PERLOCUTION.

I'm so glad I happened to run across your blog. Do you publish your posts elsewhere? If not, you seriously should look into it. All your wisdom is just kind of astounding (like, Exactly how old are you?) I hope to write essays similar to yours someday but I'm not quite sure where to start, nor am I aware of the kind of work other people would be interested in reading and publishing, or how pieces even reach the publisher. Would you have any advice for a young writer? Again, great postings! xx

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:57:38 +0100

In answer (at least partially) to two of your questions, I’m 16, so I’m not entirely sure where to direct you with regard to recommended essayists; you could do worse than Christopher Hitchens, without doubt. As for me, I read obsessively and assimilate whatever interests me, but I don’t intend to be the fount of knowledge for anybody - indeed, my perhaps overly referential style aims to avoid any possibility thereof. I’ll always recall Borges’ dictum that doubt is one of the names of intelligence (on a somewhat related note, there are fields of meaning in anything, so reading things - preferably texte scriptible - in different ways is important); thank you for the question, and good luck.

Parallel deaths; the final calculations of Camille Desmoulins.

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:41:11 +0100

The third issue of Le Vieux Cordelier, published on 25 Frimaire in the feverishly sanguinary excesses of la Terreur, is often taken as the desperate manifestation of la vertu gone mad. Its almost propitiatory exordium - ‘the reigns of the most cruel emperors…had pleasant beginnings’ - progresses in that same apologetic manner, and thus seemingly ineluctably, to a restating of Tacitus’ Annals and the descriptions therein of the despotism of Tiberius, ending by asking whether we must look so far back in history for such examples. We, needless to say, must not; yet Desmoulins’ translation is not the record of desperation which it purports to be, but rather one of the most calculated and erudite political attacks in all history. The context of Desmoulins’ having paraphrased (incidentally through Gordon’s 1737 Discourses on Tacitus intended to imply the same about the corrupt system of British politics) the Annals of Tacitus is manifest. Desmoulins, who had known Robespierre for most of his life, doubtless felt the same contrition Tacitus did at having been complicit with Domitian - Robespierre’s France had brought about servitude and called it civilisation, desert and called it peace (both words attributed to another but clearly the authorial voice). Thus Desmoulins’ attack aimed to imply that the French Revolution was midway through these Tacitean records of Tiberius’ despotism and downfall.

Tacitus’ voice in this whole affair is sine ira et studio – the impartial voice which nonetheless condemns in its objectivity the Terror and tyranny – the voice, in Desmoulins’ eyes and doubtless those of contemporary readers, of history. All history, of course, is a history of the present. The voice of Desmoulins is not that of Tacitus, but that of Cordus; contained within the narrative of his translation, Desmoulins was postulatur novo ac tunc primum audito crimine – by the Comité, or Sejanus’ Praetorians. When Robespierre attempted to silence him, he responded with his now-historic remonstration that brûler n’est pas répondre – indubitably recalling Tacitus’ derision of ‘the stupidity of those who think that present power can destroy the memory of the future’. When he was executed a month later, perhaps he considered the promise of Tacitus that ‘the authority of great writers is enhanced by their suppression.’ Yet this was not the summation of his plan. The implications of the Annals and the historical precedent were that the Comité, like Sejanus’s Praetorian Guard, were to plan against the Tiberian Robespierre, and that Robespierre, after his mysterious seclusion comparable of course to the sojourn of Tiberius in Capri, was to crush them as Tiberius did Sejanus. Needless to say, these two allegations were a self-fulfilling prophecy (the acknowledgment of which could never do anything to prevent the historic outcome) and, because of those fears of both sides, occurred. The third issue of Le Vieux Cordelier was, as is most of history, not a result but a cause of that which followed it – la Terreur, sans laquelle la Vertu est impuissante.

Thoughts on the fashion system.

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:38:00 +0000

The link between signifiant and signifié has never been more tenuous than in the context of fashion. With paint-splattered shoes, torn accoutrements and visually deteriorated fabrics, haut couture seems to be flirting with the floating signifier. Fashion could never have not been one of Barthes’ deconstructed mythologies, but the Barthesian structuralist interpretation of fashion, dating from his early days before S/Z, is in desperate need of updating. Barthes’ Système de la mode – with all of the obvious implications of monde – relies on a dyadic semiotic of signifier and signified – the sign is constituted of the relation between these two, the image and the text, the perception of the garment and the visual garment. The protean nature of fashion highlights that there is a dyadic relation, but not in this way.

The Fashion System delineates an essentialist system, intentionally or otherwise, and one feels that this was less intentional than a function of semiotics at the time. It suggests that the red light constitutes our understanding of it, even if qualifying that our understanding of it can be transferred to another signifié. Following this mode, one would expect the fashion system to be structurally determined by the clothing – that a newcomer could vanquish sartorial doyens through constructing a garment which complies more with the signifiant, the archetype, than their own work.

This is not the case. It does not justify the incomparable extent to which social structural relations dominate the fashion system. The essentialist structuralist understanding, while being of its time, fails to explicate the manner in which fashion is leant meaning by social context. It does not explicate the vastly different, yet equally valid, meaning that one signifié – in this case, one garment – may have to two observers. It doesn’t explain the notion that the système de la mode is supported not by the transient designs but by the rigid social structure of those involved. Indeed, the receiver is often factored into semiotic relations, but never as an integral part of the sign. I propose that we sever the signifiant and the signifié. The red light is not lent meaning in any way by the signifié. Indeed, the red light is a product of the meaning constituted by the dyadic link between the signifier and the receiver. The red light is an after-effect.

Adam Smith, the invisible Marxist.

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 23:37:00 +0000

The common understanding of Adam Smith’s work is of course that it was intended to buttress a fledgling free-market capitalism and equally nascent classical economics; as for Karl Marx, it is understood that he advocated an overthrow of the capitalist system due to the flaws inherent in and inextricable from it. The common view of orthodoxy is that it is correct, which is why, of course, it is orthodoxy. This says little to nothing of its veracity other than that it is assumed, and a closer examination of Smith’s opus elucidates that this interpretation is far from reality.

Indubitably, most of what is taught and learnt about Adam Smith centres on the invisible hand, far out of proportion to the fact that 122 words (‘by preferring the support…for the public good’) of his five-volume work was actually dedicated to explicating this vague assertion, which is certainly only ever an assertion, unless the sentiments of the merchants with whom he is familiar are to be taken as proof – it seems unlikely that Smith, of all people, would have adjudged that. The way in which is it is treated by modern usage is certainly nonsensical and far beyond the scope of even what Smith may have actually intended. This vague dictum pertaining to the preference for domestic trade over foreign trade was exploited as much in favour of protectionism as it now is in favour of free trade. This is closer to biblical hermeneutics than economic work and it is difficult to believe that Smith wasn’t well aware of it, considering that this putative master theory of his does not even appear in the two first books of The Wealth of Nations, which actually pertain to the markets.

For a man who was possessed of a Nabokovian obsession over words perhaps engendered by his speech impediment (a thinker who saw fit to call Samuel Johnson a ‘son of a b——’ according to Johnson’s own biographer) it seems dubious that he would pen such an unclear paragraph with such grand intentions, and other theorists vary from declaring it spurious (Grampp) to intentionally ironic (Rothschild). What is most likely is that Smith is expounding upon his Theory of Moral Sentiments, and attributing this public good not to the rationality of self-interest in mutually beneficial exchanges, but to our moral intuition in which he so singularly put his faith. One presumes that if Smith had elected to illustrate such a monumental idea in such a small space, he at least would have accomplished this in less nebulous and almost flirtatiously ambiguous terms. It is very rarely taken seriously in objective analyses, which is perhaps why this one-paragraph musing was cherry-picked and used to represent Smith in a way which has only been suffered equally by Blaise Pascal and Yeshua bin-Yosef.

Having hopefully cast some doubt on the notion that Adam Smith intended that his life’s work be capsulized in one badly-written paragraph, where it is perhaps most apt to note the convergence of Smith and Marx is with regard to their understanding of the alienation brought about by the contemporary capitalist system in their respective times, Marx’s situation not being vastly different to that of Smith aside from, crucially, the revolutions which informed the only small ways in which Marx actually went further than Smith, i.e. in dealing with the socio-political aspects of his dialectics. The first person to use the term alienation with regard to the industrial capitalist system, before Marx expounded upon Entfremdung, was Smith – I challenge anybody to dispute that. Marx’s alienation, which he viewed as an inexorable result of the internal contradictions of capitalism, focused on how Verfremdung was effected through powerlessness (distance from the means of production), isolation (the structural relations of humans mechanically as labour and not socially as is natural), and self-estrangement (how the worker’s work is externalised, that ‘in work he does not belong to himself’).

Similarly, while Smith uses the kind term ‘cordialisation’ where Marx might have preferred ‘placation’ or something in that vein, his analysis of powerlessness as a facet of alienation is actually remarkably similar, Smith concurs with Marx’s idea of depotentiation; his judgment that the division of labour isolated workers from their work was not stated as a criticism, but agrees with Marx regardless; self-estrangement is a theme in Smith’s work in the same way. When Smith comments that ‘the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations…has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his intervention’ and that ‘he naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become’ it would be, respectfully, an act of abject intellectual dishonesty to dispute that he views the capitalist process as alienating and sees it as stultifying and subjugating the human spirit. He clarifies that ‘in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to defend it’. The government of his time was unwilling and unprepared to defend it, and, since Smith was so pellucidly against the free market, it takes an exceedingly small leap to arrive at Marx’s work. That leap, incidentally, was constituted of the lessons taught by the Age of Revolutions (viz. that social repudiation of absolute authority was a viable method of societal improvement) and not of any ideological deviance whatsoever.

