What, Why & How do we Know ?
Saw this clip the other day – Craig Bellamy being interviewed about being in the GB Olympic football team – and thought as well as being surprisingly articulate, his school-boyish enthusiasm and all round good humour made such a change from all the usual earnest and corporately correct punditry and commentary.
I wasn’t the only person to notice.
[Post Note – And ironic that Welshman Bellamy should score the opening goal, only to have the Daily Express report him scoring for “england”.]
If we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all things, we shall do much what as wisely as he, who would not use his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly.
John Locke – “On The Understanding” (1670-80ish)
Been looking for this quote. Two purposes; firstly the general idea of pragmatism – ie it’s better to do something than sit and worry about rules and definitions, and secondly the more specific god vs science – proven / not-proven stalemates, where each holds up an impossible (disingenuous) truth test to the other. All truth – except our immediate personal empirical experience – involves some faith in the current state of authority and some level of creative metaphor, or both. There are no absolute facts in theology or science.
Couldn’t remember where I’d come across it or even that it was John Locke, and actually gave up when searches for the key words on quotation sites failed to find it. Then noticed it was the motto I’d seen on the BrewDog web pages. Funny old world.
In vino veritas, well, craft-beer anyway.
Flavour of Christianity vs 10 year bond spreads, relative to German rates.
No joke. Austerity = fiscal protestantism.
I’m against the teaching of creationism in school. Teaching about it in social / cultural / religious studies is a different matter of course. Teaching its content as factual is a no-no. But then the balance of good teaching is not pedagogical anyway – it’s about learning how to learn and think.
I’m also totally fed up with campaigns that are always against things – see my reference to the BHA below. It was of course the recent “free schools to teach creationism” scaremongering headlines to which I was reacting in part in that post. It is naturally suspect that the headline is actually true, but no smoke without fire I guess. Hence this post to confirm what I am actually against, lest there be any doubt.
Better though to see much more intelligent comment from Tom Chivers in The Telegraph, and Tom taking the time to moderate and comment on the comment thread generated. Real debate takes effort, not 140 character knee-jerk tweets.
Why would anyone want to play or watch football in a sh*t-hole like that ?
It’s bad enough it has a running track, but there’s about another track and a half width on top of the track itself between the pitch and the supporters – utter madness.
Free will, or quantum indeterminism ? (Hat tip to PsybertronJr)
Stevie’s right when he asks,
When did Britain become a police state?
Little people (the people holding the event license) hide behind applying rules, to apply objectivity rather than sound judgement. It’s what gives “health and safety” and a lot more a bad name. The only point he has wrong, is in blaming the police, he should be blaming us for wanting clear application of blame. The blame game wins. More’n my job’s worth, to do anything where I could be blamed for overriding objective facts. Where he is right is that UK and Europe are much worse than US.
Never been any doubt that the workings of our minds reside throughout our entire electro-chemical system, not just the hemispheres of the organ we call the “brain” confined to our skulls. Gut feel is no joke. Case in point.
Seems strange to add this case to my agenda, just one extreme example of valuing what can be counted rather than what counts. Life is more than logic and objective calculations.
Couple of things to report – little time for reviews – quite a few half-finished reads to come back to, but for now …
I finished Martin Sixsmith’s “Russia” in 3 or 4 concentrated sittings last week whilst on aircraft / in airports / in hotel bars etc. Un-put-down-able – straightforward, knowing and journalistic history of Russia from 862 up to Putin & Medvedev and the 2011 Domodedovo terrorist bombing. The timeline of deaths per page is numbing – hundreds, thousands, millions, thousands, hundreds, tens – yet an easy witty read, packed with information from first hand research and experience. Sixsmith grew up in Russia as well as being BBC correspondent. Question – Putin really is scary, but how would you govern a “state” that spans 9 time zones from the arctic to the Caucasus and the steppes of central Asia.
Example 1: We probably knew that after Borodino/1812 Napoleon got very close to the heart of Moscow before being repulsed. That and the parallel with Hitler are still very close to modern Muscovites I detect, but did we know that the Russians pursued Napoleon’s retreat all the way to the centre of Paris? That had escaped me.
Example 2: The pragmatism of selecting a unifying “culture” – any one will do if it works as a tool of governance. Did we know that Russia chose to import orthodox Christianity from pre-Ottoman Constantinople of the Roman Empire rather than Islam from their central Asian neighbours since that would have interfered with their Vodka drinking ?
Example 3: I didn’t know “Russia” was created by Rurik the Rus in (Ukrainian, Kievan) Novgorod. Given that the Rus were Vikings from the modern-day Norway /Sweden area – we all knew Vikings explored south down the Volga I guess – but I never knew the connection between the modern Scandinavian culture of Rus and the country that carries its name today. Intriguing fact among many in a recommended read. Perhaps no so far from the truth to brand modern Norway the last remaining soviet state. Kruschev and Gorbachev came so close … hang in there Russia.
Also picked-up – in true airport-bookstall anything will do purchasing mode – a copy of Le Carre’s Our Kind of Traitor, and also finished it in just a few days. Not his best, and a tough conversational style across first and third-persons, in a mix of real-time dialogue and reported narrative – you gotta keep up with who’s who. But purely coincidentally, tying up the current threads of Banking and Morality with Russian oligarchs, top-management, politicians, terrorists, spies and sport thrown in. Fun current-affairs-founded fiction.