"News from Nowhere" by William Morris

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The narrator of this story, who calls himself William Guest, goes to sleep and wakes up in the future. If that reminds you of Rip van Winkle by Washington Irving, it's not the only model. There is the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus which was included in the mediaeval Golden Legend and - as the Companions of the Cave - the Quran; their legend is mentioned in The Grey King by Susan Cooper. There's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, which was published the year before News from Nowhere was first serialised, although in this book the time travel is backwards and caused by a blow to the head. And, perhaps most obviously, there is Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, a novel which Morris reviewed, in which the protagonist falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in a socialist world in 2000; it was a best-seller in its day. Morris had a lot of possible models for his fiction.

But News from Nowhere is only tangentially a novel. For a start, the plot is really just a chronicle of things happening, with very little novelistic shape to it: it's no more than a frame on which to hang philosophical speculations. Fundamentally, there is a lack of conflict, and conflict is what drives most novel narratives. The characters surrounding the protagonist, are fundamentally nice, including the grumpy granddad. The only real tension is that the narrator is worried that he will let slip that he is from the past; he pretends to be from another country. 

It's poorly written. None of the characters have any depth, in fact they are so flat they are scarcely even two-dimensional. Of the principals:

• Dick is Mr Marvellous. Not only is he incredibly nice - he happily forgives his girlfriend after she has had an affair with another man - and eternally cheerful and immensely generous with his time but also he is a wonderful rower and, as he himself modestly says, “a pretty good mower”. I disliked him from the start.
• His grandfather, Hammond, is nice and kind and very wise.
• There is a grumpy old man who is grumpy about everything.
• The women are delightfully kind and delightfully pretty.

The first chapter is a third person narrative describing things happening to “a friend”; this then morphs in the second chapter and subsequently into a first person narrative. This narrative shift could be seen as the creation of a frame narrative in order to distance the ‘I’ of the narrator from the author, despite the many hints in the text that these are, in fact, one and the same (for example, they end up at Kelmscott Manor, the house where Morris lived, and this is described by the narrator as being familiar). In fact it just feels clumsily inconsistent.

There are poorly written sentences. For example:

• “As he sat in that vapour-bath of hurried and discontented humanity, a carriage of the underground railway, he, like others, stewed discontentedly.” (Ch 1) The repetition of discontented/ discontentedly does not seem deliberate (as it would be if this was an example of anaphora) and therefore, although the image is compelling, this is a poorly constructed sentence.
• “To her quoth Dick, ‘ Maiden, would you kindly hold our horse while we go in for a little while?’” (Ch 6) The use of ‘quoth’, archaic even then and used mainly in fiction set in the mediaeval period, and the strange word order, and the use of ‘Maiden’ as a title to address a young girl by, all suggest that Morris is trying to evoke Merrie England in the way that typically hack Victorian writers such as Charles Kingsley in Hereward the Wake and Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter did.
• “All work is now pleasurable; either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes pleasurable excitement, even when the actual work is not pleasant, or else because it has grown into a pleasurable habit.” (Ch 15) Lots of pleasure! Is this anaphora? Or carelessness?

But it isn't really intended to be a novel. Like the central part of 1984, it is basically a platform for Morris's utopian socialist political ideas. The basis of it is that the Industrial Revolution was a Bad Thing and that the perfect future is a return to the rural paradise that Morris thinks was England in the Middle Ages. It was fashionable at the time (for example, Oscar Wilde with his aestheticism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with which Morris was associated, being a lifelong friend of Edward Burne-Jones and sharing his wife with Dante Gabriel Rossetti) to romanticise the mediaeval period. Morris is aware is wasn't all great back then: “Have you not read of the Mediaeval period, and the ferocity of its criminal laws; and how in those days men fairly seemed to have enjoyed tormenting their fellow-men? - nay, for the matter of that, they made their God a tormentor and a jailer rather than anything else.” (Ch 7) 

He seems to believe that all was parasidical back then as a matter of taste. He loves the Gothic aesthetic, being an enormous fan of that architecture and adoring Mallory's Morte D'Arthur. Mediaeval good, Victorian bad is a dogma with him and anything made of metal, such as “the beastly iron bridge” (C 14), is horrid and bad. 'Chacun a son gout', or 'one man's meat is another man's poison', or 'de gustibus non est disputandum' are not precepts which sway Morris. 

