Great Books Paradox

Reading Thoreau’s “Walden” pretty thoroughly this time around, should be capturing more notes that I am noting mentally, and this is one.

In his chapter entitled “Reading” Thoreau extols the virtues of reading the wisdom of the real classics, widely and in the original (original dead languages) where possible, but balances this with the warning not to let reading replace maximum experience of real life, as you’d expect from one of the founding fathers of US-Pragmatism.

Ironic that the Great Books movement of Chicao University (Adler / Mckeon) should be responsible for rejecting the pragmatism of Dewey, and turning posession of their published collections into a Brittanica-style negative sell. Something no self-respecting family should deprive their kids of. One wonders how many of those editions were read, and read in any way that the educational value of their sources was understood as originally intended ?

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Everybody Wants To Get Ahead ?

Is a line from the wonderfully ironic “The Devil Wears Prada” a film I saw for about the 3rd or 4th time yesterday … just killing time … one of those films that always seems to be showing on some TV channel. I don’t know anything about the original writing behind it, and there is plenty of Hollywood Rom-Com cheese to disguise just how many levels of irony there are within it. The clue is that the subject matter of fashion journalism is about as thin a veneer for real value as you could conceive … there is a magnificent lecture on the trickle-down from those whose opinions of this stuff matter.

The line “everybody wants to get ahead” is a pretty simple statement of the received wisdom of the Darwinian struggle and the measure of progress … it’s a jungle out there, it’s an arms race, it’s a war on anything you care to mention … just add you own cliche.

The reason the value of the irony struck me was that I had just written a longish post on the “Zeitgeist – Addendum”, in response to gav on MoQ.Discuss (*). As usual, I have to distance myself from any idea of an “international bankers conspiracy theory” take on why the economic struggle, and its global political consequences are perverse in terms of real human interests. But I have to say the film, despite its rhetoric, is pretty good at identifying alternative models of real value … and the real solution; education, education, education. (The real conspiracy is the objectivist meme, easy value in countable things, about which I’ve said more than enough.)

Of course one reason why this is more and more scary to more and more people, is the mass and pace of global communication. The reality is more apparent to more people, and the pace at which bad decisions can lead to new conflicts, means that urgency is part of the concern. Doomsday scenarios are ever easier to envisage.

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having time to acquire any new value for each other. … We have had to agree on a certain set of rules called etiquette and politeness to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war. … we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and … we lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications.

Henry David Thoreau, “Walden” (1847)

Thoreau wrote that at a time when he considered the number of penny posts worth a penny that he had ever received, he could count on one hand, and that the recently invented telegraph and shared timekeeping, had no future value beyond the novelty of intercity rail travel. Little did he know. He did know that it was more valuable to build a school or a library than a new bridge – connectivity is good, but you can have too much of it (per his quote above.)

“Everybody wants to get ahead” is a culturally conditioned meme. What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding ?

[Post Note (*) – note the Pirsigian / MoQish-vs-SOMist language, if it’s new jargon to you. Basically “Subject-Object” (mutually-exclusive, post-rationalised-empiricist, static-dualist-objective world-view is inferior to a “Quality” (collectively-inclusive, immediately-participated, radical-empiricist, dynamic-qualitative-relations) world-view or metaphysics. Read Pirsig’s ZMM and Lila, and William James for a start, then Alan Rayner’s natural-inclusionality. That’s a dense collection of adjectives for a world-view, but trust me enough to unpick it.]

A Rare Treat

Saw Rodney Crowell at the JD in Oslo last night. It was packed-out. Didn’t know much about him beforehand, but I’d noticed he was supported and backed by Will Kimbrough and Jenny Scheinman. I saw Will just the once before at Norm’s (Cumberland) River Road House just outside Nashville, playing with Tommy Womack. Folks in North Alabama / Tennessee who knew I was a fan of Tommy were forever pointing out his association with Will and with Todd Snider. Loved all three of  ’em.  Coincidentally, during the first set Will actually mentioned playing with Todd previously at the same Oslo venue.

Both the first Will & Jenny set and the main Rodney, Jenny & Will set were entirely acoustic except for a little keyboard fill – excellent country folk guitar and fiddle with some great poetry.

Great to hear Will do his “Hill Country Girl” again – it stuck in my mind on the only previous occasion. Houston boy Rodney Crowell did really impress too; I’m going to have to listen to more of his stuff – “Sex & Gasoline”, despite the highlight of the evening being when Jenny brought the house down with a solo fiddle virtuoso piece.

It’s a rare treat when an unexpected gig turns out that good.

Where’s The Humanity ?

Sign of the economic times that this is is happening I guess, and an industry in which I have a long personal involvement, not just in the UK, but I thought this comment was an interesting statement of the root problem in globalization.

Where is the humanity in ruining someone’s local environment by building a massive industrial refinery and then bringing in people from around the world to work there?

Viral Spam in Comments

My Akismet comment spam filter has been working fine except to a few Russian (cyrillic) posts and links getting through. But these have always been easy to spot and delete / mark-as-spam.

Today I noticed a bunch and went through deleting them, only to discover that each deleting of a spam comment also deleted one real comment … I have all comments now deleted since 7th Dec !!! apologies to anyone affected.

Bigger problem for me immediately is to find out how and stop this recurring. Anyone ?

Solidaire

Only yesterday I noticed this image of protesters in Nice carrying “Solidaire” banners (solidarity presumably ?) and had John Martyn’s “Solid Air” going round my head all day as a result.

Spooky to hear at the end of yesterday that John had died.

First saw John Martyn in my student days, ’74/’75 ish, backed by Paul Kossoff. Went for years never really noticing that John remained active – unlike say, the way I continued to look out for Roy Harper in that vein, until I bought a live double CD just a couple of years ago. Apart from “Solid Air” itself, I would say “John Wayne”, backed by Dave Gilmour was my most memorable.

More on Trust

I keep pointing out that the World Wide Web model of information is enlightened enough to actually have trust at the top of the stack – ie however information is organized and presented on the web (or anywhere for that matter) it ultimately depends on trust in people in enforceable authority, even if the expert authority is earned in advance. Anything based (entirely) on the power of crowds risks overlooking this important fact.

I often note it in references to limits to freedom in free-democratic-governance at any level, most recently in the Brittanica / Wikipedia story. More frequently in the serious psychological deficiencies of most web information models – like “unfriending” in social network situations.

As a Brit resident in Norway, I can’t help thinking this survey may prove significant.