Cuttings: November 2021

Saint Martin de Porres (1579-1639) – Wikipedia entry. “Martín de Porres Velázquez OP (9 December 1579 – 3 November 1639) was a Peruvian lay brother of the Dominican Order who was … canonized in 1962 by Pope John XXIII. He is the patron saint of mixed-race people … and all those seeking racial harmony…. He was the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman, Don Juan de Porras y de la Peña, and Ana Velázquez, a freed slave of African and Native descent. … Among the many miracles attributed to him were those of levitation, bilocation, miraculous knowledge, instantaneous cures, and an ability to communicate with animals.”

The big idea: Is democracy up to the task of climate change? – article by Rebecca Willis in The Guardian. “It’s time to acknowledge a difficult truth: our democracies are failing us on the climate crisis. … Faced with a problem of these proportions, some are running out of patience. The veteran Earth scientist James Lovelock puts his faith in eco-authoritarianism. Climate change is so severe, he has said, that ‘it may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while’. … My experience leads me to a very different conclusion to that of the eco-authoritarians.… Could it be that the problem here is not too much democracy, but too little? … That if we designed a meaningful dialogue between citizens, experts and governments, we would get better outcomes? Just before Covid-19 struck last year, I was part of an incredible experiment that did just this. Climate Assembly UK was a citizens’ assembly commissioned by parliament, bringing together a representative group of 108 citizens. Over a series of weekends, they learned about climate science, impacts and action; discussed and debated with experts and each other; and then voted on recommendations. The assembly’s findings are a coherent, far-reaching set of proposals for tackling the climate emergency – created by a different sort of democratic body. Processes such as this aren’t intended to replace our system of representative democracy, but to make it work better. They allow citizens and politicians alike to talk about what they need from each other.”

Greek Myths: A New Retelling by Charlotte Higgins: gloriously interwoven tales – review by Edith Hall in The Guardian. “There is no shortage these days of lively, well-written retellings of ancient Greek and Roman myths, but Charlotte Higgins has embraced a central metaphor – weaving – that leads us through the labyrinth of interconnected stories in a startlingly fresh way. It throws radiant new light on their meanings. Although her chief model is Ovid’s phantasmagoric mythological compendium in his Metamorphoses, her voice is quite different – more tender and pensive – and she uses her considerable scholarly skills to mine many other ancient sources, rescuing some little-known stories from obscurity…. Inspired by the ancient world’s favourite literary technique of ekphrasis – not only describing a static tableau but telling a story that moves through time via a description of an artwork – she uses the personae of her weavers to add psychological depth, emotional clout and sometimes philosophical profundity to dozens of embedded narratives. Weaving was a metaphor at the heart of ancient metaphysics, since the Fates measure out and cut off the threads of human life itself.”

The Every by Dave Eggers: scathing big-tech satire sequel – review by Rob Doyle in The Guardian. “If you meant to read Shoshana Zuboff’s important and demanding The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, … The Every tackles the same concerns from a shared perspective of humanist outrage, in the form of a gulpable fictive entertainment. The Circle’s titular startup turned metaphysical empire (think: Googlebook) has merged with an unmistakable e-commerce site referred to, doubtless for legal reasons, only by its nickname: ‘the jungle’. Messianically rebranded as The Every, the corporation is now run by Mae Holland, The Circle’s fast-rising, newbie protagonist. Under Holland, The Every pursues its heedless agenda of a worldwide, soft totalitarian order of mass behavioural compliance through surveillance. … Enter another newbie, Delaney Wells [and] her housemate Wes… . The pair settle on a strategy of terroristic accelerationism: if they can introduce enough vile or moronic apps into The Every’s portfolio, it might trigger a popular insurrection that will bring about the company’s downfall. Predictably, it doesn’t work out this way. Both The Every and regular people embrace their innovations even as they bring ‘a new kind of self-hatred and ruination upon all humans’. Delaney begins to realise how much humiliation and diminished liberty the people of the world are willing to suck up in exchange for safety,”

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere by Stuart Jeffries: how we became postmodern – review by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian. “For the past half-century, postmodernist thinkers have been trying to discredit truth, identity and reality. Identity is a straitjacket, and truth is just some middle-aged academic’s opinion. As for reality, it has become as obsolete as dressing for dinner. Objectivity is a myth in the service of the ruling powers.… The final liberation is that anything can mean anything else. Once you kick away fixed meanings and firm foundations, you are free to enjoy yourself. Postmodernism is meant to be fun, even if a current of nihilism runs steadily beneath it. As Stuart Jeffries suggests in this splendidly readable survey, there is something vacuous at the heart of its exuberance…. Some studies of postmodernism are cultural, some are historical and a few of them are philosophical. The achievement of this book is to roll all three approaches into one. This is rare, because those who know about Sid Vicious may not be avid readers of Michel Foucault… Postmodern ideas certainly survive in the current scepticism of truth.… Every viewpoint should be respected, except for racism, sexism, homophobia, elitism and antisemitism, which are deeply offensive. So they are, but how do you decide this if moral objectivity is for the birds?… The most useless theory of knowledge is one that prevents us from saying with reasonable certainty, for example, that a great many Africans were once enslaved by the west. Yet you can find such theories of knowledge in most seminar rooms, even if those who tout them can rightly think of little more outrageous than slavery. Perhaps Jeffries’s compelling critique will help to sort them out.”

The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English: a lexical treasure chest – review by Steven Poole in The Guardian. “Those Anglo-Saxons did have a way with words – ‘word’ itself being one of those that has survived unchanged from the first millennium to ours. Hana Videen’s delightful thesaurus (from the Greek for ‘treasure-house’) of Old English is, she says, inspired by ‘hord-wynn’ (‘hoarding joy’), and organised around spheres of activity: eating and drinking, reading and writing, travelling or the natural world. There is, though, no word for ‘nature’ in Old English: a salient reminder that those times are as alien in some ways as they are familiar in others. …There was no call for a word for ‘nature’, one supposes, because Anglo-Saxons had not yet invented its opposite. They simply lived, like everything else, in ‘sceaft’ – creation. Which was elf-haunted and sometimes wyrm-ravaged…. What is most striking to the modern reader, perhaps, is what strong pleasure the Anglo-Saxons evidently took in smashing words together to form compounds: devil-sickness, slaughter-mist, war-sweat. Some such forms, if deliberately metaphorical or riddling, are known as kennings (as in ‘beyond my ken’). So ‘day-candle’ is the sun; ‘bone-locker’ is the body; and a ‘weaver-walker’ is a spider. Probably it’s too facile to suggest that such a combinatorial habit of description embodied a view of everything as more interconnected and interdependent, which it might be salutary for us moderns to recover. In which case, it’s a pleasure just to be reminded of their world-craft.”

‘We need to break the junk food cycle’: how to fix Britain’s failing food system – article by Bee Wilson in The Guardian. “Earlier this year, two researchers based at the University of Cambridge – Dolly Theis and Martin White – published a paper showing that from 1992 to 2020, there were no fewer than 689 separate obesity policies put forward in England. Like failed diets, almost none of these initiatives have been realised in any meaningful way.… When it comes to food policy, there has long been an attitude of ‘leave it to the market’… Recent English obesity policies have spoken endlessly of ‘action’ to help people eat healthier diets, but what they deliver, often as not, is another raft of patronising diet information leaflets… Given that poorer UK households would have to spend nearly 40% of their income to buy food for a healthy diet, according to recent data from the Food Foundation, to frame healthy eating as simply a matter of ‘choosing’ is dishonest. It’s not choice if you can’t afford it…. Earlier this year, the need for a radical rethink of food policy in the UK was set out in Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy: The Plan, an independent review commissioned by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).… There are signs that the pandemic has finally jolted us into new ways of thinking about food. Marcus Rashford’s passionate advocacy has made far more people recognise how unacceptable it is to live in a country where mothers like his struggle to buy ‘a good evening meal’ on minimum-wage jobs. Our great-grandchildren may laugh when we tell them that English schools routinely used to sell sugary drinks for profit, that hospital food courts provided burgers and chips to people who had just undergone heart surgery, and that farmers were paid to produce the very foods that caused the most damage to health and the environment. ‘That was what it was like,’ we will say, ‘living in a country where the politicians didn’t know that food mattered.’”