Fundamentally, his socialist utopia is achieved by clearing the slums of London and sending the population back into the countryside (sounds a bit like what Mao did in the Cultural Revolution, or what Pol Pot did in Cambodia) where they will be housed in the stately homes on the grand estates (plenty of room?) and will produce the necessities of life by farming. He suggests that much of what is produced in the Victorian factories is unnecessary, cheap and shoddy wares which are only wanted because people have been brainwashed into thinking they are necessary. True necessities (presumably including the pipe and tobacco that the narrator buys) can be hand produced. And Morris believes that hand-production is inherently pleasurable for the labourer. Therefore people will not need to be incentivised or forced to work, they will do it because they enjoy it, whether it is the outside work of ferrying or haymaking or digging up the road which they do because it makes them feel fit, or the more artisan work such as making beautiful pipes. 

This obviously reflects Morris’s own life. He set up a craft co-operative producing furniture and interior decoration such as wallpaper. The irony was that despite it being backed by Morris’s personal fortune (inherited shareholdings in, among other things, copper mines) the company made things that only well-off people could afford. Even nowadays, Morris designs and artisan products are more expensive that mass-produced goods and there are many people who have no chance of affording them. Perhaps this dream of a utopia was Morris trying the reconcile the realities of his life (inherited money, crafts produced for the wealthy) with his socialist ideals. 

Dick's forgiving nature when his girlfriend asks to return to him following her affair is an opportunity for Morris to set out his views of marriage. He doesn't believe in it, or at least not in the way that, in the Victorian era, women were often treated as property, belonging to father or brother before being sold to a husband. In this respect, the novel matches reality. Morris married Jane Burden, who had been one of the models (and possibly one of the lovers) of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Jane was available because Rossetti married another model, Lizzie Siddal. But when Siddal died, Rossetti returned to 'claim' Jane, and for a while Morris, Rossetti and Jane lived in a threesome where it seems likely that Jane, still married to Morris and mother to his two daughters, slept exclusively with Rossetti. The utopian ideal of free love in the pages of News from Nowehere, matches this situation (although there are suggestions that Morris wasn't particularly happy with the arrangements). But in other respects, Morris isn't quite as enlightened: “Don't you know that it is a great pleasure to a clever woman to manage a house skilfully, and to do it so that all the house-mates about her look pleased and are grateful to her?” (Ch 9) Not a lot of liberation! And, since he has abolished parliamentary democracy, he fudges the issue of women’s suffrage.

On the other hand, as an ex-teacher who was once a pupil at Eton College, I thought he made some valid points about education:

• “You expected to see children thrust into schools when they had reached an age conventionally supposed to be the due age, whatever their varying faculties and dispositions might be” (Ch 10)
• “In the nineteenth century, society was so miserably poor, owing to the systematised robbery on which it was founded, that real education was impossible for anybody.” (Ch 10)
• “In the nineteenth century Oxford and its less interesting sister Cambridge ... were the breeding places a peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves cultivated people.” (Ch 10)
• Eton College is “a place for the ‘aristocracy’ ... to get rid of the company of their male children for a great part of the year.” (Ch 24)

Other selected quotes:

• “They were clothed like women, not upholstered like arm-chairs.” (Ch 3)
• “A big mastiff, who was as happily lazy as if the summer-day had been made for him alone.” (Ch 7)
• “His face, dried-apple-like as it was seemed strangely familiar to me; as if I had seen it before - in a looking glass it might be, said I to myself.” (Ch 9)
• “Was not the Parliament on the one side a kind of watch-committee sitting to see that the interests of the Upper Classes took no hurt; and on the other side a sort of blind to delude the people into supposing that they had some share in the management of their own affairs?” (Ch 11)
• “It was a current jest of the time that the wares were made to sell and not to use.” (Ch 15)
• “Their raiment, apart from its colour, was both beautiful and reasonable - veiling the form, without either muffling or caricaturing it.” (Ch 19)
• “As for your books, they were well enough for times when intelligent people had but little else in which they could take pleasure, and when they must needs supplement the sordid miseries of their own lives with imaginations of the lives of other people.” (Ch 22)

An interesting, rather than a fun read. It's a dream of an ideal society. It didn't convince me, although there is very little argument expended in order to try and convince me.

