Cuttings: September 2022

What Big History Misses – article by Ian Hesketh in Aeon, referenced by John Naughton in his Observer column.  “Big History burst on to the scene 30 years ago, promising to reinvigorate a stale and overspecialised academic discipline by situating the human past within a holistic account at a cosmic scale. The goal was to produce a story of life that could be discerned by synthesising cosmology, geology, evolutionary biology, archaeology and anthropology. This universal story, in turn, would provide students with a basic framework for their subsequent studies – and for life itself. Big History also promised to fill the existential void left by the ostensible erosion of religious beliefs…. David Christian first made the case for what he called ‘Big History’ in an article in the Journal of World History in 1991.... Big History was in fact at the forefront of a broader shift to large-scale, scientific history.... [such as] the recent work of the medieval historian-turned-public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, [with] his bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) ... [and] a subsequent bestselling work, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015)... What accounts for Big History’s attraction for popular audiences and educators? For Christian and other big historians, the answer is built right in to the premise of writing Big History in the first place. By producing an overarching story of life, Big History is meant to fill the void that was left by the processes of secularisation that have dismantled the holistic narratives that were provided by traditional religious systems....There are similarities with more recent forms of large-scale history as well, such as the positivist histories of the 19th century, which sought to explain the development of civilised society as the product of a progressive scientism, or the evolutionary epics of the 19th and 20th centuries, which sought to tell the story of life from an overarching evolutionary perspective. What these forms of history all share with Big History is the desire to synthesise contemporary science to tell a story of humanity and to reduce its development to a set of laws or stages leading to the present and future....However, in Christian’s Origin Story humans are never really presented as more than passive observers when it comes to the major developments of the period in history that we are supposedly shaping. Industrialisation, globalisation, colonisations and more all seem rote responses to the demand for new sources of energy flows and increasing complexity.... This speaks to the difficulty of integrating a sense of human agency into the Big History narrative, a problem that becomes particularly important at the end of the story.”

Why the Tory Project is Bust – article by David Hare in The Guardian, 8 March 2016, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. “In [my] play [Knuckle] father and son represent two contrasting strands in conservatism. Patrick, the father, is cultured, quiet and responsible. Curly, the son, is aggressive, buccaneering and loud. One of them sees the creation of wealth as a mature duty to be discharged for the benefit of the whole community, with the aim of perpetuating a way of life that has its own distinctive character and tradition. But the other character, based on various criminal or near-criminal racketeers who were beginning to play a more prominent role in British finance in the 1970s, sees such thinking as outdated. Curly’s own preference is to make as much money as he can in as many fields as he can and then to get out fast. The first thing to notice about my play is that it was written in 1973. Margaret Thatcher was not elected until six years later. So whatever the impact of her arrival at the end of decade, it would be wrong to say that she brought anything very new to a Tory schism that had been latent for years. Surely, she showed power and conviction in advancing the cause of the Curly Delafield version of capitalism – no good Samaritan could operate, she once argued, unless the Samaritan were filthy rich in the first place. ... The origins of conservatism’s modern incoherence lie with Thatcher....If a previous form of patrician conservatism had been about respectability and social structure, this new form was about replacing all notions of public enterprise with a striving doctrine of individualism... Our current politics are governed by two competing nostalgias, both of them pieties. Conservatives seek to locate all good in Thatcherism and the 1980s, and in the unworkable nonsense of the free market, while Labour seeks to locate it in 1945 and an industrial society, which, for better or worse, no longer exists. And yet issues of justice remain, and always will. Conservativism, as presently formulated, is unworkable in the UK because it continues to demand that citizens from so many different backgrounds and cultures identify with a society organised in ways that are outrageously unfair. The bullying rhetorical project of seeking to blame diversity for the crimes of inequity is doomed to fail. You cannot pamper the rich, punish the poor, cut benefits and then say: 'Now feel British!' There is a bleak fatalism at the heart of conservatism, which has been codified into the lie that the market can only do what the market does, and that we must therefore watch powerless. We have seen the untruth of this in the successful interventions governments have recently made on behalf of the rich. Now we long for many more such interventions on behalf of everyone else. Often, in the past 40 years, I refused to contemplate writing plays that might imply that public idealism was dead. From observing the daily lives of those in public service, I know this not to be true. But we lack two things: new ways of channelling such idealism into practical instruments of policy, and a political class that is not disabled by its philosophy from the job of realising them. If we talk seriously about British values, then the noblest and most common of them all used to be the conviction that, with will and enlightenment, historical change could be managed. We did not have to be its victims. Its cruelties could be mitigated. Why, then, is the current attitude that we must surrender to it?”

