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I have made no secret here of my admiration for Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.
I was especially struck by the pages where he describes The Enlightenment, and I have taken the liberty of scanning these pages into my personal blog. If anyone connected with the book objects, my posting will be removed, so if a brief exposition of what The Enlightenment was and how the ideas behind it all fitted together appeals, go there, soon, and read on.
Two questions naturally arise from Pinker’s summary. First, is it an accurate description? Or does Pinker impose a coherence upon Enlightenment thinking that it never quite possessed for real? (My guesses: yes, and no.) Second, if I am right that Pinker does describe the unified scientific and moral agenda of The Enlightenment accurately, then how true are these ideas? Were errors made, as well as truths declared? Did these errors do harm? (Did any of the truths do harm?)
I could go on, but prefer not to. Suffice it to say here that it’s there if you want it, for the time being anyway.
Earlier today I visited my elder brother, in the family home we shared as children in Englefield Green, up the hill from Egham in the county of Surrey. I chose today for this fraternal reunion because the weather forecast was particularly encouraging, and I wanted also to include a visit to the nearby Air Forces Memorial.
This was my first view of this Memorial:
As you can see, the weather forecast was not wrong.
What I have always liked about the Air Forces Memorial is the views from the top of the tower. Climb that, and you are above the trees and can look out over the Thames Valley. On a day like today, you can see clearly, for miles. → Continue reading: Remembrance
Last week, on Wednesday October 31st, unaware that this was “Halloween Night”, and entirely for my own personal reasons, I happened to find myself at Piccadilly Circus, in the middle of London. Lots of people were dressed in funny costumes, with a definite bias towards monster masks and make-up that suggested extras in horror movies. I had my camera with me and snapped away. It was dark, but the big adverts flickering away above and beyond the scene ensured that it was quite well lit. Some at least of my snaps came out okay.
Halloween has been on the up and up in Britain for quite a while. But when I was a kid half a century ago and more, the big deal at this time of year was Guy Fawkes Night aka Bonfire Night aka Fireworks Night. Halloween was, then, even a distant American rumour.
Guy Fawkes Night is supposedly tonight. Remember remember the fifth of November, etc. I can’t remember the rest of the words of that nursery rhyme or poem or whatever it is, but the date is imprinted on my brain. But Guy Fawkes Night seems to be fading in popularity even as Halloween has risen up to challenge it. It is now, as I finish this posting before its November 5th deadline expires, nearly midnight, and had I not, in my central London home, been listening out for explosions, I would have heard hardly any. Even with maximum alertness, I heard only a tiny few. I am told that many pet dogs are driven nearly mad with fear by these bangings. If only for the sake of these suffering dogs, I now wish that the Guy Fawkes habit would cease entirely.
So, why is Halloween on the rise, and Guy Fawkes Night in decline? It can’t only be that people want to make life better for dogs. Let me now try to guess some of the ways.
Let me start with the simple impracticality of arranging a bonfire these days. As life gets ever more urban, random clutches of combustible material just don’t get accumulated, the way such stuff did in the big suburban garden of my childhood, or out in the public places of Englefield Green, the outer London suburb we lived in, which really did have and still does have a big “green” bit. Simply for that reason, I should guess that Bonfire Night retains more of its old popularity in places like Englefield Green – even more so in the proper countryside – than it now does in central London. In Englefield Green, there is somewhere sensible to do it on a proper scale.
But even that may not be enough for Englefield Green to continue Bonfire Nighting in a big way. The organising classes, the people who once would have organised public space Bonfire Night gatherings complete with a big bonfire and lots of fireworks, are now obsessed with health-and-safety, either because they really believe in it or because so many others do believe in it that the law now hovers over the slightest suggestion of un-safety. Bonfires? Fireworks? Worst than that, fireworks that children hold? Children being children, following Bonfire Nights in the olden times there were always a few stories of children burnt or even blinded by, e.g. mistaking a proper firework for a mere sparkly thing that you were supposed to hang on to. Then, the moral was: well, kids are kids, and those ones should have been more careful and have been better looked after. And: bad luck, how sad. Now, such incidents provoke nationally broadcast sermons about how We Need Tighter Regulation, and lawsuits that go on for ever.
The Organising Classes would probably now like Bonfire Night to be made illegal, to the point where, if it survives, it will do so as an act not of harmless self entertainment, but of popular defiance against officialdom.
But in truth, Bonfire Night, aka Guy Fawkes Night, is not a satisfactory vehicle for such defiance. After all, what Guy Fawkes Night (to choose that particularly pertinent title) celebrates, is the public execution, by the government, of a Catholic terrorist who tried to blow up Parliament. Guy Fawkes night is an officially sponsored celebration of a government victory over anti-government disruption. If we want to defy the government with a Guy Fawkes themed event, we would do better to fake up a Parliamentary explosion and dance around it in Guy Fawkes masks, like the ones worn in Vendetta, and now at every other political demo anyone tries to arrange in London. The thing that gets burned should be Parliament, not a “Guy”. Having already written the previous couple of sentences I watched this clip from Vendetta, that Guido Fawkes has up today, by way of celebrating November 5th and all that. And in that clip they do blow up Parliament, and a huge crowd all wear Guy Fawkes masks. But this doesn’t mean that Guy Fawkes Night is destined to continue as it was, more that the imagery of Guy Fawkes Night is, so to speak, being asset stripped and applied to other activities, activities which are not confined to just the one day in the year.
As for the fireworks side of things, fireworks work best when resources are pooled, and when a precise time is agreed upon as the moment of celebration. I vividly recall visiting West Germany in the 1980s, over the New Year, and witnessing the night sky of Germany being lit up with ferociously Teutonic unanimity at precisely midnight, at the exact end of the old year and the exact beginning of the new. (I wish digital cameras had existed then.) And I recall thinking how much better this was as way to do fireworks than our British week of tiny little bangs and sputters and sparkles. The point was not that all these German fireworks were paid for by the government. Lots of them were impeccably freelance in their financing, as well as in their manufacture of course. The point was that everyone agreed about exactly when the fireworks would all be detonated, so that all could share the fun, and then go back indoors and carry on with their lives.
Then the same thing happened on Millenium Night in London itself, just as it did everywhere else on the planet. This was far more impressive than any “Fireworks Night” display.
Meanwhile, what of Halloween? What’s the appeal of that? Let me try to count at least some of the many reasons why Halloween, unlike Bonfire Night, is now on the rise. → Continue reading: Is Halloween supplanting Guy Fawkes Night in Britain?
I mean, really, why does everyone believe the president is the leader of our country? What he is, is the head of our government, i.e., he is the leader of the least part of our country. We have two groups in America: the people who work hard and create businesses and jobs and all the things that make our country great, and the screw-ups who get in the way of that. Government is by far the greatest force of the latter. So why do we as citizens think the guy we put in charge of the government and all the bureaucrats — “King Idiot,” basically — is our leader? That’s like saying a pothole is in charge of the road.
– Frank J. Fleming
I stuck that paragraph up here just as soon as I read it, and before I had read the rest of Fleming’s piece. But honestly, every paragraph is SQotD material. Read the whole thing.
The traffic in the blackout areas of Manhattan is lawless in the most literal sense: the traffic lights aren’t working, so the law cannot be applied as usual. But “lawless” doesn’t seem to be a fitting description; the driving seems better-behaved than usual. We’re so used to seeing people act under a system of government rules that it’s easy to assume that without the rules, everything would descend into chaos. But perhaps free people are generally capable of acting decently on their own. Of course, that’s never going to be universal; but then, people break the law too. In fact, a dense set of rules tempts people to see how close to (or how far across) the borderline of legality they can go without being penalized. In the absence of governmental laws, people might focus more on other kinds of laws: social norms and ethics.
– This quote was, at the time I reposted it here, prominently featured near the top of Instapundit. But Instapundit moves fast, especially now, when there are about half a dozen of them and they’ve a presidential election to be blogging about. So the above wisdom will soon have been and gone. It deserves to linger longer, I think, and here, it will. A little longer anyway.