The obfuscatory tactic which dismisses this as the ‘alienation passage’ is just that. Scholars such as Rosenberg and Meek have demonstrated, to no counterproof thus far, that Smith’s lectures, consistently from almost three decades back in 1749, focused obsessively on this alienation. In Smith’s Lectures, for example: ‘it confines the views of men…where the division of labour is brought to perfection every man has only a simple operation to perform…few ideas pass in his mind but what have an immediate connection with it’. Or, this time returning to his pin factory, ‘a person’s whole attention is bestowed on the seventeenth part of a pin…it is remarkable that in every commercial nation the low people are so exceedingly stupid’. When Smith proclaims that ‘the minds of men are contracted and rendered incapable of elevation…education is despised and heroic spirit is utterly extinguished…to remedy these defects would be an object worthy of serious attention,’ he could be mistaken for Marx when he said that labouring man ‘does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased’. This cannot be dismissed, not even with reference – or, rather, deference - to popular misunderstanding.

It is thus thoroughly unsurprising that (as far as possible from what Smith suggests when he mentions the invisible hand with regard to a landlord’s desire to redistribute voluntarily in his Theory of Moral Sentiments) Smith declared that ‘the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than that proportion’ in order ‘to remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich’. When Marx wrote ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,’ he was undoubtedly drawing on Smith’s first maxim of taxation - ‘the subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities’. The two are indistinguishable – different ways of phrasing precisely the same sentence.

Nor therefore is it surprising that Smith and his continental epigone agree so unreservedly in their critique of monopoly capitalism, as illustrated, and that the only difference is that, due to the aforementioned revolutions, Marx felt more able to propose a system of replacing these. He did not venture into the Comtist ‘recipes for cookshops for the future’ which he so despised, but he certainly did delineate a way in which he could remove these from the economic system to the benefit of all. Like Marx, Smith did not blame the companies themselves but the contradictions of capitalism – ‘it is the system of government, the situation in which they are placed, that I mean to censure, not the character of those who have acted in it’. Smith believes, with Marx, that the structure of capitalism was such that a bourgeois class must necessarily be created and shaped – if one bourgeois owner of the means of production is not willing to exploit labour to lower costs, another will be prepared to do so, and so it works.

The notion that Smith thought that the interests of the bourgeoisie were aligned with those of the proletariat is also desperately misinformed. Primarily, and counter to some laughably mendacious analyses, Smith distinguishes clearly between the bourgeois and the proletariat, ‘those who live by wages and those who live by profit’. Smith concurs perfectly with Marx’s dialectics insofar as he agrees that the opposition of these interests is one of the key contradictions of capitalism and the reason why the profit motive has fomented so much discord and political strife: ‘the interests of the dealers is always in some respects opposite to that of the public’; ‘to narrow the competition must always be against [the interests of the public] and can only enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they would naturally be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow citizens’. He judges that ‘the workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible…the former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour’. Of course, Smith had no free-market solution, nor did he want one – ‘it is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into compliance with their terms’.

Due to Smith’s redistributionist stance, which was based (as has been illustrated) on the intervention of a government radically different to the one under which he was living (though at that point the mechanism of revolution in an established autonomous society was untested), what naturally follows is his exhortation of heavy regulation, defending it with the logic that ‘these exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which may endanger the security of a whole society, are and ought to be restrained by all governments’. To suggest that this is the statement of a small-government libertarian in favour of liberty over security is simply at odds with Smith’s own writing; indeed, the utilitarianism of this statement, wholly aside from the similitude of the statement itself, is Marxian. The exertion of the rights of a society against those of the individual in the name of security and well-being was a key Marxist doctrine (its eventual effects being of course known to all).

Adam Smith progresses from providing an understanding of alienation which agrees with and would fundamentally inform Marx, through the logical steps which Karl Marx took – the suppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie due to the profit motive, the necessity of a new government impossible within a capitalist system which would redistribute wealth equally from each according to his ability to each according to this need, and the unsustainability of the industrial capitalist model due to these inherent contradictions. He is, in the most manifest sense, an early Marx. To compare Marx and Smith is indeed a simple matter; to distinguish the two is a more toilsome task.

We are sinners all; hypocrisy as a virtue.

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 13:45:11 +0000

Hypocrisy has always been one of the cardinal vices of the individual. No tort or trait elicits such a censorious and emotional reaction as he who promotes higher principles than his own. One needs not look further than how we have contrived our lowest characters, from Iago to Tartuffe, from the Pardoner to Elmer Gantry; yet the hypocrisy of these individuals only exists and is exprobrated in the dimension of social structural relations. Iago’s hypocrisy inheres relatively to Othello and Desdemona; Tartuffe’s relative to Orgon and Elmire, that of the Pardoner and Elmer Gantry to their respective disciples. Yet hypocrisy is stigmatised in the individual, not in the society, even in situations where the ‘moral’ rectitude of the society is dubious. Hypocrisy trivialises all other sins.

Yet as individuals our urges are illimitable. They extend far beyond what social mores dictate, and this is true of all of us. They are repressed on a social level, and little engenders more controversy than when these urges come to the fore. When it does, nevertheless, who can say he sympathises not with Humbert but Quilty? Hypocrisy is viewed as a mitigating factor in an individual, and in intrapersonal and dual interpersonal relations. The inclusion in the closing words of ‘do not pity CQ’ is an oft-overlooked reminder that, while these urges will always exist, one must choose between hypocrisy and overt inhumanity. Between ego and id, between society and the individual. In order to maintain order, we did not evolve as individuals but as societies. It has never been necessary - evolution not being teleological - to eradicate these tendencies on an individual level. As a society, we act on the conscious level of the individual and restrain these tendencies; as individuals, we are our worst. The misanthrope is not notably collected.

Why, then, do we reserve this singular disdain for he who maintains order while being allzumenschliches? We refuse to acknowledge that the visible hypocrite is simply caught between the criminal and the dissembler, on a spectrum on which we all place. Our misconception, clear throughout all of religion and historical psychology, is that our shadow can be expiated and atoned for on an individual level. The choice is between hypocrisy and repudiation of all that is valued. The judge-penitent affirms humanity - il forniquait mais il lisait des journaux; hypocrite lecteur - mon semblable - mon frère!

Trust, peace, and to put aside the bayonet; the forgotten presidency of Rutherford Hayes.

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 21:20:00 +0000

It is a challenge to be known as the least-known President; a title which is usually afforded to Martin Van Buren, James Buchanan and a few select others. A true test of being unknown is that you are scarcely remembered at all, and this is an achievement which can only be ascribed to one man; Rutherford Birchard Hayes, President of the United States from 4 March 1877 to 4 March 1881, and quite possibly the beau idéal of democracy, equality and isonomy in presidential history. Icons such as Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson benefit from being public figures, relentless self-promoters and partial populists at the least - Rutherford Hayes did not. His reforms are unremarked, but not unremarkable. This is the life of an intellectual progressive who was ahead of his time, who, unlike some others, paid the price for that in his lifetime, but deserves to be remembered hereafter.

Rutherford Hayes grew up without a father in Delaware, adopting his uncle, Sardis Birchard, as a role model. He attended public schools in Ohio and Connecticut, graduating as valedictorian from Kenyon and eventually transferring to Harvard Law School where he graduated with an LLB. While working for a law firm in Cincinnati, he became engaged to Lucy Webb in 1851, with whom he would later remain married until she died, and remain single thereafter. His indefatigable efforts to, through his law firm, uphold the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to defend escaped slaves led to his being recognised by the fledgling Republican Party, formed to oppose slavery in 1854, but he joined the Army with the outbreak of the Civil War, and in 1861 set out to fight with the 23rd Regiment.

In 1864, while serving as brevet brigadier general in the Union Army of the Shenandoah, he received the Republican nomination to the House of Representatives; he responded, by letter, that “an officer fit for duty who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer for a seat in Congress ought to be scalped; you may feel perfectly sure that I shall do no such thing”. It becomes manifest, from this stage, that Hayes valued ideals over politics, and if he ever became engaged in politics, he would value ideals yet more. He did not contradict this during the rest of his time in the military - when George Crook, his superior, submitted that their men be put on the enemy’s front, he responded undeferentially and conscientiously that “that would be simply murder”. On December 9th 1864, he was given the full post of brigadier general for his gallantry, and Crook abided by his advice, despite Hayes’ strictly inferior rank. Hayes would later write in his diary, after Crook’s death in 1890, that “he wears the double wreath - the soldier’s and the humanitarian’s”.

Hayes was voted in as a Representative to the 39th Congress, despite his campaign consisting only of epistolary correspondence due to his commitment to the Union cause, and voted as part of that Congress for the Fourteenth Amendment - the repudiation of the Supreme Court’s judgment in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford 1857 -which rendered African-Americans citizens. His opposition to Andrew Johnson when Johnson (who had previously maintained Lincoln’s opposition to the Wade-Davis Bill, vetoed the renewal charter of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and tolerated the Black Codes in the South, wanting to restore the Union even if it meant accepting racism in the Southern states) vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Act made him integral in coordinating the first ever Congressional override of the Presidential veto. While in Congress, Rutherford Hayes also voted for the Tenure of Office Act of 1867, which established the legal basis for the later attempted impeachment of Andrew Johnson (also supported by Hayes) for his unconstitutional dismissal of Edwin Stanton.

Having made his name in Congress for his progressive stance, Hayes was considered a reputable candidate for the 1867 gubernatorial election in Ohio. He ran against Alan Granberry Thurman, a tentatively anti-slavery Democrat who nevertheless campaigned on an anti-black-suffrage platform, and won. As governor of Ohio, he reformed mental hospitals and the education system, pioneering girls’ education, during his first term. He campaigned for his second term against “Gentleman George” Hunt Pendleton, a Jacksonian Democrat who had opposed Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson unsuccessfully, on the issue of equality for African-Americans and won for the second time. During this second term in office as the Governor of Ohio, from 1870-72, he supported extended suffrage and tax reductions.

In 1872, he declined to run against the Republican incumbent John Sherman for a Senate position, having no ideological disagreement with Sherman, a liberal Republican who had in 1859 risked his career to endorse Helper’s ‘The Impending Crisis of the South’ (an economic attack on slavery). He retired, as he had no cause for which to fight politically, but later returned to politics in 1875 to contest Democrat William Allen to the position of governor, in order to defend the proposed Blaine Amendment, which upheld that “no money raised by taxation in any State…shall ever be under the control of any religious sect”. In 1876, due to his unparalleled success in becoming the only Ohio senator to hold the position for a third term, he was among the top Republicans being considered for the Presidential bid, and was supported by John Sherman, against whom Hayes had declined to run, who championed his nomination.

His campaign was against Samuel Jones Tilden, a Bloomberg-esque figure who was the Governor of New York and maintained close links with business, an opponent who was in many ways similar to himself. Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but the newly-enfranchised blacks, who the Democrats violently attempted to suppress at the polls, came out in droves to vote for Hayes. The electoral dispute which resulted is perhaps the only infamous aspect of Hayes’ life, and if so only in the realm of lists and trivia. Tilden had won 184 votes and Hayes 166 with 19 uncertain votes, raised to 20 when an Oregonian elector was disqualified; these votes were the crux of either candidate’s election. The Electoral Commission established by Congress consisted of eight Republicans and seven Democrats (the eighth Republican, jurist Joseph Bradley, being the most independent of the Supreme Court judges left after an independent refused the position), and ruled to assign the 20 remaining dubious votes to Rutherford Hayes. When the Speaker of the House, Democrat Samuel Randall, refused to allow contumaciously dilatory motions, Hayes was elected 19th President of the United States at 4:10 am on 21 March 1877.

The inaugural address which he gave was one so incongruously progressive that it ought to live among those of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. Characteristically, it did not. In it, Hayes promised “a government which guards the interests of both races carefully and equally” which would “establish the rights of the people it has emancipated”. He described the basis of prosperity as “the improvement of the intellectual and moral condition of the people,” proclaiming that “universal suffrage should rest on universal education”. He pledged to “wipe out in our political affairs the colour line and the distinction between North and South”. His vision would not be realised for almost a century, but his words remain forgotten long after that.

Hayes peacefully brought an end to Reconstruction, but that did not negate his support for universal civil rights across the United States - to the contrary. He vetoed a Democratic Bill which would have overturned the Force Acts, which criminalised the prevention of voting based on race. The legislature attempted twice more to pass it; Hayes vetoed it both times. He ensured that the Bill which eventually was passed did not contain the rider which would have repealed the Force Acts. In his diary, he later wrote that “my task was to wipe out the colour line, to abolish sectionalism, to end the war and bring peace - to do this, I was ready to resort to unusual measures and to risk my own standing and reputation within my party and the country”. That was no exaggeration.

Under his administration, the civil service saw unprecedented reforms. The system put in place by Andrew Jackson - “King Andrew” - was based on party allegiance and contributions made. Hayes brought about a meritocracy prescient of its European counterparts. He came into conflict even with factions in his own party (the ‘Stalwart’ Republicans) and yet characteristically persevered to little contemporary avail but long-lasting benefit. He wrote decades earlier that “for honest merit to succeed among the tricks and intrigues which are now so lamentably common, I know is difficult; but the honour of success is increased by the obstacles which are to be surmounted”. He could have been describing his ideals or himself, but, as is the mark of a great man, the two were indistinguishable.

In 1878, after the Paraguayan War of 1864 to 1870, he arbitrated the borders of Paraguay and Argentina, assigning the region between Rio Verde and Rio Pilcomayo to Paraguay (a decision for which the Paraguayans were so grateful that they dedicated a department to him, which today remains Presidente Hayes) without any backlash from the Argentinians (who had already been short-changed on the border arrangements). Another of his long-forgotten foreign policy successes - and successes in the name of peace and diplomacy, not military supremacy - is the agreement he came to with Mexican President Porfirio Diaz, who was angered and left politically attacked by the US Army’s power to pursue bandits across the Mexican border, to pursue bandits using the forces of both nations. In any case, Hayes later revoked the order which allowed American forces across the border.

Yet another success and achievement of the Hayes administration began with the Burlingame Treaty, made in 1868, which allowed Chinese immigration into the United States. When these immigrants effected a drop in wages, rioting pressured Hayes to abrogate the treaty. He would do no such thing; he vetoed the efforts of Congress to do so, stating that he was not willing to violate the treaty. Some Democratic Representatives attempted to impeach Hayes due to this, but their efforts came to nothing. His domestic policy is no less distinguished: Carl Schurz, as Hayes’ Indian Secretary, promoted a policy of assimilating American Indians into American culture using education and coordination. Hayes and Schurz reformed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to give these indigenous people more autonomy. Nevertheless, when a Ponca chief, Mantcunanjin, brought suit in district court in Omaha (Standing Bear v. Crook) in 1879 - making a speech in his defence which has some marked yet indubitably coincidental similarities with that of Shylock - Hayes, overriding Schurz and his old army superior Crook, established a commission in 1880 which allowed the Ponca to stay in Nebraska. He declared that it was “my particular duty and earnest desire to do all I can to give to these injured people that measure of redress which is required alike by justice and by humanity”.

True to his promise not to stand for a second term, Rutherford Hayes did not seek reelection in 1880. He spent the rest of his life supporting educational charities, encouraging black students (one of whom was W.E.B. Du Bois) to apply for scholarships from the Slater Fund, one of his charities, and advocating better prison conditions. His funeral after he died in 1893 was small, as was the cemetery in Fremont in which he was buried. Mark Twain wrote once, before Hayes’ death, that “its quiet & unostentatious, but real & substantial greatness, would steadily rise into higher & higher prominence, as time & distance give it a right perspective, until at last it would stand out against the horizon of history in its true proportions.” Perhaps, in time, it will.

Vae victis; an examination of the War between the States.

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 02:22:12 +0000

The doctrinal narrative of the ‘Civil War’ reads thusly: the secession of the Confederate states evidenced the position of the southern states as fighting only for slavery, while the cerebral Union took up arms in defence of the rights of man. Few stories read this smoothly and reality is not one of them. To provide the fundament for a more percipient understanding of what engendered the war from the information available, it is necessary to appreciate that the war was not in any case a civil war in any meaningful sense of the words; it was fought to prevent a collection of states which (by way of the 10th Amendment) was legally justified in seceding - hence, the war was motivated more by an attempt to retain the separatist states, not a war between citizens of the same country. It seems more apparent, in light of this, that the jus ad bellum would need to be more defensible than it would need to be otherwise.

This is where the slavery thesis becomes necessitous. A war undertaken in order to surcease the ownership by humans of humans is certainly a noble aspiration, perhaps even regardless of whether that war is fought against sovereign states (indeed, only a decade prior the British had provided assistance for Akintoye to overthrow Oba Kosoko for the sake of abolition in Lagos). Nevertheless, there are no right and wrong until one is looking back with the benefit of hindsight - hindsight, the wave-function collapse of ethics - and slavery was so rooted in the cultural mindset of America that it would be casuistic to suggest that any party was more than mildly interested in race equality for its own sake. Since the days of Europe’s first intrusion, the San Miguel de Gualdape settlement, European culture brought its slaves to establish, both physically and psychologically, the United States. Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion, not mitigated but motivated by the socially progressive reforms of the House of Burgesses, determined that slaves identified themselves through socioeconomic structure, not through race or origin, and such was the nature of the contemporary American social system, and the irrelevance of race to the economic issues determining the Civil War. At the time, man was born enslaved and everywhere was in chains (Rousseau, himself an ardent fan of bondage in the other sense, often conveyed the enslaved condition with the correct psychological insight). Abolition, and with it the 13th Amendment, was but an epiphenomenon to the minds of the Lincoln Administration.

I must emphasise that the intention of this piece is not to imply that slavery is in any way acceptable - rather, it is to establish that it was accepted. Abraham Lincoln may have been against ‘making voters or jurors of Negroes,’ against ‘qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people,’ and against ‘bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,’ but he was certainly ‘in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race’. Lincoln stated the case better than I ever could when he famously wrote to then-journalist Horace Greeley that ‘if I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it’. Having heard Lincoln speak for himself on the matter (credibly, or else the situation grows Epimenidean), the reasons why Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union are equally manifest, and identically ignoble.

The economic import of the secession was not negligible. Richard Hofstadter expounds in his article, The Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War, that ‘bankers expected the repudiation of Southern debts amounting to over $200,000,000, if the South should secede’; the motives for seceding on the part of the Confederacy are equivalently unrelated to slavery, with the protectionist tariff impositions of the Union (and the similar response from European trade partners) affected the agrarian export-based economy of the South more than it did the wealthy importing economy of the North. King Cotton indeed - the confederate states would indubitably have fared better under full sovereignty, and this galvanised both sides of the Disunited States during the war.