May 2024; 182 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Freedom" by Sebastian Junger

This book is framed by a travelogue. The author, with three friends and a dog, walked for a year (although not all in one go) along the railroad lines in the American east, sleeping rough. It is in many ways a classic American journey: the men are emulating the pioneers, they are practising the cherished American ideals of self-sufficiency and freedom from authority.

They are a macho bunch. Four men, all experienced in warfare (Junger is a journalist and war reporter, and the friends are a conflict photographer and two veterans from the Afghan campaign), who anticipate trouble: “We were always worried about the locals and on a weekend night it seemed like a good idea to sleep at a place that was hard to find and easy to leave. If they came up one side, we’d go down the other. If that didn’t work, we’d stay on top and see how badly they wanted this.” (Book Two: Fight) Indeed, they are shot at more than once.

As they walk, Junger muses over that classic American ideal: Freedom. He and his friends feel free (“most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom but surely that is one of them.” ; Book One: Run) but this is a mirage because their existence is marginal and precarious. Freedom is "first and foremost ... the absence of threat. A person who can be killed without any consequences for the killers is not free in the most important sense of the word” (Book One: Run) There must be a trade-off between autonomy and security. Junger and his friends may have no obligations to outsiders but to stay safe they have to become tightly interdependent, ceding personal freedom to the needs of the group. In the same way, the American pioneers as a group were tightly bound by a code of obligation to one another because each might need the other to help when the Indians (Native Americans) attacked. This is the same bargain as that made when joining a street gang: "The inside joke about freedom ... is that you’re always trading obedience to one thing for obedience to another.” (Book One: Run) 

But surely hunter-gatherer societies are freer than others. Movement from place to place is, he suggests “subversive for the development of authority ... Adults of either sex can readily, if they choose, obtain enough food to feed themselves and are potentially autonomous.” (Book One: Run). His group of friends are like nomads but although they feel free he realises that “everything we needed—food, clothes, gear—came from the very thing we thought we were outwitting. ... Few people grow their own food or build their own homes, and no one—literally no one—refines their own gasoline, performs their own surgery, makes their own ball bearings, grinds their own eyeglass lenses, or manufactures their own electronics from scratch. Everyone—including people who vehemently oppose any form of federal government—depend on a sprawling supply chain that can only function with federal oversight, and most of them pay roughly one-third of their income in taxes for the right to participate in this system.” (Book One: Run) 

Most people live as citizens of a nation state and have surrendered a part of their own freedom in return for prosperity within that state. Junger realises that, counter to the opinion that freedom means the freedom to make money, a society with a great discrepancy between the poor and the rich must have limited freedom for the poor (a wage slave is still a slave). “An important part of freedom is not having to make sacrifices for people who don’t have to make sacrifices for you.” (Book Three: Think)

 Similarly, nations are prepared to bargain away some of their sovereignty in exchange for prosperity (as brought by mutual trading alliances) or security (achieved through common defence systems). Junger believes that in human societies the powerful cannot always prevail against the powerless, citing examples (eg Afghanistan) in which insurgencies have defeated powerful armies. He sees this as key to the development of international human rights which may curtail freedom but are essential to ensuring the freedom of citizens within societies. 

The book is also a meditation on walking. I have done some long-distance walks (though much shorter than this one - up to 100 miles - and not sleeping rough but deliberately seeking out towns, hotels and restaurants as part of the experience) and I enjoyed this aspect of the book.

Selected quotes:

• “The ancient Celtic measurement of a “league” was defined as the distance a man could walk in an hour—roughly three or four miles.” (Book One: Run)
• “The poor have always walked and the desperate have always slept outside.” (Book One: Run)
• “One of God’s great oversights is that dogs don’t live as long as men” (Book Three: Think)
• “Rightly or wrongly, society tends to value women’s survival more than men’s, and that makes machine-gunning them problematic.” (Book Three: Think)
• “History is littered with fascist leaders who have rigged elections and tortured or killed critics, but their regimes are remarkably short-lived—especially considering the obsession these men usually have with holding power.” (Book Three: Think)

Freedom is an interesting, if very personal, exploration of an important philosophical concept. It's also a fun read!

