A great leap forward

There was a remarkably enthusiastic (and surprising!) reaction to the postmodern propaganda game we devised a week ago, which involves combining images from Chinese Communist political posters with postmodern academic waffle.

We had some nice feedback and lots of visitors (thanks particularly to links from David and Ophelia) and there were several people who came up with their own creations.

Some participants bent the rules a bit, in particular because they had no obfuscatory postmodern feminist texts to hand. This is the kind of practical-mindedness of which we here in the Central Committee fully approve.

But we wonder: what...not everyone has some Irigaray, Kristeva and Butler within easy reach? This might be right-wing deviationism of the most counter-revolutionary sort...

So, to make things simpler, we think any passage from the leading lights of Theory (we think we should limit ourselves to the vanguard here) that combines muddied thinking, incomprehensible jargon, faulty philosophical assumptions, and a facile and self-regarding presumption of 'subversion' (especially if it has a 'post-' attached to it) makes a delightful caption for one of the very fine posters from the collection to which we linked.

Most importantly of all, of course: have fun!

Entries so far:

Gwyn: '...a journey to the dark portals of life...'
Geoff: '...restoring erection in the ageing penis...' (image)
Rob: '...no fully (as opposed to partially) comprehensive doctrine...'
Michael: 'The discipline of the workshop...' (image)
Norm: '...a priori surfaces of emergence of antagonisms...' (image) (I have to say, this is one of my favourite images.)
Dale: '...far removed from the realm of interest...'

(If there are any I've missed, let me know and I'll update the list.)

Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft

As the wife (somewhat insistently) tells, me, today is German-American Day.

She's German, I'm American, so we feel--in some way--that this was a holiday made for us. The fact that it was originated by none other than our shared number one hero Ronald Reagan, makes it all the more special.

So...we...well, we hope you had a good time today. And, uh,...drank some beer. And maybe went to one of those many 'German-American Day Clearance Sale' sales. And, uh, drank some more beer. (Come on, it's Oktoberfest...)

Taking account of its birth in what we of a certain age remember as the Cold War, we offer two remembrances of that era: one in German, one in English.



Nena, '99 Luftballons' (I analysed this song, as I recall, in German class, circa 1986)



Peter Schilling, 'Major Tom'

Something is happening that is not happening

Two videos from The Books.



'Take Time', from The Lemon of Pink.



'Smells Like Content', from Lost and Safe.

Tales from the inner geek

I love coincidence.

In between writing a conference abstract and revising a letter that I hope will convince someone to publish my next book, some random link-clicking led me to two references to H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, which was one of the main foundations of my teenage geek enthusiasms.

(Not all that long ago, I re-read several of Lovecraft's stories: they still scare me...)

The first is Toren Atkinson's excellent revision of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are entitled 'Where the Great Old Ones Are' (via Boing Boing):
(He says at his site that he can make a t-shirt out of it. Very tempting...)


And then there's this cartoon from the consistently hilarious Monkey Fluids:


And, as an extra geek-bonus, the following cartoon was also at MF.

It's not about Cthulhu, but close enough: if you don't recognise the term 'polyhedral dice' and have never owned a bag of holding, you may not understand the joke.

Things worth reading: post-unification edition

1. One big happy family?

Yesterday was the Tag der deutschen Einheit ('The Day of German Unity', or, as the Babel Fish web translator insists, 'Day of the German Unit') which once again passed us by here with relatively little fanfare.

The Germans, I have come to understand, keep the flag waving generally confined to sporting events (such as at the recent celebration of their world champion women's football team: Wir sind Weltmeisterinnen!) and many even still seem a bit uncertain about whether reunification was even a Very Good Idea in the first place.

But the discontents of German patriotism are a discussion for another time.

However, I'm pleased to see that the German army is so successfully spreading goodwill around the world, as noted in a report from Spiegel International and nicely summarised at Atlantic Review:

Ed H., a US soldier stationed in Kandahar from December 2001 onward (...): "Basically, the Germans were not allowed to do anything," he recalls. "They looked around for things to do. They were incredibly bored." (...) But then the Germans' reputation abruptly changed. A rumor spread among US troops that at least one thing was worthwhile in the German unit -- its supply of alcohol. "Beer was like a currency," says one US soldier, who stocked up on the beverages provided by the KSK troops. "To us, the German beer supplies were Big Rock Candy."

As I've previously mentioned, the (unsung) second verse of the poem that forms the basis of the national anthem might contain a certain recipe for national happiness: 'German women, German loyalty, German wine and German song, Shall retain in the world, Their old lovely ring, To inspire us to noble deeds, Our whole life long.'

Who knows, they just might.

2. Next week on 'Academic Idol'...

There was a point in this interview between David Thompson and Ophelia Benson where I thought it might be interesting to have a TV series that placed the leading lights of Theory on a desert island and posed them with real-world survival problems. At some point the discussion would turn to cannibalism as a 'textual practice' and then the fun might really begin.

David liked the postmodern propaganda party game that The Wife and I developed a few evenings ago and kindly linked to it. I ran across the interview by following the links in his post. The interview is largely concerned with addressing the relationship between the left and postmodernism, and contains a number of good points by both participants.

It seems blindingly obvious that any movement or political perspective that wants to change the world (even in minor ways) is going to have to have a firm grounding in reality (and should have no hesitation in using that term without ironic inverted commas...).

However, this doesn't seem to be at all the case for many.

There's a particularly good passage by Ophelia when it comes to academic idol worship:

But I think the academic hero-worship is a different kind of thing. But what kind of thing; that is the question. And I don't know. I think it's partly (or maybe mostly) to do with not having much (if any) real research or inquiry to do. I think the celebrity worship is in inverse proportion to the substantive heft of the discipline. 'Theory' has to be bigged up precisely because there's not much to it. But what I still have no idea about is what that has to do with the left, and I would still say pretty much nothing. In fact I would even say it's a kind of anti-left, and then I would wonder why that doesn't trouble putative leftists more than it does. Why doesn't the stink of prestige and sycophancy and mutual adulation put them off their food? Why are they happy to cite each other in print with obligatory gold-star adjectives? The brilliant Butler, the powerful Bhabha, the epochal Spivak - why don't they make themselves sick? It seems to me more than a little narcissistic and depraved, it seems stomach-turning - and it certainly drives a lot of people out of the field.

Well put.

3. Despite all our rage, are we still just rats in a cage?

Also worth your time is David Barash's article on 'redirected aggression' at the Chronicle of Higher Education (via A&L Daily). (He refers to responses to inflicted pain and suffering that involve taking them out on someone other than the person who wounded you--typically someone weaker and more vulnerable. If you spent much time on a playground as a child, you'll no doubt recognise the phenomenon.)

Redirected aggression does not simply derive from irrationality or human nastiness, but — along with retaliation and revenge — is entrenched in the very fabric of the natural world, part of a continuum involving nature's response to pain. The biology of redirected aggression goes a long way toward explaining not only its apparent senselessness but its universality as well. It shows up across the ages, as we've seen, across cultures, and across social units, from individuals to communities to nations.

It's not entirely convincing in bits (I'm sceptical that the US invasion of Iraq can be reduced to the collective pain of 9/11 in such a simple way), and it gets a but mushy at the end with regard to religion, but I think the principles it lays out are thought provoking.

It is, of course, difficult to transfer the relevance of other-animal experiments to human beings, but the findings Barash notes are certainly intriguing even just in terms of the behaviour of other animals:

Place a rat in a cage with an electrified floor and subject it to repeated shocks. Not surprisingly, the poor animal will show many signs of stress, at first flinging itself against the walls with each shock. But after a while, it just sits there apathetically, showing no inclination to escape from its painful prison. When autopsied, the animal will be found to have oversized adrenal glands and, frequently, stomach ulcers, both indicating serious stress.

Now repeat the experiment, but with a wooden stick in the cage alongside the rat. When shocked, the rat chews on the stick, and as a result, it can endure its experience much longer without burnout. Moreover, at autopsy, its adrenal glands are smaller, stomach ulcers fewer. The rat buffered itself against the stress merely by chewing on the stick, even though doing so does nothing to get it out of its predicament.

Finally, put two rats in the electrified cage. Shock them both. They snarl and fight. Do it again, and keep doing it; they keep fighting. Yet at autopsy, their adrenal glands are normal, and, moreover, even though they have experienced numerous shocks, they have no ulcers. When animals respond to stress and pain by redirecting their aggression outside themselves, whether biting a stick or, better yet, another individual, it appears that they are protecting themselves from stress. By passing their pain along, such animals minister to their own needs. Although a far cry from being ethically "good," it is definitely "natural."

4. Dulce et decorum est...

Finally, 'A Death in the Family' by Christopher Hitchens, at Vanity Fair (via here) is a remarkably personal and self-searching look at the consequences and responsibilities of writing.

Hitchens recently discovered that his writings in favour of the invasion of Iraq had been part of the inspiration for one soldier's enlistment. He found out after said soldier's death from a roadside bomb attack.

It is particularly interesting to read, as Hitchens appears to be increasingly pessimistic about the war, and -- having followed his impassioned and eloquent (though in my case ultimately unconvincing) arguments for the war -- it is striking to see him write something like the following:

As one who used to advocate strongly for the liberation of Iraq (perhaps more strongly than I knew), I have grown coarsened and sickened by the degeneration of the struggle: by the sordid news of corruption and brutality (Mark Daily told his father how dismayed he was by the failure of leadership at Abu Ghraib) and by the paltry politicians in Washington and Baghdad who squabble for precedence while lifeblood is spent and spilled by young people whose boots they are not fit to clean.

I killed a party again

Have mandolin, will travel.



Jens Lekman, 'Black Cab', live in Gothenburg, 11 December 2003

A fabulous new party game...

[UPDATE: a list of participants and a slight relaxation in the rules is provided here.]

OK, The Wife and I have come up with something fun and innovative to do with your spare time.

1. Take one of the Chinese propaganda posters referred to in the previous post.

2. Go to bookshelf and find postmodern feminist tract of your choice (our preferred plaything is Judith Butler)

3. Flick pages and stop at random.

4. Place finger upon open page. Treat the selected sentence as a caption for the chosen Chinese propaganda poster.

This is our first result. We like. We like very much.

'Libidinal dependency and powerlessness is phantasmatically overcome by the installation of a boundary and, hence, a hypostacized center which produces an idealized bodily ego; that integrity and unity is achieved through the ordering of a wayward motility or disaggregated sexuality not yet restrained by the boundaries of individuation.' (Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, 75)

A perfect match, we think. Now that is gender trouble.

OK, now it's your turn.

Herdspeople love to read books by Marx and Lenin

Via the newsletter of the International Institute of Social History (based in Amsterdam), I discovered a remarkable exhibition on the topic of 'books in Chinese propaganda posters'.

They are...interesting.



And even just the titles are sometimes fascinating. The above, for instance, is called 'Turn philosophy into a sharp weapon in the hands of the masses', a stirring message for any era. And note the philosophically inspiring mushroom cloud to the left. Oh, how it warms the heart.

The exhibition is certainly worth a look.

What if?

The following sentences in Anne Enright's intriguing essay at the London Review of Books -- on the case surrounding the disappearance of Madeleine McCann -- provoked a spark of recognition:

Who needs a cadaver dog when you have me? In August, the sudden conviction that the McCanns ‘did it’ swept over our own family holiday in a peculiar hallelujah. Of course they had. It made a lot more sense to me than their leaving the children to sleep alone.

For us, that 'peculiar hallelujah' swept over us during our vacation in early September (leading to much frantic perusal of French newspapers and German satellite television for new developments), but it involved otherwise much the same sort of feelings that Enright describes.

It just seemed so...right, so much more interesting than the alternative version focusing on the random paedophile (a word which seems to have become as common in the British press as any definite article and therefore much reduced in shock effect).

The almost unimaginable level of hypocrisy and lying that would have been involved had they 'done it' (in whatever way and to whatever extent) was just almost too good to be true (i.e., too horrible to be believed).

But, as a recent and unconnected story shows, the larger the lie the more believable it might be.

Now that sort of turn in the McCann story would be psychologically interesting.

And it was at this point that the 'Madeleine' case began to intrigue me in a way that it previously hadn't. The 'story', as such, suddenly became much more fascinating.

Which, I realise, might say more about me than it does about the case itself.

Of course, the matter has since become rather more muddy again and, to be honest, I have no idea what really happened.

And I have a suspicion that we (apart from at least one key person involved in whatever happened) might never know.

But regardless of what turns out to be the truth, it occurred to me recently that I really don't like the McCanns. No. I don't.

As Enright notes, 'Disliking the McCanns is an international sport', so I know I'm not alone in this, and during that somehow very exciting week or two I wasn't. But, for some reasons that I can't quite describe in a way that seems to justify it, even if Kate and Gerry McCann turn out to be victims of a horrible crime and a (in that case) shameful set of police and press insinuations, I won't be capable of liking them or feeling all that sympathetic toward them.

As people.

And I'm intrigued by this issue in a particularly strong way, as I'm currently writing a book about a woman who, in the 1920s, was acquitted of committing a horrible crime, and her acquittal, while legally correct and at the time not apparently doubted by anyone in the press, leaves enough room for doubt to be painfully tantalising.

The question 'did she do it or didn't she' is the one I typically get when discussing this case, and, honestly, I really don't know. My own opinion, my gut reaction, has swung back and forth between seeing her as an innocent and tragic victim of the police and prosecution and a cynical manipulator of public opinion. The fact that she was (apparently unanimously) idealised by the newspapers of the time makes her case (much like that of the McCanns until recently) all the more fascinating. Like the McCanns, at least for a while, the woman I'm studying was idealised in the press, becoming a household name (though she has long since been forgotten, as the McCanns, someday, will be too.)

As in Madeleine's case, people invested a great deal of attention and emotion in the experiences of someone who was a stranger to their family.

What an odd thing to do.

And our fascination in such cases comes down to a great extent to the following question: What if?

Which allows us -- and our imaginations -- all kinds of options.

I think that Enright is correct to some extent that our opinions of the McCanns have a lot to do with things that are completely unconnected to their case and reflect our own perspectives on our own lives.

But unlike her own experience (related in her last sentence), I have yet to wake up one morning 'liking the McCanns'.

No. For whatever reason, I can't do that.

The Bastard of Baltimore

'H. L. Mencken', Morgan Meis reminds us in the opening of his essay at The Smart Set, 'was a bastard'. Nevertheless, he points out, if he hadn't been one, the English language (at least in its American guise) would be a great deal more impoverished.




I've long been a great admirer of Mencken's writing (if not necessarily of all his opinions), though I'm sure that having spent a few fondly remembered years in the city most associated with the 'Sage of Baltimore' has helped make me feel more closely attached to him.

Jesse Smith's article on the commemoration of Mencken's birthday on 12 September (via Arts & Letters Daily and something I'd have written about earlier had we not been en vacances) certainly took me back to those years, recounting, as it does, a series of talks and events in the Enoch Pratt library and Peabody Conservatory: I used to live just around the corner from both of them (a bit more literally in the case of the Pratt library).

And they are both lovely buildings.

Furthermore, the atmosphere, as Smith points out, is pure Baltimore, as I recall it:

The Pratt is the perfect setting for such a celebration. There are parts that feel as if they haven’t changed since Mencken wandered its halls. The first day of the celebration, the library’s main elevator was broken. Visitors who didn’t want to climb the stairs to the third floor auditorium — and there were many, Mencken fans being on average quite advanced in age — had to instead take an elevator operated by an attendant. An actual elevator attendant, who had to open the door by hand, and raise and lower the elevator with a handle. The bathroom just outside the auditorium had a shower, and its mirror was a medicine cabinet that actually opened — features for a library that seem like they could only have been logical a century ago.

Nonetheless, reading about the lectures given on his behalf and the people who came to celebrate his memory makes me think, adapting Groucho Marx's famous comment (via Woody Allen), that I would rather not be a member of a club that would have them as members.

Read the article and you might understand what I mean.

Inspired by the Smart Set articles, I pulled out one of the Mencken collections on my shelf (A Mencken Chrestomathy) and I, lo and behold, with only the briefest of skimming glances, ran across the following bits of wisdom:

The old anthropomorphic notion that the life of the whole universe centers in the life of man -- that human existence is the supreme expression of the cosmic process -- this notion seems to be happily on its way toward the Sheol of exploded delusions. The fact is that the life of man, as it is more and more studied in the light of general biology, appears to be more and more empty of significance. Once apparently the chief concern and masterpiece of the gods, the human race now begins to bear the aspect of an accidental by-product of their vast, inscrutable and probably nonsensical operations. A blacksmith making a horse-shoe produces something almost as brilliant and mysterious -- the shower of sparks. But his eye and thought, as we know, are not on the sparks, but on the horse-shoe; their existence depends upon a wasting of its tissue. In the same way, perhaps, man is a local disease of the cosmos -- a kind of pestiferous eczema or urethritis. There are, of course, different grades of eczema, and so are there different grades of men. No doubt a cosmos afflicted with nothing worse than an infection of Beethovens would not think it worth while to send for the doctor. But a cosmos infested by Socialists, Scotsmen and stockbrokers must suffer damnably. No wonder the sun is so hot and the moon so diabetically green (p. 1).

**

Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and inescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself, but also and more particularly by himself -- by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true (p. 8).

**

To sum up:
1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride (p. 9).

**

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. There is thus a flavor of the pathological in it; it goes beyond the normal intellectual process and passes into the murky domain of transcendental metaphysics. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable, for disappointment, being essentially an objective phenomenon, cannot permanently affect his subjective infirmity. His faith takes on the virulence of a chronic infection. What he says, in substance, is this: 'Let us trust in God, Who has always fooled us in the past.' (p.11)

And on it goes, for more than 600 pages.

Wonderful.

Mencken saw his main adversary as the American middle-class, and he invented the term 'booboisie' to describe them. His vision was a useful corrective to the unbounded optimism that has tended to accompany the American cultural soul (which is something different than saying there are not many very excellent things that have -- and continue to -- emerge from the US of A).

In a striking passage from his article, Meis points to a key aspect of Mencken's world-view, in the context of an essay on writer Theodore Dreiser:

Summing Dreiser up one last time, Mencken writes: “His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, to expound, to make simple; it is that ‘obscure inner necessity’ of which Conrad tells us, the irrepressible creative passion of a genuine artist, standing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life, enamored by the strange beauty that plays over its sordidness, challenged to a wondering and half-terrified sort of representation of what passes understanding.” Ironically, with that one sentence, Mencken redeemed American literature (at least for a minute or two) and realized something of the promise that Emerson and Whitman had gestured to with such profound, irrational hope. But with Mencken, there is no glorious tale to tell, just the desire that someone express the crappy truth as the only glory we’re likely to grasp.

[...]

America had grown up in the decades between Emerson and The Smart Set. In growing up, it gave birth to a brilliant little beast named H.L. Mencken who had the stomach to stare into the odd abyss, to look hard at the “strange beauty that plays over its sordidness.” In rejecting Emerson’s and Whitman’s hope he had to leave behind the vestiges of American Exceptionalism that still linger in Emerson’s rhapsodizing and in Whitman’s singing. He had to show us in our dumbness, engaged in the same fruitless struggle that lays low every beast in time. Funnily, and in spite of all his maddening missteps of judgment, Mencken — in being such a relentless bastard year after year — gave the American voice back a little of its humanity. For that reason alone his birthday, last week, ought to mean something now and for a long time to come.

Yes it should.

Thus, a somewhat belated Obscene Desserts birthday greeting goes out to H. L. Mencken.

I am honoured, for three exciting years, to have walked the same streets as that gloomy, grouchy, misanthropic bastard.

Mon petit village...

Well, we're back, after a thoroughly relaxing and enjoyable couple of weeks away.

The mental fires are being re-stoked and the neuronal pistons oiled, so I should soon be back on track.

Until then, though, I present for your enjoyment 'Ulysse' by French singer-songwriter Ridan.

We heard it several times in different contexts (car radio, supermarket, music shop) and we were unable to get it out of our heads, making it, in some way, our vacation anthem.



Till soon...

Tour de France

It's that time of year again, when The Wife and I disappear into the French countryside and all you people will have to find some other way of amusing yourselves till sometime in mid September.

Before we're off, though, I wanted to share this photo, taken in our backyard, which is, I think we can all agree, very nice.



So, it's off to the Normandy coast tomorrow, where the seafood is plentiful and the beaches can be quite pebbly. But the place we head to is relatively out of the way and quiet, which is just what we're looking for, in order--among other things--to finally get some rest. And some reading done.

In the next eighteen days, we've a lot before us. Me, for instance, I hope to tackle...

Jack London, The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
Jim Crace, Being Dead
Doris Lessing, The Sweetest Dream
Harlan Ellison, Strange Wine
Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness
China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

This combines things I've already read but feel I should revisit (Jack London), things I haven't read but feel I should, but know that I will hate, (Ayn Rand) and things I think I should read for the first time since I think I'll find them good (all the rest).

Rand is receiving my attention because the fiftieth anniversary of The Worst Fucking Novel Ever Written (Atlas Shrugged) is coming up and I want to be better prepared to say something nasty about that (which doesn't actually involve reading all of Atlas Shrugged).

I'm taking Lessing along since I liked The Good Terrorist so much that I want to continue reading things in that vein.

Crace's book takes place on a beach and looks disturbing. What more need be said?

The other have their own reasons for coming along.

The Wife, for her part, plans to read the following:

William Boyd, Restless
Jim Crace, Six
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Toby Litt, Corpsing
Alexander McCall Smith, The Two and a Half (can't do the numbers on here) Pillars of Wisdom.


She notes:

Do I need to explain why? Oh well ... I bought the Boyd on an amazon.co.uk (look out -- product placement!) recommendation, but didn't manage to read it. Now's the time for rampant entertainment.

Crace is an author I should be reading more (like Adam Thorpe), but sadly don't. So there. When John has finished Being Dead I shall turn to that and will have filled that embarrassing gap in my contemporary fiction knowledge.

I return to Madame B. after a long, long, long time of reading it, thinking that it's about time I did that.

Corpsing was recommended to me by the author himself when I talked to him about my plan for a seminar on revenge. That's work, then, really, and comes with a big notebook.

And McCall Smith's book -- about an idiosyncratic academic -- might be a good segue into the big chill out. I will start with that.

If you find all this a wee bit too masculine -- and maybe bloody (not as bad as The Husband's Levi-reading): somewhere in the French-speaking world I will also buy this month's Marie Claire and peruse the beauty tips, thereby doing my bit to uphold the old phallocratic, patriarchal and logocentric order.

I might buy some French lipstick, too!!! And put it on!

Oh, and I will also take the latest Andrew Bird album bought sometime in late spring which I haven't really had enough time to listen to. I need an alternative to The Husband's rather monotonous choice -- which is The Grateful Dead, The Grateful Dead ... and The Grateful Dead.

No, hang on: he's just told me that he will take another album after all. Hoorah! It's The Gang of Four. Oh, and he's adding Kula Shaker (have I said that the new album sounds quite good? This one is an old one, though). And The Streets. And Robyn Hitchcock.

Ain't we eclectic. The endless, empty highways of France will be alive with the manifold sounds of music.

Wish us well!

'I believe they're not going to be back...'

We're still riding the nostalgia train today, and this may be tiresome for many of you, so we'll make a brief pause for those who wish to disembark...

OK.

As a result of looking at a couple of Replacements-related links yesterday I ran across 'It ain't over 'till the fat roadie plays', a live recording of the band's final concert on 4 July 1991 in Chicago's Grant Park. The concert was part of a day-long series of shows at the 'Taste of Chicago' food festival and broadcast on WXRT which, at least for much of the 80s and early 90s was an oasis of good music in a largely arid radio landscape. (I haven't lived in the Chicago area since 1992, so I can't testify to their quality since then...)

The recording is available for download from Infonistacrat (via here) and--since I had some difficulty with the first track there--here. (Though the latter includes a final song that does not seem to actually be the Replacements: the original concert, in any case, ended with 'Hootenany')

I'm happy to have found it for a number of reasons. I'm continually struck by how significant music was (and still is) in shaping my memories, and the Replacements were one of those groups whose albums became more than just something to listen to and somehow became something important.

A more direct reason is that I was at that show.

I had discovered the Replacements in 1986, when I had a show on my high school's radio station (88.3 FM, quite literally 'left of the dial'). Someone had made a cart of 'Kiss Me on the Bus' and put it amongst the other random things people left there. (I discovered a lot of music that way.) I played it once and was hooked, and I think I played it during every subsequent show.

The first album of theirs that I bought, I think, was Pleased to Meet Me (1987) which I still think is their best (although you can start a rather long argument with other fans about which is best and whether the early punk years were better than the more melodious direction they later took, etc. That's all very tiresome. It's all good. In terms of best album cover, though, I think it's the one for 'Let It Be', pictured. It sums up an era, musically and stylistically.)

Over the following years, there was a point at which I had everything they had put out (including the infamous live bootleg "The Shit Hits the Fans") in one form or another (mainly on cassettes, which disappeared in one of my many moving-house experiences. It's amazing when I think back to how important a technology cassettes were to us...I had hundreds of albums taped from people and spent an inordinate amount of time putting together compilations for friends of mine.)

The 'Mats combined energy with melody and a strong current of desperation (and, at least on the earlier albums, a lot of humour) in a way that few bands did, and for me personally they marked an early transition between my obsession with 60s music and taking more interest in what was going on in the world of what was then called 'college rock', well before the term 'alternative' had been invented.

Two years before the Grant Park gig, I saw them at the Aragon Ballroom (aka, "Aragon Brawlroom") in 1989, in an environment that was much more appropriate: dark, dingy, crowded and loud. It remains one of the best concert experiences I can remember, though it's a somewhat sad one since I saw them with a good friend of mine at the time who soon after seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth.

Anyway, I don't remember all the details of the July 4th 1991 concert, other than it was sunny and hot, and we were very excited to be there. (It was a good summer for concerts: nearly two weeks earlier, on my 21st birthday, I had inadvertently seen Smashing Pumpkins at the Cabaret Metro: 'inadvertently' since we'd never heard of them but went in order to see the opening band, Big Hat.)

As I recall, I was in Grant Park that day with at least one other member of the band I was in at the time.

The Replacements were one of the groups we covered (we did a passable version of 'Left of the Dial') and they were on heavy rotation in the group house we shared for a year. Few other groups have the ability to instantly transport me back to those days.

Paul Westerberg, in a 1996 interview, was asked about the Grant Park concert:

Q: Was the July 4, 1991 show planned to be the final one?

A: "Tommy and I knew it was the last performance of the group. We wanted it to be absolute magic and it wasn't. It was a little tired and it was kinda sad. [...] It's tough when you know something's done. We purposely didn't make a big announcement to everyone. The beauty of that Replacements show is we ended up playing 'Hootenanny' and gave the instruments to our roadies one at a time. We left the way we started: anonymous.''

Q: Have you considered releasing it, since it was broadcast live on WXRT? Was that the reason you broadcast it - since you knew it was the last show?

A: "No, WXRT, they run the thing. They do that. Actually, it was filmed too. I have no idea who's got that footage. Somebody has that footage somewhere.''

(Yes. And where is that footage? The handing over of the instruments to the roadies during the last song, by the way, is the reason for the unofficial name of the recording.)

Despite Westerberg's modesty, I think it was a great show, as demonstrated by the recording. But it does seem obvious that he was frustrated at the time. There's a moment (right before they play 'Someone Take the Wheel') when he says 'Now you can see why we're hangin' it up' which should have made it plain to anyone that this was the end.

But I don't recall now when we found out that they had actually broken up. There was no Web in those days. I suppose it was probably via MTV or maybe in the next couple of days via XRT.

Whatever.

I've found a transcript of the commentary between the DJs after the show, which, as Jefito notes, makes sort of a fitting epitaph for the group:

DJ One: I believe the Replacements have left the stage and what a wild conclusion it was! But is it the conclusion?
DJ Two: Well, we sure don’t know, only the Replacements know for sure.
DJ One: The crowd is still hungry out there.
DJ Two: They are nowhere to be found. They’re not on the side stage area either. I think they’re gone.
DJ One: I think that’s it. They’re so unpredictable, though. Are they gonna come back?
DJ Two: Or they’re gonna break up? Maybe they’ll break up and then they’ll get back together and then they’ll come back.
DJ One: I believe they’re not going to be back.

Thank you for the flowers and the book by Derrida...

[UPDATE:] The discussion of the Replacements continues here.

A good friend of ours introduced us to the music of The Weakerthans some time ago, for which I will always be grateful.

One of my favourite songs from the Winnipeg-based band is 'Our Retired Explorer (Dines with Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961)'. It also, it turns out, has an excellent video.



I like the way the Weakerthans mix catchy music, clever lyrics and sly humour, and I've been trying to think of who they remind of. I've settled on a cross between The Dead Milkmen and The Replacements.

Which gives me an excuse to present the former's 'Punk Rock Girl' (the opening chords of which are enough to transport me mentally back to highschool) and a live (and, typically, rather far from sober) performance by the 'Mats from 1986.

Living together

A somewhat serendipitous and slightly random collection of links today, but over the last few days I've run across a remarkable number of readings on the topic of communal living.

At Click Opera, Momus has a nice little post on Lohmühle which is...rather hard to describe, really. They describe themselves as a 'Gesamtkunstwerk', as Momus points out, 'a synthesis of the arts, Eden, playground, field of experimentation, lifelong residence, inspiration, childhood dream, magnet, community, paradise.'

He observes:

We probably all have an inner hippy who'd be happy to live without running water or electricity in a shed surrounded by enormous sunflowers. I know I do. I confine my inner hippy to a 22 metre square area of my soul, to stop him taking over all my desires.

I'm not sure if I'd want to universalise this assumption, but I do have my own inner hippie (sorry, that's the way I learned to spell it...), and there are moments when he finds a settlement like this ramshackle little village appealing.

How 'radical' this dream is, of course, can be questioned:

Lohmuehle is terribly German -- not unlike the gardening allotments you see in Berlin suburbs. Of course, here the petit bourgeois Protestantism is tempered with radical protest -- in the bushes nestle banners against deportation or yuppification. And although all the allotment fences have been removed and the Protestant virtues of self-sufficiency and autonomy have been tilted slightly towards communitarianism and anarchism, this is essentially a rather conservative pastoral dream -- to opt out of the rat race, to live organically, to wash in water pumped up by hand from the water table, to gather rainwater from the eaves and electricity from the sun.

Not that being 'radical' is necessarily the point.

There are reasons, though, to wonder whether something like this is really all it's cracked up to be:

But isn't it cold in winter? "You burn wood in the stove and your ass gets cold when you go to the chemical toilet. In summer, if it's hot, it's worse. You rot like melted Emmenthal."

My inner long-hair, I think, has rather more need for comfort than some.

In a very different context, there's an interesting article at the New York Times on changes in the culture of the Kibbutz. Having gone through a series of crises in the 1980s, many of the Israeli collective communities appear to have gone through a successful reform process.

But starting in the 1980s, when socialism was on a global downward spiral and the country was mired in hyperinflation, Israel’s 250 or so kibbutzim seemed doomed. Their debt mounted and their group dining halls grew empty as the young moved away.

Now, in a surprising third act, the kibbutzim are again thriving. Only in 2007 they are less about pure socialism than a kind of suburbanized version of it.

On most kibbutzim, food and laundry services are now privatized; on many, houses may be transferred to individual members, and newcomers can buy in. While the major assets of the kibbutzim are still collectively owned, the communities are now largely run by professional managers rather than by popular vote. And, most important, not everyone is paid the same.

Once again, people are lining up to get in.

The article is certainly interesting, but it has its annoying tics. The reference to 'shedding socialism' turns out to be not so clear-cut: there seems to have been some privatisation and the more austere aspects of the movement have faded. However, they've hardly become bastions of turbo capitalism:

“What we love here is the simplicity,” said Boaz Varol, 38, who rides his bike along wooded pathways to work at the swimming pool, once for communal use, that he rents and runs as a private business at Kibbutz Yasur, in the rolling hills of the Western Galilee, northeast of Haifa. “Everyone does what they want, we have our independence, but without the kind of competition you find outside.”

And, furthermore, the apparent renaissance of kibbutz living appears to have included those kibbutzim that have resisted 'renewal':

Not all kibbutzim followed this kind of strategy. About 30 percent stuck to their socialist principles. But many of them are flourishing, too.

“I get calls every day from people who want to join,” said Yaniv Sagee, the secretary of Kibbutz Ein Hashofet. “I don’t have room for them.”

Now, anyone with extensive personal experience group houses knows the downsides of having to share your lives with others. (Excellent literary versions of these downsides can be found in Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist and T.C. Boyle's Drop City.)

And, my own experiences help to keep my own inner hippie confined to his mental room.

And then there's another, far more disturbing world of communal life, far away from those of Lohmühle and the kibbutzim.


Although calling it 'communal' is probably stretching the meaning of the term.

At Reason, I ran across a fascinating article on 'the Mesa':

In 15 square miles of abandoned land, about 400 misfits—aging hippies, disillusioned veterans, teenage runaways—have built a community where no one cares if you smoke pot, fire your rifle all day, let your kids drive your car, or walk around naked in the desert heat. It's a landscape of beat-up old trailers, shacks jerry-rigged from recycled materials, solar panels, little farms, greenhouses, and at least one tipi. "Where I live is the last remaining land of America that is left," says Dreadie Jeff, another Mesa resident. "You can do what you fucking want there."

Doing what you fucking want, of course, has its up-sides and down-sides too.

The Mesa, says Randy, represents "everything about America we loved and feared." The love, in her brother's words, is for "that pure sense of American democracy. Even though they were disillusioned with the government, they still loved the concept of America." The fear reflected the constant potential for violence, which at one point led the filmmakers themselves to think about getting armed.

I'm not surprised. Here's the trailer.



Remember: 'You don't shoot your neighbour.'

Out of control

Of course, I have been reading and seeing the news of the deadly forest fires currently raging in Greece. It's difficult to get a sense of how widespread they are.

This photo, however, is astonishing:

Source.

And there are suggestions that this might not be merely an act of nature:

Authorities fear that several of the fires have been set by arsonists, a spokesman told the AP. Indeed, just over a week ago, arson was suspected in a vast blaze that raced down the slopes of Mount Penteli in Athens. A senior researcher with Greece's Forest Research Institute explained to SPIEGEL ONLINE earlier this month that forest management policies in the country may actually promote arson.

Forest protection is written into Greece's constitution, making it almost impossible for forest land to be re-zoned for development. But because there are no official maps delineating the boundaries of the forest areas, land at the edges of burned out forests are often claimed by developers after fires. "This is the heart of the problem," the researcher told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Eight random things

I was 'tagged' by Ophelia not too long ago on one of those Blogosphere chain-letter thingies that is circulating around. I am to name eight 'random facts' about myself and then pass it along to eight further unsuspecting victims.

To be honest...I'm not so sure what a 'random fact' is, and it is impossible to be truly random about this, since any choice is based on some kind of selective criteria. But...I'll go with 'things that just kind of occur to me which people wouldn't otherwise know and which are, in the end, basically unimportant (and which don't fit into the category of, um, Too Much Information...)'.

1) An old friend of mine that I haven't heard from for about a decade got in touch with me today, and I'm very happy about that.
2) As I am writing this I am listening to the Grateful Dead (As point two was written, it was specifically 'Dire Wolf', from Workingman's Dead).
3) My favourite German word is 'verweilen', both for its meaning and euphony.
4) My alignment of choice is 'chaotic neutral' (or at least it was, back when those things mattered to me).
5) One of my favourite writers once made dinner for me.
6) I have an irrational fear of spiders.
7) I have forgotten how to solve quadratic equations.
8) I'm a decent shot with a pistol.

OK, next: RJ, Jeanie, Geoff, Sharon, Ario, Chris, Jeangis, Jasper/Peter.

There but for fortune

At the Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich has a short article ('Smashing Capitalism') whose satire falls a bit flat but which makes a good overall point and links to a couple of things worth reading.

Taking her cue from the recent shudder that went through the world's stock markets due partly to the unfolding 'sub-prime' mortgage crisis in the US as well as from disappointing sales figures at Wal-Mart, Ehrenreich comments:

Somewhere in the Hamptons a high-roller is cursing his cleaning lady and shaking his fists at the lawn guys. The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Incredibly enough, this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution.

Even meant satirically, I think Ehrenreich takes a good point rather too far: it seems to me that the recent market turbulence--as far as I can understand it--is rather more complex.

(Not to mention that the system is nowhere near being smashed: Ehrenreich knows this, which makes her somewhat flamboyant rhetoric all the more silly. I say this as an admirer of some of her work, such as her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.)

But one of her conclusions is on target...

But in the long term, a system that depends on extracting every last cent from the poor cannot hope for a healthy prognosis.

...particularly since said system is extracting more than that last cent.

On that point, far more striking than Ehrenreich's sledgehammer rhetoric (in this instance) is an article to which she links from the radical lefties over at Business Week: 'The Poverty Business'.

The main topic can be summed up thusly:

In recent years, a range of businesses have made financing more readily available to even the riskiest of borrowers. Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge.

Federal Reserve data show that in relative terms, that debt is getting more expensive. In 1989 households earning $30,000 or less a year paid an average annual interest rate on auto loans that was 16.8% higher than what households earning more than $90,000 a year paid. By 2004 the discrepancy had soared to 56.1%. Roughly the same thing happened with mortgage loans: a leap from a 6.4% gap to one of 25.5%. "It's not only that the poor are paying more; the poor are paying a lot more," says Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Along with many interesting and useful facts like that, the article profiles the human side of this situation, presenting stories of poor people who--in one way or another--have found themselves trapped in poverty and victimised by the purveyors of expensive--but oh-so-tempting--credit.

I found myself torn by conflicting emotions when reading some of these stories: certainly there was anger at the greed of companies whose business plans seem to consist entirely of taking advantage of people in the most outrageous ways. I was moved by the plight of individuals who don't sound at all that much different than people I have known.

There was also a certain amount of frustration with some individuals themselves, like 'Luisa' who owes creditors $169,585 and says: "I don't read things. I just sign them."

Comments like this send a certain part of my political brain--the one that is convinced concepts such as 'individual responsibility' should not simply be abandoned to the right-wing--into fits of screaming incomprehension.

However, there are many different ways of being working-poor, and, as is clear, if, say, you need a car to get a job (not at all that rare in the US) and you lack ready cash and good credit, your choices are limited and buying the used Saturn from the local bloodsuckers at 25% interest starts to look like an opportunity rather than a disaster.

This is even more the case when the extent of economic illiteracy (or maybe just basic innumeracy) is taken into account. Niall Ferguson is a condescending bastard, but he points to a real problem:

In 2006, the British Financial Services Authority carried out a survey of public financial literacy. It revealed that one person in five had no idea what effect an inflation rate of 5 per cent and an interest rate of 3 per cent would have on the purchasing power of their savings. One in 10 did not know which was a better discount for a television originally priced at £250: £30 or 10 per cent.

It makes you want to weep, doesn't it?

Of course, it has always been this way, and some people have always made bad choices. (And, though I can manage rather better than the people Ferguson cites, please do not ask me to explain the finer points of my mortgage to you...). Human psychology with regard to economic behaviour is a complex and often irrational thing.

But what does seem to be new is the fact that there is an entire industry devoted to taking advantage of those weaknesses in grand style. The point seems not to provide credit to assist the borrower in succeeding, but to count on the fact that they will fail.

Hence, the 'NINJA' loan for those with 'No Income, No Job and No Assets'.

And I think there is another antidote to the open contempt for the working poor that seems to roll so easily off the tongue of many commentators to the articles at the Nation, the Telegraph and Business Week: the 'There but for fortune' principle.

I have been very fortunate in life, but having worked (and borrowed) my own way through my (extended) education--and having known enough people who were living lives on the margins or who faced setbacks that were not of their own making--it is not easy to look down upon people who, for whatever reason, have found themselves in trouble.

And, unless you come from an extraordinarily sheltered background (in which case, you have nothing useful to add anyway), I imagine you'd have to admit the same.

Which is an excuse to offer this song, which I've always liked very much.

With a wave of the hand: capitalism, history and genes, part II

I was pleased to see Gregory Clark's 'response' at Cliopatria to critical comments on his new book A Farewell to Alms. (Thanks to Sharon for lending me her scare quotes.)

And then I read it. And was less pleased.

Now, obviously, the 'you haven't read my book' defence upon which Clark relies rather heavily can be an effective one. Up to a point.

I, for one, have not read his book (nor did I claim to have), which is why my original critique concluded in the way it did, by hoping that my comments would help pose some 'questions' that Clark's readers should keep in mind with regard to his assumptions and framework.

As to those assumptions and that framework, Clark is also right, of course, that books and arguments can become badly mangled in brief reviews, even those, as Clark helpfully points out, in such prestigious publications as The Economist, the Financial Times and the New York Times.

Nobody, after all, is perfect.

However, Clark's defence becomes a bit more inexpensive (I'll avoid the more harsh synonym for the moment) when he suggests that all the critiques he has so far received are based merely based upon 'misapprehensions' due to 900 word reviews.

I, for one, linked to and quoted from a paper of Clark's (more than 60 pages; some 13,000 words) that appears to contain at least some of the fundamental arguments contained in his book.

Obviously, in a book one can flesh out and revise the materials that have been earlier developed in articles and papers; however: an argument based upon shaky foundations is not strengthened by adding height.

The book--as described in various places--sounded a lot like the essay, and that was the basis of my critique. This was sufficient information, I think, to raise relevant questions about at least the basics of Clark's thesis, questions that could have been answered directly and succinctly, had Clark decided to do so.

Instead, in his 'response'--alongside the 'read the book' defence--he makes an argument that can, I think, be described with some fairness as 'cheap':

The one thing that of course gets people most riled up is the possibility raised that there may be genetic differences between societies like China or England which had long experience with stable, settled capital intensive agrarian life, and those such as the Australian Aboriginals who had no such experience. Now, of course, when Jared Diamond made exactly this type of speculation at the beginning of Guns, Germs and Steel, based on nothing more than guesswork, it raised not a murmur as far as I know, because he was speculating that New Guinea tribesmen were likely smarter than Europeans as a result of this process. And if I had written a book confirming this, all would have been sweetness and light. People, it seems are not opposed to talking about possible genetic differences between groups. They just have very strong priors about what genetic differences they would like to see.

Here, Clark tries to brush off criticism as mere political correctness or, maybe, some kind of more general bio-phobia. He also succeeds in being enormously condescending by suggesting that people are simply getting 'riled up' (read: making purely knee-jerk, hysterical responses) by his argument rather than having more serious qualms about his approach and conclusions. So far, so predictable.

Undoubtedly, there will be people who reject his argument on these grounds, but, as I sought to point out, there are good methodological reasons to question Clark's emphasis on genetic change as the motive force behind capitalist development.

The reference to Jared Diamond is odd in this context and deserves a moment's thought. Diamond did indeed make what I think is an ill-judged 'speculation' about the greater intelligence of New Guineans than Westerners in the introduction to Guns, Germs and Steel. However, there are at least two reasons why Diamond's speculation is of somewhat different quality. (Clark really doesn't like this comment from Diamond: it also features in his 'Genetically Capitalist?' article.)

First, anyone who has read Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel would realise that Diamond's comments on Aboriginal intelligence are a brief digression (the key pages in the paperback version would be 18-22), are hedged in by Diamond's scepticism about the whole issue of measuring genetic-based intelligence, and, most significantly, play no further role in the rest of his relentlessly detailed, nearly-500-page argument. Indeed, one of the key insights of Diamond's work is that genetic difference (other than that perhaps related to disease resistance) is unnecessary in explaining enormous differences in social development. (One might say the same about what we understand about evolutionary psychology, but more on that anon...)

To imply that this speculative comment is somehow emblematic of Diamond's argument is...well, unfair and somewhat bizarre.

The second difference is related to the historiographical context in which Diamond brings up his thoughts on intelligence. Why is his speculation that hunter-gatherers might (as a 'possibility') be more intelligent less controversial? Well, that just might be because Diamond felt the need, before embarking on an argument to explain the historical emergence of Western dominance, to distance himself from the many previous arguments that approached the same question and were based on specious notions of biological superiority (and that did have some very 'strong priors' about what they were willing to see).

Furthermore, I think that people are automatically less suspicious of notions of genetic influences on intelligence when they are being claimed for groups other than the one to which the person making the claim belongs.

The fact that the radical constructionist fable about the blank slate has become more than tiresome doesn't mean that any old dodgy argument about genetic difference should get a free pass.

(And a third point occurs to me: what planet has professor Clark been living on? Diamond's book was greeted with far from universal acclaim, least of all in the historical profession. I've run across as many people who find Diamond's biogeographical approach as 'determinist' and 'eurocentric' as who admire it.)

In explaining cultural change, Clark continues:

you cannot rule out the possibility of genetics. That may have implications to some people that are profoundly distasteful. But if we commit when we study human history to only admitting accounts full of hope and uplift regardless of the data, then why bother collecting more data?

The Argument from Distaste, it's safe to say, is a variation on the PC defence noted above and can be ignored.

But here, maybe, I find at least some common ground with Clark, since I too am frustrated with scholarship (or science) that puts its activism before its rigour. I, too, think that we have to explore the way the world is rather than confuse that with the way we think it ought to be.

But not only am I doubtful about whether Clark has identified the way the world is, he seems to be making a blanket claim that cannot be sustained: that those who question his research are doing so simply because they don't like the results rather than because they pose serious methodological questions about his approach.

One of those methodological issues, to reiterate slightly from my earlier post, is that in arguing for a significant role for genetic change within historical time Clark is arguing against the extensive findings of evolutionary psychology.

Actually, no I'm wrong. He doesn't so much argue against them as simply ignore them.

As I mentioned, although there is an abundance of economics citations in his 'Genetically Capitalist?' paper, there is a notable dearth of natural science literature on gene-culture coevolution, population genetics, evolutionary psychology or neuroscience, fields that, we might think, are at least tangentially related to the argument he is making.

Now, I do not expect Clark to necessarily agree with evolutionary psychologists on topics such as, say, whether complex psychological adaptations are necessarily adaptive in present societies (their answer: often they are not) or whether they can be affected by selection over a matter of centuries (their answer: with all probability, no).

However, if he is going to include the genetic argument as a serious part of his argument, then he should engage with and address those fields (or at least read a few good summaries) somewhere in his 420 pages.

If it's not a serious part of his argument, then what is it doing there?

For those interested in an overview of evolutionary psychological perspectives, I recommend this chapter by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (PDF) from David Buss's Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. It is dense and long and contains thorough citations.

It also contains, for instance, observations like this:

Thus, humans are free to vary genetically in their superficial, nonfunctional traits but are constrained by natural selection to share a largely universal genetic design for their complex, evolved functional architecture. Even relatively simple cognitive programs must contain a large number of interdependent processing steps, limiting the nature of the variation that can exist without violating the program’s functional integrity. The psychic unity of humankind—that is, a universal and uniform human nature—is necessarily imposed to the extent and along those dimensions that our psychologies are collections of complex adaptations. In short, selection, interacting with sexual recombination, tends to impose at the genetic level near uniformity in the functional design of our complex neurocomputational machinery. (p.39)

This is only the conclusion of a rather detailed section, and if you choose to take a look at it, you will find that it contains extensive citations on the debate about the interaction between evolution and society.

Clark is free to disagree with such conclusions and assumptions, and I don't for a moment claim that evolutionary psychology is the last word on the matter.

Does it 'rule out the possibility of' genetics' (or, more specifically, Clark's claim of more recent genetic changes encouraging the transmission of 'middle-class values')? No, not absolutely. But saying that it is impossible to 'rule out the possibility' of something is very different than providing reasons to think it is a good idea to build an argument upon it. And one of the things that evolutionary psychologists have done is to provide many reasons why the kind of social change and cultural variability that Clark highlights is possible in the absence of genetic change.

If Clark has startling new data about genes, then that would be very welcome. But I doubt that he does.

Again, if this is a serious part of his argument, then he should have engaged with at least some of the (extensive, readable, not hard to find) literature that has sought to nail down precisely the kind of relationships between evolved nature and culture that he seems to be interested in.

He doesn't do this in the Times article. He doesn't do this in the 'Genetically Capitalist?' essay.

It is possible, of course, that Clark does address these things in his book, isn't it?

You know, the one we 'have to read' in order to critique in any way?

Well, unless his index is very sloppily put together (and I doubt Princeton UP would have allowed that to happen), it doesn't seem that the book contains any more discussion on these matters than his essay does.

I still don't have his book, but while the shelves at Amazon.com might be empty (but not for long!) the 'Look inside' feature is operative, and the index seems to suggest that, no, there is no effort to deal with the fields mentioned above. (Of course, while this evidence is convincing, I'm not 'ruling out the possibility' that a serious engagement with the relevant literature is hidden in there somewhere.)

The entry on 'natural selection' (which subsumes all references to 'evolution' and 'selection pressures') is mentioned on about 10 pages. There are no references to 'evolutionary psychology', 'gene-culture coevolution', 'Wilson, E. O.', 'Tooby, J.', 'Cosmides, L.', 'Pinker, S.' or 'sociobiology'. There are, for that matter, no entries for 'genes' or 'genetics'.

It may be, of course, that Clark doesn't really take the genetic aspects of his argument all that seriously. His Cliopatria response even suggests that this is likely. After making the intellectually handwaving arguments of read my book and critics are being PC he emphasises the other, non-gene-oriented contributions his book makes.

And maybe it does make those contributions. I don't know.

But while we're on those other matters, I am somewhat underwhelmed by Clark's ringing declaration that there is--amazing!--cultural variation throughout the world and history. If we were to read his book, we would find, for example:

that there is evidence of quite profound differences in the degree of impatience exhibited by people as we move across thousands of years of history from ancient Babylonia to England and the Netherlands in the eighteenth century. And that these differences are impossible to ascribe to anything other than basic changes, cultural or genetic, in how people behaved.

I'm not sure what to make of this.

The first sentence is hardly news: indeed, it was in 1939 that Norbert Elias identified a series of significant historical changes between the late medieval and modern periods with regard to things like manners, aggression, foresight and self-restraint. (And this was even within Europe.)

The second sentence says...well, nothing as far as I can tell, other than something like 'difference is caused by change'.

Uh huh.

Of the two options he mentions for why this might be so, the first has been extensively researched probably since historians started scribbling and the second, as I have argued, is either a serious claim (which requires more methodological homework) or a bit of intellectual handwaving.

And then there's this comment:

The book gives, I think, a strong argument for the idea that the economic history of pre-industrial societies has a powerful role in shaping their culture. That economics produces not just goods in the preindustrial world, but also culture.

I might be alone in this, but I wasn't aware that there was a need for such a 'strong argument' that economics affect culture.

I mean...wasn't there a little-known intellectual trend known, I think, as Marxism (it was started, I believe, by some obscure German bloke) that somewhat tepidly advanced this very proposition? I don't know, it's just a thought.

(If, using the 'Look Inside' feature at Amazon, you peruse the 'excerpt' from Clark's introduction you will find that 'wealth--and wealth alone--is the crucial determinant of lifestyles'. Interesting? Certainly. New? Hardly.)

Just to reiterate (in case any potential readers might not feel like combing through my previous post on this matter to find it), my critique is not based on a notion either that biology has no place in the analysis of history, society and culture. (I have argued the contrary.) Nor is it inspired by pique that Clark has discovered some kind of truth about human nature that violates my political principles. (While I think that giving serious consideration to human nature does in many cases have political consequences, these are not clearly left or right, contrary to what is often assumed.)

Instead, I think that--at least with regard to its 'Darwinian' aspects--his argument leaves a lot to be desired and is--as far as I can gather what it is from the shorter versions I have read--either not all that revolutionary or unconvincing.

As someone who would like to see more interaction between the natural sciences and the humanities, I find that to be worth discussing.

And that, I suppose, is where I'll have to leave it.

I would urge Clark, however, to be more willing to engage with his critics in ways that go beyond telling them to 'read the book' (there is no good argument that cannot be summarised effectively).

I was particularly disappointed to see a defence based on labelling those critics as, in essence, politically motivated (though it may be true in some cases). That argument is too easy to make and it comes across as deeply condescending.

But what do I know? After all, my book's still in stock.

I miss your hard edges, I miss your bone marrow

I heard a couple of songs from the latest Tunng album a couple of days ago (on Deutschlandradio Kultur) and was awestruck in that way that happens all too rarely when something comes on the car radio. (Actually, for traffic safety reasons, it's probably a good thing that it occurs only occasionally...)

This is from something earlier. It's beautiful.



'Woodcat' from Tunng.