The right-wing press are always keen to complain that we are on a fast track to hell in a handbasket, because people in our modern society allegedly lack due respect. How right they are! Journalists from one newspaper group hacked into the mobile voice mail box of a dead child. How disrespectful to the family of the child is that? And another newspaper – which had consistently supported appeasement with the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s – just this week traduced the memory of a man who had joined the Royal Navy to fight for his adopted country in World War II. Oh the irony of Nazi appeasers accusing an ex-serviceman of disloyalty to Britain! How they must have all laughed about that in the editorial planning meeting!
And as if to prove there is no threshold below which some journalist will not sink, a reporter from the same newspaper group gate-crashed a private memorial service for a recently deceased family member, held in a hospital, and questioned participants on their attitudes to another deceased.
Have newspaper owners and journalists no sense of decency?
Does evo-psych explain anything at all?
Evolutionary psychology and evolutionary sociology have long struck me as arrant nonsense, because they ignore human free will and self-reflection, and thus our ability to rise above our own nature. There are no pianos on the savanna, as I have remarked before, so an evolutionary psychologist will have a major challenge to explain a desire to play the piano in evolutionary terms.
Christopher Booker, in a review of E. O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, views similarly the flaws of evolutionary theory when applied to human behaviours:
It is our ability to escape from the rigid frame of instinct which explains almost everything that distinguishes human beings from any other form of life. But one looks in vain to Wilson to recognise this, let alone to explain how it could have come about in terms of Darwinian evolutionary theory. No attribute of Darwinians is more marked than their inability to grasp just how much their theory cannot account for, from all those evolutionary leaps which require a host of interdependent things to develop more or less simultaneously to be workable, that peculiarity of human consciousness which has allowed us to step outside the instinctive frame and to ‘conquer the Earth’ far more comprehensively than ants.
But it is this which also gives us our disintegrative propensity, individually and collectively, to behave egocentrically, presenting us with all those problems which distinguish us from all the other species which still live in unthinking obedience to the dictates of nature. All these follow from that split from our selfless ‘higher nature’, with which over the millennia our customs, laws, religion and artistic creativity have tried their best to re-integrate us.
Nothing is more comical about Darwinians than the contortions they get into in trying to explain those ‘altruistic’ aspects of human nature which might seem to contradict their belief that the evolutionary drive is always essentially self-centred (seen at its most extreme in Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’ theory). Wilson’s thesis finally crumbles when he comes up with absurdly reductionist explanations for the emergence of the creative arts and religion. Forget Bach’s B Minor Mass or the deeper insights of the Hindu scriptures — as a lapsed Southern Baptist, he caricatures the religious instinct of mankind as little more than the stunted form of faith he escaped from.
His attempt to unravel what makes human nature unique is entirely a product of that limited ‘left-brain thinking’ which leads to cognitive dissonance.
Unable to think outside the Darwinian box, his account lacks any real warmth or wider understanding. Coming from ‘the most celebrated heir to Darwin’, his book may have won wide attention and praise. But all it really demonstrates is that the real problem with Darwinians is their inability to see just how much their beguilingly simple theory simply cannot explain.”
Political invective
I’ve long been a fan of good political vitriol. Here was a catalog, compiled by journalist Mungo MacCallum, of words used by Paul Keating in the Australian Commonwealth Parliament to describe his opponents. With such a past, it is good to see that some folks are still hard at work keeping standards of vitriol high:
Here is Telegraph financial journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, skewering (and rightly so) that smug and arrogant architect of our common European Economic Disaster, German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble:
I apologise personally to Mr Schäuble for calling him a dangerous mediocrity: arrogant, shallow, narrow-minded, provincial, and unscientific in equal degree. This was shockingly rude. It brings shame to Fleet Street.”
And here, on David Cameron, is Jake Davis, aka Topiary, who has not lost his way with words since being the tweet-face of Anonymous and LulzSec:
David Cameron is an absolute wet-lipped Eton-spawned fleshnugget with no actual perspective on global policy. I hate the Tories with a burning passion reserved for the Westboro Baptist Church. The fault of cyberbullying lies with the parents, like all fault for everything, especially the troubles in Syria.”
Recent Reading 9
The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books:
Anita Raghavan [2013]: The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund. (New York: Business Plus). This is a fascinating and excitingly-written account of the rise and fall of several people, many of them Americans of South Asian descent, associated with the activities of the Galleon hedge fund. First among these is billionaire Tamil-American Raj Rajaratnam, founder of Galleon, and convicted insider-trader. In the next tier are his many insider informants, primaily Rajat Gupta and Anil Kumar, both prominent partners of McKinsey and Company, a management consulting firm. Indeed, Gupta was three times elected global MD of McKinsey by his fellow partners, and thus the book has lots of fascinating information about The Firm and its operations, incidental to the main story.
