Cuttings: June 2019

Witcraft by Jonathan Rée and The History of Philosophy by AC Grayling: head to head philosophy - review by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. "Borrowing from modernist literary techniques, Rée slices into British intellectual history at 50-year intervals from 1601 to 1951 ...What we have, then, is less a lineage of Great Men than a series of cross-sections. We move through a set of landscapes rather than leap from one solitary figure to another. The book maps the way in which the different conceptual currents of a period intermingle, so that one of the finest literary critics ever to write in English, William Hazlitt, sits cheek-by-jowl with Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham and William Godwin.... The history of philosophy usually tells us how one set of ideas gave birth to another. What it tends to overlook are the political forces and social upheavals that shaped them. Witcraft, by contrast, sees philosophy itself as a historical practice. For much of its career, it was never easy to distinguish from political conflict, religious strife and scientific controversy.... In a mixture of arrogance and provincialism, Grayling seems to think that it is analytic philosophers such as he who get to decide who is a philosopher and who is not. A section of his book on modern European thinkers commits some elementary blunders, but this doesn’t matter much because these writers aren’t really philosophers anyway. When it comes to affairs of the mind, Grayling is determined to have as little truck as possible with fancypants foreigners, unless like Kant and Hegel they have been dead for a decent amount of time. ... The difference between the two men is clear from the way they write. Rée’s book is stylish and entertaining, whereas Grayling’s prose is lucid but lifeless. The lucidity, however, has its limits. Grayling raps European thinkers over the knuckles for writing obscurely, but in a work aimed at the general reader he produces '[(p q) & q] therefore p', which is not the kind of thing you hear in Tesco. Still, whether you understand such formulas is a handy way of sorting the Oxbridge cream from the continental dregs."

The shameful truth about Britain’s response to Grenfell - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian.  "The nation’s capacity for indignation is apparently rivalled only by its propensity for distraction. It’s not that we don’t see injustice or cannot comprehend it. It’s that we apparently get bored by it. We are becoming very careless with our innocence: we keep losing it, only to find it again in time to be 'shocked' by the next outrage. Grenfell was not only predictable, it was predicted. It did not 'take' that tragedy to teach us what happens when negligent landlords and shoddy builders come together in an age of cost-cutting and regulatory ambivalence. We already knew. But it has raised the question whether we, as a society, cared enough to do anything about it. So long as a similar tragedy could happen tomorrow, the answer is a shameful no."

The best inspiration for writers - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "Michael and Sarah's argument outside the coffee shop was subsequently fictionalised in three short stories and a novel, as well as inspiring the prizewinning poem 'Early Summer. Dappled sunlight. Terrible yelling.'"

'I feel terrified, betrayed': messages show strain on Jack Letts' parents - article by Caroline Davies in The Guardian, including an extract from a letter to his parents from Jack Letts, who left the UK to join ISIS: "You lot brought me up without faith. You taught me and indoctrinated me to look down on religious people as brainwashed idiots [you know you did]. You taught me that life had no true purpose … that there’s no afterlife and therefore no final justice. You taught me disbelief and darkness. Why should I be grateful for that?"

Inspired by 63 Up, author Tim Lott decides it's time to take stock - article by Tim Lott in The Guardian. "The idea of a single life captured through different points in time was behind the TV documentary series 63 Up (I am also 63). Partly for research into my next novel and partly out of curiosity, I find myself asking, who was I at 7, at 14, at 21, and so on? Does looking back on an entire life help us shape who we want to be from now on? Am I still the same person – or someone entirely different? After all, every life has two distinct aspects: the external and the internal."

Oliver Twiss and Martin Guzzlewit: the fan fiction that ripped off Dickens - article by Alison Flood in The Guardian, about Edward Lloyd and His World, eds Rohan McWilliam and Sarah Louise Lill.
"Oliver Twiss was one of many plagiarisms of Dickens published by the press baron Edward Lloyd, with Barnaby Budge, Martin Guzzlewit, The Penny Pickwick and Nickelas Nickelbery also hitting shelves in the mid-19th century.... The imitations were much cheaper than the originals – The Penny Pickwick cost a penny, compared with a shilling for Dickens’ story. 'It’s very likely that, given these things saturated the market for a while, from about 1837 to 1845, many working-class readers first encountered Dickens not through his original works but in these weird doppelgangers that were going around,' says McWilliam.... After publishing The Penny Pickwick, Lloyd went on to build a publishing empire. He told the illustrators of his 'penny dreadfuls' – grisly horror novels that included the first appearance of the demon barber of Fleet Street, Sweeney Todd, and Varney the Vampire – 'There must be blood … much more blood!' 'When we think of the 1840s, we think of the publication of major novels such as Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair,' says McWilliam. 'The reality is that many readers were as likely to be consuming shockers issued by Lloyd, such as Ada the Betrayed.' "

