What, Why & How do we Know ?
BHA have an “Are you a humanist” quiz doing the rounds at the moment. I scored 80% incidentally but I had to be playfully creative with the actual responses to get through it since there were too many questions (including the first one) where my answer was none-of-the-above.
I’ve been a humanist since before the BHA existed, and it makes a mockery of humanism to reduce it to a caricature of scientistic arrogance.
I’m a big fan of George, not least because a party called Respect names the right virtue for a complicated life, and politics is as complicated as it gets. And, being a small independent, you can be fairly sure George is genuinely true to his expressed principles. Trust and respect – a great combination.
Much twittering around the personally dismissive straw-man Dave threw back at George in response to his PMQ – about hypocrisy in which Islamic regimes we support and which we don’t. Now (see complicated, above) there is always a level of “hypocrisy” between actions and justifying reasons, and even with open debate before the Mali action, I doubt the outcome of supporting the French in Saharan Africa would have been different. Even with principles, in practice you always need to choose your battle-grounds, fighting where you might expect a positive result, pulling punches where …. life’s complicated.
George is a first class rhetorician, and an ace orator in steadily enunciating his whole question amid the house heckling, and ultimately in resisting the impulse to react to the personal insult he received for his troubles. In fact you might say he’s too good; hoist by his own petard even. His own use of rhetoric, right from the off with the euphemistic “adumbrate”, followed by a string of emotive venom-loaded barbs within the basic question, meant the undoubted moral high-ground in the question, is largely eroded by the time we get to its end. In essence:
“Could the PM explain why his government chooses to support Regime X but not Regime Y?”
The PM is maybe entitled to respond to the rhetorical barbs, but he is not entitled to introduce a straw-man of George’s controversial personal history, nor is he entitled to use it as a deflector to avoid the actual question. Too many barbs let Dave off the hook. (Anyway – the follow-up is in writing.)
But of course the question was not framed to elicit an answer, it was framed as a sound bite to raise the debate in public. Too good ? Very good. Dave and George both knew it full well. It’s a tough high-stakes game, a rhetorical arms-race. Another case of “the medium is the message” when the medium is George – quite clear from the moment Bercow introduces George to speak.
[Post Note: Here in intelligent debate with Andrew Neil – very impressive. A side issue, but given my rhetorical comments above, interesting that Neil opens with the question of his PMQ leaving him open to the attack.]
I am to Brian Cox as Stephen Hawking is to Schrödinger’s cat:
“When I hear of Schrödinger’s cat, I reach for my gun”
The worst possible face of popular science imaginable. (Closely followed by – I am to popular news items about the Higg’s Boson as Hawking is …. but that’s last years “news”.)
Amazingly candid and positive comments from Dave Kitson, talking about the pain of relegation with Reading FC:
“You are responsible for people losing their jobs and you are coming into training in your nice car and you see people carrying boxes of their possessions out. You just think, ‘I did that, that’s my fault’. It has affected me to this day and I nearly lost everything over what happened there.”
“They’re my team and they’re the team I take my son to watch; I always have a chat with [Reading boss] Brian McDermott after their games, whatever the result, He was the one who convinced Steve Coppell to take a chance on me and I can never thank him enough for that. I really hope he can keep them on their current run and they can survive.”
Funny after (appearing to be one of those) holding out for unreasonable financial reward following the demise of Pompey, but as he says in the article he nearly lost everything. I remember Dave Kitson standing out at Cambridge against Reading before we bought him. He was never going to be “top-flight” Premiership quality, but fondly remembered after that oh-so-nearly era of Butler, Cureton and Forster.
OK, so since I tend to use the sins of Chelski as moral parables, I should restore the balance with this one.
Chelski’s Hazard did NOT kick the Swansea ball boy. He tried to get the ball from him and eventually kicked it out from under him. He shouldn’t have done that, he should no doubt have drawn attention to the officials that he had tried and the ball-boy was resisting. Fortunately the red-card seems to be the end of any “punishment”, but I’d say that was harsh if probably the letter of the law applied by the official for “excessive force”. He and Chelski seem to have taken their punishment on the chin, and responded appropriately.
The ball-“boy”, on the other hand, should be shot, along with his “coach”. Or made a public example, if the death penalty isn’t an option. Disgraceful behaviour by a 17-year-old, no doubt a football apprentice, as old as some in the professional game these days, rolling about like a true-pro actor for the cameras, no doubt doing as instructed by his coach – to waste time on behalf of his team and interfere with an opponent trying to get on with the game. Correct me if I’m wrong about the young man, his club and his coach, but … jeez … Swansea too, who had seemed model professionals on the pitch. This stuff should be stamped out of the game hard.
[Post Note – Oh yes, look, it was indeed pre-meditated:
https://twitter.com/CHARLIEM0RGAN/status/294135719700602881
I wasn’t wrong about the “boy”. Called in because he was needed for time-wasting.
Harry Rednapp – “He [Eden Hazard] kicked the ball from underneath him and the whole thing got blown out of proportion. You only have to see that he was tweeting before the game that he [the ball boy] was a super timewaster, I think it was disgusting the way he behaved.”
Heads must roll at Swansea. ]
[Post Post Note – Oh and the FA is planning further punishment of Hazard- shame – hopefully a matter of formality for an off-the-pitch action – this is a million miles from the Cantona precedent. Pretty weak wording – no doubt because these are issues for the competitions, beyond the FA’s jurisdiction – also saying the ball-boy’s action was “inappropriate” and clubs should control this. And finally – for Hazard – the buck stops there. Phew!]
[PS Unconnected but related, re Robbie Savage’s rant on 606 last weekend about justifying the “professional foul” – taking one for the team – I already addressed a few of years ago with John Terry’s cynical mis-calculation – game-changing rules change. That’s why we have judges in court and referees on the pitch, to notice the game-changers and have the courage to apply them. Any idiot can apply the existing explicit rule – rules, remember, are for the guidance of wise men, and enslavement of fools.]
Interesting “In Our Time” this morning. Subject is Romulus and Remus, but already majoring on the recurring myths aspect. Interesting in itself.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
Most interesting the argument about the original “creation” of the myth. I agree with those arguing against Peter Wiseman; there is no actual point when a particular story is created or first told. Evolution only throws up new “species” with hindsight, and the hindsight is a choice to attach the label to the recurring pattern. There is no point when all elements are “brought” together for the first time. (Even in biology, this speciation has arbitrary choice elements.)
Intriguing – just another “creation vs evolution” meta-myth of myths.
Just to capture this image of the London Undeground Ad:
Obvious irony in the idea of joining a “church” in order to think for yourself. Reminds me of Pirsig’s problem with the “church of reason”.
[Post Note : Corruption story in HuffPo.]
[And another : Article in Free Thinker.]
How long before Herring are the next “eat only occasionally” protected species ? I eat a lot of Herring; pickled, a habit picked-up in Norway, and kippers, a habit rekindled by returning to home not far from Whitby.
Mackerel have certainly dwindled in both size and abundance in my own experience. Back in the 60’s and 70’s you could hardly fail to catch 2 and 3 pounders from piers on the North Sea coast in the summer, these days you need to be out in a boat to get into a shoal of 0.5 to 1.5 pounders. Certainly always notice that those on the fishmonger’s ice are tiny compared to those we used to catch. Herring were never a rod-caught fish of course, but size-wise they still look like they always did. The Mackerel article recommends we eat Herring instead.
Good to remember why the EU came about, when politicians of all colours use the rhetoric “yes, but always with UK national interest paramount”. I beg to differ – human interest paramount, with UK and Europe as useful constituencies to organize ourselves towards that end, and with the planet and the cosmos as wider constituencies and Scotland, Yorkshire, “my culture”, “my team” whatever as smaller ones. None is “paramount” wrt the others.
Last episode of Melvyn Bragg’s “The Value of Culture” today.
Hooray for Tiffany Jenkins – no matter how wide you include all human activity in your culture / Culture definitions and how those activities are distributed “tribally” in your definition, we must not dodge the question of quality – there is a hierarchy of value – high / mass / pop / local / general / received / traditional / radical / whatever – in terms of the content and processes of culture and in terms of experts / elites / cliques. None of which boxes fixed definitions into fixed constituencies; communication / education / evolution happens and it happens at the boundaries of those constituencies, therefore many smaller “ponds” is an advantage.
Yes the definition is broad, but the spectrum of value is real across many dimensions. To pretend “anything goes” on some artificially equal footing is pure cultural relativism.
The integration of science into culture – a third culture – has happened for sure, but a value-free science does not make culture value-free. (Not that science itself is value-free …)
There are things that science can’t explain, or that can be truly explained “better” by other forms of culture …. Shakespeare / Austen are better psychologists than Freud say, better moral philosophers than Kant say.
Cultural evolution may be Darwinian, sure, but it’s also Lamarkian and can be (must be) directed to greater value and quality in the current generation, with the learnings of previous generations – our moral responsibility.
Experts are not perfect, but they are essential; wisdom is essential. We need to manage our memes, using our better memes, not simply let them run riot on social media.
And more : A narrow economic definition of “Utility” is not the sole measure of quality and value – far from it, etc …