Instapundit found it here, and also links, again, to a piece saying that too many traffic rules can make us less safe.
For traffic rules read rules of every sort.
You tax businesses, then give them the money back and call it a growth fund?
– Eamonn Butler is not impressed by Lord Heseltine’s plans to stimulate the British economy.
Here is Roger Kimball, ruefully reflecting on Hurricane Sandy. For Kimball, the meteorological just got very personal:
Well, it was grim, Hurricane Sandy. We were prepared for something bad, but this storm, as we were warned, turned out to be like nothing I had ever seen.
Like nothing I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure. Little old England is a hurricane backwater, thank goodness.
We went back to our neighborhood this morning – it was a circuitous route, given all the downed trees and power lines. It was a devastating scene. Many houses were simply bashed in, crushed by the power of the waves. Even more (like ours, alas) were seriously flooded.
I’m sure there’s a moral here somewhere, probably having to do with hubris, nemesis, or some other unpleasant Greek offering. Or maybe it has to do with that old quip, Do you want to make the gods laugh? Tell them your plans.
Now for the Big Cleanup!
I’ll say.
A few thoughts.
Casualties seem, given the scale of the storm, to have been mercifully light. If so, that proves that the best defence against this kind of thing is to be as rich as you can before disaster strikes. Rich people are able to see what’s coming, to duck and weave, to tell each other what to do, and then to look after each other. Natural disaster is not followed by epidemic disease, the way it is liable to be among very poor people.
Samizdata has lots of American readers, including, presumably quite a few who have suffered directly from this storm. Commiserations from all of us, and here’s hoping you pull through in decent shape. If you have been seriously mucked about by this storm, you might want to ignore the rest of this and if you did I would entirely understand.
But I have to ask. What effect might all this have on the election? → Continue reading: Hurricane Sandy and its consequences
Any organisation that is not dependent upon its customers, whether a state or private monopoly, will eventually become self-serving. During my career I was party to many conversations about how to maximise profit for the owners of our businesses and provide attractive employment terms for our staff, but they all turned in the end to what our customers would want, or at least accept. We spent much more time worrying how to please customers than please ourselves. Satisfied customers who choose to come back are the only guarantee for owners, managers and workers in the private sector that they can achieve their personal goals.
As will all state enterprises funded by taxation, the BBC has become, in effect, a worker’s co-operative. The “customers” have to pay regardless, so they become irrelevant and the focus turns to the interests of its own people. No private business would survive the shit storm that is heading the BBC’s way. The share price would now be collapsing as investors tried to get out before the lawsuits begin. I confidently and sadly predict however that the BBC will survive. It has the coercive power of the state behind it and will simply take your money to settle the cases. It is the left establishment’s propaganda arm and they will rally to restore its reputation.
We are about to have an instructive, but depressing, demonstration of the realities of modern Britain. We will be able to compare and contrast the BBC news and current affairs teams’ handling of this story with their campaign against News International. Just imagine if the phone-hackers had worked for Newsnight and Savile had worked for Sky News!
– Tom Paine comments on the Saville scandal at The Last Ditch.
Follow the first link there and read the entire posting. Better yet, if you have the time or can make it, follow the last link and read the entire blog.
The latest posting there is entitled QC appointed to advise the BBC over Savile case. Says Tom Paine: “The expenditure of your money on the BBC’s defence begins.”
Can one say worthwhile things about a book that one has only begun to read? I think, often: yes. One thing one can definitely report is whether one is reading this or that book with enthusiasm, eager to learn what will follow, or only because of a self-imposed, well-I’ve-started-so-I-might-as-well-finish sense of mere duty.
So far, I have only read somewhat over a hundred and fifty pages of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, but it definitely passes the above test. It is a huge book. Just before finishing this posting I happened to drop my (paperback!) copy of it on my foot, and it really hurt. The text alone runs to over eight hundred pages, and the notes take it over a thousand, yet I already know that I am going to go on reading this book until I finish it, and that when I do finally finish it (I am a very slow reader) I will almost certainly be somewhat regretful, as if coming to the end of a wonderful holiday trip or a particularly satisfying job assignment.
There are so many things I could say about this book, so many thoughts in it and provoked by it that would be blog-worthy, but let me focus on just one, which is that it is such a very, very worthy subject for an academic to be writing about. Pinker has chosen a subject that, he says, needs a long book. Well, a decent but short book could have been written about the relentless decline of violence in human affairs, but I am very happy that this one is indeed extremely long. It is not so much, for me, that this subject needs a long book, as that it so very much deserves one.
The story Pinker tells is of the relentless rise of what he is not afraid to call civilisation. Simply, we humans have become ever less nasty and sadistic towards one another as the decades and centuries and millennia have rolled by, both qualitatively and quantitatively. To make this point, he has already (as I am reading) piled on plenty of agony, about such things as medieval torture devices, and I am sure there will be plenty more such horrors to come.
Says Pinker of this process of moral improvement (on page 160 of the Penguin paperback edition), in a deeply felt parenthetical interjection …
– and if this isn’t progress, I don’t know what is –
Well said. → Continue reading: I have yet to read most of it but I already greatly admire Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature
Here is a photograph of a sculpture, which I recently chanced upon, in the part of the city that is London is known as the City of London:
The sculpture is called “Rush Hour”. It said so, on a sign in the ground in front of it. I also photographed the sign. This is a good habit for a photographer to get into. Cameras are not just for taking pictures. They are also for taking notes.
What struck me about this sculpture, as I looked at it and photoed it, was how depressed they all look, especially when compared with London’s sculpted warriors. The warriors depicted on war memorials had any number of agonies to contend with, yet they stick out their chests, jut out their chins, look the world proudly and defiantly in the eye and tough out whatever challenges and horrors they are obliged to endure. These office drudges, on the other hand, have given up. Their eyes point downwards, avoiding any contact with the world or with me and my eyes. They trudge forwards, following the person immediately in front. They do not look like people fighting a war, successfully. They look more like prisoners of war, in a war that their side is losing.
But, when I got home I checked out the website mentioned in the sign in the ground under the sculpture, the sign that I had photographed, and when I did, I got quite a shock. I was confronted by this:
These city commuters are facing the cares and stresses of their lives with a degree of stoical optimism, even heroism, that their cousins in my photograph conspicuously lacked. Urban drudgery may defeat lesser beings from foreign lands, but Britain can do it! We shall prevail! Final victory over financial services industrial monotony will be ours!
I actually had to study the above two photographs quite carefully before being entirely convinced that they are both of the same thing. Are there, I wondered, several versions of this sculpture, in different places? I slowly worked it out. These are the same statues, in each photograph. But the photo at the website was taken by someone crouching down, very low, and perhaps even lying on the ground (which means, for instance, that at least one of the figures at the back is entirely blocked from view). The figures are not on a pedestal, as both photographs make entirely clear. But this other photographer makes them look as if they are.
Particularly significant, as I say, is the matter of eye contact. In my photograph, the commuters dare not look at me. Instead they look downwards. This is why they look so defeated, so ashamed even. But in the website photo, they are looking straight at the camera, and although not happy exactly, they seem proud of what they are doing, and confident that they can face any challenges life presents them with.
The lighting is different, and that does make a difference. But mostly, the difference is in the angle of vision.
The point of this posting is not that the angle you see things from makes a difference. Most of us know this. My point is that, when it comes to the particular matter of human statues, it can make a very big difference, far bigger than I, at least, had realised, until I spent those minutes checking these two photos to be sure that they were of the same thing.
What, I wonder, might be the effect of photographing war memorial statues, statues that are on a pedestal, from a position of vertical equality, or even slight superiority? Suppose, while photographing the figures at the centre of the recently unveiled memorial to Bomber Command, that I had somehow raised myself up to their level, or even somewhat above that level. Might my photographs have looked different in their psychological atmosphere? Would the figures suddenly have seemed less heroic, less like the masters of their fate and more like the victims of it that many of them must surely have felt?
If so, it would appear that pedestals are an even more significant part of our civilisation than I had realised.
I preferred BSA when they made motorbikes.
– James P is one of many Bishop Hill commenters who is unimpressed by the activities of the British Sociological Association, who are trying to insert sociology into the CAGW debate. To make people believe in CAGW, with further doomed attempts along these lines?
We here all have our opinions about the relative merits of President Obama and Would-Be President Romney. Last night, I stayed up (again very late) to watch Debate Two between Obama and Romney, and that being so, I might as well say something about that here.
As I commented here in connection with that earlier event, the TV Umpire Lady in the Biden Ryan debate did Biden no favours by allowing Biden to behave like a graceless fool. The result of that media error of omission was an internet buzzing with compilation video of Biden behaving like a graceless fool.
Last night, or so it seemed to me, and more to the point to many others, the graceless fool was the TV Umpire Lady herself, a person by the name of Candy Crowley. She was the one interrupting, and telling Romney what was what and generally getting way, way above herself. The compilation videos in the next few days will be of her, rather than of either of the candidates saying or doing anything embarrassing, because last night neither of them did say or do anything embarrassing – well, not a lot and no more than usual. Both did their thing as best they could, so far as I could tell, Obama in particular being a great improvement on his performance in Debate One. Yes, Obama probably overdid his equivocating about exactly when he got around to calling the embassy attack pre-planned “terrorism”, rather than spontaneous film-criticism. But what jumped out at me was how Candy Crowley joined in on Obama’s side in such a big way, like some kind of tag-wrestler.
Like her predecessor in the Biden Ryan debate, Candy Crowley did the candidate she clearly favoured no favours whatsoever. Obama, despite himself doing okay, was made by Candy Crowley to look more like the geeky kid in the playground who needed protecting from one of the older kids, rather than any sort of President. Worse, Obama was being protected by a girl.
I was half watching the BBC, again, afterwards, to see what they would make of all this, and this time they seemed to have a total blind spot, perhaps because not having a blind spot would have involved noticing that the biggest loser this time around was one of their own. As I earlier reported, the BBC called the Biden Ryan debate fairly accurately and almost immediately. This time? Well, unkind phrases like “elephant in the room” spring to mind.
Because, when it comes to Candy Crowley, I really do mean big loser. I’m not running for electoral office and I can be as graceless as I like. Other unkind commenters on various Instapundit-linked blogs I read last night talked of “Jabba The Hut” being the moderator. That a woman used to be young and cute, but has now become rather fat, hence not so cute, and consequently revealed as never having been all that verbally fluent in the first place, ought not to matter that much. But as I have been emailing my as-of-now super-cute god-daughter, in connection with photos of herself that she has recently been sending me, such things do matter. Cruel but true. Candy Crowley made the US mainstream media look, last night, like a frumpy old has-been.
During the presidential election four years ago, US mainstream media bias was not nearly so obvious, because the US mainstream media, that time around, were telling a story with widespread appeal to regular Americans. Don’t vote for the doddery old coot! Vote for the cool black dude! But now, the times have become far scarier, and the US mainstream media are backing a President who has spent four years saddling himself with a record that he is entirely unable to boast about, against an opponent who looks and sounds like he was created in Hollywood by Hollywood’s finest bio-engineers to look and sound exactly like the perfect American President. And their bias is really showing. Politics, it has famously been said, is show business for ugly people. This does not now apply to Romney. Give him four years in the White House, and he will probably turn very ugly, especially when you consider how ugly the economic facts he will have to grapple with are now and are about to get. But as of now, Romney is pretty enough not merely to be President, but to be President in a movie.
So, the first debate was lost by Obama, the second one was lost by Biden, and the one last night, I reckon, was lost by The Media. 3-0 to Romney with one to go, or so I reckon. Because of all this, I continue to reckon that Romney is going to win big
But, what I reckon is only what I reckon, and what does it matter what I reckon? What actually matters is what the USA’s voters make of things. I want the result that I want in this election because I think that I want Romney to win, because I know that I want Obama to lose, and because I really want the US mainstream media to get a right old kicking. Will the voters oblige?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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