could see Venus's crescent my naked eye. I felt profound joy and awe at the sight - an intimation of the dance of matter of which consciousness is part. And I remembered an even more intense moment of this kind when looking at hillside woodland on a bright afternoon winter light just two days before that I had already forgotten. The trees were dormant but life was still dancing.

Safe House

Janine Webber, born in Lvov in 1932, tells me she survived by posing as a Catholic and working as a maid. "I lived with two families: one betrayed me and killed my brother. After that, we lived in a hole, 13 adults and me, hidden by a young Pole. His name was Edek. He hid 14 Jews for nothing, for no money. For a year, in a bunker. We took it in turns to lie down or to sit. For a year, I didn't see daylight. I was 10."

-- Jonathan Freedland

Catch 2012

There was only one catch and that was Catch 2012, which specified that no country was allowed to have nuclear weapons to deter its enemy's nuclear weapons unless it already had them.

The only countries that possessed nuclear weapons legally – the permanent members of the UN Security Council – did so on the understanding that they had made a solemn promise to phase them out. This they had no intention of doing.

Countries like North Korea and Israel which possessed nuclear weapons illegally did not consider themselves bound by any such undertaking – an indication of the higher moral standard to which they aspired. These countries made it very clear that they had the power to inflict indiscriminate death on the civilian population of their neighbours, and that was just fine with them.

Countries like Iran which saw themselves as threatened by weapons of mass destruction held illegally countries like Israel were, however, under no circumstances to be allowed to possess the power to deter such an attack. If they tried to do so, they were to be destroyed, even if this caused catastrophic damage to the global economy and sowed seeds of hatred for generations to come.

Some people suggested that it would be quite easy to avoid such a conflict. All that would have to happen would be for the nations that possessed nuclear weapons illegally or sought to do so to phase them out or refrain from making them in the first place, and agree to a nuclear-free regional zone enforced by intrusive UN inspections.  This suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm and relief by most civilians. As the consequence it was immediately laughed at and dismissed by those who made the decisions.


(P.S. 31 Jan: Steve Coll on cool heads)

The carceral state

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

-- Adam Gopnik quotes from Charles Dickens on solitary confinement in an outstanding piece on incarceration in the United States. Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags. At any one time around 50,000 of them are in solitary confinement.

Birdsong

I put on the headphones and was suddenly engulfed in birdsong—so much so that for a moment I took them off to look around. Where were all these birds? The sun’s first rays were just lighting the foggy gray around us, and I thought I should be able to see them. Certainly, I could hear them through the headphones. Krause smiled, understanding my bewilderment. “Just listen,” he advised. I put them back on, and once again felt the slight disorientation of being pulled into an invisible world, one I had never known existed. Goldfinches added their quick, metallic notes to the more melodious calls of the sparrows; robins and grosbeaks whistled sweetly, juncos chirped, and towhees wheezed tow-wheee, tow-wheee. Every few minutes, another species joined the chorus, creating the morning’s biological symphony. I was instantly addicted, and I wanted to know why. Even more, I wanted to know why these once ubiquitous choruses are in such decline.

-- from The Sound of Silence by Virginia Morrell

Experiments in ethics

One version of Naturalism starts by thinking of ethics not as the search for a single immutable all-serving principle, but rather as an entirely human endeavor, a project begun by our remote ancestors tens of thousands of years ago and continuing indefinitely into the future. There is no mountain to climb, no final compendium of ethical truths, but only a central human predicament, from which we escaped by learning—imperfectly—to regulate our own conduct. The philosophical study of this project must absorb the insights of various natural and human sciences, bits of evolutionary biology and primatology, of psychology and anthropology, of archaeology and history. (Naturalism should be elaborated broadly, recognizing the potential contributions of all rigorous forms of inquiry across the entire spectrum, from art history and anthropology to zoology; there is no need for Naturalists to lapse into the scientism of taking some particular area of physical science as fundamental.) Sensible conclusions cannot be reached by pitting imprecise principles against fanciful cases, but rather by looking, as carefully and as comprehensively as we can, at the details of ethical practice and ethical change.

-- from Philip Kitcher's review of On What Matters by Derek Parfit

Liu Xiabo

When the “rise” of a large dictatorial state that commands rapidly increasing economic strength meets with no effective deterrence from outside, but only an attitude of appeasement from the international mainstream, and if the Communists succeed in once again leading China down a disastrously mistaken historical road, the results will not only be another catastrophe for the Chinese people, but likely also a disaster for the spread of liberal democracy in the world. If the international community hopes to avoid these costs, free countries must do what they can to help the world’s largest dictatorship transform itself as quickly as possible into a free and democratic country.

Liu Xiabo quoted by Simon Leys

Dark materials

...any hopes that the nature of [dark matter] would be quickly revealed by these first detections have been utterly dashed. The trouble is that dark matter appears to be different things to different detectors. It appears heavier in one detector than another; it appears more ready to interact in one experiment than another. In the most extreme case, it shows up in one instrument but not in another - even when both are made of identical material and are sitting virtually next door in the same underground lab...

-- from Dark matter mysteries

Beyond Afgansty

More than ten years after September 11, it is simply appalling that supposedly well-informed people are still treating the terrorist threat in such a crude and mechanistic fashion. Have they not realized that the membership of al-Qaeda and its allies is not fixed, but depends on al-Qaeda’s ability to recruit among Muslims infuriated by US actions? Or that a terrorist attack on the US is as likely—more likely—to be planned in Karachi, Lahore, the English town of Bradford, or New York as in Pakistan’s frontier areas? An essential US motive for a peace settlement in Afghanistan, one allowing complete withdrawal from Afghanistan, is precisely that it would allow America to pull back from the existing confrontation with Pakistan—not continue it into the indefinite future, with all the gains that this would create for resentment by extremists.

-- Anatol Lieven

Midwinter

'Hi!' said the Muskrat. 'Now I should like my book spirited back again, please.'

'Right!' said the Hobgoblin. 'Here you are, sir!'

' "On the Usefulness of Everything",' read the Muskrat. 'But this it the wrong book. The one I had was about the Uselessness of Everything.'

But the Hobgoblin only laughed.

-- from Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson.

The worse angels of our nature

We are different from the Nazis and the Soviets not because we have more self-control -- we don't. We are different largely because postwar improvements in agricultural technology have provided the West with reliable supplies of food, our massive consumption of which says much about our limited self-control. But what if food were to become scarcer and more expensive, as seems now to be the trend? What if unfavorable climate change were to outrun our technical capacities? Or what if melting glaciers leave societies such as China without fresh water? Pinker claims, unpersuasively, that global warming poses little threat to modern ways of life. But it hardly matters whether he is right: states are already taking action to minimize its consequences. China, for example, is buying up land in Africa and Ukraine in order to compensate for its own shortage of arable soil. The fresh water of Siberia must beckon. If scientists continue to issue credible warnings about the consequences of climate change, it would be surprising if leaders did not conjure up new reasons for preemptive violent action, positioning their states for a new age of want.

-- from War No More, Timothy Snyder's review of Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature.

Trails and stories

The nomads who still inhabit the Kalahari Desert are said to tell one another stories on their daylong wanderings, during which they search for edible roots and animals to hunt. Often they have more than one story going at the same time. Sometimes they have three or four stories running in parallel. But before they return to the spot where they will spend the night, they manage either to intertwine the stories or split them apart for good, giving each its own ending.

-- Henning Mankell

Durban and Kellogg-Briand

Last week, looking over various comments (including this) on COP 17, the following came to mind: 

I wonder sometimes if Durban and the COP process generally is a little like the negotiations that led up to the Kellogg-Briand pact outlawing war.  Lots of good intentions, but the real action was elsewhere.   This is not to say that trying to negotiate treaties on war and violence is totally pointless; they did, for example, lead to the Geneva conventions.

Flying (2)

SENSE OF FLYING from Goovinn on Vimeo.


I Believe I can Fly ( flight of the frenchies). Trailer from sebastien montaz-rosset on Vimeo.

