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· Dostoevsky’s truth vs the Tsar’s fiction.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

THE OFTEN ABSURD THEATRICS of state authority are now familiar to us all. Saying you will do one thing while deliberately doing another is what passes for modern political genius, and using the power of the state to enforce the conceit is merely the banal denouement. Today, the state’s intellectual credibility extends only to the edge of the political proscenium. But once, the world was a stage.

By MICHAEL HOLLINGTON [Synthesis] – Were I to choose any one single episode in the life of a modern writer to fit the “truth is stranger than fiction” bill, it would be a central incident in the life of Dostoevsky that took place in December 1849. In April of that year he had been arrested and imprisoned as a member of the Petrashevsky circle supposedly conspiring to depose the Tsar and overthrow the Russian government. Following the subsequent investigations, and despite a report to the Tsar to the effect that, whilst the group certainly organised discussion of desirable changes to the existing structure of authority, there was little evidence of any coherent or concrete plan to effect such changes, Dostoevsky and fourteen others were condemned to death by firing squad on November 16, 1849. Continue reading “· Dostoevsky’s truth vs the Tsar’s fiction.” »

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· Shopping for miracles with Buddha on the brain.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

THE RULES FOR SAINT-MAKING: The miracle must be proximate to the prayer. The prayer must be directed toward the object of veneration only. The miracle must be complete and instantaneous. The miracle must be documented and subjected to rational, independent and scientific scrutiny. The miracle must not involve a ritual belly-rub. Ergo, no Saint Buddha?

Probably. But there is some additional fine print.

By DAVID WEISMAN [Seed] – When considering a Buddhist contemplating his soul, one is immediately struck by a disconnect between religious teaching and perception. While meditating in the temple, the self is an illusion. But when the Buddhist goes shopping he feels like we all do: unified, in control, and unchanged from moment to moment. The way things feel becomes suspect. And that’s pretty close to what neurologists deal with every day, like the case of Mr. Logosh.

Mr. Logosh was 37 years old when he suffered a stroke. Continue reading “· Shopping for miracles with Buddha on the brain.” »

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· Karl Marx and the eternal sunshine of the communist mind.

Monday, April 11, 2011

LOTS OF PEOPLE DIED to prove how deadly Marxism’s ineluctable violence can be. Re-arranging property and people always leaves a very high body count. Most of us learned the hard lessons. For the last quarter-century, all Marxists have had to cling to is the great pretence of an impossible hypothesis: if only Marxism had followed plan B instead of plan A, none of that inconvenient history would have happened. Of course, another history would have happened, and only the romantic faith of the true believer can pretend it would be any different. Thus we have the condescending optimism of Terry Eagleton and Eric Hobsbawm, two men left alone on a plain littered with corpses, waving their red flags, singing the old songs, and claiming, really, it didn’t have to be this way.

But it did. “There is a sense in which the whole of Marx’s writing boils down to several embarrassing questions,” Eagleton writes before proceeding along Marxism’s well-worn rhetorical path. Poor Eagleton. He doesn’t even know what questions to ask. “Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists,” he writes in Why Marx Was Right, published this month by Yale. Drunks and junkies say the same thing. The theory: recognizing one has a problem is the first step to solving it. Not so when Marx is the drug.

By TERRY EAGLETON [Chronicle of Higher Education] – The political movement which [Marx’s] work set in motion has done more to help small nations throw off their imperialist masters than any other political current. Yet Marx was not foolish enough to imagine that socialism could be built in such countries without more-advanced nations flying to their aid. And that meant that the common people of those advanced nations had to wrest the means of production from their rulers and place them at the service of the wretched of the earth. If this had happened in 19th-century Ireland, there would have been no famine to send a million men and women to their graves and another two or three million to the far corners of the earth.

