Tuesday 30 November 2010

Durer's hands


The fascinating thing about Durer's famous drawing is the way the image is all about the texture of the skin of the hands but not about the fingerprint lines. Texture, here, defines space; that's its purpose. But it leaves little for the criminologist.

Monday 29 November 2010

Polyfamous

Πολύφημος (Polyphēmos), the Cyclopic giant from Homer's Odyssey, who imprisons and eats many of Odysseus' crew in his cave, such that only Odysseus's polymētis many-wittedness saves the day. There's a lot to say about him. For the minute I'm interested in one thing only, the 'many-' prefixity of these two names.

When I was a student I was taught that the name Πολύφημος means 'many voices', which is to say 'loud'. But there are other derivations, since φημη means, L&S tell us, pretty much the same as the Latin fama, from where, etymologically speaking, that word is derived. ('a voice from heaven, a prophetic voice'; 'a saying or report'; 'the talk of report of a man's character'; 'a song of praise'). Taking 'Polyphemus' as 'Polyfamous' sets up a nice allegory of the lumbering one-eyed, dinosaurian brutality of 'fame' versus the small, mammallian, quick-wittedness of Odysseus' 'nobody'. No question as to who will win that battle. A lesson for our times.

Sunday 28 November 2010

Verse

vice versaversa vice

wiki worser
worse wiki

versa vicevice versa

Saturday 27 November 2010

Duchess

Toying with what amounts to a new reading of this famous poem:
My Last Duchess (1842)

That's my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
That depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 't was not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps
Over my lady's wrist too much" or "Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat:" such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart - how shall I say? - too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed: she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 't was all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace -all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush,at least. She thanked men - good! but thanked
Somehow - I know not how - as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech - (which I have not) - to make your will
Quite clear to such a one, and say, "Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss
Or there exceed the mark"- and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse
- E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will 't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count, your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me.
I haven't time, here, to go into all the detail I'd like; but I wonder if the missing context to the understanding of this poem is: Protestantism. In 1849 Browning reprinted the poem with 'Ferrara' added: the speaker. Scholars have identified various possible Renaissance Italian Dukes of Ferrara; but I wonder if Browning doesn't intend us to make the connected with Renée, Duchess of Ferrara, a celebrated friend of early Protestantism. John Calvin visited her, she gave sanctuary to a number of persecuted Hugenots, and was eventually interrogated and forced to recant by the Roman Counter-Reformation.

According to this reading, the 'Duke' is a kind of caricature of repressive Catholicism, his 'nine-hundred year old name' (taking his family back to the 400s; or perhaps more specifically to the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, by which Theodosius I officially made Trinitarian Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire). One would not have to search far to find nineteenth-century British Protestant representations of Catholic authority as violent, repressive, motivated by a tacit sexual possessiveness and hostility and ultimately murderous. The Duchess represents a new open-hearted spirituality: whose love is untrammelled, and who finds a kind of spiritual beauty in various fundamentally religious icons: the white mule, the bough of cherries, the sun -- all artistic icons of Christ.

Needs work, though, this reading.

Friday 26 November 2010

Carroll's Name of the Song

In her essay 'Metalanguage in Lewis Carroll', [SubStance 22: 2/3, issue 71/72: Special Issue: Epistémocritique (1993), pp. 217-227] Sophie Marret considers 'the name of the song':
The White Knight's suggestion to sing a song to Alice gives rise to the following logical imbroglio:
"Let me sing you a song to comfort you." [...] "The name of the song is called 'Haddock's Eyes'."

"Oh, that's the name of the song is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.
"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is 'The Aged Aged Man.'"

'Then I ought to have said 'that's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself.

"No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called 'Ways And Means': but that's only what it's called, you know!"

"Well, what is the song, then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

"I was coming to that," the Knight said. 'The song really is 'A-sitting On A Gate': and the tune's my own invention."(Through the Looking Glass, 305-306)
There is no doubt that the White Knight's logic is faulty, but the reader still finds it hard to grasp his mistake unless he takes a closer look at the text. One could think, like Alice, that he is the victim of a semantic confusion, and that he should have said "The name of the song is 'Haddocks' Eyes'," but he points out that he did not make a mistake and that he knows the difference between the name of the song and the name of the name of the song. Alice is mistaken when she thinks she can make a distinction between "the name of the song" and "what the song is called." The difference, if any, the White Knight points out, is purely semantic, because of the ambiguity of the expression "what it is called" (in French, the distinction has to be made between "c'est ainsi qu'elle s'appelle" and "c'est ainsi qu'on l'appelle"). Alice's error thus finds a logical justification in the explanation of the White Knight, who takes advantage of it to underline his mastery of the subtleties of semantics, preventing us from interpreting his first assertion as a faulty performance. Equivalents may actually be found for the expression "what the name is called," such as "a title" or even "a noun phrase." The most disconcerting thing in the first assertion of the White Knight is that he should choose an expression from the same level as the name to qualify the latter. He remains within the register of the specific, instead of finding an equivalent in a generic category-a class of names. If he makes it a point of honor to distinguish between the level of language and metalanguage (the name of the name), he contents himself with bringing metalanguage down to the level of language, thus confusing these two levels again.
I'm not sure this is right. There are plenty of examples from ordinary usage where 'the name of the name' does not elevate us into metalanguage. Marret is thinking of an exemplary instance such as (as a guess) 'the song's name is 'To Be Or Not To Be'; this name is a quotation': but not all name-of-the-names are like this. To pluck one from the top of my head: "The name of the song is 'You'll Never Walk Alone'. This song is called (ie the name of this name is...) 'the Anfield Anthem', on account of its close association with Liverpool Football Club." Other examples suggest themselves: for example, the distinction between the name of the play 'Macbeth', and the name of this name, 'The Scottish Play' -- because the name of the play itself is deemed unlucky to utter. Besides, as Marret goes on to say:
In order to make the White Knight the victim of such a confusion, it seems that Carroll himself had to be able to make the distinction between these two levels, and we may go as far as saying that to set his paradox, such an intuition was necessary. In both cases he seems to point out that the distinction between language and metalanguage does not go without saying. In contrast to Alice's discourse that remains concerned with the relationship between name and thing ('That's the name of the song;" "that's what the song is called;" "what is the song?"), the White Knight sets the subtlety of his own logical processes, which imply the necessary distinction of the level of metalanguage ("what the name is called") although he immediately makes it equivalent to the level of language. The White Knight thus stands out as a parodic double of the author.
Quite right.

Thursday 25 November 2010

The Second Law of Theologico-thermodynamics

Roger Penrose's Cycles of Time (2010) addresses the oddness of the big bang, with respect to the Second Law of thermodynamics. That law applies to discrete systems, and does so, the physicists assure us, ubiquitously. But as Penrose notes, the Big Bang presents a problem. For the Second Law to hold, the Big Bang 'must have had, for some reason, an extraordinarily tiny entropy' [51]. He goes on: 'the issue of the Big-Bang specialness is central to the arguments of this book'; and his explanation for the counter-intuitive low-entropy initial cosmic singularity is an idea he calls 'Conformal Cyclic Cosmology', according to which our Big Bang is merely a transition in the longer history of the universe, such that the Second Law obtains in the larger system.

Now, it goes without saying that another way of solving the apparent problem of the Big Bang and the Second Law of thermodynamics would be theological. That, in a nutshell, it is not the case that the Big Bang developing into the Cosmos is a closed system; because God was there too, a kind of mega Maxwell's demon,* to steer the high entropy big bang into a low entropy early universe which could then, Second-Law-ishly, gradually become high entropy again. It should also go without saying that I do not personally see the merit in this explanation, although of course many people do, implicitly or explicitly. But what interests me is the broader parameters of this explanation; or more specifically, what those broader parameters mean for theological explanation.

In a nutshell what I mean is this: we may think of God as initiating the Big Bang, turning a high-entropy starting point into the lower entropic early Cosmos. But according to the Second Law, the total system (God + Big-Bang-Singularity → God + Our Cosmos) must increase in entropy. As with Maxwell's Demon, this would mean that by creating the cosmos God increased his own entropy. That the act of Creation was a kind of dimunition in the perfect harmomy and order of the divine. There's a kind of poetic rightness to this notion, I think: that making the Cosmos took something out of God, that it was not 'cost free' -- a poetic truth restated in the price paid by God as Christ in redeeming our suffering. But it is not compatible with the tradition understanding of the omnipotence of God. If this is right, then God wounded himself making us. And if he did so, he is no longer perfect, omnipotent and unscathed.
___
*'Several physicists have presented calculations that show that the Second Law will not actually be violated, if a more complete analysis is made of the whole system including the demon. The essence of the physical argument is to show, by calculation, that any demon must "generate" more entropy segregating the molecules than it could ever eliminate by the method described. That is, it would take more energy to gauge the speed of the molecules and allow them to selectively pass through the opening between A and B than the amount of energy saved by the difference of temperature caused by this.'

Wednesday 24 November 2010

On Criticism

Criticism stands in relation to the body of literature as a colostomy bag does to the body of a human being.

Tuesday 23 November 2010

Cowperesque

No outboard motor can prevail
To reach the distant bluegreen coast;
A breath from skies must swell a sail,
Or all our toil is lost.

The wind is complexly crosscutting;
Drags the sailstitch apart.
Motor spits at sea, tut-tutting,
The incompetence of our art.

Monday 22 November 2010

Ambition

Strangely wrongheaded comment by Johnson: 'Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession, and he that teaches another to long for what he never shall obtain is no less an enemy to his quiet than if he had robbed him of part of his patrimony.' [Rambler No. 163: 8 October 1751]

But the name for a disproportion between desires and enjoyments is not unhappiness, but ambition. We are born into this condition, and without it would lack the motivation to achieve anything at all.

Sunday 21 November 2010

Time in the Novel

Lukács thinks the novel, as the distinctive asethetic attempt to represent the life of existentially disenchanted and 'homeless' mankind, is incapable of what we might call the 'Grecian Urn' stillness of the epic: 'only the novel, the literary form of the transcendent homelessness of the idea, includes real time -- Bergson's dureé -- among its constitutive principles' [Theory of the Novel, 121]. The obvious move is to note that, written as it was during the First World War, Lukács's is one of the last great theories of narrative not to include cinema, that other great artform to include Bergson's dureé among its constitutive principles. But I'm less interested in the obvious move. I'd propose a different strategy: a naif literalism, that sees not the novel as such, but the science fiction novel, as the fullest embodiment of this notion; all those children of Wells's Time Machine.

Saturday 20 November 2010

Cosm

The blind watchmaker. The deafness of the cosmos. The dumb splendour of the world. Perhaps we should pity the material universe for its vast disabilities.

Friday 19 November 2010

Divinity

Any religion with a God or gods can be thought of as interesting concepts of divinity. Except Christianity, which alone is interested in trivinity.

Thursday 18 November 2010

Line in the Sand

Where does this phrase come from? Why, the encounter between Gaius Popillius Laenas and Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucid Empire and Ptolemaic Egypt. Livy:
"After receiving the submission of the inhabitants of Memphis and of the rest of the Egyptian people, some submitting voluntarily, others under threats, [Antiochus] marched by easy stages towards Alexandria. After crossing the river at Eleusis, about four miles from Alexandria, he was met by the Roman commissioners, to whom he gave a friendly greeting and held out his hand to Popilius. Popilius, however, placed in his hand the tablets on which was written the decree of the senate and told him first of all to read that. After reading it through he said he would call his friends into council and consider what he ought to do. Popilius, stern and imperious as ever, drew a circle round the king with the stick he was carrying and said, "Before you step out of that circle give me a reply to lay before the senate." For a few moments he hesitated, astounded at such a peremptory order, and at last replied, "I will do what the senate thinks right." Not till then did Popilius extend his hand to the king as to a friend and ally. Antiochus evacuated Egypt at the appointed date, and the commissioners exerted their authority to establish a lasting concord between the brothers, as they had as yet hardly made peace with each other." Ab Urbe Condita, xlv.12.
What interests me here is that this was a circular, surrounding line in the sand. Surely the phrase is generally taken to be a straight line, drawn to demarcate enemies, with the implication: 'step over this line, towards me, and we will fight.' But the circular line is a much more interesting thing.

Wednesday 17 November 2010

La Guerre des Robots


Plural? The robot is singular; we are the plural ones. It is bigger than any individual human, but humanity is always bigger than it.