Since Douglass North analysed in his 1961 paper Early National Income Estimates of the U.S. the economic prosperity afforded to all of the United States by slave-driven cotton production south of the Mason-Dixon line, nobody has impugned his conclusion - yet nor has anybody alluded to this as a proximate reason for why no effort was made to curtail southern slavery prior to Lincoln’s tenure. Indeed, if it weren’t for the question of tariffs, nothing would have been done (and slavery would have run its course, being etiolated as it was earlier in Europe by its comparative economic inefficiency - a little scrutiny will reveal that slavery after this point was politically, not economically, motivated).

It is salutary, of course, and most definitely simple, to maintain that the War Between the States was a Civil War fought between two diametrically opposed ideologies, one right and one wrong, one hero and one villain, the righteous battle ultimated as one ineluctable vanquishment in the grand theatre of the moral metanarrative, the malefactor consigned to the realm of proven immorality. This is not true; the War was fought between two motley interests, each believing as we all do in their own vindication, in the name of unalloyed egoism - not extrinsic storylines - and in history, what’s right and what’s wrong is determined after the fact. The abolition of slavery was indeed a noble achievement - but, the fact remains, not an aim.

The remarkable, if and by virtue of being less elegantly explicable, nature of the War was that through the interaction of self-interested parties, an outcome arose which established the rights of man as the citizen, an outcome which entrenched the (now-commonsensical and accordingly rationalised after the fact) political and social isonomy now so rightly taken for granted. Perhaps it is befitting that Abraham Lincoln should not be lionised and heralded as a saint, should not be venerated as even a flawed or tragic hero, but should be remembered, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, ‘not because he was perfect, but because he was not and yet triumphed’. It may be said that he was not the first who with worst meaning had incurred the best.

Every inch a king; Lear as a reflection of political thought.

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 21:19:03 +0000

The object of Shakespeare’s obeisance in writing King Lear was clear, being manifested as manifestly as Regan or Goneril, in stark contrast to his heroification of Cordelia; King James, who orated to his Parliament that ‘kings are justly called gods,’ would have found in Lear a tragic hero, a fond exhortation of absolute monarchy, and a justification of his own advice to his son, Prince Henry - that he ought to bequeath the kingdom solely to his son, Isaac, on the basis that ‘by dividing your kingdoms, ye shall leave the seed of division and discord among your posterity’. It would be naïve to surmise that Shakespeare did not have this in mind when he elected to base the play on King Leir of Britain, yet the import of Shakespeare’s own intentions in writing the play pales in comparison to the wealth of information afforded to us by how Lear has been interpreted throughout the centuries, and how this has often accurately conveyed the political atmosphere and consensus of the day.

The role which Richard Burbage played as Lear was typical of the consensus of the times; without any conflict or competition, he played the role of Lear, written by Shakespeare intended for him, with skill and with adroitness not adjudged but expected, and with his prepotence presupposed (and, debatably, unquestionable). He by no means inhered without the realm of critical consensus, nor did Charles at the time, who struggled with Parliament to maintain his (Blackstonian, not at this point Diceyan) royal prerogative. This historical context certainly cannot be overlooked, and nor can the parallel between Burbage’s Lear and the political milieu at the time. At a time of absolute monarchy (strong through its weakness), Richard Burbage fit the role of laudable autocrat perfectly.

An elegy composed for Richard Burbage closes thusly: ‘Kind Lear, the Grieved Moor, and more beside, that lived in him have now forever died.’ This perhaps could be said to be a tenable prediction, especially during the period from the late 17th to early 19th centuries when Nahum Tate’s bowdlerised Lear held the stage, if only it weren’t for David Garrick. The expurgated History of King Lear (notably closer to Shakespeare’s 1608 quarto ‘True Chronicle of the History’ than his 1623 First Folio ‘Tragedy’) also shares a remarkable parallel with the time in which it dominated the theatrical scene. The Union of Britain as a recent event starkly opposed the division which formed the tragic aspect of King Lear (the metaphorical division of the body politic and the corporeal existence of Lear). The background of unification also marked the enhancement of the constitutional system at the cost of precluding any real possibility of monarchical overthrow; therefore it is fitting that in Nahum Tate’s Lear ended ‘happily’ with the restoration of Lear as monarch (albeit at the cost of merrily casting off almost all the original meaning). David Garrick’s tenure of Tate’s Lear was similar; he was noted for portraying a more realistic Lear than the aureate actors of days gone by, reflecting the gradual degradation of the divine right and the royal prerogative since the time of Shakespeare and Charles, the regnant George II having historically shifted the balance of power between monarch and parliament, and having also been a human - all too human? - king, remembered for his abrasively apoplectic nature and his mistress.

The next stage of Lear was constituted of the dramatic contest between William Charles Macready and Edwin Forrest in the early nineteenth century; it is therefore unsurprising that this time was a time of contest of post-Revolutionary War tensions between the fledgling United States and the contemporarily monolithic British Empire - the War of 1812, the Caroline Affair, the Aroostook War, the Pig War and many more conflicts evidence an age in which open enmity between the US and the UK was taken for granted. The competition between the British William Macready and the American Edwin Forrest became fomented inimical tensions which culminated in the riot at the Astor Place Theatre. The Lears of Macready and Forrest still inhered within the trappings of majesty, but the import at this point becomes crescively clear; contemporary interpretation of Lear provides an almost unparalleled insight into the regnant - and latent - political feelings of the time, in a manner and to an extent which is simply not possible by any other mode of historical scrutinisation.

Tommaso Salvini’s Lear ended that tradition. His interpretation of Lear as the ‘majestic ancient’ was not of a king who was correct in proclaiming himself ‘every inch a king’, but who perhaps fit Jacques Lacan’s onetime comment that ‘a madman is not just a beggar who thinks he is a king, but a king who thinks he is a king’. Salvini’s Lear was fallible, mortal, and human. He not only reflected growing self-understanding in the sciences (the period of maximum certainty before the quantum mechanical revolution and the world wars of the twentieth century) but simultaneously a comprehension of the fortuity of the British Empire. At a time when self-rule was being offered to colonies under the British Empire in order to cut costs (as Disraeli could have declaimed, to unburdened crawl toward death), so did Salvini’s Lear bequeath his kingdom as a symptom of his weakness, not his magnanimity - a king more similar to Ionesco’s Bérenger in Le Roi se Meurt than to any monarch of prior centuries, always comprehending his own mortality and not making perfectly tragic decisions, but making the wrong decisions. Lear did not escape the national histories of the 19th century either: Honoré de Balzac (one might write Balssa, or Rastignac, himself not being too far from his work) set his Lear, Goriot, against the fall of Napoleon, brought about by Delphine - the dauphin? - the product of the Bourbon monarchy which had engendered Napoleon’s First Empire; Turgenev’s A Lear of the Steppes criticised how the 1861 Emancipation Reform had only led to further revolutionary fervour, Turgenev’s closing sentiment, ‘I am not what I was, as you knew me,’ is perhaps the essence of Lear inside and out, itself echoing the words of Dowson (perhaps not coincidentally an accomplished translator of Balzac); the pastiches go on.

The final incarnation of Lear, until we reach a new age, is indubitably the absurdist interpretation of the play rendered necessary by the calamity that made so long life of the early 20th century. John Gielgud, Donald Wolfit and Brian Cox brought slight and senile Lears to the stage, portraying power and authority as prepared to capitulate to totalitarian control at any time. Lear has not grown old with time; time has grown old with Lear. It has played itself out heretofore throughout history, and it does not end here. King Lear is a portrait of the transience of power and favour, the frailty and fortuity of the human condition, and history looks set to stay the course until the curtains close.

More things in heaven and earth? A refutation of the theory of simulated reality.

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 08:48:10 +0000

The theory which what we perceive to be reality - the world or the state of things as they actually exist, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary - is not actually reality long predates Bostrom’s rather facile ancestor simulation theory. The aforementioned ancestor simulation theory demands a certain degree of credulity which out of courtesy I will not expect of readers, but insofar as to say that the inaccuracy of the postulates on which Bostrom relies (including but not limited to: simulation would only need to extend to an atomic or photonic level; gravity exists as a universal force and not as space-time curvature in Minkowski space; time can be discretised to a femtosecond, despite physical reactions observed in Planck time giving us no reason to doubt that time is continuous; indeed, as Feynman put it, the continua of the universe would demand infinite logical computations to simulate even the smallest space, each consuming (by Bostrom’s own calculation) around three hundred millennia) implies that the computing power actually required to process a simulated universe would be infeasible. It would be dishonest, however, to treat this theory as representative of most coherent arguments for simulated reality theory, and indeed there are certainly compelling mathematical and physical justifications to be accounted for, with some equally salient problems (not least of which, though this will be its only mention, the expected CPT symmetry having been violated in nature even if not in the kaon system).

The cognitive-theoretical model of the universe (styled as the CTMU) explicated by the intentionally sesquipedalian and obscurantist prose of Christopher Langan, who himself proves that the cognitive-theoretical model fails to apply to IQ and certainly to the universe, and believes that the human mind is an endomorphism of God (in particular, judging from his supercilious responses in interviews, his own), relies on the Borde-Vilenkin-Guth theorem, which does not apply to infinite cyclicity, initial contraction, or asymptotically static space-time; it also occludes the unfounded assertions made by Alexander Vilenkin, including that an emergent universe would collapse quantum mechanically even if geodesically complete to the past with regard to classical mechanical perturbations, made in order to fit facts to theory - this theory being his fealty to a prime mover. Langan himself is of similar fealty, which goes some way, as does the inefficacy of the intelligence quotient measurement, toward explaining the inconsistencies in the theory of this putative genius.

Computability would also be mathematically infeasible; Gödel’s (crescively trite) incompleteness theorems, with appeal to Cantor’s diagonal argument and the implications of quantum mechanics, mean that any virtual reality generator would have to generate its environment including itself. Even if one assumes the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle holds true, and recursive simulation is (which it may very well be) logically possible, the power required to compute not only the universe as we know it, but an infinitely recursive manifestation of it including an infinite number of virtual reality generators, would be inestimable.

The most convincing argument comes from the perspective of phenomenological high energy physics - the fermion doubling problem means that the Wilson term must be added to fermionic fields on a lattice in order to prevent fermion doubling, and thus the simulated reality theory requires a postulate that Wilson fermions are discretised accordingly, though the Nielsen-Ninomiya theorem states that it is impossible to have a local real bilinear translation- and chirally-invariant fermion action without doubling, hence Wilson fermion discretisation breaks chiral symmetry. When one accounts for the limit to the cosmic ray spectrum, even without presuming that a (cumbersome) Sheikholeslami-Wohlert action were required to optimise the Lagrangian of the lattice field, high-energy cosmic rays could be expected to break directly isometrical rotational symmetry in order to reflect the structure of the fundamental lattice. Since the universe is finite (which, if not a facticity, is certainly a requisite of the computation hypothesis), simulation resources must also be so and thus lattice spacing is discretised, meaning that simulation is always cognoscible to those involved. It is irrefutable that any civilisation with the capacity to compute such a civilisation would not do so if the participants were sufficiently cogitative to recognise such indicators of simulated reality, and thus would be affected by the observation of those who intended to observe them behave in a natural and deterministic manner.

As Hamlet commented to Horatio, there are more things in heaven and earth than are contained in your philosophy, than are dreamt of in your philosophy - could there be fewer?

Wow, can I be as smart as you?

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 05:37:02 +0000

For starters, thank you for the implied compliment, and I wouldn’t consider myself particularly smart; I just read heavily into the areas in which I’m interested. Having said that, I would not turn down an opportunity to promote Quora, which contains a multitude of people more intelligent than you and I - I’m proud to be a member, and it’s genuinely something worth looking into, even if it’s a steep learning curve. Other than that, read anything by Jorge Luis Borges, my favourite author, and in the course of Googling the incredible amount of references he includes, you’ll become noticeably more erudite even after a three-page short story. I’d recommend El Milagro Secreto first.

The third symbiosis (a Jaussian interpretation of Godot as dramaturgic antimatter).

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 19:38:00 +0000

Beckett’s Godot is notoriously open to interpretation. Indeed, perhaps what has rendered Godot immutably sempiternal is the manner in which it, like Ionesco’s Bérenger or Ibsen’s Irena, espouses or even embodies reader reception. There is no consensus gentium - any educated reader having realised that Godot does not connote or symbolise God, the only interpretation which Beckett himself has expressly disabused us of - and one of the purposes of the play was indubitably to inhere without the realm of truth or untruth (necessitated by the implications of my theory), but my interpretation aims to venture deeper (if not further) than this, and than the multitudinous analyses which have heretofore been presented, ranging from that of Bernard Dukore - Freudian in style and substance - to Deirdre Bair’s autobiographical understanding. It has been clear since Barthes that the author is not important in his own right, but a mind like that of Beckett may be more adroit than others at cognising the illimitable meaning.

That is whence I derive justification for basing my conjecture on what Samuel Beckett once confided to Peter Woodthorpe (who personated Estragon in the 1955 British début) - “it’s all symbiosis, Peter.” The levels of symbiosis are not immediately manifest, as can be expected from such a subtly busy play. The first symbiosis, nevertheless, is the one most identified by readers, spectators and scholars - namely, the symbiotic antinomy of Vladimir and Estragon, the productive clash between the left- and right-brain (said with guilty cognisance of Goswami 2006), rational and impulsive types. The product, if you like, of Didi and Gogo’s symbiosis is human presence, a perfect archetype which could not be established with one character alone without recourse to improbable personalities. Vladimir and Estragon are both possible; Beckett needn’t resort to the implausibility of a Max Demian character, and the first symbiosis is achieved.

The second symbiosis, therefore, is between the presence established by Vladimir/Estragon, and the absence of Godot. In this, Pozzo and Lucky are inconsequential except as a foil to this symbiosis, so as to evidence how infeasible this symbiosis is with any number of present characters, as was the first with one; this symbiosis typifies the obsessive mathematical perfectionism which Beckett demonstrated with Come and Go, or with Watt. The perfect presence established by the first symbiosis and the dramaturgic antimatter which Godot constitutes, and which constitutes Godot, disaccord and react as antimatter and matter do (though, in Beckett’s mathematical paradigm, without the positroniumic creation necessitated by physics) to effect nothingness, a consummate zero. The third symbiosis, as is likely obvious by this point, is between the reader and nothing - Beckett mustn’t have been consternated by the unparalleled number of interpretations. Godot is the reader. The play is the reader’s mind.

In Borges’ essay on Bernard Shaw, he wonders ‘can an author create characters superior to himself?’ - it is safe to say that Beckett has achieved this.

Superflat; the defetishisation of nascency in post-post-war Japan.

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 08:15:09 +0000

There is a Japanese proverb which apprises the subject that deru kugi wa utareru - literally, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Perhaps this was the desideratum of Aoshima, Murakami, Nara and others when they contrived the ‘superflat’ art movement. The movement pastiches, in some way, antebellum Japan, by denuding the two-dimensionality of post-war Japanese culture; it mocks how the traditionally bidimensional work of Japanese artists such as Hokusai, Sesshu, Sotatsu and others was lent a contextual depth by the history of the time, but the destruction of the war deprived later art of any meaning. In this sense, rather reminiscent of Borges’ Pierre Menard, the Superflat movement animadverts more on Japanese culture than art, though the central thesis of the movement is that these two are inexorably intervolved.

Indeed, for a long time Western culture lagged Japanese culture; there was a time when Picasso interpreted Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, when Van Gogh’s Flowering Palm Tree was painted almost indistinguishably from Hiroshige’s Plum Tree in Kameido, or his The Bridge in the Rain from Great Bridge, Sudden Shower at Atake. After the Second World War and the Ningen–sengen of Hirohito, Japanese culture began to derive itself from the Western world. The Gutai group, to cite one notable exemplar, based itself on the “beauty of decay” and European tachisme; art in Japan began to not only lag Western art, but lag Western politics.

Japan’s 1947 Nihon-koku kenpo evidenced the Japanese acquiescence and adherence to liberal democracy. It is not fortuitous, therefore, that Murakami construed Superflat as delineating not only the linearity of Japanese art, but also the “flattening” of the class system - this is where Superflat’s mocking of sexualised consumerism and capitalist egalitarianism are syncretised. The lolicon niche of anime (based unsurprisingly on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita), far from being an inconsequential culturalistic idiosyncrasy, is key to an apperception of the burgeoning capitalism of post-war Japan. As Martin Amis opined in Koba the Dread, regarding Lolita as a metaphor for the destruction of the Russian nation by a totalitarian communist ‘father’, perhaps lolicon is an elaborate metaphor for the fetishisation of that which is prohibited - a common epiphenomenon - and the nascent ideology of free choice and ‘flattened’ isonomy, the perfect foil to Nabokov’s nymphet.

This seems fairly well–attested by the lack of correlation between sexually–motivated crime and lolicon prevalence, even with regard to specific individuals; doyen Hiroki Azuma’s explication that “for otaku who feel at odds with society, or are excluded from society, pedophilic manga is the most convenient form of rebellion”. It seems that lolicon is a manifestation of dissent, towards the Japanese capitalist system, that demands little effort from its subjects - freely correlated, in other words, with discontent and the vox populi. The crescive disinterest in lolicon in modern Japanese culture, then, typified by a stigmatisation of those who partake in it and multiple efforts at criminalising it, signifies not only the defetishisation of nascency, but also the Japanese consensus surrounding liberal democracy. Superflat is not just an art movement, but an interpretation of the modern condition; Superflat has nothing to lose but its chains - it has the world to win.

A non-PC solution to linguistic subjugation.

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 21:17:10 +0000

In his last radio address to the citizenry of Chile before being deposed by a fascist coup, Salvador Allende, the last great Marxist leader, a man omitted from the capricious annals of history, declaimed that ‘history is ours, and the people make history’. Twenty-four years prior, Eric Arthur Blair had authored a discrepant reading of the ownership of history, one that survived him and saw its dystopian realisation under the Soviet Union; but, three years prior to that, Orwell wrote about something even more profound - the intervolution of politics and language, eventually manifesting itself as Newspeak in his 1984. The vernacular of euphemism and equivocation, Newspeak would later eventuate as surely as Orwellian historiography, which I will attempt to treat concisely but with Borgesian erudition and lucidity.

It befell that the reification of totalitarian linguistics was effected through quite the opposite means - viz. the dialectic between prescriptivist and descriptivist schools of linguistics, who debate whether language ought to be recorded by the doyens of lexicography as it is spoken demotically (ss. descriptivism), or regulated by these experts (obversely, prescriptivism). The arguments for the descriptivist school are indeed alluring: it has a semblance of egalitarian democracy; language is controlled by those who use it; academic thought can follow reality and not vice versa.

Per contra, descriptivist assertions are more quixotic than they seem; consider, as does David Foster Wallace in his essay ‘Tense Present’, formulations such as ‘people who eat that kind of mushroom often get sick’, whereby the colloquially tolerable misplaced modifier can consternate when questioning whether only those who frequently consume the mushroom become sick, or whether there is a good chance that anybody who consumes it may be affected. Granted, this is an improbable instance, but the concept nevertheless applies - language evolved to suit certain purposes, and the morphosyntax of our language means that some structures are ineluctably superior to others.

The prescriptivist/descriptivist dichotomy is unresolved, however, which has engendered a rift between Standard Written English (hereon SWE, backronymised Standard White English) and dialectal English (the modern Heraclitean flux of protean colloquialisms). Many resent SWE and its arbitrary rules, such as Lowth’s precept that one cannot use a preposition to end a sentence with. Furthermore, many view SWE as an elitist tool of WASP society, with all of its esoteric conventions and inexplicable dogmas.

Indeed, I’m likely one of the few adolescents who exhort correct grammar, but with an agenda; the advent of descriptivism and its defects has begotten Politically Correct English (hereon PCE), and thusly my digression converges with Orwell. Not content to accept descriptivism with its faults, but wary of prescriptivism’s autocratic connotations, we have contrived a Frankensteinian amalgam of the two. Instead of poor, the indigent are now ‘economically disadvantaged’; instead of disabled, the infirm are now cognominated ‘differently-abled’; and instead of social equality, we have euphemisms for social equality. The problem, beyond our incipient insipience, is that censorship always serves the status quo, as David Foster Wallace averred; the leftists now cavil whether to use the appellative ‘economically disadvantaged’ or ‘pre-prosperous’ instead of propounding genuine reform. Allende is no more.

The solution to our struggles with language is not this pointedly inadequate prescriptivism, a compromise which cognisantly conflates the worst of both, essaying equality, as we have failed to coalesce the two more efficiently. Moreover, it is rendered yet more exigent as PCE cannot replace the SWE of our academic archives. When Orwell, in his ‘Politics and the English Language’, translated a verse of Ecclesiastes into ‘modern English of the worst sort’, he was making a mordant yet poignant point. SWE may indeed be perceived as a concomitant of class inequality, an inhibitor of social mobility exploited by the privileged through a compendium of discretionary and vestigial fashions and formalities; yet in reality the causal direction is mistaken - that is to say, SWE does originate from this class disparity, which may be to the chagrin of some, but it in no way perpetuates it. To elucidate my prolepsis, PCE is a gross misconstrual of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - while our language affects our thinking and vice versa, it is not the case that we can mitigate cultural recrudescent problems by whitewashing them linguistically. My final contention is that we cannot etiolate history; the truth cannot be obfuscated with recourse to ‘friendly fire’ or ‘pacification’; dysphemism is dangerous, but not so much as euphemism.

SWE can be extricated from its bourgeois heritage by way of linguistic technocracy; only experts can mediate between the social flux descried by descriptivists, and the linguistic purpose noted by prescriptivists. In this way, we can maintain a coherent language which reflects the people without mollifying the truth; one which can be changed, but not cleansed. To return to the bons mots of Allende, social forces can be arrested neither by crime nor force - history is ours, and the people make history.

I knew him well (Infinite Jest and the necessary self-abnegation of the postmodern condition)

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 07:58:00 +0100

Infinite Jest is more often read than understood; by virtue of being a behemoth, it is conclusively desirable; a conspicuously modern phenomenon analogous in literature to Veblen goods in economics. Its value is compounded by the effect of this phenomenon on others, rendering it also a positional good for having read it. By treating it in this way, much of the book’s purpose is missed, for Infinite Jest, far from being a token gesture of prolixity and literary profligacy, forms a key point in the history of literature and self-understanding.

It is clear to the reader that Infinite Jest was written in the ebb of postmodernism. However, there remains no doubt that it clearly inheres within the realm of postmodern literature; the art/drug catatonic dichotomy paying overt homage to that of Great Jones Street à la Pierre Menard, the poioumenonic hermeneutics pastiching that of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, with nonpareil adherence to Pynchonian maximalism, the densely referential prose hearkening to patently Borgesian erudition. Though there are many other ways in which this work stands on the shoulders of its forebears, the main way in which Infinite Jest is beholden to postmodernism forms the purpose of this essay.

Infinite Jest aims to encompass, and not to accrete to, postmodern literature and literary theory - hence the myriad ways in which it prognosticates its own analysis as a work of this canon; for one, it preempts Derridean analysis. The idea that there is nothing outside the text cannot be said of Infinite Jest, for whom what is made out to be the cynosure is not included in the actual text, being anterior to the introductory epilogue, and posterior to the remainder of the book. What has been called Infinite Jest’s ‘profound void’ by critics is the nonexistent centre of the book.

The plot of Infinite Jest follows a necessary parabola; the first half of the novel is spent accelerating, followed by a slow deceleration which takes place during the second moiety - this necessarily loses the book fans among those who demand a conclusion, or a climax, as opposed to the duple structure. The parabola is marked repeatedly with its vectors in order to fortify and clarify itself; Hal Incandenza and Donald Gately refer to exhuming James Incandenza’s head (with regard to the Hamlet scene which begat the title of Infinite Jest) at points in the novel reflected along the center and equidistant respectively from the start and end of the book; the same can be said of the two parts of Tony Krause’s inclusion.

The parabolic vertex, the perfect omphalos of the whole book, rests upon the death of Lucien Antitoi at the hands of the Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, during the longest sentence of the entire prolix work. At this moment, which recalls Borges’ El Milagro Secreto especially in its final reference to the world’s tongues, Lucien reflects upon his life and his mortality. The neatly mathematical nature of this point, in direct contrast to the generative ambiguity of the novel, marks it as the postmodern terminus. Postmodernism by nature tends towards its own end. Furthermore, in accordance with Hegelian dialectic, it must achieve consummation through annihilation, completing itself by reaching the limiting parabolic heights; true postmodernism is self-destructive.

 Postmodernism is a movement striving to understand itself, to understand the nature of existential heterodoxy, of self-referentiality and the repudiation of ideological allegiances - as such, it finds itself counter to its aims, while aiming to further them. It is corporeal and autonomous in its definitive attempt to understand itself, and as such, Infinite Jest is foreshadowed heavily by previous literature, as in Jack Gladney’s pertinent fear of death in White Noise - in its meta-existence, as in the coetaneous future of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five Tralfamadorians, the postmodern condition can anticipate itself. Infinite Jest is simultaneously the peak and fall of postmodernism, the very old man with enormous wings which was self-definitively unexpected. In achieving full comprehension, it is unexpected; in being unexpected, it abnegates postmodernism; in abnegating postmodernism, it consummates postmodernism.

Important, yet insignificant; solving socially disoptimal Nash equilibria.

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 13:14:15 +0100

In recent weeks, I have had the good fortune to be involved in a conversation with others more intelligent than myself which culminated in a solution to one of the most crucial problems in civilisation and our human history; situations where our input is crucial to the eventual outcome, but is seemingly marginalized by its dependence on the input of others. The human response is to disclaim the importance of our decisions due to our insignificance and lack of binary influence upon the outcome; however, our decisions are equally, if not singularly, important. This notion is designated best by game theory as a socially disoptimal Nash equilibrium; where each player would not change their strategy with full cognisance of the strategies of others, yet the outcome is still not Kaldor-Hicks, or even Pareto, optimal. The answer is simple, yet not manifest; easy to comprehend, yet hard to fathom. It rests on two basic axioms of our humanity.

The insignificance of humans is self-evident. We are motes in the comprehensible universe, and even those who have achieved the most in our society will be completely inconsequential in aeternum. The individual alone is nothing; Borges put it best, as is his wont, when he said ‘I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist’. The insignificance of the individual is evidenced in the evolutionally-bred social stigma in most known societies of hubris; the greatest crime in ancient Greek society was atë, while Buddhism denies nibbana to those bound by mana. Literature throughout history affirms this same condemnation of individual self-worth, from Aeschylus’ Prometheus to Shelley’s Victor, from Milton’s Lucifer to Marlowe’s Faustus; the reason that the feeling of significance is condemned by history is that feigning significance offers no solution to problem, and instead exacerbates the extant problem.
 It is, however, more difficult to concede our own insignificance. Indeed, historiography provides an intriguing reading of this; the attempts of the Imperium Romanum (the Empire), itself a Hegelian synthesis of the conflict of the Res-publica Romanum (the Republic) with the precedent Regnum Romanum (the Kingdom), to conquer all that they knew, culminating predictably in Flavius Odoacer’s deposition of Romulus Augustulus and the subsequent collapse; the ecclesiastical suppression of Galileo’s Copernican heliocentrism in favour of the Aristotelian geocentric model, which, as may be expected, favours our significance; Napoleon’s march from Moscow after the discomfiture of the Campagne de Russie, and his fall from grace; history is our struggle with our own insignificance. Many theories have been constructed in order to asseverate the power of the individual - Carlyle’s Great Man Theory is a shining exemplar of how individuals who were catalysts, or merely products of social movements, were heralded as prime movers and tutelaries of civilisation. We do not negate our insignificance by denying it - we are not elevating ourselves to significance. We are merely being obstinate in repudiating our insignificance, the facticity of which is further illustrated by the habitual failure of our attempts to prove otherwise.

Our importance, to the contrary, is irrefutable. As individual parts of a holistic group, we have almost unlimited power over ourselves, others, and our world. We all make our own decisions, but these individual decisions all have absolutely equipotent influence upon the collective outcome. As such, the individual, when part of a group, tends towards omnipotence, and incontrovertible importance. The rise of totalitarianism, along with its subsequent atrophy and collapse, is evidence enough of this on a global scale; it rose with the assent of the people in Germany and similarly imploded when the populace abjured their allegiance and rebelled against it; it was established with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and collapsed when the people rejected even perestroika and glasnost eight decades later. The proliferation of democracy, in the same vein, evidences the importance of the individual in a group-based society, and also the insignificance of the individual without inclusion in a group, being the human propensity to serve in heaven rather than reign in hell. This is by no means to subsume and subordinate the individual into the group, but rather to capacitate the individual through this means. The group is a manifestation of the power of the individual, including the power to countervail other individuals.

The importance of the individual can never be proven by the power of one individual over many others, and so, paradoxical as it sounds, the power of the individual is evidenced in history by the new social movements. The huge power of individuals forming into groups to influence the established status quo is betokened by: the feminist movement and its achievements in discrimination and suffrage; the French Revolution, and the Tennis Court Oath sworn by the Third Estate of the États-Généraux; the Polish Constitution of 1791, devolving disproportionate powers from the szlachta under the rzeczpospolita szlachecka. Similarly, the myriad insurrections against maleficent governments - Mohandas Gandhi’s noncooperation movement to resist British occupation and especially in response to the Rowlatt Act, the National Resistance Movement’s deposition of Idi Amin, the ‘cursed soldiers’ of the Polish resistance to Nazi occupation - are capsulised in Aung San Suu Kyi’s proclamation that fear is not the natural state of man.

History is saturated with the power of the individual over any structural authority, but there is much more that hasn’t yet reached the realms of history; Avaaz, who describe themselves as ‘the world in action,’ are currently striving to consolidate opposition to Bashar Assad in Syria, and have previously fought successfully against censorship laws in Italy, twice repudiated bills threatening to sentence homosexuals to death in Uganda, forced the South African government to act against corrective rape rituals, and mobilised half a million people to repeal a proposal to construct a highway through the Amazon rainforest. We now live in a world where even autocracy is mediated democratically; in our interconnected society, the importance of the individual has never been more clear.

Others have suggested alternate solutions. Religion, for one, denies the contradiction and tells us that we are significant, that we have an omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient deity with whom we share a personal relationship, a logical contradiction with love, caprice and personal preferences - neatly anthropomorphised like many other deities of our early human history, and then corporeally manifested, to further simplify the idea, in the Jesus of Nazareth. There is not a single shred of evidence which serves to uphold this, though many would have us to believe that the failure of science to know and explain everything (as yet, though it is ever-advancing) serves as proof for whichever alternate theory they propose. It is further appended at a later date that we do not depend to such an extent on the decisions of others, as the truth dictates, but rather we are provided with an eternal posthumous fate which is determined by the accordance of our actions with scripture, not with those of others, to grant us seemingly more control over the outcomes of our decisions (conveniently, this occurs in a domain in which verification of these assertions is, obviously, infeasible). There is no logical or empirical reason to believe this, but we choose to because it soothes and comforts us.

Our failure to acknowledge this apparent contradiction is the one true tragedy of humanity; at the very least it is responsible for our destruction of our natural environment, the perpetuation of the poverty and suffering of our fellow beings; it is the crux of the inefficient efficacy of humanity in knowledge, in charity, in ameliorative benignity. Environmental destruction is perpetuated by a society which marginalises the individual due to an overly facile and casuistic understanding of the logic of group decision-making, with individuals who are capable of, but not aware of their capability of, influencing the outcome through their own decision, ending up in a tragedy of the commons situation where what is beneficent for all is abandoned. Charitable giving would also most likely increase exponentially, resulting in development which would build exponentially, and therefore untold mitigation of the suffering of others, who would then also be able to help (ergo, again, exponentially increasing the previous exponential increases of our propensity to improve the world), QED. It is palpable that acknowledging our insignificant importance will lead to unspeakable tangible benefit - the Pareto improvement mentioned in the opening paragraph does not sufficiently convey the magnitude of this improvement.

It is evident, therefore, that, having proven the blatant nature of both of these attributes of ours, and the benefit accrued to us by acknowledging these, there is some reason why we fail to. Indeed, the human fear of this individual power stems from our fear of ultimate responsibility over others, combined with the fear of other individuals having ultimate power over ourselves. We prefer our decisions to be clearcut, simplistic and easily attributable, but reality begs to differ - all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone, as Borges again wrote aptly, and we will only truly empower ourselves when we do, as self-awareness is at the core of human endeavour. Some may ask who I am to propound such an unsettling yet beneficent philosophy, but in this post I only serve to draw attention to the axiomatic conclusion of two self-evident premises - it is, of course, theirs to reason why (a principle sacrosanct to me above all else) but the logic involved in this preposition is inerrant in its simplicity and transparency. The solution to socially disoptimal Nash equilibria is acknowledging that we are insignificant in what we are, but we are important in what we do; history notes the hurricane, not the butterfly.

Something outside the text (a response to objectivism).

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 08:59:47 +0100

As a classical liberal who has had his fair share of encounters with exponents of objectivism - a philosophy which lends itself to exponents more than proponents - it has become necessary to formulate a piece inveighing against it. While objectivism is often gainsaid amongst libertarian circles, as a philosophy, objectivism finds its roots instead in the literature of Ayn Rand, who espouses these ideas in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and through her life nominated herself the messiah of objectivism. Objectivism is essentially philosophical capitalism, and, while I agree with capitalism as a sociopolitical and economic system, there is no conscionable case to be made for transposing it into the realms of philosophy.

However, it has been, and as such the cardinal tenet of objectivism is egocentrism, a philosophical manifestation of rational action theory. Within the economic and political paradigm, actors must be egocentric in order for the market to function successfully and maximise utility and welfare for all. Postulating self–interest as a virtue cannot be reconciled with this notion, and is wholly more nocent in that it damages and corrupts human relations. There is much debate in the field of evolutionary biology regarding whether self–interest is even evolutionally beneficent; evolution relies on more than the individual, and interdependence in order to maximise specialisation can be more beneficial than dissociating from others - indeed, the commonly (and understandably) misconstrued subtitle of Darwin’s On The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life may carry some truth indeed.

There is a reason that probity and benignity are valued in most societies, and this is because they benefit the individual and the society in the short and long-term future. Rand also begs the question in answering Hume’s is-ought problem, and uses this fallacious answer to support her idea that since we are alive, we ought to act in order to sustain our life; this is no defence of self–interest, seeing as one could also argue that others are alive and that we ought to act to sustain their lives, or that we must act to sustain our illness if we are ill; her argument requires more logical justification, which is notable by absence. Moreover, Nietzsche offered an eminent refutation of the pursuit of happiness as an aim, by averring that happiness is not an aim per se, but a corollary of achieving one’s aims. The reason that this logically inerrant criticism is not only germane to the matter, but nocuous to objectivism, is that Rand does not propose a method of achieving happiness, and as such, propounds a philosophy which makes an assertion equivalent to capitalism declaring itself as unlimited wealth for everybody; as Lassalle said, show us not the aim without the way.

Beyond this, Rand’s objectivism, despite having the term ‘objective’ riveted onto it, gladly avails itself of many subjective ideas a posteriori, of Rand’s volition. One of these is the desultory antipathy towards homosexuality, characterised by Rand’s proclamation that homosexuality is ‘immoral, and more than that; if you want my really sincere opinion, it’s disgusting’ - attestations such as this not only betray an ugly malevolence and lack of respect for the logical justification of assertions, but are transpicuously beholden to parochial religious ethics. Such vitriolic animosity is neither tolerable nor tolerated in today’s society, and Rand’s o tempora o mores rejoinder betrays a philosophy that not only fails as a philosophical capitalism, but also fails in the honest translation of capitalism to philosophy, by contaminating it with spatiotemporally specific cultural and religious odium.

Objectivism can largely be understood as the hateful and solipsistic product of an outspoken capitalist outreaching herself in attempting to lend capitalism a philosophical dimension which simply does not behoove it; indeed, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are both meritorious works of literature, but one must read the individualism deconstructively without being affected by Rand’s objectivism; as Derrida memorably wrote in his ‘Of Grammatology,’ il n’y a pas de hors-texte.

Condamné à être libre.

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 22:47:15 +0100

In the aftermath of the Aurora tragedy, the gun control debate has been shaken from its slumber, a frequent concomitant of calamity that, if not for Hume, could be stylised as a circadian rhythm. Gun control advocates have iterated that this tragedy could not have happened if it weren’t for lax firearm regulations; Second Amendment exponents reciprocate that if gun control were loosened, then members of the public would have been able to defend themselves against the shooter. It is not often that I am able to argue against both dichotomous positions in a debate, and I cannot say that I take pleasure in doing so although it enables my taking a most contrarian position.

It is most inherently displeasing when issues such as this become politicised. This is not, as some argue, because tragedies transcend dialectic; nothing is exempt from dialectic, and this is a principle sacrosanct to me above all else. It is because the debate ought to be held at a much higher level than the pugnacious domain of politics, where rhetoric and eristische dialektik are prized above candor and constancy. The domain of disputation is in that of human nature, and demands an explanation of my argumentative method beforehand. Assaying humanity is best conducted through literature, which is a record of the human form; of our attempts at philosophy, our best theories of politics, our reflection of ourselves. Literature is the shadows of Plato’s cave, and, while not reality itself, is the closest we have to a corporeal manifestation of our existence on every level; it is (as is logically consequent) fitting the other way round also, as a way of conveying our self–understanding.

In 356 BC, in Ephesus, an ancient Greek region of modern–day Turkey, Herostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis. He proudly promulgated his act of immolation of his own volition, prepared to be executed, willing to be punished, seeking only fame and notoriety. While it may be more palatable to delude ourselves into thinking that he was one of a kind, the very way in which his story has become ingrained into our culture begs to say otherwise; to yet again borrow, and this time evert, Heidegger’s etymological method, the influence of Herostratus can be seen in the term ‘herostratic,’ denoting recognition pursued or achieved purely for that reason. In Sartre’s Érostrate, he expatiates upon a man who shoots six men (one for each bullet in his revolver) wholly for the pursuant sense of power. In this, Sartre describes what the story of Herostratus portrays, but with one more crucial element; he internalises the power urge. Whereas Herostratus availed himself of the derivative infamy, Sartre’s antagonist acts to fortify his internal self–perception.