August 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Liquid Modernity" by Zygmunt Bauman

This book, written in the year 2000, explores our modern ideas from a sociological / philosophical viewpoint. It has some interesting alternative perspectives and it is written with passion, sometimes anger; it is extraordinarily readable.

His thesis is that the advent of 'liquid' modernity (the internet, the flexibility of new capital, the changing relationships within society) have created substantial and important changes in the way we live our lives.

Freedom
Thus, he discusses freedom. After all, we live in the 'free world'. But this tends to concentrate on political freedom: freedom of speech, of religion, and so forth. Most of us in the western world enjoy this and it is a very precious freedom. But many people are not economically free. Poor people rarely have control of their own destiny. They may not be technically slaves but they often have little opportunity to determine their lives.

Bauman points out, first, that being free doesn't necessarily mean being happy. This works the other way as well. “what feels like freedom is not in fact freedom at all; that people may be satisfied with their lot even though that lot were far from being ‘objectively’ satisfactory; that, living in slavery, they feel free and so experience no urge to liberate themselves" (p 17) But this is not allowed by the libertarians who suppose "that people may be incompetent judges of their own plight and must be forced or cajoled, but in any case guided” to seek freedom (p 17).

In fact most so called libertarians are very distrustful of the mob. In the past, political freedom and human rights were balanced by the suffocating moral code of society. Even today, one's freedom to speak one's mind may be severely curtailed by the social opprobrium one suffers should one's opinions be deemed politically incorrect. So freedom is a balancing act. Hobbesian libertarians “draw their credibility from the assumption that a human being released from coercive social constraints ... is a beast rather than a free individual ... social coercion is in this philosophy the emancipatory force and the sole hope of freedom that a human may reasonably entertain. ... There is no other way to pursue the liberation but to ‘submit to society’ and to follow its norms.” (p 20)

Identity and Individualism

In the old days, people were born into their identities but now you have to become your identity. (p 32) In early modernity the challenge facing people was to conform to “the emerging class-bound social types and models of conduct.” (p 28) “class and gender were ‘facts of nature’ and the task left to the self-assertion of most individuals was to ‘fit in’ in the allocated niche through behaving as the other occupants did.” (p 33)

Nowadays “we are presently moving away from the era of pre-allocated ‘reference groups’ ... the destination of individual self-constructing labours is endemically and incurably undetermined, is not given in advance, and tends to undergo numerous and profound changes before ... the end of the individual’s life.” (p 7) This means that “the burden of pattern-weaving and the responsibility for failure falling primarily on the individual’s shoulders.” (p 8)

Nowadays Big Brother, the punisher of individuality, no longer exists. Nor does Elder Brother, who guides the individual into their proper channel. (p 61) “Everything ... is now down to the individual. It is up to the individual to find out what she or he is capable of doing, to stretch that capacity to the utmost, and to pick the ends to which that capacity could be applied best.” (p 62)

And we need guidance. Bauman points out that TV chat shows are “daily compulsive viewing for millions of guidance-hungry men and women.” (p 68) However the only support offered is the self-help support group. “One may perhaps also learn from other people's experience how to survive the next round of ‘downsizing’, how to handle children who think they are adolescents and adolescents who refuse to become adults, how to get the fat and other unwelcome ‘foreign bodies’ ‘out of one’s system’, how to get rid of addiction that is no longer pleasurable or partners who are no longer satisfying. But what one learns in the first place from the company of others is ... advice about how to survive in one's own irredeemable loneliness” (p 35)

Shifting the blame
“At the threshold of the modern era we have been emancipated from belief in the act of creation, revelation and eternal condemnation. With such beliefs out of the way, we humans found ourselves ‘on our own’ - which means that from then on we knew of no limits to improvement and self-improvement other than the shortcomings of our own inherited or acquired gifts, resourcefulness, nerve, will and determination.” (p 28)

“That men and women have no one to blame for their frustrations and troubles does not need now to mean ... that they can protect themselves ... if they fall ill, it is assumed that this is happened because they were not resolute and industrious enough in following their health regime; if they stay unemployed, it is because they failed to learn the skills of gaining an interview, because they did not try hard enough to find a job what because they are, purely and simply, work-shy.” (p 34)


The relationship between the governed and the governors:
Modern life is like a caravan site: “Drivers bring to the site their own homes ... each driver has his or her own itinerary and time schedule. What the drivers wants from the site managers is not much more (but no less either) then to be left alone and not interfered with. In exchange, they promise not to challenge the managers’ authority and to pay the rent when due. Since they pay, they also demand. They tend to be quite adamant when arguing for their rights to the promised services but otherwise want to go their own ways and would be angry if not allowed to do so. On occasion, they may clamour for better service ... but it won't occur to them to ... take over the responsibility for running the place.” (p 24)

Certainly the bosses no longer want to look after people. “The contemporary global elite can run without burdening itself with the chores of administration, management, welfare concerns, or, for that matter, with the mission of ‘bringing light’, ‘reforming the ways’, morally uplifting, ‘civilizing’ and cultural crusades. Active engagement in the life of subordinate populations is no longer needed (on the contrary, it avoided as unnecessarily costly and ineffective)” (p 13)

Instead the prime technique is to relocate the blame for misery. “Being an individual de jure means having no one to blame for one's own misery, seeking the causes of one's own defeats nowhere except in one's own indolence and sloth, and looking for no remedies other than try harder and harder still.” (p 38) As in the Bible, the Israelites are being ordered to make bricks without straw “and the producers of bricks are told that solely their own laziness prevents them from doing the job properly.” (p 49)

But the destruction of collective action and the iconisation of individualism has left the poor, those "limited to their own, individually owned, blatantly inadequate resources.” (p 33)  without a weapon:

Too many opportunities

Bauman suggests that modern capitalism has, in order to keep selling, moved beyond need. In the olden days goods were produced to satisfy need. But "there is a bottom line to what one needs in order to stay alive and be capable of doing whatever the producer’s role may require, but also an upper limit to what one may dream of, desire and pursue while counting on the social approval for one’s ambitions ... whatever rises above that limit is a luxury, and desiring luxury is a sin. The main concern is therefore that of conformity.” (p 76)

We've gone beyond the 'luxury is a sin' point. And now we are moving beyond desire. This is because “it takes time, effort and considerable financial outlay to arouse desire ... Consumers guided by desire must be ‘produced’, ever anew, and at high cost".

In order to keep selling the capitalists must create a mind-set in which we are desperate for endless self-improvement. “The ‘my body a besieged fortress’ attitude does not lead to asceticism, abstinence or renunciation; if anything, it means consuming more - but consuming special ‘healthy’ foods, commercially supplied.” (p 80)

But this pursuit of wishes brings anxieties: “One thing the fitness-seekers know for sure is that they are not fit enough, yet, and that they must keep trying. The pursuit of fitness is the state of perpetual self-scrutiny, self-reproach and self-deprecation, and so also of continuous anxiety.” (p 78)

We used to admire those who could wait for things. But now we are too busy running to catch up with eternally receding goals. “No longer is the delay of gratification a sign of moral virtue. It is a hardship pure and simple, a problematic burden signalling imperfections in social arrangements, personal inadequacy, or both. ...In the casino culture the waiting is taken out of wanting, but the satisfaction of the wanting must also be brief, must last only until the next run of the ball, to be as short-lived as the waiting, lest it should smother, rather than replenish and reinvigorate, the desire.” (p 159) “To stay alive and fresh, desire must be time and again, and quite often, gratified - yet gratification spells the end of the desire.” (p 160) “One can think of no reason to stick to an inferior or aged product rather than look for a ‘new and improved’ one in the shops.” (p 164)

But there is too much to want.
"The world full of possibilities is like a buffet table set with mouth-watering dishes, too numerous for the keenest of eaters to hope to taste them all.” (p 62)
I just need to look at my bookshelves, stuffed with books I have bought but not yet got around to reading, and the Amazon 'later' list which has over one hundred titles on it, and the poster of a hundred books I 'must' read on which I have nearly half still to be read, to know that there is too much wanting in my world.