Tuesday 16 November 2010

Man of Genius

In The Man Without Qualities, Musil says: 'the man of genius is duty-bound to attack'. Dangerous, that thought: tempting to run it backwards, and confuse a general mood of hostile belligerance with 'genius'. Might we not, rather say, 'the man of genius may be duty-bound to attack; but more to the point, the man of genius knows how to resist being bound by anything, least of all duty.'

Monday 15 November 2010

Heat and cold and light poem

Heat turns the albumen from gluey transparency
to opaque white, like a cataract in the eye’s lens.

Cold turns the breath from windy invisibility
to spectral white, like a fog at the edge of a photograph

where light has crept in the places it is not supposed to be.

Sunday 14 November 2010

Anatheism

Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God (Columbia Univ. Press 2010) argues (I quote from Patrick Gardner's Expositions review):
Ever since Nietzsche pronounced the death of God, philosophy has been searching for a second opinion.... [some] grant that the traditional God has met his demise, but they reason that if only a few conditions are met, religion could carry on post-mortem; it could return to God after his death. Among Nietzsche’s progeny are theorists of the well-known “religious turn,” the rebellious teenagers of post-metaphysical thought. They prove resourceful in their attempts to modify theological concepts, developing new perspectives on religion capable of overcoming the life-negating parodies of ages past. But how are we to think posthumously in a culture so deprived of its taste for higher things? And more importantly, what kind of God can we expect to rise from this modern graveyard?

One answer to this question is provided by Richard Kearney in his latest work, Anatheism: Returning to God After God. Having studied with two pioneers of the “religious turn,” Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas, it is unsurprising that Kearney has risen to prominence among religious thinkers in the continental tradition. From his earliest work, Heidegger et la Question de Dieu (1981) to his more recent, The God Who May Be (2001), Kearney has been haunted by the question of God’s fate in a postmodern world.1 In Anatheism, he specifically addresses the challenge of man’s return to the sacred at the dawn of the third millennium. He offers readers a “philosophical story” (xvii), introducing 'reasonable hermeneutic considerations into the theist-atheist debate' (171). According to this story, modern disenchantment is a symptom, not of atheism, but of a pervasive and dogmatic sense of security. Kearney’s self-appointed task, then, is to unsettle believers and nonbelievers alike, to guide them into a post-theism and a post-atheism. Faith, either in God or his absence, can never be a possession or a finished product. It is rather a wager made again and again, constantly renewed to remain enduringly authentic. But to wager rightly, man must be a proficient interpreter of his own experience. Even the God-denier must accurately interpret the God he denies. Thus underlying the wager of faith should be a disposition of hospitality toward the Other who exceeds all of our self-certainties. Such a disposition fosters openness to the divine as the stranger always remaining beyond our comprehension: the third way along which a renewed quest for God can proceed. This, according to Kearney, is the path of anatheism: a “religion of agnostics,” as Wilde called it, defined and inspired by a space of “holy insecurity” (5) and radical humility.
There's something very attractive sounding about this, I'll concede; although it also seems to me to betray its bias. 'Even the God-denier must accurately interpret the God he denies' only carries the weight Kearney needs it to if the God-believer is instructed equally to interpet the absence-of-God he denies. But these two things cannot be equally balanced, partly because the world is mostly believers, and the discursive gravity-field of belief shapes so many of our assumptions; but mostly because Kearney is asking the non-believer to contemplate the possibility (which he denies) of transcendence, where the believer must be asked to contemplate the possibility of his own idiotic credulity, and these are very different things. This, indeed, in various ways undermines a project like Kearney's: it can't quite rinse off the odour of 'my heart wants to believe, my head tells me it's all nonsense, so I shall try and reconcile these two impulses in favour of the former...' It's wishful thinking in the strictest, most demanding sense of the phrase.

Saturday 13 November 2010

Torah Torah Torah

Genesis—Bereshith (בראשית)
Exodus—Shemot (שמות)
Leviticus—Vayikra (ויקרא)
Numbers—Bamidbar (במדבר)
Deuteronomy—Devarim (דברים)

The Hebrew names, there, would make good sciencefictional character monikers.

There's also a (since random, striking) sonic progression at work: 'Bereshith' leads, via the repeated 'sh' and 'e' and the expressive proximity of 'b' and 'm' to 'Shemot', and then via a 'b'/'v' equivalence (think of the modern Greek beta) and an opening of the vowel to 'Vayikra'. Retaining the opening vowel but restating the initiail 'B' the neatly explosive 'bam!' and the bumpy aftermath of 'idbar' sets up the 'd' of Devarim. And the m (Bereshith/Shemot) takes us back to the initial B again.

There's an absurdist phonic narrative buried here, too; about the woman who needs to feed her bar-room pick-up stimulants to get him to perform in the the seedy hotel room. Embarrassing; she must -- viagra (bam!) in the bar, endeavouring.

Friday 12 November 2010

4'33"

Talking, then, of the musical composition John Cage himself considers 'his most important work'. You know what this sounds like, and if you don't then be quiet for four minutes and thirty-three seconds and you'll get a sense of it. Two thoughts about the title, though.

Do we take it 'seriously'? That what is significant about '4'33"' is its implied trajectory of 'falling away'?--from 4 to 3 to 3 to (we extrapolate) 2 and 2 and 2, and four '1's, like the pillars in a temple of silence, and so towards the emptines and silence of '0'?

I prefer the second reading: the jokey one. Underpinning this piece of 'empty' music is a grosser, more material and indeed bathetic sense of 'emptiness'. From a composer called John we turn to the gospel of John, 4:33 and discover: 'Therefore said the disciples one to another, Hath any man brought him ought to eat?'

Silence is holy, and spiritual; but silence is also all the ambient rustling and coughing and grumbling of stomachs. Silence is also a trope for: 'hey, I'm peckish.'

Thursday 11 November 2010

Lamartinery

Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Prat de Lamartine asks, rhetorically: 'What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?' [Méditations Poétiques, Second series, Sermon 15, 1820]. Fair enough, although it turns out the song is an infinitely extended remix of Cage's 4'33". But perhaps we shouldn't let that put us off.

'Le Prat', indeed.

Wednesday 10 November 2010

Plainsong

Called 'plain' because it is unaccompanied by musical instruments. But those instruments are valued most highly that approximate the human voice (the violin, the electric guitar), for generally speaking musical instruments are tonally and expressively much more limited than a good singing voice. Which is to say: it is instrumental music, without sung vocals, thet ought to be called 'plainsong': singing without instrumental accompaniment should be called 'richsong'.

Tuesday 9 November 2010

Studying the past

In the Discourse on Method, René Descartes says that 'conversing with those of past centuries is the same as traveling ... But one who spends too much time traveling eventually becomes a stranger in his own country; and one who is too curious about practices of past ages usually remains quite ignorant about those of the present.' He doesn't explain why this would necessarily be a bad thing, mind you. A too great attachment to one's contemporary discourse of thought, like a too jingoistically blinkered patriotism, can be worse than drifting from place to place, surely.

Monday 8 November 2010

Ghost

The ghost is beckoning. The ghost is inviting us. It wants us to come inside. The question is not: is there a ghost in the room? The question is: is there room inside the ghost?

Of course the answer is: yes. The answer is always yes.

Sunday 7 November 2010

Pharaoh

The word originally meant 'house with columns': which is to say, a great house:
The term pharaoh ultimately was derived from a compound word represented as pr-`3, written with the two biliteral hieroglyphs pr "house" and `3 "column". It was used only in larger phrases such as smr pr-`3 'Courtier of the High House', with specific reference to the buildings of the court or palace itself ... From the nineteenth dynasty onward pr-`3 on its own was used as regularly as 'His Majesty'. The term therefore evolved from a word specifically referring to a building to a respectful designation for the ruler, particularly by the twenty-second dynasty and twenty-third dynasty ... By this time, the Late Egyptian word is reconstructed to have been pronounced *par-ʕoʔ whence comes Ancient Greek φαραώ pharaō and then Late Latin pharaō. From the latter, English obtained the word "Pharaoh".
But was this usage originally metonymic: for the powerful families in Egypt were the ones who lived in swanky houses with columns? Or was it metaphoric: for a mighty ruler is a house in which his people can find shelter, protection and comfort?