Flying (1) here

A hitchhiker's guide to the multiverse

Different theories spin off very different kinds of multiverses. Our current standard theory of how the universe came to be, for example, predicts an infinite expanse of other universes, including an infinite number in which duplicates of you are reading this sentence and wondering if those other versions of you really exist. Meanwhile, string theory, which hoped to derive the particles, forces and constants of our universe from fundamental principles, instead discovered a wilderness of 10^500 universes fundamentally different from ours. Even quantum mechanics implies that our universe is a single snowflake in a blizzard of parallel universes.

-- from The Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse.

A journey into light

As I understand it, people who are clinically depressed can get caught in there unable to move. The thing that the composer can do and the music can do is give you a ladder outwards from somewhere very extreme and painful...

...One of the most curious things is the pleasure we take in painful and unhappy music. There must be a reason for this, and part of may be that in exploring deep emotion the music gives you access to what they call 'the locus of control.' In other words, you externalize your feelings such that you can observe them and make changes in them or at least realise that change is possible. You can see that from the painfulness that something beautiful has occurred, and that begins to give it meaning. And if there's one thing about the human condition it's that all things are bearable if they have meaning...

...There's a paradox, a tension between the desire we have to let go of ourselves, to become without boundary (this is very beautiful but very terrifying) and the horror of finding ourselves completely hemmed in by boundaries, unable to make choices.... And there's something about music in particular... that allows us to find/project/ discover/make within that fabric of sound identifications with the most profound inner conditions.  This may be what music exists for...

For quite a long period I would take my string quartet to play in hospitals and we would often be playing for people who had truly diabolical situations, and sorrows. People do face big issues when they're that ill. To begin with, naively, we used to take in music that was broadly 'cheerful', what ever that means! But no; what we found was that if we took something like Schubert's Death of a Maiden or Schostakovitch's 8th quartet, this was the greatest consolation.

I can only theorize as to why this might be. We can all recognize that there's something extraordinarly uplifiting about recognizing that somebody has made something beautiful from being in such a condition themselves. There's something extremely liberating because even though we are taken up and gripped by music we always actually have choice so that the locus of control remains with us. And the very fact that we can chose to enter the searing emotional world of Shostakovich knowing that we can choose to step out -- we're free not to be there -- gives us an extraordinary philosphical freedom, which is what we are looking for.

From a rough transcript of remarks by Prof Paul Robinson,  interviewed by Stephen Johnson for Into the Light, an approach to Shostakovitch that was rebroadcast yesterday.

The reverend is against the death penalty, but in thinking about it before the camera he veers off into an anecdote about a golf trip and his relief at not hitting a squirrel and killing one of God’s creatures, and we can see how, when pressed to illuminate its own contradictions, the human mind can go on the fritz. This may really be Herzogʼs theme.

-- from Werner Herzog on Death Row by Lorrie Moore

Fun-sized nuclear weapons

Linked from a report on the expanding US budget for nuclear weapons, Mother-Jones lists 8 of the Wackiest (or Worst) Ideas for Nuclear Weapons

These have included The Davy Crockett, a tactical nuclear recoilless rifle with a 0.01-kiloton payload that was designed for use on conventional battlefields, and deployed by the US Army until 1971.

What ho, Jeeves! Some of these sweethearts should come in handy for keeping the Persians in line!

'The music will begin shortly'

If you stop playing for like, even like a year - sometimes it all builds up in a really great way. But there's no such thing as not playing... Music has rests in it, so you are on a rest right now. And the music will begin shortly... It's like an orchestra tuning up. 

I used to try and get myself started. I would take a tape recorder, and I would put it in the trashcan and - the ones that are on wheels... And I'd turn it on, and then I'd roll around in the yard with it, and then play it back and see if I could hear any interesting rhythms, you know, that were just part of nature. 

Or - I tell you, the best snare drum on earth is a trampoline in like, November, when all the branches have landed and they're heavy and they're wet. And then you jump on the trampoline; they all lift up and come down at the same time. It's like, wow.

-- Tom Waits

Day of the Dead

A report from Basic notes:

• The US is planning to spend $700bn on nuclear weapons over the next decade. A further $92bn will be spent on new nuclear warheads and the US also plans to build 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines, air-launched nuclear cruise missiles and bombs. 