Of course this endless choice is only available to the monied. “The more choices the rich seem to have, the less bearable to all is a life without choosing.” (p 88)

Cities and strangers

The modern dream is to live in a community. But other people are dangerous. Defining a city as "a human settlement in which strangers are likely to meet" (p 94) Bauman suggests that such encounters require us to develop "civility" (p 95) a code of behaviour appropriate for an encounter unlikely to have either a past or a future. He suggests that the spaces we develop where encounters with strangers regularly take place (airport lounges, hotel rooms, motorway service stations etc) "do not require a mastery of the sophisticated and hard-to-study art of civility, since they reduce behaviour in public to a few simple and easy-to-grasp precepts.” (p 102)

But we are becoming so frightened of strangers that we are redeveloping gated communities (going back, perhaps, to the walled towns of the middle-ages) in which civility and community is ensured by the tight surveillance of security guards and CCTV (p 92)

Then we dump everything that is bad outside the walls. The “communal world is complete in so far as all the rest is ... hostile - a wilderness full of ambushes and conspiracies and bristling with enemies wielding chaos as their main weapons. The inner harmony of the communal world shines and glitters against the background of the obscure and tangled jungle which starts on the other side of the turnpike. It is there, to that wilderness, that people huddling in the warmth of shared identity dump (or hope to banish) the fears which prompted them to seek communal shelter.” (p 172)

Work

Once upon a time, we worked for our tribe. Work was “the collective effort of which every single member of humankind had to partake." This meant that work became elevated into a moral imperative. "All the rest was but a consequence: casting work as the ‘natural condition’ of human beings, and being out of work as an abnormality; blaming departure from that natural condition for extant poverty and misery, deprivation and depravity; ranking men and women according to the assumed value of the contribution their work made to the species-wide endeavour; and assigning to work the prime place among human activities, leading to moral self-improvement and to the rise of the overall ethical standards of society.” (p 137)

This was a time when labourers were needed. Bauman suggests that the welfare state owes its origin to the need for the bosses to make sure that there was a supply of (healthy) labour ready to be call upon. “The unemployed were fully and truly the ‘reserve army of labour’, and so had to be kept through thick and thin in a state of readiness, in case they were called back into active service. ... More sceptical observers saw the welfare state as a collectively financed and managed sanitation device - a cleaning-and-healing operation to be run as long as the capitalist enterprise kept generating social waste it had neither intention nor resources to recycle.” (p 145)

But now there isn't enough work to go round. “Work can no longer offer the secure axis around which to wrap and fix self-definitions, identities and life-projects. Neither can it be easily conceived of as the ethical foundation of society, or as the ethical axis of individual life. Instead work has acquired ... a mainly aesthetic significance. It is expected to be gratifying by and in itself, rather than be measured by the genuine or putative effects it brings to one’s brothers and sisters in humanity ... let alone the bliss of future generations ... It is instead measured and evaluated by its capacity to be entertaining and amusing” (p 139)

Furthermore, the global economy means that mobile capital can roam the world while the less-mobile workers are stuck in one place. This in turn means that localised governments have to pander to capital. “To an unprecedented degree politics has become a tug-of-war between the speed with which capital can move and the ‘slowing down’ capacities of local powers ... A government ... has little choice but to implore and cajole, rather than force, capital to fly in ... In practice, all this means low taxes, fewer or no rules and above all a ‘flexible labour market’. More generally, it means a docile population.” (p 150) The only weapon governments have is their markets. “Capital is dependent, for its competitiveness, effectiveness and profitability, on consumers ... a labour force is but a secondary consideration.” (p 151)

Bauman suggests there are now four sorts of work: “People who invent the ideas and the ways to make them desirable and marketable ... those engaged in the reproduction of labour (educators or various functionaries of welfare state) ... ‘skin trades’ requiring face-to-face encounter with the recipients of service ... routine labourers ... the most expendable, disposable and exchangeable parts of the economic system.” (p 153)