Continue reading “· Karl Marx and the eternal sunshine of the communist mind.” »

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· David Cameron’s non-winning ways.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

A YEAR AGO, TORY flacks dismissed any suggestion that David Cameron’s dismal poll showing and his subsequent rush to find shelter in a coalition with Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems was anything less than a victory. It was not, of course. It was a loss – or more precisely a failure to win. Inevitably, Cameron will have to face the voters again. It remains to be seen whether the results will put the Conservatives out of contention for another decade, or make clear once and for all that Labour is the party of history. One thing seems certain: the Liberal Democrats – the party of radical irrelevancy – are already political relics.

By BENEDICT BROGAM [Daily Telegraph] – By reaching a swift understanding with Mr Clegg, himself all too well aware that he was the election’s big loser, Mr Cameron ushered in the age of compromise and tactical retreat that has marked the last 11 months. Any assessment of the Coalition’s performance to date, and the difficulties it now finds itself in, has to take account of the oddity at its heart. We are led, if not by a loser, then by a politician who has no trophy to show, no winner’s badge to wear, no mandate of the kind that gave Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and even John Major an immediate bond with the electorate. Continue reading “· David Cameron’s non-winning ways.” »

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· The earthquake in Japan: it’s only been a month?

Sunday, April 10, 2011

IT’S SHOCKING TO ADMIT that the Japanese earthquake is just a day shy of being month-old news. It’s also hard to admit that, as in every Man v. Nature narrative, the moral of the story is completely absent. All we have are aftershocks.

By SUSANNA JONES [New Statesman] – It will take generations for the north-eastern communities to recover. What will be the effect on Japan as a whole? Rather than immersing ourselves in the language of horror films and the end of the world, when the time is right to try to glimpse this new territory, we might for thought reach for a book by Japan’s most popular contemporary novelist. Haruki Murakami’s slim collection of short stories, After the Quake, published in English in 2002, was written in response to, but not directly about, the Kobe earthquake. From the painful to the surreal to the gently touching, the anthology presents a series of psychological aftershocks. Continue reading “· The earthquake in Japan: it’s only been a month?” »

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· Stopping by Fred Nietzsche’s house.

Friday, April 8, 2011

IT’S A PASSION FOR some to visit the homes of famous writers, more or less the way visitors to Hollywood fill busses that pass by the homes of celebrities. The thinking must be that if a lawn can reveal the person, a look in the closet might reveal the soul – among other things.

By AUSTIN RATNER [Writers’ Houses] – The little Alpine pensione sits by a lake beside which Nietzsche supposedly did much walking and thinking and the boarding house surprises with its aspect of serenity.  It’s couched in a muting snowfall lying thick on its roof and chimneys, and on the evergreen trees crowded close around and above it.  The two chimneys look like birdfeeders but each has its own personality, and the windows share a general type but also demonstrate some amiable individuality; most are recessed with tidy shutters, except for two to the left of the front door, which are not recessed and bear friezes over them.

Continue reading “· Stopping by Fred Nietzsche’s house.” »

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· Ink-stained hippie wretches and their far-out newspapers.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

IMAGINE HAVING TO GO to your local head-shop just to read a blog or two. The blog-equivalent 40-odd years ago was the underground newspaper, the  publishing phenomenon of the ’60s, in which writers who are now in their sixties provided what blogs now provide in abundance – an alternative to the mainstream media.

By RICHARD GREENWALD [In These Times] – Communication is the oxygen of social movements, but scholars have rarely focused attention on the organs of social protest. In the 19th century, the labor and radical movements all had their own press, as did various ethnic communities, and each was vital to its cause. The medium has changed (from small magazines, to cheaply printed local community newspapers to Twitter), but the message is the same: Social movements need organic forms of communication because without it, they die.

Smoking Typewriters chronicles the pioneers of what today we call “independent media.” [John] McMillian meticulously mines the rich archive of the alternative press to reveal these newspapers as products of their era, tied to activist communities as well as powerful personalities, and linked through ideology and more than a little hustle and business moxie. Continue reading “· Ink-stained hippie wretches and their far-out newspapers.” »

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· Who’s the sharper expert – a politician or a monkey with a dart?