Language wars: the 19 greatest linguistic spats of all time - article by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian, based on his book Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth about Language. "What is it about language that gets people so hot under the collar? That drives them to spend hours arguing with strangers on the internet, to go around correcting misspelt signs in the dead of night, or even to threaten acts of violence? The languages we speak are central to our sense of self, so it is not surprising that their finer points can become a battleground. Passionate feelings about what’s right and wrong extend from the use of 'disinterested' to what gay people are allowed to call themselves. Here are some of the most memorable rows, spats and controversies...."

Calling the French ‘turds’ shows Boris Johnson is the eternal spoilt 15-year-old - article by Stephen Moss in The Guardian. "[The] foreigner-bashing [of Lord Palmerston] finds its modern parallel in Johnson, who has spent much of his career being beastly about those who had the misfortune not to be born British....Calling the French 'turds' for being intransigent on Brexit is a sign of Johnson’s vulgarity and stupidity. As his second-class degree suggests, his is a second-rate mind trying desperately to persuade us it is a first-rate one by using Latin tags and improper jokes. His useless, vapid books are the measure of the man. Everything that Johnson has ever said about the world is jokey, insensitive, stupid and needlessly provocative. His racism is well-rehearsed.... [His] racist remarks – set alongside equally outrageous examples of sexism and homophobia – should disqualify him as prime minister. Instead, they appear to endear him to the Tory membership, who feel an urgent need to out-Farage Farage, perhaps even to trump Trump. The US president gets away with it by being the leader of the world’s most powerful country, as Palmerston did when Britain was top dog in the 1860s. A Johnsonian UK will just look ridiculous. Xenophobia and gunboat diplomacy only really work if you have enough gunboats. Someone needs to tell Johnson that we no longer do."

Why do some people avoid news? Because they don’t trust us, or because they don’t think we add value to their lives? - article by Joshua Benton on the Nieman Lab blog, referenced in John Naughton's Observer column. "Why do people avoid news? In ... 2017 data, the leading causes for Americans were 'It can have a negative effect on my mood' (57 percent) and 'I can’t rely on news to be true' (35 percent). ... LinkedIn senior editor-at-large Isabelle Roughol ... asked readers about their own experience with news avoidance. And people left comments - comments that I think are instructive in how people who aren’t journalists view the news as a chore, increasingly one that can be skipped. ... A couple of thoughts. [1] The solutions journalism people should be sending this article to all potential funders, because the problem they’re trying to address shows up crystal clear here: News about big problems is depressing if I’m not presented with potential solutions. Regular news consumption can engender a kind of learned helplessness that make clear the appeal of ideologically slanted news - which offers up a clear cast of good guys and bad guys with no moral gray - and just avoiding news entirely. [2] These comments are also excellent evidence of the 'If the news is that important, it will find me' phenomenon.... These are people who trust that the sliver of news that’s of use to them will wind its way through social media, word of mouth, or some other distribution vector. In many cases, they may be right! And when they’re not, they probably won’t hear about it. ... Civically useful journalism is competing with every other form of media, content, or diversion on your phone. In that context, many people decide, as rational economic actors, they’re better off without us. How can we convince them otherwise?"

Cuttings: May 2019

Why we are addicted to conspiracy theories - article by Anna Merlan in The Guardian, based on her book Republic of Lies: Conspiracy Theorists and their Surprising Rise to Power. "In July 2016, Donald Trump fans had amassed to attend the Republican national convention.... Some of the attendees were from InfoWars, the mega-empire of suspicion – a radio show, website and vastly profitable store of lifestyle products – founded by Austin, Texas-based host Alex Jones... Jones and Donald Trump were longtime mutual fans. ... The conspiracy theorists ... recognised the future president as a 'truth-teller' in a style that spoke to them and many other Americans. They liked his thoughts about a rigged system and a government working against them, the way it spoke to what they had always believed, and the neat way he was able to peg the enemy with soundbites: the 'lying media', 'crooked Hillary', the bottomless abyss of the Washington 'swamp'. They were confident of his victory – if the globalists and the new world order didn’t get in the way, and they certainly would try.... The Trump era has merely focused our attention back on to something that has reappeared with reliable persistence: the conspiratorial thinking and dark suspicions that have never fully left us. ... The elements of suspicion were present long before the 2016 election, quietly shaping the way large numbers of people see the government, the media and the nature of what’s true and trustworthy."