Other ideas

• Reality “is created by ...the stubborn indifference of the world to my intention, the world's reluctance to submit to my will, that rebounds in the perception of the world as ‘real’ - constraining, limiting and disobedient.” (p 17)
• “When authorities are many, they tend to cancel each other out. ... It is by courtesy of the chooser that a would-be authority becomes an authority. Authorities no longer command; they ingratiate themselves with the chooser; they tempt and seduce.” (p 64)
• “Heavy modernity was the era of territorial conquest. Wealth and power was firmly rooted or deposited deep inside the land - bulky, ponderous and immovable like the beds of iron ore and deposits of coal. ... Anything lying between the outposts of competing imperial realms was seen as masterless, a no man’s land, and so an empty space - and empty space was a challenge to action and a reproach to idlers.” (p 114)
• “The labyrinth becomes the master image of the human condition” (p 138)
• “If staying together was a matter of reciprocal agreement and mutual dependency, disengagement is unilateral.” (p 149)
• “Leadership has been replaced by the spectacle, and surveillance by seduction.” (p 155)

This is an amazing book. I might not agree with many of the things that has been said, and time may prove wrong, but there is no gainsaying that this is a brilliantly argued position and it certainly made me think.

March 2018; 200 pages

"The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker

I don't re read many books but The Blank Slate is so important that I had to read it again after several years.

Steven Pinker, who wrote the phenomenal The Better Angels of Our Nature previously wrote this even better book. In it, he seeks to demolish three sacred cows:
The Blank Slate which holds that our genes have no part in our personalities and it is our environment that makes us who we are. It is the received wisdom of the self-help guru: you can be whoever you want to be, and the mantra of the left. Unfortunately the scientific evidence suggests it is not true.
The Ghost in the Machine which suggests that we have a soul, or a personality, or a consciousness that is somehow separate from our biological physicality. "'John's body' ... presupposes an owner, John, that is somehow separate." (p 10)
The Noble Savage which suggests that we were perfect and innocent before we were expelled from the Garden and that we need to get back to the perfect state of nature.

He doesn't spend a lot of time on the latter two but he uses twin studies and logic to demolish the Blank Slate.  "The mind cannot be a blank slate, because blank slates don't do anything. ... Something has to see a world of objects rather than a kaleidoscope of shimmering pixels." (p 34). It is clear that genes affect how animals behave, why on earth should we believe that the sole influence on human behaviour is 'culture' (which in any case has many remarkable similarities across the world)? "The evidence is overwhelming that every aspect of our mental lives depends entirely on physiological events in the tissues of our brain." (p 41) eg (p 42):

• Electrical stimulation of brain tissue causes lifelike experiences
• Brain damage causes loss of some function
• Brain death = death

There are clearly things about us that are hard-wired; despite many attempts there is no evidence that any gay man has ever been 'cured' of his homosexuality. (p 94)

This leaves a problem. "If the slate of a newborn is not blank, different babies could have different things inscribed on their slates. Individual sexes, classes, or races might differ innately in their talents, abilities, interests, and inclinations ... if groups of people are biologically different, it could be rational to discriminate against the members of some of the groups ... the differences cannot be blamed on discrimination, and that makes it easier to blame the victim and tolerate inequality." Furthermore, eugenics becomes defensible (p 141)

Pinker describes this as the "the 'naturalistic fallacy': the belief that what happens in nature is good." (p 150). He thinks it is dangerous to base a moral code on a scientific fact which may turn out to be incorrect (as Pinker has, with overwhelming evidence, shown that it is). "We should not concede ... that if people do turn out to be different then discrimination, oppression, or genocide would be OK after all" (p 141) he suggests. "The case against bigotry ... is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups." (p 145) "All humans can be assumed to have certain traits in common. No one likes being enslaved. No one likes being humiliated. No one likes being treated unfairly." (p 145) "Social Darwinism: the belief that the rich and the poor deserve their status" (p 149) is wrong.