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

EXPERTS ARE ALWAYS WITH us. And so, of course, are their predictions. Few are ever astonishing, but many are safer than others. For example, this week an important politician will say something impressively stupid. Bank on it. Experts are supposed to be better at this sort of thing, but, as discussed below, Philip Tetlock reported (in Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?) that after surveying 28,000 predictions by more than 280 experts, “a dart-throwing chimpanzee” could have done as well.

Although there is a safe prediction one might make about dart-throwing chimps.

By RONALD BAILEY [Reason] –The price of oil will soar to $200 per barrel. A bioterror attack will occur before 2013. Rising food prices could spark riots in Britain. The Arctic Ocean will be ice-free by 2015. Home prices will not recover this year. But who cares about any of those predictions: The world will end in 2012.

The media abound with confident predictions. Continue reading “· Who’s the sharper expert – a politician or a monkey with a dart?” »

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· Want to improve your quality of life? Get a better writer.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

A RECENT READING OF Hugh Kingsmill’s Frank Harris: A Biography, followed by a re-acquaintance with Harris’s very untrustworthy My Life and Loves, suggests how deeply fictional one’s own life can be, and in fact invariably is. Some of us could barely get through a day if we had to live the actual reality of the life we’ve been given instead of the life we daydream or otherwise invent. Only the vituperative biographer, as Kingsmill is, however winningly, is interested in the facts of a life. The truth of a life is generally far more interesting, often because it flies in the face of known facts and delivers to us a man (or woman, of course) a reader would like to believe in.

By JEROME BOYD MAUNSELL [Times Literary Supplement] – The biographical novel is “honest” in this regard: it makes no pretence to authority in matters of fact. It also neatly – perhaps too neatly – sidesteps the vexed ethical concerns over privacy, propriety and intrusion with which literary biography is enmeshed.

There are, however, many ways of writing such books, especially in terms of how close to the factual record one keeps. In his disclaimers to his campus novels Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988), [David] Lodge was keen to stress the imagined element of his fiction. In Author, Author – and in A Man of Parts, his second biographical novel, about the life of H. G. Wells – he emphasizes the extent to which he has been faithful to the facts. “Nearly everything that happens in this narrative is based on factual sources”, he tells us, “‘based on’ in the elastic sense that includes ‘inferable from’ and ‘consistent with’.” Continue reading “· Want to improve your quality of life? Get a better writer.” »

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· At top American colleges, it’s admission: impossible.

Friday, April 1, 2011

“DOES ANYONE REALLY KNOW how to sift these masses of talented, intelligent 18-year-olds for the ones who will flourish at a particular school?” asked Princeton Prof. Anthony Grafton a few weeks ago, just before rejection letters were sent out to more than 90 percent of applicants to top American universities. The answer: Of course not. Assuming most of those applicants sought admission to Harvard, Princeton and Yale in good faith and with a reasonable chance of success (else why pay the steep application fees at all?), the very low rate of acceptance to those schools is not a cause for celebration by academic bureaucrats. It’s an admission of a different sort – one of failure. Grafton’s column from the Daily Princetonian was excerpted here. Today, we augment it with this batch of reports.

By EMILY WANGER [Yale Daily News] – In line with its peer institutions, Yale’s admission rate dropped this year — from 7.5 percent in the last admissions cycle to 7.35 percent this year.

Yale is making a total of 2,006 offers of admission to the record 27,282 students who applied this year, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeffrey Brenzel said…

The University joins Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and MIT in recording small decreases in admissions rate this year.

Four college counselors interviewed said they were not surprised by Yale’s ever-lower admissions rate, which has fallen from 9.9 percent since 2007. Nancy Beane, a college counselor at the Westminster Schools, a private Christian day school in Atlanta, Ga., said decreasing admissions rates are causing more students to apply to more schools.

“Every school seems to be getting incrementally harder to get into,” she said. “It worries me, especially with the number of applications out there. It’s gotten crazy.” Continue reading “· At top American colleges, it’s admission: impossible.” »

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· First ask: what would Mr Rogers do?