These two urges, for the external and internal recognition of power and importance, are what pervades humanity and human relations, and are why the gun control issue is irrelevant. If gun control advocates were to restrict access to firearms, individuals who are more susceptible to these urges (and more reflective of them, to whom we designate the appellatives ‘sociopath’ or ‘psychopath’) would contrive other ways to damage and disturb the fabric of society; if armsbearers were to grant freedom over firearms so that others could protect themselves (viz. by concealed carrying of weapons equipotent to the shooter’s shotgun, rifle and handguns), this would not dissuade or deter those who are driven by this power–centric thanatos, who would still be able to effect as much, if not more, damage and desolation. Either way, neither of these restrictions would help, and, as Benjamin Franklin said, the man who trades freedom for security does not deserve, nor will he ever receive, either; our freedom is sacred above all else, though it necessarily involves random tragedies such as that of the 20th of July. The all–important balance between liberty and security simply has no bearing on the matter. The notion was capsulised rather well - I cite with a tinge of irony - in the antecedent The Dark Knight, where it is noted that ‘some men just want to see the world burn’.

After all of this, it is most sobering to read Jessica Redfield’s article; it delineates with nonpareil clarity and eloquence the underlying peril that endangers yet engenders our daily existence. It discerns neatly that random violence, perpetrated and perpetuated by this human urge, can strike us at any moment, regardless of the power of law enforcement, or which particular regulations are in vogue. While events like this may beget political discussion, no result in that dimension can ever prevent events such as this from occurring. In Borgesian style, I must finish by saying: Jessica Redfield died on July 20, at 00:38 in the morning.

The child of intelligence; contra nationalism.

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 22:23:40 +0100

With the Olympics in full flow, it is hard not to draw a comparison between the manifold corporate sponsorships and Subsidized Time; the dispute over corporate control is going strong, with the attacks on Romney’s outsourcing of jobs during his tenure at Bain and the contracting of G4S to provide security for the Olympics inuring the public to the debate. The issue calls up the conflict between nationalism and corporatocratic globalism. It is ours to reason why, and to propound a simple yet honest argument against nationalism, which is to argue that there is no reason that these contracts should be awarded to our own country, and not others, without further reason than support for our own. It must be noted, before beginning, that patriotism as an ideology will not be addressed, not only in order to remain fairly concise, but also because patriotism is not exempted from the arguments against nationalism, as a watered–down variation on the theme.

Primarily, it must be acknowledged that it may be natural to be loyal to one’s kin; however, neither naturalism nor loyalty are axiomatically desirable. G. E. Moore delineates the naturalistic fallacy with peerless lucidity in his Principia Ethica, though, without reading the aforementioned opus, it will be clear to a rational being that unnatural contrivances such as chemotherapy can be undeniably and hugely beneficent, while one who even implied the ignominious idea that natural occurrences such as disease and natural disaster were good would be treated (rightfully) with disdain and disregard. It has also been shown time and time again that absolute loyalty, of the nationalistic strain, to abusive partners, to invective cults, to totalitarian states, are profoundly deleterious to the loyalist. The natural loyalty argument therefore, while not a hostile witness to patriotism, is negated wholly. Per contra, it is only equitable to cede the argument from random occurrence; it is often proposed by some of my predilection that nationalism is illogical and disagreeable because it is only by chance that we are born in a certain country. The same is true of our body and our family, among others, to whom probity can be reconciled with loyalty.

This is by no means to declare a paucity of arguments against nationalism; to the contrary, the first and most poignant argument against nationalism relates to the last point, while not being fallacious. George Bernard Shaw summarised this notion as ‘Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it,’ though Seneca issued a perhaps more mordant and summary précis of nationalism by saying that men love their country not because it is great, but because it is their own. The assertion that one’s country is superior for this reason is not a concomitant of the idea that one can be loyal to a country despite their adventitious allegiance, and is a fallacy in itself, as superiority is an objective assertion, unlike loyalty, a personal emotion, and as such demands logical justification.

Moreover, nationalism extolls loyalty to a vaguely defined abstraction, coerced by stigma, and justifies feasances by their provenience, not by their nature, and not with any regard to their beneficence. Nationalism, as a concept, was borne of the extenuation of tortfeasance by way of alluding to previous actions. There is no reason that we should value the people of our own country over foreigners, in the same way that there is no reason that we should value our race over other races; however, in times of desultory tumult, it is easy to invoke fallacious arguments to feign racial supremacy, or national supremacy likewise. Nationalism also peremptorily commands respect and adoration for a country regardless of political direction, having facilitated great evil done by fledgling governments around the world, the most invoked example being that of Nazi Germany, and the critical succour from apolitical chauvinists dedicated purblindly to their nationalism, acting as kingmakers.

Nationalism also denies the complexity of a nation; a key moiety of nationalism is the characterisation of the specified nation as an intractably indissoluble entity, the ‘love it or leave it’ false dichotomy, expressed most conspicuously by George W. Bush in his contentious that ‘you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.’ Many avail themselves of this tactic to neutralise uncertainty about the forthrightness of national conduct, and to offer a simple choice - nationalism, or dissent. Nationalism is, as such, simply the exhorted option in a false choice; whereas reason, acknowledging that there is always a spectrum, will prevail. Nationalism, in stark contrast to reason, is the sole prerequisite of wars of aggression, possibly the most heinous attack on civilisation in our human history.

To close, the argument against nationalism could be encapsulated in the logic that one cannot establish objective superiority by subjective means, and as Robert Ingersoll orated, the man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and his fellow men. If one wants to advocate life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, this can be done by utilising our critical faculties, and not eschewing them in favour of a facile weltanschauung which dictates our opinions according to their compatibility.

To reason against reading.

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 19:51:00 +0100

In Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government, it is conspicuously accentuated that one of the characteristics of good government is intransigence to a certain degree; it exhorts that the leader be governed by ben comune, and be countervailed by checks and balances, but remain a benevolent dictatorship to a certain extent. This characterises the current problem with the British educational system, which is governed largely by protean bureaucratic politics, is that it has become a malleable expedience, constantly transmutated as a primary precyclic indicator of future governmental policy. For those who believe obdurately in the beneficence of democracy, education is the nocent counterpoint to democratic transience; as with all of the problems which plague democracy, there is a fairly simple solution.

Michael Gove’s proffer that the GCSE system be replaced with older O–levels is, with all due respect, a nugatory suggestion made to divert attention away from the more fundamental failings of the British educational system. The problem with the British education system is that the inexorable structure serves not only to encumber any efforts to consolidate gaps in knowledge, but also to abrogate the search for knowledge, studium scientia, of one’s own volition; the decrepit witticism that the educational system consists of repeatedly learning about the Third Reich, interspersed with the Révolution Française, has a modicum of truth, which more than slightly negates the levity.

The response is less than amelioratory - the attempt to make school fun by curtailing the amount of learning, instead of introducing some impetus for learning. The main reason that this should be done is that instead of compulsory homework, which is axiomatically useless by way of being manifestative of the lack of desire to accomplish it, instilling a desire to learn would supplement school-taught knowledge to much avail, and would have an effect akin to Hladik’s supernumary year to his Los Enemigos. The astonishing and ever-growing number of intellectuals and free-thinkers in this day and age is evidence enough that a desire for knowledge will increase exponentially with increasing knowledge; indeed, as Socrates quipped, the more I learn, the more I learn how little I know.

The teaching of Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Alex La Guma’s The Lemon Orchard, would likely counteract homophobia, misogyny and racism more than any World Pride, Mothers’ Day or Black History Month, and would naturally inspire more learning in the associated fields; the teaching of the genocidal policy pursued by the United States in furtherance of Manifest Destiny, or the genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines by the British in Van Diemen’s Land, would also counter a Nazicentric historiology of national malfeasance; the possibilities are endless. This could all be accomplished by the cultivation of debate and discourse, the catechetically elenctic questioning of dogmatic knowledge, the study of literature and historical dialectic. While improbable in the near future, the inculcation of students with an insatiable desire to learn serves as my quixotic ideal of education, and one which the shortcomings of the British education system can be remedied by working toward.

Contra theological non-cognitivism.

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 21:36:36 +0100

I recently encountered an individual with whom I engaged in a philosophical debate about the veracity of theism; his overture that, as a theist, his assertion could only be validated, marked him out as a theological non–cognitivist from a theistic perspective (a rare beast indeed). His suggestion was that the concept of God was a non–cognitive statement and as such inherently meaningless, and by arguing from an atheistic perspective regarding God, I would presumably be substantiating, nay reifying, the concept. One peccadillo is that this presupposes that the concept of God is inherently meaningless even for theists, which concludes that if the atheistic perspective is not argued, but merely assumed, then it is therefore validated in its entirety; another is that by arguing for the lack of a god (or, more fairly, godlessness) one would validate that concept also. However, a more cogent argument against theological noncognitivism in support of theism is that in referring to God, I refer to this concept only insofar as referencing the beliefs of others, as acknowledging God as a plot device in the Biblical spiel, but not in order to affirm the theist’s weltanschauung. In the sense that arguing against the concept of God affirms the existence of a God, it does so only insofar as it acknowledges that the concept of God subsists in the minds of others, an acquiescence which one would be puerile and contumacious to repudiate. The reification of this God abstraction is a further step sui generis, and this is the realm in which theism and atheism oppugn each other. The steps taken to eschew this realm are assiduous, but sophistic nevertheless.