The last couple of times I’ve visited Glastonbury, I’ve had lunch at a rather good vegetarian café. The food’s better than the salty, processed mush which often passes for food in the UK, the atmosphere is relaxed and there’s an attractive courtyard garden round the back which is perfect for sitting out in on a sunny day.
I’m not a veggie myself, but I do understand the motivations of some vegetarians. There’s a lot of cruelty and suffering involved in packing the supermarket shelves with affordable meat. In terms of food production in a hungry world, you can produce a greater quantity of food by arable farming than you ever will by trying to turn the equivalent amount of plant material into animal flesh. Finally there are the health benefits of eating more fruit and veg. This is where I do part company with the veggies (especially the pale and sickly looking ones) – a lot of us would benefit from eating more fruit & veg and eating rather less meat, but cutting out meat (not to mention eggs and dairy) altogether doesn't seem like a good move. Meat & dairy are good sources of protein and iron and I’m not convinced that it’s easy to keep well whilst abandoning the omnivorous diet our bodies have evolved to run on.
Still, two out of three good reasons to go veggie ain’t bad. I just wish that a lot of the other stuff being promoted in Glastonbury was as understandable as vegetarianism. The café I’ve mentioned is surrounded by shops selling books on ley lines, crystal healing, faries, homeopathy, colour healing and a host of other unlikely-sounding subjects. The small ads in the shop windows are for services such as angel readings (whatever they might be), reflexology, tarot readings, feng shui advice, clairvoyant services, Chakra balancing and astrology.
I’ve no doubt that a lot of the people offering and consuming these volumes and services are sweet, gentle, fluffy, would’t-harm-a-fly people, but I still can’t escape the conclusion that what they’re getting involved in here is a load of gibberish.. I’ve tried dipping into some of this stuff, just to try and find out what people are getting out of it, but it leaves me completely baffled.
Flicking through Whispering Winds of Change by New Age Guru Stuart Wilde, for example, I read that the average speed of humanity circa 1700A.D. was lower than it is today “perhaps hovering at twelve thousand cycles per second”), but the band of separation between the highest and the lowest was not great. By 1960, apparently, human and etheric metaphysical vibrational speeds were spread over a much broader band of between twelve to fifty thousand cycles per second. “Etheric” apparently refers to the electromagnetic field produced by the human body. According to Wilde, you can train yourself to see the etheric energy field surrounding people by concentrating on your peripheral vision and tilting your head slightly. If you want to try this at home, dusk is allegedly the best time to see etheric energy. Oh, and it’s also important to remember that the vibrational speed is only a hypothetical speed – “of course”, Wilde points out, the real speed must be much higher, since “light oscillates at the very high frequency of about 1015 cycles per second” but apparently we don’t need the real speed to understand the concept - “a hypothetical speed will do.”
Make sense of that if you can. There are a few places in the book where he expresses himself a bit more clearly – at one point he suggests that by the simple measure of abolishing all taxes we would all be a lot richer. At least it’s a bold, simple and easily grasped idea, although I suspect that economics of running a functioning state without any form of revenue might be a little more difficult than he seems to think. Come to think of it, he might have been suggesting that we should allow the state to collapse and let the evolving Planetary Group Soul take over its functions – I can’t say for sure because after a immersing myself in this stream of New Age Speak for a little while, I was losing the capacity for rational thought.
What a very strange set of things for any sane person to believe in. I’m indebted to a number web sites and blogs for tirelessly picking though a lot of this sort of stuff so I don’t have to – Ben Goldacre’s splendid Bad Science Column is always a welcome antidote to the tide of nonsense and I was impressed by a fairly recent post at I Kid You Not with some thoughts on visiting a New Age shop.
Why do people believe in this stuff? I don’t know, but we don’t live in an ideal world. I’m guessing that belief in an “alternative” set of values and beliefs is the reaction of people unsatisfied with society as it is, with its meaningless jobs, unsatisfactory relationships, relentless commercialism, atomised society, eroding civil liberties, the obfuscation of democracy with spin and manipulative half truths, environmental degradation, poverty, war and injustice. Not a bad impulse – I wouldn’t give you tuppence for anybody who didn’t want the world to be a bit better than that. But what seems to have happened is that somehow rationality has taken the blame for all that’s wrong with the world and abandoning critical thought has become the “alternative” prescription for everything that’s gone wrong. And that’s profoundly worrying, because critical thought and trying to see the world as it really is, are absolutely necessary for anyone who wants to change things for the better.