Insider trading is a strange crime. Surely most traders engaged in trading for its own sake (and not hedging some activity or transaction in non-financial markets) seek to take advantage of something they know that others don’t, even if it is just knowledge arising from more clever or faster analysis, or the knowledge that comes from aggregating views across multiple trades. And who, exactly, are the victims here, since any trading requires a willing counterparty? But even if insider-trading is not considered an evil, there is great dishonour in breaching confidences gained in positions of trust, and there seems little doubt that Rajaratnam’s informants did that.
An odd feature of the book, where so many prominent Indian Americans and South-Asian businesspeople are name-checked, is the failure to mention Praful Gupta. As far as I am aware, the two Guptas were no relation, and met when they were fellow students at Harvard Business School. Rajat Gupta, in a newspaper interview in 1994, said they became and remained very good friends. While Rajat pursued a career with McKinsey, Praful became a management consultant and partner with Booz, Allen & Hamilton, and later a senior executive with Reliance Industries.
An annoying feature of the writing is the author’s repeated confusion about tense. On page 217, for instance, we read, “In 2005, Lloyd Blankfein’s predecessor and former secretary of the Treasury Henry M. “Hank” Paulson Jr. had approached Gupta about joining the Goldman board of directors.” But Hank Paulson only became Secretary of the US Treasury in 2006, where he remained until January 2009. At the time this sentence was written by Raghavan in 2012 or 2013, Paulson was a former Treasury Secretary, but not in 2005, the time referred to at the opening of the sentence. There are similar instances of inaccurate or confused tense on pages 257, 288, 347, and 362, and no doubt more that I did not catch. These appear so frequently that one is tempted to consider them not mere lapses nor evidence of a non-grammatical linguistic style, but indicative of a more fundamental difference between the author’s conceptualization of time and that of most speakers of English. There are also a number of confusions or ambiguities of subject and object, and of deictic markers, in sentences throughout the text.
Abuse of media power (again)
I have complained before that The Grauniad sometimes looks as if it’s no more than the internal corporate newsletter of the people who work for it. Their sister title, The Observer, has a particularly egregious example of such behaviour this weekend. Of the 18 pages devoted to arts preview coverage, 6 entire pages are devoted to one person, 7 pages if you count the cover. Who is this paragon? Did some famous artist just die? What artist or actor or dancer or musician or film-maker or writer deserves such coverage? Why, it was none of these! The coverage is for the newspaper’s film-critic, Philip French, who hasn’t even died, but is merely retiring. And guess what? As well as these 7 out of 18 entire pages, another half-page is given over in the reviews section to French’s latest film review!
It’s good see the Guardian/Observer’s Marketing Department so successfully targeting that crucial demographic, current and former Guardian/Observer employees who know Philip French. Pity that doing so alienates the rest of us.
Cannibalism in the British Navy
. . . and may I take this opportunity of emphasizing that there is no cannibalism in the British Navy. Absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount, more than we are prepared to admit, but all new ratings are warned that if they wake up in the morning and find any toothmarks at all anywhere on their bodies, they’re to tell me immediately so that I can immediately take every measure to hush the whole thing up.”
Vice Admiral Sir John Cunningham, speaking in Episode 32 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Poem: Poem VI
A poem by Derek Jarman (1942-1994), written in 1965:
Poem VI
The days are numbered,
For us, and the old man
collecting pennies under
the bridge.
For he is in disguise
and has attended the concert –
before us,
But now he plays his
violin in a way which
demands our sympathy.
(From Sketchbooks, reprinted in The Observer Magazine, 2013-08-25, page 25).
Previous poems here.
Influential Music
Having written posts on influential non-fiction books and on influential fiction books, I thought it interesting to list pieces of music that have influenced me. To start with, I’ve confined myself initially to western art music (aka “classical” music). Jazz and world music to come in due course. The music is listed in alpha order of composer surname. Some pieces were introduced to me by friends, whom I thank with a Hat Tip (HT).