Does this mean that we have no free will, no personal responsibility? Don't blame me, blame my genes (p 176) Again, he thinks it need not. He points out that Daniel Dennett (who wrote the brilliant Consciousness Explained) says that a truly free will would not be deterred by punishment, shame, guilt etc (p 177); in any case the environmentalists might have it that we can evade personal responsibility by blaming our mothers (or our cultures; is the prevalence of female genital mutilation in some cultures morally defensible?). Pinker believes that morality has the practical effect of helping selfish individuals get along in society: from reasons of reciprocity "it pays to insist on a moral code, even if the price is adhering to it oneself." (p 187) In any case, he believes that some aspect of morality, such as fairness, are part of our genetic inheritance. "If we are so constituted that we cannot help but think in moral terms ... then morality is real for us as if it were decreed by the Almighty or written into the cosmos. And so it is with other human values like love, truth, and beauty." (p 193)

This is a truly important book, liberating moral philosophy from a number of blind alleys and allowing a twenty-first century ethical code to emerge.

Not only that, but it is also very well-written and extremely readable. 

May 2016; 434 pages

"The uses of pessimism" by Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton is a philosopher and a proponent of conservatism. Perhaps he is principally revered for his aesthetics: I can't comment on this. The present book is essentially philosophical and summarises some of the reasons why he so dislikes the opponents of conservatism.

This is the only Scruton book I have read so I can't generalise my comments but from my limited evidence it seems to me that this work is essentially reactive. He describes and attacks what he hates. He hates utopians and revolutionaries. Thus he attacks the French Revolutionaries and Mao.. In so doing it appears that he is guilty of the fallacy of the straw man. By attacking the worst excesses of his opponents, such as Hitler, terrorists and post-modern gobbledygookers, he seeks to undermine the moderates. But he doesn't seem to defend his own proposals.

However, my main concern with this book is that Scruton never provides any evidence for his assertions. He justifies nothing. For example, he supports 'free exchange' (free enterprise?) and the 'invisible hand' (Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market, one presumes) but he never defines these terms, he never provides any evidence as to why they are good (except that they are somehow opposed to what is bad and that they are 'traditional') and he certainly never explores the limitations of his ideas. He seems blind to the fact that the invisible hand of the markets does not always work perfectly, that theft and predation are a type of free enterprise; he seems blind to the fact that if 'America' does not enjoy global support there may be some reason other than the stupidity and wickedness of his opponents.

I came to Scruton from reading Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature and Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. Both hammer home every point with evidence: Pinker usually uses 'real' statistical data and Kahneman usually employs evidence from psychological experiments. But Scruton's arguments against transhumanism, for example,  come from Huxley's Brave New World, Shelley's Frankenstein, and Capek's The Makropulos Case. These are all works of fiction. They may be dystopian visions but they are not hard evidence. Again, he suggests that we only need originality "when circumstances change" (p 21) but he gives no evidence for this assertion. I look at the evolving world and see that nature continually creates novelty even when circumstances stay the same. Evolution may be massively wasteful but at least it seems to work. I worry about a world where we can stagnate and yet believe we can turn on originality as needed. Please, Mr Scruton, give me some evidence for your point of view.

A lot of his arguments rest on rhetoric using boo-words to damn. He criticises "the worst kind of optimism" (p37); presumably the worst kind is necessarily bad just as the best kind of optimism is good. He criticises "unscrupulous optimists" (p38) (does he applaud scrupulous ones?) because they create "folly and wickedness" (p37) and fall into fallacies which leave them "forever in darkness". He certainly knows how to lay extreme language on thick. At the same time, apparently without the slightest concept that there might be a speck of wood in his own eye let alone a beam, he tells us that these unscrupulous optimists damn their critics as "not just mistaken ... but evil." (p38) Scruton, heal thyself!

On page 49 he contends, without any supporting evidence whatsoever, that "it is only in a society governed by the 'invisible hand' that true equality can be achieved: not an equality of property, influence or power, but an equality of recognition." Where is the evidence for the 'only'? Where is the evidence that 'equality of recognition' is the 'true equality'?

On page 50 he contends that we acquire freedom through "obedience" but he doesn't explain why or how and he doesn't explore whether it is possible to acquire freedom through any alternative method.

Again and again he builds a tower of conclusions, each one based on his own arguments and beliefs unsupported by external evidence. The result is a philosophical house of cards.

I was terribly disappointed by this book. Something is seriously wrong if this is the best philosophical justification that conservatism can muster. This book is little more than a list of unsupported assertions. The arguments lack evidence and lack depth. This book reads like the rant of a bar-room bigot seeking to convince by shouting reason down.

Embarrassingly weak. August 2013; 232 pages