Knowing what’s really going on is the best start if you want to change things. An example from the recent history of ideas springs to mind. When autistic spectrum disorders were first identified, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts developed a theory to account for the symptoms. They hypothesised that autism in children was caused by cold, perfectionist parents, who didn’t emotionally nurture their offspring. There was even a shorthand term for a parent who “caused” her child’s autism – the “refrigerator mother” (sorry mum, but it's all your fault). A plausible enough theory for the “open-minded” to accept. Unfortunately, it proved to be dead wrong.
The precise causes of autism are still not well understood, but subsequent research has shown the condition to be caused by physical problems in brain development, perhaps associated with mutations and the interaction of different genes. Although researchers don’t know exactly what leads to these effects, it’s now as certain as any fact can be that the problem exists at the level of the physical structure of the brain and has a genetic component. The current understanding of the true basis of Autism only emerged in the 1970s and slowly began to come into the mainstream thereafter, although the syndrome had been recognised since the 1940s.
So, for at least 30 years, parents who were distressed by their childrens’ strange behaviour, who were struggling to understand what was going on, trying to communicate with and support their child were being consistently mis-diagnosed. They were having the agony of being unable to interact with their own children compounded by being told that the problem stemmed from their own lack of parental affection and intimacy. All in the name of a theory that turned out not to stand up.
Compared to some new age explanations of the world, the “refrigerator mother” theory wasn’t particularly wacky – especially given the fact that the tools needed to uncover the true explanation of the condition weren’t available when autism was first identified as a condition. If a theory which has a ring of plausibility about it can be so damaging and counterproductive, what hope can we have from the scribblings of new age gurus whose respect for critical thinking seems to be non-existent? However benevolent your intentions, subscribing to any weird theory about the world which floats your boat isn’t a neutral act. If what you believe in, or cause other people to believe in, is factually wrong, or plain bizarre, then acting on it at best won’t change this unsatisfactory world of ours for the better and at worst could cause the sort of distress suffered by those so-called “refrigerator mothers”, labelled and stigmatised by psychoanalytic gurus who were utterly confident in their particular pet theories.
Wednesday, 19 November 2008
Saturday, 15 November 2008
A very good night
I've not blogged for a little while - there's been loadsa stuff going on which has taken up what little spare attention I've got and may continue to do so in the near future, so posts may be quite sparse and /or truncated for a while.
Meanwhile, in the big, wide world, some significant things have been going on. Although I'm naturally a bit suspicious of smooth presentation which may hide a lack of substance, I was coming round to the idea that Barack Obama's rhetoric had a bit more substance behind it than I'd given him credit for as we came up to election day. When he won, I was swept up in the general tide of optimism and goodwill. Now the dust has settled, I still think it was an excellent result. Maybe I'll be disillusioned, but I hope not.
I think one good reasons to be cheerful about the President-elect is the fact that he can string a sentence together and doesn't appear to be embarrassed by the fact. I share Orwell's view that there is a link between clarity of thought and clarity of expression - I agree wholeheartedly with this New Yorker article that the night of the victory speech was "a very good night for the English language."
Combine that with the powerful image of a black person* finally accepting the top job in a country founded by people who believed that all men were created equal, but still kept slaves and where the civil rights movement is a comparatively recent memory and it was also a very good night for America.
Finally, consider the fact that this guy has lived abroad, knows the wider world and knows that non-Americans, too can just be regular folks trying to get on with their lives and that adds up to a very good night for the world.
* mixed race, if you want to be pedantic, but don't tell me he's not black enough to know that all folks haven't been treated equal, however they were created.
Meanwhile, in the big, wide world, some significant things have been going on. Although I'm naturally a bit suspicious of smooth presentation which may hide a lack of substance, I was coming round to the idea that Barack Obama's rhetoric had a bit more substance behind it than I'd given him credit for as we came up to election day. When he won, I was swept up in the general tide of optimism and goodwill. Now the dust has settled, I still think it was an excellent result. Maybe I'll be disillusioned, but I hope not.
I think one good reasons to be cheerful about the President-elect is the fact that he can string a sentence together and doesn't appear to be embarrassed by the fact. I share Orwell's view that there is a link between clarity of thought and clarity of expression - I agree wholeheartedly with this New Yorker article that the night of the victory speech was "a very good night for the English language."
Combine that with the powerful image of a black person* finally accepting the top job in a country founded by people who believed that all men were created equal, but still kept slaves and where the civil rights movement is a comparatively recent memory and it was also a very good night for America.
Finally, consider the fact that this guy has lived abroad, knows the wider world and knows that non-Americans, too can just be regular folks trying to get on with their lives and that adds up to a very good night for the world.
* mixed race, if you want to be pedantic, but don't tell me he's not black enough to know that all folks haven't been treated equal, however they were created.
Monday, 3 November 2008
Compare and contrast
I'm still not sure that when Barack Obama says he stands for "change" I really know what that would mean in concrete terms. But, unsurprisingly, if had to choose between him and the other guy, I'd vote Obama anyway. Now I've found a better reason for wanting him to win (originally seen on The View From No. 80:
Well said, Sir - most of the stupidities of our age could have been avoided had the proposals in question been "subject to argument and amenable to reason."
Well said, Sir - most of the stupidities of our age could have been avoided had the proposals in question been "subject to argument and amenable to reason."
Speaking of the stupidities of our age, compare the eloquence of the passage above with this classic observation from Sarah Palin:
Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? […] You've heard about some of these pet projects they really don't make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.
And did you hear the one about the Canadian practical jokers who phoned her up, pretending to be the President of France and and a couple of his aides? The killer quote from the merry pranksters has to be this one, explaining what happened when they called her staff:
We started making phone calls at the beginning of the week .... We realized it might work, because they didn't know the name of the French president; they asked us to spell it.
If Obama doesn't walk this one, the world (or at least a significant portion of the Western Hemisphere) must have gone utterly mad.
Sunday, 26 October 2008
How to avoid huge floating things
There seem to have been a lot of big floating things in the news lately. Like the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska's mega-yacht for example. As it says here:
Seduced by the jet-set glamour of it all, it looks as if those smart political operatives George Osborne and Peter Mandelson failed to spot the obvious danger signs. As anyone who goes to the cinema could have told them, only Bond villains own that sort of floating lair and people who are unsuspectingly lured on board inevitably find themselves getting hurt. George and Mandy really should have listened to Shirley Bassey.
You said it, girl.
Of course, like most ordinary people, I have nothing to do with big vessels like that. Well, that's not strictly true. Most of the stuff I've ever bought has come here on board something even bigger than an oligarch's yacht. I'm talking about container ships, which have been in the news recently because the shipping lines, like everybody else, are sailing into an economic storm:
Your bog-standard superyacht now costs between £40 and £70 million depending on the interior specification. The running costs tend to be about £5 million a year for the bigger vessels. “It's roughly £1 million a metre,” says Jamie Edmiston, of Edmiston & Co. “For that you get helipads, swimming pools and spas as standard.” The oligarchs want more. “They don't just want a slide for the children, they want a submarine,” says one broker.
Seduced by the jet-set glamour of it all, it looks as if those smart political operatives George Osborne and Peter Mandelson failed to spot the obvious danger signs. As anyone who goes to the cinema could have told them, only Bond villains own that sort of floating lair and people who are unsuspectingly lured on board inevitably find themselves getting hurt. George and Mandy really should have listened to Shirley Bassey.
Such a cold finger
Beckons you
To enter his web of sin
But don't go in!
You said it, girl.
Of course, like most ordinary people, I have nothing to do with big vessels like that. Well, that's not strictly true. Most of the stuff I've ever bought has come here on board something even bigger than an oligarch's yacht. I'm talking about container ships, which have been in the news recently because the shipping lines, like everybody else, are sailing into an economic storm:
Late last year, users of major European container ports kept complaining about one problem. Volumes of containers arriving at ports such as Rotterdam and Antwerp from Asia were rising so rapidly that ports were struggling to cope.
It's strange how invisible these fleets of vast container ships are, especially as the ships are among the biggest vessels on the planet. Consider the Emma Maersk, pride of the Maersk Line and the largest container ship in existence. 397 metres or 1,300 feet long, powered by the world's largest single diesel unit (the ship's engine alone weighs 2,300 tons). Yet I was hardly aware of the ship's existence. She's not to, my eyes, at least, a particularly beautiful ship and the photographs I've seen hardly convey an impressive sense of scale, but how can you not be aware of such a colossus? Especially as it was built in little Denmark, known to the rest of the world for beer, bacon, Sandi Toksvig and open sandwiches (although not necessarily in that order) - you'd think if they'd built the biggest object of its class in the world, they'd be shouting their achievement from the rooftops.
A book called How To Avoid Huge Ships recently came third in The Bookseller magazine's recent competition to find the oddest book title of the last 30 years (first place went to Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers) and most of us, it seems, avoid them by not giving the subject a moment's thought. Yet the container ships and their sisters, the oil tankers, which can get even bigger, are the largest self-propelled objects ever constructed by the human race and play a vital role in keeping our civilisation going. There's no practical reason for me to know that the tanker Knock Nevis is the biggest ship in the world by length (the Batillus class supertankers, which have now all been scrapped, beat it in terms of tonnage), but I just feel it's the sort of thing anyone who takes an interest in the world around them ought to at least be aware of.
Maybe it's just me - obscure and perhaps irrelevant facts often delight me, especially as distractions from harsh and uncertain times. I did come across details of another class of vessel this week, which has no relevance to anything in the news, but they just looked so weird I felt I had to share the discovery. Re-reading Neal Ascherson's book Black Sea recently I came across a reference to the Russian Tsarist navy's circular ironclads, shallow draft vessels developed to defend coastal waters around the Crimea in the nineteenth century. They sounded rather extraordinary, so I looked up some details on the Internet and they look as every bit as strange as they sound - flat as pancakes, chugging through the shallows like steam-powered lily pads - see for yourself here and here.
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
Best before
I was in my local Co-Op in Newport Pagnell the other day and and they had a display stand full of reduced mince pies. Reduced, because the "best before" date was October the 27th. Okay, I thought, I guess you don't only have to eat mince pies at Christmas. But no, there was the word "Christmas" in large, friendly letters on the packaging.
I don't know who buys these things, but it's that sort of thing which destroys the Christmas spirit for me. I don't do religion, but I do actually like some aspects of the old midwinter festival (Christmas, Yule, Saturnalia, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, whatever you choose to call it) - some of the carols have cracking tunes whilst Christmas lights, atmospheric ceremonies in churches smelling of old stone and incense, blazing plum puddings, the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl singing Fairytale of New York and even mince pies (at the right time) are quite jolly. What I don't like is the way Christmas has grown into an enormous bloated monster which dominates the final quarter of the year and is makes inroads into the third quarter.
What I'd really like is the sound of carols on the crisp air, candles and Yule logs just for a week or two in the dark days of December. What I positively refuse to do, despite the marketing, is give any thought to Christmas until we're well into November. The sight of Christmas tat in the shops just annoys me when we've not even put the clocks back or done bonfire night yet. Usually I'm already got bored with Christmas by early December.
And have you seen some of the rubbish that gets bought and sold over the Christmas season? Like a plastic reindeer that shits chocolates. Just think about that for a moment. Some person or people sat down and dreamed that up. Then, that person or people pitched the idea to a manufacturer, who bought the idea. People spent hours, days and weeks of their precious time on this earth designing this product. Then they sent the plans to China, where they produced thousands of the buggers and shipped them half way across the world, using up tons of our finite, irreplaceable petrochemicals in producing the plastics and transporting said product across mighty oceans. All to produce something which will amuse the feeble-minded for about a millisecond before being consigned to the attic or landfill for eternity. And they called the late Roman Empire decadent...
Not an original or unusual viewpoint, I'm sure, but I just felt the need to release my inner miserable old git....
I don't know who buys these things, but it's that sort of thing which destroys the Christmas spirit for me. I don't do religion, but I do actually like some aspects of the old midwinter festival (Christmas, Yule, Saturnalia, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, whatever you choose to call it) - some of the carols have cracking tunes whilst Christmas lights, atmospheric ceremonies in churches smelling of old stone and incense, blazing plum puddings, the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl singing Fairytale of New York and even mince pies (at the right time) are quite jolly. What I don't like is the way Christmas has grown into an enormous bloated monster which dominates the final quarter of the year and is makes inroads into the third quarter.
What I'd really like is the sound of carols on the crisp air, candles and Yule logs just for a week or two in the dark days of December. What I positively refuse to do, despite the marketing, is give any thought to Christmas until we're well into November. The sight of Christmas tat in the shops just annoys me when we've not even put the clocks back or done bonfire night yet. Usually I'm already got bored with Christmas by early December.
And have you seen some of the rubbish that gets bought and sold over the Christmas season? Like a plastic reindeer that shits chocolates. Just think about that for a moment. Some person or people sat down and dreamed that up. Then, that person or people pitched the idea to a manufacturer, who bought the idea. People spent hours, days and weeks of their precious time on this earth designing this product. Then they sent the plans to China, where they produced thousands of the buggers and shipped them half way across the world, using up tons of our finite, irreplaceable petrochemicals in producing the plastics and transporting said product across mighty oceans. All to produce something which will amuse the feeble-minded for about a millisecond before being consigned to the attic or landfill for eternity. And they called the late Roman Empire decadent...
Not an original or unusual viewpoint, I'm sure, but I just felt the need to release my inner miserable old git....
Wednesday, 15 October 2008
Moving on
Today dawned drizzly, dank and depressing. It didn't help that Radio 4's Today programme's opening headline was a story about rapidly worsening unemployment figures, with worse to come, just to darken the mood (that was their lead story before the latest figures had even been published for heaven's sake). Not that I'm directly affected at the moment, although (like millions of others) I have plans which aren't exactly helped by the massive economic storm clouds presently obscuring most of the globe.
So I've decided not to dwell on what's going on with the economy. Nor will I harbour a grudge against the over-paid twits who have so spectacularly trashed so many ordinary people's dreams - even if an enraged mob were to arrange for them to be horse-whipped in the street, I wouldn't join in, firstly because hatred is an ugly and self-destructive state of mind, and secondly because quite a few of those alpha-male freaks would probably enjoy it in a Max Mosley-ish sort of way.
Instead, I'll just ponder some of the more interesting comments and lessons from the almighty mess - see here, here and here. And then move on, with a song in my heart and a tune on my lips....
There. Now I've got closure, a couple of other things I noticed today. Firstly, in a branch of W H Smiths, I noticed they had a entire shelf of books labelled "Tragic Life Stories" - not a category I'd previously felt the lack of, but I suppose it takes all sorts. Second, a company that my workplace does business with described themselves on their letterhead as installers of heating and solar systems. I must admit to being impressed - even the Magratheans from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy could only manage to produce custom-made planets. These guys, though, install of whole solar systems. Wow! If there's a market for those babies then the economy's as far from being screwed as Cliff Richard...
So I've decided not to dwell on what's going on with the economy. Nor will I harbour a grudge against the over-paid twits who have so spectacularly trashed so many ordinary people's dreams - even if an enraged mob were to arrange for them to be horse-whipped in the street, I wouldn't join in, firstly because hatred is an ugly and self-destructive state of mind, and secondly because quite a few of those alpha-male freaks would probably enjoy it in a Max Mosley-ish sort of way.
Instead, I'll just ponder some of the more interesting comments and lessons from the almighty mess - see here, here and here. And then move on, with a song in my heart and a tune on my lips....
There. Now I've got closure, a couple of other things I noticed today. Firstly, in a branch of W H Smiths, I noticed they had a entire shelf of books labelled "Tragic Life Stories" - not a category I'd previously felt the lack of, but I suppose it takes all sorts. Second, a company that my workplace does business with described themselves on their letterhead as installers of heating and solar systems. I must admit to being impressed - even the Magratheans from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy could only manage to produce custom-made planets. These guys, though, install of whole solar systems. Wow! If there's a market for those babies then the economy's as far from being screwed as Cliff Richard...
Monday, 13 October 2008
Warning - adult material
There's a passage I vaguely remembered from Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, which popped into my head whilst listening to reports of the global financial services industry going up in smoke. Bonfire's not one of my all-time favourite books (in fact it's not even my favourite Tom Wolfe - I enjoyed The Right Stuff far more), but it does have at least one brilliant moment.
That moment concerns the main character, Sherman McCoy and his relationship with his young daughter, Campbell. Sherman makes his unspeakably well-paid living doing fantastically intricate and, to most people, abstract things with bonds on Wall Street. Campbell tells her father in clearly awestruck terms that her friend MacKenzie's daddy makes books for a living and has eighty people working for him. She then asks Sherman what he does for a living. As a big beast on Wall Street, Sherman McCoy knows that what he does is more important than the activities of some small-time printer, but finds himself at a loss, floundering hopelessly as he tries to explain investment banking to a seven year old. Needless to say he can't find anything to say about what he does for a living which impresses her.
Sherman's wife, an interior designer gets involved in the discussion, not taking Sherman's profession as seriously as he thinks it deserves. A bit of a domestic ensues, with Sherman laying into his wife's job (she's an interior designer). Her reply to this attack contrasts the self-importance, insane complexity and sheer unreality of most of the "work" done on Wall Street or in the City with work done in the real world:
It's a great The Emperor's New Clothes moment, where a child's directness cuts through the self-important adult bull. Perhaps there's something in the idea that any job you can't explain to a child isn't a proper job. People use the term "adult material" to describe porn, but I think that the description applies equally well to the world of high finance and financial services, too abstract and wilfully wrapped in layers of obscure and arcane complexity to engage the mind of a child. Come to think of it, if you published magazines for and about the whizz kid traders who, until recently, made fortunes out of all this tortuous financial complexity, you could call them Playboy, Hustler, Loaded or Nuts - the titles would be just as apt for money porn as they are for the top shelf market.
The abstraction, over complexity and lack of a direct, child-like perspective is, I think, important. The root of the whole crisis depended on people getting caught up in an almighty tangle of complex deals, which they still haven't been able to wholly unpick.
That moment concerns the main character, Sherman McCoy and his relationship with his young daughter, Campbell. Sherman makes his unspeakably well-paid living doing fantastically intricate and, to most people, abstract things with bonds on Wall Street. Campbell tells her father in clearly awestruck terms that her friend MacKenzie's daddy makes books for a living and has eighty people working for him. She then asks Sherman what he does for a living. As a big beast on Wall Street, Sherman McCoy knows that what he does is more important than the activities of some small-time printer, but finds himself at a loss, floundering hopelessly as he tries to explain investment banking to a seven year old. Needless to say he can't find anything to say about what he does for a living which impresses her.
Sherman's wife, an interior designer gets involved in the discussion, not taking Sherman's profession as seriously as he thinks it deserves. A bit of a domestic ensues, with Sherman laying into his wife's job (she's an interior designer). Her reply to this attack contrasts the self-importance, insane complexity and sheer unreality of most of the "work" done on Wall Street or in the City with work done in the real world:
Well at least you're able to point to something you've done, something tangible, something clear-cut .... something real, something describable, something contributing to simple human satisfaction, no matter how meretricious or temporary, something you can at least explain to your children. I mean at Pierce and Pierce, what on earth do you tell each other you do every day?
It's a great The Emperor's New Clothes moment, where a child's directness cuts through the self-important adult bull. Perhaps there's something in the idea that any job you can't explain to a child isn't a proper job. People use the term "adult material" to describe porn, but I think that the description applies equally well to the world of high finance and financial services, too abstract and wilfully wrapped in layers of obscure and arcane complexity to engage the mind of a child. Come to think of it, if you published magazines for and about the whizz kid traders who, until recently, made fortunes out of all this tortuous financial complexity, you could call them Playboy, Hustler, Loaded or Nuts - the titles would be just as apt for money porn as they are for the top shelf market.
The abstraction, over complexity and lack of a direct, child-like perspective is, I think, important. The root of the whole crisis depended on people getting caught up in an almighty tangle of complex deals, which they still haven't been able to wholly unpick.
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