The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias or perpetuating it? – article by Wilfred Chan in The Guardian. “‘Hi, good morning. I’m calling in from Bangalore, India.’ I’m talking on speakerphone to a man with an obvious Indian accent. He pauses. ‘Now I have enabled the accent translation,’ he says. It’s the same person, but he sounds completely different: loud and slightly nasal, impossible to distinguish from the accents of my friends in Brooklyn. Only after he had spoken a few more sentences did I notice a hint of the software changing his voice: it rendered the word ‘technology’ with an unnatural cadence and stress on the wrong syllable. Still, it was hard not to be impressed – and disturbed…. It’s an idea that calls to mind the 2018 dark comedy film Sorry to Bother You, in which Cassius, a Black man hired to be a telemarketer, is advised by an older colleague to ‘use your white voice’…. His sales numbers shoot up, leaving an uncomfortable feeling…. A Aneesh … has spent years studying call centers and accent neutralization. In 2007, as part of his research, the scholar – who has a mix of an Indian and American accent – got himself hired as a telemarketer in India, an experience he detailed in his 2015 book Neutral Accent: How Language, Labor and Life Become Global. At the call center, he witnessed how his colleagues were put through a taxing process to change their accents. … The danger, Aneesh said, was that artificially neutralizing accents represented a kind of ‘indifference to difference’, which diminishes the humanity of the person on the other end of the phone. ‘It allows us to avoid social reality, which is that you are two human beings on the same planet, that you have obligations to each other. It’s pointing to a lonelier future.’”

A moment that changed me: a maths puzzle taught me to use my brain and helped me cope with losing my daughter – article by Paul Tonner in The Guardian. “When I was 15, I was talkative and outgoing, and more interested in being sociable than in working hard. It was 1969, and I was at high school in Amherst, Nova Scotia, in eastern Canada. I never paid much attention, doing the bare minimum and often betting that nobody else would do their homework, so I needn’t either.… I did not enjoy geometry, although I liked the philosophical approach of our teacher, Mrs Trenholm... We were all struggling and I was probably the most vocal in class about it. Mrs Trenholm set us homework, asking us to try to solve a problem … She pulled me aside as we were leaving class and said: ‘Don’t talk your way out of this.’ … I went home, worked on it for 20 minutes, thought, ‘I can’t do this and no one else in the class will be able to do it either’ and gave up. I went to bed about 10pm – and woke up a couple of hours later, which was unusual. My first thought was, ‘I’ve done exactly what she said I was going to do.’ Then I decided to try again. I sat at my desk and started…. At about 5am, … I got it. I could remember every failed attempt and where I had gone wrong, and I knew that it was right. At that moment I felt like my brain had been rewired. … It was exciting and I felt really proud. I thought: ‘I can be somebody different. I don’t have to be somebody who walks around avoiding things; I can work things out.’ I handed it in the next day. Mrs Trenholm … came to me and handed me the paper. I could see it had a little check mark in the corner. She looked right at me and asked: ‘Did you do this?’ When I said yes, she nodded and went back to the front of the class and said: ‘One of you now understands Euclidean geometry. Let’s keep going so everybody gets it.’”

The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes: what Putin sees in the past – review by Bridget Kendall in The Guardian. “Prominent among [Russia’s] iconography are arresting portraits of its princes and tsars. … Whether intended to elevate the subjects to hero status or castigate them as cruel tyrants, these pictures form part of Russia’s collective memory. They are etched into the nation’s psyche, each capturing a moment in Russia’s story about itself. And this is the starting point of Orlando Figes’s The Story of Russia: ‘Russia is a country held together by ideas rooted in its distant past,’ he tells us in the introduction. ‘Histories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future.’ Inevitably in a survey of more than 1,000 years of history, much has had to be skirted over or omitted. But this book’s purpose is not to fill in all the blanks. It is to examine the recurring themes and myths that drive Vladimir Putin’s conviction that war with Ukraine and with western Europe is part of Russia’s historical destiny. For those unfamiliar with the past, this is an indispensable manual for making sense of Russia’s present.”

I’m a psychologist and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health – article by Sanah Ahsan in The Guardian. “As a clinical psychologist who has been working in NHS services for a decade, I’ve seen first hand how we are failing people by locating their problems within them as some kind of mental disorder or psychological issue, and thereby depoliticising their distress. Will six sessions of CBT, designed to target “unhelpful” thinking styles, really be effective for someone who doesn’t know how they’re going to feed their family for another week? Antidepressants aren’t going to eradicate the relentless racial trauma a black man is surviving in a hostile workplace, and branding people who are enduring sexual violence with a psychiatric disorder (in a world where two women a week are murdered in their own home) does nothing to keep them safe. Unsurprisingly, mindfulness isn’t helping children who are navigating poverty, peer pressure and competitive exam-driven school conditions, where bullying and social media harm are rife. If a plant were wilting we wouldn’t diagnose it with 'wilting-plant-syndrome' – we would change its conditions. Yet when humans are suffering under unliveable conditions, we’re told something is wrong with us, and expected to keep pushing through. To keep working and producing, without acknowledging our hurt.”

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf: big ideas from a small town – review by Adam Sisman in The Guardian. “A philosophy student attending a concert in the heart of Germany in the spring of 1797 could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes. Seated in one row were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest writer of the age; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher of the moment, whose packed lectures attracted students from across Europe; Alexander von Humboldt, just setting out on a career that would transform our understanding of the natural world; and August Wilhelm Schlegel, then making a name for himself as a writer, critic and translator. It seemed extraordinary to see so many famous men lined up together. Except that it wasn’t, not then in Jena, a quiet university town at the heart of Germany of only 800 houses and fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. … It happens very occasionally that exceptionally talented people congregate in one place for a while, to encourage and stimulate one another. Jena in the late 1790s and early 1800s was such a town. In this exhilarating book Andrea Wulf tells the story of what she calls ‘the Jena set’.”

Life Is Hard by Kieran Setiya: philosophical self-help – review by Anil Gomes in The Guardian. “Through carefully crafted examples, [Setiya] makes the case that philosophy can help us navigate the adversities of human life: pain, loneliness, grief and so on…. Philosophy’s role here is not primarily analytical. We cannot be argued into coping with suffering. Instead, Setiya’s book is guided by an insight from Iris Murdoch: that philosophical progress often consists of finding new and better ways to describe some stretch of our experience. This kind of progress is not won by logic. It requires careful attention, precise thinking and the ability to draw distinctions that cast light on that which is of value. … And if the prescriptions sometimes seem a little pat, that is a danger inherent to the project. Setiya’s targets are the infirmities of human life in general, but many of the problems that bedevil us are as individual as we are. A philosophy that spoke to our idiosyncratic fears would amount to personalised healthcare. Setiya has his sights on something more fundamental: the problems that afflict us simply by virtue of being human. Any advice offered at such vertiginous levels of generality will always risk sounding platitudinous.”

The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher: how social media rewired our world – review by Simon Parkin in The Guardian. “Inevitably, [Facebook] – and [other companies] like it – claims the patterns of radicalisation and abuse predate social media. Technology, they argue, has merely reduced ‘friction’ in communication, allowing messages to propagate more widely. Clearly a propensity to make snap judgments based on incomplete data, and to join like-minded mobs when pricked by outrage are general human flaws. But this is something else. Fisher explains how social media algorithms and design ‘deliberately shape our experiences’, exerting ‘such a powerful pull on our psychology and our identity that it changes how we think, behave and relate to one another’. He quotes Facebook’s own researchers as saying ‘our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness’, leveraging that flaw to ‘gain user attention and increase time on the platform’. Twitter and Facebook are engineered in ways that ‘supercharge identity into a matter of totalising and existential conflict’ – an idea familiar to anyone who browsed their feeds in the months leading up to the Brexit referendum. In one sense this is a contemporary retelling of the myth of Narcissus. Social media provides the mirror in which we see our ideas and preferences algorithmically reflected. As these beliefs are reinforced, we fall increasingly in love with that reflection until some previously trivial thought or prejudice becomes a defining element of our identity.”