• Russia plans to spend $70bn on improving its strategic nuclear triad (land, sea and air delivery systems) by 2020. It is introducing mobile ICBMs with multiple warheads, and a new generation of nuclear weapons submarines to carry cruise as well as ballistic missiles. There are reports that Russia is also planning a nuclear-capable short-range missile for 10 army brigades over the next decade. 

• China is rapidly building up its medium and long-range "road mobile" missile arsenal equipped with multiple warheads. Up to five submarines are under construction capable of launching 36-60 sea-launched ballistic missiles, which could provide a continuous at-sea capability. 

• France has just completed deployment of four new submarines equipped with longer-range missiles with a "more robust warhead". It is also modernising its nuclear bomber fleet. 

• Pakistan is extending the range of its Shaheen II missiles, developing nuclear cruise missiles, improving its nuclear weapons design as well as smaller, lighter, warheads. It is also building new plutonium production reactors. 

• India is developing new versions of its Agni land-based missiles sufficient to target the whole of Pakistan and large parts of China, including Beijing. It has developed a nuclear ship-launched cruise missile and plans to build five submarines carrying ballistic nuclear missiles. 

• Israel is extending its Jericho III missile's range, and is developing an ICBM capability, expanding its nuclear-tipped cruise missile enabled submarine fleet. 

• North Korea unveiled a new Musudan missile in 2010 with a range of up to 2,500 miles and capable of reaching targets in Japan. It successfully tested the Taepodong-2 with a possible range of more than 6,000 miles sufficient to hit half the US mainland. However, the report, says, "it is unclear whether North Korea has yet developed the capability to manufacture nuclear warheads small enough to sit on top of these missiles". 

Iran's nuclear aspirations are not covered by the report.

-- Beyond the UK: Trends in the Other Nuclear Armed States via The Guardian

Yes indeed: every day and in every way the world just gets more and more peaceful as the circle of empathy expands.

'After 42 years' by Khaled Mattawa

A Libyan American poet commemorates the overthrow of Kadafi

in 'print' 

read by the author

via Hisham Matar

'Necessary Daemons'

Possession, in the Haitian context, can be kind of rough, the first time or two. Frightening. Terrifying, even. You feel what you think of as your self being peeled away like the husk from a fruit...

-- Madison Smartt Bell

Lives of a cell

I finally got to the end of The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee this weekend, and posted this from penultimate chapter on the blog for The Book of Barely Imagined Beings:

Someday, if a cancer succeeds, it will produce a far more perfect being than its host. 

Preparatory to the observation, Mukerjee has noted that an emerging, although highly controversial, answer to the question of what allows a cancer cell to keep dividing endlessly without exhaustion or depletion generation upon generation is that cancer’s immortality is actually borrowed from normal physiology and, specifically, the stupendous fecundity of stem cells. No less remarkable (at least to me as a naive and ignorant reader) is the ability of the body as a whole to switch this on and off:

The human embryo and many of our adult organs possess a tiny population of stem cells that are capable of immortal regeneration. Stem cells are the body’s reservoir renewal. The entirety of human blood, for instance, can arise from a single, highly potent blood-forming cell (called a hematopoietic stem cell), which typically lives buried inside the bone marrow. Under normal conditions, only a fraction of these blood-forming stem cells are active; the rest are deeply quiescent -- asleep. But if blood is suddenly depleted, by injury or chemotherapy, say, then the stem cells awaken and begin to divide with awe-inspiring fecundity, generating thousands upon thousands of blood cells. In weeks, a single hematopoietic stem cell can replenish the entire human organism with new blood -- and then, through yet unknown mechanisms, lull itself back to sleep. [1]

I also read Will Self's essay on blood disease and drug addiction. Death, writes Self, remains the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all. Cancer, though, is also a distorted simulacrum of life.





Footnote

 [1] Even in normal circumstances, however, haematopoiesis reportedly manufactures more than 100 billion new blood cells every day

Something useful on peak oil

I have criticized wooly thinking about peak oil in the past, but I have a lot to learn, so it's good to come across some clear thinking on the topic from Jim Murray (pdf). This, for example, is quite neat:

Peak oil hypotheses 

It's not about the reserves 

It's about the production rate 

We are not close to running out of oil 

Never predict the future price of world oil or the date of world oil peak. You will only be proved wrong and discredited.

