Goodbye

posted by Brit

Time for me to off home, make way for the main man. I'll bugle a last post.

Thanks to Bryan for asking me to blogsit and to all of you commenters for contributing. It's been a lot of fun. We have chased away a horde of trannies with the help of the Wurzels and the Battleship Potemkin. We have tumbled off teeter-totters into the Quantum Flux. We have celebrated weighty Americans, lost to Kasparov, beaten University Challenge, thrown paint at an old man and cured Great Wakering. We have taken liquid lunches, won The X-Factor and (not) voted for Obama. We have been consoled by Gwyneth. We have learned nothing.

Ta ta.

National Gewgaws

posted by Brit. Bryan will be back very soon

Alas, the end of my time in charge of Bryan's blog is rapidly approaching. The audience is becoming restless, coughing and checking its collective wristwatch. The improbably-extended shepherd's crook is sneaking onto the stage ready to hook me by the neck and whisk me off... But with a jolt I realise that I have neglected a key element of my Thought Experiments Mission Statement: namely, to ensure that Malty is recognised as an official National Treasure.

Unfortunately, closer scrutiny reveals the true size of the task. Malty is, after all, far too cranky, controversial and, well, close to Scotland to fit the typical NT description (I'm sure there are a few Jocks on the list but beyond Connery and Corbett, I'm struggling.)

To qualify as a National Treasure a candidate must possess a certain sort of cosy invulnerability. A recognisable voice and a solid body of television work help (Attenborough, Dench), but the key thing is that his or her faults must be beyond criticism. Whether it be an inability to act (Connery, Moore, Caine, the other Attenborough) or dance (Sergeant), or perhaps an excessive prolixity (Fry, Motson, Madeley) or eccentricity (Patrick Moore, Madeley again), the NT character flaw is part of the package, producing a smile rather than a sneer.

At the opposite end of the scale are the National Anti-Treasures. These dregs of British public life are covered in detail here. However, my concern is with a different section of celebrity, as yet unclassified but which I shall call, for the sake of argument, National Gewgaws.

I do not refer to anything so trivial as 'people we love to hate' (Cowell, Goody, Mandelson). Rather, National Gewgaws are those figures whose failings and flaws are our flaws, familiar but magnified, accepted but not forgiven. We must follow their trials and tribulations in sorrow, sympathy and rage, mockery and guilt. They are shameful, they are consoling. Winehouse and Charles clearly fit the bill. English sportsmen are riddled with the yips, and so English sport is riddled with Gewgaws, Henman being perhaps the ultimate. Marks and Spencer is of course the Gewgaw of retail, every season and half-year profit statement bringing fresh disaster or triumph, and we must all share in the agony.

Malty, I think, will never attain true National Treasure status, but he may yet join the ranks of the Gewgaw. It is, in any case, a far more interesting class of lunatic.

Coiled steel

posted by Brit

I made the mistake of watching the news last night. One damn thing after another, isn't it?

A lot of rubbish is spoken and written about evil. Here's some more. Some people think that evil can only be exhibited by humans. Those people haven't looked closely enough at cats. The other week, as I strolled innocuously back from the papershop, a neighbour's cat fixed me with what can only be described as a steady look of hate. Bravely, I tried to stare him out. No chance. He slowly rotated his head as I passed, holding my gaze, and his eyes contained nothing but malevolence - clear and unmistakeable. I returned home quite shaken and in dire need of a cup of tea.

Other people think that evil doesn't really exist at all. This is no more meaningful than suggesting that, say, generosity or laziness don't exist. The best line Ted Hughes ever wrote was Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn/ More coiled steel than living*. He was trying to describe animal instinct or mindless purpose or something, but as a description of evil it'll do until a better one comes along.


*A line that has inspired other, possibly greater poets...

Fairness and froggish men

posted by Brit

Yesterday's post on sociobiology raised the question of fairness. According to the philosopher Raymond Geuss in a recent edition of Start the Week, the concept of 'fairness' has peculiarly English origins. Indeed, other languages such as German take their word for 'fairness' straight from the English, there being no direct linguistic equivalent.*

Interesing one, fairness. It's a sort of appeal to a natural justice (rather than a human or even Divine judgement or application of law) with hints of 'playing the game' and a hope of reasonableness and an even distribution of luck over the long run.

With its avoidance of absolutes it's a fundamentally conservative concept. And yet paradoxically, as Randy Newman here explains, the fact that life isn't fair (along with the existence of froggish men with beautiful wives) explains the failure of Marxism in the 20th Century.

*This puts me in mind of one of my favourite Bushisms: "The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur." Pity it's a hoax.

On sociobiology

posted by Brit

Way back when, there used to be this thing called the Nature-Nurture Debate. That's long extinct, but its close cousin, Sociobiology, is still evolving alarmingly.

Sociobiology is the awkward antechamber where geneticists, anthropologists and artists get cross while trying not to bump into each other on the way to their respective lecture-rooms. Nick Cohen writes succinctly and well about it here.

The problem, as Nick explains, is that while some sociobiological explanations of human behaviour instinctively make sense and are, indeed, sensible (eg. "why old men desire beautiful young women and why rich old men are more successful in bedding beautiful young women than poor old men"), there are a lot of zealous sociobiologists keen to explain every tittle and jot of human interaction by reference to what our distant ancestors were getting up to with unfortunate caribou in the privacy of their own caves.

There was an example of this on Start the Week recently, when psychologist Susan Blackmore tried to suggest that the concept of "fairness" must have a genetic origin because the world's children universally cry "That's not fair!" when something goes against them. This forced Raymond Geuss to point out that while whingeing when you don't get your way may be a childhood universality, an appeal to "fairness" is a curiously Anglospheric ploy, the concept being closely linked to England's cultural and judicial history.

Unfortunately, this all leads to a further problem, whereby the absurdity of some of the sociobiological 'explanations' - and, I would argue, the joy with which mainstream journalists seize on them - opens up a lot of scoffing room and allows evolutionary sceptics to dismiss everything as a "Just So Story", and thus throw all the babies out with the bathwater.

By 'evolutionary sceptic', by the way, I here refer to the kind of scientific illiterate who thinks Intelligent Design is a valid academic subject. I don't know where these people get that notion, but I expect there's a genetic explanation.

The origins of meh

posted by Brit

So the word 'meh' has entered the Collins English Dictionary. Used to express indifference, vague contempt or boredom, the official acceptance of meh is an example of the influence of internet-speak.

As usual, the Americans think they invented it (they think they invented all sorts of things, like baseball and motor cars. Meh!).

However, today I can exclusively reveal the true origins of the word on Thought Experiments. It is a corruption of Auden's magnificently-timed 'Mneh', which features in the sixth stanza of Moon Landing. In context, the meaning is unambiguous.

The Heart of Beat

posted by Brit

Bryan has a brainy scientific piece and explains why paranoia sells in today's Sunday Times. Go and read him.

Meanwhile Cosmo Landesman fills in Bryan's usual Culture spot with a lightish piece on the Beats (On the Road is 50 years old). It's not an uninteresting article, but Cosmo doesn't get to the heart of Beat*. The heart of Beat is the combination of a healthy rebellion against the predominant culture, with the extreme egotism and selfishness of the 14-year old who never grows up.

Like most earnest, literate teenage boys I slogged piously through On the Road and, in my earnest innocence, thought it was the bee's knees.

There's nothing wrong with the existence of literature for earnest, literate teenage boys - they need to read stuff too. But later you realise that everything Kerouac said that was worth saying, David Nobbs said far better in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.


*Heart of Beat - that's a nice one, isn't it? It was a fluke. And no doubt it's been done before.

Good name for a blog, that

posted by Brit

At school there were a lot of rock bands about the place. They didn't play much actual rock necessarily - often they didn't even own any musical instruments - but every now and again they would get together and change their name.

Often bands would form, split, reform, resplit, reform with a girl singer, sack the girl singer, merge with another band and then split again, all within the space of a fortnight and without having played a single note in anger. During this time they could go through anything from ten to - ooh, I don't know - say, 300 names.

The consequence was that everyone was always looking out for a 'good name for a band'.* Nige is still at it. I'm still at it except these days I keep seeing good names for a blog. I almost want to start blogs just to use names like Jewels and Binoculars or The Borrissey Blog.

Glenties would be a fine name for an argumentative political blog.

Why, just scrolling through the comments of any random post, such as this one, reveals a goldmine of top blog or band names: 3rd-Hand Ford Escort from Elberry, Obsessive-Compulsive Hiking Freak from Ian Russell, and best of all, Mark's The Fruits of Incest.


*Can't remember too many of my contemporaries' band names, except for Cosmic Jug and Plastic Squirrel.

For passer by

posted by Brit

A while back Passer By challenged me to write some verse about our broke bankers. Well, I had a go. Like everything else, it tries, it fails somewhat, you know. I've put it up here - take it or leave it. May it brighten up your Friday. Thankee.

Remember Vakulynchuk!

posted by Brit

Another good thing about blogging is that when you get of a bit of l'esprit d'escalier, you can always put it in another post. Weeks after what will be forever remembered in Thought Experiments legend as the October of the Transhumanists, obscure pro-death arguments are still throwing themselves at me. The Wurzels provided one, now Vakulynchuk provides another.

Vakulynchuk, as the well-informed readers of Thought Experiements will not need telling, is the Stalin-tached rabble-rouser in Eisenstein's classic Commie propaganda flick The Battleship Potemkin. I watched it recently when suffering from a brief but debilitating bout of food-poisoning. (When you're ill and there's nothing better to do, The Battleship Potemkin is the kind of worthy film you can force yourself to watch.) It is notable chiefly for two things: the famous Odessa steps sequence and, amusingly, the apparently arbitrary insertion of unnecessary captions, especially at the beginning (my favourite is "Boiling soup" - I defy even the most reverential film buff not to hoot between chin-strokes when that little beauty pops up).

Anyway, Vakulynchuk leads the crew of the Potemkin in their mutiny against the cruel Czarist officers, and is killed along the way. His brave sacrifice inspires the others, ultimately to glorious victory, much in the manner of other revolutionary martyrs such as Che Guevara, Jesus Christ, and Michael Hutchence.

Which leads us to such questions as: in a transhuman world, what do we do for our martyrs? Must all revolutionary heroes be like Castro and grow old enough to witness the full, dismal extent of their failure? Or will death be so unthinkable a price to pay when immortality is on offer that nobody will ever be prepared to lay down their precious life for anything? I don't know. I'm just running it up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes.