A proper education

As all too many parents will be all too aware, it’s exam time again. All around the world, offspring are swotting up obscure facts about Tudor history how a dialysis machine works and the generic formula for making a salt from acid and metal, all ready to regurgitate it all again in sweaty halls all around the planet. And parents recall their own traumas, dredging an unwilling memory for the distribution of opal deposits in Australia and the difference between gerunds and gerundives.

I had it relatively easy: unlike most of my contemporaries (or indeed most reasonable beings) I used to do a lot better at exams than at course work, so the extra stress translated into extra marks I really didn’t deserve. But still, definitely not the best days of my life.

More to the (present) point, not the most useful either. But there the problem lies not so much in examinations as such as in the knowledge I was being examined on. Did I really need to know where opals are mined in Australia? No, more forcefully: under what possible circumstances would I ever want to know where opals are mined in Australia? I suspect that no one but an Australian mining engineer could possibly need that information.

Standard bitching about the education system, of course. And I have to admit that, it’s a little disingenuous. As a typical teenage geek, I rather liked knowing that sort of thing. I loved that sort of obscure information. Indeed, I positively cherished it. But can I really claim that it added to my education? I suspect not. Nor looking at so much of what my children have been examined on over the last few years, can I arouse any greater enthusiasm for the current curriculum.

The fact is – and I emphasise that this is a fact – is that, in far too many cases, what my children are learning is contributing nothing to their education. My daughter spent two years studying Tudor history. Why? Because it was the syllabus. But what did that teach her? Does she have a better understanding of life – her own life and the life of the society she lives in? Especially compared with what she might have been taught?

My impression is that schools teach based on the assumption that they are preparing the student for long-term specialisation in that topic. On that basis it makes sense for the curriculum to consist of so many apparent fragments – because if they study this topic long enough, it will all fall into place. By the time they graduate, they will indeed have a very good knowledge of their specialist subject.

But of course this is completely irrational. We can’t specialise in everything on the curriculum. Andin any case, it is far from obvious that even specialisation is best achieved by specialising from the very start.

So here is an alternative proposition: that at every stage in the education process – every break point at which students are winnowed out by a change of level - departing students finish their studies with is a fully rounded understanding appropriate to that level.

Take biology. What could a child who learns biology up to – but no further than – the age of 16 be taught that would pass this test? Well, what are the relevant topics? Diet, perhaps, or drugs or reproduction or basic environmental processes perhaps? Any of these, and perhaps a few others.

And what exactly would they be taught? I don’t know, but not, I suspect, the technical details of how the body or an ecosystem works so much as the ‘functional’ connections they need to know about – what different lifestyles entail, the real nature of the foods and (legal and illegal) drugs around them, and so on. Only later – at the point at which such things have a greater significance to the student because they can do something about them – would the technical details be taught.

This would plainly be much more of an education. It just wouldn’t involve anything like much modern schooling. On the other hand, precisely because it isn’t abstract technical knowledge, I suspect that this sort of education would be a lot more politically sensitive. What food company is not going to lobby against straightforward teaching of the facts of modern diet – the disastrous health consequences of how industrial food is made, transported around the world, and so on? What pharmaceutical company is not going to lobby against straightforward teaching of the facts of prescription drugs and the modern drug industry?

But that, of course, is very largely the point. A population that was no longer ignorant – not even its least educated member – about the world it inhabits would be better equipped to deal with the modern world – including changing it to suit their needs. Indeed, if I were looking for a recipe for eliminating political apathy, this would certainly be high on my list of innovations.

Likewise for every other topic. Personally I would replace the current obsession history teachers have with the Tudors and the origins of the First World War with a general course on world history – not the Euro-centric nonsense that condemns the vast majority of humanity to the void and ignores the real history of the modern world – and a more detailed political history of post-War Britain. And then between 16 and 18 I would teach the same things again, by with a greater focus on the mechanisms of globalisation and how Britain got to be like it is.

And so on. Even English would be taught quite differently – by looking at the use of language around us, in advertising, in politics, in the media, and so on. Conversely, would 16-year old biology students study dialysis? No, of course not. Nor would anyone else, perhaps, except a specialist in renal medicine. It’s not hard to think of a hundred alternative curricula, sharing only the fact that they lead to education rather than exam certificates.

Free and frank for whom?

Jack Straw declines to allow us 'free and frank' coverage of Cabinet discussions because this will inhibit them from having 'free and frank' discussions. What can this mean, other than that they are afraid that their real opinions will be so shocking to the people that they might elect them out of office? There is no issue here about protecting their freedom of speech - we want them to speak their minds, but as public servants we are entitled to eavesdrop. In fact, perhaps all Cabinet discussions should be on prime-time TV - would this be worse than Big Brother?

Better a pig than a pitbull

Beats me. A week ago, Sarah Palin proudly compares herself to a pitbull in lipstick. A couple of days back, Barack Obama completely fails to compare her to a pig in lipstick (he was obviously referring to McCain's policies), and she gets all hoity-toity.

Look, Mrs Palin, a pig is an intelligent and useful animal and a pitbull is an ugly, stupid, vicious, downright dangerous beast with absolutely no redeeming features. Now it is perfectly clear that you resemble the latter a good deal more than the former, so when someone says something a least relatively nice about you, try to be a little grateful.

A pitbull in lipstick

Very decent of the Republicans to describe their own would-be Veep as a 'pitbull in lipstick'. Here in England, pitbulls are regarded as so dangerous that the mere possession of one is a criminal offence. If Mrs Pailn comes here, there is a real chance she will be put down - which could really put a dent in Anglo-American relations. And as far as most Britons are concerned, people who keeps pitbulls are inadequate saddos who really should get a life.

But Mrs Palin doesn't need to go quite so far to find out how most of the world sees her:

It is illegal in Miami-Dade County to own any dog which substantially
conforms to a Pit Bull breed dog... Acquisition or keeping of a Pit Bull dog:
$500.00 fine and County Court action to force the removal of the animal from
Miami-Dade County. [Legal code, Section 5 Code 17]

Pitbulls are also under some form of legal control in at least 23 other locations in the USA, not to mention Denmark, Australia, parts of Canada, Singapore, New Zealand the Netherlands and (now this will impress them) France ...

Hope no one shoots her - that would violate the fine American tradition of shooting only their presidents.

How doth the little crocodile

One detail of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland I have always liked is Carroll’s poem, ‘How doth the little crocodile’:

‘How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

‘How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!’

Carroll was parodying a typical Victorian homily entitled ‘Against Idleness and Mischief’, written by the English theologian Isaac Watts:

‘How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!’

And so on for three more sickly verses.

Last night my daughter Beany, a voracious reader, mentioned that one of the characters in R.C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End recites Carroll’s poem. If you have not seen it, Journey’s End is a play about life in the trenches in World War One. I do not know what Sherriff meant by inserting this detail, but a contemporary resonance struck me straight away.

The war in Iraq – as previously in Vietnam, Aden, Cyprus and a hundred post-colonial wars – has always been accompanied by shrill nonsense about defending this or that value or principle. Like Vietnam, Iraq is meant to be a ‘shining hour’ for freedom and democracy. But once more such ideals are being dragged in the dust by ignoble individuals like the US and British leaderships, and it is impossible to imagine that the cause of liberty will be advanced one inch by this awful disaster. On the contrary, the very idea of democracy has already been debased so far that in Arab discourse 'damakrata' translates as the forced imposition of western ideas.

But what should one expect when the West is led by arrogant and self-serving fools like Bush, Cheney, Blair and Rumsfeld, who imagine that abstractions like ‘freedom’ have any meaning at all in a country we spent a decade blockading and bombing, causing perhaps a million deaths, all in the name of these self-same ‘principles’. What were they expecting? To be welcomed with open arms? Their own experts had told them that they would be anything but welcome. But Blair’s abstractions told him better, and as the Americans managed to demonstrate almost immediately, the only thing they would do with any efficiency was sell the country’s assets to American corporations.

And the military? Having been promised that they would be welcome with open arms, they find that the peaceful cultivation of the beehive they were promised by our ‘leaders’ has turned into fighting with crocodiles. We have so obviously lost that we should get out immediately. Western governments and armies cannot save Iraq from the disaster they have created – they are the disaster. To persist out of sheer arrogance and fear of failure is to condemn tens of thousands more Iraqis, and many soldiers too, to pointless suffering and death.

After World War One they put up statues to Field Marshal Haig, Prime Minister Lloyd George and all the rest, whereas they should have hanged the lot of them. Meanwhile, shortly after the character in Journey’s End recites ‘How doth the little crocodile’, he is killed in a raid. Is that going to be the outcome in Iraq too – until, we finally admit that, in our arrogance and idealism, we are the problem, not the solution?

Mud, mud...

The UK government has this wonderful fantasy that they can define Britishness. As I argued in my posting on Identity and Equality, it is almost certainy a self-defeating enterprise. However, if they are looking for something decidedly British, let me suggest that no one should be considered for citizenship who doesn't find utter delight in any and all of the following:

• Flanders and Swan's Hippopotamus Song (especially the version sung with a live audience on At the Drop of a Hat)
• Eddie Izzard's 'Cake or death' sketch
• Monty Python's Batley Townswomens' Guild presents the Battle of Pearl Harbour

It won't work, of course. I can believe that some of the Cabinet have a sense of humour, but somehow not the po-faced Blair. Besides, I would feel quite ill if I thought I shared a sense of humour with him.

A final thought. How about depriving existing citizens of their citizenship if they don't have a suitably British sense of humour. Starting at the very top, perhaps...

Cristiano Ronaldo and the magic of market economics

Today,the BBC website tells me, Cristiano Ronaldo signed a new five-year contract with Manchester United. The BBC news told me that he will 'earn' at least £25 million over the next few years - and that's just from Man U.

Words fail me. In what sense could any human being 'earn' that much money? In what sense could they possibly earn the equivalent of 200 times the average UK wage? I would agree that the man is going to acquire £25 million by legal means, but earn it? Never.

And don't get me started on Bill Gates - a man who is 'worth' more than many small countries. If I were looking for an icon for the absurdity of market economics and unbridled private property, he would be it.

Speaking of bodily functions...

What does it tell us about the English that we have no words for bodily functions that are not either coy, childish, clinical or obscene?

I discussed this with my Spanish brother-in-law some years ago, and he literally could not believe that such a language existed. Certainly there is something repressed about English attitudes to the body, but I would have thought we were not much different from other Europeans in that respect.

It may be an interesting measure of whether we are actually finally getting over this perverse attitude if such words start to enter the language. Certainly it is much easier to talk about sex, defecation and all the rest now than when I was a child, but relatively few of the words seem to have changed their register. Perhaps ‘gay’ is a good counter-example, but I can’t think of many others.

Opium of the people

Some time ago the listeners of one of BBC Radio 4’s flagship intellectual programmes, In Our Time, voted Karl Marx, by an ‘electoral tidal wave’, the greatest philosopher of all time.

Speaking as an unreconstructed leftie, it was an extremely satisfying moment. Right there in their greatest bastion, Britain’s middle classes were voting for the very nemesis of their world. Plainly they either don’t understand what Marx actually said or they are none too happy about the world they live in. A bit of both, I suspect.

It was especially pleasing to hear the programme’s presenter, Melvyn Bragg, stutter and sway as he tried to come to terms with this appalling denouement to his pet project. But he failed. All through the special programme on Marx that followed he seemed to be unable to come to terms with – or even allow much discussion of – the idea that Marx might still be so utterly relevant to his audience’s lives. As one of the great symbols of Tony Blair’s far more appalling New Labour project, in which even England’s peculiarly pale and uninteresting excuse for a socialist political party has finally been put to sleep, it was a pleasure to hear Melvyn Bragg so far out of his comfort zone - not to mention his intellectual depth.

But this enthusiasm for Marx was by no means a flash in the pan. I can’t cite any evidence, but I distinctly recall hearing a year or so back that the most popular courses at London University were on Marx and Marxism. More budding In Our Time listeners in the pipeline, no doubt. Watch out, Melvyn.

But what exactly is it they are looking for right now? Indeed, what does the average member of England’s middle classes know about Karl Marx that they would vote for him? What does the average student know about him that would actually drive them into the lecture theatres?

Having done my bachelor’s degree (1976-1979) in psychology and sociology, Marx was an unavoidable item on the agenda. But as this was the 70’s and I had had the good sense to be 16 in 1968, I already knew a little about him. And of course he was regarded as an entirely contemporary thinker, though usually for all the wrong reasons. Most of the Marxists I knew had vaguely pro-Soviet leanings. I even knew one couple who were outright Stalinists, and spoke in that strange mechanical lingo of ‘dialectical materialism’ that is so unlike Marx himself. He could be a pig to read, but there are whole chapters of Capital that read like magical incantations: an immanent power flows through them like a terrible force. You read them and your skin tingles and your heart leaps. Really.

But only a tiny fraction of Karl Marx’s immense outpourings on history, capitalism, calculus, the Tsarist Secret Service and so on has entered into popular consciousness. Given the man’s impact on the world, this is hard to explain. Perhaps it is the often extreme tedium of his literary style - Volume II of Capital is excruciating - or perhaps it is the fact that, in many circles, quoting Marx has about the same respectability as quoting the Devil. At the very least you find yourself being looked at as though you’ve just made a joke in very poor taste.

However, Marx had many moments of sheer literary genius, so it is inevitable that some small nuggets should have crept into everyday rhetoric. Unfortunately, most of these prove to be fools’ gold, at least for would-be Marxologists, being either unoriginal to Marx or fundamentally misunderstood. In fact it is hard to identify any one remark with any one writer, given that the era all but breathed revolutionary rhetoric. Marx himself attributed ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat’ to August Blanqui (1805-1881), ‘workers of the world, unite!’ is a thoroughly un-Marxist translation of Marx's actual words, and ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ is very likely borrowed from the anarchist Michael Bakunin (1814-1876). Finally, ‘The workers have nothing to lose... but their chains’ was probably original, but co-authored with Engels (altogether more readable than Marx, though intellectually much less brilliant). It is also from the Communist Manifesto, which is probably the worst piece of Marxism Marx ever wrote, so Karl might have been grateful if history had consigned it to ‘the gnawing criticism of the mice’, as he did the much better German Ideology.

Still, it is especially ironic that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is so well known, since it always seems to have been understood in a sense which is almost the opposite of Marx’s original intentions. But then I suppose a dialectician must expect his best phrases to be turned on their heads. Nowadays it is taken as a straightforward denunciation of religion, whereas Marx was surely trying to express the equivocal relationship between religion and human existence. To put this famous remark back into context:

Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call them to give up their illusions about their condition is call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. (From the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.)

This brilliant, terse, pungent summary of the materialist view of religion is typical of Marx at his best. The method it uses is also typical of Marxism in its mature form: a revelation of the dynamism of history and consciousness, sweeping up everything in its path, both driven and undermined by the inexhaustible tension between moral consolation and political action. Writing like this, Marx has a startling way of showing that fireworks and analysis can go hand in hand. Which only makes it all the greater shame that, at his worst, Marx is stunningly dull and obscure. However, in this case it is clear that the object of Marx’s criticisms is not religion as such. For him religion was mainly a symptom of underlying structures and processes that produced the things he really did abhor - oppression, ignorance, fear, alienation. He sympathises with the underlying need, even if he does deplores the way religion fulfils it.

Perhaps it is just as well that Marxism can only be comprehended by going beyond the rhetoric and into serious research. Perhaps this shields it from the toy Marxism of so much modern day revolutionism, which takes the title of socialist even while depriving socialism of all humanity. In fact, along with ‘democracy’ and 'nationalism', ‘socialism’ spent most of the 20th century as little but a substitute for ‘true religion’ as the indispensable rhetorical device of Western politics. Where a century or two ago the crucial justification of revolution (or reaction) was that it would refurbish the faith to its ancient purity, today it promises the rule of the people in some form. What then does it matter that Marx is misquoted, any more than that the Sermon on the Mount is subverted by hypocritical churches? It's not as though the people who misquote him would be any more likely to institute a socialist society if they got the words right.

What did I personally find in Marx? A while ago an old friend of mine asked me whether spending two decades in business had altered my assessment of Marx. Yes, I said, it had. I am now even more convinced he was right than ever. What I found in Marx is the greatest and most fearless theorist of human freedom of all time. No, Melvyn, not the greatest philosopher of all time (at least among Westerners, I think that one goes to Hegel), because philosophers sit in university libraries and think deep thoughts. Marx did all that and then took it out of the library (the British Library in his case) and into working class politics, newspapers and dozens of great political tracts.

That’s what I want to do when I grow up.

What’s in a name?

What a silly line, even if it is Romeo and Juliet (Act II, ii, 43).Still, I’ve had my doubts about Shakespeare ever since I discovered Hamlet wasn’t a farce. Like ‘Fine feathers... ’, which sometimes do make fine birds, names can be critical. Imagine being blessed with one of the following:

• Mrs Belcher Wack Wack
• Newton Hooton
• Goody P. Creep (undertaker)
• Preserved Fish, Jr
• Mrs Screech (singing teacher)
• Larry, Harry and Jerry Derryberry (not, alas, brothers)
• Gaston J. Feeblebunny
• I. O. Silver
• Zezozose Zadfrack
• Mr Vice (890 arrests, 421 convictions)
• Cardinal Sin (Catholic Primate of the Philippines)
• Virginia May Sweatt Strong
• T. Hee
• B. Brooklyn Bridge
• Concerto Macaroni
• Cigar Stubbs
• I.C. Shivers (ice man)

– all recorded and authenticated in John Train’s Remarkable Names of Real People. And some choice names from my own (mostly unauthenticated) records: Brain (... ) and Head (1861-1940) were eminent neurologists. The head of the Motor Industry Research Establishment used to be a Mr Morris. One of my sisters was at school with a Miles Inigo Gapper and his sister Flavia, and one of my children’s cookery teachers is called Mrs Eatwell. Really. (I also have a colleague named Max Loosli who wanted to name his consultancy business Loosli Managed Projects, but that's a little contrived.)

It’s hard to imagine going through life with this sort of burden and getting out alive. Anyone named Quasimodo is surely destined for bell ringing and bad posture. Mr Train also reports that the early Puritans favoured names such as Fly Fornication, though he does not say whether this was intended as an exhortation to rectitude or the most ambitious perversion ever conceived. Anyway, eat your heart out, Charles Dickens.

Just as bad are names that sound like a prize-winning petunia.

But it’s not all negative - names may have the most tonic effects. As Mr Train points out,

General Ulysses Grant... what panache! Led by a Hiram - the General did in fact start life as Hiram - the boys in blue would have cracked; Gettysburg would have gone the other way. Under President Oscar Lincoln the Union would have sundered.

Maurice Bonaparte? Melvin Churchill? However, that is not to deny that whenever names are deliberately manipulated, the intention and the consequences are almost always bad. Of course, if I’d been born Marion Morrison or Archibald Cox, I dare say I’d have changed it to John Wayne or Cary Grant. But more than mere aesthetics, these are ideological names ‑ WASP names. Issur Danielovich Demsky changed his name not to some other Lithuanian Jewish name more manageable to Hollywood tongues, but to Kirk Douglas.

All in all, parents should be licensed before being allowed to name their offspring.

Campaign for the Rectification of Names (or Telling It Like It Is, as we used to say around 1972). Why don’t we have one? See Fung’s history of Chinese philosophy.

Ministry of Defence. Peace keeping. Military intelligence. Airline food. Free enterprise.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be

The trouble with this familiar old saw not that it is misquoted or misunderstood, but that it is such dangerous advice. Nor is it improved, as many quotations are, by being restored to its original context:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;For loan oft loses both itself and friend,And
borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act I, scene
iii)

In an economic system like capitalism, unsated by the most extravagant waste and debt, this would be unorthodox advice to say the least. But then, most proverbial wisdom on this topic has a wonderful irrelevance in the modern world. For example, ‘waste not, want not’. Debt is the drug of system too, and a mortgage on the future. OK on the individual level, but it mortgages the whole of future society too – under capitalism. Planned obsolescence as conquest of time by making it effectively pass faster. Fashion as socially approved form of whim. Conspicuous consumption.

The successive crises of over-production of the kind to which capitalism is so prone are only exacerbated by beggaring our children. Brave New World homilies to waste as fundamental truths of consumer capitalism. It expands the basis of production, and thus of sales and profit. But it adds nothing to our objective well-being. Individual indebtedness in Britain.Indebtedness of the Third World. Debt as basis of power over Third World and quiescence at home.

The gap (and indifference) between profit, technical excellence and human need.

Elementary, my dear Watson

It's strange where lessons in management can be gleaned from.

Having recently read all the Sherlock Holmes stories (not for the last time, I suspect), I can assure the reader that Holmes never utters the words, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’. ‘Elementary’ sometimes, and ‘My dear Watson’ often, but never together. Conan Doyle's son used it in an attempt to prolong Holmes’ career, though not to any enduring effect.

Of course, that should not stop anyone ‘quoting’ Holmes/Conan Doyle to that effect. It is a very good phrase. In John Lennon’s case, it has even been embellished - twice:

Harrybelafonte, my dear Whopper

and

Ellafitzgerald my dear Whopper (both from A Spaniard in the Works, Jonathan Cape, 1965)

As Umberto Eco has observed, William of Ockham (c. 1285-1349) was clearly an ancestor of Sherlock Holmes (fl. 1887-1927). When the famous detective asserted that:

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. (Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four)

… he was only reiterating his philosophical forebear’s famous dictum that one should always prefer the hypothesis which calls for the least number of assumptions. Or, in Ockham’s own words:

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem

- which is to say, entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. It’s an attractively simple, all-purpose principle, a sort of intellectual Swiss Army knife, and it’s interesting that such otherwise dissimilar figures as Holmes and Ockham should agree on this issue. Not only did they live six centuries apart but, as nominalist philosopher/amateur coiffeur and consulting detective/cocaine addict respectively, their experience could scarcely have been more different.

At first sight it seems that this most striking convergence must surely betoken a profound truth. Surely such a preposterous yet consonant mésalliance can only rest on a deeper meaning? But does their agreement indicate a verity spanning half a millennium and more, or merely a prejudice so commonplace that only the most foolhardy - or the most brilliant - would think to challenge it? Mere endurance is not evidence, one way or the other. After all, slavery was considered the natural order for millennia.

What should we do when ‘impossible’ turns out to be only the name of that part of reality for which our prejudices have no place, to sustain which we therefore have to introduce ever more - and ever more incredible - assumptions? Should we be whipping out that Swiss Army knife again when the situation really calls for is an intellectual linear accelerator? Is the principle of parsimony merely a principle of false economy?

For example, there is the question of cosmology. Leaving aside the obvious facts that the Earth is flat, stands still, and the Sun rotates around it once a day (to which either may have subscribed), Holmes and Ockham would both have taken a dim view of Copernicus. In fact according to Watson, Holmes was unaware that the Copernican revolution had ever taken place, so their intellectual alliance is obviously all the closer. And one cannot help but feel that Ockham would have felt much the same, if not about a heliocentric universe as such then certainly about the rather radical re-jigging of the cosmos Copernicus was proposing.

In assessing the change wrought by Copernicus, it is important to recognise why his theory was so appealing. First and foremost, Copernicus’ solar system did not work any better than Ptolemy’s, and indeed was in most respects an attempt to save the Copernican fundamentals such as a closed space, the circle as the perfect form of celestial motion, the epicycle and the eccentric as basic explanatory tools, and so on. Indeed, Copernicus’ account predicted the position of the stars rather worse than Ptolemy's. Nor was it more economical: not only did it call for exactly the same suite of spheres and epicycles but now there were 48 of the latter instead of just 40.

In fact, the only major difference was that the solar system was now centred on the Sun rather than the Earth. No basic change in the fabric of the heavens, no shift of method. Only a change in the arrangement of things. Of course this was pretty reasonable, given the appalling implications of a truly unbounded space combined with the lack of stellar parallax. In other words, there were almost no additional ‘entities’ or assumptions, yet what was needed was the complete re-conceiving of the universe - something which both Ockham and Holmes would have reviled.

Thus, the entire history of astronomy between Ptolemy’s atlas of the Heavens and Copernicus setting to with a chain saw consisted precisely of the kind of minimalist thinking Ockham called for - the same structure exactly, only with more or less epicycles. The problem is that possible/impossible is not the only dimension of knowledge. It might be so, if we already knew all the dimensions of reality, and could therefore derive every possible truth from first principles. But we don’t, so we must respect Holmes’ and Ockham’s right to believe what they please, but concur with Aristotle that:

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. (Poetics, 24, 1460).

For, as an only marginally less prominent philosophical figure has explained:

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something which works in all respects than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, ‘Yes, but he or she simply wouldn’t do that. ’... The [impossible] merely supposes that there is something we don’t know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The [improbable], however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and its specious rationality... If it could not possibly be done, then obviously it had been done impossibly. The question is how? (Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, p. 132)

As usual, fiction is so much more truthful than mere fact (leaving aside the debatable conclusion...). ‘The facts’ are so often little more than a rag-bag, picked over now and then as circumstances dictate; great fiction, on the other hand, is deduced with geometric precision from a central truth, a overriding vision of the inexorable logic which underpins the merely correct.

And from time to time a revolution occurs that reminds us that, beneath the seeming self-evidence of the possible and the impossible there is a more or less hidden framework of concepts which determine what can even exist for us while thinking and reasoning in that mode. And there is no guarantee that the Universe is confined by the concepts which currently confine our minds. Thus, Copernicus’s universe was not merely unknown to Ptolemy; he might well have found it inconceivable. Likewise the relationship between Newton and Einstein and, I suspect, Darwin and quite a few eminent neo-Darwinians.

In short, intellectual history is the history not of intellectual accumulation but of intellectual struggle. And that struggle is not only a struggle to wrest truth from the Universe, but also a struggle to prise the beams from our eyes. Hence the transmutation not only of one scientific method into another, but also of base common sense into science - and, perhaps, science into some form of reason for which science and morality, politics and art are all one. Same for cognitive development.

Now what has all this to do with management? It really comes down to the all but universal management mantra that ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. I suspect that this really originates from Lord Kelvin, who once write that:

When you can measure what you are talking about and can express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

Ah, Kelvin. The man who used the latest thinking in physics to prove that Darwinism was impossible. But what is wrong with his emphasis on measurement? Well, as John Maynard Keynes put it:

Am I right in thinking that ... the statistical method ... essentially depends on ... having furnished, not merely a list of the significant causes, which is correct so far as it goes, but a complete list?

For example, suppose three factors are taken into account, it is not enough that these should be in fact verae causae; there must be no other significant factor. If there is a further factor, not taken account of, then the method is not able to discover the relative quantitative importance of the first three.

If so, this means that the method is only applicable where [one] is able to provide beforehand a correct and indubitably complete analysis of the significant factors. The method is neither one of discovery nor of criticism.

In other words, Kelvin is assuming what he should be proving, namely that he knows what he is measuring, rather than using measurement to decide what he is looking at. And that is exactly the fallacy of “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” – the view that we already know how things work, and measurement will only add to the precision of our knowledge. And indeed it will – but it won’t add anything to its accuracy unless we understand the things we are measuring. Which is precisely what we think we are using measurement to do...

A judgment of Solomon

Where better to begin a study of proverbial wisdom than with the man who seemingly had it all? Here's the text (from 1 Kings iii, 16-28):

Then came there two women... unto the king... And the one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house. And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also... And this woman's child died in the night; because she overlaid it. And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me ...and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom. And when I rose in the morning to give my child suck, behold, it was dead: but when I had considered it in the morning, behold, it was not my son, which I did bear.

And the other woman said, Nay; but the living is my son, and the dead is thy son. And this said, No; but the dead is thy son, and, the living is my son...

Then said the king, ...Bring me a sword... Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other.

Then spake the woman whose the living child was, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it.

Then the king ... said, Give her the living child, ... she is the mother thereof.

And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the king: for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him, to do judgment."

You can't help feeling that Solomon would have cut an unforgettable figure as a social worker. Had the women between whom he judged expressed their love of their child in any way but as His Majesty’s view of mother-love dictated, the child would have been chopped in two. But of course that is precisely what proves Solomon’s wisdom - the fact that he was right. However, if that is the case, I can only hope that he was not so much wise as infallible.

Suffering fools gladly

Of course, the norm is not to suffer fools gladly. It is even the subject of boasts and admiration - we often have at least a sneaking regard for those who do not suffer fools gladly. After all, fools are fools. However, the Bible, where the phrase originated, looked at it quite differently:

For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing you yourselves are wise. (Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, xi, 19)

Perhaps Paul was being ironic, although humour was never his strong suit. Of course, folly is not always what it appears. When the Earl of Rochester proposed the following (premature) epitaph for Charles II:

Here lies a great and mighty king,
Whose promise none relies on;
He never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one

His Majesty replied,

This is very true, for my words are my own and my actions are my ministers

But there are still more telling reasons for seeming folly. Zen masters’ method with madness in it. It appears foolish because it is we who are too sophisticated - or rather, too primitive - to appreciate its utter logic.

Altogether more dangerous is method with madness in it - economic apologetics, scientism, etc.

My country, right or wrong

This bizarre, odious and possibly insane sentiment originated with a slightly more innocuous toast by Stephen Decatur (1779-1820), an American patriot of the post-Revolutionary period (when it no doubt seemed very sound). In 1816 he proposed thus:

Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be right; but our country, right or wrong. (Quoted in A. S. Mackenzie, Life of Decatur, ch. 14)

Carl Schurz [?] made a better stab at it:

Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.

But ‘my country, right or wrong’ (only the other side of vox populi, vox dei) is all that has come down to popular consciousness, and to provide countless little reactionaries with a rhetorical flourish to their vulgarity, in response to which GK Chesterton replied:

"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober".

Nor do all Americans share Decatur's views:

You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it. (Malcolm X)

And in general, to a European ear, so much of American ideals and ideology is barely intelligible. As GK Chesterton also said:

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.(New York Times, 1st February, 1931)

The ideal American certainly seems to live on a very different planet from most real Europeans. He (and the ideal American is a he) still believes in Old Glory, the unity (more or less) of his country (E pluribus unum) and that no Presidential candidate is worth a vote unless they can command an occasional tête à tête with the Almighty:

It is inconceivable to me that anyone would think that he could do this job, the Presidency, if he couldn’t call on God for help and have faith that he’d be granted that help. (Ronald Reagan, Time, 15th May, 1976)

To which the Almighty replied (through his amanuensis, Edward Sorel):

Go figure it!? The devil gets H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, Sam Clemens, Billie Holliday, Gershwin, Porter, Schubert... and... and I... I keep getting dreck like this!!! (From Superpen: The Cartoons and Caricatures of Edward Sorel)

[Add Sorel cartoon of US Presidents talking to God.]

Such sentiments seem more than a little bizarre this side of the Pond. Still, the mere fact that Americans believe amazing things is not the only reason Europeans are so prone to discount and patronise American culture and thinking. On this side of the Atlantic, anti-Americanism is the acceptable face of racism. In any case, the Old World seethes with equally reactionary sentiments; we are simply too sophisticated, if that is the word, to say what we mean. After all, it is only a decade or so since Anthony Blunt was pilloried for preferring to work for a country in whose future he sincerely believed - the Soviet Union - rather than an ugly and decadent Britain busy appeasing Hitler. Of course, he would have fared at least as badly in the United States, not only as an enemy agent but also as a ‘premature anti-fascist’, as they used to say at the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Apparently you can object to mass murder too soon for the US Congress.

Americans despise Europeans because they have no money. Europeans despise Americans because they have no culture.

[Johnson and Bierce on patriotism.]

Judas

It is hard to be too disgusted with the idea of a Judas.

But surely even Judas is not beyond forgiveness? Indeed, forgiving Judas is surely one of the great tasks every Christian faces. Not because, without his betrayal, Christianity would never have begun. That is merely a historical nicety. Far more than that, Judas’ betrayal both is the essence of sin and highlights the essentially desolate nature of sin. After all, what does Judas do once he has committed his act of betrayal? He hangs himself. Where better then to bring a philosophy of forgiveness it its historical archetype and logical conclusion?

Has the entire role of Jesus of Nazareth been misunderstood? If I may borrow a conundrum originating with Jorge Luis Borges, who is the real Son of God (Three Versions of Judas, in Labyrinths, Penguin Books, 1970)?

But the real problem for Christianity is not to forgive Judas but to forgive God. Who has betrayed humanity more completely than God?

More generally, I have long thought that the Bible was lacking in moral judgment. Of course, one has to sympathise with God’s predicament. It must be especially tough being divine in the face of modern technology. Imagine trying to manifest yourself over the phone, only to be put through to an answer machine. Imagine announcing the Second Coming by TV, only to have half the population video you instead and then record a soap opera over you without even bothering to watch.

Nor does Creation exactly reek of any deep concern with its inhabitants. At this very moment, a million children are crying with tooth ache. The state of the world, even on this small, quite non-cosmic level, would make Caligula blanch. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the Universe was surely designed by a committee of camels. (Actually, the idea of the universe as designed by a committee does solve one enduring theological conundrum - how the three persons of God can have a single substance.) Far from embodying divine wisdom, the universe is really the expression of perfect unwisdom, only made wise by humanity.

So now that he has built the universe, what does God do to fix the bugs. Not a lot. Even for those who believe in miracles, it’s hard to be impressed by the rate at which the problems are repaired, and like any badly repaired machine, it’s quite normal for the repairs to create new bugs.

But then it’s hard to think of any case where God has even tried. He reminds me the dreadful murder of Kitty Genovese. She was the victim of a vicious attack in New York in 1964, during which, although she was assaulted repeatedly over a period of half an hour, at least a dozen people who heard or saw parts of the murder failed to report it to the police. The Genovese case has become the paradigm of ‘bystander behaviour’.

But as with everything else, God has to go one up on mere mortals. God is the ultimate bystander. God never gets involved. If we can ignore the murder of a woman on a cold and ugly night, he can ignore the murder of millions. It was God who ignored the slaughter of children in Auschwitz. It is God who allows children to starve all around the world. Yes, I know, human beings did these things, but if I had had the power to undo Auschwitz with absolutely no effort or risk and did not do it, what would the world have thought of me? Well, that’s exactly what the world should think of God.

Next to forgiving God, forgiving Judas is a push over. And of course, if we are in God’s image, one can just as well reverse the relationship: he is in ours. As Voltaire put it,

If God created us in His image, we have more than reciprocated.

Or as an eminent American critic of religious institutions suggested:

Let’s get serious: God knows what he’s doing, he wrote this Book here, and the Book says he made us all to be just like him. So if we’re dumb, then God is dumb, and maybe even a little ugly on the side...

Chorus: Dumb all over... A little ugly on the side... Dumb all over...

(Frank Zappa, Dumb All Over, from the album, You Are What You Is)

It’s lucky that God no more has free will than the rest of us; heaven only knows what he might have got up to. Cataracts, indeed. Nor is he much more effective on the social and historical planes: any religion which has still only acquired a minority holding in humanity’s conscience after 2,000 years of sustained marketing by some of history's finest fanatics and delivers human happiness with the efficiency of the Plague is surely due for an overhaul.

There is no reason to worship God just because He is omnipotent, because He is our creator, etc. It may be Calvin’s opinion that one cannot help but worship one’s creator -

How can the idea of God enter your mind without instantly giving rise to the
thought that since you are his workmanship, you are bound, by the very law of
creation, to submit to his authority? (The Institutes of the Christian Religion, I, p. 41, transl. H. Beveridge, 1949)

- but that is surely to deny our integrity as responsible beings. After all, that’s how God made us - if we were made in the image of God, surely it was in his moral image. (Or if it was in his physical image, did He have acne when He was a teenager like me?) But in that case, we are as responsible for our acts as God is for his. What then is there to worship? By the same token, how can our sins be taken from us? On the other hand, is God as morally responsible as [?]

God does not exist, but even if he did, there would be no reason to ‘believe’ in Him. And even if he were worthy of belief, that would be no reason to worship him. I believe in democracy but I don’t worship it. And even if he were worthy of worship, there is no reason to think he is a Christian. After all, no one else is. Finally, even if He did exist, were a Christian and were worthy of belief and worship, then the entirety of human history cries out that he really is an Almighty Shit.