'We are awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare'

Slavoj Žižek recalls an old joke from the German Democratic Republic:

a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is red ink.”

The Grand Map

This happens to be how many of us enter the great map. One night, you locate a distant childhood intersection. You leave the street map and enter the scene, passing seamlessly from map to territory. But there are no goofy hijinks or bloody corpses there. No sublime horses. Just a bright, sunny street with uneven sidewalks, lined with parked cars—a place that once contained everything that you knew and needed to know, which once held the entire range of possible truths. Then you take a Google-step back, and suddenly it’s a bit less sunny and a bit more populated. You swing around to your left, and now the sky is overcast and foreboding. A step forward and a neighborhood man you once knew, who was pictured sitting on his porch a frame ago, has vanished. Now the sun is out again, but setting. This private territory, with its radically shifting light, its dreamlike angles, and its specters popping in and out of view—that odd combination of detailed recollection and ever-thickening fog—resembles the structure of memory itself. It’s like visiting a lost place. It’s not the grandest idea but, at certain moments in life, it’s the best we’ve got.

-- from The Grand Map by Avi Steinberg

The Angel of Capital

Above and beyond the monopoly of violence claimed by the major states, there has emerged a new kind of command, a monopoly of actuality, exercised on one hand through the power to teletechnology to shape the world in its own image, and on the other by the power of money to decide what deserves to exist. The effective horizon of this control oscillates somewhere between the news cycle and the business cycle; moment by moment it translates everything it knows into the present tense. It seeks to glory not only in ratifying its mastery over what happens today; it meticulously amortizes what used to be and assiduously discounts what is yet to come.

-- from The Bonds of Debt by Richard Dienst.

'Temple of the winds'

Interesting section in Jim Al-Khalili's Hearing the Past, starting about 9 minutes 30 secs in, on the acoustic characteristics of Stonehenge. And he quotes from Hardy in Tess:

The wind playing upon the edifice produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one stringed harp.

Some of the work by Rupert Till et al is explored at Sounds of Stonehenge.

Perhaps archaeoacoustics will, one day, inform an even broader 'archaeology of the senses' in which the deep history of other senses including smell is even better understood.


P.S. 20 Sep: Bill Fontana wants to bring sounds of Chesil Beach to central London.

P.P.S. 17 Feb '12: Did otherworldy music inspire Stonehenge?

The Stalin Prize

I have little to add to Jonathan Steele's commentary on the launch of everycasualty and the issues it raises. Here are a few quick notes:

The dedication and courage of Sandra Orlovic and Bekim Blakaj, Deputy Director and Director of the Humanitarian Law Centre in, respectively, Belgrade and Pristina, and their colleagues is magnificent. There is great nobility in projects such as The Kosovo Memory Book 1998. Both Orlovic and Blakaj emphasized the importance, in the face of considerable opposition, of recording and describing in some detail the lives of all who died in the violence, military and civilian on both sides. By way of reminder that this in itself is not enough, Blakaj noted that 12 years after the end of the war there had been only 12 successful prosecutions for war crimes. No justice, however, was possible without an honest account of what actually happened.

Wissam Tarif of INSAN expanded on this last point. Those documenting the identity of individuals murdered or abducted in Syria and elsewhere were sometimes accused of opening tombs and opening wounds. But that was precisely the opposite of what they were doing.  Tombs and wounds could never be closed without a full accounting for what actually happened. In his own country, Lebanon, people were not fighting at present but there was no peace, only a ceasefire. This was because the Lebanese had to failed to acknowledge facts, to recognize the humanity of all those who were killed and to face their families.

According to the 2011 World Development Report, around 1.5bn people today live under the shadow of organized violence. Much of this violence is criminal. One of the questions at the launch was: should  innocent victims of crime and criminals who were themselves killed also be counted by projects such as everycasualty? One of the challenges in the 21st century, it was argued, is that while war between nations and even 'formal' civil wars are actually less frequent than before, large-scale, inchoate criminalized violence is on a greater scale than ever. This presents a challenge to existing institutional arrangements: agencies such as the Red Cross, for example, cannot act in Mexico even though the scale of the violence (recent small but typical example here) resembles war because the government does not recognize a state of war. [1]

Dan Smith of International Alert said that by making it possible to know who had died in a conflict and how, the charter had the potential to reduce the traction of wild claims (up or down), which were the meat and drink of propaganda. The charter could help us respect the 'fact of war', a continuing reality which is too often hidden behind cliches and euphemisms.

everycasualty, said Smith, was a civilising idea. Like all great ideas it was obvious once stated, but it also subtly challenged the norm. Also, there was something slightly obsessive, unrealistic about it. In this, it shared much with the ideals of the Red Cross at its foundation -- a 'wildly unrealistic' idea at the time of its inception, which acted on nothing but moral authority.

I think this is right. The everycasualty charter challenges the disturbingly plausible observation, misattributed, perhaps, to Joseph Stalin, that one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic. It aims to make visible and irrefutable the tragedy of the violent death of each individual, including the deaths of those who are themselves killers.

Wissam Tarif told those present at the launch that the previous evening he had talked by telephone to one the volunteers on his team in Syria. The volunteer had said that in the midst of conflict people are completely focussed on what is happening right now. But others not caught up in the conflict -- such as those gathered together peacefully in London -- had the opportunity to think about the future. This was a tremendous gift.

everycasualty is an idea big enough for a version of the 21st century in which there is hope.  It will not of course end tragedy.  Ideals are frequently subverted (it is reported, for example, that death squads in Syria are using Red Cross/Red Crescent ambulances to abduct protestors).  And even a full accounting need not guarantee reconciliation. But it is a start.

A couple of other points: in June the Oxford Research Group published a working paper on The Legal Obligation to Record Civilian Casualties of Armed Conflict. And, drawing on the model of Iraq Body Count, there is now a Pakistan Body Count.


Note [1] My language and legal understanding here are shaky.

P.S. 24 Sep: A blog post by Dan Smith, who was on the panel at the launch

Flying (1)

Unacknowledged noticers

Scientists are:

partly poets for they are not merely embellishing with their metaphors, but extending meaning into new domains

-- from a review by Nancy Golubiewski of Brendon Larson's Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability Redefining Our Relationship with Nature.

Sleeping with one eye, like a dolphin

Reverie, writes Raphaël Enthoven:

borrows the power of narration from wakefulness and the power of divination from sleep, and keeps them vying to suspend the alternation of day and night. Reverie is how one arrives at immediacy.

After writing Hypnagogia I should be sympathetic. Enthoven has considerable insight, but packages it in prose that -- at least in translation, or for my taste -- teeters on the edge of parody:

Between the sweetness of being and the pain of thinking, between sleep that is opaque to itself and the blindness of one who can’t see the stars because of daylight, lies the talent to glimpse what escapes us, the equivalent of the dawn that threatens at every instant to evaporate into dream or condense into knowing, but in that interval (and pen in hand) replaces something impenetrable with something immaterial and reveals the imaginary foundations of reality...

Because it generously accords the world the absentmindedness it deserves, reverie is light years distant from being a distraction, which does reality the considerable honor of turning its back on it. In fact, reverie celebrates the rediscovery of understanding and imagination, sets free the secret of disinterest which, because it lets you see beauty without your consent and see nature without ego, invests the world with intense interest.

Regions of light

All things, including the species to which we belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and reproduce successfully endure at least for a time;  those which are no so well suited die off quickly.  Other species and vanished existed before we came onto the scene; our kind, too, will vanish one day. Nothing -- from our own species to the sun -- lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal.

In a universe so constituted, Lucretius argued, it is absurd to think that the earth and its inhabitants occupy a central place, or that the world was purpose-built to accommodate human beings: "The child, like a sailor cast forth by the cruel waves, lies naked upon the ground, speechless, in need of every kind of vital support, as soon as nature has spilt him forth with throes from his mother's womb into the regions of light." There is no reason to set humans apart from other animals, no hope of bribing or appeasing the gods, no place for religious fanaticism, no call for ascetic self-denial, no justification for dreams of limitless power or perfect security, no rationale for wars of conquest or self-aggrandizement, no possibility of triumphing over nature. Instead, he wrote, human beings should conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and pleasure of the world.

-- from an essay on Lucretius by Stephen Greenblatt. But, notes Greenblatt, there is something disturbingly cold in Lucretius' account of pleasure.

 P.S. 1 Oct: In a review of The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt's, Sarah Bakewell quotes Poggio Bracciolini, who discovered a complete manuscript of De Rerum Natura in 1417:

Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

Stormy weather

On Saturn a raging storm has developed from a small spot to cover an area about 4 billion square kilometres, or eight times the surface of the Earth (NASA, New Scientist).

Neptune's moon Triton has a thin atmosphere and huge streaks of black material across its surface. These are created by geysers of dust and nitrogen erupting from under its icy surface as it is heated by the sun. In other words, even at the edge of the solar system, where temperatures are below -200C, sunlight can still drive distinctive weather systems. (Carl Murray of UCL quoted in Guardian report)

'Into Eternity'

Here are a few half-thoughts (predictable for those who know my views) about Into Eternity, which I watched last night.

1. This is an outstanding piece of work. Do go out of your way to give it the time and attention it deserves.



2. Andrei Tarkovsky already made this movie. It was called Stalker.

3. A viewing of Into Eternity reinforces my view that it is corrupt and wrong to continue to increase the amount of nuclear waste unless and until we have proven and economically sane solutions as to what to do with that waste and we ensure that those who profit from new investment in nuclear power also bear their fare share of the liabilities and long term costs it imposes.

4. It would be good to see a thorough investigation of what the options are for (third, fourth generation...) nuclear power, and what prospects there may be for rendering nuclear waste, not least plutonium, less dangerous. A participant in Into Eternity says that it is theoretically possible to make transform waste into harmless substances but not practical to do so, but the film takes the issue no further. This assertion does need to be explored and tested in many fora, including non-technical documentary film.

5. The reality in the UK seems to be rather different from Finland/Sweden. Sellafield, where ... tonnes of plutonium are ‘temporarily’ stored on the surface in what is by some accounts a Steptoe and Son operation, with chaotic record keeping and people routinely ignoring alarms when they go off. Britain has at least £70 billion of liabilities in remediation at this and other sites to meet before we even start on something new. Meanwhile, as a polity, we are not yet anywhere remotely approaching serious regarding potential alternatives. We invest, according to one account, around £12m (20p per capita) per year into renewable energy generation and storage (wind, solar, hydrogen etc) R&D.

6. Watch this clip:



Note: Thanks to Jessie Tegin and OpenCity UCL for sending a copy of the film

P.S. There is a campaign to stop new nuclear power stations in Britain.

P.S. 5 July: George Monbiot has a useful commentary here, to which I have added my one penny worth of response here.

'I guess what I’m saying is at some point, we’ve all parked in the wrong garage.'

Apart from the whole Mao was “70% correct, 30% incorrect” blather which the [Chinese Communist] Party has been clinging to like a crazy shut-in on an episode of Hoarders, there’s also a growing tendency to excuse the worst excesses of the 1958-1976 period as simply “Mao being Mao.” Like a kindly but eccentric drunk uncle who gave out candy to little children but also did to 5-10 for putting the candy store owner into a coma with a 2×4. I don’t count myself among the “Mao the Monster” crowd, but give the guy his due: His reign featured some of the the craziest and most destructive events in 20th century history, and whether he was the mastermind or a dupe is kind of irrelevant. As bad ideas go, having this guy run your country is up there with hitching a ride with Ryan Dunn or hiring R. Kelly as your baby sitter.

Mao may have been great as a political visionary, a poet, a revolutionary general and/or a noted connoisseur of stewed fatty pork, but when that many people die on your watch and the NEXT guy (or the next, next guy – sorry Hua) presides over a historically unprecedented period of economic development…that’s not good. That’s not even 30% not good. That’s like 70% sucks and 30% really, really sucks and all the Red Songs in the world aren’t going to change those numbers.

-- from It’s a Mad Mad 90th Anniversary by Jeremiah Jenne