Jo Brand: ‘Bullies are lurking around every corner' - interview by Eva Wiseman in The Guardian. "Another Friday night, another comedy panel show, another biscuit, maybe two. And then suddenly, we sedentary viewers of 'Have I Got News For You' sat up. It was early in November and, responding to a headline about an MP taking his personal trainer to the cinema, Ian Hislop had chuckled: 'Some of this is not "high-level" crime, is it?' But Jo Brand, hosting, didn’t smile. The temperature changed quite suddenly. 'If I can just say,' she began, 'as the only representative of the female gender here today – I know it’s not high-level, but it doesn’t have to be "high-level" for women to feel under siege in somewhere like the House of Commons. Actually, for women, if you’re constantly being harassed, even in a small way, that builds up, and that wears you down.' There was a pause. Then the audience started cheering.... When John Humphrys’ conversation with Jon Sopel was leaked, and they appeared to joke about the BBC’s pay gap row, Brand 'enjoyed that window into John Humphrys’ mind. Though we all take the piss when we think we’re safe. But it does show what they really think about the pay gap – that they don’t take it seriously. It pisses women off when we feel a genuine cause for anger, and are unsupported by men. Whether it’s something like the pay gap, or someone shouting, "Great knockers!" at a woman in the pub, it’s really common that men will just look away. Things are only going to change when the majority of men step up and support women.'"
Britain’s imperial fantasies have given us Brexit - article by Gary Younge in The Guardian. When the outgoing German ambassador to Britain claimed this week that Brexiteers were fixated on the second world war, he was on to something. ... But Ammon was only half right. For while the Brexit vote was certainly underpinned by a melancholic longing for a glorious past, the era it sought to relive was less the second world war than the longer, less distinguished or openly celebrated period of empire. ... Our colonial past, and the inability to come to terms with its demise, gave many the impression that we are far bigger, stronger and more influential than we really are. ... Douglas Carswell, the sole Ukip MP during the referendum, was raised in Uganda; Arron Banks, who bankrolled Ukip and the xenophobic Leave.EU campaign, spent his childhood in South Africa, where his father ran sugar estates, as well as in Kenya, Ghana and Somalia; Henry Bolton, the current head of Ukip, was born and raised partly in Kenya; Robert Oxley, head of media for Vote Leave, has strong family ties to Zimbabwe. One can only speculate about how much impact these formative years had on their political outlook, (Carswell attributes his libertarianism to Idi Amin’s 'arbitrary rule') but it would be odd to conclude they didn’t have any."
The brave Brexit speech Theresa May is afraid to give? Here it is - article by Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Public opinion is still divided on Brexit. It is not divided on retaining close trade links with Europe, which is supported by some 70%. There is no way we can achieve tariff-free or frictionless access to EU markets other than by accepting the disciplines of those markets. Links with the EU have grown close over 40 years of membership. I ask my colleagues to accept that there is no move among the British people to reverse them. The overwhelming opinion of my advisers and those with whom we have been consulting this past year is that we should retain the existing tariff-free access. This is most simply achieved by being within the European Economic Area (EEA), the so-called Norway option. I know I have rejected the EEA in the past. But I now propose that we should treat it as the template for long-term negotiation, with a cross-party agreement to revisit it in 10 years."
How Democracies Die: Trump and the shredding of norms - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "In early 2016,... the Senate did something it had never done in more than 150 years: it refused even to grant [President Obama's supreme court nominee] a hearing.... Their shared view [was] that any Republican supreme court nominee would be better than any Democratic nominee, and any price was worth paying to achieve that.... This was a preeminent example of what Levitsky and Ziblatt call the erosion of norms, which they consider the greatest threat to contemporary democracy. Norms are the unspoken rules and conventions that hold a democracy together, many of them based on the idea that what’s good for your side in the short term may not do you any good in the long run, because you won’t be in power for ever (if you are, it’s no longer a democracy). When the other side get their turn, your impatience to take advantage will become their licence to exact revenge. ... Levitsky and Ziblatt want to get away from the idea that so long as the constitutional order is intact, democracy will be OK. They are deeply suspicious of any naive faith that deviant politicians can be 'contained' by the right institutions, and not just because it didn’t work out for Weimar Germany with Hitler. They point out that US history is littered with examples of political behaviour that stayed within the letter of the law but still did catastrophic damage to democracy. The racist regime that prevailed in the American south during the first half of the 20th century was underpinned by a set of norms that made hard-won African American voting rights meaningless. The constitution did not have to be overridden to allow this to happen."
The fight for the right to be a Muslim in America - article by Andrew Rice in The Guardian. "There is, literally, an anti-mosque playbook. Tactics were once unwritten, spread through websites and word of mouth, but more recently they were set down in a book titled Mosques in America: A Guide to Accountable Permit Hearings and Continuing Citizen Oversight. Written a Texas attorney, it was published by the Center for Security Policy, an organisation headed by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official who has long espoused the theory that Muslims are engaged in a secret plot to impose sharia law on the US. Gaffney writes in the book’s introduction that it is a 'how-to manual for patriotic Americans who are ready to counter the leading edge of Islamic supremacism'."
Talk is cheap: the myth of the focus group - article by Liza Featherstone in The Guardian, based on her book Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation. "In the early 1950s, the Betty Crocker company had a problem: American housewives liked the idea of cake mix, but they weren’t actually buying it.... Ernest Dichter, a Viennese psychologist who had pioneered a new kind of market research, ... set out to answer the question using a relatively new tool: the focus group. Dichter’s groups for Betty Crocker diagnosed the trouble – women felt guilty that they were not doing the work of baking the cake for their families. Serving prepared foods made them feel inadequate... Focus groups were developed first in academia – by scholars with government contracts tasked with selling the second world war more effectively to the American people. Almost at the same time, similar methods were being developed by the British Labour party, to help them understand why so many working-class voters were turning Conservative.... But what if focus groups have also been part of a process in which citizenship has been reduced to consumerism – a set of choices made passively, under constraint? Focus groups reveal our desires – for a better life, for participation, for power, to be heard – but do they also limit them? Perhaps it is a process through which our aspirations become much smaller. We talk, we feel perhaps that someone has listened, and we demand nothing more."
Look at me: why attention-seeking is the defining need of our times - article by Leo Benedictus in The Guardian, based on his book Consent. "Everyone needs attention, like we need to eat.... Facebook alone harvests and sells the attention of 1.4 billion people every day. That’s about a fifth of the world.... But we can’t know what to make of it until we understand what people need attention for. Attention is other people thinking about you, and if there were ever humans who didn’t need it, they are now extinct.... Specifically, people have been shown to need a type of attention that psychologists call belonging.... Belonging means getting positive attention from people who know you well.... People who feel they don’t belong suffer terribly, and experience health problems comparable to smoking or obesity.... The word loneliness is a good description of the feeling, but not its cause, which in reality has little to do with being alone.... Some lonely people themselves conclude that they aren’t worthy of attention, and withdraw from the world still further. Others search for a feeling of belonging, not always in the best way."
Brave by Rose McGowan: Hollywood’s avenging warrior speaks out - review by Hadley Freeman in The Guardian. "That McGowan has turned out to be an avenging warrior, determined to expose Hollywood’s toxic lies and cover-ups, would have once seemed as improbable as the most ludicrous superhero movie; a spoilt rich guy saving the city while dressed as a bat has nothing on her tale. ... McGowan’s book will not be the best book about the Weinstein scandal, but it may be the most visceral. Anger burns from every page. ... The problem with burning everything down is that it all becomes an indistinguishable pile of ash. The misogyny of gossip blogger Perez Hilton is a worthy target for McGowan; that actors occasionally have to perform wedding scenes is not.... This reads like a book written by a woman driven to near derangement by decades of abuse and gaslighting. At times I wished McGowan could filter her anger, highlighting the real abuses as opposed to folding them in among the generalised sexist garbage. But if she had been able do that she probably wouldn’t have written this book: self-control isn’t helpful when you are kicking down doors. McGowan set out to write a book that examines abuse, and she has done just that. She has also, inadvertently, shown how much damage abuse can wreak in even the toughest of women."
Ms Mansplaining - post by John Naughton, in his Memex 1.1 blog. "I’ve often wondered vaguely where the term 'mansplaining' — the patronising way in which men who know nothing about a subject insist on explaining it to a woman — came from. Now I know... The phrase was coined by the American writer and essayist, Rebecca Solnit. It was prompted by an experience she had at one of those high-end Aspen think-rests in which rich members of the US elite persuade themselves that they are really reallyinterested in ideas. Reflecting on it later, she published a wonderful essay, 'Men Explain Things to Me' in Guernica. ... 'Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, “That’s her book.” Or tried to interrupt him anyway. But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless – for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped.'"
Why Adventure Games suck - blog post by Rob Gilbert, reproducing classic 1989 article from The Journal of Computer Game Design, written while he was designing 'Monkey Island'. "There is a state of mind called 'suspension of disbelief'. When you are watching a movie, or reading a good book, your mind falls into this state. It occurs when you are pulled so completely into the story that you no longer realize you are in a movie theater or sitting at your couch, reading. When the story starts to drag, or the plots begins to fall apart, the suspension of disbelief is lost....The same is true of story games (as well as almost all other kinds of games). As the story builds, we are pulled into the game and leave the real world behind. As designers, our job is to keep people in this state for as long as possible. Every time the player has to restore a saved game, or pound his head on the desk in frustration, the suspension of disbelief is gone. At this time he is most likely to shut off the computer and go watch TV, at which point we all have lost. I have created a set of rules of thumb that will minimize the loss of suspension of disbelief. As with any set of rules, there are always exceptions. In my designs, I hope that if these rules cannot be followed, it is for artistic reasons and not because I am too lazy to do it right. In Maniac Mansion, in one place or another, I violated all but one of these rules. Some of them were violated by design, others by sloppiness. If I could redesign Maniac Mansion, all the violations would be removed and I'd have a much better game."
Is Facebook for old people? Over-55s flock in as the young leave - article by Mark Sweney in The Guardian. "It’s official: Facebook is for old(er) people. Teens and young adults are ditching Mark Zuckerberg’s social network as popularity among the over-55s surges, according to a report. In 2018, 2.2 million 12- to 17-year-olds and 4.5 million 18- to 24-year-olds will regularly use Facebook in the UK, 700,000 fewer than in 2017, as younger users defect to services such as Snapchat, according to eMarketer. A surge in older users means over-55s will become the second-biggest demographic of Facebook users this year."
Dawn of the techlash - article by Rachel Botsman, based on her book Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart. "How did that unbridled enthusiasm for all things digital morph into a critical erosion of trust in technology, particularly in politics? Was 2017 the year of reckoning, when technology suddenly crossed to the dark side or had it been heading that way for some time? It might be useful to recall how social media first discovered its political muscle.... in 2002, [Scott Heiferman] founded Meetup, a social networking platform to help people with a common interest find each other and arrange to meet, face to face. ... In early 2003, ... more than 140,000 Howard Dean grassroots supporters used Meetup to mobilise support.... From attempting to aid revolutions in the Arab spring, to co-ordinating the Occupy Wall Street movement, social networks soon brimmed with ambitions to level the playing field. It was all wildly promising. The internet would be a transparent environment that made it easier for people to hold political leaders accountable and even strengthen people’s capacity to relate to one another. On it went, the golden dream of the digital age, before the invaders arrived. Were we naive? As unprecedented numbers of people channelled their political energies and beliefs into social media, shouldn’t we have foreseen the way the platforms could become vulnerable to manipulation and the spread of misinformation? Probably, but most of us failed to imagine the imaginable."
Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand - article by Mark O'Connell in The Guardian. "If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned [Peter] Thiel’s attraction to New Zealand, ... I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. It was published in 1997, and in recent years something of a minor cult has grown up around it in the tech world, largely as a result of Thiel’s citing it as the book he is most influenced by.... The Sovereign Individual is, in the most literal of senses, an apocalyptic text. [James Dale] Davidson and [William] Rees-Mogg present an explicitly millenarian vision of the near future: the collapse of old orders, the rising of a new world. Liberal democracies will die out, and be replaced by loose confederations of corporate city-states. Western civilisation in its current form, they insist, will end with the millennium. 'The new Sovereign Individual,' they write, 'will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically.' It’s impossible to overstate the darkness and extremity of the book’s predictions of capitalism’s future; to read it is to be continually reminded that the dystopia of your darkest insomniac imaginings is almost always someone else’s dream of a new utopian dawn. Davidson and Rees-Mogg identified New Zealand as an ideal location for this new class of sovereign individuals, as a 'domicile of choice for wealth creation in the Information Age'."
Pushing back: why it's time for women to rewrite the story - article by Sarah Churchwell in The Guardian. "In 1938 a play debuted at the Richmond Theatre, which opens with a Victorian husband telling his wife that though she has been 'very good lately', she mustn’t 'read meanings into everything' or 'imagine things'. ...Her husband is systematically working to extinguish her perspective, to convince her that she is mad. Every night as he searches their attic (for jewels he believes are there), his movements cause the gas lamps to flicker. ... 'Gaslighting' soon came to denote psychological warfare, the deliberate undermining of another’s sanity. More recently, it has been resuscitated as a metaphor for the cultural sabotage of women’s perceptions, for trivialising their concerns as imaginary. ... The question of credibility gained new currency after allegations about Harvey Weinstein triggered the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns – the latest battles in a war women have been waging for centuries against the prerogatives of patriarchy. Storytelling is a key battleground: ... male privilege is the entitlement to be the centre of the story, for male voices to dominate, for male interpretations to define it, for a woman to be dismissed, in the words of the husband in Gas Light,as 'a perfect little silly'.
Five books to understand the left - article by Paul Mason in The Guardian. "[William] Davies’ book The Limits of Neoliberalism sums up the wider thinking of the UK left about the system it is trying to replace. It identifies the coercive imposition of competition by a centralised state as the core problem, and contains the most succinct definition of neoliberalism in the English language: 'the disenchantment of politics by economics'.... The most influential book [of the 2011 protest movements] is the 2009 manifesto The Coming Insurrection, by the French anarchist Invisible Committee, ...its key [being] that the proletariat was over, that the networked human being was the agent of change.... David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5,000 Years ... showed that a historical method derived from Marx could be applied to new anthropological evidence to explain one of the most pressing facts of modern economics: the strangulation of economic dynamism by debt.... If there is a single book that embodies the activist left’s turn towards electoral politics it is Pablo Iglesias’s Politics in a Time of Crisis.... Kimberlé Crenshaw ... pioneered intersectionality theory: ... the most influential framework for understanding the multiple, overlapping oppressions we face, and their relationship both to colonialism and economic exploitation."
What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson: hope, as distinct from optimism - review by Diana Birch in The Guardian. "Marilynne Robinson is a stubborn nonconformist, and her new collection of essays confirms the distance between her combative ideas and the dominant values of the west. ... Her purpose is to claim the respect for human potential, which she sees as the bedrock of Christianity, as a means of countering what she characterises as the 'thinking that tends to devalue humankind, which is an influential tendency in modern culture'. Again and again she attacks the kind of 'cost-benefit analysis' or unthinking 'self-interest' that undermines the responsibility of 'the self as an intelligent moral actor'. She returns to the primacy of the individual that characterised early Protestantism, not as a vindication of the self-seeking economic competition that she sees as a corroding force in the public life of the west, but as an exacting personal obligation to seek the good of others. An especially engaging essay, Grace and Beauty, considers the relation between Robinson’s theological position and her aesthetic practice. 'The standard I use is strictly experiential.' The wish to reauthorise 'experience, felt reality, as one important testimony to the nature of reality itself' is a reminder of her closeness to the traditions of dissenting spiritual autobiographies as testament to an authentic interpretation of our world. No preconceived or willed model for the novel can be a substitute for the strenuous work of the imagination, which is for Robinson always a consequence of a moral understanding of action."
Jessica Jones: mind control and redemption: the timely return of a feminist superhero - article by Zoe Williams in The Guardian. "Jones has superpowers; quite poorly defined ones that mainly involve throwing people... Emotionally, she is held in suspended animation by her PTSD, which was triggered by a series of harrowing events contributing to her traumatic backstory. She is caught in the eye of a three-way storm: the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of Kilgrave; the car crash that killed her entire family; and the institutional violence that somehow bestowed superpowers upon her while she was in a coma... Kilgrave’s abuse ... left her with more than ambient trauma; it hollowed out her belief in her own power as a force for good. In Jessica Jones, the past never passes, just crashes back into the present... The show is ensconced in a noir atmosphere – a feeling prompted by the sense Jessica Jones is so close to the hero that nearly but never was: she is the female Humphrey Bogart. ... Yet there is one trope more unusual still: the strong victim. As a dramatic construct, the victim functions as a frame and counterpoint to the hero. But in the case of Jessica Jones she is both victim and hero. Despite the fact we repeatedly see examples of Jones’s weakness against Kilgrave and a backstory that reveals rape and forced murder, she is not the damsel in distress but the knight."
Wednesday, 7 March 2018
Tuesday, 6 February 2018
Cuttings: January 2018
Astonishing fake in education and training: the graph that never was - post in Plan B blog by Donald Clark. "I have seen this in presentations by the CEO of a large online learning company, Vice-Chancellor of a University, Deloitte’s Bersin, and in innumerable keynotes and talks over many years. It’s a sure sign that the speaker has no real background in learning theory and is basically winging it. Still a staple in education and training, especially in 'train the trainer' and teaching courses, a quick glance is enough to be suspicious.... This is a sorry tale of how a simple model published with lots of original caveats can morph into a meme that actually lies about the author, the numbers, adds categories and is uncritically adopted by educators and trainers."
A matter of taste: six remarkable women and the food they ate - article by Laura Shapiro in The Guardian, based on her book What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. "Tell me what you eat, I longed to say to each woman, and then tell me whether you like to eat alone, and if you really taste the flavours of food or ignore them, or forget all about them a moment later. Tell me what hunger feels like to you, and if you’ve ever experienced it without knowing when you’re going to eat next. Tell me where you buy food, and how you choose it, and whether you spend too much. Tell me what you ate when you were a child, and whether the memory cheers you up or not. Tell me if you cook, and who taught you, and why you don’t cook more often, or less often, or better. ... One of the reasons I began writing about women and food more than 30 years ago was that I was full of questions like these, and I couldn’t find the answers that would satisfy my … well, hunger. ... Food talks – but somebody has to hear it. William Knight, the philosophy professor who was one of the first and most dedicated scholars of the Wordsworths, read through Dorothy’s journals early on and decided they should be edited for publication. ... One gets the sense from Knight’s brief preface to the journals, which he published in 1897, that he was a little irritated by all the meals and domestic doings that Dorothy insisted on telling him about, possibly at the expense of providing more information about the great Romantic. 'There is no need to record all the cases in which the sister wrote, "To-day I mended William’s shirts," or "William gathered sticks," or "I went in search of eggs," etc. etc.,' Knight explained wearily. He assured readers that he had snipped out only the material that plainly lacked 'literary or biographical value'. Later editors put the shirts and the eggs right back in; and to this day The Grasmere Journal is recognised as a classic of intimate prose, with a charm that has outlasted a fair amount of her brother’s verse. This dismissive attitude toward women’s domestic lives continued to flourish for another century or so."
A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War by Patricia Fara – review by Wendy Moore in The Guardian. "Grainy images of women driving ambulances and working in munitions factories in the first world war have become familiar to us all. Yet the remarkable story of the extraordinary women who took over men’s jobs in hospitals, laboratories and government research facilities only to be forced to relinquish them once men returned from the front is largely unknown. Patricia Fara’s important book, the first of many being published to commemorate the centenary of women receiving the vote, is written as a paean to these forgotten pioneers. ... Catapulted into posts previously confined to men, female scientists now turned their talents to the war effort. Women at Sheffield University developed anaesthetics for the wounded, while at the University of Wales they worked on new drugs and explosives. At Imperial College London, chemist Martha Whiteley headed a mainly female team testing hand grenades and poisonous gases, including the first sample of mustard gas, in experimental trenches."
The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain by Lynda Nead – review by Frances Spalding in The Guardian. "This is a luminous book about the greyness that delayed Britain’s search for modernity in the postwar era. It evokes the physical and psychic fabric of this country after six years of war damage. Much was dismal – the slums, poverty and dirt in Victorian cities. Change was desired and imminent when in December 1952 a horrendous fog descended; for five days it kept 8 million Londoners indoors, huddled beside coal fires. The smoke, trapped by a canopy of cold air, made the fog worse. Postwar Britain was still inextricably connected with its 19th-century past.... The Festival of Britain ... set out to portray the present, offer a vision of the future, yet also remind visitors of the past, in a set of buildings on the South Bank that rested on a muddy bombsite, its foundations constructed out of rubble from the Blitz. Picture Post, with its eye for telling detail, described this area as a 'dispiriting no-man’s land, an abandonment of slum and confusion, dust and decay: a hopeless place'. Yet when it was translated from mud into festival many flocked to see the decorative murals, the Skylon, a 300ft-high steel construction which seemed to hang miraculously in the air, and the famous Dome of Discovery, while all around were sudden flashes of strong colour on walls, doors and screens. This began the association of the South Bank with culture. Yet three weeks after the festival closed on 30 September 1951, a general election terminated the Labour government’s programme of social renewal and returned the Conservatives to power under the premiership of Winston Churchill. One of his first acts was to dismantle the entire South Bank site, which he regarded as a symbol of Labour’s profligate spending. With it vanished a sense of forward progress."
‘Never get high on your own supply’: why social media bosses don’t use social media - article by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "For all the industry’s focus on 'eating your own dog food', the most diehard users of social media are rarely those sitting in a position of power.... Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, broke the omertà in October last year, telling a conference in Philadelphia that he was 'something of a conscientious objector' to social media. 'The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them … was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?"’ ... These addictions haven’t happened accidentally, [argues Adam Alter, author of Irristible]. Instead, they are a direct result of the intention of companies such as Facebook and Twitter to build 'sticky' products, ones that we want to come back to over and over again."
Children are tech addicts, and schools are the pushers - article by Elaine Glaser in The Guardian, related to her book Get Real: How to See Through the Hype, Spin and Lies of Modern Life. "As a culture, we are finally waking up to the dark side of new technology. 'The internet is broken', declares the current issue of Wired, the tech insiders’ bible. Last month Rick Webb, an early digital investor, posted a blog titled 'My internet mea culpa'.... He called on the architects of the web to admit that new technology had brought more harm than good.... Not only is screen technology harmful to children per se, there’s little evidence that it helps them to learn.... Education technology is often justified on the grounds that it boosts disadvantaged children, yet research shows it widens rather than bridges socioeconomic divides. ... I don’t want my kids fed into the sausage machine of standardised testing and the bureaucratic 'information economy'. I don’t want them to become robotic competitors to the robots we are told are taking their future jobs. I can opt my children out of RE, but where technology is concerned, I feel bound by a blind determinism. Surely we have a choice, as humans, over the direction technology is taking us, and education is the perfect illustration of this capacity. Our children turn up as blank slates, and learn to design the future. It’s time for schools to join the backlash. It’s time to think again."
How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: Trump and the shredding of norms - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "In early 2016,... the Senate did something it had never done in more than 150 years: it refused even to grant [President Obama's supreme court nominee] a hearing.... Their shared view [was] that any Republican supreme court nominee would be better than any Democratic nominee, and any price was worth paying to achieve that.... This was a preeminent example of what Levitsky and Ziblatt call the erosion of norms, which they consider the greatest threat to contemporary democracy. Norms are the unspoken rules and conventions that hold a democracy together, many of them based on the idea that what’s good for your side in the short term may not do you any good in the long run, because you won’t be in power for ever (if you are, it’s no longer a democracy). When the other side get their turn, your impatience to take advantage will become their licence to exact revenge. ... Levitsky and Ziblatt want to get away from the idea that so long as the constitutional order is intact, democracy will be OK. They are deeply suspicious of any naive faith that deviant politicians can be 'contained' by the right institutions, and not just because it didn’t work out for Weimar Germany with Hitler. They point out that US history is littered with examples of political behaviour that stayed within the letter of the law but still did catastrophic damage to democracy. The racist regime that prevailed in the American south during the first half of the 20th century was underpinned by a set of norms that made hard-won African American voting rights meaningless. The constitution did not have to be overridden to allow this to happen."
A matter of taste: six remarkable women and the food they ate - article by Laura Shapiro in The Guardian, based on her book What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. "Tell me what you eat, I longed to say to each woman, and then tell me whether you like to eat alone, and if you really taste the flavours of food or ignore them, or forget all about them a moment later. Tell me what hunger feels like to you, and if you’ve ever experienced it without knowing when you’re going to eat next. Tell me where you buy food, and how you choose it, and whether you spend too much. Tell me what you ate when you were a child, and whether the memory cheers you up or not. Tell me if you cook, and who taught you, and why you don’t cook more often, or less often, or better. ... One of the reasons I began writing about women and food more than 30 years ago was that I was full of questions like these, and I couldn’t find the answers that would satisfy my … well, hunger. ... Food talks – but somebody has to hear it. William Knight, the philosophy professor who was one of the first and most dedicated scholars of the Wordsworths, read through Dorothy’s journals early on and decided they should be edited for publication. ... One gets the sense from Knight’s brief preface to the journals, which he published in 1897, that he was a little irritated by all the meals and domestic doings that Dorothy insisted on telling him about, possibly at the expense of providing more information about the great Romantic. 'There is no need to record all the cases in which the sister wrote, "To-day I mended William’s shirts," or "William gathered sticks," or "I went in search of eggs," etc. etc.,' Knight explained wearily. He assured readers that he had snipped out only the material that plainly lacked 'literary or biographical value'. Later editors put the shirts and the eggs right back in; and to this day The Grasmere Journal is recognised as a classic of intimate prose, with a charm that has outlasted a fair amount of her brother’s verse. This dismissive attitude toward women’s domestic lives continued to flourish for another century or so."
A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War by Patricia Fara – review by Wendy Moore in The Guardian. "Grainy images of women driving ambulances and working in munitions factories in the first world war have become familiar to us all. Yet the remarkable story of the extraordinary women who took over men’s jobs in hospitals, laboratories and government research facilities only to be forced to relinquish them once men returned from the front is largely unknown. Patricia Fara’s important book, the first of many being published to commemorate the centenary of women receiving the vote, is written as a paean to these forgotten pioneers. ... Catapulted into posts previously confined to men, female scientists now turned their talents to the war effort. Women at Sheffield University developed anaesthetics for the wounded, while at the University of Wales they worked on new drugs and explosives. At Imperial College London, chemist Martha Whiteley headed a mainly female team testing hand grenades and poisonous gases, including the first sample of mustard gas, in experimental trenches."
The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain by Lynda Nead – review by Frances Spalding in The Guardian. "This is a luminous book about the greyness that delayed Britain’s search for modernity in the postwar era. It evokes the physical and psychic fabric of this country after six years of war damage. Much was dismal – the slums, poverty and dirt in Victorian cities. Change was desired and imminent when in December 1952 a horrendous fog descended; for five days it kept 8 million Londoners indoors, huddled beside coal fires. The smoke, trapped by a canopy of cold air, made the fog worse. Postwar Britain was still inextricably connected with its 19th-century past.... The Festival of Britain ... set out to portray the present, offer a vision of the future, yet also remind visitors of the past, in a set of buildings on the South Bank that rested on a muddy bombsite, its foundations constructed out of rubble from the Blitz. Picture Post, with its eye for telling detail, described this area as a 'dispiriting no-man’s land, an abandonment of slum and confusion, dust and decay: a hopeless place'. Yet when it was translated from mud into festival many flocked to see the decorative murals, the Skylon, a 300ft-high steel construction which seemed to hang miraculously in the air, and the famous Dome of Discovery, while all around were sudden flashes of strong colour on walls, doors and screens. This began the association of the South Bank with culture. Yet three weeks after the festival closed on 30 September 1951, a general election terminated the Labour government’s programme of social renewal and returned the Conservatives to power under the premiership of Winston Churchill. One of his first acts was to dismantle the entire South Bank site, which he regarded as a symbol of Labour’s profligate spending. With it vanished a sense of forward progress."
‘Never get high on your own supply’: why social media bosses don’t use social media - article by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "For all the industry’s focus on 'eating your own dog food', the most diehard users of social media are rarely those sitting in a position of power.... Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, broke the omertà in October last year, telling a conference in Philadelphia that he was 'something of a conscientious objector' to social media. 'The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them … was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?"’ ... These addictions haven’t happened accidentally, [argues Adam Alter, author of Irristible]. Instead, they are a direct result of the intention of companies such as Facebook and Twitter to build 'sticky' products, ones that we want to come back to over and over again."
Children are tech addicts, and schools are the pushers - article by Elaine Glaser in The Guardian, related to her book Get Real: How to See Through the Hype, Spin and Lies of Modern Life. "As a culture, we are finally waking up to the dark side of new technology. 'The internet is broken', declares the current issue of Wired, the tech insiders’ bible. Last month Rick Webb, an early digital investor, posted a blog titled 'My internet mea culpa'.... He called on the architects of the web to admit that new technology had brought more harm than good.... Not only is screen technology harmful to children per se, there’s little evidence that it helps them to learn.... Education technology is often justified on the grounds that it boosts disadvantaged children, yet research shows it widens rather than bridges socioeconomic divides. ... I don’t want my kids fed into the sausage machine of standardised testing and the bureaucratic 'information economy'. I don’t want them to become robotic competitors to the robots we are told are taking their future jobs. I can opt my children out of RE, but where technology is concerned, I feel bound by a blind determinism. Surely we have a choice, as humans, over the direction technology is taking us, and education is the perfect illustration of this capacity. Our children turn up as blank slates, and learn to design the future. It’s time for schools to join the backlash. It’s time to think again."
How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: Trump and the shredding of norms - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "In early 2016,... the Senate did something it had never done in more than 150 years: it refused even to grant [President Obama's supreme court nominee] a hearing.... Their shared view [was] that any Republican supreme court nominee would be better than any Democratic nominee, and any price was worth paying to achieve that.... This was a preeminent example of what Levitsky and Ziblatt call the erosion of norms, which they consider the greatest threat to contemporary democracy. Norms are the unspoken rules and conventions that hold a democracy together, many of them based on the idea that what’s good for your side in the short term may not do you any good in the long run, because you won’t be in power for ever (if you are, it’s no longer a democracy). When the other side get their turn, your impatience to take advantage will become their licence to exact revenge. ... Levitsky and Ziblatt want to get away from the idea that so long as the constitutional order is intact, democracy will be OK. They are deeply suspicious of any naive faith that deviant politicians can be 'contained' by the right institutions, and not just because it didn’t work out for Weimar Germany with Hitler. They point out that US history is littered with examples of political behaviour that stayed within the letter of the law but still did catastrophic damage to democracy. The racist regime that prevailed in the American south during the first half of the 20th century was underpinned by a set of norms that made hard-won African American voting rights meaningless. The constitution did not have to be overridden to allow this to happen."
Wednesday, 24 January 2018
Mrs Brown and the Revolution: a tribute to Ursula Le Guin
In grateful thanks for the life and writings of Ursula Le Guin, who died on Monday, this is a tribute article which I wrote back in 1980 when I was 21. Her words brought me life.
What sort of science fiction writer says that? The sort whose parents were a leading anthropologist and a writer. Le Guin was born in 1929, youngest child of Alfred and Theodore Kroeber, and absorbed anthropology “by osmosis” in that stimulating family. Her brother Ted taught her to read, having got fed up with having an illiterate five-year-old sister about the place, and she read Lady Frazer’s Leaves from the Golden Bough “like Peter Rabbit”, as well as Norse and Indian myths. She and her brothers read science fiction, but in the late 1940s it “seemed to be all about hardware and soldiers ... starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery”;[2] so she moved on to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky instead. It was not till 1960, after the death of her father, that she found her way back to science fiction and into print. Fifteen years later, she was a leading writer in the genre, and giving a lecture of ‘Science Fiction and Mrs Brown’.
By regarding character as the essential feature of the novel, Le Guin immediately sets herself apart from the mass of science fiction, and she finds in it much to complain of. At a conference in 1974, overstating deliberately to start a discussion, she singled out American science fiction’s treatment of The Other - the being who is different in sex, in class, in culture, or in race; typically, she said, we find gormless women, faceless masses and imperialists, and monstrous aliens. The Other is wholly alienated.
The paperback publishers, however, know their market, so that even Le Guin’s books commonly appear making them out to be action-packed adventure stories, and the Penguin edition of the Earthsea trilogy has on its cover the picture of a demented-looking punk rocker with sparks shooting out of his fingertips. Yet her stories are not about power and conquest, but rather the failure of power, “the essential wastefulness and futility of aggression and the profound effectiveness of wu wei,”[5] the Taoist concept of ‘actionless action’ or ‘action through stillness’. They are not stories of success in any usual sense; as the narrator of one of her novels says, “if you’d like a story about how I won my basketball colour and achieved fame, love, and fortune, don’t read this.”[6] Le Guin’s books do not, as a result, have a traditional, victorious, “happy ending”.
For instance, A Wizard of Earthsea is the story of a young wizard named Ged, who in a fit of supreme arrogance and jealousy tries to summon a spirit of the dead, thus unintentionally releasing a shadow-beast which hunts him through the world. Desparately he tries to learn the shadow’s name, for knowledge of its true name will give him power over it. One might expect the story to end with the destruction of the shadow, for in the familiar Manichaean or Christian mythology, light is good and darkness evil and light ultimately prevails; but in the Taoist philosophy, light is not at war with darkness and does not destroy it. All Ged’s efforts to bring wizardly power against his shadow end in disaster; he does not destroy it.
A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else is a short realistic novel set in contemporary America. Owen Griffiths is a seventeen-year-old loner, on the verge of a breakdown because his father has just given him a car for his birthday - when the one thing he knows about himself is that he is not the car-loving all-American-kid which he is expected to be. On the bus, he meets Natalie Field, eighteen months older than him, whose ambition it is to be a composer; and in unthinking desperation he starts clowning with her, going into an imitation of an ape. They start to meet and talk together a lot, and their friendship flourishes, though Owen can never understand why Natalie becomes helpless with laughter whenever he goes into the ape-act. But this is not a love-story; they do not get married; they do not sleep together; what happens is that Owen feels pressure all around him to make their friendship into a love-affair, and when he tries, it all goes to pieces. The book ends with Natalie leaving town to go to Tanglewood music college.
Malafrena is set in an imaginary central European country in the revolutionary years of the early nineteenth century; it is Le Guin’s homage to Tolstoy, her War and Peace. The young Itale Sorde leaves his family’s estates in Malafrena for political activity in the capital, Krasnoy. Before he leaves, he affectionately gives his cousin Piera a copy of Dante’s Vita Nova, inscribing inside: “‘Here begins the new life.’ Piera Valtorskar from Itale Sorde, 5 August 1825.” In Krasnoy, he meets other intellectuals, including the poet Estenskar, and they start a radical paper which they call Novesma Verba. But the domination of the Hapsburg Empire continues, Itale is imprisoned for subversive journalism, and when Estenskar returns home he sees the farewell message which he carved on a tower wall many years earlier: “vincam”, I shall conquer; and confronted by his proud, youthful boast, he commits suicide soon afterwards. Itale is released from prison, barely alive; he is on the barricades in the uprising of 1848 where he sees the revolution effortlessly suppressed; and he returns to Malafrena, where Piera, who has meanwhile made a career for herself in running her father’s estates, gives him back the Vita Nova. “I’ll write something in it, if you like, to make it more of a present.... Here ends the new life. With affection, from Piera Valtorskar. Would that do?” The collapse of Itale’s ambitions is hard to bear; there is no victory in Malafrena.
The Dispossessed is Le Guin’s best-known work, already something of a classic in certain left-wing circles, and said to be Ken Livingstone’s favourite book. [Postscript 2018: when this was written, Livingstone was the radical leader of the Greater London Council.] It is set partly on the planet Urras, partly on its sister planet Annares, on which the followers of the anarchist philosopher Odo have set up a Utopian society. There is no state, no social hierarchy, no money, and most important of all no private property; even the language is reconstructed so that one would not normally say “my handkerchief” but rather “the handkerchief I use”. Existing at subsistence level on a barren and infertile planet, they survive by an ideology of sharing - both work and commodities. Shevek, an Annaresti physicist, travels to Urras where he encounters its affluent capitalist society, and is first puzzled then repelled by it. He sees that the Annaresti have nothing, except one another, and possessing nothing they are free; that the Urrasti are rich, they own, and by possessing they are themselves possessed, each alone in prison with a heap of what he owns, and walls are all that he can see in their eyes. If The Dispossessed were a different sort of book, it would end with the revolution of the Urrasti proletariat and the vindication of Odonian anarchism; but Annares is, as the subtitle says, ‘an ambiguous Utopia’, and the revolutionary state is itself in need of revolution. There are supposed to be no rules, but children are being taught to parrot the words of Odo as the new orthodoxy; there is supposed to be no police and no punishment, but when one of Shevek’s friends writes a supposedly anti-Odonian play he is ostracised, keeps getting manual-labour postings, and is driven into applying for a place in a lunatic asylum; there is supposed to be freedom of thought, but though Shevek is manifestly the most brilliant physicist on Annares, all his original ideas are condemned as ‘egoising’, and it is this which drives him into undertaking the voyage to Urras. And though on Urras the underground movement takes Shevek’s arrival as a signal for the revolution and organises a general strike and mass meetings, the crowds are mown down by machine-gun fire from helicopters and armed troops. But not before Shevek has addressed them; and some of his words are the key to Le Guin’s Taoist humanism.
The final effect given by “so much of the old Man-Conquers-Cosmos sf” is, says Le Guin, depressing. “When you’ve conquered the cosmos all that’s left to do is sit down, like Alexander the Great, and cry.”[7] Her writing, though not cheerful and upbeat, is not depressing in its final effect. Ged names his shadow with his own name, and in doing so makes himself whole: “a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.” Owen Griffiths hears some of Natalie’s songs performed, and at that moment sees Natalie as she is; and when she leaves for Tanglewood he does not do the ape act: “I stood there and did the human act as well as possible.” Itale Sorde gives back to Piera the Vita Nova which he have her when he first left Malafrena: “I didn’t know why I left till I came back - I have to come back to find that I have to go again. I haven’t even begun the new life yet. I am always beginning it. I will die beginning it. Will you keep it for me, Piera?” And Shevek returns to Annares, without possessions, as he left it; “his hands were empty, as they had always been.” In the last few words each story comes whole, comes complete, comes true: like the universe or a human life, like Mrs Brown or the Revolution.
[2] ‘A Citizen of Mondrath’
[3] ‘American SF and the Other’
[4] Science Fiction Studies, vol 2, p. 142
[5] Planet of Exile, introduction to 1979 edition
[6] A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else
[7] Nebula Award Stories, Introduction
Mrs Brown and the Revolution: The Taoist Humanism of Ursula K. Le Guin
‘Mrs Brown’ was the name Virginia Woolf gave to an old lady who sat opposite her in a railway carriage in the train going from Richmond to Waterloo, her example of the character who appears to the novelist, inside a railway carriage or inside the mind, and from whom a novel grows. In 1975, giving a lecture in London, Ursula Le Guin talked about Mrs Brown and about science fiction, and whether the writer of science fiction could sit down in the corner opposite to Mrs Brown and put her into a story, could deal with character, could write (in Woolf’s sense) a novel. For Le Guin, this was the whole point; unless Mrs Brown could be somehow included aboard the gleaming faster-than-light space-ship then imagination and invention were in vain. “If Mrs Brown is dead, you can take your galaxies and roll them up into a ball and throw them into the trashcan, for all I care. What good are all the objects in the universe if there is no subject?”[1]What sort of science fiction writer says that? The sort whose parents were a leading anthropologist and a writer. Le Guin was born in 1929, youngest child of Alfred and Theodore Kroeber, and absorbed anthropology “by osmosis” in that stimulating family. Her brother Ted taught her to read, having got fed up with having an illiterate five-year-old sister about the place, and she read Lady Frazer’s Leaves from the Golden Bough “like Peter Rabbit”, as well as Norse and Indian myths. She and her brothers read science fiction, but in the late 1940s it “seemed to be all about hardware and soldiers ... starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery”;[2] so she moved on to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky instead. It was not till 1960, after the death of her father, that she found her way back to science fiction and into print. Fifteen years later, she was a leading writer in the genre, and giving a lecture of ‘Science Fiction and Mrs Brown’.
By regarding character as the essential feature of the novel, Le Guin immediately sets herself apart from the mass of science fiction, and she finds in it much to complain of. At a conference in 1974, overstating deliberately to start a discussion, she singled out American science fiction’s treatment of The Other - the being who is different in sex, in class, in culture, or in race; typically, she said, we find gormless women, faceless masses and imperialists, and monstrous aliens. The Other is wholly alienated.
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself ... you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.She has a similar contempt for the sword and sorcery tradition, and was therefore delighted by Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream, which presents a ‘heroic fantasy’ story written by Adolf Hitler. It has all the familiar features: the virile Hero; the Hero’s Friends; the vile, subhuman enemies; the Hero’s Sword; the usual tests, quests, battles, victories; but “in reading it, reading all the familiar things about the glory of battle, the foulness of enemies of the truth, the joys of obedience to a true leader, the reader is forced to remember that it is Hitler saying these things - and thus to question what is said, over and over.”[4]
... In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women....
Is this speculation? is this imagination? is this extrapolation? I call it brainless regressivism.[3].
The paperback publishers, however, know their market, so that even Le Guin’s books commonly appear making them out to be action-packed adventure stories, and the Penguin edition of the Earthsea trilogy has on its cover the picture of a demented-looking punk rocker with sparks shooting out of his fingertips. Yet her stories are not about power and conquest, but rather the failure of power, “the essential wastefulness and futility of aggression and the profound effectiveness of wu wei,”[5] the Taoist concept of ‘actionless action’ or ‘action through stillness’. They are not stories of success in any usual sense; as the narrator of one of her novels says, “if you’d like a story about how I won my basketball colour and achieved fame, love, and fortune, don’t read this.”[6] Le Guin’s books do not, as a result, have a traditional, victorious, “happy ending”.
For instance, A Wizard of Earthsea is the story of a young wizard named Ged, who in a fit of supreme arrogance and jealousy tries to summon a spirit of the dead, thus unintentionally releasing a shadow-beast which hunts him through the world. Desparately he tries to learn the shadow’s name, for knowledge of its true name will give him power over it. One might expect the story to end with the destruction of the shadow, for in the familiar Manichaean or Christian mythology, light is good and darkness evil and light ultimately prevails; but in the Taoist philosophy, light is not at war with darkness and does not destroy it. All Ged’s efforts to bring wizardly power against his shadow end in disaster; he does not destroy it.
A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else is a short realistic novel set in contemporary America. Owen Griffiths is a seventeen-year-old loner, on the verge of a breakdown because his father has just given him a car for his birthday - when the one thing he knows about himself is that he is not the car-loving all-American-kid which he is expected to be. On the bus, he meets Natalie Field, eighteen months older than him, whose ambition it is to be a composer; and in unthinking desperation he starts clowning with her, going into an imitation of an ape. They start to meet and talk together a lot, and their friendship flourishes, though Owen can never understand why Natalie becomes helpless with laughter whenever he goes into the ape-act. But this is not a love-story; they do not get married; they do not sleep together; what happens is that Owen feels pressure all around him to make their friendship into a love-affair, and when he tries, it all goes to pieces. The book ends with Natalie leaving town to go to Tanglewood music college.
Malafrena is set in an imaginary central European country in the revolutionary years of the early nineteenth century; it is Le Guin’s homage to Tolstoy, her War and Peace. The young Itale Sorde leaves his family’s estates in Malafrena for political activity in the capital, Krasnoy. Before he leaves, he affectionately gives his cousin Piera a copy of Dante’s Vita Nova, inscribing inside: “‘Here begins the new life.’ Piera Valtorskar from Itale Sorde, 5 August 1825.” In Krasnoy, he meets other intellectuals, including the poet Estenskar, and they start a radical paper which they call Novesma Verba. But the domination of the Hapsburg Empire continues, Itale is imprisoned for subversive journalism, and when Estenskar returns home he sees the farewell message which he carved on a tower wall many years earlier: “vincam”, I shall conquer; and confronted by his proud, youthful boast, he commits suicide soon afterwards. Itale is released from prison, barely alive; he is on the barricades in the uprising of 1848 where he sees the revolution effortlessly suppressed; and he returns to Malafrena, where Piera, who has meanwhile made a career for herself in running her father’s estates, gives him back the Vita Nova. “I’ll write something in it, if you like, to make it more of a present.... Here ends the new life. With affection, from Piera Valtorskar. Would that do?” The collapse of Itale’s ambitions is hard to bear; there is no victory in Malafrena.
The Dispossessed is Le Guin’s best-known work, already something of a classic in certain left-wing circles, and said to be Ken Livingstone’s favourite book. [Postscript 2018: when this was written, Livingstone was the radical leader of the Greater London Council.] It is set partly on the planet Urras, partly on its sister planet Annares, on which the followers of the anarchist philosopher Odo have set up a Utopian society. There is no state, no social hierarchy, no money, and most important of all no private property; even the language is reconstructed so that one would not normally say “my handkerchief” but rather “the handkerchief I use”. Existing at subsistence level on a barren and infertile planet, they survive by an ideology of sharing - both work and commodities. Shevek, an Annaresti physicist, travels to Urras where he encounters its affluent capitalist society, and is first puzzled then repelled by it. He sees that the Annaresti have nothing, except one another, and possessing nothing they are free; that the Urrasti are rich, they own, and by possessing they are themselves possessed, each alone in prison with a heap of what he owns, and walls are all that he can see in their eyes. If The Dispossessed were a different sort of book, it would end with the revolution of the Urrasti proletariat and the vindication of Odonian anarchism; but Annares is, as the subtitle says, ‘an ambiguous Utopia’, and the revolutionary state is itself in need of revolution. There are supposed to be no rules, but children are being taught to parrot the words of Odo as the new orthodoxy; there is supposed to be no police and no punishment, but when one of Shevek’s friends writes a supposedly anti-Odonian play he is ostracised, keeps getting manual-labour postings, and is driven into applying for a place in a lunatic asylum; there is supposed to be freedom of thought, but though Shevek is manifestly the most brilliant physicist on Annares, all his original ideas are condemned as ‘egoising’, and it is this which drives him into undertaking the voyage to Urras. And though on Urras the underground movement takes Shevek’s arrival as a signal for the revolution and organises a general strike and mass meetings, the crowds are mown down by machine-gun fire from helicopters and armed troops. But not before Shevek has addressed them; and some of his words are the key to Le Guin’s Taoist humanism.
If it is Annares you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands.... You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.To a Taoist, even an inconsistent on (all that Le Guin claims to be), “you can only be the Revolution” is a simple basic truth. ‘Revolution’ does not just mean an overturning, as in a political revolution, the Marxist revolution; it also means a continuous turning, in the way that a wheel revolves, or the universe revolves, or Nature revolves, cycles, changes, is always made new. According to the Taoist philosophy, the sage does not dominate Nature, seeking to rule it from above, in the way that Confucians and Legalists sought to impose law and morality on society; instead, they follow Nature, they submit to it and thus rule it from beneath, in the way that the anarchic society is ruled from beneath. And as the universe is at balance, is whole, is complete, so the sage who follows Nature’s way is whole and complete. You (as human person) can only be the (Taoist) Revolution.
The final effect given by “so much of the old Man-Conquers-Cosmos sf” is, says Le Guin, depressing. “When you’ve conquered the cosmos all that’s left to do is sit down, like Alexander the Great, and cry.”[7] Her writing, though not cheerful and upbeat, is not depressing in its final effect. Ged names his shadow with his own name, and in doing so makes himself whole: “a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.” Owen Griffiths hears some of Natalie’s songs performed, and at that moment sees Natalie as she is; and when she leaves for Tanglewood he does not do the ape act: “I stood there and did the human act as well as possible.” Itale Sorde gives back to Piera the Vita Nova which he have her when he first left Malafrena: “I didn’t know why I left till I came back - I have to come back to find that I have to go again. I haven’t even begun the new life yet. I am always beginning it. I will die beginning it. Will you keep it for me, Piera?” And Shevek returns to Annares, without possessions, as he left it; “his hands were empty, as they had always been.” In the last few words each story comes whole, comes complete, comes true: like the universe or a human life, like Mrs Brown or the Revolution.
References
[1] ‘Science Fiction and Mrs Brown’[2] ‘A Citizen of Mondrath’
[3] ‘American SF and the Other’
[4] Science Fiction Studies, vol 2, p. 142
[5] Planet of Exile, introduction to 1979 edition
[6] A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else
[7] Nebula Award Stories, Introduction
Saturday, 6 January 2018
Seen and heard: October to December 2017
Nelly Cootalot and the Fowl Fleet – charming, very funny, very British adventure game, featuring the eponymous Northern pirate whose special interest is in rescuing seabirds. Handcrafted with love, played with joy. The author–artist, to judge by his Kickstarter video, is a hoot.
Monument Valley 2 – beautiful sequel to the very wonderful puzzle game. As with the original, there’s not much head-scratching, because you usually have only one possible path forward; the beauty lies in the progressive unfolding of the intricate designs and the Zen-like atmosphere.
Richard Alston Dance Company performing at Northampton Derngate – three pieces: Carnaval (to the music of Schumann), Chacony (Purcell) and Gypsy Mixture (Electric Gypsyland – Balkan music meets Techno with a DJ remix). Always a pleasure to see them, and the Gypsy Mixture is a cracker.
The Party – new film by Sally Potter. Rising politician (Kristin Scott-Thomas) entertains family and friends to celebrate her career triumph, but a personal revelation from her husband (Timothy Spall) releases chaos and breakdown in this smart North London set. A gem of a film: just 70 mins in a single location, but a good script and the magnetic performances you would expect from this cast.
W1A – third and final series of the spoof fly-on-the-wall comedy, set in BBC management, though the idiocies and self-inflicted screw-ups will be familiar to anyone who has worked in a large organisation. It’s certainly helped keep me sane these last few months, my favourite bit being when the team are trying to implement the new BBC strategy “More of less” and their first task is to work out what it actually means. “Basically,” says Anna Rampton, Head of Better, “we need to find out what we do best, and do more of less of it.” So that’s all good then.
Gunpowder – gripping and grisly TV drama, convincingly showing the origins of the Gunpowder Plot in the persecutions of Catholics of seventeenth-century England, with a sympathetic portrayal of lead conspirator Robert Catesby by Kit Harrington (his descendent) and Mark Gatiss playing rgw King’s right-hand man Robert Cecil as an evil spider.
The Way – beautiful, slow, powerful film with Martin Sheen as a stuffy respectable ophthalmologist moved to follow in the footsteps of his son who died walking the Camino de Santiago. Falling in with other pilgrims along the way, we see how all of them are changed by the physical and spiritual journey.
Howards End – BBC TV drama series, not about to supplant the Merchant–Ivory–Jhabvala 1992 film in our affections, but definitely superior in its finer detail of cringe-making class-divisive situations and conversation. Margaret’s marriage to Henry Wilcox is also more comprehensible than with the (otherwise excellent) Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins.
Wonder Woman – a surprisingly successful film, given many people's high personal investment in the character and the multitude of ways in which it could have gone wrong. Definitely helped by having a woman director (Patty Jenkins) really committed to the project and a star (Gal Gadot) with a wider acting range than the boys currently inhabiting the tights and the batsuit. Women seem to like it, and I love the concept of a superhero whose coming of age story is the realisation that she cannot save the world.
The Wolf Among Us – well-reviewed narrative game from Telltale. Excellent concept (derived from a comic book), in which fairy tale characters, exiled from their homelands, are living as an immigrant community in New York. This is game noir: you play the community’s sheriff, Bigby Wolf, walking through a seedy underworld as he investigates two grisly murders. Some of the characters really work: Tweedledum and Tweedledee as a pair of violent thugs-for-hire, George Porgie as a pimp and owner of the Pudding and Pie nightclub, Snow White running the Fabletown district office and trying to maintain some kind of decency and order. But I did get fed up with the repetitive fighting and violence. I won’t be revisiting Fabletown for the sequel.
Feud: Bette and Joan – very classy TV drama series, tracing the hostile relationship between Joan Crawford and Bette Davies which blew up when they starred together in the 1962 film 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane'. Tremendous period detail and quality performances (Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Alfred Molina, Stanley Tucci, etc) which all illuminate the sexual politics of Hollywood, both past and present.
A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov by Peter Bowler – a summary of futuristic visions, both utopian and dystopian, during the period in which people genuinely thought that science and technology could save the world, or destroy it. (That level of hyperbole is now reserved for digital technology.) The material is potent, especially if (like me) you can remember when such visions were part of popular culture, but this is really only a surface summary; I don’t get any sense of why people are thinking this way or what is driving and sustaining these world views. So there’s still a good book to be written about this.
The Miniaturist – TV domestic drama set in seventeenth-century Protestant Amsterdam. Visually stunning and decidedly creepy, with shades of Rebecca.
Kingsman: The Secret Service – comic-book thriller with an ironic take on sixties spy films. Nice to see Colin Firth in an action role, but I was troubled by the jaunty attitude to the excessive, if surreal, violence.
Monument Valley 2 – beautiful sequel to the very wonderful puzzle game. As with the original, there’s not much head-scratching, because you usually have only one possible path forward; the beauty lies in the progressive unfolding of the intricate designs and the Zen-like atmosphere.
Richard Alston Dance Company performing at Northampton Derngate – three pieces: Carnaval (to the music of Schumann), Chacony (Purcell) and Gypsy Mixture (Electric Gypsyland – Balkan music meets Techno with a DJ remix). Always a pleasure to see them, and the Gypsy Mixture is a cracker.
The Party – new film by Sally Potter. Rising politician (Kristin Scott-Thomas) entertains family and friends to celebrate her career triumph, but a personal revelation from her husband (Timothy Spall) releases chaos and breakdown in this smart North London set. A gem of a film: just 70 mins in a single location, but a good script and the magnetic performances you would expect from this cast.
W1A – third and final series of the spoof fly-on-the-wall comedy, set in BBC management, though the idiocies and self-inflicted screw-ups will be familiar to anyone who has worked in a large organisation. It’s certainly helped keep me sane these last few months, my favourite bit being when the team are trying to implement the new BBC strategy “More of less” and their first task is to work out what it actually means. “Basically,” says Anna Rampton, Head of Better, “we need to find out what we do best, and do more of less of it.” So that’s all good then.
Gunpowder – gripping and grisly TV drama, convincingly showing the origins of the Gunpowder Plot in the persecutions of Catholics of seventeenth-century England, with a sympathetic portrayal of lead conspirator Robert Catesby by Kit Harrington (his descendent) and Mark Gatiss playing rgw King’s right-hand man Robert Cecil as an evil spider.
The Way – beautiful, slow, powerful film with Martin Sheen as a stuffy respectable ophthalmologist moved to follow in the footsteps of his son who died walking the Camino de Santiago. Falling in with other pilgrims along the way, we see how all of them are changed by the physical and spiritual journey.
Howards End – BBC TV drama series, not about to supplant the Merchant–Ivory–Jhabvala 1992 film in our affections, but definitely superior in its finer detail of cringe-making class-divisive situations and conversation. Margaret’s marriage to Henry Wilcox is also more comprehensible than with the (otherwise excellent) Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins.
Wonder Woman – a surprisingly successful film, given many people's high personal investment in the character and the multitude of ways in which it could have gone wrong. Definitely helped by having a woman director (Patty Jenkins) really committed to the project and a star (Gal Gadot) with a wider acting range than the boys currently inhabiting the tights and the batsuit. Women seem to like it, and I love the concept of a superhero whose coming of age story is the realisation that she cannot save the world.
The Wolf Among Us – well-reviewed narrative game from Telltale. Excellent concept (derived from a comic book), in which fairy tale characters, exiled from their homelands, are living as an immigrant community in New York. This is game noir: you play the community’s sheriff, Bigby Wolf, walking through a seedy underworld as he investigates two grisly murders. Some of the characters really work: Tweedledum and Tweedledee as a pair of violent thugs-for-hire, George Porgie as a pimp and owner of the Pudding and Pie nightclub, Snow White running the Fabletown district office and trying to maintain some kind of decency and order. But I did get fed up with the repetitive fighting and violence. I won’t be revisiting Fabletown for the sequel.
Feud: Bette and Joan – very classy TV drama series, tracing the hostile relationship between Joan Crawford and Bette Davies which blew up when they starred together in the 1962 film 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane'. Tremendous period detail and quality performances (Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Alfred Molina, Stanley Tucci, etc) which all illuminate the sexual politics of Hollywood, both past and present.
A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov by Peter Bowler – a summary of futuristic visions, both utopian and dystopian, during the period in which people genuinely thought that science and technology could save the world, or destroy it. (That level of hyperbole is now reserved for digital technology.) The material is potent, especially if (like me) you can remember when such visions were part of popular culture, but this is really only a surface summary; I don’t get any sense of why people are thinking this way or what is driving and sustaining these world views. So there’s still a good book to be written about this.
The Miniaturist – TV domestic drama set in seventeenth-century Protestant Amsterdam. Visually stunning and decidedly creepy, with shades of Rebecca.
Kingsman: The Secret Service – comic-book thriller with an ironic take on sixties spy films. Nice to see Colin Firth in an action role, but I was troubled by the jaunty attitude to the excessive, if surreal, violence.
Friday, 5 January 2018
Cuttings: December 2017
University Challenge rivals Eric Monkman and Bobby Seagull: ‘I think people like us … I don’t think they’re walking away laughing’ - interview by Emine Saner in The Guardian. "Seagull went to Eton on a scholarship to do his A-levels. He grew up on a council estate in east London, one of four sons who all thrived at school and ended up at either Oxford or Cambridge. His parents had moved to Britain from India in the 70s; his father worked as an accountant while his mother raised the boys... At his school (where the headteacher was Michael Wilshaw, who later became the head of Ofsted) every class read the papers each day and, one morning, Seagull spotted an advert for scholarships to Eton for state-school students and applied. He says he 'absolutely loved it. People, when they think of Eton, think with their adult prejudices. I went as a 16-year-old and thought: "Wow, there are so many opportunities here."' He liked being a boarder and being able to see his friends within minutes of waking up. How did the other kids – the rich kids – treat him? He says they acted as if he was just like any other boy, though he was a bit of a curiosity."
Robert Peston: 'I’m not saying Britain is finished, but our current problems are not a blip' - interview by Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian. "His new book, WTF, is notionally about Brexit, but presents a disturbing analysis of the underlying economic reasons why so many of us voted to leave the EU. With falling living standards, poor productivity, the decline of social mobility and relentless rise of inequality, Peston regards Brexit as neither a cause of nor solution to our grave economic problems. 'I’m not saying Britain is finished or anything like that. I’m just pointing out that there are some very significant structural problems that we need to fix, whether or not we leave the European Union.' The current economic malaise, he adds emphatically, 'is not a blip. This is the moment we have to stop pussyfooting around in terms of solutions."... If Peston sounds angry with the state of British politics, this may be in part because he is also angry with himself. I can detect a slight tendency for self-flagellation, but do not doubt the sincerity of his self-recrimination. He did not see Brexit coming, he admits, for reasons that make him ashamed. 'I have a sort of self-image to do with an idea that because I went to the local state school, I was not in a sort of bubble of the privately educated privileged – or indeed in a bubble of the privileged in any sense – and that I was somehow more connected to people in this country than people who would have gone to Eton or Westminster or wherever. But among the pretty extensive circle of friends and family, not a single person that I could identify voted for Brexit. It was that bubble, that privileged ghetto – feeling completely disconnected from more than half of the people – that made me feel very ashamed.' "
'Would you be willing?': words to turn a conversation around (and those to avoid) - "[Elizabeth] Stokoe and her colleagues [at Loughborough University] have analysed thousands of hours of recorded conversations, from customer services to mediation hotlines and police crisis negotiation. They discovered that certain words or phrases have the power to change the course of a conversation.... Here are some of the biggest dos and don’ts. // Do use: willing. // Don't use: just. // Do use: speak (instead of talk). // Don't use: How are you? // Do use: some [or something] (instead of any [or anything, as in 'Anything else I can do for you?']) // Don't use: Yes, but. // Do use: It seems like [as in 'It seems like what you're saying is...'] // Do use: Hello."
Robert Peston: 'I’m not saying Britain is finished, but our current problems are not a blip' - interview by Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian. "His new book, WTF, is notionally about Brexit, but presents a disturbing analysis of the underlying economic reasons why so many of us voted to leave the EU. With falling living standards, poor productivity, the decline of social mobility and relentless rise of inequality, Peston regards Brexit as neither a cause of nor solution to our grave economic problems. 'I’m not saying Britain is finished or anything like that. I’m just pointing out that there are some very significant structural problems that we need to fix, whether or not we leave the European Union.' The current economic malaise, he adds emphatically, 'is not a blip. This is the moment we have to stop pussyfooting around in terms of solutions."... If Peston sounds angry with the state of British politics, this may be in part because he is also angry with himself. I can detect a slight tendency for self-flagellation, but do not doubt the sincerity of his self-recrimination. He did not see Brexit coming, he admits, for reasons that make him ashamed. 'I have a sort of self-image to do with an idea that because I went to the local state school, I was not in a sort of bubble of the privately educated privileged – or indeed in a bubble of the privileged in any sense – and that I was somehow more connected to people in this country than people who would have gone to Eton or Westminster or wherever. But among the pretty extensive circle of friends and family, not a single person that I could identify voted for Brexit. It was that bubble, that privileged ghetto – feeling completely disconnected from more than half of the people – that made me feel very ashamed.' "
'Would you be willing?': words to turn a conversation around (and those to avoid) - "[Elizabeth] Stokoe and her colleagues [at Loughborough University] have analysed thousands of hours of recorded conversations, from customer services to mediation hotlines and police crisis negotiation. They discovered that certain words or phrases have the power to change the course of a conversation.... Here are some of the biggest dos and don’ts. // Do use: willing. // Don't use: just. // Do use: speak (instead of talk). // Don't use: How are you? // Do use: some [or something] (instead of any [or anything, as in 'Anything else I can do for you?']) // Don't use: Yes, but. // Do use: It seems like [as in 'It seems like what you're saying is...'] // Do use: Hello."
Monday, 4 December 2017
Cuttings: November 2017
For every hour you write a screenplay, you spend 10 defending it - article by David Hare in the series 'My working day' in The Guardian. "Producers [of films] fall into two categories. The great ones make suggestions to help you realise your work more fully. The annoying ones tell you at length how they themselves might have written the story, if only they could write. I have one simple rule. Only those who are invested in the outcome are allowed to give advice.... The hardest thing in film is distinguishing between good and bad input. The whole point of writing screenplays is to provide a platform from which a director, actors and cinematographer will be able to leap to create something infinitely richer and more suggestive. You have to excite your colleagues. If you are too prescriptive in what you write, there is no room for their genius. But if you do not fight for your structure and underpinning, then everything will go to hell in an inchoate mess of actors’ improvisation and directorial overreach."
When They Go Low, We Go High: the best ever political speeches - review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "In Philip Collins’s new book, 25 great speeches through history are given around 10 pages or so each. They include a potted biography of the speaker, a sketch of the historical moment, and a discussion in accessible but not simplistic terms of what the speech is doing and how it works. It deserves to find a home in many Christmas stockings, in the library of anyone interested in oratory or political theory, and on the odd A-level reading list. As far as the choices go, it’s a parade of greatest hits: Pericles’s funeral oration; Cicero’s first philippic against Antony; Jefferson’s first inaugural address; Lincoln’s snappy sally at Gettysburg; JFK’s 'ask not'; Churchill’s 'finest hour'; Elizabeth I at Tilbury; Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate; Mandela in court; and Nehru round midnight in Delhi. Collins throws in the odd baddie – Hitler, Castro, Robespierre and Mao – and the odd semi-baddie (Dolores Ibárruri, the communist firebrand better known as La Pasionaria, is ticked off for her lifelong Stalinism but admitted to have been on the right side in the Spanish civil war). And he chooses – unexpectedly and interestingly – Obama’s second-term victory speech over the more usual anthology candidates. But for the most part it’s a middle-of-the-road setlist.... Collins is an unashamed liberal centrist for whom process is all. It’s the project of his book to argue that 'disillusionment with conventional politics' is at best a callow, and at worst a dangerous, form of cynicism. Having recruited everyone from Pericles onwards for his debating team, he more than makes his case."
The reminiscence bump: why America’s greatest year was probably when you were young - article by Matthew Warren in The Guardian's Head quarters blog. "Intuitively, it seems like a person’s age should also be independent of their country’s greatness, over which they presumably have very little personal control. But Professor Maryanne Garry, a memory researcher at the University of Waikato who is well-versed in the reminiscence bump, thought otherwise. Every time Trump said that he was going to 'Make America Great Again', Garry says she suspected that he was 'taking Americans to a place that would be different for every one of them'.... The interesting findings [in her recent study] came from the ... participants who did not pick a 'top ten' year [such as the Declaration of Independence or the Second World War]. When the researchers examined how old these people were in the year they chose, they found that the majority picked a year from their youth, with 60% selecting a date between their birth and their 20th birthday. In comparison, relatively few chose a year in the 100 years leading up to their birth, or after they were 30 years old.... Garry suggests that this could be where slogans like 'Make America Great Again' get their power. For each of us, they invoke a time in our own lives where we had our first love, saw our favourite movies, experienced key life events. 'They’re really effective messages', she says. 'We think we are on the same page, but we are actually on separate pages.'”
ABL WTF? - post by Nick Cartwright on the University of Northampton LearnTech blog. "I came to Northampton burning with a passion to get my students learning by doing because it works and because it engages many students who have been excluded by traditional schooling.... The biggest challenge is letting go and empowering students to find their own way through the issues, generating authentic knowledge which may be different from or even challenge my knowledge. Practically it also involves what I dubbed in chats ‘double thinking’, keeping two chains of thought going at once. One half of my brain is following the students journey, sometimes disappearing down the rabbit hole, whilst the other is focused on what we need to cover and trying to keep an overview of the topic all the time working out what questions I need to throw out to keep the two tracks running in the same direction – if I lose the latter the session suddenly loses any sense of direction and this disengages my students. It’s more challenging and more tiring than how I used to teach, but I believe it is a better, more inclusive experience for my students. I wonder what I’ll be doing 10 years from now and how critical I’ll be of what I do today?"
Howards End on TV: life would be worse for a modern-day Leonard Bast - article by Philip Hensher in The Guardian. "Probably [E.M. Forster's] most important novel is Howards End, but its meaning has rather shifted over the years. For most readers, the novel now matters most when it turns to Leonard Bast: hungry for culture and learning, intelligent but disadvantaged and at the mercy of the whims of the rich. In my view, Forster underestimates what a Leonard Bast could have done to save himself in 1910. There were dozens of literary and popular journals at the time that would have happily published a short story or a piece of reportage from a literate, intelligent, working-class writer, and paid a very useful £20 for it. By contrast, in 2017, a Leonard Bast would be unlikely to meet a Helen Schlegel at a concert in London. He wouldn’t be able to afford to live in London; his education wouldn’t have introduced him to that sort of high culture; there are no libraries with the resources to let him pursue his curiosity. If he lost his job, as Bast does, there would, in effect, be no means of supporting himself through literary expression. That has passed into the hands of the children of the rich. A modern-day Bast would not starve, but he would be seriously deprived, and he would have been kept from the literature that could have saved Forster’s character. Things for him have got worse."
How a half-educated tech elite delivered us into chaos - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "One of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he’s not alone. In fact I’d say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. ... It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters. Hence the obvious question: how could such smart people be so stupid?... My hunch is it has something to do with their educational backgrounds. ... Now mathematics, engineering and computer science are wonderful disciplines – intellectually demanding and fulfilling. And they are economically vital for any advanced society. But mastering them teaches students very little about society or history – or indeed about human nature. As a consequence, the new masters of our universe are people who are essentially only half-educated. They have had no exposure to the humanities or the social sciences, the academic disciplines that aim to provide some understanding of how society works, of history and of the roles that beliefs, philosophies, laws, norms, religion and customs play in the evolution of human culture."
Robert Peston: 'I’m not saying Britain is finished, but our current problems are not a blip' - interview by Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian. "His new book, WTF, is notionally about Brexit, but presents a disturbing analysis of the underlying economic reasons why so many of us voted to leave the EU. With falling living standards, poor productivity, the decline of social mobility and relentless rise of inequality, Peston regards Brexit as neither a cause of nor solution to our grave economic problems. 'I’m not saying Britain is finished or anything like that. I’m just pointing out that there are some very significant structural problems that we need to fix, whether or not we leave the European Union.' The current economic malaise, he adds emphatically, 'is not a blip. This is the moment we have to stop pussyfooting around in terms of solutions."... If Peston sounds angry with the state of British politics, this may be in part because he is also angry with himself. I can detect a slight tendency for self-flagellation, but do not doubt the sincerity of his self-recrimination. He did not see Brexit coming, he admits, for reasons that make him ashamed. 'I have a sort of self-image to do with an idea that because I went to the local state school, I was not in a sort of bubble of the privately educated privileged – or indeed in a bubble of the privileged in any sense – and that I was somehow more connected to people in this country than people who would have gone to Eton or Westminster or wherever. But among the pretty extensive circle of friends and family, not a single person that I could identify voted for Brexit. It was that bubble, that privileged ghetto – feeling completely disconnected from more than half of the people – that made me feel very ashamed.' "
When They Go Low, We Go High: the best ever political speeches - review by Sam Leith in The Guardian. "In Philip Collins’s new book, 25 great speeches through history are given around 10 pages or so each. They include a potted biography of the speaker, a sketch of the historical moment, and a discussion in accessible but not simplistic terms of what the speech is doing and how it works. It deserves to find a home in many Christmas stockings, in the library of anyone interested in oratory or political theory, and on the odd A-level reading list. As far as the choices go, it’s a parade of greatest hits: Pericles’s funeral oration; Cicero’s first philippic against Antony; Jefferson’s first inaugural address; Lincoln’s snappy sally at Gettysburg; JFK’s 'ask not'; Churchill’s 'finest hour'; Elizabeth I at Tilbury; Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate; Mandela in court; and Nehru round midnight in Delhi. Collins throws in the odd baddie – Hitler, Castro, Robespierre and Mao – and the odd semi-baddie (Dolores Ibárruri, the communist firebrand better known as La Pasionaria, is ticked off for her lifelong Stalinism but admitted to have been on the right side in the Spanish civil war). And he chooses – unexpectedly and interestingly – Obama’s second-term victory speech over the more usual anthology candidates. But for the most part it’s a middle-of-the-road setlist.... Collins is an unashamed liberal centrist for whom process is all. It’s the project of his book to argue that 'disillusionment with conventional politics' is at best a callow, and at worst a dangerous, form of cynicism. Having recruited everyone from Pericles onwards for his debating team, he more than makes his case."
The reminiscence bump: why America’s greatest year was probably when you were young - article by Matthew Warren in The Guardian's Head quarters blog. "Intuitively, it seems like a person’s age should also be independent of their country’s greatness, over which they presumably have very little personal control. But Professor Maryanne Garry, a memory researcher at the University of Waikato who is well-versed in the reminiscence bump, thought otherwise. Every time Trump said that he was going to 'Make America Great Again', Garry says she suspected that he was 'taking Americans to a place that would be different for every one of them'.... The interesting findings [in her recent study] came from the ... participants who did not pick a 'top ten' year [such as the Declaration of Independence or the Second World War]. When the researchers examined how old these people were in the year they chose, they found that the majority picked a year from their youth, with 60% selecting a date between their birth and their 20th birthday. In comparison, relatively few chose a year in the 100 years leading up to their birth, or after they were 30 years old.... Garry suggests that this could be where slogans like 'Make America Great Again' get their power. For each of us, they invoke a time in our own lives where we had our first love, saw our favourite movies, experienced key life events. 'They’re really effective messages', she says. 'We think we are on the same page, but we are actually on separate pages.'”
ABL WTF? - post by Nick Cartwright on the University of Northampton LearnTech blog. "I came to Northampton burning with a passion to get my students learning by doing because it works and because it engages many students who have been excluded by traditional schooling.... The biggest challenge is letting go and empowering students to find their own way through the issues, generating authentic knowledge which may be different from or even challenge my knowledge. Practically it also involves what I dubbed in chats ‘double thinking’, keeping two chains of thought going at once. One half of my brain is following the students journey, sometimes disappearing down the rabbit hole, whilst the other is focused on what we need to cover and trying to keep an overview of the topic all the time working out what questions I need to throw out to keep the two tracks running in the same direction – if I lose the latter the session suddenly loses any sense of direction and this disengages my students. It’s more challenging and more tiring than how I used to teach, but I believe it is a better, more inclusive experience for my students. I wonder what I’ll be doing 10 years from now and how critical I’ll be of what I do today?"
Howards End on TV: life would be worse for a modern-day Leonard Bast - article by Philip Hensher in The Guardian. "Probably [E.M. Forster's] most important novel is Howards End, but its meaning has rather shifted over the years. For most readers, the novel now matters most when it turns to Leonard Bast: hungry for culture and learning, intelligent but disadvantaged and at the mercy of the whims of the rich. In my view, Forster underestimates what a Leonard Bast could have done to save himself in 1910. There were dozens of literary and popular journals at the time that would have happily published a short story or a piece of reportage from a literate, intelligent, working-class writer, and paid a very useful £20 for it. By contrast, in 2017, a Leonard Bast would be unlikely to meet a Helen Schlegel at a concert in London. He wouldn’t be able to afford to live in London; his education wouldn’t have introduced him to that sort of high culture; there are no libraries with the resources to let him pursue his curiosity. If he lost his job, as Bast does, there would, in effect, be no means of supporting himself through literary expression. That has passed into the hands of the children of the rich. A modern-day Bast would not starve, but he would be seriously deprived, and he would have been kept from the literature that could have saved Forster’s character. Things for him have got worse."
How a half-educated tech elite delivered us into chaos - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. "One of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he’s not alone. In fact I’d say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. ... It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters. Hence the obvious question: how could such smart people be so stupid?... My hunch is it has something to do with their educational backgrounds. ... Now mathematics, engineering and computer science are wonderful disciplines – intellectually demanding and fulfilling. And they are economically vital for any advanced society. But mastering them teaches students very little about society or history – or indeed about human nature. As a consequence, the new masters of our universe are people who are essentially only half-educated. They have had no exposure to the humanities or the social sciences, the academic disciplines that aim to provide some understanding of how society works, of history and of the roles that beliefs, philosophies, laws, norms, religion and customs play in the evolution of human culture."
Robert Peston: 'I’m not saying Britain is finished, but our current problems are not a blip' - interview by Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian. "His new book, WTF, is notionally about Brexit, but presents a disturbing analysis of the underlying economic reasons why so many of us voted to leave the EU. With falling living standards, poor productivity, the decline of social mobility and relentless rise of inequality, Peston regards Brexit as neither a cause of nor solution to our grave economic problems. 'I’m not saying Britain is finished or anything like that. I’m just pointing out that there are some very significant structural problems that we need to fix, whether or not we leave the European Union.' The current economic malaise, he adds emphatically, 'is not a blip. This is the moment we have to stop pussyfooting around in terms of solutions."... If Peston sounds angry with the state of British politics, this may be in part because he is also angry with himself. I can detect a slight tendency for self-flagellation, but do not doubt the sincerity of his self-recrimination. He did not see Brexit coming, he admits, for reasons that make him ashamed. 'I have a sort of self-image to do with an idea that because I went to the local state school, I was not in a sort of bubble of the privately educated privileged – or indeed in a bubble of the privileged in any sense – and that I was somehow more connected to people in this country than people who would have gone to Eton or Westminster or wherever. But among the pretty extensive circle of friends and family, not a single person that I could identify voted for Brexit. It was that bubble, that privileged ghetto – feeling completely disconnected from more than half of the people – that made me feel very ashamed.' "
Friday, 3 November 2017
Cuttings: October 2017
The Death of Homo Economicus: why does capitalism still exist? - review by Steven Pooole in The Guardian. "'Homo economicus' is the totally made-up creature who is the proletarian hero of mid-20th-century economics: going about his daily life with unimpeachable rationality, efficiently calculating ways to maximise his self-interest. But people don’t actually live like that, as the behavioural economists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman pointed out. It is a refuted model, yet its malign influence persists.... In the meantime, especially for the young, debt has become 'a way of life' and jobs are increasingly precarious. Fleming has an excellent chapter on the 'theatre of work', where looking busy and adopting the right emotional attitude in an office can be soul-destroying burdens, and he is very astute on the inhumanity of the zero-hours contract, allied to unprecedented methods of electronic surveillance over employees. Delivery drivers, for example, are paid only for each package they deliver, with no sickness or other benefits. Fleming extends the logic remorselessly: why pay a bartender for any time other than those exact seconds when she is pouring a drink? Employers, he writes, should be paying for 'availability' over a period of time; paying only for exactly measured micro-quantities of work is just the newest way to shaft the little guy. About Uber, Deliveroo, TaskRabbit et al, Fleming is particularly scathing: what is dishonestly termed the 'sharing economy' is a cynical monetisation of the widespread hardship caused by the 2008 crisis, and the final stage in the 'atomisation of the employee'. "
Badger or Bulbasaur: have children lost touch with nature? - article by Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian, about the origin of his book with Jackie Morris The Lost Words. "Cambridge researchers seeking to 'quantify children’s knowledge of nature' surveyed a cohort of four- to 11-year-old children in Britain. The researchers made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a common species of British plant or wildlife, including adder, bluebell, heron, otter, puffin and wren. They also made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a 'common species' of Pokémon character, including Arbok, Beedrill, Hitmonchan, Omanyte, Psyduck and Wigglytuff. The children were then shown a sample of cards from the two sets, and asked to identify the species for each card. The results were striking. Children aged eight and over were 'substantially better' at identifying Pokémon 'species” than 'organisms such as oak trees or badgers'.... Their conclusions were unusually forthright – and tinged by hope and worry. 'Young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or manmade),' they wrote, but they are presently 'more inspired by synthetic subjects' than by 'living creatures'. They pointed to evidence linking 'loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it'. We need, the paper concluded, 'to re-establish children’s links with nature if we are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation', for 'we love what we know … What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren'? "
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia - article by Paul Lewis in The Guardian "A small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics [are complaining] about the rise of the so-called 'attention economy': an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.... There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called 'continuous partial attention', severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. ... 'One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,' [says Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the Like button]. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, [Leah] Pearlman [also on the team that created the Facebook Like] and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls."
Don’t press send … The new rules for good writing in the 21st century - article by Sam Leith in The Guardian, based on his book Write to the Point. "Five simple ways to engage and convince your reader. (1) Bait the hook.... (2) Be clear.... (3) Be correct.... (4) Prefer right-branching sentences.... (5) Read it aloud."
Why Facebook is in a hole over data mining - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. “One of my favourite books is The Education of Henry Adams (published in 1918). It’s an extended meditation, written in old age by a scion of one of Boston’s elite families, on how the world had changed in his lifetime, and how his formal education had not prepared him for the events through which he had lived. This education had been grounded in the classics, history and literature, and had rendered him incapable, he said, of dealing with the impact of science and technology. Re-reading Adams recently left me with the thought that there is now an opening for a similar book, The Education of Mark Zuckerberg. It would have an analogous theme, namely how the hero’s education rendered him incapable of understanding the world into which he was born. For although he was supposed to be majoring in psychology at Harvard, the young Zuckerberg mostly took computer science classes until he started Facebook and dropped out. And it turns out that this half-baked education has left him bewildered and rudderless in a culturally complex and politically polarised world.
What I learnt from being a student - blog post by Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at The Open University. "Here are some of the things I’ve (re)learnt, from the perspective of being an educator while also studying... Small stuff is big – for all the talk of revolutionary pedagogy, personalised learning, disrupted education, what really matters most of the time is the straightforward, everyday matters: do I know what I should be doing at any given time? Can I access the material? Is it clearly written? Can I get support within a reasonable timeframe? Is it set out so I can plan my time effectively?... Engaging and challenging – ... I’ve mentioned before that I came to like assessment because this forced me to engage with the content and bring it together. So it’s not just about making sure as educators we cover topics A to E but also that the student wants to learn about them. Give me a reason to interact – given my time constraints, I didn’t do much interaction in the forums. And this was fine with me, I was glad the course didn’t make lots of interaction compulsory just for the sake of it. But also without a major prompt to do so, it was easy to avoid interaction all together, and if this was my first time studying, that would be a shame. It made me vulnerable – and not in a cute puppy way. I am from a science background and so don’t have any art history knowledge. I was therefore winging it a lot of the time, and didn’t have the vocabulary or the depth of knowledge most of my fellow students had. I would have been reluctant to have been forced to display this scarcity of knowledge in the open, so I was grateful for a closed environment, and careful feedback from tutors to scaffold my learning.... the important aspect was to be reminded of how vulnerable the whole learning process is."
8 Ways UX Design Theory Transformed My Approach to Course Design - blog post by John Spencer at The Synapse. "One of the key ideas in UX is to build systems that people will intuitively understand rather than trying to get people to fit into a system. Yet, in classrooms, I had spent hours teaching procedures. ... I hadn’t even considered the 'user experience' of my pedagogy, classroom management, or classroom space. UX design was a game-changer for me.... Here are eight ideas of UX design that I am trying to incorporate into my course design. (1) Embrace on-boarding.... (2) Begin with users in mind... (3) Create multimedia instructions... (4) Be intentional with copy text... (5) Be linear but be connective... (6) Be consistent... (7) Be simple... (8) Solicit frequent feedback.... The best systems are the ones that feel invisible. You step into it and immediately know where to go and what to do. Don’t get me wrong. Confusion can be a great thing in a classroom if it is leading toward deeper learning. But confusion caused by poorly designed courses leads to disengagement and frustration. It cuts learning short and disrupts creative flow."
Why we need a 21st-century Martin Luther to challenge the church of tech - article by John Naughton in The Observer. “I’ve always been fascinated by [Martin Luther], and as the 500th anniversary [of his 95 theses] loomed and Trump rose to power on the back of our new media ecosystem, I fell to pondering whether there are lessons to be learned from the 95 theses and their astonishing aftermath. One thing above all stands out from those theses. It is that if one is going to challenge an established power, then one needs to attack it on two fronts – its ideology (which in Luther’s time was its theology), and its business model. And the challenge should be articulated in a format that is appropriate to its time. Which led me to think about an analogous strategy in understanding digital technology and addressing the problems posed by the tech corporations that are now running amok in our networked world... Why not, I thought, compose 95 theses about what has happened to our world, and post them not on a church door but on a website? Its URL is 95theses.co.uk and it will go live on 31 October, the morning of the anniversary.”
Of Women: In the 21st Century by Shami Chakrabarti: priorities for feminism in the 21st century - review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "There is no exciting new clickbait theory of feminism here, and there’s not much in her final chapter of recommendations that hasn’t been said a thousand times before: more free childcare, challenge gender stereotyping, do something about the tide of misogynistic hate speech on the internet. The world doesn’t need another feminist book to tell us that. What we do badly need, however, is a reminder to step back and look at the global picture. Too much of what is written and published about women in Britain is really written about and for a certain kind of woman – middle class, reasonably well educated, quite often white, fascinated by culture wars and symbols but rather less so by gritty economic issues – and makes only guilty passing acknowledgment of everyone else. But Chakrabarti draws in every chapter on stories from India or Kenya or Latin America as well as home. While these examples don’t necessarily lead her to any radically different conclusions about what’s wrong with the lot of women, at least for once we are seeing the problem in 3D. This book is likely to appeal to people who have frankly had enough of reading about the politics of waxing or the deeper meaning of Beyoncé, and who worry that western feminism is in danger of disappearing up itself in pursuit of rather glossy and superficial concerns, but still don’t for one minute think the battle is won."
World Without Mind by Franklin Foer: the turn against Big Tech - review by Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian. "This is not a book of small, gentle criticisms. According to Foer, Silicon Valley threatens our souls and our civilisation. Big tech companies, he believes, are on a global crusade 'to mould humanity into their desired image of it'. And this moulding is highly destructive. It involves the demolition of privacy, individuality, creativity, free will, competitive markets, the media and publishing industries, the distinction between facts and lies, the possibility for political compromise, and the space for solitary contemplation.... Because Foer sees collectivism as the problem, he has trouble imagining collective solutions. He proposes that we each make a personal commitment to consuming more artisanal forms of culture. He asks us to forgo the easy pleasures of technology in favour of 'the sustaining nourishment of the contemplative life' – a slow-food movement of the soul. But there are many who don’t find the contemplative life all that nourishing, and others who prefer to draw their nourishment from the new forms of collectivity created by the internet. Telling these people to read more books will do little to curb Silicon Valley’s growing power over our lives.... 'We have deluded ourselves into caring more deeply about convenience and efficiency than about the things that last,' Foer writes. This is a false choice. We can have Twitter and Turgenev. We can keep our humanity intact while enjoying the new tools tech has built – and use politics to make them better."
Badger or Bulbasaur: have children lost touch with nature? - article by Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian, about the origin of his book with Jackie Morris The Lost Words. "Cambridge researchers seeking to 'quantify children’s knowledge of nature' surveyed a cohort of four- to 11-year-old children in Britain. The researchers made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a common species of British plant or wildlife, including adder, bluebell, heron, otter, puffin and wren. They also made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a 'common species' of Pokémon character, including Arbok, Beedrill, Hitmonchan, Omanyte, Psyduck and Wigglytuff. The children were then shown a sample of cards from the two sets, and asked to identify the species for each card. The results were striking. Children aged eight and over were 'substantially better' at identifying Pokémon 'species” than 'organisms such as oak trees or badgers'.... Their conclusions were unusually forthright – and tinged by hope and worry. 'Young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or manmade),' they wrote, but they are presently 'more inspired by synthetic subjects' than by 'living creatures'. They pointed to evidence linking 'loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it'. We need, the paper concluded, 'to re-establish children’s links with nature if we are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation', for 'we love what we know … What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren'? "
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia - article by Paul Lewis in The Guardian "A small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics [are complaining] about the rise of the so-called 'attention economy': an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.... There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called 'continuous partial attention', severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. ... 'One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,' [says Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the Like button]. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, [Leah] Pearlman [also on the team that created the Facebook Like] and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls."
Don’t press send … The new rules for good writing in the 21st century - article by Sam Leith in The Guardian, based on his book Write to the Point. "Five simple ways to engage and convince your reader. (1) Bait the hook.... (2) Be clear.... (3) Be correct.... (4) Prefer right-branching sentences.... (5) Read it aloud."
Why Facebook is in a hole over data mining - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. “One of my favourite books is The Education of Henry Adams (published in 1918). It’s an extended meditation, written in old age by a scion of one of Boston’s elite families, on how the world had changed in his lifetime, and how his formal education had not prepared him for the events through which he had lived. This education had been grounded in the classics, history and literature, and had rendered him incapable, he said, of dealing with the impact of science and technology. Re-reading Adams recently left me with the thought that there is now an opening for a similar book, The Education of Mark Zuckerberg. It would have an analogous theme, namely how the hero’s education rendered him incapable of understanding the world into which he was born. For although he was supposed to be majoring in psychology at Harvard, the young Zuckerberg mostly took computer science classes until he started Facebook and dropped out. And it turns out that this half-baked education has left him bewildered and rudderless in a culturally complex and politically polarised world.
What I learnt from being a student - blog post by Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at The Open University. "Here are some of the things I’ve (re)learnt, from the perspective of being an educator while also studying... Small stuff is big – for all the talk of revolutionary pedagogy, personalised learning, disrupted education, what really matters most of the time is the straightforward, everyday matters: do I know what I should be doing at any given time? Can I access the material? Is it clearly written? Can I get support within a reasonable timeframe? Is it set out so I can plan my time effectively?... Engaging and challenging – ... I’ve mentioned before that I came to like assessment because this forced me to engage with the content and bring it together. So it’s not just about making sure as educators we cover topics A to E but also that the student wants to learn about them. Give me a reason to interact – given my time constraints, I didn’t do much interaction in the forums. And this was fine with me, I was glad the course didn’t make lots of interaction compulsory just for the sake of it. But also without a major prompt to do so, it was easy to avoid interaction all together, and if this was my first time studying, that would be a shame. It made me vulnerable – and not in a cute puppy way. I am from a science background and so don’t have any art history knowledge. I was therefore winging it a lot of the time, and didn’t have the vocabulary or the depth of knowledge most of my fellow students had. I would have been reluctant to have been forced to display this scarcity of knowledge in the open, so I was grateful for a closed environment, and careful feedback from tutors to scaffold my learning.... the important aspect was to be reminded of how vulnerable the whole learning process is."
8 Ways UX Design Theory Transformed My Approach to Course Design - blog post by John Spencer at The Synapse. "One of the key ideas in UX is to build systems that people will intuitively understand rather than trying to get people to fit into a system. Yet, in classrooms, I had spent hours teaching procedures. ... I hadn’t even considered the 'user experience' of my pedagogy, classroom management, or classroom space. UX design was a game-changer for me.... Here are eight ideas of UX design that I am trying to incorporate into my course design. (1) Embrace on-boarding.... (2) Begin with users in mind... (3) Create multimedia instructions... (4) Be intentional with copy text... (5) Be linear but be connective... (6) Be consistent... (7) Be simple... (8) Solicit frequent feedback.... The best systems are the ones that feel invisible. You step into it and immediately know where to go and what to do. Don’t get me wrong. Confusion can be a great thing in a classroom if it is leading toward deeper learning. But confusion caused by poorly designed courses leads to disengagement and frustration. It cuts learning short and disrupts creative flow."
Why we need a 21st-century Martin Luther to challenge the church of tech - article by John Naughton in The Observer. “I’ve always been fascinated by [Martin Luther], and as the 500th anniversary [of his 95 theses] loomed and Trump rose to power on the back of our new media ecosystem, I fell to pondering whether there are lessons to be learned from the 95 theses and their astonishing aftermath. One thing above all stands out from those theses. It is that if one is going to challenge an established power, then one needs to attack it on two fronts – its ideology (which in Luther’s time was its theology), and its business model. And the challenge should be articulated in a format that is appropriate to its time. Which led me to think about an analogous strategy in understanding digital technology and addressing the problems posed by the tech corporations that are now running amok in our networked world... Why not, I thought, compose 95 theses about what has happened to our world, and post them not on a church door but on a website? Its URL is 95theses.co.uk and it will go live on 31 October, the morning of the anniversary.”
Of Women: In the 21st Century by Shami Chakrabarti: priorities for feminism in the 21st century - review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "There is no exciting new clickbait theory of feminism here, and there’s not much in her final chapter of recommendations that hasn’t been said a thousand times before: more free childcare, challenge gender stereotyping, do something about the tide of misogynistic hate speech on the internet. The world doesn’t need another feminist book to tell us that. What we do badly need, however, is a reminder to step back and look at the global picture. Too much of what is written and published about women in Britain is really written about and for a certain kind of woman – middle class, reasonably well educated, quite often white, fascinated by culture wars and symbols but rather less so by gritty economic issues – and makes only guilty passing acknowledgment of everyone else. But Chakrabarti draws in every chapter on stories from India or Kenya or Latin America as well as home. While these examples don’t necessarily lead her to any radically different conclusions about what’s wrong with the lot of women, at least for once we are seeing the problem in 3D. This book is likely to appeal to people who have frankly had enough of reading about the politics of waxing or the deeper meaning of Beyoncé, and who worry that western feminism is in danger of disappearing up itself in pursuit of rather glossy and superficial concerns, but still don’t for one minute think the battle is won."
World Without Mind by Franklin Foer: the turn against Big Tech - review by Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian. "This is not a book of small, gentle criticisms. According to Foer, Silicon Valley threatens our souls and our civilisation. Big tech companies, he believes, are on a global crusade 'to mould humanity into their desired image of it'. And this moulding is highly destructive. It involves the demolition of privacy, individuality, creativity, free will, competitive markets, the media and publishing industries, the distinction between facts and lies, the possibility for political compromise, and the space for solitary contemplation.... Because Foer sees collectivism as the problem, he has trouble imagining collective solutions. He proposes that we each make a personal commitment to consuming more artisanal forms of culture. He asks us to forgo the easy pleasures of technology in favour of 'the sustaining nourishment of the contemplative life' – a slow-food movement of the soul. But there are many who don’t find the contemplative life all that nourishing, and others who prefer to draw their nourishment from the new forms of collectivity created by the internet. Telling these people to read more books will do little to curb Silicon Valley’s growing power over our lives.... 'We have deluded ourselves into caring more deeply about convenience and efficiency than about the things that last,' Foer writes. This is a false choice. We can have Twitter and Turgenev. We can keep our humanity intact while enjoying the new tools tech has built – and use politics to make them better."
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