Who wins from public debate? Liars, bullies and trolls - article by Steven Poole in The Guardian.  "We are told debate is the great engine of liberal democracy. In a free society, ideas should do battle in the public forum. Those who seek to lead us should debate with one another, and this will help us make the best possible informed judgments. ... People whose views we find abhorrent should not be ignored. We should debate with them, and so point out the flaws in the arguments. The more we debate, the happier and more civilised we will be.... That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, modern debate has a structural bias in favour of demagoguery and disinformation. It inherently favours liars. There is no cost to, and much potential advantage in, taking the low road and indulging in bullying and personal attack. ... Online, ... the call to 'debate' is increasingly a gendered demand, made by men as a way of attacking women with whose opinions they disagree. ... Spoken debate also favours liars, who know that even if their opponent attempts to rebut them, it will often be reported as 'balance'.... Since facts aren’t the real battleground, clever debaters will operate on a different level, for instance making dark insinuations that are designed to sow doubt in the audience’s mind. ... So the art of debating is one that rewards liars and bullies, is about beating the opponent rather than finding the truth, and is structurally biased in favour of conservative bromides rather than surprising new ideas. If that’s what debate is like, perhaps we shouldn’t aspire to be good at it."

What really matters now - summary of a Martin Wolf column in the Financial Times, by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Starting from the undeniable fact that faith in liberal democracy is declining and that charismatic politicians are enticing people into giving them support, he addresses the question: how should liberal politicians respond? He suggests ten principles that should underpin their response. (1) Leadership matters.... (2) Competence matters.... (3) Citizenship matters.... (4) Inclusion matters.... (5) Economic reform matters. ... (6) The 'local' matters.... (7) Public services matter... (8) Managed globalisation and global cooperation also matter... (9) Looking ahead matters... (10) Complexity matters."

It Must Be Heaven: Palestine's holy fool lives the dream - review by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. "The premise for this film that [the Palestinian film-maker Elia Suleiman] is playing himself: travelling abroad from Nazareth, coming first to Paris and then to New York, trying to speak to producers about getting his latest film made.... In Paris, a trio of cops swoop around on what look like Segways, infatuated with their own performance, like ice dancers. In the US, Suleiman wanders through a supermarket and discovers people are buying automatic weapons ... Suleiman has himself said that the comically heightened visions he creates 'show the world as if it were a microcosm of Palestine'. I don’t think that is exactly what is happening in It Must Be Heaven. It is more that he is satirising the oppression, security and policing that happen everywhere in the world, but that non-Palestinians in the prosperous west, who take their freedom of movement for granted, have the luxury of taking these 'policing' facts of life casually." His comedy is usually compared to Tati and Keaton – and again this isn’t quite accurate. Tati and Keaton’s deadpan setups would almost always lead to a specific visual gag. Suleiman’s hardly ever do: they just create a quirky, preposterous, amusing contrivance, generally without a punchline, as such... But this is not the point in Suleiman’s film-making; his comedy leads to something other than a punchline, it points you in the direction of a political situation."

Fan petitions - cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian, following fan petitions demanding remaking of the final season of Game of Thrones. "New ending for Beowulf. As fans, we deserve more. Beowulf should survive his battle with the dragon and go on to further adventures, maybe riding a wisecracking horse, or going into space. // Less whaling in Moby-Dick. As fans, we demand that descriptions of whaling are limited to two or three chapters. We have a long list of alternative subjects to fill out the rest of the book. // More action in Emma. As fans, we like olden-times people discussing marriage as much as anyone, but we also want seductive assassins, cursed treasure and an exploding vicarage."

Our glorious past is what we remember. The brutality behind it we’ve forgotten - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. "'The essential characteristic of a nation is that its individuals must have many things in common,' wrote the French philosopher Ernest Renan. 'And must have forgotten many things as well.' But they do not forget passively or at random. Things do not simply slip our mind. They are actively, wilfully, determinedly, selectively, purposefully buried. The issue is not one of time. When needs be, we can reach all the way back to 1066, the last time Britain was invaded, to make sense of who we are and what we do. But somehow the atrocities in the Kenyan detention camps in the 1950s, our complicity in the Bengal famine in 1943 or, even more recently, the Iraq war elude us. Our collective sense of responsibility for and engagement in these moments is similarly fickle. People say, 'We won the war', even if they didn’t fight, or 'We won the World Cup', even if they didn’t play. Indeed, one needn’t even have been born to identify with the triumph in question. The 'we' is implicitly understood as an embrace. It spans time, place and agency. But few will ever say, in a similar vein: 'We raped people' or 'We massacred people'. For then, 'we' is understood as an accusation. In these moments, individuality becomes the ultimate alibi. 'What has that got to do with me? I wasn’t even alive then.'”