Thursday, March 31, 2011

By ROSS McCULLOUGH [First Things] – What I am trying to indicate, in brief, is an ethics incumbent on us not as consumers but as neighbors. For what goes with that is a sense of the beauty of the ethical, a sense that acting rightly and well can be attractive and even in a way—here a pregnant ambiguity—graceful. It is when one conceives it as an everyday affair that one begins to see the difficulty and fragility but also the supreme draw of the well-lived life. Here is something worth doing. John Duns Scotus remarks that “the moral goodness of an act is a kind of décor it has, including a due proportion to all to which it should be proportioned.” It has what the Greeks called kairos, the right moment, the perfect time—and not just the when, but what is done, and why, and where and how it is performed. It is just right. Continue reading “· First ask: what would Mr Rogers do?” »

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· Elitists, anarchists, progressives, and their views of ‘sclerotic’ democracy.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

By MICHAEL KNOX BERAN [City Journal] – More than a century and a half ago, Benjamin Disraeli, affecting to believe that Britain’s Tory elite was “the really democratic party of England,” showed that the well-to-do could more easily maintain their ascendancy if they became paternalist champions of working people. By adopting socially progressive policies, they could “dish the Whigs” and stave off free-market reformers like Richard Cobden and John Bright.

In a no less duplicitous spirit, Otto von Bismarck invited Ferdinand Lassalle, founder of the General Union of German Workers, to the Wilhelmstrasse, where the two explored an alliance between Bismarck’s Junker ministry and the working classes. Bismarck did not “promote social reform out of love for the German workers,” historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote. Following, by turns, Marx and Metternich, Bismarck sought to make workers “more subservient” to the Junker-dominated state. Continue reading “· Elitists, anarchists, progressives, and their views of ‘sclerotic’ democracy.” »

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· Islam, Caesar and the simple problem in the Middle East.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

By THEODORE DALRYMPLE [New English Review] – There is a very simple problem in the Middle East: simple, that is, conceptually, not simple from the point of view of finding a practical solution to it. Islam has not found a doctrinal way of rendering unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s; and since one of its founding principles is the inequality of man so long as not all men are Muslim, equality before the law is very difficult to establish in a country with a preponderance of Islamic sentiment. Either it must be imposed by a secularising elite, in which case it is felt as oppressive and anti-democratic, in the sense of being against the wishes and feelings of the majority; or it simply fails to exist. And where it does not exist, modernisation can be but a veneer. Continue reading “· Islam, Caesar and the simple problem in the Middle East.” »

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· Remember when there was a French Left? Neither does France.

Monday, March 28, 2011

By ROBERT MARQUAND [Christian Science Monitor] – What is striking [in the French elections Sunday] is the continued rise of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Front and the relative scarcity of Mr. Sarkozy’s ruling party in an election notable for low turnout even though it is the last national poll before presidential elections next spring.

The French vote was round 2 for some 100 districts, and Sarkozy’s UMP party was routed, in some regions losing half its traditional totals, while the National Front in some places scored 40 percent. Continue reading “· Remember when there was a French Left? Neither does France.” »

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· Is ‘fear of failure’ a bad thing for students, teachers, or schools?

Friday, March 25, 2011

By POLLY CURTIS [Guardian] – France’s decline in the international rankings has focused minds. A book by the Paris-based British academic Peter Gumbel published last year titled On achève bien les écoliers? (They shoot schoolchildren, don’t they?) sharpened attention further. In it he argued that the education system was systematically undermining children’s confidence.

“By every international comparison kids here have a low level of self-confidence and lack of self-esteem and fear of failure and no fun at school,” he says. “Even people who have done well have a nasty butterfly feeling in their stomach when they think of school.”

A disconnect between the traditional academic education system and the diverse needs of the pupils it caters for is increasingly recognised. Continue reading “· Is ‘fear of failure’ a bad thing for students, teachers, or schools?” »

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