Saturday 6 November 2010

Wittgenstein's Arm

Wittgenstein tried to get to the bottom of the range and nature of human agency—our willpower, our ability freely to choose and will—by asking: ‘what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?’ Of course, this is a recedingly meta question. ‘What is left over if I subtract the thought of the fact that my arm goes up from the thought of the fact that I raise my arm?’ Or, indeed: ‘what is left over if I subtract the concept of subtraction from the thought-experiment I am conducting about balancing the fact that my arm goes up and the fact that I raise my arm?’

Friday 5 November 2010

Grid

The grid is more than the relations between things. The grid is a thing in its own right.

Thursday 4 November 2010

Train poem

A train pulls into Clapham Junction;
the brakes sing unangelic songs.
A laminate of form and function:
the unrightability of wrongs.

Wednesday 3 November 2010

Epic Novel, Novelly Epic

In his Theory of the Novel, Lukács argues that 'the novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.' The world of Homer, Vergil and Dante is presented as 'rounded from within', such that every element of the narrative emobodies and articulates the whole. The novel, which is to say the post-Cervantesean inheritor of epic and romance, is an exercise in 'transcendental homelessness', rendering a world in which humanity is 'unsheltered' from metaphysical roof and insulation of the divine, or a full social context.

It's a beguiling theory, even if its version of epic precious little relationship to actual epic (Lukács later distanced himself from what his later Marxism came to see as a naif 'romantic anti-capitalism' in the book). But saying so doesn't really contradict the force of Lukács' thesis: what matters is not epic as such, but the sense of epic held by the earlier novelists. We can go further and say that the existential 'homelessness' manifested by the novel as a form is precisely a sense of being expelled from the epic.

Tuesday 2 November 2010

O'Rourkeish

There's some vim in O'Rourke's zingers, but sometimes the vim is of a slapdash sort. From a recent Guardian piece (scroll down to the bottom):
Liberals have invented whole college majors – psychology, sociology, women's studies – to prove that nothing is anybody's fault. No one is fond of taking responsibility for his actions, but consider how much you'd have to hate free will to come up with a political platform that advocates killing unborn babies but not convicted murderers. A callous pragmatist might favour abortion and capital punishment. A devout Christian would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view." Give War a Chance (1992)
There's a wealth of nostril-widening, lip-foam-flecking satirical fun to be had from confusing 'potential people' with 'real people', of course; but I'm not sure O'Rourke takes this as far as he could. I'd prefer something along the lines of: 'wearing a condom condemns literally millions of unborn children to a frutiless, early death. Consider how much you'd have to hate gentiles to deplore the killing of millions of Jews, whilst actively advocating the murder of millions of unborn Christian babies with every single male orgasm! A callous pragmatist might favour condoms and genocide. A devout Catholic would sanction neither. But it takes years of therapy to arrive at the liberal view.'
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as caring and sensitive because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he is willing to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? Why I am a Conservative (1996)
It may be that the implied 'nobody' of the last question doesn't articulate a '...because it's a good idea'; but O'Rourke's satire is rather dissolved by that thought. The slippage here is moving silently from 'willing to do good with everybody's money' to 'willing to do good with other people's money'. Communal funds used for communal benefit is hardly the same as me using your credit card to buy myself a new TV.
The idea of a news broadcast once was to find someone with information and broadcast it. The idea now is to find someone with ignorance and spread it around. Peace Kills (2004)
Ah, Fox News! Yes indeed. But here I'd say O'Rourke has a problem keeping up with the reality, satire-wise.
How would Adam Smith fix a mess such as the current recessionary aftermath of a financial collapse? Sorry, but it's fixed already. The answer to a decline in the value of speculative assets is to pay less for them. Job done. Don't Vote (2010)
Financial realligment of value job done. Human misery job left undone. But what Conservative wants to worry about that? Provided, of course, that he or she is wealthy enough not to feel the misery.

Monday 1 November 2010

Making up one's mind

Something wrong about thinking 'making up one's mind' entails taking a mind in phase state A, altering it, and arriving at phase state B. The mind itself is made-up -- the decision is reached, for instance -- via a process of continual making-up. Only by arriving at a decision can we enact the process that leads to us arriving at a decision. There's nothing prior to that telos, decision-making-wise.

A parallel case is writing: I don't decide what to write and then write it. In large part I decide what I want to want to write by writing it.