Zadie Smith on discovering the secret history of Black England: ‘Into my ignorance poured these remarkable facts’ – article by Zadie Smith in The Guardian. “The past is not to be played with – but who can resist using it as a tool? ... In 1999, for example, I wanted to know – for reasons of my own self-esteem – that the history of the African diaspora was not solely one of invisible, silent suffering. I wanted to hear about agency, heroism, revolt. I received all of that from [Gretchen Gerzina's] Black England but also something that has proved far more important to me, over time, namely, a sense of the precariousness of 'progress'. It does not move in one direction. Nor are we, in the present, perfected versions of the people of the past. It is very important that we understand the various hypocrisies and contradictions of the abolitionists. But the significance of this knowledge is not solely that we get to feel superior to them. As cathartic as it is to prosecute dead people, after the fact – in that popular courtroom called 'The Right Side of History' – when we hold up a mirror to the past, what we should see most clearly is our own reflection. ... My high regard is not what the dead need or require, because they don’t need anything from me: they are dead. What I need from the dead, by contrast, is to try to comprehend how they lived and why, in the hope it might bring some insight into how we live and why. It’s perfectly obvious to me that white lady abolitionists were often paternalistic, that William Wilberforce’s Christian liberation theology considered negroes childlike innocents in need of protection, and that Harriet Jacobs seems to have mistaken British politeness and relative tolerance for equality before the law and full civil rights. It’s less obvious to me that my own subjectivity is so perfectly enlightened that my only attitude towards such people should be teleological pity or self-righteous contempt.”

Anti-empire, anti-fascist, pro-suffragist: the stunning secret life of Proms staple Jerusalem – article by Jason Whittaker in The Guardian. “By the time Parry set Blake’s lyrics to music, it was increasingly assumed that the poem referred to the legend that Jesus visited Roman Britain. However, there is no reference to this myth before the 1890s, when Victorians sought to emphasise supposed British exceptionalism. Instead, Blake was drawing on an older story, repeated in Milton’s History of Britain, that it was Joseph of Arimathea who travelled west after the death of Jesus and first preached to the ancient Britons. Milton himself had no truck with what he viewed as Papist nonsense, but Blake repeatedly referred to Joseph, lonely and vulnerable on the shores of Albion. To him, Joseph’s primitive Christianity was a rebuke to the organised religion of the Roman and British empires – one where Jerusalem, simply meaning a heavenly city on earth, could be built anywhere.... Joseph preached alone a gospel that matched Blake’s own heretical religious views, one in which Jesus recognised that all deities reside in the human breast. The traditional view of an “out there” God meant, for Blake, the ruler of this world – or Urizen, most famously represented by his image of The Ancient of Days, who imposed his worship by force. As such, for all its martial metaphors, Blake’s fight in Jerusalem was a mental one against the establishment of his day, which was creating an empire built on slavery and warfare in the name of Christianity. By the time of his death in 1827, Blake’s pacifist poem had fallen into obscurity. When it was set to music in 1916, it was transformed into the symbol of a British imperialism that the poet had spent much of his life opposing.”

The library’s new cataloguing system – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. “A guide to the categories of books in our library. Blue: may be read by anyone. Red: may be read under the stern eye of a watchful librarian. Green: may be read from a great distance through a powerful telescope. Buff: may be read on completion of the relevant forms. Blue-green: may be read on completion of a Mission Impossible-style heist. Orange: may be read upon correctly answering three riddles. Purple: may be read under a full moon in the company of the author's ghost. Brown: May be read but never spoken of.”