- Adams: Phrygian Gates (HT: RH)
- Arriaga: String Quartets
- Arriaga: Symphony
- Bach: Double Concerto for Violin
- Bach: Piano Concerto #1, BWV1052
- Bach: St. Matthew Passion
- Bach: St. John Passion
- Bach: Mass in B Minor
- Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier
- Bach: Cantatas
- Bach: Toccata and Fugue in D minor
- Bach: Partitas and Sonatas for solo violin
- CPE Bach: Magnificat
- Beethoven: Piano Sonatas
- Beethoven: Symphonies 3, 5 and 9
- Beethoven: Piano Concertos
- Beethoven: Piano Quartets
- Beethoven: Piano Trios
- Beethoven: Violin Concerto
- Bernstein: Overture to Candide (HT: DUJ)
- Binge: Elizabethan Serenade
- Cage: Music for prepared piano
- Cherubini: String Quartets
- Chopin: Nocturnes
- Chopin: Preludes Op. 28 (HT: KM)
- Debussy: Preludes
- Farrenc: Piano Quartets
- Farrenc: The Symphonies
- Feldman: Five Pianos
- Feldman: Triadic Memories
- Glass: Koyaanisqatsi
- Glass: Symphony for 8 (Cello Octet)
- Handel: Messiah
- Haydn: Sturm und Drang Symphonies
- Haydn: The Creation
- Haydn: String Quartets
- Hummel: Trumpet Concerto
- Ligeti: Etudes (HT: EK and AD)
- Maxwell Davies: Eight Songs for a Mad King
- McPhee: Tabu Tabuhan
- Meale: Clouds Now and Then
- Mendelssohn: The String Symphonies #7-12
- Mendelssohn: Magnificat
- Mendelssohn: Hebrides Overture
- Mendelssohn: Octet
- Mendelssohn: String Quartets and Quintets
- Mendelssohn: Piano Trios and Quartets
- Mendelssohn: Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Mendelssohn: Elijah
- Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor
- Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in D minor
- Mendelssohn: Concerto for Piano and Violin in D minor
- Mendelssohn: The Symphonies
- Mendelssohn: Songs without Words
- Montague: Piano Concerto
- Mozart: Last 3 Symphonies
- Mozart: Requiem
- Mozart: The String Quartets
- Nishimura: Bird Heterophony
- Nyman: Songs for Tony
- Ore: Codex Temporis
- Orff: Carmina Burana
- Penberthy: Saxophone Concerto
- Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 2 (HT: AD)
- Reich: Nagoya Marimbas (HT: JG)
- Reich: Music for 18 Musicians
- Alvidas Remesa: Stigmata (HT: KM)
- Riley: In C
- Roman: Drottningholm Music (Music for a Royal Wedding)
- Rzewski: The People united will never be Defeated (HT: AD)
- Schumann: Dichterliebe (HT: PP)
- Schumann: The Symphonies
- Sculthorpe: Sun Music III
- Shostakovich: Concerto for Piano and Trumpet
- Shostakovich: Incidental Music for Hamlet
- Shostakovich: 24 Preludes and Fugues for Piano
- Stockhausen: Stimmung (HT: LM)
- Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring
- Takemitsu: A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden
- Tchaikovsky: Symphonies #4 and #5
- Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto
- ten Holt: Canto Ostinato (HT: AD)
- Vanhal: The Symphonies
- Wagner: Prelude to The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
- Xenakis: Metastaseis
- Xenakis: Pithoprakta.
Enemies of liberty
Andrew Sullivan on the rank abuse of power that was the 9-hour detention of David Miranda on alleged suspicion of terrorism at Heathrow Airport this weekend:
In this respect, I can say this to David Cameron. Thank you for clearing the air on these matters of surveillance. You have now demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that these anti-terror provisions are capable of rank abuse. Unless some other facts emerge, there is really no difference in kind between you and Vladimir Putin. You have used police powers granted for anti-terrorism and deployed them to target and intimidate journalists deemed enemies of the state.
You have proven that these laws can be hideously abused. Which means they must be repealed. You have broken the trust that enables any such legislation to survive in a democracy. By so doing, you have attacked British democracy itself. What on earth do you have to say for yourself? And were you, in any way, encouraged by the US administration to do such a thing?
Mama don't allow
Norm’s latest entry in his Mommy and Daddy collection of songs is JJ Cale’s version of “Now, Mama don’t allow no guitar playing round here“. The version of this song that I first recall hearing was that of The Limeliters, who do not refer (as Cale does) to “My Mama“. So, I’d always understood the song to be about boarding-house owners, rather than natural-born mothers, and hence a fine metaphor for the suffocating nanny culture that was the US of the 1950s. I cannot find their version online.
Of course, a mention of The Slightly Fabulous Limeliters would be incomplete without a reference to their song about Harry Pollitt, long-time General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain.