The Art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about Maps,
But Biography is about Chaps.

But what does biography have to do with sneezing? Find out in the pages of All The Rage, December 2008 edition (PDF).

… what’s at stake is the whole concept of a cosmopolitan city open to its own citizens and to the world—a city on the model of Sarajevo or London or Beirut or Manhattan. There is, of course, a reason they attract the ire and loathing of the religious fanatics. To the pure and godly, the very existence of such places is a profanity.

The importance of Bombay is more than symbolic, as is the importance of India. As Hitchens observes, ‘India is emerging in many ways as our most important ally. It is a strong regional counterweight to Russia and China. Not to romanticize it overmuch, it is a huge and officially secular federal democracy that is based, like the United States, on ethnic and confessional pluralism’.

India is indeed our natural ally in the fight against the jihadists, yet it has been sidelined by skewed Western geopolitics that rest on obsession with China, fear of Russia and faith in Pakistan. All three elements are disastrously misconceived: China is a mirage, Russia a paper tiger and Pakistan a terror cell masquerading, barely, as a state. India is a counterweight to all three and a firm foundation for a Western geostrategy that really is committed to the things the West says it cares about: democracy, freedom, economic and social progress. Hitchens is right, we must stand by our friends in Bombay.

Sad to see Wikipedia references in a serious piece of writing, though.

(Found via Alan Sullivan’s Fresh Bilge blog.)

Anyway, what brought on these bitter reflections was a fascinating post at the Layscience Blog revealing the true depths of feeble-minded fatuity that lay behind Big Bang Day, the hysterically hyped-up coverage of the ’switching on’ (which was nothing of the kind) of the Large Hadron Collider with which the BBC bored the nation’s backside off in September, apparently under the impression that this represented serious science reporting. In a classic BBC beyond-parody moment, it turns out they even wanted the LHC team to fit a special Big Red Button that would be pressed at the crucial moment.

By the way, I have nothing against the Large Hadron Collider, which is a marvellous thing. And guess what, it didn’t destroy us all by creating a black hole capable of swallowing the universe (nor even one capable of swallowing the BBC, alas).

This month, in honour of the London Games Festival Fringe (25 October to 2 November) the theme of All The Rage is ‘games’. In accordance with this splendid theme, I have written an article on that celebrated painting by Pieter Breugel the Elder, ‘Children’s Games’:

At first sight Bruegel’s Children’s Games might appear to represent a lost world of innocence, where children live out their days in endless play – a representation of the happy state that all must leave behind as they grow to adulthood and maturity. Yet its message is in reality quite the opposite. The games of children show us that the adult world is no more than a game itself, and that all the roles and activities which adults value are mere instances of play. Bruegel’s playful children teach their adult viewers a lesson, with their mimicry of the grown-up world: that all is folly, futility, and the chance of the game.

It’s a bumper issue, as they say, so hurry along and read the gamey October 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage.

To fit in with the September theme for All The Rage, which happens to be ‘heroes and villains’, I have written a short piece on a forgotten hero-martyr of the First World War: Captain Fryatt, master of the Great Eastern Railway steamer Brussels, shot by the Germans in July 1916. To find out more about Fryatt, the best place to start (apart from my article in All The Rage, obviously) is this National Archives page. There’s no doubt that this once celebrated figure has fallen sadly into obscurity. When the signs for Fryatt Road in Tottenham, named for the Captain, were replaced recently, no-one noticed that the council had spelt his name wrong.

Why was he shot? To the Germans the case was very simple: this was no hero, but a pirate, operating outside the rules of war. It was intolerable, they believed, for someone claiming the protection of civilian status to engage in acts of war such as attempting to sink a submarine. The court martial and firing squad were, Germany claimed, the instruments of justice. Britain, her Allies and much neutral opinion saw them as the instruments of murder. The execution of a civilian seaman who had done nothing more than acted in the justified self-defence of his ship and passengers was, they believed, an outrage, and the Allied propaganda machine sought to make all the capital it could out of Fryatt’s life and death.

If you want to know what this is all about, visit the new September 2008 issue (PDF) of All The Rage. Then you will be able to read the article, which will tell you.

First, he puts the case for the importance of a historical, cultural and social understanding of science very well: ‘the reality is that science is a human activity, not an abstract calculus, and this properly makes its great achievements a subject of pride and awe, not suspicion and skepticism. It should also make us aware of its desperate fragility, and the hostile cultural forces that it constantly has to overcome’. There are scientists who reject any notion that putting science in its historical context as a human activity is helpful at all. As Blackburn argues, they are wrong, not least because such framing is their ally in resisting science-hostile forces, not a fifth column seeking to undermine science from within.

Second, he does precisely what he argues many postmodern critics of science have done, and dodges the central issue of the evidence-based nature of scientific claims. As he says, science describes the world, and its descriptions correspond to reality: ‘Our lasers and our cell phones work, our materials have their calculated strengths, our predictions are borne out to extraordinary numbers of decimal places: what can explain this, except that we are getting things right, or very nearly right? Or in other words, that we are on the track of the truth? If we were not, it would be an inexplicable coincidence — a miracle — that we are so often so successful’. He then goes on to say that science doesn’t often talk about ‘truth’. There’s a reason for that: it doesn’t have to. It talks about evidence. Scientific predictions about the world are attested by evidence, over and over again. The status of scientific assertions about the world as ‘truth’ derives from their status as evidence-based. Blackburn’s failure to see this point devalues the rest of his argument, as he goes on to prove by producing the term ‘uniformities’. Light, or water, or carbon behaving in the same way under given conditions becomes a ‘uniformity’:

The word ‘faith’ raises its annoying head at this point. [No it doesn’t. Why would it? Faith exists outside of evidence, science depends entirely upon evidence.] Is the human reliance on uniformities just as much a matter of faith as the creationist’s reliance on whatever message tells him that the earth is six thousand years old? [Not if those ‘uniformities’ are tested against the evidence and pass the test every time.] A lot of modern writing in the theory of knowledge more or less throws in the towel and supposes that it is. Wittgenstein summed it up in his last book, On Certainty, arguing that what we would like are rock-solid foundations for our beliefs, but what we find are things that simply ’stand fast’ for us — and this raises the disturbing possibility of others for whom different and in our eyes deplorable things equally stand fast.

If those ‘different … things’ are in the realm of metaphysics then there is not much you can do to prove them right or wrong - which is precisely why they are unscientific and cannot be considered as equivalent in status to scientific claims about the world. If someone turns up on my doorstep arguing that God the Son has not existed through eternity and was created by God the Father as a separate being I could neither prove nor disprove his assertion; I would have to close the door, muttering ‘gosh, the Arian heresy’. If, however, he asserted that human beings can breathe water as effectively as air, I could bring him in and drown him in the bath. Blackburn’s ‘uniformities’ aren’t just out there in the realm of ultimately unverifiable assertion: they make a difference.

[Third point redacted. It was pedantic, snarky and worthless.]

The August 2008 edition of All The Rage has, as ever, a theme: ‘monsters’. Among the high-quality content (well, among the content, anyway) addressing that theme is my own ‘Monty’s Monsters’, an essay which looks at a figure who has been of interest to me for many years - the scholar, antiquary and writer of ghost stories M. R. James (1862-1936).

The appearances of his monsters are sudden, dramatic, and fleeting; they are glimpsed briefly and are gone, leaving a powerful after-image for the imagination to work upon. The reader, like the characters in the stories, is left not knowing quite what the thing that passed before them was, but retaining a vivid and dreadful impression of horror.

The point about James’s supernatural entities is that they often are not really ghosts at all but rather physical, fleshly and substantial monsters, demons from the margins of a medieval manuscript … find out more in the August 2008 edition (PDF) of All The Rage.

The National Secular Society says the move is discriminatory (and it does look that way, given that sites relating to ’Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and other religions’ are apparently not being blocked, but atheist sites are) and they intend to fight the Birmingham ban. However, this quote from National Secular Society President Terry Anderson caught my eye:

It is discriminatory not only against atheists but they also are banning access to sites to do with witchcraft. Witchcraft these days is called Wicca, which is an actual legitimate and recognised religion.

It’s nothing of the sort: everything about ‘wicca’ from its name downwards is a load of made-up tosh. But then the opinion of a professional secularist on what is or is not a legitimate religion is bound to be a little warped.

So often, our perceptions of the place have more to do with how we look at ourselves than with what’s actually happening over there. Worried about the U.S. education system? China’s becomes a model. Fretting about our military readiness? China’s missiles pose a threat. Concerned about slipping U.S. global influence? China seems ready to take our place.

But is China really going to be another superpower? I doubt it.

Too many constraints are built into the country’s social, economic and political systems. For four big reasons — dire demographics, an overrated economy, an environment under siege and an ideology that doesn’t travel well — China is more likely to remain the muscle-bound adolescent of the international system than to become the master of the world.

It’s a balanced, realistic, well-informed view, the kind of thing you almost never get from the Western media when it comes to China. Highly recommended. If I may pick up my own trumpet and send forth a few muted notes for a moment, some of my own thoughts about China can be found here: ‘China’s future is not Europe’s past’.

By the way, I see that the Washington Post has underlined certain words and phrases in its online stories: these, of course, are links, but of a particular kind. The idea is that you, poor feeble-minded reader who needs to be led by the hand through everything, can click upon them and be taken to a page giving a list of resources (on washingtonpost.com, of course) related to the word or phrase in question - oh, and you’ll get a nice pop-up ad too, unless you’re careful. Thus, Pacific Ocean is linked in this way, in case you don’t know what that is. This is presumably the web’s wonderful version of the obsolete mind-broadening exercises once known as thinking for yourself and doing your own research. Take warning from any page scattered with those inviting underlinings: guided in everything you do by the notions of pedantic twats, you will ultimately become one of them.

I found Pomfret’s article thanks to a link from a post at Alan Sullivan’s fine Fresh Bilge blog. My thanks to him.