Month: October 2013

A month or so couple of weeks ago, I posted a holding post for a whole collection of posts I need to write. Despite more than a dozen significant posts since then, not to mention Tweets and Facebook posts, I’ve still barely acknowledged those I telegraphed then, even though some of the subject matter clearly overlaps.

I can at least catch-up on The Cyprus Connection and the Tale of Two Cities allusion contained in the ‘Twas Ever Thus passage.

I’ve completed Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities and completed Storrs’ Orientations.

Glad I finally finished TOTC after many false starts. The opening message remains important (the ’twas ever thus quotes extracted in the post linked above), and, in case we didn’t know, it ends with Sydney Carton sacrificing himself for Charles Darnay, going to his death at the Guillotine, with the words:

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done.

In between it’s all a bit predictable as soon as the visual similarity between Darnay and Carton (and the potential love triangle with Ms Manette) is laid on a plate – even illustrated in the “Likeness” instalment very early on. Useful to know the dependence on Carlyle’s The French Revolution as a British-biased source of much of what Dickens was able to imagine of France at the time. And, I have to say the long prose letter “left” by Dr Manette and later “discovered” in his original Bastille cell is a lame and contrived literary device to conveniently join up the loose ends with the metaphorical but none-too-apparent golden thread. Found motivation (the will to live) hard to continue from that point, but I did stick at it to the end. Ho hum. Come in Victor Hugo, I expect.

Orientations, on the other hand, remained wonderful to the very end. A little sad as Storrs recounts his difficulties leading up to the 1931 Cypriot revolt against the British, the burning down of Government House with so much of Storrs’ personal collection of papers and artefacts destroyed, and the eventual shootings that restored military order, but signalled the breakdown in orderly, civil development of Cyprus. Storrs went on to take up governorship of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1932, but nevertheless defends the value of lessons learned from his (and predecessors’) periods in Cyprus (and Egypt and Palestine before that) for the benefit of those who came after. His sense of being undervalued at that point is underlined by his also noting that his acquisition in 1938 of his country retirement home back in good old England was an “unfulfilled dream” until funded by Orientations written in 1936 and published in 1937.

Failure would have been not to try. Storrs also adopts the “twas ever thus / plus ca change” attitude. In concluding he spends quite some time summarising the influences on his life, as well as acknowledging a number of the losses (in the fire) “from which the rest of his life is freely and eagerly disencumbered.” Beautiful language to the end.

Affectionately, he recalls Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, (a cubic yard of) Bach, Kitchener, Allenby and of course T.E.Lawrence.

Included amongst his long but eclectic list of things he was glad to see the back of are “restaurants with bands” (*) as well as “fervent converts to any religion or cause”. In his own words :

So much the more must I cling to that highest which need not and must not be resigned while strength is left to perceive it – to that particular manifestation of immortal power by which individual spirit is most deeply moved.

I believe, and proclaim my faith, that this solace will proceed increasingly from the great classics of the world; both from their own splendour and from their contrast with the limitations of modern life. True, we may rise from Mr [H.G.] Wells Autobiography convinced for the moment that the paramount of life is physical science. Yet throughout the war, I never saw one tired man refreshing his soul with a scientific treatise or a mathematical problem; whereas there were many beside Lawrence transported from their own fatigues and anxieties by following those of Patroclus and Odysseus.

And finally:

Before such epiphanies of the god in man
I can but repeat the prayer of a Moslem
uttered in Basra more than a thousand years ago:

“O my Lord !
If I worship Thee from fear of Hell,
burn me in Hell.

And,
if I worship Thee from hope of Paradise,
exclude me thence.

But,
if I worship Thee for Thine own sake,
then withhold me not from Thine Eternal Beauty.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Four Horsemen of New Atheism, not to mention the hoard of scientistic celeb scientists and comics hanging onto their coat-tails. I recall it was cognitive scientist Dupuy I read and blogged about in 2002 that first made me realise that “literature is a superior form of knowledge to science” is a valid statement, to be denied by scientists at our peril. It is at least not for scientists to say there is no debate on scientific grounds – per Pinker / Wieseltier correspondence.

Talking of literature, the reason for sticking to the  bitter end of Storrs and the Dickensian allusion, was The Cyprus Connection.

The inter-war history of Cyprus formed a good lead in to Mak Berwick’s Langkawi Lair. Mak is under no illusion – as he said on Facebook – our high-school English masters may be turning in their graves, to read his rookie opus, though our physics teacher gave it praise. It’s not literature in any sense that would pass muster with Grayson Perry’s idea of intellectual authority for quality. I could fill a few paragraphs myself with literary criticism – too many redundant adjectives and adverbs better served by better nouns and verbs, maybe too much dwelling on explaining military jargon, procedures and acronyms rather than letting the reader’s intelligence carry them forward – but I won’t.

I managed to read the opening (Cyprus, and the single live round fired) and the developing (Paris) chapters before breaking off to finish Dickens and Storrs, and I do have a new Neil Gaiman on the reading pile. But, whilst being an action/adventure genre I would not normally read, I already know I want to get to Malaysia, and back hopefully, with a moral in the tail no doubt. A good yarn in prospect? [Post Note : having read on 3 or 4 more chapters, I can’t see me sticking with it. A great yarn if you like the smash bang wallop of designer branded fire-arms, Rolex Oysters, Mercedes AMG’s, murders, executions, torture interrogations, convenient coincidences and general mano-a-mano combat – at a rate of least 3 of each per chapter currently. BTW, do I claim my prize of spotting that the autobiographical reality flips into 99% fantasy the moment scarface reaches across our hero’s drink in the Paris bar scene? Sorry, not my scene anyway. Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” next.]

[(*) Restaurants with bands. I know what he means. I love live music, but find the idea of live musicians as background music not so much a distraction to whatever the foreground is, as an insult to the musicians and their music deserving attention. People talkin’ while I’m singin’ – as Tommy Womack puts it.]

I have much sympathy with this Susan Sontag piece from Brain Pickings.

I must admit myself to using adages and aphorisms as short-hand for many of my recurring points, some stolen directly from others, some borrowed and modified to suit, some essentially invented / evolved as new species. I use them a great deal in fact. Many of these aphorisms are effectively working chapter titles for my book. But Sontag’s point is so important, that they are no substitute for any wisdom intended, they may make the apparent wisdom easy to share and recall, but we must avoid being lazy and presuming they actually contain or communicate the wisdom.

This is exactly the same issue as the “A Picture Paints a Thousand Words” adage – which  first blogged about way back here in 2002, when I followed in back to its 1921 Printer’s Ink origins with the title “An Aphorism Too Far”. The point being a picture (typically these days a brand “icon”) can signify a massively complex point very simply and quickly, but the image does not actually contain much of the message. The communication is one of recall, of something which must already have been learnt, at least implicitly, by the viewer of the image, or the recipient of the aphorism. To think the message is “communicated” by the image or aphorism is lazy and misleading – dangerous – this case in particular, a meta-adage, an aphorism about an image.

Lovely coincidence to see this today, having read and mentally remarked on Sam Norton’s latest tweeted blog post. I had been meaning to respond from the keyboard since reading the post in mobile format at the crack of dawn today.

My initial response was “Sam, you’ve got the acronym wrong it should be APPATW not APAATW”, and was about to deliver my lecture on the “Aphorism Too Far” from 2002. Ha. No, the wise Sam has it right, he does indeed mean “And” a thousand words, not “Paints” a thousand words. The and is so important, you cannot achieve one without the other.

Just a holding post for now after hearing the first of four in full.

Democracy has bad taste.
Quality does not = popularity;
Quality = validated by enough of the right people.

Simple truth. And brings in the value of “authority” based on time-served effort to understand. That and the memetic downside of popularity – all there. Democracy itself needs layers of authority. Brilliant. This one will run. Fun too. Wonderful lecture on many levels, language and style as well as content and message. Direct and without prevarication. Refreshing. And a great collection of authorities in the invited audience, asking questions as I type.

More later no doubt.

[I like the fact that, after the visual-introduction-for-radio, there is no mention of cross-dressing in either the lecture or the Q&A.]

[Also important to note, in the context of this blog, that the bit of the “truth” people will baulk at is the idea of “the right people” – an inescapable kind of “elitism” based on earned authority – as many will want to reduce this to objective definitions as will cling to individual subjective democracy, whereas by definition it’s a kind of “agreed subjectivity”. And in fact it is very close to “governance” in any sphere, democratically delegated but operationally subjective – but never totally objective in terms of popular democratic numbers.]

[Post Note : No separate blog for the second lecture. Common sense description of the “baggy” definition of what constitutes art – starting with the inevitable Duchamp again – anything can be art but not everything is. Ultimately a Venn diagram of many complex and shifting issues.]

[Post Note : April 2016 update on Chris Packham and Speaking the Unsayable.]

Just listened to Chris Packham on Desert Island Discs. We have a lot in common, I’m maybe 4 years older, our interests in science and music had very similar origins and early trajectories, but I have to say he came across as a gross self-parody of the worst kind of scientistic media-celeb scientist. Nothing personal, just the stereotypical archetype of much that is wrong with modern science, and why the way it is promoted as teaching knowledge through the media is potentially so damaging to humanity.

His “red in tooth and claw” description of the Sparrow Hawk shredding the Greenfinch, suggesting any “repulsion” is tantamount to closing one’s mind on the true beauty of the process [*]. No, it’s the human response acknowledging that there is far more to Darwinian evolution than the individual vs individual life and death competition. His infatuation with the joyous predictability of his “dogs and other animals” is precisely because he – on his own admission – rejects human beauty as too complicated for his taste.

Proudly sceptic, like any good scientist, rejecting authority, the rebel (rebel rebel, punk to be different) always questioning authority. As he says, authority needs to be earned (yawn, this is news?) but having earned it, I ask, does it not deserve any respect ? Simple Darwinian principles are levels of “fidelity” and “fecundity” – predominantly copying established precedent – upon which to play the exceptional mutant games of new opportunity. Conservative authority must be respected or we have no progress. Anti-establishment rejection for its own sake gets us nowhere, the special – destructive – case of falsification testing [or Sparrow Hawk eats Greenfich] is only a small part of the whole enterprise. Difference must be an exception from a norm.

I’d mentally drafted most of the above during the programme, but he caps it all …. the Bible and Shakespeare as “fuel”. Oh how we laughed. I’m often impressed how Kirsty manages to skip over those two without attracting anti-religious comment (take it or leave it being left unsaid as not the point of the program) …. but no, he had to take the fight to the religious (and the literary in the same breath). What a closed-minded, bigoted, scientistic stereotype. Talk about missing the point.

And the final “pick one” choice-of-choices of this book-burning bigot?
The refrain from Penetration’s Shout Above the Noise.

“Don’t let them win.”

Truly the scientistic neurosis in Maxwell’s terms. A scientist paranoid about them. We should be teaching the next generation to acquire knowledge in the application of wisdom, not neurotic paranoia against those nasty humanities / humanists.

[(*) Post Note : coincidentally, posted on Facebook last year witnessing from my office window a Sparrow Hawk take a Chaffinch from our garden feeder in classic over-the-hedgerow smash-and-grab ambush mode last year. More interesting, early this year, we stood and watched a Kestrel stoop in full view just ten feet in front of us at Portland Bill, gradually dropping and hovering in careful stages as it kept eyes on its prey the opposite side of a 2 metre high wall in front of us, only to pop-up instantly to sit with the vole in its claw on top of the wall in front of us. It proceeded to tear and swallow strips over the course of maybe 15 minutes, as we and a growing crowd of maybe 6 or 8 passing walkers paused to watch. Fascinating.When it got to some of the more gruesome entrails it contemplated disdainfully whether to swallow before discarding and moving on to tastier morsels, eventually flying off to somewhere more private to finish its meal.]

Posted by David Morey on Facebook, an autistic child’s response to a spelling test.

Neat, though the comment thread is maybe more interesting that the test response itself?

[PS To be clear, I’m interested in autism as a description of how human institutions look objectively at human activity, not particularly in the relatively abnormal condition of a given human individual.]

Another good post from Maria Popover at Brain Pickings fed via Facebook.

Perhaps a bit obvious the list of “rules” in the Zen sense, but totally applicable to the education context – ie where education, education, education is the point of the exercise, though of course education, education & learning remains a major point of any evolving human activity. No point doing anything if you don’t also learn to adopt, adapt, improve.

Particularly like this:

“RULE EIGHT:
Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time.
They’re different processes.”

I’ll say. Not only different, but conflicting opposites. To analyse is to cut to pieces, the very opposite of constructive creation. Analysis is not only paralysis, it can be destruction too. There’s a time to analyse, there’ a time to act. The adage I’ve adopted is:

“Careful with that knife, Aristotle.”

And there are equivalent adages in many other contexts, I’m sure you can think of.

It’s almost a couple of weeks since Pinker responded with round III of his debate with Wieseltier over whether the humanities have a genuine claim of “scientism” against certain factions of the science community, or not.

[I’ve commented twice on this debate, and mentioned it in several other posts too. Most recently the post on the value of ethics in science, but also previously here and here.]

The thrust of Pinker’s argument in round III seems to be this – what I call the “good fences make good neighbours” debate :

“Why should either discipline stay inside Wieseltier’s sterile rooms? Does morality have nothing to do with the facts of human well-being, or with the source of human moral intuitions? Does political theory have nothing to learn from a better understanding of people’s inclinations to cooperate, aggress, hoard, share, work, empathize, or submit to authority? Is art really independent of language, perception, memory, emotion? If not, and if scientists have made discoveries about these faculties which go beyond received wisdom, why isn’t it for them to say that these ideas belong in any sophisticated discussion of these topics?” Pinker.

The point of the “good fences make good neighbours” argument is this. The rooms are NOT sterile. The rooms are NOT bounded by impenetrable walls that prevent each discussing the other across the garden fence, nor less discourage each to visit the other domain to participate and share. Far from it.

Cross participation is of course thoroughly encouraged. Boundaries represent working definitions, based on “good practice and established precedent” and of course boundary disputes lead to redrawing of boundaries and evolution of working definitions when necessary and agreed. And of course that healthy exchange and dialogue means both parties benefit from learning to understand the other, and acquiring knowledge that may benefit their own domain. The point is the working boundaries do exist, and what each party MUST is recognise which domain they’re in at any time, recognising the variable rules of engagement wherever they are currently. My rules on my side of the fence, it’s just being neighbourly. The boundaries exist in the sense that they represent a distinction between different rules of engagement, different rules for what counts as evidence and rational argument.

The key thing is neither side has the monopoly of rules across the whole combined domains, nor does either have any privileged position in the rules whereby working boundaries are defined and re-defined. It’s for neither “side” to say, rather for the conversation to enable the working distinctions to evolve, and by bringing ideas across from one domain to the other to reap the benefits of eco-diversity and avoid sterile in-breeding in any one domain.

Most of the rest of Pinker’s argument just seems spurious to me, not wrong, just not relevant to the point of the accusation. He also makes a great deal out of Wieseltier’s confining science to the “empirical” – but this I fear is just a talking past each on what the other means by empirical. The empirical in science has an objective repeatability, whereas in reality a good deal of the empirical involves subjective experience – a philosophical debate as old as the hills, but resolved from most practical perspectives by moving away from the focus on the subjects and objects. I’d like to see anyone highlight if I’m missing a point, specifically.

The accusation of scientism is applied to those scientists who believe in (and insist in applying) the rules of science in the domains of human value. We can obviously debate exactly who claims which rules, and in doing so refine our boundary definitions, but here I’m talking about defining rationality in terms of objectivity and logic testable by falsification – the essence of what make science science – whilst acknowledging many other aspects of quality and value, creativity and inspiration shared by science and any number of non-scientific “disciplines”. In fact we could argue with different narrow and broad definitions exactly which disciplines might claim to be sciences and which claim to be humanities. It’s part of the same debate of course, and everyone prefers to back a winner, but the point is the boundaries, the distinctions do exist, even if their only reasons for existence are a manageable sense of order – authoritative precedent against which to evolve progressive change. There aren’t really two “sides” here but multiple domains of varying shades and combination of applicable rules.

Clearly life would be much simpler if all domains agreed the same rules of engagement in what counts as rational argument and evidence for knowledge, decisions and predictors of actions. But the fact is the core value-neutral rules of scientific rationality do not apply to all domains of human value, at least not simply because science says they can be. Human values are not all reducible to science. To claim otherwise is scientistic (by definition, so no reason to argue defensively against that).

Significantly these distinctions matter between the following, though obviously the fourth is least contentious:

1. Science – Philosophy (including the Philosophy of Science)
2. Science – Technology & Engineering
3. Science – Politics & Economics
4. Science – Arts & Humanities in general

Of course, in responding to Pinker, these things have much “to do with” each other at many points, it’s just that the distinctions none-the-less matter greatly. None is totally reducible to any of the others.

[Post Note – Interestingly, having written the above in response to Pinker, I realise that Wieseltier’s round III response is pretty much the same “good fences make good neighbours” argument. Funny, I’m also having trouble getting scientists to see that there is actually a case here – some either disagree, or agree to disagree, but no recognition of the actual point. The scientism is Maxwell’s scientific neurosis, a denial that there are any rules of knowledge and values beyond science. To repeat – scientism by definition. That much cannot even be open to debate, even if science is entitled to argue the maximum scope amenable to scientific analysis and rationale. To start from the assumption that everything is not just fair-game but game-over, unless  demonstrated by conclusive argument and evidence otherwise, is to miss the point that their rules of objective evidence and logical argument are those of science. Not a valid argument, since it presumes its own conclusion. A Catch22 as I’ve called it many times before.]

[PPS – re-reading, I notice Pinker actually opened with this:

Leon Wieseltier writes,

“It is not for science to say whether science belongs in morality and politics and art.”

I [Pinker] reply:

“It is not for Leon Wieseltier to say where science belongs. Good ideas can come from any source, and they must be evaluated on their cogency, not on the occupational clique …. blah, blah, blah … “

Just look at that word – “clique” – a pejorative value-laden word if ever I heard one. Up to “cogency” no reasonable scientist or humanist could possibly disagree, so why don’t we stick to the point constructively – already elaborated above – rather than introduce disingenuous rhetorical smoke-screens. The trouble these days, is that once people get beyond the 140 character smart-ass sound-bite limit, the medium seems to be the 3 or 4 page essay full of examples of straw-men that the original interlocutor never even suggested. And to suggest them back in response is disrespect to your opponent.

So “cogency” – your word Mr Pinker, let’s work with that, it’s as good as any – to summarise the qualities of a given argument. As I (and Wieseltier) have said already, this simply begs the question of cogency according to who’s standards, the standards of who’s domain. This is why the domains matter – it’s not that they are no-go areas, it’s to accept the possibility that their standards of cogency might not be the same. For science to simply say – the standards of science are the measure of cogency for all world domains is scientistic (the definition of scientistic) according to those who see domains other than science. So let’s debate in a few sentences – sticking to the point – what qualities might constitute cogency in one domain but not the other, rather than insult the intelligence of your interlocutor.

I already made a start: Scientific cogency depends on:

• objectivity of evidence, and
• logical relations between those objects, and
• assertions built on that logic that are falsifiable, and
• falsifiability that is either directly empirical, or
• falsifiability that is related by chains of logical reason to knowledge that is.

How’m’a doin’ ? Of course the whole scientific enterprise depends, like any of the humanities, on many other less-objectifiable aspects of human interaction, imagination, creativity and ingenuity, but let’s stick to the cogency of what makes an argument or knowledge scientific (or not).]

Interesting BBC R4 Point of View this morning by Lisa Jardine.

[Fuller text in BBC Magazine article.]

Based on the telling by her father (Jacob Bronowski) of the Leo Szillard story of the flash of inspiration that led him to patent the neutron chain reaction idea as a source of energy in the name of UK Admiralty, and the subsequent UK and US development and use of first nuclear bombs.

Szillard (and Einstein and Bronowski and many others in science) raised many ethical objections to the use of such weapons as their reality became more certain. (Aside – Many previous references in this blog to the Einstein letter and to Durrenmatt’s play “Die Physiker“. Szillard is topical again thanks to recent work by Graham Farmelo, whose previous work on Paul Dirac has also been covered here.)

But Lisa’s point was really this. Being told that story was valuable lesson in ethics associated with science, even though the complex chain of events and reasoning quoted by, and told of, Szillard, as any one of the many individuals involved, was objectively suspect and in need of selective interpretation as history – a convenient narrative with an agenda. But none-the-less valuable to her (and to me).

The point I add to this is that a major – and dangerous –  part of the problem is science conflating itself with many other domains associated with science, from basic philosophies of science and knowledge, to the technological exploitations of understanding scientific possibilities by the rest of humanity, of which science is a part but not the whole.

Science is not technology and the distinction matters – in the Szillard story, the subject was “patenting” the use of idea for its technological exploitation, not the idea itself. Furthermore – science is not humanity’s sole privileged access to knowledge, the distinction between the subset we call science and the whole of “rational” knowledge applicable to human decision-making, also matters. These distinctions matter because the ethics (and politics and economics) of best choices for humanity cannot be reduced to science alone. Not even (say) Anthropogenic Global Warming.

The use of science to solve the problems of and increase valuable possibilities for human society, both requires technology and involves value judgements – human value judgements in domains where science has no privileged view. Science is privileged in value-neutral domains, but not in domains where human values matter.

Science good; Scientism bad.