Psybertron Asks

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 …

Interesting these days, that a £250m airport gets precedent over a £10m internet cable connection?

Mind you, if they’re getting £20m per year anyway, surely they could use their own discretion to prioritise £10m over a year or two ?

[Post Note : Just an observation; quite a few programmes on railways these days – interesting in how many it’s the communication of ideas and opportunities that seems to come out on top, over the physical movement of people and goods, as the main life-changing consequences.]

“Spiritual but not religious” is a meme of a joke these days, because (as this BBC Magazine piece shows) the term spiritual can cover a multitude of new-agey sins. Interestingly the list of “spiritual” books includes Pirsig’s 5m-selling ZMM, but none of the books are actually mentioned in the piece. Instead we get interview quotes from the like of Copson and Baggini:

Humanists [I’m one] are deadlocked over the issue of the “spiritual” category. Andrew Copson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association, accepts that:

For many people it’s a shorthand for saying “there must be more to life than this”. Its vagueness is unhelpful. It can be used for everything from the full Catholic mass to whale songs, crystals, angels and fairies. As a humanist I prefer to avoid spirituality. Humanism is about the belief that human beings find value in the here and now rather than in something above and beyond. People have social instincts and as a humanist it’s about reinforcing those instincts.

His “preferring” to avoid it is on exactly the same level as some “yearning” for it. Real vagueness as to what more is, is best met with acceptance for what it is, not with wishful thinking. But that vague more is still here and now. Everywhere and always, for a humanist who believes there is more value to the human spirit in the cosmos than can be usefully rationalised or “explained” in classical empirical scientistic terms. That’s spirituality. It may “transcend” the simplistic, reductionist scientistic, but it’s not a different place and time, just harder for our real, here and now, “social instincts” to access confidently through these science-memetic filters of our times.

Looking for those alternative explanations can be lead down some whacky and dubious (and worse) avenues for sure (just ask Mystic Bourgeoisie / Kat Herding). Religious tradition is one such avenue, but “New-Age++” fashions come and go.

Philosopher Julian Baggini writes in The Shrink & the Sage:

The search for meaning can be exhausting. There is a yearning for something more. My short reply is that you can yearn for higher as much as you like, but what you’re yearning for ain’t there. But the desire won’t go away.”

Author Mark Vernon says:

That doesn’t make [the desire] a bad thing, but it may lead to awkward questions. And that may explain why the research finds that spiritual people have more mental health problems. You’re going on an interior mental journey. It’s risky to go and try and see things from a bigger perspective. The promise is tremendous but the journey can be very painful.

It’s there all right – it’s “the Buddha in the machine, and the machine is you”. The problem is the “yearning” and, perversely, the more the world around us says it’s not there, the more problematic becomes that yearning. The risk of mental illness is a common angle and recurring outcome [and a topic of this blog] of the “effort to outflank the entire body of [received wisdom of] western civilisation”. But that’s a feature of the science-meme’s response to the yearning, not a problem with the underlying desire to find answers to awkward questions. There but for grace … go we all … unless we can trust and live for today with the easy [highest value] pragmatic answers.

Science is as good a religious traditional source of “easy” answers as any, providing its practitioners don’t become so arrogant as to believe it’s the one true path to privileged value, and learn to live with those who don’t. Personally, I choose humanism.

(PS by easy scientific answers – I’m not of course trivialising the effort, difficulty and value of science, just suggesting that vague answers, where certainly & uncertainty have not been objectified, are harder for the scientistic to accept. Simply not liking vagueness – on your own terms – is no response to its existence.)

(PPS Of course this week’s “Value of Culture” series by Melvyn Bragg is addressing exactly this debate about whether different “cultural” outlooks – a la CP Snow / Matthew Arnold etc. – have some hierarchical advantages of value over others.)

A real scientist / humanist heading up the BHA who doesn’t necessarily see science as the be-all and end-all of humanism. Progress, BHA.

Interesting collection. Much of the predictable “singularity” stuff, starting with Ray Kurzweil, and going through all the apps and devices taking over our lives, but some good stuff in there.

A few for me …

• The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public �” Lynn Stout
• The Social Conquest of Earth �” E.O. Wilson
• Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities �” Martha Nussbaum

And ironic, posting yesterday, with today’s BBC story about the Cornish school about boys learning good old fashioned manners and etiquette:

• Choosing Civility: The 25 Rules of Considerate Conduct �” P.M. Forni

And a completely unconnected school story … philosophy for reception class education at a Harrow primary school – Socratic dialogue, and league tables that make no odds.

BBC R4’s In Our Time today, another fine example of something about which I knew nothing before the programme. The ancient Shahnameh or Persian Book of Kings – a single continuous poem of rhyming couplets, longer than the Odyssey and Iliad together – written by Ferdowski.

Interesting after commenting on the Seven Pillars of Wisdom documentary only the day before, to think of the importance of old culture-bearing books to modern affairs. This time not the US in Iraq, but the Iranians when at war with Iraq, finding their culture under threat, preserved in its verses, repeating what had been done when the Mongols invaded and expelled the Arabs.

Anyway, a fascinating work and an excellent programme on so many levels, where the contributors’ knowledge and enthusiasm take over the whole flow. Melvyn happy to have screeds of ancient Persian read out on air, for their poetic value, notwithstanding the cultural, philosophical and historical value of their content. One for the common “Aryan” heritage pile (in the original rather than perverted sense of the word).

On another level, even academic experts are humans with their own interests and hopes, and all the better for it. I could go on.

Interesting – I was in the habit of posting football (soccer) stories for their moral value – especially Chelski, as a morality tale all of its own, but also on football supporter forums where people’s “support” for events displays fascinating turns between loyalty and pure hatred.